sophiaserpentia | Entries tagged with polemic discourse

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

I don’t normally read anything by Heart unless someone i read links to something over there. Let’s just say i have disagreements with some of her points of view.

But what is happening to her now is not acceptable.

Misogynists have shut down her website by pinging it to death, using up her bandwidth allotment, and are attacking her mind and spirit with vivid threats of rape and murder.

These aren’t random trolls, it’s part of a coordinated and deliberate effort to shut down several feminists, including Twisty, Ginmar, Biting Beaver, and others. I don’t even want to describe the now-deleted forum conversation i just found thanks to Google’s cache, wherein the attacks were being organized; suffice it to say i am horrified and nauseated.

They think they are doing it “just for lulz,” but, to paraphrase Andrew Vachss, love and hate are not emotions, they are actions. If you perform the acts of hatred, then regardless of what is going on ‘in your mind’ you are guilty of hate.

Feminists do not participate in general internet discourse because we are just frankly outnumbered. We can be as eloquent as we like, as patient as we like, but there is simply not enough time and energy to answer every point raised in objection, every post, every quibble. There are twenty objections for every point we raise. And that is under the best of circumstances, presuming that objections are not (as they usually are) delivered in snide, condescending tones which in themselves sap our energy.

The message, which we get both verbally and non-verbally, is clear: our form of dissent, whether it has merit or not, is just simply not allowed. It will not be answered on the level in which it is delivered. It will instead simply be shouted down, because majorities can do this, and because they think it is not even worth the mental energy that would be required to answer it directly.

In order just to have the chance to collect our thoughts feminists have retreated to a fairly insular blogosphere — but apparently we aren’t allowed to have even this to ourselves. It doesn’t take a mass conspiracy to shut us down, just a few determined kooks everyone else shrugs off as mere pranksters.

And then what are we to think but that is just more proof of what we are saying about there being a globally-pervasive cannibalistic pattern of misogyny?

This is not a “freedom of speech” debate. Freedom of speech has to include the sense of personal peace and security which is required before someone can even sit down to write. And secondly, “speech” is the exchange of ideas. ‘Raep’ threats and other verbal vomit which carry only malice and emotional terrorism are not an exchange of ideas. Quite the opposite in fact.

What are we going to do about this? As a society, i mean. When are we going to say, as a society, that we truly value minority viewpoints in discourse? That this diversity is a resource worth protecting? When are we finally going to take bullying seriously?

I have two incomplete drafts of an entry i've tried to write all day about reparations for centuries of unpaid labor and ethnic cleansing upon which American wealth was built. It's a messy subject that defies encapsulation, but ultimately the ethics of it demands i address this, especially since so many even today perform crucial tasks every day without compensation equal to their contribution to the economy.

But my brain is too scattered for this today, and it's even more scattered now after learning that Jerry Falwell has passed. I'm not sad about this, but i agree with

griffen that there is some cause for sorrow, since now there is no chance that he will repent of the harm he has caused and work to reconcile it with the faith he professed, or even to acknowledge us queer, pagan, or feminst folk as children of the same deity. This would have been greatly helpful for the communities he caused deliberate harm for his own profit and prestige. He became a tangible symbol of the trauma many of us felt as we were expelled from families, homes, and jobs, or shouted at in the hallways of our schools or beaten up in the allyways of our neighborhoods, his hateful words providing the soundtrack by which this abuse was carried out. Now he is gone, and his legacy in many quarters will be rejoicing at his death.

I posted Friday about a new study out of Harvard indicating that "Verbal beatings hurt as much as sexual abuse".

We are a hair's breadth away from established evidence of the trauma and emotional damage of living in our culture of homophobia and transphobia. The case has already been made with regards to racism and sexism. Evidence has already been assembled on the harmful effects of social homophobia and transphobia. Now all we need is to have a causal link established clinically. I expect we will see that in the next decade, maybe five years tops.

Will it make a difference? Maybe not much of one. But it will be another step in the unraveling of the cloak of hatred cast over our society in order to make money and consolidate the state's monopoly on violence.

But this isn't a political game or a religious dispute, this is a visceral life or death matter for millions of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people who live with fear and anxiety and self-loathing brought about because of this. We will carry these scars forever, they limit our lives and our health and our economic solvency, and the best outcome we can hope for is that future generations won't have these same scars. It is a worthy tribute, but it shouldn't have to be a tribute at all.

Even so, having this evidence in hand could actually lead to one of the conservative Christians' worst nightmares becoming true -- courts and legislators agreeing that Christian instruction regarding the "sinfulness" of homosexuality is harmful or even a hate crime. This seems an extreme outcome and one that is certainly doubtful in the US, but it's believable in some parts of Europe and perhaps even Canada, where this possibility has already raised its head.

But, here's the thing. Those who have been sowing the seeds of homophobia have our blood on their hands. Even when directly confronted with the reality of the harm to which they are indirectly, if not directly, contributing, they will not stop or at least even stand beside us. They won't stop even though the harm they cause is ethically wrong. They won't stop even though Jesus taught compassion and unity over division and shunning. They won't stop even though moral absolutism is ethically wrong. And they won't even stop when they can see that their hatefulness is literally destroying the fabric of their own churches and communities.

If they won't stop, we ex-Christians and atheists will do it for them, and i guarantee the results of that will be much less kind to Christianity (and maybe even religion in general) than it would if conservative Christianity got its own house in order and stopped hurting people.

ETA. I meant for this entry to have a more personal element, some reflection on how these things affect me every day, the cumulative trauma of transphobia from my parents, from the church, from society at large. But it didn't come out. I've already written about it, anyway.

If there's anyone still around who has a shred of respect for John McCain or any interest in him as a presidential candidate, it must surely have been damaged by his stunt the other night, of singing "Bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann." Or his little 'joke' the other night that during his shopping excursion in Baghdad, he picked up a souvenir for Jon Stewart.

Upon being criticized for these callous remarks, he's told his critics to "lighten up" and "get a life." (Of course, soldiers killed by IEDs in Iraq HAD a life until they were sent there.) Every time i've ever heard comments like this (and "can't you take a joke?" and "snap out of it") the more convinced i become that there are almost no conditions under which these are ever acceptable remarks.

Because what they mean, underneath it all, is, "I don't have to listen to you or care about what you think, you are less than a real person to me. The fact that you even bothered to voice your concern is nothing more than an irritation to me."

A while ago brownfemipower commented on the fact that her post in December on the blogosphere controversy between (white) radical feminists and (white) transactivists received widespread attention and fostered a huge number of replies -- but when she sought to explore the racial dimensions of the debate she encountered an eerie silence. She realized that her comments on the topic had become merely another part of an ongoing white dialogue.

Now i see, via pandagon, that Garrison Keillor has apologized for his recent essay which drew considerable ire -- notably from Dan Savage. I note, with a considerable uneasiness in my gut, that all of the controversy surrounds "two sentences" worth of homophobia and completely overlooks the racist overtones of half his essay. (Read the comments for further clarification.)

These are examples of fundamentally the same issue: the blogosphere has become an echo chamber in which certain issues gain traction and grab attention, while other issues are shouted down. And what i'm seeing here disturbs me: a fundamental unwillingness to explore more than one dimension of an issue at any time. If race is not the primary aspect of an issue being discussed, IOW if it is not the "topic under discussion" from the very beginning, any attempts to raise it as a concern are ignored and shouted down.

Add this to my list of concerns about the viability of the blogosphere as genuine discourse.

Leftist bloggers might have potty mouths, but at least we don't repeatedly, again and again and again, call for the violent death of people who disagree with us or point out inconvenient facts. (Thanks to Shakespeare's Sister.)

So, not long ago, the White House was reaching out to Congressional Democrats and saying, "It's time to set aside politics and focus on the future."

Now, of course, they are calling dissenters (who are only calling for symbolic non-binding dissent, not even real dissent) traitors and terrorists. "What message does Congress intend to give?" asked White House spokesman Tony Snow. "And who does it think the audience is? Is the audience merely the president? Is it the voting American public or, in an age of instant communication, is it also al-Qaida?"

But this is typical though of bullies who call for rational dialogue. They don't want to be called dividers or bigots or homophobic, because that drags down the tone of dialogue. We should instead "raise the quality of the dialogue" (in the words of the spokesman for VoteOnMarriage.org). And yet, well, see for yourself the obstacles to this (this from the chairman of VoteOnMarriage.org):

Is it exaggerated to see prophetic significance in the fact that on September 11, 2001 Boston served as the point of departure for the deadly forces that spread so much destruction and havoc in this nation and all over the world? What took place at the material level is now being carried out at the moral and spiritual level, as the virus of homosexuality and gay marriage begins to spread dramatically all over this nation and perhaps the world.

Frankly, i don't think anyone willing to say something like this deserves any of our attention. We don't owe them anything. We don't owe them a defense of our needs, we don't owe them a response, we don't owe them acknowledgement. We should take our case directly to our family and friends, to the public, to the legislators, to the media, to the leaders of business, and not engage bullies in dialogue. They will insist on setting the tone every time, and it is a total waste of our energy.

I'm sure a fair number of you know who Twisty is: radical feminist and proud resident of Austin, Texas. I've read her blog for some time, and, like several other transpeople i know, was horrified to witness an explosion of transphobic vitriol in the comments to a post she wrote on December 15 [warning: may be upsetting!] which originally had nothing to do with transgenderism. It hurt so much because (1) of the rawness of it and (2) because it was a surprise to see the topic come up there: Twisty, by self-admission, doesn't bring up trans issues because it is not something she knows a great deal about.

As happens in the blogosphere there have been numerous echoes and responses and retrenchments and un-blogrollings and such. Even though Twisty herself has made it clear she is not transphobic and has been deeply shaken and disappointed by the conduct she witnessed in her own comment page (something with which i can comisserate), i still don't feel comfortable reading her blog. The self-preservation instinct has kicked in and is still overriding my willingness to risk being stung a second time.

The silver lining is that some truly inspired bloggery has come out of this, such as Winter's response: "I did not come to feminism for this."

But on the whole i have a bad taste in my mouth over what i saw happen in the feminist and transfeminist blogosphere in the last couple of weeks. Division between feminists always pains my heart and makes me feel like i'm dying a little. Humanity needs feminism to succeed -- possibly for its very survival.

Feminism is not a revelatory religion with a high priesthood who makes proclamations and writes scripture. There is no "perfect feminist" who is without flaw and whose utterances can be taken as inerrant gospel. There is no easy answer, no laundry list of dos and don'ts that guarantee you're on the straight and narrow. It's an ongoing process of discourse and learning and introspection, and even someone who's been walking this path for decades has room to learn and grow.

Problem is, our society is not tolerant of this kind of process. We expect illumination to come in a flash, to be able to flick a switch and go from hellbound sinner to born again saint. Admitting you might be mistaken, and then forgiving yourself for having a lapse in your insight, are hard. It takes years, and honesty, and humility. It requires that we are capable of admitting, "Oh, okay, i misunderstood, i did the wrong thing, and now i know better and will act differently in the future" -- without excoriating ourselves afterwards.

This is what discourse is: growth and evolution, not standing in a trench of static, unchanging, presumably perfect doctrine exchanging pot-shots with someone in an opposing trench clasping an opposing presumption of perfect doctrine.

But in this society, true discourse is not allowed. It is subversive; it might start off as harmless-enough navel-gazing, but eventually it means questioning the current distribution of power -- and those who have power do not think it's in their interest to encourage that. And so the baby of personal and cultural growth is thrown out with the bathwater of discourse. Discourse becomes "rational dialogue" (so-called because any first-hand accounts of trauma or experience are generally considered off-limits) in which talking points are spat back and forth with no real exchange of meaning at all. Meaning is not abstract, it requires perspective, understanding, and personal experience. "Rational dialogue" is a hamster wheel: radicals are sentenced to an eternity of having the same draining conversations with status-quo defenders over and over and over, like Sisyphus in Tartarus pushing a rock up hill all day every day and watching it roll downhill in the evening.

The internet causes discourse to lose whole dimensions of understanding and communication which are present when you're talking face to face. It encourages a "gotcha!" mindset, and Google makes it possible to dredge up any kind of dirt you need to find on someone to nail someone just that much more thoroughly. Never mind if you have matured and evolved beyond a certain point of view, if you wrote it down it can and will be dredged up to discredit you today. The internet encourages immediate gratification, and so in the blogosphere people often write things without reflection. (I've taken to avoiding posts on current issues, in part because of my concern about this.)

Interacting in the comments page of a blog can feel deceptively conversational, but all too often it is not really conversation.
Let me be plain: for fostering understanding, there just is no substitute for speaking face-to-face.

In any other mode of communication, meaning is lost. For many kinds of mundane interaction this may make no difference, but when the topic at hand is difficult and requires very deep introspection and sometimes even gazing into the soul of the person with whom you are conversing, the internet is not necessarily a boon.

As an aside, to establish the bigger picture i'm pondering: this is a big part of why walls are evil. They block off whole populations from having any contact with one another. Walls do not bring peace, they bring misunderstanding and discord. Peace does not come at the point of a law enforcement officer's gun (this is the myth the government wants you to believe), it comes from face-to-face interaction; it comes from standing beside the infidel at the market watching them haggle over the price of a toy for their kid.

I've lost sleep over flame wars, i've had migraines because of them, gotten sick because of them, and did not feel that my growth was really fostered in any meaningful way. I challenge any of the people who posted transphobic comments in Twisty's blog to spend an hour or two with me, seeing my pain and sharing her pain with me, to see if they can still afterwards make the same comments they made then. (I'd challenge myself to see if i retained the same harsh opinion i have of them, too.)

I don't mean to imply that we should stop having blogs, because on the whole it is still better to have internet communication than not, but i don't know how, really, to address this concern.

I've been kind of confused as to why opponents of same-sex marriage continually insinuate that "bestiality marriages will be next." But now it makes perfect sense. They already don't think that queer people are human, so same-sex marriage is in their mind already bestial. The progression from gay marriage to bestial marriage therefore is entirely logical.

It's long, but Matt Taibbi's "Time to Go! Inside the Worst Congress Ever", published by Rolling Stone, is one of the most engaging and informative pieces i've read yet on the stunning failure which is the 109th Congress.

"I remember one incident very clearly - I think it was 2001," says Winslow Wheeler, who served for twenty-two years as a Republican staffer in the Senate. "I was working for [New Mexico Republican] Pete Domenici at the time. We were in a Budget Committee hearing and the Democrats were debating what the final result would be. And my boss gets up and he says, 'Why are you saying this? You're not even going to be in the room when the decisions are made.' Just said it right out in the open."

... Last year, [House Judiciary Committee chair James] Sensenbrenner became apoplectic when Democrats who wanted to hold a hearing on the Patriot Act invoked a little-known rule that required him to let them have one.

"Naturally, he scheduled it for something like 9 a.m. on a Friday when Congress wasn't in session, hoping that no one would show," recalls a Democratic staffer who attended the hearing. "But we got a pretty good turnout anyway."

Sensenbrenner kept trying to gavel the hearing to a close, but Democrats again pointed to the rules, which said they had a certain amount of time to examine their witnesses. When they refused to stop the proceedings, the chairman did something unprecedented: He simply picked up his gavel and walked out.

"He was like a kid at the playground," the staffer says. And just in case anyone missed the point, Sensenbrenner shut off the lights and cut the microphones on his way out of the room.

... Anyone who wants to get a feel for the kinds of beasts that have been roaming the grounds of the congressional zoo in the past six years need only look at the deranged, handwritten letter that convicted bribe-taker and GOP ex-congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham recently sent from prison to Marcus Stern, the reporter who helped bust him. In it, Cunningham - who was convicted last year of taking $2.4 million in cash, rugs, furniture and jewelry from a defense contractor called MZM - bitches out Stern in the broken, half-literate penmanship of a six-year-old put in time-out.

"Each time you print it hurts my family And now I have lost them Along with Everything I have worked for during my 64 years of life," Cunningham wrote. "I am human not an Animal to keep whiping [sic]. I made some decissions [sic] Ill be sorry for the rest of my life."

The amazing thing about Cunningham's letter is not his utter lack of remorse, or his insistence on blaming defense contractor Mitchell Wade for ratting him out ("90% of what has happed [sic] is Wade," he writes), but his frantic, almost epic battle with the English language. It is clear that the same Congress that put a drooling child-chaser like Mark Foley in charge of a House caucus on child exploitation also named Cunningham, a man who can barely write his own name in the ground with a stick, to a similarly appropriate position. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the former chairman of the House Subcommittee on Human Intelligence Analysis and Counterintelligence:

"As truth will come out and you will find out how liablest [sic] you have & will be. Not once did you list the positives. Education Man of the Year ... hospital funding, jobs, Hiway [sic] funding, border security, Megans law my bill, Tuna Dolfin [sic] my bill ... and every time you wanted an expert on the wars who did you call. No Marcus you write About how I died."

How liablest you have & will be? What the fuck does that even mean? This guy sat on the Appropriations Committee for years - no wonder Congress couldn't pass any spending bills!

A couple of weeks ago i wrote that i believe the idea of the "culture war" is a lie.

When i say that, keep in mind that i DO believe there is a war going on in our culture. I think though that it is a real war. I don't think it should be called a "culture war" for reasons i will outline in a second. But in this war, just as in any war, people are beaten, raped, kidnapped, lined up and shot in classrooms, stabbed, hanged, dragged on the street behind a moving car; people are traumatized, shell-shocked, hide in their houses because they fear attack at any time; people are denied rights, discriminated against, driven away from their homes, shamed into silence, driven to drink, drugs, or suicide, survive by passing as members of the invading army; a people is silenced and isolated from one another as their history is erased and their language is suppressed and misappropriated; the invading army turns its subjects against one another.

This is a real war, not a culture war.

In a "culture war," the conflict is said to be between competing sets of ideas. The idea of culture war is used to gloss over the real death, the real torture, the real discrimination going on. If all we have is a war of words, then the people on both sides are both "equally responsible" for the incivility.

Instead what we really have is this: most people on all 'sides' have experienced some degree of being subjugated by force, but then we are all turned against one another because we've been fed various sets of lies about who is to blame for our pain. And in the process some of us continue the process of subjugating others because they are more vulnerable than we are, so we can.

The words that are spoken on top of all of this are not spoken by people who stand at positions of equal authority. There is no "free marketplace of ideas" any more than there is a "free market." Discourse appears to be 'dying' because it has never been alive; it is a facade propped up to keep us distracted while the poor scrounge for a way to live and rail against whoever their leaders are scapegoating this generation (one generation it's the Jews, next it's the gays or maybe the blacks; misogyny is always in fashion too).

Anytime you have a clash of ideologies or institutions, what is not being said is as important as what is being said. The thing is, there are many inherent areas of agreement between institutions and ideologies which don't get a lot of attention because we are made to look at the bright shiny point of contention.

For example, the Democrats and Republicans argue all the time about various points of contention, but what is not mentioned in all of their braying and hooting is the shared (and usually unspoken) agenda they share. They frame the debate by talking about what they want to talk about, and teaching us to act as if what they do NOT talk about is assumed, presumed, common sense, everyday truth.

On one level, what they agree on might be called "the Edifice Agenda," which is the idea that authority swirls around institutions simply by virtue of their being established ongoing concerns. Authority is a social fiction which requires mass mutual consent. If everyone in the US woke up tomorrow and suddenly stopped buying into this fiction, that authority would evaporate. But we buy into it because we've been trained to think that way, and secondarily because we understand the benefits we get from it.

On another level, they collude on the agenda of perpetuating the status quo, which grants privilege and access to power for some while disenfranchising and silencing others. By controlling the flow of political discourse they marginalize the issues of faced by people of various minorities -- even their most pressing problems -- into the gutter of "special interests." The implication is that, for example, it is possible to fight poverty without addressing sexism or racism.

If these things are never spoken about, how is it that we learn to play along? Mostly, i believe, we learn this as children by watching the way adults act and the way they respond to certain questions.

To illustrate this, i learned a lot about the way things are taught to children non-verbally just from being married to a person with a disability and being out with her in public. Children, not having learned yet to treat disability with shame and silence, would come up to her in the supermarket or wherever and ask her about it. Their parents always reacted with horror and embarrasment.

There is nothing about having a disability that should result in embarrasment, and there is nothing offensive about an honest and innocent question about it. But since this is the way children see their parents act, this is what they are going to learn is the "proper" way to treat this subject.

Children ask a lot of "silly" questions. And many of them seem "silly" because we were told they are silly when we asked them.

Current Music: Chris Cornell "Follow My Way"

A line-by-line response to Gay Marriage Foes Face Issue in Schools

Ever since her 5-year-old brought home a book from kindergarten that depicted a gay family, Tonia Parker has felt that her parenting has been under attack in the only state that allows same-sex marriage.

Translation: they want to feel safe in imparting bigotry to their children.

She and her husband, David, didn't want to discuss sexual orientation yet with their son, and were shocked that the book was included in a "diversity book bag" last year. David Parker subsequently got arrested for refusing to leave a Lexington school after officials refused to meet his demand that he be notified when homosexuality was discussed in his son's class.

Yes, i remember this. The arrest was for trespassing or creating a nuisance, that sort of thing, but they've tried to characterize it as an arrest for "standing up for what is right." I'm sorry, this is not the same as protesting outside the School of the Americas, okay?

Now the Parkers and another couple have sued school officials in federal court, claiming Lexington officials violated their parental rights to teach morals to their own children.

The way they and other opponents of gay marriage see it, the 2003 ruling that cleared the way for same-sex weddings has emboldened Massachusetts gay rights advocates to push their views in schools and ignore those who feel homosexuality is immoral.

"In many parts of the United States, we could have presented our concerns and our objections, and it wouldn't have been a problem," Tonia Parker said.

Translation: anywhere else in the country, their bigotry would be perfectly acceptable.

Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, said there is no pro-gay campaign in the schools, just isolated cases exaggerated by anti-gay marriage activists who suffer from "narcissistic activist personality disorder."

Yes. Reduction of your privilege is not oppression.

Carisa Cunningham, spokeswoman for the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, said school curriculums haven't changed, just the reaction to them by gay marriage opponents. "Maybe the impact of the law is that it has made people much more defensive and much more afraid," she said.

She has more sympathy than i do (though, to be honest, any sympathy would be more than i have). It is not rational for homophobes to be defensive and afraid. They are not losing anything here except the privilege to be a bigot.

...Brian Camenker of the Article 8 Alliance, which opposes gay marriage, said there's been a striking change in tone by gay marriage proponents since marriages started.

"It's like you're dealing with people from Mars, people who feel they're so superior they can use your child's mind as a sandbox for their own personal ideologies," he said.

That's quite a statement from someone who wants to treat OUR child's mind as a sandbox for THEIR personal ideologies.

But Eliza Byard of the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network said gay families exist everywhere — the only thing different about Massachusetts is that same-sex marriage makes it much harder to push them aside. Public schools must acknowledge gay families, she said, even if it upsets parents who believe same-sex relationships are immoral.

"One of the basic realities of American life," she said, "is that all of us have to deal with beliefs we disagree with."

Queer people have been forced to live with, and continue to have to live with, offensive and hateful ideologies shoved down our throats every day. We get to see the privileges others around us have and take for granted, that have been denied us. These bigot crybabies wouldn't last five minutes in our shoes, to judge from the way they get so freaked out by what are actually very small nods to the fact that queers are people too.

Current Music: Massive Attack "Small Time Shot Away"

Thanks to

griffen for linking to this piece from the Los Angeles Times. I want to examine it.

Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.

Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality.

No, it's only her bigotry that compels her to speak out against homosexuality, because there is no commandment or requirement of the Christian faith to do so.

The only passages in the Bible on homosexuality relevant to Christians are Romans 1 and I Corinthians 6, and these indicate Paul's opinion that homosexuals do not have a place in the Kingdom of Heaven. They do not require Christians to speak out against them, just to avoid associating with them.

But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she's a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation.

Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. So she's demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy.

What exactly is "religious expression"? Is that the right to wear a cross, or a burqa, or a pentagram? The right to spend a moment out of every day in class saying a prayer?

Does it include the right to make proclamations that, directly or otherwise, promote hatred?

There is no "right" to avoid being offended. All of us are exposed, all the time, to statements that offend us. We cannot ban speech on the basis that it offends someone.

And believe it or not, that is not the rationale behind bans on hate speech.

What makes hate speech problematic is not that it offends someone. What makes it problematic is that it promotes a social power imbalance rooted in violence, exploitation, and discrimination. A target of hate speech is not simply "offended" or "put-off;" hate speech can trigger a post-traumatic stress response, which causes anxiety and other major mental health issues.

Not only that, but it cultivates an environment where people feel safe and entitled to commit acts of aggression and even violence against members of an oppressed class. The homophobic sentiment in our society is so strong (and hardly needs bolstering) that fully 84% of queer people report being verbally harassed and insulted, and over a quarter are physically assaulted.

There is, whether some want to admit it or not, a social power imbalance favoring heterosexuality. Queer people are at a distinct economic disadvantage (in spite of the stereotype of queer people as affluent), are much more likely to be the targets of violence, and as a direct result of societal homophobia have a higher incidence of mental health problems.

So, what Ruth Malhotra wants, in effect, is the right to contribute to my mental illness, and to encourage people to beat, fire, insult, and marginalize me. And, taking that a step further, i think that she and people like her are quite aware of the effects her hate speech will have. They are in fact counting on it, because they want us to feel ashamed of who we are, they want us to go into hiding because that is most beneficial to them.

( Read more... )

In my last post, I wrote that "I do not have the privilege of having my articulations taken as value-neutral." I added to that, in a comment, "Our silence is presumed, so therefore our speech is assertion."

To illustrate that, imagine public discourse as a microphone. In our culture, that microphone is presumed to be in the hands of someone who is white, male, wealthy, able-bodied, slender, sane, cisgendered, and heterosexual. The "malestream" culture is primed to hear a white male heterosexual voice in neutral terms, even when an agenda is being promoted. At the same time, the culture is primed to hear the voice of a conspicuous "other" in non-neutral terms, assuming that she is promoting an agenda even when she is not.

I use the microphone metaphor because the culture reacts as if a conspicuous "other" who is speaking grabbed the mike away from the malestream voice. "Why does she have the mike? It must be because she wants something."

This is why you see people described as a "feminist author" or an "African-American author" but you never see "white male author." The white male author might be promoting a pro-white pro-male agenda, but he is not called on it the way a feminist or black author is. The pro-white pro-male agenda is presumed; it is value-neutral. It is not an "agenda," even when it is.

The soothing voiceover intones the chant of domination, while we each scramble for our survival.

The most contentious discussions I've been involved with on LJ tend to have this in common: they buck up against the conceptual "othering" of perpetrators. What I mean by this phrase, is that people who rape, persecute, molest children, queer-bash, lynch, or commit other acts of oppression are conceptually and linguistically treated as though they are a remote shadowy group of people, faceless caricatures lurking in dark alleys or hiding beneath white sheets while burning crosses. They are less than civilized, they are "out of control," primitive, brutal.

"Othering" is hard to describe because like many aspects of social stratification there is a conspiracy of silence around it.

Conspiracy of silence means that we learn about oppression not primarily through language but by watching people act and reconstructing the "deep syntax" of social grammar. ( example using the othering of people with disabilities )

There is a lot of talk in critical or feminist literature about the othering of oppressed people. But up to now I haven't read a lot about the othering of perpetrators.

Anyone who's read my journal for a while knows that the most contentious discussions took place after I pointed out that (a) the people who have harrassed me for my religion or sought to restrict my civil rights were Christian, or (b) when I point out that the people who have sexually exploited or assaulted me were men.

As these statements are right there, they do not invite cavil.

If that statement is saltpeter and the othering of perpetrators is charcoal, here's the sulfur that gives the gunpowder: If I say that when I encounter people in public I cannot tell good Christians from bad Christians, or good men from bad men, simply by looking at them, all hell breaks loose. Because THIS is a statement that challenges the conspiracy of silence around the othering of perpetrators.

Inevitably this statement is taken as promotion of intolerance, rather than the depiction of experience. I finally figured out why: it is not the promotion of intolerance, it is the promotion of the concept that any viewpoint other than the "expected generic" viewpoint of straight-white-healthy-wealthy-male counts just as much. I write from the viewpoint of a "queer-fat-trannie other," which means that my statements come to rhetorical discourse from across a divide; the mere act of stating my experience is taken as argument in favor of a specific view. I do not have the privilege of having my articulations taken as value-neutral.

Inevitably my statement is also taken personally, though it is not intended as a personal accusation. Men or Christians have every time jumped to assert that not all men or Christians are like that. I also am sternly reminded that women and non-Christians do heinous things too. I never challenged either of those assertions and agree with them, and know them to be true firsthand.

But these points are thrust at me with such force that I'm inclined to conclude that a challenge to "the othering of perpetrators" is a challenge to the way self-identity is constructed in our society.

We want to feel good about who we are, and we want our self-identity to be pristine. We want to know that there is a solid divide between our self and evil, a barrier that keeps us safe from taint. Carl Jung described a faculty in the unconscious he called the Shadow, onto which is projected our darker impulses so that they seem to come from outside rather than inside our self.

None of us want to acknowledge that we live in a cannibalistic society, so we pretend otherwise. The purpose of ideology -- all ideology -- is to perpetuate othering (of the oppressed and of perpetrators) in the context of oppression.

crossposted to my journal and crossposted to

feminist

Sometimes compassion is hard. One of those times is when it falls to us to listen to anger that seems to be directed at us. Sometimes that anger actually is; sometimes not. Anger can communicate a lot, though, when we learn to listen to what is being said on several levels at once.

Language exists as a way of expressing our experience; which means it does not solely exist in order that we might state our experiences in literal and logical ways. We use metaphors, we use subtext, and we use emotional expression. We communicate on several levels at once; and every statement that we make carries a number of assumptions and implications and allusions to culture which make each statement a holographic representation of human reality.

Our culture focuses on discourse in a way that encourages us to focus only on the meaning of a person's words and the logical truth value of the statement taken this way.

The lure of logical analysis hypnotizes us like the siren's call so that we become enthralled and see/hear nothing else -- and this causes humanity to crash its ships on the rocks of divisiveness. In the hands of someone justifying an uneven power dynamic, it allows one to misappropriate the discussion, changing the terms away from the power dynamic (so as to force what was previously unspoken back into the closet) and onto a person's words themselves. There is ultimately nowhere to hide from this, because no statement is free from quibbling evasion. And it is frustrating because it leaves one in the awkward position of choosing between being painted as inarticulate or being drawn into haggling over semantics -- which is important, but succeeds at distracting from power dynamics.

In general I am a believer in the importance of civility in discussion. It helps people to see eye to eye and I do in general request that people who post in my journal strive to remain civil.

However, I also strive to listen to anger. Listening to anger requires compassion, and an understanding that there is much more meaning to language than the literal meaning of the words in front of you.

I am white and was born and raised male, and so as you might imagine I was defensive and angry when I read or heard statements like "The problem is white people," or "[Rape] is a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." So I was inclined to respond with logical arguments designed to demonstrate that white people can be victims of discrimination too, or men are raped too, and so therefore the statements were wrong and misleading.

But on another level (which I could pretend I was unaware of) I was arguing to retain the privilege not to have to examine the ways in which I benefit from the oppression of women or people of color.

If you are a person who strives for compassion, then at some point you have to resist the need to analyze and critique and just listen to oppression-driven anger and grok what is being said between the lines. IMO it is not possible to really learn about oppression without seeing anger and resisting the urge to wallpaper it over with logic and cavil.

Mea culpa.

I don't think I really understood this until I read, quite recently, Andrea Dworkin's 1983 speech "I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape." There is a part of me that is still male-identified who wants to protest defensively, "not me!" when I read this, but when I was able to move past the urge to paper over Dworkin's anger, I understood her message and realized I very strongly agreed.

BTW I am not advocating hardcore rudeness, I am just saying that when anger happens, it should be listened to compassionately.

Edit. I'm also not saying that logic is bad, or that statements should not be criticized for their logical truth value. I'm just saying that this paradigm, like any tool, can be misused.

Over the past few days I've been tagging the entries in my journal (I'm back to Nov. 2004 now, what a wonderful tool tags are!) and have noticed a pattern -- a few contentious journal entries aimed at Christianity and usually inspired by anti-queer agitation in the news, followed by a resolution not to let myself get drawn into posting divisive comments. Then a month (or even a week) later, I'm doing it again.

I've been wondering over the past few days whether it is possible to examine the question of power inequality without getting drawn into divisiveness. The prime examples often cited are from exemplary people -- MLK Jr. and Gandhi and a brave few who are able to speak about racial or sexual or religious inequality while remaining completely unflappable. They've set a standard of perfection and dignity which is admirable, but which sets the bar uncomfortably high for the rest of us to meet in a healthy way.

Then this morning it came together when a friend mentioned in a locked entry that even things like reading a newspaper can trigger a PTSD response -- fear and anxiety. I haven't been able to find online an article outlining a clear exposition of this link, but many times the advice given to people being treated for PTSD includes avoiding the news media.

I began to wonder if maybe PTSD makes oppression possible. If people of a given class are more likely than average to suffer from abuse, then a random person from that class is also more likely than average to respond with fear and anxiety to news about similar things happening to others in the same class.

Figures for the prevalence of depression in our society are estimated at 5-7%, with higher percentages for women than men. The one-year prevalance for generalized anxiety disorder is 3%, again with higher percentages for women than men. Compare this to the figure of over 40% of people in the GLBT community at any given time I cited a while back.

Now, depression statistics are not proof of PTSD, but they might be suggestive of it. Other evidence which I've cited before show very high percentages for major disruptive or traumatic abusive events in the lives of GLBT people. So it does not seem out of line to suppose that much of the depression or anxiety experienced by GLBT people is due to (mostly undiagnosed) PTSD.

One line of research has suggested a link between racism and PTSD response.

People who are victimized because of their race share an unfortunate legacy with victims of terrorism. Both suffer the effects of violence inflicted on them because of factors beyond their control—effects that are often both severe and chronic.

This is the contention of Chalsa Loo, Ph.D., a clinical research psychologist at the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’s Pacific Islands Division. The center is a project of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

... She noted that her findings on the relationship of racism and PTSD are in line with those of studies done in the mid-1980s that showed that African-American Vietnam veterans showed more psychological problems and adjustment difficulties than Caucasian soldiers. She suggested that a major factor in the postwar problems experienced by African-American veterans may have arisen from guilt and rage related to emotionally identifying with the "devalued" and oppressed Vietnamese people they were fighting.

"This finding tells us that the personal experience of racism is a potent risk factor for PTSD," she stated, and one to which clinicians and researchers have rarely paid attention.

The message for psychiatrists, Loo suggested, is that clinicians who fail to account for and discuss possible race-related stressors with their non-Caucasian patients are potentially missing a major cause of PTSD symptoms. (from Race-Related Stressors Can Trigger PTSD)

The picture is starting to become clear. I noted above the higher depression and anxiety figures for women because the typical explanation is to suppose that there is something about women's biochemistry that makes them more prone to mental illness. In light of sexism, could it be that women are simply traumatized more often then men?

So, news of intolerance-inspired abuse spreads like fire through an oppressed community and generates fear and anxiety not because they can imagine it happening to them in an abstract way, but because on a mass scale it triggers a PTSD flashback. In the GLBT community, this response can also be triggered by anti-gay comments styled in Christian language because so many of us were traumatized with this language as the soundtrack; for example, one fourth of us have been expelled or alienated from families or homes, often because the parents could not accept their child's "un-Christian" lifestyle.

Anxiety, fear and depression dampens one's will and lessens one's access to political and economic resources -- creating an advantage in someone who does not have it. Therefore PTSD is an effective tool of exploitation and therefore of oppression. Furthermore, in a typical victim-blaming pattern it is often cited as "proof" that there is something inherently inferior or unclean about women (feminists)/racial minorities/religious minorities/queer people or the way they live.

This thought doesn't give me a lot of optimism for the question I posed at the outset.

davidould wrote, As I've said before, I understand completely why you react with fear. I'm saying that you have a responsibility not to perpetuate that kind of feeling and impression on others.

I'm not sure, then, what you would consider an acceptable expression of my feelings. Do you mean that every time I say, "I am afraid of Christians because of my experiences and those of friends and other people in my community," that I should feel required to add a disclaimer?

Hmm. Televangelists and Christian activists who send out fundraising letters designed to generate fear of queer people in Christians, aren't required to add disclaimers. Politicians who refer to Christian doctrine when saying ugly things about queer people are not required to add disclaimers. Laws and policies rejecting the validity of a recognized medical condition purely because it offends Christian morality don't carry disclaimers. Why is no one harrassing Jerry Falwell or George Bush or Cardinal O'Malley to add a disclaimer saying, "Of course, not *all* queer people are corrupting our youth or deteriorating our moral values, just some."

I'm well aware that two wrongs don't make a right, but this is my private journal, where I write to collect my thoughts and clarify my feelings and experiences. The above are mass-distributed public statements that reach millions.

I am not going to add a disclaimer every single time I write about my feelings on this issue in my journal. I'm not. Any offense that causes is miniscule compared to the incredible restrictions on my life that I am expected to quietly endure. Why should I avoid making the teeniest offense when I'm forced to swallow grievous offense every day? What's in it for me, will it increase the chance I'll change anyone's mind? I'm not convinced I can get through to anyone if I censor myself. Those who are straight and cis-gendered have no idea how restricted my options are, socially, culturally, legally and financially. No idea.

Also, I'm not convinced that adding a disclaimer would stop people from taking offense or complaining that I'm hurting their feelings anyway. It hasn't in the past. The only way to avoid offending people, apparently, is total silence, which I refuse.

Omitting a disclaimer or voicing these feelings is not "perpetuating that feeling in others," because chances are they already have that feeling. That feeling is generated and perpetuated by politicians, several huge Christian denominations, and groups like Focus on the Family, who are making money and gaining influence thereby; it's also generated and perpetuated by people who have literally beaten and harrassed them. My journal is a drop in the ocean of fear. If people who read my journal have the same fears and angers, it's not because I've given voice to them.

You know, I'm not proud of anti-Christian prejudice, I consider it a failing. I know it is not rational. Fear is smothering this society and I don't want to play the fear game anymore. I struggle against my feeilngs on this matter and have even started praying for help. But while I work through it I am not going to be silent about it in my journal.

Current Music: Siouxsie and the Banshees "Cannons"

I'm going to make an effort to wean myself out of the echo-chamber of political polemic.

This is going to be difficult, because polemics are so gripping and sticky. Plus, like everyone around me I've been trained to follow the well-worn grooves of popular political discourse. So I'll probably backslide from time to time -- it's hard to avoid getting angry sometimes -- but I want to type this up as a reminder to myself.

Another reason this will be difficult is that I am concerned with analyzing human power dynamics. Discourse and analysis is a way of chopping up experience in order to explicate certain patterns, with the effect that other aspects of reality are excluded. So ultimately every argument is a straw man.

Of late, I've been interested in the emotional wavelength of discourse. By this, I mean that certain strains of discourse seem to float atop the waves of unconscious flow of emotion throughout society. Particular keywords and phrases become triggers for specific kinds of feelings. One who is an astute manipulator can learn how to play or even design and install these emotional triggers in hir audience.

This makes polemic discourse dehumanizing in two ways. The first, is that we find ourselves responding to the emotional triggers in a speech or a text before we can respond to the intellectual content. So it becomes increasingly difficult to really hear what the other person is saying because the negative emotions triggered by their keywords echo inside the brain.

The second is due to the fact that our conscious mind has varying degrees of control over what we do and say. It is not uncommon for people to act in accord with the contours of human power dynamics without being aware of why they are doing so, or even give a good reason for doing it. Even people who have made a life out of examining race or gender politics find themselves perpetuating patterns to which they ideologically object. Polemic discourse is largely concerned with placing blame -- and when you blame someone for something they do not believe they have done (even if they have in fact done it but are unaware of doing so) they get indignant and become incapable of hearing what you are saying. So polemics degenerates into a shouting match where no one hears anyone else anymore.

So it may be more useful to examine human power dynamics through the lens of flows or unfoldings which occur through people rather than from people.

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The Serpent's Wisdom

Eat of this fruit; your eyes shall be opened, and you will be as Gods.

Entries tagged with polemic discourse

don’t bother answering in kind, just shout us down - it’s fun and easy

jerry falwell and you

hate is undermining the fabric of the church

(no subject)

the whiteness of the echo chamber

(no subject)

(no subject)

blogging as a pale imitation of discourse

(no subject)

(no subject)

it's a real war, not a culture war

what's not being said

phrase of the day: "narcissistic activist personality disorder"

(no subject)

This can be yours for only $9.99. Underpaid non-unionized serfs are ready to take your order now.

the "othering" of perpetrators

listening to anger

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and oppression

(no subject)

dare to be naive (a reminder to myself of something I seem to be in danger of forgetting)

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December 2021

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