Appropriate for male and female people
Another thought has been bobbing around just at the edge of my vision for awhile. I’m reading (I think for the second time) a brilliant piece by Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, A gender idealist in a non-ideal world, at More Radical With Age. She says something there that brought the thought bobbing at the edge of my vision out to right in front of me. She is talking about gender as a socially constructed, externally imposed hierarchy that operates to prescribe and proscribe certain modes of behaviour, and the way it limits our freedom and potential.
We are saturated by gender in this non-ideal world. It is everywhere, so much so that most of us cannot see it: it’s the air we breathe, the water we swim in. Our entire social order is organised around the idea that different forms of behaviour and appearance are appropriate for male and female people. This idea has shaped our history and our politics. It is reflected in our language and embodied in our culture. It is the reason why gender non-conforming behaviour is still so heavily sanctioned: why homosexuality is still widely stigmatised; why rejection of feminine beauty norms comes at such a high price; why assertive, powerful women are socially shunned and ostracised.
Shunned and ostracised. Those words have a new resonance for me these days – they grab my attention more because they apply to me in a new way. Mouthy, assertive women are shunned and ostracised. (Notice I don’t call myself powerful. Mouthy, yes, powerful, no.) Well yes, we are, aren’t we.
It’s interesting to me that Ally Fogg flies under everyone’s radar at Freethought Blogs. It’s interesting to me that apparently the bloggers there haven’t felt the need to comb through his Facebook activities looking for incriminating “likes” or friends or jokes or groups. It’s interesting to me that it was so urgent to destroy me when it wasn’t so urgent to destroy anyone else. Ally’s always been quite open about the fact that he disagrees with most FT bloggers on a lot of issues about women and men, and that they would probably find material that irritated them if they went looking for it. And yet apparently no one has. Funny, that, isn’t it.
So anyway my point is here’s this network that prides itself on being all yay social justice and yay feminism and yay mouthy assertive women…
…and yet the network just succeeded in driving away by far the mouthiest (measuring by hits) woman it had. Mouthy, assertive women are shunned and ostracised, even by a putative social justice feminist network.
Funny how that works.
Countdown to the excuses in 3, 2, 1 …
Here are some varieties of possible excuses:
The Apples and Oranges Excuse, Take 1: Ally’s never said anything nearly as incendiary as you.
The Apples and Oranges Excuse, Take 2: Ally’s never associated with such heinous (and dare we also mention mouthy) TERFs before.
The Apples and Oranges Excuse, Take 3: Ally’s never dug in so deeply after being criticized in such a soft and well-reasoned way before.
The Apples and Oranges Excuse, Take 4: Ally’s never had a strong opinion with which we disagreed while also being a woman before.
Three out of the above four will be offered up as an excuse. The other one is not a lie.
I’m going to stay mostly out of this, simply because I’ve been staying mostly out of ALL of these discussions because I’m focusing my attention on a very specific set of issues that don’t happen to overlap very much (despite some potential). Also I’m only interested (mostly) in working with communities where people have a clue about how to recognize and not totally fuck up common goals.
But I just wanted to say that I don’t think anyone at FTB’s has destroyed you. I was blissfully unaware of this entire maneno until a friend filled me in on it this morning. I’ve looked over the rhetoric and yammering. I’m pretty sure that all that has happened here is that you’ve left a blog network/community that is coming apart at the seams and is essentially doomed. It will be interesting to see if PZ can pull the FTB nuts out of this particular fire, but even if he does, you are not destroyed, you are just somewhere else.
Meanwhile, yeah, this Fogg guy. He is unfettered by conventional ideology, dontha know.
Oh I know. I love it back here in my own place with NO ADS and no neighboring assholes. That was a ventriloquial thing – “It’s interesting to me that it was so urgent to destroy me” from their point of view. They wanted to destroy my credibility, etc.
Gregory:
Nobody claimed that, unless you refer to her standing within the FTB consensus — and there were dissenters from that.
What Ophelia just wrote is that she was shunned and ostracised for being mouthy, or, as she put it in a previous post, it became a “hostile workplace environment” for her.
(Your own case was different, because you certainly did not resile from hostility)
I did say “It’s interesting to me that it was so urgent to destroy me when it wasn’t so urgent to destroy anyone else” in the para about Ally.
But I didn’t mean they had destroyed me, just that their goal was to make me damaged goods that would be deservedly shunned by All Good People.
The post provokes thought. Ophelia quoting Rebecca Reilly-Cooper:
I don’t think that observation is seriously disputable. And I further think that anyone who accepts the gender-sex distinction should have no problem with transgendered people’s gendered identity — they are instantiating the distinction. Or with agendered people, for that matter, because gender is more protean than sex.
I find it unfortunate that I think the conflict between those who think their gender should be socially important and those who don’t is extant but unnecessary, but so long as the historical asymmetry between the status (and ensuing privileges) granted towards each gender remains, I think so will that conflict.
PS in this case, the essentially contested concept is the ontological status of ‘gender identity’, and I think the non-acceptance of its (reified) veridicalness was Ophelia’s transgression.
Ally is pretty low-key, but it is surprising that the Inquisition hasn’t come for him yet. I’m sure part of it is that he just doesn’t care and thus isn’t a fun target to harass. Another thought is that he hasn’t been harassed because he’s a dude.
It’s interesting, isn’t it? <– not actually meant sarcastically, I find there's a lot to think about here…
Feminism in society rises and meets backlash, and is incorporated into the system in some ways, splinters, gets redefined, etc in a sort of chaotic cycle. And while at the core of feminism is supposed to be "the radical notion that women are human", we've all been raised in a sexist society and so sexism shapes our understanding of women and discourse an disagreement and acceptability. It took me a long time to learn to see when I was holding a woman who was a public figure or an authority to a different standard than I would a man, but I've learned to check myself for sexism when I bristle at a woman.
It seems like some people have *not* learned that lesson and *don't* question their gut reaction. And I think part of the problem is that the SJW-greater-movement has made them so okay with verbally mobbing the "baddies" that they are teaching themselves *not* to question.
Perhaps the bolded fragment is one of the explanations of why no one went after Ally?
The explanation would be: Ally is just *too* different.
– he is not a feminist (he says explicitly that he doesn’t identify as one);
– he has his own commenters. Not so many people from the FtB crowd appear on a regular basis in his comment section;
– his very agenda (men’s rights, men’s problems) is of secondary interest to many people on FtB.
I can’t give the link but I remember a discussion from Pharyngula, where various commenters stated that Ally’s place is too MRA-like for them and they just don’t read him.
It may be like … I don’t know, imagine that one day a Christian apologist is offered a place at FtB. The idea of a Christian blog at FtB would encounter a strong resistance, no doubt! But once the blog is there? Would people be seriously interested in damaging the blogger’s reputation? I doubt it. From the very start, the blogger is too patently different.
You, Ophelia, are a different piece of cake altogether. You truly belonged to the family. Is there anything more tantalizing (and bitter-sweet!) than attacking a real family member? (\sarcasm)
I find the whole thing to be so … religious.
Charges of heresy, inquisitions, shunning, ex-communication.