For a good example of why I cannot take feminist theory very seriously, have a look at this response to my comment on Scott Alexander’s latest post ("Untitled").

Short recap: Scott Aaronson posted a long and rather vulnerable and personal bit on feeling oppressed by feminists, to which feminists mostly responded by bullying him. Classy bunch. Apparently because Aaronson is too polite, Scott Alexander wrote an epic 8,000-word comment on the situation basically calling feminists out for being bullies. Alexander’s post makes an exhausting number of points, but one of the better ones, I think, is questioning the implicit assumption that a lot of Social Justice types seem to have that oppression is an all-or-nothing thing. That is, if my oppression is worse than yours, then you are, functionally speaking, not oppressed at all (or at least forbidden from complaining about your oppression until mine is completely resolved). No, they don’t explicitly hold this view, but they frequently act like they do, so it belongs on the table for discussion.

At issue: whether the kind of oppression that nerds face counts as "structural oppression."

Commenter TealTerror defines it thusly:

It’s true that there are many different definitions of structural oppression. That’s because social theory is hard. Nevertheless, the basic idea is relatively straightforward: oppression is structural when it’s mainly caused by institutions and society, as opposed to contingent historical circumstance.

I think this is a useful distinction. No, we’re not exclusively concerned with oppression of the structural kind: we’d like to live in a world where the greatest number maximized their potential to the greatest extent. But while we’re still in the process of society/civilization-building, we can at least make sure that the system we’re building isn’t adding problems of its own. So, if TealTerror wants to disqualify any oppression that isn’t caused by society, I’m OK with that.

What I’m not OK with is his clearly selective application of this principle.

For example: some people go out in the wilderness with little preparation. They are far more likely to die than people who don’t. While these deaths are tragic, they are not structural, because each individual incident has no (non-remote) causal connection with (most of) the others. They’re not linked together in the appropriate way. Contrast this with, for example, racial oppression, which was not only codified in law for centuries, both formal and informal, but even today is maintained through socioeconomic segregation, governmental policies, media narratives, etc. Now then. While there are controversies with how exactly “nerd” is defined, I will grant for the sake of argument that “shy male nerds” as a group have a higher level of anxiety, particularly about their sexualities, than the average. I will also grant that they are sometimes, or even often, mocked for being nerds. For this to be structural, however, these bad things (I don’t deny they’re bad!) need to be caused by general societal and institutional forces, and not merely by individuals acting (mostly) independently.

Agreed. But you know, what makes you think they’re not? They would seem to me to be clearly caused by society – at least by any definition that feminists accept. More to the point, the example of Scott Aaronson that started this discussion very definitely is so. Mr. Aaronson’s claim is not that he naturally came to the conclusion all by himself that his sexuality was oppressive, but rather that he was told so many times by people all around him that it was that he started feeling (pathologically) guitly about it. So, that would be "society," then.

Even if you don’t want to stick to Scott Aaronson, just think about how it comes to be that nerds can’t get girls. It’s really just "they’re too shy?" Give me a goram break. They’re shy because they get beat up, given wedgies and swirlies, etc. And even if your school didn’t go to that stereotypical extreme (my junior high did, for the record), there’s still a kind of whisper campaign of making fun of nerds in public as a way of diminishing their status. Jocks get their social status points on the football field, and they guard them jealously. And as we know from general sociological consensus, which guys get girlfriends is contingent mostly on social status. In fact, I’m tempted here to just write "status" a hundred times to hammer home that this actually is about society.

So, I posted a litmus question – basically asking whether TealTerror considered "fat shaming" and "slut shaming" examples of structural oppression. If they are, then you pretty much have to concede that nerds are structurally oppressed, since the kind of oppression they fact takes a similar form.

So, a litmus question. Are “fat shaming” and “slut shaming” part of the structural oppression women face? If so, I think you’ll want to move whatever oppression nerds face closer along the spectrum toward racism and sexism – i.e. closer to the “definitely structural” end – because discrimination against nerds takes a similar form.

The response makes me thing he’s (she’s?) deliberately missing my point:

“Slut shaming” is part of structural oppression of women, yes. However, I’d say “fat shaming” lies on a different axis, since it’s applied to all genders.

Because the point was totally about whether women are oppressed and nothing to do with what counts as structural oppression. Oops, I mean, the opposite of that. OK, I opened the door by putting "that women face" at the end of that sentence, but I think the thrust of my point was still clear: we’re talking about what counts as "structural oppression," not directly whether women suffer from it. More irrelevance:

I actually think discrimination against nerds is the opposite of slut shaming: women get slut shamed because they have sex; nerds get “nerd shamed” (if you will) because they (we) don’t.

As though the point were about "whether you get shamed for having sex" rather than "whether you get shamed."

Here’s the clincher:

One other thing I should say about “nerd shaming.” Inasmuch as it is structural, it’s a product of the patriarchy, not sexism. Both Scotts (Alexander and Aaronson) assert that when feminists use “patriarchy,” they just mean any sort of gender roles whatsoever. While some feminists may indeed make this mistake, this is not what the term means. Part of patriarchy involves gender roles that specifically advantage men (as a whole) over women (as a whole).

So, we’re deliberately missing Aaronson and Alexander’s point(s) – which is that just because you’re not maximally oppressed, it hardly follows that you’re not oppressed in any meaningful way. The argument here seems to be that nerds are compensated for their oppression by being male. You know, they suffer from the patriarchy, but since the patriarchy benefits males in general, they get some kind of (nonspecified) kickback. This seems really weak. In followup comments on the same thread to other commenters, he/she suggests that the best way for nerds to fight their oppression is by fighting the patriarchy alongside feminists. Which just gets around to begging the question of why, if feminists and nerds are natural allies in the fight against patriarchy, feminists feel the need to beat down nerds so hard. Here’s the (one of many, actually) offending quote:

OK, so many nerds are unable to ask women out and suffer because of it. I blame the patriarchy for this. You blame feminist rhetoric. I posit that one of these things is a much more powerful force than the other, and thus is far more to blame. It is not the force that either Scott chooses to target.

First of all, that conclusion is inconssitent with Aaronson’s post. How did "patriarchy" cause Aaronson’s misery? By filling him with the idea that his personal worth is contingent on how many girls he attracts (or similar). But Aaronson describes his attraction as a biological impulse that he tried to find a biological solution to – a desire that he tried to have removed. The patriarchy would be encouraging him to have that desire, if the measure of patriarchal success is "success with women." It was expressly the feminists, not the jocks, that told him that wanting women was dirty and shameful.

But the point is that even if we grant TealTerror’s wilful misinterpretation of the situation, we still have the question of why feminist rhetoric needs to be so hard on Aaronson and people like him if they supposedly have the same enemies. TealTerror’s likely response (and one that he/she in fact makes later) is that this sort of divide-and-conquer situation is all part and parcel of patriarchal oppression. But that simply doesn’t square: if that’s really his/her concern, he/she should have no trouble conceding that feminist rhetoric is needlessly harsh and often aimed at the wrong targets all while arguing that Scott Aaronson is less oppressed than he perceives himself to be. And yet the tactic he chooses to take instead is to insist that Scott Aaronson is not really structurally oppressed in the first place.

Anyway, you gotta marvel at the kind of mind that goes from "nerd oppression isn’t structural" to "I blame the patriarchy (aka the thing we invented structural oppression to explain) for nerd suffering." Well.

So TealTerror’s arguments are a hot mess. Scott Aaronson must recognize that the patriarchy is his real enemy, but we don’t have any time to acknowledge that Scott Aaronson may have suffered in no small part because feminists are unable to similarly recognize that patriarchy is his real enemy and that they’re therefore allies. Oh, and by the way, even though nerds are oppressed by the patriarchy, their oppression is entirely internal and not structural. Or something.

Point being – this isn’t actually TealTerror’s fault. These concepts are muddied by design, because they need to be big-tent enough to win allies for feminists, but shrinkable down to "only women matter" when it comes time to actually do anything.

The bottom line in the Scott Aaronson affair is what it always was: nothing he said in his post meritied the abusive response he got from internet feminists, and the general dearth of any prominent feminists willing to call the abusers out for their behavior tells you all you really need to know about what kind of movement this is. If TealTerror is right and feminists and Aaronson have a shared interest in fighting patriarchy, then it shouldn’t be too difficult to find feminists sticking up for nerds. And yet it is. So, feminism is about something else, then.

(PS – I will make these points on Alexander’s thread shortly; at the moment, comments seem to be off for the night.)