@Aptdell this comment is frustrating to read as a woman who has experienced unwanted sexual harassment/attention in the EA community (for context: I was very involved in the EA community for about 4.5 years, I worked at CEA in Oxford for several years and had/have many friends who would probably count as influential people in the movement.)
Firstly, your description of sexism, including ‘benevolent sexism’, is overly simplistic and unhelpful here. Infantilising women (i.e. treating them as ‘delicate flowers’) need not be conflated with respecting women, respecting their autonomy and existence as sexual human beings. I suspect your description of a “dirty joke” is actually a joke that denigrates and disrespects women—your female friend probably underestimated your ability to understand that nuance. I’ll match your anecdote with another: I have many close and dear male friends—several of whom have a very ‘edgy’ sense of humour, they are able to joke about sex, men, women, relationships—any number of topics, without ever making me feel unsafe. Probably because ‘women’ are not the butt of their jokes—because they see women as full human beings.
Congrats on being cat-called—let us know when you’re yelled at on the street by a human a foot taller than you who could clearly kill you if they wanted to. Let us know when you’ve been followed home, or pushed up against a wall and groped.
“I wish women would invest more in helping men model their preferences.”—this part gripes me the most. You wish we would do MORE emotional labour to help men learn how to stop behaving badly? How often and loudly do we need to say that we don’t want to be yelled at in the street, or hit-on at work, or sent multiple messages after we’ve politely declined advances? I personally have spent so much of my own time gently and patiently trying to explain to “awkward” men why their behaviour sucks. I’m so tired.
[Edit: as much as I do have problems with @Aptdell’s post above, I also think they’re getting the brunt of my frustration with this whole situation. I write this not to undermine my post but just to acknowledge that my emotions were running high when I wrote it, and I might revise some parts tomorrow. ]
this comment is frustrating to read as a woman who has experienced unwanted sexual harassment/attention in the EA community
Sorry to hear that.
To clarify my perspective more broadly, I’ll link to an older comment I made: “Even in the hypothetical where you dotted every possible i and crossed every possible t, getting affirmative verbal consent for every individual muscle movement as though you were in some sort of parody video—if she feels violated afterwards, something went wrong.”
I personally have spent so much of my own time gently and patiently trying to explain to “awkward” men why their behaviour sucks. I’m so tired.
It seems to me that this is a valuable activity and it would be good if it was possible to do it in a more scalable way, to improve the benefit-to-effort ratio. Obviously if you’re feeling burnt out on it, you should take a break.
I’m sorry you’re feeling tired.
(Side note: I had some responses to your other points, but I kept deleting them because I didn’t have a good theory of how they would help move the discussion forwards. It felt like there was a danger of getting lost in the weeds in an “ordinary internet argument” which didn’t contribute to any “action-relevant” important broader point. If you want to discuss more, maybe you could articulate specific important broader points you think we disagree on that would be good to hash out. Alternatively, if you want to have an ordinary internet argument, we could move this to a different medium, e.g. you can send me a private message.)
@Aptdell this comment is frustrating to read as a woman who has experienced unwanted sexual harassment/attention in the EA community (for context: I was very involved in the EA community for about 4.5 years, I worked at CEA in Oxford for several years and had/have many friends who would probably count as influential people in the movement.)
Firstly, your description of sexism, including ‘benevolent sexism’, is overly simplistic and unhelpful here. Infantilising women (i.e. treating them as ‘delicate flowers’) need not be conflated with respecting women, respecting their autonomy and existence as sexual human beings. I suspect your description of a “dirty joke” is actually a joke that denigrates and disrespects women—your female friend probably underestimated your ability to understand that nuance. I’ll match your anecdote with another: I have many close and dear male friends—several of whom have a very ‘edgy’ sense of humour, they are able to joke about sex, men, women, relationships—any number of topics, without ever making me feel unsafe. Probably because ‘women’ are not the butt of their jokes—because they see women as full human beings.
Congrats on being cat-called—let us know when you’re yelled at on the street by a human a foot taller than you who could clearly kill you if they wanted to. Let us know when you’ve been followed home, or pushed up against a wall and groped.
“I wish women would invest more in helping men model their preferences.”—this part gripes me the most. You wish we would do MORE emotional labour to help men learn how to stop behaving badly? How often and loudly do we need to say that we don’t want to be yelled at in the street, or hit-on at work, or sent multiple messages after we’ve politely declined advances? I personally have spent so much of my own time gently and patiently trying to explain to “awkward” men why their behaviour sucks. I’m so tired.
[Edit: as much as I do have problems with @Aptdell’s post above, I also think they’re getting the brunt of my frustration with this whole situation. I write this not to undermine my post but just to acknowledge that my emotions were running high when I wrote it, and I might revise some parts tomorrow. ]
Sorry to hear that.
To clarify my perspective more broadly, I’ll link to an older comment I made: “Even in the hypothetical where you dotted every possible i and crossed every possible t, getting affirmative verbal consent for every individual muscle movement as though you were in some sort of parody video—if she feels violated afterwards, something went wrong.”
It seems to me that this is a valuable activity and it would be good if it was possible to do it in a more scalable way, to improve the benefit-to-effort ratio. Obviously if you’re feeling burnt out on it, you should take a break.
I’m sorry you’re feeling tired.
(Side note: I had some responses to your other points, but I kept deleting them because I didn’t have a good theory of how they would help move the discussion forwards. It felt like there was a danger of getting lost in the weeds in an “ordinary internet argument” which didn’t contribute to any “action-relevant” important broader point. If you want to discuss more, maybe you could articulate specific important broader points you think we disagree on that would be good to hash out. Alternatively, if you want to have an ordinary internet argument, we could move this to a different medium, e.g. you can send me a private message.)