I’ll stop arguing with anti-feminists and other provocateurs who claim that the latest act labelled “misogynist” isn’t really that, because, you know, whoever did it doesn’t actually HATE women when they stop calling rich people “philanthropists” for giving money away, because I really doubt that those rich people really LOVE the folks that are going to benefit from those funds.
Same goes for people saying they’re not “homophobic” because they’re not afraid of Teh Gay, they’re only disgusted by it.
Many of these portmanteau words were coined by an overly classicophilic population of ivory-towered dons, who wished to be able to talk over the heads of folks without a classical education and who were also fond of poetic allusion. Also, the meanings of words evolve over time! (For those not already aware of this, just go and look up the changes in meaning of the word “nice” over the last few centuries.)
What a word-root we now use as a prefix or suffix once meant to the ancient Greeks or Romans really doesn’t have that much to do with what it means here and now other than a very general classification in the for or against camp. Stop pretending that it does.
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{ 33 comments }
A nice distinction.
Also: ‘hate’ is one of those words isn’t it, where you can actually be guilty of it but disavow it. Ie/ I don’t HATE women, I LOVE them: when they keep their place, please me sexually, don’t have an opinion, dress to appeal to me, be nice, don’t talk back etc…I only HATE women who don’t conform to my high high standards (which I reserve the right to shift and change at will)…and I don’t *HATE* them…I just think they’re frigid bitches/man haters/castrating shrews/should be punished. I really hate the disavowal of hate, like hate is some technical, narrow biblical meaning. Gaargh.
I’ve had this argument before re misogyny. (Buffy nerd alert): I called Riley misogynist, cos he’s all arm grabby, ‘No you WILL talk to me now, cos you NEED to listen to me!!”, all possessive and sulky that Buffy doesn’t ‘need him’ like a woman ’should’ need a man – plus it descends into total violence later when he stakes the Vampire hooker he hired to bite him/kills a prostitute…but even prior to that, I’m sticking to my guns, this control and male assertion and guilt tripping is misogynist. Maybe he doesn’t ‘hate’ women, but he thinks they have roles, think they should be weak and let him protect them, thinks they must need him, thinks he knows better, and if they don’t need him in the right way, well he’ll go to a hooker behind her back because she MADE him with her womanly neglect. Ok. Wow. That was an unexpected rant!
fuckpoliteness’s last blog post..10,000 hits and I missed it!
Oh Riley was totally misogynist, and the most annoying of Buffy’s boyfriends. And Su, nice use of nice.
But there is a place for meaning to be nice (in the 16th century sense of precise) because otherwise how does anyone understand what anyone else means? (misogyny and homophobia denial aside)
Yes, language evolves. But as far as I’m concerned, sometimes it evolves in the wrong direction, making meaning less precise and thus communication more difficult. Witness Don Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words – contemporary words that make so little sense that everybody throws them around willy-nilly thinking they sound good and no-one understands what anyone else means. It’s all very well when it evolves making things more clear, or new words to express new concepts or things, or old words used in a new way for new things. But sometimes (mostly, even) it’s just rubbish.
Oh Riley. Grrr…. I really felt Riley was to represent male uncomfortableness with women who can handle it all themselves. I could write a book on Riley, but I’m busy.
Back to Tigtog (hi!), there was a postsecret this week – “I’m extremely terrified of Chinese people. But I’m not racist” that I don’t know how to take.
@ Anna I guess it depends how they deal with their fear, and what it is about Chinese people that terrifies them.
But isn’t that still racist, regardless? It’s an overwhelming generalization about a diverse group of people based on their ethnicity.
Is that automatically bad though?
Yes. Otherwise we would be getting frightened of all (whatever our racial in-group is) on the basis of one bad experience. But we don’t.
If you knew a group of Chinese people were coming to kill you, or perhaps kidnap and torture you, how would seeing a group of Chinese people nearby make you feel?
Would feeling fear make you a bad person?
“If you knew a group of Chinese people were coming to kill you, or perhaps kidnap and torture you, how would seeing a group of Chinese people nearby make you feel?”
But that’s setting up a straw group of Chinese people, isn’t it. How likely is it that the person on post secret is being pursued by an armed gang of ethnically Chinese murderers?
In reality, unless the generalisation is a really, really value-neutral statement, and factually accurate (e.g. x% of Chinese people do not produce the lactase enzyme as adults), making what Bene called “an overwhelming generalization about a diverse group of people based on their ethnicity” is clearly racist.
I was thinking if it’s an irrational fear that they manage and don’t let affect their interactions with Chinese people (although how you measure this I don’t know) then it’s probably just an irrational fear and not based in racism. But the “I’m not racist” sounds a bit like denial to me.
“I don’t mean to be racist, it’s just my nature.” It’s terribly original, isn’t it?
Is it possible that it’s a third-party piss take? Like an A Softer World thing, commenting on the idea that someone is saying they have the fear, and then denying the racism. I kind of got that vibe.
And at 9: *snort*, yes…I suppose that in the highly unlikely even that you were chased by a large group of people screaming “I am Chinese” (because how could you positively identify the nationalism of a person otherwise) who sought to do you harm, you might develop a fear of Chinese people that you could claim was not racism…but more likely is that you would develop agorophobia, a fear of crowds, a fear of being chased or something that has some connection to the bad surely? Or alternatively if you lived in China and were pursued by large groups of people you could potentially assume were Chinese who wanted to hurt you…presumably they’d have a reason, like they hate your religion? Or they’re pro or anti communism/capitalism/whatever…surely your fear would more likely be in relation to vigilantes? Like say you then got rushed by a group of angry Scottish vigilantes, why would that make you less scared than all Chinese people?
In my experience, people slap “but I’m not X” after something because they both know they’re saying something problematic and have a different idea of what X means than people who are used to dealing with X would think.
So, the earlier example of finding homosexuality disgusting. I would presume the person who said this isn’t going out and beating up Teh_Queers, and since the commonly-portrayed idea of what “homophobia” is is beating up Teh_Queers, then it’s not homphobia, right?
I cannot, under any circumstances, convince the men in my life that statements like “Oh, I don’t mind gay guys, I just don’t want to work with them becuase they’ll be checking out my ass” is problematic and homophobic because it’s just the way it is, right?
The reason I don’t read the postcard in question as a pisstake is because of the nature of the postsecret project, but I certainly am biased to believe everything I read there as being sincere.
My comment was in reply to Bene by the way. I must have forgotten to refresh my browser.
I realise I provided a far fetched example, but my point is that there are many practical and rational reasons for discriminating on the basis of race (see Rebekka’s example) that shouldn’t be labelled bad. The distinction should be made as to whether there’s a benign reason behind the discrimination or whether the discrimination is the end goal. In this case we don’t have enough information and shouldn’t be jumping to conclusions.
And part of that managment might be expressing such fears annoymously online, rather than bottling them up to eventually act on them.
I think I’ve just failing my savings roll vs telling random anecdote.
I really did get chased down the street in China by a (tiny!) mob of Chinese teenaged girls. It was very surreal. They wanted bits of my hair, and my autograph. I have no idea why the latter… the former seemed to be pretty par for the course when I was in very small centers. At least one group of my students had never seen a foreigner before I moved there to teach, and another group had only seen foreigners from far away. Small children hid from me, parents pointed me out to their kid, and teenaged girls wanted to touch me all the time. Very very odd.
I have a friend living in China at the moment who has strawberry blonde hair, and a child with bright red hair. They get mobbed, in Beijing. Everyone is fascinated by their hair colour.
Personally, I found the fascination of some Chinese people with blond hair to be a god send when on a plane to NZ with my two small blondish children. They absolutely loved the attention and it kept them quiet for the entire flight. Unfortunately there wasn’t a corresponding tour group on the way home.
I’m taking my husband to China next time we go. He is 6′10″ tall. No one will ever notice me. It’s gonna be awesome.
So from everyone’s anecdotes about how mobs of Chinese people in their experience are the exact opposite of scary, we get an even stronger indication of just how long that bow was that Desipis was drawing back in #9.
Postsecrets is not a site about posting something provocative because it’s stripped of context just so that a later “gotcha!” can be called once an exculpatory context is provided. Acting as though it is seems just apologetics for apologetics’ sake.
Plus, there’s the argument from psychology that most clinical phobias are actually based on the disgust reaction anyway… “homophobia” sounds pretty accurate to me.
Anna @ 14, sorry not questioning your reading, just wishful thinking on my part (and I know nothing about the site…doesn’t sound fun).
Desipis @16, you talk an awful lot of should.
Anna, I had a similar experience in Japan. As well as kids at the schools I was visiting wanting my autograph, I had a random high school girl ask to have my picture taken with me while I was shopping in Harajuku.
Anna @ 15 said:
I cannot, under any circumstances, convince the men in my life that statements like “Oh, I don’t mind gay guys, I just don’t want to work with them becuase they’ll be checking out my ass” is problematic and homophobic because it’s just the way it is, right?
Hearing men say that kind of shit makes me want to froth at the mouth, because I’m all “WELCOME TO MY DAMN WORLD, MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME.” The way they assume all gay men are constantly checking out every straight man says a lot to me about their attitude toward women, and makes me want to throw things.
And don’t get me started on ‘decimate’…
Deus Ex Macintosh’s last blog post..Alas, poor Yorick… (you’re fired!)
Yeah… those in the minority don’t count.
Now you’re not even making a scintilla of sense. Those in some hypothetical minority you pulled out of thin air?
You seem to be arguing that no-one, anywhere has ever had a bad experience with a mob of Chinese people. Or at least those that have are part of an irrelevant minority.
Tosh and piffle, that’s not my argument at all. Just like any other ethnic group, Chinese people run the gamut of nasty and nice. Judging all members of any ethnic group by a bad experience with some members of that ethnic group is racism, even if the bad experience was really scary and traumatic.
It may be understandable, it may even be forgiveable by the ethnic group in question in certain circumstances of great trauma, but it’s still racist.
Dem #25
That one drives me spare as well!
I’m not arguing it’s not racist. I’m saying if you’re going to claim that some understandable, forgivable acts are racist, then being racist cannot mean automatic condemnation.
Just like killing people is generally bad, you can’t automatically condemn a killer without knowing the circumstances because there’s a chance it might have been in self defense.
There you go, making another leap. Who is it exactly who says that accurately labelling a behaviour as racist/misogynist/homophobic is an automatic condemnation?
Racist/misogynist/homophobic behaviours that are insulting, abusive, discriminatory or otherwise unjust deserve condemnation, simply being afraid due to racist/misogynist/homophobic thoughts does not.
I’ll also point out that acts which are not damaging do not require forgiveness, so saying that an act is forgivable is not a free pass.
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