I am angry about something. I ran the same situation by Elise, and she just found it amusing.
I’m interested to know what you think, posed in both hypothetical and actual flavors.
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Hypothetical:
You are attending a conference titled “Asian-Americans Emerging in Social Media.” Whether or not you are Asian is irrelevant; assume you’re interested in the content of the conference, and that 98% of attendees are at least partially of Asian descent.
While picking up your registration packet you recognize a non-Asian blogger, and he’s wearing a t-shirt that says, “I’ve got yellow fever!”
Later in the day, you run into a white female you don’t know wearing a tank top that says, “I’m turning Japanese.” Perhaps it’s just text, or perhaps it’s paired with a minimalist illustration of slanted eyes on an “O” face in a nod to the song’s subject. Later, at a party thrown by a Chinese culture website, her apparel bears something to the effect of, “Don’t worry boys: size doesn’t matter … to me”**
Note your initial reaction to the shirts, considering the context of the conference. Now, consider that both wearers blogged/twittered a promise to “pack their most inappropriate t-shirts” for the conference. Has your reaction changed?
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Actual:
This is a recount of something Grace of What If No One’s Watching witnessed at the recent BlogHer conference.
The attendance, while not 100% female, is very largely so. I haven’t seen more than 20 or 30 male attendees since I’ve been here.
The first one I saw just after arriving, at a restaurant in the hotel. I noticed him due to his shirt. It showed a graphic of a woman with her breasts exposed, her nipples replaced by @ signs. It read “show me your tweets.”
Then, not an hour later, I saw a man sporting a shirt saying something along the lines of “I love mommy bloggers–they put out.” The next day, the same man attended a party, hosted by an ostensibly feminist website, sporting a shirt reading “I am having very spiritual thoughts about your breasts” or some similar nonsense.
Did you have a similar reaction to those slogans? Note that they’re clearly aimed at women no matter the setting, while in my hypothetical two of the shirts wouldn’t have been as striking sans Asian context.
Again, does it change your opinion that that both bloggers blogged a promise that they had packed some offensive apparel?
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Both the hypothetical and the actual rubbed me the wrong way. Yes, they might be wryly humorous, but why bring that wry humor to a place celebrating a medium where a specific minority has escaped marginalization and become empowered?
Elise – an Asian woman – found them both amusing – especially “yellow fever” and “show me your tweets.”
Are Grace and I humorless feminazis for being offended?*** Or, is Elise is a self-hating Asian woman?**** Neither. Grace and I don’t appreciate tacit misogynism. Elise gives people the benefit of the doubt.
A final fact: both of the male bloggers commented on Grace’s post, claiming they wore the shirts to get noticed and start conversations (they apparently forgot that they’d be noticed simply by being a male). Those comments were followed by friends/readers who vouched that no offense was meant (they have “good hearts”), as well as a number who less-than-kindly called Grace overly-sensitive (a gem: “Is it possible it’s your own insecurities causing this? Seems to me that you feel like you’re less than a man.”).
Seriously?
Next year BlogHer is in New York City, and I’m contemplating attending. And you had better believe that if I do I am going to spend at least one day hanging out with Grace wearing the most hard-core grrl-power t-shirt I can find.
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* If you’ve never heard the phrase before, it is a particularly unclever way to note that you are a non-Asian who is primarily attracted to Asians.
** In the same way that people assume all black men are heavily hung, there’s also an assumption that Asian men are uniformly not. Neither assumption is statistically supportable.
If I didn’t think misogyny was so dangerous, I’d be less easily offended. As it stands, this country is getting to be extremely misogynist and anything that represents a dangerous attitudinal shift bothers me on a fundamental level. There are so many people who actively hate women – the Christian Right is a great example – and to encourage that in any way just makes me bristle. I don’t think your friend is self hating so much as accepting the old “you should learn to take a joke” and “stop being a man hating feminazi” tripe we’ve had shoved down our throats. I see where she’s coming from – it is far easier to laugh with them than to be offended – but no, long story short, I don’t find that sort of thing funny.
Kari – You just described my opinion almost 100%. Even when misogynist things are relatively innocuous they’re still supporting a disturbing spin on a patriarchal take on the world.
I feel the same way about humor/insults at the expense of the GBLT community, which Elise and I both respond to rather viciously.
I was joking about Elise being self-hating, though ;)
I don’t know as I’d find “show me your tweets” offensive. That could be meant as ironically empowering? Maybe not.
Of course, the question always really comes down to the intent of the wearer. Misogyny is the problem, not misogynist speech. However, the other two t-shirts seem pretty clearly meant to objectify & offend women. They might be worn just for humor’s sake, but then they just betray a terrible sense of humor, which is really just as bad.
I don’t really understand the usefulness of your hypothetical. Is the “Asians” context really that different from the “women” context? Is it really possible to see a problem with one and not the other?
Wes, you may be right, there may be no difference. My understanding was that it was basically a thought experiment to see whether there is any distinction between our reactions to ostensibly racist behavior and ostensibly misogynist. I’m sure there are people out there that think one is more or less acceptable than the other, and maybe having it put in parallel like this will be enlightening.
And while I found one or two of the t-shirts amusing, I can see why some might find them upsetting and would certainly not try to talk anyone out of being offended by them.
To continue the thought experiment, what if a woman were wearing the supposedly misogynist shirts?
Wes. Partially disagree re: source of problem. Tacit acceptance of speech is tacit endorsement of behavior. Speech isn’t the problem, but it’s a treatable symptom.
I do not accept any forms of ethnic or GBLT hate speech for that reason, and Elise’s practice is similar. I have seen Elise hit a room like a tornado when she heard one of her brother’s friends say, “that’s so gay.” It was probably the first time he ever heard someone tell him not to say it.
Wes/Elise. Yes to Elise, it was a thought experiment. Also, I was more comfortable trying to make a parallel example with Asian because I could get Elise’s feedback on both examples.
Elise. Kari and I actually took our conversation to email and touched on your last point. We seem to agree humor from within a marginalized group often is a good way to defuse/depower that marginalization.
I think the @s shirt on a woman would have that effect. Not the latter two shirts though.
By “intent of the wearer” I meant only that. Saying “that’s so gay” might not be conscious gay-bashing, but the intent is still to equate “bad” with “gay,” and should not be accepted. However, when Dan Savage says “that’s so gay,” he’s clearly poking fun at the ridiculousness of calling an inanimate object or concept homosexual. It’s the intent that matters.
The same goes for a woman wearing an offensive shirt. While I don’t think that necessarily makes it ok, I think one can fairly make the presumption (not assumption!) that she isn’t being misogynistic about it.
The problem with a t-shirt (or bumper sticker, or other static display) is that it’s impossible to tell the intent from only the wearer, which is why I tend to shy away from such displays. Any statement can be acceptable if it has an innocuous or empowering meaning. Of course, it’s the speaker’s job to portray that meaning, and tweeting about one’s intent to offend does a pretty good job of it. I also think it’s safe to presume a person wearing a t-shirt that says “mommy bloggers put out” isn’t trying to empower anyone. Unless it’s a pregnant woman. Or an activist attempting to change our ideas about sex. Or just some misguided soul with poor social skills.
The point is that it isn’t the t-shirt that’s the problem. It’s the misogynist wearer. Of course the male bloggers claimed they weren’t being misogynist, but prejudice is so dangerous because it’s an unconscious thing. The act of thinking “mommy bloggers put out” or “I have spiritual thoughts about your breasts” is funny implies certain ideas about women, sex, and values that I don’t agree with. That’s the problem, in my mind.
Indeed, I didn’t entirely grok your “intent” comment on first pass, but here I agree.
I had an interesting reaction that I only just unpacked enough to realize where it came from: I had a strongly negative reaction to the anti-women comments, and pretty neutral, or even slight amusement, at the anti-Asian comments.
I think it’s because I more strongly association anti-women sentiments with physical overpowerment and potential physical harm (such as violence or rape). Furthermore, it seems to me that female Americans as a whole are (insert a great many caveats here, including “from my experience”, “at this point in history,” “in my corner of the world”) more disenfranchised than Asian-Americans as a whole.
Not that I would expect anyone else to have the same reactions, or that I think my reactions are “wrong” or “right.”
An interesting point… is humor about or targeted at one demographic more or less acceptable depending on how much that group is currently marginalized? If the shirts were remarking about caucasians, how potentially offensive would they be?
I found both scenarios offensive.
The Asian ones are simply unjustifiable.
“Show me your tweets” is in poor taste, but probably not misogynistic — it’s replacing the misogyny of objectification with some sort of joke about exposing our writing to the anonymous masses.
Is “put out” some kind of a pun? Perhaps as in putting out content? Otherwise it’s incredibly misogynistic.
The breasts one is boorish frat boy humor — all the more offensive because it’s not even attempting to be clever.
My take on it is the men felt somewhat uncomfortable at being the outsider at a female conference, and tried to cover their insecurity with humor — never a good move. Being a “misguided soul with poor social skills” isn’t an excuse.
I definitely think there’s a correlation between how marginalized a group is and the offensiveness of the jokes. Caucasians, as a racial group, are not particularly marginalized. They may be in predominantly African American areas of the country, for example, but as a whole are the dominant and for the most part least marginalized group in America. However, when you start to break it down, there are caucasian gay men and lesbians, who are pretty marginalized. Then you have caucasian heterosexual women, who are also marginalized. So it’s tricky. Broad jokes about white people are usually not met with much offense, probably in part due to the fact that white people have it pretty good and therefore will take a joke at their expense.
I actually think in some cases the reverse is true of what you are saying. Everyone loves to make jokes about transgendered people (“hot tranny mess” being one of the memes that flew around for a while), and they are by far THE most marginalized group. So it’s interesting.
So I went and read Grace’s post, and found the blogs in question. and came to a few conclusions:
1) Neither dude is particularly interesting or clever, so there are no unforeseen revelations regarding deeper intent.
2) Both used the “fuck em if they can’t take a joke” defense, which is intellectually lazy and dodges the question entirely.
3) Twitter guy’s shtick is shock humor, and that’s a different can of worms.
4) MommyBreasts admits he did it out of social anxiety. Nice of him to be so candid, but, as I said, not an excuse.
5) He also made an entire post of cleavage shots as his “favorite ladies at BlogHer this year.” Does he understand the concept of taking the joke too far?
6) Both also use the “there are more important issues to worry about” excuse, but MommyBoobs goes on to list for an example… SEXISM. Which *is* pretty hilarious, but probably not intentional.