Being Amber Rhea

I haven’t felt inspired to blog for the past few days, but today, at least, Octogalore has a great post that I’ll quote from at length, to break up the monotony of nothing but Twitter and del.icio.us auto-posts. Also, I do have an idea for a post, thanks to Kochanie, co-blogger at Real Adult Sex; I should have time to write it this weekend.

Bigotry relies on classification. People who are sexist, racist, ablist, homophobic, transphobic, what have you, have convinced themselves that women, people of color, etc. are X or are not Y. That they are able to feel a particular way about an entire group because the group is homogeneous in some way.

Whereas, these people feel that their own group is composed of individuals. Let’s take a white male who doesn’t think highly of blacks or women. He’s decided that blacks are a certain way, and women are a certain way. However, he doesn’t like all white men either. But the reasons he may not like someone in this group allow for more diversity within the group.

That’s why recent statements in bloglandia about individualism are puzzling to me.

There was a discussion which many of you may recall about sex workers, in which some of us who piped up and said we did or do feel good about being able to lend a bit more credibility to the profession by virtue of being educated and not addicted to drugs. Others felt this was not feminist and was exclusionary.

More recently, in another thread, I was referred to as promoting individualism and therefore antifeminist. The context was my suggesting that various women who claimed they were educated and middle to upper class could stand up to patriarchal behavior on the part of their husbands. I was told that I did not understand the capitulation that ALL women need to make as the underclass, and that in suggesting that particular women break out of this trap, I was classist, individualist, etc. It was also stated, to plentiful agreement, that any step women are able to take is purely based on privilege, rather than initiative, guts, creativity, or anything else INDIVIDUAL.

So let’s think about this. By insisting that women are homogeneous, aren’t we playing right into the hands of the bigots?

Read the whole thing. It’s good food for thought.

Amp FTW

Individualism - it’s not necessarily a bad word

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