Thanas wrote:I really doubt that. Look to the most famous movement to combat oppression, the movement to abolish slavery. It needed a lot of criticisms from realists before it got political clout.
I'm not sure how much abolition can be used as a similar example since the people oppressed by slavery were so oppressed they weren't even considered people in an explicit sense. However, if we do run with it, here's the thing: wouldn't abolition have been a lot easier to come around if society ran by the rule of giving a lot of heed to the words of those oppressed by slavery? In the same way, racial relations in America can't be bettered if you give the weight of the dominant majority equal weight as those who are oppressed and a minority. There's the double weighting there of white people being the majority and white voices being the ones given weight in public discourse that means even an "even playing field" ends up weighted in favour of the status quo.
Who do you regard as a good female fiction writer? Because in my experience I have seen a lot of bad jobs, not necessarily limited to gender.
Man, I dunno; I wasn't expecting being put on the spot :L
All my favourite comic writers are women, with Shimura Takako as an example just to my side over here. I haven't read a book in my adult life written by a woman that writes men more poorly than women, but for the other way around it's kind of a crapshoot. I mean even to my knowledge, the manic pixie dream girl cliché comes entirely from male writers. To take this away from just my personal experience, George R R Martin is often praised for actually writing good, developed female characters despite being an old white guy. This shouldn't be something that deserves praise but a baseline necessity for being a decent author.
I get that but I think it is a bit problematic. How do you expect men to ask you out then? Now granted, I'm not Don Juan so my experiences may not be authoritative, but it seems to me the problem is that almost any situation where women are being asked out can turn ugly, or that anytime you ask someone you know out in private is such a situation. Does that make it fair to characterize everyone as a potential rapist? I think this is what purple was getting at (though maybe he expressed himself badly) when he used the parallel to black men.
Now, as to this, Is someone knowing your room number when asking you out a problem per se? I don't think so, because that would mean acquintances should never ever ask each other out.
The parallel to racial profiling is just stinking by its nature, not because of any failure of Purple to express himself. First on a quantitative level, since the odds of a woman being assaulted by a man in America are vastly higher than the odds of a white person being assaulted by a person of colour. Second on a qualitative level, because look at the way they turn out. If men are "profiled" by women who then become cautious around them, how does this affect men? They might miss out on some chances for friendship or sex because of a false positive, or they may feel uncomfortable when considering how their presence can make others feel. How does it work for people of colour profiled because of their race? All of that, plus discrimination in employment, and housing, and being arrested more often, and being sentenced harder, and being victims of vigilante justice, and being harrassed by police, and so on. People
die from it.
They're not comparable and for a white guy to use the discrimination against people of colour as a tool for his own gain is always terrible.
As for propositioning, it's not an all or nothing deal. Greater care just needs to be taken on the part of (usually) men to understand the context of the situation, their body language, and how these things can be perceived. I mean, this is a benefit to both ways: not only would a widespread change here make women more comfortable, but they'd make these specific women more comfortable around you. Everyone's happier.
I say "usually" there because it's not clearly divided across gender. I'm a tall woman, and I have to take care of how my body language is coming across with, say, my partner who's a head shorter than I, just as much as I'm definitely conscious of the body language of men one and a half times my size.
For your other point here, I'll link
something that says it all better than I could try to in this post.
Purple wrote:There is also an undesirable population among the nerd culture. There are those of us who play as paladins and those who play as 13 year old sex-ninja girls. But again, there exists this sense of them being them. Bolded for a reason. I am not sure how I can get this across. I am not sure it can be explained. I am not sure it even makes cognitive sense any more.
Otherising people who have blatant issues is a bad thing to do, because it much more easily lets one get complacent about one's own issues. The people who are quick to jump up against white supremacy but think the current system would be just fine if only people didn't talk about race so much are part of the problem, and by otherising racism as something other, bad people do, it makes it all the easier for them to stick in their own bigotry without understanding it's even there.
Reading this I get the feeling that the mindset needed for such a viewpoint actually means that said person is just rationalizing. Is that it?
This said. I would like to see if said study has ever been repeated or done outside of university campus situations. If for nothing else than completeness sake.
Rationalising is part of it, but, in the case of rape most especially, for some people it just comes from an incapacity to care about things from anyone's perspective but their own. Thus you have people who try to set up rules they can try to follow which, if they do, will get them clear of any responsibility for rape. This, instead of, you know, actually trying to figure out what things they would do would be rape and not do them because they would be hurting the other party. They're seeing it from their own perspective only and refuse to look outside it.
As for studies outside of college, there's a bunch that show people who have or who would rape in large numbers. I don't have them on hand (I just happened to read that one about colleges a couple days ago) though.
And don't try to think it's just an American thing. This is rife everywhere. Using America, or, as many do, Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan or whatever as examples of REAL sexism and otherising it going along the same pattern of complacency.
Also, for anyone who said that people were jumping the gun about Andrew_Fireborn being an MRA, I leave you his further posts in this thread.
