I don’t hate men who were born men and feel male. I don’t think they should be spending their time thinking how lucky they are compared to me or telling me how brave I am.
The best thing these people who’ve never heard of me can do for me is keep living their lives without any thought to whether they’re ‘wasting’ their ‘privileged’ status because they don’t campaign for queer awarenesss, spend time consciously loving their cisgenderedness, etc.
(Basically, putting aside the gender thing I chose as an example, what I’m trying to say is: if I was a starving child in China, I’m sure I wouldn’t give a flying frell whether a Western child ate up her carrots.)
edit: I expand upon this rant in my LJ comments.
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hellmutt- A Straunge and Terrible Wunder
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So I'm not going to be advocating, say, gay rights any time soon because it's the noblesse oblige thing to do and I'm the Great White Hunter, compelled by my sinful existence to go ahead and make patronising token proclamations about the need for more Political Correctness. Guilting me into shit won't work. Rather, I'll be supporting them, for instance, because I'm in broad agreement with this huge batch of specific political ideas. (And because I'm apparently the Anti-Christ, but that's neither here or there.)
Thing is, though, that I've been told that any attempt to be in broad political agreement with gay rights/racial equality/equal pay for women/whatever is doomed to be false and shallow because, in fact, I am the Great White Hunter and intrinsically represent the enemy. Now, that is true to the degree that I do not have the deep personal experience of being a part of a angry oppressed minority. I sure as hell haven't been raised in a shtetl. But the implication that I can't think through stuff and come to the same conclusions as other people in other arbitrary categories based on the fact that it's not in my presumed social self-interest to do so is just a tiny bit insulting. Not to mention it's not smart.
(I do give each person the right to pick who they want to picket with, though. Maybe it turns out Ti-Grace is right and all the genders really are engaged in an epic battle to the death.)
I mean, for God's sake, if guilt wasn't bad enough, that's not even real guilt, that's just being a jerk.
Just as nobody's going to tell me who I must feel kinship with (any Joe Bloggs may well have more in common with other asexuals/whatevers than I have, and nobody's signing me up to any cause on my behalf), nobody's going to tell me to keep my hands off the multiples/whateverelses either. Yes I'm not one, but since actually being a whateverelse would still be no guarantee that I'd understand the other whateverelses, tough shite to the isolationists, who are just going to have to accept the idea of diversity.
Exactly. Getting together for whatever reason is nice, but there's something about (hostile) isolationism that's awkward if you want to go around affecting things. Few people anywhere like to pigeon-hole themselves based on one thing, anyway, and in general work differently enough, so ultimately it'll boil down to me against the world. And I start reading Camus or something like that.
Being or having been the social underdog, particularly in a country with deep scars like America, can be a kind of a point of pride. Nothing's wrong with that. Looking at oppression, no matter how real and concrete, as an epic battle for moral high ground is a bad platform for making changes to society. It leads to the kind of absolute confrontationalism which doomed radical feminism. Let's say, for instance,that I'm a black Cherokee transsexual lesbian otherkin vampire pagan Räelist Arab. With no legs. And MPD. What do I win? Are there prizes? But more importantly: Do I need to cull everyone who isn't me from my political posse?
Except, obviously, for Best-Boy, Best-Butler, the Best-Mobile, the Best-Mansion and all the employees of Best-Corp who provide him with the income and independence to go Besting around the place like a big woofter every evening.
Granted, that might be the only sane response to this world...
(Pardon the interruption. ;-)
Hang on a minute, maybe he WAS a goth all along...
Not that gawth ain't cool, mind you. Don't mess with the gawth.
With any of these things, it's about society moving forwards, and society obviously includes everyone. It's kinda silly otheriwse. It's like the occasional radical feminist who thinks society can be changed without the help of men; it's not that men are any more capable of doing so, it's just forcing anything like that is kind of weird and wrong and possibly counterproductive.
Poverty is bad; making a single Tyneside child feel guilty for not being hungry for her veg, using the entire Chinese subcontinent (about which the parent probably knows nothing) as a bludgeon, is not only a non-sequitur, it's stunningly insulting. If the parent really gave a shit, they'd be telling their child about world hunger in a setting other than "I want you to feel guilty so you will do this for me". (These Chinese children disappear when mummy/daddy wants a new car/frock; "that's not the same".) Possibly even putting their money where their mouth is.
But, back to the thing that sparked the entry above: "You should all put yourselves in an attitude of prayer, don sackcloth and feel jolly guilty about enjoying this thing you were born with because I wasn't". If I'm going to maintain that I can't help having been born slightly skew-wiff to the rest of society, how on earth can I launch a grudge against other people who happened to be born closer to the normal range?
And why should I expect them to know and care about me? If I meet one and the subject comes up, it doesn't do me any harm to have to explain myself. I'm not 'entitled' to understanding, sympathy or to be thought of as a brave soul (phbleech) just because of an accident of genetics. And, dammit, I'm not insecure enough to grab people and shriek "I'm here, I'm (whatever), I'm really trying to induce you to say something insensitive about it so I can feel superior!"
So basically, ignorance isn't a crime. Ignorance and innocent prejudice are something to be lifted gradually by positive example, not by cruising in on the "you should feel bad" or "you should listen to my personal details whether or not you're interested" angle.