#philosorants

CW: ranting about sexism, mention of r*pe culture, descriptions of men abusing power, mentions of #metoo,

There is a trend of men who are often 'woke', feminist, and well-educated, but who will also always consider themselves as exceptions to the rule.

For example: - The activist who interrupts and talks over women to talk about feminism. - The gender studies academic who doesn’t think it’s an abuse of power to sleep with his students. - The feminist who talks about the importance of sharing domestic labour but doesn’t practice it. - The sex-positive guy who’ll find excuses to push touch boundaries. - The leftie friend who treats women as emotional weight bearers and doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. - The good boyfriend who doesn’t know how to be friends with other women and ends up objectifying or ignoring them. - The chill guy who doesn’t think his mate is really as bad as what women say about him, cuz he’s a good bloke who just isn’t like that.

If you feel personally accused by these descriptions, or that it hits close to home, then I’d like us to take a moment to process this, because it’s important to have this discussion move towards looking at it as a systemic problem. Depressingly, yes, I probably know at least a couple of people who would fit into each description above, but it’s not a problem of thinking it as if they are ‘bad eggs’. I’m sure everyone knows some - if not all - of these types of ‘good’ feminist men. That’s the point.

All men fuck up, yes even the ‘good ones’ #yesallmen, because everyone fucks up.

Learning to apologise is an important skill for the times after we fuck up, and the first step is to practice trying not to be defensive, which is really hard but something that can be unlearnt with some effort. But if someone is taking the time and energy to say something, maybe something about how you’ve hurt them and opening up and being vulnerable about this, it’s probably because they care and believe that you can do better (which I think is a rather nice thing, and that its productive to not think of ourselves as stable beings but as people who are in processes of becoming~ H/T simone de beauvoir~).

There’s a bunch of resources online about how to apologise well. There’s many ways and approaches to apologise, but here’s 5 steps published in a psychology journal (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A%3A1025068306386):

“These five strategies are

[1] an illocutionary force indicating device (IFID; such as, "I'm sorry," "I apologize," or "Excuse me"),

[2] an explanation or account of the cause which brought about the violation,

[3] an expression of the speaker's responsibility for the offense,

[4] an offer of repair,

[5] and a promise of forbearance.”

Something I would like to add here is that there are political implications at play in these dynamics. Women are pressured and assumed to be the ones who must fix relational tensions (c.f. my honours thesis, 2016). Men who perform defensively, who do not show a desire to listen, and who have not taken the time to learn to apologise well, are continuing to force women to perform as healers. In this gendered dynamic, not only has the man hurt the woman, the onus is always on the woman to repair the hurt the man has inflicted on her.

I've seen feminist people rationalise how it’s okay to pick and choose between when and where they will listen and dismiss women, like tuning in and out of radio stations. But if we've learnt anything this past year is that we should be \ \ \ LISTENING TO WOMEN / / /

The #metoo movement was people sharing their personal stories and exerting huge amounts of emotional labour en masse to educate people. #Metoo allowed those who didn’t think it was ‘as bad as it was’, the privilege of a lens into people’s deeply vulnerable and traumatic experiences, so that we all might understand something about how the patriarchy and rape culture works.

I presented three papers at the most recent DiGRA conference in Dundee. I’m an honours student (in Australia it’s an additional year on top of an undergraduate degree, which can work in lieu of a Masters so as to go straight into a PhD program) and this was my first international conference. Before DiGRA, I had already presented at four other Australian conferences (I’ve now presented nine papers since my first in July 2015). I know I’m young in academia, but I do work very hard and I’m not completely inexperienced as my age and qualifications might suggest ~(￣▽￣)

My work and what I care about usually revolves around looking at identity politics in regards to gaming and gaming culture guided by an intersectional feminist sensibility. My training is in philosophy, so I’m most comfortable with argumentative and theoretically heavy work. But I’ve spent the last year trying to unravel these tendencies, so as to shape a more inclusive trajectory of research. I’ve extended myself from my arm-chair ponderings into ethnography, and experimented with my writing to garner a more diverse reading audience. Diversity work is not an intellectual exercise and I see academic traditions as often inhibiting to these objectives. I don’t mean that we all should popularise academic research, but that it’s important to note that sometimes we are limiting ourselves in problematic ways if we only consider the white and masculine institutionalised understandings of ‘rigour’ as the be all and end all of what constitutes ‘good academic work’.

People often comment on my very personal style of writing and some have described it as ‘gonzo’, honest and vulnerable, or as a sort of pilgrimage. I’m happy to use any academic terminology as long as I can get my point across - I guess it’s the philosophy in my blood which compels my work to exist as a conversation which encourages engagement, rather than exist as a static historical artifact.

Every philosophy student at one point studies epistemology, and so I’ve had the privilege of being trained to think about the limitations of ‘objectivity’ (I align with the school of thought that there are ‘degrees of truth’), but the point I would like to draw here is the superficial dichotomy of ‘objective’ against ‘emotional’ and tensions of ‘truth’. Women (http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/emergency-room-wait-times-sexism/410515/), people of colour (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/08/stereotype-angry-black-girls-racial) and feminists (http://www.bustle.com/articles/143248-to-the-men-who-call-me-an-angry-feminist-heres-why-you-need-to-stop) and their experiences of pain and mistreatment are consistently dismissed as being ‘overly emotional’. It’s such a common reaction that there’s even a term for people telling women and POC’s to be ‘less emotional’: ‘tone policing’ (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Tone_argument).

I am particularly tired of being told to make my work ‘more theoretical’ (trust me, the theory is always there, even if I’ve chosen to make it unpronounced so as to focus on something more important). I realise there’s meant to be a role of ‘guiding’ a younger academic to improve her work - but these ‘make it more rigorous’ suggestions are extremely unhelpful and upholds institutionalised whiteness and hegemonic masculinity. Like suggestions of ‘more nuance’ (https://kieranhealy.org/files/papers/fuck-nuance.pdf < I really love this paper), ‘more rigour’ works on the cross-section of ‘connoisseur’ elitism and restrictive ideas of ‘knowledge production’. ‘More rigour’ can be asked by anyone regardless of the quality or style of research in question - you can always ask someone to be ‘more rigorous’. ‘More rigour’ is a positioning of a senior to dominate a lesser scholar - it acts to serve nothing but to establish a violent power dynamic. As women and POCs are already socially dismissed as incapable of ‘being objective’ from being ‘overly emotional’, I observe the ‘more theory, nuance and rigour’ criticisms as another form of discouraging and policing women and people of colour in academia.

So, I presented a paper at DiGRA about Vivian James (Gamergate’s avatar) co-authored with my supervisor. I had been terrified to present this, since I am fully aware of the reaction Gamergate has had to women, feminism, and to criticisms made against their ‘movement’. So I went into this knowing I was going to step on some big angry toes. Furthermore, being a WOC feminist games studies scholar meant that I would eventually pop up on Gamergate’s radar. Depressingly, being a target was inevitable (after briefly uploading the paper, it was dogpiled by Gamergaters: http://imgur.com/a/TB5nP).

It was the second paper I had to present at DiGRA, back-to-back, without caffeine and wicked jet lag. During question time, a well-established feminist scholar suggested to add ‘more theory’ so as to give the paper ‘more substance’. Exhausted (physically and emotionally), all I could muster was a firm ‘thank you’. I’m not hostile towards constructive criticism - I welcome it (as seen in how much I value making my work ‘engaging’). But I was a little shocked that someone who promotes feminist game studies glossed over the fact that she was talking down to a young woman of colour presenting a paper criticising Gamergate. I felt the months of affective labour of preparing for a Gamergate paper reduced into merely being another ‘intellectual exercise’ of academia. 

Moreover, relying extensively on theory is only one approach to feminism. One of my favourite scholars once said that she was excited to see us in game studies moving beyond ‘the feminist paper’ and how young scholars were integrating feminism as simply second nature. Producing feminist work doesn’t always have to be reliant on feminist theory - it boxes in the work feminism aims to do, by maintaining a singular (rather white and classist) ideal of feminism.

We are well aware of the toxic masculinity of gaming and the devaluing of feminist work by wider academia (https://mvlindsey.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/journal-of-broadcasting-media-chess-shaw-2015.pdf). Those who want to make game studies a welcoming space for diverse voices need to be more thoughtful and reflexive of the institutionalised racism and sexism structuring academic practices. New and diverse voices need to be given the room to explore what it means to be ‘new’ and ‘diverse’ - they immediately stop being ‘new’ and ‘diverse’ voices when they are required to be indoctrinated into traditional and hegemonic styles of knowledge production.

I’ve seen a video float around Facebook from a segment by The Project about bigotry stemming from fearfulness. Instead of being angry when someone says a racist comment, the video calls for us to stop perpetuating the cycle of fear by being empathetic to bigots. It sounds nice and frames it in a way that makes us the ‘more tolerant ones’. But if we step back for a moment, there is really no justification for hate speech, discrimination or any form of abuse. It’s not hard to understand that someone is acting out of fear when they are violent or racist, but how does it make that act okay?

Perpetrators of hate speech already hold a false sense of victimhood which is self-imposed and self-serving. People who are asking for the deportation or internment of a group of people may be ‘scared’, but of what? It’s a position of privilege to feel that you are available to have those kinds of options of safety where you have the power to remove or incarcerate someone for their race or religion. Victims of discrimination do not have that luxury - you are always ‘coloured’. Being tolerant towards acts of hate and hate speech, because we assume that those people are simply ‘afraid’, problematically glosses over institutional and systemic racism.

Victims have consistently been told to ‘forgive’ their abusers, but it should never be asked of the victim to forgive and forget. Especially when the person who performed the hate has not asked for it themselves.

Victims have always been forced into the role of ‘the tolerant educator’, but this returns the burden of maintaining safety onto the victim. Asking someone who is on fire ‘how can I do better?’ doesn’t elevate the pain and is incredibly draining (although most people who perform hate speech are not interested in helping the people they are discriminating against and are often unapologetic).

Calling out people who say terrible things and hold terrible opinions is important. This is the thing I most appreciate from my friends - otherwise I’m forced to maintain my own safety alone.