Sat, 2006-05-27 12:46

[I used to try to do a “Saturday non-salacious blogging post” every week, but I don’t think I’ve done one since at least the beginning of the year. Anyway, don’t let the dour intro fool you. This post begins with a bad old story and hints at progress. Slow progress, yes, but progress where its really needed. —fl]

Via The Feminarian

“... our own rector, Carol Anderson. Carol told us the story of her ordination. Which is an amazing story. She was actually in a history book I read. She was one of the first women ordained in our church, you see, and she doesn’t often talk about those times. But what a tale!

...

One time she was giving out the bread during Eucharist and a man walked up to her with intense hatred in his eyes and said, “Go to hell.” She said, “I can’t, I’m busy.”

Read her whole post here.

Can you imagine hating a class of people, women in this case, so much you’d prefer damnation to salvation? That you’d approach an alter to receive a sacrament and blaspheme?

It’s not that I don’t understand hating classes of people. I do. I grew up around it. I even recognize the various utilities of prejudice, of division, of seeing one’s self as exceptional and therefore resenting reminders that you’re no more exceptional than anyone else.

But if you have faith at all I can’t see loving your prejudices more than your deity, holding your pride above God, choosing to drag someone else with you to perdition rather than ascend with them into grace.

Question: Was his outrage based on theological principle or habit and taste?

—-

Aside: There’s a line in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 where an armed-forces general, speaking to the hapless Anabaptist chaplain, expresses first puzzlement and then outrage at the thought that enlisted men worshiped the same God officers did.

Question: Was his outrage based on theological principle or habit and taste?

—-

The issue here is that “innate conservatism” (also known as “that which we learned was true before age five”) is a natural but perilous barrier to thinking beyond stereotypes. At it’s most fundamental level it’s an extremely helpful reflex — before five we learn things like “don’t stick your fingers on the stove… again” that can really help you make it to age ten and beyond. The problem with low-level reflexive learning, especially the very early stuff, is it doesn’t discriminate against good vs. bad stuff, useful vs. obstructing, moral vs. immoral.

Question: What is the consequence of overhearing one’s older siblings saying “girls are yukky?” What do we learn from the uncontrollable/phallic message in the “snakes and snails and puppy-dog tails” nursery rhyme? Or it’s nondistinct/conformist “sugar and spice and everything nice?”

Question: When the “go to Hell” gentleman approached the sacrament where did his outrage lie? An intricate interpretative construction of the Bible or a misplaced, unremembered reflex; a stereotype fossilized into bigotry; an unconsciously laid brick of good intention paving the road to Hell?

—-

Ok, so I’d started this piece yesterday and… I wasn’t really sure where I was going with it. It’s old news — the incident described was recounted to the Feminarian — and for all its viscerial impact, and (for that matter) it’s resonance with current events (link also to the Feminarian, which was inspired in turn by a post on Alternet.org.) But complaints are just complaints unless you bring something more.

So I’m going to bring a little more, if I can. By coincidence, Kochanie sent me a link to another post, coincidentally also from Alternet.org, about a tech writer’s frustration with the über-tech site slashdot.org.

A few months ago, an article of mine was Slashdotted. But instead of resulting in a lively debate about technology and social justice, it instead produced a popular thread in the “comments” area about whether I was too fat to be considered attractive. At that point, I vowed to stop reading Slashdot. What the fuck? Why should I give a shit about those morons? I would read other geek culture blogs like BoingBoing, where the male editors are feminists and Xeni Jardin knows why it sucks that some creeps care more about her ass than the political op-ed she just wrote for the Los Angeles Times.

But, like I said, Slashdot is like the New York Times. No matter how infuriating and stupid its editorial policies, the site still breaks interesting news that everybody talks about. So I started peeking at my Slashdot feed again once in a while, then visiting the site, then actually poring over it daily as I used to do. Until my most recent Slashdotting, in which a guy linked to one of my more satirical columns and described me as a “gorgeous nerd” rather than a journalist or writer or columnist or even just plain “nerd.”

You can imagine the comment threads that followed. Was I really gorgeous, or was I ugly? Wasn’t it OK to evaluate my looks because my column wasn’t really “professional,” but rather “humorous”? (As if I haven’t been writing this column seriously and professionally for six and a half goddamned years.) And, my favorite, wasn’t it OK to talk about my looks because I write about sex? (This comment was followed by links to several articles I’d published about technology and sex, as if writing about vibrators somehow meant I was “asking for it.”)

Read Newitz’s whole post here.

Ok, so once again we’re seeing a double standard. It’s not so much that Newitz’s looks were discussed positively or negatively, it’s that they were discussed at all. (I remember when Microsoft’s then-VP Steve Ballmer gave a public programmer of the year award and added, sort of out of the blue, “...and I happen to know she looks darn good in a bathing suit too.” Had I been a Microsoft programmer, and had I somehow managed to be the best programmer in the systems division, I rather doubt he’d have mentioned how I looked in a bathing suit.)

I said I wanted to bring something to this discussion beyond merely cataloging complaints, and Newitz offers a rather sturdy straw:

...I went back and began rereading the comments on Slashdot about my article. At least half of them were written by outraged readers who asked why my looks were relevant. A woman had posted about how this kind of treatment was exactly why so few women are in the tech industry. It wasn’t a solid wall of sexism — there was a debate going on. And for every sexist dick, there was at least one feminist dick talking back to him. Even the guy who’d written the post sent me an e-mail apologizing for having used the word gorgeous, explaining that his English was really bad and he hadn’t intended to inspire the kinds of comments he had.

I wasn’t seeing biologically entrenched male domination at all. I was seeing a slow cultural evolution. The action on Slashdot is like a social version of that “missing link” fish with legs that some paleontologists just discovered. Maybe these guys don’t have their gender equality land legs yet, but they’ve got the beginnings of feet growing inside their flippers.

And there’s the crux of the issue. Reflexes aren’t destiny.

One more quote from Newitz that’s worth pointing out. From her introductory paragraphs:

Back in the 1990s, somebody told me that infamous antiporn feminist Catharine MacKinnon used to joke that she wished sexism were biological, because biology is easier to change than culture. I remember this unverified quote half a dozen years later because I thought it was such a great response to the claim that men are dicks to women as a result of neurological hardwiring — a claim you still hear all the time.

But is it dickish biology or dickish culture that creates a problem like Slashdot?

The answer, as Newitz notes, is that bad as things can get our biases are cultural, not biological. Boys as metaphorical squirmy, slimy garden creatures is a cultural truth, not a biological one, nor is the implication that they can’t be “everything nice” biological — it’s cultural. Similarly girls as saccharine bastions of pleasantness and the implication of intangible attributes or achievements is cultural, not biological. (Which, once realized, can come as a relief both to boys who discover they can be nice after all, and for girls who realize they may be nice without feeling obliged to model it for the benefit of others.)

In other words, McKinnon was right to point to culture rather than biology. And she was right that shifting culture is difficult. I think, though, that the shift away from startled “go to Hell” towards baffled “what the Hell was that all about, anyway” is underway.

If I may further wear out William Gibson’s wonderful phrase, “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” Our goal, then, is to further distribute it.