Hi Julie,
I sense from the above that you were aiming to bring this topic to a close but I’ve been pondering on this since I read your post on Sunday so I hope you don’t mind me adding (this rather lon post) to it…
When I read David’s article the first time I tried to ignore the provocative parts and focused on what I felt was the underlying message (which I took to be that acknowledging the realities of human behaviour is the best way to guard against abuses by it) and I complimented David on raising the point.
As criticism (and support) for the article appeared I went back and read it again and this time focused on the ‘overlying’ aspect and it was clear to me what people had found offensive (and what I had chosen to skip over).
It says a lot about my own continued capacity for and tolerance of sexism (not to mention the ‘immunity’ of being a man) that I wasn’t arrested by those comments in the first place to the extent that that aspect became my focus.
I think it also says a lot about choosing provocation as a means to convey a message / stimulate debate. Uncovering bias was one of the concerns David stressed in his article. Unfortunately provocation has a tendency to provide cover for those who are not as in touch with, or not as willing to uncover, their own biases. It is, ironically, a predominantly emotional rather than intellectual tactic.
Many of the subsequent responses from men have struck me as inadequate (the ‘I can’t be sexist, my daughter’s a woman’, the ‘we are still animals, so we can’t help it’ or the ‘I’ve been maligned by a woman at work too’ do not speak of understanding a woman’s experience of sexism) and I think the nature of the article helped to stimulate rather than discourage that.
I can’t speak for women (actually that’s not true, I do it all the time) but we men all (yes, all) demonstrate sexist behaviour to an extent, and quite often. It is culturally established, which is an explanation and not a permission. It’s quite refreshing to be able to say in public that I can be sexist. I think it says something about the nature of the group that I’m communicating with here that I feel confident to say that without fear of reprisal (or at least confident about discussing strongly held responses). I think that possibility is available elsewhere in private but the more public aspects of the debate about sexism is not necessarily helping.
I have read in recent months challenges to men by high profile female journalists to join the debate about sexism. I’ve always felt silenced by that challenge which I’ve experienced as provocation, because provocation is typically, as I have said above, emotional rather than rational and I find myself at a loss for words (not to mention quite hugely disempowered). It has been a useful experience on which to reflect about sexism and power.
To enter a debate from a position of emotion requires support and/or huge confidence both because the expression of emotion is widely derided (hence its frequent emergence in such debates, if at all, as resentment or outrage rather than as anger) and because it is only in the expression of emotion that we find the language to join a debate on intellectual and equal terms.
Ironically, it is, I feel, men’s incapacity to express the genuine, lived experience of being sexist that stymies debate about sexism in general. I feel confident that within the community that is developing here we are getting closer to being able to have that conversation but I think we need to think carefully about how we make that happen.
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