So a couple of weeks ago Slactivist said something that I, even though I’m not specifically a white male Protestant Baptist, should have said because, hey Baptist, Catholic, Unitarian, agnostic-but-with-a-vaguely-Protestant-sounding-last-name, it’s all the same thing with us people.

Head’s up: it starts out sounding ordinarily Jon-Stewart-y snarky…

Please forgive me for the actions of extremists I have never met who commit acts of violence that I have never advocated

As a white male Baptist, it is my duty today to denounce the violence perpetrated by Patrick Gray Sharp, 29, who yesterday attacked the police headquarters in McKinney, Texas, in a heavily armed but ineffectual assault involving a high-powered rifle, road flares, “gasoline and ammonium nitrate fertilizer.”

I understand that this denunciation must be swift and unambiguous and that, in the absence of such denunciations made by and on behalf of every and all white male Baptists, others are entitled to assume that every white male Baptist is fully in agreement with the actions of Patrick Gray Sharp and to therefore deny white male Baptists the rights others enjoy.

So I denounce this attack and state unequivocally that we white male Baptists do not believe in this kind of violent extremism. I beg you all not to condemn all of us for the actions of this lone member of our community, although of course I will understand if you decide that you must do so and will humbly accept whatever restrictions on our full participation in society that you see fit to impose. That’s only fair.

I further beg your forgiveness for my not denouncing this violent act sooner. Unlike the nearly identical failed attack in Times Square, this attack wasn’t the lead story on our local news and the newspaper I work for somehow didn’t mention it at all. Then today I was outside most of the afternoon cutting the grass and just didn’t hear about the story until now. I plead with you to understand that as soon as I learned of this incident, I rushed to post this denunciation.

Read the quote in context here.

...but the twist makes it not only generally relevant to the context of grossly unfair expectations that all even-vaguely Muslim people should apologize for and denounce violence committed by other equally vaguely Muslim people (even if they’re, say, Shiite and the perpetrator was Suni, even if they’re ethnically Persian or Turkic and the perpetrator was ethnically Arab or Pashtun.) The twist makes it appropriate to the context of sex, gender, and relationship blogs like this one. Slactivist continues…

UPDATE: Boy is my face red. This is so embarrassing — I totally skimmed past the fine print on the unwritten rules and completely missed the exemption for hegemonic classes. It turns out that we white people, males and Protestants never have to worry about extravagant displays of vicarious contrition. As a white male Protestant, apparently, I don’t need to promptly denounce every evil act committed by any and every other white male Protestant.

This is awesome. Do you realize how much time this is going to save me? Plus just the relief of no longer having to watch the news on pins and needles, worrying every time there’s a crime or a gun-nut on a spree that it’ll be some white male Protestant guy and that everyone is going to assume we’re all like that. What an enormous relief to be judged only as an individual and not prejudged according to the worst thing ever done by anyone ever claiming to belong to my faith community, or sharing my gender or my ethnicity. It’s not just a relief it’s a … oh, what’s the word? ... privilege. Yes, that’s what it is — a fantastic privilege.

Two points to this twist, incidentally.

1) If you’re white, male, and Protestant it really is a privilege that you don’t have to apologize ever time another fuckwad shoots up a school, a church, an office, a clinic, his family, random passers by, an Oklahoma City federal building, a Texas or California IRS office, random police officers, and so on. No, really, it’s a privilege. Not a resentment-driven, anxiety induced, demanded for male-privilege privilege, I mean it’s a real actual privilege. One that should be extended to anyone else who isn’t directly responsible for supporting, endorsing, instigating, or participating in such incidents should receive.

2) Yeah, Mary Daly was really separatist. Yeah, Catharine MacKinnon is really anti-fellatio. Yeah, Twisty Faster is really antagonistic towards men. And sure, somewhere, some time, someone who identifies herself as a feminist… or more to the point someone you identify as a feminist (even though like Lorena Bobbit or Wendy Vitters they aren’t) may have said or done something that hurt your feelings. But unless you want to start taking responsibility for the behavior of Timothy McVeigh, Dick Cheney, David Koresh, Scott Roeder, and Randall Terry and you might want to ask why you think every feminist should be held responsible for the most extremist, and occasionally even obscure feminist positions.

Of course none of this means one can’t take on responsibility for wrongs committed by others. Whether or not they resemble you in some way superficial or real. It just means your resemblance doesn’t oblige you to.

Just to be clear, since several people have mentioned it in email, in my post Privilege: A Perfectly Accurate Word That’s Perfectly Unusable For Communicating With Those Who Have It I wasn’t complaining about the concept of privilege. At all! It’s actually freakishly important!

Instead I was complaining (and it is a complaint) that the language that we use is perfectly descriptive when recognized in others but not descriptive to the people it’s recognized in.

Consider the late gentleman who was privileged enough to own a private airplane, a consulting company, and a brick and stone house. He was privileged enough to be able to marry the person of his choice, privileged to be able-bodied and oriented towards someone he could have two beautiful children with. He was privileged to be loved enough by them that they became distraught when he failed to return home. And he was privileged to have a car he could drive to the airport. He had privileged skin color, car, haircut, clothes, and age such that he didn’t have to even think about getting pulled over for a “background check” by police or border patrol when he drove to the airport hanger where he kept his plane.

He saw none of this privilege. As with everyone when they have privilege it was invisible to him. It gave him no solace nor comfort. Even as it surely grated on those around him who had less. Or none.

The stupid fucker was exercising his privilege when he flew his airplane into an office building in Austin, Texas the other day, killing himself and someone else and injuring others — directly from the burns and impact, indirectly through grief, displacement, and loss of loved ones. He was exercising privilege when he killed his children’s father, when he killed his wife’s husband, when he emptied their lives of him and of the home he burned in… an only-slightly extraordinary expression of his sense that he had no privilege at all… because he was evidently unable to resolve some manner of dispute the way his (unrecognized) privilege let him to imagine he should have been able to, over taxes he owed on income he didn’t recognize himself as having been privileged to be able to earn.

I wasn’t thinking about that guy when I wrote about privilege. Instead I was thinking about the friendship-jeopardizing gulf of communication between Champagne and Benzedrine, who disputes the notion of privilege, and Britni Danielle, who clearly gets it but can’t get it across to C&B.

The inability to articulate it such that it can be received spreads chaos. The invisibility of privilege in those who have it spreads injustice. Sometimes, as between Britni and C&B the cost of failure is measured in loss of friendship. In Texas the cost must be measured in lives. In all cases the cost of privilege, as we can see over and over, outweighs the benefits: it increases the misery of others without noticeably improving the lives of those with.

This is not “mansplaining” and it’s certainly not justifying privilege. As in Texas it’s a deadly killer that manages to hide itself in plain sight, ruining, and even ending the lives not only the myriad victims but also its banally evil perpetrators. All things considered even a zero-sum game would be an improvement. Fortunately that needn’t be the only alternative. But it ain’t going to get better by telling guys who are suffocating trying to rebreathe the stagnant air of the unnoticed wind at their backs that they’re privileged. Even though to everyone else it’s achingly obvious they surely are, if they don’t see it that way the trick is to find out how to get through to them. Before they drive another fucking airplane, or yacht, or BMW into another crowded building, or, with their shoes full of their own fearful urine, write “legal opinions” that a Vice President who orders the torture prisoners is acting in “self defense.”

Via Tyler Cowen Eric Barker of Barking Up the Wrong Tree points to an interesting-looking social psychology paper on entitlement and selfishness as it relates to a sense of victimization.

Does feeling like a victim make you selfish?:

Three experiments demonstrated that feeling wronged leads to a sense of entitlement and to selfish behavior. In Experiment 1, participants instructed to recall a time when their lives were unfair were more likely to refuse to help the experimenter with a supplementary task than were participants who recalled a time when they were bored. In Experiment 2, the same manipulation increased intentions to engage in a number of selfish behaviors, and this effect was mediated by self-reported entitlement to obtain positive (and avoid negative) outcomes. In Experiment 3, participants who lost at a computer game for an unfair reason (a glitch in the program) requested a more selfish money allocation for a future task than did participants who lost the game for a fair reason, and this effect was again mediated by entitlement.

via Journal of Personality and Social Psychology – Vol 97, Iss 5

Barker said it here.

Quick note: Barker may have been citing the print version. For whatever reason, though, the the article appears online in JPSP Vol 98, Issue 2: Victim entitlement to behave selfishly Zitek, Emily M.; Jordan, Alexander H.; Monin, Benoît; Leach, Frederick R. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 98(2), Feb 2010, 245-255.

I’m not going to cough up ~$12.00 to read the gated version but while digging around for more information it looks like the same results turn up quite a few similar studies of selfishness, fairness, and sense of entitlement. I ought to add it makes sense because it’s been my intuition, stated repeatedly online and in real life, that privilege and entitlement (stereotypical male in particular, kyriarchal in general) derives more from insecurity and resentment than the stereotypical spoon-in-your-mouth aristocratic sense of “the peasants are revolting.” And finally makes sense because I’ve been around my children and their friends for 13 years now… although that experience might be unscientifically anecdotal. :-)

At any rate, assuming the research supports the conclusion, and assuming it confirms similar prior research, it’s going to supports my contention that those who exercise privilege tend to perceive their actions as defending themselves from unfairness or attack. With the result that asking, say, men to “give up” their privileges never seems to work (and, when it does sort of work, seems really wimpy, half-hearted, or passive-aggressive. Or chivalrous, which would be by far the least productive!)

I think it also supports my developing strategy of attempting to recruit “oppressive” classes with the entirely reasonable (and often easily-observed) point that conditions that are worse for someone don’t necessarily imply that conditions are better for you.

Ily of Asexy Beast points out how asexuals are subject to… well… not exactly heteronormativity so let’s call it maybe “sexnormativity.” Whatever you want to call it boils down to pressure felt by asexuals to conform to the expectations of people who aren’t themselves asexual.

Apparently, there’s an ideal asexual. It’s not me, and no offense, but it probably isn’t you either. Who is it, you ask? Well…

Read her whole post here.

It’s a cool, cool post getting into issues of self-doubt, self-censorship and conformity among asexuals. Which you’d think (if we were trying to construct stereotypes of asexuality!) would be silly since (constructing that asexuality again) you’re obviously either asexual or not, right? No? Good answer! Like trying to answer for another whether they’re gay, or kinky, or trans, or even straight, it’s not for for someone else to decide what it means for you to be asexual. Here’s Ily again (emphasis mine.)

I didn’t realize that “trying to be asexual” can actually mean “trying to be an ideal asexual”, and that it could be a problem, until I read this post/manifesto, also on Apositive. Its author talks about how our increased visibility in the media has also led to the rise of an “ideal” or “good” asexual. Of course, this person doesn’t actually exist, because asexuals appearing in the media no doubt conceal aspects of their asexuality that might be seen as contradictory or confusing.

From conversations I’ve had in person and online with asexual people it’s as messy as, well, any other orientation. Which, if you think about it, is only fair — orientation being a quality of human beings and not much about humans is clear cut.

The first out/activist asexual I met when she joined a pre-blogging online forum on sex. She got just about everything in the book thrown at her from neurosis to buried trauma to unfortunate prescriptions to inhibitions to religious zeal to “just haven’t met the right boy/girl/goat” to… well, the book. To be as cheerfully disinterested in sex as she was just really got people’s… well… goats. Anyone else might have withered in the withering criticism she received, and so I can see how the pressure to conform to outsider’s stereotypes could be intense.

But as Ily also hints, in part because asexuality is so unclearly understood, the more “ideal” the definition becomes the more pressure flesh and blood asexuals are going to face. And, perhaps worse, it raises the risk that people who might otherwise find comfort, camaraderie, and identity are likely to think “well, that can’t be me either.”

And if all that sounds familiar…