Passionately Promoting A More Perfect World

maybe-a-lizard:

sinesalvatorem:

kirbymatkatamiba:

@sinesalvatorem A while back in reference to this post about a different video decrying sexual racism you said:

Someday, someone is going to 100% seriously claim that gay men and straight women are sexist for not finding women hot, and I am going to bash my skull in against a gay rights monument.

Well. um. I hope you won’t feel the need to bash your skull against anything, but:

In the comments of this video, someone made this excellent critique:

I very much disagree that a sexual preference can be “racism”… Similarly, the fact that I have no sexual preference for men does not make me sexist. What you find attractive is not something you consciously control, so it is wrong to put the label “racist” on it.

I’m curious, Lindsey, if you would consider anyone who is not pan/bisexual to be sexist. If not then why the double standard?

and in her response she said:

…indeed if we preference “race” and call it racism, then preference for “sex” or “gender” would be sexist. It’s not what this episode is about so I didn’t bring it up but I think it is where the world is going. We’re going to realize that sexual orientation, like racial preference is a form of discrimination and have to muddle through what that means and whether or not to change it.

(This is not just anyone saying this, it’s a popular internet sex educator, who is also a clinical sexologist… so yeah I find this pretty fucking horrifying.)

(Also, oh my god, how obvious is it that this is The Worst Argument in the World. Racial/gendered sexual preference = racial/gender discrimination, racial/gender discrimination = racism/sexism, racism/sexism = bad.)

OK, I’m going to approach this again in as calm and not-triggered-to-death way as possible, because I feel like I should give the actual contents of the video a fair hearing.

Point-by-point on the video itself:

Racism is a belief that all members of a racialised group are the same in some way that’s either inferior or superior to other recialised groups.

This is actually a very good definition and I’d probably endorse that for general use.

If you believe that all members of one group are less attractive, less worthy, less whatever-your-dating-or-sexual-expectation - then that’s racist.

And that’s where she goes way off, because none of these things are actually traits of a person. It isn’t meaningful to ask if members of a given group are less attractive in some cosmic sense, because there isn’t an inherent “attractiveness” trait. A person is attractive or not to you solely based on features of your brain. For all you know, everyone else in the world might disagree with you.

If I don’t find a particular person attractive and you do - or vice versa - that says pretty much nothing about the person as a person. If you thought that people you were attracted to were somehow better human beings, and you were only attracted to people of one race, then that would be racist. But here the primary flaw is thinking that people you’re attracted to are better people, because that’s ridiculous.

WRT worthiness, I have to ask: worthy of what? Of love? How does that even work? No one can be worthy or unworthy of someone else’s love, because love isn’t an entitlement. You can’t just proof your worthiness and have it land on you as your just reward. Feminists have been saying this for literally years. Please don’t turn your back on your principles the moment you can score a couple anti-racism points.

She says no one likes being called racist but it’s hard for her to find another word to refer to people making negative assessments of large groups of individuals that they’ve never met based solely on the colour of their skin.

Really? That was the only way you could refer to it? OK, so, the argument here seems to be that skin colour is a minor enough fact about someone that it’s unreasonable to make attractiveness assessments based on it. Fine. Is it also unreasonable that I like long hair, then? Or tall people or people with straight teeth? What I mean is, is it unreasonable to have any preference at all about someone’s physical appearance when deciding whether to sleep with them? Or do we all need to make our sexual choices while wearing blindfolds?

[From here the video is mostly about why media representation is responsible for racialised sexual preferences. No evidence is presented that this is true, but I also don’t know of evidence indicating it’s false. I won’t comment on the factual accuracy of this theory, as I have no way of knowing if it’s true.]

Research participants who explicitly expressed positive attitudes toward white and black people were tested on their implicit attitudes.

I continue to be sceptical of the implicit association test, unless the study you’re referring to used a better version of the test than I took. In fact, my own complaint experience with the test is about the most relevant you can get: I’m someone who is most attracted to dark skin and (at the time I took the test) quite offput by pale skin (I’ve moved toward being neutral toward light skin after long term exposure to white people).

When I took the IAT, it still scored me as preferring light skin to dark skin. This happened because the test itself had first set up a Good=White association in my head by making me match good words to white faces first. Then, when it switched to Black=Good, I was initially disoriented by having to flip the primed association around. With a method like that, the IAT could have made it look like I implicitly endorsed nuclear war or hated my family or something. It might be possible to design an IAT that doesn’t have such an effect, but the one I took was bullshit, which makes me sceptical of anything citing them.

Institutional racism is at work here

[Citation needed]

Like, you could totally be right here, but don’t boldly assert shit without backing. You are basically telling people to override their preferences and sleep with people you don’t want to sleep with. I am going to hold you to some damn-high standards of rigor here.

So what do we do?  Well, if you don’t want to be racist - sexually or otherwise - you start by acknowledging that you are. Make a list of ten countries and, next to each one, write a prejudice that you or your society has about people from there. Why you wouldn’t date them.

Making people think through stereotypes about different groups in order to combat them actually makes them more racist. So, nice try, but advice that does the opposite of what you want probably isn’t the best idea.

Then, one by one, find evidence to negate the snap judgment or shortcut in your mind and make a new pathway

So, there are really only two options here: You don’t think any of the actual variance between people of different countries is a legitimate reason not to date someone, or you want people to lie to themselves about what the facts say.

Because, newsflash, not all things that people think about a given country are falsehoods! If your “prejudice” is “I don’t want to date a Catholic because we’d have incompatible life plans”, then you’d either have to convince yourself not to care about your plans for the future, or to not not believe Ireland is mostly Catholic. Either way, unless you really meant the kind of milquetoast anti-racism where people say “Well, not all [group] are [trait]”, then this is advice to mess yourself up.

To address racist behaviours, swipe right onto your profiles [?] of a person from a racialised group you usually pass up, don’t set racial restrictions on your dating profiles, and go on dates with all the people and listen.

Firstly, I have no desire to defend of racial restrictions on dating profiles. I think they’re dumb, even though I wouldn’t support banning them.

But for the rest of that… What? You want people to swipe right on individuals they don’t find attractive and then go on dates with them? Besides the fact that just going on a date with everyone you see of a skin tone darker than yours is exhausting even to someone as extroverted as me (I know introverts who’d probably die if they tried this), I have to ask: How far do you expect this to go?

This isn’t a rhetorical question. This is deadly serious. This is the whole reason I’m here. Because what this sounds like (and what I can guarantee you some people are feeling) is that if you go on a date with someone and can’t find a good reason to reject them, you’ve got no excuse not to sleep with them.

This will obviously have one of two effects: If this person has a hint of self-preservation in them, they’ll become really good at rationalisations for why all the people they aren’t attracted to are assholes who haven’t earned the right to sleep with them. Remember what I said above about it being dumb to decide people’s worth as human beings on how attractive they are? When people end up thinking that way, it’s often a defense mechanism to allow them to reject people when working within a framework where their body is not their own.

And, if this person only goes out with white people when they’re attracted to them, but goes out with every minority they ask - well, guess what? They will become very experienced at coming up with reasons why minorities are terrible people in order to avoid sleeping with them. Congratulations! You just made someone way more racist than they were before!

But that’s the good outcome. The person who comes out of this experience being super racist is the success story. I hope to G-d and back that this is what they go with. Because the alternative is so horrifying that I had to get up from the keyboard to retch when I first tried to write about it.

What happens to the person who can’t come up with justifications for why they deserve to protect their body from violation is that they get violated. Over and over and over again. You’re a sex educator, right? Maybe you’re aware of the fact that the experience of being raped is unpleasant? Like, this is just a heads up, in case you missed that fact.

There are so many things I’m trying to find the words to say that don’t devolve into yelling “despicable cretin” a lot but, alas, words fail me in the face of this. So, instead, I’m going to turn to a more selfish topic: Why would you think minorities want this?

Why do you think I - or any other minority with even a quarter of a soul - want to be put in the position you’ve just proscribed for us? In the best of cases, to be strung along on date after date by people just looking for reasons to decide we’re horrible people and cut us loose. In the worst of cases, to end up sleeping with someone who is terrified, and horrified, and wants to die, and -

*gets up to retch again*

Why would we want that!? Who do you know who actually wants that? I’ll bet there are some people who would love to have their victims to come to them. But, if I can be real with you, them’s the niggas I would take out back and shoot. They’re a blight on both humanity and the reputation of my people. If your idea of helping minorities is helping the small proportion of human filth, I have to question whether you really don’t think of us all this way.

I use OkCupid sometimes. By their own statistics, I may be in the worst demographic possible for being messaged. The average black woman on OkC receives fewer messages than any other race of women. Lesbians receive fewer messages on OkC than straight women. Only a quarter of OkC users say they’d date a transperson. By category effects alone, I should expect to not get much attention.

This makes it even worse for me if people start going out with folks they aren’t into. Because, if the number of people who actually are into me are lower, the proportion who are doing this because I’m ~the most marginalised ever~ should be way, way higher.

And this is terrifying to me. I mean, honestly, it’s kind of first-world-problems compared to the actual people being guilted into sex here, but it still really fucks with my head. It makes me somewhat tempted to delete my OkC, except doing so would mean increasing the proportion of advantage-taking monsters that people so-guilted are likely to run into.

Please please please only leave me with the people who actually want to go out with me. I do not want the role you’ve cast me in. No one with a sliver of decency wants the role you’ve cast us in. Just. Fucking. Stop.

…Aaaand I completely failed at preventing this from turning into a hate-and-terror fueled ramble, so I guess I didn’t even do what I hoped to. Whelp. At least I’ll have made my views (and my hatred and terror, of course) known.

First, given your interpretation of what she’s saying, I absolutely agree with your conclusions, that’s horrifying and people should stop it. Especially the part about needing excuses not to sleep with people, ugh wow yes let’s none of us ever go there.

But I think there are two different things going on here. There’s racial preferences 1) by attractiveness (“I don’t like the way X look”), and 2) by stereotype (“I think all X are sexist”). And I THINK she’s saying you should override #2, not #1. Which makes some sense - if you don’t see anything against the specific person but are just making race-based assumptions about them, it might be a good idea to try getting to know them instead of just going with your stereotype, and it sounds like doing more of that could in fact result in changing your mind about the stereotype thing.

(While with #1 you already don’t find the specific person attractive, which is a very different thing, and in that case I agree with you that feeling obliged to try to date them anyway would probably be bad. Although it depends - for example my rating of people’s attractiveness changes hugely based on whether I like them, so if I was going to try online dating for serious relationship purposes, I should probably ignore initial attractiveness anyway.)

Of course I’m writing this as if people can tell whether they’re doing #1 or #2, which they probably mostly can’t, so that’s an issue. But at the very least I don’t think she meant to imply anything like what you’re saying - although yes her advice could still lead to that and it’s a major issue.

I don’t think she intended to imply my outcome, because I don’t think she’s evil or anything, but I don’t think she meant to say what you’re portraying her as saying either. Or, if she did, she talking about it so badly that you specifically have to look for the second interpretation to find it.

In the very beginning of the video, she says that thinking that members of one racialised group are less attractive is racist. In order for it to be the case that she’s only talking about holding negative stereotypes about them making you less willing to date them, physical attraction would have to not exist (or maybe she’s unaware that not-her people experience it?). If not being attracted to people from a certain group is racist, and attraction can be based on physical features, then not being attracted to dark skin is racist.

This interpretation is backed up when she talks about a porn performer being in lower demand because she’s black. When an actress is on screen, you don’t care if her stereotype is sexist or religious or uneducated or what have you. Unless it’s part of her storyline, it’s pretty much irrelevant. You care about whether she looks hot.

Lindsey uses this as an illustration of why racial preferences are bad in a video about getting rid of your racial preferences, so I can’t not assume she also means preferences against dark skin specifically. She then goes on to quote Jane Eliot that “Pigmentation should have nothing to do with how you treat another person” and adds “…or whether or not your get off to them”. It is quite conclusively the case that Lindsey believes that not being attracted to dark skin is racist.

Now, an alternative explanation of these facts is that Lindsey believes the sole causal factor behind skin colour preferences is stereotypes, such that those preferences would go away if you simply fought off your stereotypes.

However, this is bullshit. Maybe there’s a causal arrow between the attractiveness of a feature and stereotypes about people who have that feature (not something the video in any way proved, but plausible), but there’s no way it’s the sole factor. People who like big breasts don’t like them because they think people with big breasts are kinder people - they like them because they think big jiggly boobies are hot.

I even have an anecdote about skin colour specifically! I once hung out with a very sheltered white girl who, at one point, mentioned that she found my skin very pretty. About an hour later, I found myself giving her a crash course in black stereotypes. She couldn’t come up with a single one, and it meant she was missing all of my (very classy, obvs) humour. If this isn’t definitive proof that skin colour preferences can for some people (and, I expect, could for most people) form in a vacuum, I don’t know what would be.

So, now we’ve established that the text of the video strongly supports the idea that sexual preferences for or against darker or lighter skin is racist. The video doesn’t come right out and say that racism is immoral but, let’s be real, if you asked her directly, do you think Lindsey would say it isn’t immoral? More importantly, do you think the people watching this video wouldn’t be coming with the idea that racism is immoral?

So, chain them together, and you get: Not being attracted to people of a certain skin colour is immoral. The ways given to combat this are sensitivity training (which is known to be the opposite of effective) and going on dates with people even if you aren’t attracted to them. This, in itself, is stupid and probably ineffective. But it’s not evil as stated.

My problem, as I expressed above, is that it doesn’t tell you where to stop. It doesn’t put safety rails on. It loads a certain kind of impressionable white person up with guilt about being an awful person, and then points them in a direction and says “Go fix that!”

That direction is going on dates with people you’re not attracted to. The way dates typically work is that you go out with someone you’re into to see if there’s enough of a connection to start a relationship. You’re looking for reasons to approve or disapprove of this person as a partner. Except, wait a sec, “I’m not attracted to them” kind of just got removed as a valid reason for disapproval. Whoops. This is my basis for thinking it’ll collapse into either rationalisation or a bunch of unwanted sex.

Now, it’s possible to take the video seriously and still not go that far. It’s possible to continue reserving your right to reject people for lack of attraction. This video has probably made it so you feel guilty every time you do, but you could do it.

But, even if I’m being as generous as possible, for every 10 people who take this video seriously, 1 will not come with safety rails. Honestly, probably way more. People are surprisingly bad at enforcing their boundaries when their usual methods of enforcement are taken away.

Furthermore, even ignoring what happens or the date, what about the actual going on dates? WRT online matches, Lindsey says “go on dates with all the people”. All the people? Seriously? That’s insane.

As someone who has used online dating sites, I can tell you that a lot of people are creeps to stay the hell away from, and you can often get signals of this in their profiles and match questions. Profiles that darkly hint about how their ex got what was coming to them, people answering “Can someone refuse sex after they’ve already slept with you once?” with “No”, people saying it’s OK to poke holes in condoms to cause pregnancy, etc. People you want to screen out ASAP before going to meet them.

And Lindsey is telling you to go on dates with all of them. Not “everyone whose profile you like”, but all! She even laid the emphasis hard on the word “all”! Even assuming an audience with maximal good sense (well, as much good sense as you can have if you don’t immediately decide this video is bullshit), if enough people actually follow her advice as stated, someone is going to be assaulted. Or worse.

So, even looking at this video in the morning and trying to apply as much charity as possible, there is still no way for me to watch it and conclude that, if anyone takes this video seriously and at its word, the world won’t be a worse place for that. Lindsey is probably not advocating for any of the obvious effects of her policies, but those are the effects nonetheless. For her ignore this and advocate regardless is pretty much criminal negligence, and she should be kicked out on her ass for malpractice.