"I have the feeling that we’ve been only addressing one side of the story. It’s the side where women are victims. I’m here to tell the story of how I, as a woman in tech, benefited from sexism and that men can be victims too."
Something that keeps bugging me - and this is in no way limited to tech - how being a victim has become an identity to many, which is almost worn as a badge. While I do what I can to emphasize with every individual who has been exposed to discrimination, harassment (and while as a white man I experienced most likely much less of this, although not nothing), a scenario in which everyone walks around all day long feeling as the victim (followed by the inevitable selective perception and confirmation bias) cannot function.
I recently listened to a philosophy podcast which started with a line which has since been stuck in my head "In a time in which being a victim offers so much social capital...". (edit: I recalled the quote slightly inaccurately, but the point was the same: "In a culture in which there is so much social currency connected to being a victim..." In case you are curious, it's episode #105 of philosophizethis.org)
I don't know what to do
about it and I in no way want to diminish the harm that those who feel like victims experienced. But whenever victimhood is becoming an identity, things are getting out of hand.
(the feeling of being a systemic/structural victim can be found on all sides of the political/ideological/gender spectrum of course).
TL;DR There are traditionally 2 kinds of culture - honor, and dignity. The west tends to be predominantly Dignity culture. Asia and Africa tend to be predominantly Honor cultures. This idea is that we are seeing a shift into a culture that combines both of these - the victim culture.
His take is a little different (that Victimhood culture is a result of a march through time from Honor to Dignity to Victimhood). He's referencing the same paper [1] mentioned in the reason.com article.
The thing that strikes me about victimhood is that when it's used in a pejorative sense, it's always non-interested and often uninformed persons assigning judgment to another's highly-interested behavior.
Once you look more deeply into the situation, the story changes. A good example of this is the McDonalds hot coffee lawsuit. You should go do some reading about it if you haven't.
Generating moral outrage, as a tool for solving individual problems, isn't ever going to go away. You had it in honor cultures, dignity cultures. "Blaming the victim" is one of the costs of the strategy and if you aren't prepared for this going in, you're going to get burned pretty badly.
Or sometimes you get thrust into it. The only reason we know anything about that particular lawsuit is because McDonalds' PR team turned it into a media circus. The initial lawsuit asked only for medical costs, no punitive damages.
It's a new modality of getting the upper hand if you wish.
In some contexts showing how wealthy or strong one is works, but in other contexts that doesn't work, so showing how much of victim one is works well. Even more, the interesting phenomenon is if the person can't really swing looking like a victim, they'll gain the upper hand by claiming to deeply care about other victims.
It is very important to be nuanced and honest in this discussion of "victimhood culture," as while there are legitimate arguments to be made it can also be used as another way of avoiding substantive discussion and derailing efforts for change. I've heard discussions follow essentially the following path: "Hey, we should change the lights in here -- if we switch to a softer bulb we'll get less glare on the screens." "Stop being such a victim! Victimhood culture these days...."
Some of the comments here that characterize, say, women speaking about sexism as "proponents of victimhood culture" seem to be mainly bent on making sure that if women speak up they're told they shouldn't and if they don't they're told they should have. If one is always constructing the situation so that people in adverse situations have no possible way of winning, one should admit that.
> In a time in which being a victim offers so much social capital...
Not just social capital, but literal financial capital too. There's a growing number of people who are leveraging their 'victim status' in Patreon backers and donations, or trying to move from being the centre of a controversy to a public speaking role.
I've seen many of these people, nearly all women, and it's amazing to me that they can electronically panhandle and make multiple times what a gainfully employed person can make. They don't even do anything for the money other than continually tweet out how they're victimized.
Possibly because once you label one group a victim everyone else naturally goes "what about me?" I think they're right to as well, because pretty much everyone is oppressed to some degree; if you're short you're oppressed, have you seen Tinder? "I'm 5ft8 so tall guys only", if you need glasses you're oppressed, obviously, those things are expensive! If you're homosexual you're oppressed, disabled, poor, have a mental illness, a dietary requirement, if you're ugly, it never ends, and how do you weight that? Who gets to decide?
Whether or not this is in dispute, what you're doing here is injecting Trump and an inevitable culture war about him into a thread that's already likely to be contentious.
Unless Trump has specific relevance to this dispute, which I don't think he does, bringing him up is going to just add heat and fuel, not understanding. I think the mods would rather you didn't.
Anything he says about his wealth without also releasing his latest tax returns is up for debate. Whether the debate happens or not is a different question.
Does the requirement of viewing tax returns apply to anyone attempting to claim to be a billionaire or is there specific criteria for which to apply this extra safeguard?
A self-admitted[1] serial liar with a history of failed businesses would require extra scrutiny before anyone should trust their claim of being a billionaire.
Saying someone should show tax returns to run for a high office seems quite a different thing that saying that we should doubt someone's wealth unless they show tax returns.
Are we saying that running for political office is reason to require someone tax returns to prove a claim level of wealth?
I'd generalise a bit and say that anyone running for political office should show evidence for claims of fact, purely because supporting claims with evidence is a critical part of running a rational and informed society.
If you don't want to provide proof, don't make claims.
I see, thanks for clarifiication. Although even with released tax returns, he could have benevelontly committed fraud there as well, to increase his tax contributions. /s
I think this is interesting because we have to ask ourselves: what is it that we're worried about? What do we imagine will happen when everybody thinks of themselves as being victimised? Some kind of cultural apocalypse? I doubt it. Our culture will be "weakened" in some ill-defined way and we'll be "beaten" or "taken over" by some other, more confident culture? I don't buy it.
Being a victim is not a purely objective matter. It is part subjective assessment and part social consensus. Social consensus actually determines most of how we react to it. I think at the moment the consensus is undergoing a major change and that feels uncomfortable for those who felt the balance was OK.
When the consensus stabilizes then people who claim victimhood that is without merit will be ignored. Sadly, some legitimate grievances will also be ignored. And the cycle will doubtless continue.
In the meantime probably the great majority of people will continue to NOT think of themselves as victims.
I don't believe there will be a cultural apocalypse necessarily, but I am afraid there will be a gradual degradation of our culture. I'm afraid we will move away from a society that tries to be meritocratic towards one that accepts all sorts of norms so nobody gets offended. That lack of social continuity would lead to everyone walking on egg shells all the time to avoid offending everyone, thus destroying any chance of a sense of community forming.
I'm also afraid of historical wrongs committed by my grandparents being used to further legitimize racism against whites and sexism against men, simply because of "white privilege". I'm afraid of a culture forming that says they're for "diversity," "equality," and "multiculturalism" while completely suppressing any person who varies culturally in the wrong way, or who questions diversity systems that were designed in a different time when blatant racism and sexism was much more commonplace.
> Social consensus actually determines most of how we react to it.
At one time, it was a social consensus that blacks and whites were segregated. At another time, perceived socialists were pushed out of the labor pool just because of their viewpoints on what a society should be. Social consensus is a terrible metric on whether or not something is right or wrong, and people who raise legitimate questions on the current social consensus(that only seems to reflect the cultures of the east and west coasts of America, btw) shouldn't be fired or forced out of the labor pool for discussing those norms in a polite, rational manner.
>At one time, it was a social consensus that blacks and whites were segregated. At another time, perceived socialists were pushed out of the labor pool just because of their viewpoints on what a society should be. Social consensus is a terrible metric on whether or not something is right or wrong, and people who raise legitimate questions on the current social consensus(that only seems to reflect the cultures of the east and west coasts of America, btw) shouldn't be fired or forced out of the labor pool for discussing those norms in a polite, rational manner.
This. Society changes fast relative to a human lifetime. Creating a society where PCness becomes the target metric is an invitation to return to the practices of casting people out based on hearsay and rumors like was done in the McCarthy days.
To give a concrete example in the US, the male/female narrative concerning who has power and who is a victim had led to a deafening silence discussing sexism in the justice system. One of the issues Hillary spoke about during the 2016 US election was how poorly the justice system treated women, she (or at least her campaign website) purposed a number of changes to make it easier on women.
So the victim narrative not only led to us ignoring an issues of sexism, but of making it much worse, because the actual victim of sexism in this instance isn't the victim according to the narrative. It also leads to an issue logical inconsistencies like how socially acceptable certain statements are.
Consider the following statement:
Men are over-represented in prison because they are more violent than women.
Now, switch from sex to race, keeping it inline with actual data, and measure how socially acceptable the resulting phrase would be.
I think of this as a significant harm. No, it isn't as bad as a world war or genocide, but it still leaves to countless lives being ruined.
Emma Sulkowicz being 'made' (as far as fame is important for artists) by turning victimhood into an art project. It gained international acclaim although her victimhood was neither proven nor the accused found guilty. She started a witch hunt on the accused and was allowed to use this "performance" as her graduation thesis.
Something that has been disturbing to me has been the rise of the phrase "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences."
On some level, this is true. People can of course legally react in certain ways to someone's speech, such as deciding not to associate with them.
However, I feel like the phrase is a bit deceiving because it seems give the impression that "freedom" and "consequence" are unrelated. It's designed to give people the feeling that they are justified to impose more and more "consequences" (such as blacklists or even threats of violence).
Here's the definition of the phrase from the dictionary: "the right of people to express their opinions publicly without governmental interference, subject to the laws against libel, incitement to violence or rebellion, etc"
In this definition, "freedom" is directly identified with protection from a certain consequence, i.e "governmental interference." I think it should be obvious that "freedom" isn't really about the ability to move ones' mouth and make noises, but rather the freedom one has is DIRECTLY related to ones' protection from consequences. Extralegal actions to increase the "consequences" of certain types of speech directly reduce free speech.
This isn't a black or white thing, but based on what I've been seeing in social media, the possibility of some people internalizing the mantra "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" to the point that they justify violent action against speech they dislike doesn't seem implausible.
When everyone thinks they're a victim, nothing really happen (except that it's freagin annoying to listen to).
When everyone thinks they're victim who is owned the world as reparation and shouldn't have to be a productive member of society, then that's an issue.
I think at the moment the consensus is undergoing a major change and that feels uncomfortable for those who felt the balance was OK.
Blaming a vague fear of change strikes me a cop-out. A convenient, reductive, explanation that makes it easy for me to not even try understanding a perspective I don't share.
I don't think it's too hard to try and hypothesize towards "steal manning" the perspective against defining myself as, or identifying publicly as, a victim.
Perhaps it's just meant as a life skill for achieving personal success. Not that we will be "taken over" at a culture or even individual level. A perspective that says the world is hard, and no matter how many accommodation are built it, I am responsible minimizing the impact of life set-backs. I might recall the setbacks when an external system is willing to help alleviate them, but should prevent myself from wallowing in them. In the areas I have control over, it's a better strategy to dust myself off and keep going than let myeself become consumed by setbacks.
Or another possible take...
What do we imagine will happen when everybody thinks of themselves as being victimised?
A culture that becomes decreasingly well-equipped at psychological coping.
> What do we imagine will happen when everybody thinks of themselves as being victimised?
On an individual level, self-pity, even when justified, is not very helpful, and though the two are not exactly the same, one leads to the other pretty easily.
The conservatives call it 'cultural marxism' when everything is filtered through a lens of oppressors and victims. Men oppress women, whites oppress blacks, and so on.
You and that podcast and all your direct replies seem to be taking "being a victim has become an identity to many" or "there is so much social currency connected to being a victim" as axioms. From an outsiders view, that seems like a meme that has spread quite widely, but does not seem to reflect reality.
So would you say that Damore is creating a victim identity for himself, or that he is an actual victim?
I can't imagine that you'd say "this company victimizes people for thoughts like mine," in front of the company, and then be surprised when exactly what you described seems to happen.
> So would you say that Damore is creating a victim identity for himself, or that he is an actual victim?
Based on interviews I have seen with him, he feels as a victim, but isn't creating any "victim identity", because he (somewhat) rejects the notion that he is a part of some group.
At least that's how I think one can answer your (somewhat loaded, frankly) question about somebody without opening their brain. Creating "victim identity" requires that there is a social group that one associates with, because the whole point of doing so is to find allies.
IIRC in the Bloomberg interview linked from the article, he explicitly rejects that he would identify with alt-right (that's because the interviewer asks about it), and explains that he is pretty much a centrist. He does claim though that conservatives are victims of bias in Google, but that doesn't mean he _identifies_ with them.
Kinda similar worldview to Jonathan Haidt, for example.
He explicitly identified himself as a classical liberal in his essay, which most people today call libertarian. He feels that this group is a victim in the Valley, and he identifies as being part of this group.
If there's one thing this year has established, it's that we're all centrists, from the "create a white ethnostate" to "blackbloc anarchy forever" people.
Not that you could ever take people at their word for their beliefs and politics, but its seems especially disingenuous in this case.
My point/observation is not so much about individual moments of feeling/being on the receiving end of discrimination, harrassment or "unfair" treatment, but about this being part/core of the identity.
I hope he will not adopt a victim identity although its sadly likely that this could happen, as this offers him more social currency and validation. Following the logic "better loved and championed by one tribe than by no one".
And who knows how it feels to be him right now. I have no idea.
> and while as a white man I experienced most likely much less of this
I think you might be less confident about this if you examine your framing. Examining your own framing is difficult, so humor me while I examine the author's framing:
'I’m not suggesting that my fellow interviewers were sexist. They weren’t even aware of their inconsistent judgment until I pointed it out. But this incident made me think that subconsciously, people are using another scale to judge women’s ability in tech. Nobody says it out loud because that’s no longer socially acceptable, but I couldn’t help but hearing it in my head: “She’s good for a woman. Even though she doesn’t do as well as that guy, she still gets the same scores because she’s in the women’s league.”'
The author is looking at a situation where a man is offered fewer opportunities, and it is framed as sexism against women. This is justified by asserting what was going on in the heads of other people (something she can never know).
Situation: Man is denied an opportunity
Framing: This is sexism against a woman
Evidence: Assertion about someone else's inner life
Well, we can just as easily make a different assertion, changing the evidence, which changes the framing. Why not assert that the interviewers are really thinking 'I couldn’t help but hearing it in my head: "He did the best, but he's a man. Men don't deserve positions of power because they abuse them to take advantage of other people sexually and economically. He should have a lower score."'
This changes the framing. Now the sexism is against a man:
Situation: Man is denied an opportunity
Framing: This is sexism against a man
Evidence: Assertion about someone else's inner life
Which framing fits the situation better.
But now you might say, "Sololipsist, that's unlikely to be the thought process. I don't know if we should make assertions about other people's inner lives." To that I say, "I strongly agree." What SHOULD happen here is that we should see evidence, which leads us to a frame that describes the situation. In both cases above, the frame leads to the evidence, which is wrong. This is a post-hoc rationalization.
Claims of sexism are a post-hoc rationalization to justify a claim. In this case, it's to justify a claim that denying an opportunity to a man is an injustice not to that man, but to women in general. Why, oh why, would you want to justify that claim in this particular case, without evidence? Why would you accept invented evidence (the inner lives of others) to justify this claim?
I suggest that it's because you've been socially conditioned to accept the frame that women are victims of sexism, but that men are not, and that this frame does not necessarily reflect reality. In fact, I suggest, in this light, that it's no more likely to be the correct frame than the opposite frame, that men are victims of sexism and women are not. Sure, you can justify the former frame with evidence, but is that evidence following from a frame?
I'm sure you accept the premise that men in the 50's
lacked the appropriate frame to see how their actions and culture was oppressive to women - one of the greatest achievements of feminism, it is said, is that it provided this frame - after all, women didn't have to take power from men violently, they changed culture to get men to cede power willingly.
Maybe, as a white man, you've experienced a lot more racism and sexism than you realize, you've just been denied the appropriate frame to see it.
Sadly i dont remember anymore which episode it was. One of the most recent ones.
edit: #105. and as i've now listened to the quote again, i realize it was slightly different, but same point: "In a culture in which there so much social currency connected to being a victim..."
The thing is being a victim if a self-fulfilling prophecy. You have no idea what it's like to be another person. But if you are told that "people like you" will find it harder and will be the victim of more hardship then you will naturally attribute any hardship whatsoever to that fact.
The truth is that everyone has their own problems and hardship. Yes, even white men. If we really want to look at which group of people have, statistically, the hardest lives then we'd start by looking at suicide rates.
> The thing is being a victim if a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I don't agree. I think it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But the only way it could always be one would be if everyone single person's life contained an equal amount of good and bad. But life's not like that and some people get unlucky hands at the start of their lives and during their lives. Some much worse than others [1].
Also, note that in the notion of 'victim' I'm using here, being a victim of something has nothing to do with how you respond to that. It doesn't mean you have to act all victimised all the time and let it consume you.
[1] regarding "The truth is that everyone has their own problems and hardship. Yes, even white men", I think that statement is too vague. It comes across like it's saying since everyone faces problems/hardship then no-one has it worse than anyone else. Regarding the second sentence of that, I definitely agree that white men, and even straight white men, can face terrible problems and hardship. I really wish we, as a society, could recognise statistical points about certain groups statistically facing greater levels of certain hardships without also treating this as meaning therefore all members of the other groups always have it better.
That's not entirely true. Philando Castile, for instance, would not have been helped out by simply believing he was not a victim. In situations like job interviews and office experiences, it's certainly optimal on an individual level to expect (pretend?) that you'll be treated fairly -- it helps you carry yourself with confidence and increases the chances that you will be treated fairly. But it's irresponsible to put all your chips on just believing that you won't be treated unfairly.
For instance, I was recently confronted with an upcoming medical procedure in which 90% of patients in the US are treated with what I believe (and the evidence supports) is a riskier procedure than necessary, with longer recovery times. Simply believing I wouldn't be treated that way would be foolish -- it's hospital policy most places! So I did the work to find a place where I could be treated in the way I wanted, according to evidence-based guidelines. That was not trivial.
Looking at suicide rates is really interesting, although one should look more broadly at life expectancy. (Suicide rates do after all have a paradoxical relationship with some kinds of danger, like war.) Life expectancy for US men has decreased for the first time in recorded history outside of times of war, and it's almost solely due to drug overdose ("accident" in the data). The data tells some very interesting stories; when I find the study I'll add a link here. Anyhow, Native Americans win the "hardest lives" award by miles if we look at suicide or life expectancy, but white men have recently moved up in the standings, which might explain some of the current zeitgeist.
I think this whole claiming that being a victim as a self-fulfilling prophecy is flawed. It's hard to say a trans woman who's been murdered or raped had it coming. Or to say that an effeminate gay man is responsible for the actions of those who assaulted him.
I know that might not be what you mean but that is what violent perpetrators will use when it comes to court. They'll argue they panicked or that they felt an overriding urge to murder as if they went insane. This has been the common defense tactic used in criminal cases under the gay/trans panic defense. I don't know of a case where it's been entirely successful but it has mitigated sentences. So I think I'd rather have to deal with people perceiving themselves as victims but are not truly such than deal with mountains of corpses of true victims of our inherently violent cultures.
Seems that rational action to that defense tactic is to not allow it. Given the usually high bar for insanity pleads, the gay/trans panic defense is lowest form I have ever heard.
There were recently a case here in Sweden where a psychiatric patient had gone out of his meds, tried to get himself committed but got denied because there were no beds available, and then decided to commit suicide and brought his new born baby to a ledge. He throw the baby over, but then backed out on committing suicide himself and got charge with attempted murder (the baby survived). The court decided that while the episode was part of a psychiatric breakdown, it was not enough for a insanity plead.
If a person with no psychiatric problems can claim insanity when assaulting a gay or trans person, then thats seems like a extremely poor excuse.
Wikipedia has some cases where the defense was used, but it's hard to ascribed the cases where there was a conviction on a lesser charge (or sentencing decisions) specifically to the use of the defense.
> Something that keeps bugging me - and this is in no way limited to tech - how being a victim has become an identity to many
Victimhood is a strategy that has been used since forever to gain power, influence and control. Victimhood is both shield used to defend against criticism and spear used to attack others.
You could look back to ancient greece ( herodotus ) and the Peloponnesian War. Or more recently to the "settlement/extermination" of the natives. One of our excuses for exterminating the natives is that we were being victimized by the natives who were defending their land.
An interesting case is ww2 and the holocaust. The nazis painted themselves as the victims of jews and used that supposed victimization to attack, steal and murder jews. Of course that naturally led to push back from the jews and which the opportunistic nazis as further evidence of "victimization".
And as a juxtaposition, look at what the israelis are doing to palestinians. They are using the victimization via nazi germany as an excuse to seize palestinian land and to prevent anyone ( especially europe ) from criticizing it.
Look at japanese justification for ww2. They justified invading much of the pacific rim nations were that they were being victimized by european powers.
The same applies to gulf of tonkin and our official entry in the vietnam war. Or more recently with 9/11 and the invasion of iraq. We were victimized and used that victimization to invade iraq ( which
had nothing to do with 9/11 ).
The difference between seeking justice ( civil rights/suffrage/etc ) and victimization is that latter is vengeful and dishonest and greedy. Justice is a matter of what's right and fair. The ideology of victimhood is getting something for myself and taking something from others.
The civil rights and suffrage movement was about equality ( justice ). The modern victimhood movement is about taking from others. It's why the victimhood movement wants censorship. They want to take away someone else's rights. The civil rights movement was against censorship.
Something that keeps bugging me - and this is in no way limited to tech - how being a victim has become an identity to many, which is almost worn as a badge. While I do what I can to emphasize with every individual who has been exposed to discrimination, harassment (and while as a white man I experienced most likely much less of this, although not nothing), a scenario in which everyone walks around all day long feeling as the victim (followed by the inevitable selective perception and confirmation bias) cannot function.
I recently listened to a philosophy podcast which started with a line which has since been stuck in my head "In a time in which being a victim offers so much social capital...". (edit: I recalled the quote slightly inaccurately, but the point was the same: "In a culture in which there is so much social currency connected to being a victim..." In case you are curious, it's episode #105 of philosophizethis.org)
I don't know what to do about it and I in no way want to diminish the harm that those who feel like victims experienced. But whenever victimhood is becoming an identity, things are getting out of hand.
(the feeling of being a systemic/structural victim can be found on all sides of the political/ideological/gender spectrum of course).