Is it surprising that you'd be wary around strangers, and especially around strange men? Not at all. Seems completely reasonable to me. But as I said from the beginning, I'm also not at all surprised that we are just talking past each other on this.
I tried very hard to forestall this walling off response, about how I didn't understand what it was like to be a woman where that was made the substance of the rebuttle of what I said, or the whole of the understanding of it. And, sure, in the sense that I was watching rather than participating when my children were born, there are some experiences unique and particular to being a woman that are quite beyond my imagination to grasp. But it's not that sort of experience we are talking about. Despite my many asides to concede the reasonableness that being a woman might give you a different perspective, here we are. So let's take this more directly head on.
It's not beyond a man's capacity to walk a mile in a woman's shoes or visa versa. Men and women are gifted with fantastic imaginations, and intellects, and likewise we also share in common experiences of being marginalized, of being threatened, of being victimized, of being bullied, of being harassed, and in some cases of being brutalized. What is needed is more discussion over what we have in common, rather more lines drawn around us to separate us into little tribes.
I'm well aware of what women are taught and arguably need to be taught about being safe around men, and avoiding being alone with strange men, and so forth. I have to do the job of teaching it.
You managed to make yourself livid over your assumption of my blindness despite all the effort I took to forestall that by admitting that we had very different experiences, and in part that those experiences were because I was a man. All that was admitted up front. And her anger and suspicion of me and anyone that looks like me were conceded as reasonable from her background many times in my writing. There is I admit truth to the fact that people can come from different places, and experience different things. And while there is some truth to the statement that we can never know exactly what it is like to be someone else, I firmly believe that it is also true that that is not an absolute barrier to our compassion and understanding of one another. And I likewise believe that it is good to act on the hope that other can relate and sympathize with our struggles and our difficulties and all the hardships we've endured as people, not merely as men or women.
I do too.
I do too, and said as much.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter why you've been marginalized and harassed. It doesn't hurt less to get marginalized and harassed because you are a woman or because you are autistic nerdy white boy with a deep tan and a Caribbean accent in a rural Southern town where many people have never had the resources to go more than 30 miles from where they were born. The majority is just whoever outnumbers you, which when you are in a community of one, is everybody. And privilege and protection is not something that is particular to a skin color, but can be simply just being the popular kid. Telling someone about privilege of being white or male while they are getting kicked bloody by a half dozen black men four to six years older than you simply because they've been taught to feel threatened by white people, and maybe even with legitimate reason, but this is a scrawny white kid no body will protect who they can take that frustration out on.
Then maybe they should look at the person. I hear from black people from privileged backgrounds about the sort of racism they endured - the looks they receive, or the jokes that they've heard, and so forth. And I'm sure it hurts. I can sympathize. My sympathy gets strained when they start talking about those minor incidents as evidence that they need more privilege, or evidence that I could never understand the pain that they experience from taunting, especially from people who tell me they've never actually been the victims of violence but live in continual fear of it. I tend to start thinking its not my imagination that is actually limited by experience here.
Because it's wrong. And it's not merely wrong, but it's destructive and dangerous, and needs to be challenged. And disagreement with you might make me an insensitive jerk, I'm hardly the best at social skills, but any jerkiness on my part isn't directed especially at women or minorities.
Don't expect my challenging things that need to be challenged to be limited to just those things you think need to be challenged.
You really think no one says that all whites are racists? Or that no one believes that? I grant the majority of black people don't believe that, but many do. I mean, I've had a black friend of mine get involved with a church that taught the theology that white people were the creation of the devil and they didn't actually have souls. And he believed it, to the extent that it made him sad that I couldn't go to heaven.
You don't have to go far to find many people arguing that all white people are racists. You don't have to go far to find people arguing that black people can't be racists.
You think I haven't developed thick skin? You think my experiences haven't left me wary?
Why don't we focus on what we have in common instead of assuming we just can't possibly understand each other?
That probably made you feel uncomfortable. We can talk about those specific issues, but is there really a point in talking about them until we get passed this idea we live in such different worlds that we can't see anything from the other's point of view? Or we can sit here and debate whose victimization gives us the most authority to tell everyone that disagrees with us to shut up because they just can't possibly understand.
