prokopetz:

korrasera:

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

Tired of the old “your problem doesn’t affect me, therefore it’s not real” game? Try one of these fun alternatives!

• Your problem is real, but since it doesn’t affect me it’s not important
• Your problem is real, but first let’s talk about this other, more urgent problem that neither one of us can meaningfully engage with
• Your problem is real and important, but I’ve framed it as a subset or consequence of a problem that does affect me, so the best way to address your problem is to focus exclusively on my problem
• Your problem is as urgent as you say it is, but I’ve decided that it’s an inevitable consequence of humanity being intrinsically awful, and I’d lose Enlightened Cynicism points if I actually tried to do anything about it
• Your problem is awful, but I’m reluctant to act on it because of some purely hypothetical consequence that I have no evidence is even a thing, yet am firmly convinced would be worse than the status quo

Bonus round:

• Your problem’s solution is clearly a radical restructuring of all of our cultural, political and economic institutions, and advocating any less drastic or more immediately fruitful approach represents a cowardly capitulation to the Man and makes you Part Of The Problem™.

These are all good but the last one in particular sounds like it can butt up against one of the difficulties that intersectional feminism encounters.

The ‘me first, you later’ problem occurs where people argue that your cause isn’t a good one to champion right now because it’s too extreme and would require too much work, or because you and your community are too far away from the norm. It doesn’t matter that those things are rarely true, what matters is that you’re centering people who aren’t straight, white, or cisgender and that’s worth fighting over, apparently.

And I say this in response to your bonus round, @prokopetz, because claiming that we cry capitulation and ‘Part of The Problem’ is exactly the way that people like to dismiss intersectional activism.

I still like this way of framing the discussion, I just wanted to articulate this one point of friction.

Oh, absolutely; spuriously accusing folks of engaging in derailing tactics is, itself, a time-honoured derailing tactic. The “bonus round” entry is meant more to refer to the rhetorical trick whereby, if you can’t find an excuse to dismiss a problem, but you also don’t want to adjust your actions to account for it, you instead generalise that problem until whatever you were planning on doing anyway can be framed as somehow addressing its root cause, resulting in a sort of sterile one-size-fits-all activism where abstract opposition to the Great Evil is more important than doing stuff that actually helps people.