Let’s take the point that women are too emotional to decide on women’s issues, trans people are too invested to be rational about gender issues and people classified as ‘non-white’ too upset to understand racial issues, all regardless of experience and knowledge (unless they defend the status quo, of course). Now, if that is a correct assumption, I have a great suggestion to end misandry.

We should have a big panel of Blackfoot nation women only with the power to decide on all issues touching white Canadian and American men. It has all the correct requirements: they’re outside of the emotional vortex that makes people irrational when they speak of misandry. Of course, that means that men’s voices should be silenced when it comes to all men’s issues, because they’re like little uppity children throwing temper tantrums.

Of course, I personally think it’s a terrible idea, but it must be because I am too invested in the whole thing. What could be the rationalization from the unbiased crowd against my proposal? Perhaps that evolution has bred caucasian men to be completely unbiased and rational in all situations? It might *look* irrational when they spend 8 hours a day writing comments decrying the excess of one or two posts Rebecca Watson wrote about anything.

She should remember that writing while being Rebecca Watson is a clear invitation to write 200 comments calling her a brainless irrational child. Clearly, that makes all the @Truthteller526 #braveheros.

[If anyone needs this... /sarcasm]

You honestly don’t notice how much of your brainpower during a conversation is set on figuring out what you’re going to say next instead of listening until you stop trying to figure out what you’re going to say next.

this.

Besides, again: it’s not like these assholes are actually listening to sociologists in gender/race studies, i.e. the educated experts on such experience; they revile Feminist Theory and Critical Theory.

The only criticism to “shut up and listen” I’ve seen is “living through an experience isn’t the same as having expertise in the subject”, without understanding that this is being said to people who do NOT have expertise in the subject. It is being said, in fact, to people who ALSO talk over those who do have expertise in the subject. It’s being said to people who have neither expertise nor experience, yet seem to think that their opinions ought to carry equal weight with those who have one or the other or both. I have not once seen someone with expertise in the subject be told to be quiet, nor have I seen an expert complain about being silenced.

As to the value of shutting up: seriously, you don’t realize the value until you actually try doing it. I am a talker. I am the kid in the back of the room with their hand raised for every question. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago, when I was trying to learn about womanism and ableism, that I consciously realized that NOT commenting was a good strategy to learn what was going on. I watched other people make comments that were similar to what I would have said, and watched the cluelessness in those comments get dissected, and watched the other commenters grow weary of having to rebut those stupid comments time and time again. And over a month or two, I realized that I was paying closer attention to what was really being said in the first place. You honestly don’t notice how much of your brainpower during a conversation is set on figuring out what you’re going to say next instead of listening until you stop trying to figure out what you’re going to say next. It’s sort of like how when you’re in a room with air conditioning on, you don’t even hear the sound and don’t realize how loudly the person next to you is talking until the air handlers shut off, and suddenly you hear how everything is quiet and that person’s voice sounds super loud. Deciding that you are going to shut up and listen is like turning off the air handlers, and suddenly the voice talking to you is so much easier to understand.

I don’t know who “you” is supposed to be in this comment. Because nobody at the pit, nor Lindsay, have shown any interest in discussing gender with social scientists who work on gender; quite the contrary, since the very few instances anyone there has voiced any opinion on the topic of social science, it’s been in the context of how social science is like creationism. Also too, “identity politics”.

Ron Lindsay isn’t a social scientist who works on gender. There is nothing in his background that would indicate that he has any special kind of expertise on gender issues. He is not, shall we say, a physician going over a list of physical ailments in his head. Furthermore, he isn’t coming around with information from people who might have some kind of academic or experience based information about gender. In fact, the people who do have experienced based information (you know, women) are the ones being told that their experience based information doesn’t make then any more of an expert than having no particular information at all.

The fact that women live as women and men don’t live as women isn’t irrelevant to the discussion. It certainly doesn’t mean that women are always right (any more than physicians are always right), but their lived experience as women does grant them a certain amount of knowledge about living as women.

That’s often repeated, but verges on disingenuous. At least local to a specific conversation, I can’t think of a better definition of “silencing” than telling a person to remain silent.

Please localize the accusation that feminists say “shut up and listen” to a specific conversation. Being able to localize this would focus and improve the discourse, I think. Absent some relevant quotes, I think Lindsay’s statement about the concept “shut up and listen” being a known feminist misbehavior is a smear and an exaggerated one.

The irony, which I find obvious, is that Lindsay lectured his audience for 30 minutes. He went over his allotted 20 minutes by 50 percent (allegedly). This was a non-interactive medium in which is would have been considered rude to reply to him. Rebecca “spoke” about his speech on Twitter during the speech and he objected strongly to her remark. (Content more than timing.) In this room, who had the power to speak and who didn’t?

Accurate language is important. Hyperbole, especially hyperbole designed to conjure up images of totalinarianism, is a tactic that people that want authentic dialog should avoid. Telling someone you want them to stop talking can hurt their feelings but it does not literally silence them. Have you seen internet trolls? Of course you have. Some of them output so much verbiage that it seems like they never stop talking.

Even the biblical quote that Lindsay used from Timothy that says that women should be silence in church is just a statement. Accepting and enforcing this rule is the actual silencing.

Men have had the pulpit, the megaphone and the microphone much more than women throughout most of history. Claims that women are literally silencing men are overwrought.

I would like to see men listening more, rather than posting, yelling, complaining about how they aren’t allowed to speak. The current silence is full of lots of noise, lots of words, lots of dialog.

The meaning of “shut up” has been minced so far that only the banal interpretation remains that it means listen carefully without interrupting for a few minutes.

Right. Shut up for a few minutes. All the term has ever meant was to be quiet. All that’s being asked is that we give minorities a chance to speak (by shutting up for a few minutes so that they can be heard).

Frankly, the whole thing is a bit muddled. What is the exact meaning of shut up? and for how long. Shut up forever, because you’re wrong or shut up and let me tell you that I just went through an earthquake and this is what it was like…

Do you really need specific rules for this? Is “acting in good faith” not enough? Shut up and listen; give minorities a chance to speak before responding; stop reiterating the same privileged viewpoint as if it must be representative of mostly everyone.

Other times, I think your explanation should be able to clear you, which is one good reason conversations need to be two-way

clear you of what, actually? if you’ve triggered stereotype threat or the psychological reaction to a microaggression, how is explaining you didn’t mean that undo the psychological effect? that doesn’t even make sense.

. Swimming in a privileged environment doesn’t obviate the need to clarify confusion or correct misinterpretation.

how would the person with less knowledge and understanding of how a particular axis of oppression works be able to be the one doing the clarifying or correcting? Asking questions that might get to the bottom of the miscommunication, sure. But where would the knowledge come from to actually accurately explain/clarify?

And now consider this in the context that privileged people almost always think they’ve just been misunderstood, and therefore always feel the need to explain and clarify, regardless of whether they’re right or wrong. How is that working for communication?

I am enlightened, I am sensitive, I am progressive, I am rational. I am not one of those white males. What I said was devoid of bigotry, it was not demeaning, it was not belittling, it was not in any way tainted by privilege.
You may even be right!

I’ll set aside for a moment the “intent isn’t magic” part. Let’s say you’ve been called out on something, and you’re “objectively” not in the wrong. How are you planning on figuring out whether you’re not in the wrong? Are you just going to assume that you’re not in the wrong, and argue from there? Why?
Point being, if the moment you perceive the other person to be saying something you think is incorrect you’re formulating a reply in your head, you’re no longer listening. So you have to do something else: you have to absorb everything the other person has to say, and once they’re finished think about what they’ve said, how it fits with what you thought was said, and so on. None of that can be done while talking or thinking about what to say.
Anyway, response can only happen after listening and after thinking about what was said; and then preferrably with questions rather than accusations and defenses, because you’re still trying to figure out what went wrong, right? Not just assert that you’re right and they’re wrong?

Ok, now let’s go back to “intent isn’t magic”. I’ve on numerous occasions linked to various studies showing how stereotype threat works, showing the effect of rape jokes, and more recently I’ve been linking to studies on micro-aggressions, too. Not a one of these show that intent of the person doing the harm makes any difference to the initial harm-causing (insofar as that has been studied; most amazing are probably the results of “colorblindness” studies that show that whites trying to be colorblind come off as more hostile than those not trying to do that. e.g. the effect was the reverse from the intent); sometimes doubling down will cause even more harm, because it just re-does what just happened. So again, shutting up is probably a better solution, to not cause more damage than was already done. You may well be right in some way, but is not shutting up about being right more important than not exacerbating inadvertent harm?

Any conversation on the topic that just caused harm can of course still be had, but generally only at a point where it’s no longer one person trying to explain their experience and another insisting that that’s not what happened; rather, it could happen later, when no one is being hurt/defensive anymore (preferrably with someone else, on a more theoretical level; but I get that that might not be possible, because maybe that’s the only person disprivileged in this particular way that you know, or they’re the only person on that axis of oppression that has ever reacted in this way to that particular thing that caused the problem in the first place).

In any case, “shut up” is the correct action while someone disprivileged is explaining their point, and in the immediate aftermath as well. “Shut up” is also the correct action when a space and time has been set aside for a particular disprivileged person/group to talk about their perspectives on the issue, no matter how much you feel like you’re gonna explode if you don’t immediately jump into the discussion (trust me, I know that feeling); in that case, it’s an “shut up until after the designated time for the disprivileged to speak has concluded”.

And yes, sometimes “shut up” really does just mean “don’t interrupt”; sounds trivial, but women being constantly interrupted and talked-over by men is a well-documented phenomenon.

Basically, the whole concept of “shut up and listen” is about becoming a hell of a lot more aware of the tendency of privileged folks to really like to hear themselves talk: to interrupt; to offer their perspective even on things they have no experience with; to butt into conversations between disprivileged people with demands for explanations; to immediately start arguing back, even in situations when the concepts being used/talked about are unfamiliar; etc. ad nauseam.

In my personal experience, “shutting up and listening” has on occasion required literal tongue/lip biting to not butt in with my opinion where it could hardly provide new insights. It takes practice. Really.

Here:

If you couple that with PZ’s injunction to never argue back, you have a situation where disputes will literally never be resolved.

again the assumption that the privileged perspective is unknown, and thus if a privileged one doesn’t get to immediately argue against the disprivileged position, the argument against it will remain unknown. What is this assumption based on, given that like I said, we’re drowning in a constant broadcast of that perspective?

I was talking about the hypothetical in Fidalgo’s post where he actually assumes an error of interpretation on the part of the less privileged person, although it is conceivable this could come under the heading of “intent is not magic,” a concept I only partly agree with. I think it’s quite possible to still be in the wrong when called out on something, even though you didn’t intend any offense, but only sometimes, in particular, when you’ve been really stupid about something and should have known better. Other times, I think your explanation should be able to clear you, which is one good reason conversations need to be two-way. Swimming in a privileged environment doesn’t obviate the need to clarify confusion or correct misinterpretation.