on 'civility'
i am sure everyone feels nice and cozy keeping discussion on the plane of the theoretical. this, after all, is how discussions work, no? as long as we're talking about hypothetical choices being made by hypothetical people in hypothetical situations, we can afford to be 'civil', though it appears to me that 'civility' is being used as code for 'avoiding unpleasant disagreement, because disagreement is no fun at all -- and it's all theoretical anyway, so why get all het up over it?'
not to put too fine a point on it, but the people on the recent abortion thread chastising me (jokingly, in some cases) for my lack of 'civility' were all dudes. those commended in that same thread for their dedication to 'civility' were all dudes. those doing the commending - also all dudes. i hate to put it that way, but it's the case. nate and tim and all the rest: none of you will ever have to actually have to worry about getting an abortion. you can afford to be 'civil' in a way i can't. you can still suffer a great deal from a possible abortion ban - you can be forced to have children before you are ready. you can see someone you love harmed or killed. thanks to simple biology, though, you are still sheltered from the full force of the blow. a ban on abortion will necessarily affect women more than it affects men. it will affect us in ways you probably cannot fully appreciate.
there is not 1:1 gender parity on the blogmass, so this skewing of gender is not unusual. truth told, i rarely think about it. i have tried to stay quiet on nearly all blogmass abortion debate threads, because of this emphasis on 'civility'. all this 'civility' has discouraged me from speaking, because on this topic, i do not choose to be 'civil'. i've tried for some time to be 'civil'. in debates with those who are pro-life, it gets me ignored. on the internet, it gets me banned. i have come to the conclusion that being 'civil' gets one exactly nowhere, but since everyone takes such pains to be 'civil' around here, and since the only way i see to be 'civil' has involved shutting the hell up, i've kept quiet.
i do not know if this holds true for other female members of the blogmass. hell, i don't know if it holds true for other male members of the blogmass. it well might. i don't know what prompts someone to comment on a given post, or what prompts someone to let a given thread go. it may not be a topic which interests them. they may not have happened to read those particular threads.
it is possible, though, that there are some who may have felt uncomfortable speaking up amidst all this good ol' civility for fear of being labeled 'impassioned' or 'overemotional' or ahem 'uncivil'. if so, and if you read this now, this post and those following it are for you. please comment if you wish. be as rude as you damn fucking want. (civility will be tolerated, too. i won't threaten anyone with any motherfucking lectures on any fucking subject, motherfuckers.)
i have repeatedly said that i started out being civil. i did. i began my response, answering lines as i saw fit. then all hell broke loose - i deleted the foregoing 'civil' response i had begun, and i posted what i wanted to say. the quote from nate which triggered my abandomnment of 'civility' was this:
But that it's really such a terrible thing to ask people to carry a baby to term, deliver it, THEN get rid of it instead of tossing away what MIGHT be a human life? I just can't get my mind around it.
that quote may well look perfectly 'civil' at first glance. consider the word choices, hear my arguments and decide whether my reply was really so 'uncivil'.
who is doing the 'asking', in this quote? state and federal laws are not intended to be viewed as polite suggestions. if one doesn't do what the law 'asks', one gets punished for it. laws do not 'ask'. laws demand. to support a ban on abortion is to demand that women comply absolutely, or face legal consequences. one is not 'asked' to obey the speed limit, or 'asked' not to rob a bank. very good reasons can be offered for not engaging in illegal activity, but the law, ultimately, is the law. the law tells you what to do, and tells you what the consequences are if you disobey.
is 'asking' a 'terrible thing'? 'asking' women to 'carry a baby to term' is already policy in many states - mandatory waiting periods before an abortion can be obtained, mandatory 'counselling' and the like. doctors who perform abortions present a woman seeking an abortiion with a full range of choices - at least, ethical ones do. they ask the woman if she has considered carrying the pregnancy to term, and keeping the child or giving it up for adoption, when those are medically feasible options. an abortion ban isn't 'asking' women to 'carry a baby to term'. it is telling women to carry their pregnancies to term. or else. (guilt-tripping women by throwing garbage at them, calling them godless sluts and filthy murderous whores, bewailing the state of their damne'd souls, or confronting them with misleading information and gory pictures isn't 'asking', either, incidentally. that is also a form of demanding.)
'people' don't get pregnant. only women do. no one can 'ask' nate, tim, martin, moss, or any other bearer of XY chromosomes to 'carry a baby'. i am getting rather tired of being 'asked' to be a martyr for someone else's cause. consider those people who never have served and never will serve in any branch of the military by their own choice , yet still extoll the glories of war, those who 'support the troops' by sticking magnets on their cars. 'chickenhawk' is a popular term for such people, and it springs to mind here, frankly. is it proper to draft me, and half of all america's citizens, in a moral war i, and they, may not support? that we may consider misguided, harmful, and wrong, and that may end up with us getting injured or killed?
we come now to the lovely turn of phrase 'carry a baby'. i'm not even going to get into the when-is-it-a-baby debate. to even claim one can 'debate' such a point is disingenuous.
this post grows long, and so i reseve the balance of the quote for my next post, in which i will also put forth my argument that personal experience does, in fact, have some role to play in arguments which go beyond the theoretical and eventually wind up setting real actual public policies - which policies lead to thoroughly non-hypothetical people being injured and killed in thoroughly non-hypothetical ways.
posted by anne @ 3:14 PM
12 Comments:
You know, if you'd just said this in response to him, it would have nicely dismantled his argument in an entirely civil fashion. As it is, you just made me feel embarassed to agree with you.
If you honestly want to know how I feel on the subject, I'd love to discuss it with you. If, on the other hand, you'd rather accuse me and other people agreeing with you of an inherent inability to even comment on the subject, I'll just keep my mouth shut.
(And for the record, I don't think Nate was being particularly civil at all. In fact, if I skip over your comments, he starts to sound like a real dick, to be frank. But you did an excellent job of making him into the good guy.)
Thanks, Anne. I was contemplating giving up on the blogmass permanently (not for the first time), but I'll stick around and get your back for a little while longer, because I certainly know what it is to be the only "uncivil" person in one of those threads.
Martin, you are welcome to have an opinion on abortion. Everyone is. What no one is welcome to do (and I don't think you ever have in any discussion I've ever been involved with) is imply that those of us who are getting all emotional have no particular reason for doing so and are just disrupting an interesting, abstract, theoretical discussion with our hysteria.
I know lots of men who are able to discuss abortion with women and remain actually civil, not just passive-agressive pretend civil. I live with one of them. He avoids the hell out of those oh-so-civil threads because they piss him off just as much as me. If you didn't see it, Anne, there was one time on my blog where the civility rules were tossed aside and it felt pretty damn good. An attempt was made to insist upon "civility" but it was ignored.
http://www.m14m.net/liz/comments.php?comment=2006023164544
it is possible, though, that there are some who may have felt uncomfortable speaking up amidst all this good ol' civility for fear of being labeled 'impassioned' or 'overemotional' or ahem 'uncivil'.
yes, exactly. Being dispassionate is a luxury in this sort of debate. This is as basic and essential a right to me as suffrage -- probably more, actually. The best analogy I can think of is forced labor, no pun intended. And of course our culture makes "un-emotional" synonymous with "reasonable" and we all know how irrational us ladies can be! I guess you'll be addressing this in your next post.
Most of the pro-life positions I've heard tend to be a mixture of "fetus=human" and unexamined sexism and/or androcentricity (e.g., "But that it's really such a terrible thing to ask people to carry a baby to term..."). To some degree I can understand when pro-lifers want to assign full rights to a human fetus, but I cannot tolerate the accompanying attack on my own humanity.
I'm just not very comfortable with trying to argue about Abortion. I don't feel what I have to say is new or different, or likely to change anyone's mind. I can see both sides of it, but I do have a clear opinion on the side that says it ought to be legal. I do understand your being passionate about it, and I don't hold it against you. I just don't really feel like getting into a big old conflict for naught. Because we can all argue and scream til we're blue int he face over this, but to what end? I'd rather not argue about it and quietly give some money to planned parenthood. I'm really sorry about the way this has clearly hurt so many feelings. I hope I'm not adding to it all by saying this.
Liz: I'm certainly not claiming it's not an emotional issue. And I'm sorry you're being scared out of commenting by Nate's mutant power of sitting there placidly ignoring the emotional impact this subject has for millions of people, men and women alike*, for whom the right of a woman to choose is, as Sarah says, as important as the right to not be sent to the Gulag. As I said before, I don't think Nate is by any means the model of civility the rest of the blogmass should aspire to. If everyone debated like he does on those issues he really digs his heels in on, I would totally shoot myself.
But I don't think civility is a lost cause, and the reason I keep harping on it is because I feel so strongly about this issue. It's as much pragmatism as anything: I've never seen anyone really slaughter an opponent in a debate without being deadly civil about it. And frankly? I wouldn't mind seeing Nate get slaughtered on this one. Wouldn't mind that one bit.
* Though I'm not claiming in equal numbers, and I'm not claiming men face exactly the same fears. But that doesn't mean we don't face any, or that we are entirely devoid of empathy.
I'm sorry, I simply do not have any civility to give on this matter. I demand the right to make my own choices, especially in cases where my well being or survival is threatened. And I demand that others have that right as well. When someone threatens that right, I've no time to waste on an argument: if the threat stands, a fight is my only option.
If y'all want to fight with words, that's cool. But I find it soul-sucking, especially around here. I can't do it anymore.
What Julia said.
moss -
i certainly didn't mean by this post to lay any blame on you. that wasn't my intent and i, for one, don't accept your apology, because i don't think an apology is necessary. you have a perfect right to post anything you want without fear of a fracas, and you shouldn't feel a need to censor yourself, or to post in code. you shouldn't feel that saying what you want to say is 'asking for an argument', unless you actually want an argument.
that was my point, in making this post - to walk on eggshells is absurd. if we can't speak freely on the internet, where the hell can we?
i had as big a role as anyone involved in the thread - probably bigger than most, certainly bigger than yours. i should have left sooner, and taken the rancor with me. i didn't mean to wreck your post, and i didn't mean to ruin your weekend.
i understand that civility has its place. i also think it unhealthy and counterproductive to entirely stifle one's feelings and thoughts for the sake of that civility. i think a balance can be struck, but i'll try to do that in my own space, not yours.
Anne: I think real life examples are vital, and important to bring up. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. It isn't substance I object to. It's more or less entirely the SHOUTING and back-handed insults and insinuations. There's also a low debating trick you keep pulling here. Nate says A. You think B logically follows from A, therefore Nate believes B. An example: I could deduce that you think infertile women's thought on abortion are less meaningful and important, and that they can never truly understand how you feel about it.
In fact, Liz just did the same thing to me above, or at least that's how I read it: She's accusing me of calling you a hysteric, with all the connotations that lovely word implies. Absolute rubbish, and insulting rubbish at that. I never thought any such thing. But apparently it can be deduced from the fact that I find the tendency of abortion debates to turn nasty depressing. Now, I'm fairly sure Liz doesn't mean it that way, and I'll assume she doesn't until she tells me otherwise. That's more or less all I mean by civility: Not looking for personal slights, insults and suchlike, and taking what people say at face value. It doesn't mean leaving real life out of it. I picked on you rather than Nate, not because you brought up your friends experience, but because you brought up his personal life, and as a hypothetical at that. Also, everyone else does such a good job picking on Nate; you don't need me.
Just for the record, I think your a sensible person and your reaction is an entirely appropriate one to impending federal prohibition. I'm a bit more sanguine about it, perhaps partly due to my tragic inability to bear a child, but also because I don't see federal prohibition as a serious possibility. It's just so dumb on the face of it. This may be because of selection bias: I know a lot more people who think like you than who think like Nate. This is why I want to study Nate rather than kick him.
You asked somewhere else why I felt civil discourse is more productive than the regular sort. In the blogmass, I'd agree it isn't. More or less anything we say in this space is equally unimportant. But unfortunately abortion is a political issue. If it's ever going to be resolved, and it won't, because it's such a wonderful issue for fund-raising, but if it were, it would have to be because we find a legal framework that lets everyone live together. We manage it on a lot of similar issues.
I just feel some of you all are trying to drive Nate away, or anyone else who disagrees with you, and I think it's a damned shame. Maybe you aren't, but that's the effect. I felt that I couldn't remain silent, either here or when he was getting kicked around on Liz's blog, without appearing complicit. Maybe that was wrong-headed, dunno. Basically, he isn't a troll. Or, if you think he is, and I would understand why, you should ignore thim rather than getting all capslock about it.
Sorry for blogging angry. I'd delete the whole thing, but I feel I owe you an answer, since my name is in the post.
Moss: sorry for playing thread police on your blog. I knew I should have left that particular sentence out of it immediately after I posted it. The fact is that I do find it damned depressing, but that's just what it is, I guess.
I had resolved to stay out of these arguments on the blogmass, including promising Remi I would, because it makes me so unhappy that it has ruined a few weekends. I came here to talk to Anne because I think I know exactly how she's feeling right now, especially how it feels to feel attacked from all sides. I'm going back to my promise to Remi, and I'm not going to argue here.
moss, the 'eggshell' statement was also directed toward you, was intended as an echoing of the previous statement. i really hate that you feel that something you post might invite an argument you don't want. so all i'm trying to say is that i won't argue on your blog anymore, and hoping, by so saying, that you'll feel more comfortable posting stuff. that's all.
I second Julia (and Erika).
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