I've also avoided even looking at the misogyny thread, but I'll still share my thoughts here.
I remember reading about a study that showed that men actually hear less of a message if it's spoken in a woman's voice than if the same message were to be transmitted in a man's voice. I thought to myself, "well, that's not surprising". If you think about it, common sense and experience teaches us that in general, people tend to pay more attention to words spoken by people with whom they identify. Rich people are more likely to listen to another rich person, Whites are more likely to other Whites, adults are more likely to listen to other adults, university professors are more likely to listen to other university professors, etc.
But then I thought about it some more and reviewed my experience some more, and realized that this is not always true. The determining variable in how clearly a person's message gets through is not always, as I had initially assumed, whether the listener identifies with the speaker. Far more important is the perceived likelihood that the speaker has a message that is immediately relevant to the listener, the more immediately the better. This is very important, because it helps us to avoid wasting our time and energy banging our heads against brick walls. It tells us that no matter how articulately formulated, or how morally lofty, or how logical or even how urgent the message is to the speaker, it will simply not get through unless the listener believes that it represents a genuine solution to his or her pressing problem.
People care a lot more about their own problems than they do about other people's problems. They might give lip-service or even make a gesture or a donation, but the less relevant the problem is to them personally, the lower the price they're willing to pay to solve it. Therefore, if you want to make your urgent problem matter to someone else, you have to somehow make it into their urgent problem, preferably without identifying yourself as their enemy, which can be very counter-productive if they have more power than you do. One way to do that is to take stock of the resources at your disposal that you may not be using or even be fully aware that you have, and then mobilize them quietly to create a counterbalancing force through which you can impose your will. Depending on the circumstances, it's usually safer to do this while remaining under the radar.
I'm not specifically addressing misogyny here, per se, just thinking out loud about power imbalances and injustice and suggesting that there are effective and ineffective ways to address them. Purely for convenience, I'll refer to those whom the power imbalance favors as "Group A" and those who are marginalized or actively oppressed as "Group B". In my view, the least effective course of action is for the members of "Group B" to waste their time and energy on a futile effort to persuade "Group A" that the current situation is catastrophic, because it's not, to them.
It's much more efficient and ultimately effective to focus one's effort on those who are already suffering and motivated to change things but feel helpless and don't know what to do. This is crucial, for two reasons: the first is the one I mentioned before, because there is safety in numbers but more importantly, power. The second is that working among those who share the same problem(s) that you do helps you to identify and formulate specific objectives that need to be fulfilled, rather than vague and diffuse complaints that are difficult to address in a concrete and measurable way.
In other words, if change is really what you're after, three things must be done:
1) Identify a specific, concrete problem that is immediate and widely shared;
2) Draft a list of specific, concrete steps that can be taken to solve this problem, including those that address other issues that indirectly or directly contribute to this problem;
3) Do your part to mobilize as many affected individuals as possible into a front dedicated to the achievement of these goals. Promote solidarity through shared values, knowledge, resources and objectives.
Note that all of these involve working with others who share the same problem, rather than appealing to those who do not. Ultimately, it boils down to power, period. Guilt trips and complaints and arguments about whether this word or that is "offensive" in my view are passive-aggressive substitutes for taking practical, targeted action to effect genuine change. They represent a dangerously seductive illusion, for both sides, because only weak people use them but they allow both sides to pretend that the "dialogue" is taking place on a level playing field. Rather than transform the power imbalance, they entrench them, confuse everybody and siphon off valuable energy, as Maddy's title so eloquently attests.
