Hi, I was reading your Tumblr with interest and it eventually led me here. You’ve written a lot of things that I feel like responding to, but this caught my attention the most.
I think what marginalized groups have in common, the pattern you’re seeing that gets plurals and asexuals (and a lot of other people) targeted, is that they’re all making choices mainstream culture disapproves of. The “inherently [sic] mockable identity” thing is a smokescreen for “I want you to stop making this choice I don’t like, and if you refuse I want you to suffer for it.”
Society tolerates these people being attacked and holds them up as acceptable targets because it wants these deviations from the norm to carry a high social cost. It benefits from people being afraid to identify in certain ways, and in agreement about who the losers and monsters are.
I think the fear with multiples, and especially fictives, is that their perception of reality is so different from a singlet’s that they may not really care about the world outside their head (not because it works like that at all, but because binary thinking leads to a lot of irrational, selfish “but where do we fit in?” on the part of the dominant group). The thing with asexuals is that adults aren’t supposed to choose whether to have sex. It’s acceptable to not want to have sex with a particular person, or at a particular time, but … “I’m never interested in sleeping with anyone, stop asking and leave it be” isn’t. The latter, as a life choice, makes some onlookers very angry. How dare you do that, you think you’re so special, and so on. I’d suspect they’re singling out asexual women because some of the harassment has the same undertone of offended rejection that lesbians used to get from men; the part of it that isn’t accusing all asexuals of being immature children who will inevitably change their minds about this silly idea, anyway. Society tacitly approves of asexuals being bullied, because “what are they doing for us?”
That’s … sort of the crux of it. The unspoken assumption that you should be making choices that the dominant group sees some benefit for itself in. Individualism my foot, these are the limits of what society’s willing to tolerate. And when you surpass them, for whatever reason, it will try to ridicule, attack, gaslight, and invalidate you into conformity or hiding.
I think a lot of the maligning of hateable groups (I understand why that term has gained currency but I don’t like it) is more productively analyzed if you turn it inside out. Being special is not an attribute that humans should be accused of fraudulently claiming. The same way being a man, woman, or adult shouldn’t be something you have to prove you are and qualify for, uniqueness and basic, innate value isn’t something to hoard, dole out to the few, and revile anyone else for thinking they deserve. Plurals aren’t claiming the identity they claim “to be special” because they are special, with or without this stigmatized trait. And if you’re paying attention to a person because they’re different from you in a significant way (particularly if you’re hassling them) it’s pretty self-centered to believe that they’re doing it “for attention.” Attention is only a reward to people who like it, and whether they like it or not, it’s sick to assume by default that non-normative people don’t deserve to be seen or heard.
Now, about oppression. As best I can tell, oppression exists on a number of spectrums, and admitting that oppression against any group exists is something that society is very reluctant to do. The groups that most people believe are oppressed have fought hard to get that acknowledged. Unfortunately, a lot of SJ seem to think that human rights are a zero sum game, and if they acknowledge identities that are less organized, politically active, and conventional as oppressed, their cause and the smaller one will be thrown under the bus. This is part of the conflict between feminism and trans* people. Society at large at least acknowledges women as a real thing. Another liminal group that’s edging towards being taken seriously is the fat acceptance movement. Many people are still reluctant to see fatness as a stigmatized physical attribute, rather than “a bad choice” that they’re totally entitled to disapprove of. And make no mistake, things that society wants to punish are always presented as choices, whether they are or not. Remember when being gay was portrayed in the mainstream media as a destructive choice? And women are still getting this shit from rape culture – it’s not that anyone hates women, oh no, but what did she expect, drinking and partying? [sic] Anyway, my point is that oppression is justified as something that would stop happening, if minorities just stopped pissing ordinary people off. The trouble is that they aren’t being targeted for something they’re doing, unless you consider existing an active offense. And that is more or less the definition of oppression. Being bullied is not as bad as being murdered because society doesn’t like you. But fearing for your life is the extreme end of a spectrum, and even for people who are facing that much violence, most of what they deal with on a day-to-day basis is what your quote called shittiness. That’s oppression too. That’s the aspect of oppression that wears you the fuck down. And groups that everyone agrees are oppressed don’t have the corner on it.
Activists and minorities desperately need a more nuanced understanding of abuse and victimization, and society is fighting tooth and nail to make sure they don’t develop one. On the contrary, it’s working to manipulate SJs into policing everyone from a less established cause into disavowing the idea that they could possibly be oppressed. Even when the alternative implies that the bigots kicking you around must have some right to. If there’s abuse that goes unchallenged, because of who it’s aimed at, the real message is “abuse is not always wrong. We object when it happens to innocent people who don’t deserve it.” That’s the problem with arguing that some attacks are trivial. You can’t cheapen mistreatment by acknowledging that it’s endemic. But you can make society look really bad by recognizing how many groups it paints targets on, and you can find out exactly who’s more invested in believing that the status quo is good (and just needs a little minor tweaking!) than they are in facing facts. Those people are willing to assert some suffering doesn’t count, often because they believe their group can be accepted by society if they just act normal enough. And it really doesn’t work that way. Stable members of marginalized groups need to find a way to say “we respect your struggle, and we expect you to respect ours, even if it’s different,” instead of fighting about who can legitimately claim to be oppressed.
Oh, you know what else? Often the people who get the most hate spewed at them, people that the whole group is stereotyped as consisting entirely of, have important things to contribute to the whole. Teenagers have every right to be plural. Whites have every right to be plural. People who don’t work for whatever reason, or don’t worry about money have every right to be plural. Privileged groups that intersect with stigmatized ones can be a huge asset to the stigmatized group. (Unless everyone reacts to trolling by saying “eeew, we definitely don’t have any of those around here!”) The gay rights movement never apologized for containing men who could afford to donate a lot of money to AIDS research and political advocacy. It didn’t publicize who its membership consisted of, but it didn’t bash people for leveraging whatever privilege was at their disposal.
Teenagers tend to have time, attention, passion, and these days also a fair amount of computer savvy. It gets society’s goat to think that they might be attracted to a misfit lifestyle, they might be listening to crazies, they might choose to be something other than normal. (Conveniently ignoring that most people don’t assume it’s glamorous to belong to a group other people stereotype and despise, and … it’s not actually an inferior way to live.) If they do identify with a stigmatized identity, it may well continue to be a thorn in the public side for a long time. Teenagers also go on to make money, if they don’t already have much access to it, and they've been known to share it with the hateable people they consider their peers. Just because someone said “I need help,” and actually did. I don’t think society likes the sound of that, either.
The privileges of whites have been enumerated all over the place, so I’m not going to get into what whites can contribute to a space. Or otherwise-neurotypical people, for that matter. As for having money, I think that’s something most rabid commenters are jealous of, regardless of how much they insist they despise the idea of anyone getting something they didn’t earn. (That’s another broken record accusation, by the way – “you have something you shouldn’t have!” when the truth is, they actually have something everyone should have. Having your basic needs met and being allowed to exist is an absence of abuse, not a privilege or a blessing.)
Let’s take the financial bit from the top. First of all, most people in the US who have money come from a family that has money. That’s not the exception, that’s the rule, and if some plurals are young and well off, more power to them. There are certainly many others who are poor, disabled, institutionalized, and otherwise getting the short end of the stick. Second, there’s a big, wide range between abject poverty and having all your financial needs met. A lot of solidly middle class people feel guilty for what they have and worry any amount of self-expression is illegitimate, because it’s partly something they can afford to express; their strangeness might be invisible to the world at large if they couldn’t afford a computer, for instance. Third, having access to money doesn’t mean you live a charmed life. Even if it did, that wouldn’t mean you shouldn’t identify as anything weird. That’s true no matter who’s paying the bills. People who are supported by their spouse or live with their parents have a right to exist too. (It’s too bad that the latter idea is only gaining currency now because of so many able bodied young people who did everything by the book are finding they can’t get work in this mess of an economy and move out when they expected to. But anyway.)
Members of a stigmatized group should be sensitive to any advantages that stack the deck a little in their favor, and they shouldn't apologize for having them. This includes people who seem to fit every negative stereotype anyone ever came up with about what “you people” must look and act like. No one, seemingly privileged or not, has an obligation to volunteer their energies (IMO, looking at people as mere resources is something subcultures should go out of their way not to do), but they generally have strengths that should be highlighted and valued, if only as a counterbalance to the constant barrage of negativity aimed at [hah, this brings me back full circle to the point about] people who are doing things with their life that society doesn't like. Intersectionality everywhere.
And I could probably add more, but I won’t. Great post.
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Date: 2013-10-04 11:57 pm (UTC)I think what marginalized groups have in common, the pattern you’re seeing that gets plurals and asexuals (and a lot of other people) targeted, is that they’re all making choices mainstream culture disapproves of. The “inherently [sic] mockable identity” thing is a smokescreen for “I want you to stop making this choice I don’t like, and if you refuse I want you to suffer for it.”
Society tolerates these people being attacked and holds them up as acceptable targets because it wants these deviations from the norm to carry a high social cost. It benefits from people being afraid to identify in certain ways, and in agreement about who the losers and monsters are.
I think the fear with multiples, and especially fictives, is that their perception of reality is so different from a singlet’s that they may not really care about the world outside their head (not because it works like that at all, but because binary thinking leads to a lot of irrational, selfish “but where do we fit in?” on the part of the dominant group). The thing with asexuals is that adults aren’t supposed to choose whether to have sex. It’s acceptable to not want to have sex with a particular person, or at a particular time, but … “I’m never interested in sleeping with anyone, stop asking and leave it be” isn’t. The latter, as a life choice, makes some onlookers very angry. How dare you do that, you think you’re so special, and so on. I’d suspect they’re singling out asexual women because some of the harassment has the same undertone of offended rejection that lesbians used to get from men; the part of it that isn’t accusing all asexuals of being immature children who will inevitably change their minds about this silly idea, anyway. Society tacitly approves of asexuals being bullied, because “what are they doing for us?”
That’s … sort of the crux of it. The unspoken assumption that you should be making choices that the dominant group sees some benefit for itself in. Individualism my foot, these are the limits of what society’s willing to tolerate. And when you surpass them, for whatever reason, it will try to ridicule, attack, gaslight, and invalidate you into conformity or hiding.
I think a lot of the maligning of hateable groups (I understand why that term has gained currency but I don’t like it) is more productively analyzed if you turn it inside out. Being special is not an attribute that humans should be accused of fraudulently claiming. The same way being a man, woman, or adult shouldn’t be something you have to prove you are and qualify for, uniqueness and basic, innate value isn’t something to hoard, dole out to the few, and revile anyone else for thinking they deserve. Plurals aren’t claiming the identity they claim “to be special” because they are special, with or without this stigmatized trait. And if you’re paying attention to a person because they’re different from you in a significant way (particularly if you’re hassling them) it’s pretty self-centered to believe that they’re doing it “for attention.” Attention is only a reward to people who like it, and whether they like it or not, it’s sick to assume by default that non-normative people don’t deserve to be seen or heard.
Now, about oppression. As best I can tell, oppression exists on a number of spectrums, and admitting that oppression against any group exists is something that society is very reluctant to do. The groups that most people believe are oppressed have fought hard to get that acknowledged. Unfortunately, a lot of SJ seem to think that human rights are a zero sum game, and if they acknowledge identities that are less organized, politically active, and conventional as oppressed, their cause and the smaller one will be thrown under the bus. This is part of the conflict between feminism and trans* people. Society at large at least acknowledges women as a real thing. Another liminal group that’s edging towards being taken seriously is the fat acceptance movement. Many people are still reluctant to see fatness as a stigmatized physical attribute, rather than “a bad choice” that they’re totally entitled to disapprove of. And make no mistake, things that society wants to punish are always presented as choices, whether they are or not. Remember when being gay was portrayed in the mainstream media as a destructive choice? And women are still getting this shit from rape culture – it’s not that anyone hates women, oh no, but what did she expect, drinking and partying? [sic] Anyway, my point is that oppression is justified as something that would stop happening, if minorities just stopped pissing ordinary people off. The trouble is that they aren’t being targeted for something they’re doing, unless you consider existing an active offense. And that is more or less the definition of oppression. Being bullied is not as bad as being murdered because society doesn’t like you. But fearing for your life is the extreme end of a spectrum, and even for people who are facing that much violence, most of what they deal with on a day-to-day basis is what your quote called shittiness. That’s oppression too. That’s the aspect of oppression that wears you the fuck down. And groups that everyone agrees are oppressed don’t have the corner on it.
Activists and minorities desperately need a more nuanced understanding of abuse and victimization, and society is fighting tooth and nail to make sure they don’t develop one. On the contrary, it’s working to manipulate SJs into policing everyone from a less established cause into disavowing the idea that they could possibly be oppressed. Even when the alternative implies that the bigots kicking you around must have some right to. If there’s abuse that goes unchallenged, because of who it’s aimed at, the real message is “abuse is not always wrong. We object when it happens to innocent people who don’t deserve it.” That’s the problem with arguing that some attacks are trivial. You can’t cheapen mistreatment by acknowledging that it’s endemic. But you can make society look really bad by recognizing how many groups it paints targets on, and you can find out exactly who’s more invested in believing that the status quo is good (and just needs a little minor tweaking!) than they are in facing facts. Those people are willing to assert some suffering doesn’t count, often because they believe their group can be accepted by society if they just act normal enough. And it really doesn’t work that way. Stable members of marginalized groups need to find a way to say “we respect your struggle, and we expect you to respect ours, even if it’s different,” instead of fighting about who can legitimately claim to be oppressed.
Oh, you know what else? Often the people who get the most hate spewed at them, people that the whole group is stereotyped as consisting entirely of, have important things to contribute to the whole. Teenagers have every right to be plural. Whites have every right to be plural. People who don’t work for whatever reason, or don’t worry about money have every right to be plural. Privileged groups that intersect with stigmatized ones can be a huge asset to the stigmatized group. (Unless everyone reacts to trolling by saying “eeew, we definitely don’t have any of those around here!”) The gay rights movement never apologized for containing men who could afford to donate a lot of money to AIDS research and political advocacy. It didn’t publicize who its membership consisted of, but it didn’t bash people for leveraging whatever privilege was at their disposal.
Teenagers tend to have time, attention, passion, and these days also a fair amount of computer savvy. It gets society’s goat to think that they might be attracted to a misfit lifestyle, they might be listening to crazies, they might choose to be something other than normal. (Conveniently ignoring that most people don’t assume it’s glamorous to belong to a group other people stereotype and despise, and … it’s not actually an inferior way to live.) If they do identify with a stigmatized identity, it may well continue to be a thorn in the public side for a long time. Teenagers also go on to make money, if they don’t already have much access to it, and they've been known to share it with the hateable people they consider their peers. Just because someone said “I need help,” and actually did. I don’t think society likes the sound of that, either.
The privileges of whites have been enumerated all over the place, so I’m not going to get into what whites can contribute to a space. Or otherwise-neurotypical people, for that matter. As for having money, I think that’s something most rabid commenters are jealous of, regardless of how much they insist they despise the idea of anyone getting something they didn’t earn. (That’s another broken record accusation, by the way – “you have something you shouldn’t have!” when the truth is, they actually have something everyone should have. Having your basic needs met and being allowed to exist is an absence of abuse, not a privilege or a blessing.)
Let’s take the financial bit from the top. First of all, most people in the US who have money come from a family that has money. That’s not the exception, that’s the rule, and if some plurals are young and well off, more power to them. There are certainly many others who are poor, disabled, institutionalized, and otherwise getting the short end of the stick. Second, there’s a big, wide range between abject poverty and having all your financial needs met. A lot of solidly middle class people feel guilty for what they have and worry any amount of self-expression is illegitimate, because it’s partly something they can afford to express; their strangeness might be invisible to the world at large if they couldn’t afford a computer, for instance. Third, having access to money doesn’t mean you live a charmed life. Even if it did, that wouldn’t mean you shouldn’t identify as anything weird. That’s true no matter who’s paying the bills. People who are supported by their spouse or live with their parents have a right to exist too. (It’s too bad that the latter idea is only gaining currency now because of so many able bodied young people who did everything by the book are finding they can’t get work in this mess of an economy and move out when they expected to. But anyway.)
Members of a stigmatized group should be sensitive to any advantages that stack the deck a little in their favor, and they shouldn't apologize for having them. This includes people who seem to fit every negative stereotype anyone ever came up with about what “you people” must look and act like. No one, seemingly privileged or not, has an obligation to volunteer their energies (IMO, looking at people as mere resources is something subcultures should go out of their way not to do), but they generally have strengths that should be highlighted and valued, if only as a counterbalance to the constant barrage of negativity aimed at [hah, this brings me back full circle to the point about] people who are doing things with their life that society doesn't like. Intersectionality everywhere.
And I could probably add more, but I won’t. Great post.