Intellectual dark mansplaining
Oh good GRIEF.
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Why can’t seven guys team up to pronounce on gender? Why can’t six white guys plus one brown guy (see how woke we are?) tell us all what to think about gender and race, and charge money for it? Who doesn’t want to hear what all-male panels think about gender?
That’s the intellectual dark web. You can tell because it’s dark outside the window.
Christ. You’d think by now they would at least manage to find someone–a Christina Hoff Summers, for instance–to provide just the faintest bit of cover. Hell, find a few desperate college students looking for internships. Anything to break up the Pallid Phallus Parade, while still letting them call the shots. That’s what drives me up the wall–they aren’t even competent evil shitfuckers, and they still get followers.
Maybe that should be the name of their rock band.
These people are making me sick. I have to listen to it at work, from the young man who is my colleague. Shouldn’t it just be about who is qualified? Yes, that’s true. Which means a qualified woman or a qualified non-white person should have an equal chance. But they don’t. So then the white men who run things go on and on about how there are so few women in [insert field name here] proves that women are less qualified. And blah blah blah – not thinky – blah blah – estrogen vibe – blah blah blah – more of a guy thing…..no matter what the actual evidence might suggest in reference to women’s qualifications and what is really keeping them out of the various fields (such as groping, fondling, ogling, ignoring, talking over, being asked to make coffee, being treated like one is going to pop out a baby or start bleeding from their whatever any minute).
I think our response should be to point and laugh, but unfortunately it’s too serious for laughing, because the “Pallid Phallus Parade” has more power than the women and the non-white men.
Aww, y’all’re just annoyed—nay, bitter—that a movement that promised to make the world a better place by humans working together to discover the truth is actually chock full of assholes who think they’re clever because they take the status quo as the null hypothesis in every social situation, which makes them pretty much like any other group of dumb unreflective sheep.
(I may have quit Twitter for a couple of days because of said assholes.)
iknklast: Specifically, they love to talk about ‘most qualified’, which is a judgement that’s almost impossible to make–invariably, once you’re in the larger bubble of ‘qualified’, sorting within that set is down to a matter of often arbitrary qualifiers. Test scores, grades, personal recommendations and prior experience, for instance, typically favor the people who were wealthy, not forced to live in a ghetto, were immediately invited to networking opportunities and didn’t have to spend part of their post-highschool lives trying to figure out how to make rent.
Meanwhile, affirmative action, Title IX and the like (which primarily attempt to counter that imbalance by also factoring in the truth of the classic “backwards and in high heels” line for women, and similar truths that affect people of color–namely, that in order to get into that same bubble, oppressed people usually have to work two or three times as hard as the privileged) are derided as ‘reverse discrimination’, rather than simply ‘reversal of discrimination’. Overcoming lifelong obstacles IS a qualification, chucklefucks! It’s usually a far more pertinent one than the ability to test well or schmooze with your peer group (let alone simply having a peer group that happens to come with a stamp of pre-approval).
I never lived in a ghetto, but I can relate to the rest of that. Networking? Still struggle with that at 57, and am shut out of a lot of networks because I am in a community college environment in a small, rural city in a rural state in a backwater of the breadbasket. Plus, I grew up in a family where parents had no social skills; ergo, I have had to struggle to attain the small amount of social skills I have after reaching adulthood when such things are not natural.
But one of the biggest obstacles I have encountered, did encounter, and still encounter is the old: Girls don’t do that. That is boy’s work. No, go in the kitchen. Take HomeEc, not Chemistry. I was watching a show one night that was a biopic of E. O. Wilson, and he seemed to take it for granted that everyone was raised the way he was, roaming the wetlands and forests near his home, collecting critters and learning about them, and in general supported by parents and society in his quest toward science. In reality, very few of us have had such a childhood, and many of us have been actively discouraged from meeting our goals.
The idea that everyone has those opportunities is perfect for the anti-affirmative action folks, though. Because if they believe everyone had the same chances, and they are the ones who rose up through the ranks to their current celebrated position, then it follows that the rest of us were choosing other paths, not availing ourselves of opportunities, or just plain lazy – or our genetic makeup led us to play with dolls and tea sets until we grew old enough to have daughters and tea parties of our own. In short, it validates the accomplishment of the ones that reached the top (who did work, yes, but no harder than anyone else. They just assume they did. I am not denying their talent or skills, I am only denying their denial of the talents and skills of others who did not grow up with their opportunities).
Freemage and iknklast,
What are your thoughts on job interviews? On the one hand, I’m in favor of employers bringing more minority candidates in for interviews to give them a chance. On the other hand, I’m skeptical that interviews are all that reliable a measure of anything other than “how similar the candidates are to the interviewer.”
I’ve been on both sides of the interview table many, many times. The difference between interviews that seemed to go well and those that didn’t seemed to be whether or not I had something in common with the interviewer — hobbies or interests or some biographical detail. I don’t need to spell out for this group how that can lead to unintentionally favoring “in groups.”
And it seemed to be really hard to outright “fail” an interview. I can only recall two instances where the interview really changed my view on a candidate. The first involved a candidate who did something so dumb that it showed what most of us on the hiring committee agreed was either gross disrespect or disqualifyingly bad judgment — and yet we had to work hard to persuade the person in charge not to make an offer. The second was a candidate whose background and behavior and answers just screamed “I consider myself above this job and will use it as a paycheck and base of operations to hunt for the job I really want”; everyone ignored my advice and hired him, and sure enough, he ditched us for a more “prestigious” place within six months.
Screechy, one of my experiences with interviews (on the side of interviewing) is that some people who are lousy people, lousy workers, nasty players, can still interview very well because they know how to hide that. They know how to play the game. They’ve been through all those “how to succeed” programs and written down every single suggestion and relentlessly use them. And search committees continue to be impressed by these people because they know all the interview techniques.
On the other hand, I think an interview can be valuable, because it might let you see something you can’t see anywhere else. It was the interview process that kept my Nazi brother who believed we should still have black slavery from ever becoming a history teacher for impressionable high school students. He was not a good interview subject, and could not hide his contempt for women and minorities, nor could he hide his rather…unique…view of history. So it was the interview that kept him from being imposed on a generation of youth.
So I guess you could say, I’m ambivalent.
Oh, yes. Those long lists of instructions on how to micro-manage every aspect of your performance to most effectively play your particular role / market your particular brand (“Trademark You”), all in the service of creating a certain impression in others to pursue a certain agenda and achieve a certain result. In my experience most of them end with the instruction to just “act naturally” and “be yourself” :-S