Feminism Friday - Feminism 101: “Sexism is a Matter of Opinion”

By Melissa McEwan (Crossposted from Shakesville, where it is part of Liss’s ongoing Feminism 101 series)

---

There’s a very common misperception that sexism is subjective—that any given incident identified by one person as sexist could be identified by another as not sexist, and either both of them are right, because the whole thing is just a matter of opinion anyway, or the latter is right, because if it’s not equally obvious to everyone, it can’t be sexist. It’s this conventional wisdom about the subjectivity of sexism that underlies the ubiquitous “I don’t see it” rejoinder, particularly recurrent in discussions of expressed sexism against women, on which this post will be focused.*

Sexism is, in fact, not subjective. What’s subjective are individual reactions to sexism, but sexism itself can be objectively determined. (I’ll come back to that in a moment.) Individual reactions to sexism will, naturally, be as vast and varied as the individuals who react—but because there are men, or women, who aren’t offended by something, or don’t find it sexist, doesn’t mean it isn’t. One can always find someone who refuses to be offended by something: That Michelle Malkin wrote In Defense of Internment doesn’t American government-built concentration camps any less objectively offensive or wrong.

So: Toss out the idea that there must be unanimous consent, or even majority agreement, that something is sexist for it to be determined as such. In fact, toss out the idea that sexism is determined by subjective opinion altogether.

Disability is a feminist issue

The 2008 roundup is at Diary of a Goldfish

The new WP.com admin interface strikes again

This post is about a sidebar module management problem. If you need to remove the Possibly Related Posts feature there’s a footnote to this post giving you the needed link.

---

One of the sidebar widgets is incorrectly formatted, but when I go to the design management section that particular widget has no link showing for “Edit”. I can move it, which is why it’s currently sitting at the bottom of the left-had sidebar looking like a complete mess, but without an edit-link showing I can’t access the edit-function which is the only way that the new interface allows me to remove that widget. So I can’t fix it, and I can’t remove it either. Brilliant.

Update: someone on the forums gave me a fix that worked. Ta. Details at the end of the post.

Focus on: Equal Pay

Here’s an excellent column by Amanda Teuscher in Ohio U’s student newspaper which sums up the issues regarding the defeated Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act:
The Feminist’s Corner: Equal pay litigation is justice, not an inconvenience

There’s not much commentary around pointing out that the proposed legislation would have enabled more than just women to have more time to sue for pay discrimination. Any employee with an unequal pay case would have gained the same time extension to enable discovery of the discrepancy and timely litigation, no matter whether the people they were being paid less than were of a different race, ethnicity, sexuality, socioeconomic class or physical ability level.

The major stated objection by the Senators who voted to block the bill was that it would enable “too many lawsuits” seeking restitution for pay discrimination. The idea that companies who behave unjustly and illegally should be forced to provide restitution seems to have entirely passed them by.

When did it become the province of the Government to protect corporations rather than its citizens? This trend of legislation which essentially provides corporate welfare has become rampant in the USA (note the revisions to bankruptcy laws which benefit corporations over citizens yet again). It’s apparently also an emerging trend in other countries where economic conservative politicians hold the legislative power.

Links from FF101 readers to instances of blatant protection of corporations over the interests of citizens in other countries would be greatly appreciated.

Update: A Lurker sent me a link in email to some fine reportage by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate giving more details of the US Republican Senators arguments against the Ledbetter bill, as well as to links of the Majority and Minority Reports from the judgement made by the Supreme Court. I neglected to point out that some of the language used by Republicans just assumes that women are too stupid to know their own best interests. Despicable.