I’ve been following a discussion over on a friend’s blog about the recent Guardian article titled “Casual sexism is nothing but misogyny.” Bidisha, the article’s author, discusses casual sexism — the kind you’ll overhear in public transit and in coffee shops, the kind that a coworker will bring into your world while completely unaware they’re doing it. Or worse, being aware and not caring. It’s a real, serious, and insidious problem that should be voiced often.
But not the way Bidisha is doing it, for goodness’ sake. Her discourse is shooting its own cause in the head.
Two moments in her article bring me to disproportionate anger, because they exemplify rhetoric that is not only damaging but actually, it seems, in largely uncritical favor with the crowd where I get most of my politics on. (This statement has much more generalized data behind it than the single post I’ve referred to.) One: “Any man who thinks it’s OK to live in a household where the woman does the overwhelming majority of all the housework, childcare and family admin is a woman-hater. If he weren’t, it would agonise him to live in such an unequal and exploitative setup.” And two: “So, what to do about casual sexism? Don’t perpetrate it yourself, call it when you see it and fight any man defending his misogyny or any woman defending her false consciousness.”
Taking most of the nuance out of my reaction to these statements, we’re left with: in what universe is this helpful to anybody?
Let’s break this down. Just the one LiveJournal post I’ve witnessed discussing the article has 109 comments on it so far. Clearly, it says things that people find it interesting to talk about, to think over. Isn’t that already helpful in spurring dialogue? No, I don’t think it is. Because this is the choir right here, the one Bidisha is preaching to. We are the friendliest of allies. Most of us evidently aren’t repelled by the way she phrases things. No warning flags go off in our heads upon reading those words in the larger context of the article.
But just as decisions about who does what around the house don’t exist in a vacuum, neither does her article — and there’s a hell of a lot more responsibility on Bidisha, what with the power of the press, to be balanced enough to get through to people. To not alienate people. To make her point, be loud and clear, and at the same time avoid giving the impression that the author is a nutter, frothing at the mouth. Because shenanigans like the above are going to get her ignored and the efforts of the people in her political camp undermined.
Here’s what I think of the substance (as opposed to the very poor form) of the two quotes above. With the false consciousness, she can take that horse and ride it right back out. She doesn’t get to conscript me into her black-and-white camp on the basis of my gender, and she doesn’t get to guilt trip me if I don’t go bleating assent. The issues around sexism and gender roles in the Anglo West are multifaceted, prismatic. Looking at them closely, you get a different picture every second because there are just so many factors that go into our gendered behaviors. And no Guardian writer gets to write off anyone else’s opinions as unexamined based on grossly incomplete information.
The bit about men who think it’s OK to live in households with unequal household labor division being woman-haters isn’t just absurd and factually wrong, it’s slander of some of feminism’s most important allies. Plenty of those men are ignorant, many are sexist, a good proportion are woman-haters. And a significant number have given the matter a lot of thought, often in concert with their female partners, and have made their decisions according to what makes everyone involved happiest.
Are those decisions informed by a sexist society? Certainly. Do these people help perpetuate it? Only if you limit your gaze at those situations to a cursory one. What they are doing is living by example. They might do well to talk about these hot-button topics from their perspectives, male and female alike; we need those voices. But they should not be changing the way they live on simply because they appear to be upholding the patriarchy. That’s an absurd, defeatist demand based on appearances and not substance.
None of this is to say that the fact of uneven household labor distribution, and the ways in which it plays out most of the time, isn’t sexist. It is. It is bad when it’s unexamined. When it’s considered, it’s significantly less bad. When it’s a conscious choice by generally thinking and aware people, you and I and Bidisha don’t get to judge it bad at all unless we know more intimate details about these people’s lives. Who are you to say they aren’t compensating in some other arena? Who am I to dictate how people should approach situations where nobody actually involved feels deprived, and nobody is harmed? This is a slippery-slope argument, given how many victims consent to being victimized because they don’t see any way out. But that doesn’t give us license to erase the line between unconsidered and thoroughly considered decisions, no matter how similar they look from the outside.
As for the discourse… sometimes I wonder why I bother. “Rhetoric” and “discourse” are dirty words to so many people. The concepts are ridiculed, dismissed as having nothing to do with the real world. But rhetoric matters. Discourse matters. It’s all we have here in the real world. What we say and how we say it are equally important, and both become much more so when volatile topics like gender roles are involved. Cutting Bidisha so much slack that this crap she says is mostly ignored in the name of a larger context is irresponsible. It’s the crap that will be most damaging to the relevant causes, and turning a blind eye to it just because the author writes about sexism in the Guardian is a bad thing to do.