When people do horrible things to other people, like say flying airplanes into buildings or becoming serial killers, we like to say that they are evil. We use words and phrases like that to disassociate ourselves from the act. It’s the same for rape apology and victim blaming. It’s a way to disassociate ourselves from the victim. The more different from us that we make them, the less likely we think we are to be them.
But we don’t just disassociate for the big, grizzly things. We do it all the time for relatively less difficult stuff. Disassociation is one way of othering people.

Back when I was still reading stalkerbot’s comments, he was pissed cause I just don’t get where prejudice and misogyny really come from. According to him, it all comes from parents teaching children to hate. If that were true, with 30 some odd years of fluffy tolerance lessons in schools and Peacock messages on TV, we should all love each other now.

Funny, it didn’t really work out that way.

Privilege is pragmatic. I’ve said that over and over again, I know. And for many of you reading this, it’s a no brainer of a statement. But many many people still think that it is simply the result of irrational hate. They think that if they can just make everyone play nice, then all the problems of a unequal society will be solved. And when that doesn’t work, we disassociate ourselves from the problem. They’re evil, or stupid, or violent, or whatever, but they aren’t us. Disassociation makes us feel better because it means we get to keep our privilege while pretending it doesn’t exist or that if it does, we aren’t the ones keeping it around. We don’t have to do the hard work of dismantling privilege brick by brick this way.

We disassociate whenever we talk about how lazy the poor are or how violent blacks are or how women are bad drivers. As if there has never been a rich white man who was a lazy, violent and a bad driver. Nah, never happens. We do it when we complain about domestic violence victims who just won’t leave their abusers. We assume that we would never allow ourselves to be in that kind of situation, and if we were we would act differently.

But people are rational creatures, even badly beaten wives and racists. By othering both of them, we refuse to find the real solutions to problems. We refuse to even look at the problems because we have disassociated, and the problems are no longer ours.

I was thinking about those statistics from the women in academia slides. Why is it that both men and women in the Swedish study judged men and women differently? Why was men’s work overvalued and women’s work undervalued in the same process. What benefit does it give to the evaluators to undervalue women and overvalue men? Are these just evil misogynist who hate women and want them to fail? Nope.

For the male evaluators, there is a definite benefit to them in keeping lower standards for men than for women, even if they don’t realize they are doing it. By keeping standards lower for men, they are keeping themselves competitive. Without doing anything other than being male, they have just made their own chances better. They associate with the male candidates, identify with them. So they judge them as they would like to be judged. But when it comes to female candidates, they disassociate. They judge them more harshly, require higher standards, and keep women at a competitive disadvantage.

Think of it this way. (The following analogy is entirely the fault of AG and this post). For your entire life you have only ever eaten McDonald’s Quarter Pounders with cheese. You’ve never eaten at Wendy’s or Burger King, and you’ve never had a real gourmet burger either. Whenever you eat a burger, you judge it based on the other burgers you’ve had. Is it hot, fresh (comparatively) or did it sit so long the cheese started to get gummy? The basic parts are all the same every time, so you are very familiar with Quarter Pounders and you have a kind of shorthand in your head for judging good one from bad ones. Then one day, someone puts two burgers in front of you. One is the trusty quarter pounder, the other is something else. In order for you to choose the other burger over the quarter pounder, that burger needs to have all the components of the original, plus something that will make you choose it instead. It has to be much better than you are used to get you to pick it. .

As for female evaluators, in order for them to get to the position they are in, they probably had to do a lot of disassociation with their own sex.