Racism, Sexism, Antisemitism and other things one can unwittingly be

Any theories?

Law school grades aren't the only thing that makes a lawyer successful?

edited 6th Sep '12 10:33:33 AM by Wicked223

This.

Alternatively(and cynically), minority lawyers are held to lower standards, in doing their jobs, than white lawyers...

Knowing several people who went through law school, I'm pretty confident that the stuff law schools grade on is almost entirely irrelevant to success as a lawyer. Not saying it's not useful in their jobs at all, but there's a lot in the lawyer job that's not at all connected to law school skills.

@Post 299: That's pretty much what I was thinking, too.

This doesn't happen often, but I've seen cases where patients or clients will actively search for minority doctors and lawyers because they assume that they are better than their white peers. The line of thinking behind this is that a minority has to work several times harder to get the same professional position, so he or she must be better.

General racism and antisemitism have been covered pretty extensively, but what about unwitting sexism? That one hasn't be touched up on a whole lot.

One example that comes to mind for me is the use of the term "women's self defense". If you've seen me get preachy about this about this in the Martial Arts thread or somewhere else, you know where I'm going with this. One of my family members is getting ready to teach a women's self-defense course, and while I've bitten my tongue on the issue, I find it a little inaccurate and socially blind to identify a course by gender specifics when it really isn't necessary. At least to me it isn't.

I'll elaborate. When you call a martial arts training program "women's" self defense, you are inadvertently communicating the notion that women require a specialized or scaled down version of "normal" fighting techniques. Can you see the unfortunate implications in that approach? Now, I don't think many of my colleagues and instructors are male-chauvinist jerks who want women to stay in the kitchen or some other nonsense, and they really are operating under the best of intentions. However, the idea of a self-defense class that caters to women is problematic to me because the courses are often taught as the Fisher Price version of a technique that really didn't need to be diluted or simplified any further.

The arm bar, for instance, is a simple joint locking technique, and it's sure to work on any human being with a rotator cuff and an elbow. Most adult humans, male and female, have the same limbs, and the only moderately significant distinction between the two in terms of fighting techniques are the genitals and the breasts. Groin strikes are almost as effective on women as they are on men, and strikes to the breasts, while painful, are negligible because you should be striking a more decisive area like the solar plexus or the diaphragm. Aside from those details, your martial art, if designed correctly, should emphasize simplicity and ease of deployment for the general human anatomy.

What I've especially noticed in the martial arts community is this idea that women need to be taught separately from men, and I've heard some somewhat legitimate reasons for this. In the cardio-kichboxing class, we didn't have any mirrors on the walls because the women sometimes had body image issues. Okay, fair enough. Many women really do. However, a colleague of mine once boasted that his school would have self-defense classes set up where the men were only taught by male instructors and the women were only taught by female instructors. I don't like this at all because it perpetuates the myths about women, fighting and strength that probably contribute to domestic violence and sexual assault. In order to simulate a realistic environment, you need to train with a diverse group of people. You need to learn how to fend off someone twice your size and twice your strength, and you need to learn how to out-pace and out-flank someone half your size and twice your speed. Training with peers only of your body type and sex is not realistic.

There are specific issues that will affect women, like the use of jewelery as an improvised weapon and how to lower your center of gravity in your stance to keep from getting swept. Again, not a big problem, but this "don't be a victim" line that gets pitched specifically to women presumes that women need less sophisticated, dainty versions of the standard curriculum, and it also presumes that men have a relatively natural aptitude for martial arts. They don't.

When women argue with me about this, they usually tell me it's not blind sexism on the part of the instructors because women tend to be physically weaker than men. They also tell me that I wouldn't understand because I've had years of training. Both assumptions, while not totally false, are exaggerated. First, a good instructor will teach skills that can, as I said before, be easily deployed without the need for extensive strength training. Physical fitness certainly improves one's fighting abilities, but it's not necessary for most ordinary people who aren't professional fighters. You can make the biggest man or smallest woman fold over by nailing him with a proper front punch to the solar plexus or by kicking above the knee cap. We're all built this way. I also have to tell women that I can, indeed, relate to them because I'm not a very big man and I know what it's like to have to train with and fight against a significantly larger opponent. I'm not Hulk.

With regard to extensive training practices, again, they are good for a seasoned martial artist, but for someone who just needs the rudiments of self-defense, this can be gathered in just a few weeks of basic training or even an intensive three-day weekend seminar. The reason why the "women's self-defense" argument is dangerous mainly comes from the idea that women are somehow less competent in terms of fighting. This is actually true, but it is much the result of centuries of socially reinforced concepts rather than innate limitations. One of the reasons why early civilizations invented systemic hand-to-hand combat techniques was to shift the battlefield scenarios away from brute strength and toward leverage and identifying structural weaknesses in the human body on a fundamental level.

edited 6th Sep '12 11:28:11 AM by Aprilla

Well, it's a marketing technique. Businesses (including martial arts instructors) have to sell their services, and many products and services are more easily sold to women when they think that they have been specially engineered for them. In general they really are, but the differences from "male" oriented products are never as great as the marketing indicates. For another example, I own a bookstore, and I didn't even know what "Chick Lit" was before a female told me. It's stories with a different emphasis and style than so-called "male-oriented" stories, but most works of fiction (like 90%) really fall somewhere in-between. But if I put them on a shelf that said "In-Between Lit" I wouldn't sell a copy.

So if it's sexist, it's self-perpetuated sexism, based on a kernel of truth, and a whole lot of wish-fulfillment.

edited 6th Sep '12 11:27:54 AM by DeMarquis

Precisely. Many martial arts instructors are, sad to say, snake oil salesmen while others are just honestly under the impression that they're reducing violence against women by segregating them and creating diminutive versions of the same technique.

The martial arts industry is big business. To use David Cross's line, it's an existence predicated by manufactured necessity.

edited 6th Sep '12 11:31:49 AM by Aprilla

It's also possible that some of the women who are seeking out women's self-defense classes would not want to interact with men for various reasons. It's just conjecture on my part, but it would make sense, considering that there's quite a few other "women's only" things for that reason.

Yes, there's that, too. In fact, one of my female instructors worked privately with a woman who might have been sexually abused as a child and didn't like being around men very often. She finally told the student that counseling sessions would probably be better therapy than martial arts classes, and I think she was right in telling her that. I've been a punching bag for one too many women who have some tremendous chips on their shoulders, whether it was an abusive ex-boyfriend, a cheating husband, a relative who was a pedophile, or something else that just seriously bugged them.

At the risk of sounding stupid/potentially sexist, I'd think that martial arts classes would get just a bit awkward if they were co-ed.

(That, and co-ed classes would probably have far more males than females, for some reason.)

edited 6th Sep '12 11:49:37 AM by RocketDude

It really varies from school to school. I've trained in all-female groups just because it turned out that way. Some training groups are a sausage fest while others can be a sea of estrogen, and it can oftentimes be a total coincidence. It's not that weird, really.

My fencing class was pretty evenly split, but my kickboxing class was mostly female.

Then again, the kickboxing class had one guy who got bullied out of the class by the other students. I quit shortly thereafter.

So they kicked him out?

I know, I know ...

Yeah, because they didn't think he fit inside their box.

-Rimshot-

People will usually say I'm sexist when I express my views on genders. That's not as much unwittingly being sexist maybe, but I am in favour of equal rights, I just see the current situation differently.

In an attempt to maintain the peace in this thread, how about you DON'T tell anyone about them?

I'd like to hear what Besserwisser has to say. Nobody interested in an honest discussion is afraid of a dissenting opinion.

That depends. It kind of sounds as if he/she has already made up their mind that their views aren't sexist, so are they interested in a discussion?

That depends. A discussion on Israel and the Middle East, for instance, is seldom well-served by the argument that all the Jews should be fed into gas chambers and every Palestinian should get one (1) alcohol-laced chocolate chip cookie.

Yeah, I kinda thought I should not tell them here or this thread might get either derailed or the discussion could become rather personal. That's why I didn't tell them right away and I just posted this here to get off some steam.

Well, in that case, your post is kind of saying "I have a bunch of views that you'd probably find offensive, but I'm not going to tell you what they are! Nyeh nyeh!" Not really all that useful.

I think you're going to have to bite the bullet and tell us, Bess. We'll let you know if you're a bigot sooon enough if they are inflamitive.

My basic point about sexism is that it's done more to men than women nowadays. Or at least when people get sexist against men, nobody cares.