About the Whining Thing...
As a sissy femme male, I'm quite qualified to talk about the whining thing. When males complain about masculinity being imposed on us, it's always seen as whining. Compare to female people speaking about how femininity is foisted upon them: anger is among those things femininity denies to women, and to step outside of feminity as they do is to be seen as erupting in furious anger. But anger isn't outside of masculinity. Whimpering and asking for sympathy solace and understanding is. And so it is inevitable that we're perceived as whiners.
But to an extent everyone who raises their voices to complain about a social issue is viewed as whining. Around us are always people enduring the same thing but not making noise about it, and around us is an entire society in which the social issues we speak of are not new. If others can endure it and it's been endured for decades or centuries, who are we to expect it to change on our behalf?
I've had various friends who grew up in Jewish or Black households telling me about how it was for them growing up. A common occurrence was being put in their place by their parents, being told that they had a lot of nerve complaining about whatever they were complaining about at the time, when their life was so easy compared to the life of great-aunt Rachel or your grandpa's uncle Raphael. He was born a slave and made to work in the hot sun and shipped in chains to the market when he was 12. She was marked for extermination and hid from soldiers and eventually caught and sent to the concentration camp and starved and then gassed to death in the showers. Admittedly, my friends' complaints to their parents were often about being required to clean their rooms and being denied permission to attend a weekend party with their friends, but if you extend the logic of their parents, people are just whining if they complain about racism or antisemitism today because they aren't property in chains or the target of an explicit genocidal pogrom. That's ludicrous.
Social justice discussions shouldn't be about whose oppression-scars are ugliest and most traumatic and dismissing the insufficiently injured people's complaints as unjustified whining.
We do admire the tough survivors. The woman who shouldered her way into a men-only world and always had to prove herself better to be perceived half as good, and outlasted them and thrived there. The middle-class suburbanite confronted by a would-be mugger who upsides him with her purse and whacks him with her cane resulting in him yelling for help. The fifh grader who knees her would-be abductor in the balls and calls 911 while he writhes on the ground. The lesbian in graduate school who describes crossing campus at 1 AM and approaching a cluster of young men gathered close to her car, only to see them scatter as she strides close, exuding "don't fuck with me" confidence. The gay femme on the subway who responds to threats and harassment with a loud and entertaining ridicule that has the whole car applauding and the belligerent harassers slinking away.
But the fact that some people do indeed go up against pervasive unequal treatment and don't let it stop them doesn't mean we as a culture don't need to stop the unfair unequal treatment. Presumably no one responds to the story about the brave fifth grader by saying "Oh, we don't need to protect children from sexual predators and abductors and abusers, they should be able to handle themselves like that girl did".
When I'm accusing of being a whiner, I'm often reminded by my accusers of my various social privileges. I'm not perceived as female and I can safely walk with no real fear of assault, threat, or harassment. I'm not exiting gay bars in sight of bigots weilding crowbars. I'm not put in a position where I can't pee in any available public bathroom without someone calling the police. What has a sissy male like me to complain about?
Well, let's see, I do get let in on the homophobic violence. It's mostly better the older I get but as recently as last month I had a pair of young male belligerents asking me if I were a boy or a girl and then calling me faggot. Then there's the social isolation, that's always a big one. My existence is tolerated but I never quite fit in. Like so many other Different people this is at the core of my experience. In particular it has been a problem throughout my life to negotiate sexual interaction, courting and dating and finding someone to be in a relationship with and all that. Oh, and I do face discrimination in hiring and promotion and similar differential treatment. Not because I am directly perceived as a gender invert and discriminated against for being in that category, that's true, but because I am perceived as pathological, as impaired or otherwise not normal.
Some people would reply to that list by saying that the gay bashing is something I should be protected from, but that the world does not owe me dates or sex, and that I'm not socially entitled to a sexual relationship. Yet for me, it's the latter that was the dealbreaker as far as just silently and stoically coping with what the world deals out to me. I was able to come to terms with the intermittent violence and random hate. It was like bad weather; I tried to be prepared and if I got caught, well I'd dealt with it before and survived. But being left out in the cold and never have the connection that I craved? Devastating. Go figure. Each person has their own scale of tolerable versus intolerable offenses. We should listen to each other and put down those litmus tests for deciding who has a legitimate social issue and who is just whining.
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But to an extent everyone who raises their voices to complain about a social issue is viewed as whining. Around us are always people enduring the same thing but not making noise about it, and around us is an entire society in which the social issues we speak of are not new. If others can endure it and it's been endured for decades or centuries, who are we to expect it to change on our behalf?
I've had various friends who grew up in Jewish or Black households telling me about how it was for them growing up. A common occurrence was being put in their place by their parents, being told that they had a lot of nerve complaining about whatever they were complaining about at the time, when their life was so easy compared to the life of great-aunt Rachel or your grandpa's uncle Raphael. He was born a slave and made to work in the hot sun and shipped in chains to the market when he was 12. She was marked for extermination and hid from soldiers and eventually caught and sent to the concentration camp and starved and then gassed to death in the showers. Admittedly, my friends' complaints to their parents were often about being required to clean their rooms and being denied permission to attend a weekend party with their friends, but if you extend the logic of their parents, people are just whining if they complain about racism or antisemitism today because they aren't property in chains or the target of an explicit genocidal pogrom. That's ludicrous.
Social justice discussions shouldn't be about whose oppression-scars are ugliest and most traumatic and dismissing the insufficiently injured people's complaints as unjustified whining.
We do admire the tough survivors. The woman who shouldered her way into a men-only world and always had to prove herself better to be perceived half as good, and outlasted them and thrived there. The middle-class suburbanite confronted by a would-be mugger who upsides him with her purse and whacks him with her cane resulting in him yelling for help. The fifh grader who knees her would-be abductor in the balls and calls 911 while he writhes on the ground. The lesbian in graduate school who describes crossing campus at 1 AM and approaching a cluster of young men gathered close to her car, only to see them scatter as she strides close, exuding "don't fuck with me" confidence. The gay femme on the subway who responds to threats and harassment with a loud and entertaining ridicule that has the whole car applauding and the belligerent harassers slinking away.
But the fact that some people do indeed go up against pervasive unequal treatment and don't let it stop them doesn't mean we as a culture don't need to stop the unfair unequal treatment. Presumably no one responds to the story about the brave fifth grader by saying "Oh, we don't need to protect children from sexual predators and abductors and abusers, they should be able to handle themselves like that girl did".
When I'm accusing of being a whiner, I'm often reminded by my accusers of my various social privileges. I'm not perceived as female and I can safely walk with no real fear of assault, threat, or harassment. I'm not exiting gay bars in sight of bigots weilding crowbars. I'm not put in a position where I can't pee in any available public bathroom without someone calling the police. What has a sissy male like me to complain about?
Well, let's see, I do get let in on the homophobic violence. It's mostly better the older I get but as recently as last month I had a pair of young male belligerents asking me if I were a boy or a girl and then calling me faggot. Then there's the social isolation, that's always a big one. My existence is tolerated but I never quite fit in. Like so many other Different people this is at the core of my experience. In particular it has been a problem throughout my life to negotiate sexual interaction, courting and dating and finding someone to be in a relationship with and all that. Oh, and I do face discrimination in hiring and promotion and similar differential treatment. Not because I am directly perceived as a gender invert and discriminated against for being in that category, that's true, but because I am perceived as pathological, as impaired or otherwise not normal.
Some people would reply to that list by saying that the gay bashing is something I should be protected from, but that the world does not owe me dates or sex, and that I'm not socially entitled to a sexual relationship. Yet for me, it's the latter that was the dealbreaker as far as just silently and stoically coping with what the world deals out to me. I was able to come to terms with the intermittent violence and random hate. It was like bad weather; I tried to be prepared and if I got caught, well I'd dealt with it before and survived. But being left out in the cold and never have the connection that I craved? Devastating. Go figure. Each person has their own scale of tolerable versus intolerable offenses. We should listen to each other and put down those litmus tests for deciding who has a legitimate social issue and who is just whining.
-------
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts