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Smile if you’re a privileged white dude

This has been all over the news and blogs recently, but I figured I’d give my take on it, anyway…

Alberta Conservative MLA Doug Elniski has been stirring up the wrong kind of shit. At the Pride Parade last weekend, he soundly demonstrated his understanding of Edmonton’s queer-identified community. Some of his comments (via Twitter and his now defunct blog) include:

“i am surrounded by bumping and grinding lesbians waiit 20 then send help”

“It was “just” a parade, relax already”

Doug couldn’t stop there, though. In a recent blog post (presumably his last before he deleted his entire blog), he wrote:

Ladies, always smile when you walk into a room, there is nothing a man wants less than a woman scowling because he thinks he is going to get shit for something and has no idea what. Men are attracted to smiles, so smile, don’t give me that ‘treated equal’ stuff. If you want Equal, it comes in little packages at Starbucks.

It’s unclear whether Elniski said this to a group of junior high school graduates or if it was the preamble to his speech in text form, but either way, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he put these harmful ideas out for the public, and it’s pointless to dwell on the medium he used.

When he was questioned on his sexism (which is apparently obvious to most people except himself), Elniski stated, “If I were sexist I think I would certainly know about it by now.”

Regarding his comments about Pride, he insisted “that he’s not insensitive to the gay community, adding that his cousin in California is gay.”

Never mind the fact that most people with a functional brain know the “my friend is Black/queer/poor” shtick further demonstrates someone’s ignorance; I sure hope Elniski’s cousin was out, because if he wasn’t, he may be now.

So far, Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach hasn’t publicly addressed Elniski’s sexism and heterosexism/homophobia. In a province that has just de-listed sex reassignment surgery for trans-identified folk and passed Bill 44, this is pretty demonstrative of just how much the Conservative government cares about oppressed groups and acts that reinforce that same oppression.

A large order of entitlement with some victim-blaming on the side, please

I’m still in the process of getting a lot of things together, but there is a blogging component for the spring course I’m taking and I thought I’d paste what I’ve written on the private blog over here. I’ve removed the names of those in the class to protect their privacy. This is in response to some comments made in class about women on construction sites and “appropriate attire.”

Let me tell you: it’s damn good to be a man in this world. Really—we can do a lot of vile stuff other people would never get away with (assuming, of course, that we’re privileged in some other ways, too—masculinity doesn’t exist in a vacuum). We can basically be as awful as we want to most of the time, because no one really expects better of us, except for those lesbian feminists, and even they trip over themselves sometimes. We’re free to harass people and we’re rarely, if ever, called on it. We can talk down to women, immigrants, queers, whoever we want! Not only that, but we can beat them up and rape them, too, so long as we can put the blame on them; no worries there, though—other people do the work for us in most of those cases. A lot of us are assholes, sure, but we’re entitled assholes.

Just so it’s absolutely clear, I’m being facetious. With that said, I wouldn’t hesitate to say most of what I’ve written above is true; it depends on the context and the space we’re in, but as men, we’re entitled to do a lot of terrible things—in the Western world, our level of entitlement increases if we’re white, heterosexual, middle-class, and so on, depending on the act we’re committing. We all know about Matthew Shepard and the debate over the hate crimes legislation, right? How about this doozy from Big Brother, where a man sexually assaulted a cast mate on camera—and the episode was aired?

Then, of course, we have ideas like those we were presented with today regarding women on construction sites. According to [edited for privacy], who was an otherwise excellent guest speaker, women who “dress inappropriately,” at least on construction sites, are asking for unwanted sexual attention, from sexual harassment to—presumably—sexual assault. “But it’s a construction site,” I hear people cry out, “women should know better,” and some of us take the bait, including a bit of my pre-Women’s Studies self. So what’s the problem with taking up this argument?

First, victims of violence are never “asking for it.” For some reason or another, a lot of us accept the idea that a woman is soliciting sexual remarks or asking to be raped if she shows anything below her neck. (Gay men are also “asking for it” because they come on to every man in site, too, apparently, but this is another matter, at least somewhat.) Even on a construction site, this isn’t the case. It’s one thing if they’re breaking a dress code in their contract; it’s another matter altogether to say they deserve unwanted sexual attention (at least) as a result.

As I pointed out in class, this serves to erase the perpetrator(s) from the picture and absolves him of responsibility for the act. As [edited for privacy] added (if I remember correctly), this attitude also silences women who face sexual harassment/assault. Whether we’re focusing on women’s clothes (on construction sites and elsewhere), behaviour (countless examples here, my favourite being police asking women to lock their doors and windows to prevent their rape in the Garneau area last summer), or weight (yep—fat women are asking for it, too, and should be “glad of the attention“), it’s all victim-blaming, and it lets men off the hook in a lot of cases. Most, probably.

But what about men and masculinity? Well, besides being entitled to rape women when we want to, this attitude reduces us to brutes who can’t help but take the opportunity to sexually assault a woman when we see it. We also have the right to catcall, make comments about their appearance, and—in some cases—kill women. (I frame it as a “right” because in a white supremacist patriarchy, that’s often what it is.)

In her article, Nancy Quam-Wickham discusses a masculinity in Western extractive industries that is determined not by strength, but by skill. If masculinity isn’t stable and fixed through time and across cultures, what’s stopping a redefined masculinity that focuses on care and respect for one another from being adopted in Western society? The answers to this question are likely numerous, to say the least, but one answer is, in my mind, that we’re not required to. The dominant form of masculinity, however we choose to define it in words, is problematised, but not enough. Not only that, but it’s bolstered by attitudes like victim-blaming that further enhance men’s entitlement to do as we wish.

The solutions to this are probably numerous, too, but I can’t get into them here. We can sure start by holding men accountable for their behaviour, though, and stop giving us excuses to get away with acts we commit. In fact, I can’t think of a better place to start.

Under Construction

Doing Feminism is, as you might have guessed if you’ve visited within the past few days, under construction. I’m breaking my silence and coming back on the blogosphere.

Please feel free to browse the archives as I mess around with my site some more. Hosting a website all on my own is a new experience for me, but I’d also like to get to posting soon. Stay tuned, and subscribe to the RSS feed if you’d like to receive updates.

Gender and Race at the U of A IDEAfest

Yesterday was the pilot project for the University of Alberta IDEAfest, an event for those in the Edmonton community to present their ideas to attendees. Presenters were given half-hour slots for their presentation and questions, and at any given time there were three presentations happening, each in a different lecture theatre, allowing attendees to choose the sessions that interested them most.

The sessions were varied, from Ian Bushfield’s “Atheism, Alberta and the 21st Century,” to Ross Lockwood’s “Zymurgy and the Physics of Beer.” In some sessions I learned a lot, in others, I was watching the clock tick the seconds away. All that being said, though, it was a decent pilot project, and some problems could have been fixed with more time to plan (it was all coordinated in two weeks, I believe), and better promotion.

Other problems, however, require a bit more attention. For example, the fact that most of the participants (presenters and attendees) were white.

Yes, there were some People of Colour at the sessions, but we were very clearly outnumbered by white people. Everywhere. And yes, I realise this is Alberta, but it’s also Edmonton, at the University of Alberta, both of which are hardly impenetrable bastions of white supremacy. Despite this, though, we (for the most part) had white audience members listen to white speakers, who at times spoke about issues facing POC. For example, Kevin Kutchinski presented a session originally titled “How global free trade will cure poverty.” Apparently he realised the problems with this and changed it to a slightly less offensive title that I’ve since forgotten.

Embedded racism aside (for now), Edmonton has also been facing some gender issues in some circles, including the activist community, and, as was demonstrated to me yesterday, the online community*. At IDEAfest, I presented “Putting an End to Rape Culture: Challenging Attitudes and Misinformation.” I didn’t expect to get much of an audience (only about 100 people dropped by throughout the day), but I did end up getting between twenty to thirty people, which was an average turnout.

The problem, then? Only four men showed up.

Let me repeat: There were only four men who showed up because they gave at least a bit of a damn about strategies to end the sexual violation of women, at an event dominated by men–over 20 presenters were men and less than 10 were women. The attendees were somewhat more balanced, from what I saw.

I want to make it clear that I’m not phased by the size of my audience, but the gender imbalance. When men don’t pay attention to or ignore information on what they can do to help end rape, especially when it’s practically handed to them, they reinforce the idea that’s it’s up to women to stop rape. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, it demonstrates that the majority of men just don’t care.

I fully recognise there were two other interesting sessions being put on (both by two of the under ten women presenters), so I don’t feel entirely comfortable blaming individual people for not showing up, but it is interesting when presentations on the history of clothing or the importance of arts for children take precedence over ideas on how men can end the violation of their mothers, sisters, daughters, and partners (if they showed up to any of the sessions at all).

So although I can’t blame all individual men who didn’t show up to the session, I do believe that every man there had a responsibility to the women in their lives to attend. The number of men who showed up is a clear example of embedded sexism within the men at IDEAfest. Rape doesn’t affect men (to the same extent), so no need to show up, right?

So what are the solutions? For the embedded racism of the event, it’s a simple matter of talking to more POC. Why weren’t more POC invited to speak? Why not have POC talking about the issues that affect them, rather than getting whites to? These are pretty easy first steps. As for the gender representation, again, the first step is ensuring an equal number of men and women speak. Finally, regarding the rape issue, I think we all need to hold the men in our lives accountable as a first step. I hope this post causes some of the men to think about why they couldn’t spare a half hour to learn how they can end the rape of women.

To reiterate, I’m not saying my presentation was the best one to choose from, or that I chose the greatest topic, or that I executed it perfectly. What I’m saying is that all men have a responsibility to end gendered violence, and when gendered violence is a result of so many things, from sexism in general to gender roles, all men (and certainly all men who are unaware), encourage the rape of women to some extent, whether they commit the act or not. The fact that most of the men in attendance were “decent men” does nothing to discount the fact that their gender politics are fucked.

*The event was largely promoted through Facebook and Twitter, so many of the attendees can, I think, be classified as being part of the active online community in Edmonton.

Underground Media and the Importance of do-it-yourself local media.

By Samantha Power and Aaron Chubb.

Click Here

SUBvision and student filmmaking

Hey all, I’m liveblogging from the U of A IDEAfest today!

Click Here

Twitter and Social Media

Twitter and social media

Spoken Word, Race, and Intimate Violence

I’d be writing more, but the AirPort on my MacBook is thoroughly fucked, and I get Internet access only intermittently. This isn’t going to be a post about one specific thing, rather, since I haven’t been writing much lately, it’s going to be a great mix of thoughts and goings-on. With that said, here we go…

I had my first spoken word performance Thursday night (29 January). I wrote the piece in about an hour and rehearsed it once before going. I think it was received generally well; I definitely felt like the black sheep in the crowd. I shared it at the University of Alberta Sexual Assault Centre’s Night of Expression, and there was a lot of art and poetry shared about sexual assault. My piece was angry and humourous, while there were a couple darkly ironic pieces (I felt), and a lot of really morbid ones. Not that there’s anything wrong with that by any means. I think humour has a role in healing and dealing with serious issues like sexual violence, though, as long as it’s used properly. In case I need to make it clear for some folks, making jokes about sexual assault is not funny or helpful. Using humour to criticise the media and police when they tell women to lock their doors and windows to prevent rape, was, I think, funny and constructive. Of course, I’m open to criticism.

I’ve become really critical of white feminists (and white “liberals”) lately. Since last semester, my anti-racist politics have really developed, and these politics have, among other things, led me to write a paper on gendered violence against Indigenous women and present it in Albany, NY. Since really looking at race and my own relations to it, I’ve learned to recognise so much of the racism that goes on in a lot of feminist circles, and there’s a lot of it. I recently brought up some concerns I had with the U of A Women’s Centre regarding the fact that nearly all of its’ members are white university students. There is absolutely no excuse for that. Ignoring issues that concern Women of Colour and People of Colour and focusing on issues that only affect white people or focusing on issues from a white perspective only is racist.

So yeah, I’m noticing things that are so goddam obvious now and should have been before, too. Like how most of the students in Women’s Studies are white. Or how no one objected yesterday to a sentence in a text comparing white women’s situation in the 1700s(?) to Black slaves. Or how people get all nervous and try to change the subject when you tell them they’re not focusing enough on race when they should be*. And yeah, it’s a subject that gets me pissed off, because I’ve dealt with it my whole life when I wished every day for my skin to be whiter so I could pass as a white person, when I told by my grade six teacher I was a waste of space, when I was called a dirty Indian. And you know what? I think all PoC have a right to be pissed off when they get fed the same bullshit day after day.

On another note, if you’re in the Edmonton community, you should come to Freeskool this Sunday (8 February) at the Pride Centre (9540 111 Ave). The subject is going to be intimate violence, and how to be a good ally. I’ll be speaking really briefly, probably not about much but what people can do to get involved in fighting violence against women. If you’re interested in being part of the organising committee, come at 10:00. If not, the day starts at 11:00. I hope to see some Edmontonians there!

Anyway, these are some of the thoughts around my head. Once again, if anyone has any pointers for MacBooks with AirPort problems, it would be greatly appreciated, and then hopefully I can get to posting more often.

*I realise there are other groups of women who get ignored and are marginalised by privileged feminists, like fat women, (dis)abled women, trans women, sex workers… I could go on for some time. None of these women should be ignored, but I feel I can only focus in-depth on one dynamic at a time, and when I feel I’ve sufficiently learned it, I move on to another. It’s not ideal, I know, but it’s the best I can do.

I’m Back… Again

So, I’ve decided to poke my head in the door once again and see who’s still around. It appears that a few of you are still checking the blog, which is encouraging. At any rate, I’ve been gone for some time now, but the break was very much needed. I’ve begun pursuing some new things and have thought a lot about blogging.

First, the blog, since that’s why you’re here. I’ve decided to keep Doing Feminism as my primary blog. It only makes sense, since I love writing here. The confusion before about a new blog was simply out of a desire to try new forms of writing, writing that I’m (thankfully) pursuing offline. It was getting to a point where so much of my work was done online that I think I needed to put things into perspective and unplug a bit. So, the short story is that I’ll be blogging here, and with things more in perspective now, I hope the writing will be better. At least, it will keep getting better, as it did before, I think. (Gawd, it’s embarrassing to look at things I was writing only half a year ago.)

Now, as I stated, I’m pursuing some other forms of writing. Namely, I’m doing some work in creative non-fiction, but I’ve recently begun to dabble in spoken word. Depending on how this piece I’m working on works out, I may or may not be performing my first spoken word piece this coming Thursday. Time will tell. I’ve also begun a small writing group with some friends, and we’re exchanging and discussing our writing on a bi-weekly basis. It’s a blast, and something I definitely need.

I’ve got other news here and there about recent goings-on, but I won’t post about them just yet. Stay tuned for excerpts from my offline work I’m doing; I’m sure I’ll post some from time to time. Anyway, I’m back, and, once again, it feels great.

Also of note, something is effed up with AirPort in my MacBook and I have very limited Internet access with it as a result. If anyone has any pointers on this, please post them in the comments or email me. Thanks!

I’ve Moved

Well, not so much moved as spread myself around. I’ve got another blog up and running now, but rest assured, I haven’t abandoned Doing Feminism. While the more I think about it, the more it makes sense to just take my feminism there, too, but we’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, if you like what I write, please follow me there and/or add the blog to your RSS feeder. As I said, my intention isn’t to abandon this site, but I’m also unsure of whether or not I have the resources to run two sites effectively. Time will tell.

If you’re looking for a reason as to why I moved, I suppose I feel this space didn’t allow me to express myself as much as I wanted. I could always change that, but those weren’t my intentions when I started the site, and the name isn’t suitable, an so on. All in all, I simply couldn’t express myself the way I wanted to. Anyway, I hope the offers a bit of an explanation for those of you who were looking for one. I hope you stick around!

Best,
Derek