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From: mangoe@cs.UMD.EDU (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Advocacy and Passion
Message-ID: <8910041344.AA27103@mimsy.UMD.EDU>
Date: 4 Oct 89 15:15:36 GMT
Sender: tittle@ics.uci.edu (Cindy Tittle)
Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science,
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Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu

If there is one issue here that seems inevitably polarizing, it is
divorce and child custody.  In particular, the Morgan/Foretich case.
To some extent, I would count myself as one of Dr. Morgan's partisans;
I freely admit this as a *prejudice* of mine, and I won't make any
attempt to argue one side of the case or the other.

What I find instructive, though, is the fire fight about this issue in
soc.men.  Here there is not even a pretext of equal rights.  People
argue passionately on one side of the case or the other, often from
personal experience.  And the most dubious sorts of arguments float
out.  We have polygraph testimony-- which is known to be unreliable.
We have Foretich's other ex-wives-- as though this testimony is free
of bias, something which the passion of the argument would seem to
deny.  And moreover, there is a sharp division here along gender
lines.  This case is, at least on the net, a rallying point for some
quite partisan viewpoints.

And personal experience plays a major role in this.  Several people
are arguing opposite sides of the argument, arguing from their own
experience.  Well, to me at least it seems that personal experience is
valid almost by definition; the truth must encompass all of it.  In
the Morgan/Foretich case ther are two quite separate issues: the legal
issues surrounding contempt, and the truth of Hilary's situation.  As
far as the latter is concerned, our personal experiences are not the
truth about Hilary.  This may seem trivial, but the tendency is always
to act as if our own experience is THE Experience.

And this seems to me to be a problem that pervades "solutions" to
social problems.  There is always a tension between generalization and
treatment of individual cases as individuals.  Advocacy groups, by
their nature, tend to prefer the former to the latter.  It is
particularly tempting to characature those who, for whatever reason,
find themselves in opposition to the group.  And the natural response
is for all the opponents to band together.  The end result is that
truth gives way to politics.  "Feminism" and "anti-feminism" come to
have the same truth content as "democrat" and "republican".

Now, I've exaggerated this somewhat.  At the same time, however, my
point remains: insofar as "feminism" means "gender equality", it
cannot mean "advocacy for women".  Such advocacy must be reined in by
attention to the complaints of men.  When all the women's complaints
are on one side, and all the men's are on the other, what we have is
not gender equality, but simply two political parties.

Charley Wingate