KuraFire

On getting people to the point of finally realizing they were being offensive

Daniel Nye Griffiths wrote a good post. And then, in a comment to it, The Girl wrote something (even more) powerful: 

Frankly, having thought a fair amount about this topic too, I don’t think it can be skipped. One of the more damaging aspects of the way that our society sets men as the ‘norm’ is that (as well as female experiences / women in general being devalued) when women talk about experiences almost entirely unique to their gender they get shouted down and accused of exaggerating or being over-emotional.

This is no less clear than any time a woman mentions she’s been sexually assaulted. The Apachecon incident absolutely terrifies me. I’ve been assaulted at a tech event before and the absolute fact that, if I didn’t hide the details from the general community, I’d have my reputation dragged through the mud and be subject to devastating personal threats is quite incredibly silencing.

The result of this silencing is that women don’t talk about the ridiculously high incidence of sexual assault – in all its forms – or the micro-inequalities they experience in daily life. Leading to, of course, the rare times that women do dare to mention them being seen as aberrations that they must have had some culpability in.

So (to generally men, but also women) it’s massively shocking to be told that they’re hurting those around them, when they’re merely acting in their culture’s normalised manner. Being confronted with the idea that you and your culture can be engaging in behaviours (especially unintentionally) which are actively hurting the people around you leads to powerfully strong denial mechanisms. It’s only when there’s a sheer weight of women who (in the “safety” of numbers) speak up and confirm that the behaviour is harmful that the message starts to get through.

What this means is that, in the end, there is no “shortcut”. The process of realising the society you’re living in is not only unequally damaging to fifty percent of the population but that many of the things you do and accept are contributing to it is an incredibly painful experience to go through. It’s no wonder that many choose ignorance, denial, anger at the knowledge-bringers, threats and more over living with that knowledge. In my opinion, all we can really do is try and talk and talk about these things, and “normalise” the idea that they exist, as much as possible and hope that one by one, we reach the people who need to hear it.