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How most men, even good caring men, have no clue what women go through

Started by ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞, September 06, 2012, 10:59:53 AM

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The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: East Coast Hustle on September 09, 2012, 07:51:18 AM
In all fairness, I do recall an explanation of privilege being posted in an earlier thread, I think by Pixie.

I must have missed it.  There's only been about 3 million threads about this shit, all of which have turned into the same thing by page 3.

What I have learned:  Cain is right 169% of the time, and I should start paying more attention to what he says.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

East Coast Hustle

Also, in all fairness, though I understand how you feel and why you feel that way, try to remember that you're mad at one person, and PD has a whole lot of other people. So it would be easy for someone else to overreact in kind along the lines of "Oh, you're just here because of Nigel and if you and her have a falling out the rest of us are chopped liver, huh buddy?"

In short, this too shall pass.
Rabid Colostomy Hole Jammer of the Coming Apocalypse™

The Devil is in the details; God is in the nuance.


Some yahoo yelled at me, saying 'GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH', and I thought, "I'm feeling generous today.  Why not BOTH?"

The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: East Coast Hustle on September 09, 2012, 07:57:21 AM
Also, in all fairness, though I understand how you feel and why you feel that way, try to remember that you're mad at one person, and PD has a whole lot of other people. So it would be easy for someone else to overreact in kind along the lines of "Oh, you're just here because of Nigel and if you and her have a falling out the rest of us are chopped liver, huh buddy?"

In short, this too shall pass.

Yeah, I'll be over the whole rage thing in a few hours.  Apologies to everyone not involved.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Freeky


Murmur

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on September 09, 2012, 07:58:58 AM
Quote from: East Coast Hustle on September 09, 2012, 07:57:21 AM
Also, in all fairness, though I understand how you feel and why you feel that way, try to remember that you're mad at one person, and PD has a whole lot of other people. So it would be easy for someone else to overreact in kind along the lines of "Oh, you're just here because of Nigel and if you and her have a falling out the rest of us are chopped liver, huh buddy?"

In short, this too shall pass.

Yeah, I'll be over the whole rage thing in a few hours.  Apologies to everyone not involved.

Apology accepted, though not needed. I try to stay far away from this type of stuff, but I feel bad for Roger, and the way this page has played out is fucked up. I wanna give the guy a hug.
And with that, I'm out of this thread.
Tolerable Terror for Toddlers Legionaire, Nixon Division™

"Onlookers will be horrified and amazed by the sheer volume of fluid."--TGRR

"SaraLee, I say unto you!  If ye have a cake and halve it, and then halve it yet again, you would have four quarters and yet still not have a dollar.  Eat of that cake, for it is cake which is NOT cake, which ye may have half a mind to have at a reasonable price, yet in indecision achieve satori with said stale Moon Pie.  That's what you get when YOU FUCK WITH US." - DOUR

Epimetheus

I have an idea and it's open to criticism. It might help to rephrase how we talk about prejudices, so instead of referring to some nebulous entity like The Culture or The Society we talk about individuals; "most people" is I think more honest than "the culture," because culture isn't a solid block of One Ideology, it's an ocean or forest made up of tons of unique individuals each acting and believing in slightly or vastly different ways. Culture doesn't exist except in the minds of individual people, collectively. Saying "the culture" almost as if it's the whole population is misleading.

I think this also ties into Roger's idea about fixing the issue locally, with peer pressure. It focuses on the individual's wrongness rather than something outside of them.

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on September 09, 2012, 07:26:01 AM
I see nothing of value in any of these conversations.  I see mountains of butthurt, and until you came along, nobody doing a fucking thing to attempt to correct misconceptions.

I thought Garbo addressed them well here, and then reiterated here...?
POST-SINGULARITY POCKET ORGASM TOAD OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

Freeky

Sounds like a decent idea, epi.  No idea how to implement, though.

Faust

Quote from: Secret Agent GARBO on September 09, 2012, 12:11:44 AM
I'm sorry that I made assumptions. I ought to know better. That's my fault. But you are, nevertheless, white and a cis male, yes? That right there still puts you into the dominant group in two very important ways (I think I've said this before, but one's sex/gender, race, and class are the three biggest determiners of how your life will go and how others will treat you).
It's not fear, it's wariness. Jesus. If I thought everything was out to get me, I'd never go anywhere except to therapy or something. Can we not derail this further?

I've previously rejected your language of classification and am offended that once again you have applied it to me. Even by your definitions, no technically I am not. Make no further attempts to shoehorn me.
Sleepless nights at the chateau

ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞

I find myself viewing everyone's posts in this thread as very valid, but at a loss in terms of putting it into words. As much as I want to disagree with the guy, RWHN makes some excellent points.

I think the problem is in generalizations—which in one sense are true, but in another sense gloss over the complexities of reality. When we talk about the former it seems to preclude the latter, and vice versa. Probabilistically speaking, cis white guys are the easily identifiable, everyday oppressor. But on the other hand, that can easily be seen as insulting to the cis white guys that have an obvious commitment to equality. It's less likely according to the probability, but still very real.

It's much harder to discern the insidious but also ever present effect of wealth/income inequality, in spite of it having a more encompassing and deterministic effect on one's privilege. Coming from a cis white male standpoint, I naturally gravitate to the economic class distinctions, as that is the most salient perception to me—it's what I was born into from middle class parents. What I'm subjected to is primarily class warfare. If I had been born female, the most salient perception from my everyday life would probably be the males of wide ranging socio-economic status, not just those born into wealth. What women are subjected to is primarily patriarchical bullshit.

Kyriarchy is a complicated mess of distinctions that we're not used to compiling, but a crucial challenge to sort through. Anyone who has participated in feminism/egalitarian threads even the slightest bit ought to be commended for grappling with an extremely difficult topic. Thank you for having the courage. This shit is fraught with hard to perceive bias and traumatic experiences so it's prone to fallout. But at the same time, it's fertile with getting beyond yourself and removing your head from your ass.
P E R   A S P E R A   A D   A S T R A

AFK

#339
Quote from: Secret Agent GARBO on September 09, 2012, 03:29:00 AM
But on the whole, men still have certain privileges and status that women do not, regardless of class or race or any other factor.


No, that's bullshit, not "regardless of class".  You can't tell me the white single Dad on welfare has some level of privilege over Nancy Pelosi.  That's just such an insanely stupid thing to suggest that it pretty much discredits any supposed authority you think you have on this subject.
Cynicism is a blank check for failure.

AFK

Also fellas, it really IS okay to agree with me on other things even though we disagree on drugs.  I promise it won't sting too much.  ;)
Cynicism is a blank check for failure.

Verbal Mike

Quote from: CorbeauEtRenard on September 09, 2012, 06:51:40 AM
It seems to me like a large part of the problem here is the problem I almost inevitably see crop up in discussions involving Privilege Theory.

There isn't a clear enough emphasis that privilege is something that happens to some people, not something they are doing.

Receiving privilege does not make someone "part of the problem" and in most cases, one could not divest oneself of a given form of privilege even if one tried.
Receiving privilege doesn't make you part of an oppressive class, it makes you part of a class that is favored in some way by society and/or culture.
Receiving privilege doesn't mean you can't have valid insights, but it does mean there's probably some different cognitive biases that are likely to be at play in your worldview than the cognitive biases likely to effect people who didn't receive that particular privilege.
A thousand times this.
I kind of thought this had already been pointed out, but I doubt any of us has a clear memory of more than a couple percent of this discussion by now anyhow.

I have to say though, this concept of all-pervasive memetic oppression – i.e. that it's not some concrete group of people doing the oppression but mainly everyone who isn't aware of it – seems to me very similar to (my understanding of) the concept of The Machine. So I'm kinda surprised how hard a time the concept has had getting traction in this discussion. And again, while I personally just make an effort to see past divisive language, I do think the divisive language is a big factor in this.

It's not men that oppress women. It's that people of all sexes and genders routinely participate in social and memetic systems that oppress everyone based on gender pigeonholes. The oppression is different for men and women. At this point I see no value at all in reiterating that "women have it worse". I personally happen to think it's true, but it's rhetorically pointless and counter-productive to make that the point of the discussion. The goal should be to identify forms of gender-based oppression and figure out how to counteract them. This is only possible on an individual level – you can't break The Machine or even directly change it, but you can locally tweak it in small ways, which over time can accumulate, possibly then become integrated in The Machine, and then possibly alleviate some of the oppression.

That said, because of men being a culturally privileged class, with a lot of culture catering towards some imaginary Typical White Straight Male, it's crucial to look specifically at how other groups, the biggest one being women, are oppressed. Not necessarily because "women have it worse", but because male privilege makes oppression of women either less visible to men (= men are usually not aware of the kind of stuff in the OP link) or seem natural and unavoidable (think of tropes like "women are better at X than at math/science/management" as an alternative to "women are kept from attaining important positions in society"). Insisting that "women have it worse" is just as counterproductive as insisting that "men have it just as bad".


Aside from all of that, the scientist in me is jarred by the insistence that no discussion of gender-based oppression take place without reference to other dimensions of oppression. (I'm talking about things like RWHN's reply to GARBO just now.) Throughout this discussion, we've repeatedly reached the point where everyone who's otherwise focussing on the oppression of women has to acknowledge that class is a huge factor in oppression as well. And class really is a huge factor, of course. But the discussion can be perfectly valid, and imho more in-depth and illuminating, when it abstracts away from other dimensions of oppression. Parallel discussions about race or class which abstract away from gender are valid and necessary as well. But when a big swathe of the population has a certain type of experience because of a common denominator, and the rest of the population does not have that type of experience and may not even be aware of it, you're not going to get a coherent view of anything by trying to take ALL factors into account all of the time. There are some things which suck about being a chick, some things that suck about being a dude, some things that suck about being a PoC, etc. By focussing on one of these you can get into the nitty-gritty and figure some possibly important details out; by insisting that every mention of oppression towards women be made relative to all other factors you're placing too high a hurdle for any kind of useful generalization to be made.

Generalizations are not avoidable. They have some nasty side-effects which you have to be aware of. They should not be used to pigeonhole individuals like GARBO just did to Faust, for example. But we humans cannot understand anything we don't already know without using it. Insisting that no generalization be used at all, even in a group like this one, highly aware of its ill effects, can come across as, and often functions as, a way to shut down the conversation altogether. (I know it's not intended this way, this just seems to me to be the impact it has.)

To me, one of the cool things about this discussion has been that all these discussions of specific and general aspects of gender-based oppression, especially the oppression of women, which I don't experience myself, have given me a better understanding of oppression in general, one which I can generalize and apply to other forms of oppression. Discussions of Kyriarchy/The Machine/intersectionality as a whole would be fascinating, but far more abstract and difficult to gain direct insights from, IMHO. And gender-focussed discussions, even female-focussed discussions, feed into that kind of discussion in a way that seems highly productive and well worth the time.

I honestly don't remember the last time I've found a discussion of any sort in any form as interesting and important as this one. ETA: Meaning the gender inequality threads in the past weeks here, taken together.
Unless stated otherwise, feel free to copy or reproduce any text I post anywhere and any way you like. I will never throw a hissy-fit over it, promise.

Placid Dingo

Quote from: Rev. What's-His-Name? on September 09, 2012, 11:57:36 AM
Quote from: Secret Agent GARBO on September 09, 2012, 03:29:00 AM
But on the whole, men still have certain privileges and status that women do not, regardless of class or race or any other factor.


No, that's bullshit, not "regardless of class".  You can't tell me the white single Dad on welfare has some level of privilege over Nancy Pelosi.  That's just such an insanely stupid thing to suggest that it pretty much discredits any supposed authority you think you have on this subject.

it's privilege of not privilege over.

Men are the baseline for normal, so there are things that work better for us, in terms of sexual and cultural norms.

Everyone has privleges.

White people can buy skin coloured bandaids that are actually skin coloured.

Men can be openly into sex without being shit on.

Middle class don't have to live day by day

Women are allowed to pay more attention to fasion

And so on. It doesn't have to be an amazing advantage to be privilege. It just has to be a little social reward for you bring lucky enough to fall in with a particular group.

The reason it comes up in discussion is because when we compare male privilege to female privilege it becomes clear that the male privleges are a bit better.
Haven't paid rent since 2014 with ONE WEIRD TRICK.

AFK

The problem I've seen with the gender/privilege discussion is that the generalization seems to be accompanied with a notion of "you haven't walked in our shoes".  And that,for me,where the generalization doesn't work.  If you want to talk broadly about gender inequality,that's one thing, but if it becomes used,inaccurately,as a cudgel against, in this case men,suggesting "you don't know what it's like", well that's a problem, and it doesn't work.  Because as I've pointed out, and will continue to point out, there are many,many men who are in less privileged positions in society compared to many,many women because of issues of class.


So sure,have the generalized gender inequality discussion,but maybe drop the "men don't know what it's like" part in termsof privilege because inmany cases it is a load of bullshit.
Cynicism is a blank check for failure.

AFK

Quote from: Placid Dingo on September 09, 2012, 12:40:49 PM
Quote from: Rev. What's-His-Name? on September 09, 2012, 11:57:36 AM
Quote from: Secret Agent GARBO on September 09, 2012, 03:29:00 AM
But on the whole, men still have certain privileges and status that women do not, regardless of class or race or any other factor.


No, that's bullshit, not "regardless of class".  You can't tell me the white single Dad on welfare has some level of privilege over Nancy Pelosi.  That's just such an insanely stupid thing to suggest that it pretty much discredits any supposed authority you think you have on this subject.

it's privilege of not privilege over.

Men are the baseline for normal, so there are things that work better for us, in terms of sexual and cultural norms.

Everyone has privleges.

White people can buy skin coloured bandaids that are actually skin coloured.

Men can be openly into sex without being shit on.

Middle class don't have to live day by day

Women are allowed to pay more attention to fasion

And so on. It doesn't have to be an amazing advantage to be privilege. It just has to be a little social reward for you bring lucky enough to fall in with a particular group.

The reason it comes up in discussion is because when we compare male privilege to female privilege it becomes clear that the male privleges are a bit better.


For those men in a position in society to actually benefit from that privilege.  What about the poor guy who canonly get food onthe table and can't buy flesh colored band aids?  What about the skinny ugly white guy who is socially undesireable for sex?  You are talking theory,divided from reality.  The privilege is ther for some men to take advantage of but there are many, because of class, who could never dream to wield it.
Cynicism is a blank check for failure.