On the upside though, I’ve discovered an excellent Twitter account to follow, that of biologist Josh Witten, and four tweets that say a thing I keep having occasion to say, and say it beautifully.
Saying you “respect women’s toughness” as a justification for not considering how actions affect others as individuals is a cop out.
It’s a lazy & selfish excuse to do what you want when and where you want to. It’s the philosophy of a toddler.
Women are tough. That doesn’t mean we should structure society so they constantly have to be tough, on guard, to survive their day.
You show a high opinion of people by giving individuals the time & energy to consider how you affect them.
I think the first time I felt the need to make a point of saying that was after I read Paula Kirby’s horrible piece “The Sisterhood of the Oppressed.” She likes that “women are tough” line of talk, and she takes it to mean that women should just battle through the obstacles rather than that the obstacles should be done away with. I don’t know if she got that from Dawkins or Dawkins got it from her or they have both always thought it, but whichever it is, it’s a terrible way to think about structural oppression. Terrible. It’s a bullies’ creed. If it were true, then we should all go out of our way to make everything more difficult for everyone, because it’s good for us, like exercise.
Bollocks. We should do no such thing. We should try hard to get rid of all needless obstacles, in order to maximize everyone’s ability to use her particular talents and ambitions. There are plenty of obstacles we can’t do anything about; there’s no need to create new ones by being shitty to people. Also? Being shitty to people is bad for the character.
Why not? You should be tough. Or submit. S u b m i i i i i t. You know you want to.
I see this attitude a lot, and not just with regards to women. Unsurprisingly, it’s usually from conservatives. It’s just an off-shoot of the bootstraps attitude. Why, don’t just sit there begging for someone to remove the obstacles, just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and overcome the obstacles yourself. Conveniently forgetting that many people have really lousy bootstraps and some don’t even have bootstraps at all, and never reflecting upon the quality of their own bootstraps or how they came to have them. It’s particularly infuriating when the ones insisting upon bootstrappiness are the ones putting up the obstacles. The saddest though is hearing it from people who have been there themselves. When I see unfairness in the world, my usual reaction is that the unfairness needs to go away. But so many people see unfairness in the world and say to themselves, “the world was unfair to me, so it needs to be unfair to EVERYBODY”. They have come to adopt a stance that fairness is achieved by spreading around the unfairness rather than eliminating it.
I am *so* tired of being tough…
So, women need to be tougher than men in this world, but that’s not sexist because why?
We keep hearing this from anti-feminists. If women cannot tough out the misogyny that men live without and happily ignore, then they are weak and whiny and should fight harder. Meanwhile they stubbornly ignore the fact that speaking up about sexism IS fighting. The people arguing that they should shut up and be stoic in the face of oppression so as not to upset the delicate sensibilities of the menfolk are one of the obstacles we have to fight against.
This is a maneuver from a very old playbook. It’s the nut, slut and shut method of discrediting a rape victim to silence her applied to all forms of misogyny. There is no sexism and any woman saying there is should be ignored because she’s immoral, her mind does not function properly and she should know better than to speak up in the first place.
“Never mind the bollocks,” say the Sexist Pistols.
This is of course the same principle as the theologians’ old stand-by for weaseling out of the Problem of Evil, the Irenean or “soul-building” theodicy. Mildly perplexing to see a self-proclaimed atheist peddling the same line.
Keep in mind that bullies and fascists consider weakness to be provocation and abuse to be the corrective agent laid on by an agent of correction.