What Happens to #MeToo When a Feminist Is the Accused? | Hacker News Reader

What Happens to #MeToo When a Feminist Is the Accused?

nytimes.com

260 pointsTomte272 comments

This is from the letter signed by her colleagues:

We write as long-term colleagues of Professor Avital Ronell who has been under investigation by the Title IX offices at New York University. Although we have no access to the confidential dossier, we have all worked for many years in close proximity to Professor Ronell and accumulated collectively years of experience to support our view of her capacity as teacher and a scholar, but also as someone who has served as Chair of both the Departments of German and Comparative Literature at New York University. We have all seen her relationship with students, and some of us know the individual who has waged this malicious campaign against her. We wish to communicate first in the clearest terms our profound an enduring admiration for Professor Ronell whose mentorship of students has been no less than remarkable over many years. We deplore the damage that this legal proceeding causes her, and seek to register in clear terms our objection to any judgment against her. We hold that the allegations against her do not constitute actual evidence, but rather support the view that malicious intention has animated and sustained this legal nightmare.

It is crushing to see a statement like this signed by a person like Judith Butler. It is exactly the kind of response that have kept sexual harassment quiet for so long. "We know [accused harrasser], he would never act this way. We've worked with him for years, he's an honorable man, we know his character,... The accuser is just seeking attention/money in this malicious campaign". It just happens to be the case that the accuser is a woman in power this time.

Having a powerful feminist be accused of sexual harassment does zero damage to the feminist movement at large. If nothing else, #MeToo has taught us that there are harassers hiding everywhere, and even the people you least suspect can be guilty of it. This is just another example.

> Having a powerful feminist be accused of sexual harassment does zero damage to the feminist movement at large.

But then a person like Judith Butler should not sign such a letter, showing that she has not understood the power dynamics that have been keeping sexual harassment quiet.

I think her personal friendship with the Ronell is blinding her to the realities of the case. I think it's unfair to say that she "doesn't understand" these kinds of power dynamics. She's just human like everyone and she's made a terrible mistake signing this letter.

I should be clear: I'm a huge admirer of Professor Butler, and her writing has been very meaningful to me personally (though i recognize that many HNers might disagree). I still admire her greatly, but it just makes the disappointment so much greater. She should know better than this.

Thinking some more on that case, in a similar situation (if I had a friend accused of a crime that I am trying to fight against), I don't know what I'd do. I most likely would still support my friend, so I might have been too harsh in my previous comment.

Just because it needs to be said, supporting a friend or family member and holding them accountable for things they did are not mutually exclusive ideas. It is perhaps emotionally tricky when the problem is viewed as a he said/she said argument, but in this case there seems to be evidence bearing out the allegations at least in part.

Very well put. I wonder if the reason people try to support an accused friend by denying the allegations, is because alternative forms of support haven't occurred to them.

For example, if the accused continues to protest the accusation, a good friend might offer to help the accused bring the truth to light.

Or if the accused is clearly guilty, a good friend might offer to help the accused find appropriate ways to make restitution, and/or offer emotional/logistical support if the accused will be punished.

It could be mutually exclusive, if you think the expected punishment for being found guilty is unfair and disproportionate to the "crime".

Thank you for adding some nuance to my statement wit a good point. I'll have to keep that in mind (supporting a friend or family member and holding them accountable for things they did are not mutually exclusive ideas)

We have been told not to forgive others for common human mistakes. Why should Professor Butler be given an exemption, especially when a lot of her scholarship has been aimed at addressing the unfortunate responses to the very same situation?

To add, the accused professor is, along with the signers of the ridiculous letter, are obviously completely corrupted. Similar to politicians who campaign on fighting corruption and then go and do it themselves, this woman should be treated as an academic criminal and forced to retire and be forgotten about in the field. Kind of like former governor Blagojevich of Illinois, though they don't have prisons for corrupt career academics.

Did you really think that she was ever about principle rather than pragmatic tribalism?

I'm not sure about this particular person in question, but it seems to me one never knows who will stick by the principle instead of "their side" until real-world challenges come along to "test" those principles. I'd wager even the persons being "tested" don't really know what they'd do under such circumstances.

My feeling is that it's rare to stick to the principles at hand compared to protecting your own (and I mean for any group/tribe not any specific one).

Thank you jules, this is really the bottom line of the whole article IMO.

We should support feminist agenda and movements like #MeToo. But to keep ourselves sober to whole movement, at the same time we should never forget there's a strong tribal element to actions of these people. And hopefully keep the effects of these in just in the right levels.

I'd note that all the feminists were fine with Title IX star chambers with oppressive rules that hampered a good defense... As long as it could be a cudgel to be used against "misogyny" and "patriarchy".

They are only unhappy now that someone they value is under the same rules.

So much this.

Hello, I'm a feminist. Not unhappy that people who are committing sexual crimes are being brought to justice.

Your wide brush is counterproductive to the "logical and open" discussion here. The whole point of the article that you read in its entirety and internalized before commenting upon it was that this is difficult for some people to accept: a champion of women's rights was perpetrating the crimes she seemed to be fighting against. Reconciling these truths is difficult for some people, and some people who worked closely with this woman will come to defense of her character as they knew her.

Hypocrites abound. In fact everyone holds some conflicting views/acts in ways that work against their self interest. It's human nature. But not everyone who you disagree with is a hypocrite. Hell,some of them aren't even objectively wrong! But if you only exist in an in-group vs. out-group mindset you're going to miss some great points.

TL;dr- Title IX is great, and it seems like this woman is both a renowned academic AND a sexual abuser.

I'm curious as to how often you go out of your way to criticize the lack of logical and open discussion in feminist circles.

I'm in the journalism industry, and have seen time and time again one-sided mob psychology suffocate anyone even considering to constructively criticize the movement.

If you can't admit just how extremist and tribal the current atmosphere is, I don't think you're going to be able to appreciate the perspective of the person you're replying to.

Is "when I think they're wrong" often enough?

You're just restating my point back to me. Remember when I said this: "Hypocrites abound. In fact everyone holds some conflicting views/acts in ways that work against their self interest. It's human nature. But not everyone who you disagree with is a hypocrite. Hell,some of them aren't even objectively wrong! But if you only exist in an in-group vs. out-group mindset you're going to miss some great points."

That's the same thing as admitting that tribal behavior is a problem. My whole POINT is that the tribal behavior/generalized statements (like "all feminists") creates a breakdown in the discussion.

As a journalist who presumably is covering feminism, are you familiar with the ongoing back-and-forth between second wave feminism, third wave feminism, and intersectional feminism? Do you know what a TERF is?

I see a lot of healthy debate and constructive criticism within feminism.

I think you've distilled the debate perfectly to it's uncomfortable and anachronistic point.

I think what it comes down to is that some people (myself included) are finding it hard to give the benefit of the doubt here when the character defence being offered so closely parallels what's been said in the past in defence of brazen male perverts.

That said, I think you've hit the nail on the head regarding in and out groups, and we should simply be looking at this as: a person has been wronged here, what's the appropriate response?

There's a reason the law as written doesn't discriminate offences on race or gender.

Read up on Erin Pizzey, if you truly have a "logical and open" mind on this subject.

Is there anything specific I'm supposed to feel about her to show my open mind? Seems like a nice enough woman who primarily earned her living selling books. Public opinion turned on her, she couldn't sell her books, and she's had a rough go of things. Shelters for victims of domestic violence are a public good, and women can be abusive. Not all feminists are nice people, some of them have political agendas that are meant to replace a patriarchy with a matriarchy and her opinions didn't jive with that, so they likely put pressure to silence her voice.

I'm still a feminist though, and other than learning one woman's story I genuinely don't understand what was supposed to happen here.

A woman who started the very first DV shelter in the world, then was ostracized by the entirety of mainstream feminism for stating forbidden truths.

This isn't a debate between 2 equal factions, as you've seemed to cast it: it was a Stalinist style purge of all who didn't hold the correct opinions; with the same people who committed the purge, still in control today.

A group of people did a bad thing to a lady. There were many people in the group and they had more power/agency which they leveraged against this lady for reasons I can only speculate on because I wasn't really alive at the time or invited to the meetings. In all likelihood I wouldn't get along very well with these people. They're part of a group I don't consider myself associating with.

I'm still a feminist, and I still don't understand why I can't be a feminist and also believe the story I just told. The fact that "mainstream feminism" ostracized Pizzey has nothing to do with my personal beliefs. I guess I'm not a mainstream feminist?

Is this mainstream?: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/01/19/feminism-inte...

This is pretty close to me.

FWIW, I think very few people exist as absolutes but typically shades of grey. IDK what "good" or "bad" people are anymore, just good or bad actions. Promoting equality is something I find to be a good action. That is what I feel feminism represents (or should represent, or represents to me).

I'm so glad we can put aside our stereotypes and narratives and have constructive, un-hyperbolic discussions about these nuanced topics on this site.

Name a prominent feminist that came to the defense of the proven-innocent Duke lacrosse team, prior to the prosecutor, Mike Nifong, being shown to be a liar.

Relevance, beyond, "What about this bad thing some of these people I don't like did"?

Specifically, what about these cases is remotely illustrative of "all" of anything?

"Pattern and practice of behavior," your Honor.

I must admit that, if a close colleague of mine was accused of something that I did not believe to be true, I could be compelled to sign something like that.

The lesson we need to learn is how powerful and misleading our biases and emotions are.

The letter is a massive mistake. The most ardent feminists that I know aren't willing to defend it. It's absolutely and clearly hypocritical, and maps directly into every shitty, awful defense of a male sexual harasser, just with the pronouns switched. It's a shocking lapse of judgement that the co-signees were not able to understand that.

I find it frustrating that this letter gives cover to the kneejerk victim blaming defenses over the last year of male sexual harassers. It's a straightforward argument for those writers to point out that a group of world renown feminists, who have studied power dynamics in-depth, fell into the exact same trap. This is exactly the wrong conclusion to reach, and stalls the momentum of a movement that was doing genuine good. I disagree with the trend of dismissing due process in the #MeToo movement, but it is absolutely undeniable that it has brought justice to victims of horrible abuse, in a way that simply would not have been possible 2 or 3 years ago, and should be applauded for that.

Just an incredibly infuriating story overall.

"It's absolutely and clearly hypocritical, and maps directly into every shitty, awful defense of a male sexual harasser.."

I haven't seen any such similar defense of a male harasser. Some individuals dared to say something about someone here or there, but a letter by a group of leaders in the field that the accused works in... No, nothing of the sort.

Standing out for me:

1. there was a real and direct power differential, which moves this very fast into „inappropriate, possibly criminal“ territory

2. her allies defend her on the grounds of „we don‘t know anything about this issue, but we‘re vouching for her character“

And most obviously

3. those two points are exactly what happens when a female student accuses a male teacher. Seems people behave just the same as everybody else, in a tribal way.

Ad 2 and 3: Supposing for the moment the accused is innocent, how else could a defense/support look like? If "this issue" did not happen, how could they know about it? How could they prove that nothing happened other than "I think I would have noticed"?

> Seems people behave just the same as everybody else, in a tribal way.

Supporting someone you believe innocent should not be derided as "tribal".

> Supporting someone you believe innocent should not be derided as "tribal".

The problem, I think, is that plainly believing someone is innocent just because you happen to work with them or think they're moral is not useful, and you should probably keep it to yourself.

Yes.

This case is rare because it's rare for the woman to be in the position of power and the man in the subordinate position.

In any of these cases, we need to take the accusations seriously, which is what #MeToo is about.

Let me reiterate that. #MeToo isn't about women vs. men. It's about acknowledging the abuse of power to harass, humiliate, intimidate, and violate. It's about resisting the knee-jerk reactions in defense of people who abuse power. It's about fixing the dynamics that have historically caused victims to avoid speaking out because doing so is more likely to destroy the victim's career than the abuser's.

> This case is rare because it's rare for the woman to be in the position of power and the man in the subordinate position.

This may just be due to unfortunate phrasing, but is it really rare? In this case the roles are adviser-student, and at least anecdotally it doesn’t seem that rare for an adviser-student relationship to be a female-in-power one. We just don’t hear often about abuse in such relationships—likely because it doesn’t happen as much.

(If you meant that it’s rare for the woman to be in a position of power in #metoo cases then I’d not disagree, otherwise I find that specific statement surprising and possibly misrepresenting reality in an unfortunate way.)

That aside, I’m mostly in agreement with the sentiment.

Usually when people do make studies and take a hard look at people a common attribute comes out: both men and women are human. The idea that female-in-power is less likely to abuse assumes that there is some form of biological sex or gender role difference that is so dominant that human behavior diverge. The Amygdala is not bigger or smaller depending on sex, which mostly leaves culture and gender roles to explain why we don't often hear about abuse in female-in-power relationships.

The female-in-power is less likely to abuse precisely because of fundamental biological differences. Men and woman differ significantly in their sexual behavior and sexual strategies because they have evolved through millions of years of sexual selection producing significant sexual dimorphism. We can easily observe the same behavior in other animals species, who lack any culture and gender roles.

It's quite illuminating that both you and your parent are making unsubstantiated claims (I'm not criticizing, just observing), but only your comment gets downvoted. I believe the reason is that you are expressing a forbidden idea, a taboo. "Behavioral differences based on sex? What next, are you going to compare races and then grow a narrow mustache?"

People are so afraid to find that not all humans are equal in every respect other than body that they are willing to stop, mute, censor any and all discussion on the subject and even block research into human nature rather than face the danger of having to deal with this (granted, difficult) issue.

2 & 3 feel like classic ad hominem arguments, right?

“I am of course very supportive of what Title IX and the #MeToo movement are trying to do, of their efforts to confront and to prevent abuses, for which they also seek some sort of justice,” Professor Davis wrote in an email. “But it’s for that very reason that it’s so disappointing when this incredible energy for justice is twisted and turned against itself, which is what many of us believe is happening in this case.”

Given the context, this may be the most blatantly hypocritical thing I've ever seen in print.

I'm hoping someone can shed some light on this that indicates there's more to this than what there appears to be.

"I only wanted to take away due process from other people!"

"Mr. Reitman said he never intended to become any kind of public figure in a national conversation about gender, and that he started the process before the movement took off. “It didn’t come from #MeToo,” he said."

Misleading title.

I'm a feminist, and knowing neither the professor or the former student, I would believe the student's claims above those of the professor. Gender has nothing to do with it.

My reasoning: there is absolutely no good reason for the former student to lie about what happened, and there are plenty of reasons for the professor to lie. Additionally, the email about, "I'll try not to kiss you," is pretty damning evidence.

I've flagged this article because it seems it is attempting to portray this as a men vs women issue, which it absolutely is not. Anyone who abuses their power and makes others feel uncomfortable in this way deserves to face consequences.

The #MeToo movement is about all of us, all humans, taking a stand against sexual assault and harassment, especially in professional relationships such as the one in the article.

> The #MeToo movement is about all of us, all humans, taking a stand against sexual assault and harassment, especially in professional relationships such as the one in the article.

While I'd agree, the prominent feminists quoted by the article do not agree.

Which prominent feminists? The person who says the most reprehensible things in the article, Diane Davis, is not a prominent feminist. I've never even heard of her. I looked up her wikipedia page, and it looks like her main hobby might be updating her own wikipedia page.

The other person quoted, Dana Bolger, who said Title 9 has mostly been used against predatory men, seemed like they were being quoted out of context. Nowhere did Dana Bolger say, "historically this has been the case and it needs to stay that way."

Googling Dana, she actually responds to the article on her Twitter page, saying much the same thing that I do in my comment.

https://twitter.com/danabolger/status/1029369826710564866

From the article:

"Soon after the university made its final, confidential determination this spring, a group of scholars from around the world, including prominent feminists, sent a letter to N.Y.U. in defense of Professor Ronell. Judith Butler, the author of the book “Gender Trouble” and one of the most influential feminist scholars today, was first on the list."

I assume this is to what grandparent was referring.

The signatories of the letter mentioned in the article, which you can download here: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/files/butler-letter-for-avi... (it's a 37KB .doc)

There were 51 by my count, but I didn't count carefully. (also that might not be the final version)

You are right. There is often disagreement and infighting within feminist groups. That's how we've made progress. Some feminists being wrong isn't an indictment of the entire movement.

> I'm a feminist, and knowing neither the professor or the former student, I would believe the student's claims above those of the professor. Gender has nothing to do with it.

I would believe neither, ignore Title IX, and have such serious claims investigated by a judge. Then I'd believe the judge.

Investigated by police and prosecutors, then decided by a judge. This ain't megacity 1

I agree it shouldn't be framed as man vs woman, but see my other comments about the complexities of this.

Also, the #metoo movement is pretty dangerous in the sense that prominent people in it are seeking legal frameworks and changes. See my comment about Heidi Matthews's interview and take on me too on the Owls at Dawn podcast.

You can't help how you feel. If you fall in love with someone at work or in academia or in some other type of "position of authority," do we now need contracts to ensure the relationship is wanted by both parties?

That would be the legal requirement, and .. do you need another contract to break up? Maybe you should give your partner two weeks notice?

I feel like there are a lot of deep complexities here and really difficult questions, more than a simple harassment complaint. I think the people ruling on this complaint must have felt the same way.

I think back to some of my partners. I can't imagine having all our personal e-mails and notes put on display for a committee to decide the nature of our relationship. What world are we living in?

"You can't help how you feel. If you fall in love with someone at work or in academia or in some other type of "position of authority," do we now need contracts to ensure the relationship is wanted by both parties?"

Sure. Or, just don't date subordinates.

I think it is quite easy. If you have a relationship with someone and having a "position of authority", the simple solution is to get rid of the "position of authority", let your lover have another boss. That responsibility is of course on the one with power.

I say "the simple solution" as it is the company policy of all companies I have been working for. I _guess_ it is the same for all universities.

I can _only_ guess that _maybe_ youngster is under pressure having sex with oldster with position of authority.

I need not guess that all these complexities could have been handled easily by assigning another professor to the student. And there is no question who's fault that is.

You do not need a contract, but do not fuck people that you have direct power over.

> I've flagged this article because it seems it is attempting to portray this as a men vs women issue, which it absolutely is not. Anyone who abuses their power and makes others feel uncomfortable in this way deserves to face consequences.

The highly rated comments tend to understand quite clearly that this isn't a man-versus-woman thing. I don't think flagging this article is appropriate. Hacker news has a rather mature crowd when it comes to issues like this.

(In contrast, if you're in any way critical of Bitcoin or Blockchain, you'll bring out the crazies.)

"Hacker news has a rather mature crowd when it comes to issues like this."

You and I have been visiting very different Hacker Newses, then.

Sexual power dynamics have to do with power more than anything else, and this is an example of that. More men are being exposed via #MeToo because more men are in positions of power. Some percentage of all people are creeps who will misuse power, so it should not be surprising when women in power are caught up like this.

Agreed. To add, men also seem to value sex more than women (see: prostitution industry), so they'll be more likely to use their power to get sexually satisfied.

Kind of.

Sexual crimes are more likely to be about sex, not power. The reason why men are overwhelmingly more likely to commit sexual assault is because of basic biology of sexual selection - men (in general) desire many and varied partners compared to women. Positions of power make it easier to perpetrate sexual crimes without repercussions, but this is still skewed heavily in favor of men.

Women clearly do get caught up as perpetuators, but it's surprising and comparatively rare because of the polygynous basis of our species (and most other animals).

This is a controversial idea because of the public narrative, but evolutionarily-informed ideas about sexual coercion can be surprising when applied to humans, while the same behavior in other animals is not questioned.

This is intuitively true, but is it also factually true? Many studies (https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/kze8qn/the-hidden-epi...) seem to indicate that, at least for cases of actual rape, it is not, and women are abusers at pretty much the same rate as men. This might be different for sexual harassment, but that's a claim that needs to be verified.

As it is, research and public perceptions when it comes to sexual violence against men are sorely lacking.

I had not seen this paper, so thanks for sharing. The primary conclusion is that more males are victims of sexual crimes and more females are abusers than is generally thought. I'm sure this is the case, but this shouldn't be mistaken for women being equal abusers.

First, the referenced source data (NCVS and NSVRC [1]) explicitly point out that 9% of victims of all rape and sexual assault are male. This is not insignificant, but it still means that > 90% of all sexual crime victims are female. 99% of female victims have male abusers [2]. Another recent study out of Germany found that women were 10-20x more likely to be victims across all age groups, and men were 50-100x more likely to be the abusers [3].

I think these new looks at the data do highlight a serious lack of knowledge about male victimization and female abuse, which will help us have a better picture of what's really going on. Unfortunately, the study referenced by Vice makes many politically-motivated statements about gender stereotypes, and then attempts to fit the data to that narrative. It suggests that we should adjust our national discussion about these issues from a more gender-neutral approach, which is a very palatable idea.

Modern ideas about sexual abuse that are rooted in evolutionary psychology actually attempt to discuss ultimate causes about why this kind of behavior occurs, using well-understood ideas about the evolution of human behavior and countless examples from other animals. It should come as no surprise that men and women differ significantly in their sexual behavior, both intuitively and factually. This is a controversial idea in the social sciences (which are more widely discussed in the media), but not in biology.

[1] https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc... .

[2] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1097184X08322632 .

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4791564/ .

Men are sexually harassed frequently but we don't hear about it often because there is a lot of shame in speaking about it... since you're admitting to being lower power/status.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. I've had grown women, strangers, inappropriately grab my butt in public or otherwise inappropriately touch me. Sexual harassment is inappropriate, full stop. There's no gender based excuse that allows it or makes it acceptable.

There is a pretty big contingent of people out there who fully believe the "men can't be raped" type stuff.

I had a 100-year old neighbor that grabbed my butt, then she laughed like a teenager. It was shocking, but only because no one would associate centennials with that kind of behavior; otherwise it's a super funny story to tell at parties.

My brother and his girlfriend both worked at the same retirement home when they were in high school. They both were harassed extensively and on a daily basis. And yes, they were both minors at the time. Your experience is exactly what I've come to expect of centennials :)

I've had similar experiences. I had an elderly 90+ year old woman grab my crotch in a bar, multiple times when I was in my mid-20s. Around that time of my life, I had multiple other women (mostly 45+ years old) aggressively grab my ass or touch me unsolicited in bars. One (who was married, mind you) tried to pull me into her vehicle as I was leaving a bar.

I never reciprocated or led them on. The most I can say is that I was affable and would indulge anyone who wanted to talk. I will admit that I never really felt threatened though, so I think that still makes the situation different than women experience.

First Nations woman grabbed my butt in East Vancouver when I was out running.

I don't know the statistics on sexual harassment, but there are many studies suggesting domestic violence is dramatically underreported in men so it's very possible.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090104074211/http://www.phac-a...

Honestly, I think it's because men internalize these kinds of things differently than women.

I wish someone more knowledgable in the topic area could say something backed by real data, instead of my uneducated opinion.

Women internalized them differently as well, back when they were taught that was "just the way things are", "not a big deal", and to "suck it up".

Too often, ideological movements devolve into tribalism. If you align with one, you have to be vigilant that your motives don't make that shift.

Most ideological movements are tribalism. "Their tribe is oppressing our tribe, so down with their tribe!" is a good summary of most leftist ideologies, whether those centered around class, gender, or ethnicity.

Also true of far right ideologies like Nazism and racial supremacy. Generally speaking, identity politics are tribal because they're about identity.

Racial supremacism and Nazism are based around identity and tribalism, but the notions of oppression and victimhood aren't as central. Nazism in particular doesn't have the leftist narrative of overthrowing oppression in general; it was very explicit about the "strong" (Germanics) dominating the "weak" (Jews and Slavs).

The Nazi party built a great deal of its support on the argument that the wealthy Jews were oppressing the "pure" germans.

Yes, but they didn't exactly equivocate about the idea that oppression was bad regardless of who was oppressing whom. They didn't try and guilt Jews into not "oppressing" them; they spurred Germans into a deep hatred of the Jews that would persist independent of any situational influences.

True, there is some interesting mindbending going on: it's not directly "they are suppressing us". It's "they are on the way of suppressing us, you see the first signs already, and here are their world dominion plans. Instead we should be suppressing them, because we are supreme". You see a similar pattern towards the muslim world today.

If you had left out "leftist" here you could have made a point instead of serving as your own example.

You could try explaining why you think that way instead of going for some snide remark.

I agree with him, you don't see this dynamic on the conservative side of things with anywhere near the same zealotry as the left. Leftists have turned purity spiraling into a competitive sport, which has turned into a snake eating it's own tail. The winner of the oppression olympics is still a loser overall.

Actually you do. "The liberals own the media and the universities, and they are all out to get us, and take away the things we love", is a pretty common narrative. Everybody wants to claim that they are the oppressed group.

There absolutely is tribal zealotry on the conservative side -- any side of any issue. Just not this specific shape or color or flavor of it that happens to stand out as an example because one tribe is seen to do something that another tribe is not seen as doing.

People generally don't act with sufficient intent and information, don't have great theory of mind for large groups, have a hard time with large figures and probability, so most of any kind of political meme (traditional meaning here) - concept, movement -- will devolve to a tribal version of itself once you get more than a handful of people involved in it due to regression to the mean.

Instead of "do I think this or that policy is likely to have a good or bad impact upon this or that situation" which requires some deliberate steps and psychological self-mastery you get "does my tribe prescribe this or that policy regardless of the situation" easy because it's automatic, an involuntary knee-jerk.

This is why politics discussions are frequently fruitless -- while you can form rational arguments and negotiate consensus about policies and their utility, you can't do so with identity.

Painting others (or even oneself) with labels like "leftist" seems to only perpetuate that problem, and it seems that a strawman is a strawman even if most of the population and therefore most of any group above a certain size happens to be made of said straw.

I think we should be careful to point to specific people or at least specific groups, specific events or actions, specific policies as applied in specific situations and determine the value of those and that statements like "<general class> does ..." or "<general class> doesn't..." is insufficiently precise to demonstrate we aren't falling into the tribalism trap.

It's so easy to use tribalism to false-generalize that even when we know a generalization is correct I think we should avoid using it because it promotes the use of those generalizations which may not be.

Specifically in this thread I think we are all concerned about a set of groups who hold as truth a broad generalization that all privileged classes act as oppressors regardless of any individual's actions or intents. That's certainly a concerning concept, and I have specific examples of problems that it has caused, but I don't think "most leftist ideologies" subscribe to this concept -- nor that even if they did, I don't think it is useful to generalize about it in that way because I'd like to extend to the ideologies that do not subscribe to that the same benefit of the doubt that I hope they'd give me as a member of several privileged classes.

Politics is rooted in tribalism; I'm not sure what your point even is.

There is no trap; tribalism (collectivism) is the foundation of a nation. Trying to resist it is doomed to failure.

I suppose we are both confused then.

Politics is rooted solely in policy: if we do or don't form this or that policy, are the subjects of our policies better or worse off? Anything that distracts from a process of objective assessment and consensus-finding in the process of forming said policy means we fail to form the correct policies and so reflects an inefficiency.

> Politics is rooted solely in policy

And where does that policy come from? The collective. A "correct" policy is whatever the tribe deems is correct.

I doubt you propose we abandon the concept of there being objective truth, or any possible way for diverse groups to find consensus, but what are you proposing?

If I use simulated annealing to arrive at an optimal schedule for some processing task -- is that not a policy because there is no collective of identities or their feeling/opinion involved? Certainly not.

The correct fiscal policies for my HOA are whichever ones that keep the roofs maintained vs the ones that do not, even if that is a concept that's not popular among with the board right now.

A policy is a policy -- this is what we are doing -- correctness is derived from the results as filtered through some value function, which is derived not from agreeableness but some set of value-axioms.

Obviously, at human scale, we can differ on what those axioms are because they are axiomatic, but that's not the same thing as policy, and it's not what's happening in the typical political discourse -- people will frequently have very similar axioms for what is valuable in the outcome of policy but get distracted about other concerns and fail to find consensus.

A sufficiently diverse group will indeed fail to find consensus. That is something that can only be reached when diversity is low.

I'm proposing we approach policy setting with a basis in reality instead of trying to project an inhuman value function to humans. People are not driven by pure rationale, rather emotion and instinct.

That is a very interesting perspective and I think it helps me understand a few issues in a new light.

Thank you for sharing it.

I think I should clarify what I mean by "leftism".

I distinguish leftism from liberalism. Liberalism, in most English-speaking cultures today, is variously centrist, center-right, or center-left in outlook. Liberalism is the ACLU lawyer who fights for both the Neo-Nazi's freedom to hold a protest march in Skokie as well as the black tenant's freedom from discrimination. Liberalism is the Enlightenment. The term "liberal", in American parlance, has been intermittently hijacked by leftists, but it is a separate tradition from leftism.

The archetypal leftists were the French peasants seated in the literal left wing of the Estates-General. The French Revolution itself was a huge mess of conflicting influences, ranging from constitutional monarchists to Enlightenment republicans to the bloody-minded Jacobins. But the grand narrative was that the commoners of France represented a social and economic class that was oppressed by the other two estates (the clergy and nobility), and rose up to overthrow their oppressors. It doesn't take a lot to turn this narrative into the Marxist narrative (where the working class overthrows the oppressive bourgeoisie). With a little bit of squinting, and by throwing out the distinctly Marxist idea that class divisions are primary to gender or ethnic divisions, this narrative turns into the left-feminist narrative (where women overthrow the oppressive patriarchy), the leftist racial narratives that mostly found full fruit in places like Zimbabwe (where People Of Color overthrow the oppressive white colonizers), and so forth.

Leftism is, in my estimation, an ideological mistake. The Jacobins didn't build a grand republic, they just killed a bunch of people until the country fell under a military dictatorship. The Marxists didn't build a grand socialist republic, they just killed a bunch of people and the countries they controlled fell under despotism. Zimbabwe turned into a basket case, while its neighbor South Africa prospered by fostering reconciliation rather than retribution towards their white population. I think it's crucial for sensible, moderate, centrist, liberal people (of which I consider myself one) to identify, reject, and repudiate this narrative. Obama has made imperfect but valiant efforts at this, while Nelson Mandela's rejection of post-colonial leftism is, in my estimation, one of the greatest acts of political heroism in recent history.

Also, yes--while right-wing and non-leftist ideologies also employ tribalism, they don't employ it within the specific context of the oppression narrative.

Already using the term 'Leftist' in such a broad and vague context makes it totally obvious that we see a tribal bad 'Leftist' vs. good conservative mindset here.

The snide remark was in the comment they were replying to.

"you don't see this dynamic on the conservative side of things with anywhere near the same zealotry as the left."

That is complete and utter horseshit. Remember the phrase "Republican in Name Only"? How about the "War on Christmas"?

All movements have both kinds of members. Usually the movement professes a universal ideal that works for everybody. Usually there's a portion of its members who actually hold to that higher principle. Usually there are also members who use that as cover to wage banal social warfare.

There will always be people who suck. All you can do is try not to be one of them.

This is clearly a legal matter - and college based tribunals and councils have often looked like a Star Chamber or Kangaroo courts. That's not a mistake - it's the inevitable outcome of a non-judicial and closeted legal system that is unconstrained by transparency and fairness. In fact, this was the exact fate of the original star chamber:

"The Star Chamber was originally established to ensure the fair enforcement of laws against socially and politically prominent people so powerful that ordinary courts would probably hesitate to convict them of their crimes. However, it became synonymous with social and political oppression through the arbitrary use and abuse of the power it wielded."

So how do you make a non-governmental court even more powerful? You make up laws and definitions as you go. There is a difference between the legal definition of racism/sexism and a (sometimes held) academic definition of racism/sexism. The argument put forth here fails the basic doctrines of equal protection and application of the law.

When you combine Unelected and unconstrained tribunals, with non-legal justifications of crime, it's inevitable that there will be abuses and usage of that power not just in the persuit of good and noble goals (where it always starts) but in the systematic destruction of people with different viewpoints the accuser (where it ends). People are objecting not because of the guilt or innocence of the accused, but because it's a arbitrary use of unconstrained people-crushing power in the first place. It's a unconstrained weapon, and the only the wielder is safe from it's effects.

What is a more core principle of feminism, equal treatment of the sexes or empowerment of women? These are not synonymous.

Just wanted to tell you that yes, you really do have a valid point here. Society isn't ready to confront this in 2018 though, so it won't stop us both getting downvoted to oblivion. Take this as me tilting a glass in your direction before a wave of hate sinks the ship.

Climbing aboard the ship. I have thought of it as the difference between women's rights activists (equal rights for all) and feminism (empowerment of women).

I would agree that both of these positions exist. AFAIK, particularly since the 80s, the terms are flipped - AFAIK, feminism is about equal rights for all, instead of the other way around. But I agree that both foo and bar exist.

This is a real question, but, also an unanswerable question, and also an incorrect question; it's both, and sometimes in ways that are impossible to distinguish - it's also neither. Like basically any large social movement, you're not going to find multiple core principles and be unable to pick one that is "more core".

I realize that's all possible answers to that question. Stick with me for a moment.

You can look at the suffrage movement - literally, the seeking of a right that men had that women didn't - and consider it both "reaching for equal treatment" and "empowerment". Empowerment was the means by which equal treatment was approached. So in that way, it's both at the same time.

If you look at feminism in medical research, one of the major points is that most medical research is/was done on the male body. So then feminism in this realm is about equal representation in the experimental populations (equal treatment) but also sometimes about women-specific research, such as birth control (women's empowerment). So in that way, it's both, at different times.

If you look at third wave feminism (started in the late 80s) - which many of us probably by default consider "modern" feminism since it's what we grew up with - it introduced the concept of "intersectionality", which is literally about more than women/men. Combine that with the heavy overlap with LGTBQ+, and it starts being about equal treatment and empowerment of _people_ irrespective of woman-hood / sex. So in that way it's neither.

So now we're on fourth wave feminism (according to Wikipedia) which (AFAIK) is entirely about "stop doing shitty things to people, specifically these shitty things to these groups of people". And yes, the heavy emphasis is on women and minorities, but the "core principle" is "stop doing shitty things to people". So, in that way, it's neither.

If that's still not all clear, this question you've asked is kind of like asking "which is a more core principle of Christianity; love of Jesus or worship of God?", or like asking, "which is a more core principle of Amazon Web Services; on-demand computing power, or not managing your own hardware"?

Or - and this one's a bit more out there - "which is the best peak in the Adirondaks?". You have too many people involved to have an actual answer to that question, but you can identify the possible answers (the peaks) the same way you can identify the possible more core principles of something. But like the peaks, there's gonna be a set where asking "which is more core" is an unanswerable question.

It's a question that I imagine Feminists must answer when confronted with a scenario where one "principle" is in direct conflict with another. I believe you've covered "AND, OR and NOR" in your examples what about XOR?

Conflict between principles is something that any entity capable of holding multiple principles must deal with. You do it (mulling things over). The government does it (courts). Social movement do it (public conversations).

If you're looking for XOR instances in feminism, you don't have to look far. The sex industry and burkas are both great examples of value conflict in feminism.

I think it is interesting to consider that whenever their is a cultural shift in opinion, if you were to chart the populations opinion over time, it would look like a bell curve sliding in the direction of an axis.

To what extent are 'extreme' long-tail opinions necessary to shift the center of the bell curve? Which cohorts along the curve have the most influence on velocity of the center point?

specific to this example:

Premise

- Equal treatment of the sexes is a noble goal.

- Currently society values women as less to some extent.

- An inversion of sexism that places women over men would also be undesirable.

- When people fight for a position, they often compromise to achieve progress.

Conclusion:

- Fighting for equality can only asymptotically approach equality, while never reaching it.

- The 'extreme' viewpoints on the long-tail of cultural opinion that women should receive not just equal treatment but unequal benefit from society may be a fundamental requirement for the centroid of the population curve to reach the equality point.

I'm not convinced of this idea (or even all the premises), but I think it's interesting. Wondering if anyone could suggest further reading on this subject.

To assist with your reading I’d suggest you create a list of legal rights that men have that women don’t. Then create a list of legal rights that women have that men don’t.

This exercise will lead you into interesting territory.

'"I woke up with a slight fever and sore throat," she wrote in an email on June 16, 2012, after the Paris trip. I will try very hard not to kiss you — until the throat situation receives security clearance. This is not an easy deferral!" In July, she wrote a short email to him: "time for your midday kiss. my image during meditation: we’re on the sofa, your head on my lap, stroking you [sic] forehead, playing softly with yr hair, soothing you, headache gone. Yes?"'

Her defense is that everything was consensual. The problem is that she was his advisor. Nothing they did was really consensual. If you want to have a truly consensual relationship with someone for whom you are in a position of authority, you have to remove yourself from that position.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here (this topic)!

Do as we say, not as we do.

Some random highlights:

> “Our communications — which Reitman now claims constituted sexual harassment — were between two adults, a gay man and a queer woman, who share an Israeli heritage, as well as a penchant for florid and campy communications arising from our common academic backgrounds and sensibilities,”

This is the ... it's not sexual harassment if you're gay and Israeli defense?!

Anyway, that comment makes it sound like she thinks it's all just office-place banter, but:

> In July, she wrote a short email to him: “time for your midday kiss. my image during meditation: we’re on the sofa, your head on my lap, stroking you [sic] forehead, playing softly with yr hair, soothing you, headache gone. Yes?”

Also:

> In a submission to the Title IX office, Professor Ronell said she had no idea Mr. Reitman was so uncomfortable until she read the investigators’ report.

and

> Maybe, Professor Ronell suggested, he was frustrated because he just wasn’t smart enough ... “His main dilemma was the incoherency in his writing, and lack of a recognizable argument”

Ouch. Also, Reitman is now a "visiting fellow at Harvard", so can't be all that thick.

Finally:

> Diane Davis ... were particularly disturbed that ... Mr. Reitman was using Title IX, a feminist tool, to take down a feminist.

All other points aside, she needs to take a fucking hike.

That "Israeli heritage" comment threw me for a loop when reading. It just came out of left field. What is she trying to accomplish by adding that?

"People like us just talk like that..." is a common enough defense.

I'm looking back through this ... so .. did he ever tell her to stop?

Forget about who is the man and who is the woman in this and think about just two people. The partner, who is your student yes, but they still accept all your flirtations, sleep in the same bed with you, cuddle with you, and either don't show any signs they're uncomfortable or you're just really not socially aware and don't real them.

They graduated and then sue you for the entire, what was in your mind, "relationship."

She probably loved this guy. She probably thought he loved her, or at least felt something for her. I dunno. Are we going to now require contracts before going into any relationship that might involve a power dynamic?

Under the aegis of #metoo, he had to give explicit consent.

Right from the article:

----

“She put my hands onto her breasts, and was pressing herself — her buttocks — onto my crotch,” he said. “She was kissing me, kissing my hands, kissing my torso.” That evening, a similar scene played out again, he said.

He confronted her the next morning, he said.

“I said, look, what happened yesterday was not O.K. You’re my adviser,”

----

Not the strongest "no". But on the other hand how many of the #metoo women said no? I think the implication is that they don't have the option.

I would agree. Part of why it's risky ground to try to be in some kind of romantic/sexual relationship while there is a institutional power dynamic between two people is the risk that the one in less power cannot say "No", and/or that saying "no" will be detrimental to their well-being.

sounds like victim blaming but OK

Why the heck is this being downvoted? That is the big problem: When someone has power over you you don't have the option to say "no." That's the entire goddamn point.

Because "it would have been different if you'd said 'no' more clearly" is a horribly common refrain that should be removed from our vocabulary. A weak no is still no and we should never criticize somebody for having a hard time saying no forcefully.

Affirmative and enthusiastic consent.

And this is why enthusiastic consent is a thing. You shouldn't be looking for a 'no' to stop, you should be looking for a 'yes!' to continue.

Not the strongest no? I don’t think it left any room for doubt.

When there is a significant power differential, can the victim effectively say no? Can they say no at all? It is pretty clear that some victims can't bring themselves to or don't think they can, and that some offenders understand that and depend on it to get away with their offenses. I have no idea if that is what happened here, naturally, so I won't comment on that.

> Are we going to now require contracts before going into any relationship that might involve a power dynamic?

In many enterprises (universities included) there is a blanket prohibition on sexual relationships between persons whose organizational power differs. In those cases the answer to your question is "no, you're not allowed to engage in such a relationship at all, contract or no contract". Consent isn't always sufficient.

It is very important to forbid sexual relationships between professors and their students, for otherwise a) professors are arguably taking advantage of their students with whom they engage in sex (even if the students don't think so), and b) other students are put at a (real or perceived) disadvantage and/or encouraged to do the same to get similar (real or perceived) benefits to those who are already engaging in sexual relationships with their professors. Similarly, it is important that managers not have sexual relationships with the people they manage. This applies to military organizations as well, not just private enterprise, and it should apply to civilian government organizations.

People who find themselves wanting to be in such relationships have choices besides violating applicable regulations: don't do it, move elsewhere in the organization (e.g., switch classes) or quit it altogether in order to be free to engage in a relationship with the other person. Many people actually make those choices, often happily.

This has not been a controversial position in decades. There are controversies in this topic area, such as how Title IX should be interpreted and enforced, but regulation of power-asymmetrical relationships is not controversial.

> Are we going to now require contracts before going into any relationship that might involve a power dynamic?

I don't think such a contract would be enforceable. It's better to avoid relationships with people you have power over entirely, because they may feel forced to comply to avoid you wielding power over them in revenge.

It's already in a contract before the relationship ever starts - namely, the university/company's sexual harassment policy, most of which prohibit relationships like this one, for exactly this reason. And such contractual bindings are becoming more widespread, because to not explicitly ban power-differential relationships in the workplace (including teacher-student) opens the organization to lawsuits.

As professor, you can't have a sexual relationship with your students. It is taboo, exactly because of the huge power asymmetry. Like teacher-pupil, therapist-patient, etc. Of course, each individually case could be a healthy relationship, but there are too many dangers, so society has established a boundary.

Surprise, this applies to female professors, too.

AFAIK it is not yet forbidden by all colleges. It is kind of a recent transformation, partially as a result of the movement.

I went to school in 2000 - 2004 and students would say that if you got in a relationship with a professor or TA, they were required to transfer you to another class.

My math professor said, "Show me in the handbook where it says that." He then corrected me that, at least at our university, there were no explicit policies on teacher/student relationships. That professor said that every year, they got a big e-mail from the president reminding them of the sexual harassment policy.

If it's a company, yes they can have a policy that says "don't date across pay grades or you get fired." And some people fall in love and they take that risk and when the company finds out, they move them to different departments. .. Or they get fired; so they have to find new jobs. Hopefully it was worth it.

Private schools could probably do the same thing. In the public service space, it gets considerably harder to write these types of policies.

> Diane Davis ... were particularly disturbed that ... Mr. Reitman was using Title IX a [good old girls network] tool, to take down a [good old girl].

fixed that for you.

Last sentence makes me sick.

Sharks had their share of cheap blood, it's time for them to taste their medicine.

Don't dismiss a whole, useful movement simply because some adherents are assholes.

> "We testify to the grace, the keen wit, and the intellectual commitment of Professor Ronell ..."

By golly, so do I so testify. Evidence: "my astounding and beautiful Nimrod."

I found the article informative, but this title seems like click bait which is why I hesitated reading it.

shouldn't it be something along the lines of:

Avital Ronell Title IX investigation found her guilty

There's a rinse and repeat pattern of denial, suiting narratives here.

Anytime the modern feminism movement is faced with situations not to it's liking, there's an immediate, knee jerk, non-objective denial, and bull-shittery that casts aspersions on the truth, accuser, media, etc.

It happened with Sarah Jeong, where the feminists distorted the English meaning of the word 'Racism' to suit their narrative that it only applies to those in power. It happened when Linda Sarsour was openly anti-semetic and when her troupe faced metoo accusations.

It's happening now with this case, and it's not the last time. And just so you are aware, these narratives rely on the evisceration of science, logic, reason and well established definitions of words

^^^ Yeah, there's a rinse/repeat pattern, all right. ^^^

That particular definition of racism has been in use for at least 25 years. You might recall it as a key plot point from the first season of MTV's reality show, The Real World, for instance.

Well, even if you agree that the term "racism" has somehow been redefined to mean "prejudice + power", it's awfully hard to _still_ argue that feminists don't have more power than just about anybody in academia, the press, entertainment industry and most business as well.

>it's awfully hard to _still_ argue that feminists don't have more power than just about anybody in academia, the press, entertainment industry and most business as well.

It's definitely not. What's the ratio of male to female CEOs in fortune 500 companies (it's around 20 to 1). What's the ratio of male to female members of congress? (~4 to 1). How many Presidents were women? Supreme Court Justices?

Not a women are feminists, and feminists don't represent the interests of all women.

Assuming you're agreeing with the poster I'm replying to and not just making pointless comments.

If feminists really have more power than just about anyone, why don't they put more women in positions of power?

It definitely has been around a while. It's important to note that the "power" is not the power the individual holds, but rather "institutional" power that a person holds simply by virtue of being of a particular collective. For instance, if you are a hiring manager at a repair shop and you decide "this Asian must be good at math, so he won't be interested in working on cars" that's racist and you hold demonstrable power. That's not the same thing as institutional power, since that definition of racism would allow a black hiring manager to discriminate against that candidate on the basis of the black collective holding less institutional power than the Asian collective.

If one is simply racist or not racist because of what collective their a member of, it negates individual agency and dehumanizes everyone.

This leaves us with some possibilities:

One, racism is an immoral act committed by an individual, and the individual's conduct is the principal determining factor.

Two, we can just blame it all on the patriarchy at which point racism as a concept is pointless.

Three, you could claim that only white people have moral agency, which even white nationalists would disavow.

Four, something between one and two, which is probably what the left prefers. And the moral of Jeong case is that it leads to a blatant double standard based on your political stance that is worse about undermining the notion of racism than #2.

I'd also add Evergreen State forcing a Jewish professor into hiding with violent threats because he refused to leave campus for the Day of Presence / Day of Absence.

That was super fucked up. It's incredibly sad that in this day and age people still view one's skin color, sex/gender, or sexual preference (regardless of what it is) as some kind of original sin.

What's most disconcerting about this new-wave definition of "racism" is that they don't say, "well, we want to keep the word racism for prejudice against minorities, but here's another word for prejudice against white people", they just insist that the very concept itself doesn't - and can't - exist. When people refer to something as being "Orwellian" they usually mean constant surveillance a la 1984, but the book itself seemed to be a lot more concerned with efforts to control language and rewrite history to support a particular narrative.

No-one (who knows what they're talking about) says prejudice against the dominant group(s) isn't a thing.

Anyone who does say that is, I submit, either confused, or trying to confuse.

The position, whether you agree with it or not, is "Racism is prejudice plus power". Disenfranchised groups don't have the latter, but they damned well can — and often do — have at least as much of the former as the enfranchised.

EDIT: Or is somehow your position that the prejudices held by enfranchised and those held by the disenfranchised have no meaningful difference in their affects?

I'm not the parent.. but I think you overstate things when you say "Disenfranchised groups don't have the latter [power]".

Power is relative. A minority manager has a certain power over those working beneath him/her, for example.

While there's a dearth of minorities in top positions in the economy... it's incorrect to take this generalization, and then say no minorities have any power.

There are minorities in positions of power, and they can use that to take racist actions.

Therefore, I disagree that minorities are incapable of racism (using the prejudice + power definition).

> There are minorities in positions of power, and they can use that to take racist actions.

Which means the definition holds. Give someone power, they can be racist, and not merely prejudiced. It doesn't matter how much power objectively. It matters that they have relative power, over someone who is the object of their prejudice.

How is this so confusing?

> I disagree that minorities are incapable of racism...

Me too. Can you please clarify where you found a position to the contrary in my commentary?

I think no one here on HN finds this definition hard to understand, even though not everyone agrees with it.

I think the most contentious point is that "prejudice without power" has become a socially acceptable phenomenon while a decade or two ago people were campaigning for no prejudice of any kind.

> I think the most contentious point is that "prejudice without power" has become a socially acceptable phenomenon while a decade or two ago people were campaigning for no prejudice of any kind.

That's really insightful point! To my ear, condemning someone for engaging in "prejudice" has far less sting than condemning them for engaging in one of the "prejudicial isms" (like racism or sexism). The extra sting comes from the widespread and deep understanding that those isms refer to totally unacceptable behaviors.

I only see the "prejudice + power" definition of racism come up in defense of racially prejudiced comments. The effect is to (relatively) sanction and normalize forms of racial prejudice. Personally, I find that to be a totally unacceptable effect.

I understand this position, but I still would say that it's muddying the semantic waters a bit. If you had "prejudice plus power" against someone in the LGBTQ community, would that also be called racism?

In general, I think the most common interpretation of racism would be "prejudice w.r.t. race" rather than "prejudice plus power". I would suggest that perhaps oppression is a more appropriate word to use for "prejudice plus power".

That's a fair argument.

Unfortunately, I wasn't appointed Plenipotentiary in Charge of How Controversial Terms Are Used in Academic Discourse, so my powers here are limited to explaining the position, as I understand it.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bric...

When the word is used this way, it's also implied that "power" means an amorphous and ideologically-defined racial hierarchy (ex., a black CEO is lower on the power totem pole than a homeless white person, etc., because of the attributes of the groups as a whole).

It's only a problem linguistically because of jumping levels - context-switching from broad social generalization to specific instances of specific individuals. Frankly, that's the flaw at the heart of 99% of such arguments.

See my reply to the parent post. This isn't exactly a "new wave" definition.

A bicycle is a vehicle.

A motorcycle is a vehicle.

A bicycle is not a motorcycle. Why? Because a motorcycle has power.

Seriously, I don't know why the "prejudice + power" definitional distinction is so hard for well-meaning people to understand. It makes perfect sense.

Because if you repudiate that definition, you can cry "Reverse racism!" with a straight face.

Because that’s not how it’s used by 99% of people. A bike can mean either a motorcycle or a bicycle. Calling someone racist can mean they're racist against a person of any race.

>Seriously, I don't know why the "prejudice + power" definitional distinction is so hard for well-meaning people to understand. It makes perfect sense.

It is easy to understand, but there is not consensus that the meaning should have been changed. Nor is there consensus on what "power" means.

Academics may have a good need for that distinction, but they made the mistake of overloading the word.

You should go out and talk to people outside of your bubble then. Go somewhere that isn't as left. Go have a conversation with a normal person who is just trying to live their life in a city that isn't majority blue.

Did you just define "normal person" as someone who lives in a non-diverse environment?

Before you get angry, go read your sentence again, at how you used "normal person". What does that say about those of us who live in places with more social diversity? That we're not "normal"?

I don’t think it’s fair to say he’s equating normal with less diverse.

>You should go out and talk to people outside of your bubble then. Go somewhere that isn't as left. Go have a conversation with a normal person who is just trying to live their life in a city that isn't majority blue.

Attributing qualities and intentions to someone you do not know is not a constructive way of having a meaningful discussion.

There is already a linguistic convention in place that disambiguates those two concepts. We had the terms "racism" and "institutional racism"/"systemic racism". What do we gain from condensing the words into one?

Given how this new construction is used, my more cynical side wants to believe that what is gained is the ability of one side of the political aisle to spew any kind of hatred towards particular groups of people without criticism or consequence.

Because the linguistic convention is inadequate and misleading.

For a counterexample, look at the use of the word "privilege", a new definition introduced to the lexicon to explain one of the expressions of prejudice in society. (If you're already poising fingers over keyboard in angry rebuttal, stop and listen.) Privilege is conceptually very simple - it is the absence of discrimination. The absence of racism, or of sexism.

Yet the very term arouses righteous fury, to be even mentioned in the presence of many privileged people. Just watch the rebuttals this comment will draw for examples.

So to my original point, if you introduce new language to describe the prejudice + power concept, it will be vociferously attacked by those who do not face prejudice + power in their daily lives.

Likewise, if you more precisely define an existing word from this world - say, racism - it is also vociferously attacked, by the same people.

And attacking the very language being used to describe the problem is part of the problem.

My favorite "Ah-ha!" illustration of privilege actually came from someone culturally and politically towards the Right:

Imagine you're gay, and you're hanging out with a new friend of your gender, who does not share your orientation. At what point is it appropriate for you to disclose your orientation to your friend? Too early, what if you're seen as coming onto them? Too late, what if you're seen as not trusting them? &c.

Not having to ask yourself that question is a form of "hetero privilege". It is a burden that, as a cis-het person, you will never face.

That's a good one. The annoying thing is, privilege is a simple, obvious concept that not even right-wingers can disagree with, once they understand it. But getting past that initial hump of resistance is so difficult. It doesn't help that those who came up with the terminology used a word that carries a meaning most people are offended to assign to themselves. "I'm not privileged, I was poor once in college!"

The term "privilege" actually makes a lot of sense in the academic context, where it's been rigorously defined (both inclusively and exclusively), but as soon as it made its way into popular discourse, someone interpreted it as a thing that could be someone's "fault", and that narrative has never shaken loose.

I remember when it first came into vogue, back in the 1990s. I was one of those saying "Your choice of word will always cause you problems!" And for a long time, I believed that the resistance came from using such a loaded word.

I no longer believe that. I think the people who are angry about the term "privilege" would be angry if we called it "bunnies".

"Hetero privilege" is proved by the discrimination and stigma against gay relationships, families, the violence against them, rejection by their families, their churches, institutions like blood banks, etc. I think if someone can't already see it there then they won't find it by teasing apart an example like this. It's just seen as another awkward situation. There are awkward situations specific to hetero men too, so it's not seen as a problem.

Because even if you accept the definition, you then have to deal with selective definitions of power.

In my not so humble opinion, it's illiberal and destructive in its current form.

For example, a white Appalachian coal miner and a black Ivy League professor have a power disparity based on income, education, and social class.

But the "prejudice + power" crowd will have you believe that the coal miner's membership in the elusive all-powerful "white people" monolith gives him more social cache´ (hence power) than the professor. That's because the professor's membership in the elusive "black people" monolith puts him near the top of the marginalized intersectional hierarchy.

Any rational person who isn't obsessed with the phenotypical categorization of individuals (aka a bigot) will reject this notion - recognizing the professor's freedom/power relative to the coal miner.

People are individuals (not groups) with complicated lives and experiences.

To reduce ALL "black people" to marginalized victims is the soft bigotry of low expectations. But worse, to elevate all "white people" above all "black people" is a vile and tacit view that all "white people" are the necessary saviors of all "black people". This kind of twisted illiberal thinking permanently infantilizes all "black people".

This is not the position.

To insist that the "prejudice + power" argument is premised on bright-line "race == power" is to mischaracterize it to the point of being unrecognizable.

It's about relative power. If I'm black, and your boss, and have a prejudice against your race, I can be racist. If I'm black, have no meaningful kind of power over you, and have a prejudice against your race, I'm just prejudiced.

That's the position. This "ALL" lunacy is a multiple fallacies in one, and it remains a bitter disappointment to see a crowd of people who otherwise pride themselves aloud on being so smart, buy into it so unexaminedly.

That's nice because you reduced it to actual authoritative power. I can respect that. But that's not how it's playing out in the culture.

So what is playing out in the culture? A privileged majority angrily attacking any attempts to refine the meaning of existing words to describe the real-world consequences of prejudice (racism), and attacking attempts to introduce new language to describe the structure of non-prejudice (privilege).

It's almost as if the majority doesn't want us talking about it at all. That's how it's playing out in the culture.

Think about this when you attack terminology.

> A privileged majority angrily attacking any attempts to refine the meaning of existing words to describe the real-world consequences of prejudice (racism), and attacking attempts to introduce new language to describe the structure of non-prejudice (privilege).

1. Which privileged majority?

> It's almost as if the majority doesn't want us talking about it at all. That's how it's playing out in the culture.

2. No one is censoring you. Talk all you like. Putting ideas and thoughts in the open is critical to arriving at common truth. But if these redefinitions and new language terms are to be pushed into the culture then expect inquiry, discussion, criticism, debate, resistance, dissent, and (when dialogue fails) mockery.

> Think about this when you attack terminology.

3. I don't accept that use of the terminology in question, in case that was unclear. Your redefinitions and new language are not sacrosanct to me. Here's how I see the three _P_ words:

* Prejudice, colloquially speaking, is to negatively judge people based on preconceived notions and stereotypes.

* A Privilege is a specific right or advantage gained through merit or inheritance.

* Power is the ability to exercise a freedom with low risk of sanction.

By that same token, we don't need to regard your definitions as sacrosanct, either.

Remember, you're asserting your personal definitions over those that have developed through decades of academic discourse on the subject.

Why should we prefer your terms, again?

Because they're not my definitions.

They're the generally accepted definitions.

The definitions you are presenting are therefore ideological at best.

"Generally accepted" by whom? In my circles, the definitions rosser and I have offered are the generally accepted ones.

>Why should we prefer your terms, again?

They are not his terms. His definition is the one that has existed for much longer than the ones the academics prefer.

People don't have issue with the academics' need to make distinctions. The issue is that if you need to make a distinction, you should coin a word for what you mean - not use a very well established term.

1. Duh. Don't be obtuse.

2. I'm not being censored. Duh. Just because the right whines about being censored whenever someone disagrees with them doesn't mean I do.

3. Let's address the term "privilege" here again. I've defined privilege as "absence of discrimination". Discrimination is separate from prejudice - it's an expression of power (this is equivalent to the definition of "racism" that you reject).

Now you're going to have to think here, not just react. You agree that prejudice exists, right? Ok. So you agree that discrimination exists - that parties with power use their power to harm those who suffer their prejudice? Ok then. If you're arguing discrimination does not even exist, that's a different and unsolvable problem.

So what do you call an absence of discrimination? Because the absence of a thing is also a thing. We create words for that.

The generally accepted word for the absence of discrimination is "privilege". You reject this definition, disallowing the common English-language concept that words often have more than one meaning. So do you have a different word for the absence of discrimination? Do you have a way to express this in your pure vocabulary?

Didn't think so.

Your arguments aren't wrong, but your phrasing isn't helping them.

1. Aw shucks - I guess I just ain't as sharp as you :-B

2. Whatever.

3. MW dictionary shows no such definition of privilege. Is it in wide use? Link?

Of course, I agree there's such a thing as "discrimination". When we make value judgements, we discriminate. You like blue better than red? That's discrimination. You like people with hazel eyes best? Discrimination. You like your family better than strangers? Yup - discrimination.

In the context of this thread. racial discrimination is to favor a race (positive discrimination) or devalue another race (negative discrimination).

And FWIW, I begrudgingly accept that the contemporary definition of racism is a superset that includes racial discrimination, racial prejudice, and racial antagonism.

I say begrudgingly because this wasn't the case 20-30 years ago. The words "racism" and "racist" were reserved for the most vile organizations or individuals that actively sought to discriminate/disenfranchise/injure people on the basis of their race or ethnicity. The word "prejudiced" was used to describe thoughtless or inadvertent discriminatory attitudes. The word "bigot" was reserved for people who hurled racial/ethnic epithets and found self-satisfaction from putting/keeping down people based on their race/ethnicity.

So you see - back then people used discrimination to sort these trespasses into a value hierarchy: the prejudiced person was annoying but okay, the bigot was an intolerable asshole, and the racist was vile and physically dangerous scum.

Please don't do this kind of flamewar on HN.

On HN, please don't do ideological flamewar to begin with and please don't get personally nasty as you did here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I much prefer the definition of "racism" that has been in use since its inception, why change it?

Because, given the demonstrated ways racism "works" (as in, how it's practiced, and what effects it has when practiced between differentially enfranchised groups) it's not accurate?

> To insist that the "prejudice + power" argument is premised on bright-line "race == power" is to mischaracterize it to the point of being unrecognizable.

Would you mind clarifying the distinction between "differentially enfranchised groups" and "race == power" ?

By analogy, membership in a group that is more or less enfranchised than another could be seen as a Bayesian classification, while "race == power" is more Boolean.

One describes a tendency; the other asserts an identity relationship.

It doesn't map perfectly, but it's close enough for the bandwidth I have to keep contributing to this thread right now.

Because someone saying mean words about someone who looks like you is far different if they have the power to do bad things.

Well, for one thing, that's not what the "you can't be racist against white people" folks say. Instead they say, "you can't be racist against white people".

WHY, dear fucking g-d, do people expect me to defend positions I neither hold nor agree with in these discussions?

This is like saying that if someone were, e.g., operating from mistaken beliefs about the prevalence of some socially regressive attitude or other among technologists, it's appropriate for them to ask any random developer, "Why do developers think ____?"

Huh?

I can't speak for "dear fucking g-d" but my it would appear that your position is distinct from that of the mainstream critical theory/intersectionality social justice crowd.

> ...it would appear that your position is distinct from that of the mainstream critical theory/intersectionality social justice crowd.

Not the subset of it I engage with — and that includes people who hold (graduate) degrees in things like "Gender Studies" or "Ethnic Studies", and such-like — which means we're playing some form of "dueling anecdata".

To that end, I'd invite you to speculate momentarily on how many people in this discussion have ever engaged in meaningful, substantive discourse with people from the "social justice crowd" (which, btw: ugh, dismissive name-calling, much?) about their positions, and aren't merely regurgitating their own narratives, of whatever other origin.

I'm not clear on your point of view - so perhaps you're correct that we're talking past each other.

And with regards to "dismissive name-calling" - I wasn't aware that "social justice crowd" was a pejorative. If there's a better moniker that represents the broader set of ideas I'd be pleased to know and use it.

As for your claim that you're engaged in "other meaningful discourse" and that I'm "merely regurgitating my own narrative", I'd invite you to notice that your ad hominem attacks are not arguments.

Where am I making an ad hominem? It's my — all too often — repeated experience that there are people who meaningfully talk with "SJWs" and there are people who talk about them.

I'm not asserting any specific person here is a member of either set — except myself, based solely and specifically on my own, direct experience. I'm also absolutely not asserting you're "regurgitating" anything.

Just, on the basis of the conversations I've had, and the independent reading I've done, there is no way some of the positions being fervently argued in this broader discussion are based on anything except internalizing some (usually agenda-serving) misapprehension of what "SJWs", or feminists, or whatever, are, want, and intend.

As for the term, itself, it's been seen as mostly pejorative for as long as I've been aware of it. How about, instead of a bucket you (the general "you") can dismiss people and their beliefs into, ("Oh, look. Another 'SJW'..."), we try something along the lines of, "Hmm. Someone who thinks differently from me. I wonder how..."

It's, in my "I've been online for more than 20 years now" opinion, a term that is vastly more often used to shut down discourse than it is to open it up.

Excuse me, but I expressly avoid the term "SJW" because it's a known pejorative.

I prefer to use "social justice advocates" - I used "crowd" here but there was no ill intent.

And if I didn't apologize earlier for making assumptions about your views, I'm apologizing right now. I'd rather learn what you truly think than insist a caricature upon you. It's the only way to have an honest conservation, I think.

Thank you for the clarification.

I think "social justice advocate" is a reasonable term, though "social justice anything" is probably always going to risk evoking a reaction, and not a response; for example, I probably did with your use of "crowd", which might in turn have colored my reply.

I hope I'm offering you some food for thought, or at least another insight into a perspective that differs from yours.

There are people out there who hold considered, nuanced perspectives on these (and many other) topics. Our contemporary style of discourse makes it very difficult to be one of them. :(

I agree there are many nuanced views. And I found our interaction useful in illuminating your views - I suspect they're not entirely dissimilar from my perspective.

The discourse does tend to quickly descend into defensiveness & assumptions of bad faith. For my part, I hope to do better the next time around. Cheers.

Somewhere downthread, someone else said that we'd think differently if we lived among "normal people" rather than in the liberal-oriented big cities.

So yeah, speaking of dismissive.

fwiw, critical theory is distinct from intersectionality. Intersectionality is more or less a 21st century concept. Critical theory dates to the Frankfurt School's work as far back as the 1930s. And conceptually, they have very little to do with one another, other than being "left". Critical theory is largely a Marxist critique of culture, targeted at all totalitarian systems - fascism, Stalinism, and capitalism (why they say capitalism is totalitarian is worth reading). The term "intersectionality" was first used in the late 1980s, one of the first shots of third wave feminism, but really didn't hit vogue until a decade or more later. Totally separate things.

I hear this all the time from my guilty white friends, it's such a confusing perspective.

Thank you for calling it lunacy since that is exactly what I feel every time I read on HN comments that say that black people can not be racist or women can not be sexist. Worse is when people talk about privilege in regard to race or gender as if those automatic resulted in power.

Relative power is relative, and its associated with a distribution curve. One can acknowledge that different groups has different averages and distribution curves, and that those indicate social issues, while still object to lazy stereotypic that ignores the relative property of power. So much political fighting and polarization could be avoided if more people would see power as relative property between individuals.

Yes, it's a relative property between individuals, but asserting it's just that ignores the systemic aspect, which is never not also in play.

The systemic part is a profoundly under-recognized force multiplier for the individual's power.

This is a bit late reply but I will post just in case you read it.

The systemic bias is an term for the result of gender stereotyping. It is lazy thinking by people who ignore individual attributes and reduces people down to a single bit of information. Does this happen? Yes. It is a probabilistic aspect that can have beneficial or negative effect on a person. As a force multiplier, both negative and positive, it is a sign of fault in society.

I agree it is a often profoundly under-recognized, but I will add that it is also profoundly misrepresented. Gender stereotyping is harmful to individuality in a such strong way that only seeing the benefits for one gender is to ignore the harm that it does to both genders.

Similar to what ankushnarula said, I think this interpretation is fine, but what’s the benefit of using it? What, then, do we call the white minimum wage worker who uses a slur to describe a black CEO? Mean?

I don’t think the people arguing for this alternative definition quite agree with you, anyways. I think that most of them prefer it because it means they can say “black people cant be racist agains whites,” for whatever reason.

> Seriously, I don't know why the "prejudice + power" definitional distinction is so hard for well-meaning people to understand.

It's not hard to understand, it's just a redefinition that was consciously created to justify claims that it was impossible for blacks to be racist, and which serves no good purpose. Yes, power dynamics are relevant to the impacts of racism; no, that doesn't make the effort to redefine racism in terms of them useful. Particularly because power isn't a binary trait, it's a multidimensional continuum, and prejudice is always accompanied by power, of some degree or scope.

And particularly, also, because he history of the redefinition is well-known and makes it divisive and redirects any discussion into a heated fight over semantics rather than substance, even if revisionists attempt to save the redefinition by trying to apply it in a more nuanced way.

> distorted the English meaning of the word 'Racism'

I studied Sociology in the late 1980s and this definition of racism was part of the curriculum.

Isn't it entirely possible that a word can have different meanings in academic and non-academic circles?

Just because a term is overloaded in the context of an academic specialty doesn't mean that definition has entered common use, or should be used as the legal standard.

But if there are conflicting views about what a word should mean, isn't it a bit much to say "well your (accepted) version of the word means isn't what I meant, and therefor you're wrong"?

Let's take something (presumably) less polarizing: the word "Literally". To some people, it means "an event that actually is/has happened" but it can also be used as a synonym to the word "figuratively". This can create conflict or misunderstanding when 2 people have different expected definitions of a word. Both are accepted by large populations, and if you use one in a way that has not been accepted by the person you're speaking to, you're not "wrong" you're just having a misunderstanding.

You can argue the validity of each definition, but there's no objective right or wrong here. If I say "Black people can't be racist towards white people because they don't have the institutional power to do that", and you respond "anyone can be racist" we're not having the same argument. You're just arguing semantics while I'm trying to make a point about the world.

I think what people are truly angry about is when someone is racist (to be clear I'm using the definition involving prejudice based on race) towards someone who is of a generally privileged class (i.e. white) and when this is pointed out sometimes the answer is is that they're not being racist because their definition of it is also related to power. And so both parties are drawn into the argument over language semantics. However, it is the wrong argument to be involved in, because it is correct to point out the hypocrisy: it is not ok to be racist (using the definition without power) to anyone, regardless if in general they benefit from their race.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/are-white-people-jokes...

I disagree. This article pretty well sums up my thoughts.

Racist jokes, are just that, jokes. IMO it's ok for anyone to make a joke against anyone else due to a joke's harmless nature. Although yes, someone who is a racist (i.e will deny you a job because of your race, or hold negative stereotypes about you to your detriment) is more likely to utter a racist joke, but the joke itself is the harmless act. However I'm not talking about jokes. I'm talking about racist actions that are actually negative to the person on the receiving end, you know, the things that actually matter -- not jokes. It's bad for anyone receiving it. Whether you are denied a job, or an opportunity due to your race it is bad. For example, read up on Asian-americans being the victims of positive discrimination and having to earn more marks to get in solely due to their race. Typically these people are affluent and definitely not powerless and probably are the most powerful in terms of getting a place at an Ivy, I'd argue they are at the receiving end of a policy that is racist. Also remember, power can be localised. For example is it impossible for a white person to be racist in South Africa, because they are in the minority? Yeah I'd say so. Thougu under your definition - I definitely can say we can have a debate on that. Is it impossible for a black person to be racist in South Africa? No, according to my definition of racism and also according to yours (though you may disagree depending on how you believe powet works); whilst I imagine the average white person in South Africa is richer than the average black person, they dont enjoy much political power nowadays and they are in the minority in terms of people.

My point is, don't let people commit racist actions (I don't care about jokes) because they may have 'less power' due to their race.

It's not just "the context of an academic specialty". Almost every non-white person I know uses this definition.

By contrast, the traditional definition of "racism" that so many are vociferously defending here is used almost exclusively by white people. Think about that.

> It's not just "the context of an academic specialty". Almost every non-white person I know uses this definition.

So people have self-serving definitions. Not a surprise.

> Isn't it entirely possible that a word can have different meanings in academic and non-academic circles?

It almost seems like rather the rule than the exception.

Outside of disciplines that produce precise documents (law, engineering, academics), most words do not even have well-defined meanings. People associate words with fuzzy clouds of meaning: their own personal ones, not the definitions from a dictionary. When they speak they crudely grope among these clouds of meaning to fetch the words that best approximate what they are trying to say.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocabulary#Degree_of_knowledge

Yes. But the academic meaning cannot be used in this context as a legal meaning. It fails the basic requirement that a government enforce the rule of law with equal standing and rights before the law.

I'm not at all surprised that the academic meaning of the term "racism" is entirely different than the colloquial meaning. I am, however, confused as to why people are demanding the academic usage enter into common usage.

The academic meaning and common use is only different in "academic" circles filled with modern feminists, that insist on it being different, for no scientific reason what-so-ever. For instance, Prof Jordan Peterson from U of Toronto, is a well known disputer of such alternate narratives mascaraing as academics

If ISIS started publishing papers distorting the meaning of terrorism, peer-reviewed it among sympathizers, it wouldn't supersede the proper, scientific definition of the word

Except there is a huge difference between someone just saying mean things about people who look like you, and also being able to actually have an affect on your life. Sarah Jeong can't do anything to white people. Donald Trump has quite a history of not renting to persons of color.

I generally agree with you but I disagree with your use of the term "the modern feminist movement." It is not a single, uniform set of things to which all adherents subscribe. To the contrary, "the modern feminist movement" is rife with in-fighting among factions of people who vehemently disagree with each other about what exactly it means to be "feminist" (not to mention their wildly different and sometimes conspicuously absent stated goals). A feminist who belongs to, say, the Beauvoir school of thought has a very different outlook on things than a lot of people who participate in the internet #MeToo movement, and the #MeToo "feminists" may fight vociferously with so-called "intersectional feminists." And so on.

Any position premised on "feminists" — or any other group — being a monolithic entity one can hand-wave about as suits one's narratives should be immediately, and extremely, suspect.

I don't necessarily agree that it should be automatically treated with suspicion, but it does always warrant further inspection. One of the biggest problems with discussions about contemporary feminism is that it's often unclear who is being talked about when one talks about "feminists." Accordingly, vague invocations of "feminists" or "feminism" may not be deliberate but instead suffer merely from erroneously insufficient specificity.

> ...but it does always warrant further inspection.

That's what I mean by suspicion: scrutiny, not dismissal. What, e.g., are the narratives in play, that enable someone to speak that casually, yet confidently, about a thing they're prima facie demonstrating a flawed understanding of?

Alternately, the "erroneously insufficient specificity" might be quite deliberate, if not explicitly considered. Blanket attacks on "feminists" often have origins other than mere academic inquiry.

So long as ^that premise is applied across the board, I agree. Since it follows that feminism is not merely the belief that women are equal to men.

Then you (the general "you") need to take that concern up with people who profess those positions, and not throw it in the face of everyone who professes feminism of any kind.

I'm a "women are people too" feminist. I really have no interest in being your whipping boy regarding "man-hating bull-dykes" or whatever such bullshit. It's not accurate. It's not interesting. It's not even novel.

And yet, near-enough every time this stuff comes up, someone expects me to defend a position I neither hold, nor agree with.

Is it any wonder these kinds of stories get flagged off the front page?

I think this would more accurately be phrased as "feminism may not merely be the belief that women are equal to men." In any event, "equal to" remains awfully vague.

I agree but that's not how things normally work. When there is a fault on the "other" its a inherent systemic attribute of that group (and when it get nasty people use words like biological) and when there is a fault with "us" it is singular individuals that in no way represent the whole.

I find The history of the different feminist factions to be very interesting and in particular I find the split between equality feminism and difference feminism to be one of the more significant event that illuminate much of the inconsistency of the movement that we see today. The older equality feminism view was that men and women are significant more alike than different and should thus be treated as identical androgynous humans, while difference feminism view men and women as different but deserving of equal power. The modern feminist factions are largely descendants of the difference feminism view so we get occasionally modern feminist that claim that women can not be sexist since men has more systemic power than women. It follows a kind of logic if one look at gender as uniform groups that wield power.

Still all those factions exist and so do the older equality feminism even if its just a minority today. The sad thing is when infighting occur, the common suggestion is that the other side is automatically far-right for not agreeing. I would suggest that this is why "the modern feminist movement" is starting to see more like a uniform set than different factions.

> the older equality feminism even if its just a minority today.

[citation needed]

The narrative is as what I have read from a book, wikipedia, and published articles from the 1960-1970s, where much of this theory also goes under first-wave, second-wave, third-wave, fourth-wave and post-feminism definitions. The history is not exactly defined in stone by any measure so it could be wrong.

When it comes to actually numbers I would like to think that most people would agree to view women and men as androgynous humans for all practical purposes unless it involves the sliver of domains where sex difference actually can be proven to have a large impact, and then being skeptical since most such finding that I have read get later reversed and attributed to culture and bias. I will assume you are one of those and thus give you an up vote.

I don't understand the point you're trying to make here. In what way is what I described "not how things normally work"?

Maybe people should choose better terminology to identify themselves then.

Personally I'm a believer in equal rights regardless of gender, colour, beliefs or passion for collecting garden gnomes.

The term "feminism" implies that it pertains specifically to female rights. Perhaps "social egalitarian" is a more apt description for someone wanting equal rights for all, to clarify any difference.

Now, excuse me while I go and barricade myself into this hut in the woods before the pitchforks arrive.

I use to think this way myself - I'd like to explain how my thinking has changed (sans pitchforks) to the best of my ability.

My understanding is that "feminism" doesn't imply more rights for females, but rather highlights where they believe inequalities lie. Same reason people have adopted the phrase "Intersectional Feminist" so as to draw attention to where equality (even among women) is lacking - to those of color or less economic privilege.

Just like saying "Black Lives Matter" doesn't imply that African Americans lives matter more than others, you are using specific words to focus the application of a general idea (lives matter, equality is good, etc.) to a where you may think it is lacking.

There's a problem with this. Imagine you take group A, and you find every spot where they fall behind group B. And you manage, through whatever, means to rectify this. In the end you have not created equality, but almost certainly made group A vastly superior to group B, as you ignore the spots where group A was already ahead.

To take things out of the abstract, consider 'women in STEM'. In college girls do not enroll in STEM with anywhere near the rate boys do. And this receives immense media attention and coverage. However, there has been a sharp and increasing imbalance in girls:boys in college enrollment as a whole. In 1979 they became the majority. And the share of that majority has constantly increased. We're starting to push towards girls outnumbering boys in college by 2:1. And some education is, in general, leagues ahead of none. Yet this receives next to no media attention. And when it's mentioned the person is immediately pegged as some sort of a bigot or extremist as the connotation implied by labels such as men's rights activists.

And for what it's worth, I don't think there should be focus on this, but neither do I think there should be a focus on getting any gender/race/group/age or whatever into anything. I am an egalitarian and I think we should focus exclusively on providing equal opportunity so much as possible, but without pushing people into things. Norway is arguably the most gender-equal nation in this world, and one of their findings was when they directed girls towards fields girls did not regularly participate in, there was a mild but constant increase. Practically as soon as that push was relinquished, the numbers diminished to 'pre-push' times. On a smaller scale, like a good egalitarian I also pushed my wife into pursuing computer science over her previous interest in sociology during university. She excelled, as did I. Now years after that when we both have really our choice of whatever we want to do, she works with people -- and I work with code. I have no regrets bringing her into computer science, but it does make one wonder if it was truly the best decision. People are pliable enough that you can fit square pegs into round holes, but we also tend to be like sponges and after all that contorting that square peg contorted to fit into that round hole is eventually going to go back to being a square because that's what it wants to be.

[1] - https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_303.10.a...

I see your point, but if I may nitpick:

The phrase "Black Lives Matter" is Ronseal. Which is to say that "it does what it says on the tin" - in the sense that the phrase exactly explains what you're campaigning for - equal consideration and rights for black lives.

The phrase "feminism" implies female rights, and (at least linguistically) nothing more. Now, it may be that feminists and non-feminists don't see the phrase as meaning that, which I understand to be your point, but I think that's where this becomes much more nuanced.

Anecdotally I have known self-described feminists who were very much about equal rights - but I have also encountered several (admittedly fewer) who were openly pro-female and anti-male.

Edit: removed anecdotal stories as they're just that: anecdotal.

I think there's a bigger discussion to be had here for all of us, and I really hope getting confronted with stories like this has the silver lining of bringing it about.

A) I think it's also incumbent upon anyone who wants to have a discussion with someone who proclaims themselves simply a "feminist" to ask what sort of feminist they are. Otherwise the conversation is likely to end up suffering from the sort of definitional confusion we're talking about here.

B) In what way does "more rights" inhere in the term "feminism"?

B) is a fair point, and not exactly what I meant either - I'll update the parent.

The term "computer science" is also largely crappy but we have it for historical reasons. Criticism of the name is about as shallow as it gets, especially since it is clear that a very large portion of gender oppression is directed against women.

There is almost certainly a more accurate name. But changing the name would accomplish so little that sparring over the name feels like a distraction rather than progress.

I can see your point.

What I'm saying is rather that the term itself encompasses a broader array of views than we're discussing here. I think to simplify it to "equal rights" isn't exactly congruent to what every adherent to the term holds as it's sole meaning.

If you actually prioritized these rights then you'd recognize that specific groups who are especially disadvantaged by historical racist and sexist precedents would obviously have the most incentive to speak on societal reform, and therefore obviously the movement for intersectional social and economic equality would arise from some group other than rich white men?

That it is named "feminism" in this specific incarnation is an ephemeral and uninteresting detail. If this is genuinely your only sticking point, then call yourself a social egalitarian and stop demanding other folks conform to your private nomenclature. If, as it seems is more likely, this is a fig leaf to push back against what you see as the loss of privileges held by white men in society? Too bad: you're assuredly losing these, as they come at a high cost to everyone else.

This is why people can't have calm, reasoned discord in 2018.

"obviously the movement for intersectional social and economic equality would arise from some group other than rich white men?"

I'm not rich. I never said I was white (as it happens I am, but that's neither here nor there - why are you trying to start a racial argument?)

And why is your statement obviously correct as you put it?

"stop demanding other folks conform to your private nomenclature"

I didn't demand anything at all. Did you even read what I wrote? My point was the term is applied ambiguously, making the meaning unclear.

"this is a fig leaf to push back against what you see as the loss of privileges held by white men in society? Too bad: you're assuredly losing these, as they come at a high cost to everyone else."

This is a dramatic, well-crafted response.. to something that was never said in the first place.

None of this is even the most ridiculous part of your comment, which is surely the over-arching notion that any opinions you feel over your own privileges and how you've arrived at them are shared by everyone else on the internet who you assume is of the same skin colour and gender.

I believe very strongly in actual equality, as do most people describing themselves as feminists that I've spoken to, as I stated.

In short - please don't misconstrue my statements in an effort to make me look intolerant and bigotted. It debases a valid discussion, and I personally find it deeply offensive.

Now as I don't like to be confrontational about something so serious I would like to end by saying something kind; I'm proud of you that you used the words intersectional, ephemeral and nomenclature correctly in your post.

> This is why people can't have calm, reasoned discord in 2018.

Oh?

> I'm not rich. I never said I was white (as it happens I am, but that's neither here nor there - why are you trying to start a racial argument?)

Well, I don't see me saying or implying you were, merely pointing out the incentives of the disenfranchised promote protest where the incumbents do not.

> I didn't demand anything at all. Did you even read what I wrote?

I did, actually! Let's quickly look at this telltale paragraph:

> > The term "feminism" implies that it pertains specifically to female rights. Perhaps "social egalitarian" is a more apt description for someone wanting equal rights for all, to clarify any difference.

So I'm left here with one of 2 conclusions:

1) Either this guy is parroting a common anti-feminist praxis.

2) This guy has no clue about the space and discourse, simply not realizing that in fact "intersectional feminism" is simply a historically faithful term for this "egalitarianism" he likes.

Personally, I don't believe you accidentally stumbled upon your argument. I think you made it in bad faith. That you immediately came back and demanded that I pretend to acknowledge your figment of neutral tone is confirmation, because what a rational person would do when confronted with a misunderstanding of magnitude 2 is try to work out how their communication went wrong. They would not (as an example) say, "Are you trying to start a racial argument?"

But on the off chance that this is all a massive misunderstanding: you're parroting an argument that is often used by people to derail and defuse the actual arguments presented by intersectional feminism by bikeshedding over the name. Please think on this, because in a modern 2018 internet when you do this (in a forum full of posts like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17759924) your voice is indistinguishable from theirs.

And if you disagree that "Feminism" captures your intent, please point to actual policy and not nitpicking about the name. Nitpicking about names is at best unhelpful.

I'll say plainly that I'm not acting in bad faith, you're just plain wrong in assuming that.

Your latter assumption is correct, though - I'm not familiar with the discourse. "Intersectional feminism" is not a term I was familiar with, and having Googled it, it does appear to be what I was referring to. I say this cautiously, as Googling something is hardly going to give me a rounded understanding - but I intend to read up on it more.

"That you immediately came back and demanded that I pretend to acknowledge your figment of neutral tone is confirmation"

I really do not want to argue with someone over the internet about a topic like this, so it's the last time I'll quote. I just wanted to point something out to you.

For the second time, I've demanded nothing of you, and I don't understand why you keep using that word. You've again assumed malice when I really don't see that I've given you reason to.

I can't switch tabs right now to read the article you linked as I'm on a mobile and my phone will lose this comment, but I will read it as soon as I'm done posting here.

I don't agree or disagree that "feminism" captures my point. My point is that the term covers broad ideas that aren't always internally compatible, as you've pointed out.

"Intersectional feminism" does appear to cover my view on the topic (again, not familiar with the term before 20 minutes ago, so.. pinch of salt until I'm more up-to-speed on the topic).

Once I've read up, I'll be more aware of the terminology for the future, so thanks for the link.

Respectfully though, when you say my voice is indistinguishable from what I can only assume is going to be some fairly rough anti-women and/or LGBTQ speech, I'm going to be offended by it. I don't see where I've been irrational but maybe I'm just blind to it, I asked why race was being brought up as I genuinely don't see why skin colour needed to be mentioned at all.

UPDATE: I've read the comment you linked to. I've honestly nothing to say about it, or more to say to you on this topic. Good luck to you.

It wasn't 'feminists' redefining anything, it's spelled 'semitic' and more importantly, you're just pivoting to completely unrelated culture war topics simply because women happen to be involved and you want to rant about them. That's not a great look.

> simply because women happen to be involved and you want to rant about them.

He didn't rant about women, did he? he only mentioned feminism, or are you saying that only women are allowed to be feminist?

"these narratives rely on the evisceration of science, logic, reason and well established definitions of words"

They absolutely do not. If you honestly believe that what Sarah Jeong tweeted was racism, then you have an incredibly sheltered life, and have never faced any kind of adversity.

“You say that it’s impossible to be racist against a white person? And impossible to be sexist against a man?”

It really is a confusing time for normal people outside of the intelligentsia / twitter bubble.

Never concede any territory on the linguistic battlefield.

ugh, I've had this conversation before and it's absolutely not worth it.

It's basically a new religion with its own preachers and evangelical prosyletizers. And dare I say, religious enforcers too. Incidentally, also has a concept of "original sin" and atonement to some extent. If only they could provide an eschatology.

I try to stay away from it. Brings back horrible memories.

> There's a rinse and repeat pattern of denial, suiting narratives here.

Have... have you actually talked to a cross-section of feminists? Or do you just watch the kind of youtube videos about them where someone who failed out at the rest of their life now is a professional video-pauser?

If your exposure to actual feminist dialogues is quite sparse if you think Jeong hasn't faced substantial criticism. Her comments were pointed out as crass (if not actually structurally racist; because they're not for multiple reasons) and alienating.

What's more, Jeong has a long running scandal of helping Vice totally screw over a Chinese woman who is a performative maker named Naomi Wu. The reporter there wanted to run a piece about Reddit conspiracy theories w.r.t. (that Naomi is actually, by virtue of being a woman, obviously backed by a man who is the "real" talent). Naomi's addressed this a lot and had a written contract she pointed to as violated.

Sarah jumped in and helped deplatform Wu off of a variety of platforms and lead a charge to get Wu thrown off Patreon, because she wanted to defend her friend against the accusations of a woman who was angry for being dismissed as a sex symbol and nothing more.

So yah, there is a lot of feminist critique of Jeong that's valid. She's also kinda shitty to sex workers even as she says she thinks it should be fine. That's unsurprising, most of us have shitty upbringings and part of the idea behind public feminist dialogue is to help people recognize that these unconscious biases need intentional correction to be stamped out.

If you make jokes about how "I don't recall hearing about this plan at the last global patriarchy council" you can also make that same joke about "feminism." It's a broad movement with many adherents and to try and collapse it to a single priority set is ridiculous. The movement is not a monolith.

> It happened with Sarah Jeong, where the feminists distorted the English meaning of the word 'Racism'

Maybe you should time travel back to 2012 when boys-club Youtube skeptics were busy losing this fight and walk through the video breadcrumbs of how this collapsed. There are multiple senses of the word racism and some are more facile than others. What's more, Jeong was ironically mimicking the tweets of someone else making racist comments.

There is no doubt this is crass. It's discriminatory, even! But racist? If so, it's only in the sense that it's often misused as a synonym for "discriminatory" when in fact racism encompass a lot more than that.

> It's happening now with this case, and it's not the last time. And just so you are aware, these narratives rely on the evisceration of science, logic, reason and well established definitions of words

It's curious then, how if science and logic are the pole stars of the anti-feminist movement then how often actual scientists, statisticians and historians are considered to be "the enemy." Academia itself is often vilified by narratives your pushing, and the definitions you're decrying don't emerge from tumblr, but rather decades of scholarly inquiry. Many aspects of modern feminist theory have rich histories in literature that can't be easily brushed off as modern abominations.

Your original complaint about "redefining the word racism" is actually a complaint about how Academia (including your reviled humanities, but also many more disciplines) have recognized that there are systemic, evidenced-based measures of how environments alter the effect and scope of people.

The fact that you're upset about Jeong's words means that you actually believe in so-called "feminist bullshit" like micro-aggressions. To which I say: congrats to you for independently recognizing this is a thing, now ask yourself how that applies to others.

Yeah, the parent comment is patently BS. I searched for feminist subreddits discussing this article, and every single one of them had people expressing a mix of sadness, disappointment, and anger at this revelation. There were no comments supporting the accuser or decrying the accused. And in my experience, this has also been the case for previous such events.

Say what you want about modern feminism, but the community certainly has integrity.

There's a rinse and repeat pattern of denial, suiting narratives here.

Anti-feminists are covering their tracks by saying we live in a world that's already equally fair to women, which is obviously false. It happened with Adam, where believers distorted the meaning of "fall of man" to suit their narrative that it only applies to women separating men from their god. It's happened for ~2000 years, documented in the founding texts of the people now calling foul.

It's happening now, and it's not the last time. And just so you are aware, these narratives rely on the evisceration of science, logic, reason and well established definitions of words.

No one's claiming that we live in a world that's already equally fair to women. In fact, classic feminism - those espoused by Jordan Peterson and the like, are truly about uplifting women, where they aren't treated fairly. Modern feminism is in direct contrast to these founding prociples - it throws out science, reason and basic truths - in favor of unproven 'narratives'.

Speaking of founding texts, God and religion, classic feminism fought for emancipation of religiously enforced garbs, head coverings, female genital mutilation, etc. Contrast that to modern feminism - where women with freedom to dress as they please don Hijabs in the name of 'freedom', while the actually oppressed women fighting the Hijab [1] are conveniently ignored. That my friend, is the evisceration of science, logic, reason and well established definitions of words - where women in the west with all the freedom do the bidding of oppressive men who cite religious text's demeaning reasons to cover one's head and body

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-44040236

FYI, this post hit the front page, but looks like it's been deliberately buried. I can't find it at all in the first few pages of front page results.

That's probably for the best, even though this seems to be the kind of "man bites dog" story that generate some novel, interesting comments amidst the flames.

It's currently at #10 for me.

It's at #110 for me now. There's a similarly-aged post with only a third of the votes that's on the front page at #16, though.

readers have been flagging it, and its probably been auto flagged due to other readers downvoting a significant number of comments.

Seems like one of the better discussions of the issue I've ever seen.

I really suggest this episode from the Owls at Dawn postcast:

http://www.owlsatdawn.com/episodes-2/2018/6/25/me-too-ism-wh...

In it, Heidi Matthews, a law professor, goes into all the legal implications of the me too movement. The trouble with the whole movement is the way that many people in it seek legal guards in our framework, but which simply don't work in the really complex and nuanced ways our social relationships work. It's a really good and in-dept legal analysis that I highly recommend.

So let's take a step back: professors who marry students. My graduate adviser married one of his students (she was a grad student when he was a professor when they met). Where do wanted/unwanted advances being and end?

In this specific case, it looks like the professor kept going after this guy after he was clearly not interested. She should have stopped, right? Yes. Should this be a legal thing? Hmm... now we get into gray areas right?

Let's take a big step back to the 1990s and the TV show Family Matters. Steve Urkel was a creep. Go to YouTube and watch some old videos. He does a lot of really questionable stuff, his infatuation is stalker-ish and the show is written to sympathize the audience with his unrequited love.

I don't think this show would be made today, but we are talking about people in different age groups, different generations and totally different ideas of what is or isn't acceptable.

Louis CK asked for consent in many of the cases (there are two questionable reports, one where he stood in front of the exit and another where he didn't ask consent when he was on the phone with a woman; both of those are not OK of course). This consent doesn't matter because he was in a position of authority over them, or so the argument goes. But they're adults right? So when is consent not consent? When is a Yes not good enough?

I think there are a lot of complexities here that may not have legal solutions. Sex and sexuality are weird things, which is why we classify things as "fetishes". Most of the animal kingdom (cats, dolphins, fruit flys, ducks) all participate in non-consensual sexual activities (if animals had the ability to consent; also in most animals, sex last less than 1 minute, except for Bonobos, Dolphins and possibly a few others). There is an inherent violence that is a part of the core human psyche that goes with sexuality and we have to be willing to acknowledge and address that and the awkward way that doesn't fit into our legal frameworks.

There is a lot of complexity here and I think everyone should think really carefully and critically before taking any stances. It will affect the way people pursue relationships and how we think of ourselves (as sexual men/women/whatever). There are already A LOT of lonely people out there. I don't want to move to a world where people are even more afraid to connect than they already are.

> There is an inherent violence that is a part of the core human psyche that goes with sexuality

I don't understand. Can you elaborate?

Otherwise I think this is top-notch post.

While I mostly agree, all you said needs to be balanced out against our human tendency to exploit power relationships, in particular because of the possibly involved 'inherent violence'. The legal system and many social rules are established to protect the weaker actor in a relationship.

With respect to your example of a professor marrying his student: people simply fall in love, and that means occasionally professors fall in love with students, and students with professors. But we shouldn't tolerate a sexual relationship and a professor-student relationship at the same time. So the moment they start the sexual relationship, the couple needs to adjust their professional one (e.g., moving to different universities).

How was Louis CK in the position of authority? As a celebrity, his attractiveness level was way off charts, otherwise an obese, middle-aged balding guy would be completely invisible, so he tried to capitalize on that. But those women freely flocked to him, trying to capitalize on associating with him. If anything, both sides were "damaged goods".

Because he was a big name in stand-up comedy at the time. He had connections, and people listened to him. If he really wanted to, he could have blackballed the women who rebuffed him.

  > “Our communications — which Reitman now claims
  > constituted sexual harassment — were between two
  > adults, a gay man and a queer woman, ..."

I was under the impression that gay and queer meant basically the same thing. This seems to imply that there's a distinction of some sort. Does anyone know which is correct?

Gay can specifically mean male homosexual (why there is both an “L” and a “G” in LGBTQ) or homosexual more generally; queer can encompass any distance from strict heterosexuality or stereotypical gender expression. The terms aren't mutually exclusive, but they aren't identical. And people whose sexuality is substantially identical may identify differently given that the terms aren't mutually exclusive crisp categories, and a tradition of respect in the community is to use the label the subject identifies with not to interpose your own categorization.

The rules apply to you not us!

Revoultion eats its own children

This article reminded me of this incident at th Pride march in London this year: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/anti-trans-p...

tl;dr - lesbians were campaigning against trans people. At a Pride march.

Sad as it is, as a white middle-class cis straight male it is relieving to know that it is not solely people like me that responsible for #MeToo (as is sometimes implied in the media), but that actually the "minority groups" are equally capable of being idiots too... <sigh>

I dont disagree that there is still a lot of unconscious bias and unearned power/respect/influence that white middle-class cis straight men wield though. Just saying that it seems that we're not the only "problem group" and I think that is worth remembering when it comes to the rhetoric et al

That is not surprising at all. Ever hear of TERFs?

Unfortunately TERFs are real. And I guess on some level, its comforting to know that there are shitty people to be found in all walks of life.

"Bigotry is fractal" is I believe the saying.

Ayn rand ( love her books) had a similar affair

http://brucelevine.net/how-ayn-rand-seduced-young-men-and-he...

While it may make Rand socially suspect, she was perfectly okay with this behavior and made it clear in her writings. The issue at hand in this case is more than just socially unacceptable behavior, but also the hypocrisy.

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