I want to lazily but quickly refer anyone who’s reading this to a recent video from Hank Green and a Vox video from last year concerning Facebook. During her 60 Minutes interview this week, Frances Haugen revealed that political parties in Europe have written to Facebook, claiming that the platform is making their constituents’ views more polarized and extreme, leaving them with little choice but to alter their campaigns and policy proposals to fit in with these emerging viewpoints. This is a reminder that peoples’ identities are constructed and maintained through our engagement with all forms of media. You think you’re in control of your beliefs; you’re not. And that’s not just about intentional propaganda and division. These algorithms, left on their own, reinforce any oppressive identity categories that already exist, like what women “should” be doing or what poorer people “should” be doing. There’s little room for diversity of thought. Historian Yuval Harari has written about this… others have too… about how “individuals” are constructs of capitalism, and we “individuals” distinguish ourselves chiefly through the goods and services we buy, liberal and conservative alike. Subgroups are easier to market to, so the free market is incentivized to keep our interests concise as well as consistent. As the Vox report shows, cleaning jobs are marketed mostly to women, and lumber jobs mostly to men. If you come into these platforms with more questions about the world than answers, you will leave with more answers than questions. If you feel two ways about a social issue, or another way entirely, social media will force you to coalesce into one of the pre-approved stances, like a Schrodinger Box. We need to be humble and vigilant while we’re compelled to rigorously defend our identities in the Misinformation Age, because our identities exist at the convenience of corporations. Otherwise, societal oppression will go unquestioned and unchallenged, whether the humans in charge of social media want it to or not.
Tag: feminism
People Miss the Whole Point of Political Correctness
Ah, the joy of r/fatlogic.
I already knew what the commenters would write as soon as I saw this. This argument has been applied to other forms of verbal abuse and microaggressions such as sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and misgendering: you don’t get to decide how someone should feel in response to how you treat them. If someone tells you that the manner and content of your speech causes them to feel uncomfortable, afraid, or sad, the burden had ought to be on you to change your behavior instead of them sucking it up. I generally agree with this maxim, but I don’t think this is the best argument for why people should check their privilege and bigotry. People on the other side of this – usually conservatives and libertarians – claim that feelings are primarily one’s own responsibility (though conservatives are plenty offended by certain things). And people can feel offended about anything. That in itself does not make all feelings logical. Honoring everyone’s feelings as truth would probably amount to cultural relativism when feelings are shared among groups – this dreaded so-called “identity politics”.
I would caution two things. One, it is technically correct to acknowledge that someone has a feeling. Feelings are not under anyone’s control. They are automatic. They can be rational, but they don’t need to be. Erasing someone’s feeling because it’s illogical or inconvenient to you is a pointless endeavor. And two, you shouldn’t change your language or behavior around someone because JUST because it offends them personally. You should do it because you understand the specific ways that people are treated in society based on their group membership and how that creates a different experience than yours – even if they haven’t experienced it yet. It’s the reason why doing blackface is wrong even if your black friend doesn’t know the history and tells you they don’t care. This political correctness crusade has never been about exhausting yourself by constantly catering to individuals’ whims. It’s about understanding general patterns.
If you yell at a woman, especially if you are a man, you should understand that A) as a woman she might have had the experience of being abused by a man in the past – a particular dynamic that most men can’t experience, and B) she probably experiences low levels of verbal harassment most of the time, and your behavior will add to this accumulation of stress.
If you’ve been thin all your life and some of your friends make fun of fat people, with jokes ranging from playfully using fat stereotypes to being downright annoyed by them, you will probably laugh along with them even if you’re neutral or apathetic toward fat people personally. But then what happens if a year or two later you’ve gained 60 pounds? You’re not just so fat that only you notice – you’re so fat that everyone else has noticed too. You’ve never been one of “those people”, but now you are. How do you think all the jokes and insults your friends made about fat people are going to affect you? You’ll probably hate yourself and you won’t know what to do. You probably won’t have many sympathetic friends or relatives to fall back on.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, you can’t just assume that since an individual has not yet experienced explicit instances of discrimination for their group affiliation(s), it’s okay to make jokes or share negative views of their group. You might have a black or Muslim friend who may have been subject to systemic discrimination but happens to not have had insults and slurs hurled at them by strangers or been threatened with racist symbols or Islamophobic messages. But they can still experience these things in the future, and if they do they will probably not recognize it right away, because you’ve been deriding Muslims or black people for years. Just because you don’t see them as “one of those people” and you’ve convinced them that they aren’t, that doesn’t mean they won’t eventually be treated that way by others.
The point of political correctness is to try – at least TRY – to educate yourself about the experiences of marginalized groups and use what you’ve learned to treat strangers and kin with more empathy and respect. But more than that, it’s about fighting for systemic change; a kind smile and a conversation will only do so much. It’s dishonest and misleading to reduce fights for social equity to policing individuals’ language. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. But people who are truly “woke” know that people get their beliefs from SOMEWHERE, and they spend more of their time fighting the institutions that produce loyal followers rather than simply shaming people into compliance, or exiling them as punishment for their personal failings.
Losing Weight – Does It Mean Losing What Makes You Unique?
I don’t have to be as fat as I am, or get fatter than I am, in order to affirm my truth – the truth that I am queer, that I am sensitive, that I am an introvert. But I certainly do treat my fat body differently than I used to; I dress myself differently, I use more expressive body language, and I show more skin. I should have the right to change or maintain my body however I like. I cannot deny, however, that for most of the time I’ve ever lost weight intentionally that it was rooted at least in part in a sense of shame over my personality, my talents, needs, and desires. And much of the rhetoric I’ve used and I’ve heard other people use when it comes to the need to lose fat and maintain a thinner body is actually code for the real reason we all got so fat in the first place – an initial fear and grief over having been unacknowledged, mistreated, or ignored. Again, it isn’t necessary to be fat in order to reclaim our authenticity. There are some serious conversations to be had about mental and physical health. Exercise is objectively a good thing, and no one should have to feel like a prisoner in a cycle of food addiction or social isolation. We should have the right to experience a more social or physically active life if we want to. But the censorship and condemnation of fat bodies is a way to silence the hearts and minds of people of color, LGBTQA+ people, and people with psychological or physical impairments. We have to make sure that if we do try to become thinner, we aren’t losing more than our fat in the process.
Why I Wish I Could Shake Using Male Pronouns
The biggest incentive I have to stop gendering men is that I do not want to invite the opportunity for people to gender me as a man any more than they already do. To illustrate, in the situation I had at Target, these nice women associates teamed up to help me locate a backrest pillow. After a male associate informed one of these ladies over walkie-talkie that there was just a rather fluffy looking one, the lady stuttered for a moment and after regaining her composure pressed the associate to look for something else, claiming that the customer she was helping (me) was a male and that the item in question might be too “um… feminine”. After the initial shock I tried being nice and I leaned it and clapped my hands down and said: “that’s okay, it’s fine, it doesn’t matter to me, I’ll look at it”. This woman was what… trying to protect my shattered male ego? This is a more innocuous example; experiences with men have been far worse. If I stop people from gendering me, it’s not about “you need to get my pronoun right so I feel recognized” – it’s consequential in how you are going to treat me in a conversation. If you gender me as a man, you are almost certain to treat me differently. You’ll assume all sorts of things about me, like that I respect authority or traditionalism or nice suits or stocks or mechanics. You’ll tone down your emotional intelligence and assume I don’t want to receive affection or concern. You’ll have expectations of me to perform in a leadership role that I can’t fulfill, or worse, be emotionally stable, which is probably never going to happen.
Questions The Internet Will Not Give Me An Answer To
Why is it in virtually every “after” photo or video I’ve seen of males on the internet or TV commercial involve becoming more muscular and not simply being less fat? I feel like it’s sometimes true that women’s after pics show “toned” figures, but that for men it’s a given that they have to have visible muscle definition and laud their dedication to fitness regimens. Why?
Already Ridiculous 