Global Crisis

As I watched the finale of Game of Thrones, I spent a lot of time thinking about sexualized shame. We're in a kind of ongoing conversation about internet shame lately, with much of the drama focused on white people who feel really uncomfortable being taken to task by historically marginalized groups (people of color). The status quo is so worried about these white folks that Jon Ronson wrote a whole book about them, and keeps taking to the internet to tone police us.

Me, I'm worried about when shame interacts with power, rather than when people without power collectively use shame. One way is to think about punching up/punching down, but first of all - I don't like punching. Second, I think the simple verticality of power spectra is almost never clear (this is true for comedy).

Instead, I recommend thinking about whether a given situation undermines hierarchies and stereotypes or replicates them. When Tim Hunt is called out for his sexism, the collective action undermines hierarchies. When Adria Richards was harassed out of her job, the collective action replicates and reinforces hierarchies.

Recently, Jeb Bush's 1995 call for more public shaming came to light. His actions as a governor reinforcing that shaming mentality did likewise. In fact, the public shaming of women for their sexual choices has a long history and remains a fully modern aspect of our society today.

In Salon, I wrote about the 13-year-old girl Izabel Laxamana, who killed herself after her father shamed her for sending a selfie. I wrote about Jeb Bush. I used Cersei Lannister as a jumping off point, because too many responses to that pointed at the scene as a kind of thing "other people" do. It's not. It's us.

And then we come to Bush’s anti-choice credentials. At its core, the discourse of anti-choicers embraces the need to shame women for their sexual choices, functioning as what Amanda Marcotte calls “the sex police.” For single women in particular, the anti-choice movement wants their decision to have sex visible to the world, a warning sign to others. And Bush’s anti-choice credentials — again, drawing from his history as governor — are severe. In 2003, Bush declared himself the “most pro-life governor in modern times.” He fought to keep an intellectually disabled rape victimand, in 2005, a 13-year-old rape victim, from having abortions. He now says he is willing to consider a rape and incest exception to a ban on abortion, but that’s it. For all other women, in the views of Bush, the decision to have sex is a public matter.
Shame is a powerful tool. It can be used to shed light on prejudice and injustice, but the power dynamic between a state and a woman being shamed by the state is inherently abusive. When we take a scene like Cersei’s walk and justify it as a dramatic re-creation of a bygone era, or the kind of thing that only happens in other places, we miss the ways such dynamics continue to play out in our society. That’s not a criticism of “Game of Thrones,” but a criticism of us.
The public shaming of women in order to control female sexuality is not a medieval throwback or a fictional problem, but a major part of our culture today. It killed Izzy Laxamana. And it’s still being perpetuated by at least one man seeking to become the most powerful person in the world.

Public shaming has a body count.

Over the last week, I twice wrote (and tweeted) about Joshua Kim and an essay that I found to be sexist. More importantly, the women he wrote about found it to be sexist, and in the ensuing discussion, Kim spent a lot of time talking about what he thought and he felt, rather than acknowledging the truth of Rab's and Watters' lived experience.

• I wrote Kim an "open letter."
• I later wrote about three premises on speech, including -  (1) A powerful white man cannot call out a woman on tone without reinforcing patriarchal discourse.

One of the gifts that this whole week has given me is that I’ve had lots of really good conversations with some of my closest female colleagues. They told me story after story about how they have been made to feel when making arguments… “too political, “too emotional, and entirely out-of-line”. (Again quoting from Watters). Over the years I have extensively linked to the writing of Watters, referencing her as an authority in educational technology. (On 4/9/14 I even said that Watters was one of 3 people I know in edtech who should get a McArthur Genius Award, writing - “…who would better use this money/platform more to change our ideas about higher education?”). Given this background, I had assumed (and I think that this was a bad assumption) that my critique of her and her co-author would be understood as part of an ongoing professional interaction within our IHE community. It was my mistake to think that this history would matter in how my critical comments would be received, and to not fully appreciate the way that I wrote would be heard. It is absolutely true that at the time I would have written a similar response if the authors of the Watters/Goldrick-Rab review of Carey’s book had been men. My blindspot is not that I thought about gender when I wrote my critique of their review, it is that I did not.

He still relies on his intention as a shield, which is understandable. Intention does matter. It's better to be sexist accidentally than intentionally. On the other hand, he actually cannot know whether he would have written a similar response of the authors of the review had been men, because we are not wholly independent actors, and that to me is what is interesting.

We consume patriarchal (and racist, and classist, and ableist, and homophobic, and ...) culture from birth and it can rear up and shape our perceptions, our speech, our actions without warning. This is why it is vital, in these cases, to make the apology, to listen to the aggrieved (not me, but Rab and Watters and those in a similar situation), and then hope for restored community. Because we will all mess up from time to time.

Listening is key, and that's what I like about the paragraph above. He set out to listen to his female colleagues, heard what they said, and modified his response. Had he listened from the beginning, he would have realized that inadvertently or no, he was operating in sexist ways, and quickly backtracked and tried to make amends.

When we really listen to the voices of others, the voices of people experiencing discrimination and prejudice, then so much else follows.

Open a new browser window and do an image search for boys. Here's what I got.




All but two images in the first four rows are, in fact, boys (there are two adult male actors in row three).

Now do the same thing for the word "girls."


It's breasts and butts and lace and sexualized poses. Around image 40 or 50 you start to get the occasional actual child (from girl clothing ads), but as far as I scroll down, it continues to be mostly sexualized images of adult women.

Now there are plenty of other issues here in terms of race and body type and so forth, but right now I just to focus on the gender and age issue. 

I spend a lot of time writing and being concerned by the constant sexualization of girls throughout their whole lives, in fact even before they are born. I call it cradle-to-grave sexism.  Every time someone makes a "better get a shotgun" to an expectant father of a girl, it reinforces the idea that the whole job of the father is to control his daughter's sexuality. Every flirty doll intended for children. Every shirt about dating or getting money from daddy or otherwise linking sexist perceptions of adult behavior to children. Every "sexy" Halloween costume for girls. It's endless. here's the word "girls" itself. There are no girls. There's no room for a girl to just be a child.

And here we see that even the word "girl" has been locked within this sexualized framework. Even the word!

And unlike when there's some sexist product we can fight or boycott or protest, I have no idea what to do here. This is not Google's fault, but rather the aggregation of use and links and imagery flung up on the page. I have no solutions today.

[Note: This post was inspired by a friend, J., who was talking about gender pronouns with her daughters, and thought Google might help. Google instead showed this].