Why is comparing Womanface to Blackface offensive?

It's not just Asian men who exploit white working class women and girls either. The class angle tends to be handwaved or ignored when I talk to liberal Americans. Here it can't be.

I'm reminded of my former neighbour - grew up in care, neglected and abused, teenage mother, heroin addict, child taken away, horribly vulnerable, doing her best, sanctioned for three years, forced to prostitute herself. The people who moved themselves into her house and turned it into a crack den while beating her and letting her be raped by all and sundry - their actions weren't dependent on them having socially-powerful skin tones. They were black and she was white. They were all at the bottom of the economic ladder, to the point they were exclusively reliant on crime - not even working class but underclass. But they were men, and she was a woman, so she was fucked for their benefit.

Colour's the excuse du jour, men are the reason.

(I'm going to shut up now lest I put my foot in my mouth, but my thanks to the black women who've taken the time to explain their objections - makes a welcome change from Americans assuming I must be racist because I don't automatically and intuitively understand things from the perspective of Americans of non-European descent.)

I wasn't bringing up what the English did to the Highland Scots as a suggestion for using that as some kind of framing for what men are currently doing to women. I was pointing out that men always steal from those they oppress, whilst trying to stop the oppressed taking possession of what belongs to them.

We need our own words for men's fetishisation, appropriation and colonisation of women and our bodies. Feminists have always done this - coining our own terms for what men do to us. We'll do it again.

My family survived a genocidal event under British colonial rule. As a result of years of colonial oppression my mother grew up in poverty. As a young woman she had to endure racism, walking past signs in windows saying people of her race weren't welcome. She moved to a country where her ancestors were chained for their political beliefs and who became an underclass. When she had me, she taught me that racial markers such as my black frizzy hair was a sign that I was strongly representative of characteristics of my race. She taught me that when I was bad, it was because I was inheriting those racial characteristics. Things I read as a child reinforced those negative characteristics in my mind. I internalised them.

It’s the fact that for white women, sexism is a lived experience of oppression while racism is an intellectual exercise... hence even

So I'm Irish.

This is the problem of simplistically shoehorning a white/black dichotomy. It's got a really visible intellectual paucity.

The examples of “womanface” being very very fringe things like sissy porn is missing the point of blackface and minstrelsy which was mainstream. There will always be fringe fetishists that offend the mainstream. The fact they exist doesn’t make “woman face” a real thing on any similar level with blackface.

Karahair had a good analogy about English people oppressing Scottish people and compelling their speech and wearing tartan. Maybe people could use that!?

I would think that the comparison could be critiqued on the same sort of grounds as you are using.

Slavery was not race based so much as opportunistic.

Here in France we have a history of enslaving people based on religion.
In the 1600s and 1700s we enslaved Protestant men as galley slaves in our navy until death either in enemy action or dying of lack of food, beatings, sickness. Protestant women were made comfort women in military brothels also until death. They paid us to become slaves because the crown seized all their money and property. Trying to flee the country was punishable by summary execution.

We also did take part in the Atlantic slave trade of Africans, but not so much as other nations because we had local sources of slaves based on religion.

The Americas were unique in that over 95% of its slaves were African so racism developed along lines of free versus enslaved based on skin tones.

For 1) “Womanface” isn’t about race is it - so there’s your answer regarding why it isn’t racist

2. “Blackface” was a form of degrading and humiliate black people who were forced to be slaves for years and decades.

I’m not exactly sure what is confusing about that.

But not all men dressing as women is drag.

Some of it is done in porn and as a humiliation fetish.

Yes, Grayson Perrry goes out in public in stylised little girls' clothes because he finds it sexually exciting to be humiliated by being seen dressed like that.

We definitely need words for all this stuff.

I reject the idea that for any analogy to be allowable the history and useage must be identical.

Yeah, I find this really weird

I don't even really agree with the analysis in a lot of cases where people use the term womanface, or compare drag to blackface, but the analogy is useful in terms of understanding the analysis, so I can say "I disagree".

That doesn't make it offensive. It's not offensive if there are some important differences if the analogy is useful in other ways, either. It doesn't minimise anything, it doesn't mean something is less serious.

I'm just really not sure where this idea that there should be offence or upset over historical or ideological comparisons or borrowing language, that if someone asks you to explain your POV or disagrees it's somehow asking too much and is some kind of terrible requisition of emotional labour.

2B

I'm a Scotswoman. I am well aware of my own people's history. I'm acutely aware of contemporary issues.

I am also aware of this case. Happening today. Right now. On 31st October 2019. Not historical. Right now. This is the result of accepting men's mockery of women's bodies.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7630973/Roderick-Deakin-White-murdered-Amy-Parsons-arguing-cross-dressing-fetish.html

You have not given me a term to describe this right here, right now, resulting in the brutal murders of women behaviour on the part of men. Comparing such brutality in the right here and right now to historic injustices against the Scots isn't really useful. Not least because the wokerati don't believe people with white skin can ever have been subject to oppression.

Give me a term and I'll use it. But it must convey the fact that mocking women's bodies is leading to murder. Today. Right now. Not just in the past.

"I won't use the term 'womanface' because it's an appropriation"

Crikey.
When you elevate offence of women using the WORDS woman and face, over the actual ACT of men WEARING a costume of womanhood, and the 'appropriation' you care more about and condemn is the former, not the latter, I think your priorities are wrong.

Woman and face are my words to use, not possessed by others for me to be accused of appropriation.

I don't accept the policing, silencing and chilling rules from anyone, regarding what language I may or may not use to describe an aspect of women's oppression.
Not from TRAs and not from feminists.

*The utter reach required in a woman telling women they may not use women and face juxtapositioned to describe the offence of men literally painting themselves with a woman face - because women haven't been killed in sufficient quantities

'The lie that society sees racism as wrong is all about pretending that, because we're not physically enslaving black people as we did in the past, '

My understanding as an outsider is that the USA still does this via the mechanism of imprisoning black men for years and years for petty crimes and making them work for free.

My understanding is also that the 'was on drugs' was to give a reason to go after black men really hard in order to achieve this goal.

I'm not sure I want to look to America as a leader on this topic either.

Yes we are racist here and it is institutional but we're not in the same league.

This is so narrow. USA is not the centre of the universe. Other countries, cultures, histories exist.

'Blackface comes from an era when there weren't any positive representations of black people in society'

In which countries? Every country in the whole world??

This is incredibly USA centric.

English people have done a lot of shit to a lot of people to call on, there is no need and it makes no sense to say that white women in Norway or Scotland or yes even England have to consume USA history as our own. Each country has its own history and context. This is UK website. Why are we being asked to view everything through the lens of one small part of the world?

Thank you Tyro

Yes and white working class women have been subjected to truly awful oppression, and still are.

In Rotherham white WC women were horrifically sexually abused and exploited, overwhelmingly by Asian men... just awful.

And historically white female servants were very vulnerable to sexual assault. Every society seems to have a “rapeable class...” well, until we defeat the Patriarchy that is.

"Society now sees racism as wrong" - does it bollocks! Society pays lip service to the idea while doing fuck all to change it.

Truer to say there's a subset of white society who accepts violent enslavement of men based on skin is ethically abhorrent. The lie that society sees racism as wrong is all about pretending that, because we're not physically enslaving black people as we did in the past, there's no longer any real problem beyond readjusting a few backwards people's expectations.

It's bollocks and exactly the same thing happens with sexism.

It's absolutely true that for me racism is largely intellectual - I grew up in a very very white area so not even seeing it second-hand - but the underlying human psychology still plays out. When there are no black women around to hypersexualise, men don't just shrug and make do without a rapeable class. They make one out of whichever subset of locally-available female bodies is most easily exploitable - and the local women back up their menfolk in the belief it keeps themselves safe.

(Sorry Not that what happened to Scots people was in any way a good thing at all, I mean for the current falling out I and others are in the middle of) 😬

Tyro well that’s all the more reason to do it, no? The English/ Scottish thing I mean, with Brexit putting a contemporary spin on it! I believe some Scots people were even bonded as slaves and deported

This could be a thing!! 😉

Its not a matter of prioritising racism over sexism or vice versa

It’s the fact that for white women, sexism is a lived experience of oppression while racism is an intellectual exercise... hence even thinking “society now sees racism as wrong but sexism is still acceptable” (I only wish this was true)

Black and brown women experience sexism and racism both as a lived oppression

Blackface is not only racist, it is sexist against black women. It mocked Black women’s body shapes for how they looked as women and sex objects, often hyper-lascivious (sexist) and how they differed from (were inferior to) white women’s bodies (racist).

If you equate:
Black face = racism; and
Drag = sexism

You “invisible” black women, and the sexism they suffered in blackface

Just as the “default woman” is white
The default Black person is male

So more accurately:

Blackface: sexist and racist
Drag: sexist

2B using a reference to the oppression of the Scots (or Irish, or whoever) is fine by me, though I suspect it would have far less impact and would be laughed off as ridiculous by most.

After all, it lingers on in anti-ginger sentiment, and we're expected to suck that up as normal and unremarkable and harmless, and if we point out the origins of the practice and imply it might be a bit xenophobic we're pretty universally shouted down as oversensitive and unable to take a joke.

Beautiful, feminine gay men like Fionne, I call TW (mods, Fi uses “men”, please don’t delete).

Those of the ball-waxing ilk: macho ma’ams

I’m not a fan of W-face myself, even before the Great Unfollowing. But I’m even less a fan of compelled speech - if other women wish to use it, they can (of course).

Karahair had a good analogy about English people oppressing Scottish people and compelling their speech and wearing tartan. Maybe people could use that!?

I strongly disagree with the poster who says womanface isn't a thing because women in trousers aren't wearing manface.

Example to demonstrate point: Eddie Izzard's current attire I would call womanface, because he's obnoxiously equating the sexist stereotypes and expectations that serve to keep us mentally enslaved to our local iteration of patriarchy with being naturally female, and is thus normalising and legitimising culturally-specific mechanisms of oppression, subjugation, and sexual exploitation. He's proclaiming that our oppression is natural and by implication normal, unremarkable, and something that neither could not should be overturned.

Women in trousers aren't normalising the systemic oppression of men over millennia by choosing bifurcated leg-tubes. In fact we're explicitly saying "trousers are a human thing, not a man thing," by doing so.

You could make a case for transmen wearing "manface" but it doesn't really work so well because it's equating punching up with punching down. The structural power imbalance matters.

Tyro, a fair point, well made. Male aggression and supremacy is to my mind, undoubtedly the root of so many evils.

because Blackface did not only mock: it dehumanised Black people and low-key legitimised their murder and rape by portraying it in a funny way

I take the point that some black women have objections to the comparison, and I'm fine with being mindful of my language in order not to alienate whoever I'm talking to, but this quotation so strongly reminds me of whichever dick it was who goes out dressed in socially-constructed-woman-as-fucktoy costume and then tells men how hot and sexy and powerful it makes first-person-singular feel when passing men make sexually aggressive and derogatory remarks.

People like that are inviting and excusing and celebrating male sexual predation of women and girls, and we all suffer for it.

Americans of my acquaintance - male or female, whatever colour - have shown a tendency to prioritise racism and cast it as the primary source of social ills. I get why, but it seems blinkered to me - racism and sexism aren't fundamentally different things. They're both rooted in basic human psychological tendencies towards ingrouping and the denigration and exploitation of outgroups. What I don't get is the unwillingness to contemplate the fact that US-style racism was implemented by a very aggressively patriarchal culture. The skin colour of that culture was largely incidental; the behaviour of that culture was and is so destructive not because it is racist per se but because it has evolved around a male-dominant ideology that cannibalises and consumes everything it touches.

It's not about forbidding speech. Not for me, anyway. It's just about saying "Yeah, I can see how that causes more problems in this context than furthers our argument. I'll use a different means of explaining this point."

This is it for me. I read a couple of twitter threads yesterday asking white women to stop drawing parallels and explaining why. I can't see the value in fighting to use a particular phrase which is problematic/hurtful/divisive/triggering to a group of women when other phrases can be used. In-fighting and division will not serve us well.

But not all men dressing as women is drag.

Some of it is done in porn and as a humiliation fetish.

It's such a spectrum at one end you have men putting a bit of make up and dressing up as Beyoncé, and at the other you have men using dressing as a woman to sexually dominate.

It doesn't help to just call it all drag, we need the language to be able to call out when men are using it as a form of dominance and control.

It's the difference between someone plaiting their hair and full black face.