Have you ever been the only female in a room full of men making sexist jokes? Everyone else is laughing, but you’re offended and not sure how to react about it; you want to say something, but you’re afraid that if you do you might be told that you take things too seriously, don’t have a sense of humor, and need to lighten up. You decide that you’d rather stay quiet than risk being viewed as an easily angered person, but afterwards those feelings of humiliation and anger continue to eat away at you.
The political theorist, Alison Jaggar, has a term for those feelings. She calls them “outlaw emotions”, because we experience them in isolation. Outlaw emotions aren’t in conformity with the status quo or cultural norms, but that does not make them any less legitimate. I briefly outlined a classic example above, but there are an infinite number of others that could be discussed. Last year one of my male professors took a snarky hit at the intelligence of one of my girlfriends after she responded to a question he had asked our class. It was clear that he had intended to make her feel stupid. I didn’t say anything at the time, but I deeply regretted it afterwards, especially because I saw how visibly hurt my friend was by the comment.
The questions I want to pose are the following: When it comes to responding to sexist remarks, how do we pick and choose our battles? Is there a limit to our right to be offended, and who/what should have the authority to impose this limit? Most importantly though, if we do not call out sexism for what it is, how can we ever hope to educate people out of it?
I’ve given a lot of thought lately to the notions of anger and conflict. I believe that a great deal of the hesitation towards speaking out against sexism comes from a fear of creating conflict. Let’s be honest- conflict scares the wits out of a lot of people. But if we’re even more honest, we must acknowledge that it is also a critical driving force pushing life forwards. If we have enough courage to confront it, it is possible for good things to emerge from conflict. Anger, one of the inspirations behind conflict, is an emotion that is too often painted in a negative light. However, I contend that if channeled properly, anger can serve as a catalyst for positive social transformations.
I believe it’s important for women to be assured that the little voice inside their heads/hearts alerting them that something wrong is not a sign that they are bat-shit crazy and unreasonable beings, but a human response to what they (often very rightly) perceive as injustice. Women shouldn’t have to apologize for, or feel guilty about what is making them uncomfortable. It’s crucial that they talk about it. Learning to trust my emotions has not been the easiest lesson for me, personally. I’ve always tended to subject my sentiments to an intense questioning and filtering process before I dared act upon them, but in the last few months I’ve been rethinking this attitude.
Historically, women have always been associated with the emotional domain, while men have been designated to realm of rationality. Need I even mention which one has been granted primary status in the Western world? History has created and reinforced a false binary between the emotional and rational spheres, when in reality these two faculties bleed into one another in all aspects of human life. There is a tendency to trivialize emotions; to treat them as things that grant us no knowledge and only lead us astray. I would argue, on the contrary, that emotions play a vital role in the construction of our ability to navigate the world, respond to our environments and pose powerful questions about ethics and the responsibility tied to human agency.
You can read more of the wonderful Alison Jaggar’s work here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/7455115/Alison-Jaggar-Feminist-Ethics