Links of Great Interest: Bleeeeeergh

The Benevolent Sexism article is awesome – it’ll be a handy term for explaining why positive stereotypes are not better than negative ones, and how we’re not just “overreacting”. But it goes one step further and explains exactly where we’re at on the social justice front right now:

While “old fashioned” forms of discrimination may have died down quite a bit (after all, it really isn’t quite as socially acceptable in most areas of the world to be as explicitly sexist and/or racist as people have been in the past), more “benevolent” forms of discrimination still very much exist, and they have their own sneaky ways of suppressing equality. Unaffected bystanders (or perpetrators) may construe benevolently sexist sentiments as harmless or even beneficial; in fact, as demonstrated by Becker and Wright, targets may even feel better about themselves after exposure to benevolently sexist statements. This could be, in some ways, even worse than explicit, hostile discrimination; because it hides under the guise of compliments, it’s easy to use benevolent sexism to demotivate people against collective action or convince people that there is no longer a need to fight for equality.

It took Susan Faludi several chapters to distill this then-unfamiliar concept in Backlash. Now they’ve whittled it down to a near-soundbyte, so actual comprehension may start any minute now.

I almost didn’t read the one about reality TV, but then it grabbed me, and it made me cry. I wish Bravo had had the courage to NOT keep the abuse off screen. I know, legal considerations, felonies on film – it’s certainly not their fault alone. We have this whole system that protects predators, and it pisses me the hell off.

Not being a Potter fan, I’ve never really paid attention to Radcliffe one way or another, but good for him! We have this really screwy way of thinking: the richer someone is, the more perks/freebies we give them.

I’ll reserve my “yay California” for when they actually get this thing struck down completely, once and for all, and there’s no higher court for it to go to. And that’s going to be the US Supreme Court, I think, and I just don’t know how that will go. I think legally Prop 8 is on awfully shaky ground, and the appeals court has it right. But some of the current justices on SCOTUS don’t seem to know the law as well as your cousin that used to stick Boston baked beans up his nose.

I have nothing to add about Emily McCombs. Except I’m just thrilled she’s been able to process this and get to the point where she could deal with her attacker as she did. This, sadly, is not such an unusual situation – date rapists seem to commonly assume rape is a normal part of dating, and that the relationship is healthy, and aren’t things going well and when’s the next date.

The father’s response to his daughter’s Facebook is, um, wow, and the commenters are too stupid to live. He’s not punishing her for being ungrateful. He’s punishing her for venting to her friends, which is, hello, something teens do. Clearly, he’s more disturbed about the public nature of it – about her connecting with people outside the family and maybe getting some support – than he is with her behavior. And the “cleaning lady” definitely sounds like something the IRS and Social Security Admin might like to hear about, unless he’s declaring the value of her services.

Here’s what I don’t get. So many parents genuinely seem to think they have no responsibility whatsoever for how their kids turn out. Like, the kids were a product from a factory, and who can guess why they’re malfunctioning. Contrast that attitude with this person criticizing the laptop shooting father:

http://mandyray.blogspot.com/2012/02/dear-dad-who-shot-his-daughters-laptop.html

If I’d found out that my child had posted something so bold and upsetting on the internet, I would have reacted much differently.

First of all, I would have looked at myself to try and figure out why he or she was so angry and felt the need to use so much profanity and so much loaded language. Usually, our children are a reflection of us, their parents.

The last sentence is really important. People complain about kids not being responsible, but they don’t want to hold parents even partly responsible for how kids turn out.

The girl’s FB post didn’t strike me as all that bad – hearing it alone, I’d give even odds whether she has a real complaint or is just venting because some of her friends don’t have to do chores. It was *entirely the father’s behavior* in the video (and in making the vid) that convinced me there’s something very wrong in this girl’s household.

The linked blogger goes on to say that just being locked out of your child’s Facebook ought to be a sign that there are trust issues, and it’s up to the adult in the situation to fix them. Ya think?

Again, not condemning parents who honestly just don’t know what to do for their teens and maybe make mistakes. It happens to the best intentioned parents. But the best intentioned parents do not make huge public issues out of a Facebook entry and shoot laptops. That’s reactionary ego-centrism, not “I’ve carefully thought what would be best to do for my kid in this case, since I want her to turn out responsible and good, and this is what I came up with.”

Spartakos: I mean, Jesus Christ, “hey, I’m really super sorry and would never have done it if I could go back…but I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong!”

You know how I read it? I thought he was saying he really didn’t realize he’d done anything wrong in the moral or criminal sense, but that now he realized he’d hurt her feelings, and he was sorry about that. Wow, what a Nice Guy.

The saddest part, though? Is that he could be sincere. As I described last week, most of the rapists who do not lack empathy are going to be participants in a gang rape, most likely when they’re young and less experienced about life in general, and bonus points if the victim is on drugs of any sort, since most of the world seems to believe that makes her fair game for whoever wants her, anyway. Let’s face it: a lot of people would victim blame her for this. She blamed herself for years. If his attitude toward what he did wasn’t shared by anyone else, this would be a very, very different story.

Azzy,

Great point, and I have a feeling it’s reliable. I make an interesting case study, because I had an abusive father and a wonderful mother. My father thought I was an ingrate, and said so often. When I asked him what I was supposed to be grateful for, he couldn’t come up with anything, so he decided I should be grateful he wasn’t a drunk. I shrugged and said – purely to illustrate the absurdity of what he was saying – he should be grateful I hadn’t ever stabbed him in his sleep.

Interestingly, my mother never commented on my gratitude one way or another. I have tons of things to be grateful to her for, and grateful I am. Very, very grateful. In fact, you can all be grateful – this site emerged very much from her critical assessments of the TV and media we watched together when I was a kid, and her helping me overcome my youthful tendency to hold women *more* responsible for our part in perpetuating sexism than I held men.

eldritchMortician,

I think authoritarianism may be the reason. The Milgram experiment indicates most people tend to assume people in authority must be correct and should be obeyed – as if no bad leaders have ever existed repeatedly since the beginning of time, LOL. And then there’s emerging research into right wing authoritarianism (not referring to right wing politics, though there happens to be much overlap).

The basic idea seems to be that most people either assume authority is always deserved, which is not based on either sense or knowledge of history, or they would rather not be responsible for decisions, so they always yield their decision making to an authority figure and rationalize it in a social Darwinist sort of way. (I vote for the latter.)

Therefore, until confronted with (for example) video of Hilary Adams’ father beating the shit out of her for seven minutes, most people would never even consider that the child could be right, because that would violate their belief that authority is always right. Confronted with the film, many people still maintained the father was right.

What frightens me about authoritarianism in humans is that AFAIK, we don’t see this attitude in other animals. Assuming our research is at all correct and well-interpreted, it seems animals realize the leader can be fallible, and they challenge each other for leadership fairly routinely. And honestly, many humans seem to understand this too. I’m interested in the research which suggests it may be a personality trait, because I’m thinking it’s a personality trait that’s not compatible with the continued survival of the species. Some people seem completely content to play follow the leader right off a cliff, and I’d just as soon not get dragged along with them.

One more thing: is there any way to keep someone from reading a FB post other than locking it to friends only and not putting that person on your friends list? That’s all I know of. If so, then she wasn’t really doing this publicly – she was ranting to her friends, and that is something teens do, or at least should be able to do.

Sabrina: This is a man who consciously decided he’d destroy any sense of safety and trust between him and his daughter (or at least whatever might have been left after whatever form of abuse he might have shown earlier). I just can’t wrap my head around this.

I know you weren’t asking, but for the benefit of the audience at home: I don’t think he ever wanted her to HAVE any sense of safety and trust. Some people feel absolutely entitled to violate others’ boundaries anytime and in any way they like. The only reason they sometimes don’t is because they think they’ll be caught and disapproved of. In this case, he rightly calculated that society would approve. It’s entirely possible he was less affronted by this than he was thrilled to have an excuse to violate his daughter’s boundaries.

And the violation of boundaries is DESIGNED to make you feel you have no privacy, you can’t escape, you exist only as an extension of his reality. Because that’s certainly how HE sees it, and it would suit him best if you saw it the same way.

It’s a mindfuck extraordinaire.