Three Things that I Have Heard Feminists Say that are Hurting Feminism (Part Three)

(3) Don't make a big deal about it, he just did what any decent person would do.

Let's slap some context on this bad boy ASAP.

This statement usually comes in response to a cis male who says something like “Well, I never wolf whistle at women on the street,” or “I saw a drunk girl at a party and made sure that she got home safely,” or “My coworker was sexist toward me and I called him out,” and the response that often comes is “So what? You managed to make the minimum standard of decent human being and you’re proud of yourself? That’s dumb.” The real quote I’ve often seen repeated in blogs and comment sections and by acquaintances is “I’m so tired of men who meet the bare minimum of decent behavior and expect us to throw them a fucking parade.”

Now, this kind of negative response to the bragging feminist male is a little bit insidious because it contains a good point: it really is just the minimum standard of decency to help other people and not be a sexist dick and it is disappointing that this is not the standard that most people live by. In fact the people who don't acknowledge this often portray serious things like harassment or sexism as endearing lapses rather than dangerous, decency violating behaviors.

On the other hand, put-down statements like the parade comment punish good (or decent) behavior in the worst possible way. Not only do they give negative feedback to perfectly reasonable behavior, they paint feminists in this hypocritical, sour light. Our little would-be feminist reads all the material that he’s told to and stops saying those sexist things that people in high school or the people in his frat house taught him and he takes drunk girls home instead of molesting them and he’s so proud of himself; so, he posts on a feminist forum and brags about how feminist he is...and the feminists say, “We don't care, we’re still not happy.”

Of course, that’s reasonable. I don’t expect to see learning stop at the "okay human being" stage either. People who are unimpresse by basic decency are correct, in an ultimate sense, but consider this situation: imagine you met someone taking a literacy class and they bragged to you that they had learned to spell the word “unusual,” – and your response was, “You think that’s something to be proud of? Jesus. I mean, welcome to the world of the barely literate.” What would that accomplish? That response might be the honest one, but it will probably not send the receiver back to class with fresh verve. “Oh yeah man, I just wanna learn to read so I can be like that asshole.” Feminists tend to fall into this trap a lot.

People, on the whole, are pretty rational when it comes to feedback. If they brag about their progress and feminists complain or insult them, they will say, “well, that was socially unpleasant, maybe I’ll try something from the MRA side of the buffet.” Now, there may be mitigating context, like the person bragging is doing so to "prove" that they are not sexist or retract a previous statement. Sometimes the full conversation will go:

Joe Sexist: "Ha ha, what about dem sluts."

Feminist Fatale: "That's messed up and sexist."

Joe Sexist: "What are you talking about, I stand up against sexism all the time at work when my boss is being a prick to the secretary."

I really do understand the impulse to respond, "Yeah, so what? That doesn't mean anything," in this case, but the fact is that, practically speaking, it doesn't really matter where Joe Sexist is coming from or what the context around that statement is. You can make any assumption that you want about Joe's worthiness as a human being, but insulting him will still drive him further from the truth, not closer. It is good that Joe stands up to his boss regardless of what other transgressions he might have perpetrated. We want to reinforce good behavior like speaking out, and punish bad behavior, like slut-shaming. "Joe, it's great that you stand up for your coworkers, labeling women sluts is still really messed up, though." I am a big fan of the comment, criticism tactic online because (1) it mitigates tone and (2) it really throws people with big egos for a loop; the compliment makes them feel good about themselves and they are reluctant to let that feeling go just to avoid constructive criticism (it is very difficult to label a speaker insane or ignorant if you agree with half of what they say).

I am always on the fence when I hear statements like “feminism is the minimum needed to be a decent human” or “feminism is easy to learn,” because, while it is true that learning feminist theory is truly vital and not as difficult to understand as all the weird terminology makes it look, it is not easy to learn in one day. It takes some time and dedication and you have to talk to some women/feminists/bloggers some time during that process, maybe even when you are still kind of a jackass by their standards. If I had my way we would throw a parade every time some convert from the MRA blogosphere (or wherever) did something decent. Goodness knows, the other side has enough positive reinforcement. I have never seen a wolf whistle that wasn't followed by laughter and hi-fives and all kinds of reinforcing social interaction. There are thousands of rape supporters on Reddit just waiting to tell rapists that what they did wasn't rape and was such a sympathy provoking ordeal for both sides of the encounter.

I understand that sometimes these people stumble on Feminist safe spaces and it is hard to deal with them. Not everyone has to be a teacher, but the problem remains that we can talk all we want about how bad patriarchal culture, MRA blogs and mainstream politicians are, but we will never get anywhere unless we create positive spaces for our members and are able to direct new initiates there. This doesn't mean that you have to coddle every nut job who thinks he is a hero, but gently directing ignorant people to written resources or to people who will walk the baby steps with them is definitely more productive than shouting at them. People who come to feminist blogs (even the ones who come just to pick apart arguments) are in a vulnerable place (whether they realize it or not); If we aren't willing to teach them we should at least not ruin someone else's chance to do so.

Summer 2012: Rape Culture

It's August in Chicago, and I already know that this summer will be remembered for two things: high temperatures and public figures who try to deny or justify rape. Listening to [Trigger Warning for All: Rape] Tosh.0, Todd Akin, Mike Huckabee, Paul Ryan and Jack Willke (Romney's Doctor) among others spout off their views about women and reproduction has not been easy, but the question I have started to ask myself recently is what have we learned here? We already knew that there was a seedy subculture in our country that occasionally claws its way to the surface and tries to drag women back to the colonial era. But really, what actually went wrong here to cause so many people (and to be fair, not all of them seemed nuts before this debacle) cough up the stuff that I have heard? Here is what I've got:

(1) Private conversations allow fluid discourse, but public figures must understand that any statement they make can be considered an argument addressing a larger topic. At great risk of being yelled at by someone, I am going to put forth a small slice of my complicated view on the abortion debate as an example of this phenomenon. I believe three things (among a others) about women's health and abortion rights:

(a) I believe that human life is important. I think we should do as much as possible to preserve it.

(b) I believe that fetuses are kind of human at some point. I don't really know when. They are not undisputedly human, but they are definitely more than just another organ, in my mind.

(c) I don't believe that anyone's (read: women's) rights should be restricted based on incomplete information or speculation.

Each one of these statements on their own represents a different political statement, but together they are not incompatible and create a different meaning than each alone. If I only said (a) and (b) I would appear to be pretty pro-life because that is the standard argument put up against defenders of third trimester abortion rights. (a) By itself could be a pacifist statement or a pro-life mantra. On the other hand: (a), (b) and (c) together represent my true belief, which lands pretty far on the pro-choice side of the fence - basically, prove unequivocally that it's murder or leave women alone. The trick is, if a newspaper wanted to quote me, I would be luck if they gave me enough space to say half of (a) and (b) "I believe that human life is important...Fetuses are kind of human at some point" who would know what I actually meant by that? - but a lot can be read into it.

The thing is, that doesn't give me or anyone else a pass to say what they want. My response to a personal conversation with Tosh.0 would have been very different than my actual response to his public statements. I think that what Tosh.0 said was horrible, but if a friend had come up to me and said, "You know, I don't know how to address this with anyone, but I think rape jokes might be funny," my reaction might be more compassionate (contrary, but compassionate). It could even stray into the territory of what funny and edgy humor on the subject actually looks like. Why? - because a private conversation is not addressing the one in four women who have been raped in this country. Tosh.0's "joke" was doing just that. When Tosh.0 told his audience that rape jokes are funny, he took the wrong side in a nasty public debate that was happening all around him. There was only one reasonable answer to his statement on those terms, and he recieved it: "No, they are not." The fact that he responded with rapey threats, just further showed that he could not separate a personal insult from a public scene. The same is true with the even less sympathetic (if that's possible) Todd Akin. Whatever he meant to say, what came out of his mouth was a statement that implied that women who got pregnant from rape liked it; there is no excuse for that. What you say publicly is what you say, you either have to stand by it, or immediately apologize and then explain what you actually believe. You cannot just dip a toe into the waters of public opinion and then say that you weren't actually going to take the dive.

(2) We live in a weird, rape obsessed country and the horror of rape gets buried under the ubiquity. It's not just the politicians who are talking this way. Consider this: If you have a child (male or female), you will have to, at some point, explain the things that she should do in life to avoid getting raped -- and I don't mean when your daughter goes to college -- I am starting with the "don't talk to strangers" speech you give them at age three. We can go on from there to the high school talks about misleading men or dorm room safety and locking her door or the very weird talk about supposed gay rapists that I received from a close adult when I was 16, but the point is that we really think of rape not as a tragedy but as an ever-present fact of life most of the time. Many people that I have gotten to know personally enough have confessed to me some sexual encounter where either they felt that their consent was violated or they felt that they had violated the consent of someone else (on purpose or by accident). I won't name the institutions, but there are Chicago colleges that give women their own bathroom keys because if they don't, men will go into the bathrooms and rape whoever is in the toilet stalls.

It's everywhere around us, but a little bit invisible, like a fog. Be careful going out at night honey...don't share drinks...dress conservatively. We talk about rape so casually that we don't even think about it sometimes, like when we tell children to avoid strangers: who ever finishes that sentence with, "...because you might get raped and left in a ditch"?

When Tosh.0 or Akin or Romney say these things it is not just a political gaffe, it is an assault on our humanness. We are just a means to an end. What they are saying is "ha, ha, you might be raped (probably not by me, but by someone), no one is going to care or help you, and I am going to build my career on that."

Three Things that I Have Heard Feminists Say that are Hurting Feminism (Part Two)

(2) Our culture is better, so fuck you for not knowing about it.

Everyone has this impulse. You know about an issue or you have a new way of looking at the world and suddenly everyone who doesn't know about it seems to be somewhat ignorant. You slide through crowds wondering if people even know that tens of thousands are dying in whatever African country you've chosen to focus on or whether they know that hemp is the key to sustainable ethanol. You might even slip briefly into the delusion that you are one of the enlightened few sliding, aloof, through a world of sheep. See: everyone who both smokes a lot of weed and has strong political opinions on weed.

The big feminist issue that tends to be a victim of this is the idea of Rape Culture. The pattern is pretty recognizable. Some guy posts something along the lines of "Haha, what about dem sluts at frat parties," and a feminist of some persuasion responds "Stop promoting rape culture k thnx bye," and the original sexist blogger responds "What's wrong with you? I don't support rape; no one does except rapists." The feminist (or one of their supporters) will often respond, "Go to hell," followed by a response from the OP of "No, you go to hell." For a good example of this, see the dick wolves fiasco.

Now, I personally understand why objectifying women promotes rape culture and I will definitely go on record saying that I do not blame people who get really, really upset over sexist and rapey remarks. That said, a lot of the times when people say "this stuff is important, you should know it," what they really are saying is "why aren't you privileged enough to know this?" Most of the feminists I know are rich and white. Most of them have had an incredible amounts of time at their disposal to learn the terminology and the theory and to read activist blogs and to do all kinds of other things that lead to feminism. They understand the language that people speak on the liberal side of the internet.

So, do I really begrudge you your anger over sexism: no, it is incredibly justified; on the other hand, can I disapprove of the guy who doesn't understand why you are angry? Not really. That guy has not necessarily gone through college or (more importantly) had the time to read extensively about feminism. He might be working three jobs, he might just not have the critical reading background to understand what you are even trying to say. Ultimately, my point is the following: not everyone goes to college; not everyone has had the fortune of hearing what you have; and most people have a million things going on in their lives that don't have anything to do with your crusade. So, insulting someone because he is sexist or a supporter of rape culture is sometimes understandable, but it will not make anyone instantly see things from your perspective.

So, what should we do? I do think that people should be called out for their sexism and bigotry, but insulting them is not the way to do it. Whether or not you see it that way, telling someone that they support rape culture comes across as an insult every time. If someone has no idea why you think that they have a problem, then you should be directing them to resources that will help change that state of affairs. Too often I see people getting driven off of feminist blogs for saying something wrong, when really (unless your blog is just supposed to be a hate party) the point of all of this written material is to educate. If you really can't deal with them, send them to my Feminist 101 post (all trolls welcome; I mean that). It's not the definitive source on the issue, but it is better than nothing. Really, almost anything is better than nothing or an MRA hate blog. Send them to Pervocracy or Feministing. Those are two of my favorites. Even Shakesville's 101 is okay, although that blog is about half of the reason that I am posting this article in the first place.

Just, please, don't drive the people who really do need to read your blog or hear your speech away from feminism just because they said something ignorant or offensive.

Is Romney Wealthy and Out of Touch (and Does it Matter)?

Recently, Mitt Romney took pictures of himself riding a Jet Ski ride at one of his mansions in New Hampshire, bringing forth the usual partisan cries. One side vehemently claims that Romney is out of touch and wealthy. The other side claims that Romney is a successful businessman and that his critics are just smearing his name because they are jealous of his wealth.

Before I launch into any kind of analysis, let me state this fact: I am jealous of Mitt Romney. I would love to have the kind of money that it takes to own 5 mansions and a ski-lodge. I am very jealous of people who have that kind of cash. Those who are economically independent in the way Romney is, have the kind of freedom that the poor and middle-class can only dream of. That said, I also, separately, have this impulse to question what exactly it is that Mitt Romney is doing with those freedoms. For example, Mr. Romney has hired a lobbyist to encourage the city of San Diego to substantially increase its maximum building size allowances so that he can build an 11,000 square foot mega-mansion that includes among other things a two-story garage. Wait, what?

It’s one thing to be out of touch with the 99%. The wealth inequality in this country has become so great that I doubt the 70th percentile understands much about the habits of the 40^th percentile, but Romney regularly does things with his money that are incomprehensible to about 99% of the top 1% of the country. He literally never has to worry about money. He wants a bigger house but the law says he can’t? Just spend some money to change the law. He wants a two story garage? Fine, just buy it. He wants to connect with middle-class Nascar fans? Just tell them his friend who owns a few cars and a racetrack. Regardless of how jealous anyone is, Romney is out of touch and wealthy. There is just no question. The fact that he thinks that people who own racetracks are the same people who watch the races and that complying with the local zoning laws means changing the local zoning laws shows that he is not just out of touch with some Americans, he is out of touch with everyone but around fifty or so, very wealthy Americans. Most people who have more money than Romney has don’t even do the crazy stuff that Romney does.

Okay, he might be out of touch. So, what? It won’t really affect his competency as president right?

I think it probably will. Here is why:

(1) Romney doesn’t understand other cultures. Any other cultures.

Romney’s most important jobs as president would be diplomatic and military. The president can’t do a whole lot domestically without the help of congress, but he will have to talk to a lot of foreign dignitaries and travel to other countries. As we saw with Bush, the president can have a lot of influence over things like African aid or wars, all on his own. If Romney doesn’t understand people who own fewer than four houses (and his cabinet will probably also be full of the people giving him $10 million a month), he will certainly not understand cultures with different religions, different standards of living or different governments. His reaction to Palestinian unemployment rates cannot be, “well, why didn’t those bums stay in school?”

(2) Romney does not understand the consequences of his actions.

When Romney says, “I like firing people,” there is some room to interpret that statement. Maybe he understands that firing people is a necessary evil that eventually leads to economic efficiency maybe not; but, in the context of his other statements, it kind of sounds like he likes firing people because he doesn’t really understand what firing people means. To Romney, getting fired means living off of his substantial capital gains income (around twenty million a year) until someone wants him to go on a speaking tour. Romney has always been pretty extravagantly wealthy from birth and at this point, without even lifting a finger, he makes roughly twice as much as quarterback Brett Favre did when he played for the packers. He has no concept of what a 'livelihood' is. He has no idea that when he says "I like to fire people," he is saying, "I like to destroy people's lives and families."

(3) He doesn't understand the economy.

I am sure that if you talked to Romney in an academic capacity, you would find that he is a fan of the the law of large numbers. He tends to say things like, "sure, some Americans will lose their jobs, but it is good for the economy as a whole. Look, average income goes up." He has no concept of variation. When he tells people things like, "Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business," it is because he thinks that most Americans live the same way. When he hears (if he ever has) that 67% of Americans are homeowners, he thinks that most Americans probably own a few houses (and the rest rent, right?). He has no idea that economic policies can cause one set of people to benefit immensely and another to suffer unbearably, while the average wealth of the two groups together increases slightly. Now, in Romney's highly specialized area of business called corporate raiding this is fine because departments don't have feelings (though the people in them do). When running a whole country, it is considered inhumane to just abandon one cohort with crippling debt in order to increase GDP growth by 6 basis points.

I Am Me

This song, by Willow Smith, just got posted on Feministing and I wanted to share it with all of you because it is amazing and says so much, so well.

Dear Armchair Economists, You are Ruining the Country

Dear Armchair Economists,

I understand where you are coming from. You read some book about globalization by Thomas Friedman or you read some awesome plan for free-market-based prosperity in a politician's memoirs. It feels good to believe that you have the right answers, I know. But, on behalf of the United States and economists everywhere: please stop.

You don't actually know how to fix the economy. You don't actually know what the function of safety nets like welfare are. You probably don't even have a good grasp of what a free market is, largely because your idea of controlled markets comes from the Soviet side of the Command and Conquer franchise.

How can you not support this?

"Wait," you protest, "I never played Command and Conquer. I really have tried to study economics and your fancy degree doesn't automatically make you more knowledgeable than me." Great, that's true. Here is a pop quiz. Explain (to yourself or in the comments section) what these things are and what they are used for (without using Wikipedia).

GDP = C + I + G + (X - M)

Λ(x,y,λ) = f(x,y) + λ(g(x,y)-c)

Pareto Efficiency

How did you do? If you did not know one of these, you would get laughed out of an introductory economics class. "But, I know about real world cases!" you protest. Great. I am sure you are very good at winning economic pissing contests about who knows more trivia surrounding the actions of a certain cold war president, however the items in this pop quiz were important because they are not data. They are expressions of important relationships between quantities that shape our economy. You can talk about how this one time someone used supply side economics and the stock market went up all you want, but that doesn't mean you understand why things happened the way they did.

I've been backhandedly referring to Reaganomics here since this is the school of thought that seems to correlate most with the armchair cohort. Reaganomics is a combination of a specific school of supply side economics and a fairly unorthodox interpretation of the now-famous Laffer curve. The basic premise is the following:

Business is driven by investment and hindered by taxes. Therefore, the best macroeconomic policy is to lower taxes on the rich and corporations (with a concurrent cut in government spending) so that companies can generate more revenue and create more jobs. This boost in economic productivity should increase tax revenues enough to make the decrease in tax rate irrelevant. This sounds great in theory. Who doesn't want lower taxes, more tax revenue and more economic growth? However, in practice, just like any other "one-sided" economic policy, it fails.

What do I mean by one-sided economic policy? A one-sided economic policy is any plan that doesn't take into account the reactive quality of the market. In the Soviet Union, there was this noble idea that every worker should be paid what he was worth and since the Soviet leadership were not monsters (at least not at that point) the average worker's salary in the Soviet Union was pretty high. However, because firms were paying exorbitant amounts in salaries and administrative costs, there was no capital left over to produce quality goods. In addition they put price controls in place to keep the value of their workers wages high. This led to a huge excess of demand and a huge dearth of supply - i.e. bread lines, which, in turn, lead to widespread famine. Reaganomics has been touted as the opposite of Soviet demand-side pricing but that doesn't make it better. Doing the extreme opposite of something wrong doesn't make you right, it just makes you a different kind of extremist. Reaganomics leads to reverse bread-lines, or over-stuffed inventories, firms are subsidized like crazy with tax breaks and government investment, so the produce a lot of cheap stuff. This is a little better than Soviet economics for a while because at least food is cheap and plentiful, however eventually the market corrects. People can't buy all of the extra stuff so inventory (products that companies just have lying around, unsold) numbers increase and companies have to fire workers. Since the poor and middle class are paying the same taxes as the rich but don't have an income now, everyone gets poor very fast. This means that companies that sell non-essential goods either go bankrupt or subsist on bailouts and subsidies (see banks, car companies, blackberry, if you have read a newspaper in the last five years you can name them). As the middle-class disappears corporate inventories start to look like Soviet breadlines and government infrastructure crumbles because only a few people are paying taxes.

Now, I am picking on supply-siders (ahem, neo-conservatives) a lot here, but this kind of blindness comes from both (all) sides of the aisle. From Marxists who cry that capitalism has failed every time the stock market crashes to people who think that really all we need is a little more compassion to make the free market work to Ron Paul supporters, all of them have something in common. While they may sit on different sides of a political issue, they all talk about economic policy as if it is just a set of rules that can be committed to memory (big government bad/tax breaks good, capitalism bad/peace and love good, etc.), but talking about an economy without a sense of the whole system is like saying that the only point of an airplane is to fly. It sounds reasonable on the surface, but if you take that advice literally and forget that planes also need to land once in a while, you are going to end up with a crashed plane.

Now, pilots need licenses, but politicians and lobbyists don't have to understand or even care about the economy or policy-making. They just need to get people to vote for them, and often those people are you. So, don't stop reading your pop econ books and don't stop thinking about the issues, but please, please, please before you vote: learn to tell the difference between political propaganda and a systematically reasoned economic argument.

Three Things that I Have Heard Feminists Say that are Hurting Feminism (Part One)

Feminism is on a roll these days. Women's rights are everywhere in the media and people are starting to wake up to the inequality all around them. If I didn't know any better, I would think that the Republican party was a clever scare campaign to raise awareness about the threat to women's rights (as opposed to actually just being the threat themselves). However, as feminism becomes more mainstream, it will come under more scrutiny and I think that we need to clean house or face humiliation. So, here is the first part of a multi-part post on things I have personally heard that will mess feminism up on the national stage.

(1) He's not just misogynist, he's so icky too.

Jezebel (the feminist Cosmo), printed (posted?) an article on July 4th called Meet 'Guy on the Internet,' Champion of Dullards. For those of you that don't click links (I believe that may be all of you) the article basically starts out complaining about how misogynist men are on the internet. I have my own take on that, but their general point that people are picking on Anita Sarkeesian because they are sexist and dumb is well taken. However, then this little gem of a description came up about half way down the article:

This is the trademark of the mediocre, the unthinking among us. These people are the kid you knew in high school who wouldn't — maybe couldn't — stop making the same terrible Austin Powers impressions. Every day he'd sit down at the cafeteria and look down at his rectangular pizza and bellow a, "GET IN MAH BELLAH," years after everyone else stopped giving a shit. 

This is a little disturbing to me. I'm not really sure yet how bad I think it is to make fun of nerdy high school students with borderline Asperger's (I know popular culture loves to do this), but it certainly qualifies as a cheap shot and sits awfully close to being on the wrong side of the anti-bullying movement. If a feminist writer wants to be taken seriously, she (or he) can do better than bad high school movie stereotypes, but time and time again, I see weird mentions of how old and disgusting such and such senator trying to stop birth control is or what a "witch" Michele Bachmann is (no, it's funny, I swear, because she's Republican and was actually a witch once). Not only is it almost as bad as what the mainstream media does with women's clothes, it's not even very effective. Trashing people over their (hypothetical) awkward high school social habits is going to turn off a lot of intelligent and sensible people who had awkward high school social habits. Whatever argument people might have with my privilege or with the route my claims might take, I can tell you this: the feminist movement should not be branding itself as "those women who were awful to you in high school."