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Eh, I don't know. I think even the people who were saying "So what?" were coming from a place where they're aware there are children being sexually exploited in much worse conditions in the world.Do you think so? Would there have been a similar reaction if this had been about, say, taunting and not-terribly-injurious physical abuse of middle-class American boys who were bad at sports? Because in the grand global scheme of violence and abuse, being called a faggot for being bad at sports isn't a huge outrage. There are a lot of kids in the world who would kill to be those bullied American boys, who take for granted that they will have three meals a day and a bed to sleep in and won't be forced to become a child soldier or harvest cocoa beans for fourteen hours a day. But I certainly still have sympathy for middle-class American boys who are bullied, and I suspect most people on metafilter would. I think that people here tend to be a little selective about their selective outrage. But maybe I'm just imagining it.
Yeah, I managed to have it happen to me in this very thread. Trying to give other people the benefit of the doubt by saying "Well, at least the critics seem to be coming from a place of sympathy for the least fortunate, BUT that's still misguided, in that it takes the argument that sympathy is reserved solely for the highest bidder", I in turn get called out and given an extended metaphor on the nature of empathy.I dunno if you're talking about me, but if so, I didn't mean to call you out. I just think your generous reading is maybe a bit too generous. My issue isn't with you. It's with people who claim to be coming from a place of sympathy for the truly oppressed because that's more socially acceptable than saying that they're coming from a place of resentment of and hostility towards beautiful, well-paid women and girls.
Who cares where the posters are "coming from"? Read and react to comments for what they say instead of trying to place people's motivations and psyche into some ill-defined box.I care, because like every woman in the world, including totally average-looking ones like me, I live with the consequences of this kind of thinking. And there isn't a lot that's new here, if you pay attention to the way that people talk about sexual assault and abuse of women. Katha Pollitt has a similar story about how her parents reacted in the '60s when Andrea Dworkin went public with her story about being sexually abused in police custody:
I first heard of Andrea Dworkin in 1968. She had been arrested in an antiwar demonstration and jailed at the old Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Village, where male doctors subjected her to brutal internal exams. Her name was in the news because she had gone public with her story. My good, kind, radical, civil libertarian parents thought this was ridiculous. What did she expect, this privileged white woman, this "Bennington girl"? It wasn't that they didn't believe her, exactly. It was that they didn't see why she was making such a big, princessy fuss. It was like getting arrested and complaining about the food.Like Pollitt, I'm not a fan of Dworkin. But like Pollitt, I understand the ways in which the "privilege" discourse gets used to excuse or write off or diminish sexual abuse of some women, just as other discourses get used in exactly the same way to write off or dismiss or excuse sexual abuse of other women. And in the end, it's open season on all women, as well as on certain men. (I don't think that this functions any differently with men, but men are much less likely to be sexually abused unless they end up in prison or another institutional setting.) Either you think sexual assault and abuse are unacceptable or you don't. To me, it's irrelevent what terms you use to excuse or diminish sexual abuse. The point, and the only point, is that you think there are factors that mitigate the horror of sexual abuse or assault. Once you've crossed that mental bridge, you can find a way to write off pretty much anything that happens to pretty much any of us.
jessamyn: Generally speaking I see a lot of early commenting in threads as really setting the tone for how a thread will go overall. Early comments that are just saying that you don't like something sort of poisons the well. Use the flagging feature, feel free to email/im us but don't fill the place up with your negative comments just because a post isn't relevant to you personally.I don't think what she was directing this directly at me, but it resonated, and this is my new MetaMotto. I wasn't deliberately trying to "thread-shit." I didn't have a problem with the post at all, but I know taking the position I did colored the thread.
There's also a small subset of people who seem to do this a lot. We'd like them to maybe consider doing that less.
Who cares where the posters are "coming from"? Read and react to comments for what they say instead of trying to place people's motivations and psyche into some ill-defined box.And craichead responded:
I care, because like every woman in the world, including totally average-looking ones like me, I live with the consequences of this kind of thinking.craichead, it's great that you care, but that doesn't make you even a little bit better at reading minds. Imagining that you know what's in another person's heart and responding to that instead of what they actually said is the best way to turn a civil discussion into a bitter quarrel.
posted by Burhanistan at 7:33 PM on June 8