Ann — I totally agree with you on the “calling out” your partner’s family members. It’s definitely difficult to maintain relationships while attempting to talk about difficult subjects.

..and yes, your run on sentence broke my blog and apparently you also broke the Media Temple Grid Servers

Heh.

I think the context of the previous post would have made things a little [lot] clearer. Upon reading your post for the first time, I mostly felt bad for your “friends” and thought about how mad I’d be if we had hung out and a couple weeks later there was a less than complimentary blog post about me and/or Vic when the situation probably could have been diffused with a few pointed comments. I wasn’t going to comment originally, but every time I read it over I cringed for your friends, heh.

Family business is largely different. I’m glad Wendy felt comfortable enough to allow the sharing of her experiences. I have noticed many similar things about Vic’s family (and even about my own), but you can’t really call out your significant other’s family members or talk to them about something that may well be ingrained in their minds and personas. Well, I suppose you could, but it wouldn’t put you in their best graces.

It’s interesting that you mention context (you’ and Wendy are both high context, like me, if I remember right), because although I am religious reader of your blog, I rarely comment, because I feel like there is so much context that I want to add that I don’t have time to. Also, there is the context of all of our experiences and so there are certain assumptions that I make about all of your posts (i.e. filling in the context based on previous conversations, etc.), and admittedly, I was left wanting for more context after your last post. However, based on knowing you and Wendy, I assumed you wouldn’t choose an example that was not, indeed, sexism. At the same time, I can see how those without some of the context would feel otherwise.

I admire your openness to criticism and learning. And I think that’s the only way we make this world better: by being able to take the ego blows or admit when we screw up or that we don’t know everything about the ism’s but we know we want to do whatever we can to get rid of them.

And I think you’re very correct in not leaving these issues to classrooms or laboratories, but to dissect the every-day occurrences of sexism, etc. I do agree that it can be very difficult to address these issues right as they are happening, particularly when they are occurring with family members. I know that many times when people say something sexist for instance, I am often so shocked and amazed that they would say something like that, that my brain kind of fries for a moment. Anyway, I try, however, to challenge myself to address these things in whatever way possible (often I use humor, when appropriate, to point out the absurdity of what people are saying and go from there).

Anyway, there’s not enough to time to put all the context I want into my comment. But I hope it makes sense to you, Eric, based on our context…

Ok, I’m off to discuss Judith Butler now!