'Instead, change the subject. It’s a big one all right: the violence that men do to women. Easier to accept that it is just the way things are, unless perhaps you worry for yourself or your child or your sister...
The scale of the violence and abuse of girls and women keeps on trying to make itself heard. We don’t want to know. No, let’s talk about Ebola or Isis. Distant, scary threats...
Do we simply accept that this is the product of technology combined with overwrought masculinity? That gamergate represents angry wounded men? Do we say that male violence is innate?...
Women also murder and abuse, but 94% of murders in this country are carried out by men ...'
---Suzanne Moore, The Guardian.
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Can we only see and understand things from our own position ('position' includes not only geographical location but identity, social conditions that have gone to form our way of thinking, the constraints of the human mind)? What does it mean 'to step into some one else's shoes'?
'Positional objectivity' implies independence from personal characteristics or social conditions but it doesn't follow from that that we are free from illusions or that we can always or easily escape having a partial view. We may never fully be able to comprehend things but can still move to clarity (or does the former statement imply the latter is thrown into doubt?) Positional objectivity in this weaker sense means that the view or understanding is person-invariant. But we may still-all of us-be mistaken or only be able to form a partial picture.
94%
94% of crimes..not: 94% of men.
But are men in the position to understand this violence (one might say: yes, since they are mainly the perpetrators of it). Or is this violence so close, so instinctual, that they (we) have difficulty in comprehending it and instead turn our gaze away and distance ourselves from it? Not just through religion and war and the destruction of nature, but day-to-day.
We like to imagine that we can see things from other perspectives. It is a comforting thought and promises much progress. To be too tied down to our own point of view, to believe that our moral duties are more pressing if they stem from a relational perspective can sometimes morph into the parochial and confined outlook of a nationalist or bigot. On the other hand, the universal or the abstract, the view from the point of view of the universe, may only have a limited hold on us, given the beings we are.
That seems like a cop out for what is sought here is not to see another person as a Person, but simply as another human being. Firstly, though, it means seeing oneself as a human being-and that, precisely, is what is in question.
The scale of the violence and abuse of girls and women keeps on trying to make itself heard. We don’t want to know. No, let’s talk about Ebola or Isis. Distant, scary threats...
Do we simply accept that this is the product of technology combined with overwrought masculinity? That gamergate represents angry wounded men? Do we say that male violence is innate?...
Women also murder and abuse, but 94% of murders in this country are carried out by men ...'
---Suzanne Moore, The Guardian.
|||
Can we only see and understand things from our own position ('position' includes not only geographical location but identity, social conditions that have gone to form our way of thinking, the constraints of the human mind)? What does it mean 'to step into some one else's shoes'?
'Positional objectivity' implies independence from personal characteristics or social conditions but it doesn't follow from that that we are free from illusions or that we can always or easily escape having a partial view. We may never fully be able to comprehend things but can still move to clarity (or does the former statement imply the latter is thrown into doubt?) Positional objectivity in this weaker sense means that the view or understanding is person-invariant. But we may still-all of us-be mistaken or only be able to form a partial picture.
94%
94% of crimes..not: 94% of men.
But are men in the position to understand this violence (one might say: yes, since they are mainly the perpetrators of it). Or is this violence so close, so instinctual, that they (we) have difficulty in comprehending it and instead turn our gaze away and distance ourselves from it? Not just through religion and war and the destruction of nature, but day-to-day.
We like to imagine that we can see things from other perspectives. It is a comforting thought and promises much progress. To be too tied down to our own point of view, to believe that our moral duties are more pressing if they stem from a relational perspective can sometimes morph into the parochial and confined outlook of a nationalist or bigot. On the other hand, the universal or the abstract, the view from the point of view of the universe, may only have a limited hold on us, given the beings we are.
That seems like a cop out for what is sought here is not to see another person as a Person, but simply as another human being. Firstly, though, it means seeing oneself as a human being-and that, precisely, is what is in question.
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