Fortunately, before I read Grossman and Pinker I
already had some experience in being disappointed by authors.
As part of my long reading list I read The
Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, and I really liked it. Then he let me down.
I read multiple articles on it. The Buzzfeed link is
more about Ronson and the book, but the Shakesville link is really important
for context, and for Ronson's duplicity in dealing with Adria Richards, which I
find interesting in light of his sympathy for the quote manufacturer that is
mentioned in the Buzzfeed article. I just have no trust for Ronson anymore.
Let me go back to On Killing. What I thought
at the time was that Grossman was so entrenched in the military mindset that it
limited his outer view. There were some things it helped him to understand
better, but other things it made him miss.
It is completely normal for your lived experience to
affect how you view the world. I know a lot of people get their hackles raised
when you bring up "privilege", but it is true that there are things
that you don't have to know. That doesn't apply to Grossman as much, but I
totally believe it applies to Ronson and Pinker.
I don't have to think about what being black is
like; I do have to know what being a woman is like. There are things I am aware
of because of my economic status, and because of being educated, and because of
being fat, but I don't have to know about being queer or not having good
educational opportunities available, and I wouldn't if I didn't make a point of
listening and reading.
if your circumstances place you at the top of the
hierarchy (straight white male), then it is easy to only know that experience.
These particular writers missing important things is not surprising.
Therefore it is easy for Ronson to compare job loss
to rape. It is easy for him to sympathize more with the person who lost one job
(where he already had a file) and still has a fair amount of privacy than the
person who has had death threats and online harassment and had much worse
employment problems. That is not changed by the fact that the man was violating
the conference's policy, and the woman was following it.
It is easy for Pinker to decry rape culture as a
thing when he is not the one devalued by it. Honestly, we might not have the
right name for it. Right now I am finishing up Danielle McGuire's At the
Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance. Black women were
raped and sexually molested by white men frequently, and there were rarely any
repercussions. At the same time, accusations of the rape of white women got black
men killed pretty regularly and the fear of it was used to keep white people
afraid of integration.
That is about maintaining a social structure, so it
is political. That doesn't mean there is nothing personal there, or that the
sexual aspects are meaningless, but that's not all it is. It can be perfectly
reasonable then to see in how we as a society respond to rape that there is
something more there.
I don't want to prove rape culture or resolve online
harassment in this post, but there are two things that I notice. One is that
privilege comes through. Adria Richards, as a black woman, gets abuse that the
person she reported got to skip. That's not a coincidence. You can find lots
and lots of examples of that happening. So white guys missing things is one
thing, but when the people at the top of the heap won't see the problems of
those lower down, that's a structural problem and it needs addressing if we are
going to pretend to care about fairness and justice and democracy.
The other thing I notice is that since you do have
to actively seek out other viewpoints to get the full picture, it is
fascinating and discouraging how strongly some people resist the inclusion of
other voices. I read recently that diversity has become a word that people use
to avoid talking about race, but that's unfortunate. Truly seeking out
diversity means that you can get better information and better ideas.
That's why you need to hear from other writers, even
though publishing is mostly white. You need to have racial diversity in film
crews, and not just the cast. You need to be hearing from different people on
the opinion pages. Unless we just don't care, but we should care.
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