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While recuperating after the virus of Doom and trying to press out as many clever questions from the Spiderwick Chronicles as possible for young readers, I did one more thing over the weekend.
I put my foot outside of my safe and cozy zone of friends with humanistic values and debaters with knowledge and intellect attached to their statements.
Sometimes I dress as a normal girl and visit a Swedish forum called Passagen, I don't use the blog function on that site, because I found that LJ had much more to offer in that department, but they also have places for "debate" - vaguely similar to LJ's communities, only with less information posted.
What made me visit this particular corner of the debate communities was a particularly dumb post, which was put up on Passagen's front page, and thus caught my eye and led me to the source. So I read a couple of postings and commented on one of them, and lo and behold found myself in an exchange with some fellow who had given his definition on the term "sexual harassment". A lot of males commented negatively on my statement that "sexual harassment is just as much (if not more) about power than about sex. They simply could not fathom the connection.
In the end I wrote a post of my own, trying to explain in as simple a way as possible this, for me, not very complicated connection. The post was called "The connection between Sexual Harassment and Power" and stated such facts as: 1)not only attractive people get harassed, 2)harassment is not only exclusive to the work place, 3)both genders can get harassed, 4)but females by far dominate the statistics of those harassed. And then very basically how the impulse switches to power in the brain of a harasser after he/she has been given a negative response, and the main goal is no longer to get laid (or whatever), but to establish dominance.
In my great naivete I thought this was not such an explosive topic, I had after all talked about both genders being harassed, I had also stated that only a certain minority among men (and women) do this, and the focus of the post was not on blame but on dynamics behind the behavior.
Five angry men immediately (and in bad spelling) called me a feminist bimbo who hates men and only wants to castrate all men. They promptly then continued to talk about other things than what the post had addressed, they ranted on about women being cowardly, shallow (for snubbing them and not wanting them), that women had themselves to blame for having on average a lower income, that women were having it too good in society, etc etc.
A handful of other men tried to play I'm-gonna-nail-you-in-this-debate card and worked their asses off in their pursuit of a loophole in my text, their primary triumph card being to simply state that women often say "no" when they mean "yes" and thus a guy, in order to have some success, needs to "push a little". When one such man (who was called the best debater of the forum by a girl) dropped this epiphany in my lap he was lauded and applauded by three other men directly.
I realized one thing during this debacle, I realized how I have been avoiding these tiresome generic and plump "male guilt" arguments for years, because I've heard them all and I simply hadn't the stamina to explian the same thing over and over again. I recognized the feeling being described by a lady who no longer liked to send the same message to people with no insight in the situation of people of color, she was simply too tired.
But this time I figured I wanted to follow up on my own planted garden. And mostly on my part it was a good exercise in internet sociology. To those who expressed a simple language with lots of errors, I slightly lowered my own language and addressed them with direct examples as much as possible. Those more advanced, I answered with more abstract logic..and those very aggressive, I addressed as kindly as possible. I found that kindness could make a few downright livid, but it also without exceptions made them lose the debate.
One woman was angry at me and blamed me for "making it worse for all us women out there" for "not understanding men" and for being "an anti humanist" (!)
Around two handfulls of women joined in the debate, describing their own experiences, and in general, with a few exceptions, they were less angry and exposed a higher quality in written language.
Only two men wrote and expressed a complete understanding and support for what my post had been about.
In the end I think I addressed all the main debaters with respect and could even see saplings of some interest and understanding for the subject other than confrontation/aggression from those men negative or mixed in the beginning. (including a digression from the guy who had been called "the best debater of the forum")
In some ways it feels like a small victory, but trust me when I say that my feelings are still mostly a mixture of surprise and low grade dismay.
I must have thought things were better in Sweden (often called one of the most equal countries in the world).
What I realized is that the Swedish law is in many aspects promoting equality for women and mothers, but that the loss of power that those laws mean for some men is something that will not be suffered silently.
There is an undercover gender war in Sweden, and a lot of the grenades are thrown around on the internet.
Could anyone enlighten me about the climate in the US?
I put my foot outside of my safe and cozy zone of friends with humanistic values and debaters with knowledge and intellect attached to their statements.
Sometimes I dress as a normal girl and visit a Swedish forum called Passagen, I don't use the blog function on that site, because I found that LJ had much more to offer in that department, but they also have places for "debate" - vaguely similar to LJ's communities, only with less information posted.
What made me visit this particular corner of the debate communities was a particularly dumb post, which was put up on Passagen's front page, and thus caught my eye and led me to the source. So I read a couple of postings and commented on one of them, and lo and behold found myself in an exchange with some fellow who had given his definition on the term "sexual harassment". A lot of males commented negatively on my statement that "sexual harassment is just as much (if not more) about power than about sex. They simply could not fathom the connection.
In the end I wrote a post of my own, trying to explain in as simple a way as possible this, for me, not very complicated connection. The post was called "The connection between Sexual Harassment and Power" and stated such facts as: 1)not only attractive people get harassed, 2)harassment is not only exclusive to the work place, 3)both genders can get harassed, 4)but females by far dominate the statistics of those harassed. And then very basically how the impulse switches to power in the brain of a harasser after he/she has been given a negative response, and the main goal is no longer to get laid (or whatever), but to establish dominance.
In my great naivete I thought this was not such an explosive topic, I had after all talked about both genders being harassed, I had also stated that only a certain minority among men (and women) do this, and the focus of the post was not on blame but on dynamics behind the behavior.
Five angry men immediately (and in bad spelling) called me a feminist bimbo who hates men and only wants to castrate all men. They promptly then continued to talk about other things than what the post had addressed, they ranted on about women being cowardly, shallow (for snubbing them and not wanting them), that women had themselves to blame for having on average a lower income, that women were having it too good in society, etc etc.
A handful of other men tried to play I'm-gonna-nail-you-in-this-debate card and worked their asses off in their pursuit of a loophole in my text, their primary triumph card being to simply state that women often say "no" when they mean "yes" and thus a guy, in order to have some success, needs to "push a little". When one such man (who was called the best debater of the forum by a girl) dropped this epiphany in my lap he was lauded and applauded by three other men directly.
I realized one thing during this debacle, I realized how I have been avoiding these tiresome generic and plump "male guilt" arguments for years, because I've heard them all and I simply hadn't the stamina to explian the same thing over and over again. I recognized the feeling being described by a lady who no longer liked to send the same message to people with no insight in the situation of people of color, she was simply too tired.
But this time I figured I wanted to follow up on my own planted garden. And mostly on my part it was a good exercise in internet sociology. To those who expressed a simple language with lots of errors, I slightly lowered my own language and addressed them with direct examples as much as possible. Those more advanced, I answered with more abstract logic..and those very aggressive, I addressed as kindly as possible. I found that kindness could make a few downright livid, but it also without exceptions made them lose the debate.
One woman was angry at me and blamed me for "making it worse for all us women out there" for "not understanding men" and for being "an anti humanist" (!)
Around two handfulls of women joined in the debate, describing their own experiences, and in general, with a few exceptions, they were less angry and exposed a higher quality in written language.
Only two men wrote and expressed a complete understanding and support for what my post had been about.
In the end I think I addressed all the main debaters with respect and could even see saplings of some interest and understanding for the subject other than confrontation/aggression from those men negative or mixed in the beginning. (including a digression from the guy who had been called "the best debater of the forum")
In some ways it feels like a small victory, but trust me when I say that my feelings are still mostly a mixture of surprise and low grade dismay.
I must have thought things were better in Sweden (often called one of the most equal countries in the world).
What I realized is that the Swedish law is in many aspects promoting equality for women and mothers, but that the loss of power that those laws mean for some men is something that will not be suffered silently.
There is an undercover gender war in Sweden, and a lot of the grenades are thrown around on the internet.
Could anyone enlighten me about the climate in the US?
