This is tangentially about both RaceFail and AmazonFail, but only in that they’re both examples of the phenomenon I want to talk about. And I’m not drawing any direct comparisons between the two incidents.

Let’s take a sequence of events: Somebody is Wrong on the internet. And not just Wrong about, you know, gun control or abortion or whether to vote Democrat or Republican (or whether the rest of the world outside the USA actually exists as anything more than a fable or source of rhetorical ammunition) but displaying bigotry against some minority group. Because the internet is inherently a public medium, people who belong to the minority group are going to notice, and are quite likely to express their hurt feelings. What happens now?

People don’t like being criticized in public, especially when it’s something that touches an important part of their self-image. A bigot is a bad person in most people’s understanding these days, so it’s hard to hear “this action or comment has bigotry-promoting consequences” without hearing “you’re an evil bigot!” So the accused person is very likely to get defensive. In scrabbling to find reasons why the accusation can’t possibly be true (because I’m a good person!), they’re likely to cause more harm. For example, they may accuse the minority group of being over-sensitive or stupid, or claim that bigotry is a thing of the past. If the targeted minority was hurt before, being called stupid or told that their experiences of discrimination don’t really matter to real people is likely to make them incensed. Because the internet is the internet, they’ll deal with this by complaining to all their friends. The friends will rush to support the target and try to make the originally accused person see reason. Inevitably, the accused person will also get support from their friends, and the more tempers run high the more random second-degree connections and eventually total strangers will start following links and everything will get amplified and messy. (I very much like CartesianDaemon’s comment on outrage: if I’m a little bit outraged, it might either look like (a) I think amazon were only a little bit culpable or (b) I only care about discrimination a little bit.)

Once things get horrible in public, people who don’t really know the original facts will conclude that the whole thing’s just a pointless flamewar, and that both sides are equally at fault. The people who are complaining about bigotry get accused of dogpiling, of ganging up, of being too angry and aggressive. And because emotions are already running high, you hear the rhetoric of violence, talking about mobs or lynching or angry hordes.

I think what really drove this home to me is that some people are taking this line regarding the AmazonFail story; the people who twittered about it and got large groups of people shouting about how Amazon is homophobic and they’re going to stop buying from Amazon until there’s a proper apology are being classified as an angry mob, getting carried away by the crowd dynamics, rushing too quickly to violence before they know all the facts… Waitaminute! Deciding to buy books from Barnes and Noble instead of Amazon because you don’t like Amazon’s homophobic policies is not violence. It’s not even a little tiny bit like violence. Googlebombing is not bombing. A commercial boycott is neither social shunning nor, most certainly not, declaring war! And this is Amazon, this isn’t even an individual person who meant well but said the wrong thing in an internet discussion and ended up getting their feelings hurt and understandably their friends want to take their side.

Part of it is an instinct to go against whatever the crowd is doing; if everybody is angry with Amazon, it’s natural to want to defend Amazon, to feel like a balanced person who sees both sides of the argument. But realistically, Amazon is not the underdog here. Straight, gender normative, able bodied individuals are not the underdog here. (Some of the worst of this is in the Making Light post on the subject, and again understandably, the mods are not very happy about the comparison to RaceFail. Which is why I’m taking this here rather than trying to comment in that thread.)

The other thing I want to talk about is the asymmetry. On a very crude level, it means something different when a white person calls a black person stupid, from when a black person calls a white person stupid. A white-only club is a very different thing from a club for an ethnic minority group to get together and provide mutual support. But there’s another aspect to this. There are some techniques which the powerful use against outsiders, such as shunning and social exclusion, such as getting a big group together to gang up on one individual, such as shouting and aggressive mannerisms, and so on. That’s definitely bullying, and since many people who make their social life on the internet were bullied as kids they’re very sensitive to it. But when a group of hurt people get together and decide that they don’t want to socialize with someone who keeps hurting them, that’s not the same as social exclusion. When people get support from their friends in order to defend themselves against bigotry, that’s not the same as ganging up or piling on. When a member of a minority gets angry about being constantly mistreated based on a superficial characteristic, that’s not the same as a powerful person yelling at someone in a subservient position in order to intimidate them. Refusing to do business with someone because you don’t like their skin colour is not the same kind of action as refusing to give your money to a business that discriminates.

Equally, some of the dynamic I’m seeing is that people with power are adopting some of the tactics used by discriminated groups to try to lessen discrimination. For example, suing institutions for discrimination against white people or men if they have policies to try to support POC or women. Accusing people of intolerance when they complain about bigotry. Again, complaining about homophobes is not at all equivalent to discriminating against gay people!

There’s another aspect which is a bit harder to define. Often, part of unconscious prejudice against minority groups is that the same reaction is perceived as being more aggressive than coming from a higher status person. This is partly because of direct stereotypes about the group (eg “black people are violent and animalistic”), and partly because groups that experience discrimination often learn to be extremely polite, deferential and conciliating and any deviation from that is perceived as threatening (eg a woman who complains about sexism instead of trying to adapt to it is “a man-hating feminazi”). It’s also partly because people are quite naturally more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to people like them, and if people like you happen to run society, then they get a whole bunch of automatic credibility on top of that. Also, it’s a big problem when a group that is generally not subjected to violence uses the rhetoric of violence to dismiss the complaints of a group who do fear actual, literal violence.

In the probably vain hope of forestalling annoying responses to this, I want to point out that I am NOT saying that anything that a person from a discriminated background ever does is right, or that anyone who shares characteristics with the people who generally wield social power is automatically in the wrong. I’m saying that I’ve seen a lot of dynamics where an argument between powerful people who are behaving in a bigoted way, and vulnerable people who are complaining about that bigotry is perceived as “both sides are just as bad as eachother”. Or when both sides do in fact behave badly, the less than perfect behaviour of one or two representatives of the minority is treated much more seriously than all the bigotry which led to the situation in the first place.

In conclusion: calling someone a homophobe is really not equivalent to calling someone a f*ggot. Calling someone a racist is really not equivalent to using a racial slur.

There’s a really sad story in the news here at the moment: it concerns a premature baby, whom the medical team had decided couldn’t be saved so they agreed to turn off the life support. They followed normal procedures and sedated the baby so she wouldn’t experience distress, but the dose was miscalculated and the baby died from the sedative. The consultant responsible for the overdose has been arrested and imprisoned, facing charges of euthanasia, ie murder because euthanasia is not legal under any circumstances in Sweden.

Even if it transpires that the doctor deliberately gave an excessive dose and killed the baby, there doesn’t seem to be much moral logic in punishing her for ending the baby’s life a little faster than she was planning to end it, legitimately, anyway! Every step leading up to the doctor being in prison is perfectly reasonable, but they add up to horrible unintended consequences.

I think it’s right to prohibit euthanasia, because although in theory I accept that it can be moral for a doctor to assist a patient to commit suicide, in practice there is no way to enforce the law to prevent its abuse by those who want to murder “undesirables”. In a society where people with disabilities, poor people, and old people were fully valued, legal euthanasia would be morally good, but we’re a million miles from such a society. I think it’s right that causing death by giving the wrong dose of sedatives should classify as murder (or manslaughter depending on intent). I even think it’s right that the accused doctor has been temporarily imprisoned; the Swedish legal system jails people arrested on a murder charge, purely in order to take witness statements without the suspect interfering in any way. Once this process is complete, the doctor will be released on bail and await a full trial like any other criminal defendant.

It seems likely that the doctor will be found innocent when the case does come to trial. If not, I foresee a new unintended consequence: doctors in an end of life situation may be reluctant to give adequate pain relief in case they are held criminally responsible for hastening the patient’s death. There has to be a distinction between active killing, and simply ceasing treatment (otherwise doctors would have to go to extreme lengths to save patients in every case, and nobody could ever be removed from life support). The problem is that dividing line is ludicrously fine in practice.

When I was a kid we had a neighbour who was found to be carrying a foetus with spina bifida. Being Catholic, she would not consider abortion, but when the child was born, simply didn’t feed her until she died. I can’t help thinking that it would have been “kinder” for the baby (if you believe that an unborn child has the status of a baby) to be killed by a lethal injection at an early stage in pregnancy, than to be brought to term and then starved to death. Similarly with this case: surely being put to sleep with an excessive dose of sedatives involves less suffering than being taken off a ventilator. Yet, on a technicality at least, the crueller alternative avoids active killing.

Lots of different things recently have led me to ponder the situation of being a member of a minority group while also being white. This is mostly just stuff swirling incoherently round my head, but I want to write some of this down and I don’t think waiting until I have a polished theory is going to work.

I’ve been applying for jobs and therefore filling in equal opportunity monitoring forms. Like many white people with liberal leanings, I used to be opposed to the whole idea of monitoring: obviously we all know that race is just a made up excuse for powerful people to be horrible to less powerful people, so what’s the point of collecting statistics that make people declare themselves to belong to a category that isn’t even meaningful? Then I learned that basically no person of colour objects to them, and thought about it some more and realized that you actually do need to collect statistics in order to detect and deal with discrimination, you need to count how many people do believe in race even if you don’t. But I still keep getting enraged by the the categories chosen; they come from the 2001 census (and really, the argument for including race on the census at all is a lot weaker than for putting it on equal ops forms), and they’re a horrible mishmash of skin colour with geographical origin, and completely fail to cover the major UK minority groups properly. Also “Black Irish” means something entirely different from “Black British”, but hopefully people know how to interpret things in context.

So as usual I tick “white other”. (Thuggish Poet wrote a satirical piece about the fact that Jews always tick that category, but I don’t have a copy I can quote here.) But anyway, that makes me think about two aspects of being in a white minority; one is that in online race discussions, white people always get defensive about being white, they say, I’m not white, I’m part German and part Scottish, or I’m not white, I’m a mutt, or even, I’m not white, I’m disabled / gay / Pagan / special snowflake. This is partly to do with white being the default so people don’t think of it as a racial or ethnic identity, and partly to do with wanting to be on the side of the oppressed, not the side of the privileged. (The latter of course is to do with one of the worst features of online debates, that it becomes all about “sides”.) But there’s another aspect: the fact that some white people actually do have a recent or even current history of racial discrimination.

Clearly, it’s a very bad thing if PoC are trying to talk about incidents of racism, and a bunch of white people shout them down and talk about vaguely relevant things like the fact that white people get stared at when on holiday in Japan, or the way a black person called them a mean name once or whatever. But the way the dialogue goes at the moment, there is no good way to talk about the experience of being Irish or Slavic or, well, Jewish. Furat emptor linked to this essay about being caught in the middle, which is partly about being mixed race, with a background that isn’t really covered by the usual definition of “mixed”, but also partly about the fact that there’s no framework for her to talk about her father’s experiences coming from a Slovak background.

I have sympathy for the “but I’m not white” people, and I know I’ve been there myself a few times. Ten years ago I was dating a non-Jewish guy, and he reported to me that he was cutting contact with someone he’d thought of as a friendly acquaintance, because this person turned out to be a scary racist. The ex-friend disapproved strongly of “interracial” relationships and had been vile towards another friend’s ethnically Chinese girlfriend. And my boyfriend told me this guy would probably be ok with me, since I’m white, and I really reacted against that; if someone is being racist, I’m supposed to be among the people they hate, not among the people they think are racially acceptable. And more generally, I don’t like being counted as one of the people with unconscious privilege, or part of the dominant / hegemonic culture. But obviously there are many ways that I do benefit from having pale skin, and many experiences that I never have because although I might be weird, people can’t tell at a glance that I am.

And that’s another thing: a friend asked me if I considered Jewishness to be an ethnic identity. My first reaction was that that isn’t a valid question. Then just after we’d had a really interesting conversation about this sort of issue, I was teaching my adult ed class, and we were discussing what makes a service meaningful. One person, a transplanted (stereo)typical New York Jew, talked about the sense of connection with other Jews, both present at synagogue and as part of the world-wide Jewish community following the same traditions. Another member of the class, who is a convert and very vocal about this background, tried to dismiss that as “just an ethnic thing”, which people who didn’t have that ethnic background couldn’t connect to. I wasn’t having that, I looked round at the class full of blonde Swedes (with a few equally blonde Germans and Finns and English people) and said, seriously, are you saying that our sense of community comes from an ethnic identity?

The truth is that the majority of Jews in western Europe and the US are in fact members of an ethnic group as well as a religious one, as most of us are from an Ashkenazi, central and Eastern European origin. Indeed, lots of Jews have hardly any religious connection at all, but are Jews purely because they share that ethnic background. Many Jews do experience racism based on appearance, as they are often darker and with visibly different features from the western European majority groups they live among. Note that plenty of Jews actually are people of colour and it’s awkward if they get forgotten about when talking about racial dynamics. Also, plenty of Jews are fair, including me. They may be converts or descended from converts, and like nearly everyone in the world the majority of Jews are very unlikely to have only Jewish ancestors throughout history. (My friend Joanna looks, to my eyes, pretty “Jewish”, but apparently people consider it appropriate to speculate, to her face, about the likelihood that some of her ancestors were raped to give her the genes which made her hair auburn rather than dark brown.)

Now, me, I have fairly “Jewish” (ie Ashkenazi) features, but I also have fair skin and light brown hair, so most people don’t think I “look Jewish”. I know about some fairly close relatives who aren’t Jewish, but many of the Jewish ones on my mother’s side are just as fair as I am. So generally I make an initial impression of being white. I do get slightly impatient with people who refuse to believe my own statements of my Jewish identity because I don’t look like their stereotypical idea of what a Jewish appearance is supposed to be, but I have it a lot less bad than my Jewish friends who are actually blonde, and a whole lot less bad than the ones who are Indian Jews or Jews from an east Asian background via adoption or conversion.

I have been in situations, rarely, but it happens, where I feel uncomfortable with people knowing that I’m Jewish. In those situations I can choose to remove items of clothing that make my religion obvious, and keep quiet about topics that would identify me. I’m lucky both in that I can do that (and I’m not breaking what I consider an absolute religious principle by removing my head-covering, hiding my fringed ritual garment or revealing enough flesh to fit in with social norms), and in that I very rarely need to.

The thing is, “passing” is almost certainly preferable to being constantly visible whether you like it or not. But passing isn’t without cost either. This certainly applies to people with invisible disabilities, or queer people, and I expect it applies to PoC who happen to have light skin. Also, there are lots of people who, appearance-wise, pass at a glance but not if observant people are looking for signs that they might belong to a despised group, even without having to lie about or conceal part of their life.

j4 has been posting a series about <a href="http://j4.livejournal.com/332418.html"how she ended up at Oxford, and this seems an interesting exercise, so I’m copying her idea.

I’m very much the sort of person that people expect to be at Oxford. Those expectations are not entirely fair, but the facts are: I’m intelligent in ways that show up well in conventional education and exams; my parents are both university graduates (my father was at Oxford himself), and sent me to an academically competitive girls’ private school. Between all those, I’ve always been encouraged to think of myself as the sort of person who could do well academically, and given resources to make it easy to convince other people of this. I think when I was five or six I was talking about how I was going to be a maths professor at Oxford, having little idea what maths was or what a professor did other than being good at it.

Realistically, though, it was about midway through secondary school when it was clear that I was keeping up steadily good marks and not being thrown off course by puberty, that my teachers started taking it for granted that I would be in the Oxbridge stream. Mind you, the kind of school it was that really only meant being in the top quartile of the sixth form. I had a really hard time choosing A Levels; the only GCSE subjects I was happy to drop were English and physics, English because I couldn’t stand literary analysis, and physics because the kind of people who ended up teaching physics at a girls’ school tended to be a bit wet. Chemistry and maths were pretty much a given, and I let myself get talked into further maths without much persuasion. but that only left me with one more slot. I wanted to take French, but a combination of the teachers, my mother (a biologist) and my best friend Spanish M persuaded me that I’d be better off with biology. I was still really unhappy about having to give up French, though, and somehow or other it ended up happening that my French teacher took a public bet that I could get an A in French A Level if I just showed up to some of the classes and didn’t bother doing any homework that looked like it was going to interfere with my important subjects. School managed to fiddle the timetable so that I could take five subjects, which wasn’t really allowed, though I wasn’t the only one who did. The school had I think about 80 girls going into sixth form, and they prided themselves on giving everyone total free choice in subject combinations, not forcing you to take related subjects. I think they achieved this by all the teachers spending a week in the summer vac shuffling labels around until they could make it all work like a giant sudoku.

I had some really fantastic teaching at A Level, going way beyond what was in the formal curriculum and inspiring real curiosity about the subjects. (In retrospect, physics A Level would likely have been fine, because the teachers I looked down on for their inability to control a class of recalcitrant 15-year-olds would have been fine with sixth formers who actually wanted to learn.) I learnt to speak French nearly fluently, and just started to get the hang of analytic reading that had been so opaque and deathly in English GCSE. I loved the intellectual challenge of maths and chemistry, like a complex puzzle where all the clues were properly in place and if you really exerted yourself you could come up with a satisfying solution. And I got into biology enough to understand that it wasn’t just a collection of miscellaneous facts to memorize, and to discover that there was a whole field of molecular biology which was exactly like the genetics I’d loved as a kid.

There was some amount of support for Oxbridge candidates, advice on how to choose a college and practice papers for those subjects where you needed to take an entrance exam or S / Step papers. But the most useful stuff was available to everybody, interview practice and advice on filling in UCAS forms and most importantly, general confidence that we were intelligent and could expect universities to be fighting over us. I wanted to do some kind of joint honours, biology and chemistry, or biochemistry and French (still having that problem with dropping subjects I was enjoying!) but that wasn’t offered at Oxford, and I didn’t really want to stay in Cambridge or go for the Natural Sciences tripos. So I applied to Oxford for biochemistry, and Manchester, York, Nottingham and Sussex for weird joint honours or modular degrees. And, um, Southampton I think as an “insurance choice”, somewhere that would take me if I bombed out of A Levels. I went through the Oxford prospectus trying to get “vibes” off the different colleges; I assumed that all their descriptions were exaggerated, but I could get some good ideas based on which unrealistic claims they thought worth pretending to. I ended up with a shortlist of three colleges, and since one of them was my father’s old college, Merton, that seemed a reasonable deciding factor.

Interviews were in December. I dressed up smarter than I had in my life up to then, a matching tartan skirt and waistcoat and a nice blouse. Almost the only thing I remember about the interview days is meeting MK and instantly getting into the kind of deep, wonderful conversation that only happens when you’re 17 and you’ve just met a soulmate. His future wife was up for physics and he was so busy talking to me that he didn’t even notice her. At some point it got late, all my good intentions about spending the day before the interview doing more reading and making myself noticed by influential people were quite forgotten, so we decided to leave the JCR and continue the conversation in “my” room in Rose Lane. My whole upbringing had told me never ever to invite a strange man up to my room, but I was so high on wonderful conversation that I really didn’t care. Of course MK had no dishonourable intentions at all, and this led to me entirely rejecting all the messages about why I should never trust men. That might have been the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction, but not assuming men are predators has stood me in good stead. And it was very liberating to be able to consciously throw out such a frequently repeated piece of life advice, it was the realization that I was my own woman and could make my own judgements, albeit based on limited experience.

I got through the interview itself on adrenalin replacing sleep. Tim Softley interviewed me, and I can’t remember who else. I had been prepared to be thrown curve ball questions, and I felt very confident. I think I didn’t care if I got into Oxford or not; I was fairly certain that one of the redbricks would take me, and I felt like having met MK would be worth it whatever happened. The interview was largely fair; they asked questions that probed my ability to think about biology rather than specific domain knowledge. I think the only unreasonable question I got was: I can see from your CV that you’re quite religious; how do you think you will cope attending a university that has produced such famous atheists as Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkin? I was quite indignant that they thought my convictions so weak I might tremble at the prospect of being in the same city with people who didn’t share my views.

Other than that, I remember the candidates buzzing with rage about the story that a candidate for Medicine from Brunei had been asked why she wanted to bother studying modern medicine that relies on the latest technology, when she would just go back to her primitive third world country and all her knowledge would be irrelevant. Even if they were trying to see how she’d react to an outrageous question that was inappropriate. The next day MK got called for interviews at pool colleges, and I got sent home.

I was annoyed with the university for keeping me on tenterhooks for weeks after that, and then demanding a firm commitment within three days when the offer finally arrived. I later learnt that they’d had nine candidates for three places, six indistinguishably excellent (really, what can you say about a bunch of 17-year-olds beyond their predicted A Level marks?) and three reasonably good, and had rejected the three weakest, offered places to the three of us who had both chemistry and biology A Levels, and pooled the rest (including MK). In a way that wasn’t totally fair, because the university literature said that only chemistry was a requirement and they didn’t care what subjects you did as long as you had three solid A Levels, and anyway there were pooled candidates like MK who were not English and therefore didn’t take A Levels at all. In a way it was, though, because if they had nothing to choose between us, they might as well go for some minor difference that would make our lives easier when we joined the course. So I was lucky that I got good advice from my school that if you were intending to read science at uni you should have at least two science A Levels.

MK was treated very badly by his pool college, Christ Church, and ended up at Imperial. Even aside from the fact that he met his wife there, she having been turned down by Merton also, this suited him much, much better than Oxford would have done. If the aim of the admissions system was to choose the most brilliant scientists, they should certainly have picked MK over me, but if the aim was to pick the three people most likely to thrive at Oxford, they made the right choice. MK would have been very impatient with all the quaint Oxford customs and the education designed, even today, to make you a gentleman as much as to prepare you for academia, whereas the truly excellent scientific education at Imperial was exactly what he wanted.

If you have that political inclination, it’s easy enough to read this and conclude that I only got into Oxford because I had a whole bunch of privileges in my life up to that point. Certainly I did have many advantages that made Oxford seem attainable and desirable. But when I got there, I found that the place was not at all filled with people like me. I met people of every different background imaginable, different countries, different social strata, different ethnic background, different ages and life situations, you name it. And you simply couldn’t tell someone’s background by how they took to Oxford society; the people from conventional middle-class backgrounds and private schools with lots of extra coaching weren’t all mediocre but confident beyond their ability, and some of the most appallingly posh tweedy, braying types actually came from poor backgrounds and schools that didn’t believe in sending their pupils to university, they just chose to adopt that persona and social set.

It seems plausible that there are some people who are at least as objectively “clever” as I am, who didn’t go to Oxford because they came from the wrong backgrounds. But I think it’s more likely that they never got to the point of applying in the first place, than that they were unfairly rejected because of not being middle class enough. At the same time, I did see direct evidence of unfairness, in the form of Christ Church telling MK that his inhumanly high Abitur scores were an obscure German qualification that didn’t count for anything, and the way that the Merton medics were openly racist towards one candidate.

What it comes down to is that Oxford is going to end up with several uniformly excellent candidates for each place available, and almost any means of choosing between them is going to have the potential for unfairness. That doesn’t mean that unfairness is a good thing, of course. But I don’t think it’s as simple as the system being rigged to favour people from posh schools.

may be turning into one of those American style liberals…

One of the most interesting conversations I had was with a guy from the relatively new Progressive community in Warsaw. (Incidentally, he doesn’t look like a stereotypical Progressive Jew, he has a beard and discreet but present sidelocks and a black velvet skullcap.) An English klezmer musician was enthusing about the klezmer revival that is happening in Poland at the moment, and our Polish friend was very dismissive, saying it was run by non-Jews for non-Jews and had nothing to do with the exciting Jewish cultural stuff that is happening over there. Musician and I both argued the view that you don’t have to be Jewish to play or enjoy klezmer, culture belongs to everybody. The musician is more of a fluffy spiritual type than I am, and had more time for the counterargument that klezmer comes out of a particular religious and cultural tradition, and simply playing klezmer style music in a band at a concert isn’t as meaningful as playing it as part of living a Yiddish life and using klezmer for religious celebrations. But even so, neither of us was completely convinced that the non-Jewish character of the Polish festival scene was such a big problem.

Then we heard about some of the context: apparently after the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, there was one street left standing, which became known as “Emptiness street” in the period after the war where there were too few Jews left alive to move back into their former homes, so the street was simply abandoned to the depradations of time and weather. The klezmer festival involves putting actors and stage sets in this street, to make fake stalls that mimic the kind of shops that would likely have featured in the pre WW2 Jewish quarter. The actors dress in the seventeenth century style black clothes associated with ultra-Orthodox or stereotyped Jews, giving the musicians a cute, olde worlde backdrop, while ignoring the historical reality of a pre-war Jewish community that was highly assimilated and secularized, and most certainly ignoring even the existence of the modern day real Jewish community.

I know a lot of people reading this don’t believe in cultural appropriation. But while I agree that art, culture and music belong to the whole world, I don’t think this is at all a morally acceptable way to celebrate world culture. Even though the people running the festival are not remotely the same people responsible for the atrocities of the past, there is something rather queasy about turning the place where thousands of Jews were forced to live in overcrowded and degrading conditions, and where they were eventually rounded up to be murdered, to stage a kitschy, romanticized version of Jewish culture, and make money which absolutely doesn’t trickle down to the contemporary Jewish community who are really struggling. I think appropriation is the only word for that.

I also had a series of much less interesting conversations with a particular attendee at the conference, a Catholic guy who has fallen in love with Judaism and is thinking of converting. Fine. Not so fine is the way he insisted on interrupting every single discussion to “give the Christian perspective”, ask totally irrelevant questions, or just enthuse about how wonderful and beautiful Judaism is. And he kept cornering people outside the sessions in order to pour his heart out about he’s just so in love with Judaism, and how difficult it is going to be for him to leave his Catholic background. When he did this to me, I actually told him in so many words, look, Christian perspectives are very interesting, but we’re trying to accomplish something specific here, as Progressive Jews learning and networking together, so this isn’t the right situation for you to talk about this stuff. It didn’t help. I think he was hoping that we’d be so delighted (and flattered) that he was considering joining us, that we’d bend over backwards to encourage him, whereas in fact most people expressed polite interest and wished him luck on his spiritual journey; Jews aren’t generally interested in interfering with other people’s religious choices.

A large part of the problem here is that this guy is self-obsessed and has poor social skills, which is nothing to do with the fact that he’s Christian. But I think the best way to describe this may well be the frame of saying he has an excess of privilege. He simply takes it for granted that he will be listened to, even when he has less than nothing to contribute, and this expectation is probably not unconnected to the fact that he’s a white, middle-class, Christian male. He took advantage of the fact that we’re the kind of group who are very careful not to exclude anybody, because we all know what it’s like to be a Jewish minority in a Christian world, and even a Progressive minority within a largely Orthodox leaning Jewish world. The amount of irritation he caused by trying to make every single possible conversation, both public and private, about his bloody spiritual search and his feeling of being welcome or unwelcome in the Jewish community, made me suddenly see the possible benefits of minority-only spaces, even though I’m reflexly against that kind of segregation. In truth there’s no real way we could have banned him from showing up, because he’s been attending a synagogue for a while and we generally don’t want to keep people out just because they haven’t finished converting yet. But perhaps it would have helped to be able to say, sorry, this is a Jewish event, it’s not about your relationship with Christianity or your enormous sense of entitlement.

(I stole the subject line from Joanna, by the way…)

I know you shouldn’t eavesdrop, but the group at the table next to me this lunchtime weren’t speaking quietly or confidentially. They were having a loud, cheerful discussion of how difficult it is for a man to mention any of the fundamental biological differences between men and women. In fact, the way that is is hard for men to have a voice in feminist circles is just like the way that certain topics to do with race are taboo for white people. It’s a big problem for feminism, this unwillingness to listen to men and to put the movement on a sound, objective scientific basis rather than just clinging to victim identity and unempirical but ideologically sound political theories.

These are Swedish men, a sociologist and a couple of ecologists I think, the sort of people who would be deeply offended if you implied they were anything other than staunch feminists. They knew all the right buzzwords, they talked about the difference between sex and gender, and decried essentialism. They rather deplore the fact that women are under-represented at the senior levels they belong to, though they expect it’s probably mostly a matter of time lag and the fact that so many women choose family over career in spite of all the opportunities available to them.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain, perhaps a generation ago a similar group of middle-ranking academics would have bonded by means of loud conversations about the fuckability of their secretarial staff. And they really do mean well, they really do seem to feel hurt about not having an equal voice in feminist discourse. It’s extraordinarily unlikely that they were having this discussion with the deliberate intention of making female colleagues feel unwelcome. It’s just sad that people who have lived most of their lives in a remarkably egalitarian society, people who strongly believe in principle that women and men are absolutely equal, people who by the sound of it are better versed in feminist literature and theory than I am, just so fundamentally don’t get it.

Having decided I’m going to be a feminist, I should actually do something about it. I’m somewhat in trepidation about discussing directly feminist ideas in public like this, but I’d be pretty useless if I kept silent and never dared to say anything about my convictions. But I am certainly not claiming to be any kind of authority on this stuff.

When I posted about taking a more active interest in feminism, Raving Glory offered to lend me a collection of feminist essays by Ursula K Le Guin, Dancing at the edge of the world (copyright 1989, ISBN 0-8021-3529-3). Well, books of feminist essays are not my number one favouring thing, but I definitely need more education in feminist issues, and I thought Le Guin’s marvellous writing would go a long way to sweeten the pill.

I enjoyed many of the essays, and was infuriated by a few of them, but the combination of Le Guin’s very persuasive prose and my determination to overturn the anti-feminist biases I’d acquired encouraged me to keep turning the ideas over in mind instead of throwing the book away in disgust. On reflection, I don’t think the message is that success, leadership and rational investigation are inherently male qualities, more that a just and balanced society ought to value things like community, compromise, and kindness as well.

I was particularly impressed by the last essay in the book, The fisherwoman’s daughter, from 1988. It’s riffing on Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own idea. She conveys the idea that most women historically have had to run households and fit creative endeavours around that; in recent decades, some women have been grudgingly allowed to pursue careers or artistic visions, but almost none of them get the kind of practical support that a man would have had in the pre-feminist era. A woman who wants to be the best in her field is expected to give up any sort of family or personal life, and essentially gets male disadvantages without most of the advantages. Le Guin argues that giving women the option to choose between motherhood and fame is an improvement on forcing everybody into the domestic sphere, but really we should be more ambitious than that, we should organize society so that mothers can also pursue their dreams. It’s all concepts I’ve come across before but that essay draws them together very well indeed.

(That said, I’m still pretty incensed at the 1978 essay on abortion, Moral and ethical implications of family planning, which is not only gender-essentialist but argues that women are naturally predisposed to put immediate practical concerns over abstract moral principles. The most hair-raising parts seem to be quoted from one Irene Claremont de Castillejo, but Le Guin quotes her approvingly, describing as natural, unperverted feminine morality the view that the thalidomide tragedies…of course [should] be aborted! It is criminal to make a woman carry a deformed child! But then, in The Princess, Le Guin writes extremely movingly about her own experience of unwanted pregnancy and abortion, and I don’t think she really means to imply that the feminist thing to do is to kill the weak to ensure group survival.)

Anyway, the very strong impression that I took away from the collection is that in Le Guin’s eyes, I’m basically a man. I’ve always been encouraged to do whatever I want to do, and have picked an academic and technical path. I’m far more rational than intuitive, I expect to be taken seriously, I’m a capitalist at home with hierarchical systems, and I’ve always had as much freedom to follow my own desires (whether in life decisions or expressions of my sexuality) as economically feasible. I’m nobody’s wife or mother and I don’t intend to be. Now, Le Guin is aware that she herself is in a pretty masculine position; she describes herself as a princess precisely because she had a lot of opportunities in life that aren’t available to most women, and she has plenty of recognition in the male world as a successful writer. But the point is that I had to be convinced by intellectual argument that there was a point to feminism, in the same way that most men have to be convinced rather than knowing all about sexism from their own personal experience.

It is by no means an insignificant achievement of the feminist movement that people like me have been able to live more or less as men, and encounter only a few dinosaurs who look at my breasts and conclude that I can’t possibly be a man. It seems that feminism still has some ground to cover, and in two ways: firstly the obvious one, of making sure that all women have the freedom that I do, to live as men if they want to. But the second goal was not very clear to me before I read Le Guin’s book: feminism needs to bring about a world where women who choose to live in a more feminine context are just as valued as those who are competitive and ambitious. I would add that if caring for others and doing practical but mundane work and so on were adequately valued, men who were temperamentally inclined to such roles would be able to take them up without losing status or being despised.

I find myself in a discussion where I am trying to explain why feminism is a matter of justice. Atreic comes from a similar place to me and feels alienated by feminism telling her that she’s a victim even when her life is in fact perfectly satisfactory. Lizzip has a strong sense of the need to make the world a fairer and more welcoming place for women. And all three of us find ourselves in conversation with men who don’t see why they should bother with feminism, because at least this part of the world is basically equal already, and there are feminists making sloppy, man-hating arguments all over the internet.

I am working on the basis that the men who don’t see the point in this discussion and a whole lot of other similar are mostly coming from a position of good faith. (Not absolutely all of them; there are clearly some people who just like to disrupt feminist discussions because they feel threatened or just like the attention they get from literal trolling.) But it’s perfectly possible to genuinely and sincerely care about women, and still not get it; I didn’t for a long time, after all. At some level, I want to convince such well-meaning people, but at the same time I feel really, really uncomfortable with any kind of proselytizing.

I’m also all dewy-eyed and naive and actually taking an explicitly feminist position in a highly charged internet argument is a novelty to me. I can really see both sides of the argument so well it’s almost dizzying. I can see the weary frustration of seasoned feminists who have to deal with a huge wall of denial every time they mention a sexist incident. I can see why many might not want to argue at all, or might not want to be polite and patient, with men who might possibly deign to care about injustices against women if they can be convinced that feminists have a cast-iron rational case that would stand up in the strictest court. Everybody who complains about sexism has to answer for every feminist who might ever have said something negative about men, or something more emotional or hyperbolic than rigorous. At the same time, I can completely see why feminism can look really alienating; it alienated me for a long time, and for exactly the same reasons being raised in this kind of conversation.

I am going to propose a theory about why it’s extremely difficult to report sexism and systematic discrimination. This is probably obvious to experienced feminists, but it might be helpful to people who don’t see the point. Anyway, it’s a conclusion I’ve come to recently. If you talk about individual incidents, people can (and seem particularly inclined to) always propose reasons why that particular incident might not be sexist. Even if someone believes that the most likely reason why a woman was disadvantaged is sexism, she’s still rather in a double bind: if the incident was minor, she’s making a fuss about nothing, but if it was major, then it wasn’t mere sexism, it was viciousness by someone so far beyond the pale of normal human behaviour that there’s no hope for them.

To avoid this problem, you have to go to systematic analysis to look for overall trends. The problem with that is that it becomes very abstract, people don’t relate emotionally. And it’s a lot of work, so it ends up being its own academic discipline, with its own jargon and community that is not very accessible to outsiders and a sort of self-perpetuating orthodoxy. Like most complex subjects, feminist studies and positions get misquoted and over-simplified by ignorant internet people. At the same time, if someone posts to a blog complaining about an annoying sexist remark, they don’t want to and quite likely can’t justify their complaint by giving an overview of all the feminist studies and theory ever to have been performed on the topic.

So it’s easy to get to a point where someone who has done a fair amount of reading and thinking about feminist issues is going to dismiss a well-meaning but relatively ignorant man out of hand, if he starts demanding detailed arguments why he should believe her complaint. This can end up looking a lot like telling him that his opinion is worthless just because he’s male, which is not at all likely to encourage men to be sympathetic to feminism.

Obviously, the fact that something is hard to demonstrate doesn’t make it true! But what I would like to see is a little less readiness to look for reasons why sexism might not be sexism. I want people to at least consider the possibility that something might be true, and realize that some of the apparent causes for scepticism would still apply even if it were true. Also, the fact that some people who consider themselves feminists say ridiculous things fairly obviously doesn’t make every claim that might be interpreted as feminist prima facie ridiculous!

*sigh* Watson’s talk was even more pointless than I had suspected it would be.

First of all the organizers did something very stupid, namely scheduling the talk for a tiny little lecture theatre which was in no way big enough for such a famous speaker. It was also hard to find, so I was ten minutes late, by which time the place was absolutely crammed like a pre-Hillsborough football stadium and I found myself at the back of the crowd in the doorway. Obviously it was impossible to see or hear from there, and it was also boiling hot, and I was very tempted to give up, but in the end patience paid off and enough other people gave up first that I ended up just inside the doorway.

So I heard the lecture standing jammed between sweaty bodies, which may not have been the ideal circumstance. My expectations were not that high; I assumed Watson would follow the pattern of most grand old men and speculate a bit about where biology is going, with a little bit of gossip about his career. But he didn’t talk about biology at all, and realized that he is famous enough that anyone who cares knows everything about his career already. Instead he provided some careers advice, most of which was obvious, and a lot of which was more applicable to 1950s America than modern Europe. So even if I had been younger and more inclined to hero-worship, I don’t think I would have got a lot out of it. I think the most interesting he said was that it’s very important to collaborate, and you’ll never get anywhere if your goal is personal glory; you must ask for help if you’re stuck, you must talk to others in your field even if they are your rivals, you must seek out people who are more intelligent than yourself and who are experts in related fields.

There was a little bit of “yay, atheism”, and a little bit of dismissing RNA biology as just a fad (I think he’s wrong there; DNA is important, sure, but it’s part of a system, you can’t these days get away with only caring about DNA). But he rather lost the thread of what he was saying, overrunning his allotted time by rather a large margin, and degenerating into a rambling diatribe against Franklin by the end. He’s apparently moved on from calling her unnatural and unfeminine, to calling her “autistic”, which he probably thinks is less offensive. It really did just come across as completely pathetic; the poor woman has been dead for half a century. He didn’t appear to notice the irony of complaining (at excessive length) about how Franklin was arrogant and difficult to work with, where in another part of the talk he commended us to work with scientists who have a reputation for being arrogant and to care more ability than niceness. He was also rude about Linus Pauling, so I suppose he isn’t only misogynistic.

He made a bunch of random snide, but not actively offensive, remarks about Jews (the whole of biochemistry in the 40s and 50s was massively dominated by Jewish scientists who had fled Germany and Russia, and indeed most of Watson’s major scientific influences were Jewish). He was extremely rude to Georg Klein, who was as usual sitting in the front row; I don’t know their history enough to know whether it was just friendly teasing or being deliberately offensive.

I didn’t bother staying for questions; it was too hot and crowded and Watson had really lost my interest by that point. Oh, he did make one rather cute remark to finish; he said that if they ever made another film about him he would like to be played by Sacha Baron-Cohen.

I cut him slack for being vague and rambly on the grounds that he’s eighty. But I don’t cut him slack for his sexism for that reason; he’s just not old enough to remember a world where it was reasonable to assume that women are naturally incompetent and all the serious work is done by men. Female scientists were still the minority back in the 50s, but hardly unheard of; he himself mentioned that Franklin was one of a couple of dozen women in the chemistry department at King’s College London. Even if has been completely unable to adapt to the changes in society in the past fifty years, there’s no excuse to make comments about how you should make sure to spend time in conversation with other scientists and not waste too much energy gossiping about politics with your wife. I don’t think he even intended that remark to be offensive, unlike some of his comments about “the feminists” who were so meeeeeeeeeeean to him and made a totem of Franklin just because she was a girl even though she wasn’t particularly competent (sic). He just unthinkingly assumed that all scientists are men, and women only talk about trivial things. I think for someone to be too old to understand that women are people, he would have to be at least 150, which is to say, there’s no excuse any more.

I think it’s a given that it is morally worthwhile to pick polite words rather than rude words. No, seriously. Nobody who expects to be taken seriously uses openly racist terms in public, for example. But the question is how far to take this basic principle. This gets into philosophical questions of how far language influences reality, and also political questions about where the ideal balance is between avoiding offence and using language expressively. Actually, both those principles are pretty important to me. I strongly don’t want to insult anyone by using an inappropriate term to describe them, but I also care very much about precise and meaningful communication.

We all agree that racism is bad

On one level, it’s a matter of basic respect. Yes, it can sometimes seem as if the fashion for which terms to use changes with the wind, and the whole system can look very fraught and complicated, or in many cases silly. But the thing is, if you can’t be bothered to find out how someone wants to be referred to, that essentially means that you can’t be bothered to make even a small effort to avoid insulting and hurting them. Of course, you can innocently get it wrong, because yes, the correct word to use is going to depend in a detailed and unpredictable way on the preferences of an individual and the situation and so on. I think the appropriate response in that case is to apologize and switch to the preferred term. Insisting on continuing to use the offensive term once you know it’s offensive is extremely rude. Of course, a lot of the time you’re just talking about a group of people in the abstract, and you don’t have a specific individual around to express a preference. I think it’s morally right to make a reasonable effort to find what the generally accepted terms are in that sort of situation.

Having said that, I am wary of euphemisms. It seems to me that a statement like “It’s a well established fact that African-Americans have lower IQs on average than Caucasians” is much more racist and dangerous than a statement like “See that black guy over there? He works with my mum.” (For that specific example, I feel very weird about the term “African-American”, because very few of the black people I know are either African or American. However, see the previous paragraph about respect; if someone prefers to be called African-American rather than black, it’s rude and obnoxious for me to grumble about that preference.) To me, though, the formal sounding terms for ethnic groups actually promote the idea that “race” is a real and important characteristic, and allow people to say things that are actually really offensive while superficially coming across as rational and objective. I also really don’t like the hodgepodge of skin colour terms with geographical terms, nor the implication that there’s something insulting about mentioning the fact that someone is black.

It’s more of a grey area when we get into terms that are not direct references to ethnic groups, but are metaphors and figures of speech which may or may not have insulting connotations. It’s not helped because there are loads of urban myths around such terms; no, niggardly is nothing to do with thinking that black people are mean. (Though if a particular person felt offended at this term, I would probably avoid it in their presence, even though they’re wrong on etymological grounds.) At the opposite end of the range, a thoughtful person probably should look for an alternative simile to replace working like a black. There are lots of examples in between; is it racist to use fair for beautiful, for example?

What about gender?

When it comes to sexist language, there seems to be much less broad agreement than with racism (though as I’ve outlined, there’s still a range of views about that topic). Even actively insulting terms for women (bitch, cunt, pussy, etc) are arguably acceptable in some circumstances. Though I think that someone who referred to women in general as “bitches” would probably face as much social opprobrium as an open racist. I am not absolutely convinced that calling a mean person a bitch or a cowardly person a pussy hurts women in general, but it seems likely that it might, so I’m leaning towards the opinion that I should stop using such epithets. Then there are terms which are thought of as sexist, but aren’t insults as such, like bird, chick, sometimes girl, and so on. I think they’re pretty context dependent in many cases, but it’s good to be aware of them.

The other hot button issue is terms which do not insult women, but which seem to imply that men are at least the default, if not actively superior. I’m really conflicted about those. The argument that saying chairman rather than chairperson makes it harder for women to take charge of meetings and companies seems really implausible to me. However, there does seem to be increasing evidence that this sort of thing really does matter. Words that mark women as exceptional seem to be a bad idea; I don’t at all regret the demise of lady doctor / doctoress or undergraduette. Things like actress and waitress seem to be heading the same way, but some people think that actor and waiter are explicitly gendered masculine, and want to say waitron / waitstaff, and er, what’s the gender neutral form of actor? Although it grates, altering words which actually refer to a man is probably worthwhile, though replacing them with reasonable neologisms seems more likely to succeed than using clunky constructions where man becomes person. I really can’t buy in to the idea that it’s needful to find-and-replace every possible incidence of a syllable that sounds like it might have to do with men, because that just leads to monstrosities like herstory, girlcott, a-people, personscript and the like.

Pronouns. I think English very much needs a true epicene pronoun, and I think any effort to create one is very nearly doomed. (Mainly I think it’s needed to allow people to opt out of picking sides in the gender binary, but I think that too is a feminist goal, as well as helping uncomplicatedly female identified women.) Short of that, the question arises about what to do when writing about hypothetical people. I was resistant for a long time to altering the generic he which has become standard at least for formal writing, but now I know more about the history of how singular they was deliberately marginalized, I am prepared to relax my prescriptivist stance and accept that singular they is correct because it comes naturally to most native speakers. (Swedish people speaking English tend to use the formally correct generic he, and it’s actually starting to sound weird and stilted to my ears.) Also, partly because feminists have kicked up a fuss about it, he now sounds explicitly male, and therefore should be avoided. I think it’s more important to think about the content of writing, and not assume that a generic person is male unless otherwise specified, but making an effort with pronouns may help to counter that lazy assumption. It should go without saying that when speaking about an individual, I will try to find out, and subsequently respect, that person’s choice of pronoun.

Gender neutral liturgy

One subset of the debate about gendered language is how one handles religious texts to avoid implying that God is male, or that worshippers always are. This is something I’m very much involved in, because I end up leading services and dealing with liturgy a whole lot. Of course, in this case, there are pretty strong conservative forces, as there’s a real value in keeping texts familiar. I am generally on board with altering language to get away from the metaphor of God as an old man in the sky, primarily because God is not supposed to be a super-powered person, as much as because that might lead to people thinking God is male. So, let’s translate God’s name as “Eternal One”, rather than “Lord”; the latter is a translation of a euphemism, but it definitely carries unwanted connotations, and it seems more theologically valid to refer to God as the root of existence (though of course we don’t pronounce the Divine name in Hebrew) than as a powerful feudal leader. I don’t know if the use of the male pronoun for God historically meant that God was seen as male, but it certainly comes across that way now, so I generally avoid pronouning God at all where I can. Of course, there are also plenty of neutral and abstract terms for God, Almighty, All-present, Holy One, Most High, and so on.

In contrast, I don’t think we should throw out the metaphors which talk of God in masculine terms. Source of our life and our Sovereign is a horrible, weak rendition of Our Father, our King. There is an emotional resonance to talking about God as Man of war, Lord of Hosts, Hero, Champion etc, which is completely lost if those are replaced by gender neutral terms which also happen to be completely abstract. My preference instead is to emphasize the feminine metaphors for God alongside the masculine ones. Let’s talk about God as Maternal and Nurturing, not just Merciful or Gracious. Let’s delve into the texts which cast the Shechinah, the In-dwelling Presence of the imminent aspect of God, as explicitly feminine.

When it comes to talking about the worshippers, mostly the same arguments apply as for using gender-neutral language about hypothetical people in a secular context. The vast majority of the liturgy uses “we” anyway, so gender is a non-issue there. But where that doesn’t work, I think it’s good to be sensitive and make it clear that the community includes women. What I’m not so keen on is the attempt to find a female counterpart every time a historical male figure is mentioned, saying Abraham-and-Sarah in place of Abraham, and so on. I think that’s actually counterproductive, because it makes the women seem like appendages to their husbands and brothers. Miriam wasn’t the “counterpart” of Moses, she was a person in her own right, so let’s talk about her actual history, rather than attributing the stories about Moses to Moses-and-Miriam. The thing that really riles me is people taking the noun adam, which explicitly means human (not man), as if it were the proper name Adam, and changing it to Adam-and-Eve. That’s just illiterate, and actually takes away one of the very few gender neutral terms available in Hebrew.

(I am talking mainly about translation here. Hebrew has no grammatical neuter at all, it’s a purely bi-gendered language, so trying to make it gender neutral just linguistically doesn’t work. I suppose one could try to use the feminine plural as generic in place of the masculine, but it would be very unnatural and not particularly helpful, because there’s just no way round the issue when talking about anything in the singular. Also, it’s a lot easier to update translations than change original texts; I’m willing to change prayers when there’s a good reason, but not gratuitously. And like most Jews across the spectrum, I’m not willing to alter Scripture in any way.)

Extending the argument

If I haven’t stirred up controversy by now, I suspect I’m about to, when I talk about other discriminated groups. Note that I’m not saying that other forms of prejudice are analagous to racism, but rather that some of the same arguments apply. We want the world to be a better place for people who are currently disadvantaged, and we want the people we are talking about to feel respected. The same question therefore arises, how far can deliberately politically correct language help with these goals, and is it worth the annoyance of having to change habits and slightly restrict what can be said?

The issue I feel most strongly about is also the one that is most difficult to convince people of. I want to think very seriously about using language which may potentially hurt people with disabilities. At least among politically aware circles, people are just starting to notice that it’s not appropriate to throw around terms like retard and spaz as insults. But even that basic politeness isn’t anything like universal. Aside from using disability related terms as actual insults, many people use outdated words and phrases to talk about people with disabilities in what they believe is a neutral manner, but is actually perceived as offensive by many, words like cripple, handicapped, wheelchair-bound and so on. I understand why people are resistant to changing their habits with this sort of thing, because it’s distressing to learn that you are accidentally offending people when you think you’re a perfectly nice person (but just haven’t kept up with the latest trends).

Indeed, it seems to me, as an outsider to the disability rights community, that there isn’t quite a consensus yet about how to use language. For example, I am following the so-called “person-first” mode of saying people with disabilities rather than the disabled, but among groups that have a strong cultural identity, such as the Deaf and autistic communities, this isn’t favoured, because they often don’t want to talk about an impairment as a separate thing that has happened to them, but rather as an element of who they are. I don’t claim to be an expert at all, but it’s something I’m aware of. Even though it can be fairly fraught, I do think it’s worth it to try to use language in a way that makes the world more friendly to a large minority who have dealt with some really horrendous issues of discrimination both historically and currently.

If it’s hard to convince people to say uses a wheelchair rather than confined to a wheelchair, it’s next to impossible to put the argument regarding disability related metaphors. I suspect part of the problem is that people actually do hold ableist prejudices, so it’s not as simple as everybody agreeing that we should support people with disabilities, but arguing about whether politically correct language is an effective way to do this. Instead, a lot of people are stuck on the so-called “medical model” of disability, seeing disabilities purely as bad things which can happen to people, and obviously you can use a bad thing as a metaphor for another bad thing. But if you take into account the idea that a disability may also be part of a person’s identity, then it can become problematic to throw disability terms around to indicate that something is bad, horrible, stupid or non-functional. Again, it’s clear to me that it’s necessary to be sensitive to context and not just find-and-replace “bad” terms with euphemistic equivalents.

I am trying to cure myself of saying that somebody is crazy, lunatic, mental or a nutcase when I mean that their point of view is irrational. Terms for stupidity are awkward, because almost all of them (even idiot) have been used as medical terms at some point in history, and as insults at other points, but ideally I’d like to see cretin and similar terms consigned to the same bin as retard. I am willing to at least hesitate before using crippled or paralysed in a metaphorical sense, or blind and deaf to mean unperceptive. I am rather expecting to get angry comments about this paragraph, because every time I’ve seen the topic raised, even among generally politically aware people, I’ve seen major, major resistance to the idea.

Along similar lines, though again not making any direct analogies, I personally would be much happier if fat were not used as a negative intensifier. You can perfectly well call someone a bastard without calling them a fat bastard. And if some unpleasant person happens to be fat, why not criticize them for being unpleasant, rather than implying that everybody with a similar figure is equally disgusting.

Arguments against

Let me try to preempt some of the arguments I expect to be made against the view I’m taking. Yes, linguistic precision is important. If you read my journal at all, you’re probably aware that I care very much about both correct grammar and choosing the most apt word to express what I’m trying to say. To some extent, artificial terms created to avoid offence can go against established ways of using the language, and can block off certain forms of expression. I am not dismissing this argument, and it’s probably the major reason why I am not full of enthusiasm for political correctness. I think there’s a balance between insisting on speaking the same way people did 50 or a hundred years ago no matter who gets hurt, and hacking the language to bits and speaking like a stupid bureaucrat to avoid any possible hint of offence.

Yes, the goal of making language reflect the more just society we want can be subverted by stupid identity politics. Politically correct terms can become shibboleths, which are mainly used to catch out outsiders who don’t use vocabulary the same way as a particular activist group. That’s what the originally perjorative term “politically correct” was satirizing. Indeed, it is very often people who make “activist” a big part of their identity who make the most fuss about terminology, sometimes ignoring the wishes of the people they are supposed to be supporting. I have read articles about people of American Indian extraction getting into arguments with white people who insisted on calling them “Native Americans” against their express wishes, for example. I think the only thing to do about this down side is to be as educated as one has time for, making sure to listen to members of the relevant minority group as much as possible, not only to advantaged activists talking about them. But that’s a good idea in general if you want to work for a fair society, so I don’t see this as a major extra burden.

Yes, political correctness can be taken to ridiculous extremes. However, I think a lot of the obviously comic examples are made up by not very witty comedians or people who want an excuse not to have to bother, or even to carry on being bigoted. I don’t believe anybody ever seriously proposed the term vertically challenged as a euphemism for short, or insisted on saying chalkboard because blackboard was racist. Certainly nobody outside over-zealous left-wing local authorities in the 70s. Along similar lines, I have little time for the argument that being deliberately politically incorrect is a sign that you’re a really direct, honest sort of guy, bravely resisting some vague conspiracy to keep middle class straight white guys down. That kind of argument is almost always a preemptive excuse for making offensive remarks. A person who really objects on principle to any kind of language alteration, or who really can’t manage to remember the appropriate terms to use, doesn’t need to advertise how bluff and hearty they are. It’s a slightly more sophisticated equivalent of saying “I don’t mean to be rude, but.” It’s nothing to do with “free speech” and certainly nothing to do with the surveillance-based dictatorship of 1984.

What to do with people who disagree

In short, nothing. I have very little interest in telling anybody else what they can and can’t say. There are certain obviously offensive terms which I will object to hearing, but even those I am not even slightly advocating for making illegal. And for most terms which are arguably offensive, I might think less of someone who uses then, or I might point out why they are considered offensive if the speaker appears to be genuinely ignorant. But I’m not going to take any active steps to get people to change their usage. Language is a very personal thing and people have to make their own decisions about what terms they want to use or avoid. What I’m asking for in this post is for people to be mindful, and think about the ramifications rather than just casually using borderline words because they come naturally. If you decide to put the boundary between offensive and acceptable in a different place from me, I don’t have a problem with that decision, but it should be a decision.

I would argue very strongly against censoring any media which contains offensive terms or even offensive concepts. Censorship is bad, mmkay? I’m totally in favour of criticizing media which promotes offensive views or uses dubious terminology, or refusing to support it financially if it’s really extreme. People in public positions, particularly politicians [arrgh alliteration alert!], should face career consequences for expressing racist and bigoted views, but they should be perfectly allowed to express them. I should probably mention older works which use terms which would be unacceptable today; I don’t give anyone a pass because “everybody was racist in the olden days”, or something, but to my mind there’s a big difference between using a no longer valid term, such as negro, and actually taking a racist view. It also seems obvious to me that fictional characters are sometimes going to express offensive views and use offensive terms, and that sort of rigour with viewpoint shouldn’t be compromised because the author and readers don’t agree with the offensive opinions.

Basically, you can say what you like, the question is whether you should.

I’ve been writing this in bits for a while, but have been very busy. I hope it hasn’t grown too rambly and incoherent, and that the thread of the argument is still clear with all the tangents I’ve included! I’ll be surprised and disappointed if it doesn’t raise some strong reactions…

I think I might be a feminist after all.

I’ve probably been headed in this direction for a while now. My sporadic habit of delving into feminist writing seems to have developed into an ongoing interest, and I’ve been finding myself more and more taking feminist lines in discussions I’ve been involved in. At the same time, I’ve been getting increasingly angry about sexual violence in various forms. I am not completely sure that feminism is the optimal way to address this problem, but there’s not much else available in the way of movements organized around the issue, and it’s important enough that I feel I have to do something. I can’t just dismiss it as somebody else’s issue when so many women’s lives are constrained by the fear of rape, and when that fear has proved justified for so many of my friends.

There are undoubtedly some people who define themselves as feminists who are not at all nice or even rational people, but I’ve become increasingly aware of feminists I strongly admire. (Not just people I admire who happen to be feminists, but people I admire because of the way they live as feminists specfically.) It’s never a good idea to judge an ideology by its worst adherents!

The immediate cause for making this decision now is to do with the discussion around and reaction to the incredibly stupid Open Source Boob thingy. I found myself following links and reading posts about it almost compulsively, and some of it was really amazing and insightful, but some of it was incredibly, crushingly depressing. I’m not going to talk about it much because really absolutely everything original that could possibly said has already been chewed over about five hundred times. But the point is I was feeling more and more strongly that I want to be on the side of the people who are making insightful and compassionate analyses all over the place, and not on the side of the people who keep coming out with crass and depressing comments.

I don’t really expect the Sisterhood to welcome me with open arms, mind you. I still don’t really believe in the Patriarchy or Privilege or eliminating the syllable man from English, and I’m still really not an enthusiast for abortion. I don’t particularly want to police anyone else’s gender expression or sexuality, and I get defensive when people try to proscribe mine. Also, I’m not generally terribly good at being a Sister, because I don’t fit well into groups organized around gender identity. I think this is part of the reason why I was so reluctant to embrace feminism for so long: I don’t really identify as a woman very much, either in the positive sense of thinking that being female is an important aspect of who I am, or in the negative sense of experiencing difficulties in my life because of being female. But I’m starting to realize that gender is a major force in society at large, even if it isn’t a major force in my life. And, well, it’s a moral thing to combat discrimination regardless of whether you personally are disadvantaged by it. To quote the inestimable , don’t be an ally because you think it will get you something; be an ally because you don’t want to be an asshole. So it’s very much not about being liked and accepted by the feminist community.

Talking of the feminist community, I’m very much not interested in sitting around discussing whether trans women are real women, or whether disabled women should grudgingly be permitted to exist as long as they don’t cause too much burden on their caregivers, or whether it’s acceptable to appeal to racism in order to promote the feminist cause. The thing is, though, that activism for women’s rights which isn’t transphobic, ableist and racist is still called feminism. I think the danger with this sort of ideological movement can be that it becomes a mechanism for perpetuating its own existence, feminism for the good of feminism rather than for the good of women. That doesn’t mean that all feminism is like that, of course, but it’s an outcome I’m rather wary of. Even my religion is non-dogmatic and non-proselytizing, so I certainly expect as much of my political affilations. I want to commit myself to feminism as a pluralist, which means I don’t want to waste my energy defining who gets to be in the club or striving to be in it myself.

What I do want to do is align myself with pro-women and anti-sexist causes. That’s probably going to mean giving money at least initially, but I hope I can get to a position where I can contribute my time and effort as well. And more generally, I want to consider my decisions, opinions and actions in the light of whether they are likely to contribute making the world safer and freer for women. I want to notice what effects ways of telling stories may have on the position of women in society, and make sure that I communicate in positive ways.

Now, I’m the first to admit that I’m pretty arrogant and opinionated, but I will make a point of taking more experienced and knowledgeable feminists seriously if they criticize me for not living up to my newfound feminist ideals. I suspect this is going to make me uncomfortable; up till now, I would just have brushed off such criticisms by saying “who cares, I’m not a feminist anyway”. But I am coming to think that from a moral perspective I need to deal with that discomfort and think seriously about whether I’m actually harming women or just genuinely have a different opinion about what is good for women from some other feminists. It might also happen that I’ll get attacked by people who abominate feminism or think the whole concept is mean and unfair to men, but I doubt I’ll ever be a major target for that sort of thing, and any such attacks would likely make me more convinced that affiliating with feminism is important.

Recanting a long-held opinion is a bit painful, isn’t it? Last time I went through a process like this was in my early teens, when I realized that caring about the long term environmental effects of my lifestyle was actually morally important, and not just some stupid trendy bandwagon. It’s a big part of my self-image that I am capable of changing my mind if I’m convinced by better evidence or arguments, and that allows me to overcome the cognitive dissonance and just general embarrassment of admitting, actually, I was wrong.