hey so could you explain or do you have links to explain why generalising the oppressors is not bad and why saying not all X are Y is not bad? my anger, memory and socialising issues are making it hard for me to articulate what i intend and i was hoping for a more reliable source to give this person better information. please post publicly if you do, so i can reblog for them? ◥ buckythirteen

Metonymy: a figure of speech in which something is called not by its own name but by the name of a conceptually related thing e.g. Hollywood being used to refer to the US film industry, or Washington being used to refer to the governing bodies of the United States.

One principle of metonymy is synecdoche: referring to the part by the whole e.g. calling a cattle a “head” and an assistant rancher a “hand”.

You often hear people say how corrupt “politicians” are, or in what bad shape “Washington” is in, or how morally bankrupt “Wallstreet” is, and how “Television” is corrupting the youth.

Are these people referring to every single politician? Are there hoards of bloggers demanding that “Not all politicians are like that!” (except they actually are lol). Are people complaining about the immorality of a literal street in New York? Are they condemning every investment banker in history as a monster? Do they cite every single tv program as the culprit of their accusation?

No. It should come without question that the implication is that there are certain notable individuals or groups within the whole that are enough to semantically taint the speaker’s perception of the whole. One bad apple makes the whole bushel rotten, or whatever my grandmother used to say.

It’s a linguistic principle. People are lazy assholes, that is one of only three methods of linguistic evolution: economy. We want to save energy while still expressing what we want to. It’s easier to use metonymy in rapid, familiar, casual speech, then going out of your way to completely clarify your intentions. Context is the key, my child.

We’re literally coding in “Not all x are like that!” in our original statements. You need but extrapolate that caveat through human nature. You already contextually know we don’t mean that literally all x are like that.

But, of course, with less conventional targets, like men, there will still be resistance. Politicians are an easy target, because their power is vast and their approval rating is low. The patriarchy is more subtle, and more applauded. When a guy says, “Hey wait not all of us are like that” he’s saying “I’m surprised that men have such a low approval rating”. He’s shocked that his perception of misogyny being a rather minor system of stratification, and of male culprits of hate crimes against women being few, far between, and outliers, has been challenged.

So until majority groups overcome their own denial about their complicit subjugation of minority groups, they’ll continue to ask, “But you don’t mean me do you? I thought I was a nice person!”, as if humans are supposed to be flawless.

It’s cognitive dissonance, and it can be overcome, quite easily depending on the person. So, in most cases, you can dismiss people taking umbrage with your “overgeneralizations”, but in very extreme and annoying cases, you can cite metonymy and synecdoche.

Of course, some “overgeneralizations” are not so. All men are oppressors and are complicit in sexism, is literally true, sociologically. All men assault women and are awful, is a clear case of metonymy at work. But to point out something that a venting victim of abuse already knows is disingenuous, cruel, and oppressive. It is silencing a marginalized person to focus on you. You are not the victim, imagined majority audience. So if you try to make yourself the victim of some perceived crime, you are wasting everyone’s time.

Hope this helped! :D