G(o)rrrr

by Eszter Hargittai on April 6, 2015

There is no shortage of stories about how uncomfortable things can be for women in tech, how hard it is for women to be taken as seriously as men, etc. Well, here is the nth installment of that saga. I attended GOR, the General Online Research conference, a couple of weeks ago hosted at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences. When I walked in, I was greeted by several women wearing the following T-shirt:

GORgeous

I found this rather curious. Why would the T-shirt for the staff/volunteers of a research conference on Internet use measurement and behavior have this word on it? I’m not so dense as to not get the GOR part, but it seemed completely out of place. Soon I started looking around the room for a male staff member, because I couldn’t help but wonder whether he would be wearing the same shirt. What do you think, dear reader? After the jump, I show you what the male volunteers were wearing.

GORilla

And there you have it. I double-checked and it is indeed 2015, in case you were confused like I was.

Then again, this was also the conference that hosted a panel discussion on “Behavioural Economics: A new idea of man – a need for new methods?” with – wait for it – exactly zero female panelists among the four plus the chair. Because, presumably, there are no women who could make relevant intellectual contributions to such a conversation. WTF.

{ 149 comments }

1

GeoX 04.06.15 at 4:10 pm

I don’t know what it says about me that my mind immediately flashed to Outlaws of Gor et al.

2

William Berry 04.06.15 at 4:32 pm

Pathetic, really.

I wonder: what is the relative likelihood of seeing this in the U.S. (or Anglo-sphere, generally) as opposed to in Europe?

I’m thinking a little less overt here in the U.S. (Which probably just means it ‘s more insidious.)

3

Eszter Hargittai 04.06.15 at 4:36 pm

William Berry, as clueless as many academic contexts can be in the US as well, I just cannot imagine an academic institution in the US hosting an event like this and ending up with such a case. Perhaps that’s naive and/or too generous, but that was my thought as I experienced all this.

4

Jacob Christensen 04.06.15 at 4:40 pm

[Bangs head repeatedly into desk]

Who, exactly, thought that was a good idea? Names of the organizing committee, please.

5

Brett Bellmore 04.06.15 at 4:48 pm

“Because, presumably, there are no women who could make relevant intellectual contributions to such a conversation. WTF”

Let’s see; 4 bits, that’s 16 different permutations, assuming half of the participants are women, and the participants for each talk were chosen entirely on non-gender basis.

A quick look at the program confirms there were on the order of 50 talks. So, purely by random chance, you’d expect 3-4 of the talks to have had all male participants, and a like number all female.

Admittely, this is a rather crude analysis, but I think you get the point.

6

Eszter Hargittai 04.06.15 at 4:48 pm

Jacob, I wondered about that myself. I don’t know if it would be members of the Program Committee or a local organizing committee. Whoever had the idea, I really don’t know what the person was thinking.

7

Phil 04.06.15 at 5:04 pm

Let’s see; 4 bits, that’s 16 different permutations, assuming half of the participants are women, and the participants for each talk were chosen entirely on non-gender basis.

On what basis are you making the latter assumption, precisely?

A quick look at the program confirms there were on the order of 50 talks. So, purely by random chance, you’d expect 3-4 of the talks to have had all male participants, and a like number all female.

I know you can square this circle if you try, big guy.

8

Jane 04.06.15 at 5:05 pm

I read stories like this and feel a small twinge of nostalgia for the early ’80’s when grown men would run away from personal computers because they had keyboards (only women knew how to type).

9

Brett Bellmore 04.06.15 at 5:14 pm

Phil, I am not saying that nothing funky happened. I’m just saying that a first order analysis says that, using not entirely crazy assumptions, you should have expected several all male, and several all female, panels at an event that big. And so, the existance of such a panel, by itself, says nothing at all profound.

Perhaps what I’m missing is an unstated, “But you should prevent that from happening, even innocently!” I think that’s the sort of thing that should be stated. The relentless determination that women should always be included is not the same thing as non-discrimination. It’s practically an opposite sort of thing.

10

bert 04.06.15 at 5:49 pm

Brett, despite you being a godawful tool, you may be on to something when you say there was an all-female panel. Eszter was at the conference; she’ll clear this up for us I’m sure.

11

parse 04.06.15 at 6:03 pm

Brett, your focus on calculating the likelihood of all-male panels occurring complete by chance may have blinded you to a salient detail that Eszter included: the title of the panel discussion was “Behavioural Economics: A new idea of MAN.” Given the total numb of words in the English language and the total in the title, why don’t you distract yourself with figuring the likelihood of arriving at that particular sequence.

12

gianni 04.06.15 at 6:14 pm

Brett, you are surely to convince us all to your side very soon. Your points are always well taken and drive right to the heart of the issue. Any day now we will see the folly of our leftist ways. Any day now…

13

Lynne 04.06.15 at 6:23 pm

Given the slogan on the T-shirts, why would you assume the all-male panel was random? They pretty much give the heads-up on how the organizers think.

14

Lynne 04.06.15 at 6:32 pm

Now that really made me laugh out loud, literally. If you are sincere, communication with you on this topic is probably not possible in a comment thread.

15

Abbe Faria 04.06.15 at 6:41 pm

“…as clueless as many academic contexts can be in the US as well, I just cannot imagine an academic institution in the US hosting an event like this and ending up with such a case.”

I couldn’t see even the most misogynist elements of US academia not knowing that this was a dead cert for a shitstorm.

Is this a German cultural thing? There’s not neccesarily the identity politics there is in the US. Parts of Eastern Europe are just monumentally fucked up in their treatment of women. You get a revanchist macho culture which combined with poverty leads to a massive sex trade and enormous sexualisation of women. I can imagine German tech would just the place that’s insulated enough from American liberal academia and exposed enough to a massively sexualised culture to allow this the two to collide.

16

Anarcissie 04.06.15 at 7:16 pm

So no males put on GORGEOUS shirts and no females put on GORILLA shirts to overturn the paradigm? I mean for starters. What a missed opportunity!

17

Cornelius 04.06.15 at 7:59 pm

Ouch, that is extremely embarrassing. Having attended this and past GORs, I think this wouldn’t have occured at a purely academic conference, in constrast one closely tied the ad industry, like GOR. I think that is a strong contributing factor, more than Germany being particularly sexist.

Having said that, both the tshirts and the idiotic panel title seem like good reasons to reconsider reviewing for the conference, particularly if it leads to generalizations about sexism in Germany like those voiced above.

18

bert 04.06.15 at 8:00 pm

All-female panel, with a female session chair … Hello, Eszter!
If I was organising a conference, I’d be unimpressed by someone in such a position attempting to round up a posse against the Program Committee.
Granted, someone clearly hard pressed to round up a decimal point. But even so, it’s rather grubby.

(Brett, this doesn’t mean you don’t remain an utter cock.)

19

Sean Matthews 04.06.15 at 9:54 pm

I wonder do the GORillas really drag their knuckles, or only metaphorically?

20

heckblazer 04.06.15 at 10:23 pm

“I don’t know what it says about me that my mind immediately flashed to Outlaws of Gor et al.”

It says that your mind works the same way mine does.

21

Ogden Wernstrom 04.06.15 at 11:05 pm

I began to suspect that the shirts were performance art, once I read, “…our decisions are to a much lesser degree made consciously than we thought…” in the document that Bert linked @21. (I was trying to understand what Bert is getting at in that post, BTW.)

Speaking of performance art, Brett posted:

… given that the women got complimentary shirts, and the men insulting ones, I’d assume that any bias was running the other way.

Brett is lucky that Dian Fossey is not here to call him to account for this slur.

He is also lucky that homo sapiens is still the primate-in-control of this planet.

Just in case, Brett, you might want to befriend more orangutans.

22

Z 04.06.15 at 11:19 pm

(I was trying to understand what Bert is getting at in that post, BTW.)

I think that he was pointing out that, according to the schedule, there might indeed have been a women-only panel. One in fact, in which Eszter Hargittai is scheduled.

23

Val 04.07.15 at 2:18 am

@ 21, 25 and 26
I remain confused. Bert’s link doesn’t take you to the whole programme, but even if you look through the whole programme, there is only one panel session with multiple speakers, and the session that Eszter is presenting in does have a male speaker – so, no answers here.

Brett @ 12 has actually illustrated part of the problem though:
“Your focus on feminist outrage may have blinded you to a salient detail: In English, “Man” can mean just human beings.”

Obviously at this conference, there are some men, like Brett, who have time travelled from the 1950s and therefore missed the whole debate about patriarchy and gendered language.

Joking aside, this is ridiculous, including the stupid t-shirts. If there is anything I can meaningfully do to support Eszter in opposing this nonsense, happy to do it. (Possibly as a researcher in public health in Australia, there may not be much I can do, but the thought is there).

Also can CT tell Brett to stop deliberately trying to offend women and people of colour (because in fact it’s clear he does it deliberately)

24

bert 04.07.15 at 2:46 am

Don’t blame you for being confused, Val.
I’d copied Eszster’s link in her OP.
Eszter’s session is here.

For what it’s worth, a brief scan of the program shows another all-female session on “Germans about Ebola” (book now to avoid disappointment).

I agree that the T-shirts are misjudged. Probably though best seen as a German attempt at levity. I think Anarcissie has by far the best suggestion for how to handle it.

25

ZM 04.07.15 at 2:50 am

Brett is sort of right about man – I think originally it was not especially gendered and gendered terms were wife-man which turned into woman, and I think maybe males were husband-man or something similar. But since males then decided to bogart the word man for themselves, I guess we are not now particularly obliged to accept ‘man’ is a gender neutral term for all persons.

26

engels 04.07.15 at 3:20 am

They were originally all going to be wearing T-shirts printed GORean before someone decided it wouldn’t be appropriate.

27

maidhc 04.07.15 at 4:22 am

In the US I’ve never seen gendered promotional T-shirts. I’ve sometimes seen T-shirts available in different cuts for men and women, but what was printed on the shirt was the same, whether clever or not.

More generally T-shirts given out as promotions are the cheap generic unisex kind, while the ones worn by the people working the booths are the much nicer polo shirt type with usually a more tasteful design.

While one may still encounter “booth bunnies”, they usually are not dressed differently than the real sales staff and are best distinguished by their inability to answer questions about the product. (I guess it depends what industry you’re in though.)

28

dsquared 04.07.15 at 4:34 am

29

Eszter Hargittai 04.07.15 at 5:12 am

I’d like to clarify a factual issue about the panels I was on and give some background on conference panels. For the record, both panels I was on had one other speaker and that other speaker was a male. (For details, go to the program page and do a search for my name.) But in any case, these panels are not relevant comparisons here, because these were panels put together of independent presentations submitted by participants. The panel discussion I mention in the OP was presumably based on invited panelists (either by the conference organizers or the panel organizers), which is different from stitching together a panel of independent papers.

30

bert 04.07.15 at 5:40 am

So, not you and your two female colleagues making a presentation of your research in front of a female moderator. You’ve cleared this up, as I suggested you might.
If someone had the impression from your comments that the conference organisers put together a sexist conference, would you want to clarify anything there?

31

Val 04.07.15 at 6:05 am

bert @ 34
“You’ve cleared this up, as I suggested you might.”
As my children used to say, who died and made you king?

I really don’t get what you’re saying but it sounds like you’re complaining about something. So just maybe to save Eszter some time (after she has specifically taken the time to clear this up already), maybe I can add a bit of info.

In the programme the person who presents is underlined. There are often multiple authors of presentations, but usually only one presenter.

In most conferences there is a mix of invited speakers and people who have applied to present through a submission process. In this conference I assume most presenters in the simultaneous programme have applied to present, while the keynote speakers and in this case the members of the panel Eszter is talking about have been invited by the conference organisers. That’s a crucial difference.

The sexism Eszter is noting appears to be particularly:
the t-shirts
the name of the panel session which has not caught up with ‘non-gendered language’ – eg using ‘human being’ when you mean human being, rather than ‘man’ – which is recommended if not mandated in many educational institutions (at least here in Australia)
the fact that all speakers on the invited panel are male

That’s quite enough to be going in with, I’d say.

32

Eszter Hargittai 04.07.15 at 6:22 am

Val, you’re too generous, thank you. Spot on all the way. (One more clarification that no one could know without having been at my panel: my co-authors were not present, I was the only one presenting from among the three of us, not that this matters much to the current conversation given the details already explained.)

Val, I hope to be in Australia next February, perhaps we can meet in person during my visit (Melbourne will likely be my base of operations).

33

Val 04.07.15 at 6:46 am

Eszter that would be great. My Monash email contact is available on my blog (linked to my name as I guess you know). Will look forward to it.

34

Colin 04.07.15 at 8:06 am

ZM: I think the old word for ‘adult male human’ in English is ‘wer’ (as in ‘werewolf’), and ‘wife’ was formerly a general-purpose word for ‘adult female human’ that became more specific. Similar stuff happened in the Romance languages (look at what happened to Latin ‘homo’ and ‘vir’ as compared to Germanic ‘man’ and ‘wer’).

German comes out slightly better than English in this: the word ‘Mensch’, while grammatically masculine, has no gender connotations in terms of meaning, but sounds a lot less formal than the Latinate borrowings we need to resort to in English, such as ‘person’ and ‘human being’.

35

Shamash 04.07.15 at 10:22 am

I am ashamed that a comment pool this well-read would not have suggested “Gormenghast” as an alternative. That everyone here immediately associates the Gor- prefix with John Norman’s works instead of Mervyn Peake’s says something, methinks…:)

And, we should think of other useful and potentially sexist T-shirt possibilities:

GORgon
GORmand
GORdita
GORmless

I think the first and last choices would be equally offensive, regardless of the gender wearing it, and this would solve the problem, gorblimy!

36

bert 04.07.15 at 10:43 am

Val, Eszter,
If you’ve not seen the publicity for Jon Ronson’s latest “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed”, Eszter, I’m sure you’ll find it interesting, given your research interests. Once you’ve read it, your linking to the bio pages of the Program Committee on a high-traffic blog on which you have been given posting privileges may be the sort of thing you’ll want to avoid doing in the future.

37

Val 04.07.15 at 12:27 pm

Bert I’m worried you’ve lost the plot here. That’s a public page that Eszter linked to. Are you thinking the CT commentariat are going to descend en masse on the program committee for the conference and start publicly shaming them via Twitter, or threatening them, or what? Because I think it’s unlikely. But I am curious to know, because I still don’t get it, what is it that you are upset about? Is it really feminism you object to?

38

engels 04.07.15 at 12:31 pm

39

bert 04.07.15 at 1:15 pm

Ronson’s book has plenty of incidents. None of them exactly match, but a related example would be this one. A sequence of events you’d think unlikely had it not actually happened.
Val, in repeatedly saying you don’t understand what the issue is, you’ve answered your question about feminism yourself.

40

engels 04.07.15 at 1:41 pm

Is this a German cultural thing? There’s not neccesarily the identity politics there is in the US. Parts of Eastern Europe are just monumentally fucked up

This from the country that brought us Hooters

41

Just Another Commenter 04.07.15 at 5:57 pm

Clearly they needed a visit from Gort!

It would be interesting to know if “GORgeous” and “GORilla” were assigned, or whether the conference provided t-shirts with either, and volunteers neatly sorted themselves into the gender bins.

42

Abbe Faria 04.07.15 at 6:20 pm

So I’m clear: the phrase “a new idea of man” was used at a conference hosted in German by Germans, it was hosted in English for the benefit of foreigners, with most of the hosts presenting in a second language they would have had to learn for their employment. The CT consensus on this is that the victims of oppressive language use are Anglophones exposed to dated phrasing by speakers who aren’t as current as they should be with debates/guidelines at Anglosphere institutions.

Is that what’s actually happened, or have I lost the plot too?

43

Eszter Hargittai 04.07.15 at 6:42 pm

Just Another Commenter, I asked about the shirts and they were assigned.

Abbe Faria, the organizers seem to want this to be an international conference (it’s not always held in Germany, last time I attended, it was in Zurich), people from various countries attend, including some of their keynote speakers – if not this year then in the past for sure – and one of the questions on the feedback form specifically asked about whether you felt it was an international conference. But if this is all you got out of the post then yes, the main issues were completely lost on you.

44

adam.smith 04.07.15 at 6:51 pm

@45 – yeah, the poor oppressed Germans won’t help you here: The German Mann/Mensch and the English man/human translate very literally and similar debates exist in German.

As for culture–I do think this may well be a cultural issue (culture in the broadest sense). Not so much that Germany is a sexist country, but that it does better than the US in some aspects (parental leave, non-pink girls’ clothing, political representation of women e.g.) and worse in others (sexual harassment policies, women in corporate leadership positions, awareness of gendered representations in academic contexts).

And bert @40 — I do think Ronson’s book is important, but if it’s going to be used to silence entirely legitimate public complaints about discrimination etc., it’s going to do more harm than good. Are you really suggesting that Ezter, instead of publicly drawing attention to something that’s part of a widespread issue should have just written a private e-mail to the conference organizers?

45

Bob 04.07.15 at 8:34 pm

Let’s cut to the chase with Bert. He will never get it since he’s really here to semi-politely insult and demean others and their beliefs. He’s angry and it’s all feminists fault. And his obsessively posting on this website shows his desperate need for control of something/anything in his life. The words “sad troll” comes to mind.

46

Charles R 04.07.15 at 11:31 pm

Val @ 35

using ‘human being’ when you mean human being, rather than ‘man’ – which is recommended if not mandated in many educational institutions (at least here in Australia)

Who recommends and who mandates (personal peeve about passive voice)?

What’s the punishment for failure to comply? What’s the reward for complying?

47

engels 04.07.15 at 11:46 pm

re gender balance in academic conferences, I believe it’s been pointed out before but 3/4 CT posters are male (and they probably produce quite a lot more than 3/4 of posts) and the webinars seem to regularly have all-male panels (it looks like of the last five, two were all male and the other three had only one woman on each)

48

me 04.08.15 at 3:58 am

How many words begin with “gor” that you could put on a t-shirt? Something of a Gordian knot…

49

bad Jim 04.08.15 at 5:00 am

Tall and tan and young and lovely,
Gorilla of Ipanema went walking…

50

Val 04.08.15 at 5:19 am

@49
Yeah I kind of agree with you Bob. But as a commenter with female name, I have been exposed to a few of these types, and I think it’s not quite enough to say ‘they’re just trolls, ignore them’. I also think it should be stated that they’re sexist, just like Belle said on the other thread about racists – call them out, and then ignore them.

So I guess my message to bert is: bert, your tone towards Eszter and towards me is patronising and sexist. Having called it as that, I’m now going to ignore you.

51

Val 04.08.15 at 5:22 am

Charles R @ 50
I’m actually not a fan of the passive voice either Charles. In this case I’m just being a bit vague because I’m not really sure and I haven’t got time to research it. If you’re interested, maybe you could do it?

52

js. 04.08.15 at 5:29 am

If you’ve got it at hand (mine’s packed up unfortunately), check out Chicago’s entry on the generic (third-person) pronoun. It is a thing of beauty. (Tho perhaps that’s not a style guide very prevalent in Australia.)

53

dr ngo 04.08.15 at 6:23 am

One doesn’t normally look to Brett Bellmore for working definitions of feminism, but I have to admit I was impressed by:

The relentless determination that women should always be included.

54

DGOF Board 04.08.15 at 6:59 am

Dear Eszter,
thanks for your feedback about the GOR15. We saw the discussions mainly started about the GOR volunteer shirts. We promised you via Twitter to come back about this topic and here are our comments.

About the shirts: We see your point and we can understand that you and others feel offended. The shirts are not official DGOF shirts, they were created by a sponsor. We know, that is not an excuse, just an information for you. We apologize for the shirts, there was no intention to hurt or offend anyone with them. We know that the graphic designer who designed them had absolutely no intention to do so either. She just was looking for text to play with the word GOR. But to avoid further irritation or offence, we will not use them anymore.

About the programme: You have also mentioned that you got the impression that GOR is a male dominated conference or that some panel discussions were dominated by men. We have an anonymous review process for all the papers. The reviewers come from different organisations and institutions. They have no information about gender, race, nationality, etc. they just see the text and they evaluate this text. When you have a look at the programme committee you can see that we have 5 women and 5 men, one of our keynotes was Suzy Moat, the other a man. We try our best to have interesting, inspiring, high quality presentations and discussions during the GOR. Gender, race, nationality, etc. are no criteria based on which presenters are chosen, only the content of their work and ideas matters.
We also try hard to be an international conference which means that we have different languages and nationalities and that most of our presenters are no native English speakers.
The GOR conference tries to bridge the gap between the scientific online research world and the commercial online research world, that’s why we also have guests and presenters from universities and commercial institutes or companies.

We hope you will present or visit the GOR in the future and we really appreciate your feedback. We were and are open for feedback during the conference, but as you can see also after the GOR.
You wondered who was responsible for the programme and the shirts. To be clear, the programme committee is responsible for the programme, but not for the shirts or any other organizational things. Just ask us, if you have further questions!

Kind regards
The DGOF board members

55

Eszter Hargittai 04.08.15 at 7:59 am

Dear DGOF board members, thank you for taking the feedback seriously and for your helpful response. I am glad to see that you are open to feedback. I have not written off GOR as a potential venue for discussing research, you cover interesting and relevant topics.

For a panel discussion, my impression is that participants are usually known when the panel is evaluated since it is an integral part of determining the potential contribution of such a session. Assuming that is indeed the case, I am sorry to know that the extreme gender imbalance was not something reviewers of the panel and ultimately the conference organizers who likely make the final call about the sessions found to be of sufficient concern to ask for a revision of the panel participants or decide against it for the program. I’m also sorry that people submitting panels still think this is an appropriate line-up, but I guess they were validated since their submission did make it onto the program.

56

bert 04.08.15 at 10:37 am

Well, that’s an admirably measured response from the board.
The t-shirts were always stupid. You now have an explanation for how they happened, and a gracious apology.
Your wider complaints about the sexist nature of the proceedings were always thin. The board gently shows they were also groundless. Your decision to pursue these complaints of sexism by posting links to the personal pages for the Planning Committee members is not addressed. I know that if I was one of those ten people I’d be angry with that decision, and justifiably so.
For Val, Bob and others, you’re free to imagine what you like about me. I enjoyed the suggestion that because I am posting on this subject I am obsessed and therefore irrational. The truth is that during an otherwise empty lunchbreak I saw this blog being used to hit out at an undeserving target, and thought I’d pitch in. But while we’re offering frank assessments of each other, I should say that while Eszter made a mistake, I don’t think for a moment that she acted maliciously or is in any way a bad person. Rather, as a blogger, she is accident-prone. It’s been a problem a while.
I think we can all ignore each other again now.

57

Val 04.08.15 at 11:11 am

Here are some guidelines from university of Melbourne https://hr.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/87501/Watch_Your_Language.pdf

It’s earnest, no doubt some here might not like it, but language that includes rather than excludes is a good thing. (Especially for feminists who have a relentless determination that women should always be included).

The committee might be interested in something like this Eszter? Especially the bits explaining about masculine pronouns and why you shouldn’t use them to mean ‘people’.

Charles R, I’ve done that much, but if you want any more, you have to find it for yourself :)

58

Val 04.08.15 at 11:17 am

Btw Charkes when I said “recommended if not mandated” I meant ‘I think it’s usually recommended though probably not mandated’ or ‘I think the university policy usually recommends non-gendered language, though probably doesn’t mandate it’

(The latter is the best I can give you in active voice, because really, it would be a bit foolish to say ‘the university does x’, given how diverse and disparate and contradictory universities are in practice)

Sometimes being precise means using a lot of words. I’m not against using quite a few words (obvs), but I try to keep it within reason,

59

Charles R 04.08.15 at 12:41 pm

Given my own experiences on various sides of bureaucracies both state and private, I say the “diverse and disparate and contradictory” practices of any bureaucracy are the point, especially when we’re talking about recommendations and the not-yet-mandated.

But I am grateful for the link and the admission that your reasoning here was to use vagueness to obscure your ignorance, which is usually why people resort to the passive voice when speaking in the moral mode (eg., “Women are victimized” as opposed to figuring out who’s doing the victimizing). It’s not often people just admit with some amount of humility something like that.

I figured, since you referenced your own region, you were speaking about things you witnessed or saw or experienced yourself, and that’s the sort of in-the-streets experience I find helpful. What bureaucracies codify into regulated behaviors tells me only so much about how it looks to live there. And usually then, it’s going to tell me—again, speaking from experiences—something about how deep people have to go to be themselves.

60

Val 04.08.15 at 12:56 pm

Charles R
Calling sexism. Not going to engage.

61

Val 04.08.15 at 12:57 pm

Of course I have first hand experience. Twit.

62

Lynne 04.08.15 at 1:21 pm

Val, I’ve been following this discussion and I felt a little burst of surprise/relief/pleasure from your posts at #64 and #54. Usually I note sexist posters and ignore them, and assume some of the other women here do the same. Good to see sexism named.

63

Lynne 04.08.15 at 1:22 pm

dr. ngo @ 57

Yeah, it was pretty wonderful.

64

Lynne 04.08.15 at 1:28 pm

DGOF Board, fwiw, when someone apologizes because someone else feels offended, it doesn’t come across as much of an apology.

Your T-shirts were sexist. Own it, regret it. The mostly-male make-up of the panels sounds sexist, too but instead of apologizing for it you seem to be _explaining_.

If I step on someone’s toe and say “I’m sorry if you feel hurt but your foot was right there in the way”, that wouldn’t be much of an apology either.

65

engels 04.08.15 at 1:30 pm

[CT] webinars seem to regularly have all-male panels (it looks like of the last five, two were all male and the other three had only one woman on each)

Okay, I just checked this quickly. Of the first five listed two, Scialabba and Graeber, were exclusively male events, Teles was all male apart from Kimberley Morgan, Stross was all male apart from Maria Farrell, Spufford appears to have been the most gender balanced (4 out of 21 posts were by women).

Related question: how many of CT’s staff or guest posters have been black or from other minority ethnic groups?

(NB. I’m not accusing anyone of racism or sexism, or implying Eszter’s complaint against GOR isn’t valid.)

66

Val 04.08.15 at 1:41 pm

Thanks Lynne. As you may see, I did briefly (very briefly) engage with Charles R after that, but it was just so ridiculous I had to do something. First he asks me to identify what universities are doing, and then when I do that, he says oh I didn’t want that, I wanted your first hand experience – implying that I know nothing about it! No way a woman commenting on CT could possibly have any first hand experience of universities and how they handle these issues. Grrrr.

Anyway I think calling it and then refusing to engage is a good idea, so I hope everyone will jump on the bandwagon.

67

Val 04.08.15 at 1:59 pm

I should be asleep, but you have to look at this
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2015/04/05/just-for-fun/

I just chanced upon it via Feminist Philosophers – serendipity!

68

Hector_St_Clare 04.08.15 at 2:48 pm

Brett is of course right. And Crytandra was right on that other thread.

69

oldster 04.08.15 at 2:53 pm

“Belle, why do you let HSC comment here? Rilly tho y? I am totes serious. Srsly y u do this to us?”

70

Lynne 04.08.15 at 2:57 pm

Val, great caption!

Hector St. Clare, as I live and breathe. And just as the subject of banishment is being discussed in the Hugos thread.

For those who don’t know, Hector was banned a year or so ago for saying, among other things, something about women standing up on their hind legs to preach. Something like Samuel Johnson, anyway.

71

Hector_St_Clare 04.08.15 at 5:29 pm

Lynne,

I should also like to take advantage of this opportunity to express my support and love for Mr. Dugin’s idea of a vast global antiliberal alliance, and my fervent wish that he is successful.

72

geo 04.08.15 at 5:46 pm

dr ngo @57; Lynne @67:

What is the difference,if any, between “the relentless determination that women should always be included” and “the relentless determination that qualified women should never be excluded”?

73

Lynne 04.08.15 at 6:31 pm

geo, where is this question coming from? What is the context?

74

Hector_St_Clare 04.08.15 at 6:33 pm

Long live Alexander Dugin!

75

Hector_St_Clare 04.08.15 at 6:34 pm

And his global anti liberal alliance, which makes me feel like my life has a new purpose.

76

Anarcissie 04.08.15 at 6:39 pm

geo 04.08.15 at 5:46 pm @ 75:
What is the difference,if any, between “the relentless determination that women should always be included” and “the relentless determination that qualified women should never be excluded”?

The appearance of one who, or that which, creates qualification, and separates the qualified from the unqualified.

77

js. 04.08.15 at 6:52 pm

Is Hector doing performance art now?

Anyway, I wanted to say something about geo’s bit about “qualified women”, because I find that rhetoric really problematic. I know it more from the debates surrounding affirmative action than specifically wrt to feminism. But if you do look at the debates surrounding affirmative action and esp. right “critiques” of the same, it’s always all about “more qualified” and hence more deserving white people losing out to brown and black people who are getting “in” just because they are brown or black. To which the first thing to say is: motherfucking white people have been getting shit just by virtue of being white for a couple of centuries now (at least), and if one or two non-white people here or there derive some small advantage from being non-white, it’s hardy going to change the basic power imbalances in society (which, again, overwhelmingly favor white people). At least partly because representation itself counts. It doesn’t count for everything and sometimes it may not count for much, but it definitely counts for something.

This is getting kind of long, and is kind of off-topic. But my point is that I would be extremely surprised if similar dynamics weren’t at play with respect to gender as with respect to race, etc. (I was going to say something about problems in definitions and perceptions of “qualified”, but that’s well-trodden territory and others can probably cover it better.)

78

Abbe Faria 04.08.15 at 7:14 pm

“It’s earnest, no doubt some here might not like it, but language that includes rather than excludes is a good thing.”

Language policing people who are made to speak a second language for your benefit isn’t remotely inclusive, it’s linguicist.

79

geo 04.08.15 at 7:16 pm

Lynne @76: The second definition — “the relentless determination that qualified women should never be excluded” — is the anti-discrimination definition of feminism (and anti-racism), which is inarguable. I would say anyone who accepts it — even Brett — is entitled to call him/herself a feminist or anti-racist.

The first definition — “the relentless determination that women [or minorities] always be included” — is (or could be, which is why I asked) a broader definition, implying affirmative action, which is a large and complex topic that feminists and anti-racists may well have different views about. My own view is that special efforts should be made 1) to find qualified members of historically disadvantaged groups and smooth their way; and 2) to equalize resources available to members (especially young members) of advantaged and disadvantaged groups, eg, by providing universal, free, high-quality education and medical care, relentlessly promoting full employment, and reducing wealth and income inequality. This, I would suggest to js @80, is the best way to “change the power imbalances in society” — better than emphasizing numerical parity (ie, quotas). The strongest case I know of for this point of view is The Case Against Diversity by Walter Benn Michaels.

80

MPAVictoria 04.08.15 at 7:27 pm

“For those who don’t know, Hector was banned a year or so ago for saying, among other things, something about women standing up on their hind legs to preach. Something like Samuel Johnson, anyway.”

Yep and he also threatened physical violence to a couple commenters as well.

81

Hector_St_Clare 04.08.15 at 7:41 pm

“Is Hector doing performance art now?”

No, just expressing my point of view here since I wasn’t able to coment on the Dugin thread.

82

Ben 04.08.15 at 7:46 pm

The board’s “apology” is typical of the level of childish discourse institutions expect to get away with. I’m so bloody sick of it.

An apology is one that identifies where in the decision-making process you fucked up. Identifying that mechanism is necessary to demonstrate you understand why you’re at fault. Did you not see the shirts until the conference? (Possible but unlikely.) Did you see the shirts and were too spineless to confront the sponsor? Did you see the shirts and not recognize they were problematic? Each of these dynamics has a different level of culpability and a different intensity of sexism. Identify the dynamic so you specify the board’s culpability and nature of its sexist behavior. Follow that up with a plan to mitigate that dynamic in the future.

Doing the above indicates you accept the legitimacy of the grievance, not just the negative publicity it got you; actually accept responsibility by discussing *your* actions and their consequences and not some hapless graphic designer’s; and accept the need for reform by establishing a plan of action.

An apology that does not include those things is one that does not in fact recognize why the apology is needed. It’s a child’s apology.

If you don’t think you need to apologize, explain why. But if you do, apologize like an adult.

83

Lynne 04.08.15 at 8:12 pm

geo, I accept your distinction. As I recall, the Brett quote was emphatically not sympathetic to feminism, but I gather you are less concerned with the quote than you are with the issue of achieving equality and how it is to be done.

I have qualms about affirmative action. It certainly can’t succeed without the supports you describe, and I fear it leaves minorities open to the whispered verdict that they wouldn’t have the job if they weren’t brown or female. On the other hand, the playing field is so ridiculously uneven that it may help. As the mother of two white sons, one of whom has applied for a government job (the government practises affirmative action) I am hoping hard that in this hiring no one’s sex or colour weighs in the decision; not his, not his competitors’.

84

js. 04.08.15 at 8:42 pm

This, I would suggest to js @80, is the best way to “change the power imbalances in society”

No doubt it is. Taken singly, it’s also a good way to deny tangible benefits—indeed reduction of discrimination—to presently underprivileged groups in the here and now. I’m not saying this is your intent; indeed, I fully realize that your intent is quite the opposite. It’s still overwhelmingly likely to be the practical outcome of opposing affirmative action. I believe this is pretty well borne out empirically (e.g. with respect to college admissions). In any case, I realize this is pretty off-topic, so I won’t say any more about it here.

85

Lynne 04.08.15 at 8:51 pm

js, there is a tension between what works for people today and what will work to make a better society for their and our children. I would love us to aim for both, as I imagine you would. I really liked your comment upthread about, basically, so what if a few brown or black people, or women, get a job because of affirmative action because it’s so darned easy to lose sight of the forest here, which is as you said that this has worked just peachy for white men.

86

Lynne 04.08.15 at 8:52 pm

And it doesn’t seem that far off topic to me. A generalizing from Eszter’s post about a specific incident of sexism.

87

engels 04.08.15 at 9:12 pm

if you do look at the debates surrounding affirmative action and esp. right “critiques” of the same, it’s always all about “more qualified” and hence more deserving white people losing out to brown and black people who are getting “in” just because they are brown or black

Yup, and in this connection see:

“it’s common knowledge that Harvard selects at most 10 percent (some say 5 percent) of its students on the basis of academic merit”

88

engels 04.08.15 at 9:13 pm

At the admissions end, it’s common knowledge…”

89

Hector_St_Clare 04.08.15 at 9:19 pm

MPA Victoria,

I’m sorry for antagonizing you and other commenters in the past, and for unnecessarily personalizing disagreement. I know I have been guilty of that, please accept by apology.

Having said that, I will not be around to debate the point. I consider it outrageous that Crytandra was banned, especially on the grounds that his opinions might hurt the feelings of someone’s unnamed ‘indigenous coworkers’. A blog that values hurt feelings over truth, evidence and virtue is not where I choose to spend my time. I am leaving Crooked Timber again, this time in solidarity with Ze Kraggash, Crytandra, and Alexander Dugin, herald of the new anti liberal age.

90

engels 04.08.15 at 9:24 pm

Has Ze Kraggash been banned?

91

Ronan(rf) 04.08.15 at 9:31 pm

More to the point, has Alexander Dugin ?

92

delagar 04.08.15 at 9:39 pm

Hector has flounced.

Anyone think he’ll stick to it?

93

Z 04.08.15 at 9:40 pm

The T-shirts were stupid and offensive.

Abut the panels, I think it should be recognized that a consensus has not been reached within academia on how to best deal with the issue of gender imbalance. My impression is that English-speaking academia is more prone (on average) to favor actual direct corrective action to change a panel if the selection process yielded an imbalanced first choice compared for instance to the (continental) european culture, and that this difference does not entirely reduce to sexism. Different political cultures do produce different outcomes in that respect.

For that matter, as a good by-product of my own political culture, I was initially uneasy about direct action in that respect and rather satisfied with the usual “we looked for the most qualified without caring (or sometimes knowing) about the genders and that’s what we got” explanation (as in the DGOF board members message above). However, a stream of pretty convincing actual experiments (on professors evaluation, on CV evaluation, etc…) have changed my mind in the past years (and consequently put me slightly at odd with most of my colleagues, and again I don’t think this can be brushed off at them being sexist). An unresolved question (for me) is how far corrective action should go and how to weight priorities (what if your panel is gender-balanced but all the speakers come from the same country? would that be a problem?)

94

geo 04.08.15 at 9:45 pm

if you do look at the debates surrounding affirmative action and esp. right “critiques” of the same, it’s always all about “more qualified” and hence more deserving white people losing out to brown and black people who are getting “in” just because they are brown or black

Michaels’ The Case Against Diversity is a left-wing critique of affirmative action, or rather, an argument for class-based affirmative action. He claims that current diversity policies mainly result in economically privileged minority members enjoying greater access to elite institutions (high-ranked universities, corporate executive positions, political office representing corrupt and undemocratic political parties), and that this neither does very much good for less privileged minority members nor undermines the socioeconomic inequality those institutions foster. Better, he argues, to directly attack that inequality — which is the main obstacle to a decent life for disadvantaged groups of every race and gender — than to change the racial/sexual make-up of elites.

95

geo 04.08.15 at 9:46 pm

Sorry, the first three lines @96 are a quote.

96

geo 04.08.15 at 9:47 pm

Oops, that should be @98.

97

Val 04.08.15 at 9:55 pm

Geo @ 76 and 83
I don’t know if you read Brett’s original comments, but I think it probably confuses the issue to take as a definition of feminism something that he said as an attack on feminism. Js used it as a joke (it was funny) and I took it up, but I don’t think it’s a good starting point for serious discussion.

Other than that, what Z said @ 97.

98

Val 04.08.15 at 10:01 pm

@ 98
I haven’t read The Case Against Diversity, but there is nothing to stop people trying to reduce inequality across the board, while still advocating that current unequal and hierarchical organisations include women and minority groups at higher levels.

This is one of the big questions in my research – how do we work to reduce inequality while living in a society where unequal and hierarchical organisations are part of the taken for granted everyday reality? It’s a really complex question, but I don’t think reducing it to a simple either/or will help. I guess we’d all resign from our universities etc post haste if that’s what we thought.

99

engels 04.08.15 at 10:02 pm

Better, he argues, to directly attack that inequality — which is the main obstacle to a decent life for disadvantaged groups of every race and gender — than to change the racial/sexual make-up of elites.

Personally, I think this is a false dichotomy. Poverty might be the ‘main obstacle’ for poor blacks and poor women but there are other important injustices specifically caused by their race and gender. My own feeling is changing the racial and gender make-up of elites does nothing to change the nature of capitalism, which can run perfectly smoothly, or perhaps even more smoothly, with women and brown people in charge, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t progressive.

100

js. 04.08.15 at 10:03 pm

Js used it as a joke

That was dr. ngo, not me. I wish it had been me…

geo, Lynne: I think we all agree about the goal, but we (maybe) disagree to some extent re best methods to pursue it/get partial results in the present. Anyway, a more substantive response a bit later (I hope).

101

Val 04.08.15 at 10:23 pm

Oh my very sincere apologies to dr ngo! So clever.

I scrolled really quickly back through the thread trying to find it and obviously didn’t look closely enough.

102

ragweed 04.08.15 at 11:02 pm

Personally, I think this is a false dichotomy. Poverty might be the ‘main obstacle’ for poor blacks and poor women but there are other important injustices specifically caused by their race and gender. My own feeling is changing the racial and gender make-up of elites does nothing to change the nature of capitalism, which can run perfectly smoothly, or perhaps even more smoothly, with women and brown people in charge, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t progressive.

+1 – these things are complicated and multifaceted. Race and class and gender and sexuality, etc.

And

(if the HTML works)

103

ragweed 04.08.15 at 11:03 pm

104

geo 04.08.15 at 11:06 pm

Engels @103: I too would feel better if capitalist elites were browner, gayer, and more female, if only because it would be a small but satisfying way of giving the finger to all those centuries of cruel and stupid oppression. Still, if that just means it’s Carly Fiorina who gets to fire 30,000 people while her company’s stock loses half its value and then retires with a $42 million severance package; or Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O’Neal who gets to load up on $40 billion worth of subprime mortgages and CDOs, thereby costing thousands of homeowners their homes and hundreds of thousands of retirees some of their pensions; or Tim Cook who gets to outsource Apple production to a Chinese company employing thousands of virtual slave laborers – well, it’s only a little progress.

But I agree with you (and js and Lynne and Val) that there’s no need to pose a stark choice between different ways of reaching a common goal. It’s a matter of emphasis.

105

MPAVictoria 04.08.15 at 11:38 pm

Really great series of comments by Val, geo, js and Lynne. Thank you all.

106

Charles R 04.09.15 at 12:06 am

Val, I am sorry. I once tried to engage the comments here with more words, but as you found out before I did, it’s not sensible to write a lot of our thoughts when there’s little reason for any of us to give our time to time to one another, short of some social grace. So, I’m saying that I apologize for not writing more.

I wanted to hear what your first hand experiences are. I don’t live in Australia. I don’t know what it is like for you to experience what it is like to live in an environment where people confine language for us rather than let us fuck up on our own. Maybe it has it’s good sides, and maybe it has it’s bad sides. I just don’t know.

I deny that I’m being sexist, since to me your sex and gender are irrelevant. This may be a bit misanthropic, but so far as I’m concerned every single username I come across on the Internet is a living cog in a social machine, and you are all just as fungible as any username itself is. It makes it much easier for me to not be sexist, but it comes off as a bit disconcerting for my interlocutors. —I’ve been reading Arendt’s The Human Condition, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and Rand’s Atlas Shrugged all at the same time, and the usual everything else. It’ll make for an interesting paper, but all three of them brilliantly address the sort of social pressures of organization and control found in socially enforcing language, sort of the request you made that people should “jump on the bandwagon.” Those are exactly the kinds of phrasings and rhetorical moves performed among fair and free people that make me ask, like I did earlier, “What’s the penalty for defecting? What’s the penalty for cooperating?”

Borrowing a little of both Metzinger and Kahneman, I think it’s a lot like the Muller–Lyer illusion. Even though we teach kids all the time about peer pressure, about critical thinking, about the dangerous power of careless words formed by carelessly vague thinking, about how social righteousness doesn’t absolve anyone of the duty to be truthful, we still can’t not see these as okay for casual, social conversation. Even though we know we’re muddling about with people’s souls by just interacting with them in a public space, we still just see these as perfectly fine.

That’s the sort of thing I have a problem with, and even though everyone clearly sees it in Brett, it’s how few people see it in themselves, especially when there’s no sense in any person, after all these years of habituation to the Internet’s eroding of sympathy’s dependency upon the face, we still get suckered in with the illusion that it’s okay.

Once we get rid of that illusion, then nobody who pretends at justice can snooker us with our own sins.

So, no, I’m not sexist. I do write awkwardly. I think poorly. There are reasons why I get very anxious about posting, and why that kind of quick denunciation hurts.

But I am sorry.

107

js. 04.09.15 at 12:08 am

geo,

I haven’t read Michaels’ book. I have some thoughts about the general idea—basically, class and race are so deeply complicated and intertwined in the US that “let’s focus on class and not race” is I think a non-starter (in the US, other places may be different)—but I’m going to leave that aside because this anyway takes us away from your original point about “qualified women”, which I was reacting to and which I still find deeply problematic.

First, if you accept and advocate for class-based affirmative action, this already gives up on the idea of just accept (all and?) only qualified applicants, in whatever context, because any kind of affirmative action, whether gender-, race-, or class-based, or whatever else, cuts against a purely “merit-based” system, which is what a focus on “qualifications” leads us toward.

Second, as engels notes, the idea that (under current conditions) what you get in the absence of affirmative action is a merit-based system is a complete sham. I mean: (traditional) affirmative action, oh no! injustice against more qualified candidates; legacy admissions? Oh yay! come on right in! This is part of what I meant when I said that white people—and indeed, white men—get a whole lot of things just by virtue of being white in the normal course of things. I mean, one way to put this (I’m not the first to think this up) is that the normal course of things is affirmative action for white men. So, while we go about creating a society that has more egalitarian basic institutions, a bit of pull in the other direction can be can only be salutary.

This is all probably stuff you agree with. To get back to the thing I’ve really been wanting to say, let’s go back to this:

What is the difference,if any, between “the relentless determination that women should always be included” and “the relentless determination that qualified women should never be excluded”

The thing is: the first is clearly better than the second. (1) The second, taken literally, is actually unsatisfiable because in almost any given situation, there are going to be too many qualified candidates—excluding some is pretty much a given, and who gets excluded is (under the best circumstances) going to be a matter of luck or other random factors. Which is another reason that too much focus on merit (and only merit!) is misplaced. (2) More importantly, we all know about implicit biases and how they color perception, etc. Given these, focusing on selecting the “best qualified” or whatever will almost inevitably favor already overrepresented groups at the expense of underrepresented ones.

So, I think the relentless determination that women should always be included is indeed what we should aim for. If those evaluating the candidates are fair-minded, the women included are almost certainly going to be qualified anyway (and if the evaluators are not fair-minded, we’re fucked either way).

108

William Berry 04.09.15 at 12:19 am

@Hector:

” . . . in solidarity with Ze Kraggash, Crytandra, and Alexander Dugin, herald of the new anti liberal age.”

Awesome company. You all deserve each other.

And don’t let the door hit you in the a** on the way out!

109

LFC 04.09.15 at 1:05 am

engels @91

Can’t say I’ve read every word of the thread, but in looking through it I saw engels’ quote from what turns out to be a Sept 2014 piece in The New Republic by Steven Pinker. The fuller passage from the engels took the sentence is as follows:

At the admissions end, it’s common knowledge that Harvard selects at most 10 percent (some say 5 percent) of its students on the basis of academic merit. At an orientation session for new faculty, we were told that Harvard “wants to train the future leaders of the world, not the future academics of the world,” and that “We want to read about our student in Newsweek 20 years hence” (prompting the woman next to me to mutter, “Like the Unabomer” [typo in original; should read “Unabomber”]). The rest are selected “holistically,” based also on participation in athletics, the arts, charity, activism, travel, and, we inferred (Not in front of the children!), race, donations, and legacy status (since anything can be hidden behind the holistic fig leaf).

Couple of things about this:

First, virtually every ‘selective’ college or univ. in the U.S. takes what Pinker calls here a “holistic” approach to admissions. If they didn’t take something like this approach, there would, for one thing, be no affirmative action of any kind (race-based or class-based) at all. What Pinker apparently wants is to admit an entire college class on the basis of test scores (and maybe grades), period. (I’m inferring this from the title and subtitle of the article.) That’s a profoundly bad idea, IMO.

Second, it’s sad (if not terribly surprising) that, according to Pinker, new Harvard faculty members are told at their orientation that “Harvard wants to train future leaders,” since that’s either meaningless rhetoric (indulged in these days by all universities) or it’s code for “we want to turn out Senators and captains of industry etc,” which is not what the goal of institutions in their undergrad programs should be. Nor should it especially be to train future academics. Rather it should be the turning out of (at least minimally) educated citizens.

Anyway, Pinker should stick to writing his bloated tomes about language and the mind and teaching psychology, which he presumably knows something about, and keep his opinions about how college admissions should be reformed to himself. Admissions might well need reform, but not in what (I take to be) Pinker’s preferred direction.

110

LFC 04.09.15 at 1:07 am

(have a comment in moderation)

111

Hector_St_Clare 04.09.15 at 1:11 am

Oh, I forgot Alexander Lukashenko. Unquestionably the leader of the world’s best run state, though not my personal favourite (I prefer the Castro brothers).

112

Hector_St_Clare 04.09.15 at 1:11 am

Oh, I forgot Alexander Lukashenko. one of my favorite current world leaders.

113

adam.smith 04.09.15 at 1:14 am

Just want to join Lynne and Ben in saying how weak I find the non-apology apology by the organizing committee. The whole “I’m sorry your [tender] feelings were hurt” routine is really quite bad–why not just say “we realize the shirts were in bad taste”? What does “we understand why some people could be offended” even mean?

If you want to apologize, say you made a mistake and specify how you’ll avoid making similar mistakes in the future: Are you considering requiring sponsors to get approval at least for highly visible products identified with your conference? Are you going to instruct program chairs/evaluators to watch for gendered language in panel titles and abstract? Maybe even actively engage with specialists on gender (and/or other underrepresented groups) and technology on program design and language? These people Are you going to try to actively recruit a diverse set of participants, or are you just going to rely on the claim that “only the content of their work and ideas matters” and let structural barriers do the rest to keep your tech conference male dominated? etc. etc.

Addressing gender issues in a male-dominated field isn’t easy. People are going to make mistakes (I certainly have), and that’s OK. But it’s OK only if they’re willing to learn from their mistakes if they’re pointed out.

114

Ronan(rf) 04.09.15 at 1:42 am

The board didn’t apologise for someone feeling offended, they apologised for causing offence:

” We apologize for the shirts, there was no intention to hurt or offend anyone with them.”

115

geo 04.09.15 at 1:50 am

js@111: Yes, I agree that there’s no justification for legacy preferences. I agree too that in most situations there are going to be too many (or anyway more than enough) qualified candidates. And I also agree that among equally qualified candidates (or approximately equal, since in most cases there’s no way to measure precisely), there are good reasons to prefer women, gays, and minorities. My only reservation about the first definition (“relentless determination that women should always be included”) is that, where relevant quality/merit/qualifications are clearly unequal, that fact should, in general, govern decisions, even if the result is numerical disparity.

We may disagree, though, on whether “let’s focus on class and not race” is necessarily a non-starter. To put it crudely: I think Michaels may well be right that to address the often desperate situation of tens of millions of poor (and even struggling middle-class) women and blacks might justifiably seem to some (even if not all) people more urgent than to address the undeniable grievances of millions of comparatively economically secure women and blacks, and that the best way to do that is to emphasize policies that help all poor and middle-class people. Again, that doesn’t mean neglecting discrimination. It means what used to be called in the sixties “an interracial movement of the poor”; now perhaps better called “expropriation of the .1 percent.”

116

Val 04.09.15 at 2:16 am

Charles R @ 110
I am going to engage (briefly because there are other things I must do), partly because I feel guilty about calling you a twit. I have to make only a partial apology though (wrong as we all know they are), because what do you expect when you say things like this to people:

“But I am grateful for the link and the admission that your reasoning here was to use vagueness to obscure your ignorance, which is usually why people resort to the passive voice when speaking in the moral mode (eg., “Women are victimized” as opposed to figuring out who’s doing the victimizing). It’s not often people just admit with some amount of humility something like that.”

That is not due to not using enough words Charles – that is patronising, rude and sexist. How could anyone read it any other way?

I get flabbergasted when I read stuff like that – and yes as a consequence I am sometimes rude in return. Not the best response I admit, but what should one do when treated like this?

I will have to leave it at that for the present. I accept that you want to sort this out.

117

Val 04.09.15 at 4:46 am

Charles R – adding to the above
Our original discussion was about whether Australian universities have guidelines or mandatory policies on inclusive or non-gendered language. I was a bit vague about because I wasn’t sure. That is not a moral claim, it is a claim about facts, or reality, or evidence, whatever you want to call it. There is no shame for me in saying ‘I think they have something like this but I’m not sure’ and there is no way I was trying to cover up my ignorance. I was trying not to be too definite because I didn’t want to mislead. Ok so far?

It is quite possible that when you read that, you had some though along the lines of ‘here is some feminist who wants organisations to have compulsory inclusive language policies on the basis of some unfounded moral claim about women being victimised, for which she can’t provide evidence’. That’s a big leap, but you may have thought it, and I can’t stop you. But when you put stuff like that out on the Internet, it’s a different story, because you are impugning my intelligence and integrity. Can you see that?

There are thousands, possibly millions, of men on the Internet, who do think feminists are by definition stupid (or at best misguided) and dishonest. But that doesn’t make it true.

Someone else can explain why saying you’re’gender-blind’ (like ‘colour-blind’) isn’t really a defence against sexism. I’ve said enough for now.

118

adam.smith 04.09.15 at 4:57 am

Ronan:

We see your point and we can understand that you and others feel offended.

The problem is that this turns this into an issue of “feeling offended” that needs to be understood. I don’t think that’s much of an apology, even when it includes the word “sorry.”
“We realize the shirts were offensive and they should never have been used. We’ll do xyz to prevent this from reoccuring” is what you say when you’re actually sorry.

“We understand that you and others feel offended. . . . To avoid further irritation or offence, we will not use them anymore.” Is what you say when you’re passive-aggressively trying to placate someone. I’m willing to attribute some of the nuance here to non-native English, so we can be charitably say that the passive-aggressiveness wasn’t intended, but the lack of proper apology — including an admission of the fact that the shirts were objectively awful — definitely is.

119

ZM 04.09.15 at 7:24 am

geo @98

“Michaels’ The Case Against Diversity is a left-wing critique of affirmative action, or rather, an argument for class-based affirmative action. He claims that current diversity policies mainly result in economically privileged minority members enjoying greater access to elite institutions …. Better, he argues, to directly attack that inequality — which is the main obstacle to a decent life for disadvantaged groups of every race and gender — than to change the racial/sexual make-up of elites.”

In Australia higher education equity access procedures do already include socio-economic criteria well as criteria for race, gender, disability, location etc.

I think that economic inequality is only one type of inequality, so focusing on that alone is not quite enough.

Also economic inequality has been difficult to “attack” as you put it. The mode of increasing economic growth as a rising tide lifts all boats has led to just as much inequality as ever and too much unsustainable production/consumption.

Even if people don’t care much about biodiversity losses from this, this unsustainability will cause more inter-generational inequality. It was quite displeasing to read Jonathan Franzen in last week’s New Yorker asserting how he himself is emulating Saint Francis* by traveling by plane to see bird conservation efforts in South America and how he thinks it is cruelly puritanical to suggest mitigating climate change is the proper thing to do for people and birds and how it is also oh so boring of people not to embrace this historical period where he may sublimely imagine and anticipate his own death coinciding with the death of the Earth itself (this hyperbole is Jonathan Franzen’s not my own)

Robert Manne (politics professor and public intellectual for non-Australians) wrote a critical response to Franzen’s essay, making the point that while Jonathan Franzen says doing anything himself to reduce his personal ghg emissions would only make the very slightest bit of difference so he may as well do as he please and everyone else may as well do as they please and anyone who says otherwise is a terrible spoil sport — we don’t make this illogical argument about racism claiming that racism can only be solved by the state so individual efforts to not discriminate on the basis of race are pointless, and as the state will never agree to or be able to solve racism we should therefore give up hope of ending racism and everyone should jolly well be allowed to enjoy being just as racist as they want.

Manne also posed that perhaps Franzen’s ideas are representative of liberal Americans generally as he wrote it so frankly and publicly without any shame — but I think this is not necessarily true because I remember the other year when Franzen wrote about how Edith Wharton was awfully ugly and how one time he threw coins on the ground just to see poor old women painfully bend to pick them up, and most people seemed to think these things were not representative of liberal America but only representative of Jonathan Franzen being somewhat of an arsehole

Anyway, if continual growth is liberalism’s only way of trying to decrease inequality, then liberalism is a failed philosophy unless it can be modified to adequately respond to present problems.

There was an article on our public broadcaster’s internet site on post-liberalism a while ago, the argument running that as liberalism as an ideology is very much bound up with both creating wealth/property and relatedly with maintaining inequality (eg. John Locke, James Madison, and lately Tyler Cowen) rather than try to defend liberalism there might be “a better possibility that is, at this point, still difficult to imagine. What I want to try to outline are reasons why we should actively hope for an end to liberalism, and seek a fourth sailing – after antiquity, after Christendom, after liberalism – into a post-liberal future…. It is now the task… to begin to envision an alternative future to the one to which we now seem destined, which will focus especially on beginning to put together what liberalism has put asunder.”

So if we are looking to decrease inequality now, it should be in the context of needing to address over-consumption as well — and maybe in a post-liberal (but not Stalinist) outlook poverty and wealth are both equally problematic.

I think an outlook that problematises wealth as well as poverty is also potentially better for addressing other inequalities relating to race and gender etc. as groups previously excluded from liberalism’s apex can — rather than being expected to aspire to reach that apex — participate in making other norms that do not have that legacy of exclusion, and are not predicated on the less equal status of others. I hope that makes sense, it is a bit ramble-y.

* Franzen demonstrates a poor knowledge of Saint Francis since the Saint is well known for being very strict about living a life of poverty, and he never encouraged plane trips to see bird conservation far away when people can just see bird conservation in their local areas . If someone was absolutely set on seeing bird conservation efforts far away, I’ve no doubt Saint Francis would recommend a long contemplative pilgrimage by foot — maybe even barefoot to build character. Possibly the New Yorker could commission a follow up “Jonathan Franzen walks barefoot all the way to South America as a more representative emulation of Saint Francis” essay

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Abbe Faria 04.09.15 at 7:52 am

““We understand that you and others feel offended. . . . To avoid further irritation or offence, we will not use them anymore.” Is what you say when you’re passive-aggressively trying to placate someone.”

They are trying to placate someone. Can you not see the other side of this? Turns out this wasn’t wasn’t as thought employees forced to wear gendered clothing. It was volunteers choosing to wear a free t-shirt and offending the feminist neo-puritan tendency. The organizers are understandably relcutant to condemn people – particularly young women – for their dress choices.

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Ben 04.09.15 at 11:35 am

Ronan,

What adam.smith said. Can you really not see the difference between “we’re sorry this happened because we recognize it’s bad so we’re taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again” versus “we’re sorry this happened because you threw a snit” ?

The latter, besides being incredibly immature, means that the systemic issue doesn’t get addressed. “We’re so sorry this awful thing happened that we will take no steps to ensure something like it doesn’t happen in the future”, which is an adequate restatement of the board’s position, is both condescending *and* harmful. Sexism will continue to be part of the cultural dynamics underpinning that event until the board recognizes it as a problem serious enough to take preemptive action to stop.

I haven’t read enough of the thread to know if Abbe Faria is trolling, so if this can be considered feeding then everyone please ignore it:

The problem, Abbe Faria, is that *the shirts are offered to begin with*. It re-enforces the idea that women, specifically, are to have “looking attractive” as an essential group trait, and the only intellectual problem to grapple with is why you can’t see that’s a bad thing.

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Ronan(rf) 04.09.15 at 12:30 pm

I guess I should lay out my prejudices so as to explain why I didn’t think the apology so bad:
(1) I’ve had a number of jobs which have meant apologising for an organisation/dealing with the public/professionals (primarily at a lower or middle level) so have very little time for the ‘aggrieved public.’ I do think the purpose of an apology is to placate an individual, as 95% of the time a persons complaint is without real merit and all they want is to be placated
(2) those who want to fix a situation *dont* call attention to it publicly. All that leads to is defensivness and wasted time. Think of the most extreme cases, hospitals,nursing homes etc, when someone is ill and what you do matters in a very real, immediate sense. You approach individuals with power and responsibility and ask them to rectify the situation. You might try and highlight it through social media etc at a later date, but public shaming as a ‘problem solving tactic’ doesnt work
(3) Since this is the board we’re talking about, not someone at a low level, it’s fair to expect better. But again, these are probably busy people who are being asked to respond to a situation publicly, in a place (this blogs comment section) that might be hostile towards them. This doesnt seem (to me) to be a useful way of starting the ‘conversation.’
(4) I’m not looking to pile on Eszter, so will leave it there. I think the apology was fine, given the context. I also dont know if this was a last ditch effort by Eszter to bring attention to the situation after making private inquiries. If that’s the case then my opinion would be different.

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Ronan(rf) 04.09.15 at 12:34 pm

but beyond that, I think you’re overstating the extent to which the apology didnt apologise. I think their explanation for the gender imbalance made sense and their apology for the shirts was fine (ie they apologised for the offense and said it wouldnt happen again)
The apology, the rejection of the apology, the apology for the apology and so on until everyone tires themselves out, is really one of the more odd aspects of contemporary life.

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Yama 04.09.15 at 2:29 pm

If you cannot even accept a gracious attempt at an apology, why should anyone take your complaint seriously?

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engels 04.09.15 at 3:54 pm

where relevant quality/merit/qualifications are clearly unequal, that fact should, in general, govern decisions, even if the result is numerical disparity

I agree that courses and jobs should be offered only to people who are qualified to do them but it’s not obvious to me that when there is an over-supply of applicants whose qualifications meet or exceed the requirements, they should be offered to those with the highest level of attainment (but I do agree with your post #108, that it’s hard to get enthused about Carly Fiorina, Tim Cook, et al)

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engels 04.09.15 at 4:02 pm

LFC #113 I understand many other US colleges have a similar approach to Harvard’s (and I was citing Pinker for that statistic, not for his proposals, which I disagree with).

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hix 04.09.15 at 4:54 pm

If its a country culture thing, its an US one. The extend of gender role differentiation increases from the Czech Republic eastwards. Germany is pretty much only considered a place with tradtional gender roles by people from one country. Now that might be bec. the US is more advanced in that regard than any other country, or it might be because Americans are misinterpreting some things. You can guess which version i personally give more explanatory power.

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hix 04.09.15 at 4:55 pm

That sounded a bit stronger than intended. Germany isnt gender equality paradise and doing pretty bad on some scales – its just that mostly Americans tend to notice it i as big thing.

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Anarcissie 04.09.15 at 5:04 pm

@113, @130 — Indeed, if one of the primary functions of the higher levels of the education industry is to maintain the state’s class system (the people you will read about it Newsweek — or your holovid implant), why not just cut to the chase? ‘Qualify’ can have many meanings.

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adam.smith 04.09.15 at 5:31 pm

Ronan – following on Ben, the distinction here would be between systemic issues and individual issues/mistakes.
If, say, the GOR conference had messed up technology and the tech support folks were rude and unhelpful, that’d be the type of issue that indeed you’d best address in an e-mail to higher-ups.
But the reason (I’m assuming) that Eszter pointed this out on this blog (and on twitter, it appears) is that more or less casual sexism at tech (and, other) conferences is a systemic issue. Recognizing and addressing it goes beyond the organizers of one particular conference (though they can and should be part of the solution).

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Ronan(rf) 04.09.15 at 5:33 pm

Ok I get what you’re saying and take the point, and regretted my last comment after I’d posted as it read back overly hostile (and a bit incoherent)

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adam.smith 04.09.15 at 6:02 pm

No worries Ronan. It actually did make sense as voicing frustration having been on the other side of complaints (and urging empathy for the people dealing with that).

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engels 04.09.15 at 8:19 pm

I…regretted my last comment after I’d posted

I’m afraid that’s just not good enough. Deeply felt remorse is what I was looking for…

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Ben 04.09.15 at 8:47 pm

Ronan, I also think the “low-level functionary / group with real power” distinction you bring up is necessary when assessing this stuff, thanks.

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engels 04.09.15 at 8:51 pm

I do think there’s an interesting question about when it’s appropriate to go public with ccomplaints, and oftentimes it definitely isn’t. Twitter etc has made it much easier for people who are doubtless already twats to act like twats in this respect, some of them seem to do it almost as hobby – I assume an increasing share of our GDP is devoted to dealing with them through the largely pointless exercises Ronan mentions. (Fwiw I don’t think the OP did anything wrong by blogging this.)

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Ben 04.09.15 at 9:58 pm

To try and keep the other (excellent) conversation thread going:

That Robert Manne essay mentioned above really is good, and ties in a lot of CT hobby horses: the role of public intellectuals, collective action, “ruling ideas are ideas of rulers”.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/08/is-jonathan-franzen-really-asking-us-to-shrug-off-the-destruction-of-our-world

ZM, Manne explicitly recognizes that the effluvia from Franzen is a product of his (Franzen’s) own psychology; the broader point he’s drawing is less about liberalism and more about elite ideology, that someone of his cultural cache is being allowed to voice specific opinions – that global capitalism’s march of death is to be embraced; that an intensely selfish and narcissistic progressive hedonism is the only respectable way to live; basically, the celebration of the cheapening (in every sense) of human life – and voicing them in a mainstream, centrist, establishment organ.

It’s a canary in the coal mine observation, basically, and I’ve been noticing similar wafts of Thanatos from elite opinion recently. That kind of ideological production is . . . worrying.

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Belle Waring 04.10.15 at 6:43 am

Val: THANK YOU FOR DOING YEOPERSON’S WORK IN THIS THREAD! Seriously excellent work; it makes me want to post on my own blog.

Charles R.: you are being a condescending, sexist twit. “I’ve been reading Arendt’s The Human Condition, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and Rand’s Atlas Shrugged all at the same time, and the usual everything else. [I bed you don’t even own a TV–ed] It’ll make for an interesting paper, but all three of them brilliantly address the sort of social pressures of organization and control…” I can quite honestly say I would rather be stripped naked, had a bunch of fire ants killed on me and their “death to the ant-murderer pheromone” mixed with honey and smeared all up in every crack of my body, and then get staked out over a huge fire-ant nest in the middle of the damn summer, inland somewhere like Statesboro, GA, 104F on a humid day, than read that fucking paper. No contest. If confronted with the alternatives I would shout “fire ant mound” before you got to the word “Shrugged.” And I invite everyone in the CT commentariat to join me with bowed heads in a minute of silence to show we stand in solidarity with the poor bastard who ever has to read this paper.

oldster: ummmmm, sorry? I maybe absolutely, definitely made a bad call there and was wrong. Hector is capable of being polite and even charming when he wishes (I know this seems impossible, but really, he is). He begged successfully for a chance to return and then, as soon as it was granted, jumped on a table in the next available thread, pulled his pants down around his ankles, and immediately took a steaming crap right in front of God and everyone. When it was closed up he just moved on to start shitting in other threads, and we were like, “OK, we screwed that up.” My ‘pro-troll/sympathetic towards people who have mental problems biases’ made me put my hand up for “eh, let’s give him a shot.” I dun goofed. I think he’s re-banned already now; if not, he will be.

Abbe Faria: “It was volunteers choosing to wear a free t-shirt and offending the feminist neo-puritan tendency. The organizers are understandably relcutant [sic] to condemn people – particularly young women – for their dress choices.” I appreciate your concern about people judging young women based on what they wear, rather than who they are, or what they think. Also, have I ever told you that FUCK YOU? No? I’ve been meaning to. Sorry it took me this long to get around to it.

re: gender balance in academic conferences, I believe it’s been pointed out before but 3/4 CT posters are male (and they probably produce quite a lot more than 3/4 of posts)
One of the reasons the male posters write so much more is that the sexist blowback from posting is so stupid huge. Jesus Christ read this thread?! Do you think Eszter’s reading it and thinking “gonna do that again tomorrow!” I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve thought of writing things and not done it because I couldn’t get my game face on that day. HAVING SAID THAT you were all awesome recently in our “things that people might not like your liberal/feminist opinions on” thread and the one in which I described getting raped. I was fully assuming I’d have to erase some horrible comments on the latter but you were all lovely and thoughtful.

Separately, the recruitment of authors for the book events is an issue that is on us, and that haven’t succeeded in addressing well so far, though we have made conscious efforts. I would be interested in suggestions for how better to recruit a wider array of authors if anyone has any.

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Val 04.10.15 at 9:40 am

Ah, thank you, Belle.
I don’t even write much on my own blog nowadays, and I think this thing of, I have to be perfect and get everything right, because there are guys (and sadly some women) who are just sitting out there waiting for feminists to make a mistake, so they can say, oh look there’s a feminist and she made a mistake, so just proves it, they’re hopeless – well it’s inhibiting.

Even though a lot of the time, like Charles, they’re inventing the mistakes – still unpleasant.

Thank you so much for everything you do.

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dax 04.10.15 at 11:11 am

“Also, have I ever told you that FUCK YOU?”

This is an appalling reply.

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Lynne 04.10.15 at 12:31 pm

“I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve thought of writing things and not done it because I couldn’t get my game face on that day. ”

I was afraid of this. I don’t blame you but I wish it weren’t so! Is there anything we can do?

Love having you step into this thread.

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Lynne 04.10.15 at 12:34 pm

“This is an appalling reply.”

Is it? Is it, in context? And if so, why do you think she might have made such a reply?

I would imagine (I’m guessing) it is because she is TIRED of hearing stuff like what Abbe Faria said. Tired of having to explain why it is so annoying and wrong and condescending.

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Charles R 04.10.15 at 1:34 pm

Val, I see your point. I was rude and patronizing for reframing your own words how I did. I don’t think ignorance is a moral sin, but what we have as finite beings, and since I don’t believe in original sin, I’m okay with our ignorance being openly admitted rather than obscured behind vague language. Someone who sees how their own words go wrong is someone whom I hope will summon me to the right tasks and challenges public discourse demands. So, I was and am grateful for what you said then, and continue to say.

I don’t like the passive voice especially in cases such as “Women are raped” because it keeps the discussion about women and what they do or do not do, rather than whoever performs the verb. In the case of universities mandating or recommending language changes, we start to debate or quibble about which rules or recommendations will be the best ones to bring about the Promised Land of inoffensive communication. We sometimes do ask questions about whether or not it’s right for any institution to govern how it’s members speak with one another, but the passive voice here helps to obscure this question and keeps us focused on the rules or the recommendations, rather than how it comes about that this power to dictate language comes to exist in the first place. Simone Weil in The Need for Roots makes her point that individuals have their freedom to speak for themselves, but the larger groups–maybe trade unions, institutes, labor boards, all the various committees for committees, but also churches, political parties, social clubs–making a statement as a group forces the individuals to comply and assent to the group’s claim or risk expulsion or harassment or worse. What initially seems to be a show of solidarity and social cohesion becomes a harrowing and a weeding, and the ordinary diversity of opinions individuals share becomes not as important as the diversity of opinions groups share. Reading this in light of Arendt’s argument in The Human Condition, I’m inclined towards suspicion when the University speaks. (Maybe, if someone’s inclined, we can also throw in some Lacan here about University discourse and its appropriation of language power towards its own self-preservation, but it’s been a while since I needed Lacan to understand this.) It’s that sense when someone gets up and says “I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say…” and then we have to wonder about ourselves, about our divergence, about our difference. The growth of the social organism and its intrusion into the lives of individuals starts small, as all life processes do. I am not so suspicious of individuals speaking about their own experiences, and on this point, I am also flabbergasted that I didn’t just say “What have your experiences been like, Val?” from the start.

Maybe some people want social conformity more than others. There’s a lot of assurance and safety and security in conforming with one’s environment and social ecosystem. And, as we see, when it comes to diversity of opinion, especially the sort of opinion that openly states there’s great value in trying to find the synthesis of nearly contradictory positions, of getting past the stalwart social leaders deciding for us what’s good to read and what’s damnable to say, of recognizing that studying the coincidence of opposites leads to higher forms of thinking, some people actually do not want to read. But there are also those people who do not want to be driven into conformity, whether by the inward feeling of shame for being different or by the compulsion of others to shame them for not following the Party line.

I see how my words impugn your integrity. From your perspective in the midst of this world where we have to carefully select our words in fear of facing the retribution of anyone with the capacity to click a few buttons, it makes sense. But I don’t mean to impugn your integrity. I’m a pessimist who looks for people who are willing to admit to posting uncertainly. As you said, you also peeve about the passive voice, so in the moment of making the case, you went against your own peeve. And then you restored the act by filling in the details, removing your uncertainty, and posting more of the story. To me, those are all indications of a high integrity. You admitted the act, you corrected the act, and you carried on. That’s worth praise, and that’s why I was grateful. I accept you weren’t wanting to mislead anyone, but recognized with me that these are ambiguities we remove.

But if you don’t think you did anything wrong initially in going against your own peeve and speaking off-the-cuff about something you were unsure of, then clearly saying this was about curing one’s own ignorance is not going to read warmly. I thought your actions showed you wanted to correct your statements towards accuracy, since you gave me more attention and more material to work with in understanding you and your views. I think we share a similar sense of the value in taking time to correct ourselves, and correction at root requires our own admission of our own ignorance. That’s the basis from which I said what I did, and it’s also the basis from which I judge myself. I’m a very ignorant person who strives to learn just how wrong I am from others, such as yourself, who teach me.

I don’t think feminists are stupid. I don’t even think they’re misguided. I prefer a more womanist orientation and methodology, if it’s right to say it’s a ‘methodology’. It’s interesting to me, though, that you’re saying I could research for myself the problems of being “gender-blind”, when so many people tell me that the best thing for instruction and review in Universities is to anonymize ownership of our words and grade or judge accordingly. So, some people tell me there’s merit and value to judging the quality of people’s work without consideration for who and what those people are. Consider this my own paradox, then: I go off words and their performance online, because the Internet now makes it impossible to see how race, gender, class, culture, pain, and joy infuse and inform and nourish the words and speech we share with one another, unless we overcome the normal anonymity by revealing who and what we are. But vulnerability on the Internet exposes us to its violent and bullying whims–as some already discussed here. So, this same Internet both fosters the conditions for the vulnerable to seek shelter in obscurity and makes the claim that we need to see the border markers in each other’s lives to accurately judge the sense of what other people say. How do I work this out? Slowly, over time, and fucking up along the way. How else do we gain wisdom? Certainly not by obeying bureaucratic policies.

I apologize if this long post bores or tires. I mean it for understanding.

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Belle Waring 04.10.15 at 3:11 pm

Eh OK it’s not fair for front-page posters to tell commenters to fuck off except in extreme cases, so although the Abbé has been trying my patience sorely I apologize for the intemperate remark, and invite readers to substitute some milder condemnation of their own devising. Sorry Abbé Faria.

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Bob 04.10.15 at 3:56 pm

Thanks Belle, well said. I’ll try not to be deterred.

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Rich Puchalsky 04.10.15 at 3:56 pm

“and then get staked out over a huge fire-ant nest in the middle of the damn summer, inland somewhere like Statesboro, GA, 104F on a humid day, than read that fucking paper”

People should write poetry instead of papers. Look, a) no one reads poetry, so it’s pretty safe, b) those people who do read it know full well what they’re getting into: it comes with an implicit kind of trigger warning in the form of “this is a poem”, c) if you joy in the feeling of making someone else trudge through your stuff, there’s just no comparison. Poetry beats anything else hands down.

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MPAVictoria 04.10.15 at 4:01 pm

“Is it? Is it, in context? And if so, why do you think she might have made such a reply?

I would imagine (I’m guessing) it is because she is TIRED of hearing stuff like what Abbe Faria said. Tired of having to explain why it is so annoying and wrong and condescending.”

Yeah I am with Lynne on this one. Completely justified. No reason to be polite to assholes.

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MPAVictoria 04.10.15 at 4:03 pm

“I apologize if this long post bores or tires. I mean it for understanding.”

Less is more Charles. You stuff is long and hard to read. My comments may be stupid but at least they tend to be short.

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Charles R 04.11.15 at 12:41 pm

Okay. I’m out.

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Val 04.11.15 at 10:29 pm

Charles it’s possible I misread some of what you were saying, but it’s hard to tell really. Truly what you are saying seems vague.

However, two last points:

1. Inclusive language policies try to make sure that some people aren’t left out, eg get everyone in universities (in the case we are talking about), to speak as if men and women are equal, rather than as if men are default ‘normal’, women are ‘other’.

When you argue against inclusive language, you are not arguing for some vague ‘freedom’ – you are arguing for the specific freedom to discriminate against groups of people.

2 The reason that people may recommend actual ‘gender-blind’ assessment ( where they genuinely don’t know the gender) is because we are aware that gender discrimination exists in many scenarios. This is different from saying that you ‘don’t notice’ the gender of people’s names, because it is people who think they are ‘not noticing’ who are in practice giving the differential results.

People on (eg) biased selection committees don’t say ‘oh look there’s a female name, let’s treat her application badly’ – they say ‘we looked at all the applicants on the basis of merit and happened to prefer men, because they happened to be the best’. Unconscious bias is unconscious.

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