Home

social justice

Insights into Privileged Thinking: Emily Zitek and Colleagues Research Paper "Victim Entitlement to Behave Selfishly"

Sun, 2010-01-24 13:50 — figleaf

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.

Putting a Band-Aid Pasties Over a Bigger Problem

Tue, 2009-09-29 19:24 — figleaf

Rosie of Feministing, discussing a proposed Detroit city council amendment to ban strip-club lap dancing says

many of the women in sexually oriented businesses in Detroit are entering these industries because of economic constraints. This is different from folks who enter into sexually oriented professions having chosen exotic dancing from a variety of economic alternatives. But banning lap dances is an incredibly paternalistic way to show respect for women. If lawmakers are really concerned about women in these industries and increasing agency of these women, they should earmark some of the $18 billion in stimulus funds to create initiatives to provide women with real choices for employment.

She said it here.

That sounds about right. Blogging from Europe Matthew Yglesias notes that in Sweden a Big Mac costs about $8.00 and suggests why this might be (emphasis mine)

Recent blogging about the price of soda reminded me of the Economist’s occasional Big Mac Index feature which purports to offer a quick-and-dirty look at Purchasing Power Parities. Actually looking at the results, however, it seems to me that it’s really telling us more about low-end wages. Big Macs are incredibly expensive in Scandinavia not because the currencies are overvalued but because people in the bottom half of the Scandinavian wage distribution earn more money than people in the bottom half of the US distribution.

He said it here.

There will always be some objections to sex work. But one of the big sticks in the craw involves economic differentials between traditional provider and consumer classes. Whether or not the Detroit city council restricts lap dances is sort of immaterial — I’m not saying they should or shouldn’t and I’m definitely not concern-trolling it — if they’re not also doing something to generate employment alternatives for sex workers they’re effectively endorsing the institutions that make it possible.

If, Detroit, say, had a comprehensive social infrastructure that left men and women on an equal footing it’s possible there might still be sex work (although I suspect there’d not only be less supply but also quite a bit less demand.) And it’s possible some of that sex work would include stripping and lap dancing. But you could be pretty confident that whoever was doing it was doing it as a considered choice rather than economic necessity.

If you just outlaw it then even if there’s no emergence of underground alternatives you’re still painting over rotten wood.

From Porn and Self-Mutilation to Serious Social Change

Sat, 2009-09-05 11:57 — figleaf

This post started out as an innocent attempt to answer a startling accusation about the influence of porn on men. The answer is… larger. Unusually, for me anyway, there’s a call to action at the end.

The porn commentator Daze Reader, newly revived after a long hiatus, expresses skepticism about one more outlandish story about the perils of watching porn. The source is an interview with BBC producer Tim Samuels on The World from public radio’s PRI

And even Papua, New Guinea there were doctors who said that they’ve had to deal with cases of young men putting ball bearings down their penises to try and keep up with the impressive nature of the porn stars they’ve been watching in films.

Samuels said it here.

Daze Reader retorts

As for porn-obsessed dudes stuffing ball bearings down their penes, I’ll believe that when I see notarized X-rays. Until then, it’s a great urban legend.

Read the quotes in context and follow the links here.

A bit of Googling suggests it actually might be an urban legend. But if it is it’s a very old one! Australian research demographer Terence H Hull, writing for the website Inside Indonesia, says that reports of Indonesians, Melanesians, and Southeast Asians employing esoteric penis piercings and implants go back to Chinese traders in the 1400s and Magellan’s voyagers in the 1500s! The inserted items included “spurs,” bells, implanted balls, and even precious jewels.

(Quick aside: According to Hull the traditional Indonesian word for a device piercing the glans of the penis is “palang.” According to Wikipedia the traditional kinkster word for a glans piercing is “ampallang,” which they say derives from a tradition of the Dayak peope of Borneo. And I know this is all complicated but I’ll just say here that parts of both Borneo and New Guinea islands belong to Indonesia, which is why I’m citing an Indonesian website. Now, where was I?)

For the record the, well, record of Indonesian, New Guinean, Southeast Asian ball-implanting predates the kind of porn folks like Mr. Samuels concern themselves with by at least (um, 1980, the year VHS-based video players became commonly affordable, minus 1433, the year Ma Huan noted ampalling in Thailand equals) five hundred forty-seven years! Give or take.

Case closed on the “porn drives young men to ball-bearing themselves” idea? No, it’s still complicated. Hull says reports of the practice, once believed to be obsolete, is flourishing in laboring-class sailors, loggers, miners, and prisoners. Who evidently share the characteristics of being young, single, unschooled, and very segregated from contact with actual women.

Which lack of contact is… problematic.

Says Hull

From ad hoc interviews I have found that men use the devices before marriage, but remove them when they settle down with one woman. Why, if the purpose is to please a woman? One explained: ‘You can’t really be sure about these things – what if something went wrong? You wouldn’t want to take a risk with your wife.’

So where does the idea that women “love it” come from? Hull says

Informal but persistent attempts to understand the practices of genital cutting and the use of inserts and implants among Indonesian men indicate that what we are seeing today is not the resurgence of tradition. Rather these are largely attempts to come to terms with sexualities based on gender relations emerging from rapid modernisation.

Workers in isolated camps who rely on their peers for information on ‘what women want’ are easily convinced that implants may make them attractive to lovers. Young men who see peers attempting the operations to insert stones or plastic balls, and hear the bragging afterward are easily swayed to try the practice themselves. They do not hear clinical evidence of damage done to sex organs, and they definitely do not hear women’s stories of pain, discomfort or infection. From the viewpoint of men and reproductive health the response to penis implants must be based on education and the demystification of large areas of sexuality.

And how easy would it be to get word out that a) it’s dangerous, b) it’s actually not all that traditional, and c) despite what young men tell each other women actually don’t care for it at all? Turns out it’s hard because

The Indonesian Health Department regards any talk of penis adornments as esoteric, sensitive and obscure. Reproductive health service providers do not recognise the problems associated with genital cutting and the use of sexual accessories because such things are quickly dismissed as immoral. Whatever the moral arguments though, the practice of penis inserts appears to be spreading because men’s sexual education is incomplete and isolated. Lower class men in particular are likely to experiment with implants, not because their sexual needs are any different from other men, but because they are the groups most likely to experience isolation from women in their occupations.

M’kay, so in that environment it’s actually possible to say that porn could somehow be influencing young men raised in that environment to stick ball-bearings (and horsehair threads, bells, and the caps from toothpaste tubes!!!) in their penises. But whereas I don’t have a lot of patience with porn I think its totally missing the point to imply, as the BBC’s Tim Samuels does, that without porn young Indonesians and their regional counterparts wouldn’t “[put] ball bearings down their penises to try and keep up with the impressive nature of the porn stars they’ve been watching in films.”

To the extent porn matters at all for these men it’s just one shovel of dirt in an egregiously stifling, repressive, dehumanizing cemetery of isolation, bad information, institutional denial, misogyny, segregation, chattelization, miscommunication, insecurity, bluster and bravado, loneliness, alienation, ignorance, not even rudimentary education about actual heterosexual sexuality, othering, exploitation, and self-mutilation!

And that’s just for the men! Who nevertheless have an understanding that the mere fact of their gender renders them superior. Or, worse, baseline/constant/normal against which all others are measured and made to fit! And if they’re willing to subject themselves to such torment what are they willing to see befall everyone else inside and outside their societies?

Yeah, porn might be a problem in parts of New Guinea but that’s like PETA saying the problem with Guantanamo Bay is they serve meat to prisoners. A problem, possibly, but so far from the problem it would… I think… you could…

Sorry, lost for words there.

Recommended Action Item: It would be really, really nice if, when he’s done promoting this series the BBC would send Samuels and/or other documentary production teams to shine a little light on what’s happening to the men in the places he casually mentioned. And I’m not saying this in a “whut about Teh Menz” way. I’m saying it because what happens to these guys is bad, yes, and shouldn’t happen to anyone, yes, but also because whatever they learn, whatever happens to them, whatever view of the world they bring home with them rains down on everyone else in their lives from wives to children to brothers and sisters to sex workers to employees and so on.

So, to get back to Daze Reader’s question about whether this is an urban legend. Here’s one last snippet from Hull’s article

For some years I had been hearing of penis inserts in Indonesia, but like most middle class Indonesians I dismissed the stories as being little more than sensationalist rumours or fillers for slow news days in tabloids. Eventually though the growing number of reliable sources suggested that there might be something worthy of further research.

I was serious when I said someone like the BBC should send someone like Samuels shed light on it. The world still needs change and change doesn’t happen in the dark. This would be a good place to start.

Madonnas and Whores, Sex-Trafficking Edition

Thu, 2009-08-20 15:54 — figleaf

Grim quote from The Guardian by Holly of Self-Portrait as who introduces it as “a real-life example of what happens when women are treated as commodities. This story, from the Guardian, details what is happening in Uganda, where…”

The practice of bride gifts has been relabelled “bride price”, demanded by families and fiercely negotiated. It has reduced young women to commodities and has made families see their daughters as a source of income. Today bride price isn’t a bag of potatoes, it’s a list of demands for money, animals or clothing made by fathers and older brothers, who might want to throw in requests for new shoes or school fees. The mother gets nothing because she was more or less purchased herself, and the sisters are ignored too as they are all set to be exchanged for commodities when they reach 12 or 13.
The impact of this commodification on young women is catastrophic. It breeds misery and reduces them to chattels.

Read the quote in context here.

Sex-trafficking is very real. It’s just not all commercial sex trafficking.

I remember reading that European slave traders in Africa justified themselves by mass-baptizing their human cargos before shipping them out via the infamous Middle Passage to the Americas. The idea being that, having been baptized the 30-50% of victims who routinely died of dysentery, scurvy, thirst, and suicide while chained ankle-by-ankle to the decks would perforce go to heaven.

I get the impression same mentality applies to their descendants for whom marriage for women, no matter how nasty, brutal, short, or profitable for her family, is automatically assumed to be virtuous.

And I think this is why we see so much more emphasis than is warranted placed on trafficking of “whores,” and virtually no emphasis on trafficking of “madonnas.”

Again, it’s not that there’s no trafficking in commercial sex. There certainly is! But just as it’s a mistake to imagine that all sex-work is sex-trafficking, it’s a much bigger mistake to imagine that only sex-workers are trafficked for sex.

Letterman's Joke and Palin's Legislation: Two Wrongs Make Two Wrongs

Tue, 2009-06-16 09:23 — figleaf

Samhita of Feministing has a great take on the… unfortunate David Letterman joke about one of the women in the Palin family

Letterman apologized last night and while I think Letterman’s jokes were in poor taste, let’s not forget that Palin’s actual stance that has been legislated and made into policy is far worse. Does this make joking about her or her daughters OK? Definitely not. But watching those two women duke it out, I think it is so interesting listening to conservative women use feminist talking points. It is smart and calculated and plays so well into the often rudimentary understanding Americans have about the fight for women’s rights.

She said it here.

Should Letterman lose his job over his women-hating, misogyny-enforcing, insensitive, tin-eared, offensive, intrusive joke? (Not over writing it, which he didn’t, but over not just plain balking when it showed up on his cue-card handler’s queue.)

Well, it seems a little harsh, and he has apologized, and he probably won’t do it again but… yeah, maybe I wouldn’t fire him (not knowing the entire decision-making process or who else has already been disciplined or fired for letting the joke get as far as his cue cards) but I wouldn’t shed tears if someone else did.

But Samhita points out he just made a joke. Gov. Palin and a whole raft of her ilk have not only advocated but signed women-hating, misogyny-enforcing, insensitive, tin-eared, offensive, intrusive legislation into law! And not only are they not embarrassed about it, not only are they not apologizing, and not only are they bragging about it, they’re actively and openly planning more of the same… and in the process appropriating not only the tactics of those they would oppress but the language!

And not to put too fine a point on it but that they know the tactics and language of feminism makes their opposition to it more, not less women-hating, misogyny-enforcing, insensitive, tin-eared, offensive, and intrusive.

Why are they going to be asked to resign or be fired?

—-

Quick note: ever since Reagan administration spin-meisters architected the “news cycle” there’s been a tendency to imagine that only one thing can be done at once or that attention can be paid to only one initiative, event, or scandal at a time. And so if you were used to that philosophy you might mistake my greater condemnation of Palin et. al as some sort of negative, “bigger fish to fry” defense of Letterman. Au contraire! One of the coolest thing about the Obama era is it turns it’s perfectly possible to do two things at once. Maybe even more! No reason, therefore, to let Palin or Letterman off the hook.

Extreme Interrogation Techniques (Are Never Justified or Useful)

Sun, 2009-05-31 15:05 — figleaf

The problem isn’t that waterboarding and similarly torturing suspected terrorists about their activities, organizations, and supporters doesn’t work.

The problem is that if you waterboarded or similarly tortured 1024 randomly selected “pro-life” activists they’d all confess to the terrorist attack on a church in the heart of Kansas that ended in the murder of Dr. George Tiller.

When in fact the chances are probably close to zero that any of them would have had anything to do about it.

That doesn’t mean that anti-terrorist groups shouldn’t investigate and prosecute the kind of terrorist organizations that endorse, sponsor, commit, and celebrate murderous attacks in Kansas churches. Just that such investigations and prosecutions should happen within the law.

Update: Hoo boy, did I ever put this wrong.

I was trying to propose that just as we wouldn’t torture domestic suspects we shouldn’t have tortured anybody. That evidently didn’t come across very well.

I was secondarily trying to propose that our relationship to domestic terrorists is the same as those of populations in other countries in hopes of creating understanding about why, say, collectively punishing a general population through bombing or blockades of goods (including food and medicine) doesn’t work because “sympathy with objectives” generally has no correlation to “complicit in extreme acts.” But I didn’t get that over very well either.

Memorial Day Thought (Via Twitter)

Mon, 2009-05-25 13:51 — figleaf


Photo “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier – Small Pillars” by Flickr user paurian. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So when I was a teenager (looking forward to the still very-real military draft) during in the Viet-Nam war era, one of the minor hits was the Draft Dodger Rag by Phil Ochs. Here’s a snippet (emphasis mine)

I’m just a typical American boy from a typical American town
I believe in God and Senator Dodd and keeping old Castro down
And when it came my time to serve I knew better dead than red
But when I got to my old draft board, buddy, this is what I said:

(Chorus)
Sarge, I’m only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen
And I always carry a purse
...

See the rest of the lyrics, plus chords, plus copyright info, etc., here.

Being gay back then was not, um, well understood, with the result that transsexuality was generally confused with homosexuality. Nor was it tolerated in the slightest (until surprisingly recently in California men who’d been convicted of the “sex crime” of homosexuality in the 1950s and 1960s were still required to notify the sexual-offender registry any time they changed addresses!) And so it was quite a step back then, not to mention quite a risk, for a straight man to claim homosexuality in order to evade conscription into military service.

Which only makes more poignant this observation from @Stranahan, on Twitter:

Today, let’s all give thanks to the men and women forced to hide their personal life just so they can serve their country.

If you didn’t have to go if you were gay back then, it’s all the more important to recognize those who must conceal, and by doing so at least partially surrender, their identity in order to serve in the military today.

Hats off to all who’ve served, and sacrificed, not just those who were “supposed to.”

"I Am a Sex Worker" PSA From Speak Up!

Wed, 2009-04-29 13:53 — figleaf

Found here and elsewhere.

From Audacia Ray’s “Speak Up! Media Skills for the Empowered Sex Worker” workshop.

It is not the case that all sex-workers are empowered. It is also not the case that this is either innate or unalterable.

I don’t know if we have to have sex workers, any more than I think we have to have image consultants or quantatative analysts. But since they’re here there’s no real benefit, and quite a lot of mischief, to encouraging them to keep shut just because folks want to Rorschach away about them as if they were random ink blots instead of human beings with own thoughts, words, and deeds. Not to mention personalities, hobbies, course-loads, pets, parents, reading habits, day jobs, and <coughcough>bacon<coughcough> dining preferences.

Failure to Excommunicate

Tue, 2009-03-10 18:24 — figleaf

Pam Spaulding of Pandagon passes along a Vatican statement that incestuous rapist pedophiles who impregnate their nine-year-old daughters are just fine by them.

He also said the accused stepfather would not be expelled from the church. Although the man allegedly committed “a heinous crime … the abortion – the elimination of an innocent life – was more serious”.

Read the quote in context here.

I… think they made a mistake. Politically stupid? Obviously. Morally unclean? Undoubtedly. Legally suspect? Sure. But even doctrinally it’s completely unclear to me how that’s supposed to work. It’s certainly not the way I’d want to operate an enterprise where one of the primary missions of both clergy and laity involves being trusted alone with minor children.

"Human Beings" vs. "Same *As* Human Beings"

Mon, 2009-03-02 15:52 — figleaf

Serenity Valley of Feminist Mormon Housewives has a nice piece about the conflict noted (strongly!) by Shulamuth Firestone’s 1968 “The Dialectic of Sex” between feminism on the one hand and multiculturalism on the other.

I’ve just been doing some reading for school, and I came across this article by Susan Moller Okin: “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?”, published in a volume by the same name and edited by Okin, Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha Nussbaum. In this piece, Okin defines feminism as the belief that “women should not be disadvantaged by their sex, that they should be recognized as having human dignity equal to that of men, and that they should have the opportunity to live as fulfilling and as freely chosen lives as men can.”

Read the quote in context here.

Valley (and others elsewhere in the blogosphere) have rightly pointed out Orkin’s point that deference to cultural traditions that subordinate women are problematic. Activist Kimberle Crenshaw (who I posted about here) and others have clearly articulated how “rescue” policies are often no more helpful, or respectful, or less oppressive than sub-cultural oppression itself.

And any number of people have pointed out the complications of equality-based rhetoric when speaking about women in any culture, dominant or not. While in Kyriarchy it may be impossible to eliminate oppression and othering I think it’s possible to drastically limit the scope of such complications.

Orkin says “that [women] should be recognized as having human dignity equal to that of men.” I’m… pretty sure an awful lot of the ambiguity about how, exactly, different cultures might interpret terms like “human dignity,” “equals,” and “that of men” by replacing the clause, and underlying sentiments … and indeed much of Orkin’s preceding and following clauses, with “women should be recognized as human beings.” Or, even more tersely, accurately, and evidently radically: “women are human beings.”

This collapse of language to it’s indivisible core has twin benefits: It Disambiguates what “the same human dignity as…” might really mean. And it pitches the “accusing” or “rescuing” cultures into the same pot as “accused” or “in-need-of-rescuing” cultures since “other” cultures are not alone in reducing of some of its members to the status of objects, nor of sacrificing those members for the convenience of more intra-culturally valued, objectifying members.

To the… best of my knowledge none would defer to a subculture that claimed it needed to bring itself good luck by strangling servants in oak groves. We would not defer because servants are human beings and we would have to note that strangling in oak groves would be extraordinarily bad luck for those servants!

Similarly you can’t sew women’s pee-pees shut and claim “but it’s for the traditional pleasure of men in our culture” because it rather curtails the traditional pleasure of other human beings in that culture. Nor can you legislate that some human beings die involuntarily from preventable complications of late-term pregnancy to salve the consciences of different human beings who treat their own children abominably because that conflicts with the right of human beings not to die involuntarily.

Given this understanding multiculturalism can be in conflict with feminism only to the extent that we fail to recognize women as human beings. Not “like” human beings. Definitely not “having dignity equal to human beings.” As human beings. (Radical I know. Get used to it.)

Syndicate content