Categotry Archives: privilege stories

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Now Let Us Praise Wicked Men

Categories: privilege stories, the patriarchy: you can't live with it....that is all

So dear friend of the blog Sady has a post up at Salon’s Broadsheet about Sophie Tucker, whose career as a female singer who pushed gender boundaries in the early 20th century would normally make her a feminist icon–except that she also did blackface for a long time. And that, as well as the funeral of Senator Kennedy, has me thinking about bad people who did good things, or vice versa.

Of course, Teddy looms large in this calculus.

Liss at Shakesville has the most nuanced discussion of the senior senator from Massachusetts’ career, I think:

Teddy, as he was known, was privileged, in every sense of the word. And he made liberal use of his privilege, in ways I admired and ways I did not. The terrible bargain we all seem to have made with Teddy is that we overlooked the occasions when he invoked his privilege as a powerful and well-connected man from a prominent family, because of the career he made using that same privilege to try to make the world a better place for the people dealt a different lot.

Twice, Teddy did despicable things with his privilege, very publicly.

…the two things being the horrific Chappaquiddick affair, and whatever role he helped play in getting his nephew, William Kennedy Smith off the hook for his (alleged, I have to say alleged) rape of a young woman.

Those are two pretty terrible things, by the way.

Daisy over at Daisy’s Dead Air does her best to speak for the dead:

I will mourn the working woman who was forgotten, as the actual circumstances of her death were covered up by a powerful family, who then arbitrarily assigned her slut status.

Imagine slowly, slowly drowning, water enveloping you inch by inch as you drown, waiting for the person to rescue you that never arrives.

Sorry, folks. Some things, I do not excuse.

Mary Jo represents all the nobody-women killed (or allowed to die, if you want to quibble over my terms) by all the powerful, rich men, because they were “evidence”–because they got in the way.

And yet, and yet–he fought hard for people who weren’t able to fight as hard for themselves–the Americans With Disabilities Act, fighting apartheid, even helping Jews escape the Soviet Union. He never let up on the universal healthcare fight. He blocked Robert Bork from the Supreme Court. And he did all those things largely in part by using his name, his wealth, and his reputation to accomplish things other people might not have.

And he let a woman slowly drown. And he helped an (alleged, ok? alleged.) rapist avoid punishment.

Lots of–let’s not say heroes–icons have feet of clay. Martin Luther King had affairs. Thomas Jefferson raped his slaves. And lots of wicked people do great things: Napoleon spread the rule of law, the ideals of the French Revolution, and death, death, death throughout Europe; Wagner wrote some of the most complex (and occasionally even beautiful) music in history and was a dead-beat, adulterer, and depraved anti-Semite. Julia Child was frequently homophobic. And so it goes.

How do we judge? Is it only time that allows us to be dispassionate? What are the morals of admiring the Declaration of Independence or the ADA when you know that they are the results of men who did despicable deeds?

I’m not sure I know. I mean, I’m glad for the Declaration and (well, sometimes) Tristan und Isolde and the millions of people that Senator Kennedy helped. I am aware of the enormous good that has been wrought by flawed men and women.

But I still can’t shake the thought of that woman drowning, or that woman screaming on the beach where nobody could hear her.

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And the Lightbulb Goes On

Categories: all about me, don't get your panties in a bunch, invasive kyriarchy, privilege stories

So I’m reading this post at Shakesville about a full-of-FAIL article by Satoshi Kanazawa about how feminism is evil and unneccesary because women are HAWT and only need shoes (or something; his logic is hard to follow, mostly because there doesn’t seem to be any.) And there’s a comments thread that is in the best tradition of Shakesville comments threads. Which means, among other things, that there’s a discussion of why a common epithet turns out to be far nastier than you thought.*

In this case, it turns out the word “maroon” really is a racist term**, even though I (and the original commentator) seem to have always associated it with Bugs Bunny’s joking mispronunciation of “moron.” (Which is also not cool, because it makes fun of people with mental disabilities.)

Now, being what I am–a human being caught in the invisible web of the kyriarchy–I couldn’t help for a second thinking, “great, another word I’ll have to be careful about using.” (Just for a second, ducks, we take checking privilege seriously around here.) And then it occurred to me: oh yes, how terrible it would be to end up living in a world where a person’s thoughts would have to be actually addressed, instead of just dismissed by a senseless epithet that lets you turn off your brain. How truly awful that would be for everyone.

But I never claimed to be quick on the uptake.

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*That’s not snark; one of the great things about Shakesville is that you continually get your assumptions challenged there.

**The people the term applied to were actually pretty amazing–fleeing slavery to forge an existence out of almost nothing.

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Crossroads

Categories: privilege stories, teh tranz, tiger beatdown rocks, your RDA of intersectionality

Intersectionality, ducks! It’s all the rage! Everyone talks about it because–everyone lives it!

Take, for example, this story over at Pam’s House Blend. It seems that there was a topless coffee shop up in Maine, one that a (deranged, angry, spiteful) local resident decided it was OK to burn to the ground. Nobody was hurt, but they could have been–the owner and his wife and children were sleeping inside. In addition to the destruction of his uninsured building, the owner lost the lobster pots and carpenter’s equipment he used to make a living.

Why am I bringing this up? Because of the dizzying intersections of forces, privileges and theories in this one case. When I first read the story, my thinking went something like this:

  1. A topless coffee shop? That’s got to be some sexist exploitation going on.

  2. Didn’t deserve to burn down, though. That’s not right.

  3. Wait, they had a topless waiter too?

  4. The family nearly died?

  5. Still, I think a topless anything is probably exploitative.

  6. The townsfolk didn’t like the place.

  7. But they didn’t like it, it seems, because they thought it was sexist: they didn’t like it because they thought it was “dirty.”

  8. Well, sex isn’t dirty. I like sex. People, such as me, should have more sex and feel less guilty about it.

  9. Wait, one of the waitresses was using the money to put herself through college?

  10. But it’s still exploitative, right?

  11. Sure, because it’s sexist that being a topless waitress was the best way for her to make money. Whew. I almost had to think for a second.

  12. My head hurts. I can’t figure out if I should write a post condemning the place, or write them a check. Or both.

And that’s a relatively benign example. Things can get far more complicated than that.

For example, there’s me.

Being trans opens you up to a wonderful world of intersecting under- and overprivileging. On the one hand, I’m a woman–I identify as one, I look like one, I am in general treated like one, with all that entails. Moreover, I’m a trans woman, which means that if/when people find out/are told/Google me that their attitudes about me will very likely change. Some will stop thinking of me as a woman. Some will think of me as a woman with an asterisk. Sometimes I’ll be expected to be the mystical tranny, here to tell everyone about what it’s like to be trans. (And, of course, almost everyone will want to know what my genitals look like, something not an ordinary area of discourse, at least not at lunch.) Not to mention that there are people who will react violently towards me, who will single me out, who will make me a special target–that over and beyond the targeted/othered status I bear as a woman, as a trans woman I’m at risk for even greater degrees of violence.

But wait. There’s also no denying that I have and have had privileges simply not available to most women. As a very, very simple example: it is highly unlikely that a woman who had my editorial assistant job 14 years ago would have been given the license to teach herself how to program computers that I received. (Especially not at that company–the boss was a right old chauvinist.) In fact, just about everything about my career in IT, which is my bread and butter, was aided by being male at the time. I had instant credibility; it was considered proper for me to be in the field; and I never had to vouchsafe my identity as a programmer the way many women in IT have to. (Though many women don’t have to vouchsafe their gender the way I often have to; like I said, it gets dizzying.)

And of course I’m white, not overweight, college-educated, not disabled. A ton of privileges. Do my underprivileged characteristics–not cisgendered, not straight, not chromosomally female–outweigh my privileges?

It depends.

One of the reasons I began writing this blog was the gradual awakening I had about the iniquities of privilege. It’s the passion that drives me, even as I struggle to understand and expose my own privileges. It’s why I am an opponent of kyriarchy, why I so staunchly oppose all the various petty divisions within the different communities of underprivilege.

But as it turns out, checking your privilege is very hard to do.

Which leads me to Shakesville. I’ve only been a recent reader there, but the community there had a profound influence on me; indeed, Shakesville and Tiger Beatdown are the two sites that inspired me to start blogging again after a four-year hiatus.

I’m mentioning Shakesville because–as you may have noticed in my little blogroll widget–the site is in stasis right now. You can read about it at Shakesville, but what it breaks down to is: Melissa McEwan, the founder and webmistress of the site, had to take a break from posting. On her own blog. Because people wouldn’t listen to her when she said that a lot of the comments were bothering her, and that people needed to be more civil.

I’ll repeat that. She stopped posting. To her own blog.

Even though I’ve only been a recent Shaker, the safe space that Liss has created and worked so hard to maintain is something I cherish. And even as I get mad that things came to this head, I feel bad for my own failings, sins of commission and omission, there.

The idea that Shakesville has reached a crossroads, that there could really not be a Shakesville anymore, is chilling.

Sady at Tiger Beatdown as usual is all over this, far better than I can add with my poor powers. But I will say: this is an issue of privilege, of flaunting it and most of all of not examining your own privilege. But just so we all understand:

When somebody tells you something you said hurt them, and you don’t take it
seriously, that’s privilege.

When somebody tells you your conduct is against the simple rules she created
for her own space, that’s privilege.

When you repeatedly ignore complaints except to occasionally apologize and
then go right back to doing what you were doing, that’s privilege.

If you think that somebody is supposed to do something for you, something
that you value and treasure, and you don’t listen to what they say, you in fact
act like you were owed something–you better believe that’s
privilege with a capital-fuckin’ P.

And when somebody writes an incensed blog post about privilege, you can bet she has some privilege too. We all do. So what are you going to do about that?

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Fear of a Diverse Planet

Categories: privilege stories, teh tranz, Your RDA of Outrage

Warning: some of the links below may be triggery, as I went to the originals.

The Sotomayor nomination has once again driven the white male protestant establishment–who after all suffer from the greatest discrimination–in an uproar. And as usual a new coded language emerges–Sotomayor is a “bully” for dressing down (male) lawyers, that she got her nomination thanks to affirmative action, and, of course, she’s not qualified.

The idea that the white guys might be biased against everybody but white guys is of course ignored.

That is, of course, the gift of privilege–the ability to ignore it or pretend it doesn’t exist. White men are “normal” in this country–anybody not a white guy is a “minority” even though white men–and men in general–are the real minority in this country.

One of the things about being trans is that it has the potential to help you visualize your privilege, especially if you were, like me, a white male crossdresser–outside I looked no different than any other guy (well, except for the groomed eyebrows and long fingernails), but I knew that if anyone knew about my inner life, I’d immediately lose my “normal” status.

Not everybody makes use of this opportunity. I’ve met incredibly chauvanistic crossdressers–and even transsexuals aren’t immune; I’ve encountered many who were so busy sandcastling their privilege that they try to deny the womanhood of other transpeople. (Warning: super-triggery.)

(I’d be on their list for fessing to having identified as a crossdresser.)

Those who do, however, learn an important truth: that “normal” can’t live in the abscence of “abnormal”–that there always has to be some shadowy Other who opposes all your basic values. The shock of those people of privilege–like myself–who realize that their transness has made them that Other can often lead them to feel solidarity with all the other Others. (Perhaps this is why trans people still support lesbian and gay rights even after one of the largest gay rights groups threw us cruelly under the bus during the ENDA fiasco last year.)

Privilege is afraid of diversity, because it forces it to confront the Other; privilege hides in the language that underprivileged people use in order to subject them to ridicule; privilege, in short, is nothing else than fear of the Other, of losing that which didn’t belong to it in the first place, of having, in other words, “normal” become normal–a world where our various diversities of race, gender, religion, sexuality are no more important than our diversities in favorite sports team or ice cream flavors.

They live in fear, unfounded fear because diversity has never hurt anybody. Except in their minds.

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