That feeling when you’re “over it”

So I’m about 20% of the way into a book, and realizing that while I’m kindof enjoying it there is also something about it that’s making me go “eh, over it”. I finally realized the “it” I was “over” is VR-based dystopian futures. They’re not a bad kind of book – I don’t think it’s bad that people read them or bad that people write them! And I have really enjoyed many of them, and expect to enjoy more in the future. But right now it feels like such well-trodden ground in my own reading life that I’m craving a break from it, and that’s the “over it” feeling. So I’m going to be intentional about deprioritizing books on the subject until I’m not feeling that so strongly.

…Just kidding! I love VR-based dystopian futures and I am nowhere near over them. The “it” I’m “over” is the seeing a cool world through the eyes of a gifted, socially-troubled young male protagonist that really struggles to engage with girls in particular, whose coming of age involves actualizing his greatness and massively growing in his ability to engage with girls. They’re not a bad kind of book – I don’t think it’s bad that people read them or bad that people write them! I have really enjoyed many of them, and expect to enjoy more in the future. I am sure those themes specifically are really great and important for a lot of people. But I have read many, many, such stories – many more than I have read VR-based dystopian futures – and right now I’m craving a break from the topic in my own reading life. So I’m going to be intentional about deprioritizing books on the subject until I’m not feeling that so strongly.

And yeah, I am kinda salty that I can’t just say I’m not feeling that particular kind of nerdy-male-coming-of-age-story¹ the same way I could say it about another common literary subject without distressing people. I don’t want people to feel bad if their positionality and experiences lead them to relate to this narrative right now differently from how I am relating to it right now…but I also don’t want to feel guilty or stifled about this reading experience I’m having.

1.  I love stories about growth, and stories about boys & men who are growing through challenges that are not “can’t talk to girls (yet)” or “can’t see women as people (yet)” because they pretty much already had those things down at the start of the story.↩

Intentional Space

Many social justice events and discussions go badly awry because people are looking for different things from the conversation. The movement to develop and disseminate best practices for including marginalized communities, articulated as creating “safe spaces”, has been very valuable and successful, but there’s an opportunity to build on its best achievements while reducing some of the negative associations and impacts it has.

The problem with calling a space “safe” is that it leaves a critical question totally ambiguous: safe for what? Safety it a personal experience we can’t always anticipate or control, and therefore perhaps shouldn’t promise, particularly when the same things that make some feel safe make others uncomfortable. I think the movement for safe spaces is about redistributing discomfort rather than eliminating it, by disrupting the norm where making the privileged feel bad is a catastrophe and making the marginalized feel bad is business as usual — I think this is a great thing. So when people say “this is a safe space”, there is a shared understanding of the “for what”: it’s intended to be safe for marginalized communities whose needs are deprioritized in the overwhelming majority of spaces.

Even within that shared understanding, even with a deep commitment to intersectional thinking, there is still tremendous room for organizers to have different visions and priorities for an event. The person who makes the flyers may not be the same person who facilitates the ground rules discussion, and they may have very different unconscious understandings of what they are trying to accomplish – particularly when the stated goal is to include “everyone”. In fact, how could they not differ?

Not every event should be optimized for successfully educating people who are new to the subject matter (which often involves managing their feelings and comfort closely) – but not every event should exclude this critical education and outreach work, either! This is exactly why we need a breadth of events, organizations, and approaches in our movements. We can create events that center the needs and experiences of marginalized communities and also create events that center on helping neophytes encounter new perspectives. There are many legitimate reasons someone would not want to do the work of educating the privileged on any given day – we should make it as easy as possible in our movements for them to opt out of this work, which we can do by being more intentional, aligned, and open about the goals and tone of events. When we advertise events as “safe spaces” and to “everyone”, we are implicitly promising very different things to different people, and the entire event suffers when those competing expectations clash.

Instead of talking about creating “safe” spaces, we should move these inclusion best practices into a different framing: creating intentional spaces.

I understand why organizers and participants often aren’t aligned; this isn’t intuitive, but it actually involves a lot of work and skill to articulate the right objectives and participants for a meeting. It’s true about meetings in general, and a big part of why people hate meetings is that most meeting organizers don’t do this work up front to make the meeting effective. So I get why social justice organizers don’t always do this, just like I get why it doesn’t always happen in a team meeting in a business context.

Here are some concrete suggestions for how organizers can ask themselves the right questions during the planning stage to create an intentional space. (Hint: If the answer to any of these questions is some form of “everyone”, this process is not working.)

• Understand what you are trying to accomplish by asking yourselves some of these questions and coming to a shared vision: What would a “successful” event look and feel like at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end? What is the intended outcome i.e. what would you like to happen in the next week as a result of this event?
• What should this event be safe for? This should be focused on behaviors (“what”) not identities (“who”). What things do we want people to be able to feel safe doing?
  • For example: Is it a safe place to use the “wrong” terminology for trans* people and not receive harsh criticism? Is it a safe place to be out as genderqueer and not have the legitimacy of that identity questioned?
  • It may also be productive to specifically address: What do we want people to feel safe expressing ignorance about? What do we want people to feel safe expressing anger about?
• Confront competing access needs directly and make decisions about the trade-offs. It’s not possible to make your event perfect for everyone, and, whether you want there to be or not, there will be trade-offs where some needs are prioritized over others. By making those decisions reflectively and intentionally, you can better manage the impact on those whose needs are deprioritized than if you are in denial about how they will experience your event as planned.
• Based on the above objectives, who are the intended participants for this event? There will likely be multiple answers, and they should be specific and concrete.
• Whose needs are being deprioritized, and how can we manage that impact? This might include a decision not to advertise to certain populations, to offer content warnings, to separate elements into different events, or to plan and practice interventions for probable ways the event could start to derail. The discussion might also identify some ways that negative impact could be mitigated, but it’s important that it not be about how to perfectly include everyone (which is not possible), but to be reflective about whose needs might not be met by the event and use this awareness to inform the event planning.
  • For example: If the needs of marginalized groups to have confidence their self-definition is being respected are going to take priority over the need to ask “non-politically-correct” questions, this event should not be advertised heavily as a 101 space for everyone to learn and ask questions.
  • While it might not feel good to have to state a barrier to physical accessibility, doing so sensitively can communicate to people with disabilities that they are seen, reduce the investigative effort needed on their side to decide whether to attend, and facilitate their making the right choices for their own time and energy.
• Bring the conversation to the most directly impacted actions and translate the abstract vision to concrete decisions on them, including how the event is advertised, how it’s kicked off with participants, and how it will be followed up afterwards.

The above questions are neither trivial nor easy to come to consensus on—and that’s exactly why they are essential. These decisions are the building blocks of any event, whether they are made openly with intention or unconsciously by default. Social justice organizing is much more effective when done with intention.

Generosity & Tzedakah

So I was reading the comments on a post someone in the EA scene had made encouraging people to chip in and help out a friend financially, and went YIKES ALL THE CRINGES.¹

It makes me feel even more strongly about multiple categories of “charity”, and the right terminology for myself crystallized as I was thinking about this. In my mind it’s the difference between “tzedakah”, which is a mitzvah/dedication I have to making the world better and where EA analysis is really important, and “generosity”, which is about being kind to the people around me.

Generosity is when my friend’s family has a health crisis and I come over with $100 worth of takeout and frozen food. It’s also generosity when I support my local arts and/or religious communities, and when I go out of my way to financially support free media. Generosity is good and we should feel good about it. It’s one of the ways we live our values. It can be personal and subjective and can be about feelings as much as ROI. In fact, it is inherently subjective, and the right specific generous acts should be different for different people, because they are distributed like tastes, interests, friendships, communities, and other personal attachments.

Tzedakah is deciding to donate 10% of my income to saving lives in the developing world, and doing my research to make sure it’s doing as much good as possible. Tzedakah is saying BED NETS BED NETS BED NETS. Tzedakah is a sense of urgency to make the world better for people I will never meet and who will never know or care about me personally.² Tzedakah isn’t a corner I want to cut to buy something nice for myself.³

So for me, the important thing I learned from EA wasn’t “don’t donate to the arts”, it was”don’t let my generosity interfere with my tzedakah by confusing the two”. I give money to bloggers I respect because it’s one of the ways I live my values, but I’ve stopped thinking of it as tzedakah because it’s not in the same category as saving lives, and I don’t want to do the former instead of the latter. Some things that are called “donations” are in the same category as being generous with my friends and family. Acts of generosity come out of my general budget for spending money on myself, not at the expense of tzedakah.

Back to the situation that had me cringing: this was a call for generosity, and if people didn’t want to do this specific generous thing they should be able to just not do it. (That’s totally fine and they shouldn’t be shamed for not automatically making someone else’s generous cause their own.) But helping a community member in need is supposed to be subjective, and unless you think people should never be generous, saying very unkind versions of “but this isn’t as good as bed nets” in response to a call for generosity is just harmful and missing the point. If you don’t want to do it, just don’t do it.

I didn’t bring my friend frozen food because I thought it would save more lives than Bed Nets, so there’s no misunderstanding anyone needs to jump in and correct in the name of EA; I actually understood quite well that this was not the optimal lives saved per dollar, I just wanted to make the week easier for some people I love. Good thing it in no way diminished how much money I actually donate to Bed Nets. ⁴

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1. Maybe I am at least in part cringing because I’m just not wild about debating the ethics of someone else in public where they are reading it but not at all trying to be kind or aware of their reading? ↩
2. Maimonides’ prioritization of anonymous tzedakah as more virtuous resonates with me here, because it’s not about the personal relationship. ↩
3. I’m struggling to articulate this well so I’ll put it in the footnote: It has the emotional resonance of justice, not kindness. ↩
4. Afterthought: Personally I think both generosity and tzedakah are genuinely giving acts but also ones that can be motivated by ego, identity, status, etc, and even if there are empirical differences of degree they are in the same ballpark as each other in this respect. So I don’t think one of them is the “real” “altruism”, but I do think they are two different impulses that should be thought about different ways. ↩

Burlesque

I’m uncomfortable with the glorification of “burlesque” because the main difference I see between it and “stripping” is (socioeconomic) class. And I’m really put off by “it’s cool when middle and upper class women do it, but awful when poor women do it”.

But, in fact, class is an important difference! It is on the whole physically safer, less vulnerable to exploitation, and “more empowering” when performed within communities with more income and education. But instead of glorifying burlesque as totally different from stripping, we should try to make women who are “strippers” physically safer and less vulnerable to exploitation. And we should definitely not compare the two as though people are choosing between them – I’m pretty sure they generally are not.

First person

Writing that last post got me thinking that maybe social justice discourses would be better if we spent less time talking about what other people need to change and more time sharing how we improved our own thinking and addressed our own mistakes. (Mistakes are things we make, not always things they make.) Vulnerability is hard, and maybe a “multivalent public discourse where you can be vulnerable” is just not going to be a thing, but I kindof think we can do better?

(Yes I know this post is an example of that, I said “less time” not “no time”.)

Focus

Still figuring out how to articulate this well, consider it V1

Social justice discourses would benefit from keeping how we choose to spend our time (i.e. prioritize) in the conceptual foreground. I hear a lot of critiques articulated in terms of whether something is Good or Bad, and I think reframing in terms of advocating for a prioritization is often beneficial.

A few illustrative case studies where I’ve found this framing valuable:

• I think it is really important to extend empathy towards people who are learning and give them space both to make mistakes and to wrestle with challenging notions. I want there to be more of that happening. But I think the best way to pursue that goal is to be that person, and to advocate for being more intentional about discursive space and what it should be safe for and from (a post for another time). What I don’t want to focus on is telling marginalized people they’re communicating about their own oppression wrong. That doesn’t mean I don’t read things sometimes and think “That’s too bad they reacted that way” or “Yeek, that is not cool”, but tone policing isn’t where I’m going to put the majority of my energy or focus. And, while I might critique, it’s also a priority for me to keep compassion in the foreground when someone is reacting from a place of pain.
• Do I think running around destroying property is good? Hell no. I literally watch action movies and make up side stories in my head about the people whose livelihoods were ruined by a car driving into their store. But I think the critiques of the way people obsessed with the “rioting” in Ferguson (to the exclusion of caring about police violence, combating racism, and listening to protesters) were really insightful and on point – and I responded to them by deciding that I was not going to make property damage the focus when I thought and talked about the situation.
• Bernie Sanders gave a speech in Seattle that was interrupted by young activists of color. I see why people were upset about it. If a friend came to me and said, “I’m thinking about doing this, do you think I should?”, I would probably not advocate for doing it and might even try to dissuade them. But what I really thought to myself is “I’m really busy today, and I’m just not going to set other things aside to be mad that a powerful white dude got interrupted by some young black activists“. That was an unpopular opinion over dinner, but I stand by it – and the more people tried to convince me that was the most important thing to be angry about, the more I stood by it.
• It is really painful to lose something you want, like a job offer or college acceptance, especially when our society has made the stakes so damn high. I do genuinely empathize with people who experience affirmative action negatively, and think many implementations of affirmative action policy are genuinely problematic. But if you think that the most horrifying role of race in America is affirmative action disadvantaging while people, then we see the world profoundly differently.

Saying to myself “that’s not how I’m going to spend my time” is often a better framing than “that’s Bad so I won’t do it”. Something can be true and still not be what I want to make my top priority. Privilege isn’t about having your non-issues taken too seriously, it’s about having your (real) issues take precedence over the issues of marginalized people even when there’s good reason to prioritize differently. That’s how we end up encouraging women to compromise their autonomy to protect men’s feelings – but advocating that men’s hurt feelings don’t matter is a bad solution. A better solution is to say “Yes, being rejected sucks¹, but it’s not more important than someone’s right to say no when they want to.”

It’s the difference between saying “That’s not a real issue, so stop derailing” and “Yes, that’s important, but it’s not what we’re talking about right now, so stop derailing.” We have to be able to say, “That’s important, and I understand why you care about it, but it’s not where my focus is going to be right now.” And we have to let others say it. We’re live in a world full of important things.

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1.  and we should do a better job as a society of equipping people to handle it [but that’s another post] ↩

Star Wars

So I’m not actually that into Star Wars, generally speaking…I hold the heretical view that the movies aren’t the best thing ever. But I got caught up in a spurt of enthusiasm in advance of The Force Awakens and now I have Things to Say About Star Wars:

1. Where Star Wars really excels isn’t the plot, characters, world-building, or even the visual effects¹, but the sound. THE MUSIC. THE SOUND EFFECTS. They are GENIUS and I would definitely listen to an audio file that was just the music and sound effects with the dialogue removed. (VARACTYLS, guys. VARACTYLS.)
2. I think the reason Star Wars has so successfully captured the imagination of so many people is not because it’s the best at plot, narrative and world-building, but because it just throws out enough neat things to engage people but is incoherent enough that there is plenty to imagine and theorize and have heated discussions about.² NOTHING makes me want to backseat-screenwrite like Star Wars dialogue.
3. I love, love, love that there is a canonical hierarchy of canons. I feel like my academic background in historiography of religion makes me highly qualified to talk about Star Wars. I love hanging out with my friends who are truly into Star Wars and hearing them talk about Star Wars and name all of the characters in the background who are never named in the movie.
4. I want this slightly spoilery shirt.³
5. VARACTYLS.

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1. I know that the visual effects were ground-breaking at the time, but I have to say: the sound is STILL amazing. ↩
2. See also: The Tanakh. ↩
3. You know you’re entitled when you’re getting increasingly frustrated that you can’t find the specific gif you decided should exist. (It should totally exist and I’m sure it will soon.) ↩

Headcanon: Leia and Vader

[There are no spoilers for The Force Awakens in this post, but there are spoilers for the other Star Wars movies if you care about that.]

My favorite Star Wars headcanon of the moment is that Darth Vader already knows Leia is his daughter before A New Hope and has thought about turning her but wasn’t able to. I like to think there’s an entire interesting story there that plays out off-screen and guys I would super watch that movie. I have yet to find anything in any of the movies that contradicts this. I submit for your consideration:

• It’s clear from their interactions that they have crossed paths before and have a lot of history, but that the movie is just not depicting that onscreen.
• How would he not have figured that out? Like…she’s the adopted daughter of her mom’s BFF running around the galaxy being a princess and a senator and a rebel sympathizer and generally acting like her mom. Also..the force?)
• When I say there is nothing in the movies that contradicts this, I am definitely including the scene where Vader tells Luke that he has discovered he has a twin sister by reading his mind and is going to turn her to the dark side. It totally does not make sense that he can get that kind of “fact” out of Luke[^1] and there is nothing else like that they sense from each other using the force. It does, however, make perfect sense that Vader would say that to Luke in order to freak Luke out, and oh hey look it totally worked.[^2]
• Turning Leia to the Dark Side would actually pose a pretty big challenge, and it makes sense that it would have been tantalizing but not really achievable: he’s definitely got her angry and afraid (good job) but he doesn’t really have a way to get her to learn to use the force.  Luke super conveniently learns it from someone else but is not fully trained, and therefore presents a great opportunity to turn.
• All of the scenes with both of them are more awesome with this interpretation: their verbal sniping at the start of A New Hope, his torturing her and then telling Tarkin that she will never betray the rebellion, his talking a lot about how he’s going to have her executed but never quite getting around to it, his standing there silently with his hand on her shoulder while Tarkin blows up Alderaan, her saying “I’ve always known” and having ALL THE FEELINGS after Luke tells her Vader is his father and she’s his sister.

Rey the “Role Model”

Link and my commentary below the cut because they both have SPOILERS for The Force Awakens.

Speculative¹: Effective Altruism is capitalism harm reduction²?

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1. “Speculative” = this seems like an idea that might have some merit and it’s worth articulating and discussing it to find out, but I don’t stand by it with confidence (yet). ↩
2. For the record, I think the correct stance on harm reduction in general is “ambivalent” – compelling reasons to think it does both good and harm. ↩