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pozorvlak: (Default)
Tuesday, March 8th, 2011 01:31 pm
[This post is basically a holding page for a discussion that started on Twitter but quickly spiralled beyond 140 characters per point.]

I think that the term "privilege", as used by feminists and other equality-campaigners, is unhelpful. I think the concept to which it refers (which I attempted to explain here) is extremely helpful and important; I'm objecting only to the signifier, not the signified. The reason I think "privilege" is an unhelpful term is that the word's ordinary meaning hides the fact that it has a nonobvious technical definition, leading the uninitiated to think they know what's being talked about, draw (wrong) conclusions, and get offended/drag the argument off in the wrong direction/generally mess things up. This annoys equality campaigners and impedes the enlightenment of the uninitiated person.

The workaround is to say "blah blah blah privilege - which I am using in a technical and nonobvious sense which you should read up on quickly if you haven't met it before - blah blah pay gap blah." But this is unsatisfactory because (a) it takes (perhaps unnecessary) extra time and effort from the equality-campaigner every time, (b) you have to do it early on or you're already off down the wrong path.

This is one of the reasons I prefer the term "kyriarchy" to "patriarchy": it sounds like jargon, sure, but it doesn't have an obvious wrong meaning for your interlocutor to focus on. If they haven't met it before, they'll have to ask what it means, and you can tell them, and then you'll both be on the same level.

Some possible objections

1. Who the hell are you to tell us what term to use?

Oh, nobody in particular. Ignore me if you like. But I've seen this failure mode play out a number of times (most recently this morning, kicking this discussion off), and I bet you have too. Think of this as a bug report, which you're free to mark as WONTFIX.

2. Other scholarly disciplines give technical meanings to ordinary words all the time, and that doesn't cause a problem.

Well, sure. But those subjects don't deal with the basic stuff of everyday life. If I see "jerk" in a physics textbook or "exact" in a book on homological algebra, I'm probably going to assume that they're not using those words in their ordinary sense, and turn to the index. It helps that those words are very unlikely to be used in places where their ordinary meanings would make sense, of course. However, if I as an uninitiated person encounter the word "privilege" on a feminist website, in a piece about something I already think I have some handle on, I'll read it with the ordinary meaning, decide it more-or-less makes sense but is WRONG, JUST WRONG, and charge off in the wrong direction.

3. Why should we change our established terminology to make life easier for people who can't be bothered to do their own Google searching?

Well, the problem is not that they can't be bothered to do their own Google searching, it's that they don't realise they need to. Something which flags up "this is a technical term" would solve this problem (while still leaving you with the folks who genuinely can't be bothered to do their own Google searching, who constitute a more intractable problem).

Besides, you want your ideas to be widely disseminated and understood, don't you? Just think about the current penetration of feminist ideas into the wider culture. As a society, we still struggle with "equal pay for equal work" and "rape is bad". Anything more sophisticated, like the concept of privilege, is (I believe but have not checked) understood only by a depressingly tiny minority.

4. We've already got loads of books and websites that use "privilege". Are we meant to change them all?

This is a genuine problem - something I remember vividly from my time among mathematicians is how hard it is to change entrenched terminology. The problem is particularly acute when there's wide agreement that the old terminology is bad, but not about what to replace it with, because then you get lots of splinter factions using different words, and the only sensible default for the unaligned is the bad old terminology.

But as I said above, if "privilege" is entrenched terminology, it's only entrenched for quite a small fraction of the people who would benefit from understanding the concept.

I don't have any good suggestions for how to achieve a switchover, but hopefully one of my lovely commenters will.

5. Do you have a better term to suggest?

Alas, no. Sorry. But perhaps you do?

[Also: Happy International Women's Day! If you're feeling depressed about the much-tweeted statistic that women do 66% of the world's work, produce 50 percent of the food, but earn 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property, then cheer yourself up with The Guardian's top 100 women or the Awesome Shit Women Did tumblr.]
pozorvlak: (babylon)
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 05:56 pm
[Everything herein will be extremely old hat to many regular readers, but it's new to me and so I thought I'd share. Consider this part of my ongoing project of self-education.]

Charlie Stross, in the comments to his most recent blog post, posted a link to the site Derailing for Dummies. The conceit is that it's a guide to arguing with members of marginalised groups for people who want to drive them to apoplexy and/or despair as quickly as possible - this allows the author to explain why such conversational gambits as "you're just being oversensitive" won't help your interlocutor's blood pressure.

As a "white, heterosexual, cisgendered, cissexual, upper-class male" (plus a bunch of other things besides - able-bodied, literate...) I've only had conversations about race, sexuality, etc, from the perspective of a member of the privileged¹ group [from which perspective the conversations often look like this :-( ]. So I found the site to be rather uncomfortable reading, but also very educational, and I'm glad the author chose to ignore their first two points (If You Won't Educate Me How Can I Learn? and If You Cared About These Matters You'd Be Willing To Educate Me). I've definitely used the lines

If You Won't Educate Me How Can I Learn
You're Just Oversensitive
You're Interrogating From The Wrong Perspective
Aren't You Treating Each Other Worse Anyway
Well I Know Another Person From Your Group Who Disagrees!
You Are Damaging Your Cause By Being Angry

from the page (in all innocence! And with the best of intentions!), and probably a bunch more. If I've said that to you, I'm sorry, and can only plead that I didn't know how upsetting it would be. Now I have some idea of how that feels to the other person, I'll try not to do it any more.

¹ "Privilege" in this context is a term of art that (AIUI) means something like this. Suppose group X is in some way marginalised. Then the world will be set up in such a way that non-X people benefit from their non-Xness in all sorts of ways, big and small, that the non-X people simply don't notice, because they've known them all their lives and think that that's just how the world works for everyone. This means that (a) they simply don't realise many of the ways in which life sucks for X people, unless they've made a positive effort to find out, (b) they are almost certainly unwittingly contributing to the further marginalisation of X people, because they don't understand the effects of their actions - as non-X people, they never experience said effects. Hence, if you haven't made an effort to educate yourself about the lives and difficulties experienced by X people, you're probably part of the problem.

This effect could, I suspect, be understood as an especially unfortunate interaction of various well-understood cognitive biases. To my utter lack of surprise, I am not the first person to think of this.

Non-X privilege also applies to people who are non-X but members of some other marginalised group Y: while the difficulties experienced by X and Y people will probably have some overlap, they won't be identical, and privilege applies to those experienced by X but not Y. The D4D author actually wrote the piece after observing exactly this: conversations in which X¬Y people used the same lines on Y people that ¬X people had previously used on them.
pozorvlak: (Default)
Friday, July 16th, 2010 11:03 am
I've been living in Scotland for nearly six consecutive years now (around ten years in total), and in that time I've become increasingly open to the ideas that
  1. a viable independent Scotland is possible,
  2. in the event of Scotland becoming independent, I might well choose to become a Scottish citizen¹.
There's a kind of baseline respect for the life of the mind here that I've often found to be sadly absent in England, and Scotland resisted a lot of the worst excesses of the last Government - not charging University tuition fees, for instance, and not keeping DNA samples of suspects subsequently found to be innocent.

However, proponents of Scottish independence (this guy, for instance - recommended) need to stop doing the following three things if they want to convince me.

Assuming that Scotland will have ownership of the North Sea oilfields. First off, from an environmental standpoint we should be leaving the damn stuff in the ground anyway. Climate change is here and it's real and it's scary, and if we want to stand a decent chance of avoiding 2C of warming then we can't afford to exploit all our known reserves, much less start drilling new deep wells (and we all know how well that turned out in the Gulf of Mexico, right?). Secondly, England will fight, and fight hard, to keep ownership of the North Sea oilfields even if they let the rest of the country go. I invite you to read the CIA World Factbook's list of ongoing UK territorial disputes. Would they go as far as military action? Not likely, but not inconceivable IMHO. Thirdly, North Sea oil peaked in 1999, and more than 70% of the oil had been extracted in 2006, so even if we get the oil, we wouldn't get it for very long.

If you want to talk about the phenomenal possibilities for wind and tidal power in the Pentland Firth, however², then we could be in business.

Assuming that Scotland's entry to the EU would be unproblematic. Here, England wouldn't be the problem (they'd want cross-border trade, and EU membership would make that vastly easier), but you have to explain why every European country with a small secessionist region (which, to a first approximation, is all of them) wouldn't blackball our entry pour décourager les autres. Plus, timescales matter, and it takes a long time for most countries to join the EU. Even a short gap between secession and EU accession would hit us hard economically.

Showing Sean Connery. Yeah, yeah, he's a big SNP donor, and I liked Thunderball too. But if he likes Scotland so much he should fecking live here.

¹ I was born here, so I don't think I'd have any difficulty qualifying.
² Not to mention the fact that we already have substantial expertise and plant for heavy offshore engineering in place right now.
pozorvlak: (Default)
Saturday, June 26th, 2010 02:39 pm
Last night I was re-watching The IT Crowd S3E4. It was one of my favourite episodes, and I still think it's beautifully constructed, but I found it a bit... squirmier this time round. For those who haven't seen it, one of the main characters meets a woman, invites her to dinner, then asks her to go to bed with him. She tells him that she's trans ("I used to be a man - I wish there were an easy way to say that, but believe me, there isn't.") and he says "I don't care. Takes all sorts to make a world." Cue romantic courtship montage: they get drunk, eat pizza and watch the darts, she beats him at arm-wrestling, she astonishes him with her prowess in bed and detailed understanding of the male anatomy, she teaches him to shoot pool, she beats him in a lager-drinking contest, they go to the football together, and so on. Then one night they're in bed together, tell each other that they love each other for the first time, and he says "And to think you were worried about telling me you were from Iran!" Turns out he misheard, they break up, they get into a fist-fight in a chemistry lab, throw each other through walls and into racks of glassware, and end up destroying the Internet and causing the collapse of society... but that's another story.

A beautiful relationship ruined by transphobia and prejudice. How sad.

Thing is, though, she was really apologetic when she first told him, and was worried that he'd feel deceived. Half-way through their first date, remember. It seems to me that, while she's probably sensible to worry about a potential adverse reaction, (a) she has no need to apologise for having done something difficult, expensive and brave, (b) she could hardly have told him much earlier.

And then I log on this morning, check my friends page, and discover that one of those godawful LJ Writer's Block suggestions recently was
Regardless of your sexual identity/orientation, would you be upset if a long-term romantic partner neglected to tell you that s/he'd had a sex change operation before you met, and why?
Funny how these coincidences happen.

[You can't see the question any more: they wimped out and changed it to one about partners who'd committed serious crimes in the past.]

Anyway, there are a couple of transfolk who read this blog, and plenty of people who are more clued-up about trans culture and trans rights than me, so I'd like to ask: at what stage (if ever) do you tell potential romantic or sexual partners about your trans status? What do you say, and what kind of reactions have you had? If you weren't to tell them (and I guess I'm directing this at the postops) would they be able to tell? Please feel free to comment anonymously if you'd rather.

For the record: if I discovered that someone I was sleeping with was trans, it would probably freak me out a little bit, but that would be my problem, not hers, and I'd work to get past it. I'd really like to have kids some day, which could be an issue.
pozorvlak: (sceince)
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 08:00 pm
Every time I read about a new development in the weird and wonderful world of materials science, I wonder if I've gone into the wrong field. Here are a few new products that have caught my eye recently:

Sugru - a bit like modelling clay, only it cures into a flexible silicone overnight. Make your stuff waterproof, or more ergonomic, or funky and artistic, or simply not broken. Check out the video on their site, and some of the hundreds of pictures of cool sugru hacks submitted by their users. Currently out of stock, due to (foolishly, IMHO) unanticipated massive demand.

Spray-on glass - I can't decide if this is a hoax or not. According to the article, the spray can coat whatever surface you like with a 100nm film of glass, with some really bizarre properties (breathable, waterproof, non-toxic, flexible...). Apparently it makes clothes stain-resistant, kitchen counters wipe-clean and antibacterial, wood termite-proof, and vines resistant to fungi. My bogon detector is triggered by the bit about "not available in supermarkets because they make too much money off conventional cleaning products", however.

Woolfiller - not sure if this is really materials science, but - well, watch the video. If you've ever darned an item of clothing, you'll see what I mean.
[Edit: turns out this is clever marketing of a well-known (for suitable values of "well-known") technique called "needle felting". I still think it's cool, though. Thanks to [livejournal.com profile] susannahf and [livejournal.com profile] taimatsu for pointing this out.]

Rather older, but still cool: metallic glass and rubberized asphalt.

PS: I am now employed again - I started work here this morning :-)
pozorvlak: (gasmask)
Friday, May 15th, 2009 11:24 pm
My trousers, as is their wont, have all decided to fall apart at the same time again, so I've been doing a bit of sewing this week. I'm not much good at sewing, but I offer up what little I know about the subject in the hope that others may find it useful. Most of this was taught me by [livejournal.com profile] stronglight, [livejournal.com profile] mi_guida, [livejournal.com profile] half_of_monty and [livejournal.com profile] susannahf, some of it I remember from school, some was taught me by my mother, and some of it I worked out for myself. It's enough for basic repairs - mending holes and burst seams, that kind of thing. To make clothes from scratch or to carry out more advanced adjustments, you'll need to find a more knowledgeable instructor.

Read more... )

Sewing's time-consuming, but it's also very satisfying, like most repair work.
pozorvlak: (gasmask)
Friday, March 27th, 2009 11:53 am
So, I was thinking: given the recent ascent of El Capitan by paraplegic adventuress Karen Darke, have we now got the definitive answer to those grumpy souls who complain that (for instance) the existence of a path up Ben Nevis means "you could get up it in a wheelchair"?

Then I read a bit more of her blog, and found that Ms Darke has actually attempted to get her handbike up Ben Nevis, and failed.

You heard it here first, folks: El Cap is easier than the Ben Nevis tourist path.

But the real response to the grumpy complainers is to ask why exactly would it be a bad thing if the Ben were wheelchair accessible? Don't get me wrong - I love the wild places too, and I understand that their very inaccessibility is part of what makes the mountains so special. But by that same token, I want to share that specialness with others. If people in wheelchairs can aspire to get to the top of Ben Nevis, or Snowdon, or Schiehallion, or wherever, and experience the beauty that's up there, that's no bad thing. Yes, it reduces the challenge for the able-bodied, but if you want challenge, then some of the world's finest scrambles and most challenging rock and ice climbs are over on the other side of the mountain.

There's a balance to be struck here, between providing accessibility so that more people can enjoy the summits, and preserving the remoteness that makes them attractive in the first place. The key point is that there are many mountains in the UK, and we don't have to have the same levels of accessibility for them all. As long as there are still relatively unsullied areas of wilderness for those motivated to go there, I see no problem (and much benefit) with making some highly accessible, including to disabled people.