The Plight of the Bitter Nerd

[davidgillon]

I clearly missed out on the first round of the Scott Aaronson debate - an MIT professor who argued in an online discussion of the position of women in STEM that as a shy, nerdy guy he was not privileged, and that feminism made him feel like a monster, and did this in response to a woman talking about her experience of being raped by a shy, nerdy guy *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* - but a friend just pointed me at a good analysis of what Aaronson was trying to say, and how he went so wrong, that may interest people here: The plight of the bitter nerd: Why so many awkward, shy guys end up hating feminism

Laurie Penny (who has already written about this general issue when she pointed out the need for male nerds to make the uncomfortable recognition that their position in society isn't as their fondly imagined parallel to the Star Wars Rebel Alliance, but that they're actually an arm of the Empire) also has a good analysis of this in her article On Nerd Entitlement, in fact she pretty much nails the argument with her sub-title: 'White male nerds need to recognise that other people had traumatic upbringings, too - and that's different from structural oppression'. She examines where Aaronson is coming from (white male nerd who had an appalling time at school), compares it to her own lived experience (white female nerd who had an appalling time at school), and then rips him to shreds for trying to claim male nerds aren't part of the structural problem, particularly for women in STEM, by showing that yes, in fact we clearly are. And I love the fact that she goes on to tear apart his bewailing the fact that boys/men like him would do better if marriages were still being arranged by elders within the shtetl as happened for earlier generations of men in his family, by pointing out that his ancestral 'better' was only achieved by the ancestral subjugation of earlier generations of women in her family and others, within the demands of seeing the young men had the best chances, enabled at the cost of the hopes, and even ultimately lives, of young women like her.

It's this kind of *headdesk* -worthy idiocy from male nerds that makes me so glad I became disabled, as that transition/revelation/Damascene conversion gave me a much better appreciation of how, even as the proverbial shy, nerdy guy, my life had been privileged until that point (and still is) by the fact I'm also a straight white, middle-class male. While I wouldn't wish disability on Aaronson, it sounds like he needs a similarly revelatory experience if he truly thinks his experiences as a nerd equate to a woman's experience of being raped

Comments

[davidgillon]

(Struggled with the cut function here, so apologies if I failed with trigger warnings - I've been into the HTML and it looks right now, but DW is only showing me the full text so I'm not sure if the cuts are working or not)

[davidgillon]

And now it's showing me the cuts again - DW moves in mysterious ways. (But at least they're right)

[jesse_the_k]

You see the cut when you view a page with multiple entries.

When you see the entry solo on the page, you see the expansion.

No, this is not obvious—at all.

[syntaxofthings]

*claps* That analysis is powerful.

[cosmolinguist]

I liked my husband's response to what both Aaronson and Penny had said. I think there's a lot of nuance here that we ignore at our peril -- Aaronson's follow-up indicates that he understands now that privilege is a magic word he has to use in order to keep people from yelling him and that, while possibly true, isn't the robust understanding of social injustice that all the people yelling at him want -- and I think Andrew covers more of it than I've seen elsewhere.

[davidgillon]

I like your husband's response, too (and he bared his soul more than I could have done). Even coming from an (apparently) similar background to him and to Aaronson, it took becoming visibly disabled, and running head-first into disablist oppression, before I really understood how structural oppression and (lack of) privilege affects minority groups.

It took me years in an appropriate forum (BBC's Ouch) to fully develop my understanding and shift from being on the outside of the debate to arguing that yes, our privilege as straight white men is real, blights lives and needs to stop (and understanding what I was arguing rather than just parroting it). Hopefully Aaronson will now be in a position to develop that same understanding (as opposed to just saying he has), if for no other reason than after such a spectacular faux pas people will keep talking at him about it.

[cosmolinguist]

He bared his soul much more than he usually would! It was a very difficult thing for him to write -- he asked me, as a "safe" person, lots of questions as he was writing it and then wanted me to read it over before he posted it -- which I think speaks to how important he found the issue, that he couldn't just say nothing.

I've heard such good things about the BBC Ouch forum; I'm glad it was useful to you. Different corners of the internet have been essential to this kind of awakening for almost everyone I know who's had it.

Exposure to diverse viewpoints is so monumentally useful. I hope Scott Aaronson finds some path to that conclusion, too. :)

[davidgillon]

I've heard such good things about the BBC Ouch forum;

It was a fantastic forum on multiple levels: for talking to other disabled people, brainstorming practical problems, offering support when the non-crips in our external lives were causing problems, and, at times, offering serious debate on disability theory. Sort of like a crip-specific Dreamwidth. The only problem was the BBC itself, which just didn't know what to do with it, insisted it needed (costly!) proactive moderation and ultimately shut it down rather than continue with it.

[liv]

That's a really strong piece, and your husband isn't the first person I've come across who is really damaged by some of this stuff, and not purely in a frustrated entitlement way. Of course I'm inclined to agree with him that feminism is certainly not the culprit and may well be part of the solution.

I also liked this response piece pointing out some of what's missing from the bitter nerd viewpoint. Though it's a bit weird about paid sex work in places.

[hilarita]

Some of the structural factors didn't make that much sense to me until I found out about intersectionality. Mind, in many ways I benefit from several bits of structural privilege myself. And I didn't really 'get' that women are still structurally oppressed until I (in no particular order):
- learned about microaggressions, and realised that most of the ones I'd experienced were rooted in misogyny.
- started to want to move into positions of authority in a technical sector
- spent 6 months on long-term sick leave because of my disability and massive structural disablism.

[davidgillon]

Intersectionality is so fundamental, and so obvious*, that it boggles my mind that anyone, never mind some people who proclaim themselves activists on this stuff, can deny its importance/existence.

(* and I still needed it pointing out - maybe it's a can't see the wood for the trees thing?)

Microaggressions I know I can regularly still fail to see if they aren't in the disability area, and having had non-disabled people unable to comprehend microaggressions towards me that they've just witnessed, and wondering why I'm fuming, I recognise I need to support/let myself be led by members of other minority groups when talking about microaggressions in their own areas. Interestingly microaggressions and the damage they do (though they used another term which escapes me right now) were one of the things covered in the CBT module of my recent pain management course.

I escaped the structural oppression of being a woman in STEM by the simple measure of being a man, but I saw it happening to all my woman peers, to the point I'm not certain any of them still have their original careers (the only one I know still working in STEM had to move to Germany to do it). It really wasn't any surprise to run into the disablism after that, other than it being quite so blatant, and quite so openly corrupt.

[hilarita]

Well, the "problem" with intersectionality is that you have to own your own privilege, eventually. But once it's pointed out to you, it makes perfect sense. But like you, I needed it pointing out - in my case through the medium of reading a fuckton of things on Twitter.

Microaggressions are hard to spot - that's part of why it's often hard to spot why one doesn't fit in in a particular environment until someone points out what microaggressions can look like. I got one a few months ago when a coworker was complaining about Doctor Who having a lesbian kiss in it. (Frankly, I'd think interspecies was far more controversial, but who am I to judge?) The person was suggesting that there was no need to put that sort of thing in our faces during prime-time TV (though having no personal objection to lesbians etc). I didn't feel confident enough to speak up (and I pass as straight there), so goodness knows what any gay people there thought (there were at least ten of us, so odds were good that there was at least one). But these things are all over the bloody place, in situations where you don't necessarily expect them :(

I too was surprised by the sheer blatant disregard for disability legislation - I think that employers kind of rely on the fact that you're almost certainly too ill to try suing the fuck out of them. And that if you're in a pretty tight-knit environment, that you don't want to piss people off so much that you can't get another job, should this ever be possible. It feels very much where maternity discrimination was at in white-collar environments around 20 years ago to me - there was legislation in place, but it took a few high-profile, expensive, cases to kick HR practice up a few gears. (Not that it's perfect yet, but there are definitely some big differences between now, 5yrs ago and 20 years ago.)

[davidgillon]

complaining about Doctor Who having a lesbian kiss in it

*headdesk* For god's sake, it's 20 years - effectively a generation - since the Beth Jordache (Anna Friel) lesbian kiss on Brookside. And doubtless there were complaints back when Star Trek had the first interracial kiss on US TV (Kirk/Uhura IIRC), but this is how we make progress, by making these things normal and a regular part of prime-time. If people are still complaining 20 years on, clearly we need more lesbian kissing, not less!

sheer blatant disregard for disability legislation

At Evil Aerospace the blatant disregard extended to even reading the legislation. I had to explain to the then newly appointed head of Occupational Health what the Disability Discrimination Act actually said. I mean, you would have thought being up to date on the relevant laws and regulations was the kind of thing they would have checked before offering her the job!

What particularly peed me off was that they regularly claimed to be national leaders on diversity and equality. Not if you actually worked for them....

[hilarita]

In short, ARRRRGGH, the world is still Quite Shit.

[cosmolinguist]

Microaggressions I know I can regularly still fail to see if they aren't in the disability area, and having had non-disabled people unable to comprehend microaggressions towards me that they've just witnessed, and wondering why I'm fuming

Part of the "aggression" in microaggressions is that others find it impossible or at least difficult to see stuff that doesn't apply to them. Half the time when I'm fuming, I only fume more at the "Don't you think you're overreacting?"/"Is that all?"/"You have no sense of humor" responses I get when I try to explain why I'm suddenly upset or shaking or whatever.

Lacking the cumulative effect of all the microaggressions I encounter, even well-meaning people who don't fall into the categories I'm marginalized by (being a disabled bisexual immigrant women) often can't comprehend what that cumulative effect feels like. And the resulting sense of isolation and unfairness -- that I have to care about things others don't even see -- is another part of the aggression.

[davidgillon]

Lacking the cumulative effect of all the microaggressions I encounter

There are certainly one or two things you've mentioned in posts that have made me stop and think 'I'd never thought of that as a consequence of saying X', and if I'm missing the effect in a specific area I'm certainly missing the effect across multiple intersectionality. I'm theoretically only in one minority group as disabled, but I see enough 'internal' intersectionality between the different and overlapping microaggressions and other discrimination we encounter around visible disability/invisible disability/sensory disability/MH/varying disability and so on that there's absolutely no doubt in my mind it is a significant issue across the whole spread of minorities and consistently underestimated by anyone outside that particular intersection.

[cosmolinguist]

Yep, and the combinations they can exist in, too: how physical disabilities affect frequency and treatment of mental health conditions (and vice versa: when I still had a job, it took me to an interesting seminar on diagnosing visual impairments in people with learning disabilities, which combination had never occurred to me; also via my ASD husband I've learned it's difficult to diagnose autism in blind people because some of the autistic presentation overlaps so much with blind people's difficulties and even coping strategies). The intersection of more than one kind of disability is really underappreciated, considering how common it is for a person to have/develop more than one facet of disability.

[davidgillon]

The intersection of more than one kind of disability is really underappreciated

Absolutely, I was delighted when someone pointed me at a medical paper saying 'we know there's got to be some sort of weird hypermobility-neurodiversity linkage because there are just too many people turning up with both', as that describes so many of my friends (and me).

[jesse_the_k]

Yes.

You say Interestingly microaggressions and the damage they do (though they used another term which escapes me right now) were one of the things covered in the CBT module of my recent pain management course. I've spent several sessions too many trying to teach my therapist what microagressions are. I would adore a reference if available. The concept of "microaggression" is exceptionally useful. That some aspects of my impairments make me specifically less capable of handling them is frustrating.

Fortunately I encountered "intersectionality" and "cross-disability coalition" while I was still identifying as nondisabled; those ideas certainly made my view of the world more acute. On the other hand, it provided more options for anger. And on another toe, I could look for wisdom for living with that anger from a range of cultures that handle incessant oppression.

[davidgillon]

I would adore a reference if available. The concept of "microaggression" is exceptionally useful.

I think it's something that was in the printed notes we were given, I'm fairly certain I know where those are, and I'm finally back home tomorrow, so I'll see what I can dig out.