Someone bought me this book for my birthday, but since a lot of people bought me books, I can't remember who bought me this specific one, but it's clearly someone who knows me well because I thought it was great and very insightful.
The author is a philsopher and very aptly explains a lot of the reasoning behind the views I hold on issues such as reverse-racism and reverse sexism, intersectionality, trans exclusionary radical feminism, cancel culture, climate change and capitalism - it was wonderful to see it argued so concisely and far more logically than I could ever express. I think her debunk of the "Not All Men" retort was my favourite part. I found her perspective on words and the impact that they can have highly relevant to my creative practice, so it was very useful to read the book and I would recomend it highly.
Quotes
‘Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge …. [W]hether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary check – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. – Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture (1993)’
‘Showing your working is a way of being open with others, in the sense of being intellectually honest, which means making your assumptions and reasoning vulnerable to criticism. Being open in this way is also a challenge to another concerning trend. In online skirmishes about political issues, people sometimes respond to perfectly reasonable requests for explanation with the refrain, ‘It’s not my job to educate you!’ or are quick to assure others that ‘You don’t owe anyone anything!’ These proclamations are sometimes the result of an understandable frustration: marginalised people are often burdened with explaining their marginalisation and thereby expending energy that could be used for rest or resistance.’ (page 3)
On capitalism; ‘Such a patently unjust system could not persist without some degree of assent from those it harms. This compliance is secured by producing and maintaining divisions between people in order to consolidate its rule. The objective of extracting as much labour as possible while paying the lowest possible wages is helped along by the entrenchment of gender categories.’ (page 10)
‘Creating these hierarchies of exploitation requires division into social groups, and requires that some of those groups be subjugated relative to others or, in other words, that some groups are oppressed.’ (page 12)
‘Oppression being structural means that it is everywhere. The variety of scenarios in which its obstacles and humiliations might arise are potentially infinite. This is not the case for ‘reverse-racism’ and ‘reverse-sexism’. If someone calls a white person a ‘white cunt’ chances are it’s the first time that’s happened and in all likelihood it’ll never happen again.’ (page 18)
‘Intersectionality is sometimes misunderstood as meaning that each of us has a unique fingerprint of intertwined oppressions, so that we should approach questions of social justice as individuals, without making assumptions or drawing parallels. It’s a misapplication that’s been welcomed in establishment circles because it individualises the burden of challenging injustice, prevents ordinary people from seeing their commonalities, and requires no systemic change. Taking intersectionality into account encourages collective organisation, but challenges us to build movements that recognise interlocking dimensions of oppression, and begin with the needs of the most marginalised.’ (page 24)
‘Yet words do hurt, as anyone subject to cruel or insulting comments can attest. Brain scans suggest that social rejection, of the kind that can be effected through verbal abuse, activates the anterior cingulate cortex: the same area of the brain that lights up when we’re subject to physical pain.’ (page 42)
‘Those of us who ask for considerate language do so because that’s one part of the world we can make a bit easier. We would spare one another the indignities we can control. To say that politically correct language is damaging because people must be able to deal with cruel, inconsiderate utterances is like saying: ‘I must be permitted to e racist, because otherwise people won’t be able to deal with racism.’ If we can subtract some of life’s eliminable harms, we’ll have greater reserves to tackle the harder problems.’ (page 50)
‘That said, we must remain attentive to the ways in which fixating too closely on social identities in isolation can leave our movements frayed and toothless. To start with, focussing on individual dimensions of oppression fails to account for the empirical reality that people live within multiple, amalgamated identities, But also, marginalised people have a great deal in common. Above all, they are more likely to be poor, unsafe and voiceless.’ (page 60)
‘when we think about oppression we tend to focus on the intentions of the speaker rather than the effect of their speech on others. If we see racism as a property of a few bad people, then as long as someone can convince us that they’re not a bad person or didn’t intend any harm, it seems churlish to call them racist.’ (page 75)
’56 per cent of the 2,600 South-African men surveyed in a 2015 study admitted to having beaten or raped a woman at least once in the previous year. Studying men’s attitudes gives some clue as to how these behaviours are perceived. In a recent questionnaire in Australia, a third of young men said they thought that accusations of rape amount to a woman regretting sex, one in five believed that domestic violence is a normal reaction to stress, and almost a third felt rape occurs because men can’t control their need for sex.’ (page 82)
‘Only 3 per cent of UK adults associate masculinity with kindness or care, and just 1 per cent with respectfulness, supportiveness and honesty. More than half of young men feel they must not ask for emotional support even in times of need, and two-thirds feel compelled to display hyper-masculine behaviours.’ (page 83)
‘People who appear to be credible get more out of life. They have a better chance of getting a job, being respected at work, winning arguments, accruing followers on social media, influencing other people’s ideas, having the police and courts take them seriously, and succeeding in public roles, including politics and journalism. Importantly, they also have a better chance of being listened to when they say they’ve been treated unfairly. We rarely know for sure how credible a person is, so we find ourselves estimating how credible they seem. In making that assessment, we take shortcuts.’ (page 129)
‘Scientists have also frantically sought to prove that women have smaller, less powerful brains, governed by hormonal fluctuations, which make them apt to lie and exaggerate. Aristotle was an early adopter of this view, writing in 350 BC that women are ‘more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive [than men]. This would set the tone for the next two and a half thousand years.’ (page 135)
‘Reading off credibility from confidence is worrying, because self-assuredness is heavily gendered: men and boys tend towards over-confidence, while women and girls tend towards under-confidence. This trend has been observed across many contexts. Women are likely to apply for jobs or promotions only when they meet all of the listed requirement, while men apply if they think they can meet around half of them. Male students overestimate their test scores compared with their actual performance, while female students underestimate theirs, and this effect is stronger where respondents also indicate agreement with gender stereotypes. This suggests that the more sexist a man is, the more over-confident he’s likely to be.’ (page 139)
‘The upshot is that as a woman, you can be competent, or you can be likable, but you can’t be both. It is assumed that women are less competent than men, but when we are forced to admit that they are just as capable, we don’t like them any more. Competence is required of those in positions of power, and reducing one’s approval of a person who is undeniably proficient is a way of discouraging such people from seeking high-status positions. The trends mentioned here are exacerbated for women of colour. The attacks on Diane Abbott have always been deliberately hostile: they intend to warn Black women that they are not welcome in politics.’ (page 140)
‘The fact that women sometimes lie about orgasms when they have sex with men is usually presented as a humorous one, a private joke between women about the ways in which we hoodwink men, and how easily they’re fooled. But it’s not funny. When women lie about orgasming, they put their partner’s feelings ahead of their own pleasure, as, as a trend, that’s troubling.’ (page 145)
‘Lying about sex and suffering in sex are ways of meeting our needs in an imperfect world. Power compels us to conform to its desires and when we cannot meet those desires, it forces us to lie to avoid its rage.’ (page 146)
‘A 2016 study conducted in the US showed that men tend to find intelligent women less attractive, and are prepared to make an exception only if an intelligent woman is also exceptionally beautiful.’ (page 147)
‘The epistemic impoverishment has measurable effects. To take just one example, 80 per cent of ‘experts’ quoted in online news articles in the UK are men, and this trend, which is particularly pronounced in relation to business and economics, hasn’t changed over the last decade. This perpetuates the harmful idea that women are not able to peak authoritatively. But there’s a bigger issue: certain perspectives are excluded.’ (page 153)
‘Our responses to individual instances of structural oppression seem to serve as scapegoats. The idea of a scapegoat first appears in the Old Testament. The moral transgressions of the people of Israel were symbolically loaded upon the head of a goat who was then cast out into the wilderness to carry away their sins and thereby purify them. It was an expedient way of being seen to have dealt with a problem without having dealt with it at all.’ (page 185)
‘In recent years, there’s been a rise in ‘gender critical’ or ‘trans-exclusionary radical’ feminism in the UK, which amounts to groups of cis women (usually older, white, middle-class women) devoting considerable time and energy to demonising trans women and attempting to ensure that women-only spaces (such as rape crisis centres, domestic abuse refuges, prisons, changing rooms and bathrooms) exclude trans women. These people have caused great damage to the public discourse on trans people’s rights, and have in some cases harassed and attacked (or incited others to attack) individual trans people. Those harms cannot be excused and there is something perturbing at the heart of their tactics which deserves closer analysis. Many of the cis women involved have experienced particularly traumatic sexual abuse at the hands of cis men, and appear to be directing their pain at trans women, on the basis of two mistaken assumptions: that the violence of men is encoded in genetic or genital sex, rather than in the operation of gender, and that cis women are uniquely vulnerable to violence by cis men, rather than having that vulnerability in common with trans women.’ (page 191)
‘The works of the likes of Allen and Weinstein are the staples of our cultural canon, and other voices and perspectives that might serve as a foil or counterweight are minimal, marginal or absent. Rather than thinking about it as ‘cancelling’ we might consider extending some quality control into the art, media and information we consume, choosing our encounters with a view to diversity, challenging and bolstering our capacity for independent thought.’ (page 198)
‘While the major moral problems we face are structural, there is a widespread tendency to fixate on individual solutions such as donations to charity, eating Fairtrade chocolate and using ecologically kind washing powder. This serves capitalism very well. Focussing on our own privatised culpability and that of our neighbours averts our gaze from the failings that are core to the system itself.’ (page 207)
‘the conventional understanding of responsibility as liability for past harms tends to lead us astray in the case of structural injustice. It is futile to try and work out what share of blame or guilt is yours to bear. We should instead think about the responsibilities we have to prevent harms in the future, and, given the nature of the injustices, those responsibilities will have to be discharged collectively if they are to be effective.’ (page 217)
‘The case of cigarettes might be an exception; smoking endangers public health, which is costly to the health service and the work-force, while the harms of meat consumption and fast fashion mostly occur elsewhere, in places that are deemed not to matter. Still, there is a deeper lesson; we won’t undo structural injustices without targeting capitalism’s engines of spin.’ (page 223)
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