Infringements on Worker’s Rights: Not Imaginary

Its slightly presumptuous to assume that your interlocutors haven’t had personal experience of workplace abuse merely because they disagree with how best to remedy that abuse. For example, having experienced both, I know that a bad altercation with a manager can be much much more shattering than a robbery at knife-point. And I know that I am comparatively fortunate.

Many bosses are freaks. And many people become freaks when they become bosses. Unfortunately, workplace democracies, more union powers, bureaucratic regulations don’t always reduce the powers of those freaks. They can also create new positions of power for the freaks to cluster towards. I have heard of far worse abuses than my own experiences that are present in much more tightly regulated workplaces, including in union offices and at government departments.

1: Phil is spot on. They don’t even enjoy the stuff you can get while being rich; this is why they keep on working while still having more money than they will ever be able to spend.

There are people who get rich by starting companies and find that what they really enjoy is starting companies; so they retire, take their billions, and start another company in a sector they think would be fun. This is how you get private spaceflight.

What libertarian is there that would put up with sexual assault?

afinetheorem, did you actually read Belle’s post? If your boss is given to sexually assaulting you, the only way not to put up with it is to leave the job. There are four ways you can do this:

1) You can leave the job by turning on your heels and walking out;
2) You can leave the job by chewing your boss out and getting fired;
3) You can leave the job by smacking him upside the head and getting arrested;
4) You can leave the job by calling the police on him and getting fired for causing trouble by the guy who appointed him to be your boss.

Now if you have dependants, or you are in debt, or you don’t have a particularly saleable skill set, YOU CANNOT AFFORD TO LEAVE THE JOB. It doesn’t matter whether your personal prejudices are libertarian or Stalinist or anything in between: you need to keep the job or your kids will go hungry. Therefore you put up with sexual assault. Is that so hard?

Well, there was this Stanford prison experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment ) that demonstrated that (apart from the phenomenon of assholes raising naturally to the top) getting assigned to be a boss of other people will quickly turn a random person into an asshole as well. So, there’s that.

In my experience observing bullying school principals (who admittedly arent the same as bullying private sector bosses, and who are constrained by union rules, contracts) they are motivated more by fear than sadism.

Yes, why?

@Belle: Let me know, please, via whatever channel, if you thought I was too abstract and gender-blind in the other threads. It wasn’t my intention to be so, but I can see how “Coase this Coase that” would come off that way.

Why is it important, the male to female ratio? If this was a sex orgy – sure, but intellectual power of the brain must be the same, on average. And it’s not like men are from mars and women are from venus, not really.

of course there are laws against sexual harassment. Do you think that when they were proposed libertarians were in favor of them?

Ooh, nasty. Very very valid and important point, but nasty.

One of the unanticipated benefits of writing a thesis (and subsequently a book) was being able to include some really, really good quotes, and here’s one of my favourites:

during the nineteenth century workers, employers and governments engaged in a continuing struggle; its general outcome was not only the legalisation of some sort of strike activity but also the creation of shared understandings concerning the actions that constituted a strike. By no means all concerted withholding of labour qualified; the parties hammered out detailed rules excluding individual absenteeism, occupation of the premises, refusal to do particular jobs, and so forth. It is not simply that legislators made some forms of the strike legal and other forms of the strike illegal. That happened, too. But in the process the antagonists created – in practice as well as in theory – a sharper distinction between the strike and other forms of action with which it had previously oftenbeen associated: sabotage, slowdown, absenteeism, the demonstration. A narrowed, contained strike entered the repertoire of workers’ collective action.
(Charles Tilly (1979), “Repertoires of contention in America and Britain, 1750–1830”)

Sexual harassment is illegal because a lot of people pushed very, very hard to get it made illegal (and a lot of those people were probably pushing for more than that, and some of them probably still are). And while they were pushing, lots of other people were resisting and pushing back. The property-rights crowd don’t get to say “hey, sexual harassment’s illegal, what’s the problem?” unless there’s good reason to believe that they were among the ones doing the pushing, not the ones doing the resisting.

I mean, I notice that Maria, Tedra, Ingrid and Niamh haven’t commented on this thread. Should we start rustling them?

@Data:

Why is it important, the male to female ratio? If this was a sex orgy – sure, but intellectual power of the brain must be the same, on average.

Because it’s not just about power of the brain. A lot of workplace experience is differentially gendered. As men, we are likely to overlook aspects of on-the-job social dynamics that women won’t overlook because they can’t.

For instance, look at the concreteness of Belle’s description of surviving under a boss inclined to sexual assault. As a male writer, I’d be guessing at those details, and I’d miss many of them, because sexual victimization on the job is not part of my lived experience. The “contrary sympathy” of those nervous giggles? I’d have missed that. The guilt of leaving your inexperienced co-workers to bear the brunt of abuse you yourself have figured out how to minimize? Never occurred to me.

Men can think, sure, but people think about things. Evidence. Men thinking only among ourselves about things that affect men and women both are missing evidence. We will fail to think as well as we need to think.

Adding, in re comment to ajay: this was my failure too. I could’ve “started rustling” as well as anyone else, and did not.

31: I would be interested to know how many female CT regulars would welcome a stream of emails from men they don’t know trying to persuade them to take part in discussions that they’ve already decided they don’t want to be a part of (either because they’re unwelcoming, or they don’t have anything particular to say, or they’re busy or whatever).

If the answer is “quite a lot” then I’ll agree with Jim; it’s possible, after all, that the emails would have a reassuring effect, make them feel welcome and get them to participate.

But that wouldn’t be my first guess.

Belle, thank you for this post.

Back when I was a receptionist, I had to deal with a few very mild instances of creepiness (customer mailing in pictures of a diseased male genitalia as a protest against our product; creepy dude who called around 3 p.m. every Monday and started a conversation about whether I was wearing pantyhose). As a 19-year-old, it was upsetting — even though I was in a safe, clean office and happily employed at a good wage. I can only imagine how frightening it would have been to be subjected to that kind of behavior from my (older, male) colleagues or boss.

As it happens, the scariest thing in that job was worrying whether the police officer husband of one of my colleagues would come in some day with a gun to resolve one of their explosive arguments. My big plan — since my desk was the only thing between the front door and her office — was to hide under my desk and try to grab the phone off my desk and call the police. Fortunately, this never came to pass.

ajay: One thing that men could do in that situation is to *mention* the fact that they’ve observed that there are few/no female-handled commenters in the thread. That’ s a good way to signal that a) you’ve noticed, b) you think it might be an issue, and c) you’re interested in hearing from people who happen to be women. One of the most frustrating aspects of this issue is to feel as though it’s always our (women’s) responsibility to raise it.

“Do you think that a woman who knew she would have a union lawyer and a desk job away from her harasser would be more likely or less likely to report sexual harassment than a woman working at an hourly wage in a store that doesn’t have a unionized staff?”

This feels undoubtedly true. I’m curious as to why it’s true though. In theory, if a person is sexually assaulted at work, they can inform the police and a prosecution should result. If the assailant is found guilty, as he should be in the case as described, then it’s unlikely that the woman would lose her job. She might even be in line for significant compensation from the employer, given that the employer appointed a sexual predator to a position of authority in the first place. (They might reasonably argue that they couldn’t have known this to be the case when they made the appointment, but I doubt they’d really want to fight it. Is this a crucial point?)

So, provided that the legal system does its job, the woman should have nothing to fear from asserting her legal rights against a criminal assailant. Of course, that’s a pretty big assumption, for reasons that should be obvious. I guess the libertarian argument here is that it would be better to fix the problem with the legal system rather than to simply assume that sexual assault will happen and will go unpunished, and that we must therefore institute some quasi-legal system of workplace justice, mediated by unions, to tackle it. Many professions and workplaces do have their own rules and codes of conduct, with mechanisms in place to enforce them in cases where no law has been broken.

An example of the difference between the two systems might be found in two alleged cases of racism in the English Premier League last season: in one case, Luis Suarez was accused of racially abusing another player during a match; in another case, John Terry was accused of a substantially similar act. However, the evidence against Suarez was weaker, and his case was considered by the Football Association, which delivered a lengthy ban as punishment. The case against Terry was stronger (not least because the incident was caught on film) and is being prosecuted through the legal system (and, pending that prosecution, he has continued to play for both Chelsea and England). One can argue about which player got the better deal here – Suarez had to face workplace justice and received a prompt and lengthy ban which disrupted his season (and probably cost Liverpool’s manager his job), whilst Terry’s case proceeding via the courts allowed him to collect a Champion’s League winner’s medal.

What this shows, though, is that this separate system of workplace justice looks most compelling when we’re talking about acts that the legal system is bad at dealing with, or because there are acts which are considered to be wrong without necessarily being illegal. If libertarians are to argue that special rules for the workplace are unnecessary, they have to be able to argue, with a straight face, that any injustice can be realistically addressed through the courts, or that justice can reliably be obtained through voluntary codes of conduct and enforcement mechanisms. Personally, I find that solution preferable, although I have strong doubts about how realistic such a scenario might be.

ajay: That’s why measures well short of that level of familiarity are also appropriate. Such as: in the thread, post regretting the lack of comments by women and requesting some; pointing to the thread on Twitter or Facebook, noting that it’s really missing female perspectives and requesting some; in the thread, being a good ally to women who do post by calling out behavior that makes the thread unwelcoming.

Me, I did precisely none of those things in the other two threads. But I could have.

Do you think creepy dude would have asked a male receptionist the same questions he asked me?

I do think you’ll tell me, and everybody else, everything about the creepy dude at the next coffee break. I think I’m perfectly capable of understanding your story. I don’t think you have any special insights that are incomprehensible to me only because you’re a female.

I do think you’ll tell me, and everybody else, everything about the creepy dude at the next coffee break.

No, she won’t. Data, if you got assaulted at work – in a way that made you feel embarrassed and humiliated, maybe by a popular colleague, maybe by someone senior to you, or even by your boss – would you really stand there beside the percolator, sing out “Gather round, boys, I’ve got a story for you!” and then proceed to go through every detail?

I’m of a libertarian bent, and I’m well aware we get accused of not being empathic enough or grounded enough in the real world. Which makes the remedy proposed re unions look a little crazy to me. A society of permissiveness is what makes sexual harassment tough to deal with. Applying a union on top of things doesn’t change that. It might change the locus of people who feel they can be the harassers (to people well connected to the union) but it doesn’t necessarily reduce the harassment. Unions have a horrible history of sexism and it extends to the present. If you aren’t dealing with the permissiveness you’re just adding another layer of people with the ability to do nasty things to people they don’t like. And if you don’t think that happens with unions, you have no right to call libertarians the naive ones.

Now I’m a man, so I fully expect that I don’t personally see lots of sexual harassment that goes on. But the only workplace that I did see it, and where it was allowed to be blatant and open, was working in the carpentry shop which was part of the local IATSE. The worst of it was by the guy who was the union rep. If you’re a female arts carpenter are you going to risk having problems with IATSE? Ummm no. At least if it is a single workplace she could theoretically quit (and yes I fully understand that is often more theoretical than real). Her union rep can fuck up her ability to work anywhere.

Unions may be good for all sorts of reasons. They may even be good at reducing sexual harassment *by the boss*, though I’m skeptical. But that isn’t the same as saying they will reduce sexual harassment in the workplace. They change the locus of people who feel they have power to get away with it. In some cases they just add additional people who feel they have the power to get away with it.

Eh, speak for yourself, Jim Henley. If you don’t communicate enough with your colleagues, and with Mrs Offerings, that’s your problem.

Fine, what if I were a woman who, for one reason or another, is not getting harassed by creeps, ever? Would that shift me into the ‘male’ category?

@Data:

Eh, speak for yourself, Jim Henley. If you don’t communicate enough with your colleagues, and with Mrs Offerings, that’s your problem.

But I already know, for certain, that I am not communicating enough with my colleagues and loved ones to know everything that’s important to know, because no one does. It’s like you’ve never read a book or seen a movie, let alone noticed how partially people reveal themselves in real life.

You are claiming, “I know everything significant about other people’s experiences and feelings about those experiences. It cannot be otherwise.” This is arrogant and naive. You are also saying, “There is nothing a woman could tell me about these issues that I don’t already know.” That is presumptuous and absurd.

And also, in itself a harm to the discussion. You are a reason women avoid these fora. That’s completely unacceptable.

Fine, what if I were a woman who, for one reason or another, is not getting harassed by creeps, ever? Would that shift me into the ‘male’ category?

Of course not. It would simply underline – and this is the whole fucking point – why a discussion like this needs multiple female perspectives, not the “female perspective.”

There’s a problem with saying that there’s no libertarian problem with sexual harassment in the workplace because no one supports the legality of sexual assault like that described in the post. The problem is that sexual conduct only becomes sexual assault in the absence of consent, and the whole point, from the harasser’s point of view, of harassing subordinates at work rather than random passers-by is that it is possible for the harasser to extort (in some sense) consent from subordinates by implicitly or explicitly threatening their jobs.

While the harassed employee in the post obviously does not want to consent to be the subject of the boss’s sexual conduct, there’s a sense in which (depending on the exact circumstances) she may act in a manner indistinguishable from someone who does genuinely consent out of fear that she’ll be fired if she doesn’t . And at that point, appealing to “everyone agrees sexual assault is wrong” fails, because to identify and respond to something as sexual assault, you need to have enough protection for the person assaulted that they are safe identifying it as such and calling down a law enforcement response.

@Jim Henley’s 50: This. Precisely how I feel, but said more clearly than I could have.

I was briefly thinking that this is an issue of equilibria–on at least some discussion topics, this forum has developed a reputation of unfriendliness towards female perspectives. Even if there’s a concerted effort to make things more friendly, it’s very hard to move to an equilibrium that has a large number of openly female commenters. But that’s assuming collective movement in that direction, and the last dozen or so comments have made it clear that not everyone feels that it’s important to do so.

And so things remain unfriendly and nothing changes. As ajay said at 27, it’s very hard for individual commenters to change that, and so I appreciate Witt’s suggestion at 36. The lack of female commenters doesn’t imply a lack of female lurkers, so encouraging comments could have a positive effect.

Great series of posts. Need some time to re-read them. Of course, Belle, Witt, and LB in a thread usually means that there is something worthwhile to read.

Glad other people are addressing how mind-bogglingly wrong Data’s assumptions are, as it’s exhausting even to contemplate — the last time I tried to do that kind of education it was on Ask MetaFilter, to help someone who wanted help.

I’m glad Belle brought up bosses’ culpability and possible origin story here — harassment prevention should prevent harassers from harassing, as astonishing as that may sound.

And — speaking as a middle manager — I do have a little imaginative empathy for the kind of petty tyrant whom Belle characterizes. I have just enough to scare myself and make me work to ensure I never turn into her.

A society of permissiveness is what makes sexual harassment tough to deal with.

Sexual harassment is tougher to deal with now than it was when society was less permissive?

(I got trapped in auto-moderation; can someone free me? thanks)

I’m not claiming that I know everything, that I can’t learn anything new, or that every man is like me. I’m rejecting the idea of a unique[…] perspective.

You do get the distinction between abstractly recognizing something and concretely feeling it, right? That there’s a difference between being told that a woman can’t walk past a particular coworker’s desk without being groped or hearing some taunting comment and between actually feeling the fear/anger/revulsion that would arise from such a scenario?

I consider myself fairly empathetic. I get pretty riled up when I hear about those sort of things. I can even compare it to situations in my past when I felt scared, angry or revolted at something I didn’t think I could avoid. But that specific combination of situation/event/self/response, I can’t replicate.

What I have to do, then – what I try to do, I’m not perfect – is to take the speaker’s words at face value. When a woman tells me that she can’t walk past a coworker’s station without attracting some lewd attention – whether verbal or physical – I don’t wonder if she’s lying. I don’t interrogate her to see if there’s something she’s not telling me (“well, did you flirt with him earlier?”). I take what she’s saying as what it is.

I started out commenting on these threads, but to be honest I gave up after a while. Sometimes there’s only so much beating my head against a brick wall I can take.

But I sure I’m missing a lot of subtle, or perhaps entirely not subtle, points of their experiences, and it’d be better to have somebody with that perspective weigh in.

Thank you, and since you seem to be open to this discussion, can we start by talking about disabled people, rather than “the disabled”, which is deprecated on the basis that people’s experience of widely differing disabilities are best not regarded as a homogeneous lump.

I could tell you a little about my own experience with cerebral palsy and congenital heart disease; I have no idea what it’s like to be blind or deaf or intellectually disabled.

ajay, I’m personally cool with any of those. As you go through life you will encounter disability activists who favour one or another for reasons that are a subject of constant debate. I don’t really want to take this thread off topic quite so completely as to post a thesis about this, though. Most people are happy as long as you talk to them rather than whoever they’re with.

I am aware of all sexual harassment traditions.

I don’t even see gender.

@chris y: Sorry about that! I’ll keep that in mind in the future. (And–this isn’t meant to be passive aggressive–thank you for providing a clear example of an empathy failure on my part.) You’re right, in general it’s almost impossible to talk about disabled people as a class without being too reductionist and that wasn’t my intent.

I have only a very slight idea how either of those conditions would affect the work environment. I can try to reason it out, and I once had a boss with cerebral palsy so I can think about how he was affected, but that information is imperfect. Not to threadjack(?), but is there anything you want to discuss about your experiences with them? Has the employee/boss power differential affected you in a way that an ignorant able-bodied person might not expect?

@Hidden Heart: Good point, I’ve been conflating empathy and information. My point, poorly stated, was that to successfully empathize requires information that often can’t be discovered by reasoning from first principles. The latter is necessary but not sufficient, so a failure of the former could be due to a lack of the latter. (And props for referencing that always useful Raul Julia line.)

Given that Tyler Cowen recently insisted that poor people dying because they are too poor to afford insurance is a “principle” we have to accept, as opposed to an tragic fact we need to change, I don’t think you are being provocative but rather accurate.

“A society of permissiveness is what makes sexual harassment tough to deal with.”

Nonsense — hundreds of years ago, when most women worked as domestics, sexual harassment and abuse of servants was protected and reinforced by a repressive society.

I read that sexual harassment of domestic workers is still fairly common. What makes it tough to deal with is that a huge section of society thinks it’s not as important as the interests of the harassers, or that it’s basically the victim’s fault.

I don’t know how you can take a bunch of internet forum handles and easily figure out who is male and who is female. I’d wager that ambiguous handles are much more likely to be women than people who are willing to sign their full names. And I would not have guessed that some regulars here were women before they indicated that they were.

@76: I read Sebastian as saying that the problem is a culture where sexual harassment is treated permissively, not that a permissive culture is a problem.

You know where has made an unbelievable amount of progress in improving diversity and equality in the workplace (albeit that this has improved racial and gender diversity at the expense of introducing almost unbelievable class and ideological homogeneity)? The investment banking industry.

How did they do it? By a very aggressive policy of disciplining and sacking people.

Why did they do that? Because of losing a bunch of lawsuits.

Just saying, really.

(I am currently pretending to be a woman, in order to reduce the perception of gender monoculture, and help create a safe space.)

The Raven 07.05.12 at 11:20 am

” Belle Waring, #12: And you just know that most of these libertarian guys (and the people who make the arguments usually are guys) would squeal like stuck pigs if a male boss harassed them.”

somebody pointed out (on a later post) that the president of the GMU law school used harassment to clean out the non-law&economics professors in the 1980’s.

It’d be hilarious to watch the economics professors at GMU howl if that university ever got an honest administration, and decided to clean out their Koch nest. (I know, the flying pigs will be more noticeable………..)

Why the gender disparity in interest about libertarianism/criticizing libertarianism? Is it the same reason that there are few female libertarians? Is this gender disparity evident in other ideological movements, like Marxism?

Snitches, rewards from those favored by the boss, mercurial shifts in which the favorites suddenly become lowly and can be triumphantly trodden on by the ordinary man, a whole world made of rumor, where nothing is certain…the workplace run by an evil boss is like nothing so much as a tiny Soviet satellite state. There is no death of course, only exile. But is there freedom? No

No, obviously this never happens. I bet you read a couple too many Orwell novels and you think it describes the trivial little world which is the only one you can imagine. (Oh, I see you got this reaction already in comment #1.)

Seriously, this The elision is from “refuses to let you leave the room to pee and you have to wear adult diapers to work and sit in your own fucking piss for hours” to “bosses you around.” That’s really smoothing out the rough edges a bit much, I think, and is extraordinarily unhelpful. is important. Which is why, at one extreme, reinforcing that it’s some kind of Scientific Truth that There is always power and power always works the same way only leads to teaching B-school and J-school classes that anyone who says that’s not how it is, is ignorant. (Like if your employee’s mother-in-law told her she couldn’t possibly have said that to you, you’re her boss!) And on the other extreme, waiting to change people’s minds about sexual harassment and bathroom breaks until we’ve solved the issue of power . . . just seems too silly to me to give it an academic-sounding description.

(But hey, if your goal is, on the contrary, to help ease people out of careers they’re too sensitive for, but maybe don’t know it yet, go right ahead.)

Jim Henley, you may interpreting me as complaining about promiscuity, but I’m talking about a permissive culture regarding sexual harassment.

Raven, I don’t agree with your framing of corrupt vs non corrupt and I further don’t agree that it had much to do with democracy. There certainly are lots of corrupt governments, corporations, unions, and churches. There are some fewer that aren’t largely corrupt. So long as we have a permissive to harassment culture, injecting other opportunities for people to gain power over others is unlikely to reduce sexual harassment. That isn’t a comment about the general utility of governments, unions, churches, corporations or what have you.

and re b-school, there are managers I’ve suspecting of being scared witless by the responsibilities of middle-managing, and of having been thoroughly confused by half-baked management courses and self-help books, which IMHO made things much worse, and gave them a repertory of odd, and mismatched, phrases that were possibly much, much creepier than they could have imagined–which is why I come down hard on a certain kind of “consciousness raising” that in a different context I might think was a good idea

Marc @78:

I don’t know how you can take a bunch of internet forum handles and easily figure out who is male and who is female. I’d wager that ambiguous handles are much more likely to be women than people who are willing to sign their full names. And I would not have guessed that some regulars here were women before they indicated that they were.
It should be easier to tell if a comment thread includes diverse perspectives than what the numbers of posts by male or female authors are. Also, there are many reasons to be pseudonymous, so I would guess that the gender distribution of pseudonymous commenters and named commenters is about the same.

Jesus, that was long and self-indulgent. Sorry, folks!

Lynne, #85: yeah. I worry about discussions of the power relations of the sexes where women don’t chime in because I know important views are being omitted.

Data, #22: “intellectual power of the brain must be the same, on average.” But humans are not omniscient or omnibenevolent (or universally empathetic.) You probably don’t know what women experience from your own experience, and even if you know quite a lot, you may not be sympathetic. Any individual human perspective is limited, and the compassionate understanding of those limitations is valuable in making human lives and relations easier.

And I think I am going to fly away. I hope that there are many more comments from women, and other oppressed groups when I return.

Please see ‘The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy’, by Albert O. Hirschman. I swear that that guy took a time machine, and boiled down all right-wing arguments from the beginning of writing until the end of mankind.

Sometimes people argue in the following way: we should carry out some social program (P) in order to further some aim or goal (G). It hardly takes a rocket scientist to see that ways to oppose this sort of argument are going to be of the form

(1) P will in practice not further G, but will make it worse (“perversity”)
(2) P will in practice not further G (“futility”)
(3) P will further G, and G is desirable, but its desirability is outweighed by other goods that are threatened by P (“jeopardy”)
(4) P will further G, but G is not desirable (I guess Hirschman forgot this one)

It’s not like any of these are necessarily fallacious argument, so I guess I don’t get why people think that book is so great.

Dan @ 101: “ways to oppose this sort of argument are going to be of the form . . . P will further G, but G is not desirable (I guess Hirschman forgot this one)”

“P will further G, but G is not desirable” is not a winning argument for the reactionary, because it comes too close to revealing the reactionary’s actual desiderata.

The rhetoric of the reactionary must be adapted to the reality that the reactionary is up to no good.

“go get someone off the street or something, or like maybe the woman next to you at Starbucks, to comment? Don’t tell her it’s about libertarianism!!”

Thank you Belle for giving me the courage to come out as a woman and comment on the most testosterone driven ideology since the Enlightenment; libertarianism. As you will no doubt have noticed there are very very few woman who are interested in this ideology; I refuse to call it a philosophy. But my lack of ability to ‘reason’ like those ubermasculine adoscents who call themselves libertarians, means that I just sit back and know in my bones, or my womb, that they are so fkn wrong that it isn’t funny.

The most fundamental area in which, using my female intuition, I know they are wrong is about the primacy of freedom as a goal for a human life. Any human who has the opportunity to raise a child knows that complete freedom is not something that is good for children and as far as I can tell; there are very few adults among the libertarian population. When do we become adults and then have to take responsibility for our actions and the ‘contracts’ we make with others?

How do we decide when a person is capable of being part of the libertarian project and who is not free during the years it takes to build a person with character and integrity and the ability to contribute to a decent society. Recent evidence shows that for some humans, mylenation of the frontal cortex – which provides the ability to think more carefully about things – does not finish until age 25 or so. So my youngest son, very high IQ but an ‘aspie’ with no social skills, would look like a ‘prole’ to someone stupid enough to believe that there is such a group of people.

It takes a good upbringing to raise an adult and a good upbringing is best organised through a ‘village’ or a community; not a pair or a single parental unit given all the responsibility and blame for the outcome of the child. And a parent, male or female, requires security as well as freedom to raise the next generation. Where is my gaurantee of security in which to do the essential job of raising the next generation.

I will finish reading the rest of the post and the comments; apologies if I have been too keen to respond to your exciting request. But don’t men and particularly libertarian men still believe that women, like proles, are less intelligent than they are?

It’s actually true that unions have often had problems with entrenched sexism, racism, homophobia, and other prejudice, and that some still do.

It is not true that in any of these regards, they compare unfavorably to the management of firms whose employees they represent, and even less true that they compare unfavorably to the management of firms that have resisted unionization.

Ok now I’m on a roll, I’ll tell you about the consequences of the first time I was sexually harassed. I was 15, a long long time ago, and my job was selling encyclopaedias door to door- that’s how long ago it was; my ‘boss’ was driving us to the suburb where we were to start work but we ended up way out in the middle of nowhere – and then he began the sexy talk and the touching.

Although I managed to avoid any real violation of my person, my ‘self’ was incredibly damaged and I became very depressed and ended up in a psych hospital after a suicide attempt. Of course, I was an incredibly ‘highly-strung’, emotional, and sensitive adolescent and if I had been able to think like a man, or if I had been an ’empowered’ woman, it would have been something to laugh about rather than an experience that seems to have been a significant contribution to a total breakdown that meant that I was unable to work or study for several years.

I had PTSD I suppose, and for years I couldn’t stop seeing his ugly leering face and smell his breath etc etc. Such an overreaction from me and obviously something that would only happen to a prole; not to a highly evolved reasoning libertarian.

Emma, bianca, Lynne, Sherri, HH (I think…), BethanyAnne, Sumana, Katherine, Witt, presumably Katniss, anyone I missed: thanks very much for answering the call for more women commenting to these threads. It helped the thread a lot, and my understanding specifically.

Emma, truly, a balm to the addled soul sometimes. :)

Just a note to say I would welcome more women commenting on this thread and on CT in general.

Having finally worked my way through the lengthy BRG post that initiated this here, I can’t bear to read the comments to it.

I’d want to know whether the BHL crowd, who appear to be ‘liberaltarians’, are at all responsive to the proposition that they should really just be liberals, and what’s their real problem with that? I hope that this is taken up in various posts at the BHL site, which I’ll work my way through at some point.

Sorry if the threads on the other posts have entirely dealt with this.

Hi Stephen. It’s from the first section of Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand. It’s something the tutor AI says to the protagonist, whatsisname.

Jim, Stephen: the bit from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand isn’t quite so concise:

Stupidity: a process, not a state. A human being takes in far more information than he or she can put out. ‘Stupidity’ is a process or strategy by which a human, in response to social denigration of the information she or he puts out, commits him or herself to taking in no more information than she or he can put out…

But “Search Inside This Book” tells me I’m wrong! New theory: I am a genius.

New theory: I am a genius.

I always knew it. Even back when you were a libertarian(ish).

What a droid Data is.
“I’m rejecting the idea of a uniquely female perspective.” #57
A man of subzero empathy who cannot imagine the ordinary female experience of constant fear of rape and harassment to mention just one issue. Most women manage by modifying their behavior and stiffening their inner defenses, but we are all on guard until we age out of the victim class.
Data probably also thinks he fully understands everything about crossing Niagara Falls on a wire and would be able to duplicate the feat.
Data-do you have a clue as to why the Republicans (and all the fundamentalist religions) have chosen to conduct a war on women?
This is my contribution to the slightly changing the M/F ratio on CT.

@128, Data-do you have a clue as to why the Republicans (and all the fundamentalist religions) have chosen to conduct a war on women?

I don’t know about “the Republicans”, but I suppose it’s because they, like you, feel that women are inherently different, have a different mentality.

It’s actually true that unions have often had problems with entrenched sexism, racism, homophobia, and other prejudice, and that some still do.
It is not true that in any of these regards, they compare unfavorably to the management of firms whose employees they represent

Also a good point. Of course trade unions have a history of entrenched discrimination. Every human institution has a history of entrenched discrimination. Schools, universities, photography societies, amateur Gilbert & Sullivan companies, religious orders, long-range reconnaissance patrol squadrons, SF fan clubs, television production companies, chess clubs, police forces, karate dojos, steel bands, quilting bees…

Damn, it’s nice to see so many women commenting here. I have this tendency not to be able to shut my gob, and I often worry that I’m doing my gender a disservice by commenting on things I don’t necessarily have a deep and technical knowledge of (eg economics) but hell I do it anyway. It’s nice to know I’m making a fool of myself in front of a mixed audience!

Right, I’m off to Savage Death Island to wash Data out of my brain.

I read nearly every post and many (st all) of the comments every day, and consider CT as coming under the rubric of “further education” in fields like sociology/EU studies/economics/politics, in which I received no formal or systematic training.

A few random responses to Belle’s OP & comments:
Libertarianism does not appeal to me at any level or in any of its dimensions. My own political inclinations (as a citizen) cause me to be more concerned about the rights of the property-less as opposed to the propertied, nor I do not consider an “ownership society” wherein few own much and many own nothing a model for human happiness.

Thus, the “standard” (if there is such a thing) libertarian response to the dilemma posed in the OP – sexual harassment in the workplace, and what if anything can be done about it – viz., that the sexually-exploited worker is “free” to contract her labor elsewhere, just doesn’t cut it with me. I want that worker to be free FROM sexual harassment in the working environment, not free TO sell her labor or starve if she can’t find another buyer. I don’t feel that libertarianism addresses inherently unequal power relationships (owners-non-owners/ bosses-workers) in such a way that the weaker party is secured from the inevitable vagaries of the stronger. Unions (whatever their human frailties) do (in the U.S., make that “used to”) address this imbalance by empowering powerless/property-less workers with the very tangible power of numbers, and for a while, it actually worked (still is working in other places: see Niamh above, absolutely spot-on).

Libertarians are against Obamacare (ACA) because … freedom? What kind of an argument is that? Freedom to die because you’ve been unemployed for five years and lost your health care? (And while we’re on this subject, there is no defensible argument from any ideological perspective against Single Payer; the real argument against SP is that it would interfere with the bottom line of Big Pharma and the health insurance industry.)

dsquaredette @84: hmm, lots of lawsuits, followed by lots of sackings and firings. Sounds like a good strategy to me – could it work for bankers who have apparently been engaged in muni bond rate price-fixing, manipulation of LIBOR/EURIBOR, playing around with – oh, somewhere between $4 and $9 billion of FDIC-insured funds out of the JPM Londion CIO, and other assorted acts of … well, er …?

Lynne@89, Emma in Sydney@111, JanieM@129, (plus all the women noted by Belle @131) it’s good to hear your voice(s), all of you were read with attention and reflected upon. Keep it up, please!!

Having read the whole thread, I’m a bit disappointed. The incomprehension between the libertarians and non-libertarians seems to be mutual, but what’s weird is how happy everyone is with that. It seems too easy to say “those libertarians don’t understand reality, and I don’t really understand their screwed-up ideology because it’s totally weird”. I mean, I get that this is how most political discussion ends up anyway – mutual incomprehension and no small amount of loathing on all sides. But does it always have to be that way? Even here?

As a long-term (got to be getting on for 5 years at least) lurker, I’ve always ended up coming back to CT because the quality of discussion here occasionally elevates itself above the quagmire of Talking About Politics On The Internet. But sometimes it feels like a happy accident; despite the fact that CT actively tries to cultivate improvements in the level of debate (e.g. diversity of participation), one thing that nobody ever really tries to do is cultivate a focus on trying to logically decompose opposing views. The arguments being made by the libertarians are probably daft and unworkable for reasons of excessive idealism, but arguing a variant of “libertarianism is insane” or “libertarianism can only be held by straight white men” or what-have-you isn’t actually going to result in anyone being persuaded of the wrongness of the libertarian position. There have to be much better ways of doing that, surely?

I suppose that maybe this just isn’t the point – we’re not trying to seriously discredit the argument, we’re just trying to work out talking points with which to argue with it in a “politics as war by other means” kind of sense – after all, simply being right about stuff isn’t enough, you need to build your community and fire people up with a strong dose of (perfectly legitimate) righteousness. My real question is this : does anyone know of somewhere online where it’s possible to debate these ideas in a spirit of logical investigation rather than as a purely political debate? Can such a thing even exist?

“In modern society couples get pregnant”.

Wow.

My conviction is that as progressives we need to be honest about the possible undesirable side effects of some of the things we advocate; they don’t in any way outweigh the good that will be achieved, but if we seek to deny or ignore them it’s too easy for the opposition to present us as naive idealists. So, more female commentators on CT, wonderful, especially when they’re as good as the ones on this thread, but we have to face up to the fact that their presence appears to make the stupid comments even stupider.

@Neville: I think I get the dry humor intended in your comment, but I think a woman reading this thread could reasonably take it negatively. That whole “we” thing has some exclusionary implications that satirical intent can’t balance.

Niamh, could you lift 133 onto the front page at some point, because it’s important and too often overlooked. Thanks.

Data,

“In modern society couples get pregnant, not women. That’s in the language: “we are pregnant”, 2.8 million google hits.”

When that phrase was first used, it was cute, and women embraced it because it got hubby interested more interested in the baby and look what happened? Men began to change diapers and push baby carriages! I remember when those things were radical.

But turns out that it was the beginning of a process of colonization. Like when Neil Patrick Harris announced he and his male partner were “pregnant” and subsequent to the birth of twins referred to their mother dismissively as “the surrogate.” Something wrong there, something very wrong.

Data, what you don’t get is this: you may claim to understand another’s experience, but you aren’t the judge of that claim’s truth. The other person is. You claim to understand women’s experience and consistently in this thread dismiss women telling you that you don’t, in fact, get it. You aren’t unusual, but you are, as Jim Henley said, a problem.

Holy… you were actually serious with that nonsense, Mr. Data?

Couples do not get pregnant. Women do. Their partners can help out, and should, but COME ON.

As for the rest… I dabbled in libertarianism back when I was in my teens. It had a certain appeal. I’m sure the fact that I was/am a well-off, reasonably intelligent/not disabled, educated white guy had nothing to do with that appeal. Nothing at all.

Then I grew up.

“In modern society couples get pregnant, not women. That’s in the language: “we are pregnant”, 2.8 million google hits.”

Meanwhile, “I am pregnant” – ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY SEVEN MILLION GOOGLE HITS. This is almost too easy.
As I seem to remember remarking earlier, I am not very surprised that the Georgian for data is “data”, but I am quite surprised that Georgian has a single word meaning “that I have just pulled out of my ass”.

I claim to understand women’s experience. Certainly to the degree necessary for a comment thread, and, frankly, beyond. And you believe that other persons get to judge whether I, in fact, get it or not?

Well, of course they do. If you were to say “Look, I’m not a commercial airline pilot, but I understand what it’s like to be one”, then people who are in fact commercial airline pilots do get to judge whether you, in fact, get it or not.

I’m starting to think the use of the word “Data” in a certain commentator’s net de plume is an ironic little joke thought up by the Tyrell Corporation’s marketing department during a nice long lunch.

Data @149 and 73,

I was dismayed to see that you have adult daughters and yet do not feel the male/female ratio of comments is important. Sure, you probably understand your daughter better than I do (I trust that you do). But I probably understand the effect of harassment better than you do because I’ve experienced it myself. In any case, how can you have daughters and not see that women’s participation in a thread matters?

“I claim to understand women’s experience. Certainly to the degree necessary for a comment thread, and, frankly, beyond.” So you and other men can speak for women? What else am I to conclude from the fact that you don’t think it’s an issue whether most commenters in a thread are male?

Check your privilege.

Lynne, I don’t speak for women. I speak on thread’s topic. Women and men, my daughters, and everyone else are free to participate. They may say something interesting or they may say something boring, or something stupid, or something funny, or something profound, and their gender is completely irrelevant. As far as I am concerned. Why is this so controversial?

And while I’m in snark mode, beats me why so many libertarians think a society run along their preferred lines would move them up the food chain. Most of them seem singularly ill-equipped for a productive life in the kind of world they want.

@158

“Women and men, my daughters, and everyone else are free to participate.”

Would you feel free to participate in forums where so much of what you said was routinely dismissed, ignored or willfully misrepresented because of your gender? I thought you said you claimed to understand women’s experience.

@Nababov, Would you feel free to participate in forums where so much of what you said was routinely dismissed, ignored or willfully misrepresented because of your gender?

Well, as you can see, I do participate despite all that, and I don’t even mind it. But thank you for your sympathy.

@Rob, 138

My real question is this : does anyone know of somewhere online where it’s possible to debate these ideas in a spirit of logical investigation rather than as a purely political debate? Can such a thing even exist?

Depends on what you mean by “these ideas”. If you mean the neoliberal position that further workplace regulation would have costs exceeding benefits, I’m sure that’s possible– it seems to be the ascendant view in both American political parties.

If you mean the libertarian idealist view that freedom is by definition nothing but enforcement of contracts and property law, then, no, that isn’t possible, because it’s a purely political project in disguise as a philosophy. It takes some forms of coercion faced by real people and tries to redefine the word “coercion” to ignore them. So, to victims of the marketplace, the threat libertarianism poses is not merely that they will be harmed, but that the very language they rely on to call upon the rest of their community for aid and justice will be taken out from under them.

The only way to keep the discussion purely “logical”–to exclude all mention of privilege or empathy–is to exclude anyone who objects to the new definitions. Logic alone can’t be the arbiter between two incompatible definitions. So, no, the thing that you ask for cannot, in principle, exist.

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand: Wow, I’ve got to read this.

Philosophy is always political, politics is not always philosophy. The idealist libertarian isn’t trying to understand the world we live in, they’re trying to deduce a new one from first principles. They’re doing politics without admitting that they’re doing politics.

And another vote for certainly worth reading parts of, not worth feeling bad about not finishing or enjoying the whole thing.

@164. Oh, I don’t think it’s your gender that’s driving the general reception of your views here.

Yes, Dhalgren. Hard work but sometimes worth it. And Bellona, if you follow many libertarians’ logic to the end, is where they should end up.

(And we’ve crossed over with the fun summer reading thread.)

I am reminded of a talk I attended at an open source software conference a few years ago in Portland, Oregon. Abstract: “….As a developer, how do you encourage users to report bugs? This is not a tutorial, but an examination of the social aspects of bug reporting….We’ll look at some dos and don’ts when reporting and receiving a bug, how to provide enough information, avoid a hostile tone, make it easy to report and track bugs, and how to keep your head when all you really want to do is bash someone’s in….”

During the Q&A, I asked: in a sense, this issue reduces to, “How can I become a better person?” and asked for tips. The speaker responded that, in his case, moving to Portland had helped.

JanieM @ 121

Thank you for answering. I think it’s interesting that Belle’s sexual harassment example has struck such a chord. Could we say that the absurdity of libertarianism is more evident to women because they tend to be aware of their vulnerability much earlier, in their early teenage years, while men still are under the illusion that they are immortal ubermenschen (and thus attracted to the freedom to conquer and dominate)? It seems like two obvious reasons that women would be more aware of the importance of legal protections are: 1) conscious exposure to sexual predation, which fewer men will have been privy to; 2) consciousness that their recognition as equals in society is recent, contested, was resisted by men every step of the way, and needed the force of law to come to fruition. There are probably other reasons as well.

I think Data is making the mistake of assuming that male and female voices, if they differ, must be in a competition for the truth rather than being complementary ways of thinking and feeling?

@ Sherri-

Interesting. If you can see early on that meritocracy is a myth or a very imperfectly operating system, you won’t be convinced by those beating the drums to just let it work its glorious magic. It’s also true that people like Caplan make libertarianism look bad: but plenty of young dudes are taken in even so!

@180 Sorry, but it’s almost exactly the opposite: I’m assuming that voices (in a conversation like this one) differ for reasons that have very little to do with gender. That’s all there is to it. And it seems to me that the opposite view, when you get to the bottom of it, is based on crude stereotypes: girls feel vulnerable, boys want to dominate, men resist gender equality, and so on.

@etv13:

Jim Henley @142: Seriously? Did you actually say that you (I assume a man) get the joke, but women can’t be expected to?

Not my meaning. I meant that I could see a woman failing to find it funny. Despite the author’s intent, it does cast the presence of women in a thread as a problem for a “we” that is cast as the folks who count.

@Jim Henley:

Well, okay, but even now you are dangerously close to the old saw about women not having a sense of humor.

For the record, I didn’t read Neville Morley’s “we progressives” as meaning “we [male] progressives.” And, for the record (I’ve said it in other threads, but I don’t expect people to remember), I’m a woman.

Since I have limited free time, I usually show up late to the party, when points I would make are already made, especially since CT often engages the kind of rightists where it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Like the “women were freer in 1880” thing – you scarcely need my help for stuff like that. And going into the weeds with them seems only to further inflate libertarians’ already exaggerated sense of seriousness and legitimacy. The questions just aren’t all that subtle, and to act as though they are almost verges on social irresponsibility. On a blog which also has much technical content that’s over my head, I can only hope that e.g. careful parsings of Hayek are some kind of dry academic jest I’m too common to appreciate. I also have limited reading time, and would rather spend it on things that actually *deserve* painstaking attention, like Marx or Japanese quilting magazines.

I don’t usually feel it as a gender thing, but I was just a wee bit deflated that, although he was already being run off for other reasons, nobody but myself took up with asdf for calling me “hon” in the first thread of this series. Where a man might see that as an annoyance as petty as the word is short, I felt it was his crowning offense. And there was another recent thread where I was told my own perception of what is offensive to a person of my gender presentation was wrong, and uncharitable to the normative majority, but I don’t remember that person’s handle or gender.

Nobody wants to be tokenized, and I personally am too heterodox in my feminism, with a bit of hard Left suspicion of obsessive identity politics, to feel quite at ease with calls to participate qua female, especially if the point is to back up a canonical “women’s experience” I may not share because of my gender variance. I *am* that girl who doesn’t have to worry about unwanted passes, which, although it makes me hate Data T. even harder, also makes me doubt I’m quite the sort of comrade Belle is looking for.

[Continued] The part-time pay left no room for insulin, and in the several months it took him to wrangle a charity prescription he got sicker and sicker. Eventually so sick that he could only work the 20 hours they were actually paying for, or a bit more. (I should probably note that this was not simply a low salary – he was unambiguously working off the clock, complete with fictional paystubs reading “20 hours x [$rate].”) Repeated attempts to explain his situation and renegotiate with the owners were stonewalled. After not many weeks of doing only as much as he was actually paid to do, he was fired for underperformance. And could not collect unemployment because he was fired “for cause.”

@Jim Henley: Fair enough. What I am wondering now is whether it is simply a feature of communicating (or attempting to communicate) on internet comment threads, or an indication of the way gender considerations are embedded deep in our culture and language that even you, who from all I can see are a decent, intelligent, feminist guy proceeding in good faith, can find himself in the position of saying something that can so easily be misunderstood/doesn’t represent your conscious intentions. I originally wrote “gender stereotypes,” but changed it to “gender considerations” because what I am trying to convey is not that you fell into the women-lack-a-sense-of-humor mode, but that you apparently read Neville Morley’s “we progressives” as excluding women. And maybe you’re right; I haven’t read enough of Neville Morley to know whether it is fair to say that by “we” he meant “we men.” All I know is that I didn’t read it that way.

@193

“I don’t know, Kip, I judge it empirically, by experience. And maybe that’s the problem. I live in a city, work for a big NGO, and I don’t see women around me being more submissive, or less power-hungry than men. They are not treated differently. Everything is about the same. In the family were I grew up (also in a city) my mother was the dominant figure, and that wasn’t anything unusual. But it occurs to me now that perhaps other people have difference experience. Maybe they are, I don’t know, farmers, or something. If that’s the case, I admit, I was wrong. I have no idea what it’s like to live on a farm.”

A danger of privilege is assuming that your observations are true and then being able to dismiss the need for diverse observations because if yours are true, then how is it that any others are necessary? A consensus of data must be formed. Another danger is that observations are personal and can be very flawed. A way to combat this is to rebuke confirmational bias such as the one you occasionally espouse in some of your comments.

Ex: The women around me don’t particularly seem submissive or otherwise troubled by their ambition and desire to do what it take to realize that ambition.

It is very easy to turn the above summation into: So now I will look around for specific behaviors that I deem to be submissive or distressed.

This in turn precludes any behaviors that you don’t find submissive. What if the women you are observing has had a history of abuse and has developed coping mechanisms? What if she is able to push all that aside and single-mindedly work towards her goal? What if, and this is a big one, some women self-select out of the process entirely? In these cases, the behaviors you look for are not present and to your observation show that there is not a problem. You cannot assume that you know people so intimately as to be able to divine why they react the way they react.

In fact, you don’t even need to stay in the realm of sexual harassment to know this is true. Any kind of trauma or event. This thinking can also lead to “This woman isn’t crying hysterically while she reports a rape, clearly she was not raped.”, which is the bedrock for rape culture. Or “This woman reported that her child died. She does not seem distressed to *me*. Clearly she killed the child.”

And from this, how easy would it be to find the things that bolster that thought? To the exclusion of any other avenue of thinking?

In this way you have betrayed privilege for truth. When you are privileged, and that can look like anything (You could be a minority and a Christian, but the mantle of Christianity does confer tribal advantage with other Christians for instance), your reality can effectively shut out anyone else’s because it is not conforming to the way you *know* your work place functions. Your reality is no one else’s. Your perception is yours and yours alone, but in aggregate you and others like you experience certain commonalities, certain privileges that allow you to maintain your reality. I don’t know what kind of sexual harassment others may have experience, but I know that certain circumstances are the hallmark of the shared experience. There are shared experiences typical of being a Mexican immigrant or a Black man or a woman that may or may not overlap. The Venn diagram is ever-shifting so to suss out these things you need these voices, these people, to share with you what you are missing. At any given moment you are missing something; especially if you are a white male.

So when folks trying to engage women in these threads or any minority, they are saying “We accept you here and we would welcome your input. We will also attempt to make this a zone where your thoughts are heard. Please, don’t self-select out of this process of engagement.”

There are entire fields of study that reveals these issues that you dismiss with a simple “But *I* never witness these things!”

tl;dr: Anecdotal evidence =/= empirical data.

@etv13: Agreed!

I blame society!

But it seems highly unlikely to me. So I choose to ignore this possibility. In fact, it doesn’t even occur to me.

The mind is to boggle at how so profoundly stupid this is, but I am thankful that you made it clear what everyone was basically assuming. So, I guess from this point on, I know that nothing you say will be relevant, that, at no point in time, should you be taken seriously because you take nothing seriously unless it happens to you and a lot of things will never happen to you that others experience daily.

This is a comment thread. Anyone who cares can read the post, type a comment, and press submit. And – voila – it appears on the page. Others read it and they either welcome your input, or ignore it, or sometimes they may try to make fun of you, or even bully you. Based on your input. Is this unfair to women and minorities? To fat people? Why? This attitude seems patronizing. In my experience, people, including women and minorities, don’t like it.

Once again, a clarifying statement that really explains just how privileged and completely non-serious you are to this conversation. If you think that there aren’t some forms of harassment, comments, and general tone of a thread that actively discourage those groups of posting, you are out of your mind. You can afford to be dismissive because there are very few places that will, even passively, be uncomfortable for a white male to post. You feel entitled to post, but there are groups of people who have never experienced that since of entitlement everywhere. The amount of sexist, misogynistic, and violent comments that can be casually tossed around as soon as someone identifies themselves as a woman (or any other minority) is staggering.

There was a bit of a brouhaha about the terminology of how to refer to those with disabilities earlier in this thread. Had the commenter (Chris?) who corrected the other been ignored or brushed off or recognized, but had those comments he found offensive been maintained he might’ve said “Screw it! These people cannot understand my reality. These people refuse to even contemplate it. I’m not welcome here.”

People are telling you, point blank, that this is actually an issue and you dismiss it because you don’t experience it. You take your experience to highly and disregard those of others. I believe that what you say is your experience is your experience, but you don’t of others. That isn’t informed. That isn’t objective. That is uniquely personal and flawed.

If your kind of comments were the only comments on this thread, I’d have bolted so fast because there is nothing here for me. I generally don’t even engage in these kinds of threads because of comments like yours: ill-informed words, disguised as nuanced opinion (when it is not), wrapped in selfishness. It’s just half-baked ideology that really wants to be taken seriously and it really shouldn’t because it isn’t.

It comes down to this. If I can ignore you, I will. I cannot possible take you seriously because you are not a serious person to the conversation.

>can’t quit because my sister-in-law has been unemployed for 15 months and I’m afraid he’ll tell everyone in my small town I’m “difficult” and no one will ever hire me.

Sounds like a good reason to create jobs without higher government spending, inflation, or trade barriers no?

[link to explanation of how to do this removed due to spam filter]

>Is that kind of like when the margin is too narrow to contain the proof?

Try this: /moc.topsgolb.nalpnoitaercboj//:ptth

Belle, don’t worry about it, not only because I personally didn’t take it that way, but also because excessive scrupulosity about sensitivity to identity can be a very bad thing, though of course not in the guilty manner of Data’s opposite mistake. By its very nature it tends to afflict those who need it least, distracting from or in some cases completely obliterating the universal problem of class and exploitation, which even most white men can never escape. I do think discussions of identity can be useful, particularly in revealing how very little the social hierarchy under capitalism has to do with personal merit. But taken to extremes it’s almost, weirdly enough, like when the guy making $120K is persuaded to identify his interest with that of the rich and wastes his energy resenting those just below him: wrong enemy, buddy. Only the conscientious liberal’s mistaken enemy is herself. Unless you control the means of production, you haven’t got all that much privilege over me anyway. You may have marginally better luck finding a job that lets you pee. Go you! (Incidentally, don’t you think it’s fascinating that in the US the upper-middle class is in the same tax bracket as the ultra-rich? I think it’s a deliberately designed bottleneck, much more specifically revealing of how power really operates than the inevitable story of how the rest of us are left to fight over the crumbs.)

I don’t consider myself trans, rather genderqueer or something like that. IRL I always use feminine pronouns and the name my parents gave me, no matter how that may fuck with people’s heads relative to my appearance. When, how and why I can appropriate male privilege is a knotty question. IRL my more masculine style of communication has often earned me no thanks from men. Online is different depending on what handle I use. But people who respond to argument under a female handle with misogyny I leave aside as too stupid to bother with, rather than wasting my time appeasing them with the trick of passing.

The amount of sexist, misogynistic, and violent comments that can be casually tossed around as soon as someone identifies themselves as a woman (or any other minority) is staggering.

First of all, I don’t believe I’ve seen any of that here, in this thread, or, for that matter, on this blog in general. It’s quite comme il faut. But more to the point, objecting to sexism and advocating special treatment for women are two different things. They are not of the same kind. I suppose I can see a blogger saying something like: ‘I now realize I was sexist, and that was wrong, so I apologize, it won’t happen again, and I welcome women to my blog.’ But that’s certainly not the case here.

Fisher, ‘an anarchist and a middle manager..’ is like a vegetarian butcher.
You’re obviously not an anarchist, for you would refuse to operate in any powerstructure or hierarchy if you truly were one.
You probably just imagine yourself being an anarchist but obviously lack the sincere ideology and willpower to refuse to go along with the rollover and fetch game.

That’s another reason managers are usually not nice people; at heart they’re angry at themselves for squandering their moral dignity and the ideals they once pretended to hold sacred, but most of them will ultimately project this anger at the ones not willing to do the same.

I have not denied the phenomena of prejudice. And I certainly don’t count the incident in which you were called “hon” (I wasn’t aware of it, I don’t read all comments) as misogyny. I don’t think I need any special reasons, common sense will do. Condescension, directed at you specifically – yes, but nowhere near misogyny. Just like addressing someone, a specific person, as ‘boy’ wouldn’t indicate any general attitude towards the men in general.

@Jim Henley: sorry for lack of response, I’ve been away and out of reach of internet all weekend. Fair point; I did mean ‘we progressives’, but comment was undoubtedly ambiguous – comes of posting in too much of a hurry.

Maggie, may I ask: in your comment 215, where you decided to address me, you didn’t bother to hide your contempt and condescension. I hope you agree. You tell me that my response can’t be anything but uninteresting, you mock my reading comprehension. You accuse me of denials, endorsement of prejudice, cowardness, and god knows what else; all in 2 short paragraphs.

This is typical for comment threads in political blogs. Orwell wrote:

But when one has admitted that nationalism has not triumphed everywhere, that there are still peoples whose judgements are not at the mercy of their desires, the fact does remain that the pressing problems — India, Poland, Palestine, the Spanish civil war, the Moscow trials, the American Negroes, the Russo-German Pact or what have you — cannot be, or at least never are, discussed upon a reasonable level. […] Let a certain note be struck, let this or that corn be trodden on — and it may be corn whose very existence has been unsuspected hitherto — and the most fair-minded and sweet-tempered person may suddenly be transformed into a vicious partisan, anxious only to ‘score’ over his adversary and indifferent as to how many lies he tells or how many logical errors he commits in doing so.

This is typical and I don’t mind. And you seem to be right in the spirit. Which is fine, and I take it as a confirmation of some of the points I made earlier in the thread.

One thing I don’t understand though: why do you demand a different standard from those who respond to you?

Thanks.

Data @ 220: “One thing I don’t understand though: why do you demand a different standard from those who respond to you?”

Data, asdf resorted to an infamous sexist trope in response to Maggie’s second comment on that thread. On this thread Maggie suggested that “you must not be a very attentive or careful reader” after many of your comments made that a reasonable conclusion. (For instance: “So I choose to ignore this possibility. In fact, it doesn’t even occur to me.”)

If we were talking about the exclusion and misreading of farmers at Crooked Timber and you wrote “I know what farmers’ life is like — I’ve been to a farmer’s market, after all,” and held to that thesis against all comers, eventually you’d get an annoyed reaction from a farmer.

“Boy,” particularly, is a glaringly bad example of something that would never be used as a discriminatory insult.

It is if used by a white man to a black man, BTW …

On this thread Maggie suggested that “you must not be a very attentive or careful reader” after many of your comments made that a reasonable conclusion. (For instance: “So I choose to ignore this possibility. In fact, it doesn’t even occur to me.”)

A reasonable conclusion from the fact that I choose to ignore what I consider a ridiculously unlikely possibility is that I must not be a very attentive or careful reader? I don’t think so.

You don’t like what I’m saying, and you are trying to belittle me, that’s all. And that’s fair enough as far as that goes, but I wish you would instead address the issue: are modern western women (on average) normal, fully developed, independent persons, just like the men (on average), or are they noticeably more traumatized and vulnerable, in need of special care and encouragement, in CT’s comment threads?

Spell it out. And then, perhaps, we’ll agree to disagree, because I don’t see why someone who believes that the former is true must necessarily be defective.

…the issue: are modern western women (on average) normal, fully developed, independent persons, just like the men (on average), or are they noticeably more traumatized and vulnerable, in need of special care and encouragement, in CT’s comment threads?

…and have you stopped beating your wife?

Data @ 227: “A reasonable conclusion from the fact that I choose to ignore what I consider a ridiculously unlikely possibility is that I must not be a very attentive or careful reader? I don’t think so.”

The possibility you chose to ignore was Shay J @ 198’s “A danger of privilege is assuming that your observations are true and then being able to dismiss the need for diverse observations because if yours are true, then how is it that any others are necessary?” Yes, I believe that ignoring that possibility, in the context of this thread, makes you an inattentive and careless reader.

You go on: “You don’t like what I’m saying, and you are trying to belittle me, that’s all.” It’s true that I am criticizing your behavior. That can be uncomfortable. My hope is that you will amend the behavior. I also hope (perhaps more realistically, given that it’s hard to amend behavior in the face of direct criticism) that other men will amend similar behaviors, or not take them up in the first place. I’m trying to be an ally, one of the Jim Henley’s of the world and not one of the asdf’s.

I wish you’d try it too.

Data
“are modern western women (on average) normal, fully developed, independent persons, just like the men (on average), or are they noticeably more traumatized and vulnerable, in need of special care and encouragement, in CT’s comment threads?”

I don’t think that the ‘average’ person exists or is of any real interest. Average doesn’t really tell an accurate story and is one of the shortcomings of most psych publications; only the average is seen as important but it is the standard deviation that is really interesting.

One study that perhaps needs to be understood better by looking at the individuals who participated and the differences between the subjects is the Milgram shock experiments.

“In 1961 psychologist Stanley Milgram embarked on one of the most controversial, yet fascinating psychological experiments ever conducted. They were said to show that we are all capable of evil, in certain circumstances. Many of the participants are still traumatised by the experience. We present a panel discussion about the lessons and ethics of the Milgram experiments called ‘Behind the Shock Machine – Did Science go Too Far?’.”

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/beyond-the-shock-machine/4044812

This link is totally off topic, but I’m into inclusiveness and finding links between this, that and everything.

And to answer your question; yes I am in need of special treatment to ‘feel’ entitled to participate in a discussion in which there are people as strongly self-confident and as lacking in empathy as you are. But I understand that I am not average. I have no idea why I am in need of the encouragement of someone like Belle to feel as if, and to believe that my contribution would be welcome and not dismissed as the foolish romantic ravings of a typical unintelligent female who naturally exaggerates, takes things personally etc. These old stereotypes linger on outside the rarefied atmosphere of your workplace Data. Do you think my kind should die out as your type of person takes over the world and makes it the perfect place it could be if only…..

One more thing, I have this crazy idea that it could be useful to discuss differences between people using the yin-yang concept; as Jonathon Haidt has done for the left-right dichotomy in his book “The Righteous Mind”.

Misaki you are not wrong, this is a variation on the Dunning-Krueger effect;

http://www.spring.org.uk/2012/06/the-dunning-kruger-effect-why-the-incompetent-dont-know-theyre-incompetent.php

“”One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”

Is it yin or yang that is more likely to be filled with doubt and indecision? How much better off would we be if there had been more of this in evidence when many of the policy decision had been make over the past decades?

Data Tata at 227: I wish you would instead address the issue: are modern western women (on average) normal, fully developed, independent persons, just like the men (on average)

Oh for heaven’s sake. Here’s what you said there: normal, fully developed, independent persons are just like men.

I doubt more commentary on Data’s remarks is needed, however.

Yarrow,
the “unlikely possibility” remark was (obviously) a reply to “What if the women you are observing has had a history of abuse and has developed coping mechanisms? What if she is able to push all that aside and single-mindedly work towards her goal?, etc”

The “privilege” thing is another nonsense, at least in my situation. Because of the gender imbalance that exists at my workplace, I’m at a disadvantage. It’s not my fantasy. It’s an official handicap, being a man here. It’s in the HR manuals. Should I indulge in self-pity?

Alright, anyway: sorry about all this. Not a bad way to kill a Sunday, and I hope it was a good fun for everybody. Thanks, Belle.

@addicted44,

The reasonable libertarian response to workplace sexual abuse is not “leave the job”. Sexual abuse or coercion is wrong. However, it is important to consider the effectiveness and side effects of a regulation.

It would be equally wrong for me to say that the liberal response to every workplace indignity is to pass a regulation against it.

There are good regulations. Most libertarians consider the enforcement of property “rights” as good regulation or law. My guess is the vast majority would agree that it is also entirely reasonable to prohibit sado-masochistic sex with dead animals as an undisclosed condition of continued employment.

There is a place for good regulations. In general, these tend to be simple and consistent and they don’t attempt to engineer social outcomes. They are fair and are the type of thing that anyone would agree to before starting “the game.” The trouble with too many rules is that they limit human freedom and limit actions and that they often have unintended side effects. They can limit dynamism and stifle prosperity. But too many regulations and micro management are a long long way from no rules or regulations.

@Jerry,

Good catch. I concur with your edit.

For what it is worth, I will add that reasonable libertarians would like the outcomes to be determined within the game wherever possible.

In other words, they want to establish rules of the game which reinforce positive sum, win win interactions and which discourages zero sum win lose interactions. They’re much more skeptical of top down efforts to influence who wins and who loses from above.

For example, I would be very suspicious of a rule which attempted to help employers or employees at the expense of one or the other. I would be much more open to rules which both the employer and employees would voluntarily agree to absent the knowledge of whether they are in the former or the latter position. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but is a useful rule of thumb.

If ‘boy’ indicates a general attitude towards children, then ‘hon’ must indicate a general attitude towards sweet substances.

Women call men ‘hon’ all the time. Like I said, Maggie could easily call me ‘hon’, instead of typing “Whatever it is I’m sure it will be really uninteresting.”

Data T., #249:

If ‘boy’ indicates a general attitude towards children, then ‘hon’ must indicate a general attitude towards sweet substances.

No, that’s not how language works. I suggest you consult a semanticist.

Also, this wasn’t about calling a man “hon” in any circumstance, or calling a woman “hon” for purposes of flirtation, but putting down a woman during an intellectual debate by employing “hon”. Different thing.

Data, I’ve finally gotten to the end of the comment thread and I have to say that your posts have been one of the primary encouragements for me to de-lurk. So, good job, I guess?

You’ve claimed (perhaps facetiously) that you are being discriminated against in this comment thread because of your gender – apparently forgetting that the majority of the commenters on this thread and on these conversations have historically been male.

You’ve claimed that women and men are treated the same in your workplace, even though I am 95% sure that you have no idea what the men and women in your workplace are paid, because whoever told you would be fired.

You’ve claimed that pregnancy doesn’t have a greater socioeconomic effect on women than on men, despite claiming to have children of your own. Does the mother of your children work, by the way? How many of your married peers have stay at home wives? How many have stay at home husbands? If you have any female peers who have had children, how do their ages compare with your own?

I will admit to not knowing enough about your industry to know if nannies are common in your class, but remember, the grand majority of families are unable to afford full-time childcare or domestic employees. For families which cannot afford childcare and domestics, who do you think shoulders more of that unpaid labor? How do you think that additional labor responsibility affects their performance in their paid work?

You’ve implied that an industry would have to be as different from your own as agriculture in order for gender gaps which every single woman and many of the men in this thread have attested to to exist, despite the fact that the grand majority of the personal examples given by commentators in this thread indicate low- to mid-wage city work. I may be reading too much into this because I’m from an agricultural family, but in my experience, when someone brings up farmers in contrast to their own high-paying office job, it’s in an implicitly derogatory light.

You are denying the experiences of the majority of the commenters here because it is against your own experience. What’s more likely – that you are mistaken about wide swaths of the country with which you are admittedly unfamiliar, or that twentyish other people are mistaken about their own everyday lives?

And what does it say about you that 200 comments on, you still privilege your own impression of other people’s experiences over their own testimonies?

This has been half of an interesting thread to read, and half junk. I rarely comment, and I will delurk just to say: it is not worth my time to participate in conversations in which there are other participants, such as Data, who deny my humanity, my worth, and who out of hand dismiss the possibility that I could have something to say which they have not already thought of themselves. Data needs no actual input from other people to reach his/her conclusions; he/she said so (“It doesn’t even occur to me”). Having someone like that masturbating all over the conversation derails at least half of it into attempts to argue that (help me lord) different kinds of voices can be valuable. That is just much too elementary an argument to hold my interest. It’s an assault on my dignity and fatally crippling to my arguments to have to argue that I can, theoretically, have something valuable to say, before I can even say something.

It’s not that women are more fragile than men, really. It’s that there’s a certain kind of debate that assumes people don’t exist in a social context, the poster has objective access to facts, and the only thing worth discussing is speculating out your ass on those “objective” facts. I have heard women using this style as well, though I think it is much less common in my social context. I used to use it a lot myself. I’ve tried to learn not to. It’s not important to me to quantify how “male” this style is; I will just say it drives me away, and it drives me away specifically as a woman. And it is a very, very libertarian way of being in debates.

It’s been very nice to read some of the welcoming things here, and has encouraged me to comment. At the same time, allowing commenters such as Data to attack the very idea that women may have something valuable to say, as women, really reduces that welcome.

If you want more participation from this woman, you have to censor people like Data. Yes, censorship. Not all kinds of conversations can be had in all spaces. Each social space can only hold a limited range of conversation and every productive discussion I’ve ever participated in was held under certain social limitations, whether spoken or unspoken. If you want enthusiastic participation by women in Crooked Timber threads, you’re going to have to ban- or limit to 1 comment per day or something- malicious commenters who say things like “women don’t get pregnant, couples get pregnant” in order to deny that women’s voices have any value. There has to be a baseline level of good faith argument to have a good conversation, and that means excluding certain types of comments or lowering their volume enough that the adults in the room can actually talk.
(I’m a woman in case I didn’t make that clear above)

Personally, I didn’t respond to Data because he was worth my trouble to as such, but because it’s incredibly hard to leave that kind of stuff out there without responding, lest someone read the comments and think “oh, well, no one responded so therefore everyone agreed”. It’s the standard bait of a troll. If he wasn’t commenting, my blog experience would undoubtedly be better, not worse, and I don’t feel that Bread and Roses was disrespecting my judgement as such by her suggestion.

Yes Data Tutashkhia, I was condescending towards yew (phew, you noticed!) I have little but contempt for people who eschew the work to read up on and familiarize themselves with topics their background hasn’t pre-disposed them towards and then proceed to wear their ignorance as a badge of honour, expecting that their discussion partners take up the yoke of explaining and explaining and explaining again, against their own resistance.

If anything, your linguistically incredibly uninformed quip about sweet substances confirmed you being inclined to this form of overbearing arrogance.

Katherine’s thoughts resonate with me. It would be so nice to be able to simply *participate* in a discussion without first having to lay out that 2+2=4, the earth is round, and “hon” being a misogynist put-down when used towards someone who should be treated as an intellectual peer but happens to be a woman. But no, we have to wade through and dry out that swamp first.

2. I work for organization where your compensation is calculated according to your grade and other known parameters (location, dependents, etc.). There are no secrets.

Dependents are included? Wtf? Does that mean men with stay-at-home wives get paid extra? How are children of divorce accounted for? If I have a dependent parent who needs care do I get to count them as a dependent?

What industry is this, and which country?

@Katherine 257, Merian 259: There are some places, some threads, and some trolls where it’s best to feed the trolls a knuckle sandwich. But if your only reason for engaging with Data T. is so that people will know that not everyone agrees with him, on a thread initiated by Belle Waring on Crooked Timber, then I think you are making a tactical error.

Katherine @265: I get you. I get caught up in things sometimes, and have to tell myself, “You’re 52. You ought to know better.”

And far more importantly than my much longer 267:

I want to join in expressing sincere appreciation for the all the posts from the de-lurkers on this one. A much richer discussion because of you.

(As a sufferer of SIWOTIS, I appreciated how each new voice and contribution provided a sort of living refutation to the profound wrongness of the thread’s, erm, antagonist shall we say. Not that this was always the intention, of course – just an interesting side effect. One imagines a rocket indifferently bearing a flat earther stowaway into orbit far above the planet, even as he closes his eyes tightly to the scene in the viewport…)

@Katherine: and further to my comment at 266, you only have to look at my responses to Misaki in the “Frictionless Markets” thread to see that I’m still doing it. This is what comes of being on the internet at 3:00 in the morning.

(Re: point 1, I’m picturing a scene: The study, after dinner. Dark wood paneling and the severed heads of large animals adorn the walls. Carefully trimmed mutton chops and tightly waxed mustaches adorn the faces of our participants as they sit propped about on brown leather furniture, sipping scotch and filling the room with cigar smoke. (The 4 -year olds, too.) We join the discussion in progress: The experience of pregnancy and modern work life.

“Quite so, quite so, Professor Harcourt. But consider what we’ve all experienced. That tense feeling one gets when the person in line behind you at Starbucks reaches out without asking, after less than 15 seconds of acquaintance, and touches you on the abdomen. Making perhaps the 37th time something like that’s happened just this week. In a culture where pregnancy compels perfect strangers to feel they have license to touch us in such an intimate way with barely a by-your-leave, is it any wonder when our bosses and co-workers do the same? It’s really intolerable.”

A glass of scotch is slammed to the table for emphasis even as those present erupt momentarily in a chorus of “hear, hear!”; the four year olds, finely in tune with these and sundry other such trials – having had the basic mechanics of pregnancy fully explained to them by an older man once – nod their heads sagely…

Nothing strikes you as maybe a little odd about that?

And nothing strikes you as odd about me writing this whole contrived illustration? I for one know that if I had to go on to try to imagine a whole conversation like the above, with our without mustaches, I’m dead sure I couldn’t dream up even a fraction of the real issues, or write examples that were a fraction as compelling as stories of events that have actually happened, told by those who lived them. So,

Pop quiz: What are all the important issues of pregnancy and work life for women according to Data Tutashkhia?
…
Pencils down. Do you believe your list is comprehensive? That many women would agree it was, or that women couldn’t point out things you hadn’t thought of?

What if all the men on this thread collaborated on such a list. Certainly some of the men here are pretty astute, but do you really think we’d get to all the important issues, as judged by those here who actually face them? Do you think our discussion would be so thorough, so comprehensive that none of the women here could possibly think of a vital wrinkle or twelve that the “intellectual power of our [man] brains” alone had not illuminated for us? Couldn’t possibly relate a story that might radically change our opinion on the importance or plausibility of one matter or another?

And “pregnancy” is of course framing the discussion to consider issues faced by women from the start. If the starting point were something generic like “power issues in the workplace”, do you think that list, if created solely by men, is more likely to be comprehensive than the pregnancy one? Ha.)

Jack, I don’t know what else to say, that I haven’t said before. Most men are intimately involved with their partners’ pregnancies. Every aspect of it. In fact, from what I see, it’s not unusual for them to know more about it than their female partners. I already said that. If you don’t find it convincing, so be it.

I’m not sure what “pregnancy from a feminist perspective” is exactly, but the word ‘feminist’ doesn’t imply ‘woman’. There may very well be more male than female feminists in this world. Wouldn’t surprise me.

All other things equal: same location, same social class, same occupation, etc. – why would they have female-specific, systematic, and, the implication here is, concealed, differences in experiences/perspective? It doesn’t make sense to me. I would like some proof, or at least an example.

All other things equal: same location, same social class, same occupation, etc. – why would they have female-specific, systematic, and, the implication here is, concealed, differences in experiences/perspective?

Because women are systematically treated differently from men, even when all these variables are controlled for. Which is something that a lot of people in this thread have been trying to tell you and something you are committed to intentionally ignoring.

Except the part where they actually physically bear and give birth to the child

Yes, if we were discussing sensations experienced during pregnancy, that would’ve been a great point for you to make.

Most men are intimately involved with their partners’ pregnancies. Every aspect of it. In fact, from what I see, it’s not unusual for them to know more about it than their female partners. I already said that. If you don’t find it convincing, so be it.

Let’s assume that’s true. Maybe not the “know more about it part”, but that the men here — as sensitive and attentive friends, partners, fathers, etc. — have collectively paid excellent attention when women of their acquaintance relate to them feelings and thoughts about things like being felt up by strangers at Starbucks while pregnant. And, thus sensitized, they have gone on to notice such things when they see them later out in the world, and made careful observation of the reactions of the women experiencing the event, and so forth.

So, let us hypothetically concede that, technically perhaps, just perhaps, a sufficiently well attuned group of men, such as that which no doubt populates Crooked Timber comment threads on libertarianism, would be able to relate back their second hand accounts of these issues reasonably accurately to each other. And thus informed by the experiences of women retold second hand by some men we could, arguendo, have at least a tolerable conversation on a blog about the experience of pregnancy without any women at all.

Um. Great?

But why. in. the. world. would you want to so vocally defend the idea that all those second hand accounts, however hypothetically faithful, cannot be productively supplemented by a few, you know, first hand ones? In what possible world are the original accounts valueless once a man can relate it second hand?

What Neville said, and Katherine and Jerry.

Jack, those are not second hand accounts. They are first hand accounts. Experienced by both. Except the physiological part. Which I don’t find relevant here.

Jerry, you got me. Replace “all aspects” with “all but physiological aspects”.

Sexual harassment has no assigned gender roles. I’ve seen various kinds myself.

Jerry, in your last paragraph, as it usually is with denunciations, you’re telling me what I think, but I don’t recognize it. Everybody has a different experience, there is no denying it. Everybody has a story to tell. I’m objecting to the idea that any representative of one well integrated and evenly distributed category necessarily has some valuable insights unavailable to her counterparts from the other category. Weird application of metaphysics, if you ask me.

Jerry, in your last paragraph, as it usually is with denunciations, you’re telling me what I think, but I don’t recognize it. Everybody has a different experience, there is no denying it. Everybody has a story to tell. I’m objecting to the idea that any representative of one well integrated and evenly distributed category necessarily has some valuable insights unavailable to her counterparts from the other category. Weird application of metaphysics, if you ask me.

I’m not telling you what you think; I’m telling you what you’re doing and how what you’re doing is being perceived.

But, ok, progress! You recognize that everyone has different experiences. But the problem persists because you’re “objecting to the idea that any representative of one well integrated and evenly distributed category necessarily has some valuable insights unavailable to her counterparts from the other category.” That says to me that your recognition that “everybody has a different experience” is not really genuine; you only believe it in a trivial sense, not in a deep sense. But it is true, in a deep sense, because the experience of any situation is in some sense path-dependent, and the things you see in it are path-dependent too. That means that my hypothetical black (or gay, or female) counterpart is going to be attuned to certain things that I’m not attuned to, because I’ve never had to be. They say privilege is all the things you don’t have to think about, and I think that’s pretty accurate: I never have to think about the fact that someone might grab my ass or stare at my chest instead of listen to what I’m saying. I don’t have to worry about being raped in almost any circumstances because rather than being a 5’3″ female, I’m a 6’2″ guy. That’s how it goes. What it means, though, is that if someone is telling me about how things look from their end, I try to do my best to see it through their eyes. I can’t, obviously; I’ll never have grown up black, say, or a woman. But I can make an effort and possibly learn something that I might not have learned otherwise. It’s not that different from any other kind of alternate perspective; after all, you wouldn’t say, as a structural engineer working on a building, “hey, I don’t have to know anything about this electrical wiring stuff.” You’d sit down with an actual electrician and let them tell you about the electrical issues that might affect what you’re doing.

Why would you even specify, incidentally, that your “representative” has to be “well-integrated” or “evenly distributed?” Presumably (and here I’ll hazard a guess at what you think), it’s because these actually make a material difference. If they were not “well-integrated” or “evenly distributed” (I’m still not quite sure what that means, exactly) then it might come out that this is another important variable that affects their experience. So given that you seem to accept those sorts of things as relevant, why stop there? Why not accept that sex (among a whole host of other factors) is just another such variable?

Your conviction that alternate views have nothing to offer you is exactly what’s at issue. If you continually deny the possibility that someone else is capable, by virtue of their experience, of offering you a unique perspective that you haven’t thought of yourself, then what that sounds like (even if you don’t say it explicitly) is: “I already know everything worth knowing. Your actual lives are of little interest to me.” Small wonder then, that people will feel, rightly, slighted by that sort of formulation and take umbrage!

jack, #279, this is quite brilliant. I may steal it.

The experience of workers who are banned from going to the washroom and therefore wear adult diapers is also a lot more easy to discuss without the physiological part. Or we could have a conversation about war — without the physiological part, you know, where people get killed and maimed.

…with violence and security concerns, when I moved here, there was a briefing. Rape, of any kind, wasn’t mentioned. But there is a large skinhead organization, and some areas are not safe after dark. It’s probably not too dangerous for me, because I don’t look different (just need to keep my mouth shut), but for others it may be. Women and men.

@Date, re: virtually any of your posts because they are uniformly dumb, not ignorant, dumb

I think you are confusing views with experiences. Yes, your female colleague may tell you that she’s some flavor of politics, but beyond that how she got there may be incredibly different.

My view is that pregnancy is hard and I may tell you that. Your view may be that pregnancy is hard and you may tell me that. But why *I* find it hard will probably be very different than why *you* find it hard…and that is because of…the psychology of it all. It is my body. I am directly experiencing child birth and you will never experience that so you’re probably inconvenience. You may empathize with me about how hard pregnancy is, but you cannot experience and thus your comment on how hard it is is very different than mine.

Same goes for literally any other condition you can think of. Are you poor? No? So how can you possibly, actually know what it is to be poor? A person who was born rich will never truly understand the struggles of their grandparents or parents who actually grew up poor and got rich.

Is your day spent worried about how the guy in the cubicle next to you keep hitting on you and you keep declining? Are you constantly aware of how much bigger he is? How he may not stand close to you, but you feel his presence? How terrified you are of ever being alone with him? Has he flirted with you? Did you rebuff him and he still continue?

See, on the outside, her rebuff may look like a polite “Maybe some other time.” And you take away from that “Oh, yes. Linda is seems interested because she indicated that she might be open to a date.” When actually, she doesn’t want to make that guy angry. And hell, he doesn’t even have to be physically imposing. All he has to be is her boss. Or maybe the boss likes that guy. Or maybe if she complains people will view her as “That woman who keeps leading Frank on. Crazy bitch.”

If you think that doesn’t happen, then that just goes to show how utterly and completely clueless you are. You can do that with being any kind of Other. If you don’t think you are privileged or that your experience is privileged, then you are wrong. You assume a default for everyone when that is not even objectively true. Numerous fields of studies have shown this. In fact, all you have to do is look at your own responses. Everything you have said suddenly has the caveat of “aside from psychology because that is irrelevant”, which is so dumb that I cannot even imagine anyone actually typing that with a straight face, let alone believe it. What the hell do you think the human experience is if it isn’t the psychology of the situation?

More than anything else, there is a bizarre repudiation of knowledge here. Everyone can have an opinion, but not all opinions are equal and opinion is not knowledge. I am a molecular geneticist, therefore, in that field no matter what any of you say unless you are also molecular geneticists, I more than likely have knowledge on my side. I can completely be a crank, but you would probably need 1) a working knowledge of what I’m talking about 2) another expert 3) a significant body of evidence provided by literature to disprove me.

And that is what is happening here. Subjectively, you can think you know everything about pregnancy; but *objectively* you are not actually pregnant. Your wife can tell you that the baby is kicking her, she can let you feel the baby kick and thus you have experience the kick through her, but you don’t actually know what it is like to *be* kicked. You know what she told you. It is second-hand and not experienced. You can think you know what Hypothetical Linda is experiencing; but unless you are Linda or even another woman, you actually don’t know.

So let’s try an exercise. I am about to defend my dissertation. Tell me what writing a dissertation is like. Tell me what being a woman in a hard science is like. Tell me what being a black woman in hard science is like. Tell me what being a Christian, black woman in hard science is like. If you can describe that perfectly, then please do so. If you can’t, then clearly you are missing the experience, aren’t you? I’ve been sexually harassed, go ahead and tell me what that is like. And while you’re at it, tell me what the people around me thought about it. I’ve been stopped in my car, while going to visit my mother, who lives in a rather well-to-do area. I was obeying traffic laws and all my tags were up-to-date. Tell me about that experience. You can, of course, assume I’m lying; but for this exercise, assume I’m not.

That is what you fail to consider when you try to normalize. By the way, normalizing data, scientifically or anything to do with the scientific method, is only useful when designating a default. That default must be agreed upon as truly representing the broad experience so that you can understand and put into context outliers. White guy =/= the default of human experience.

Just adding to the chorus of cheers for jack lecou — #’s 268 & 279 are brilliant.

@All

With Data’s comment at 291 can we finally stop feeding the Troll? We’ve destroyed the bridge to the Valley of Perpetual Cluelessness. We don’t need to go back. Ever. That way lies stupidity.