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

[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.