{"id":11125,"date":"2008-04-23T18:34:31","date_gmt":"2008-04-23T22:34:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/04\/23\/11125.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:48:16","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:48:16","slug":"no-no-they-do-but-jest-poison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/04\/23\/no-no-they-do-but-jest-poison\/","title":{"rendered":"No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest; no offence i’ the world."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As long as I am writing things sparked by My Gracious Host<\/a>, I should write here that I’ve been ruminating on his post about Clinton, Obama, sexism, feminism, etc<\/a>, and the response to it. Jed wound up regretting having posted it, and of course he has to assess the positives and negatives to him, but Your Humble Blogger found the post, the article and the responses very helpful for complicating some of the world in a productive manner.
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The article in question is Hey, Obama boys: Back off already!<\/a>, by Rebecca Traister in Salon, and although I it is a far from perfect article, I think it’s informative and provocative. One of the things that I find interesting is what different people see in the article, as its focus and as its agenda.
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My take on it (which is the right one, because this is my blog) is that Ms. Traister is focusing on a reporting that, as the subhead says, “Young women are growing increasingly frustrated with the fanatical support of Barack and gleeful bashing of Hillary.” The headline is, then, in the voice of the young women of the subhead, rather than in Ms. Traister’s voice. Having identified this more or less widespread situation, Ms. Traister goes on to document a handful of instances of this frustration and makes a few attempts to identify the causes of the frustration.
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Some other people have a different take. In their perception, it’s Ms. Traister in the the headline that is shouting at Obama Boys to back off. I certainly understand that, and although (as I say) I don’t perceive that as the essence of the article, it isn’t strange to me that many supporters of Barack Obama are upset by being called fanatics, and being told that they are upsetting young women. Furthermore, Ms. Traister suggests that one of the causes of the discomfort is that supporters of Barack Obama are regressive on feminism, consciously or otherwise, and even that the reason that they support Sen. Obama (or don’t support Sen. Clinton) in the first place is subconscious patriarchal residue. Nobody likes being told that the reasons they give for doing things are not the real ones. Either these people are lying (to themselves and others) or they are dupes, right?
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Or there is more going on?
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Ms. Traister reports that there are a lot of young women who share a feeling at the moment. Let’s call this set of women A<\/strong>. Ms. Traister convinces me that the set A<\/strong> is not empty, but I’d be happier with the article if I felt it showed how big set A<\/strong> actually is. That is, of the bigger set of women who support Sen. Obama, is A<\/strong> half? A third? A handful? Well, anyway. The set exists. The characteristic of the set A<\/strong> is that people in A<\/strong> feel that male supporters of the Illinois Senator often express themselves in a way that demeans not only the New York Senator but the members of set A<\/strong>. Are they right? Is this fair?
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I don’t honestly know. I suspect it is, because, you know, the Patriarchy. But then, what does this word fair<\/I> mean? Does it have to do with the feelings of the women involved? Of the men? Is it the right question to be asked at all?
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I went to Swarthmore College in the late 1980s, when there was this thing called Political Correctness. Have I written about PC yet? Anyway, this was after the term had stopped connoting somebody who joined whatever political causes were likely to get him laid. It had started applying to language, with there being correct and incorrect terms. The idea was that it mattered whether you offended people, even if there was no intention to give offense. If using lame<\/I> to describe a terrible movie offended people who were unable to walk, then you were giving offense, and you shouldn’t do it. Now, there was a lot of nonsense tied up in this, and if I haven’t ranted about the history of PC I should probably do it, but the point is this: if you care about giving offense, it is the person who takes offense that is important, not you. If, in fact, there are a lot of women who feel demeaned by my actions, then my actions are demeaning, even if I didn’t notice. My instinct is to defend myself, but who the fuck cares what my instinct is?
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Is it fair? Is it fair that I can’t use perfectly reasonable words—like lame<\/I> or chick<\/I> or boy<\/I> or Hispanic<\/I> or janitor<\/I> or pussy<\/I>—when I mean no offense, no offense in the world? Why does it matter if it’s fair? Is it fair that I can’t express a perfectly reasonable political preference for one candidate over another, or express a perfectly reasonable distaste for one candidates conduct of her campaign, without either taking tremendous care or risking hurting the feelings of the members of set A<\/strong>? Is it fair that the members of set A<\/strong> have to risk feeling that way?
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And, um, as long as we’re chatting, isn’t there another group, set B<\/strong> let’s call them, who are African-Americans who support Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, but feel that white supporters of the New York Senator often express themselves in a way that demeans not only the Illinois Senator but the members of set B<\/strong>. That can’t be a null set, can it?
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger rushes in where Angels would probably, you know, fly, or float on clouds, or just sit around with a harp and a Harp, chatting about those bastards zooming around on Red Bull.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11125"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18339,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11125\/revisions\/18339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}