Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Fix up, young men, in reply to LaraH,
Especially older more experienced men
I think the main key is people who are respected. I remember talking a guy more than twice my age out of attempting to get into a romantic situation with his mate's 15 year old daughter. I was the President of a club we were both in, and the oldest other person there, so I guess he homed in on me. I did have a lot of soul searching to do that night about what kind of role model I must be that he thought I might be sympathetic to his plight.
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Hard News: Fix up, young men, in reply to Bart Janssen,
As you say part of it is because victims (women) know they are being abused and bystanders (men) don’t necessarily know.
Also, I think in a reasonable number of cases, the perpetrators don't even really know. They either don't know that their attention is unwanted or their behaviour is beyond a joke, or they can't remember they even did that at all. Alcoholic memory loss is really common, and it's right when a lot of people are at their absolute worst. It might even be the only time they're like that. And their group are all like that, all affirming the behavior at the time and denying it later.
I can remember some pretty atrocious attitudes to women from when I was younger. I didn't know what to believe, though, because my own intimate contact with women was a lot less.
My one sole serious confiding in my teen years was with a girl who was raped after getting really drunk. I remember feeling what a gulf there was between our experiences, and what sort of fucked-up maggot the guy must have been to have done that to this wonderful person, and how the hell he got away with it at a party. She was mostly worried about being seen as a slut by the people who mattered to her. I found it interesting in hindsight that it didn't matter what I thought about it, or perhaps that she already knew that I wasn't going to be judgmental towards her about it. It clearly helped to talk about it. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind it was true in every detail - she had no reason to tell me something like that if it wasn't true. She even showed me a photo of the guy (he was hanging in the back of a shot, and wearing sunglasses at night, as if he didn't want to be in the pictures), and literally shivered as she did it. This was amid a whole lot of party pics she was sharing which looked like everyone was really enjoying themselves. I was never going to cross paths with him and she was not going to follow up in any way, and she disassociated with the group straight away. The group memory of her being raped simply never happened. They all probably thought of him as that funny guy who hung around with the sunnies until the party ended.
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Hard News: Fix up, young men, in reply to Bart Janssen,
ETA: Not @bart…that’s accidental.
Not being a concert goer, and looking from the outside inwards, I’d have to say my instinct on how to make sense of the dispute over whether there’s been a change of culture recently would be to weight far more heavily the testimony of the targets of the abuse.
How much more heavily would be an arbitrary number picked out of thin air. I’m not going to say that women’s voices count tenfold, or a hundredfold. But I’m mindful that abuse very often goes on right under the noses of people who are not the targets, and would be furious to find out it had happened. They’re not very good judges. But anyone being abused tends to have quite a good feel for how much of it is going on, because they can’t ignore it when it’s happening to them. I use abuse widely here, to mean harassment of all kinds. Something visible and obvious to outsiders is most likely the tip of the iceberg – the final straw even. Any time I’ve felt I was receiving unwanted attention, it was very hard NOT to notice it from then on. I’m not talking about sexual harassment here (in my own case), just attention generally – we humans are very, very good at spotting when someone is concentrating on us, personally. We’re not alone in the animal kingdom on that, and for obvious reasons – our survival depends on it. I would think that if anything, the more of a target the creature, the better it is at this. So women are likely to have hypertuned sense compared to men, when it comes to sexual attention. Men, OTOH, quite possibly have hypertuned sense of impending overt violence towards them. Which may explain the reluctance many have to intervention – the outcome can be a severe injury. However much we talk bravely that we will intervene whenever we see it, no man throws himself without pause into such a situation, and rightly so. Those who do can be as much of a problem as a solution.
We have a thread here with about a 30-70 female-male split. But I notice reading back through it that about half of the women’s comments are about this very point, that they dispute that systemic change has happened, and that men are unlikely to be reliable witnesses. This began mostly around page 4 where the numeric trend was pretty clear. The women commenters quickly agreed with each other, even if they hadn’t themselves kicked off with any such observation. Many of the men also agreed, although, like me, we are doing it from behind the blindfold.
I’d agree with them, except in so far as abuse of men is concerned, where of course men are the more reliable witnesses. But we’re talking about one report in the entire thread here, and that might even have been more about an age discrimination, I couldn’t tell.
It’s going to be hard to have an evidence based conversation that is about subjective experiences, across a long period of time in which many confounding factors have changed (not least that every single person got a lot older). Which is why threads about harassment, particularly sexual harassment/violence, very quickly go south. The only real point I have to make here is that if you’re a women out there with a perspective on harassment, I at least am likely to weight it much more highly than any man’s story about it. But I doubt that there will be any “winning” going on. It’s an unstructured match and as likely to degenerate to shouting as not. When it doesn’t degenerate, it’s not always because it went well, either, quite often it’s because one team just leaves the field, either voluntarily or forcibly.
None of which is to say this conversation should not happen. I’m of half a mind that this is a worthless contribution to it, adding only another penis to the mix, and a particularly uninformed one at that, when it comes to the specific context of the original thread. But, fuck it – it’s very hard for me to accept the idea that when it’s male behavior that mostly needs changing that males should keep out of the conversation.
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Hard News: Fix up, young men, in reply to steve newall,
About 2/3 of the culprits - other young women who seemed to be "friends". Really foul to watch.
Makes for a tricky situation.
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Polity: Protesting too much: responses…, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Yes, it's not over now. But could it be the beginning of the end? Or at least the end of the beginning?
Anyway, my sentiment is that we don't beat neoliberalism by buying into it, and I'm sure as hell not going to allow it to beat me down into acceptance just because I suffered under it.
We’re still a long way down the rabbit hole.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that. That we're still stuck in it hard? Or that we're in a deluded dream? Either way, if we're Alice, it's on us to wake up.
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Or perhaps a better way of saying it is: If we truly want to see the end of the Me Me Me philosophy, we have to start with ourselves.
Also, even with our war scars, I think young people are looking at a much harder time than we are economically. It's on us to work out how to fix that.
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Polity: Protesting too much: responses…, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
My generation was screwed. Bent over a barrel of user pays philosophy while my parent’s generation benefited from lower taxes and invested them in tax free capital gains on rental property.
Yeah, but we can wear that as our war scars. A shitload worse has happened to other generations and goes down (if they survived it) as their genuine contribution to a better world.
We survived neoliberalism so our children wouldn't have to.
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Re: The Raw Deal Generation. As a founding member myself (1990 was my first tertiary year) I get the bitterness, but I choose to direct it only towards those actually responsible, rather than downwards to my own children. I will never find it in myself to vote for Goff as Mayor, for instance. But, by and large, this bitterness is moving towards ancient history and the true remedy will be time - we are poised on the brink of being the demographic of power in this country, as the Baby Boomers retire and (I hate to say it) die. We can fix the injustice ourselves of the indebted generation...
If we choose to. I can't say I'm entirely sympathetic to the large number of my compatriots who recklessly took on massive debt they never intended to pay back and never have. Our education was still mostly free, in the sense of being about 80% subsidized, and a lot of those loans were frittered away on non-educational shit. For example, one of my mates boasted that his student loan funded about $3000 worth of CDs. Others bought cars, overseas holidays, drumkits, and so on.
Of course I don't forgive Lockwood Smith on that account. This is what happens when you allow unfettered access to debt to children.
And for the most part, student loans get paid back. I paid my first one back in a few years (I've got a smaller one now, which will most likely get paid off in a few years again). Those that spiralled out of control are the minority. I don't know what could be done about them, but I suggest that treating them like any other unrecoverable debt makes sense - the holders could pass through bankruptcy, just like we do for bad business debts. Then the record is eventually cleaned, after a short period of minor institutional penury that is hardly unjustified. It is a big mistake to forget that a lender takes risk too - that is why they charge interest. Debts that can't be expunged by becoming unrecoverable are odious. We can and should simply treat the fraction of bad debts out there as outright losses against the investment made by the government into educating all the other people. In the long term, it was probably a good investment, if you take the fuxored view of the government being a business investing in the nation for profit.
Of course a better view, which is looks like Labour is finally returning to, is that education is a right and a good, rather than simply a business. If we pass through a phase of both views concurrently, it would perhaps be a stepping stone back to a more equitable future, one with an actual vision of a time coming (if it isn't here already) in which human work for money is not how our social organization can continue.
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Polity: Protesting too much: responses…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I was interested in what he had to say.
Ditto to that. Rob's kicked off some very interesting stuff here. I would love to see him under his own masthead. The fact that this is NOT a partisan Labour website makes that all the better, because he gets robust disagreement from a number of established commentators here. If anything, this blog is mostly inhabited by people who tend towards the Greens, and so a tussle with a Labour strategist is excellent mix.
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Polity: Protesting too much: responses…, in reply to linger,
One of the many problems with user-pays education is that it quickly removed the “public good” perception among students themselves:
“I paid (and am still paying) for this, therefore it is mine.”
That’s an attitudinal change that will take generations to reverse.Very much so. I'm currently doing post-grad and I find students are astonished at the idea that I'm not doing it entirely for vocational reasons. Indeed since I already had a well paid career, most are astonished that I'm doing it at all. The idea that education has value in itself is like a thing of the past. This head scratching is not limited to students either. Even the general population, and most ironically, quite a few people in the education profession, think I'm some kind of nutcase for willfully putting myself through the "horror" of postgraduate tertiary science education.
Will it reverse? I don't know. A big driver of it that I see is demographic changes among students. Foreign students seem to be a much larger proportion than before and they tend to be doing it for vocational reasons, and their attitude of the complete valuelessness of anything non-vocational does rub off. I don't rate our chances of driving any kind of systemic change in attitudes of foreign students.
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