Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

FWIW, I started doing these threads to make SW storytelling more diverse, not to Fix Society--because I don't think it's broken. I haven't had a whole lot to contribute to this whole feminism thing because, well, feminism is winning. Maybe the word is damaged, maybe not, but the ideology it represents is advancing and always has been, at least in fits and starts. Exhibit A being that we all appear to agree with gender equality ideologically. The first debate on something like this, the only one feminism really requires us to have, is whether women are equals, and the fact that the debate we're actually having takes that for granted and instead focuses on all the little crenellations of feminist doctrine and whether they're helpful or unhelpful...is itself a victory. So even if I were to grant 100% of PC's worldview as correct, my reaction would be, so what? Call it whatever you want, criticize its fringes as much as you want--you're still with us.

 

That's more or less the opposite of the case. "Giving power and validation" is a very powerful notion. As the old adage goes, "Don't bother believing anything until it's been officially denied".
Your example isn't really the wrong part, as "I refuse to dignify that with an answer" can be seen or portrayed as a denial in itself.
Along the lines of your example, we see the Republicans making a big deal about Benghazi, despite their own investigation reporting no wrongdoing. Voters who are willing do do the research already know the truth, but it's enough that the low-information demographic you're talking about sees 'Clinton' 'Benghazi' and 'Cover-Up' in the headlines as often as possible.
It's why the military refuses to deny or even comment on UFO rumors - every time they did, it just made headlines and whipped the true believers into a frenzy about the cover-up.
It's also why all major science advocacy groups have started recommending against debates with creationists. You'll never have time to thoroughly explain why all the unscientific claims they make are wrong, and even getting up there and having the argument plays into the "teach the controversy" narrative.
The better approach in every case is just to stay on topic, and keep saying what you're trying to get people to hear. People are often inherently distrustful, and more likely to disbelieve a denial than believe a rumor on its own. People who seek out bad examples to confirm their own preconceptions will always find something. People who are on the fence are more likely to be swayed by someone making a good point than someone distancing themselves from another person making a bad point.
Every time we say "Oh, I'm not like those feminists!" it just reminds people that they exist, and gives the impression that they're taken seriously - which they aren't. Fox News and other such outlets do plenty to draw attention to any bad examples they can find or invent, and exaggerate their significance; we don't need to help them.
The fact is that "radical feminism" has been largely marginalized for decades. Once famous and controversial names like Andrea Dworkin are now obscure jokes, and radical language like using "womyn" to avoid using "man" is now mostly heard as tongue-in-cheek irony. If a blog like The Mary Sue cracking snarky jokes about a movie is what's an example of "radical" now, I'd say we're doing pretty well.

EDIT: Posted before I saw Coop's post. Yeah, pretty much that.

Clarification: I think the impasse here is that you're arguing about what we should do about Feminism being negatively perceived - but we're arguing about whether Feminism is negatively perceived, at least relative to the past.
I see it doing better, and being less controversial, than anytime in my lifetime; though that's not to say there isn't still a long way to go. Certain extremists like GamerGate have been making headlines, but the reaction in the mainstream has been largely negative. I can remember when diatribes like theirs were mainstream and acceptable. Issues that were once only discussed within the most academic feminist circles are now in the general consciousness.
People are arguing about Hillary's record, character, and abilities, not whether a woman should or could be President. It's incredible.

I think we can shake hands on this. The only point I'd make is that college students have always been silly and extreme on both sides - it's a time to try out ideas and identities. It may be more visible now that everyone and their dog has a blog, but I expect most people will grow into more or less functional adults, like the rest of us did.

 

The fact that this is just the way things are done is not proof that it's the best way to do them. And once again, you keep doing the thing I've always said you're doing: You're conflating my thoughts on fringe radicalism and casual irresponsibility as if I believe they're the same thing, and I don't. They're only parts of a spectrum, and once again, it's irrelevant anyway; I'm talking about perceptions here, and many people have begun to see that spectrum by its ends instead of its middle. You can ramble all you want about how wrong those perceptions are, but you haven't presented anything which actually counters them in practice, except to simply trust that you know better.

If you honestly believe it's possible to counteract right-wing propaganda against feminism---that is, if you honestly think that's a more promising pursuit than instead undermining the us vs. them pimping of feminism by presenting it as a politically-neutral matter of right and wrong---then we're just not operating in the same realm. That strikes me as apologism for the American political system, which I can't accept. If that were all we ran on, then gay marriage wouldn't be legal anywhere yet. 80% of the energy of feminism goes toward preaching to the choir and inspiring more support from people who already agree, but for most issues, what's needed isn't more support... what's needed is more supporters.

 

And yet I've cited instances when breaking from this concept (or, more appropriately, expanding into other methodologies) showed better results, especially among fairly apolitical or casually-partisan Americans. Why stoop to the deadlock of basic rhetorical precepts when you could fairly easily defeat someone on their own battlefield? Because that's the thing: Is it winning, or is it not? I'm not saying it's not. I'm not talking about avoiding a failure for feminism, but about maximizing a success. You guys seem to have no concept of the very high-stakes practical evangelism required to bring these ideals closer to reality before this wave crashes, though. Once again, we're not talking about a situation where 51% is enough; we're talking about the whole of society. The way I see it, politicization just isn't the tool for this job, because politicization can do no better than half.

And, I mean, the proof, well... you guys can see how much this sounds like a modern stand-in for religion, right? Putting a proud name on it, even though it's really just a way of grouping a set of morals, some widely accepted, some less so... radical fringes, disavowed, etc. But once again, you can say that good Christians don't deserve the blame for the existence of bad Christians all you want, but it doesn't matter what should happen; they do suffer from that association. There are naturally many nonreligious people engaged in this discussion, so can you honestly say you don't have the slightest hint of disdain---not intellectually, but just that jolt of wariness---when you find out someone's Christian? Hell, I have a version of that religion, and even I do that when I find out someone's Christian. I'm just saying, there would be a wisdom to taking heed of religion's failings here, instead of taking a par-for-the-course political position the whole way---especially when, as I pointed out with the slavery example, that's a paradigm solidly proven to be overwrought in America.

 

It seems to me you guys are buying into the already-most-universal view, not because it's right, but because it just... exists. It's certainly the easiest to believe, I'll give you that. Even if you are so genuinely civilized that you don't have the slightest hint of inherent wariness of the "other" in your heart, I know you're more familiar with human nature than to project that unique gift onto the general population. There have been plenty of studies on inherent bias; it's one of the keystones of modern progressivism: To make it clear that nobody's being accused of active bigotry, but merely being alerted to their inherent bias. See, high-roading on that sort of thing is what makes me question your sincerity.

But no, the general point was that anyone who calls him or herself a feminist is, whether they believe it or not, engaging in social evangelism and representing a cause, which comes with greater responsibility than simply believing those things without identifying as something. You're simplifying it to saying I'm advocating for a "not all feminists" approach or a direct rebuttal, but I'm not doing that; I'm saying, make a bigger case, open your mind to paradigm shifts. The enemies of progress want you to believe strongly enough to embrace the label, because that's how they discredit you to their own constituency. If you, yourself, undermined the label---which is slightly beginning to happen, but could easily be sabotaged if the matter isn't massaged by those who understand what's really important---then you'd be able to do more than business-as-usual politics. Natural progress doesn't inherently represent a success of progressivism; only a leap in progress does. Those leaps are so few and far between because there are so many people justifying the systems we already use to "generate" progress (which is often just correlation, not causation; some portion of humanity is naturally going to absorb new ideas without any active organization), but there are times when those justifiable, practical, business-as-usual flaws can be exploited to lethal effect. The next election will almost certainly be such a time. However, the groundwork to succeed using indoctrination just doesn't exist on the left the way it does on the right. We can't take that for granted.

 

EDIT: Eh, nevermind. I came across a post which refuted a lot of incorrect stats we've run away with on things like the wage gap, but those facts are so unfortunate that you can't find them without the pseudo-libertarian commentary. The unfortunate thing is, most of the data on these issues supports the other side... but you know what? As long as it has the antagonistic baggage, I don't want to spread it. In a way, I'd rather people keep seeing things simply, if that makes it easier.

If I find a convenient list of references without all the commentary, I'll post it.

 

I don't know that I agree, but I can at least appreciate this POV. But with that in mind...

...what exactly do you mean by this? What exactly is the worst-case scenario you're trying to warn us of, if radicals are allowed to corrupt the conversation unabated? It's one thing to say they're slowing progress down, in the natural-vs-leap paradigm as you stated above, but to my mind they're part of natural progress, because no partisan issue has ever not had 5-10% dimwits.

I see it like this--there were radical black activists during the civil rights momement, people who thought blacks were inherently incapable of racism, or who wanted an armed revolution against the country. Is racism over now? No, but things are better, and the civil rights wave, as it were, is still seen in retrospect as a success and as a positive thing, and to the extent that we do still have big problems with race in this country, nobody is attributing them to black radicals from fifty years ago. What's Tumblr going to do that they didn't?

 

No, you're absolutely right about that, but it's connected to what I said about slavery: We also have to stop looking at it through the lens of our own inefficient political system. That's because the changes sought by third-wave feminism are unlike any of the changes sought by any other social movement. Comparing it to post-segregation black America is tempting, but there was so much of a rubber-band snap of (healthy) white guilt over things which should have been corrected long ago. However, the true goals of third-wave feminism are so nuanced, so abstract, most can't even be legislated around. We're at a turning point in evolution, as a major focus of modern feminism is actually to start denying our biology; it's an unpopular statement, but the simple fact is there's not a lot of science to back up this idea that all our gender roles have been somehow entirely social in nature. We've been seeing the exceptions and trying to use them to prove the rule wrong (and don't get the wrong idea here; I think manipulating our perceptions of those things could be a great way to enlighten people, at least if there were a little less judgment of people being honest about those natures in the process of trying to gain control over them). That's BIG, and you can't compare that to our severely-belated changes to racial rights.

So there are little things, and you can reduce it to Tumblr, but there's a lot more which has leaked out into mainstream feminism. The wage gap myth is one, the rape culture point of view, the idea of a privilege structure which is anything but a product of inherited wealth. People attribute the failures of second-wave feminism to the hypersymbolic "bra-burning" approach. That's what second-wave feminism is remembered for, and in fact, it didn't get a lot done. I think we're on our way to doing better, but in two years, that could all change. Someone's going to pull out Hillary Clinton's statement that "women have always been the primary victims of war" (which is absolutely nonsensical) and other sensationalized statements made in the past to gain female support, and all the backlash, all those radical fringes? Those are going to become the only things people see, because those are going to be the things that make the best campaign ammunition. If there's ever a time to judge feminism by its worst examples and prepare to counteract them, it's now.

 

Not at all; I don't know what specifically indicates that shift to you? If it's the bit about denying our biology, understand I don't think it's wrong to do---I think that's the definition of evolution for a social species. But I think the tactics and doctrine of feminism are wrong to say, "We've just been socialized into these patterns," when primate research shows otherwise. I think we can accomplish more with scientific honesty than idealism, and science set those biological roots we're trying to get past. By all means, let's evolve, but let's realize it's the massive task of taking our own evolution into our own hands as self-aware beings---not exactly something to be cavalier about.

Or if it's the ideas about the wage gap/privilege structure, hell, man, I'd be alright with some of those misconceptions if they weren't becoming a dangerous fuel in this particular period of a couple years; at least they get things going the right direction. But the fact is, wage gap studies failed to factor in different patterns of choice within the same job, the same education level, etc. I like Obama as a dude, but somehow he managed to get away with saying there was no wage equality law... but there was. Kennedy signed it. Using bad statistics shifts the focus to bad tactics---in this case, it's not a legislative issue, but a gulag by powerful people who know how to get around legislation using the free market ideology. Similarly, associating the privilege structure with race and gender is taking aim at the symptoms of a bad system, not the virus itself; racial minorities aren't successful in this country because the same white people continue to inherit old imperial wealth and connections, and everything else is just a byproduct of those same white people having that money. Concern about race and gender is useless without a primary focus on the class system, and the class system can't be overturned in our current one-party political system (and it is a one-party system: capitalists with conscience, and capitalists without conscience, but not different enough to represent opposites). In other words, stingy rich white men are thrilled that people are taking the racial and gender angle with their activism, because that's what's keeping people distracted from the source of their power.

GAJ: Ultimately, it comes down to this ^. Yes, I'm for different causes, because different causes are the only way to affect these causes. The goal of feminism should be to catch more flies with honey specifically because these more abstract social nuances are the only things which can't be automatically enforced using government reform. The social philosophy is all there; my Jungian cynicism distances me, but my Chomskyan neutral-idealism keeps me attached to these conversations... and neither of those perspective are particularly prevalent in modern discourse. But, man... I'm just saying... they ring true. I may not apply them perfectly, but at the very least, I'm willing to ask the questions.

 

Guys, seriously. When I talk about you being indoctrinated, you're demonstrating what I mean.

RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) issued this statement about "rape culture" activism. There's an entire 16-page report which says more than I need to about why the current prevention philosophy is flawed. "But it's denying the experiences real women have!" No, it's not. It's a system proposed by skilled people who have dealt with thousands of rape cases whose jobs depend on its prevention, as opposed to a system based around the very complicated spectrum of emotional reactions individual women have to their isolated personal experiences with assault. Professionals insist "rape culture" has no part in that system.

Also... I'm supposed to be accountable for the bad men in the YJCC, but you're not supposed to be accountable for bad feminists? You must be joking. If the existence of those men justify your position, then you've just undone your entire argument throughout the course of this thread.

I'm a big believer in the research about how when most people are confronted with data which proves their convictions wrong, they double-down instead of believing it. I thought you guys were above that, but if you'd like to accept the mindless populist approach with all its comfortable flaws, go right ahead.

AF, you're living in a society whose only admirable establishments are built on philosophy, whether you care to acknowledge it or not. Without the innovation of thinkers, you would have no society to live in. It's funny how you just can't hold your tongue about how bothered you are by my analysis, and yet I haven't once called you down for your willful ignorance of anything you see as philosophical, which is absolute nonsensical hypocrisy for anyone who claims to have moral principles of any sort.

 

Ha, yeah, you're real slick, huh? Who needs logical refutation!

Sooooo yeah, you don't get to "rest your case" when you haven't made one (unless you count making mine for me).

 

Maybe you're feeling some personal feelings, but I don't think posting a concrete link is all that personal or emotional. Neither is pointing out a contradiction in that you, yourself, are constantly vocal about how you hate philosophy, even though feminism itself is a social philosophy.

Seeing as I've been posting some very literal things here, most of which aren't even "corrections" but simply responsible questions to ask, this whole thing didn't start getting personal until I mentioned a few specific feminist myths, and when it did, it got personal toward me, and how obviously my whole perspective is wrong now that I've provided some factual material. Hey, somebody asked me to provide examples, so I did. But those things don't make a difference to you, soooo if we're talking about anybody having an emotionally-based perspective here...

 

I just asked you where that perception shifted for you, because none of what I've been saying has changed. It simply got more specific; did it get into territory you can't disprove? Because I still haven't seen a refutation. Could it be that's frustrating? I get that, because I used to be a much more doctrinal feminist myself. I fought and fought until I realized, when you reject reasonable proof, you give your enemies ammunition.

Here's what I think happened:

- You all kept saying "Tumblr this, Tumblr that, I don't see how it's that bad."

- I posted a few common concrete myths within feminism, all of which I can back up, to prove that I'm not just talking about petty social network stuff here.

- I posted those things because an honorable movement is a stronger movement. I posted them because I care about feminism not becoming a target, a mockery, and hoped somebody might pay attention to the facts. Why is it so offensive that I'm trying to correct some misconceptions and approaches which have been said to be statistically inaccurate (or, in the case of rape culture, even dangerous) by professionals?

- I'm not saying there's no wage gap: The myth is that the wage gap is 77 cents on the dollar, which came from a biased study. The truth is that the wage gap exists, but is couched in a much more abstract structure, all of which ties into a problem of capitalism itself. Pay is actually closer to 95 cents on the dollar, land ownership is almost perfectly equal, but advancement to select positions of control is what's truly gated (and often balanced out internally so that women hold high-paying non-oversight positions, specifically to 'spoof the sensors' in these studies). I'm not saying it's a necessary evil---I'm saying fix capitalism if you don't want progress to be continually reversed by a loaded die.


EDIT: "Spending too much time analyzing" is in fact often about stripping away the messy, complicated structure of modern human life and seeing what's beneath it all. Believe it or not, it's not more convoluted than your philosophy-rejecting worldview... it's less. It aims to reject ideology about what people "should" do or how you "think" they'll react to this or that, in favor of reality---for better or worse---so that issues can be addressed as they really are, and not just the way society popularly perceives them to be. If you can't appreciate that, then you must believe that perception is reality. If perception is reality, then wouldn't that actually mean someone who cares about progress should take heed of the perception issues I was bringing up before?

You don't have to care about the underlying principle basis of anything I'm saying, but if that's the course you take, then you also don't get to say it's wrong.

 

I think the feminism topic has probably run its course. PC, consider your objections noted.

 

I was hoping to be proven wrong... but alright.

 

Right or wrong, you're clearly getting nowhere with us. I'd rather suffer your lowered opinion of our level of discourse than watch you and AFS snipe at each other for another week.