The problem with Feminist language

I feel that the biggest problem holding back a more effective discussion about gender equality is a problem of language.  What is alienating about the feminist movement is the use of somewhat exclusionary language.  I think in order to reach a broader spectrum of people, language must be carefully used when hashing out the important issues.

When driving any kind of revolution forward, I think it’s natural to create an ingroup.  This ingroup will automatically empathize with its own members.  This causes a kind of doublespeak in some internal dialogues.  Out of convenience, these movements will create their own words to describe certain concepts.   Like any kind of political party, nationality or ideology, it’s members know more about the “real” issues than outsiders.  Projecting an image of ignorance and incredulity on the outsiders of the movement.  

I’ve been a part of many of these ingroups which create their own mini-languages to explain the paradigm they’re attempting to overthrow.  Its very easy to sink into a closed off intellectual bubble, where only those who are inside can understand what you are talking about.  This becomes problematic when you attempt to relay these concepts to outsiders.  This is especially problematic if your bubble is intent on overturning the current system and replacing with their own way.  

It can be most easily seen in religious movements.  its very hard for religious to address the outside world if they’re so enveloped in the language of their tradition.  Words and phrases like “redemption”, “fear of God’ and “sinner” probably have a much different meaning to those who hear them outside of their religious contexts.  This can only alienate and confuse those well-intentioned outsiders.

This unfortunately, I feel is true about the feminist movement.  Any kind of group with an “ism” at the end of their name is going to encounter alienation problems.  While the ideas behind the movement are by and large good, they present an unpleasant and alien image to the outside.  The feminist movement is appealing to those who are already alienated from the male-dominated culture.  It’s language is appealing to those who have found alienation and emptiness in gender identities.  But it’s true intention is to change the culture.  It’s not going to be attractive to those still fully connected to the gender system who in fact need feminism the most.  

The first language problem I think stops most people is the use of the word “Feminism”.  “ism” is a sure sign of a political ideology.  The root, “feminine” denotes the inclusion of the female sex as the biggest component.  The word by itself is exclusionary to anything masculine.  If someone sympathizes with feminism as a man, they often must caveat their identity with “male-feminist”.  I believe that the true ideals of “feminism” would not need anyone to declare their gender identity.  

I think the word “feminism” is creating a problem that is counterproductive to it’s own cause.  Because of its name, it’s creating an ingroup of people, simply based on a single sex or a gender. Naturally It will gather together people who are alienated and angry at the gendered system we live in.  

Its a stereotype and an oversimplification of feminists that they are “angry at men”.  For the most part, I agree that its just a stereotype.  But even the most offensive stereotypes have their origins in some kind of small truth. To illustrate this point, I would compare this to people calling atheists “angry at God”.  While the atheist would say that they don’t even believe in God’s existence.  The theist may not properly comprehend the very idea of a godless world.  They can’t truly understand the mentality of an atheist.  So, to them it looks as if the atheist is behaving like a rebellious teenager against a parent.

When someone says “Feminists are just angry and hate men.”  That person is probably well situated deep inside the gendered system.  To an outsider, all they see is a group of upset women.  Since this person takes the notion of “men and women” for granted, who else can feminists be possibly angry at?  They are like the theist who doesn’t understand the mindset of a person without a belief in God.  The outsider to feminism doesn’t understand that the whole dichotomous gender system is what is being targeted, not men.  They can’t understand a world without gender as a personal identity.  Gender is such an important part of their world, its very hard to see these issues without it.  The word “feminist” enforces that mentality with its inherent dichotomy of feminine versus masculine.        

Are there feminists who do actually just hate men? Sure, I wouldn’t bet against it.  But they’re no different than those men who hate women.  I would say that these people have legitimate complaints about their gender and its relationship to the “opposite”.  But this negative energy is just missdirected.  Without recognizing the real source of their issues.     

       

I should expand this to all kinds of movements that are attempting to change gender and sexuality in our culture.  I truly believe these groups are trying to change the world for the better.  But the way they’re presented to the world is often in an unfavorable light.  Its often because of the language used.    

Words like “patriarchy”, “hegemonic masculinity”, “CISgender” “rape-culture”, “male privilege” have a way of unconsciously talking down to those who don’t know their meaning.  How many letters have to be added to the LGBTQ..(?) abbreviation to be politically correct?  Is it offensive to call someone “transvestite?”, “transexual?”, “transgendered?”.  It feels like if I don’t know the correct term, I’m a bigot.  It’s these sorts of concepts only privy to insiders have an alienating effect to those outside.

The word “rape-culture” is one such example of a topic worth addressing that is alienating to those who don’t know what it is.  When I first encountered the concept of rape-culture, it was in a dialogue in a university newspaper. I found the term to be unnecessarily aggressive and shrill.  Whoever was arguing against rape-culture, the writing seemed to be coming from a place of high emotion.  I can totally understand why.  But keep in mind, that kind of passion will be alienating to men who’ve never heard of it.  I was one of those men.  I didn’t know what it was, but the article certainly didn’t win me over.  From then on I associated that term with an air of confrontational feminism, which I had no desire becoming a part of.  As a man, “rape-culture” made me feel guilty by association.  I’m the one of most timid guys you’ll ever meet.  I felt I would never do anything to enable that kind of behaviour.  All it did was make me even more confused than I already was about how to behave around women I was attracted to.  

Keep in mind, I’m not trying to discredit any of the facts about rape culture.  I’m just trying to point out how the concept isn’t the most endearing to those uneducated.  Many men are probably now feeling the same way I used to about “rape-culture”.  

 It wasn’t until I took a sociology of gender course, that I began to really understand these issues.  It took maturing and self examination to see feminism as a good thing.  But it took a process of becoming fluent in feminist language to fully grasp what the intent was.  To be clear, I’m not proposing any kind of alternative to the words we use.  I wouldn’t know where to start.  I’m just trying to illustrate some of the unintended problems that naturally occur in social movements and language.       

"I"-deology, The ego centered proof of existence

I have been thinking a lot lately about how an individual defines oneself.  How much do words, symbols and ideologies form the identity of the individual human being? I talked a little bit about language and words forming identities in a previous blog post.  But now I wish to address cultural and ideological identities more specifically.  Its interesting to see that as I wrote this blog entry, it seemingly turned into some sort of life manifesto by the end.  It may be a little rambling and disorganized, so read on if you dare.

A few months ago I had come to an important intellectual conclusion which could be summed up in a Facebook status update.

“It is very bad idea to build an identity on the ideas of other people”

I had come to this while writing about how important language is and how it can be misused.  One of the worst ways people can misuse language is to use it to define their existence.  Our language is by its very nature, cold and logical.  The language of logic is all about assertions and contradictions.  And so I have the inclining that we get very insecure when our existential bedrock is nothing but abstract logical dictions.  A perfect example of this is fundamentalist religion.

The western forms of religion are essentially absolutist in their interpretations of existence.  They are very logical in regards to interpreting scripture as the final truth of the universe.  Everything else must follow that (holy book x) is true.  Just like in any logic equation, you must have at least one given truth(or faith) to figure anything out.  In scripture based religion, the entire universe then must fit into perfect order because the ultimate truth behind everything is assumed.  Followers of fundamentalist religions will tell you, things which don’t appear to make any sense actually do make sense but we just aren't able to totally understand God's plan.  But rest assured everything is for the best.

I don’t want to seem like I’m picking on religion exclusively.  I want to demolish all forms of ideology. Fundamentalist religion seems to be the most obviously flawed ideological system that sticks out like a sore thumb.  But I believe that all ideological definitions of the self are illusions at their very core.  Political ideologies are also very weak and function with these kinds of faith based belief systems.  They usually begin with an assumption of the nature of humanity.  For example, socialism begins with the belief that humans left to their own devices are naturally bad and therefore need to be controlled.  Libertarianism assumes that humans left to their own devices will behave naturally good and therefore need no government to control them.

I want to show you that you don’t need to prove your own existence.  For some reason, we are very insecure about our own existence if we don’t have anything that appears external to define it.  Here is the most critical flaw of the modern idea of existence.  The idea that the self is something different than the world.  We feel like the “I” is something that sits behind the eyes that makes decisions and controls the body.  Nonetheless “I” is a foreigner in a strange world. For example, look at the various linguistic ways we make this distinction.  When we are born we say we are brought into this world.  When we refer to the human body, we say we “have” a body.  As if the body were something of an object that the “I” can posses.  This is an idea that is so totally ingrained into our language and culture that we take it for granted.  It appears in religious rhetoric as the “soul”.  Even in secular society the idea as the self as something separate from the world, greatly informs the worldview of the modern person.

I think ideologies are phenomena that occur when our ego centered sense of self feels insecure and attempts to prove that it exists

Huh?.  

Before I continue, I want to say that these ideas of the self are heavily influenced by a man named Alan Watts.  I have been listening to a lot of his lectures regarding the nature of consciousness and what the modern conception of the self is.  He was an utterly captivating orator and he has introduced me to whole new ways to think about life.  Its amazing to me that some people’s personalities like Watts’ can be so alive in my mind yet they have been dead for decades.  

The Ego

The idea of the self is what we should be focused on here.  What am I?  What are you?  The harder you look into this question, the more vague the self appears to be.  If you strip away all constructed ideas of identity such as gender, race and culture, the self appears to be nothing more than moment to moment experience.  You are nothing more than the continuation of consciousness of an individual human being.  You are not your past.  You have access to this person’s memories and you assume the responsibilities and consequences of their past actions, but you should not be defined by them.  Even your sense of agency and free will as an individual is illusory.  Your moment to moment thoughts you act upon arise seemingly unintentionally out of thin air.  Every thought originates at very rudimentary levels of neurochemistry.  Did you come up with those thoughts?   How could freewill be an actual concept if there is no intentional control of all the brain and body’s functions?  Are YOU responsible for the beating of your heart?  are YOU digesting the food in your gut?  Do you have the freewill not to feel hungry?  Where do you draw the line between “You” and your desires?

The funny thing is when you try to control something that comes naturally, it gets tripped up.  When you draw a line between “you” and the body’s behaviour it becomes an uncomfortable mess.  Just like a microphone held up to it’s own speaker creates a disturbing feedback sound.  For example, if you constantly think about your breathing, it becomes disordered.  Breathing only works properly if you don’t think about it.  In a social situation, If you are constantly reviewing and second guessing what you want to say, you come off as awkward.  People who stringently monitor and try to consciously control their social interactions with people, present themselves as unnatural.  There is some sort of act going on and they don’t appear to be expressing themselves properly.  If they would just let go of the controls and say what comes naturally, their genuine person shines through better.     

The idea of the ego seems to be an illusion created by a pattern in the stream of consciousness.  We have been constantly reminded since birth, that there is a thinker behind our thoughts.  We are unintentionally taught that there is a separate entity of the self that “Thinks our thoughts” and “feels our feelings”.  When those are perfectly obvious to be absurd statements.  Our language and culture has created a rhythm of thought that creates an image of a separate self.  This image is created by our patterned stream of consciousness that goes something like: Thought thought thought THINKER, thought, thought, THINKER.  We constantly acknowledge the presence of a being that thinks our thoughts.  But I am starting to believe that the default human stream of conscious thought does not require the perceived presence of a thinker to function normally.  Altered forms of consciousness achieved through means such as sleep, practices of meditation or psychoactive substances offer windows into a state of being free of an ego.  It shows that a reality with a self-other dichotomy is not the default state of being.    

We know that any pattern when repeated enough, fades into the background and taken for granted.  This happens in everything we sense.  We don’t feel our clothes on our body we wear all day.  We only notice it when we take our clothes off.  We don’t notice how bad our house smells if we live in it all day. We will notice the smell only if we leave the house for a while and come back.  We only notice a difference when the pattern is interrupted.  So in this way, our fundamental first premise of reality is based on the simple and constantly repeated thought pattern of self and other.         

Hey Scott, what the hell does this philosophical bullshit have to do with ideology?

What I’m trying to say is that the “I”, the “self”, the “me” or the “ego” is an illusion plain and simple.  I’m also trying to say that ideological labels such as: Christian, Atheist, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, American, Canadian, Vegan or Feminist are expressions of the ego trying to define it’s existence.  Since our culture is so insistent on the concept of the ego as the thing that is YOU.  We try to find our true existential identities in ideologies and culture.  We think of ideologies as fundamental truths that exist outside of ourselves.  If I use an ideological label such as “I am a child of God”.  On some level, I am saying “my ego exists”.  “I exist because of a relation to the other”.    

I’m not saying that we should now strive to destroy our current egocentric thought pattern paradigm, but we should just begin to acknowledge this as just one of many possible states of existence.  It’s not the default state of humanity, but just one possible way that we can exist.  This way we can take one step back and look at the definitions of ourselves, once thought to be taken for granted.    

Our conformist behaviour inside our culture are also attempts for ego expression.  The universal goal to be “successful” in our culture is one of these cultural ideals taken for granted.  But success is only a relative term in our culture.  You can only be measurably successful in relation to others.

.

I want to make a small example of this with a experience I had.  Not too long ago I encountered a man at a friend’s BBQ in Medicine Hat.  He seemed like a nearly middle age guy, recently married and with a very time demanding oil field job   We got to talking about positives and negatives of the cities we both live in. He remarked that he would like Lethbridge as a city if not for “the certain ethnic group that refuses to work for a living and begs for money. Get a job.”   

What is very interesting to me is to compare his own apparent position in the culture and his attitude toward outsiders. I didn't know the man at all, but we had barely been talking for more than 5 minutes and he already made a very negative racist remark about people who haven’t conformed to the racial majority culture.  You really couldn't find a better example of an expression of insecurity in culture.  From what I gathered from our brief meeting, this guy has really bought into the cultural game. And he takes the game very seriously.  This is why he hates those who do not pursue the same cultural goals as he does.  It shows him a possibility that there are meaningful ways of existence that are different than his own.  Maybe he has spent all the best years of his life trying for a state of illusory happiness without substance. He spent his years trying for what culture has told him what he should want instead of trying for what he truly wants.  

I believe that a culture that is hostile to outsiders shows an insecurity in the cultural ideal.  From my experience growing up in a small town, the cultural ideal in Alberta is to find a high paying job in a booming labour industry like the oilpatch.  You are defined in this culture by how much money you can make and how many big toys you can collect.  The actual work involved in the career is very time consuming and labour intensive.  But ultimately the work done doesn't mean all that much to the person doing it.  So you spent two weeks straight, welding pieces of a big-ass pipeline together, great.  What matters is the amount of money made doing all that work.  You did all that work so you could add another vertical foot to your pickup truck. yeah budday.

Those who decide to opt out from the local culture game are hated because of the insecurity of the culture norms.  Granted, my culture is much more lenient towards outsiders than lets say Saudi Arabia, but you get the picture.   

Your Life

I believe that in order to have a healthy and open understanding of the universe, you can’t be attached to any form of limiting ideology.  Ideologies are only stepping stones to higher understandings of the universe.  Take the good ideas from an ideology and move on.  Use them as intellectual scaffolding on which to build better ideas.  If you find a better idea, discard the old one.  Instead of using ideas to create an identity, use them as a blueprint of reality.  That blueprint can help you move around the social, spiritual, scientific and physical world more easily.  

Neo: “I have these memories from my entire life, but… none of them really happened. What does that mean?”

Trinity: “That the Matrix cannot tell you who you are.”

The Matrix, 1999

No one can tell you who you are.  No group of people can tell you who you are.  No amount of old scripture can be the ultimate truth of your universe.  Don’t attach yourself to a culture that wants to turn you into an anonymous consumer.  Don’t give your intellect up to religions that only degrade and dehumanize you.  Don’t wrap yourself in cultural sentimentality because it is comfortable and familiar.  I believe life should be about constantly pursuing new experiences.  I believe it is our mission as apertures of the conscious universe to write what has never been written. To draw what has never been drawn. To invent what has never been conceived of.  Meet new people and form unique relationships with them.  Try not to mold those relationships into pre-determined roles.  Experience new things.  Travel to new and strange places.  Use those experiences to create your own personality. Make that personality unashamedly weird and unique.  Don’t define yourself as a caste that culture has laid down before.  You’re not doing the human enterprise much good by plunking yourself down into the most typically average role .  Don’t take the safe route and buy a mortgage with your perfect green lawn and picket fence like its the 1950s.  Where is the creativity in climbing the corporate ladder to buy the new mercedes and a cookie cutter suburban house?  What kind of interesting story will your life be, if you don’t try to pave a brand new path?  Culture, religion, sentimentality and ideology will only hold you back from the true human experience.

Shedding my ideologies

Its very simple math
Me with kitten=more views

This blog entry is kind of a disclaimer for my previous blog entries and a preview of my next one. This blog was once named “The incoherent ramblings of a Libertarian Atheist”.  Both of these ideological labels I wish to no longer be associated.  I do not wish to identify as a Libertarian any more.  I want to say I am libertarian leaning when I’m asked political questions.  But frankly, I really don’t care about politics anymore.  At least the way politics is force-fed to us by the mainstream media outlets.  When I was passionate about politics, I noticed that I was an unhappy person.  The more I knew about how much nonsense the political world was made of, the more stressed out I became.  I thought I could make a difference by voting in elections and buying into the way political systems worked.  In short, I used to believe it was real.  But that is a discussion for another time.  As a libertarian I’m tired of people assuming I believe certain extreme right-wing dogmas.  So I am disowning myself from the political arena.        

You ruined it for me Rand!

I do not wish to be identified as an atheist anymore.  Only when I am asked, “Do you believe in God?” am I an atheist.  More specifically the Abrahamic, anthropomorphic God.  No other time will “atheist” define me. Because now, “Atheism” comes along with a lot of ideological baggage.  There is a sort of assumption that if you’re an atheist, that you’re also kind of a lefty, and a skeptic to an extreme.  It would be great if Atheism was only the answer to the God debate, but this is unfortunately not the case.

"Atheism Plus" was/is an attempt to make a leftist ideology out of atheism

Now I enter a new chapter of my intellectual life.  This chapter will be defined by nothing other than my attempt to mold ideas of my own.  No doubt my ideas will change over time as I collect and reform better ones from minds much greater than my own.  In fact I want to be a flip-flopper.  I think it shows intellectual honesty.  I want to be as open minded and scientific as I can be, without being constrained by an ideology.  Science only forms rough frameworks of how reality works.  Real science in theory isn’t attached to any theory of the world.  It creates a blueprint that works better than the one that existed before and discards the previous one.  But it is never 100% true.

Religion and ideology however do not act like this.....

To be continued