So white and privileged and heterosexual and never marginalised in your life
The Times interviews Sandi Toksvig:
Toksvig certainly boasts the widest-ranging CV imaginable. Her most recent achievement was officiating at the Abba star Björn Ulvaeus’s third wedding last month in Copenhagen. She and Ulvaeus, it transpires, have been friends since 2015, when she organised a Scandinavian-themed Women of the World festival at the Royal Festival Hall, where an all-female orchestra played Waterloo and Ulvaeus appeared. “You can be feminist and fun, you see.” More recently they collaborated on writing the interactive show Mamma Mia! The Party.
“Björn is a very gentle, not divaish person; he and I are both humanists,” she says…
I knew that about Björn. That time I went to Stockholm when Hatar Gud Kvinnor? was published, his daughter picked me up at the airport. I pretended not to know.
But that’s not why we’re here. This is why we’re here:
“I’m easygoing, but I’m also keeping an eye on things. The world is still full of people who take against your life. Homophobia’s increasing. The only good thing about lesbians is they titillate men so it’s marginally less aggressive towards us. I don’t know what they think Deb and I are doing. Mainly we’re discussing if the tomatoes have gone off.”
The hostility, Toksvig continues with quiet fury, is fuelled by “intemperate language on social media around the trans discussion. That’s opened the door to people thinking it’s now fair to have a general go at diversity, that the world is too woke. I don’t know how you can be too woke — woke means being awake to the dangers that are around you. Mental health within the LGBTQ community is not good and that’s not because you’re not comfortable with who you are. It’s the way society treats you.”
She is especially angry
by[about] how many “radical feminists” attack trans people. “How could you be so white and privileged and heterosexual and never marginalised in your life yet you decide to punch down on people?”
Excuse me? Excuse me???
Who tf says we’re all privileged? Who says we’re all heterosexual? Who says we’re all never marginalized?
What utter bullshit. Women are not privileged in the sense of seen as and treated as better than the other sex. That’s rather the point of feminism. We have to fight to be seen as and treated as not the worst, the stupid, the weak, the sly, the whoreish, the disgusting sex. We have to fight to be seen as not inferiors. That doesn’t suddenly stop being true just because some men pretend to be women and berate us when we say they’re not.
Gods, it’s so painful. Every word of the above is correct. She just fails to comprehend that it’s the TRAs using the intemperate language, and their deliberate effort to attach themselves to, and ultimately suborn, every legitimate social justice movement, which has created this opening for racists, homophobes and xenophobes of every stripe to try to claim some form of legitimacy in the public square.
In addition to everything you said …
I hate this BS. Woke means awake to dangers? No, it clearly doesn’t. If you’re awake to different dangers, then you aren’t woke. You may even be anti-woke. Hell, you might be a TERF or a “nazi”. Woke only ever meant having a very particular worldview. It only ever meant having a Critical consciousness.
Even if we ignore that, it’s trivially easy to imagine being too awake to dangers. Being hyper-aware of and hyper-sensitive to danger is the core of anxiety disorders. When you start seeing danger where there is none or magnifying real danger, you’ve become too awake to danger—too woke.
That line definitely ground my gears, Nullius. The claim I’ve seen is that the “awake to dangers” was the original definition in African American English. It seems plausible (but of course I’m probably the last person to be in a position to judge, being white and on the other side of the world). And while some considerable degree of wariness is of course reasonable, and necessary, for a black person in a white world, those who appropriated the term, and thereby changed its meaning irrevocably, can hardly pretend to be in the same perilous situation except in a parodic “help, I’m being oppressed” kind of way – or as you suggest, a sort of (performative) paranoia. So it’s both amusing and profoundly irritating that, when the appropriated term, emptied of the last vestiges of meaning,* becomes a boo-word used by the right to indiscriminately beat the left, those who stole it suddenly remember it was never theirs to begin with (assuming the origin story is true). Yeah, it’s all the black guy’s fault.
*I think vestiges of meaning is probably all that it even had in its appropriated form – a vague gesture to some idea of awareness whose vagueness the ‘critical’ with a capital c works overtime to obscure.
“ I don’t know how you can be too woke — woke means being awake to the dangers that are around you.”
Er, how is Toksvig “too… awake to the dangers” when Toksvig is practically comatose in relation to the dangers facing the female sex due to the forced inclusion of the male sex in every part of our lives? How high does the Mridul Wadhwa Index need to climb to penetrate her consciousness?
I would argue that “woke” is not social awareness but the claim of social awareness. These are two very different things.
Social awareness, for example, may well mean being aware of how the trans debate is used to shut down women’s shelters, endanger women in women’s prisons, undermine women’s sports etc…
Indeed the primary argument for the Terf side of the debate is based around the “dangers” associated with uncritical acceptance of men’s claims to be women.
Yet I do not think that those who call themselves “woke” would consider Terfs to be their fellows. Social awareness in fact appears to be in short supply in this particular crowd.
For example, She Hulk was a “woke” show, yet in its opening episode it has an upper middle class woman in stable employment declare she had to control her anger infinitely more than a mentally unstable former long term homeless former slave who spent years of his life on the run from a US military that wanted to use him for human experimentation.
What I see with “woke” is not in fact socially aware people. What I see are people who claim to be socially aware in order to gain some sort of authority from which they can lecture the rest of us, yet do not do any of the work involved in actually being socially aware, or apply any thought to their own “awareness”. Indeed, the “woke” would proclaim that having to put in any work to inform their activism would be an unjust imposition. It is not their job to educate us on their oppression, and therefore not their job to be educated.
Hence how comfortable “woke” activists are in silencing their critics.
But that definitional issue aside, I find her description of what it is to be woke, concerning in and of itself.
I’m a South African. We have extremely high levels of unemployment, and thus high levels of crime. Where I live recently has had some debate over whether we’ve been hearing a load of gunshots or if someone really just needs to do something about their sparkplugs.
I do not spend my life constantly “aware of the dangers” around me. To do so would drive me insane, instead I adjust, take reasonable measures, and go on to thinking about other things.
To be “aware of the dangers” can easily tip one over into paranoia. Hyper-vigilance can be as bad as blindness, as one slowly drives oneself into taking things far more seriously than they genuinely deserve. This highly excitable state leaves one open to distractions away from more important issues.
This was part of the Bell Pottinger scandal, quibbles over phrasing in order to distract from the fact that the country was being looted on every level. To push a hyper-vigilance against claimed racism that purposely got in the way of concrete action against large scale corruption.
Which is to say, one can indeed very much be too “woke” as she defines it.
Well said. I would add that the nuances of the problems are also more work and an unjust imposition. It’s simple to say TWAW, and call someone who disagrees TERF. It’s much more work to actually explore the problems that come up from this simple, and inaccurate formulation.
Francis:
It’s yet another example of the varieties of motte and bailey. They know damn well that to be woke is to perceive injustice in a very particular way, but they try to pretend that it doesn’t when challenged. It’s much easier to defend a generalized, non-specific awareness of injustice ir danger than it is to defend any particular conception thereof. The general is a given, but particulars require explication and justification. As so much of what is woke is received in the uncritical, unthinking manner of religious teaching, they simply aren’t equipped to provide that kind of account. All that is left to them is to run back to their motte or to lash out at those who would drive them from their bailey.
I’ve always liked Sandi as a TV presenter.
Reading her spout the transmaiden’s mantra is very saddening.