Spiritual Friendship

Just wanted to draw your attention to an amazing blog on the topic of queerness, sexuality and theology: Spiritual Friendship. Check it out!

Let's talk about X, baby

A little more than a month ago, Mother Jones ran an article titled "The Problem with Men Explaining Things."  Although I do not want to go into too much detail here, the article deals with the issue of "mansplaining," a lovely Portmanteau coined to describe the social phenomena in which a man presumes that a woman does not know anything about some particular subject and then proceeds to explain it to her. In the article, a man unknowingly lectured a woman about a book that she had authored:

Here, let me just say that my life is well sprinkled with lovely men, with a long succession of editors who have, since I was young, listened and encouraged and published me, with my infinitely generous younger brother, with splendid friends of whom it could be said—like the Clerk in The Canterbury Tales I still remember from Mr. Pelen's class on Chaucer—"gladly would he learn and gladly teach." Still, there are these other men, too. So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, "That's her book." Or tried to interrupt him anyway.

But he just continued on his way. She had to say "That's her book" three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a 19th-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless—for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we've never really stopped.

I often hate to post topics like this because, inevitably, I end up with well-meaning comments about how this only happens every once in a while, and really women are considered equally, anyway. I have to quash my eyeroll reflex. But I find myself concerned with the phenomena because my lovely friend Jordan had this happen to her last week at a sports bar while she was watching the Texas football game. Not only did said person try to explain the football game to her, he patted her shoulder and asked her what she thought about Erin Andrews' shoes. To quote Amy Poehler, "REALLY?!"

Most of us women have learned to deal with these occasional slights to our intelligence by employing a well-placed comment that signifies our literacy in the subject, or by ignoring them entirely (though for me, this is the road-less-traveled). The more problematic edge to these phenomena, however, is more subversive, and one that I find that I encounter on a regular basis. This occurs when a woman who makes an intellectual claim about a topic in a field in which she has excellent credentials (and not merely knowledge—although the knowledge should be enough), and is automatically disbelieved or presumed not knowledgeable enough about the subject. And this is where it's really damaging.

If you are at all acquainted with me via facebook, you are probably aware that I have strong opinions on many controversial topics. This means that I often end up in debates where, unfortunately, I first have to legitimate my voice before I can successfully contribute to the topic. If I make a claim about a particular topic, I often have responses from others participated in the debate where the responders checked my facebook profile to find out where I went to school and what I majored in before evaluating whether my knowledge on the subject is relevant to the conversation. Even after I establish that I do have a sufficient knowledge base, I find my arguments picked apart based on everything from my vocabulary choices to the presumed tone with which I responded—a particularly frustrating argument since tone cannot be effectively communicated via text-based methods—rather than responding to the content of what I say.

I recently ended up in a surprisingly pleasant debate with a 16-year-old boy, a junior in high school, who kept trying to explain to me why my particular approach to a subject was wrong. While trying to explain my viewpoint and why I thought the way I did, we were interrupted by another male who informed me that my explanations were unpleasant, that I had bad people skills, and that he couldn't believe I wanted to be a pastor. He told me it was not my place to "teach" and that I needed to learn to be "harmless, not helpful." There was no critique of the 16-year-old who kept telling me I was wrong.

I write this post not because I have an answer to the question of what to do in situations like these, but because I want to draw attention to them. What should we, as women, do in response to situations like these? How can we prevent them from happening? Can we even do so?

All I know is I'm tired of the fight to defend my voice.