I was actually thinking of the initial responses to both ibis's thread and this one, and didn't have in mind who exactly had said things like: You are being far too sensitive as well as the people in the other threads who complained. Men and women are different - get over it. (Qwik, the second response on page 1), and, from the work thread, Qalyn's immediate: You're paranoid. Men treat each other like that, too..
I went to a restaurant for lunch a few weeks ago with a friend. We're both women; she's black, I'm white. Maybe it shouldn't matter, but as it happens we were both dressed professionally, for work--she always dresses for work and I'd had a meeting and this lunch date I wanted to look good for. I've rarely received such lousy service. The server actually went out of his way, more than once, to be rude. OF COURSE I KNOW that it's possible that this waiter was just an asshole or he was having a lousy day or had a hangover or ... But, really, he was so rude, so careless... The experience sticks with me because I can't be sure--was it sexism? racism? both? neither? Or a bad day combined with "it's just these two fucking women who probably won't tip so who gives a fuck." It's US so I did cut his tip to a mere 10% (normally I'll easily go 20% at a relatively nice place). But, fuck it. It's tiresome.
And if we had both looked like white male professionals* we'd have been able to be certain that it was just fucking bad service and it wasn't to do with who we were perceived as being.
Now, that was just the one experience. If the experience was repeated I would be more certain, but, of course, I don't know if she and I will ever go back to that restaurant, together. Whatever. Bad service happens, you get over it.
But in both these cases, an ongoing job situation and sexism here on Barbelith, someone's saying there's a problem with sexism, experienced over time, and the knee-jerk reaction from a few, quick-trigger male-identified posters (ones with great wives! even!) is: you're imagining this or you're being over-sensitive or everyone has it rough.... It's just so patronizing (Really? other people have problems? I had no idea, I better not talk about this one!).
And it's especially annoying that in these two cases they were in the very earliest responses, because it can set a tone for the whole discussion: feminist posters are placed in a reactive position of dealing with the asshole, which means it's easy for the problem to get slighted, or vise versa.
*Edited to add professionals, thinking about class as a vector. And then I thought, I suppose other factors could come into play--orientation, etc., of course. And I'm wondering about how I worded the whole thing. But my point is, because of how I look, I wouldn't normally have to think "was race a factor in this bad experience?" |
