sev's Labels and Sexuality

Bisexuality: when gender is a different kind of factor

Feminism: the empowerment of women is good for everyone

Fetish: reclaiming sensuality

Kink: what it is that some of us do

Polyamory: multiple responsible committed loves

Queer: more than just politics

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Sexism

I see the invisible pervasive oppressive force of the patriarchy (loaded word as it is) all over usenet, all over the newspapers I read and the television I try not to watch. I learned my speech patterns in the seventies from a society which had managed to notice sexism but hadn't -- and still hasn't -- eradicated it. Unless I examine my every sentence, every phrase, some of it still slips through -- and I should be more aware of it, given it's my gender that's usually the target of it.

I see it in ambiguous phrases used everwhere. I don't see the ambiguity as syntactical sloppiness, I see it as a symptom of the way we -- as people who have to use an ambiguous natural language rife with cultural baggage -- are hemmed in by the speech patterns we learned when we were too young to really understand the assumptions that were being stamped into our subconscious.

I come across it when I'm reading reviews of computer hardware, and some (male) writer slams a game pad as no good for any purpose because it's too small for his hands. While hand size varies widely, many women have smaller hands than many men. Wonder why there's this stereotype that women don't play video games?

Sexism is more complicated than just giving up the "men are logical, women are emotional" or the "men get angry, women get depressed" or any other artificial-difference-between-genders myth. We can know all the right answers and try to live by them, but the entire society I live in evolved from one focused on men, and as much change as we've made in the recent past, it's still there. The change has been in the things we can identify; there remains an undercurrent of sexism so pervasive in the way we think that we can't even find it, don't have the words to talk about it, and when someone questions it, the general reaction is: that's completely irrelevant, you're imagining it, that's some other problem entirely...

I wandered away from my computer, got a cup of coffee, had a cigarette, and realized that whatever it was I was going to say next is gone. What's in its place is more nebulous, less logical, less well-thought-out, probably less relevant to this thread ...and quite disturbing to me.

Why the hell do I feel like I have to justify my feeling of oppression? Why do I search for facts and proof and then fume in silence? Usenet, like the rest of the world I inhabit, is sexist because of its emphasis on facts and proof and logic. That's not because logic is a male realm and emotion is a female realm -- most of have figured out that that's at best an over-generalization and at worst a complete myth.

It's sexist because the focus on logic evolved when logic *was* considered the realm of men. Admitting that logic is not a gender-based skill is an important aspect of facing our biases, but it's not the goal. We've only addressed the obvious problem. The unobvious problem is that emotion is still taboo, even after the era of the "sensitive man," the "get-in-touch-with-your-feelings" movement, the admission that therapy is okay.

Why do I still feel like this is sexism, even while people all around me are saying that logic and emotion are genderless concepts? Because they're not genderless concepts, if you look below the surface into the miasma of unconscious associations we make. It's invisible and pervasive because it's still there in our subconscious, even after we've eradicated it from our conscious thought. I don't think we can get away from the assumptions that shaped our language generations before we were born.

The linguistics that I've studied say that communication in general is epistemic (that it affects the way we come to know the world) that it is laden with the values of the society in which it evolved, that language is taught to little girls differently than to little boys (in the use of qualifiers, for instance), that this taught language comes back around to reinforce the way that people are viewed (for example, if someone meets far more women who use qualifiers in their speech than men, they're likely to conclude -- even if its just subconsciously -- that women are less sure of their own ideas than men), that language evolves more slowly than society (so that things that have changed in society will linger in the language we use).

I believe these things to be true; I think that we, here in usenet as well as in the world at large, continue to devalue anything that's not male -- be it emotion, words of women, the work of women -- anything that is either woman-based now or was woman-based in the past. What can we do about it? Beats me. Wish I had an answer. The closest I can get is a suggestion that we take people seriously when they try to point out sexism or oppression, even if we ourselves can't see what they're pointing to; that we continue to point out any problems we see, even if we don't feel like we can properly dissect them, even if we feel like we're still not being heard. Hopefully, somebody will hear, understand, or at least think a little.

I understand that I cannot see into someone else's head, but I trust my gut on this one.

However, in the name of providing references for those of us who need a more logical discourse of these subjects, we could take a look at Ann Gill's _Rhetoric_and_Human_Understanding_, Laurie Arliss's _Gender_Communication_, or Becky Michele Mulvaney's "Gender Differences in Communication".

The demand for statistics is a tool of the oppressor. The statistics available are usually collected by the whitestraghtmalepatriarchy, and when they're not, they're not as "reliable." The people-in-power have the resources to collect the statistics.

I can root out every sexist thought I can find myself thinking, but I learned speech in a sexist society, and I hear the attitudes of those who taught me in my speech. It's insidious, it's frustrating, it's humbling.

When I see someone else in the same situation, My take on it is to try to point out the statement in a non-judgemental way, in hopes that the people hearing my comment will, instead of getting defensive, will think about whether or not there's still more room for change.

Sure, there's a "reasonable" explanation for every single one of my examples. But it happens over and over, and after a while, I started to see that there's this pattern of speech that, when questions, yields a different explanation every time, and I started to question whether or not there's an underlying reason common to all of these sexist statements I'm seeing from people that I sometimes know to be non-sexist in their conscious thoughts and actions.

My challenge to anybody who reads this (myself included!): Take a good listen to the *way* you say what you mean, and see if there's anything lurking there that'd you'd rather not imply. Why do we say things the way we say things?