Guardian – what a stupid, obnoxious rag, people – published yet another idiotic, alarmist post. It is titled “Why is feminism such a tough badge to wear?”
To answer the brainless journalist’s stupid question: there is absolutely nothing “tough” about calling yourself a feminist. I have always identified as a feminist in a very vocal and insistent way. It cost me zero problems in my personal and professional life. To the contrary, it brought me and my husband together. The idea that, in this day and age, anybody but a complete country bumpkin who hasn’t been away from the pig farm in decades sees feminists as “man-haters” is ridiculous. Is the article’s author living in the same century as I am?
As for this boring old canard that students don’t raise their hands to identify as feminists when asked to because feminism scares them, it is promoted by people who are not educators. Before belly-aching about how this experiment proves something, I suggest the fool who considers herself such a specialist on student behavior try asking the class a few other questions. Then she will realize that it is next to impossible to get students to identify publicly as anything. Unlike this brainless piece of fluff, I have actually conducted this experiment. Students refuse to raise their hands when asked who among them plays video games, watches television, likes reality TV shows, shops online, has a credit card, and has breakfast. This does not mean that being a breakfast eater is “a tough badge to wear.” Students are reluctant to raise their hands because they are afraid that doing so might end up in them being put on the spot and asked to explain something or speak publicly.
I remember a prof of mine suddenly asking whether anybody in the class was married or divorced. I was divorced but I didn’t raise my hand. I didn’t know why he was asking and saw no reason to respond. I figured it would do nothing for my participation grade, so why bother?
In order to get students to discuss anything whatsoever (and especially getting them to say something in the first person), you need to work like an animal to create a special environment and a special kind of relationships within the group where that will be possible. Otherwise, any question starting with “are you. . .” or “do you. . .” will be answered with a deafening and slightly contemptuous silence.
Guardian has sunk low, indeed, if it asks some completely unintelligent loser with miserable writing skills whose entire system of beliefs is based on Google searches and Legally Blonde to contribute a post on feminism. Am I mistaken or is Guardian the UK version of The New York Times?
Clarissa's Blog 
I regularly laughed out loud when the idiotic Obama campaign ad appeared featuring a worried-looking woman claiming that now was the most dangerous time in history to be a woman in America. Why? Because she might have to purchase her own contraceptives!
What kind of a worthless specimen would prostitute her own kind in such a manner. This Guardian article sounds like yet another such specimen at work. if all women were like that – and thankfully they are not – Larry Summers might still be President of Harvard University!
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“if all women were like that – and thankfully they are not – Larry Summers might still be President of Harvard University!”
– Oh God, he was such an embarrassment to the university and then went on to become an embarrassment to the entire country.
“I regularly laughed out loud when the idiotic Obama campaign ad appeared featuring a worried-looking woman claiming that now was the most dangerous time in history to be a woman in America. Why? Because she might have to purchase her own contraceptives!
What kind of a worthless specimen would prostitute her own kind in such a manner.”
– I never saw the ad but I would have the exact same reaction to an ad of this kind.
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It was about healthcare for women in general. You know, insurance. Reproductive choice and so on. Romney wanted to roll back Roe v. Wade, and much more. That the issue was who buys the condoms is sexist rot and is uninformed on various levels.
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I’m not so sure. Most of my college-aged friends have a very negative view of feminism. One associates feminism with “hairy legs, no man”. Another friend once stated (not in jest) that he would rather marry a drug addict than a feminist.
While your observation that college students aren’t particularly willing to identify as anything, I do think there is another force in play. Much like “liberal”, the word “feminist” has been tainted as a negative term. For people that care about that sort of thing, they will probably not identify as feminist even to themselves, even while they endorse positions that are considered to be feminist.
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“Most of my college-aged friends have a very negative view of feminism. One associates feminism with “hairy legs, no man”. Another friend once stated (not in jest) that he would rather marry a drug addict than a feminist.”
– Maybe you should get more intelligent friends. These sound very stupid. Don’t you get bored around them?
“Much like “liberal”, the word “feminist” has been tainted as a negative term.”
– No, it hasn’t. And I have better knowledge about this because I actually identify as a feminist every day.
“For people that care about that sort of thing, they will probably not identify as feminist even to themselves, even while they endorse positions that are considered to be feminist.”
– You are completely mistaken. More and more men and women identify as feminists every day. Just not in the classroom. It has become fashionable to say “I’m a feminist.” The label is so prestigious that even hugely conservative politicians are falling all over themselves to claim it for themselves.
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I’ve never had a problem identifying as a feminist. What I do have a problem with is seeing other people co-opt the term for the most banal, incredibly stupid things. “Oh, you’re a feminist Leah! Well, I’m something of a feminist myself, I made the oh-so tough decision to become a stay-at-home mom!” “I’m definitely a feminist, I love my sister and my mother and my girlfriend.” Or, my favourite, “Oh yes, I am a feminist, that’s why I’m pro-life, I want to protect all the unborn girls!”
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“Oh yes, I am a feminist, that’s why I’m pro-life, I want to protect all the unborn girls!”
– I never heard this one until now. I’m a little speechless. Some people are idiots.
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You can blame groups like Feminists For Life and Youth Protecting Youth for that particular turd of a thought.
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That’s sometimes given as a reaction to sex-selective abortion. Personally, I don’t see abortion as the source of the problem with that issue.
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I agree with you completely. This is not an issue that is caused by abortion at all.
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Maybe it is because some self proclaimed “feminists” are or were man-haters. Does Mary Daly ring a bell?
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To today’s 20-year-olds? Seriously?
No, nobody knows who she is outside of Gender Studies departments and nobody cares.
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I know who she is and have never wandered over to the gender studies department. But I am not too bothered every movement has its extremists it doesn’t invalidate the whole movement.
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Bringing up “man-haters” in a conversation about feminists is the same as talking about pedophiles during a gay marriage debate- they have absolutely nothing to do with each other and only serve as a petty attempt to derail the conversation.
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@alex
Really, I dont know any gay people who would even hint at being a pedophile. That isnt true for some feminists and their “dislike” of men. Feminism isnt a monolith, but Im sure you were aware of that.
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I wasn’t suggesting that gay people “hint” at being pedophiles, I was citing the “If we let two men or two women marry, where do we draw the line?” argument. All I’m saying is that being a “man-hater” isn’t the same as being a feminist and that feminism has nothing to do with disliking men. It’s like what Clarissa said, one person doesn’t “taint an entire movement.”
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@alex
The problem is that there are more than one individual in the so called feminist movement that are not as altruistic as you or Clarissa may be.
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The greatest number of woman-haters and man-haters can be found among the patriarchally minded folks. Altruism has absolutely nothing to do with this.
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You do realize she was an educator for many years and still has followers today. You dont really believe her type of sentiment was exclusive to her?
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One male rapist doesn’t make all men rapists. Even a thousand male rapists don’t make all men rapists. One idiot American doesn’t make all American idiots. One racist college prof doesn’t make all college profs racists. Some ancient freakazoid whom nobody even knows any longer doesn’t taint an entire movement.
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Her perspective is interesting and she was an important figure even if maligned or ignored or disagreed with. And nothing she had to say was as superficial as “man hating,” that term is just silly.
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You are correct but the term feminist doesnt guarantee an intelligent, level headed, rational human being either.
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Nah, the only title that does that is Mathematician 🙂
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lol. 🙂
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If you ignore Ted Kaczynski, mathematician and unabomber as an outlier. 🙂
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If we did that it would be statistics, otherwise known as easy maths. 😛
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I noticed that the writer of the piece is a second year journalism student at the University of Lincoln and I’ll bet that she’s an unpaid intern at the paper who only gets credits for her work. This is how the current business model in mass media works so they’re not stupid just greedy.
By the way, have you read this article by Suzanna Venter about the war on men?
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/11/24/war-on-men/
Her thesis is that there’s a lack of marriageable men because they’re tired of dealing with angry women.
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Whenever people start to speak about a lack of prospective partners, we have to remember that it’s their way of complaining about their personal lives and nothing else. Dating sites are overflowing with men looking to marry. Who’s to blame if this specific woman is so unappealing that she can’t get anybody interested?
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“Why is feminism such a tough badge to wear?”
Well part of the answer is that feminists themselves make the badge hard to wear by the way they act and the ideas they espouse.
You don’t get to act like a jerk under a banner and then get all surprised when that banner gets tarnished.
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Answer to what? We have just established there is nothing hard about the label which has become too prestigious for its own good.
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As in some of the folks that complain about feminism being such a tough badge to wear actually bring some of that toughness on themselves with their own actions and ideas.
In the article someone says, “Young people don’t want to identify as feminists because there is this man-hating, frumpy, lesbian image forced on us.”. Obviously there is nothing inherently wrong with being lesbian and I’m really not about frumpy.
But when it comes to hating men, disregarding men, and mistreating men, is it really any surprise that when there are feminists that embrace these ideas, it comes back around later in the form of people holding that behavior against them?
And also I’m not trying to say that is the entire reason.
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“But when it comes to hating men, disregarding men, and mistreating men, is it really any surprise that when there are feminists that embrace these ideas, it comes back around later in the form of people holding that behavior against them?”
– The number of women who hate, disrespect and mistreat men is overwhelmingly high between the most patriarchally minded women. This is why I find it strange that anybody would want to hold this against feminists where the number of such women is negligible compared to the anti-feminist housewives.
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This is the kind of mistreatment I’m talking about: https://clarissasblog.com/2010/03/24/who-owns-a-husband/
In the meanwhile, feminists are engaged in promoting this kind of legislation: https://clarissasblog.com/2010/06/03/aragon-makes-shared-custody-the-norm/ I just assigned to my students an article by a Spanish feminist where shared custody is explained as the only civilized, feminist approach.
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– The number of women who hate, disrespect and mistreat men is overwhelmingly high between the most patriarchally minded women. This is why I find it strange that anybody would want to hold this against feminists where the number of such women is negligible compared to the anti-feminist housewives.
Because the feminists that do it do so while claiming identification with a movement that is supposed to be against those things. And it doesn’t help that other feminists would rather pretend they don’t exist or sweep them under the rug.
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“And it doesn’t help that other feminists would rather pretend they don’t exist or sweep them under the rug.”
– Nobody pretends they don’t exist. But their numbers are so statistically negligible and their influence is so non-existent – once again, as opposed to all those HUGE crowds of abusive housewives – that discussing them seems like a straw-man strategy. I keep hearing about Mary Daly whom nobody knows and cares about, yet the reality of 30% of women in this country who refuse to maintain themselves and their children because they are entitled to men keeping them in return for them having a vagina doesn’t seem to bother anybody as much as a few crazy statements by a long-dead psycho.
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In the meanwhile, feminists are engaged in promoting this kind of legislation: https://clarissasblog.com/2010/06/03/aragon-makes-shared-custody-the-norm/ I just assigned to my students an article by a Spanish feminist where shared custody is explained as the only civilized, feminist approach.
I’m happy to see that such feminists exists but this happens at the same time as similar efforts here in the States are opposed by feminists on the usual grounds of “he only wants to be in the child’s life so that he can hurt mom”.
I recognize that feminists are a mixed bag. Just a bit bothersome when people are expected to believe that they are not a mixed bag but a bag full of perfect egalitarian angels.
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“Just a bit bothersome when people are expected to believe that they are not a mixed bag but a bag full of perfect egalitarian angels.”
– You know I don’t like the passive voice. Who cares what anybody expects you to believe? There is a very worrying trend here where people who seem to support men’s rights never have a single critical word to say about crowds of patriarchally minded women who bully men into keeping them and then discard them end exclude them from the children’s lives whenever they feel bored with them, yet there is so much clamor about what some confused person who identifies as a feminist because it’s fashionable says something stupid on her blog.
“I’m happy to see that such feminists exists but this happens at the same time as similar efforts here in the States are opposed by feminists on the usual grounds of “he only wants to be in the child’s life so that he can hurt mom”.”
– And in the meanwhile, the traditionally minded women are all passionately in favor of shared custody, I assume?
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– You know I don’t like the passive voice. Who cares what anybody expects you to believe?
Oh I can agree that it should not matter what I am expected to believe. But then there is a matter of when not meeting said expectation is held against me as some sort of evidence that I am against equality.
There is a very worrying trend here where people who seem to support men’s rights never have a single critical word to say about crowds of patriarchally minded women who bully men into keeping them and then discard them end exclude them from the children’s lives whenever they feel bored with them, yet there is so much clamor about what some confused person who identifies as a feminist because it’s fashionable says something stupid on her blog.
Yeah I’ve noticed that too.
And in the meanwhile, the traditionally minded women are all passionately in favor of shared custody, I assume?
I imagine not but it’s not traditionally minded women that say they want equality for all people and then turn around and contradict that by holding positions that are pretty clearly anti-man/woman/child.
Part of the reason I used to get into “discussions” with feminists about these things is that I was coming from the angle that since they say they support equality surely they could see how not supporting anti-male ideas is a good thing for everyone. But oh well.
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“Part of the reason I used to get into “discussions” with feminists about these things is that I was coming from the angle that since they say they support equality surely they could see how not supporting anti-male ideas is a good thing for everyone. But oh well.”
– Believe me, I know what you mean. All of these female-only spaces, the belief that all choices are sacred when made by women and oppressive when made by men, the refusal to acknowledge the existence of male survivors of rape and abuse, the vision of all men as potential rapists and child-abusers – this gets to me a lot. The suffering I experienced in my gender theory course where all of these ideas were promoted as gospel still haunts me. But the end result is that these few idiots get all the attention and I (and feminists like me) don’t. And that bothers me.
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– Believe me, I know what you mean. All of these female-only spaces, the belief that all choices are sacred when made by women and oppressive when made by men, the refusal to acknowledge the existence of male survivors of rape and abuse, the vision of all men as potential rapists and child-abusers – this gets to me a lot. The suffering I experienced in my gender theory course where all of these ideas were promoted as gospel still haunts me. But the end result is that these few idiots get all the attention and I (and feminists like me) don’t. And that bothers me.
If it makes you feel any better even though I’ve engaged in such “discussions” with feminists I’ve been on this side of it too.
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The side of unpopularity, you mean? 🙂
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The side of unpopularity, you mean?
Yes. I made the mistake of writing a guest post at a blog a while back talking about how teaching boys a sexuality that encourages being forceful with girls is damaging to boys. Made no comparison to how such sexuality harms girls, just that it harms boys.
You wouldn’t believe how quickly I was told that I was trying to make a false equivalence by claiming that harm done to boys is equal to harm done to girls….on a post where I literally said nothing about the harm done to girls.
And then there was the time where I was told that the body image issues that guys face have nothing to do with our gender and that I should recognize that women have it worse.
From those and other stories I’ve learned one thing. A lot of feminists don’t like the idea that women might lose the spotlight in the gender discourse. Sounds odd right?
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“You wouldn’t believe how quickly I was told that I was trying to make a false equivalence by claiming that harm done to boys is equal to harm done to girls….on a post where I literally said nothing about the harm done to girls.”
– I didn’t even understand what you were saying at the first try. This is a very sad story.
“And then there was the time where I was told that the body image issues that guys face have nothing to do with our gender and that I should recognize that women have it worse.”
– I think we would all win if people just accepted that deciding who is hurt more and who benefits more from traditional gender norms is useless. I have a very strong suspicion that for many people the discussion of gender is not about gender at all. It is a roundabout way of complaining about their unhappy personal lives.
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Danny said: “You wouldn’t believe how quickly I was told….”
Well that’s the thing with identity politics. Although it’s foundations of often epistemologically sure, the majority of people who embrace it cannot overcome their ressentiment. This means that instead of thinking carefully about what they hear, and then only resorting to attacking their actual enemies, they tend to attack their closest allies. I think this has to do with not being able to handle their revelations about systemic injustice. Their emotions build up to a point where they set out destroy those whose positions to them are almost the same in most respects.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment
That is why we need to see that intellectual maturity and emotional maturity require each other, otherwise one of these gets beyond the other and people can’t contain themselves effectively.
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“This means that instead of thinking carefully about what they hear, and then only resorting to attacking their actual enemies, they tend to attack their closest allies.”
– This is an establishment of borders and margins that any collective identity necessitates.Of course, it would be great if we just moved past defending these useless collective identities and worked towards actual change.
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I agree with that. The establishment of borders and boundaries does serve some primeval safety need, but there is a point when you have to get beyond the obsession with primeval issues of belonging and try to attack the system that produces inequality.
Unfortunately, the greater stress people experience, the more they will think in terms of these strange boundaries, rather than being able to focus outwardly.
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“there is a point when you have to get beyond the obsession with primeval issues of belonging and try to attack the system that produces inequality”
– You don’t have to convince me. It is very curious how in a struggle against gender roles people grasp so passionately at their own strictly defined gender identities.
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Yeah, you bring to light another point, which is that people try to develop group identity not only on the basis of a shared ideology, but on the basis of re-instating the ideologies of the oppressors. This is the degree to which identity politics is pathological — and I would say it is 70 to 80 percent mad.
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Clarissa:
– I didn’t even understand what you were saying at the first try. This is a very sad story.
It’s okay. The take away is that apparently bringing up the ways that men/boys are harmed is an inherent attempt to say they have it just as as women/girls. But remember, it’s not a zero sum game. How’s that for understanding?
I have a very strong suspicion that for many people the discussion of gender is not about gender at all. It is a roundabout way of complaining about their unhappy personal lives.
That and actively trying to attack and harm other genders.
musteryou:
I think this has to do with not being able to handle their revelations about systemic injustice.
I wonder just what revelations could generate such responses (by responses I mean the resentment that you mention).
…but there is a point when you have to get beyond the obsession with primeval issues of belonging and try to attack the system that produces inequality.
I think a part of the problem is that people are still getting some sort of benefits based around those group identifications.
Yeah, you bring to light another point, which is that people try to develop group identity not only on the basis of a shared ideology, but on the basis of re-instating the ideologies of the oppressors.
Perhaps for the sake of protecting their own? And then justified with some thought along the lines of, “It’s oppressive when you do it but it’s not oppressive when we do it.”?
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“I have a very strong suspicion that for many people the discussion of gender is not about gender at all. It is a roundabout way of complaining about their unhappy personal lives.
That and actively trying to attack and harm other genders.”
– As a form of a subconscious revenge? Yes, I could see that.
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Clarissa said: “- As a form of a subconscious revenge? Yes, I could see that.”
–Although, a word of caution — one should never automatically assume that complaining about gender is just a form of subconscious revenge — i.e, “ressentiment”. I know that my complaints about gender, when I made them, were absolutely legitimate. I was trying to communicate about some important imbalances I had observed in my environment, and everybody at the time seemed to be saying, ‘It’s just emotion. It’s perception. You are necessarily overreacting about something that is necessarily totally normal and acceptable, just like everything in life is.”
The gender stereotype, that women are incapable of referring to the objective environment because they are stuck at the level of only being able to relate to personal issues, made my life miserable. I really did need just to be able to communicate, but nobody seemed open to that.
If you thwart communication, you make life very difficult indeed — and you certainly do nothing to combat any social ills. You exacerbate them.
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“Although, a word of caution — one should never automatically assume that complaining about gender is just a form of subconscious revenge — i.e, “ressentiment””
– No, not complaining. I’m talking specifically about instances where people of both genders try to push each other out of the discussions about gender.
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musteryou:
–Although, a word of caution — one should never automatically assume that complaining about gender is just a form of subconscious revenge — i.e, “ressentiment”. I know that my complaints about gender, when I made them, were absolutely legitimate. I was trying to communicate about some important imbalances I had observed in my environment, and everybody at the time seemed to be saying, ‘It’s just emotion. It’s perception. You are necessarily overreacting about something that is necessarily totally normal and acceptable, just like everything in life is.”
The gender stereotype, that women are incapable of referring to the objective environment because they are stuck at the level of only being able to relate to personal issues, made my life miserable. I really did need just to be able to communicate, but nobody seemed open to that.
If you thwart communication, you make life very difficult indeed — and you certainly do nothing to combat any social ills. You exacerbate them.
True enough. Yes presuming that the motive is revenge would be bad (in fact assuming any motive would be bad).
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– The number of women who hate, disrespect and mistreat men is overwhelmingly high between the most patriarchally minded women.(Clarissa)
This is true, but when you have a certain amount of women in the ranks of feminism that espouse the exact same thing, do you not think that its more likely that they will be targeted for that behaviour rather than an inclusive one?
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Musteryou: “If you thwart communication, you make life very difficult indeed — and you certainly do nothing to combat any social ills. You exacerbate them.”
Danny: “True enough. Yes presuming that the motive is revenge would be bad (in fact assuming any motive would be bad).”
—-
Presuming nefarious motives is the mark of othering. One is free to ignore annoying people, but one shouldn’t presume to know them, unless one truly does.
In my experience, people have often attributed to me motives which I might reasonably have been thought to have had, had I been brought up in the same environments as they. I hadn’t though, so my drives, meanings and ambitions were misaligned with the expected norm.
In my experience, most people in the contemporary First World can’t imagine what it is like to fight for values when it seems like a matter of life and death. They assume that one who feels this way must necessarily be being silly. I can tell you that I’m not a ridiculous or silly person, and yet I did feel this way.
To make sense of why I felt so, one must go back into history. In fact, my father’s history holds the key. He’d fought a war for particular values, which were based squarely on valuing whiteness, patriarchy and Christianity. When he lost the war in historical, tangible form, he had to win it in other ways. That is, he was driven to win it symbolically, by enforcing these values as the patriarchal breadwinner. I was to have no choice in the matter because, you know, people had died for this ideal. We had lost close family members, killed in action.
In order to be free, I had to do battle with the patriarchy in a most extreme and fundamental way, which had to do with my cultural history and familial relationships.
Whilst the degree of anxiety I experienced in this might have seemed silly or disproportionate to an outsider, the outsider didn’t have to fight my battles. In fact, no outsider could really understand what this battle was about. You would have to read a bit of Freud, to understand how patriarchal values are internalized. You’d have to know a lot about the ideology of the Rhodesian cultural system and the isolationist politics the society adopted. You’d also have to have had similar experiences, or at least be able to imagine what it means when people literally sacrifice their lives for an ideology and then expect it to be upheld, above all by closest family members.
Understanding all of these points would enable an outsider to begin to grasp the degree of my anxiety. Not understanding any of them, an outsider would presume that I was a delicate little flower, overreacting to normal, First World gender relations. But my reaction to everything was influenced by this structure of anxiety, even if not entirely based on it.
My initial feminism was therefore very fraught and uncertain. It involved a sense of freedom at the expense of partial self-annihilation. I had to sacrifice the past and its value in order to obtain my freedom.
I wasn’t an overreacting feminist — but many people saw me that way.
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I feel like people are discussing me in the 3rd person and that is kind of weird, especially when it happens on my own blog.
I don’t see why it’s so problematic to analyze people’s motives. I think everybody does this all the time. If I assume that a student is lying to me about handing in her essay in order to wiggle out of having to write it, I don’t do that to marginalize her. To the contrary, if I decided that she is an inscrutable and incomprehensible creature whose motives I will never be able to grasp, that would be Othering.
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I wasn’t discussing you, and don’t understand that reference.
I think you are rather good at analyzing people’s motives, but most people are not. One has to be able to stand apart from the person and make them a subject of something other than one’s own morality, to understand them. I think you are pretty good at this, because autism gives you some distance and hence, breathing space.
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Well, as soon as we recognize that I’m special, then I’m totally fine. 🙂
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Aha. Well maybe it’s natural to feel one is discussing you on your blog. 🙂 I tend to be a very, very impersonal person much of the time, so it is hard to know what I am making reference to. I generally observe everything in a very detached way.
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Oh God. Am I a narcissist, too? It must be hereditary.
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Are you? I’m losing control of this conversation. All people who work within a capitalist, competitive context must necessarily become narcissists. Most of it is compensatory, because competing against others rather than cooperating produces a sense of alienation and lack of emotional fulfillment. Hence, the compensation is in the idea, “I must be great, anyway, moreover because I’ve sacrificed so much!”
But, no, I don’t think you are a narcissist.
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No, I’m sorry, it’s me, I’m getting tired. It’s almost the end of the semester and there is so much to do. I’m getting loopy.
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ah, it’s cool.
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musteryou:
I think this has to do with not being able to handle their revelations about systemic injustice.
Danny: I wonder just what revelations could generate such responses (by responses I mean the resentment that you mention).
—-There’s a woman of my age, whom I met on Facebook. An American. Described herself as a working class feminist — i.e. using the sociological terminology that categorizes her as poor. She suddenly flipped out and became rad-fem — but that’s another story. Before that change, she seemed very logical in documenting various sorts of legislative oppression. But suddenly, she expressed herself in only an emotional mode and used some very boring rhetorical tactics against me. I think she’d got to the point where she had become emotionally overloaded. She no longer wanted to relate her observations in terms of the facts. Instead, she wanted to make out that somehow I had more “privilege” than she. I was supposedly looking down on her because of my education. Well, she was also educated to a very high degree. She had a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, and she was clearly self-educated beyond that in a way I found to be particularly impressive. I had previously told her so. But, somehow she had suffered from a sudden lack of confidence. She began to project quite strongly in my direction. Let me say, I know when someone is projecting cultural baggage and concepts that do not belong to me, because they accuse me of having an ego. Supposedly, I am egoistic in the bourgeois, individualistic sense. In this case, I’m to be viewed as uppity because I have an education and caution against falling into the identity politics trap of letting of steam by attacking other “identities”. Thing is, I’ve never really mastered Western individualism, much as I tried, so the assumption that I’m competing individualistically is very bizarre. That’s not how my character is constructed — I only have a superficial understanding of Western egoism as an expression of economic force or intent. So, all I know is she freaked out about something — probably a relationship with a man — and then blamed me for what she was feeling.
my:…but there is a point when you have to get beyond the obsession with primeval issues of belonging and try to attack the system that produces inequality.
Danny:I think a part of the problem is that people are still getting some sort of benefits based around those group identifications.
—I’m sure you’re right.
my: Yeah, you bring to light another point, which is that people try to develop group identity not only on the basis of a shared ideology, but on the basis of re-instating the ideologies of the oppressors.
Danny: Perhaps for the sake of protecting their own? And then justified with some thought along the lines of, “It’s oppressive when you do it but it’s not oppressive when we do it.”?
—Yeah, the status of victim can and does offer some protection in many instances, primarily when it is taken on by a group.
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