Category: gender

2 Diversity makes us smarter

July 12, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · gender

I often find myself drawn to discussions of ‘diversity’, which, it should be noted, is a term that can have a lot of different meanings – a diversity of meanings, if you will. Oh, you won’t? *Gulp* Sorry.

When I talk about diversity, I generally refer to a non-sociological definition – one that is really more grounded in colloquial usage: having representation of a variety of different groups, all working toward the same goal. So ‘diversity’ in a classroom means that you have many different types of students, all working toward the goal of learning. ‘Diversity’ in a government agency might refer to having people with differing socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, working toward the goal of achieving the agency’s objectives.

Another colloquial usage of ‘diversity’ refers explicitly to increasing the number of minority group members in an organization. Usually this refers to racial minorities and women, since many of our institutions tend to be white and male dominated (although we have been getting better about this). It has also become a dirty word for that same reason, since many see any advancement of minority groups as taking something away from the majority group. My argument has always been that this isn’t the case.

This post was supposed to follow a post that’s planned for this Monday, but I have decided to push it up for a couple of reasons. First, because it’s easy to write about and I have limited time while I’m away from home. Second, because it’s interesting. Third, because it’s relevant to a fight that’s currently happening on my Facebook wall:

Professors Woolley and Malone, along with Christopher Chabris, Sandy Pentland, and Nada Hashmi, gave subjects aged 18 to 60 standard intelligence tests and assigned them randomly to teams. Each team was asked to complete several tasks—including brainstorming, decision making, and visual puzzles—and to solve one complex problem. Teams were given intelligence scores based on their performance. Though the teams that had members with higher IQs didn’t earn much higher scores, those that had more women did.

This isn’t really the substance of the fight – it has more to do with the so-called ‘glass ceiling’ (which I have discussed in depth before) and wage equality for women. However, the issue of ‘tokenism’ has come up, and I feel the need to respond to it in more words than are really wieldy on a Facebook comment. The argument that a certain friend made is that there are women in positions of power, so we should really consider the issue of accessibility more or less solved – at least we shouldn’t consider it something worth making a big deal about.

‘Tokenism’, for those of you that haven’t encountered the phrase before, refers to having a single member of a non-majority group present in an organization, who can then be pointed to whenever discussions of diversity come up (“we’re not _____ist, we’ve got Pat, who is a _____!”). The problem with this ‘solution’ to the problem is that it does not reflect real diversity, only the wish to avoid appearances of selective hiring. This study I’ve cited above seems to suggest that having more diverse groups (at least gender-diverse groups) makes those groups actually work better.

Woolley: We’ve replicated the findings twice now. Many of the factors you might think would be predictive of group performance were not. Things like group satisfaction, group cohesion, group motivation—none were correlated with collective intelligence. And, of course, individual intelligence wasn’t highly correlated, either.

Malone: Before we did the research, we were afraid that collective intelligence would be just the average of all the individual IQs in a group. So we were surprised but intrigued to find that group intelligence had relatively little to do with individual intelligence.

So if the individual IQ of the group members doesn’t predict group performance, what is important? Apparently, women are (for reasons that are likely sociological as much as – or more than – biological) better at understanding non-verbal communication and can facilitate group co-operation and problem solving more adeptly than men, allowing the group to get the best from all of its members. While it is obvious from even a cursory examination of the people in your life, there are some men that are better at this skill than some women, the underlying point remains – having a variety of kinds of people and kinds of skills is a boon to group effectiveness that goes far beyond the simple appearance of diversity.

While it is certainly convenient to point to individual examples of women in positions of power as evidence that sexism isn’t as bad as it once was, nobody is making the argument that there has been zero progress along the lines of gender inequality. The point is that we can still do better about addressing the inequalities we continue to see. If and when we do that, we will have done more than simply righted a moral injustice, or made women stop complaining, or reached some faux-liberal goal of making sure nobody feels excluded ever. We will have improved our society in such a way that it improves life for everyone.

It is a stretch to cite this article as proof that reducing racial inequalities will have the same effect, and I am not claiming this to be conclusive evidence of that. My personal belief in this matter is that increasing diversity in general results in a similar outcome – more people who can bring unique experience and perspective to a novel problem will tend to outperform groups that are more homogeneous, regardless of individual merit of the members of those groups. I will flesh this idea out in greater detail on Monday.

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4 To protect and serve… kinda

June 22, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · gender · hate · law · news

I have a difficult relationship with police officers. First of all, I recognize that they are tools of the state, which has its own plusses and minuses. When the goals of the state are bound to the benefit and protection of the people, then a strong police presence is a good thing. We saw this in last week’s riots in Vancouver – police were more interested in protecting people and minimizing harm and loss of life than they were concerned about protecting private property. However, when the will of the state is opposed to the welfare of the people, police have carte blanche to abuse civil rights and become an essentially-unchecked force of oppression. We saw this at the G8/G20 protests in Toronto – the legitimate right of people to voice opposition was met with boots and truncheons.

The second part of my cop conundrum comes from the fact that police officers are still human beings, which also has its negative and positive aspects. Individual police officers are capable of great compassion, discretion and empathy. I remember during the Olympics seeing smiling police officers talking to enthusiastic tourists and locals, joking and posing for pictures. I’ve had several positive interactions with police officers where they have revealed themselves to be human behind the badge. Then again, being human means that they have all the failings of individuals (pettiness, panicked responses to threats, abuse of power), and demonstrate the mean stupidity of groups. A reader sent me a story that I think illustrates how fraught these conundrums are particularly well:

Chris Cochrane, an entertainer who goes by the name Elle Noir, is recovering from a gunshot wound to her right arm. She said her attackers yelled homophobic slurs as she was hit with gunfire at her Fairview apartment early Tuesday. She said she believes they intended to kill her.

“They were yelling, ‘Tranny faggot, open the door, let us in, let us in,’ which leads me to believe they knew who I was. I’m in a second-floor apartment. You know, you have to have a security key to get into the building. Obviously it was 100 per cent hatred.”

So we have the victim’s statement, that armed men shot through her front door with handguns and a shotgun(!) after accosting her verbally. There was no reason for the intruders to pick that apartment at random, since there was no drug activity. There is a long and sordid history of violent assault against transpeople (that is, people who identify as a sex other than the one they were born into – someone please let me know if I worded that incorrectly), and this has all the hallmarks of a hate crime.

The police reaction?

Halifax Regional Police interviewed Cochrane on Wednesday. After speaking with witnesses, investigators doubt her claim that the shooting was a hate crime, said a police spokesman. “We believe this particular unit at least — while not saying this particular victim — was targeted specifically,” said Const. Brian Palmeter.

“Certainly we don’t believe this was a hate crime based on the information that we have so far… There may have been other reasons at play why this might have occurred.” Palmeter refused to elaborate on what those reasons might be.

And immediately the skepti-shields go up. Police would like us to believe that a group of armed men broke into a building, targeted the apartment of a publicly-transsexual person and shot their way in. They did this, according to police, for reasons that have nothing to do with the gender identity of the inhabitant. To persuade us of this highly dubious set of circumstances, police are offering us the iron-clad reassurance of “there may have been other reasons at play”.

It seems to me that there are two things that could potentially be happening here. The first comes from my cynical side: Halifax police aren’t interested in investigating a hate crime. Crimes against transpeople often go unreported and poorly-investigated (I offer no evidence for this assertion – it is based on the testimony of every transperson and gender equality speaker I have ever heard/read). It is trivially easy for the Halifax police to sweep the motivation for this crime under the rug, especially since it happened in an area known for drug involvement. The police force may be acting like a person – allowing their biases and transphobia to bubble to the surface in such a way as to preclude Ms. Cochrane from seeing justice.

The second possibility I can see is that Ms. Cochrane is mistaken about the nature of her assault. She lives with a roommate – perhaps the roommate was involved in the drug trade unbeknownst to Chris herself. Maybe she misheard what the attackers said at the door – hearing “tranny faggot” in her panic when something else entirely was said. The police are suggesting another option but are being intentionally vague (which is their usual way of doing things when evidence collection is ongoing) – maybe the neighbours are privy to some knowledge that Chris herself isn’t, something perhaps to do with her roommate.

Regardless of what the reason for the cagey response from police, this kind of reaction sends a chilling message to transsexual and transgender people living in Halifax and elsewhere: despite the fact that you are more victimized than cissexual people, police will absolutely refuse to take that fact into account. At the very least, Halifax police could have said “we are concerned about the hate component, and even though at this moment we don’t have evidence to suggest hate was a factor, we are cognizant of the fact that transpeople are singled out for special treatment by their assailants, and so we will give the matter our own form of special treatment.”

I am curious to see how this whole story shakes out.

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0 Special Feature: I participate in SlutWalk Vancouver

May 17, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · civil rights · feminism · First Nations · gender · privilege · race · sex · skeptivism

This past Sunday, I participated in the local (to Vancouver) SlutWalk event. I have spoken previously about the issues that preceded this event, so if you haven’t heard of it you should probably read that post. I will attempt to summarize: a police officer in Toronto suggested that women who don’t want to get raped probably shouldn’t “dress like a slut”. Giving Constable Sanguinetti the benefit of the doubt for a moment, I’m sure what he was trying to say is that rapists are more likely to target women who are wearing clothes that expose skin than someone dressed in, say, business casual (more on this later). What followed was a backlash against the idea that rape victims are “asking for it” through their dress, as though a woman’s job is to not provoke the ravenous male hordes through improper dress.

Obviously, when put into context, this idea is not only wrong but very dangerous. Women are often blamed for being raped, disbelieved by even their own families and the judicial system. This kind of slut-shaming double standard inherently disadvantages women – “slut” is always a gendered term even when used (subversively) to describe men. Inherent in the word slut is the idea that a woman enjoying her sexuality is dirty and immoral. It is leveled against women irrespective of their level of sexual activity – a girl who sleeps with her boyfriend for the first time (or indeed, who has never done anything sexual) is just as likely to be called a slut by those around her as is a professional sex worker. Neither of them deserves the appellation – the word should never be used.

In this post, I will give some of my reactions to the event.

The Good

1. Attendance

I wasn’t sure how many people would bother to come to an event like this. Keep in mind that it was pouring rain at various points that day (this is Vancouver, after all), but there was a crowd of around 1,000 people (my estimate would have been higher, but that’s what the paper said) there. Some were dressed in a variety of costumes: three men in operatic drag, a woman in a Saran Wrap dress, a young woman in a really uncomfortable-looking corset, a guy wearing a tiny t-shirt and silver bicycle shorts (not a flattering look… they kept slipping down), and my personal favourite: bandana man – so named because that’s all that covered his junk. My response to my friend (who I will call “Julie” just for simplicity’s sake) was “wow, who knew people actually cared about women’s rights?”

2. Who Attended

One would expect that an event like this would be almost entirely women. I was pleasantly surprised at the gender mix: still majority women but with a lot of friends, spouses, boyfriends, and people like me who simply care about the issue there. It is a sad fact of the sexual double-standard that these kinds of issues only seem to gain real traction when men start speaking about them, but at least the Y chromosome camp was well-represented. It certainly surprised a couple of knuckle-draggers who showed up expecting a parade of sluts, and were instead confronted by a group of passionate feminist allies.

3. Support

This was not a fringe event where only a few whackos showed up (although there were a few of those, to be sure). In addition to various legal and social support organizations, the deputy mayor of Vancouver Ellen Woodworth showed up and spoke at the kickoff to the march (“As a lesbian, a queer, a dyke… I know the power that words have”). Media were present, and sponsors had donated materials and time to the event. The Vancouver Police were also on hand to block traffic, which was important because there were a lot of people on the streets.

4. The Reaction

Nothing was more rewarding than seeing people’s faces as the parade moved past. People were shocked to see not only the attire, but the word “SLUT” paraded defiantly and openly through the streets. I said to Julie “that is the face of consciousnesses being raised.”

The Bad

1. Messaging

One of the stated purposes of SlutWalk was to reclaim the word ‘slut’, in order to rob it of its power. Ultimately, I disagreed with this part of the campaign. Like with the word “nigger”, I don’t think that re-appropriating words is a useful endeavour. I am of the opinion that people should be forced to deal with the full history and implication of a word like ‘slut’, and to understand that it is a word that cannot be separated from inherent hatred of women. Once people understand not only where it comes from, but how it is used to silence, shame and victimize women, they won’t want to use it. I have never been the target of the word ‘slut’, and so it is not my place to say that women shouldn’t re-appropriate it; my criticism is of the idea of re-appropriating words in general.

2. Failing to understand the point

I spotted a number of signs saying things like “real men don’t rape” and “don’t tell me how to dress; tell men how not to rape” and “rapists cause rape, not women”. Even one of the organizers went up and said “women don’t need to be reminded not to dress slutty; men need to be reminded that they will go to jail!” While I understand the spirit behind the statement, I think it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of rape and slut-shaming. Men that rape women do not do so because they want to get laid*. They certainly don’t do it because they “are rapists” any more than people commit crimes because they “are criminals”. Failing to understand this is committing a fundamental attribution error.

Rape is an issue of control and respect. Rape is the result of someone believing that their own wishes supercede the rights of another person, and that the victim deserves her/his treatment for whatever reason. Rape, like all violence against women, is the product of the idea that women do not have the right to sexual self-determination. The word ‘slut’ is a manifestation of that idea. It is the idea that needs to be fought, rather than focussing on “rapists” – as though that was a group in and of itself that must be identified and punished. A man who doesn’t rape because it’s illegal will rape as soon as he thinks he can get away with it. Better to make fewer men that think rape is acceptable.

3. Failing to address the fallacy

There was a particularly powerful moment during the introductory speeches, where one of the organizers said “I am a woman, a colleague, a friend, a girlfriend, and a person deserving of respect.” She then removed her pants, revealing a short sequined skirt, followed by the words “I am still a woman, a colleague, a friend, a girlfriend, and I am still a person deserving of respect.” It was a perfect demonstration of the fact that regardless of a person’s apparel, she/he should be treated as a self-determining individual whose body is her/his own. However, as great as the demonstration was, it skipped over an important point.

While it is difficult to get exact numbers on this (since many sexual assaults go unreported, particularly in places where they are not taken seriously), I hope those of you who are skeptically-minded will allow me to get away with the following assertion: places that have strict dress codes for women do not have lower rates of sexual assault. While it is my suspicion that these places have higher rates of assault, at least we can conclusively state that covering women head to toe does not eliminate the risk of sexual victimization. The fallacy committed by Constable Sanguinetti was not that he was impolitic in his wording, it’s that the original statement is nonsense. The way that women dress is not related to their risk of being raped, at least at a population level.

I am reminded of the old joke about the two hikers that run afoul of a bear. While the first hiker starts running, the second quickly starts putting on his running shoes. “You fool!” calls the first hiker “Those shoes aren’t enough to outrun a bear!” The second hiker says “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you.” There is no standard definition or quantitative parameters for what “dressing like a slut” means. It is entirely subjective – the things that are worn by the women I work with would be considered pornographic in many Middle-Eastern countries. The problem is not the clothes; it’s our attitudes towards women and sexuality.

This point was not adequately addressed by the speakers, and I think it was a real missed opportunity.

The Ugly

1. The Racial Double-Standard

Vancouver is a city with a large East- and South-Asian population. Black women and aboriginal women are disproportionately more likely to be victims of sexual assault (including rape) than are white women. Neither of these facts would have been apparent while looking at the crowd. Like most feminist and social activist causes in North America, SlutWalk Vancouver was attended by white people, organized by white people, and focused on issues that do not include race. One of the speakers was Angela, a woman who works front-line for a victim support service in Vancouver’s downtown East Side (DTES). She began talking about the work that she and her colleagues did while dealing with assault victims, and whenever she talked about defending women from rapists, her every sentence was greeted with enthusiastic applause and cheering.

When Angela pivoted to point out that there is a racial component of the word “slut” that is largely ignored, that women of colour don’t particularly want to take back the word “slut”, that this wasn’t an issue of wearing a little black dress but of not being beaten and subsequently ignored by the legal system, the reaction was far more muted. I think I might have been the only person who cheered.

There is a common theme in the intersection between race and feminism. Feminism is well-tended by white women, and many women of colour recognize that there is a need for shared mutual struggle. However, when issues of race and racism – particularly the fact that PoC are disproportionately affected by sexism – come up, there is significant hesitation to face those head-on. Aura Blogando calls this ‘white supremacy’ – I think that characterization is perhaps a bit strong. I think of it more in terms of “white blindness”, or more familiarily, privilege. White women are very enthusiastic to address those issues that are germane to themselves, but more reluctant (it seems) to bring issues affecting PoCs to the fore except in very tokenistic ways (for example, the organizers of SWV noted correctly that Vancouver is built on unceded Saalish territory, but didn’t say word one about the fact that Aboriginal women are more often the victims of assault).

By completely dismissing, or at least not making a point of raising, the issues associated with race, SlutWalk Vancouver allowed white people to feel good about themselves for standing up to one injustice, without having to deal with the related injustice in which their own (unexplored) attitudes play a role. This criticism should not be interpreted as an indemnification of white people, merely an observation that these issues tend not to become publicly-relevant until they affect the majority (in much the same way as sexism issues don’t get treated seriously until men complain about it too).

So in all of it, the good bad and ugly, I think SlutWalk Vancouver was a success. People from many different walks of life were present to raise consciousness about an issue that I think is very important, and hopefully a conversation will be sparked about not only the word “slut”, but how we think of women in our society in general. I was proud to participate, and look forward to more opportunities to do the same.

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* I will no doubt be criticized for making the generalization that it is only men that rape women, or that only women are raped. I fully recognize that men rape men, and less frequently women rape men or other women. Rapists are not exclusively male, and victims are not exclusively female. I also recognize that transpersons are caught in a tricky gender classification limbo, and are disproportionately more likely to be victims of sexual assault and rape than are cispersons. It is not my intention to diminish these cases, and I hope I do not come across as dismissive of this very real issue.

4 Good Idea; Bad Idea – the gay edition

April 26, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · forces of stupid · gender · hate · LGBT · news · religion

And now it’s time for another Good Idea; Bad Idea

Good Idea: Providing counselling and other support to gay kids to reduce their risk of killing themselves

Several international studies have found higher attempted suicide rates among lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) youth compared with heterosexuals. Overall, suicide is the third leading cause of death among youth aged 15 to 24, researchers say. The study in Monday’s issue of the journal Pediatrics found LBG youth living in a social environment more supportive of gays and lesbians were 20 per cent less likely to attempt suicide than LGB youth living in environments that were less supportive.

I am not gay, nor have I ever had any serious questions about my sexuality or gender. Due to what I hope is just a weird set of coincidences (rather than a subconscious bigotry), I’ve never had any close gay friends. As a result, it’s difficult for me to truly empathize with gay youth. Insofar as being a young person sucks in general, I can connect to my own struggles to establish my identity and my feelings of alienation, but to add to that being a gay kid in a society that still treats being gay as an “alternative lifestyle” rather than simply the way some people are (although, to be sure, this is changing rapidly) – it’s got to be extra tough to be a gay kid.

So perhaps it is unsurprising that living in an environment where you constantly have to question and hide a part of who you are – from friends, from family, to even have to deny it to yourself – makes gay kids more likely to turn to self-harm and suicide. Conversely, being in a place where being gay is seen as just another facet of a person’s identity – like their race, height, sense of humour, whatever – must take an enormous amount of pressure off of gay kids. It would, at the very least, remove some of the alienation and feeling of “otherness” that can come from a non-supportive environment. At its best, it helps balance out the hateful speech coming from various corners of society – equating homosexuality with unforgivable sin or some sort of deep character flaw.

Bad Idea: Sending gay kids to correctional camps to ‘fix’ them

Sixty-six Muslim schoolboys in Malaysia identified by teachers as effeminate have been sent to a special camp for counselling on masculine behaviour. They are undergoing four days of religious and physical education. An education official said the camp was meant to guide the boys back “to a proper path in life”.

Ah yes, we can always count on Malaysia to drag humanity kicking and screaming back into the dark ages – when men were men, women were women, and fags were persecuted and killed for having the temerity to try and live like everyone else does. It is stuff like this that makes me cringe any time someone raises the idea of promoting “traditional gender roles”. For many people, there is no conflict between how they behave naturally and what tradition would dictate. However, there are many others that strain against the expectations of historically-established behaviours. This isn’t simply a matter of education or conditioning; forcing yourself to rebel against instinct – especially in something as fundamental as sexuality, a characteristic that underpins the entire human experience – can be incredibly disruptive.

Picking young kids out of school and sending them to gender re-education camps as a way of stamping out ‘teh ghey’ is about as egregious a breach of trust and duty of care as you can get. The news report suggests that the children are attending voluntarily, but you’ve got to question how ‘voluntary’ it could possibly be when you’re being singled out by your teachers and coerced by your parents for being a little too queer. Of course we know at this point that religious education is almost useless in changing gay kids straight, and gay people can also be in typically “manly” professions – education has nothing to do with it. This is simply psychological abuse perpetrated against those who are the most vulnerable.

I do pick on Christianity for a variety of reasons – chief among them being that I am most familiar with it, and it is constantly all around me. However, for all its flaws as a movement, there are at least some moderate/liberal elements within Christianity that help balance out the more destructive factions. Islam, at least outside of North America, doesn’t have anything that approaches a moderating force capable of balancing out such blatant hatred and stupidity. However, to be fair to the good people of Malaysia, there does appear to be some backlash within the country:

But the women’s minister, Shahrizat Abdul Jalil, said singling out these children based on perceived feminine mannerisms was traumatising and harmful to their mental health. The camp violates the Child Act, which protects children without prejudice, she said.

Once again, it is the women to the rescue. This should help clear up any potential confusion over why I, a straight, cissexual (identifying with the gender into which I was born), man would spend so much time talking about women’s issues and gay issues – because I am not completely insulated from what happens to other people in the world. Despite the various flavours of privilege I might enjoy, I’m still acutely aware that not everyone sees the world through the same lens I do.

When we fail to protect those that don’t count themselves among the majority, we invite those same to fall through the cracks of our neglect.

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1 Dispatches from the gender gap

March 22, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · civil rights · feminism · gender

Crommunist is on vacation this week, so blogging will be spotty. I’m going to make sure there’s at least SOMETHING up every day, but they’ll be short. Things should be back to normal by April.

If there is one thing that science can do for us, it’s challenging our assumptions and the resulting underlying myths that they propagate. While we are mostly blind to the narrative that we tell ourselves on a day-to-day basis, we can at least test the truth of those assumptions through the scientific method:

Despite its relative wealth, Canada is tied with Australia as the sixth best place in the Commonwealth to have been born a girl, a new study has found. New Zealand took the top spot in 54-country ranking, released Monday, followed by Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Dominica and Seychelles. Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Tonga, the Solomon Islands, Pakistan, Gambia and Bangladesh were among the lowest-ranked countries.

We have an amazing, wonderful country in which women do better than in most places in the world. We should not take for granted the fact that women in Canada are among the most privileged in the history of the world. We as a society worked hard (women particularly) to ensure that women have a greater level of opportunity than any woman has had as long as human society has existed.

However, going hand in hand with not taking the advances of women for granted comes not being complacent about the progress that has been made. Are we doing better by women than we have done in the past? Absolutely. Is that enough? Absolutely not.

Canadian girls, she added, report that gender-based violence remains pervasive in schools, on dates, in workplaces and over the Internet. They complain that girls remain under-represented in science and technology and that the problems are even worse for aboriginal girls, girls with disabilities and visible minorities.

This is the age-old problem of the downward comparison. Just because we are doing better than other places – countries that cannot compare to us in terms of economic power or political stability – does not mean that we can lean back and rest on our laurels when it comes to the rights and treatment of women.

The great strength of the scientific method is that it allows us to challenge the assumptions that lead to our gender complacency. We can make specific, targeted observations about the differential treatment of the disadvantaged sex, allowing us to investigate specific discrepancies in how we treat our vulnerable groups, of which women are one. It is this ability to ask specific, targeted questions – rather than simply relying on our cultural prejudices – that allows us to ensure that all people are treated fairly, regardless of the circumstances of their birth.

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1 Why I care, and why you should too

March 14, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · civil rights · crommunism · feminism · gender · racism

Jeez, it seems like forever since I did one of these.

Regular readers may have noticed a significant up-tick in the number of times I’ve talked explicitly about women’s issues in these past couple of weeks. Really regular readers will have noticed that I often go to bat on behalf of the ladies, even on issues that have nothing to do with race, free speech or religion. The same goes for LGBT issues, actually – it seems as though I can’t stay away from women and gay shit.

It may seem somewhat antithetical, or at least counterproductive, to spend the amount of time and energy that I do talking about issues facing communities to which I have little-to-no connection. Sure, I have sort of a vested interest in women’s issues – many of my friends are women. However, I don’t really have any close gay friends (a fact that has baffled me for years), nor do I think that blogging about women’s issues will somehow impress or mollify my female friends (the women I am friends with are smart enough to judge someone based on his/her actions, rather than his/her blog). Why then do I put so much effort into pointing out women’s and LGBT issues?

First of all, I defend those positions because it’s the right thing to do. Not having a selfish interest in an issue is not license to simply ignore it. To be sure, there are a number of issues that I don’t talk about (quick list: genocide in Sudan, global warming, third world exploitation, naval piracy in Somalia, loss of the manufacturing sector… the list goes on). These topics are all worthy of intense discussion, but there are only so many hours in a day and, as callous as it sounds, there are things I am more passionate about. It doesn’t mean that I don’t care, so much as it means that I have different priorities. I am glad that there are people out there who care more about world hunger than they do about race issues – both are problems that need passionate advocates. I’ve chosen my fight.

Second, I actually do have a selfish interest in the advancement of women. As the rights of women improve, so too does the standard of living for the entire society. From the moment we are conceived, the health of our mother is of direct impact to our physical health. The better educated both of our parents are, the better chance we have of receiving education ourselves. Our interactions with women in the workplace or out in society generally give us a wider viewpoint than we’d expect in a male-dominated society, which allows for cultural progression and growth. From the moment we are born to the moment we die, the welfare of women is directly tied to our own well-being, regardless of our sex.

Thirdly, and perhaps most selfishly, when I speak on behalf of women I am actually speaking on behalf of myself as well. While I may not be a woman, women are a political minority that face generations of prejudice and antiquated attitudes. They are marginalized, and have been for so long that it has simply become the norm – so much so that sometimes it is other women who are doing the marginalizing. Women in North America face economic disparity, are more likely to be victims of crime, and face a disembodied and largely invisible series of obstacles that seem, without discernible effort, to put them at the bottom of the ladder.

The above description could have just as easily been written about black people. The cultural establishment has been, for years, stacked against the advancement of black people, to the point where our standing in the social ladder is thought to be essentially inevitable. The forces we struggle against are no longer concerted efforts by a shadowy cabal of active racists who are trying to disenfranchise the black population, but if one takes a step back, the outcomes are identical – black people are pushed as though by active effort into the margins of society. Being a minority within a minority (black atheist), this kind of cultural pressure is even more palpable to me.

So wherefore the gays? Well it shouldn’t be too difficult to piece together the fact that the same kind of ancient hatred and exclusion that has faced women and black people is currently shouldered by the gay community. The absurd taboo about same-sex attraction is older than the scriptures that are used to justify it. We have begun, as a society, to recognize that gay people are part of the human population and have been since time immemorial. There is no reasonable justification for the way they are treated, or to curtail their civil rights.

So even though Glenn Beck has forever ruined the quote for me (and he gets it wrong in that clip, which I wouldn’t bother watching unless you enjoy the paranoia-stoking ravings of a carefully-cultivated clown act), it does remind me of the old adage:

First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Or perhaps even better expressed by Martin Luther King Jr.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere

I speak about women’s issues, LGBT issues, atheist issues, race issues – all of these and more – because they are all the same thing. The forces stacked against women and against gay people are also stacked against me, and they’re stacked against you too regardless of who you are. It is only by recognizing the shared threat that we all face that we can struggle against them, and prevail.

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0 You finished cleaning that glass ceiling yet, sweetheart?

March 8, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · culture · feminism · gender · good news · news

Today is the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, which should be some cause for celebration. After all, 100 years of progress is an incredibly long time in human history. In the past 100 years we moved from horse-drawn carriages and plows to an international space station orbiting the planet. In 100 years we went from a largely-illiterate population with extremely limited access to information to a planet-wide network that puts virtually the sum total of all human knowledge at ready access from something that we can slip into our pockets. Our understanding of the universe has gone from the deterministic passage of small particles to a nuanced, varied and complex probabilistic model, allowing us to probe concepts previously written off as unsolvable “mysteries”.

Surely in all that time, with all that progress, we’ve made similar strides in the way we treat each other. The answer, as always, seems to be “yes and no”.

Why Feminism Still Matters:

Across the globe by almost every measure, women lag well behind men. Even though women do 66 per cent of the work and produce half of the food, UNICEF reports that they earn only 10 per cent of the global income and own just one per cent of the property. Nowhere in the world do women account for even a third of the national parliamentarians and, in most regions, including Canada, it is considerably less.

Still, this represents progress.

This article, published in the Vancouver Sun, is a pretty decent overview of the various stalls and starts of the movement for women’s equality, but it doesn’t do an explicit job of answering the question implied by its own title – why does feminism still matter? Why should we be focusing on issues that affect women? Anti-feminists, in their attempts to resemble reasonable and decent human beings (rather than reactionary dicks) often refute the feminist position by arguing that we should focus on having equal rights for everyone, and that focusing on women is the same as ignoring men. And while feminists sometimes just want to scream “men are doing just fine, shut your face hole!”, that’s a quick way to lose an argument for a stupid reason.

Canadian companies lack strategies for promoting women:

In the U.S., 70 per cent of companies surveyed lacked strategies for promoting women, compared to 71 per cent internationally. Despatie noted that the Canadian survey also showed that 43 per cent of companies didn’t feel they had a problem with promoting women to top jobs. To women, however, the lack of support strategies was clear. More than half (53 per cent) of all Canadian women and about 38 per cent of American women thought their organization provided “no or minimal support” for their promotion.

It’s right here that the importance of feminism is revealed: companies think they’re doing an excellent job promoting women, but the reality is that they are even worse here than they are in the United States, a place that we’re all happy to look down on socially (to my great chagrin). When there is such a huge gap between perception and reality, the status quo becomes deeply entrenched and progress becomes next to impossible. I am somewhat reminded of the bromide from Alcoholics Anonymous – the first step is admitting you have a problem.

When confronted with this kind of information, the usual reaction of the anti-feminists is to go with the old standby excuse of “maybe there aren’t enough qualified women for the positions”. To me that seems to invite the question: why the hell aren’t there? Women are statistically better educated, are supposedly guaranteed by law to be free from official discrimination based on sex, and equally intelligent as their male counterparts – wherefore the disparity?

Women are underutilized in executive workforce – study:

In both years, a full 30 per cent of the largest companies in Canada did not have a single woman in their executive ranks. “Time is up for ‘give it time’,” Gillis said, though she added that the solution is not simple tokenism. Research indicates that on average, companies with more women senior officers outperform those with fewer (emphasis mine).

That agrees very much with what one of Canada’s largest companies has found in its efforts to reduce the homogeneity of its executive ranks. “If you start to see it as one versus the other, you miss the point,” TD Bank CEO Ed Clark said of the bank’s efforts to promote more women in a recent CBC interview. “By framing it as a people development issue, you don’t get this zero-sum game; everybody wins.”

More and more we are finding that the stereotypical underperformance of women in “men’s fields” like sciences and mathematics are a product of the stereotypes, and not due to any actual difference in cognitive ability. Tearing down stereotypes is a process that requires the intentional encouragement of cognitive dissonance – creating highly visible and immediately recognizable violations of the stereotype. Faced with observed reality and “what I’ve always heard”, reality wins out in the end. Add to that the fact that encouraging women appears to have beneficial outcomes above and beyond being the right thing to do, and you’ve got the recipe for a winner.

(There is an important fact raised in that article that doesn’t fit the overall theme of the argument, but I thought it should be raised anyway. While Crown corporations had the largest proportion of women in executive positions, the private sector came in second place, a number that has increased slightly in the past 2 years. It appears that the private sector is doing a better job of promoting women than the public sector. Just food for thought.)

The premier-designate is a woman:

It may not be kosher to discuss the premier-designate (Christy Clark) in terms of her sex, given we are conditioned to believe that a person’s capability has nothing to do with gender, but it’s clearly a factor, because when it comes to positions of power, whether it’s Parliament Hill or a corporate boardroom, a skirt is still an anomaly in Canada.

And it is relevant. The majority of the population is female, and yet women remain woefully under-represented at the top -be it by historical choice or entrenched sexism. Women, despite making up the bulk of the workforce, are still traditionally considered custodians of the home and hearth and, as such, are often viewed as weaker than men, slower to decision and less likely to be strong political leaders who will go the distance.

My home province of British Columbia (or at least those who are registered members of the provincial Liberal party) recently appointed a new leader… and it’s a lady! If you scratch the surface of the image of the B.C. granola hippie yoga hipster, you’ll find that B.C. is still a western province with deep entrenched Conservative (note the capitalization) values. It is indeed, therefore, a big deal that the person with her finger on the button is a “her”. Despite the fact that the provincial Liberals would pass for Conservatives just about anywhere else in the country, a female premier (designate) is just the kind of high-profile stereotype-busting position I was talking about, and I wish premier-designate Clark success.

Ivory Coast women protesters shot:

Soldiers backing Ivory Coast’s defiant leader mowed down women protesting his refusal to leave power in a hail of gunfire Thursday, killing at least six and shocking a nation where women’s marches have historically been used as a last resort against an unrestrained army. Because the president’s security force has shown almost no reserve in opening fire on unarmed civilians, the women decided this week to organize the march in the nation’s commercial capital Abidjan, assuming soldiers would be too ashamed to open fire. But at least six of the thousands of women demonstrating Thursday were killed on the spot, said Mohamed Dosso, an assistant to the mayor of Abobo, a suburb of the city.

Women bring another set of sensibilities to the table when discussing issues, and a diversity of viewpoints is a strength. Whatever the final decision, having a plurality of insight allows decision-making authorities to consider a variety of potential outcomes. In the Ivory Coast, women have traditionally exercised a different kind of power to their male counterparts, and have been able to blunt the more outrageous actions of a male-dominated culture. Their execution by the army signals a disturbing new development in an already-disturbing conflict.

Closing thoughts

Which brings me back to the question I tried to address earlier: why does feminism still matter?

Well, do women experience disproportionately little political and economic power? Is the improvement of the standing of women irrevocably linked to the improvement of society in general? Have gains been made? Is there still work to do?

The answer to all of the above questions is “yes”. We are not yet, as a society, in a position to let feminism slide into history as obsolete. While I am primarily a commentator on race and associated issues, I am not so blind as to fail to recognize that the same societal forces that are stacked against black people are stacked against women. A victory for women is a victory for all of us, and there can be no equality until we see the advancement of women as being part of our own self-interest. In order to achieve that, people need to be talking about it.

Happy International Women’s Day.

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20 In defense of the “weaker sex”

March 3, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · civil rights · crapitalism · culture · feminism · gender · law · sex

Note: This article first appeared on Monday, February 28th on Canadian Atheist. While it is CA policy not to cross-post, I felt that this case needed to be made on as many outlets as I could.

A good friend of mine posted a story on my Facebook wall last week about a police officer who fell victim to the arch-stupidity of the “she was asking for it” argument:

A police officer who suggested women can avoid sexual assault by not dressing like “sluts” has apologized, saying he is “embarrassed” by the remark and that assaulted women are “not victims by choice.”

“I made a comment which was poorly thought out and did not reflect the commitment of the Toronto Police Service to the victims of sexual assaults,” Const. Michael Sanguinetti wrote on Thursday to Osgoode Hall Law School where he made the comment. “Violent crimes such as sexual assaults can have a traumatizing effect on their victims. . . . My comment was hurtful in this respect.”

It’s a tired trope that is almost guaranteed to come up in any discussion of women and sexuality – if women didn’t make themselves so open to sexual predators then they’d be safer. It is due to the privilege of being male that this argument offends me only intellectually, since I will never be the target of a sexual assault. I will never appreciate the visceral part of the feminist response to this argument, try as I might. The reason this particular friend posted the link on my wall is that she and I have gone 9 rounds on it in the past, with me articulating the “personal responsibility” position. Don’t worry – I got better.

However, a second friend of mine saw this and posted what he thought was an entirely reasonable response. His response (I’ll call him “Billy” just so we can avoid pronoun confusion) was that the story failed to take the police officer’s side into account. It is a fact, said Billy, that women will be less inviting targets for assault if they are dressed more conservatively and hide their sexuality. Billy didn’t understand why this was such a controversial statement, and was taken aback with Sheila’s (again, for the same of pronoun confusion) full-throated and confrontational response. Billy messaged me afterward to apologize for starting a fight on my wall, and confessing that he couldn’t really understand what he had said that was so inflammatory.

The problem with this “she was asking for it” argument, aside from the fact that it isn’t true (sexual assault is just as common in Muslim countries where women have to stay covered and none of them dress sexy for fear of being arrested, beaten, or scalded with acid), is that it completely misses the point, and tries to derive an “ought” from an “is”. The mere fact that a woman is more likely to be assaulted if she wears certain types of clothing does not make it right. The solution to the problem is not for women to “dress less slutty” (a phrase which is provocative enough on its own), but for men to realize that a woman’s choice of dress is not an open invitation to sexual assault.

It seems as though this seemingly-obvious (once explained) argument still has yet to suffuse through common consciousness:

A University of Manitoba law professor has concerns about a judge’s comments at a sexual assault sentencing. Karen Busby said the remarks by Justice Robert Dewar are a legal throwback to the time when how a woman dressed or acted could be treated as implied consent to sex. Dewar said “sex was in the air” when he spared a man jail time by handing him a two-year conditional sentence instead and allowing him to remain free in the community.

During the sentencing, Dewar also commented on the way the woman was dressed and her actions the night she was forced to have sex in the woods along a dark highway outside Thompson in 2006. The man and a friend met the 26-year-old woman and her girlfriend earlier that night outside a bar under what the judge called “inviting circumstances.” He pointed out the victim and her friend were dressed in tube tops, no bras, and high heels and noted they were wearing plenty of makeup. Dewar called the man a “clumsy Don Juan” who may have misunderstood what the victim wanted.

On a Facebook wall, the kind of statement that Billy made (although, to be sure, he didn’t intend to suggest that it is a rape victim’s fault for being assaulted and he went out of his way to say so) is merely annoying. When it comes from a judge’s mouth, it carries behind it the force of law. I do not wish to derogate Justice Dewar’s abilities as a jurist – perhaps he would have handed down an identical sentence if the victim’s clothing had not been a factor. One cannot guarantee that this would have been the case for all judges, although it certainly should be.

And certainly, this kind of cavalier attitude toward sexual assault does appear in other places:

Reports that women are being sexually assaulted at a Downtown Eastside shelter are being ignored, a coalition of women and women’s groups is charging. But the agency that oversees the First United Church co-ed shelter at Gore and Hastings says it has had meetings with both police and women’s groups on the matter and is actively working to address it. “The safety and security of people using provincially funded shelters are our top priority,” said a statement from BC Housing, which funds and has an operation agreement with the shelter. “We will continue working together to make sure the shelter is a safe place to stay.” But Harsha Walia, a coordinator at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Shelter, said women have reported sexual abuse to front-line workers, police and staff at the shelter, and nothing has been done about it.

When it is a woman’s fault for being assaulted, when her mere presence is provocation enough to justify some kind of violence against her, we know something has gone terribly wrong. When we turn a blind eye to women being assaulted, we cannot call ourselves a society where women enjoy equal or sufficient rights under the law. And because language like “she was asking for it” or “don’t dress like a slut” only serves to reinforce the casual tolerance of violence against women that leads to assault, it is the job of every feminist to speak out against it whenever it comes up. It will forever be a source of chagrin for me that I didn’t always speak this way, but I bloody well will from now on.

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0 Vancouver does something good

December 23, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · gender · good news

I was poking around the archives from the past few weeks, as I do from time to time, and I realized I haven’t done a “good news” segment in a while. I started hunting for good news segments after it got back to me that a friend of mine thought the blog was too ‘ranty’. While I am inclined to think that anyone who puts their beliefs forward without apology will be accused of “ranting”, but in the interest of maintaining a sense of balance, I throw out stories like this from time to time:

Vancouver’s mayor Gregor Robertson and police chief Jim Chu announced Monday the launch of the Sister Watch program, designed to make the Downtown Eastside safer for women. Chu said police were targeting “predatory and violent drug dealers” who were responsible for attacks against women. “The levels of violence against women in this community must not be tolerated. We must work together to reduce [them],” he said.

One of the things that politicians like to do is legislate larger punishments for crimes. This is a quick and easy way to gin up votes without having to commit any money up front to solve a problem. The logic behind such legislation is that if punishments are high, it will deter would-be criminals from committing the crimes. The problem is that, despite what the rational agent theory within economics would have you believe, there is a ceiling for such disincentive, beyond which the magnitude of the disincentive is immaterial. If, for example, someone threatened to stab you if you didn’t do something, would it make any difference to you if they said they were going to stab you and then punch you in the face? The addition of the face-punch is not the point – if you’re willing to risk getting stabbed then you’re probably hell-bent on doing the thing anyway.

It is for this reason that I favour programs that actually do something rather than just assuming something will be done by a policy. Those of you regular readers who are not from the Vancouver area may not know much about Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. Imagine it like a much whiter (and more Native) version of Compton or Harlem – this is the “rough part of town” in Vancouver. There is a great deal of drug use and abuse that happens in this area, and a lot of associated assault and violent crime. Passing stricter drug laws and proscribing harsher penalties for possession and distribution have not deterred crime in the area. Nor, sadly, has increasing police presence (although there is a caveat here, since increased familiarity and rapport between police and DTES residents has led to greater reporting of crime).

Of course, women in the DTES are particularly vulnerable, as with the regular risk of muggings, assault, and the hodgepodge of random crimes that anyone is at risk of, there’s a whole slate of sexual crimes that women are particularly targeted for. Putting a service like this in place is actually two things – first, it is the recognition of a particular problem affecting a subpopulation of Vancouver residents, and it is a policy targeted at community involvement. This serves the purpose of both protecting women and raising the consciousness of the community at large. This will hopefully result in a sea change in which people are more aware of the issues surrounding violence against women, and will reverberate through the city of Vancouver outside the specific issues related to the DTES.

Hurray.

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1 HIS will be done, dammit!

December 2, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · crapitalism · gender · religion

I’m kind of flabbergasted that anyone (let alone Tony Blair) would agree with the statement that religion is a force for good in the world. Every major civil rights, scientific, social and human achievement in the history of the world has been staunchly opposed on religious grounds. The fact that they were supported on religious grounds is largely unimportant to me – all it does is demonstrate the fact that religious texts and beliefs can be used to justify anything, thus disqualifying them as a force for anything.

However, look at any group trying to retard social progress, trying to hold back the passage of time, on the side of hate and intolerance, and you will always find the justification for such stupidity draped in the garments of the faithful:

Since its debut in 1978, the New International Version — known as the NIV — has been the Bible of choice for evangelicals, selling more copies than any other version. But a 2005 gender-inclusive edition bombed after being condemned as too liberal. Translators hope their latest edition, which debuted online this month, will avoid a similar fate. They’ve retained some of the language of the 2005 edition. But they also made changes — like going back to using words like “mankind” and “man” instead of “human beings” and “people” — in order to appease critics.

Ah yes, mustn’t give them wimmins any ideas about gender equality. As everyone knows, man is the head of woman the way that Christ is the head of the church, or some such nonsense. It obviously makes for a far better world when the deeply-entrenched sexism of the past thousand or so years of western civilization continue to be propped up as the immutable will of the invisible sky-ghost that makes football players miss catches.

Of course the delicious irony of this whole situation is that they’re discussing the immutable will of the sky-ghost… as revealed through His holy books… with those tasked to translate those very books!

They also broke a promise they’d made to James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, John Piper, pastor of Minneapolis megachurch Bethlehem Baptist, and other conservative pastors, not to produce a gender-inclusive NIV. In response, Dobson accused translators of distorting the word of God.

I can muster a grudging respect for those who have taken the time to learn the original languages of the Bible. They, at least, are willing to put in the effort to explore the full implications of their superstition. Most everyone, at least those who are relevant to this story, can only read English (if that). The hypocrisy required to tell the very people who make it possible for you to understand the book you’re referencing that they’re “doing it wrong” is so particular to the religious, I think it should have it’s own name. Hypocrigion, perhaps? Theopocrisy? I’m sure you can come up with something.

It is as I’ve long suspected – the Bible doesn’t make people sexist; it was written by sexists, and then used to propagate that bigotry for the future to enjoy. Thanks, guys!

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