Worth reposting

[kisekileia]

This was originally a reply by someone named Keith Ellis to a post on feministing.com about an obscenely misogynistic shirt produced by a company called David and Goliath. The post was linked from neko_indi's journal. I thought it was a great post dealing with a really important and difficult issue

Comments

[kaitlee]

I agree

[kisekileia]

Yeah, I think I basically agree with you on that.

I'm glad I ran across this post on feministing, because it's an issue I've thought about but haven't been quite sure how to explain. (I also ran into a somewhat analogous issue recently, only it was need rather than responsibility involved; that is, there were two needs involved that were grossly unequal, and neither changed the other, but not everyone understood that.)

To reiterate, though, it wasn't me being eloquent: this was reposted from a person named Keith Ellis on feministing. Just trying to be clear here.

[kaitlee]

oh, it was? hahaha.

well in that case I'll actually take back the comment about "eloquent." cause I actually don't think it's all that eloquent, on second thought. but it is articulate.

sorry I didn't catch that.

[kisekileia]

it's okay, I just edited to make it clearer.

[velvetpage]

I agree with this entirely. My problem is that I often find myself in the position of arguing that we still have to teach safety precautions, we still need to act responsibly, and I'm not going to blame the people who did or didn't act responsibly if something goes wrong - but neither am I going to use "I don't blame the victim" as an excuse NOT to teach those safety measures. Many feminists take it so far the other way that they never, ever see how people can contribute to their own messes

[saintcheney]

YES, EXACTLY. And to piggyback off that, a lot of "bullying" is the result of young kids simply not having the social skills or maturity to deal with situations like that. (Many ADULTS don't!) I can think of so many really annoying "friends" who I spent time with more than I wanted to simply because I didn't know how to communicate otherwise. My brother (9 years) spends a lot of time playing with the neighbor boy, who is completely obnoxious. They get along all right for the most part, and Josh is the sort of kid who wants other kids around to play with (while I was much more "LEAVE ME ALONE, I want to read!") but he routinely reaches his limits with Paul, and no one else in the neighborhood can stand Paul, because he absolutely wears you out. So Paul whines and whines about "bullies", even though he is the biggest bully of all ("I'm better than you at this - and this - and this - and this"), and the bossiest, and the other kids turn mean simply because they get fed up with tolerating ridiculous behavior, and don't know how to address

[velvetpage]

Yep. The "victim" in my class is nicknamed Mr. Aggrieved in my journal. The sentence that best describes his attitude is, "Sure I did X to them, but that doesn't give them any right to do Y to me!" I've tried many, many times to make him understand that a) on one level, he's absolutely right - they shouldn't have done Y no matter what, but b) his own actions had a predictable consequence, and what goes around comes around. Most of the kids doing Y are not really bullies; they're fed-up kids who don't have the social skills to extract themselves from a situation. I've been trying to teach them the social skills, give them the words they can say to smooth things over, etc, etc - but it's a long and involved process

[kisekileia]

I feel bad for kids like Paul. I remember being a kid who had no social skills and got mistreated because of it, and the fact that my lack of social skills contributed to the problem didn't make the other kids' bullying hurt any less. Someone needs to sit down with that kid and TEACH him, in very concrete and specific ways, what he can do to improve how others treat him, and then help him apply that knowledge to specific situations as they come up. It never occurred to me when I was a kid that my actions could be hurting other people--but that was at least partly because my self-esteem had been beaten down so far that I didn't believe I was capable of anything that important.

[pewter_wings]

Thank you for posting this. I am having a large problem with a victim right now and I feel as if I say anything, that I will end up blaming the victim. Not cool. But I am angry about how the culture of the US is going about this problem ass-backwards.

Instead of making laws saying it was a bad thing, *duh* shouldn't we be concentrating on STOPPING this sort of thing from happening in the first place? Shouldn't we be teaching people not to do these things to begin with?

Point being, why are we so more concerned with punishing people after the fact instead of training them before hand or helping them to move beyond afterwards.

[failstoexist]

interesting...I think the problem is that some people DO get so caught up in "we must never blame the victim" that they refuse to acknowledge that there are things that do make you more or less likely to be a target in general, nor will they teach those to people to keep them safe

[crumblingredsky]

i'm intrigued that you read feministing too. It's one of my favorite blogs. i don't have a lot to say on this that hasn't been said... i'm one of those people who tends to be very black and white about things because i need the world to make a certain amount of sense sometimes, but i recognize that that isn't always the sanest way to be. That said, my brain tends to go "a girl should be able to walk by seven hundred guys, completely naked, in a dark alley at midnight, drunk, and not one of them should touch her."

i will probably have more to say about this later.

[kisekileia]

I don't read feministing normally--I followed a link from someone else's journal. It looks like it might be interesting to look at now and then, though.

[crumblingredsky]

Oh yeah, i just figured that out, sorry.

It's pretty rabid and ardent, my kind of feminism. Once in a while i find myself disagreeing with them--if they call someone out as sexist that i think just made a mistake, for example. But most of the time, right on, and concerned with issues of race and class as well.