| > I hate it more than I can say when I read books or listen to talks and performances by men who tell and ‘interpret’ women’s stories, and who are kind enough then to suggest to us ways in which our lives as women might be improved. I’ve never wanted to do the same to them What a weird take on things: let's apply neat little discrete labels to every person and pretend that the experiences of each particular combination of labels is so radically different from everybody else's that we can't possibly learn anything from anybody else. > but the knowledge of psychology, myth and folklore that I’ve acquired over the past several decades isn’t restricted to women, and it seems a pity to hold back information and ideas that might be useful Ah, some common sense prevailed. Thank goodness. It can't possibly be the case that when men do the same it's somehow with the same goal of trying to be useful; no, it must be that they are trying to "'interpret' women's stories". Look, I'm an immigrant queer disabled man, and if all I did was listening to what other immigrant queer disabled men had to say and looked down on input from other people my information bubble would be very small indeed. Fortunately, most people are willing to listen to all sorts of other people and judge what they have to say fot what it is, not based on some labels we assigned to the source. And conversely, when the information they have provided falls below our standards, we should place the blame on the individual rather than the collective that we think they belong to. |