Liminal states

Today’s the last of the 16 days of activism against gender violence and so I wanted to highlight December’s Carnival against sexual violence, hosted by abyss2hope. Categories include legal, media watch, personal stories, raising awareness, research, and my fave solutions, which has a link off to shakesville’s excellent What Men Can Do.

A few especially worth highlighting (all previously from Kevin‘s list on A Call to Men):

1. Acknowledge and understand how sexism, male dominance and male privilege lay the foundation for all forms of violence against women.

2. Examine and challenge our individual sexism and the role that we play in supporting men who are abusive.

3. Recognize and stop colluding with other men by getting out of our socially defined roles, and take a stance to end violence against women.

4. Remember that our silence is affirming. When we choose not to speak out against men’s violence, we are supporting it.

Well said. Actually, they’re all worth highlighting; and worth reading in context, so please do.

Thoughts on these recommendations, the rest of the article, other articles in the Carnival, related topics?

An anonymous commenter on Mini patronizingly critiqued me for “airing dirty laundry” about Microsoft on a public forum under the guise of a “helpful” warning me that “my new employer” might have second thoughts about me because I’d presumably “do it to them as well”. (See the thread for the full language and context — it’s near the end.)

Especially in context, it’s one of those comments that’s fascinating on so many levels, and representative of certain kinds of thinking that it’s well worth analyzing. Where to start?

First of all, it’s kind of bizarre and very amusing to critique me for “airing dirty laundry” in a thread that starts with Mini’s saying “What does it take to be disappeared from Microsoft? We can only guess one day Stuart Scott was walking outside of his building when a black Escalade with VI0L8R plates pulled up, Ken DiPetrio swung open a door and said, ‘Get in.'” So no matter what the poster thinks of my argument, he’s shooting himself* in the foot by framing his critiques in this way. In an environment where people value transparency, “airing dirty laundry” is something that’s generally seen as a good thing. Putting me completely aside, showing his lack of understanding while unnecessarily dissing and devaluing whistleblowers and all the people who *do* see appropriate airing of dirty laundry as potentially in the company’s best interests (like Mini and his/her/their fans) isn’t a good way of starting an argument.

For his goal of criticizing my behavior, rather than using the vague and loaded term “dirty laundry” it would have been better for him to be more concrete about what he thought I had done that was against Microsoft’s interests. Making blustering and sneering implications like he did is easier but usually counter-productive, leaving him with a hard time responding when you’re challenged — for example, if he attempts to advance a more concrete argument now he risks looking defensive.

Lots more to cover, including the reason potential future employers at Microsoft and elsewhere would be likely to see this discussion as a positive rather than counting against me (quick summary: it embodies positive transparency and empowers employees by helping them understand existing processes), why the “let me explain” framing similarly backfires, the hegemonic effects of devaluing personal experience, and of course gender issues.

To be continued,

jon

* Or, potentially, if the poster’s a she, shooting herself in the foot. Since the communication style here has several pattern that are much more common among males, I’ll use male pronouns for simplicity; so whenever you see “he” in relation to the poster, please mentally translate to “the poster, whatever gender he and/or she might be” or something like that.

Ann Rostow’s excellent Bay Times article gives details and context. After transwoman Diane Schroer was denied a job at Congressional Research Service when she told them she would be reporting at work as a female,

Schroer sued in federal court under the aforementioned Title VII, alleging that her job was revoked due to impermissible sex discrimination. The government asked U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson to dismiss the suit, based on the fact that Title VII doesn’t ban discrimination based on transgenderism. Judge Robertson declined, pointing out that Price Waterhouse [the 1989 Supreme Court precedent] might apply, and also wondering in a court memo whether Title VII’s ban on “sex” discrimination might be interpreted to ban discrimination against transgendered people based simply on the plain language of the statute….

The bottom line is good news for Schroer. Robertson ruled that her suit could proceed based on the possibility that she could prevail under Price Waterhouse and its ban on gender stereotyping. But Robertson then rejected the idea that Title VII might outlaw trans bias on its face. Why? Because of the trans-less ENDA that recently passed the House of Representatives.

“At the time of my 2006 opinion,” wrote Robinson, referring to his initial memo on the case, “there was no relevant legislative history as to Title VII’s relationship to discrimination on the basis of sexual identity. That is no longer the case. In recent months, a bill that would have banned employment discrimination on the basis of both sexual orientation and gender identity was introduced in the House of Representatives. An alternate bill that prohibited discrimination only on the basis of sexual orientation was also introduced. The House ultimately passed the version that banned discrimination only on the basis of sexual orientation.

“…Even in an age when legislative history has been dramatically devalued as a tool for statutory interpretation,” Robertson went on, “one proceeds with caution when even one house of Congress has deliberated on a problem and, mirabile dictu, negotiated a compromise solution.”

Ouch. So much for the argument against trans inclusion on the grounds that transfolk are already protected. Thanks, Barney Frank (and thanks, HRC) for a ‘compromise solution’ that compromises existing protections.

jon

In  a comment in the Power vectors thread, Vanita said:

You were useless (I met with you several times at Microsoft) and it looks like you still are. I am glad to hear you are gone – it made no sense for Microsoft to pay you a hefty salary given the “work” you were doing. All this high level bullshit…

I let the comment through because it’s a great illustration of the kinds of attitude and environment that’s disappointingly common at Microsoft these days, unwilling to take the time to understand new ideas and so threatened by anything “high level” that might actually lead to a change in the system, that the response is to hide behind the cloak of anonymity to spread around virulent negative abuse in completely inappropriate situations.  Yeah, that’ll help.

Imagine working in an environment where this kind of behavior is widely tolerated.  When I was at Microsoft, I got reactions similar to this from maybe 5-10% of the people, and so on large mailing lists or with the 200+ people who attended a mashup the odds were extremely high that somebody would jump in with some garbage like this — with superficially more polite phrasing if their names were associated with it, but still the same mix of knee-jerk uncomprehending rejection and personal attack.

And bear in mind the impact this has not just on the person receiving the abuse (me), but all those witnessing it.  No wonder so many people at Microsoft are unhappy and frustrated.

There were a couple of interesting articles about this year’s presidential election in this month’s Atlantic.

Andrew Sullivan suggests in Goodbye to all that that Obama’s real significance is that “unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us.” Putting aside for the moment the question of why Atlantic isn’t embarrassed to be paying and promoting Sullivan, it’s an article well worth reading for many reasons.

In the first section think Sullivan does an excellent job describing several dimensions of divisiveness and the general sense by the vast majority that we’re ready to get beyond that — I remember dignitarian Robert Fuller saying a similar thing after his All Rise book tour over a year ago and so it’s nice to see that it’s now getting accepted even by the testosterone crowd.

For me it started to go off the rails for a bunch of reasons at the paragraph starting with “of the viable national candidates…” Who is Sullivan to be judging who’s “viable”? What affect does his restriction to “Obama and possibly McCain” have on the rest of the discussion? At this stage, how could anybody possibly view McCain as a transformational candidate of healing? And so on. By the time we get to “What does he offer? First and foremost: his face.” — laid out at the top of a page, no less, to highlight its importance — it’s unusually revealing: of Sullivan’s blinders, and of how deeply cultural norms frame our discourse. Too bad there wasn’t discussion of the very challenging intersectional issues related to race and orientation; I would have thought progress here is key to getting beyond our divides, and Sullivan apparently not only doesn’t see it that way, but doesn’t think it’s worth mentioning.  Revealing indeed.

Hey, I said it was worth reading, I didn’t say I thought it was a good article.

Marc Ambinder’s subscriber’s-only Teacher and Apprentice by contrast is a great piece, fully living up to its billing as a “story of nasty surprises, dueling war rooms, and the Drudge Report.” I thought the author did a great job of presenting both perspectives, putting the question of media coverage squarely on the table, and highlighting the challenge Obama faces trying to go the (relatively) high road. How to defend onesself against unfair accusations and framing, how to call out your opponents spin and sometimes outright lies, without looking like you’re “going negative” yourself? How to get real discussion of this in a situation where most media is either co-opted, colluding, racist, or hostile?

The idea of Drudge and the Clintons, together again for the first time, is well worth calling out in the subhead. Do the Clintons really believe this kind of alliance is good either for the causes they believe in, or the party they claim to care so much about? And it’s a nice tie between the articles by illustrating Obama’s transformational bridge-building possibilities: these enemies and ideologically-opposed men and women who have fought so bitterly in the past have indeed joined forces in response to him. Yay! Let’s all hold hands, sing folk songs, and go negative — just like Matt used to do to you!

And at the meta-level, it’s really disappointing to see Sullivan’s (intellectually shoddy, blatantly racist, from a conservative standpoint) piece being freely-available, while Ambinder’s (well-thought-out, noticeably more conscious, from a neutral-to-progressive standpoint) article is locked behind subscriber’s-only walls. Oh well. At least it’s an unusually stark example of how restricting IP invariably leads to a situation where views and people favoring the entrenched power base get preferential treatments to dissenting views.