Dog Ear Publishing

Tolerant Oppression: Why Promoting Tolerance Undermines Our Quest for Equality and What We Should Do Instead

beth — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

On the surface, tolerance seems like an innocuous concept. We’ve heard it before in relation to diversity, acceptance, and other key words that denote something positive. However, a deeper look into the idea reveals a mess of conflicting messages and confusion. For those who have never considered the concept of tolerance from this perspective before, Dr. Scott Hampton provides a handbook of sorts that critically assesses tolerance. Each of the 110 mini-chapters works to debunk the idea that tolerance is enough in order to achieve harmony.

Hampton uses quotes from respected leaders and a variety of exercises to illustrate and demonstrate his points, making this a light and quick read. In fact, its format makes it a useful teaching tool for those looking to challenge their own or others’ views on tolerance. The point is driven home all throughout, but the exercises allow for readers to reach their own conclusions as well.

To explain how tolerance simply isn’t enough, Hampton draws on a variety of controversial and hot button issues such as sexism, suicide, human trafficking, and more. The moral and ethical arguments surrounding these issues serve to support his points and give him an opportunity to present ideas such as, “Tolerance is politically correct hatred.” He suggests alternatives to tolerance like acceptance, understanding, and respect, because these words are less likely to be confused and more accurately describe what a person typically means when they say tolerance.

Many who are part of traditionally oppressed groups will see the logic to Hampton’s claims. Being tolerated isn’t enough, and it only serves to further enforce differences. Tolerance perpetuates the idea that one group or person is superior to another rather than challenging that very idea. On one hand, this might seem like a simple case of bad word choice, but given the fact that many people and organizations hold tolerance up as the goal or hoped-for end result, it is worthwhile to take a moment to identify what we truly want (justice, equality, etc.) and how we might better achieve it.

Written by: Shana Mattson, January 29th 2011

Why Don’t You Understand?: A Gender Relationship Dictionary

mandy — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Karen Gail Lewis

Dog Ear Publishing

Is it just me, or should a person with designation “Dr.” in front of her name know the difference between sex and gender? True: language changes all the time and words gain new meanings. So, as American society becomes increasingly uptight when talking about sex (the act), sex (the anatomical distinction) has been replaced in our vernacular with a word that refers to the classic assumptions for social role play placed upon each sex: gender. (It would seem we’re the new Victorians.)

This ambiguity isn’t the only issue I have with Dr. Karen Gail Lewis’ Why Don’t You Understand?. While the good doctor (of education) assumes that women are generally oversensitive, spontaneously emotional, nagging crackpots and men are under-responsive, clueless dingbats, and in doing so assumes too much; her real crime is in assuming that heterosexual couples are made up of these two parts universally. The answer to your query, Doc, isn’t that men and women don’t understand each other sometimes because we are different from each other owing to our sexes, but that people in general are unique individuals and, therefore, different from each other irrespective of their sexes.

It is the case that this dictionary comes along twenty or so years too late, now that we’ve been liberated from gender in many ways. Not all men have trouble expressing their feelings because they live in fear of a beating from dad or name-calling from school bullies. Yet Lewis has the audacity to make blanket observations like: “Men do not confront a relationship problem unless absolutely necessary because – like the boy who took apart and re-assembled a clock, only to have one piece left over – the risk is that they’ll make things much worse.”

Do men in homosexual relationships both behave this same way? If so, how do their problems get solved? What about women who don’t confront relationship problems head on? Are they abnormal? This text prompts many questions like these.

Education is never a waste. It’s a great idea to recognize your, and your partner’s, patterns of behavior. This can help you avoid many of the miscommunications detailed in this book. But the problem with gender assumptions is that they limit us. You can believe in astrology, for instance, but that doesn’t mean that you believe all people born under the sign of Aquarius are friendly yet unpredictable, at least not in the same exact way as the next Aquarian.

Of course, Lewis could have avoided this overwhelming analytic pitfall by eliminating the language of assumption. She could have described scenarios between Individual A and Individual B rather than Category Man and Category Woman. She could have contributed to the emerging relevance of queer theory, which challenges sex and gender binaries and their resulting “normal” behaviors. It is the acceptance of gender fluidity that liberates men and women by allowing us each to be the kind of person it feels good to be.

Written by: Rachel Moehl, October 24th 2010

My Sweet Wild Dance

kristin — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000

By Mikaya Heart

Dog Ear Publishing

It is always difficult for me, as a writer, to review another’s work. I find sentiment and solidarity too often hold sway, making me a bit kinder than I should be to those whose ghastly prose tarnishes the craft I have spent so many long years attempting to master. As someone’s whose known both praise and condemnation in my own career, I find myself, perhaps far too often, seeking some positive contribution I can offer to a fellow wordsmith, something which at least partially redeems the frequently soul-crushing process of reading critiques of one‘s own work. After wading through My Sweet Wild Dance, reluctantly in the end and with only the reviewer’s duty as motivation, I find there is neither sentiment nor solidarity enough in the world.

The language itself is not truly horrific, but neither does it offer any literary value. The constant use of the present tense, which can offer such intensity and immediacy in the right hands, seems a meaningless affectation here. The descriptions are rather vague and well, nondescript. The much-ballyhooed dialect shift between British and American English is barely noticeable as neither is written very convincingly as a distinct dialect. And there are no sentences or passages that grab the senses or make you want to read them again to relive the experience. The words are just there.

So, language is a but not the problem. It’s the plot, the perspective, and the characters that truly offend. Although purportedly the true story of “an extraordinary and courageous woman,” My Sweet Wild Dance comes off as nothing more than New Age navel-gazing, devoid of both empathy for the other characters that people the book and any sign that either the author or the protagonist has done enough real self-reflection to confront her own perceptions or prejudices. The central narcissism of the book is best exemplified, I think, in the author’s choice to deny many of her male characters a unique identity, labeling them all John as “what matters is how they affect the protagonist, Chris, at that time period.” No female character is similarly treated; each is given her own name at least. However, none of the characters, male or female, take on any real depth or humanity. They are merely one-dimensional stage props for Chris, who manages to be only two-dimensional herself while flitting disjointedly from one poorly portrayed, stereotypical life-event to another.

The worst aspect of the book is the gratuitous misandry that simply leaps from the page. Through most of the story, we are presented ad nauseum with one detestable male character after another, not a single one given the option of being merely unlikable. Instead, men are indicted, by both implication and outright accusation, of being nothing more than child abusers, molesters, and rapists, devoid of any sympathy for or true emotional connection with anyone or anything beyond their own genitals. We do eventually see a male character with some humanity, but he is set up to apologize for his sex and is described as if he, a man of integrity, is some sort of rare species and thus further proof of the depravity of the overwhelming majority of men.

The problems only compound themselves from there as we travel into the land of New Age woo and pseudo-empowerment. But really, it’s no more worth further dissection than it is worth reading.

Written by: Melinda Barton, September 19th 2010