{"id":29530,"date":"2015-01-05T04:00:14","date_gmt":"2015-01-05T09:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29530"},"modified":"2015-01-04T11:48:13","modified_gmt":"2015-01-04T16:48:13","slug":"scott-aaronson-on-white-male-privilege-as-experienced-at-mit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/01\/05\/scott-aaronson-on-white-male-privilege-as-experienced-at-mit\/","title":{"rendered":"Scott Aaronson on “white male privilege” as experienced at MIT"},"content":{"rendered":"

Down in the comments<\/a> on this post<\/a>, Scott Aaronson gets extremely personal:<\/p>\n

… You also say that men in STEM fields \u2014 unlike those in the humanities and social sciences \u2014 don\u2019t even have the \u201crequisite vocabulary\u201d to discuss sex discrimination, since they haven\u2019t read enough feminist literature. Here I can only speak for myself: I\u2019ve read at least a dozen feminist books, of which my favorite was Andrea Dworkin\u2019s Intercourse<\/em> (I like howls of anguish much more than bureaucratic boilerplate, so in some sense, the more radical the feminist, the better I can relate). I check Feministing<\/em>, and even radfem blogs like I Blame the Patriarchy<\/em>. And yes, I\u2019ve read many studies and task force reports about gender bias, and about the \u201cprivilege\u201d and \u201centitlement\u201d of the nerdy males that\u2019s keeping women away from science.<\/p>\n

Alas, as much as I try to understand other people\u2019s perspectives, the first reference to my \u201cmale privilege\u201d \u2014 my privilege!<\/em> \u2014 is approximately where I get off the train, because it\u2019s so alien to my actual lived experience. This is not, insanely, to suggest a lack of misogyny in the modern world! To whatever extent there is<\/em> misogyny, one could say that there\u2019s also \u201cmale privilege.\u201d Rather it\u2019s to suggest that, given what nerdy males have themselves had to endure in life, shaming them over their \u201cmale privilege\u201d is a bad way to begin a conversation with them.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But I suspect the thought that being a nerdy male might not<\/em> make me \u201cprivileged\u201d \u2014 that it might even have put me into one of society\u2019s least<\/em> privileged classes \u2014 is completely alien to your way of seeing things. To have any hope of bridging the gargantuan chasm between us, I\u2019m going to have to reveal something about my life, and it\u2019s going to be embarrassing.<\/p>\n

(sigh) Here\u2019s the thing: I spent my formative years \u2014 basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s \u2014 feeling not \u201centitled,\u201d not \u201cprivileged,\u201d but terrified<\/strong>. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison. And furthermore, that the people who did these things to me would somehow be morally right<\/em> to do them \u2014 even if I couldn\u2019t understand how.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You can call that my personal psychological problem if you want, but it was strongly reinforced by everything I picked up from my environment: to take one example, the sexual-assault prevention workshops we had to attend regularly as undergrads, with their endless lists of all the forms of human interaction that \u201cmight be\u201d sexual harassment or assault, and their refusal, ever, to specify anything that definitely wouldn\u2019t<\/em> be sexual harassment or assault. I left each of those workshops with enough fresh paranoia and self-hatred to last me through another year.<\/p>\n

My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erd\u00f6s did. Anything<\/em>, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which for me, meant being consumed by desires that one couldn\u2019t act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness.<\/p>\n

Of course, I was smart enough to realize that maybe this was silly, maybe I was overanalyzing things. So I scoured the feminist literature for any statement to the effect that my fears were<\/em> as silly as I hoped they were. But I didn\u2019t find any. On the contrary: I found reams of text about how even the most ordinary male\/female interactions are filled with \u201cmicroaggressions,\u201d and how even the most \u201cenlightened\u201d males \u2014 especially<\/em> the most \u201cenlightened\u201d males, in fact \u2014 are filled with hidden entitlement and privilege and a propensity to sexual violence that could burst forth at any moment.<\/p>\n

Because of my fears \u2014 my fears of being \u201couted\u201d as a nerdy heterosexual male, and therefore<\/em> as a potential creep or sex criminal \u2014 I had constant suicidal thoughts. As Bertrand Russell wrote of his own adolescence: \u201cI was put off from suicide only by the desire to learn more mathematics.\u201d<\/p>\n

At one point, I actually begged a psychiatrist to prescribe drugs that would chemically castrate me (I had researched which ones), because a life of mathematical asceticism was the only future that I could imagine for myself. The psychiatrist refused to prescribe them, but he also couldn\u2019t suggest any alternative: my case genuinely stumped him. As well it might \u2014 for in some sense, there was nothing \u201cwrong\u201d with me. In a different social context \u2014 for example, that of my great-grandparents in the shtetl \u2014 I would have gotten married at an early age and been completely fine. (And after a decade of being coy about it, I suppose I\u2019ve finally revealed the meaning of this blog\u2019s title.) This is not, in any way, shape, or form, to suggest that I yearn for an era when women could be purchased as property. There were many times and places where marriages did not<\/em> occur without both parties\u2019 consent, but there was also a ritualized system of courtship that took much of the terror and mystery out of the process. Even that is not exactly what I \u201cyearn\u201d for; I merely say it\u2019s what I felt \u201coptimized\u201d for.<\/strong><\/p>\n

All this time, I faced constant reminders that the males who didn\u2019t<\/em> spend months reading and reflecting about feminism and their own shortcomings \u2014 even the ones who went to the opposite extreme, who engaged in what you called \u201cgood old-fashioned ass-grabbery\u201d \u2014 actually had success<\/em> that way. The same girls who I was terrified would pepper-spray me and call the police if I looked in their direction, often responded to the crudest advances of the most Neanderthal of men by accepting<\/em> those advances. Yet it was I, the nerd, and not<\/em> the Neanderthals, who needed to check his privilege and examine his hidden entitlement! Contrary to what countless people have said, this is not intended to blame women for their choices \u2014 or even, really, to blame the Neanderthals. Rather, it\u2019s intended to blame a culture that told male nerds since childhood that they\u2019d be horrible people if they asked \u2014 even more horrible than if they didn\u2019t<\/em> ask! \u2014 thereby ceding the field to the Neanderthals by default.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So what happened to break me out of this death-spiral? Did I have an epiphany, where I realized that despite all appearances, it was I<\/em>, the terrified nerd, who was wallowing in unearned male privilege, while those Neaderthal ass-grabbers were actually, on some deeper level, the compassionate feminists \u2014 and therefore, that both of us deserved everything we got?<\/p>\n

No, there was no such revelation. All that happened was that I got older, and after years of hard work, I achieved some success in science, and that success boosted my self-confidence (at least now I had something<\/em> worth living for), and the newfound confidence, besides making me more attractive, also made me able to (for example) ask a woman out, despite<\/em> not being totally certain that my doing so would pass muster with a committee of radfems chaired by Andrea Dworkin \u2014 a prospect that was previously unthinkable to me. This, to my mind, \u201cdefiance\u201d of feminism is the main reason why I was able to enjoy a few years of a normal, active dating life, which then led to meeting the woman who I married.<\/p>\n

Now, the whole time I was struggling with this, I was also fighting a second battle: to maintain the liberal, enlightened, feminist ideals that I had held since childhood, against a powerful current pulling me away from them. I reminded myself, every day, that no, there\u2019s no conspiracy to make the world a hell for shy male nerds. There are only individual women and men trying to play the cards they\u2019re dealt, and the confluence of their interests sometimes leads to crappy outcomes. No woman \u201cowes\u201d male nerds anything; no woman deserves blame if she prefers the Neanderthals; everyone\u2019s free choice demands respect.<\/p>\n

That I managed to climb out of the pit with my feminist beliefs mostly intact, you might call a triumph of abstract reason over experience.<\/p>\n

But I hope you now understand why I might feel \u201conly\u201d 97% on board with the program of feminism. I hope you understand why, despite my ironclad commitment to women\u2019s reproductive choice and affirmative action and women\u2019s rights in the developing world and getting girls excited about science, and despite my horror at rape and sexual assault and my compassion for the victims of those heinous crimes, I might react icily to the claim \u2014 for which I\u2019ve seen not a shred of statistical evidence \u2014 that women are being kept out of science by the privileged, entitled culture of shy male nerds<\/em>, which is worse than the culture of male doctors or male filmmakers or the males of any other profession. I believe you guys call this sort of thing \u201cblaming the victim.\u201d From my perspective, it serves only to shift blame from the Neanderthals and ass-grabbers onto some of society\u2019s least<\/em> privileged males, the ones who were themselves victims of bullying and derision, and who acquired enough toxic shame that way for appealing to their shame to be an effective way to manipulate their behavior. As I see it, whenever these nerdy males pull themselves out of the ditch the world has tossed them into, while still maintaining enlightened liberal beliefs, including in the inviolable rights of every woman and man<\/em>, they don\u2019t deserve blame for whatever feminist shortcomings they might still have. They deserve medals at the White House. This is obvious hyperbole.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

H\/T to Scott Alexander<\/a>, who has much to say about both Aaronson’s painful confession and the rather over-the-top responses to it from the feminist community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Down in the comments on this post, Scott Aaronson gets extremely personal: … You also say that men in STEM fields \u2014 unlike those in the humanities and social sciences \u2014 don\u2019t even have the \u201crequisite vocabulary\u201d to discuss sex discrimination, since they haven\u2019t read enough feminist literature. Here I can only speak for myself: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,13],"tags":[987,912,139,255,764],"class_list":["post-29530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-usa","tag-feminism","tag-privilege","tag-psychology","tag-sexuality","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7Gi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29530"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29534,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29530\/revisions\/29534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}