Update: It seems that Greg Laden has taken this criticism from sofiarune, myself, Erik, and others to heart, and is mass-replying to the commenters in Stephanie Zvan’s post even as we speak. We’ll see what comes of this.
Update II: Perhaps there is some confusion over “yelly.” This is not rage, this is fun. It seems a lot of people have trouble with this. As people keep reminding me, we’re just not normal that way.
Update III: Good news and bad news. Good news is that Tioliah commented very thoroughly on my post regarding “the Y chromosome is a damaged X chromosome” nonsense, but unfortunately Laden has doubled-down on his “it’s right even though it’s wrong” gambit. Ah well, we tried.
There are a lot of things you don’t do in activism. You don’t alienate the people around where you’re holding your vigil/protest, you don’t ignore the people on whose behalf you’re protesting, you never, ever start a fight, and you be as honest and complete as time permits in your discussion of why you believe what you do (sincerity really works). The serious never-do-this rule, however, is “don’t burn bridges with another generation of activists.” This is a hard lesson to learn that people keep forgetting, and it unpacks into a lot of sub-rules, such as:
- Don’t assume that your generation has a monopoly on the truth
- Don’t assume theirs does either
- Remember that a conversation is an exchange
- Remember that no perspective includes the views of all others, no matter how much someone in that position (or your position) may have suffered/been privileged.
This little four-part whammy is very often forgotten, because it knocks out most of the easy-at-hand justifications for the stupid little hierarchies that we humans are so good at setting up on a moment’s notice for no apparent reason or utility whatsoever (that is perhaps its greatest charm, besides the little thing about it being a very good idea). These hierarchies lead to stratification, which leads to institutionalization, which can only lead to the Dark Side of self-perpetuating organizational fail and loss of purpose. So what’s this got to do with anything? Read on, but first know that I’m writing this with sofiarune’s knowledge and approval. Why that’s important will be clear later.
I’m browsing the web searching for stupid people being stupid (as I often do in the target-rich environment that is the Internet), and I decide to check the gold-mine that is Thunderf00t’s blog. Having already read the latest post at the time, I delve into the land of meta-stupid (namely, the comments for that post). A particular comment catches my eye, because it sounds like someone badly rephrasing a fairly standard Feminist argument (that you need to shock people out of the complacent way in which our culture teaches us to equate “male” with “normal”) that someone has thrown out as a response to criticism to Greg Laden’s Really Stupid and Unscientific Statement about Brains (“You know, the male brain is a female brain damaged by testosterone in various stages in it’s life.” video link here, starting about 30 seconds prior) (though what’s surprising about it is that it took so long for anyone to notice him saying this).
I forget about it, because well, I’m having fun digging around the stupid. Later on, I called sofiarune on Skype, and we start talking about the crazy and stupid things we’ve noticed (as we are wont to do), and Greg Laden’s fail comes up. I mention that someone is claiming that it was Greg trying to shock the audience, and her reaction could best be summed up as “that’s a bullshit response, because what Laden said was scientifically and academically irresponsible. You never drop value-laden statements like that because they’re not useful and not informative.” It was something like that, but a bit more yelly (we tend to rant a lot at each other see update II at the beginning of this post). So I dig up the link to Stephanie Zvan’s blog post attempting to explain Greg Laden’s statement, and not only is it a standard “you gotta break some eggs if you’re going to do consciousness-raising” justification*, it sounds suspiciously like she’s rationalizing what he’s saying after the fact. He could have been thinking that, but nowhere else in the recording does he present his statement as anything other than simple fact.
Anyhow, do read her blog post, and then read from this comment on if you don’t have time for the whole thread – that’s where sofia jumped in to respond, and gradually became angrier than I have seen her on all but two occasions. I quietly stepped in once here to try and offer a constructive bit of criticism when I saw that things were going very badly. I did act as a sounding board for her phrasing, but generally tried to stay the hell out of a discussion gone horribly wrong. Take what you will from Zvan’s last reply (to both of us). Sofia was beside herself, feeling like she’d been, well, you read the comments. If you didn’t, go do it now.
I am disturbed by the whole thing as well, for several reasons. First of all, given that I’d just uploaded my video on wicked problems, I was in no mood to take anyone’s assumption of sage wisdom without a few pounds of salt. Second, we were being asked to take something essentially on faith, with no evidence to support it. Third, it was a connection that most people could not be expected to make, or that most people would be comfortable making unless they were already trying to rationalize something more sensible than an utter brain fart into Laden’s words.
Fifth, Ms. Zvan’s reply to Sofia (saying that she was “defenitionally concern trolling”) was a wee bit of unfeeling sophistry that reminded me a lot of an elder upbraiding a younger for being insufficiently devoted to The Cause, and questioning their loyalty. Looking at sofia and listening to her as she was trying to have this dialogue, this was not concern trolling. It was far beyond concern, even. It was anger and frustration and a touch of despair about the people she hoped would be beyond tribal apologetics. That didn’t go over well with me at all, as you can imagine. Then, I saw her reply to me at the end, and that changed everything.
Stealth Badger, I’ve been known to be a bit demanding of my audience.
To be honest, I was trying very hard not to laugh when I first saw that; an assertion of authority and privilege by someone who is lecturing others about how necessary it is to understand that Greg Laden was challenging their preconceived notions of authority and privilege. I know it’s supposedly a sign of low intelligence to think in images, but this demotivational was the first thing that came to mind when I saw her response:
It’s really interesting watching this cycle of pontificating at and then shooting/dismissing the messenger during these many feisty discussions on the Internet. While I empathize with the difficulty of realizing just what is valid communication and what is trolling or hating, there’s little doubt that if you’re feeling comfortable and secure in your knowledge, then you’re almost certainly missing something. There’s absolutely no doubt whatsoever that if you’re involved in two traditions that stress rigorous self-examination and questioning and you publicly dismiss the questions of others about something said that is incomplete (and therefore difficult to make sense of), then you’re acting against the values you espouse, especially if that miscommunication touches the core of what those values represent.
As with any thoughts or advice I give, I don’t much care whether anyone buys into my reading of this or not. What I do know is that to make a statement such as Laden did without subsequently providing the context to interpret it the way he purportedly wanted it to be interpreted is silly. For Zvan to dismiss the sincere scientific, social, and linguistic concerns of someone about this miscommunication as “definitional concern trolling” is to make herself look ridiculous in an effort to cover for Laden’s mistake. Also, to talk about genetics and developmental biology on such a panel and in such terms so sloppily, well, you aren’t getting half the grief y’all deserve, because a lot of other people (such as Christina Rad) are getting grief just for being associated with you, and you could lessen that outrage just by admitting the errors (I know, the haters will never be satisfied; that’s just the nature of haters).
Lastly, I have a thought for any would-be teachers of activism out there. The moment you decide you don’t need to learn from someone or can’t learn from them, then stop the conversation and withdraw. You’re not going to be able to teach them anything, because you won’t be able to learn enough about their perspective to know how to communicate to them, let alone learn what they need to know (or what they know that you don’t).
Oh, and I highly recommend Emil Karlsson’s counter to Zvan on scientific grounds.
* a line of reasoning that has always made me more than a little squeamish, since you can often put off more people than you successfully teach with this approach, and no matter what anyone says about the glory days of activism in years past, humans generally never react well to having their world-views grabbed and shaken without warning
Ah, nice to know she worked herself up good and hard before coming over to pontificate without reading the discussion up to that point. By the way, I’d suggest people read the entire comment thread. Then they can see how much energy she put into demanding I repeat myself just for her and telling me things I’d already said. It would have been funny if it weren’t such a waste of my time.
It was only a waste of your time if you feel it was unnecessary to engage. If you were approaching this from the perspective that you were definitely right and she was definitely wrong, then you were the one wasting her time.
As an outside observer, I have to concur with Stephanie’s analysis — sophiarune was definitely demanding that Stephanie acknowledge points that Stephanie herself made, and was growing steadily angrier that her points weren’t being addressed despite them being addressed earlier in the comments. Sophiarune admitted to not reading the comments, nor was she apparently interested in doing so when asked to. Calling her, at that point, a concern troll is quite fair. Just because she’s your friend, doesn’t exempt her from criticism for doing things you’ve mocked others for doing.
I’m puzzled, because I read that entire thread, and didn’t get the impression that she had acknowledged what sofiarune was talking about as important compared to attacking gender stereotypes (which was done badly given the lack of context provided with Laden’s statement at the panel). I suspect that, just as I had the knowledge from exposure to make the connections that Stephanie was talking about, that you may be (and again, emphasis on me suspecting this, no hostility) basing your interpretation on knowledge not available to those who aren’t already familiar with Feminism.
I’ll read the comment thread again.
I’m not doing this to attack you but I also don’t think you can claim outside observer status. You know Zvan and Laden personally. I don’t. I can’t use that personal knowledge to interpret what either of them say. I think you’re tapping into some esoteric knowledge in the same way that they are. Again, I’m saying this sincerely. I feel like people have forgotten what the outside looks like at this point.
Nah. After reading the post and comment thread again, I stand by what I said. While she said that the situation at the panel “wasn’t perfect,” she stood on making her comments section a discussion section on the topic, which is good, but not incorporating this material into an update on her post kind of defeats the purpose of all that effort she expends in clarification (even though I still am dubious about the manner in which she did it). Her stance still places the blame on the listener for being insufficiently sensitive, rather than on Laden for attempting something suited to the controlled environment of a classroom in an environment that was not conducive to what he was trying to do. Seriously, if you are trying to teach something so critically important and you do it badly, why wouldn’t you make a visible effort to rectify it?
I just don’t see how telling people (paraphrasing) “it wasn’t my/his execution, you just didn’t see it right” is anything but arrogant.
Edited to add: upon reflection, I can see how it could be stubbornness, embarrassment, or tunnel-vision. None of these things are good to rest on, though.
Just to make it clear, because I’m realizing in attempting to describe this just what a half-measure the response is: the way Zvan handled the issue in her comments section and in her blog post is to say that what Laden did wasn’t important, but the point he was hoping to make is.
That’s not correct, because what was caught on that video at that panel will rabbit all over the Internet much further than the comment thread discussion ever will, and ignoring it (as Zvan implies about sexist statements that are male-normative) only encourages those who cling to that frame of reference.
It’s interesting that you assumed I was upset before our exchange.
to Ergh. Threaded comments are the bane of my existence, especially when they have a nest limit. Please pardon me for ignoring the shiny reply buttons that beckon to me to reply to individual posts, turning this conversation into a series of parallel conversations, instead of one larger one with multiple participants. :/
sofiarune: I think you’re probably right in that I know them personally, and have been allies in many, many, many fights about misogyny and race and other social justice issues. I am aware that one of Greg’s techniques in conversation is to throw problematic language into the mix on purpose, to elicit responses. Stephanie knows this about Greg too, which is probably why I expect both of us are reading him more charitably than others have. That’s not to say the tactics are always valid, only that I might be more accustomed to seeing Greg do exactly this on a number of topics. The tactic tends to draw actual trolls out to actually troll, and those folks usually serve as good examples. When an MRA comes out to attack the idea that men are somehow damaged, even while the same douchebag returns to his subreddit or In Mala Fide or whatever else where he’s free to continue to call women inferior, they expose themselves as hypocritical. This has a secondary, insidious effect of proving the argument itself — that any class of people that has some substantial but ultimately inconsequential-to-their-value-as-human-beings difference (e.g. their genitals, their chromosome makeup) is somehow a “damaged” version of the “default” genitals or chromosome makeup — is invalid on its face.
That last sentence was tangled. Sorry.
So I am aware that Greg does things like this in an educational sense, and in a trojan horse sense, e.g. to salt the earth against this sort of argument in the future. It sometimes works. Oftentimes it backfires and all it does is splash damage.
This really doesn’t change the fact that you severally said that you couldn’t be bothered to read the comments. When someone makes that suggestion, there’s usually a good reason for it. That’s concern trolling, when you refuse to engage on the arguments and assume that it’s necessary to re-tread ground that’s already been trod, all because you take issue with things emotively that have, really, honestly, actually already been addressed. Now, you may not have wanted to act that way, and being called on trolling might sting, but it’s defensible as a descriptive. Maybe not as a “you’re a troll” epithet, but “you’re trolling”. Same as people rankle at the difference between “you’re a racist” and “you’re being racist”; and sometimes even imagine you said one when you said the other.
Stealth Badger: There’s a few points about being an activist I have to disagree with, mostly that one must never be anything less than professional and polite. I know, you didn’t say that, this is a reductio ad absurdam of your position. Fair cop. But really, sometimes the people tossing the bombs are pulling an overton window over — sometimes they’re throwing and taking punches that others can’t. Think about this in the context of “die cis scum”. It’s the difference between punching up and punching down.
There’s one important aspect to that, that really bears mentioning though — I feel strongly that as equality nears parity, as the gap between the underprivileged and the privileged shrinks, the underprivileged lose the right to make those punching-up statements. If men and women ever achieve anything like true parity, where there are no wage gaps, no rampant misogyny shouting down women for being in a group that’s dominated by men, et cetera, then they lose the right to fight back against privilege if it’s eroded. It becomes a case of “sore winners”. The problem is, with MRAs and their troll-kin, they honestly think women achieved societal parity just by winning the vote, and everything since has been women trying to dominate men (by taking away the tools they leverage to dominate women, naturally, but they don’t know this). So as parity is neared, clawback groups appear. White supremacists will gain power as racism is nearly squashed. Not that it’s anywhere near as far along as women.
Anyway. Intersectionality is key. Having people willing to throw punches and pull overton windows the way Greg does, is certainly valuable. He can weather whatever the MRA trolls throw at him, because he’s dealt with them enough, and he’s not even a woman, so they are less likely to attack him (and when they do, they use the ineffectual “mangina” nonsense). So even if Greg knows full well that his problematic language is problematic, it serves a few purposes, even where it does splash damage. It might be a slightly ill-aimed grenade, but it is not completely ineffectual, even where MRAs are given a bit of grist for their mill. Their arguments are undercut. If they push back against it too hard, they lose one of their main lines of argumentation — that women are inferior, and must needs stay that way. They won’t risk that.
I’m sorry that you feel this is an attack on you. It’s not. It’s disagreement. We can have arguments about tactics, but I’ve long argued for a plurality of tactics because we need to counter all sorts of other units on this playing field.
I sometimes think in video game terms. I’m thinking RTS games, where pikemen beat cavalry, cavalry beat infantry and infantry beat pikemen. You need a balanced army to win.
Okay, setting aside the arguing against your point responding to your admitted exaggeration for purposes of rhetoric, just because I’m tired and parsing that back to the position I actually hold would be difficult.
I disagree strongly with the idea of the Overton Window as a controlling influence in dialogue, because as far as I can tell, in actual practice it not only moves the cultural frame of reference, it is phrased in such urgent terms that it corrodes and destroys the implicit social habits that make civil discourse possible (I’m repeating myself here because the person who wrote me this evening made the same point about Thunderf00t that you do about Laden. To me, revolutionary jargon can be helpful in moderate doses, but when it becomes the mainstream method of discourse in a communications medium, that medium is effectively lost to rational dialogue.
Agreeing to disagree, I can do though.
Have a good evening.