The Serpent's Wisdom

So, the tapes of Mel Gibson's rants against his girlfriend are starting to become publically available, and...

...well, lets just say that if I ever have to teach a class on verbal & emotional abuse, these tapes would provide an excellent classroom example.

Normal arguments last a few minutes, right? Sometimes longer, sometimes epically long, but not usually. There's some yelling back and forth, and then everyone's anger is spent, and you spend a while calming down and patching up and feeling vaguely sorry for the way you just spoke to the person you love. What makes arguments in a relationship tricky is that you're arguing with the person you usually go to for comfort when you're upset; so, you're mad at them and simultaneously looking for comfort, and simultaneously wanting to comfort them because, well, that's what you do when a person you love is upset.

That's not the way verbal abuse looks, though. You have on one hand someone who is raging, and will not stop raging no matter what conciliatory gestures you offer. The one who's raging is throwing insults in a demeaning tone, screaming, and threatening violence, while talking about how much he or she is the real victim here, because "can't you see what you do to me?" All someone can do in the face of this is to remain as utterly calm as possible, which the abuser takes as assent. There is nothing one can say or do that is the "right thing" that will make the screaming stop; say one thing, you are demeaned; say another thing, and you're picked apart for contradicting what you just said. The raging will continue until the abuser decides to stop; frequently it'll go on for hours.

And I say "decides to stop" because it is absolutely a choice to treat someone that way. They might scream at someone who works for them that way, or a cashier at a store, but they would never scream at their boss that way, or a cop, no matter how angry they were. So they are capable of controlling it; it's not a coincidence that it gets unleashed on someone with less power.

I'm tired of politics.

Well... let me be more precise. I'm bone weary, exhausted to the core, by the antagonism and infighting and sniping and hatchet-jobs. I have no idea how we, as a society, are supposed to comprehend what is going on in the world, and what needs to happen and how we're going to accomplish it, when social discourse has become so bitterly acrimonious it becomes a political issue in itself.

Slowly, but steadily, I've been taking blogs off my reading list. First it was queer and feminist blogs. General lefty blogs have followed, starting with FireDogLake, which I got so fed up with I even removed from my bookmarks. There aren't any blogs anymore that I regularly read. I still read them from time to time, but I feel like I have to steel myself in preparation.

It's not that the topics depress me. They do, they always have. It's not that I don't agree with their views on what's right and wrong -- I do, most of the time. It's the overwhelming acrimony. There's no sense of community, no sense of coalition, just an overwhelmingly consistent approach of, "I'm right and this is why someone else is wrong." Anyone at any time can go from being an ally to being a target, and it's unnerving. The acrimony gets into my blood and then the anger sits in my brain like battery acid, eating away at my insides since it has nowhere to go. John Stewart's plea to Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala on their show "Crossfire" comes to mind.

Do I still care about social issues & economic policy? Of course I do. But the fact that I even have to assert that shows that we've gotten to where this is the game you have to play if you have political opinions. Well, I have political opinions, but I am convinced there must be other ways to disagree, other ways to call someone out.

I'm beginning to see this as part of the work of the revolution. I've written before about affinity politics vs. identity politics, and when I say there's no easy-mode radicalism I mean that we're called to examine our own attitudes and behaviors on a very deep level, so deep that to subscribe to an "-ism" is to duck the issue. The ways out and through are likely to be shown in art, music, fiction, poetry; to be expressed in community gatherings and perhaps religious expression as well (though I feel the need to add a few caveats to that since so much of the current acrimony is expressed in religious terminology). I was toying with the idea of this as a kind of "para-politics:" an accompaniment to the political process that forces everyone involved to be mindful of their opponent's humanity and common cause. I don't expect that the adversarial mode of politics will ever go away -- nor do I think this would necessarily be a good thing -- but I believe in the necessity of tempering it with mindfulness.

I am in favor of banning hate speech. I know my position on this isn't popular, but I believe the consequences of allowing it to be uttered are worse than any likely consequences of stopping it.

First of all, hate speech is not discourse. It only looks like discourse because they are both forms of human linguistic expression. Discourse is a flow of ideas and a distillation of the human condition, the cultural lifeblood. Hate speech is to discourse what theft is to commerce: a poisonous disruption of the patterns and flow.

Secondly, I do not believe there is a slippery slope. There is no legitimate idea which can *only* take the form of a slur, insult, or mean-spirited joke. Conversely, there is little substantive content to any utterance of hate speech. Hate speech primarily binds those who hate or brutalize and issues an implied threat to an already traumatized community, a reminder of past abuses and the specter of future abuse. Banning threats and slurs does not logically imply the future banning of legitimate discourse.

Some might argue that leeway should be made for satire, but honestly, I am not really a fan of satire at this point either, because it can be just as triggering as that which it supposedly sends up. If it has the same effect on the traumatized community, in what way is it better?

Lastly, I find myself having less and less sympathy with anyone who feels constrained when asked to refrain from making hateful utterance. The amount of consideration being requested is tiny compared to the amount of consideration people of traumatized minority communities feel every day in dealing with the majority. It is not too much to ask that people use the brain in their heads to find some other non-hurtful way to say what has to be said.

As a feminist and a leftist i get this a lot: the implication that if i find something offensive which they did not -- or especially if it is something they found funny or amusing -- that i am overly sensitive and, if i am so easily offended, maybe i shouldn't be using the internet.

Look, please don't say this to people. It's not helpful.

If i say i found something offensive, or even say i can see why someone might be offended, i am not implying that you're a horrible person for finding that same thing amusing. If i happen to think someone is a horrible person, i'll say so, but it takes a lot for me to think that.

But, here's why this upsets me.

Reaction A: "Oh, that offended you? Huh. I was actually amused by it."
Reaction B: "Oh, that offended you? Huh. I was actually amused by it. I guess you must just be really sensitive. If you're so sensitive, maybe you shouldn't even be on the internet where people can hurt you."

Reaction A is a simple expression of "Okay, i didn't have the same reaction." It's fine for people to not agree on things or have the same reaction.

Reaction B goes further and belittles you. It's is exactly the same as, "Why can't you take a joke?" But someone who says this may as well also be saying, "If people can hurt you by doing/saying X, maybe you shouldn't do anything you find fun or even leave the house." Because it's not just a game or an internet forum where someone might be triggered, it's anywhere and everywhere you go.

Reaction B is victim-blaming because we don't choose what triggers us. "Triggering" is when something random and unexpected reminds you jarringly of a traumatic event in your life. It's especially frustrating when something insensitive done or said by someone else triggers you. Again, we don't choose to be triggered by something. Also, not everyone is triggered by the same thing.

So when you say Reaction B, you are blaming someone for being triggered by something. They aren't going to read your comment and say, "Oh, gosh, you're right, i'm choosing to be offended by something so little and silly," because their response wasn't a choice in the first place.

...I didn't mean you any harm, but i think the blog communicates a point about racism very effectively that probably can't be made in a gentle or abstract way.

Many of you have heard, i'm sure, of Jane Elliott's "Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes exercise," and other similar seminars and exercises, designed to give white people a taste of what racial discrimination and stereotyping is like. Many who have participated in these exercises describe feeling rage, sadness, and considerable upset lasting for years, even though they know it's only an exercise that lasts a few hours and that they can go back to their lives and everything will be the way it was before.

We white folk don't have any callouses when it comes to racial stereotyping, and so even a little bit of it stings very much.

But i'm certain a person of color would tell me that it doesn't sting them any less than it stings me... and worse, for them there's no "going back to your life" after the exercise in stereotyping is over.

I talk a lot about racism, sexism, classism, transphobia, and other kinds of discrimination, and it's easy to start to think of these in abstract ways, especially where i get into things like terminology and misappropriation and other kinda esoteric aspects. But at the heart of it, always, always, is the neverending sting. You can take the sting you felt with you whenever you read a discussion about racism, and perhaps it will all be more clear.

Clogging the arteries of discourse about racism (and sexism, though for the specifics here i'm going to stick to racism) is this notion that people who work against racism, by bringing it up, are preventing us from having a "truly color-blind society."

Here's a couple of examples.

The first stems from a recent incident in Arlington, Texas. Silk Littlejohn was hit with a two-by-four by one of her white neighbors, who also spray-painted racist slurs on her garage door. While she's in the hospital recovering from the attack, neighbors began to ask her husband, Roland Gamble, to paint over the racist graffiti. Their comments include things like, "Everyone knows what happened. They get the drift. It's time to take it down.", and "We understand that someone got hurt, and we understand that someone's feelings got hurt. But our kids don't necessarily have to be exposed to it."

The second example is seemingly disconnected. Ron Paul, who has been a member of Congress off and on for over 30 years, was the only one who voted against a 2004 measure recognizing and honoring the 40th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. LewRockwell.com praised him as "heroic" for doing so.

There was a lot i could say in response to Paul's justification - and i have a long entry on this in the works. But for now, what i want to draw attention to is this: "The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society."

What these examples share in common is a fundamental misperception among many (all?) white people that discourse about racism is, at heart, an intellectual or ideological undertaking. We whites don't feel racism in our gut; we don't deal every day with the exhausting effects of racist trauma or the health effects of economic disadvantage. We can walk away from thinking about it and our lives will go on just as they have.

And so even if we say something like, "We understand that someone got hurt," we don't really understand the depth and breadth of it.

From that mistake, it's easy enough for white people to think that the solution is just simply creating a world where "race doesn't matter," which in turn is simply a matter of declaring it so, holding a few parades touting equality and giving black people a federal holiday named after one of their activists -- and then aferwards accuse anyone pro or con who discusses race of perpetuating the problem.

Fighting racism takes more than simply declaring it to be over. It requires more than talking about racism. It requires material measures to stop the violence - including the weapon of mass destruction known as poverty - and right the economic inequalities. Racists have to be held accountable. Real, tangible things in the world have to be done, on large scales, for a long time.

The neighbors of Silk Littlejohn and Roland Gamble got a teensy-itsy-bitsy taste of how persistent and invasive racism is, by having to see a reminder of it every time they drove down their street - and their immediate response was to demand that it be hidden away so they and their kids don't have to look at it anymore. "Don't make us face this!" But what are people of color supposed to do when they don't want to face it anymore? They don't have the privilege of removing reminders of it from their lives by simply repainting a garage door.

(For more on this, i refer you to my earlier post the bizarro-world of misappropriation.)

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?

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

Last week i wrote about an issue close to my heart - the crisis facing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth.

But i only told half the story, and left out perhaps the most important part; the part which is more difficult to talk about because it is shrouded in secrecy. That half of the story is this: who it is that actually commits the violence.

We know who the survivors are, by their scars, by their determination to move on, by their lives in the perpetual spotlight of being marked as Other. But so little is ever said about the ones committing the violence. We hear about who is assaulted and think we know all we need to know about the perpetrator. A woman was attacked? Probably done by a man. A gay man was attacked and peppered with slurs? Probably done by a straight person.

But this is far from the whole story, because most men have never attacked anyone, and most straight people have never attacked someone queer. What do we know about those who actually commit acts of violence or harassment, and why do they do it?

It was very easy to research the entry i wrote about the prevalence of homophobic and transphobic violence, exploitation, and harassment. But it is very difficult to find any information on the web about why people commit violence. I may have to actually — oh the horror! — go to a brick-and-mortar library for any answers.

Some time spent this weekend searching for a first-hand account of what was going through someone’s mind when they assaulted someone was fruitless. It’s possible that many perps even block this from their own conscious mind. Or its possible that the simplest reason of all applies — they did it because, straight up, they wanted to, and figured the relatively small risk of official sanction was worth it.

Psychologist Karl Jung claimed that we attribute our “undesirable” feelings and motivations to a part of our mind he called the Shadow, so that we can mentally detach ourselves from them and pretend they are not a part of us. Many people still attribute these feelings and motivations to the Devil. A while back i wrote in my LJ about the othering of perpetrators; it’s likely that many perps do this even to themselves in their own mind. “It was like someone else doing it through me,” or “i don’t really know why i did that, it’s not like me.”

That may account for the lack of personal accounts of committing violence; but it still doesn’t address the question of what is going through someone’s mind before they do it.

Criminal science and criminal psychology seem to mostly deal with finding out who has committed crimes. Even profiling does not seem to deal so much with what leads people to attack as it does with identifying characteristics which are likely to distinguish those who commit attacks. A criminal profile parses people into a list of things to look for, bits of demographic information and pieces of behavior, the kind of analysis that erases whole people from direct attention.

Google “criminal psychology” and mostly what you see are accounts of unusually heinous criminals: serial killers, sadistic kidnappers, that sort of thing. Not much on run-of-the-mill attacks like insulting and intimidating the queer kid every time you find him near his locker.

Serial killers appear to lack the part of the brain, which the rest of us have, which makes it possible to empathize with other people. So, they cannot conceive of the “thing” they subject to torture and murder as a conscious person who sees and feels the way they do.

But unless we’re prepared to believe that a fifth to a fourth of the population is psychotic and lacks the most basic ability to empathize, we need a better answer to why so many people set aside their empathy and lash out when they see the queer kid at his locker.

ETA.  Even appeals to neuro-psychology are incomplete and unsatisfying.  Why should lack of empathy lead to sadism? It does not logically follow that a missing or disordered part of the brain should lead to thoughts and actions being added.  And why should the drives and desires which appear be those of aggression?  Despite the stereotype of the ‘crazy person,’ people who are neuro-atypical tend to be in much more danger from others than they themselves represent.

The lack of satisfactory explanation is what drives feminists to conclude that acts of violence are primarily acts of will, driven by opportunity (”i can do that and get away with it”) and entitlement (”i have the right to do what i want, no matter who is put out in the process”); and furthermore, that they reflect a prevailing paradigm of silent, unspoken encouragement to violence against the out-class.

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

A few days ago i described the amazing energy i feel whenever i’m around young queer people. There’s a vibrancy there that brightens the day and gives me hope.

But i’m also very worried because queer youth are in deep trouble. If you’re young, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, you’re in crisis. I’m especially concerned about young people of color in our community.

Statistics. They never tell the whole story, but pretend i’m writing about real people here:

• 83% of queer youth experience damage to their property, personal attacks, or verbal insults. (83%? Just pretend this refers to every young queer person you meet and you would basically be right.)
• 40% of queer youth experience physical harassment.
• 26% are forced out of their homes due to conflicts with parents and family over sexual identity. That’s one in four. I’m sure that’s what Jesus really wanted, right — your kid on the streets?
• Between 25-40% of homeless youth are queer. Since queer people make up somewhere around 5% of the population, this means that a queer young person is five to eight times as likely to wind up homeless than a straight young person.
• Homeless queer youth are often prostituted, and face discrimination in the shelter system. Only a few small shelters have been designed to meet the needs of homeless queer youth.
• The hate-murder rate of transpeople may very well outpace the per-capita rate of all other hate killings. Most of this is happening to young adult transpeople of color.

A few sources:
Health toll of anti-gay prejudice
Southern Poverty Law Center: ‘Disposable People’
Gender PAC: 50 Under 30
Transgendered Youth at Risk for Exploitation, HIV, Hate Crimes
After Working the Streets, Bunk Beds and a Mass (NYTimes, reg. req.)

Here in Massachusetts, there was some “controversy” last year over Youth Pride. I put “controversy” in quotes because, unless you are ex-Governor Mitt Romney, Brian Camenker of MassResistance, or some other reactionary Republican or Catholic, you can either see the need for Youth Pride (see the above if you have any doubts) or it doesn’t put you out very much.

Mitt “i’ll be a more effective champion of gay rights than Sen. Kennedy” Romney thought it would look good for his 2008 presidential campaign to take this class of exploited, abused kids and add his own kick for good measure. He moved first to kill (that didn’t work), then to gut, the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth.

This after using his line-item veto to kill (the very meager) state funding for AIDS programs and GLBT domestic violence programs in Massachusetts.

Kicking someone when they’re down. Mmm, very compassionate.

(Connected to this was the decision of 39 commissioners, advisors and past members of the Governor’s Commission on Sexual and Domestic Violence to express “no confidence” in Lt. Governor Healey as the head of that Commission.)

As you might guess, i have a problem with people who can look at a class of vulnerable people who are being routinely harassed, beaten, kicked out of their homes, prostituted and otherwise exploited, and killed, and think that the compassionate thing to do is to treat them like a political football, to point a finger at them and talk about what is wrong with them.

Of late i’ve been finding my perspective shifting much more towards the situation young people are in. For those of us who are over 35, our job really is to pave the way for them and to not screw up their lives. They’re not just “the future,” they’re the world. And those who lead our society should be deeply ashamed at how low they have prioritized the needs not just of young queer people, but of young people in general.

The Epoch Times is a newspaper which was founded primarily to report on human rights abuses in China. I have on my desk here at work a copy of a similar paper which was handed to me a few months ago in Harvard Square, carrying a story about the Chinese government basically farming dissidents for their organs -- rounding them up, carving them up while they are still alive, and putting their organs on the transplant market.

Excuse me, i don't mean to speak out of line, but didn't we, as a species, decide that we wouldn't tolerate this kind of thing the last time a government rounded people up and farm-cannibalized them? Every now and then some government or other will make a statement about this, but so far not a damn thing has been done about it.

And i don't know what to say to the people who stand on the street trying to hand these newspapers out to people who, for the most part, don't want to be confronted with it. It's truly chilling to know that you can stand on a streetcorner all day and talk openly about terrifying crimes going on against thousands of people right now, here's the evidence, and few will even care to listen, and fewer still will do anything about it.

Elsewhere in the world, millions of girls have had their developing breasts ironed by their parents to keep them from growing. This is ostensibly to protect them. The city of Bangalore in India is considering a law that would forbid many employers from scheduling women to work at night. This is ostensibly to protect them.

Elsewhere in the world, the Virginia Citizens Defense League organized a gun giveaway to pointedly spit in the eye of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who complains that people are buying guns in Virginia, where laws are lax and enforcement of them even laxer, in order to commit crimes in New York City. Gun control may or may not be the answer, but the message is clear: for trying to stem violence at the source, you get ridiculed.

At the source -- that is the key to what i am getting at with all of these things, the thread that connects them all. No one ever wants to talk about what is wrong with bullies and abusers; instead the attention goes on the victims, the survivors, or the potential victims. For example, the most popular answer to widespread gun violence in the US is to propose that more people get guns, so they can have standoffs with would-be gun criminals. Perhaps that may even work.

But what troubles me about this approach is that it leaves completely unquestioned the observation that people buy weapons and commit crimes with them. Try to address the problem from that angle, and people get furious. Why is the most popular solution to take thuggery for granted and meet thugs at their level, rather than try to change them?

Many cities in the US have a shelter system for battered women. These operate on shoestring budgets because abuse survivors are not a social priority. But this system is frustrating and disheartening because everything falls on the survivor. The abuser almost always gets off scot-free. The survivor often loses everything, including whatever social standing they had. After seeing this happen to one survivor after another, after seeing one abuser after another getting away with it and facing no consequences whatsoever, it becomes really disheartening. Is this truly a world where someone can beat a person they claim to love and no one will do a goddamned thing about it?

"But, Sabrina, the prisons are overflowing. We do hold thugs accountable." Yes, prisons are overflowing, but to what extent does this actually address or fix the problem? This subject demands its own series of journal entries actually, particularly the extent to which the prison system is itself a form of institutional bullying, and the extent to which crime survivors feel bullied by the justice system. Suffice it to say for this entry that the justice system and the prison-industrial complex takes for granted the existence of thugs and bullies.

Our justice system examines individual events as if they occur in a vacuum, excluding social and economic factors from consideration as much as possible. The goal of the court proceeding is to establish guilt or innocence with regards to single isolated incidents, with everything else being deemed irrelevant. The bigger questions of social environment are thus kept out, are never scrutinized; a verdict is reached, someone is imprisoned or goes free, and justice is said to be served. Court proceedings are part of the enforcement of laws which have been crafted to call attention to some forms of bullying while legitimizing other forms or creating loopholes for abusers.

And this criticism is not meant to say that we shouldn't examine individual events and seek accountability in such cases, but to say that this is not all there is to justice. We are leaving out the biggest part. Instead of addressing the systemic problems in society that cause and perpetuate abuse, our edifices of justice play whack-a-mole and, as often as not, whack survivors instead of perps. It is a reaction, not a response.

Not only are we accustomed to treating thugs as "inhuman others," we are unaccustomed to thinking of injustice as something that permeates a society. Catch the bad guy and you're done, right?

Lasting justice will require sustained focus and interest on thugs themselves, why they do what they do, and how they play on our fears in order to avoid scrutiny and accountability. It will require every single person to look inside themselves and face what they do not want to face -- the piece of them that sympathizes with bullies and sees their point of view as normal or even normative. It will require sustained scrutiny of our institutions for encroachment by abusers and their sympathizers. It will require facing head-on the culture of fear that keeps each one of us scrambling for our own survival instead of seeing the interconnected threads of injustice. It will require keeping some of the focus on the big picture, to recognize when our pursuit of injustice on the small scale has made it possible for some to get away with injustices on a bigger scale because no one was looking.

But most of all, we have to start expecting better from thugs and bullies. If we resign ourselves to the "fact" that there will always be bullies, we enable them.