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What do you think of Scott Aaronson's comment #171 and the subsequent posts?
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4 Answers
I'm glad he started a conversation about the place of men in the conversation about gender. If we want gender equality, we need to include men in the conversation. I hope Comment #171 is moving us in that direction.
There's a growing troubling phenomenon in tech. All too often, men are blamed for the gender inequality in tech and in the sciences. Men are called entitled, insensitive, and exclusionary. They are accused of abuse; they are accused of harassment; they are told they just don’t understand.
While there are the dense men, the creepy men, and the mansplainers, the majority of men I have encountered want things to be better. After I started talking about gender issues on the Internet, I began getting a steady stream of e-mails from male friends, acquaintances, and, eventually, strangers. “I wanted to share this article but I didn’t want to seem patronizing,” some say. “I want to help but I feel helpless,” others say.
Scott Aaronson seems to be in the category of men who want to make things better. And as a PhD student at MIT, I've read Scott's thoughtful blog for years. I've known him as nice, reasonable guy who smiles at people in the elevators. When he bared his soul in Comment #171, I was glad that somebody was finally putting out there an eloquent, extended version of what my "shy, nerdy" male friends have been telling me for years. One friend who shared the comment said, "this is exactly how I feel about feminism in tech."
Unfortunately, many of the responses to Comment #171 confirm what men have been telling me--that they are often made to feel stupid or insensitive when they try to get involved in conversations about gender issues. Several of the widely-shared responses go something along the lines of, "Nice try, Scott, but women have it harder so please meditate on that until you figure it out." Laurie Penny's well-written response On Nerd Entitlement fails to respond to Scott--and proves his point that this idea of "male privilege" shuts men like him out of the conversation. Scott articulates an inability to get around his supposed privilege to join the conversation about gender; Penny tells him life is harder for women so he should just deal. In The plight of the bitter nerd: Why so many awkward, shy guys end up hating feminism, Arthur Chu argues that the experience of women deserves more attention because women are in more physical danger. Not only does this favoring of the the external world dismiss many "real" feminist problems (for instance subtle bias and body-shaming), but is also based on questionable assumptions. (This study Men, women, and murder: gender-specific differences in rates of fat... shows that men are more likely than women to be murdered.) We should be skeptical of arguments that play up the physical danger women are in, as fear is another mechanism of oppression. It is often the perceived threat of physical assault, more so than actual the likelihood of it, that keeps women at home.
If we want gender equality, we need to give men space to talk about their experiences. We have the legacy of patriarchy to blame for our current gender problems; directing that anger at the men does not do much good. These patriarchal structure oppress men as well, just in a different way. (The trailer for The Mask You Live In does a great job of talking about how expectations to be “manly” may cause male misbehavior, especially towards women.) As opportunities increase for women, men are becoming increasingly confused about what roles are appropriate for them. While it is often acceptable for women to talk about their issues, men are often not given the space to process and reflect. If we are going to define new roles for men, we're going to need to let them talk about it.
While I'm glad Scott's comment has gotten people talking about men and feminism, we need to remember to listen to the men when they want to talk. We can't blame men for not trying to help if we shut out genuine attempts to join the cause. Diversity benefits everything, even in the quest to promote diversity. Feminism is about including everyone: it’s about time we welcome men to the party.
P.S. If you support what Scott has done, it's worth sending him a note. It can't be easy to open up about your vulnerabilities and then have what feels like the entire Internet tell you that your feelings are wrong.
I've not studied all of it in depth; so keep in mind that I may find on closer study that I change my mind about some of this.
I think he's right about a number of things.
He is right that there's a lot of willingness to tell young men a sometimes seemingly endless list of things that "might be" sexual harassment, but a corresponding complete lack of willingness to say anything about the opposite; and yes sometimes it can feel the way he describes it; that no matter what you do it's potentially wrong.
I've written before that people tend to forget that average men don't have any choice but to initiate with women if they want any odds of not being single for life. And this reality does need to be kept in mind when judging what people do. I've seen people here on Quora say that ANY unsolicited sexual or romantic attention is inappropriate. That's clearly absurd, because no romance and no sex would ever happen between anyone unless SOMEONE took step number one.
And at the point in time when they do; it's by definition unsolicited. If there was a previous invitation, then that would be step number one. (and then THAT would be inappropriate if you take such claims at face value)
He is also right that blanket statements of "privilege" are often used as a silencing-tactic; that's especially true if the people wielding them are unable or unwilling to see that being privileged or not is context-dependant. One and the same person can very well be privileged in one situation, yet disadvantaged in another situation. And simply insisting that he's privileged overall tends to mostly mean "your problems don't count", and that's not a good way to include anyone in a conversation.
As a university-educated reasonably wealthy heterosexual white dude; yes of course he's privileged in many ways. But it's still possible, or even from how it sounds like LIKELY that he was never privileged in the area of dating, sexuality and romance.
Introverted and shy guys with low assertiveness and low social dominance can struggle with this. I did; for some periods in my life. (I wrote more about that here)
Imagine some guy ain't as much as held hands or kissed, ever, despite trying his best, and then he walks into a conversation with some women about dating and sexuality, most of them have and/or have had at least a handful of partners over the last few years, and in fact several of them complain that men tend try to initiate with them pretty constantly so they're having to turn down a lot of guys.
And then they claim that his perspective isn't valid because he's "privileged" given that he's a man. That's no way to start a conversation; and yes doing that will predictably simply result in anger.
But on the other hand, he's writing from a position where he clearly still hasn't figured it out; and consequently he's wrong about many things.
He says, for example:
And no, that's really genuinely not true. It is true that you'll have a better success-rate with women if you dare talking to them rather than covering in the corner in fear. But there's a long way from that and to being a "Neanderthal", contrary to his claim, no most women do NOT appreciate men who act aggressively, rude or disrespectful. It's just plainly not true.
That the impression exists has to do with visibility. The loud extroverted dominant guy who is an asshole, and mostly prowls the bar-scene and got laid 4 times this year is extremely visible. The less dominant, less loud, less extroverted guy who spent 90% of the same year in stable relationships to two different women and who got laid more in any given week than the asshole did in a year is very much invisible; you'll not see him at all flirting with random women in bars.
In short; I think his comment is a fair description of what the world can FEEL like to a certain subset of men.
But it's not a fair description of reality in total; the vast majority of women do not actually behave the way he claims they do.
I think he's right about a number of things.
He is right that there's a lot of willingness to tell young men a sometimes seemingly endless list of things that "might be" sexual harassment, but a corresponding complete lack of willingness to say anything about the opposite; and yes sometimes it can feel the way he describes it; that no matter what you do it's potentially wrong.
I've written before that people tend to forget that average men don't have any choice but to initiate with women if they want any odds of not being single for life. And this reality does need to be kept in mind when judging what people do. I've seen people here on Quora say that ANY unsolicited sexual or romantic attention is inappropriate. That's clearly absurd, because no romance and no sex would ever happen between anyone unless SOMEONE took step number one.
And at the point in time when they do; it's by definition unsolicited. If there was a previous invitation, then that would be step number one. (and then THAT would be inappropriate if you take such claims at face value)
He is also right that blanket statements of "privilege" are often used as a silencing-tactic; that's especially true if the people wielding them are unable or unwilling to see that being privileged or not is context-dependant. One and the same person can very well be privileged in one situation, yet disadvantaged in another situation. And simply insisting that he's privileged overall tends to mostly mean "your problems don't count", and that's not a good way to include anyone in a conversation.
As a university-educated reasonably wealthy heterosexual white dude; yes of course he's privileged in many ways. But it's still possible, or even from how it sounds like LIKELY that he was never privileged in the area of dating, sexuality and romance.
Introverted and shy guys with low assertiveness and low social dominance can struggle with this. I did; for some periods in my life. (I wrote more about that here)
Imagine some guy ain't as much as held hands or kissed, ever, despite trying his best, and then he walks into a conversation with some women about dating and sexuality, most of them have and/or have had at least a handful of partners over the last few years, and in fact several of them complain that men tend try to initiate with them pretty constantly so they're having to turn down a lot of guys.
And then they claim that his perspective isn't valid because he's "privileged" given that he's a man. That's no way to start a conversation; and yes doing that will predictably simply result in anger.
But on the other hand, he's writing from a position where he clearly still hasn't figured it out; and consequently he's wrong about many things.
He says, for example:
The same girls who I was terrified would pepper-spray me and call the police if I looked in their direction, often responded to the crudest advances of the most Neanderthal of men by accepting those advances.
And no, that's really genuinely not true. It is true that you'll have a better success-rate with women if you dare talking to them rather than covering in the corner in fear. But there's a long way from that and to being a "Neanderthal", contrary to his claim, no most women do NOT appreciate men who act aggressively, rude or disrespectful. It's just plainly not true.
That the impression exists has to do with visibility. The loud extroverted dominant guy who is an asshole, and mostly prowls the bar-scene and got laid 4 times this year is extremely visible. The less dominant, less loud, less extroverted guy who spent 90% of the same year in stable relationships to two different women and who got laid more in any given week than the asshole did in a year is very much invisible; you'll not see him at all flirting with random women in bars.
In short; I think his comment is a fair description of what the world can FEEL like to a certain subset of men.
But it's not a fair description of reality in total; the vast majority of women do not actually behave the way he claims they do.
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tl; but who knows, maybe you want to read it anyway, and who am I to take that choice away from you, and also there may be pictures below the fold:
It feels exhilarating. It feels like Scales are dropping from my eyes, whee!, and then Oh no, there are more scales--bummer! and then Scales dropping, whee! and so on in what is naturally quite jarring and even nauseating but also, Wow, that was great, after I stop throwing up can we get on the ride again? It's like what Lean In Circles and consciousness-raising exercises and re-education camps are probably meant to feel like but almost never ever do. It's like what deeply engaged learning feels like, and it is an excitement and anxiety that I have sorely missed. Thank you, Scott Aaronson, for showing me both your vulnerability and your keen mind. I found you through comment #171, but I'll stay with you at least until I have internalized the lesson that "quantum computers would not solve hard search problems instantaneously by simply trying all the possible solutions at once." Pinky-swear.
Down with razor-sharp claws!
Up with soft underbellies!
So, a little about me:
Born a girl in 1971. Liberation movements were still in the air, but the optimism of the 60's was looking a little ragged.
Soon the 80's would arrive: Life is hard. Let's go shopping!
I have two loving middle-class parents who both tried, mostly successfully, to avoid putting their kids in tight-fitting little blue and pink suits.
(This is me copping to my privilege, which can also feel like, Because of your advantages, you do not have the right to hurt when you hurt. And Stop that crying before I give you something to cry about. To this day I cannot say anything remotely negative about situations I find difficult without tightly swaddling it in disclaimers. But I'm working on it.)
I am white and Southern and my parents tried to bring me up anti-racist but our whole society, not just the South, is still racist, so we all breathe the same air. And so I would have thoughts like, "Why don't the black kids want to be my friend? I'm not some hateful redneck." Or, "None of my ancestors were rich enough to own slaves, so is this still my fault?" Or "If I accidentally say something clueless or insensitive, why do they snub me instead of teaching me to do better?" And even the very worst: "I feel scared when I'm walking alone at night and see a black man."
But of course I couldn't voice thoughts like that, because that would brand me as a racist and racism is bad and I want to be good.
(By the way, http://bmoreantiracist.org/white... is helpful for more on this.)
So at least I had one up on Steve Martin. I feared I might be a jerk, I knew I wasn't a person of color. I knew or at least really really hoped that I wasn't an ignorant small-minded Southern bigot, so those weren't my tribes.
And perhaps the best thing to do is just withdraw from the conversation.
Also, I was diagnosed as smart at a very young age.
I really liked climbing trees and reading books, preferably at the same time.
I wasn't that into dolls and I was into Hot Wheels, but I played with the cars the way many but not all girls play with dolls, meaning less fiery crashes and more society-building.
I went to public school the whole way through, but at the age of 10 I took a test and was placed in a program for the Gifted and Talented. You're the Best and the Brightest but Hey, no pressure! In 4th and 5th grades I went to a special "Enrichment" program one day a week while staying in regular school the other four days. In 5th, 6th, and 7th grades we "gifties" had our own wing of a regular school and only "mixed" at PE class and lunch, which resulted in a lot of nerdy boys getting assaulted to and from our wing. I do not recall a girl ever being physically assaulted for being smart and a little different physically and/or socially, but it happened to many of the boys on a weekly basis. Which sucks. In that context, I was privileged because I got a lot more resources than the "regular" kids. And compared to the boys I was physically safer. And also, it felt ostracizing to be segregated from the other kids. Yet I feel so special and yummy! So can you start to see how that goes?
If not, let me make it super-clear to you:
The other day I was driving along here in New Orleans in my big awesome Dodge Ramcharger (who I call Ramachandra after my favorite neuroscientist) and I see a black man, looks to be in his 60s, standing under an overpass where people often stand to solicit money, and he's holding a cardboard sign with this written in Sharpie:
Everybody needs a little help sometimes.
Get it, Amanda Marcotte?
Not I deserve help and you don't. Not I am entitled because my suffering is greater than your suffering. Not Eff you honky you better effing help me or else.
It's not that complicated, even when it is so, so complicated.
He was standing there with dignity and humanity allowing me to also have my dignity and humanity and I was so grateful for that. Doubtless we did not see eye to eye on every issue. We chatted for a minute and I gave him a couple bucks and left feeling more fired up to do my bit for making our society something better than this one we both inherited and comply with, in which a person's best shot at meeting his basic needs can be from standing in traffic with a sign out. I mean, srsly? We can do better.
So where was I? Oh yes.
Right away I could tell that, OK, yes, my brain seems a little different and even (at the risk of sounding arrogant, which is so not okay for girls) better than a lot of the kids in my regular school. But the stuff we got to do in the 'smart kids' programs were so cool and fun and not boring compared to the soul-crushing juggernaut of the compulsory educational system. Who wouldn't learn better with better teachers, better lessons, and more tools? Ex: Dude, how cool is this? We got to design packages for raw eggs out of straws and paper clips and then drop our eggs out of a helicopter and see whose package was designed well enough that the egg didn't break. Meanwhile back in the regular school there was no budget for straw and paper clips, let alone the helicopter. (Though I think our eggs may have actually just stowed away on a helicopter chartered by the local college's engineers, who were also doing the experiment, and whose asses we little nerds handed to 'em on our cafeteria trays. But you see my point.)
So it was super-clear to me that the "regular kids" would benefit from these extra resources, but instead we set about giving "people like me" more and more and "people like them" less and less and before you know it, Look! We made this giant school-to-prison pipeline without even really trying!
Which is to say, I developed a complex matrix of feelings and strategies around my own intelligence, the praise it brought, the thorny expectation minefield, the guilt at recognizing the inequity I benefited from, that whole kind of yawn Drama of the Gifted Child yawn thing.
But that devilish curiosity kept rearing its ugly head making me do terrible things like "get enthusiastic about learning something new" and "go too far" in debates with my dad. Plus, despite my ostensibly high intelligence, I had still failed to figure out a way to eradicate my emotions (just a little bit later, though, I discovered drugs really helped with that), so I was forever "losing control" and needing to go to my room until I could calm down. But then there were books in the room, and the curious interest devil snake was awake again, and again it began to devour its own tail....
So anywho. I decided the smart money was on just stealthily opting out of anything where it wasn't immediately apparent that I totally rock.
The negotiation hammered out between my scary limbic lizard and my prissy frontal cortex was I could keep getting the praise fix for doing the things that did come easily to me, but only if I diversified the risk by not giving any of it my full effort, attention, and passion, except for itty bitty binges of time. I could have flings with all sorts of subjects, but not marry any of them. Yes, associate professor of gender studies, I AM aware of the connotations...but thx for the assist.
And that, friends, is how I was able to perform the curious contortion of being an overachieving underachiever.
Like, for instance, math and science.
I really wanted to learn that cool stuff, but it didn't come as easily to me as the "soft" stuff like words. (And I've heard it rumored that in "hard" is better than "soft.")
But either "I'm just not smart enough" or "we all have different talents" or "the class needs to move on now" or "the teachers sucked." Secretly I bought into the idea that I wasn't logical, rational, capable, while also being able to see that when girls pretended to be dumb, that was sad and wrong and wasteful.
So perhaps the best thing to do is just withdraw from the conversation.
Which led to feeling like an imposter in some fundamental ways, a fraud to those who thought I was a rockstar (Hi Mom! Hi Dad!), a traitor to myself for not letting myself learn and explore and for God's sake be a kid.
So while I definitely liked me some logic puzzles and tinkered with some TRS-80s and played a little D&D in my day, I wasn't deep into the scene. The nerds weren't my tribe either.
Started sleeping with girls at age 13 (you little slut you!), before I had even done much/any conscious thinking about sex and sexuality.
That was very, very interesting, and I very much enjoyed my time sneaking into the local lesbian bar, which was called--wait for it--Whispers--but it was disappointing that there only seemed to be two kinds of women there. You had your country music flannel dykes, and you had your softball dykes, and neither of those costumes quite fit me.
But okay, I'll roll with it. Sex and love--cool! And having already gotten some fuel/armor from being different in terms of my brain, that helped me avoid a lot of the crushing self-hatred that one might have expected me to feel being queer in the let's-just-say-not-super-accepting milieu of south-western Louisiana in the 1980's. I could just be be all, Homophobes are dumb!
I felt that it gave me a unique perspective on you straight people with your quaint customs and sad little stereotypes, which is something I actually still believe. But I thought that being gay, being able to hang with the fellas and also charm the ladies--gave me diplomatic immunity in your world. (Although I don't consider myself bisexual. Not that there's anything wrong with that.) In retrospect, it seems maybe I was just a tad naive.
Hey, maybe if I just wear this baggy shirt everything will be easier....
Okey-dokey. Arrived at Oberlin, my ultra-progressive Northern liberal arts college, thinking I'd throw myself in and feel right at home. Um, not so much.
Many of my "not rich, just really well off" peers would brightly ask, So, how does it feel being from the backwards racist South? Because you can't be racist if you're unfailingly polite to the family housekeeper and also have an acquaintance of color who has a white-collar job. And also jokes about incest are still super-funny. And Christians are the new Poles. But we're all about tolerance and diversity.
I also found it really difficult to relate to what I came to call "women's studies lesbians," the ones who seemed to do a LOT of talking and writing about sex, but less gettin' down to it, if you know what I mean. I am terrified and also bored by this world's Amanda Marcottes, and I have been tour guide to quite enough four-year lesbians, thankyouverymuch. Plus by then I had gotten pretty deep into my whole drinking and drugs "hobby"/medicine, which didn't fit "their" culture of brewer's yeast and herbal tea but made me a very strong candidate to join up with the hippie/punk bloc in our co-op, where "a search for consensus" and a "search for something to eat besides this tasteless soy cheese" competed for my attention. You young vegan queerpunx have all the luck. Oh, how I missed pork chops and a sense of humor.
This was right at the time when reductive equations were all the rage. Silence equaled death, no meant no. That I could get behind. But "if a woman says she's been raped then she's been raped?" That scared the hell out of me. Not solely because I am afraid of my own feelings and intolerant of my own experience, therefore I struggle with letting other people have their feelings. But also because some people could end up in jail who didn't deserve to be there. (Even though actual false rape claims are very, very, very rare.) I like it a lot better these days when the equation is less No Means No, more Tea Means Sex. I love the humor and humanity in the approaches being tried these days.
Like this: http://ncase.me/polygons/
And no doubt in five or ten years this style of discourse will look like bell-bottoms and rounded corners. Which are actually still quite nice.
Okay, let's roll with it.
Wrap college. Cue Friends soundtrack. Now I'll do the "but you're so smart, why are you just a waitress" thing for a while, and sober up, and "get a real job," and feel exhilarated by that new thing, and then stopped flat when I hit hard stuff or get disillusioned, and quit, and travel and have big adventures, and start again in an even bigger better job that people who don't know anything about computers thinks is a programming job but I know it is "only design" or "just on the business side." And fall in love with a real person that I can see and allow to see me, and stick it out for going on 15 years now even though shit got real. And get an MFA in poetry while working full-time because language makes me feel exhilarated and also I'm just pretending to be in your work world, really I'm a poet, but also then disillusioned, because sometimes/often poetry seems so unnecessary and laughable and soft, ugh, and men are still dying every day from lack of what is found there, so how effective could it be, so I'll get the degree but then quit writing again. And then get exhilarated about the web's ability to bridge all these worlds and connect all these people and help us learn. Earn even more money and prestige and still can't feel it. Hiya disillusionment, I was sort of thinking you'd show up. And before you ask, Yes, there's therapy. Yes, there's meds. Yes, as directed. Yes, somehow through it all, still don't have to drink and do drugs anymore even though for ten years of my life it was about all I could do.
And then soft dissolve and somehow go learn to build a house by building a house. Not by myself but with help. Not because it came easy but because it didn't. Having to re-learn a little math to GIT R DONE. Built it back down South where my soul felt allowed to exist and my interest in happiness was not viewed as off-topic. Okay, my subscription to The New Yorker and The Atlantic and even Wired lapsed, but were those even my people?
And of course, you've long seen in me what I'm just now able to see in myself. It may not be so black and white. It can be less binary, more Venn diagram. There is no such thing as two genders. There are many many more than two races. It's not math/science or arts/humanities.
And as I am just now finding out, even making a bone-headed move doesn't make you a bonehead. Everyone has an asshole, but not everyone is an asshole. So what if we treated each other like people instead of treating each other like assholes?
It's okay to screw up. It's even okay to see the same situation a different way. Despite what you may have heard, this doesn't mean, Everything is relative, nothing has any meaning, our universe now has no underpinning whatsoever, I'll say something and then you say the opposite thing and then we've given it all a fair hearing and we can agree to disagree. Sometimes I could feel dissed and you could feel like you were doing the best you could at the time and don't really get where I'm even coming from. Well, what a sticky wicket. Because what I was taught about conflict resolution boils down to just this:
Oh dear me. Assessment time. Mom, Dad, on this issue, I've just gotta say, I love you enormously, I know you did your best, none of this is your fault, you were spreading the same information you'd been taught, your best was really not very good at all.
*cringes, waits for lighting strike*
She was mean to me.
So all of life becomes a sort of mashup between Don Quixote and Square Pegs. But perhaps I'm being unfair. Yep, I definitely feel electromagnetism in the air. We should head for cover! Admittedly, there was a second component to the lesson:
So one might have all kinds of good intentions to be an excellent dancer (which for all those underprivileged non-MFA in Poetry holders among you, is a metaphor for a "really nice person," a skillful, sensitive lover, a terrific parent, a productive worker, and a great teammate. But no pressure.)
1. Insteps get crushed.
2. Crushed insteps hurt like the dickens.
3. I want to kick somebody when my instep gets crushed.
"But I didn't intend to crush your instep, and also I have this bunion...."
Let's be clear. Despite the impression you get from Facebook, good intentions are not enough. It's not enough to Like justice. But wait, I put a rainbow on my profile pic, how come we don't all have marriage equality yet?
Likewise, what I have learned from my own experience is that when I feel shamed, I tend to blame. When I feel like I could never possibly live up to the expectations placed on me, I tend to limp away.
But yet, even knowing what I know, I still get triggered and spout off and get mad and call names. And then cool off and think it over and open my heart and rejoin the long hard conversation.
So wait, what just happened? I was all awkward and confused and wrong and then I had to go and make it worse by letting everyone see me at the big dance with this giant zit, and then, yes, some people pointed and stared, but most people came over to support me and started showing their own zits and scars. This is what people go looking for gurus behind. This is some deep-level jujitsu shit. This is creating federations out of factions. This is the true Revenge of the Nerds. This is our shared humanity. This is how Scott Aaronson put it:
True 'dat!
Down with EITHER/OR!
Up with BOTH/AND!
It feels exhilarating. It feels like Scales are dropping from my eyes, whee!, and then Oh no, there are more scales--bummer! and then Scales dropping, whee! and so on in what is naturally quite jarring and even nauseating but also, Wow, that was great, after I stop throwing up can we get on the ride again? It's like what Lean In Circles and consciousness-raising exercises and re-education camps are probably meant to feel like but almost never ever do. It's like what deeply engaged learning feels like, and it is an excitement and anxiety that I have sorely missed. Thank you, Scott Aaronson, for showing me both your vulnerability and your keen mind. I found you through comment #171, but I'll stay with you at least until I have internalized the lesson that "quantum computers would not solve hard search problems instantaneously by simply trying all the possible solutions at once." Pinky-swear.
Down with razor-sharp claws!
Up with soft underbellies!
So, a little about me:
Born a girl in 1971. Liberation movements were still in the air, but the optimism of the 60's was looking a little ragged.
Soon the 80's would arrive: Life is hard. Let's go shopping!
I have two loving middle-class parents who both tried, mostly successfully, to avoid putting their kids in tight-fitting little blue and pink suits.
(This is me copping to my privilege, which can also feel like, Because of your advantages, you do not have the right to hurt when you hurt. And Stop that crying before I give you something to cry about. To this day I cannot say anything remotely negative about situations I find difficult without tightly swaddling it in disclaimers. But I'm working on it.)
I am white and Southern and my parents tried to bring me up anti-racist but our whole society, not just the South, is still racist, so we all breathe the same air. And so I would have thoughts like, "Why don't the black kids want to be my friend? I'm not some hateful redneck." Or, "None of my ancestors were rich enough to own slaves, so is this still my fault?" Or "If I accidentally say something clueless or insensitive, why do they snub me instead of teaching me to do better?" And even the very worst: "I feel scared when I'm walking alone at night and see a black man."
But of course I couldn't voice thoughts like that, because that would brand me as a racist and racism is bad and I want to be good.
(By the way, http://bmoreantiracist.org/white... is helpful for more on this.)
So at least I had one up on Steve Martin. I feared I might be a jerk, I knew I wasn't a person of color. I knew or at least really really hoped that I wasn't an ignorant small-minded Southern bigot, so those weren't my tribes.
And perhaps the best thing to do is just withdraw from the conversation.
Also, I was diagnosed as smart at a very young age.
I really liked climbing trees and reading books, preferably at the same time.
I wasn't that into dolls and I was into Hot Wheels, but I played with the cars the way many but not all girls play with dolls, meaning less fiery crashes and more society-building.
I went to public school the whole way through, but at the age of 10 I took a test and was placed in a program for the Gifted and Talented. You're the Best and the Brightest but Hey, no pressure! In 4th and 5th grades I went to a special "Enrichment" program one day a week while staying in regular school the other four days. In 5th, 6th, and 7th grades we "gifties" had our own wing of a regular school and only "mixed" at PE class and lunch, which resulted in a lot of nerdy boys getting assaulted to and from our wing. I do not recall a girl ever being physically assaulted for being smart and a little different physically and/or socially, but it happened to many of the boys on a weekly basis. Which sucks. In that context, I was privileged because I got a lot more resources than the "regular" kids. And compared to the boys I was physically safer. And also, it felt ostracizing to be segregated from the other kids. Yet I feel so special and yummy! So can you start to see how that goes?
If not, let me make it super-clear to you:
The other day I was driving along here in New Orleans in my big awesome Dodge Ramcharger (who I call Ramachandra after my favorite neuroscientist) and I see a black man, looks to be in his 60s, standing under an overpass where people often stand to solicit money, and he's holding a cardboard sign with this written in Sharpie:
Everybody needs a little help sometimes.
Get it, Amanda Marcotte?
Not I deserve help and you don't. Not I am entitled because my suffering is greater than your suffering. Not Eff you honky you better effing help me or else.
It's not that complicated, even when it is so, so complicated.
He was standing there with dignity and humanity allowing me to also have my dignity and humanity and I was so grateful for that. Doubtless we did not see eye to eye on every issue. We chatted for a minute and I gave him a couple bucks and left feeling more fired up to do my bit for making our society something better than this one we both inherited and comply with, in which a person's best shot at meeting his basic needs can be from standing in traffic with a sign out. I mean, srsly? We can do better.
So where was I? Oh yes.
Right away I could tell that, OK, yes, my brain seems a little different and even (at the risk of sounding arrogant, which is so not okay for girls) better than a lot of the kids in my regular school. But the stuff we got to do in the 'smart kids' programs were so cool and fun and not boring compared to the soul-crushing juggernaut of the compulsory educational system. Who wouldn't learn better with better teachers, better lessons, and more tools? Ex: Dude, how cool is this? We got to design packages for raw eggs out of straws and paper clips and then drop our eggs out of a helicopter and see whose package was designed well enough that the egg didn't break. Meanwhile back in the regular school there was no budget for straw and paper clips, let alone the helicopter. (Though I think our eggs may have actually just stowed away on a helicopter chartered by the local college's engineers, who were also doing the experiment, and whose asses we little nerds handed to 'em on our cafeteria trays. But you see my point.)
So it was super-clear to me that the "regular kids" would benefit from these extra resources, but instead we set about giving "people like me" more and more and "people like them" less and less and before you know it, Look! We made this giant school-to-prison pipeline without even really trying!
Which is to say, I developed a complex matrix of feelings and strategies around my own intelligence, the praise it brought, the thorny expectation minefield, the guilt at recognizing the inequity I benefited from, that whole kind of yawn Drama of the Gifted Child yawn thing.
But that devilish curiosity kept rearing its ugly head making me do terrible things like "get enthusiastic about learning something new" and "go too far" in debates with my dad. Plus, despite my ostensibly high intelligence, I had still failed to figure out a way to eradicate my emotions (just a little bit later, though, I discovered drugs really helped with that), so I was forever "losing control" and needing to go to my room until I could calm down. But then there were books in the room, and the curious interest devil snake was awake again, and again it began to devour its own tail....
So anywho. I decided the smart money was on just stealthily opting out of anything where it wasn't immediately apparent that I totally rock.
The negotiation hammered out between my scary limbic lizard and my prissy frontal cortex was I could keep getting the praise fix for doing the things that did come easily to me, but only if I diversified the risk by not giving any of it my full effort, attention, and passion, except for itty bitty binges of time. I could have flings with all sorts of subjects, but not marry any of them. Yes, associate professor of gender studies, I AM aware of the connotations...but thx for the assist.
And that, friends, is how I was able to perform the curious contortion of being an overachieving underachiever.
Like, for instance, math and science.
I really wanted to learn that cool stuff, but it didn't come as easily to me as the "soft" stuff like words. (And I've heard it rumored that in "hard" is better than "soft.")
But either "I'm just not smart enough" or "we all have different talents" or "the class needs to move on now" or "the teachers sucked." Secretly I bought into the idea that I wasn't logical, rational, capable, while also being able to see that when girls pretended to be dumb, that was sad and wrong and wasteful.
So perhaps the best thing to do is just withdraw from the conversation.
Which led to feeling like an imposter in some fundamental ways, a fraud to those who thought I was a rockstar (Hi Mom! Hi Dad!), a traitor to myself for not letting myself learn and explore and for God's sake be a kid.
So while I definitely liked me some logic puzzles and tinkered with some TRS-80s and played a little D&D in my day, I wasn't deep into the scene. The nerds weren't my tribe either.
Started sleeping with girls at age 13 (you little slut you!), before I had even done much/any conscious thinking about sex and sexuality.
That was very, very interesting, and I very much enjoyed my time sneaking into the local lesbian bar, which was called--wait for it--Whispers--but it was disappointing that there only seemed to be two kinds of women there. You had your country music flannel dykes, and you had your softball dykes, and neither of those costumes quite fit me.
But okay, I'll roll with it. Sex and love--cool! And having already gotten some fuel/armor from being different in terms of my brain, that helped me avoid a lot of the crushing self-hatred that one might have expected me to feel being queer in the let's-just-say-not-super-accepting milieu of south-western Louisiana in the 1980's. I could just be be all, Homophobes are dumb!
I felt that it gave me a unique perspective on you straight people with your quaint customs and sad little stereotypes, which is something I actually still believe. But I thought that being gay, being able to hang with the fellas and also charm the ladies--gave me diplomatic immunity in your world. (Although I don't consider myself bisexual. Not that there's anything wrong with that.) In retrospect, it seems maybe I was just a tad naive.
Hey, maybe if I just wear this baggy shirt everything will be easier....
Okey-dokey. Arrived at Oberlin, my ultra-progressive Northern liberal arts college, thinking I'd throw myself in and feel right at home. Um, not so much.
Many of my "not rich, just really well off" peers would brightly ask, So, how does it feel being from the backwards racist South? Because you can't be racist if you're unfailingly polite to the family housekeeper and also have an acquaintance of color who has a white-collar job. And also jokes about incest are still super-funny. And Christians are the new Poles. But we're all about tolerance and diversity.
I also found it really difficult to relate to what I came to call "women's studies lesbians," the ones who seemed to do a LOT of talking and writing about sex, but less gettin' down to it, if you know what I mean. I am terrified and also bored by this world's Amanda Marcottes, and I have been tour guide to quite enough four-year lesbians, thankyouverymuch. Plus by then I had gotten pretty deep into my whole drinking and drugs "hobby"/medicine, which didn't fit "their" culture of brewer's yeast and herbal tea but made me a very strong candidate to join up with the hippie/punk bloc in our co-op, where "a search for consensus" and a "search for something to eat besides this tasteless soy cheese" competed for my attention. You young vegan queerpunx have all the luck. Oh, how I missed pork chops and a sense of humor.
This was right at the time when reductive equations were all the rage. Silence equaled death, no meant no. That I could get behind. But "if a woman says she's been raped then she's been raped?" That scared the hell out of me. Not solely because I am afraid of my own feelings and intolerant of my own experience, therefore I struggle with letting other people have their feelings. But also because some people could end up in jail who didn't deserve to be there. (Even though actual false rape claims are very, very, very rare.) I like it a lot better these days when the equation is less No Means No, more Tea Means Sex. I love the humor and humanity in the approaches being tried these days.
Like this: http://ncase.me/polygons/
And no doubt in five or ten years this style of discourse will look like bell-bottoms and rounded corners. Which are actually still quite nice.
Okay, let's roll with it.
Wrap college. Cue Friends soundtrack. Now I'll do the "but you're so smart, why are you just a waitress" thing for a while, and sober up, and "get a real job," and feel exhilarated by that new thing, and then stopped flat when I hit hard stuff or get disillusioned, and quit, and travel and have big adventures, and start again in an even bigger better job that people who don't know anything about computers thinks is a programming job but I know it is "only design" or "just on the business side." And fall in love with a real person that I can see and allow to see me, and stick it out for going on 15 years now even though shit got real. And get an MFA in poetry while working full-time because language makes me feel exhilarated and also I'm just pretending to be in your work world, really I'm a poet, but also then disillusioned, because sometimes/often poetry seems so unnecessary and laughable and soft, ugh, and men are still dying every day from lack of what is found there, so how effective could it be, so I'll get the degree but then quit writing again. And then get exhilarated about the web's ability to bridge all these worlds and connect all these people and help us learn. Earn even more money and prestige and still can't feel it. Hiya disillusionment, I was sort of thinking you'd show up. And before you ask, Yes, there's therapy. Yes, there's meds. Yes, as directed. Yes, somehow through it all, still don't have to drink and do drugs anymore even though for ten years of my life it was about all I could do.
And then soft dissolve and somehow go learn to build a house by building a house. Not by myself but with help. Not because it came easy but because it didn't. Having to re-learn a little math to GIT R DONE. Built it back down South where my soul felt allowed to exist and my interest in happiness was not viewed as off-topic. Okay, my subscription to The New Yorker and The Atlantic and even Wired lapsed, but were those even my people?
And of course, you've long seen in me what I'm just now able to see in myself. It may not be so black and white. It can be less binary, more Venn diagram. There is no such thing as two genders. There are many many more than two races. It's not math/science or arts/humanities.
And as I am just now finding out, even making a bone-headed move doesn't make you a bonehead. Everyone has an asshole, but not everyone is an asshole. So what if we treated each other like people instead of treating each other like assholes?
It's okay to screw up. It's even okay to see the same situation a different way. Despite what you may have heard, this doesn't mean, Everything is relative, nothing has any meaning, our universe now has no underpinning whatsoever, I'll say something and then you say the opposite thing and then we've given it all a fair hearing and we can agree to disagree. Sometimes I could feel dissed and you could feel like you were doing the best you could at the time and don't really get where I'm even coming from. Well, what a sticky wicket. Because what I was taught about conflict resolution boils down to just this:
Not everyone you thought was your true friend is your true friend.
Oh dear me. Assessment time. Mom, Dad, on this issue, I've just gotta say, I love you enormously, I know you did your best, none of this is your fault, you were spreading the same information you'd been taught, your best was really not very good at all.
*cringes, waits for lighting strike*
She was mean to me.
Not your true friend.My heart is broken.
Not the one for you.I feel frustrated at work.
Not a good fit.
So all of life becomes a sort of mashup between Don Quixote and Square Pegs. But perhaps I'm being unfair. Yep, I definitely feel electromagnetism in the air. We should head for cover! Admittedly, there was a second component to the lesson:
Just give it some time.How much time?
Unknowable. Just keep your head down, and then every so often, poke your head back up and see if it gets shot off.Is Dad still mad?
Pow!Is achievement still fraught?
Whizz!Is racism over yet?
Pop pop pop!Gender all squared away?
Ratatatatat!
That concludes our instruction in conflict resolution. You should now have all the information you need now to go out be the Best and the Brightest.But wait, I don't get it--
Sorry, the class has to move on now.
So one might have all kinds of good intentions to be an excellent dancer (which for all those underprivileged non-MFA in Poetry holders among you, is a metaphor for a "really nice person," a skillful, sensitive lover, a terrific parent, a productive worker, and a great teammate. But no pressure.)
1. Insteps get crushed.
2. Crushed insteps hurt like the dickens.
3. I want to kick somebody when my instep gets crushed.
"But I didn't intend to crush your instep, and also I have this bunion...."
Let's be clear. Despite the impression you get from Facebook, good intentions are not enough. It's not enough to Like justice. But wait, I put a rainbow on my profile pic, how come we don't all have marriage equality yet?
Likewise, what I have learned from my own experience is that when I feel shamed, I tend to blame. When I feel like I could never possibly live up to the expectations placed on me, I tend to limp away.
But yet, even knowing what I know, I still get triggered and spout off and get mad and call names. And then cool off and think it over and open my heart and rejoin the long hard conversation.
So wait, what just happened? I was all awkward and confused and wrong and then I had to go and make it worse by letting everyone see me at the big dance with this giant zit, and then, yes, some people pointed and stared, but most people came over to support me and started showing their own zits and scars. This is what people go looking for gurus behind. This is some deep-level jujitsu shit. This is creating federations out of factions. This is the true Revenge of the Nerds. This is our shared humanity. This is how Scott Aaronson put it:
may I surround myself, for the rest of my life, with men and women who are psychologically broken like I am.
True 'dat!
Down with EITHER/OR!
Up with BOTH/AND!
TL;DR:
I think Dr. Aaronson has some distorted ideas about feminism (he needed a salt-shaker). But he is not a misogynist and I think his camp and the "Amy" camp agrees on the important stuff. He's 97% feminist (self-identified). Now if they could only see that and had a more productive discussion instead of fighting about the other 3%...
-----------------
[Long version]:
First of all, can I just say how much the furore over Dr. Aaronson's comment-on-his-own-blog has reminded me, yet again, how much I hate hate hate the "Woe-Is-Me Olympics"?
I don't know why so many discussions on worthy topics aimed towards societal betterment tend to devolve into:
-"Such-and-such have it bad"
-"Don't make me laugh I have it worse"
-"No that's because you haven't heard about MY suffering. Oh man there's a doozy that'll make you feel privileged."
Seriously what does this accomplish? Seems like all sides in a social-justice debate do this, maddeningly often. And yep it happened once again in this case--both in Dr. Aaronson saying he used to wish he were a woman or gay or a minimum-wage roofer (because presumably those people's lives are happier than his adolescence and he would trade his problems for theirs), and the commentary articles like Penny and Chu pointing out that women's suffering are worse.
Not productive. They're not mutually exclusive.
Therefore, I am frustrated both by Dr. Aaronson's refusal to admit that he is at all privileged ("here's where I get off the train" he says) and Chu and others ending their commentary by citing rape and assault statistics for women, as if that achieves anything. All of these things are real sufferings of real people, and admitting that does not make your suffering any less real or your point any less valid.
I'm also frustrated because Dr. Aaronson and "Amy" in the same comment thread (they're the two main players in the conversation) don't fundamentally disagree. Do they both want equal rights for the sexes, sexual harassment/sexual crimes be appropriately punished, more women in STEM and other fields, etc.? The impression I got was yes. But it's easy to get distracted from that big picture by all the time that they spent debating their (overall minute) differences--mostly about whether shy male nerds really have it bad and how that degree of suffering compares to other groups of folks.
So, just as looking at a few or maybe a lot of instances of "Neanderthals" getting girls made Dr. Aaronson's come to a few wrong conclusions about feminism, they focused so much on their differences that they forgot about their (much much larger) agreements.
I want to bring up a side point: I read the entire thread, all 600 or so comments. And buried in there is Dr. Aaronson's tongue-in-cheek exhortation that Amy "give him some credit" for having consistently said that Dr. Lewin DOES deserve to be severely punished (he just didn't think the lectures should've been taken down), rather than minimizing what the harassed student might've gone through (because Dr. Aaronson's right that a lot of the commenters on his blog post WERE saying things along the lines of "they wouldn't tell us the details so it must not have been that bad"). Anyway, Amy came back with something like: "you don't get credit for the base-line stuff."
I think you do. You do get credit. I WOULD give Dr. Aaronson credit for that. Because it's obviously not that "baseline," if so many people disagree with it and Dr. Aaronson is finding himself having to actually defend the baseline.
Now, is it SAD that some things are not baseline (like you shouldn't give harassment victims a hard time when you DON'T know the details) and SHOULD BE? Yes. But that doesn't mean when somebody's saying they're on your side, you should scoff at it and say that that's nothing, that that's what they SHOULD do anyway or they're just bad people. That tends to drive away your supporters and again, not productive. And I hate unproductive.
Rome wasn't built in a day. It seems like a lot of people act like, if they don't agree completely, 100%, then they're on opposite sides. Or when they're doing something and it's not completely perfect, then it's not good enough? Yeah your husband should do half of the housework. But again, Rome. Built in presumably multiple days. If, say, he started off doing none, and now he does 10%, that's progress, and I'm going to "give him some credit" and encourage that. Soon it might be 20%. Eventually it might be 50%. But it's certainly not going to get there, if at 10% I roll my eyes at him and go "yeah buddy don't gloat, 10% is far from where you're supposed to be, you chauvinist." (Amy actually uses the housework example although I don't think it does her "this is baseline" position any credit). F = ma might be "duh" for all physicists, but they all had to go and learn that at some point. And maybe if they had been made to feel stupid for not being born with that knowledge, they would have been discouraged from going on to learn other stuff in the field.
I think Dr. Aaronson has some distorted ideas about feminism (he needed a salt-shaker). But he is not a misogynist and I think his camp and the "Amy" camp agrees on the important stuff. He's 97% feminist (self-identified). Now if they could only see that and had a more productive discussion instead of fighting about the other 3%...
-----------------
[Long version]:
First of all, can I just say how much the furore over Dr. Aaronson's comment-on-his-own-blog has reminded me, yet again, how much I hate hate hate the "Woe-Is-Me Olympics"?
I don't know why so many discussions on worthy topics aimed towards societal betterment tend to devolve into:
-"Such-and-such have it bad"
-"Don't make me laugh I have it worse"
-"No that's because you haven't heard about MY suffering. Oh man there's a doozy that'll make you feel privileged."
Seriously what does this accomplish? Seems like all sides in a social-justice debate do this, maddeningly often. And yep it happened once again in this case--both in Dr. Aaronson saying he used to wish he were a woman or gay or a minimum-wage roofer (because presumably those people's lives are happier than his adolescence and he would trade his problems for theirs), and the commentary articles like Penny and Chu pointing out that women's suffering are worse.
Not productive. They're not mutually exclusive.
Therefore, I am frustrated both by Dr. Aaronson's refusal to admit that he is at all privileged ("here's where I get off the train" he says) and Chu and others ending their commentary by citing rape and assault statistics for women, as if that achieves anything. All of these things are real sufferings of real people, and admitting that does not make your suffering any less real or your point any less valid.
I'm also frustrated because Dr. Aaronson and "Amy" in the same comment thread (they're the two main players in the conversation) don't fundamentally disagree. Do they both want equal rights for the sexes, sexual harassment/sexual crimes be appropriately punished, more women in STEM and other fields, etc.? The impression I got was yes. But it's easy to get distracted from that big picture by all the time that they spent debating their (overall minute) differences--mostly about whether shy male nerds really have it bad and how that degree of suffering compares to other groups of folks.
So, just as looking at a few or maybe a lot of instances of "Neanderthals" getting girls made Dr. Aaronson's come to a few wrong conclusions about feminism, they focused so much on their differences that they forgot about their (much much larger) agreements.
I want to bring up a side point: I read the entire thread, all 600 or so comments. And buried in there is Dr. Aaronson's tongue-in-cheek exhortation that Amy "give him some credit" for having consistently said that Dr. Lewin DOES deserve to be severely punished (he just didn't think the lectures should've been taken down), rather than minimizing what the harassed student might've gone through (because Dr. Aaronson's right that a lot of the commenters on his blog post WERE saying things along the lines of "they wouldn't tell us the details so it must not have been that bad"). Anyway, Amy came back with something like: "you don't get credit for the base-line stuff."
I think you do. You do get credit. I WOULD give Dr. Aaronson credit for that. Because it's obviously not that "baseline," if so many people disagree with it and Dr. Aaronson is finding himself having to actually defend the baseline.
Now, is it SAD that some things are not baseline (like you shouldn't give harassment victims a hard time when you DON'T know the details) and SHOULD BE? Yes. But that doesn't mean when somebody's saying they're on your side, you should scoff at it and say that that's nothing, that that's what they SHOULD do anyway or they're just bad people. That tends to drive away your supporters and again, not productive. And I hate unproductive.
Rome wasn't built in a day. It seems like a lot of people act like, if they don't agree completely, 100%, then they're on opposite sides. Or when they're doing something and it's not completely perfect, then it's not good enough? Yeah your husband should do half of the housework. But again, Rome. Built in presumably multiple days. If, say, he started off doing none, and now he does 10%, that's progress, and I'm going to "give him some credit" and encourage that. Soon it might be 20%. Eventually it might be 50%. But it's certainly not going to get there, if at 10% I roll my eyes at him and go "yeah buddy don't gloat, 10% is far from where you're supposed to be, you chauvinist." (Amy actually uses the housework example although I don't think it does her "this is baseline" position any credit). F = ma might be "duh" for all physicists, but they all had to go and learn that at some point. And maybe if they had been made to feel stupid for not being born with that knowledge, they would have been discouraged from going on to learn other stuff in the field.
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