Oppressing the overdog

[Tabouli]

Sheryll:

>Excellents posts, both of you. Let me throw another
>thought out to you. Let's not forget that the
>discrimination goes both ways.

Phew, you wouldn't ever, ever, *ever* catch me forgetting that, let me tell you.  Quite apart from living in Australia, Land of the Tall Poppy Choppers, I could dredge up tens of examples from my own personal experience alone (the amount of punishment I cop for being my father's favorite, presumably to correct the supposed pampering, is enough to make me avoid my family almost completely).
 
As well as being stridently opposed to homophobia in all its horrid guises, I am also opposed to oppressing the overdog.   Hence my comments about physical beauty being a mixed blessing for women a few months ago.
 
A case in point: a couple of years ago, I took a short course in Modern Greek on the island of Ikaria.  Every now and then, this stunning French woman called Sandrine would turn up at the school, apparently because she was trying to cultivate a relationship with Michaelis, one of our teachers.  She didn't say much, and wore sleeveless summer dresses which were short but not outrageously so (mid thigh-ish).  The reaction from the other women (all the students were women, mostly aged 30-50) in the course was quite disturbing.  "Why doesn't she say more?  She thinks she's too good to talk to us" (had she been ugly, I bet they'd have said the poor thing was shy, and that we should make more of an effort to bring her out of herself).  "Poor Michaelis, I hope he sees through her." (poor Sandrine, more like: given no-one had really talked to her, who were they to assume she was a manipulative bimbo on the basis of her looks alone?).  "For God's sake, does she have to swan about in those cutesy little dresses all the time?" (um, it was very hot, and they did suit her: why shouldn't she?)
 
Worst of all, at the a party I engaged in a little mild bantering with Michaelis, and as I left one of the other women started laughing uncontrollably.  "You should have seen Sandrine's face when you were flirting with Michaelis!  She just scowled and scowled, and the more you flirted, the more she scowled and the MORE I LAUGHED!"  Seriously nasty stuff.  In the end I decided to befriend poor Sandrine myself, and she was actually intelligent (she was working in Athens as an interpreter) and pleasant, and seemed quite relieved to have someone to talk to after sensing the hostility from the other women.

The same goes for savaging men on the grounds that it's their turn to suffer for a change (for God's sake, doesn't female chauvinism come under the "two wrongs don't make a right" category?), being horrible to thin women (um, isn't the issue we're fighting about body image?  Surely degrading women on the basis of their body shape applies to both ends of the spectrum?), Sheryll's example and so on.  OK, so oppression is horrible, and it's natural for oppressed groups to want a better deal, but surely vengeance (oppress the oppressor back), however satisfying in the short term, only perpetuates the problem, especially given that the oppressed are by definition fighting from a position of less power.  
 
In my view, any change in an oppressive status quo requires that the overdogs be willing to understand, make an effort and  sacrifice some of their privileges.  If they're constantly under vicious assault from the less fortunate, only a very understanding, compassionate minority are likely to do this: the rest will probably say "well sod you then, I win, I have more power and I'm keeping it, so bad luck" and rush off to reinforce the walls, widen the moat and insert their ear plugs.  I see it all the time in the gender issue department.

This issue also plagues cross-cultural training.  I have heard of sessions where upset staff have walked out because they felt that they were being taught that being a middle class white Australian (read: overdogs) made them intrinsically bad oppressive and racist people and that they needed to make concessions for every other culture.  Um, trainer, hello???  If you're teaching cross-cultural sensitivity, being very insensitive to your audience's culture is *not* a great place to start!

Sigh.  It's a cruel, hard world...

Tabouli.


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