= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Randy_M comments on LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (472)
I sense a fallacy of gray coming.
The reason for distinguish this genre of discourse (which one might merely call "being an ass") from mansplaining and its related categories (e.g., the other day I overheard in a Starbucks a guy solicit two Asian students, ask them their "ethnic origin", and then reassure them in all seriousness that "We'll send that Dennis Rodman guy back to patch things up.") is that the explanation revolves around the minority party's everyday life. Therefore, e.g., your male friends don't mansplain to you (provided you're not a woman) because you all live in the context of being male.
Calling it all merely "being an ass" conceals the political and social mechanisms lurking under the surface of the exchange.
The latter -- sometimes. The former? Carving reality at the joints is a good epistemic habit, and I think this does the trick.
Of course "being an ass" isn't something only men do but because of the power differential, it's socially acceptable for men to call women out on being wrong, and not the reverse. If you refuse to see the politics, then of course it all looks the same.
It's a patent absurdity of the social justice dogma that every man has power over every woman.
My Yvain-inspired view of this is that there are several different levels of power, and social justice dogma tends to conflate them. This sometimes results in things like trying to solve things like institutional, situational poverty using discourse, and in pushes that will leave one side without self-respect and the other side no better off materially than before.
If they push intersectionality to its logical conclusion, they'll actually be paying attention to what's happening in individual lives. I don't have a strong opinion about whether this is likely to happen.
I'm... not sure what you mean by that.
I've noticed a tendency for groups to join a very specific political cluster (Kind of blue-green-ish maybe?) once they find out about and internalize intersectionality. This happened with New Atheism, and while I think it's for the better, I don't like it. It also seems to result in Inclusivity Wars being incredibly messy and inordinately high-stakes.
What happened with the New Atheists?
My notion is that intersectionality allowed people to bring more of their identity into a discussion than previously-- for example, allowing that a person could be both black and homosexual rather than having to choose one.
If the process is allowed to go to its logical conclusion (not something you should count on with human beings), then a person's whole experience becomes relevant.
I have a notion that one of the things that goes wrong in social justice movements is that they don't allow enough for specialization-- everyone is supposed to care equally about a huge list of injustices.
I've wondered about the history of the acceptance of the idea of intersectionality. This seems like a safe place to ask.
As far as I can tell, some of the leading New Atheists decided to expand their identity to include certain political stances, as well as certain political labels. By doing so they formed a distinct in-group, and immediately became embroiled in an escalating series of in-group vs. out-group skirmishes. At present, as far as I can tell, New Atheists in both groups spend more time on inter-group fighting than on advancing their original goals.
The New Atheists: this is just my perspective: Started out with becoming aware that New Atheists should cooperate with other social issues, and should try to appeal to people outside of white, educated, ex-Christians, combined with (correct) realization of problems within community: Elevatorgate, skeptics uninterested in actually useful applications of skepticism to social issues, Dawkin's Islamophobia, etc. Meanwhile, New Atheism ceased to be lonely dissent. Bunch of talk happened, some factions adopted intersectionality and kind of just merged with the rest of modern quasiradical/moderate Social Justice, others went contrarian on other stuff and became (un-thoughtful) reactionaries, etc.
My (somewhat fuzzy) criticism of intersectionality is basically that it discourages keeping ones identity small, specifically on stuff that is usual Social Justice fare, and tends to encourage the congealment of a big body of politics where somebody can always spam 'but that doesn't include _' or 'but that wouldn't work for _' whenever they run into an idea they disagree with.
That said, I do think that the basic concept is important and needs to be understood.