Woke

shakahislop

Well-known member
an example from last night in brooklyn, which gets at something i think i was saying earlier on in the thread (or on some thread): sat on the floor eating cheese and watching the oscars with a mostly european crowd. someones printed out lists of the oscar nominees, and we have to guess who is going to win and mark it down. some loud and gregarious arab dude turns up late and doesn't get it, and hasn't written down whether he's guessed correctly or not after about ten of the results have been announced. he gives it to a brazillian girl to mark it and she starts to do it, but then halfway through she says to me 'ok this is basically admin work isn't it, and he's a man so i shouldn't do this', and then she gives it back to him.

extremely unimportant and low level thing, and i'm not saying anything about whether its good or bad thing, but i find this is a consistant feature of my life now, these small interactions in which some kind of identity-based belief is voiced and acted on, people fighting back in these minuscule ways. probably has been the case in more activist circles for a very long time, but this group of people isn't that at all. it's possibly an example of a behaviour which was cultivated in a subculture that has very successfully broke out into the wider world.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
there's of course a whole category of practices and beliefs that have emerged out of broadly left subcultures from the 70s onwards, which have been picked up by mainstream culture. it's one of the reasons the battle lines feel a bit mangled to me now, the coordinates from the past have been scrambled.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
why did he give it to the Brazilian girl in the first place?
I assume it was one of those games where you score each other, like a pub quiz, and she just happened to be next to him.

Or, being an Arab, he's just used to having women do any tedious task for him that comes up?
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
I assume it was one of those games where you score each other, like a pub quiz, and she just happened to be next to him.

Or, being an Arab, he's just used to having women do any tedious task for him that comes up?

No it wasn't, we had to mark our own. Actually what had happened is that he hadn't been marking his paper as the results were being read out, and everyone was starting to count how many we got right to see who won. So he was passing it to her because she had marked it all down, and he obviously couldn't remember who had won all of the ten categories that had already been announced, which she had most of already written down on her piece of paper.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps


No it wasn't, we had to mark our own. Actually what had happened is that he hadn't been marking his paper as the results were being read out, and everyone was starting to count how many we got right to see who won. So he was passing it to her because she had marked it all down, and he obviously couldn't remember who had won all of the ten categories that had already been announced, which she had most of already written down on her piece of paper.
Oh right, so he was just being useless? Her comment seems fair enough then.
 

Leo

Well-known member
then yeah, seems like he was being obnoxious or lazy, or both. He could have asked to see her card when she was done, and then copied the winners to his card himself.
 

version

Well-known member
You could just be like "Nah. Fuck off, man. Do it yourself." Bit weird to turn it into something like that and make a point of involving someone else.
 

luka

Well-known member
I assume it was one of those games where you score each other, like a pub quiz, and she just happened to be next to him.

Or, being an Arab, he's just used to having women do any tedious task for him that comes up?
Tea hates those fucking Arabs
 

version

Well-known member
extremely unimportant and low level thing, and i'm not saying anything about whether its good or bad thing, but i find this is a consistant feature of my life now, these small interactions in which some kind of identity-based belief is voiced and acted on, people fighting back in these minuscule ways. probably has been the case in more activist circles for a very long time, but this group of people isn't that at all. it's possibly an example of a behaviour which was cultivated in a subculture that has very successfully broke out into the wider world.

I've heard about this happening during break ups and housemate disputes and all sorts. Someone not paying their share of the rent or doing the dishes then throwing all this jargon at the person bringing it up and blowing it up into a completely different kind of argument.
 
Top