Steph Guthrie

The false solidarity of progressive communities

April 1, 2013July 20, 2015 Steph Guthrie3 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about progressive communities, and how they handle criticism of their within-group power dynamics. Maybe it’d be more appropriate to say “groups that consider their collective cause or objective to be a progressive one.” Groups that see themselves as challenging the mainstream or status quo.

Some such communities that come to mind are atheists and skeptics, anarchists, and the free-speech libertarians that populate many corners of the Internet. So central to these groups’ collective identities is the sense of being an underdog in the David & Goliath tradition, whose skill and intellectual superiority will ultimately lead to triumph for themselves and for the greater good. Their own identity is held up in contrast with an unenlightened, perhaps even brutish or primitive status quo or cultural mainstream.

As in most social realms in the western world, white men in these communities tend to have the most power and loudest voices. And, like in most western communities, women and people of colour are rarely treated without skepticism, aggression and hostility when they point this out. But I find there’s something unique (and uniquely frustrating) about challenging sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism, or other forms of bigotry in self-identified progressive communities.

Not only do challengers face the same vitriol, insults and threats of violence they would in any community (sigh), but also other, more insidious manifestations of resistance. Perhaps because these communities valourize rational argument (not a bad thing on its face), dissenters within the ranks must present scientific, peer-reviewed evidence that verifies their lived experiences. When the example of bigotry or power imbalance is too glaring for community members to ignore, challengers face accusations of “derailing” the community from their “core objectives” – as if any group claiming to pursue the greater good can do so while alienating marginalized groups.

There’s this sentiment of “we’re on the same side here, let’s tackle the real problems.” But who gets to define what our collective “side” is, and what problems we aim to tackle? While solidarity is important, dismissing or resisting community members’ good-faith concerns about inclusivity is pretty antithetical to solidarity.

It may be that the notion of not just moral but intellectual rightness as a core element of group identity serves as a barrier to progressive communities’ acceptance of the ways in which they still need to progress. It may be that the closer groups are to one another on the ideological spectrum, the more fraught these challenges become (I think I read something about that in first-year psych). It may be that I just feel more disappointed when my challenges are rebuffed by a group that I do feel should be “on my side” about representation and treatment of marginalized groups. (Personally, the stakes in my disagreements always seem higher when I feel I actually stand a chance of changing the person’s mind or broadening their perspective.) It may be all of these things, it may be none of them. I’m just thinking out loud here.

Have you noticed the same phenomenon or wondered about any of the same things? Are my musings totally off-base? Tell me in the comments!

Building ourselves a future in digital media

March 23, 2013July 20, 2015 Steph Guthrie2 Comments

As a news junkie whose smartphone sometimes requires surgical removal from her hand, I have a vested interest in a thriving environment for the creation and dissemination of digital media. That includes the journalists and editors who produce news, the designers and coders who develop apps, the people who engineer hardware, the community managers who spread the word, and much more.

For our Canadian content and technologies to thrive, we need an industry that attracts and keeps not only “the best” people, but an incredible variety of people. Diverse teams perform better than homogenous ones, so we all benefit from ensuring the diversity of communities that produce and distribute digital media. I’m talking diversity in the broadest sense, here, including things like gender, race and socioeconomic class.

The casualization of working conditions (i.e. an increasing reliance on contractors and particularly interns) threatens the potential for a diverse industry. Many careers in digital media require a high-risk “investment” on the front-end for workers – slugging it out in a no-pay or low-pay job whose opportunities for advancement are rapidly dwindling. Only a small slice of the population can afford that risk.

As the handful of major media companies in Canada lay off hundreds of workers, how many of those full-time internal roles will be partially replaced by a combination of contract work and unpaid interns? How many will not be replaced at all, shrinking the number of decent-paying and often unionized jobs in the sector? And what kind of leverage do independent contractors and interns have to respond to this shifting climate in any way other than to look out for Number One?

When the Canadian Media Guild approached me about creating a walled online community for digital media workers, it was an easy sell. This kind of platform can serve as a useful complement to more formal efforts to organize Canadian digital media workers. It can connect us with people, organizations and initiatives that share our goals and value our skills and knowledge. Just as importantly, it is a place to share experiences with others in our field without fear of being watched by our bosses, as on a Twitter account or Facebook post.

The MediaTech Commons is designed to help us share information and build the connections and confidence to demand better, both in negotiations with our bosses and in our careers writ large.

You can join me at the MediaTech Commons by signing up here, and you can learn more about it here. In French it’s called l’Espace MédiaTech and there’s more info for francophones here.

Dear Jane Doe

March 15, 2013July 20, 2015 Steph Guthrie1 Comment

TRIGGER WARNING for sexual assault and victim-blaming.

I won’t rehash the horrific, digitally documented rape of a 16-year-old girl in Steubenville, OH by multiple young men while other teenagers laughed or shared photos and video of the assault with their friends. I’m taking a cue from Jaclyn Friedman and not using the word “alleged” here because, as she puts it, “there’s video [evidence] and this column is not a court of law.” If you don’t know the case’s background, you can find decent breakdowns here, here, or a million other places on the internet.

Here, I don’t want to tell the story of what happened in Steubenville and the trial taking place as I write this, whose verdict is expected mere days from now. I want to tell the anonymous survivor, whom the media has dubbed Jane Doe, what an incredibly strong and admirable young woman she is.

Going public about a sexual assault (to your family, your friends, your community) is incredibly difficult, particularly if you share mutual acquaintances with your assailant(s). When no physical proof exists (and even when it does), the overwhelming tendency of bystanders is to “not get in the middle of it,” which typically means at least tacitly siding with the accused – in other words, acting as though nothing happened. All too often, people the survivor knows and trusts find ways to assign blame to them and not the accused. You were drunk. What were you wearing? You were flirting with him all night. He’s pretty popular – are you sure you’re not just looking for attention?

Victim-blaming isn’t restricted to people who know both the accused and the accuser. While incapacitated by alcohol at a bar as a university student, I was dragged away, driven home and carried through my apartment door by a sober and opportunistic stranger. I woke up to find this unfamiliar person in my bed, and learned he had had sex with me without a condom while I was incapable of speaking or walking. When I told my roommates what had happened later the next day, they cast suspicious looks in my direction, pointed out how unbelievably wasted I was (as if that didn’t merely prove that what happened was rape), and chided me for “bringing home” a dirty-looking man that nobody knew. A month later they kicked me out of the apartment.

I recently shared this story on Twitter in the wake of a torrent of victim-blaming after former mayoral candidate Sarah Thomson alleged Toronto mayor Rob Ford sexually harassed and assaulted her at a party. At least seven followers then shared their own stories of being blamed for their assaults by their friends, their teachers, their own mothers. If this is what we face when we speak up about our assaults to our loved ones, imagine what happens when a survivor reports their assault to the police.

I want to preface this next part by saying that no survivor of sexual assault is in any way obligated to report their assault to the police, nor does the decision not to report render the survivor a weaker human being. It takes an inordinate amount of strength to survive at all. Survivors of sexual assault owe exactly nothing to the community or to other potential victims, and there are a great many reasons why people do not report. One doesn’t have to look very far to see cases of re-victimization upon reporting, including dismissal or callous disrespect from law enforcement, expulsion from school, being arrested themselves (!!!), and (I shit you not) being straight-up raped again by police officers. The legal system is not a friendly place for sexual assault survivors, and going that route takes a toll even on those who encounter the most benevolent officers.

I don’t know much of anything about Steubenville’s 16-year-old Jane Doe, and that’s as it should be. Nobody deserves privacy more than she, after enduring the violation she has. But I would very much like to shake her hand. I’m overwhelmed by how bravely she is facing, at such a young age, the brutal reality of how communities, the media, and law enforcement treat sexual assault cases. I hope that as she testifies in the courtroom, she feels my and others’ solidarity and rage on her behalf. I hope she has many arms to hug her and ears to listen to her and anything else she needs to find strength and peace in the aftermath. I hope she knows how many survivors she has touched and inspired by coming forward. And while I dearly hope she isn’t crushed by the weight of the discourse surrounding her case, I hope someday she can find solace in knowing that she pushed that discourse forward.

What should we call… Men’s Rights Advocates?

February 22, 2013July 20, 2015 Steph Guthrie116 Comments

The term “Men’s Rights Advocate” and its shorthand, MRA, loom large in many feminist circles. The term is far less familiar to the general population and on its face, the connotations of “Men’s Rights Advocate” seem positive and wholly defensible. After all, patriarchy may bestow privilege upon men and boys (duh) but it also foists on them a variety of problems and sexist expectations worthy of an advocate’s attention. Unfortunately, the term does not honestly represent the modern project of men’s rights advocacy. While today’s MRAs (not necessarily cut from the same cloth as earlier iterations) rail against the sexism men and boys face, their chosen culprit is not patriarchy but feminism.

Men are not denied custody of their children because a sexist society and family law system deem child-rearing a woman’s domain. It’s feminists trying to make sure women take all the kids!!! Women don’t have an easier time getting laid [sometimes against their will, it bears noting] because men and boys are socially instructed by a patriarchal, heterosexist, cissexist culture to view them first and foremost as sexual objects. It’s those pesky feminists encouraging women to lord their sexual dominance over lonely men, muhahahahaha [evil feminist laugh]!!! Girls don’t perform better in the school system because social cues encourage them to be obedient and polite, while boys are encouraged to roughhouse and interrupt. It’s a teaching system brainwashed by feminists to ensure women’s supremacy!!!!

Okay that’s enough, but it should give you some idea of what most MRAs are really about, which is anti-feminism. Some sites and organizations make this agenda more obvious (see: A Voice for Men), while others (see: Canadian Association for Equality) push their agenda more insidiously by, say, hosting a speaker who has a history of calling date rape “exciting” and pontificating about the positive impacts of incest. In fact, A Voice for Men used facial recognition software to doxx and actively encourage the harassment of teenage women who protested this speaker’s appearance on the University of Toronto campus in late 2012. What ties the extreme and less-extreme groups together is their belief that feminism is a barrier to men and boys overcoming gender-based challenges and realizing their potential.

The truth is that men do face challenges in a world that, ironically, has largely been governed by men. Perhaps this is why it’s so easy for MRAs to make feminism the scapegoat – it seems illogical to presume that men are holding themselves back. But patriarchy isn’t one big, discrete, conscious decision. It’s the composite of zillions of decisions: conscious and unconscious, big and tiny, made by humans of all stripes including men, women and trans* people. Collectively these decisions hold back all genders in different ways, but men by far the least so. Their challenges are also counterbalanced by myriad privileges they accrue (often without noticing, because privilege is like that) for simply being guys. On the whole, men (in particular cis, white, straight, able-bodied men) occupy the position of greatest privilege on the gender spectrum.

Recently I got together with some feminists and feminist allies to discuss how to address a recent spread and intensification of anti-feminist activity in Canada, especially on post-secondary campuses. These men and organizations are not so much concerned with reclaiming men’s rights as they are with preserving men’s power and privilege. So we thought let’s call a spade a spade, scrap the “Men’s Rights Advocate” handle and call them Men’s Power Advocates. MPAs: they’re a thing.

Epilogue: Shout-out to the men’s organizations doing great work to challenge sexism and foster positive masculinity, including the White Ribbon Campaign.

Sort-of Review: Manufacturing Depression

February 12, 2013July 20, 2015 Steph Guthrie1 Comment

This is less a review of Gary Greenberg’s 2010 book Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease, and more a description of what I loved about it and why it was useful to me.

The book’s title suggests that Greenberg doesn’t believe depression is a real affliction, but that is not at all the crux of the book. The feelings and struggles are very real, and he doesn’t hesitate to share his own history of depression in great detail. While Greenberg’s analysis does not spare Big Pharma, he does not argue that depression is a profit-driven illusion.

Instead he elucidates how profit-driven scientific research and discovery shaped our collective and individual understandings of depression, its role in our lives, and whether/how to cope with it. He illustrates how a lot of psycho-pharmaceutical research involves discovering neurological reactions, then creating conceptual definitions for conditions whose effects would be reversed or mitigated by those reactions.

Greenberg deftly integrates surprisingly colourful research about the science and business of depression with provocative anecdotes about his personal experiences with it (as a sufferer and as a psychologist). There may or may not be a really entertaining and touching story about how taking ecstasy helped him feel emotionally awake and connect with his partner again.

He is a verbose storyteller (which is maybe part of why I like him…) but his tales are vivid, relatable, and sometimes hilarious. He encourages readers to formulate their own narratives for their mental health journeys, and to consider but not confine themselves to definitions and solutions offered by the industries and professionals that diagnose and treat mental health.

Since it’s that day where we all talk about mental health (can we do that more, please?!), it seemed like the perfect time to recommend this book to anyone interested in these issues for personal development or just food for thought.

“Lady” problems

February 11, 2013July 20, 2015 Steph Guthrie6 Comments

On Friday a woman who I respected as a peer, despite our tendency to disagree on matters relating to feminism, wrote a piece for VICE disparaging forms of womanhood that she considers lesser (certainly less subversive) than her own. She goes as far as to suggest that those who don’t line up with her standards of womanhood (in which the Woman’s impulse when she is wronged or in danger is to destroy her oppressor) are not women at all, but “ladies” or even “girls”.

She crudely used me as an “example” of a lady concerned only with “amicable co-existence with men and ‘the status of women,’ so long as it doesn’t upset the status quo.” Her reasoning? Last year I turned to the justice system to prosecute a man who harassed me incessantly for months on Twitter. Well this guy bothered her too, y’know, and getting rid of him was as easy as being “directly and verbally a cunt” until he disappeared. As such she felt it was within her rights to judge the acceptability of my decision to go to the police, and to deem me an inferior woman (not a Woman, but a “lady”) for it.

“Good ladies, for example, complain daily about female bodies and identities being “policed,” then call the literal police, the literal fucking patriarchy, when something threatens that body or that identity. […] Giving the bro-force some nice, educated, single, white female to protect is the lowest of low things a lady can do, and while it was maybe, depending on her immediate threat level, okay to report him, it would have been far righter to fight back, to go Foxfire on the guy.”

Thanks, Sarah. I’m glad to have “maybe” secured your approval for the choice I made in order to protect myself, although it was “the lowest of the low” things I could have done [?????????]. The morally superior choice, the “righter” choice, would have been vigilante justice, “going Foxfire” on the guy. If only all women being relentlessly pursued and harassed by men who come across as hostile toward women and emotionally unhinged (perhaps dangerously so) knew that they could just form a gang and beat the living shit out of the guy.

I’m not entirely sure that such choices would end as poetically IRL as they do in, well, literature and films. I’m also not entirely sure how responsible it is to advise the readers of a publication that this is the “righter” way for women to deal with situations that make them feel unsafe. But then, Women probably don’t concern themselves much with issues of personal responsibility because they’re far too visceral for that.

For most people, I hope it would go without saying that perhaps Sarah’s experience with this guy was not identical to mine, and perhaps she is in no position to determine what the best way to handle it would have been, because we are not the same person nor are we in identical situations.

The police and the justice system are far from perfect, both on the handling-gendered-violence front and the knowing-what-the-internet-is front. I am more than a little insulted at the insinuation that I’m naive to their roles in the patriarchy. But there are officers who are doing what they can to push their institutions in the right direction. I was lucky enough to find such an officer, who spoke in front of a group of his peers last week about online harassment at SMILE (Social Media in Law Enforcement) Conference.

I would never attempt to prescribe the most appropriate or “right” way for a woman to cope with a situation in which she feels unsafe and in which I lack personal knowledge – I’ll leave that sordid task to other Women. The truth is for many women in many situations, the police are not a viable option. But I’m not willing to wholly write them off, and I’m certainly not willing to make determinations about the character of any woman who turns to them in her pursuit of justice and safety.

The more officers like Detective Bangild find opportunities to do good work and set positive examples for their peers, the more viable police may become as an option for women in dangerous situations. And if some Women continue to choose vigilante justice over courtroom justice, well, I wish them the very best in those endeavours and hope they choose their tools and targets wisely. There are many routes to personal safety and peace of mind, and none of these routes make the traveller any less a woman.

What should we call… “trolling”?

February 4, 2013July 20, 2015 Steph Guthrie13 Comments

There’s a problem I’ve been encountering a lot in my travels as an internet feminist. Sometimes the presently available language for describing a phenomenon is wholly inadequate, and sometimes the consequences are harmful. The internet has been going through a bit of a popular-use growth spurt in the last several years, and a lot of things (governance, commerce, the legal system) are struggling to catch up. Language is one of those things, so I’ve decided to start a series on my blog examining the phenomena I feel are begging for re-definition.

I think we’ve long since reached the point of linguistic inadequacy with the word “trolling”. It’s only gotten worse since the mainstream media picked up on the concept in its most rudimentary form. These days it seems like 75% of the time I see the word “trolling”, the context implies its meaning is something along the lines of “being mean on the internet” (um, nope.jpg).

So what do we talk about when we talk about trolling? I tend to think of trolling as provocation for provocation’s sake. In other words, intent is an important part of the definition, and a troll’s primary intent is to get a rise out of someone. Urban Dictionary, o holiest of internet linguistic tomes, backs me up on this one. (Worth noting: all the most popular Urban Dictionary definitions had a high number of downvotes as well as upvotes, suggesting that definitions of trolling are pretty contested terrain.) One of the most popular definitions of trolling says, among other things, “…trolling statements are never true or are ever meant to be construed as such” and “trolling isn’t simply harmful statements”.

THANK YOU, PERSON WHO WROTE THAT. In so many of the instances in which the popular press (and the general public) apply the label “trolling”, they’re referring to sincere statements from people who believe every word they’re saying. These alleged “trolls” have myriad intentions that may include getting a rise out of their target, but also include silencing their target, humiliating their target, inspiring fear or emotional distress in their target, etc etc etc. It’s not provocation merely for provocation’s sake, and the stakes are much higher.

The word “trolling” is not appropriate for these situations, and that’s largely why ye olde adage “Don’t feed the trolls” is such absolute bunk advice in these situations. If the person’s primary intent were to get a rise out of you, then sure, “feeding” that desire would probably be unwise. But what if the person’s primary intent is to silence you, to erase your voice and your presence from their jealously guarded spaces for online social interaction? Following the “don’t feed the trolls” advice would be giving them exactly what they wanted, wouldn’t it?

It’s one thing to erroneously apply the “trolling” label when referring to someone simply being a dick on the internet. I can live with that. But when we apply it to people who are spewing hateful things about people of colour, women, queer people, trans* people… When we apply it to people who orchestrate months-long campaigns of harassment intended to terrorize the target… When we apply it to people uttering death threats and rape threats… Well, we’re insulting the targets of this hatred and harassment, and I’d even go so far as to say we’re insulting THE PROUD INTERNET TRADITION of trolling itself.

I’d argue these kinds of behaviours shouldn’t be defined differently on the internet than they are offline. We don’t need special internet words for hate speech, harassment, or death threats. These words already exist. But to appease the many who seem hell-bent on calling this stuff “trolling”, would it be worthwhile to come up with a new expression for this kind of internet treachery? What should we call it? Tell me in the comments.

I thought I hated improv, but…

January 30, 2013July 20, 2015 Steph Guthrie

As you know (right???), I recently became a faculty member at Academy of the Impossible, a collaborative adult learning facility. Last week, this new role took me outside my comfort zone when I facilitated an improv-based session on the “performance” of online identity with the inimitable Dan Speerin. It was actually awesome and liberating and inclusive and super-fun. And we’re doing it again!

This Saturday February 2nd, Dan and I are working with Academy co-founder Jesse Hirsh to facilitate an improv-based session on media relations for activists and other muckrakers. Dan and I planned the session via Skype last night and we have a bunch of fun improv exercises in store that will liven up more traditional discussion about how to best present you and your cause to the media (print, broadcast, web, whatev).

If you’re involved with any organization or issue that you’d like to shine some light on by sharing your perspective with journalists, this session is for you. Hope to see you there!

Kathleen Wynne was the right choice for Ontario

January 29, 2013July 20, 2015 Steph Guthrie

Yesterday evening I wrote a short essay for Canada.com on why I believe Kathleen Wynne is well positioned to lead her party’s minority government in Ontario.
I did found an organization called “Women in Toronto Politics” so you probably could’ve guessed I’d be thrilled about Ontario’s first woman Premier (and a queer woman at that!). But Wynne stands to offer a lot more than her mere gender identity and sexual orientation. Check out the essay to learn more about why I’m stoked re: this new development!