Hard News: #NetHui: it's all about you
469 Responses
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I’m too busy lurking to answer any research questionnaires.
But what if someone really, really needed to know whether you are a chief household shopper?
Yeah, that was really dispiriting. You know they're home, but they see you coming and just don't answer the door. And I had laminated flash cards and everything.
Tales of a Market Researcher: Part II
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Sacha, in reply to
they see you coming and just don't answer the door
lurkers, see
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Robyn Gallagher, in reply to
Yesterday, I went to the supermarket. I wanted to buy stockings. The brand I wanted was on special, all varieties of it, except for the “curvaceous” range.
Here's my dilemma - I'm tall but not skinny so not only do the 'regular' range of pantyhose not fit me, but the 'curvy' size doesn't either. I've got the power combo of taller than average (generally considered better than short, yeah?) and wider than average (generally considered worse than skinny). Where does my privilege fit? I envy women who can buy tights from the supermarket!
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
You get the culture you breed, twonkface.
Needs be put on t-shirts, caps, embroidered samplers and even tattooed inside the eyelids of people on this list I prepared earlier...
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
Can we talk about privilege, or rather the use of that word as a weapon of sorts?
Sure, but I think one really wonderful thing about the internet is that your experience of the world, and the perspective it gives you, is enormously different from mine (and vice versa). That's not a bad thing, or a good thing, but it sure doesn't hurt to STFU occasionally and genuinely listen to other people, and try to get your head around where folks are coming from -- even though that might be a really difficult thing to do.
And, yeah, I make no apologies for challenging myself to own a lot of under-examined privilege in my life that comes entirely from the accident of being born with a penis to middle-class parents in a First World country. I don't bother getting all angsty about it, not least because that's just ego-masturbation and condescending to people who neither need nor welcome an on-line Lady Bountiful. But being conscious of that really should make me think more carefully about how I talk about, and to, women, ethnic and religious minorities and generally towards folks who don't look, sound or live like me.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
Ooo that's meta lurking there - love it
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Sacha, in reply to
meta lurking
nice
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
And I just spent 3 hours watching the new Sherlock and still no one has said that :(
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nzlemming, in reply to
No shit?
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Sacha, in reply to
shitless
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Centaur -right politics...
It’s pretty hard to trot on two legs, innit?
I was always under the impression that English was the horse's arse end while show pony John fronted as the mane man - as in trots key (careful with that icepick Eugene...)
L for male?
Re mansplaining, I find it odd that it’s got nothing to do with being in mantrol.
but everything to do with Man Troll...
(and yer still unlikely to get an abridged version)never give up the honeypot...
I do, on the other hand, have a problem with them holding the rights over the works of AA Milne for longer than absolutely necessary.
Maybe they'd be in deep Pooh without it...
They haven't had much in the way of their own properties for a while and have to share the profits on Pixar and Marvel which seem to be their big earners....Fanfare for the Commer Van...
what, no rooters for the Ford Transit van
especially the Mark 1, preferably matt black
and Rip It Up had a lovely beige one...
(which could be lost for hours at a time
if its parking place had not been divulged!)Shell be rite...
I’m talking eggs, dammit, eggs!
how did that old pick up line go?
"how do you like your eggs in the morning?"
to which the best reply was
"unfertilised..."Privilege...
I always liked those shoes with the curled over loop at the toe, that you could hang onto when squatting at the privy ledge... -
Hmmm.... totally agree about the usefulness of concepts like 'mansplaining', and 'tone argument' and something else that someone mentioned upthread but I've forgotten what it was. Anyway, Megan caught them on the wing and passed them back to Danielle who kicked them right up the field to Emma in an awesome display from the First XV. And I absolutely agree about the concepts being overused, and slammed down as trump cards to shut other people up. That has really pissed me off of late.
Regarding privilege. One way of thinking out it may be to turn it upside down, and think about vulnerabilities instead. I have one major area of vulnerability in my life i.e. being a woman. But I am not vulnerable in all areas of my life: I'm white, cis, straight, able-bodied, educated etc. I did nothing to deserve any of this: they just *are*. (Even 'education', where it was the good fortune of being born to parents who highly valued education, and knew how to obtain it for me.) Most of the time, I can just sail through my days, not worrying about anything much because I just don't have to. And because I don't have to think about it, I usually don't, and I can tromp all over other people (metaphorically) because I don't think hard enough. I can also choose not to deal with people who don't fit my world (white, able, cis, straight etc) by just ignoring them, but typically, people who are not privileged don't have that choice. I can choose not to be aware of Pasifika culture and ways of behaving, but sure as hell is hot Pasifika people can't afford to ignore palangi culture. That's privilege.
Yes, thinking about 'other' and 'othering' is helpful in this context, but I don't think it picks out quite the same ideas. In one way, what we do when we 'do privilege' (i.e. we act in a way that springs from being privileged), is that we are 'saming' people i.e. we are assuming that everyone is exactly the same as us, instead of recognising and responding to difference.
(I may not be able to respond much, I'm sorry, because right at the moment I am in that citadel of white first world privilege, Oxford, and the time difference makes things a little tricky.)
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Long, but excellent parable explaining privilege, 'though, Jackie, I guarantee that you will not like the title at all. I don't like the title either.
On the difference between Good Dogs and Dogs That Need a Newspaper Smack.
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Jackie Clark, in reply to
I don't think everyone's the same as me. I just think they should be.
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I think "privilege" does some of the work that "blind spot" used to do (before the latter was presumably consigned to the Memory Hole for its hint of able-ism). With the difference that "privilege" has the advantage of calling attention to a sense of ease that a person may never have noticed simply because it's the water they swim in (e.g. straight people casually talking about their partner without dodging around pronouns). But the word seems to have calcified, lost its original "aha" value, and developed a new definitiveness: "Check your privilege" => "Checkmate! You're privileged!"
Argumentative shorthand is great, especially when it's new and cathartically funny. "Mansplaining" cracked me up the first couple of dozen times I read it, and still makes me giggle, despite or perhaps because of its cheeky essentialising (it could have been invented for Alasdair Thompson and his explanatory woes).
But at the same time, I find a lot of jargon as disempowering and mentally itchy-making as others find it handy and empowering. My linguistic quibble with both "privilege" and "blind spot" and indeed "tone argument" is that they're nouns, and nouns are just so... nouny, so stolid and lumpen. They sit there in the middle of the table, taking up space, neither proposing nor inviting obvious action. What do you do with a noun like "privilege"? You "check it" -- but how? In the mirror, or at the left luggage office? At least "blind spot" suggests immediate remedial action, encouraging a person to move their eyes in the direction of something they haven't seen before, or to mentally occupy a position they've never stood in, or simply to ponder the possibility that what-they-see is not all-there-is.
And "tone argument" is just ambiguous.
I dunno. Give me a plain verb any day (like when, in the parable Deborah linked to, the gecko asks the dog to just listen; or when a march route goes up steps instead of a ramp, because people with feet forgot about people with wheels). Verbs help people of good will figure out what to do -- this time, next time, any time.
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Ugh. Just realised my whole comment above is probably a classic example of tonesplaining.
Which is why I lurk more than post, these days. The stakes are so high.
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Jolisa, in reply to
Nice one! The human condition in a nutshell. Especially the online human condition, eh?
And while I'm here, can I applaud Islander's reclaiming of shortsightedness as a gift, a page or so back. Myopes of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your corrective lenses.... [scrabbles about]... I know I put them somewhere...
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The stakes are so high.
Ribeye or porterhouse?
But seriously, earlier on you were the reason I stuck it out here. I really do miss your book blogs, and the quiet contemplation in your comments. Just so you know.
Ford Transit
The in transit van verve. Have noun, will travail.
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Cecelia, in reply to
Fabulous posts by you and Deborah about privilege. It was Coleridge, wasn't it: "What oft is thought but ne'er so well expressed". A poem, a blog post, what's the diff?
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Jackie Clark, in reply to
I think that's my problem. I use jargon so much in my work - be it educative jargon and not political - that I weary of it very quickly. Whatever word we want to use for it, we know what it is, we acknowledge it's existence, we do what we can to counter it in ourselves. I used to think the things that are outlined here and in other places about privilege, and I still do to a certain extent. I used to spout the jargon, walk the walk, talk the talk. It was my passion. Nowadays, my passion is about advocacy for children. So my beliefs about privilege haven't changed necessarily, it's just that I have moved my focus from adult disenfranchisement, to that of children . If you want lecturing about that, I'm your woman.
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Deborah, in reply to
it’s just that I have moved my focus from adult disenfranchisement, to that of children . If you want lecturing about that, I’m your woman
'cept it's not 'lecturing': it's passion and insight and experience brought together and shared with us.
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andin, in reply to
The dog kind of looks at her, and shrugs, and keeps turning the dial.
This is not because the dog is a jerk.
This is because the dog has no fucking clue what the lizard even just said.
And so it goes... I'm thinking planetary dial.
I can still call people jerks right? -
Megan Wegan, in reply to
Hey Craig?
That’s not a bad thing, or a good thing, but it sure doesn’t hurt to STFU occasionally and genuinely listen to other people, and try to get your head around where folks are coming from – even though that might be a really difficult thing to do.
I adore you. That's all.
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
I think “privilege” does some of the work that “blind spot” used to do (before the latter was presumably consigned to the Memory Hole for its hint of able-ism)
"Blind spot" could be construed as ableist only by Peripheral Vision Man, surely. And owls.
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Okay, for the first time in their lives I have introduced the concept of privilege to my colleagues. One said, and I quote “What the hell are you on about, now?” and with the other, we talked about the privilege that her daughter enjoys by going to a school that is not in South Auckland, like all her cousins. A privilege that her parents make sacrifices for. Now, I know that that sort of privilege isn’t what we were originally talking about, strictly. But this is a conversation I will be pursuing with people outside my colleagues as well,
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