There’s a thing that bugs me a lot with some written pieces on discrimination (particularly class based discrimination), wherein the writers ascribe a kind of malicious intent to the group doing the discriminating. The example that has set this off in particular was pointing out bourgeois feminists have historically attacked sex workers but done very little for women getting undervalued in domestic labour. This is actually a really interesting observation and definitely got me thinking, but the writer took the stance that this was a big intentional thing to prevent women uplifting themselves through higher paying sex work and instead maintain a cheap supply of domestic labour. I will agree that that is absolutely the result, but if you want to break up discrimination you need to understand why people discriminate to begin with and just assigning it to this intelligent greed of the people with power is for one, a cop out and two, unhelpful because you’re insisting that it’s a character flaw on the part of the powerful which is as good as saying it’s unchangeable.
In this particular example and in many like it I’d say that what is more likely at play is thoughtlessness that is self-serving. This looks very much like selfishness from the outside, but the character flaw isn’t that people don’t care about other humans, it’s that they’re fucking lazy and will generally not think about things that don’t benefit themselves to think about. The bourgeois feminists this particular piece was decrying conflicted with sex workers because there was a perceived morality issue between their brands of feminism. To the bourgeois (I’m so sorry I keep calling them that it was just the article please I’m not a marxist anymore) feminist, their battle was in legitimising their power, breaking glass ceilings, getting into political office, etc. This is their goal and everything is either in support of it, working against it or not relevant to it. From their perspective then, women in sex work are misconstrued to be in support of the patriarchy that works against their goal (as opposed to just doing their own thing within a patriarchal system that unfairly colours everything they do as political). They then seek to turn women from this work, not thinking of the reasons they might be doing it to begin with. They do not think about the situation of women in the domestic labour market being underpaid and having very few options for upwards class mobility because that’s not relevant to their particular goal.
The reason they create this situation is not because they were greedily trying to secure a supply of cheap domestic labour by cutting off one of the few pathways through which women could escape poverty in a patriarchal system, it is because they didn’t ever think that women might need to escape poverty in a patriarchal system because they were not in poverty and thinking about other people is hard. Without sufficient motivation, people won’t do it. We pay attention to our own battles and everyone is either for us, against us or invisible.
This is the case for so many forms of oppression, it is not that the people with power are malicious it is that they do not conceive of what other people are dealing with. This obliviousness creates the bystanders that make up systems of oppression because they don’t realise what they’re doing is discrimination. And treating obliviousness like it’s instead malicious intent causes the bystanders to turn off because they feel attacked rather than educated. Worse, it turns them against the cause decrying the oppression the bystanders are unthinkingly committing.
I’m not trying to tone police here, and I’m not saying we don’t call out systems of oppression because the people in power can’t stand to have their widdle feelings hurt. I’m saying we need to stop assuming people hurt us because they meant to rather than because they just didn’t think.
By the way there’s a transphobic joke like half an hour into Deadpool and it took up two seconds but ruined half the movie for me. Nobody I’ve talked to even remembers it was said. Not because they’re bad people, just because it didn’t even occur to them that a sentence fragment could spoil a movie for someone.
The point is not intent, the point is that it’s a result that assists in the maintenance of bourgeois capitalism (I am a Marxist, or well a general communist, have some anarchist leanings), because it assists in the survival of the bourgeoisie, and bourgeois women in particular, it becomes a form of thought that is popular. Power creates flawed thought, and behavior, behavior that cannot be changed without stripping people of that power.
There cannot be a bourgeois without a proletariat. There cannot be an employing class unless there are people who can be exploited for employment. That is simply a fact.
There will never be any change until we abolish the inequalities that create and maintain this social structure.
TL;DR: Stop assuming an analysis is of individuals when its about the functioning of systems of power
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 