Don't Be That Guy.

[synecdochic]

I keep thinking about the discussions that have come up in the comments to my post about sex-positivism and performative sexuality and the concept of bystander consent, and I keep thinking about all the subtle little cues and clues I personally use to separate Okay from Skeevy when people approach me. Talking in the comments there made me realize

Comments

[hilarytamar]

I'm not nineveh_uk, obviously, but one difference that struck me between

and I piped up “But far too many women still die in childbirth in the West, let’s focus on that”
and
and i don't believe you would be out of line in pointing out how maternal morbidity in the West might affect a Westerner's attitude toward the African experience.

is the difference between focus on and mention. I say that because in reading each of these two comments I found myself nodding & saying, 'sure, OK', and then having to re-read, because I didn't see where you were disagreeing with each other; it wasn't until I paid closer attention to the word choice that I began to see where that disagreement might come in.

In my experience, and I emphasize in my experience, if I'm in a discussion of privilege category C & I happen to have privilege category C, I find it really hard to stay on the side of "mention", and I have an even harder time recognizing that what I think of as "mention" is being heard as "focus" by the people in the group who do not have privilege C. I'm so used to having my privilege C that I have a hard time recognizing that it's not always relevant, or not really relevant to what's being said, or--even more subtly, to me--that even if it's relevant, it's not something I need to mention. In this specific example, as a Westerner I might well think to make the point you talk about--but that's a point the non-Westerners are equally capable of recognizing, and my mentioning it might easily sound like I think they wouldn't recognize it if I didn't tell them, and, well, here we move into That Guy-dom: being patronizing and Explaining. (And even if it isn't Explaining, I try to err on the side of caution and avoid doing things that might be taken as Explaining.) I think that's the dynamic that some people here are trying to get at: that it's quite hard to see the line between 'mention' and 'focus', especially if you (I) are used to discussions already focusing on the things you (I) find it relevant to mention.