8:44am July 19, 2012

Liberal Feminist Problems

liberalfeministproblems:

#113: When you find the concept “Misogyny Recipient Privilege” appalling, but can’t say a thing to offend your trans overlords.

I don’t think that ‘trans overlords’ is exactly an accurate view of the world, but I find the idea that someone actually came up with something called ‘misogyny recipient privilege’ as a PRIVILEGE absolutely abhorrent.

Nobody does believe in it. The term was made up in a satirical context:

“It’s not a privilege. That was dark humour, which I guess doesn’t play well out of context. It was a riff off the more commonly used “passing privilege”, with the intention of indicating that being treated as a woman isn’t really a privilege. Misogyny is vile and being on the end of it is horrific. So it’s clearly not a privilege. I was using it in the same way someone might say sarcastically, “Yey. Getting punched in the head privilege.” I thought that was obvious in the phrase, but these conversations are so broken that it looks like something didn’t communicate very well.” (From this post..)

There’s a disturbing pattern I’m seeing on tumblr in general lately. Well, really ever since I got here. And that is that someone will invent an idea as satire or hyperbole. Or worse, a troll will invent it to cause trouble. And an uproar will happen from people who rightly see the idea as ridiculous and offensive. But those people won’t stop and figure out whether anyone actually believes in it or not. Then rifts form, or existing rifts deepen. And then by the time anyone figures out what happened, the damage has been done.

(Like with the troll-invented idea of transethnicity. Where practice identity was created by trolls, the major people claiming it were trolls, and if anyone else claimed it at all, it would have been a teeny number of very screwed up people. But the trolls managed to convince people they were a whole movement – and deliberately entangled their fake identity with actual legitimate identities that have nothing to do with ethnicity, just so they could get their lulz about making more people hate people who are already hated. And that hate still remains so the trolls are happy.)

The moral being: Really check into things when you hear of an outrageously offensive idea or identity. Often enough, it will be real, given the world we live in. But also often enough, it was either hyperbole/satire to begin with, or trolls are trying to fuck with you. In both instances, believing its real can do serious damage to people and communities. I know it’s not always possible to tell either way, especially with the things people really do believe. But it’s still worth checking into.

Even here, we don’t know who submitted this or what their agenda, if any, was. Maybe they really believed trans people believed in this, and had disgusting prejudices against trans people. But it’s also possible they knew nobody believed it and were trying to inflame feminists against trans people. It’s impossible to know for sure, but it pays to be careful. I was able to figure out it wasn’t real with a short Google search – a search I made because it sounded all wrong.

ETA: Another scenario I found really odd, that was neither satire nor trolling. Was when someone basically said “What will they think of next, [THING X] privilege?” And a week later, she began frequently describing “[THING X] privilege” as something she had literally seen people talking about. And yet the only time that phrase, or anything remotely like it, came up in a Google search, was that first what will they think of next post. And then from there, that phrase became used by a lot of people as proof that the idea of certain kinds of privilege had gone too far. Except nobody but that first woman had ever come even close to using the phrase, and she was now acting as if she’d seen it. I never could figure that one out so I just kept my distance.

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