I too find the "education" thing hard to stomach, not least because I'm a product of the academic community (in which yes, it is your responsibility to educate those who know less than you about a topic) and the open-source community (which belatedly realised that telling newbies to "RTFM" (especially when there was no canonical FM) was causing serious harm to the community, and which is in the process of installing strong tribal norms against the practice). I dunno what the answer is here, but it's worth knowing that a request for clarification or explanation may well be met with hostility. Unfortunately, Person X being an asshole according to your tribal norms doesn't excuse you from your moral obligations towards every group of which Person X is a member.
how much should I spend investigating any particular theory before I decide that it's rubbish?
Depends on the topic, I'd have thought. In the case of feminism etc, you don't have to look far to find real-world negative effects of prejudice against women, gay people, trans people and so on. So there's obviously something real there, and it's at least plausible that people who've thought hard about this stuff for decades will have better ideas about how to tackle it than you'll come up with on your own. So I'd say that this topic at least merits a reasonable investment of time and tolerance of apparent craziness.
should I keep reading more books until I find one that I agree with
Coming back to the education thing, this is something else that bugs me about it. By Sturgeon's Law 90% of writing on a given topic is crud, so if I just pick books off the "Feminism" shelves at the library at random I'll expect to read 10 before I hit one that's OK. In practice I can do a bit better (by looking at Amazon rankings and so on), but this is where the personal touch is really appreciated: if my friend knows a lot about this stuff, then a personal recommendation from them carries a lot more weight than one from an Internet random, because I have some idea of how extreme and/or well thought-out their views are and I can calibrate accordingly.
In practice, though, I've read exactly one book on feminism, and that was this one (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Introducing-Feminism-Susan-Watkins/dp/184046058X), some years ago. So I should probably make a bit more effort.
Surely it would be fairer for the people who advocate a particular theory to actually say what their views are?
And again, on the education thing... different people use words in different ways, and the question "The word 'foobar' seems to mean a variety of things depending on who's speaking: what do you mean by it?" seems to me entirely legitimate, but (given the anti-kyriarchy crowd's cultural norm against expecting spoonfeeding) it's important for the student to differentiate that question from "What does 'foobar' mean, I can't be arsed to Google it?"
That implies that "You're either with us or you're against us" - no middle ground.
I don't think that's what she's saying - I think she's saying that if you know a bit (or even a lot) about this stuff, you can kid yourself into thinking you know it all, and consequently do Bad Stuff while thinking "I'm so enlightened, I never do sexist things, go me". The answer here, I guess, is to realise that it's really hard to not be sexist if you've been raised in a sexist milieu, and that overconfidence leads to slip-ups.
That's the point where I just say "sod it", and decide that it's best just to follow my own conscience.
Yeah, that kind of conversation can be really frustrating, can't it? The trouble is, if privilege theory is right then your conscience is miscalibrated, and you'll end up doing hurtful things unintentionally :-(
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how much should I spend investigating any particular theory before I decide that it's rubbish?
Depends on the topic, I'd have thought. In the case of feminism etc, you don't have to look far to find real-world negative effects of prejudice against women, gay people, trans people and so on. So there's obviously something real there, and it's at least plausible that people who've thought hard about this stuff for decades will have better ideas about how to tackle it than you'll come up with on your own. So I'd say that this topic at least merits a reasonable investment of time and tolerance of apparent craziness.
should I keep reading more books until I find one that I agree with
Coming back to the education thing, this is something else that bugs me about it. By Sturgeon's Law 90% of writing on a given topic is crud, so if I just pick books off the "Feminism" shelves at the library at random I'll expect to read 10 before I hit one that's OK. In practice I can do a bit better (by looking at Amazon rankings and so on), but this is where the personal touch is really appreciated: if my friend knows a lot about this stuff, then a personal recommendation from them carries a lot more weight than one from an Internet random, because I have some idea of how extreme and/or well thought-out their views are and I can calibrate accordingly.
In practice, though, I've read exactly one book on feminism, and that was this one (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Introducing-Feminism-Susan-Watkins/dp/184046058X), some years ago. So I should probably make a bit more effort.
Surely it would be fairer for the people who advocate a particular theory to actually say what their views are?
And again, on the education thing... different people use words in different ways, and the question "The word 'foobar' seems to mean a variety of things depending on who's speaking: what do you mean by it?" seems to me entirely legitimate, but (given the anti-kyriarchy crowd's cultural norm against expecting spoonfeeding) it's important for the student to differentiate that question from "What does 'foobar' mean, I can't be arsed to Google it?"
That implies that "You're either with us or you're against us" - no middle ground.
I don't think that's what she's saying - I think she's saying that if you know a bit (or even a lot) about this stuff, you can kid yourself into thinking you know it all, and consequently do Bad Stuff while thinking "I'm so enlightened, I never do sexist things, go me". The answer here, I guess, is to realise that it's really hard to not be sexist if you've been raised in a sexist milieu, and that overconfidence leads to slip-ups.
That's the point where I just say "sod it", and decide that it's best just to follow my own conscience.
Yeah, that kind of conversation can be really frustrating, can't it? The trouble is, if privilege theory is right then your conscience is miscalibrated, and you'll end up doing hurtful things unintentionally :-(