Okay, so this post is going to be incredibly sensitive so I want to start off with one thing, and if you start to get angry and upset and righteous, come back to this one thing: I want nothing more than a world in which all people are endowed with the same liberty, the same opportunity, happiness, quality of life, protection under the law, you name it. The question is: how do we get there?
I ask "how do we get there?" because it feels like we're not getting there. Instead of getting to that "city upon a hill", we seem to be seeing a fragmentation of the city into warring tribes. This is a problem I've wrestled with for years as waves of feminism have lapped against the white-sand shores of patriarchal norms, as Muslims were persecuted following 9/11, as black kids were getting shot, as latinos were sprinting away from extreme poverty and violence straight into a white-brick wall of xenophobia. The discussion has bubbled and popped, bubbled again into new life, evolved, and tensions rose and the movements bled, torn apart by their own internal disagreements.
In a way, this post is one of those internal disagreements. However, read carefully, this post is an olive branch and my sincere effort to bring people together, because I know Muslims, blacks and Latinos, Native Americans and a large set of overlapping, un-recognized types of victims (for example - I have a profound hearing loss and there are all kinds of norms - speak quietly, indoor voices etc. - that run contrary to the needs of the hard of hearing), and I know a bunch of men who were victims of bullying (I was part of this cycle, a bully who was bullied), who were socialized around white men to say things that make women and non-whites uncomfortable, and whose instinctive drives for love and sex are parasitized by infinitely many mosquitos of porn and ads of unrealistically sexy women. I know black people who talk differently around black people than around white people (but when they find out you've got a good taste in R&B and aren't afraid to sing and dance, they open up), Latinos who don't want to speak Spanish with gringos (but when they find out you love Latin America, they open up), White men who are hardened by norms they never invented and unintentionally perpetuate (but when they find out you appreciate some things they do, maybe an Irish play writer, a German song, or a French pastry, they open up).
Having seen and known these people, I'm often torn by the contemporary discussions of social justice that, I feel, are creating chasms where we need to be building bridges. My first experience of this effect came from the seminal Mansplaining article, where a guy in Aspen talks to a respectable lady from New York about a book that, it turns out, she wrote. It happens time and again that women are subordinated by men who assume the women don't know what's going on, and so the lady in New York used the gentleman in Aspen as a special example of this general pattern of subordination in speech. It was termed "Mansplaining", and then suddenly women everywhere had a word to place on the action.
I totally empathize with the woman - I have had countless dudes tell me ridiculous things that I know much more about (one guy insisted there were only three bald eagles ever in the state of New Mexico, one guy told me New Mexico was never a part of Mexico) - and if this would happen to me more regularly than it does, especially if it happened in my professional life, I would be writing a blog post about this pattern of behavior and trying to find out how we can fix it. I would've called it "sex-splaining" to humbly admit that it could go both ways, but whatever - that woman and I have a lot in common.
However, when I read this article, I couldn't help but also empathize with the man, and I think that is why, not standing entirely on one side or the other, I so consistently fall in the chasm on these social justice debates. The guy was living in Colorado, a wild-western state with a large number of Christians and a relatively recent urbanization. What's more, he was an older gentleman, so it's not like he read "The Smurfette Principle" in college. Heck, he probably never even read that article and might not even know what the word "mansplaining" is. Maybe he did feel more confident talking down to the woman because of his socialization under antiquated norms... or maybe he thought she was attractive and was excited and overly eager to share his knowledge on this one thing they have in common. I don't know, but I thought it was important to know this guy's motivations before judging his behavior. When I finished reading the article, I was grateful to have learned more about this common and subordinating interaction and now I am more careful about it in my personal life. However, I felt very uneasy about the straw "man" made of this Aspen dude.
Why was the lady in New York sure that this particular guy was a sexist jerk? Or even a jerk? More information about the intentions of the man is needed to know just how malicious this mansplaining is, because people come from different cultures and part of living in a pluralistic society is learning, to the extent possible, how we can live our own lives with our own norms about male-female interactions while letting other people live theirs. Would we charge a cheif of an Amazonian tribe with mansplaining? Doing so feels very culturally imperialistic, borderline fascist - why should people living elsewhere subscribe to our own norms? There are clear cases of black and white - other people can eat whatever (non-endangered-animal) food they want, but no matter what their cultures we will not tolerate murder or genocide. However, the etiquette of a man talking to a woman, insofar as this guy in Aspen was motivated by patriarchal self-perpetuation, seems like it should be fair for people to... well.. choose. Feminism is about choice, right? not limiting the scope of acceptable choices to what is deemed acceptable by feminists, but that principle of choice that any human can agree to.
The straw man in Aspen ticked me off, as did the gender biased term "mansplain" that arose from a straw man, and I argued about it with some people on facebook and finally shut up because it seemed impossible to explain that (1) we need to understand what the man is thinking if we want to fix it and (2) we shouldn't make a word that labels men as the only people who talk-down to women. However, many people saw my remarks as invalidating the NYC lady's experience and, while I wanted everyone to at least try to see the world through Aspen Dude's eyes, I didn't want my colleagues to think I'm a sexist ass (even if their opinions were, in my opinion, not fair). Ironically, when a woman named Lesley on xoJane made a (very well-written) argument to the same effect, it was embraced by many of those same people as "a good point" and proof that feminism marches along. We, the well-meaning social justice world, created a word that is gender-biased in an effort to eliminate gender biases, and it felt to me like that discussion was not open to input from men. In the process, that single article and that single word pushed the gender worlds farther apart by creating a culture that does not try to empathize with people different from them (in this case, men who were brought up with disagreeable social norms) - which is precisely the culture I think we need to fix.
The same thing happened when a friend of mine was accused of unwanted sexual penetration. Right now, consider your initial reaction to that statement "I (you note: white man) am upset because a friend of mine was accused of unwanted sexual penetration". If you reacted strongly to that statement, the hairs on your back raised immediately because (1) you assumed the friend was male, (2) you assume he is more likely guilty than not and (3) I'm part of a counter-progressive culture standing in the way of women's rights. It's possible that some people will stop reading immediately after hearing that statement, because their minds are already made up.
Well, it turns out that, after a thorough investigation by the school, it was discovered that the girl was accusing the guy because she didn't want to admit to her best friend that she willingly slept with her ex-boyfriend. So, it was easier to claim that she was raped than to admit to her friend that she had done something wrong.
My friend is very likely a marginal case in the world of sexual assaults. Sexual assault is incredibly awful, most accusations of sexual assault probably have some legitimacy behind them, and sexual assault is more likely to be perpetrated by men than women. However, the culture in which we assume that he is guilty because he is a man is, in the blind eyes of justice, no different from the culture in which we assume someone is guilty because they are black. My friend was not innocent until proven guilty - he was a guy accused of rape, so he needed to prove his innocence with six months of digging up every text he could. That kind of social justice is anything but. Even if, statistically, black people are more likely to commit crimes, it is wrong to assume someone is guilty because they are black, it is wrong to be afraid of someone because they are black, to shoot them because they are black. These stereotypes reinforce the divide and don't provide room for people to be good, much less incentive. If you were black and always getting arrested, where's the motivation to be good if you get arrested anyways? My friend was innocent, yet people looked at him like a rapist. It is not the people, but the behaviors that we need to address, and the labels we give people, originally intended to identify the types of victims, become catalysts for stereotypes and cause us to lose our focus on what warrants punishment - a committed crime, not a perceived criminal. Hate the sin, love the sinner.
I listed two cases that differ from standard feminism and favor men - mansplaining and sexual assault on college campuses. In fairness, let me turn the tables a bit.
Men's rights activists have some legitimate positions (lower the hairs on your back to recall that, above, I started by saying that the woman's experiences in the mansplaining article were legitimate and that sexual assault is wrong and a real problem). For instance, our boys are doing terribly in public schools. What's more, men are far more likely to end up in prison than women. Whether due to an unhealthy socialization of men or due to a criminal law that disproportionately identifies and punishes crimes perpetrated by men, we have a serious inequality. When we see black people in prison, we rightfully think "criminal justice reform", but when we see more men than women in prison, we are remarkably silent. However, in my opinion, Men's Rights Activists are painfully ineffective at moving us towards men's rights; they are too busy being obstructionist to women's rights and wading in their own puddle of victims' tears while providing little of substance for how we can achieve greater equality. While women are blogging and engaging in substantive discussions - some even in line with men's rights concerns about labels like mansplaining, and many advocating for things like Planned Parenthood that help women without hurting men - the MRA is just throwing stones at feminism with no intention of building a bridge. Sure, men are going to jail - but lashing out against the "privileged" women is not the answer. Nowhere close.
The general theme I see as I straddle the chasm is that well-meaning people are more likely to see their own victimhood - and with every victim there is someone who is making out just fine - and less likely to recognize the legitimacy of the victimhood, with regard to other desirable liberties or equal protection, of those who are making out just fine. A key epiphany here is thta inequality is not a general statement but rather depends on the particular desirable good or state of being under consideration - there is different degrees and directions of inequality depending on what desirable good or state of being we're looking at. Men are getting paid more than women, and women are going to jail less than men. Women are more likely to get raped than men, and men are more likely to unknowingly raise a kid that's not their own. In all of these cases, it helps to be less general about "inequality" and more specific about the precise type of inequality we're trying to alleviate - income inequality, inequality in public school performance, inequality in crime and punishment, inequality in norms for acceptable dress in the officeplace, etc. Furthermore, comparing inequalities should be avoided at all costs - inequality in income is incomparable to inequality in rape or imprisonment - because different desirable goods are apples and oranges. We need to revolutionize our way of thinking about inequality so that we no longer attack labelled people "on the other side" of the inequality chasm, but instead see them as people, with their own kinds of suffering. To bring up the most loaded class of victims in history, consider Jewish people. Even if Jewish people are more likely to get into ivy leagues, possibly because of stereotypes or in-group favoritism or economic inequality, for example, they still suffer from extreme and atrocious acts of antisemitism around the world and while we fight for equality on college admissions we should also fight for equality in the treatment of Jewish people around the globe. Instead of trying to weigh apples and oranges to see if it a group's advantages and disadvantages "average out", we should recoil at the suffering of a fellow human and try to help. If someone gets paid more than other people, but is dying due to an inequality in access to healthcare - we should give her some healthcare.
In addition to the underlying definitions of inequality, it seems as if well-meaning people have forgotten the real reason for wanting to fix inequality - because it's virtuous (and much needed) to care about *other* people. It's as if social justice has marched to far ahead of its leaders and has evolved some behaviors that run contrary to the principles that drew me in to begin with. I will always fight for equality, but as both sides march away from each other, I find myself alone in the middle, where the discussion needs to be if we are ever to come together to fix these problems. Much of the eFeminism tweets and blogs that invalidate my experience as a male march away from Bell Hooks' memo that "feminism is for everyone" to the point where men can get fired (Tim Hunt) for voicing their experiences about gender interactions. The (disputably) well-meaning MRA sprints away from Gandhi's call to "be the change you wish to see in the world" as Men's rights groups shoot burning arrows to undermine women's rights. When privilege becomes so intimately tied to "white" that we create a term marching us farther from Dr. King's stern yet inclusive compassion calling on us to always "judge a man not by the color of his skin, but the content of his character".
I'm a white, deaf scottish, Irish, German, Mexican, Native-American guy who grew up in an upper-middle-class family going to some of the poorest and roughest public schools in one of the poorest states in the nation. Like every other human being, I'm a mutt - trace it back far enough, and your life was made possible by two people from different backgrounds falling in love with each other. I don't fit into the labels we have defining the two sides in the war for peace and equality. I try to be very sensitive in my treatment of some indisputably identified victims because, more than all of those labels, I'm a human being and so is every other person in the world. I'm not black, but you bet your ass #BlackLivesMatter - the disproportionate shooting of black people in this country is atrocious and we need to fix it. I'm not a woman, but you bet your ass I'll be calling out the cat-callers, people talking down to women (even if the talkers are women), and people discriminating against women in pay and hiring, and trying hard to alleviate all manners of other sufferings brought to my attention through the women in my life and online who report their suffering. I'm a man, but that should not affect your emotional reaction when I point out that there are so many men in prison, or men referred to as "creeps" or try to understand the motivations behind "man-splainers" and cat-callers in an effort to talk them into different behaviors.
We're all human. We're all socialized by an imperfect world and we identify clear imperfections. Women are being paid less and raped more. That's awful and we need to fix it. Black people are being shot and arrested. That's awful, and we need to fix it. Men are being thrown in jail. That's awful, and we need to fix it. We've come so far - instead of being complacent with these imperfections, we are using the internet to become well aware of so many kinds of suffering, and we are all burning to change them, or at least some of them thereby permitting compromise. There's so much positive energy in the push for a better world, we just need to find a way to channel it. We all see where we want to go, now we just need to figure out how to get there.
In the process of getting there, we have marched apart, thrown stones, and divided into warring camps that label each other almost as different species that can never understand each other, but, as we all intuitively know, that is not how we're going to get there. The story of the move for justice parallels the Tower of Babel - we are so close to working together to the point where anything is within our reach, but in the process of working together we've disagreed over the color of the bricks or the size of the stairs and been divided into camps that can never work together to accomplish anything. However, unlike the tower of Babel, there has been no God dividing people into camps, only people dividing each other into camps - that means there's a solution within the reach of us.
So how do we get there? In all humility, I don't know - I'm just one guy - but I can tell you my guess based on what's worked for me. In my political discussions with friends, I can tell you that the most unifying fuel is compassion and the most productive engine is pro-active thinking. We need to love everybody - definitely the victims but even the sinner - and try to understand why they're doing what they're doing. Then, and only then, can we start to think proactively about how to fix this. Why do guys commit crimes, rape among them? Why are guys doing so poorly in schools? Why are cops shooting black people - how much is due to racism (corrected by counseling on racial attitudes) and how much is due to their work environment (corrected by better mental health care for cops and serious, societal introspection on why we are so violent)? Why do people cheat on each other, leading one spouses to discover another baby is in the picture, and what can we do to promote more honesty in relationships?
None of these discussions can be solved by the victims alone, because victims are often suffering so greatly that they are scraping madly to breathe and arrive on the shores of justice that they may likely inflict harm on the beneficiaries of inequality (note: I did not call them the "perpetrators" of inequality, because sometimes the beneficiaries of inequality never intend to be unjust). Nor can these problems be solved by beneficiaries - the beneficiaries are doing fine, and are more focused on their own problems/victim hood/experienced injustices.
The infinite pile of overlapping labels and bias for personally experienced injustices motivates fewer labels and more common humanity. If there's anything we have in common, it's that we have a lot of labels in our social network, that in some ways we're a beneficiary, and in some ways we're a victim. Any human can sort through their personal labels and the labels of their loved ones, find which label has the greatest perceived inequality, and that is the problem they likely care most about. For me, it is environmental injustice and the treatment of people with special needs, because I grew up in the great outdoors, cultivating a love of the world's biodiversity, and because I have had a profound hearing loss. I also care about Gingers, but whatever - you can call me a daywalker and I'll laugh about it, because the Irish and Scottish immigrants are doing alright now. While these labels define our own lives, they do not preclude compassion for other people. In fact, often it's a simple analogy that leaps over the walls between labels and helps us see that we're really the same thing. Despite my initial white-guy reaction to #blacklivesmatter, my (unbelievably intelligent) girlfriend*, using my connection to nature, pointed out that somebody saying "save the rainforests" is not saying "f*** all other forests", and in an instant I was converted. The people who disagree with the victims' memes and are scratched by the victims' reaches for justice are often not hateful bigots but are limited by their experiences, and so the way to reach the beneficiaries of inequality is to talk with them about their experiences and find the connection.
Compassion is the key, because, to me, compassion is about seeing the similarities, not the differences; it's about feeling what it's like to be another person, walking a mile in their shoes, and appreciating them has humans bound by their circumstance, just like the rest of us. Our labels come from our environment and our ancestry, yet our on the small scale our environment is an artifact of our birth and, on the large scale, we're all inhabiting the same world. As for differences in ancestry, the story of our ancestors written in our DNA is 99.9% similar. The chasms that divide us are seams on rocks in the mountain of humanity that unites us.
So, to cross these chasms, I encourage all of us to find those people and groups that make the hairs on our back raise in defense, and, after a few deep breaths, earnestly try to understand what makes them tick. Walk a mile in their shoes, not trying to understand them out of pity or superiority, but rather to feel for yourself - what do they value? What would make them feel happy? How can we help? How is that similar (not different) to my own experiences?
If you're pro-choice, try to imagine how much it hurts to think of babies being killed in our democracy because of a supreme court ruling, and how happy you'd feel if that could stop, someway, somehow. If you're pro-life, try to see that, in the ambiguity of defining the onset of human life, especially in light of modern biology's ability to make clones from skin cells, liberals' definitions based on sentience have some merit. If you're a dude who doesn't really prioritize street harassment, try to imagine a giant guy with overwhelming physical dominance harassing you on the street, calling you out on your tiny biceps, or maybe grabbing your junk and humiliating you in front of the world... and then imagine how that experience would shape your feelings when walking through a world of predatory eyes looking at your chest and ass, and how that is amplified by knowing the history of women's rights. Imagine if your greatest fear on a first date was not "looking bad" or "saying something stupid", but "getting raped and/or killed". If you're a woman, try to imagine being socialized as a simple-minded jock and trying to navigate the landmines of sexism in your profession, landmines that can label anything you do - talking to a girl you like, being somewhat awkward because you like her, can result in being called a "creep" (which, in the mind of a well-meaning dude, is a species of offense in the same family as rape), explaining things to a colleague can become "mansplaining", sharing your feelings about a "distracting" sex drive in a conference in South Korea can get you fired, and sleeping with the wrong girl in college can become rape. If you're white, imagine seeing someone who looks like your kid get shot by a police force that is overwhelmingly not white - imagine if all cops were Muslims and Mexicans and white kids were getting shot - imagine not being able to ask people for directions without them defensively gathering closely or, sometimes, lashing out in straight-up racism, imagine walking down the street with white boys leaning out the window shouting a word that conjures up generations of suffering written in your DNA and still present today in your environment. If you're deaf, imagine how annoying it is for people who can hear well to have some loud-mouthed person hogging the verbal space in a room.
I'm convinced that if enough people sought out this universal compassion on their own volition, the people around them would see, hear and read this kind of compassion, be drawn to it, emulate it, and that tower of Babel can be built.
* My girlfriend is the better half of the brains behind the core content of this article. She and I have had many intense discussions about these topics and she has displayed the patience of a saint as I've tried to wrap my head around things she understands so easily, but in the process of our discussions, some lasting until 3am, we have arrived at some remarkable revelations that I just had to share with the world.
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