Fairness, Justice, Harassment, a Rant

[lydy]

Over the course of working anti-harrassment issues, and in the wake of the Me Too movement, I have been struck by how completely and utterly the world is built around the experience of being male, at such a basic level that concepts like fairness, justice, and damage are not entirely applicable to the way women live and move in the world.  Moreover, there really isn't a good vocabulary to describe our experience.  There is literally no language to discuss the substantive issues, and the connotations and denotations of the language that we have available to us so overwhelm the discourse that often we end up talking about things in entirely male-centric ways, utterly without know it.  To be clear, the concepts of justice and fairness and measurable harm are incredibly useful, and I don't propose that we simply abandon them.  At the same time, they badly deform the conversation in ways that are literally impossible to describe.  You know the classic example of the women's march?  It starts as a bunch of women wanting to get together and show solidarity for each other, and to insist that they are important, too.  Men think that this is a fine idea, and want to join and help.  Some women object, for a large variety of reasons, some of them really well founded, some less so.  And all of a sudden, the conversation is entirely about the guys, whether or not they can march, whether or not they can be allies, etc. etc. etc.  It's an almost inescapable dynamic.  It's one of the reasons why women's-only spaces keep on cropping up. Because any time, any time, you let guys in, the conversation revolves around them, regardless of the wishes of any of the participants.  Even in venues where everyone is acting in good faith, this dynamic occurs.  Add in even just one person of bad faith, and it rapidly becomes toxic as fuck.  

Let me give you an example of how fundamental concepts like fairness don't work for women.  Think about "equal pay for equal work".  What does that even mean?  It sounds straightforward and obvious. Every guy can get his head around this.  It makes sense.  Do the work, get the dough.  How is this complicated?  Two words: mommy track.  Barring some pretty stunning bio-tech, girls are gonna be the ones to make the babies.  This is a societal good; indeed, it is a societal necessity.  Which means that women need to take several months off to gestate, give birth, and recover.  Additionally, somebody needs to take another couple of years providing intensive care for the baby human.  The child-minding job is not biologically determined, but what with one thing and another, it's usually a girl.  So, we have incredibly smart, talented women who, if they want to have kids, get sidelined from their careers.  Even three months off is a significant hit in a fast-paced professional environment, never mind two to five years.  "Equal pay for equal work" doesn't encompass this, not even close.  It doesn't help that we do not define procreation as "work."  We don't even admit that it's necessary, and it is treated as an individual choice that one should have to pay for, like a skiing holiday.  There's a loss of prestige, a loss of income, and a loss of opportunity.  And there isn't an easy fix for this.  Do we pay women and provide advancement for them as if they were working while they are home raising babies?  I don't see that as feasible, do you?  Do we societally mandate paying women good wages for procreation and child-minding?  If we do, that still moves women out of the advancement track in their field.  I mean, sure, destroy capitalism, that'll work.  (It might not, depends on what replaces it.)  But short of something utterly radical and very nearly unthinkable, there isn't a good answer for the mommy track.  Having babies is not really an economic activity, it's a biological and social imperative with huge emotional and physical burdens.  (Ok, yes, everything is economic in a sense.  We talk about the economy of honey bees, so in that sense, yes, but can you see the edges of the way that the use of the term economic warps the discussion?)  In the current context, with the current language, there isn't a "fair" alternative.  And most of the ways that we try to talk about it end up turning procreation into either an economic activity like any other job, or a hobby.  It is very much neither of these.

This is not a tangent.  It will sound like it.  In my working life, I have not noticed a gender bias in lazy grifting.  Some people just don't want to do the work, and will finagle to avoid doing as much work as possible.  Assholes gonna asshole, I guess.  The opposite, however, is gender-biased. There's the co-worker who's generally aware, not only of her own work, but of the work that is happening around her.  What other people's work styles are, what their priorities are and how their work load varies.  That person, almost always a woman, adjusts her own workflow to make sure that stuff is easier for everybody.  At my job, I tend to know if it is a good time for me to take a break, how long it takes my co-worker to make beds, where not only my own patients are, but my co-worker's patients.  I know where all the various supplies are, I know if we're low (even if I didn't use said supply recently), and so on.  I make minor adjustments to my work flow, choosing which tasks to do when, based on what makes everybody's life a little easier.  It is something men almost never, ever do.  When my work environment changed such that I was the only girl on-shift, I started coming in a little earlier, so that I could get there before my co-workers.  In part, it was to make sure that I didn't always get the worst patients and the worst wire sets.  But it was also so that I could set things up so that the rest of the night would go more smoothly.  Check on on the sleeping rooms, check in on the supply room, read the charts and make sure that the patients were well -paired so that no one has a really horrible night.  Many of the women I have worked with throughout my life, did similar things.  It's not that we're doing more work,per se.  It's that we're adjusting the work that we do do, so that everyone's environment is smoother, easier, more productive.

Here's the interesting thing:  most of this work is invisible to the guys.  I've experimented with not doing it.  What happens is that no one else does, either, and there's just a lot more grit in the gears.  Things are harder, schedules get jammed up, everything takes longer, important details fall between the cracks, things don't get ordered.  It's stressful.  And it's not, as far as I can tell, that guys are just waiting around for me to do it because I'm the girl.  As far as I can tell, they are simply, completely unaware of how the way they move through their workday creates problems or solutions for people around them.  Guys are often crap at accepting help, even when they need it, and they are terrible at offering help, even when asked for it.  And this goes beyond selfishness and arrogance, I think.  There's just a huge amount of how people rub along together that they don't think about, and quite honestly don't see.  If I do all the little things that make life easier one night, and don't do them the next, the guy will notice that the second night is more difficult, but does not appear to have a single solitary clue as to why.  It's a lot like being invisible, and having people bump into you, step on your toes, push you into walls, all without knowing it because they can't see you. 

A friend identified this as "emotional labor" and he's not wrong.  But the phrase "emotional labor" is, fundamentally a male-centered and capitalist-based view of the problem.  It points at the problem, but creates a misapprehension of what the problem actually is.  This isn't work that can be identified and remunerated.  I've been doing serious, emotional labor, both at work and in my social relationships, all my adult life. I've gotten better at it as I've gotten older. But the ROI is pretty crap.  Very rarely, someone will ask why I do the work. The question of why is actually really important, but it's generally asked in the rhetorical, as if it were one of the great mysteries of the world.  As if it were as unknowable as the mind of God.  And we're back to the impoverished language with which we are stuck.  I have done this, continue to do this, because I love the men in my life, and generally like the guys I work with.  Love, like, those word that means everything and nothing and conveys exactly nothing, here.  But there aren't better words, either.  Relationships are central to our experiences as humans, love central to our stonger bonds.  But I don't have nuanced, precise language to discuss it. I have general-purpose, close to meaningless words such as “love” and “like” and “care for”.  I have a damn good vocabulary, but the words aren't there, or don't do what I need them to do.  But I tell you true, if I and other women didn't do this kind of work, the world would be a much worse place for all of us -- and the guys would have no clue why.  There's a thing about living in communities that is fundamental to the human experience, which is also invisible to large swaths of the population.  The question of why we do this is central to the problem, but there's literally no good language to discuss it that I know of.

A lot of people like to mock what is seen as leftist pieties and jargon.  Leftists, feminists, progressives, they are people, which means they are subject to all the hypocrisies and arrogance and ignorance that all humans are.  But words like "intersectional" are not nonsense words designed to obfuscate, although like all language they can be used that way.  Instead, they are an attempt to grapple with concepts for which there are no useful words, concepts which are utterly deformed by the way our common language is designed to describe the male experience, but not the female experience, the dominant social position, but not the marginalized social positions.  All of this is brought into sharp focus, for me, in conversations about anti-harassment.  When women talk about it, they talk about how they feel, how it hurts, the way it limits them.  When they talk about solutions, they talk in complex, nuanced ways about the men they know, using specific examples, and striving for a clear taxonomy.  (No, we don't have one, yet.)  Men talk about fairness and rules and clear guidelines and specific punishments.  The problems are contextual, systemic, emotional, and the solutions are neither clear not clean.  The solutions involve relationships, interactions, iterative decision-making.  They are community-specific.  The very idea of fairness, when introduced into this realm, rapidly deforms the whole conversation very  much like the conversations about whether men can march in the Take Back the Night marches.  The conversation shifts into a paradigm that really doesn't work.  And yet, women strive, patiently, to construct narratives and rules and guidelines that meet some abstract idea of clarity and fairness, in a world that is fundamentally built on inequity and unfairness.  The ground on which we meet, men and women, is not level.  So when guys, from a great height, try to insist that we provide for them a level playing field, it is completely reasonable to rage or to mock.  What you want is not possible.  You do not meet us as equals.  Justice, fairness, rules, all these things assume a level of equality, or the possibility of equality, that simply does not exist at any point in a woman's life.  And so when faced with demands for these things, of course we kick against it.  Just as many people don't see the constant micro-adjustments that people make to create less friction, they don't see the fundamental inequity of demanding fairness.  I think that pretty much everyone wishes we could use those metrics, it would be so much easier.  But it doesn't work. 

Another really important thing to understand, here, is that when people mock the language being used by feminists, LGBTQ, and other marginalized groups, they are not mocking the vocabulary, they are mocking the experiences of people trying to talk about their lives.  There really, really aren't words to talk about how we move in the world, and so we are building that vocabulary.  And, yes, we make mistakes, and yes, sometimes those words are deployed in ways that aren't helpful.  But when someone mocks those words, what they are saying is that the only experiences that matter are theirs, that they get to define what is real and important and valuable, and that by extension, my life and my experiences are not real, not important, that I am not valuable.  It really doesn't matter that they only intended to mock my language.  What they do is mock me.  And it hurts so much.  And it hurts again that they can't see that they are hurting me. There are ways in which the invisibility of my pain, of the pain of so many women, is uniquely horrible. Imagine standing on a busy street corner, streaming with blood, and having every passer-by look away. Or worse, jostle against you, as if you weren't there. There are a lot of pieces of identity and experience that I do not understand, a lot of the language that I don't get, either.  But people need to stop mocking and start listening, because we are all here SHOUTING.

In the end, I am so tired.  I am so tired of everything I do and say on the topic of harassment, being recast into a framework that doesn't actually reflect my lived experience.   Here are some things about harassment that people need to understand.  The actual harassment is frequently weird and gross and embarrassing.  That means that talking about it is weird and gross and embarrassing.  Which means it's just plain hard to talk about.  It's even more difficult and embarrassing to provide specificity.  Also, that kind of information is frequently weaponized.  There's a huge loss of privacy when a target admits that they were hurt by being called a particular name, or when they admit that a particular physical action was performed upon them.  It's like admitting in public to having done something very embarrassing, even though it was done to us, and not by us. It's still bloody embarrassing. And whatever the issue, there's always someone there to insist that it didn't happen, or if it did happen, it wasn't that bad, or if it was that bad, she deserved it anyway.  Transparency will (not may, will) cause additional aggression against the target.  There are a lot of reasons why women don't come forward when they are abused, but one of the big ones is that when they do so, they know that this will be the proximate cause of additional, targeted abuse.

When we think about fairness and justice, we tend to think in a framework which assumes that harm is easy to understand and assess.  Harassment doesn't work that way.  The harm is not clear-cut.  It's the harm of terrorism, not of robbery.  The effect isn't to steal a specific thing, it is to create fear and circumscribe people's choices.  And it exists in a matrix where women's experiences are denied, devalued, or mocked.  Which means that those actions have a force-multiplier which will be variable depending on the target's previous experience.  In so many ways, the specific action cannot be assessed in isolation.  At which point most men-people will start to talk about how this isn't fair, and that you can't write rules that way.  And yep, yep, yep, it ain't fair, and the rules don't work, and hi, didn't I say that at the beginning?  Am I not saying that now?  Harassment is the tip of the iceberg of inequity that women live with all the time, and attempts to deal with it necessarily touch on a lot of systemic issues in ways that are not clear, clean, and discrete.  It's not a clear, clean, discrete problem.  It is the messy problem of living with people, having relationships, and having to continue to have relationships with people who mistreat you. 

I do not want to burn the world to the ground.  I do not want to harm the men in my life.  (Well, not most of them.  There are a couple notable exceptions.  Moving right along.)  I wouldn't mind smashing the patriarchy and destroying capitalism, but I don't expect that work to be done in my lifetime.  But it doesn't seem impossible make progress. To get men to see women more clearly, to get people to see the other people in their lives in context, rather than trying to force those people into worlds and words where they don't exist. To develop a better vocabulary to discuss this.  I want the men who love me to see where I stand in the world, to see the ways in which, when we move in the same space, I tend to yield and they tend to prevail.  I hope for the revolution, but in the mean time, I'd just like some fucking burden-sharing.  For all my life, every time a social interaction has gone wrong, it is the woman who is held responsible for the failure.  I am asking that men step up, and see that for what it is: bullshit. 

One last thing: some of this is applicable to other marginalized identities.  Some of it is not.  As a cis (mostly) het white girl, I am hesitant to speak for other people carrying their own burdens.  I want to call out this, because it might seem that I'm ignoring those issues.  I'm not, I just don't think I understand them well enough to write about them coherently. But I am listening.  You should start listening.

Comments

[lydy]

I very much want to chat with you about this. It's very interesting that the pieces of the brain that understand meaning and the pieces of the brain that attempt to communicate that meaning are roughly the same, and that you get cognitive jams. At least, i think that's what you're saying. Any gate, when you're free and not running a fever.