Why London is the centre of the universe, and why systematic sexism still exists

[miss_s_b]

(this entry composed on my phone, so formatting will likely not be very polished. Apologies for that)

It's all about the adversarial mindset, baby. Every question is binary, Either/or, yes/no, you win I lose.

Is London the centre of the universe? If the only possible answers are yes or no, then everyone who lives in london is bound to say yes, ESPECIALLY people who have moved there from elsewhere, after all, why would you put up with the squalor and the crampedness and the horrendous expense and the faff if it wasn't? The number of people who buy into the myth is a reinforcement to all the others, and everybody admires the emperor's new clothes. Meanwhile, those of us who live in the provinces resent the Londoners for getting all the money, all the attention, etc. We particularly resent the refusal of those who live in london to travel outside it - if it's the centre of the universe, after all, by definition nothing that happens outside london can be important - despite the fact that you can get to my house by train faster from king's cross than you can get from one side of london to the other.

What if we didn't think in this binary, adversarial fashion. What if we accepted that, despite it's wonders, there are legitimate valid reasons for people to live outside of London, and they don't deserve to be completely excluded from all decision-making as a punishment for this? Well, of course, intellectually, people claim that they DO accept this, and they get offended when you point out that their behaviour says otherwise. London-dweller logic is like smoker logic. If coming to meetings in london is difficult for you, the solution is easy - move to london! Etc.

How does all this apply to sexism, then? The same tendency towards binary thinking can be seen affecting gender balance. Intellectually, everybody knows that all people are individuals and deserve to be assessed on their own merits, but we can't help but be embedded with stereotypes. Women are better at some stuff, men are better at others, and the fact that the difference between members of each group is always orders of magnitude bigger than the difference between the average man and the average woman doesn't impact on most people's belief that because the average woman is better at x than the average man then THIS PARTICULAR woman must be better at x than this particular man... It takes a huge weight of evidence on the part of the disadvantaged party to get people to believe that they really ARE good at x, and they have to do the convincing every single time. And the othe similarity is that if you point out to someone who doesn't believe themselves to be sexist that they are behaving in a way that supports and reinforces this system, they get incredibly offended... And don't even get me started on racism, the very definitionn of us-or-them thinking.

I don't know what the solution to any of this is. But I'm a liberal, so I believe that there must be one, and it must be one that it is possible to persuade people to adopt.

Or perhaps I've just found another brick wall to beat my head against...

Comments

[gwenhwyfaer]

the difference between members of each group is always orders of magnitude bigger than the difference between the average man and the average woman

This is such a blatantly obvious thing to know; all you have to do is look around. Why do so many people forget it on such a regular basis?

[andrewducker]

I don't know what the solution to any of this is. But I'm a liberal, so I believe that there must be one, and it must be one that it is possible to persuade people to adopt.

I'm a liberal, and I don't believe that there are necessarily answers to all problems. I certainly don't believe that there are answers that won't take generations to come to fruition.

Shame, really.

[purplecthulhu]

There is no centre to the universe, and I can say that with professional authority :-)

[pmoodie]

London certainly isn't the centre of MY universe, let me tell you! :)

I probably have my sexist moments though, but I hope I'm able to look at myself critically and accept that I'm not always right about everything. That's all it takes really. People need to put their egos aside and realise that they are occasionally wrong about things, and be prepared to alter their view of the world when they get better information.

Unfortunately, putting our egos aside is a difficult thing. It's far easier to get all defensive and shouty.

[daweaver]

It is not necessary for any one person to have answers to everything. Simply stating and identifying a problem is a positive step, it allows other people to crysallise their thoughts and channel their efforts.

The recent announcement of the UK City of Culture 2013 springs to mind. The honour has been bestowed on Derry/Londonderry, beating claims from Birmingham, Sheffield, and Norwich. My city lost, but it is easier for me (and an awful lot of people) to get to the Foyle than to East Anglia.

One datum of interest: assuming that Royal Mail postcodes are correlated with the population, the population centre of Great Britain (excluding Northern Ireland) is at Yeaveley, about five miles south of Ashbourne in Derbyshire. Derby, Stoke, Nottingham are the biggest areas nearby. Any organisation that won't look north of Birmingham is sending out clear messages.

The centre of the universe is, of course, wherever Zaphod Beeblebrox happens to be at the moment.