People say: “Don’t get so upset. Don’t take others’ politics or beliefs so personally.” I’ve been trying to put my finger on why this is so hard for me to accept.
Most of the time, I am happy to live and let live with everybody, even when I disagree fiercely with their beliefs.
But some people whom I otherwise like and try to respect intend to vote for politicians who specifically want to deny fundamental rights to me and to others I love.
By supporting the GOP’s inhumane policies against women and gays, you are telling me clearly that you value me and my gay friends less than you value straight men.
“When you judge someone, it doesn’t define the person you’re judging – it defines you.”
Tulisa Contostavlos (story in The Guardian)
A few months ago I had a Twitter exchange with a woman in the tech industry, who wrote that girls the age of her teenage son should not be allowed dress like “skanks”. I assumed it was her son who defined them thus, and gently suggested that he should be taught not to use such terms. She replied that it was herself, not her son, who made this judgement. Her son, she added, being a teenager, was happy for them to dress that way.
I resisted the impulse to argue, because I may have to deal with this woman professionally someday. But it saddens and angers me that so many are prepared to pass judgement on other women based on their mode of dress and their (real or perceived) social and sexual comportment.
I’ve lived in places where women are judged far more harshly, and consequences for “transgression” can be severe. In Bangladesh, I was appalled that most of women on the street – and they were few – were covered head to toe in black burqas, only their eyes barely visible through black mesh. Though I was a skinny, innocent 14 year old, uninteresting to the average male gaze in my own country, in Bangladesh I didn’t feel safe, exposed to the eyes of men who assumed that any woman not completely covered up was somehow sexually available. So I dressed conservatively, by American standards (covered to the ankles – in tropical heat), and never went out alone.
Once I took a bicycle rickshaw somewhere with a woman friend. We were puzzled as to why the driver was pedaling so erratically, stopping and starting and weaving all over the road. We finally realized that he was masturbating furiously through his lunghi – apparently irresistibly turned on by the sight of our (not very) naked flesh – or by whatever fantasies and assumptions he entertained about unchaperoned foreign females. Had I or my friend been alone with him, we might have been in danger. By our own cultural norms we were modestly dressed: long skirts or trousers, loose, high-necked blouses. But those same clothes, in the eyes of the rickshaw driver, branded us as available sexual objects: our hair, faces, and arms were uncovered! Obviously, we were sluts, and lucky that we got no worse than a display of public masturbation.
In some countries, particularly those under Islamic law, it’s considered sluttish behavior for a woman to ride in a car or speak with a man who is not a relative, and punishments can be severe. Many girls worldwide have been murdered by their own families for “dishonoring” them by falling in love with the “wrong” men.
So, to define a girl or woman as a “skank” or “slut” is not just insulting: it implies a threat of physical harm as punishment for her “transgressive” behavior. Even in America, how many times have we heard – even from authority figures – that a woman “deserved what she got” because she was in the wrong place, dressed the wrong way, behaved provocatively? When you call a woman a slut, you have judged and condemned her to… whatever she gets.
Most Americans reading this were probably shocked and disgusted at the rickshaw driver’s behavior I described, but your definition of “slut” comes from your culture, just as much as his did. I don’t necessarily agree with any of you. Actually: your right to have an opinion ends where my body begins.
If you think you’re more civilized or enlightened than that rickshaw driver was, then it’s time for you to stop judging girls and women based on their dress or sexual behavior. Who a woman has sex with is none of your damned business. The idea that it might be comes from the notion that women are property, whose ability to bear children must be kept safe for a socially-approved man.
Legally and culturally, most of the people likely to read this page should be well past that. It therefore follows that you should not be using words like “slut” to threaten, shame, control, and silence women. Or you’re really not so different from that illiterate, ignorant rickshaw driver on the streets of Bangladesh.
Thanks to Brendan for insightful comments during the writing of this piece.
I attended this session because : danah boyd (one of my heroes) and Judith Donath of MIT Media Lab and Harvard’s Berkman Center (whom I happen to know personally) were speaking.
Also on the panel (and interesting in their own right):
Siva Vaidyanathan (author of the forthcoming “The Googleization of Everythingâ€), who said (among other things) that privacy is not the opposite of publicity. Privacy is not a substance. It means different things in different contexts.
Alice Marwick, doing her dissertation on the Effect of Social Media on Social Status
What follows is a transcription of my notes, with [my own thoughts and comments].
CEOs these days expect their staff to be familiar with social technology. [Yay! I can haz job!]
There is social value to online relationships – people get real emotional support online.
But the information we put online is valuable to marketers.
[D here: So what? I just wish they’d make it valuable to me. Personally, I would be happy to see advertising that I’m actually interested in.
Take car advertising. How often does any of us buy a car? Yet it seems that every other ad on TV or at the movies is for a car. I’d like to know which is larger: the number of cars sold in the US each year, or the number of car ads shown? For most people, buying a car is a relatively rare event. Much of that advertising must be a waste of car companies’ money, and it’s certainly a waste of my time and attention, which I resent.
I was intensely interested in information about cars for a few weeks last summer, and again this March when I was buying a first car for my daughter. For myself, I ended up leasing a Toyota Rav4. I knew I liked this car because I had driven it as a rental for several weeks, but I didn’t feel comfortable with the sticker price. Then I discovered (on the Toyota website) a great lease deal that I qualified for, so I was able to get my dream car. I only test-drove one other (a used Hyundai SUV). No doubt the fact that the Rav4 was available as a rental at that time and place was part of a marketing effort – in my case, a very effective one.
For Ross, I did a lot more research, entirely online, for a good “starter†car that would last a while. She drove only one model – the Honda Fit – and that’s what she now owns (or rather, what the bank owns and I’m now paying for). A key selling point was Consumer Reports’ safety rating on this model (a big concern for me as the mother of a new driver).
If I’ve ever noticed either of these cars advertised in print or media, I don’t remember it. I do remember examples of advertising that had a negative impact on me, e.g. the painfully obvious product placement of Lexus in Desperate Housewives and Fiat in Montalbano.
So all the money spent showing me car ads was wasted. As Judith Donath said, there should be rewards for accurate targeting. In fact, there would be: I would buy!]
Judith Donath is interested in visualization of online identity/history.
Is online identity meaningful? You have different public faces for different spheres. We try to maintain control of our various public personas, but the web is causing the collapse of personalities.
[Which is to say: It’s hard to be one kind of person in your private life and a very different kind of person in your professional life, if much of both is viewable online. Coincidentally, a woman at another session I attended described trying to juggle two identities in Second Life. She said: “I’m trying to live two lives. And it’s killing me!”
It’s hard to know how others see you. We need technology to show us a mirror of the trails we have left behind (an area of research interest for Judith right now).
SV: There was a movement towards privacy in the mid-70s which resulted in current laws, e.g., no branch of government can share information about you with any other branch.
danah boyd: Young people see privacy differently. They do not see their homes as private spaces because they do not have control there – their parents can invade their rooms at any time.
Young people are also very aware of the role of power imbalances in privacy, and they find ways to trick the system.
“Because she puts so many things online, people think that’s all that’s going on.†[Now there’s a topic I could write reams on. But not today.]
SV: personal information is a currency.
JD: Time is also a context.
Discussion on health insurance, privacy and employability [ a topic I’ve written about myself].
Privacy and personal presentations of the self:
Privacy is a historically recent concept. People used to live in small tribes/communities in which everyone knew everyone else’s business.
[Me again: If you’ve ever lived in a small town, you know exactly what this is like.
It seems to me that the solution is simply not to do anything that you would be ashamed to have held up to public scrutiny. Obviously, this requires a society in which very little is grounds for shame. And this may be exactly what is happening in America. As Judith said: “We are creating what may be the most open and accepting society [in history] because we can see so much [online] about people’s divergent behaviors.â€
The film “Milk†portrays how (some) young gay people living in middle America in the 1970s saw Harvey Milk – an openly gay man – on the news, and realized that they could go and be themselves in larger cities that had gay communities. For that to happen, Milk had to make enough of a stir to appear in the national news, and perhaps he died for it. Nowadays, all sorts of “differences†can be researched online, and anyone can find kindred spirits and support. (Yes, there are some cases in which this is worrying.)]
JD: In a society of millions of people trying to keep up with what their norms are, that’s the function of celebrity: to give us a basis for comparison/discussion. [D: I find this idea frightening. Paris Hilton and Britney Spears as social norms?]
We want people to pay attention to us. What is the value of that?
Today I asked campaign volunteers in Westminster, Colorado, why they are dedicating so much time to getting Barack Obama elected. Here are their answers.
Last Sunday, a cold, dreary fall day in this part of Colorado, I went out canvassing to find out who’s going to vote for Obama. I arrived at the local HQ (a storefront in a strip mall near a Costco) around noon. A guy explained to me at length what I was supposed to do, over my increasing nervousness.
“Do I have to do this alone?” I asked. “I was told someone would be with me.” I didn’t feel confident about knocking on doors by myself. Having spent so much of my life overseas, most recently the last 17 years in Italy, I know that many standard American cultural cues pass me by completely unnoticed. And everyone’s armed in this part of the country (yes, including the liberals) – I didn’t want to miss something that might imply: “Get off my lawn before I blow a hole in you with my 12-gauge.”
Eric, the man who’d been training me, instantly agreed to go with me. On the way we chatted about more personal things and I learned, with no great surprise, that he, too, had been a Sun employee. He got laid off in July, calculated that he had enough money to retire early, and decided to devote his time to campaigning for Obama.
We had pre-printed sheets of paper with names, addresses, and (usually) political leanings for each of the people we were supposed to visit. These were organized by street and side of street (odds and evens), including a map showing the location of the targeted houses.
“Why are we going door to door instead of just calling?” I asked.
Eric’s an engineer, so he has studied the numbers behind his activities.
“This is more effective than calling. Studies show that, for every 14 doors you knock on, you persuade one voter. It takes 200 calls to do the same. This is a swing state, and Jefferson County has traditionally voted Republican. 200 votes could make all the difference here.”
“That’s a lot of doors,” I gulped.
We knocked on 34 doors in about 90 minutes that day. The people we had come to see were all listed as Democrats or undecided. We weren’t expected to call on any Republicans; the thought is that it’s too late in the game to persuade them. Now it’s mostly about making sure that people have their mail-in ballots and know what to do with them, or know where they can go for early voting (which starts Oct 20th in Colorado).
Many of the people on our list had already received their mail-in ballots, and some of those had already sent them in. Three or four refused our polite request to tell us for whom they’d voted. There are still people who feel strongly that this is a private matter, but Eric suspected that they had all voted for McCain and didn’t want to tell us that.
On the other hand, four or five told us they definitely had or would vote for Obama, and one said that her husband would also do so in spite of being a life-long Republican (they were both young).
We did the first street together, with me hanging anxiously behind, not liking the idea of disturbing people on a Sunday, though most took it well. At some places, someone was clearly home but did not answer the door.
Eric pointed out clues to the likely voting habits of the households we visited. A Subaru in the driveway indicated a liberal. On the other hand, 95% of the houses we visited or passed had four-wheel drive vehicles and/or trucks, so those aren’t necessarily a sign of conservatism. Every house seemed to have multiple dogs as well.
One house where I was just as glad no one answered had a jeep in the driveway hand-painted in camouflage, with various aggressive bumper stickers including one that said “Fuck Iraq” – an ambiguous statement at best.
We split the next street, one of us doing odds, the other evens. Eric was trapped for quite a while with a man who wanted to complain about the price of diesel fuel – the only canvasee who had shown much desire for conversation.
Then, frozen to the bone, we went back to the office. Happily, it’s supposed to be sunny and warm when I go out canvassing tomorrow.
