February 8th, 2011 / 4:12 pm
Snippets
Snippets
Blake Butler—
Are all perceptions of inequality equal? If not, is gender discrimination worse than race discrimination, or sexual orientation discrimination? What about income, or shoe size? Or if they are all equal, who isn’t inequal? I’d like to see more publication of work by glass.
race discrimination is worse than gender or sexual orientation discrimination. All three are worse than income discrimination. All four are worse than shoe size discrimination.
Here we go again…
Inequality is not quantifiable. I think you are thinking about Young Jeezy and Gucci Mane.
actually i might amend this to the following, from worst to better: race, shoe size, income, and then sexual orientation & gender are tied.
this is based completely on how blurry the lines are that distinguish one race/shoe-size/income level/sexual-orientation/gender from the other. Gender being a less blurrier line than race or shoe size. So also assuming that a blurry line means there is less ethical ground to stand on to discriminate..
not sure if my ranking holds actually. shoe size isn’t blurry. Not sure how to rank them. But I’m holding to my ranking system at least.
no i was right, shoe size is blurry, there are more than only two sizes of shoes.
Stained glass? Gendered glass: la finestra? The working-class glass on a Ford F-150? A glass slipper, Cinderella-sized?
amended from worst to better: income, shoe size, race, sexual orientation and gender are tied.
shoe size and race are close, there seem to be close to the same number of prevelant races as there are prevelant shoe sizes.
something im not taking into account though is consequence and also how much control a person has over their status (ie. income is arguably under the control of a person to change it, more so than a person might change their own gender). i would have to factor that in somehow, it would move gender and sexual orientation up. It would probably end up being something like race, gender/sexual orientation, income, then shoe size. which was actually my original order. So there you go.
shoe size keeps throwing me because it doesnt really exist much, but if it were prevelant, it would have to rank high, along with race. people dont have control over their shoe size, and there are many shoe sizes, so there is hardly ethical ground to stand on, which is why it probably doesnt exist much.
so amended, i now put shoe size back next to race and I’m at my original second ranking. i think thats the final.
no its not. its like this: race, shoe size, sexual/gender orientation, income. i think that’s it.
yeah i think thats it. is that what other people got too?
you conflate ‘gender discrimination’ with ‘sexual-orientation discrimination’?
pig
Discrimination against shoe size doesn’t exist though. If people with small feet had been treated as second class citizens for decades, then it might be equal.
haha. only mathematically. there are only three genders (man woman trans) and only three sexual orientations (gay straight bi), and in neither case does the person have a choice. so i’m equating them in this scenario.
“I’d like to see more publication of work by glass.”
When glass starts writing in great numbers, makes up more than half the population, dominates the lower rungs of the writing community (from writers’ groups to MFAs), reads writing regardless of its glass-like quality in higher numbers than non-glass, and has thousands of years of political and social discrimination as its inheritance then we can start comparing it to gender.
Is “inequality” simply a matter of “perception”?
Are there really no empirical determinations, no quantities, that can be measured and reasonably interpreted to indicate comparable levels of systematic viciousness imposed by community-‘perceived’ identification?
Shoe size is a euphemism.
Long before perception is filtered through the prejudices that one screws onto the many pathways through which informantion flows in the mind, it is reality-based and entirely empirical.
And by “long before,” I mean a matter of milliseconds.
Really? What does a woman’s foot-size have to do with her fun-bags??
Well, I agree (I think).
I’m with the “anticipatory forestructure of [all] understanding”, but I think it’s obtuse – or cruel – to insist that identity-based discrimination is only a matter of perception or semantics – that one can conjure one’s perspective ‘out’ of the concrete determinations of a discriminatory community.
Original comment meant more in a chummy, sighing agreement. The empirical is out there if we—covered as we are in our black and purple obtusions—just let it in.
Yep to both of you. I’d say more, but the last time I got involved in a discussion at html about inequality, representation, and literary publishing (and ’empirical evidence’) I believe I lost all sense. The VIDA numbers do not explain causes, nor do they tell us how many women submitted, but they do provide a snapshot of gender representation at some of the better magazines. And my *perception* is that something is awry.
A true beauty’s feet were bound at a young age.
Is there some rule that if you talk about one thing (gender) that you have to talk about all the other things that are like that thing? One set of statistics doesn’t foreclose the possibility of another set that focuses on something different. By all means, if small-feeted people are never published, they should talk about it. I am small-footed, a woman, and published in one of the places VIDA did stats of. But when I see numbers like this, I get scared, and it makes me think about babies and working in a way that I didn’t when I thought I had much more time for both. Personally, I think Tina Fey’s discussion of it in this week’s New Yorker is more interesting (and funny) than a column of pie charts. That someone as rich and famous as Tina Fey has these feelings scares me. But it can only be useful and additive to look at the numbers, too. It doesn’t mean the numbers tell the whole story, OBVIOUSLY. Sure, there are reasons for numbers, and not all of those reasons have anything to do with sexism or misogyny, but to me as a woman that’s actually kind of irrelevant anyway. The fact remains that I and most of the women I know think and worry a lot about babies and work and age in relation to those things in a way that I don’t really hear men of a similar demographic discuss.
discrimination is kicking people out of jail
i wear a size 5 in shoes. most shoe stores don’t carry shoes in my size, unless i go to the kids section. once, to get my pumas, i had to go into toddlers. now that’s just embarrassing.
This is a really great reply, Amy.
One thing I find so weird about this place is how it’s so resistant to ‘naturalism’ as a literary form and yet there is this intense defence of being able to “act naturally” in everday life. If there’s a disproportionate amount of male authors around you, then you’re not reading the best there is on offer: you’re only reading the best of what there is that’s being offered to you. If it feels unnatural to try and find books based on colour, sexuality, gender, class or bodily ability, or if they’re not around to find, that’s because what’s natural is itself what is fucked. Acting against habit, acting artificially, not to appease what might seem a sociological criteria but in order to negate the way that very criteria already orders your judgment, isn’t just a matter of equality; it’s a matter of being true to aesthetics.
Actually, this brings up a related point: Amy, do you (or anyone else) have any thoughts on why it seems like women are so generally underrepresented in online blog collectives (like as contributors)? Not only in collectives either, but also in comments. I find the maleness of online space is so strange. Or is it that I’m just not visiting the right places?
I always assume it’s because women work harder or are less inclined to squander time in these forums.
ha ha
the Oates prerogative
No form of discrimination is inherently worse because democratic rights are indivisible.
In practical terms not every conceivable form of discrimination is a problem in any given society.
‘Shoe size’ is a euphemism for density?
If there’s empirically compelling evidence that there’s identity-based discrimination, that discrimination is “identity politics” – and of a sort more egregious than a protective flight into ‘identity’ that, to me, has hijacked too much of progressive politics.
Your second statement gets into some pretty tricky territory, mainly because of the weight of the word “discrimination.” You’re referencing how our society discriminates against murderers and rapists, right? But we don’t consider this discrimination because it is seen as beneficial to society, although I full acknowledge the moral slipperiness of the word “beneficial.”
At any rate, discrimination = unfair judgement of people or practice. If discrimination is positive, fair, or not a problem, it isn’t discrimination. Yes, it depends on the mores of a particular culture, but hey, we’re not trying to figure out a universal moral code as I’m sure some of us have jobs/school to go to sometime in the next thousand years (i.e., it’s a morally useless argument).
“You’re referencing how our society discriminates against murderers and rapists, right?”
No, I was referring to discrimination by shoe size, etc. I was just answering the post in a literal-minded way.
Maybe I’m misreading, but I got the impression that alan was trying to say that some societies have a problems with discrimination in regard to A, B and C while others have problems with discrimination with B, C, and D while A isn’t really an issue.
One way to discern discrimination against blacks, gays, and women from discrimination against murderers and rapists is to ask whether the ‘thing’ discriminated against is what another person is or what another person does.
(The former is what we usually call “discrimination”; the latter reaction – penalty – is usually not called “discrimination”, though a “discrimination” is made, in a more catholic use of the term.)
I don’t think a distinction, either of judgement or of response, between a state of being and an action is “morally useless”.
I’d agree with that. I’ve written some about the politics of race, and I agree, too much of progressive politics has devolved into identity politics. I do think, though, that there was a time when identity-based discrimination and the political response to those inequalities were less divergent.
excellent question, I think all perceptions of inequality are in fact equal with some more equal than others but only arithmetically, the others geometrically and exponentially. Who isn’t inequal is a koan. The most egregious inequality? Income to IQ, of course.
Speaking of…did anyone hear about that thing at AWP where someone quoted Tony Hoagland as saying: “I write for white people”
The thing was an essay by Claudia Rankine, the text of which is available on her website, claudiarankine.com. (Click on *AWP.) The Tony Hoagland poem she discusses is here: writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2008/01/11. An description and an analysis of the event (by Sara Jaffe) is here: http://allhooknochorus.blogspot.com/2011/02/condition-of-being-addressable-response.html.
thanks for these links
it is important to remember how many women bloggers are treated as sexual objects, especially if you post photographs of yrself on yr blog. i’ve actually had a rather well-known poet ask for a larger version of a picture of myself in a bra (found on my website) in exchange for a copy of their book. when i did not answer the email, they sent a follow-up reminder. that’s how sure they felt of the okayness of their request. i often get gross/pervy comments from goodreads users (which caused me to change my userpic and delete the link to my website) and so do a lot of my female friends. there’s also the classic trick where the male editor (or whoever) adds only the very attractive girls (whether they are writers or not) on your facebook friendslist, usually after you have uploaded a picture of them. then—all the great comments you read on blogs about female writers, which often involve some mention of her physical appearance. just sayin this kind of shit happens all the time.
it is important to remember how many women bloggers are treated as sexual objects, especially if you post photographs of yrself on yr blog. i’ve actually had a rather well-known poet ask for a larger version of a picture of myself in a bra (found on my website) in exchange for a copy of their book. when i did not answer the email, they sent a follow-up reminder. that’s how sure they felt of the okayness of their request. i often get gross/pervy comments from goodreads users (which caused me to change my userpic and delete the link to my website) and so do a lot of my female friends. there’s also the classic trick where the male editor (or whoever) adds only the very attractive girls (whether they are writers or not) on your facebook friendslist, usually after you have uploaded a picture of them. then—all the great comments you read on blogs about female writers, which often involve some mention of her physical appearance. just sayin this kind of shit happens all the time.
it is important to remember how many women bloggers are treated as sexual objects, especially if you post photographs of yrself on yr blog. i’ve actually had a rather well-known poet ask for a larger version of a picture of myself in a bra (found on my website) in exchange for a copy of their book. when i did not answer the email, they sent a follow-up reminder. that’s how sure they felt of the okayness of their request. i often get gross/pervy comments from goodreads users (which caused me to change my userpic and delete the link to my website) and so do a lot of my female friends. there’s also the classic trick where the male editor (or whoever) adds only the very attractive girls (whether they are writers or not) on your facebook friendslist, usually after you have uploaded a picture of them. then—all the great comments you read on blogs about female writers, which often involve some mention of her physical appearance. just sayin this kind of shit happens all the time.
ugh, a large part of my comment got lopped off. anyway, i was saying that i think some of the reason women are less likely to engage as bloggers and commenters is that blogs and their users sometimes get real intense and aggressive and (as a woman) you often have to deal with overt sexual bullshit that often makes it not worth it. but then, of course, there are a lot of female bloggers and great sites like delirious hem and lemon hound.