U.S. Presidential Election 2008

[cacophony]

Originally Posted by Sean

I was really hoping for a reply from you to some of the points I last raised on this. Any chance you may have the time?

i realized today that i never got back to you. i'm not dredging this up now to reopen old wounds, rather to address the issues you wanted addressed.

Originally Posted by Sean

No, offensiveness is not purely dictated by intent. But by the same token, offensiveness is also not dictated purely by perception. All I'm saying is that we need to measure both sides of the situation - how the word is perceived coupled with the actual intent - in order to objectively determine how big a deal something like this is.

i won't disagree that the degree of offensiveness lies on both sides of the issue, both intent and perception. i think in any discussion about potentially offensive language you have to take both sides into consideration. in this case the comment was notable enough to enough people to have been raised as an issue in the first place. how many words did obama utter in that one appearance that day? how many made national news? that speaks to an established precedence for the potential volatility of the word. if we can accept that, then we have to accept that his intent isn't purely the issue here.

Originally Posted by Sean

The best way I can explain this is by sharing something that once happened to me. A friend of mine from college was an intense feminist. I mean really, really intense. She was over at me and my roomate's apartment one day, flipping through a magazine, and she came to some advertisement that had a picture of a young female model in it. She seemed kind of flustered by it, showed me the picture, and said something like "do guys really find her attractive?" I looked at the picture, and I said something like, "yeah, she's a pretty girl". My friend responded with a look of shock and said "GIRL? A pretty GIRL?!?", and then went on to berate me for using the word "girl". I explained that the model looked like she was younger than me (I was around 19 at the time), and since I didn't think of myself as a "man" yet, then it's only natural that I didn't think of this model as a "woman" yet either. My friend asked what I would call my male friends who were around my age, and I said "not men...probably guys". Her final angry point was that it isn't "guys and girls, it's guys and gals". So I said "okay, she's a pretty gal then", and that was the end of it.

i see your point, although i will say there's a massive difference between the hystrionic feminism of a college aged girl just coming to terms with her "womyn" power and the more general segment of the american populace that reacted to obama's comment. undoubtedly in college i spewed similar hysteria about the plight of women in the western world, just as i undoubtedly spewed some fairly offensive anti-christianity arguments during my most vocal pro-atheist phase. it's both blessing and curse that college opens us up to new ideas at an age when we're most vulnerable to charismatic thinking.

so while i appreciate your example and i understand the point you're trying to illustrate, i have to take it with a grain of salt. which is not meant to diminish her feelings on the subject. i'm just saying it would be as though we were discussing legislation about animal cruelty and you used an example about a PETA activist to prove the counterpoint. when you have an issue that's supported by a fairly general slice of the population, you can't entirely depend on extremist parallels to create a counterpoint.

Originally Posted by Sean

As you said, we have no way of knowing exactly what motivates Obama's use of a word like "sweetie", but I think it's safe to say that his overall demeanor and treatment of people doesn't seem to support the idea that we should take his use of it in the worst possible way.

and i guess my point is that all we know of obama is what's edited in to nightly news reels. we know what he's allowed himself to express in public when people are watching. we don't really know any politician's overall demeanor. i would go so far as to argue that the "hillary is a bitch" people don't know jack shit about what she's like outside of the public eye. she's got a family and friends and a longstanding career as evidence that what we see on the news isn't necessarily 100% of her personality. obama and every other politician live in the same dichotomy.

the psychology of a national politician is not the same as the psychology of any other average joe. you can't just look at nightly news clips and go, "well he seems like a good guy." after all, that was a huge argument in support of george w bush during his first election.

Originally Posted by Sean

It's funny you should use this picture as an example, because yes, I would take some small issue with someone accusing the photographer (or editor who wrote the caption) of being offensive by using the word "boy". The first thing I thought when I opened the picture after reading what you had written was "well they do look to be young boys". I mean, how old would you guess they are? I would guess around 15 or so myself...maybe even younger. I don't consider 15 to be a man, I consider 15 to be a boy. So maybe it was meant as derogatory, but there's a very fair argument to be made that it was not.

the men in that photo are most certainly older than 15. the only way i can substantiate that claim is to say i spend a lot of time on shorpy and there's a comparable appearance among age groups in photographs of that era and those are young men, not boys. additionally, even if your age assessment were accurate i can assure you that photographer captions on images of white males in that age group are typically referred to at the very least as "young men." 15 year olds were not kids during that era, remember. by the age of 15 most young men had been working hard labor for years.

and i would agree, as i think it was my original point, that the use of "boy" was not intended as derogatory. it was a generally accepted colloquial way to refer to black men during that time. but does that mean that the usage was not offensive? would you consider calling a black man "boy" now? i'm going to guess you're like anyone else and you wouldn't because you understand how strongly offensive it is.

Originally Posted by Sean

And this is something we fundamentally differ on. I understand your point, but I flatly disagree that an instance of someone like Obama using the word "sweetie" is "much worse" than someone calling a woman a "cunt" or a "bitch". Yes, you can fight harmful intent, but my feeling is that you don't have to "fight" the use of a term you view as derogatory if the intent is not malicious. Deckard gave a great example with his parents. He didn't need to fight them on it because they weren't trying to be hurtful. All he seemed to have to do was point out that what they said could be taken as offensive, and they adjusted. Easy as pie, and everyone's happy. As an example to the contrary, my college friend DID choose to fight me over my benign use of the word "girl", and all it accomplished was taking an innocent situation and turning it into a confrontation that we both left feeling frustrated.

i never claimed that cunt and bitch are unequivocally less offensive than sweetie. i said to me, in my own personal view of language, sweetie is worse because it speaks to an ingrained and thoughtless diminishing effect on the intended target. i would wager that 99% of the "feminists" in this country would be shocked and offended that i shrug off cunt and bitch the way i do. or that i use them as casually as i do in rush hour traffic.

ultimately, though, that's not the point. the point to be resolved is whether obama's use of sweetie in that context was ultimately offensive. i would argue that is is, not because of his intent but because of the perception of the community that the word applies to. just like the photographer referring to those young men as "boys" during a time when the intent had nothing to do with maliciousness.

Originally Posted by Sean

In this case with Obama, he immediately recognized how what he said could be perceived, and apologized. As far as I'm concerned, that's the end of the issue. Now if he starts showing a pattern of true disrespect towards women that stretches beyond the isolated bad habit of using a word like "sweetie", then yes, I will agree that his use of the word is quite possibly indicitive of something more. At this point however, that's not the case, so I just personally see this as a pretty minor issue.

apologies from politicians are rarely anything to get excited about. they apologize when they're caught. they apologize when they're caught text messaging lewd sentiments to underage pages. they apologize when they cheat on their wives. they apologize when they out CIA agents. a politician's apology is one of the most worthless things on the planet.

but you're right in that the issue is a fairly small one unless and until he demonstrates a pattern of disrespect. unfortunately i don't blow off this one incident as just one incident. i see it as someone who had not yet set a pattern suddenly setting up the potential for a pattern. he took the first step. you can't create a pattern without that first step. he is more disappointing to me than someone who never made a slip in the first place.

do i ultimately think someone should weigh their support of him based on this one slip? of course not. but i find it irresponsible to simply brush it away. it's an element of a potential leader's personality. i want to see how he handles himself with regards to this issue going forward. hopefully it was just a one-off mistake. fantastic if that's the case. but i'm not going to forget it happened.