Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

Many, many x-posts but isn't it possible to identify with a character in a novel, whilst also noticing yourself doing that, and noticing whatever biases it may be giving you as a reader? Although I think someone else upthread said it wasn't an either/or thing, identification, anyway.

Interesting to note how strongly some of us fall to either end of the pro/anti identification spectrum as readers

<a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6253/the-art-of-fiction-no-221-ursula-k-le-guin";>"It’s funny, The Anxiety of Influence came out at just the time that women were discovering other women writers and saying, Hey, we have influences! We never did before! Here were all the men worrying about the anxiety of being influenced and the women were going, Whoopee!"</a>

the anxiety of bbcode

http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/america-tonight-blog/2013/12/9/lena-chen-onlineharassment.html

good god, that's the most sickening thing i've read in quite a while

ugh
Is there any possibility of this sort of thing becoming "easily" fixable by Google or w/ever?

ugh i had to stop reading it
how scary

...

I mean, I have experienced only very mild internet stalking / hate mail / rapes threats etc compared to what those people have been through. But the sense of powerlessness and terror that it engenders is unfortunately all too familiar.

It's hard to imagine what it's like to be the focus of this kind of harassment if you've never been through it. It's even way, way harder to try and imagine the person - or persons, but it really seems like it's "one dude with a serious grudge and a lot of sock puppets" - who would be willing to keep up such a determined campaign for so long. (Though if it's a group, it's easier to imagine, as they reinforce one another's behaviour, like stalking and harassment is a kind of game that they win points with their friends for activities.) Not sure if this would go so far as to be a part of Predator Theory (which is the scariest and yet one of the most interesting branches of forensics) but the study (if not unmasking) of these kinds of offenders (and it's very clear that damage and offence has been done here, even if our current legal framework doesn't always recognise it) might be of more use towards stopping it?

I'm always reminded of that high profile case of violentacrz or whatever his name was, the unmasking of someone who was terrorising people - though not with the kind of *focus* in this case - and his apparent cluelessness as to how his behaviour was affecting people, combined with that hypocritical "Oh noes, don't out me, I have a job and family etc!" That on one level, articles like this don't stop the harassers because letting them know that they have beaten their opponent (as if in a game) makes them feel like they have accomplished their goal. But to get people like *Google* to accept that this is a problem, your services are facilitating violence, and you can't just throw your hands up and say "we're no more responsible than the phone company when someone prank calls someone!" Because the phone company is obligated to turn over records to the police if someone is using the phone as a weapon of intimidation, but Google just keep going "oh noes, privacy!" (Perhaps harassed people should pose as market research firms, and just *buy* the data, bet Google would roll over then.)

But the root problem here, with the google thing, is that same problem with all massive tech companies - when you are vastly over-dominated by young, techie, cis-het white men - i.e. exactly the demographic statistically *least* likely to BE affected by these issues, and *most* likely to be the CAUSE of these of these issues.

I've had the experience, unfortunately more than once, of being harassed or made super-uncomfortable by creepy guys with no sense of boundaries, through a web-based medium, contacting the moderator and asking "DO SOMETHING!" and having the dude turn around and say some unhelpful variant on "A few rape comments? What's the big deal? Just ignore it." It's impossible to tell whether ignoring/responding to someone online will produce a few zings, or a multi-year campaign of harassment. These are the conditions women learn to live with online.

It's the same as that change to Twitter's blocking policy last week. "Some guys get mad at getting blocked, and escalate? Oh, instead of dealing with those people, let's coddle them by tricking them into thinking they haven't been blocked." And women quite rightly responding: "we wanted more, not less protection. If you've got a situation where someone is standing outside your window shouting; before, at least, we had a thick curtain we could draw. Now you have turned that into a one-way mirror facing the wrong way. NO." It's hard for me to believe that anyone could think that this was a better solution, but having witnessed the groupthink that evolves around techie guys of the ~Silicon Valley demographic~ ("Why would you not want your real name and face on our website? What could possibly go wrong with that?") unfortunately I know they do.

Yeah, I do feel like Google could find a way to make this easily fixable. But until it becomes something which is regularly experienced by ~people like them~ instead of being *caused* by ~people like them~ what incentive do they have to make it easily and easily-accessibly fixable?

Also, wow, but this morning is becoming kind of a bummer, but I just wanted to leave this post somewhere. And I was going to leave it in the midst of one of the discussions on child-rape and paedophiles and wow, there are so many potential threads that I'm not sure if I should leave it on the R Kelly/Jim DeRo thread or the Ian Watkins thread or any of the so many other delightful "how do we talk about people who pursue sex with 13 year old girls?" threads we've had recently (because this shit is hard to read without getting triggered) and so, instead, I shall leave it here:

http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/TroubleAndStrifeReader_9781849662956/chapter-ba-9781849662956-chapter-0008.xml

This does require a content warning, because it does discuss child-rape but it also does produce a really nifty addressing and debunking of the usual "Cycle of Abuse" theory which gets trotted out every so often when talking about These Issues (and I counted at least one on the R Kelly thread).

But it was certainly eye-opening for me, because I have certainly trotted out "Cycle of Abuse" as an explanation or mitigation many times.

And now I am going to go and lookit pictures of flowers and kittens and sea arches for a bit.

that's a very good article and addresses something that hasn't changed since it was written, the way that media and professional othering of paedophiles tends to overshadow the vast majority of abuse taking place within family/social settings

NV, I thought quite hard about asking this, because I'm well aware that it'll open me to accusations of "humourless feminist" and worse from the peanut gallery. But.

Are you aware of the dissonance of posting to a Feminist Theory thread, while using a screen name which mocks an aspect of feminist theory - or is it deliberate?

i'm not sure i would describe the term "mansplain" as an aspect of feminist theory.

i thought about that to be honest but my take is that "mansplaining" has a certain mocking humour to it as a construction and the song i'm spoofing is pretty mansplainy in itself, i don't think the joke (such as it is) is at the expense of the idea

on the other hand sometimes a 48-hour passing whim of a display name does end up being off on some threads

i'm attributing more thought to it than was put in, really. at heart it's just a bad pun

Please be aware, I'm not even saying "don't do this" but more "are you at least aware of the dissonance involved here?"

yeah i think i was but see above

also just realised ledge did this better with "itt: 'splaining men"

That one is much more clear in the direction at whom mockery is being directed.

I'm sorry, and I did not mean to pick on you, NV. I am just in a Place Of Badness right now and prob need to go look at kittens and sea arches.

it's all good, got no wish to aggravate anybody's bad places

This does require a content warning, because it does discuss child-rape but it also does produce a really nifty addressing and debunking of the usual "Cycle of Abuse" theory which gets trotted out every so often when talking about These Issues (and I counted at least one on the R Kelly thread).

fwiw i hesitated before posting that on that thread b/c i was aware it might come off like an attempt to mitigate, which it was absolutely not intended as; it was more a huge thing that i hadn't seen brought up even tangentially (and still haven't). i was very inarticulate overall yesterday for many reasons though (couldn't even find the right phrasing to tweet it, so didn't)

i think it's possible to look at a variety of causal factors in abusers without adopting the naive determinism that Liz Kelly identifies in the "cycle of abuse" narrative. a naive "patriarchy determines all abuse" theory wouldn't be much more convincing.

From Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

Incest perpetrators are similar to partner abusers in both their mentality and their tactics. They tend to be highly entitled, self-centered, and manipulative men who use children to meet their own emotional needs. ...(T)hey are often controlling toward their daughters (or sons) and view them as owned objects and tend to use seduction and sweetness to lure their victims in.

Immediately the word paedophile appears we have moved away from recognition of abusers as ‘ordinary men’—fathers, brothers, uncles, colleagues—and returned to the more comfortable view of them as a small minority who are fundamentally different from most men.

on being a female baseball fan

http://cratesandribbons.com/2013/12/13/patriarchys-magic-trick-how-anything-perceived-as-womens-work-immediately-sheds-its-value/

http://i.imgur.com/rEIjV9b.gif

Have not read that yet, but I have read many many articles on that phenomenon's little sister, which is "Want to feminise a field real fast? Drop the pay!" as applied to everything from medicine to journalism to the priesthood (in almost every denomination except Roman Catholic Christianity).

That's really interesting, but I'd be dubious of the conclusion unless the gender balance is genuinely the only difference between the Russian healthcare system and UK/US ones.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/01/16/time_s_hillary_clinton_cover_will_our_next_president_be_a_pointy_heel_trampling.html

The cover trades in the imagery of several sexual fetishes—macrophilia, in which (mostly) male fetishists get off on images of (mostly) female giants; trampling, in which (mostly) female dominant parties walk all over (mostly) male submissives; and the common foot fetish, which also looms large over the image.

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/xx_factor/2014/01/16/140116_DX_HillaryTimeCover.jpg.CROP.promovar-medium2.jpg

Oh, macrophilia. Sure.

Foz Meadows being awesome http://fozmeadows.wordpress.com/2014/01/25/dear-james-delingpole-you-are-the-problem/

This is a longread, but it's very thoughtful and thought-provoking

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/reachingout

About the current fissures in feminism, how they developed, how they play out, and how to resolve them using the same conflict resolution tools that intersectional feminists have used in other parts of the world. Well worth a read.

intersectional international.

God I have been typing that word so much it's started to co-opt the typing patterns of other words!

I tried to read that, Zora, but I've never heard of James Delingpole, and his original article that this is refuting reads like complete trolling. My mind keeps bending away from his words and wondering about other things, like whether I have enough eggs for breakfast.

Yes, he's a very unpleasant right-wing troll who'd have been banking on provoking the reaction that he did.

BB, that New Left Project link is GRRRRREAT! I liked a lot of things about it, will bookmark and probably share.

Good "big picture" sketch of how things blow up online, rather than staying on the merits of any particular controversy--many of them thoroughly merited, imo, but I appreciate the macro take here. Good bit on conflict analysis, really liked some of the ideas there, another area I have in mind to learn more about. Just rich, rich with sparks for me.

Yes, I thought it was very good on that - an analysis of how/why the blow-ups occur, rather than getting into the she said/she said details of any of them (not that those details aren't important, but at this point many of us are familiar with most of them) and instead of those hollow and IMO rather false calls for "unity" (usually at the expense of the injured party) talking about conflict resolution, and methods that are effective at getting important messages heard effectively. I really liked the sound of the workshop that Chitra ran.

http://maisonneuve.org/article/2014/01/10/white-girlsyoung-girls/

That Delingpole article is a lot of words expended on a one-note troll who glories in the opprobrium of the left.

Fisking Delingpole is like analysing a turd in a lab to confirm that it stinks.

lol

foh with this white feminist shit

http://www.thenation.com/article/178140/feminisms-toxic-twitter-wars

Aren't these comments worthy of a better response than that?

Katherine Cross, a Puerto Rican trans woman working on a PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center, wrote about how often she hesitates to publish articles or blog posts out of fear of inadvertently stepping on an ideological land mine and bringing down the wrath of the online enforcers. “I fear being cast suddenly as one of the ‘bad guys’ for being insufficiently radical, too nuanced or too forgiving, or for simply writing something whose offensive dimensions would be unknown to me at the time of publication,” she wrote.

And

Being targeted by other activists, she says, “leaves you feeling threatened in the sense that you’re getting turned out of your own home…. The one place that you are able to look to for safety, where you were valued, where there is a lot less of the structural prejudice that makes you feel so outcast in the rest of the world—that’s now been closed to you. That you now have this terrible reputation… I know a lot of friends that live in fear of that.”

If your professional life is tied up with activism, the threat is redoubled. “To suddenly be tarred by the very people that I’m supposed to be able to work with, my allies, as being a sellout or being infatuated with power or being an apologist for this, that and the other privilege—if that kind of reputation gets around, its extremely damaging,” says Cross.

I mean, I don't know how you can read an article with a range of voices, mostly WOC, and dismiss it as "white feminist shit".

The article frames criticism from WOC/trans/etc. individuals as hysterical and over the top, quoting a few people who think of criticism as some sort of casting-out does not change that. Look at how Mikki Kendall frames the piece, she's called a fucking Maoist. For fuck's sake.

If there’s something inherent about the way women work within movements that makes us assholes to each other, that is incredibly sad.”

I'm going to steal from carl agatha here: IF ONLY THERE WERE SOME WAY TO TELL IF THIS IS TRUE, OH TOO BAD I GUESS IT'S UNKNOWABLE.

That article is unmitigatedly terrible and I wonder how Prof Cooper feels about being extensively quoted in it.

Online, however, intersectionality is overwhelmingly about chastisement and rooting out individual sin. Partly, says Cooper, this comes from academic feminism, steeped as it is in a postmodern culture of critique that emphasizes the power relations embedded in language. “We actually have come to believe that how we talk about things is the best indicator of our politics,” she notes.