Why is it socially acceptable to stereotype and vilify white women as a whole?

Haven't read the whole thread but a comment above reminded me of Karen Blixen the Danish writer who wrote Out of Africa and many mesmerising tales. She was Karen Christenze Dinesen who married a Swedish baron which is where the Blixen surname came from. She also used the pen name Isak Dinesen.

Yes, the closest is those hair dye adverts and even then there is more of a positive spin. e.g.
I do think maybe this is where women could pick up a few lessons though. There is nothing wrong with men and women being able to express vulnerability or admitting fault/shame or self reflection. But the bad old days of adverts/even society trying to make women feel bad for who they are seem to have been replaced by the even worse days of trying to make everyone feel bad/apologise for existing. Which is a type of equality...

So maybe men are better at pretending this stuff doesn’t bother them, which means that male insecurities are not such open targets to manipulate men with.

There’s the other side too - that there is a collective abhorrence to men looking vulnerable and weak (or anyone of higher social status for that matter). People want to think of ‘those in charge’ of being strong and invulnerable - unfazed. Any sign of weakness and they seem unsuited to their position.

If you had an ad for, say, hair growth shampoo for men, where a bloke was measuring his hairline closely in the mirror, looking almost tearful as it cuts away to his memory of how it looked thicker only last month, followed by him scrolling through his dating apps hitting ‘like’ on loads of women’s profiles on his laptop, then ‘no matches’ appears in a dialogue box, then he holds his head in his hands in despair, only to touch the increasing balding hairline and almost jump with the shock and look really mournful… this vulnerability and weakness would freak everyone out so much they’d switch channels, complain, boycott the brand, etc. It isn’t ‘manly’ to be bothered by things - and it threatens the status quo for everyone for men to admit it.

@AnalogueFondness I definitely agree that men can suffer from feelings of inadequacy/imposter syndrome etc etc. I do think though that women are more** likely to be influenced by feelings of shame/guilt which is a bit different to lack of confidence. That's why advertising towards women tended to look different to advertising towards men: . Telling women they are terrible people can encourage them to buy stuff. When they tried that shit on men (ironically with both shaving razors and beer) the response was "Fuck Off". And of course I don't like that hugely negging advertising. But they use it because it works.

**obviously this is a huge generalisation

women could profitably adopt the male attitude, just brush that shit off and forget about it.

It has real word implications.

For example, I know a woman, an American- (and in the name of oppression olympics, a Hispanic American woman), really devout Christian and generous person, thinking of others always. She was talking about a situation where she was being treated unfairly and dreaded asserting herself because “They’ll just call me ‘Karen”. The way said “Karen” was with an eyeroll and a tone like ‘tedious, whiney, pain in the backside’.

So in real world terms the word is used to discourage women from setting their own terms, boundaries and expectations.

There are other words to discourage women asserting ourselves eg - bitch

Women as a whole need encouragement to assert ourselves. It’s not easy when it is affectively socially acceptable for people to say “Woman know your place!” which is effectively what is being said when we are called Karen.

Men do not “brush that shit off” at all. I have known men who are really anxious that they are being singled out and passed over for promotion, etc, because they have a Northern, working class background, didn’t go to private school, etc. You may think they are ‘brushing that shit off’, when actually they are styling it out, having their insecurities needled.

True, but that’s because men don’t pay a heavy social price for not being kind.

Women need to push back against this racist stereotyping, though. We have seen with gender ideology what happens if we don’t.

@DemiColon We do overthink things sometimes!

Violence is one possibility, men will sometimes take that route in conflicts.

Though I think there would be a very real likelihood in that particular example of the guy just laughing or rolling his eyes and walking away. Which is why people are less likely to use that kind of manipulation towards men.

Women seem much more likely to take it personally or take it seriously.

It's one area where I think many women could profitably adopt the male attitude, just brush that shit off and forget about it.

Yeah, he absolutely does not think it's a credible theory. I hadn't ever connected it to postmodern theories, now that you've said it though it seems obvious it would be, I might have to go back and re-listen to some of the podcasts where he talks about it.

It is, @Spendonsend , but it does lead back to the theory that middle aged white women are being stereotyped and vilified because they’re relatively harmless. They’re seldom perpetrators of violence, for example, so people feel they can say anything to them/about them.

If someone used the Karen slur to a man’s face, what do you think might happen?!

I only brought it up in response to the suggestion that middle class white women were regularly and deliberately behaving in a way that risked black men's lives.

I think this focus on homicide is setting a rather high bar for measuring the impact of racism on someone's life.

Rambling before I go to bed - the weakest versions of the S-W hypothesis hold some water. Apparently in Russian there is a word for light blue and a word for dark blue but no word for just blue. Apparently Russian brains also show a greater ability to distinguish between light and dark when looking at blue things. No shit, human brains are extremely plastic.

But it's always about the minutiae of colour perception or something like that. It's never about really basic categories like male or female. Every single one of our ancestors, regardless of race, geography or culture, managed to work out those categories, at least well enough to have sex and leave offspring.

There are plenty of examples of prejudice rather than racism being directed at Black people. I’d never disagree with that since prejudice is obviously not always related to race. It’s a set of beliefs which are usually formed because you don’t know enough about the thing/person you are prejudiced against. My Black gay friend has faced prejudice because of his sexuality both from within the Black community and from other races.

The example I gave of the Asian man giving a ‘dirty look’ to the white woman was simply to point out that this might have nothing to do with her race. If a white man gave a white woman a dirty look that wouldn’t be because of her race so why can’t the same be true for anyone else?

None of this detracts from my original opinion regarding the difference between racism and prejudice. Based on the definition of racism I described, white people cannot be the victims of it in this country. They are not oppressed by any other racial group.

But if you think they can be/are - that’s fine!

Huh? Never heard this.

Karen is a common Scandinavian derived name and prevalent in the Midwest for about a hundred years-in places largely settled by Scandinavian immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century. Variant spelling is Karin.

AFAIR, DemiColon, there are also also 15+ years of The Glenn Show on the original platform, blogginheads, with McWhorter, and others. Great stuff.

I've tried a couple of the podcasts but I find them difficult to follow because they presume a level of knowledge about what's happening in the US that I just don't have.

I've got my eyes on The Language Hoax which appears from the description to drive a coach and horses through at least the strong version of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis. This is kind of relevant to this discussion because the S-W hypothesis says that the structure of a language determines a native speaker's perception and categorisation of the world ('Eskimos have a hundred words for snow' etc.) It's a massive plank underpinning standpoint theory and cultural relativism, and more widely, all these postmodern theories: the idea that language creates reality.

I'm also interested in The Creole Debate for less relevant reasons.

Re John Mc Whorter, not a progressive ideology, but a religion, it's as if that sector of society that has largely ditched religion has refocused its religious fervour, spiritual yearning and need for some higher direction onto all sorts of dubious bullshit which sometimes makes even the nuttier ends of Christianity look positively sensible by comparison.

Agreed. Most sectors of society in the west have largely ditched religion. I'm glad about that but it does leave us all extremely susceptible to this kind of stuff. We've evolved to be religious animals, just like we've evolved to be animals with language and cooking and music.

It would be good if we could somehow find ways of doing the good bits of religion - sense of community, sense of awe, shared moral code etc. while ditching the bad bits - authoritarianism, dangerously batshit ideologies, persecution of heretics etc. but I fear the bad bits might be as equally baked in to human psychology as the good bits. Hence we do this to ourselves, over and over again.

It would be better if we kept the original focus which states that the way racism, sexism, classism etc. benefit certain demographic groups and harm others, especially when they are built into the structures of a society (institutional), are about those groups on the overall level, and should be discussed on that level.

If we apply all that to any particular individual, by not focusing on why what she or he is doing is wrong, but by interpreting it as (only) caused by their group membership, then we are using some of the same formulas many sexists and racists use.

You might have good luck finding some through the library. I really enjoyed "Nine Naughty Words."

He does a podcast with Glen Loury you might find interesting too, it's on youtube,. They cover quite a few topics of interest, but what I think is especially interesting to Brits is that there tends to be an assumption that American racial politics don't work in the UK because they reflect an American situation. Loury and McWhorter would say that in a lot of cases, they don't reflect what is true in the US either, in fact the narrative they present is often patently false.

In my experience, quite often (but not always) people who use the phrase 'speaking truth to power' as though everyone should try it have power themselves, and have a fucking shitting fit if you speak truth to them.

Re John Mc Whorter, not a progressive ideology, but a religion, it's as if that sector of society that has largely ditched religion has refocused its religious fervour, spiritual yearning and need for some higher direction onto all sorts of dubious bullshit which sometimes makes even the nuttier ends of Christianity look positively sensible by comparison.

And these Puritans des nos jours are just as unpleasant as the last lot.

Ha ha this is the reality. If you ask for almond milk now you're being a ''karen''. Heaven FORBID you ask for something in particular when you're buying coffees and treats for three people, two of them teenagers.

what I suspect in reality is a seething resentment from some quarters at a group of women who have amassed a modicum of power and influence for themselves.

Of course, because - classically - any group that is oppressed resents the group immediately above it in the hierarchy. Marxist revolutions were obsessed with the petit bourgeoisie and peasant landowners. A big chunk of anti-Semitism is because Jewish people were traditionally of the small trader class, so hated by poorer workers.

These perceptions aren't totally false - white women have, on average, had more social advantages than black women. But the focus is always on the group immediately above, and not the ones with the greatest power: in this case, men. I guess it is human nature to feel more resentment of people who are quite like you but just slightly better off in the pecking order, than those far above you in the hierarchy, with whom you identify less. It's probably also because everyone lower down in the hierarchy (all women in this case) are strongly socialised to defer to, and to appease, those at the top.

Thank you for this, I've now made the effort to look him up properly. I've just bought his book, Woke Racism. I found this, from the description, remarkable:

According to John McWhorter, the problem is that a well-meaning but pernicious form of antiracism has become, not a progressive ideology, but a religion – and one that's illogical, unreachable, and unintentionally neoracist.

In Woke Racism, McWhorter reveals the workings of this new religion, from the original sin of 'white privilege' and the weaponization of cancel culture to ban heretics, to the evangelical fervour of the 'woke mob.' He shows how this religion that claims to 'dismantle racist structures' is actually harming his fellow black Americans by infantilizing black people, setting black students up for failure, and passing policies that disproportionately damage black communities. The new religion might be called 'antiracism,' but it features a racial essentialism that's barely distinguishable from racist arguments of the past.

Anyone who's been around these parts for a while will be feeling a strong sense of deja vu reading that. The parallels with queer theory and trans ideology are uncanny.

I'm now trying to resist also buying several of his books on linguistics that look really interesting.

If we're going to be US-centric then the brutal reality is at the demographic most risky to black males is other black males. Wealthy white women are pretty far down the list of threats in most people's day to day lives.

Sadly this is very true, @FrostyFifi I did a quick Google and the 2019
FBI stats bear this out.https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6.xls