Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

Honestly, Walter Benn MIchaels really is a piece of work. I’ve been packing my stuff to move, and so I have plenty of time to think about this one particular chapter. It starts out, helpfully (!), to show that it’s just not race that’s a problem, but also other things like gender. (Of course, don’t pay attention to the word “diversity” in the title of the book, because then you will be hard pressed to understand the connection between “culture” and “gender” and how it is that anyone is pursuing “gender diversity”.)

Walter Benn Michaels dismisses sex discrimination lawsuits because they distract us from pursuing economic inequality. Never mind that he’s failing to understand the logic of these lawsuits: while they might be focused on the “rich” women at Morgan Stanley and boy isn’t it a corker to see to it that a woman makes the same 1.6 million as a man — wasn’t she hurting before the lawsuit — they are pursued because they are meant to change the way all companies operate by establishing legal precedent.

Frankly, I pretty much see the effects of such lawsuits regularly at my job in so far it’s clear to me that my company’s law firm and its HR department likes to make damn clear that they don’t tolerate sex or race discrimination in pay. Which, as a white woman, makes me pretty glad because if I were paid 30% less than a man, that would be a significant chunk of change. It might only amount to peanuts for the Walmart women but I don’t suppose Michaels has ever noticed that it makes a fucking difference if you get a $2-3/hr boost in your paycheck. Fuck, it makes a difference if you get a 50ct boost when you’re making $10/hr. (Interestingly, he does seem to care that someone said *he* made $250k. He quickly pointed out that *he* made $175k. The questioner at the forum shrugged as if to say, big deal [just as Michaels sniffs at the idea that $300,000 might matter to the female Morgan Stanley broker]. Michaels replies: It’s a big deal to *me*. )

So never mind all that horsepuckey, he goes on to say this with regard to the Morgan Stanley suit in which $2 million was allocated to a diversity program:

“It’s like a workplace version of the dancing class I went to as a kid; what they taught us then was not to let any girl be a wallflower; now, if you’re working for Morgan Stanley, you learn not to dump her in a cab while you and your “male co-workers” take “the client to a strip club.” The point here is not that it’s OK for bond salesmen to make more than bond saleswomen or to behave badly to bond saleswomen (any more than it was OK for the boys in dancing class to behave badly).The point instead is that nothing about this victory for diversity… has any connection to the liberal goal of creating a more economically equal society. Or, to put it another way, insofar as winning this bias suit counts as a victory for liberalism, it’s only because liberalism has itself given up the goal of creating a more economically equal society. Redistributing wealth is one thing; making sure that the women of the upper class are paid just as well as the men of the upper class is another.” (p 116)

As I mentioned, Michaels doesn’t seem to grasp that a Morgan Stanley case is going to operate as, at least in my experience, an often effective way to motivate individuals and firms to operate differently. So, the impact of the case isn’t just on Morgan Stanley brokers, it’s all the women at Morgan Stanley, and it’s the women in the workplace in the u.s. more generally insofar the lawsuit has an impact — and those lawsuits have.

But then there is the crack about treating women nicely. He makes an analogy between chivalry on the dance floor — be nice to the ugly and shy ones too! — with teaching men to be less sexist in their daily interactions with women.

Now, I’d sure as shit like me summa that in *my* workplace. I suppose, if I were to rank it, I’d say that the bigotry against my sexuality is the worst, but what’s the point in engaging in the toilet bowl of comparative oppressions? But just take my word, I’d be here all day if I had to explicate the details: plenty of sexist words and behaviors happen in my workplace on a daily basis. some of them convey a clear message of contempt for women, including (in IT) clear assumptions about women’s inferiority in certain areas.

Michaels dismisses the day-to-day experiences of sexism as insignificant — as a matter of behaving nicely. As I mentioned a few posts ago, he is either wholly unaware of the literature on oppression or chooses to ignore it so he doesn’t actually have to make an argument as to why that the arguments about the salience of oppression are wrong.

Dennis Claxton’s characterization of the guy having a “tin ear” might be on the mark. Apparently, sexist practices such as making the assumption that, since we’re *all* guys here, let’s go to a strip club as part of our business dinner, is a matter of having no sense of chivalrous manners.

In my less charitable moods, I’m pretty certain that it isn’t a tin ear but a perverse desire to be dismissive because he simply has zero respect for anything about feminism, let alone any of the other social movements against oppression he claims to actually applaud. Because if he actually *did* support them in a meaningful way, I severely doubt
that he would have written this statement:

“The point instead is that nothing about this victory for diversity… has any connection to the liberal goal of creating a more economically equal society”

What if he had started out talking about “liberal goalS?

And what if he’d dropped the qualifier. instead of writing “economic inequality”, what if he had written “inequality.”?

See the difference? In Michaels world there is ONE liberal goal: creating a more economically equal society.” It isn’t even ONE liberal goal of creating a more EQUAL society. For, had he just written equal, then people would have objected and said, but purusing lawsuits against pay discrimination is contributing to a more equal society so that women get paid the same as men.

So, to pre-emptively remove criticism, you simply heavily qualifiy what you say. They’re called weasel words.

I’m sure it occurred to him that he could have actually thought about it otherwise in order to recognize that liberalism has *other* goals when it comes to equality. Michaels, however, chooses not to. He chooses to posit a world in which liberalism *is* about economic equality — about economic equality and economic equality alone.

You don’t even have to worry about parsing the intent behind making a claim that there is “nothing” about fighting sexism in the workplace that “has any connection to” economic equality.

From jump street, the guy appears to choose to have a dismissive understanding of feminist struggles against sexism: apparently we are about getting men to behave nicely, instead of badly, to women — much like you do when you have good manners on the dance floor.

From that same jump street, of course, Walter Benn Michaels decides to take a stand on feminism and whether or not it achieves appropriate goals by, shockingly, writing as if he’s never heard that there are different kinds of feminism, and that the debate over fighting sexism-as-discrimination vs fighting sexism-as-oppression, over fighting individual level sexism v fighting structural systemic sexism, and so on and forth has been going on since the inception of feminism.

It’s not that Walter Benn Michaels is wrong to criticize what Janet Halley calls power feminism for focusing on discrimination because feminists have already done the work. It is rather that, since feminists have already done the work, and done it much better, with better arguments, and better writing, you might as read about the debates within feminism from feminists themselves.

Of course, if you don’t really care about feminism, then you’re the perfect audience for Walter Benn Michaels. He doesn’t either and his writing is guaranteed to encourage you to care little about feminism and possibly even start thinking of it as pretty much a washed up enterprise. Feminism, having done its work, can safely be left behind, appreciated as a relic, much as anti-racism sice we are, after all, already an antiracist society. We can safely move on to bigger and better things like fighting economic inequality which, Michaels assures us, cannot be advanced by participating in struggles against sexist oppression discrimination. It’s not hard to move from that view to thinking that, ultimately, there’s no use for feminism at all and maybe that feminism is kind of bad because, in a world with limited social movement resources, why should we bother fighting against sexist oppression. We have to prioritize! And prioritize Walter Benn Michaels hopes you will. It’s an either/or world out there, man. don’t trouble yourself with distractions.

I’m going to flesh this out more later, but it’s not just that Walter Benn Michaels’ work is an insignificant piece of fly shit on the pimple on my fat furry ass. It is, I think, because he promotes ideas like the above, this grand either/or and a rhetoric that blames new left social movements for being the enemy of economic equality, that Walter Benn Michaels is very damaging to leftist struggles against oppression and class exploitation.