Comments Elsewhere

Raznor:

The thing is with bigotry, is it is possible that a person can say something bigoted out of purely innocent ignorance.

I’m not sure what you mean by “innocent ignorance” here. Do you think that (say) men’s ignorance is innocent? I know that, for myself, I’ve messed up and done the wrong thing many times in my life, and most of the time I either knew what I was doing (and defended or made excuses for it) or else bloody well should have realized it if I’d stopped ot think about what it meant for a couple seconds. (I think that both of these apply, for example, to different cases of my using pornography as a teenager.) And judging from what I have seen and what other men and women have told me, I’m hardly the only man for whom this is true.

You don’t have to be a Phelps-style monster to have shady motives and chalking up a mistake to ignorance isn’t necessarily enough to make a difference for how you ought to treat the person making it. I don’t think I’ve seen Q Grrl or Crys T or others make any real distinction on the basis of “innocent ignorance” or “culpable dishonesty”—mainly because the issues that they are calling attention to have a lot more to do with:

(1) whether the man making the mistake is belligerently defensive about it (as I think novalis obviously was) or listens to criticism (especially when that criticism comes from women), and

(2) whether contempt and belligerant defensiveness are being thinly veiled by “polite” diction (as I think Robert obviously was), and

(3) what it means when male interlocutors and male moderators seem to pay much more attention in comments to the veil than to what’s under it

I think (1) and (2) make much more difference for how productive it is to try to talk patiently with someone than questions of “innocence” do, and (3) seems to be at the root of worry much more than whether or not anyone happens to say anything bigoted in Amp’s comments section.

Of course there are more things going on here than just those points and I’m probably missing a lot. But I do think that both of those two are much more clearly important to the points being raised than the question of “innocent” vs. “dishonest” bigotry.