7 ms·
> I hate it more than I can say when I read books or listen to talks and performances by men who tell and ‘interpret’ women’s stories, and who are kind enough t
by david-gpu 3y ago
> I hate it more than I can say when I read books or listen to talks and performances by men who tell and ‘interpret’ women’s stories, and who are kind enough then to suggest to us ways in which our lives as women might be improved. I’ve never wanted to do the same to them
What a weird take on things: let's apply neat little discrete labels to every person and pretend that the experiences of each particular combination of labels is so radically different from everybody else's that we can't possibly learn anything from anybody else.
> but the knowledge of psychology, myth and folklore that I’ve acquired over the past several decades isn’t restricted to women, and it seems a pity to hold back information and ideas that might be useful
Ah, some common sense prevailed. Thank goodness. It can't possibly be the case that when men do the same it's somehow with the same goal of trying to be useful; no, it must be that they are trying to "'interpret' women's stories".
Look, I'm an immigrant queer disabled man, and if all I did was listening to what other immigrant queer disabled men had to say and looked down on input from other people my information bubble would be very small indeed.
Fortunately, most people are willing to listen to all sorts of other people and judge what they have to say fot what it is, not based on some labels we assigned to the source. And conversely, when the information they have provided falls below our standards, we should place the blame on the individual rather than the collective that we think they belong to.
- RoyalHenOil 3y agoAs a heterosexual immigrant woman, the two people in the world who understand me best are men. And also not immigrants. Indeed, our personal experiences have rather little overlap, but they understand me best because their thought processes are similar to mine and because they are thoughtful, empathetic people. I'll take their life advice over anyone's.
- bitwize 3y ago> What a weird take on things: let's apply neat little discrete labels to every person and pretend that the experiences of each particular combination of labels is so radically different from everybody else's that we can't possibly learn anything from anybody else. This is called "intersectionality", a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s but some of the key concepts date back to the work of bell hooks in the 1970s. It's a generally accepted pillar of modern feminism. Something bubbled up on StalkedIn a couple days back: it had images of King Charles III and Ozzy Osbourne, and it said both were white, male, British, born in 1948, married twice, and on and so forth. And it said "A customer is not their demographics. A customer is their individual goals and needs" or something like that. Which, while still laden with business-speak, was something of a contrarian take in today's DEI-mediated world. You gotta be careful with this intersectionality stuff. The endgame of intersectionality is -- gasp -- considering people as individuals.
- hnbad 3y ago> The endgame of intersectionality is -- gasp -- considering people as individuals. I'm not sure I read your tone correctly but this is indeed what authors like bell hooks try to get at: being Black is one thing, being a woman is another and being a Black woman can be different from either of those things in isolation; ultimately our experiences are defined not by each attribute individually but the way they interact in combination. Any subset of attributes will always give you an incomplete understanding but they can still be useful lenses. Charles and Ozzy do have a lot of things in common and they do have many shared experiences because of them and do experience many things similarly because of them. Of course those things are not all there is to them and e.g. being born into the royal family may significantly outweigh most of the attributes they have in common for many such experiences. Modern feminist critique is intersectional because it recognizes these complexities and recognizes the limitations. But feminist critique explicitly challenges the systems underlying our society. Girlboss pop feminism did the opposite, an infamously inane example argument being that then-state secretary Hillary Clinton is underprivileged compared to a homeless man because she's a woman. Corporate DEI is a step up from this but still falls flat because its ability to critique systems is limited by being beholden to the corporate structures that allow for it to exist: it's essentially the "more female drone pilots" joke but without a hint of irony. Again, that does not mean DEI can't do good things (e.g. being mindful of inclusivity can reduce artificial or cultural barriers to entry and increase representation) but it can't solve systemic issues because it can't meaningfully challenge the systems it exists within. This is what led to the tensions resulting in stunts like those at Basecamp or Coinbase where the owners of the respective companies decided to expel DEI and claim to create a "politics-free" workplace because the people involved in their DEI projects refused to stay in the comfortable confines of feel-good corporate (literal) virtue signalling and got dangerously close to critiquing the structures around them. You need to consider people as individuals but if you want to make sense of systems you need to pick subsets (plural!) of the attributes that define each individual. Where DEI falls short is that it usually by design is only allowed to pick a limited number of attributes and is even more limited in what systems it is allowed to look at. Wheelchair-accessible workspaces, yes. Racism towards Black employees by their peers, yes. Sexual misconduct by middle managers, yes. But anything that challenges the leadership or ownership structure of the company is too close to unionization for comfort.
- dazzawazza 3y agoI agree, it saddens me that they feel they can't (or maybe shouldn't) write about men because you are not one. As a man I can only learn more from the different perspective they would bring. If only one perspective is offered we all lose and in the past we lost a lot because of this.
- vouaobrasil 3y agoThat is exactly right. The only reason why we get perspectives as in the article are because the author and people like them are deeply offended and have ritualized their feeling of being offended into their personality so that they can't help but take out their disharmony on everyone else by seeing false falsehoods towards them.
- junke 3y agoThat's a very malicious way to interpret what the article is talking about in hundreds of words.
- david-gpu 3y agoI sincerely tried to steel-man her case, but her sexism was so explicit that I could not let it pass. Having your opinion dismissed because of your gender is grating; I think we can all agree on that, at least.
- ajuc 3y agoI agree with the sentiment, and it's prevalent in modern feminism - to the point of inventing words to deprive half the population the right to speak, but in this article the author is trying to do the exact opposite?
- zozbot234 3y agoShe's nonetheless 'interpreting' men's stories for them, even as she suggests that it might be problematic when men interpret women's stories.
- ajuc 3y agoShe said she doesn't want to do this - people complain that it's sexist. She did this - people complain it's hipocrisy. With that amount of bad will communication is impossible.
- junke 3y agoagain, I won't argue with a straw man version of what she wrote
- david-gpu 3y agoI provided verbatim quotes of what she said. If you disagree with my interpretation of their meaning, you are free to provide an alternative interpretation. A blanket dismissal doesn't move the conversation forward.
- mock-possum 3y agoThat seems like an inappropriately uncharitable interpretation of what shes written.
- david-gpu 3y agoPlease, do elaborate. Would you defend what she said if the genders were reversed? I provided verbatim quotes for the readers' convenience.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]