IBARW: feminism, feelings and privilege
Thanks to the work of women of color online, I finally get the dynamic of white women defending our privilege via (supposedly) feminist values around validating feelings.
( long ibarw post is long )
( long ibarw post is long )
"white women as guardians of civilization"
YES.
Which is the direction in which kate_nepveu's observation about this being a variant on the tone argument has sent me.
And in that direction there is definitely intersectionality to ponder here. When women hurt white men's feelings -- hell, when we simply fail to take care of their feelings like we're supposed to (an expectation white men and women place on men and women of color x 100), white men don't react with tears and hurt feefees. IME they react like rabid dogs, tearing and ripping and punching everything in sight. We go from sugartit to castrating bitches in a red hot second. And people of color go from interesting cool omg new friends! to orcs in a flat second.
Somehow the viciousness of the attacks from the privileged ones are comparable to that one original critique, the one that hurt someone's feelings.
Is it because defending civilization is hard, regrettable work? Like "why do you make me hurt you?" kind of thing? Again, kate_nepveu's observation about this being but one part of the tone argument is making me think ...
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...the drama is in part about white people negotiating their gender relations, no matter who else is unfortunate enough to get caught up in it.
About snappy taglines vs. 3 screens: it's helpful to understand clearly all the different purposes wwt serve. One can be clear on how this shuts down anti-racist critique yet miss the piece about gender entitlement. Thank you for this post!
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Ducking the bitch label, yes. Claiming femininity and all of its privileges in the patriarchy while also claiming the power to regulate/control that comes with white privilege.
Which is why HRC's tears were so important to her campaign, and so infuriating to every person of color I talked to or read online in the days afterward.
For the 3 screens ... thanks. I think I am mostly bemused at how thick-skulled my own privilege is, that I read that quote from Baldwin years and years ago, and it just never fully sunk in until I started writing this post.
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Yes, and for committed feminists of a certain stripe comes another piece: getting whatever it is that men who are otherwise just like you in generation/race/ethnicity/class get.
And if you can't extract whatever kind of entitlement from those men, you sure the hell will get it from everyone else.
So you don't get to hurt my feelings without a hot mess on your hands is thus the stance of a woman fighting a feminist battle to get her due denied by the patriarchy.
(I'm trying to account, partially, for the element of righteousness in the wwt phenom. Righteousness that makes even women who are genuinely trying and trying hard to get antiracism to lose their minds and instigate the wwt passive-aggressive bullying of a woc.)
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The tv show Southland dealt with this. Link to hulu video and transcript here.
Good post. Thanks for sharing it.
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Yeah.
There's a thing here that I'm not sure came out in the main post (or if it did, I missed it), while white men might be dismissive of white women's feelings when it's just white men vs. white women, if you bring any other factor into it -- race and class are the two biggies, but anything that causes the white men in question to identify with the woman instead of whoever is "making" her cry (family relationships trip this like whoah) -- in those cases white men suddenly consider white women's feelings to be sacred.
And white women know that. If you cry, you've got respectable odds of getting a white man do what you want; if you have the opportunity to target the tears against anyone other than that particular white man himself -- especially if you target against an outsider -- your odds are fantastic. And that's been true for far longer than the second wave of feminism has been around.
So I don't think this is just a second-wave thing. I think it's more likely that second-wave feminism took something that already worked pretty well, and in trying to make it more effective against the men who had remained resistant to it, deliberately amped its other effects even more.
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white men might be dismissive of white women's feelings when it's just white men vs. white women,
True enough. And what I wanted to highlight is what white men do when anyone hurts their feelings -- or even fails to safeguard their feelings, as everyone is supposed to do. They don't cry, but rather turn on the person who hurt their feelings like a rabid fucking dog.
in those cases white men suddenly consider white women's feelings to be sacred.
Oh hell yes. Which is, I believe, the unacknowledged purpose for the tears. See: HRC and the fucking audacity of Bill Clinton sitting at the convention and making smarmy googly lovey-dovey eyes at HRC during her speech. It's his job in this script, as her he-man white male husband, to make her look more acceptably feminine.
And I completely agree that this dynamic goes back much further than second wave feminism. I wonder how intentional white feminists have been about surfacing it, when it privileges white women so easily. And I wonder how much of the post-modern/feminist ethos around feelings has been an unconscious defense of a centuries-old dynamic that affords white women so much privilege.
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:: like a rabid fucking dog. ::
Oh, lord yes. Don't ever try to tell me that white men's feelings don't matter, because I will point and laugh. White men's feelings don't matter to other white men, is all. (Telling, how that gets abbreviated to "don't matter," isn't it?)
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I was on the receiving end of a six month long attack from a white man online, initiated because I told him he didn't know what he was talking about wrt feminism and needed to educate himself. I think at that moment I triggered (no seriously) some of his really deep hatred for his ex-wife, and he went after me with a viciousness I have never seen before. And I've seen a lot of shit on the internet.
But having dealt with that, I recognize the snarling evil that comes out when privileged people's feelings get hurt. White women start with tears, which are just tears, GOD, until we remember what those tears are intended to put into motion. And until we see what white women do when the tears don't get the expected result.
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White men do have to pay back something for the support/priv they enjoy, there are always expectations, and backing up the ppl in the #2 or #3 slot (those ppl are sometimes white women, sometimes not) is part of how they pay back. And it also reinforces their status. And they get to be Good Guys.
Plus it's just really exciting when white women produce a spontaneous spectacle of physical abjection and those bodily fluids start to drip, and the men get to Do Something concerning it. I am so not kidding. Now I'm remembering how stock it is for Hollywood blockbusters... at some point you are going to have the plucky female lead start with the tears and sniffles. And after she's cried, something is gained and lost. She's cashed in some element of her toughness or agency and gotten white man muscle in return.
I'll start paying more attention to crying scenes in Hollywood blockbusters now. Though I kind of swore off watching them after the last Star Trek movie.
I have been told if you are used to shedding tears when your back is against a wall (relying this strategy to get you out of jams) and you then see the light and try to learn assertiveness, it's really hard... the crying response has been so rewarded, so effective, that it is nearly hard-wired. I'm remembering one friend who sort of had to do both for a while, go through motions to be appropriately assertive even as tears were flying.
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My mother (who is a white woman) taught me with the ferocity of a thousand suns to never use tears. (AFAIK her anathema to tears had nothing to do with intersectionality; it was purely the cold strategic observation that tears only let you borrow/manipulate someone else's power while non-incidentally cosigning a contract that you, as a woman, don't deserve power of your own. If you ever want to get real power, my mother taught me, you have to have the strategic discipline to refrain from using tears.) However, even though I had that very solid training to never use tears, there are moments when my back is up against the wall and I can feel exactly how effective tears would be. Tears would be as sweepingly effective as overturning the chess board, a complete and utter game-changer. Oh, but it's tempting in that moment. (And easy to justify on the fly! Because it's not like I would be faking it! I really am upset enough to cry!)
*sigh*
Which is mostly to cosign that yeah, I can see how if you've been routinely using tears, their sheer effectiveness is going to have a strong conditioning effect on you at the behavioral-psych level.
And I think this is one of the things that makes discussions of WWT so confusing for so many white women -- it's not like they're faking it for power (like what the evil women in movies do). They really are upset enough to cry. It's genuine. However! A big part of the reason that being upset so often manifests as tears in white women (as opposed to some other response), is because it has been so awesomely effective. The tears may be genuine, but they're not precisely what you'd call innocent. :-/
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