I had a Facebook friend recently post something I found offensive and I thought my reaction to it raised some interesting questions.
Basically the person made a post embracing the philosophy that women, on the whole, are better than men.
I’m not interested in debating whether or not you think this is true. This post operates on the default assumption that it is patently false and gross.
Anyway, I have a very low tolerance for any kind of bigotry in my Facebook feed, and this is the sort of thing that under ordinary circumstances would cause me to immediately unfriend someone.
I didn’t unfriend this person, though, for two reasons
Our history is pretty solid. I don’t know this person IRL but my friend has generally been respectful, intelligent, thoughtful, and capable of evaluating nuanced arguments.
By and large I feel enriched for having this person as a Facebook friend.
He’s a man.
It’s reason #2 that gives me the most pause. It’s hard to say exactly how much weight I gave in consideration of gender when evaluating this blatantly bigoted statement, but I certainly considered it a factor. And I guess the underlying assumption is somehow that it’s less bad to be biased against a group you identify with than one you do not.
OTOH, I find it quite outrageous personally when women bash other women, as a whole. This would suggest that my rationale is not sound.
Is the source of any relevance when it comes to the relative wrongness of bigotry, or is all bigotry created equal?
It also might be interesting to explore the #1 rationale. Does a person’s contribution to your life as a whole factor into how distasteful you find certain opinions, and is it possible for someone to have an opinion that is so egregiously bigoted it just trumps everything else good about them? Would a statement like that elicited above qualify as so egregious as to warrant unfriending, in your estimation?
It’s equally wrong, but I think one stems from superiority/malice and the other stems from inferiority/self-loathing.
Example: I’m Asian. I know there are white people who feel that Asians are inferior to white people. But…I also know there are Asian people who feel that Asians are inferior to white people.
The latter is significantly trickier to overcome. It’s like the quote about how the enemy behind you is worse than the enemy in front of you.
There are no facts that are true about all women and false about all men (or vice versa). Anyone who thinks in those terms is unreasonable and can’t be argued with. Some people are like that for small things but are otherwise worthwhile human beings. But dismissing half the world’s population like that is rather offensive.
Why does it matter if someone is part of the group they discriminate against? If anything, it’s worse because you know they mean it rather than just being self-serving.
Also, humble bragging much? My half of the population is flawed but I am enlightened enough to recognize it? Sure.
I have no opinion on the unfriending, as thinking about such dilemmas is exactly what I try to avoid by being a non-user of Facebook.
Can’t say I agree with the bolded part. Seems like a person might be acting out of self-interest to make themselves look better to the group they are calling superior. Using the OP’s situation, a guy could be criticizing men in front of women to make himself look better to those women than a “normal” guy. The same can be said with disparaging one’s own race.
It can also be interpreted as really fucking patronizing to women. I dunno. I think there are clear and measurable differences between sexes that warrant some generalizations (that certainly do not apply to every individual), but these particular assertions are not borne out by statistics and any reasonable person can see the view is unbalanced. Being treated like a different sort of creature, even if it supposedly makes me better, feels weirdly objectifying. Similar to the ‘‘model Asian’’ stereotype maybe - what does it mean if I don’t embody all of these things women supposedly do? Am I not then a woman?
I wonder if power dynamics matter? To use Velocity’s example, which is worse? An Asian who believes Asians are inferior or a white person who believes white people are inferior? It’s arguable the white person’s bigotry can’t be as harmful since there’s no real threat of white people being oppressed by Asians in the U.S.
Amusingly, almost none of those criteria are actually “measurable”. Really, I’d say none of them are but I guess you could give more weight to various intelligence tests than they deserve.
If we’re fortunate enough, we all find friends who possess qualities we respect and admire. But having known them long enough and having gone through enough life stuff with them, we also figure out their shortcomings (and they our’s). At the end of the day, we make decisions about whether or not the friendship is worth keeping and further investment despite the shortcomings. The test of this friendship is whether you can present him with a differing opinion and see how he’ll react. He may make this easy for you by making the decision for you. Or you can just let it go and accept this shortcoming about him.
It’s also difficult, since he’s just a person I know on Facebook, to determine how deeply this sentiment runs and how much it affects his treatment of others. I really don’t see any meaningful differences in how he treats men vs. women on Facebook.
Maybe because I don’t know him IRL that’s the only standard by which I should measure, I dunno.
The truth is I tend to unfriend people like this because I don’t want to be publicly associated with those ideas in any way. My motive is selfish.
For whatever reason…choice, random chance, job, whatever, maybe most of the guys he “knows” are generally jackasses? Or at least enough to skew the stats for him to think this?
I know that it ain’t that uncommon for me to hear somebody else telling their life experiences and me thinking “that sure ain’t the universe I’ve experienced”.
But there is some truth to the old adage “birds of feather flock together”. He may or may not be loyal member of such a flock, but he could be hanging out with em.
He has at least one IRL friend who is an unbelievable asshole, so you might be right about that.
But even if that were the case, are his opinions then more justified?
I once had a profoundly misogynistic friend who assumed women were horrible because 90% of the women he chose to spend time with were horrible. He attracted horrible women. It didn’t make him any less insufferable.
That’s my first reaction.
It’s akin to the “Noble Savage” concept in that it sees the subject simultaneously ideally and inferior.
It implies that women are simple and unspoiled and as a result incapable of the complex motivations or emotions that men have. It’s treats women as innocent children instead of recognizing them as equals, warts and all.
I have a friend who hangs out with “dudes” and they are quite “dude-ish” and gross and do & say gross stuff that maybe 30-something males shouldn’t doing or saying anymore. He kind of describes them in horrible terms and they seem pretty horrible.
But these dudes have girlfriends and wives, and kitty cats and jobs and aren’t on the Sex Offender Registry. So they can’t actually be that bad.
I think they all just get drunk and high together, and they confess weird shit, and it weirds my friend out and he sees them all as these very dark, disturbing dudes. And he sees all men that way. And when he has thoughts like they have, it freaks him out and he hates it.
He was the victim if male-on-male sexual abuse, so that doesn’t really help him see males any better.
And I don’t think he knows any women deeply enough to know that women can be weird and mean and gross too, and have bad thoughts and do bad things. I don’t think he quite puts them on a pedestal like the quote in the OP. But he certainly knows men enough to know how awful they are, so instead of realizing “people can have bad thoughts” he just seems to think “men are bad and so am I.”
It’s hard for a woman to get close to a guy like this, so it’s hard to give them that balanced perspective on people as a whole. Maybe it is all related to the abuse as a younger teen, I don’t know.
But from my armchair psychologist perspective, this guy is full of self-hate. Sucks.
I think this is an assumption that some biases are justified, so if you’re biased against a group you’re a part of, it’s likely because you really know what you’re talking about. And there’s a sense that you don’t have as much to gain as someone who is elevating their own group at the expense of another.
But for me the problem of bias or bigotry is that it is not built on science or evidence. It’s really just a matter of a chance if a bigot is going to have more acceptable forms of bias. The thinking that went into the development of the bias (or lack of thinking) is just as likely to have a very offensive target as one that’s more appealing to me.
Analogy time! You have a friend who backstabs everyone else, but not you. Woo hoo! You haven’t been the victim! But what protects you? You just haven’t been the target, but the nature of the friend is still the same whether you were or not.
So, for me, I might engage in a little bit of dialog about it, but not much. And yes, I would defriend. Because I don’t like hanging out with known bigots, and that’s what he’s espousing.
I think that there’s a difference between a privileged group heaping coals on itself and anyone (including the unprivileged group, honestly, although I’m likely to give it a little more slack because of the self-hatred component) heaping coals on an unprivileged group. The latter, I think, is far worse than the former. Because even though the former is kinda icky, as you note, at least it’s not perpetuating the form of the bigotry that is most likely to lead to the worse forms of discrimination.
Also, I think people can say some tone-deaf things about groups they’re not part of because they just haven’t thought about how that group might perceive it. Like a while back, I remember, there was that thing about a woman who got stuck with an annoying guy in an elevator (I think this was the one at the atheist convention?) and she posted about being all worried about what could happen. My husband was all, oh come on, that’s ridiculous, who would be worried about what would happen in an elevator? I replied by pointing out that he was a fairly large man, of course he wouldn’t be worried. I’m a shorter woman, not very strong, and I absolutely do a mental calculation when I’m in an elevator alone with a guy! (Usually that calculation comes out to “not really worried,” but the point is that I do it at all, while men don’t typically.) It made him think.
Your friend, similarly, probably has no idea that many people would find the statement he put up patronizing and sort of icky.
Maybe I am a hypocrite (or ‘‘sexist scum’’ as you put it), or maybe people really are responsible for repeating terrible patterns in relationships. Both could be true.
My friend was a racist, misogynist bigot who hung out almost exclusively with people who fit his stereotypical views. So yes, because he was a terrible person, he attracted terrible people into his life. He was an asshole in college (Wow, Spice Weasel, you cleaned the kitchen! You might not make such a terrible mother after all.‘’) but over the years he got even worse and more and more fucked up. It got to where his only friends in the country he lived were the prostitutes he paid to have sex with. This is a man who could meet an honest-to-god sex slave and laugh about it later. The final straw for me was when he promoted infanticide on my Facebook page. I doubt he means half the fucked up things he says, but I wasn’t about to give him the benefit of the doubt any longer.
But the important thing is you saw what you expected to see.
