The Gordian Knot of instituitionalised sexism - a stream of consciousness

[miss_s_b]

Because I am poorly and have no spoons, I got into a fight I possibly shouldn't have started last night, with someone who winds me up with his sexist behaviour at regular intervals. I'm not going to link to it, because I don't want this post to be about that specific incident, but about the generality. It ended up with him saying to me that I have no right to complain about him not linking to women's views unless I, personally, spoonfeed him women's views to link to.

Now, my instinctive reaction to that is to think fuck you! Why should I do all your work for you, you lazy git?... But that's possibly counterproductive for two reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, as I have discussed before, men will happily self-promote in ways that women won't. Mediocre men will shout from the rooftops about how awesome they are, and the more mediocre they are, the more they shout; awesome women, because of shyness, or socialisation that women who shout are harpies, or insecurity about their awesomeness, are much less likely to self-promote. This is made worse by the fact that very few people will look beyond what is waved in front of their faces, so the shouty men get noticed and the quiet women don't; very few people are willing to hurt somebody else (of whatever gender) by telling them they are mediocre if they are, and so the mediocre people get promotion they don't deserve, just by being shouty (Iain Dale is a PRIME example of that); and thus the cycle that to be noticed half as much as a man, a woman has to be twice as good continues in our supposedly post-feminist times.

The second reason my reaction is counter-productive is male priviledge. Male opinion aggregators are used to being spoonfed. This is unfair and annoying, but telling them to look beyond their spoonfeeding is telling them to do more work that they don't see a reason to do. Even if that were not the case, it takes a special kind of person to resist being spoonfed, why would anybody give themselves extra work to do?

This gives us two reasons why the blokosphere is self-perpetuating, and those two reasons feed into and reinforce each other. Even a completely non-sexist feminist ally man will often unconsciously perpetuate sexism under these circumstances. This is a problem I have been talking about for years, and I still don't have a suitable sword to cut this Gordian Knot. Nobody else seems to have one either.

How do we go about forging one, people?

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Comments

[joeotten.blogspot.com]

OK so maybe this is just ignorance, so by all means tell me to RTFM, or have a go, or whatever, but I have some sympathy with Stephen here. And I haven't seen the original dispute so I am probably missing something important.

If the problem is differential amounts of self-publicity (and mutual publicity) between men and women on average, and you don't have a good solution, then how's Stephen going to have a good solution either?

The blogosphere is buried in a sea of mediocrity, and so the amount of publicity is everything. Well and quality. But if you look beyond what has publicity and quality, then 99% will be mediocre and you will be wasting your time.

We all in a sense read what we have stumbled upon rather than what is great - hence our contempt of the willy waving competition - and linkblogging is much the same. If we had a duty to link on merit rather than by accident, then linkblogging would be impossible. And a linkblogger who linked to equal numbers of men and women, still wouldn't be treating fairly the individual women whose blogs are better than any of them. And it's about fairness to individuals, rather than arbitrarily defined groups in the end isn't it?

Also - said at great risk I feel - I'm not convinced that there is no genetic element to the average difference in appetite for self-promotion between men and women. Millennia of selective evolutionary pressure seem to have rewarded men for appearing to excel and women for being safe. Clearly there is socialisation going on as well, which can and should be fought against, but I fear we humans are imperfectible on this score.

[gwenhwyfaer]

OK so maybe this is just ignorance, so by all means tell me to RTFM, or have a go, or whatever, but I have some sympathy with Stephen here. And I haven't seen the original dispute so I am probably missing something important.

And yet...

This might be part of what Jennie is talking about. This kind of "well, I don't know what I'm talking about but the hell with it, I'm going to talk about it anyway" seems to be a somewhat male-dominated pursuit, even when prefixed by "no really, I am self-aware enough to know I'm talking crap, honest". The same instinct that drives even the mediocre to self-promote like mad ignites the belief that one's opinion is so vitally important that the rest of the world must have it, even if it isn't actually constructed with reference to anything as mundane as, you know, the events under discussion.

[joeotten.blogspot.com]

Well yeah, the incident under discussion wasn't linked to...

And "typical man talking crap" doesn't convince me that I am talking crap this time. Not that there's any guarantee an explanation of why I am talking crap would convince me either.

But OK I think you're probably right that self-promotion and talking crap go together - that both exhibit the same kind of overconfidence. The tragedy is that it pays off. Perhaps because there is "no such thing as bad publicity".

But ultimately this tragedy is not one that favours men over women, but one that favours the overconfident over the reasonable. There just happens to be a correlation.

[gwenhwyfaer]

It's not whether you're talking crap. It's that without doing some research first, you can't possibly tell. And that tendency to expound without doing one's homework is what I was talking about.

[cesy]

It didn't sound to me like she was asking Stephen to have a good solution.

Stopping promoting a bad non-solution would be a good start, though.

It might also help if you read a few articles on feminism before engaging in a discussion on the topic - you've made some very basic mistakes in your comment.

[joeotten.blogspot.com]

Sure. What errors, and what article deals with each?

[miss_s_b]

if you really are interested in learning, follow some of the links above. Especially the article about why it shouldn't be a feminist's job to spoon feed you knowledge which you can easily find with a bit of googling, I would suggest. For what it's worth, I don't think Stephen IS consciously sexist, but that just makes it harder, because when someone points to him doing something sexist, he takes it as an insult, rather than an opportunity to learn.

[joeotten.blogspot.com]

Jennie, I get your grievance - I'm not trying to dispute it.

I've followed some of these links. I agree with the feminism 101 thing. I didn't see the spoon feeding one here, but I remember you talking about it before.

But is it just a question of googling? If somebody said: your politics is all wrong, but I'm not going to tell you in what way, just google it...

You might end up reading the opposite of what I had in mind for one thing.

But I'm happy to keep out of any discussion of sexism if you prefer.

[miss_s_b]

But if you keep out, you won't learn nothin'!

http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/03/11/faq-what-is-male-privilege/ - you are displaying lots of this. In asking us to stop our discussion and explain the basics to you, you are unconsciously projecting that us educating you is more important than finding a solution to the problem at hand. In this case, though, since I think educating you is possibly PART of the solution to the problem at hand.

In answer to your "men and women are basically different" point: http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/05/10/faq-but-men-and-women-are-born-different-isnt-that-obvious/ (and a post I did on this point myself a few years ago)

[joeotten.blogspot.com]

Thanks for the links. Fair enough that this is the wrong place for this conversation. Is there a right place for it?

I totally agree with your Venn Diagram thing - as I did when I read it the first time around. I'm not trying to justify discrimination. But even those small differences in averages can explain differences in average outcomes, even if opportunities, rights, culture, conditioning, etc, were to be equalised.

And I reject the idea that overconfidence is a superior trait. It is a big part of the curse that promotes mediocrity above talent across society and business.

[joeotten.blogspot.com]

Hmm, I should clarify that because your Venn diagram was about some sort of measurable attribute I think - and all I am talking about is a difference in the kinds of choices people make.

Ultimately I am in favour of people being free to make their own choices, even if those choices result in different average outcomes between some identity group an individual is in, and one they are not in.

I am against conditioning people differently according to sex or class or whatever, but I don't think conditioning is all-powerful.

[matgb]

I don't think conditioning is all-powerful

Neither do I, but I do think it's systemic.

Example, on Thursday at the school, I was asked by one of the kids, a fairly bright one, if I was on sandwiches or dinners. I said neither (naturally), and that I go home to cook myself something.

She was confused and asked why, and I said that it was because I was a good cook and enjoyed it, and it was easier and cheaper for me than paying for dinner at the school.

She then asked if I cooked it myself, and then followed up with "don't you have a girlfriend then?"

At 6, she's already conditioned to expect the woman in the house does the cooking, and men only do it if they've no choice. Playtime is incredibly gendered, and it's not deliberate, but is still exclusionary. Girls are scared of the rough boys, so don't play football, so they're not as good, sot he boys don't want the less good players to play.

It also excludes some of the gentler boys, one asked me if he could play football with the girls because "the boys are too rough", but there's a tiny number of girls that'll just join in. Skipping is for girls, although some of the boys enjoy it, they avoid it once they realise this.

Girls may, on average, be less likely to want to join in with a boisterous game of football. But that acts to not only exclude those that don't want to play, but also make it harder for those to join in, because there aren't any girls there doing it, etc.

Some of that is biological, size, strength, etc. Some of that is confidence, and the latter is exactly what this is all about, the boys don't see there's a problem, so much so that on the one day a week I give the field to the girls, many of the boys complain and are horrified, it's not fair, "we let the girls play". Except they don't, actually, they only let the girls that play like boys play, the confident ones who're already good enough.

Something I need to work on a lot more next few years if I stay in the job, but it's definitely a mixture of conditioning and inbuilt preferences.

[andrewducker]

I'd love it if you took five minutes to turn this into a post so I could link to it!

[matgb]

Ah, see, I've promised not to blog directly about work stuff. There're privacy concerns about talking about kids and similar, it's a bit of a gray area but I'd rather not put school stuff up on my aggregated feeds.

But you could link to the comment.

[andrewducker]

Aaah, fair enough. I'll link to the comment.

I really do wish you posted more.

Mind you, I wish _I_ posted more.

[bagpuss]

This is interesting, My mum keeps commenting on similar things from her grandchildren and my nieces and newphews, one of whom was having a party and said not to invite a girl as it was no girls allowed untill of course it was pointed out several of the people who wanted to attend were girls and he kind of saw the flaw in his logic but probably didn't really understand.

He won't be being actively taught that boys should exclude girls but something about our society and the way we teach and interact with children has generated that view and I am not sure what we can do about it other than challenge it when we see it ourselves

[bagpuss]

That should read

"who he wanted to attend"

[cesy]

You could try posting in your own blog that you're trying to learn about this stuff, and then people who have spare time and energy can give you links, rather than taking over someone else's space.

http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/the-faqs/faq-roundup/ has a lot of the basics, and http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Geek_Feminism_Wiki is well worth a browse.

Part of the problem is that your point is not wrong - there are small differences in averages, and if you eliminated every other variable, those differences would remain. But the thing is, they're relatively tiny. Really tiny. And talking about them distracts from the main point - that the differences caused by opportunities/conditioning/etc. are huge.

Overconfidence may not be a superior trait, but our society values it, and this means that people without it tend to suffer, even though it's a bad thing.