blogger profile

Alison Piepmeier

My life is all about bringing down the patriarchy. I write books and articles about feminism, and I also teach and direct the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the College of Charleston....

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Difficult conversations

Alison Piepmeier

How do you have a conversation with someone whose views are dramatically different than your own?  If, in fact, you consider this someone’s views offensive and hurtful?  And what if this person is part of your family?

I’m good at dealing with a variety of opinions in the classroom.  In fact, I love having a lot of different perspectives circulating in class conversations.  In this context, if someone says something that I think is troubling or offensive, I can say,  “Okay, that’s interesting.  Let’s take a minute and consider this.”  If, for instance, someone uses the term “femi-nazi” (a term I hear much less these days since Rush Limbaugh has lost a lot of his credibility with the under-60 set), I can write the word on the board and say, “Let’s look at this word.  ‘Femi’ is the first part of the word ‘feminist,’ a belief in the political, social, and legal equality of men and women.  ‘Nazi’ refers to a group of people who killed six million Jews and millions of other people.  Why would someone bring these two terms together?  What does this term mean?”  Then we can have a real conversation, a thoughtful conversation that goes beyond knee-jerk reactions and loaded soundbites.

This approach doesn’t work as well when you’re in a conversation with your family--or, even more challenging, a conversation with your in-laws.  If you become the college professor in that context, you come across--and rightly so--as an egotistical control freak.  You weren’t invited there to run the discussion.  Nobody’s getting any course credit for this after dinner discussion.  And if you’re the person in the room with the most education, then it might be the case that everybody else is already a bit defensive, waiting for you to make them feel stupid.

How do you say, “Ouch!  What you just said really upsets me!”?  I don’t have a good answer for this yet.