Sexism

5 Apr 2016

Oppression – You Keep Using That Word, but it Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

Teachwell Gender, Political Parties Feminism, Prejudice, Sexism, University 0

Am I the only one tired of hearing the word “oppression” being thrown around like confetti? It was inevitable that there would be a cry of oppression in response to @oldandrew’s post yesterday (‘Is promoting women really the issue?’). In the age of the social justice warrior, how much one is a “victim of oppression” corresponds with one’s self-worth.

What is oppression though?

Definition (s):

Prolonged cruel or unjust treatment or exercise of authority.

The state of being subject to oppressive treatment

Mental pressure or distress

(Source: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/oppression)

According to the Geneva Convention, cruel treatment includes: torture, humiliating and degrading treatment, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health. Humiliating and degrading treatment includes lack of food, water or medical treatment. The idea that anything other than a tiny minority of women in this country are facing oppression on a daily basis is preposterous. While there are women who are the victims of domestic violence, assault and rape, the idea that all women are oppressed because of it is the worst kind of bandwagon jumping I can think of. Neither are the majority of women subjected to anything like cruel treatment day in day out like they are elsewhere.

Spare me the lecture too, I witnessed domestic abuse as a child and don’t think the genuine suffering of those women should be hijacked by a group of virtue signalers. Neither am I going to waste my time trying to trick myself into believing that I have it just as bad or worse than women in the past. I actually do have better things to do than twist reality so that I can throw myself a pity party.

We live in a society where legally no one is allowed to rape anyone else. I can already hear the “but the system is not perfect” being thrown back at me via the computer screen in a high pitched shriek of social justice warrior anger. I have some sympathy for that. However, the idea that any system can be perfect is part of the problem with the exaggeristas among us. They really do believe that there exists a utopia where there is no rape, no domestic violence, etc. As much as I hate to admit it, there is no cure for any of those things. The best we can do is ensure there are no legal loopholes, that victims know they can go to the police and that the justice system works effectively and is held to account for any poor judgements by the press. We can reduce but not eliminate the issue entirely.

Most change is slow and incremental but it is happening, and great gains have been made. A hundred years ago, I doubt many women would have reported a rape to the police, much less expect the rapist to be sentenced. Chances of being packed off to an asylum would have put off many.

What do most women in the Britain face? Some, and I do mean some, women face discrimination in their lives or at work. Not all, not all to the same extent and not all for the same reasons. Each generation faces its own challenges and has to meet these. It is narcissism of the worst kind to think that all human beings who lived before oneself should have figured out every problem so one can live in a utopian dream.

As for the third definition – mental pressure and distress – well the only distress I can see from those who claim oppression is the one they are causing by tying themselves in knots trying to prove they are oppressed in the first place.

The meaning of a word does matter and if we want to be taken seriously then let’s use the correct words and not words that sound dramatic. If your cause is just it doesn’t require you to exaggerate the nature of it.

This post was originally published on the Labour Teachers website.

29 Dec 2015

Epiphany

Teachwell Humanity Philosophy, Prejudice, Racism, Sexism 5

The word epiphany has many definitions. However, this one explains my experience of an epiphany the best:

“a moment when you suddenly feel that you understand, or suddenly become conscious of, something that is very important to you.”

Source: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/epiphany

At the age of 32, I finally realised that I was a human being, I really would be dead one day, and if I carried on the way I had, I would have wasted my life focusing excessively on the negative. Better late than never.

I had just split with my partner of 4 years due to his infidelity. Upsetting as this was, what was truly shocking was his belief that I would stay in the relationship. He had convinced himself that even if I found out, he could blame me, I would accept it, and then I would not leave him.

It was simple – he knew I wanted to get married and have children. Leaving him would mean little chance that this would happen in my early 30s (in my mind a cut-off point before both were going to be much more challenging and unlikely). The shock of him telling me this caused a crisis in me which was two-fold:

a) Was it true that I wanted to go down the marriage, house, children route at any cost?

b) If none of these were to be part of my life, then what?

I knew instinctively that a) was not entirely true. After all, I had left an emotionally abusive husband eight years earlier precisely because I could not continue and have children with him.

As for b), it seemed that I had no answer. All I could feel was a sense of sadness at the idea of a potentially empty life ahead of me.

Then I saw it. A picture of myself, aged 20, lying on a hammock pretending to look unhappy (it was the rage among my friends in Italy for some reason). It hit me that while I had faked it for the picture, I had never really been happy.

When I started to think about why, I realised that I pushed away anything positive or downplayed it while at the same time I accepted the negative without question, letting it take over. I could never let things go, problems were never resolved, and I hung onto negative experiences and churned over them endlessly without resolution. I was an ongoing victim of every negative interaction and experience, each one adding to the previous one.

So for the first time, I thought about all the advice I had been given and what it meant. I started to see that my whole life up to that point was not an unmitigated disaster. I realised that I was drowning in a sea of assumptions. So I started to examine them one by one.

2729231119_3fb0c01532

“Power, Beauty, Soul” by Ged Carroll is licensed under CC BY 2.0

‘I am ugly’ was one.

Who was telling me that? Why did I accept the opinions of people who didn’t think I was attractive and yet reject the ones who did? Was it true that people are objectively beautiful or ugly? What about those who are closer to some societal ideal of beauty? Did they all have happy, fulfilled lives where everything went well? What about my friends who I considered to be attractive – were they all settled, happy and without a care in the world?

Slowly but surely I was able to think about this issue and realise just how much BS I was telling myself.

I was a perfectionist. I wanted it to be objectively agreed that I was either attractive or ugly. I wanted fact and objectivity when in reality the best anyone could give me was a subjective opinion. Even this was affected by the timing of my existence in this society at this point.

I had never thought about how I should look to feel happy in myself. What did I want to wear? What made me happy? What did I want to look like? Why did I want to look a certain way? Was that realistic?

I started to separate out where my thoughts and ideas were coming from.

Organisations, Society, The World: I was allowing magazines and general ideas of beauty and attractiveness to affect me inordinately. So to what extent did I have to act on it? What did I need to do? Did I have to buy into the ideas out there? Who was making me and why? I understood the maxim of ‘accept what you can’t change and change what you can’t accept.’ I couldn’t change the entire media, but I didn’t have to accept their ideas and standards. I just stopped buying any magazines that reinforced negative ideas that made me unhappy. Why go there? Was that going to change the magazines? No of course not but then did I care enough to campaign for diversity in print in the era of the internet?

No one person is going to change everything they think is wrong in society. So I accepted that not everything was of equal importance to me and neither did it need to be. Personally making a stand on the CPD teachers at my school were receiving (which I have blogged about before) was of far more importance to me, particularly since it was evident there was widespread discrimination involved.

Other people: I stopped being so dependent on the opinions of others. I stopped seeking their approval all the time. If they felt the need to say something, I listened and took it on board to the extent that it was useful. There was no compulsion on me to agree with others or for them to try to alleviate my insecurities. In terms of the latter, I had spent most of my life assuming that others knew better and that they had been let into the secret of how to live a happy life which I had not. It seems a crazy thing to think now, but at the time, I was convinced that I was missing something. The more responsibility I took for myself, the less I expected from others and the healthier my relationships became. I couldn’t do anything about people who were unhappy, insecure or toxic. At the end of the day, I wasn’t responsible for them.

Me: The more I separated out what messages and ideas I was getting and where from, the more I realised how negative I was towards myself. While I had no control over society or other people, I did have control over myself. I needed, to be honest with myself, and that meant accepting both good and bad for what it was. I was able to be pleased about what was going right in my life and deal with what was going wrong. A friend described the experience beautifully:

‘Confidence is just a change in the way you view the world. In the past, you shone the light on the world and saw just the negative, and now you have shifted where you shine the light and can see both positive and negative.’

3000614550_6df6cae9e0_b

“Sunshaft” by Ruth Hartnup is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Letting go of perfectionist ideas was the best thing I could have done. Being imperfect was part of the human condition, it always had been, and it always would be. As I grew surer of my moral compass, I could see that perfection was not about right or wrong. I also realised that I could seek solutions to my problems from others. There were billions of people who had lived in the past and now. How had they dealt with the same issues positively?

I realised the best I could do was try to do the right thing insofar as I knew and understood it. If I did the wrong thing, I tried my best to make amends (not that it was always possible), learn from it and move on. I stopped dwelling on things so much because I dealt with them. I had a plan of action. I would seek solutions to the problems as best I could. That meant that there wasn’t this constant piling up of negative experiences.

It wasn’t just the superficial I questioned and challenged my thinking on. It was everything, and one thing led to another. The more I challenged my thinking, the more I understood who I was. The more I did so, the more I could see what was me, what was other people, what was wider society or the world. It is the separating of each and making decisions about what I could do about each circumstance that has enabled me to gain confidence. Instead of looking outside of myself, I looked to myself first.

I am acutely aware of the fact that like all individuals I don’t have a great deal of power other than over myself. To relinquish this to others or society when one has a choice is to be a victim by choice.

21 Dec 2015

Being Human

Teachwell Gender, Humanity, Race Feminism, Prejudice, Racism, Sexism 10

Human beings are funny things, they really are. Despite the fact that we are all equally human, we seem to love inequality. We have created stratified societies; we have created divisions based on religion, colour of people’s skin, height, weight, language, etc. These differences exist but variations are just that, variations. The meaning we choose to attach to these differences is within our power, how we let it affect our interactions with other human beings is too.

Let’s get one thing straight here. As humans we are capable of both the good and the bad that other humans are capable of:

Courage or cowardice,

Bravery or bullshit

Heroics or hate,

Determination or despair,

Altruism or arrogance,

Insight or ignorance,

And so on and so forth.

No one group of humans has a monopoly on the better traits and no one group is immune to the bad ones. Reality provides the greatest evidence of this.

If you choose to classify yourself based on one of the parts of your whole being because you think it means you will or can only be associated with positive traits, if you wish to tell yourself this lie, then so be it.

But the downside is that if you choose to elevate these parts and give them greater importance than being a human, then you are dehumanising yourself. You are doing it to yourself, not others, not society, not the people who oppose you. That doesn’t mean some people are not trying but it is you who are letting them succeed.

So I won’t be joining the PoC brigade who insist I elevate the colour of my skin or the feminists who insist I elevate my gender above being a human being. Because while I have no choice but to be a human being, with both positive and negative traits and habits, I do have a choice whether I reduce myself to what is simply one part of the whole. Intersectionality be damned.

I will not support those who share the same skin colour and accept their word as gospel when they preach racism, hatred and manufacture history to suit their purposes, justifying it on the past actions of others. Because acting and behaving like the people who wronged ones ancestors is to disregard their experiences and suffering, not understand them or what they went through.

I will not support those who share my gender, who advocate discrimination and unfair treatment simply to sustain their grip on power. Who choose to undermine the greater cause of equal treatment just to corruptly prop themselves up in their petty fiefdoms and accuse those who oppose them of being sexist. I will not support their attempts to avoid criticism nor support the idea that they should not be scrutinised for some of the wrongs they have committed.

I hear much of the lenses of race and gender, and yet, no mention of the lens of humanity, which sees no less injustice or prejudice but demands that you fight these within and outside of yourself.

But it is a hard lens to look through. It exposes one’s hypocrisy; it highlights the contradictions in one’s arguments and ideas. It is unrelenting in demanding that one sees one’s flaws and inhumanity, and so I can see the reason for gazing through other, less judgemental, more flattering lenses.

Yet to view the world through the lens of race is to be racist and to view it through the lens of gender is to be sexist.

It is to replicate the very circumstances that led to the misery of so many millions of humans in the past. It is to ignore the basis of their suffering but use the fact that it existed to cloak one’s prejudices. It is to repeat, deliberately, the injustices of the past in new forms, based on new criteria. It is to reproduce the circumstances that led to gross injustice and inequality and justify inflicting them on a different set of victims, on behalf of those who sought an end to these ideas and practices.

It undermines and denies the very humanity that binds us and thus dehumanises us all.