what elephant in the corner?
Jun. 23rd, 2005 09:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
electriclandoh, you mean this elephant.
I was quite surprised by the response to my post on Tuesday. Also delighted. Also unnerved. (I hate confrontation.) But mostly fascinated.
This exchange has seemingly sparked off discussion all over my friends list, which is really cool. It's also catalyzed a ton of thoughts in my head, about feminism, about women's experience of the world, about neuroscience and evolutionary biology, about how we make sense of our daily experiences, which I won't attempt to post all at once because the post would be about a mile long. But bits are coming.
First, though, I want to thank everyone who posted for keeping the discussion comparatively civil even when the discussion got quite upsetting and even when you felt, rightly or wrongly, that you were being personally attacked. Let's keep it that way, 'k?
Second, I want to say how awed and grateful I am to know so many articulate, passionate, amazing women who are willing to stand up for their point of view and able explain things so much more clearly than I can.
For those of you just joining us:
I never thought my original post would lead to so much discussion and go down so many pathways. It was a fairly lighthearted post about an experience which I suspected would strike a chord for a lot of women: random guy speaks to you, you don't want to talk to him, he demands to know why you don't want to talk to him, you decline to give an explanation, he gets pissed off and tells her so. Boy was I ever right about that. A lot of women chimed in to say "Yup, been there," or "I HATE that!" or "Why do some men feel like they have the right to behave like that?"
And then a man posted, and it was clear from his comment that, even though he would probably never behave like that himself, he hadn't really got what the original post was about. He offered a counterexample: guy speaks to a random woman, she completely overreacts, he gets pissed off (but doesn't say anything). Another woman tried to explain why the two situations were different. And it went from there down a lot of pathways, like the actual statistics on violence, and how likely it is under a given circumstance that a woman or a man will be attacked, whether women's caution and fear in certain spaces is legitimate, and so on. All of which was very interesting, because our male poster -- I'm willing to believe, not out of malice, but in a positive attempt to be helpful -- really was not getting it. He encouraged the women posters in the thread to stand up for themselves, learn self-defense, be willing to fight back. (These are all positive things, incidentally.) He pointed out that men get attacked and killed too. What he didn't seem to be able to grasp was that women's subjective experience, what we go through daily from the time we are very young indeed, is different than a man's, and that this of necessity shapes our behaviour and our responses to other people. That sometimes not being friendly to Random Guy is part of our self-defence strategy. He was, I think, really upset to think that some women walk around with these constant calculations in our heads.
Where I think he had a disconnect in his thinking is in assuming that these experiences, these considerations, make us feel weak and afraid and powerless. (Jump in any time if I'm totally misinterpreting.) I'm guessing that the women he knows don't seem weak and afraid and powerless, so he assumes that they don't have these considerations and experiences in the background. I am betting, and the other women in that thread are betting, that they do. We all do. We move on, we deal, we make jokes about them, we don't keep them in the forefront of our lives. But they colour our experiences and our reactions, and we would actually be very stupid and foolhardy not to let this happen, because that is how instinct and gut reaction help keep us safe. Split-second reactions are the result of your brain integrating an enormous body of accumulated life experience and coming to a decision without being consciously aware of it happening. Allowing for the fact that everyone is an individual, women's accumulated experience is different than men's, and their reactions will therefore also be different, and it is not weak or anti-feminist to say so.
One last thing (for now). Every individual human being's life is a collection of subjective experiences. By definition, I can't know everything about what's happening in another person's head, what's happened to them over the course of their lives, because I'm not them. (Children typically gain this awareness that not everyone has the same collection of experience and knowledge at around age 4. Children with a developmental disability, or brain-damaged adults, may not have this awareness.) But that doesn't mean that those experiences are not real. To look at my post from Tuesday, at the comments of a lot of women who've had similar experiences, and to say "Well, I've never experienced that, and it's just you, it doesn't apply to all women, so it's not relevant and it's nothing to do with me" is not only unhelpful, it's profoundly insulting. It also treats a near-universal social problem as an individual problem to be solved by individual women.
More to come.
I was quite surprised by the response to my post on Tuesday. Also delighted. Also unnerved. (I hate confrontation.) But mostly fascinated.
This exchange has seemingly sparked off discussion all over my friends list, which is really cool. It's also catalyzed a ton of thoughts in my head, about feminism, about women's experience of the world, about neuroscience and evolutionary biology, about how we make sense of our daily experiences, which I won't attempt to post all at once because the post would be about a mile long. But bits are coming.
First, though, I want to thank everyone who posted for keeping the discussion comparatively civil even when the discussion got quite upsetting and even when you felt, rightly or wrongly, that you were being personally attacked. Let's keep it that way, 'k?
Second, I want to say how awed and grateful I am to know so many articulate, passionate, amazing women who are willing to stand up for their point of view and able explain things so much more clearly than I can.
For those of you just joining us:
I never thought my original post would lead to so much discussion and go down so many pathways. It was a fairly lighthearted post about an experience which I suspected would strike a chord for a lot of women: random guy speaks to you, you don't want to talk to him, he demands to know why you don't want to talk to him, you decline to give an explanation, he gets pissed off and tells her so. Boy was I ever right about that. A lot of women chimed in to say "Yup, been there," or "I HATE that!" or "Why do some men feel like they have the right to behave like that?"
And then a man posted, and it was clear from his comment that, even though he would probably never behave like that himself, he hadn't really got what the original post was about. He offered a counterexample: guy speaks to a random woman, she completely overreacts, he gets pissed off (but doesn't say anything). Another woman tried to explain why the two situations were different. And it went from there down a lot of pathways, like the actual statistics on violence, and how likely it is under a given circumstance that a woman or a man will be attacked, whether women's caution and fear in certain spaces is legitimate, and so on. All of which was very interesting, because our male poster -- I'm willing to believe, not out of malice, but in a positive attempt to be helpful -- really was not getting it. He encouraged the women posters in the thread to stand up for themselves, learn self-defense, be willing to fight back. (These are all positive things, incidentally.) He pointed out that men get attacked and killed too. What he didn't seem to be able to grasp was that women's subjective experience, what we go through daily from the time we are very young indeed, is different than a man's, and that this of necessity shapes our behaviour and our responses to other people. That sometimes not being friendly to Random Guy is part of our self-defence strategy. He was, I think, really upset to think that some women walk around with these constant calculations in our heads.
Where I think he had a disconnect in his thinking is in assuming that these experiences, these considerations, make us feel weak and afraid and powerless. (Jump in any time if I'm totally misinterpreting.) I'm guessing that the women he knows don't seem weak and afraid and powerless, so he assumes that they don't have these considerations and experiences in the background. I am betting, and the other women in that thread are betting, that they do. We all do. We move on, we deal, we make jokes about them, we don't keep them in the forefront of our lives. But they colour our experiences and our reactions, and we would actually be very stupid and foolhardy not to let this happen, because that is how instinct and gut reaction help keep us safe. Split-second reactions are the result of your brain integrating an enormous body of accumulated life experience and coming to a decision without being consciously aware of it happening. Allowing for the fact that everyone is an individual, women's accumulated experience is different than men's, and their reactions will therefore also be different, and it is not weak or anti-feminist to say so.
One last thing (for now). Every individual human being's life is a collection of subjective experiences. By definition, I can't know everything about what's happening in another person's head, what's happened to them over the course of their lives, because I'm not them. (Children typically gain this awareness that not everyone has the same collection of experience and knowledge at around age 4. Children with a developmental disability, or brain-damaged adults, may not have this awareness.) But that doesn't mean that those experiences are not real. To look at my post from Tuesday, at the comments of a lot of women who've had similar experiences, and to say "Well, I've never experienced that, and it's just you, it doesn't apply to all women, so it's not relevant and it's nothing to do with me" is not only unhelpful, it's profoundly insulting. It also treats a near-universal social problem as an individual problem to be solved by individual women.
More to come.
