Separation

The idea that many women deal with sexism male chauvinism daily is a lot like saying that water is wet. It's one of those truths that's become so pervasive that it's nearly lost all meaning and faded into the background noise. I can't speak from personal experience, but I suspect that it's a lot like dealing with racism in that one of the sensations that it produces is an isolation from others who don't have the same experience.

The Huffington Post has an article about the #QuestionsForMen hashtag campaign, something that strikes me as part public awareness campaign, part indictment and part support group. In it, Alanna Vagianos selects 16 of her favorite questions to reprint. Many of them are the sorts of things that you'd expect - like: "Question to the male writers/speakers etc out there. Is it common for you to be called an ‘attention seeker’? Or do just women get that?"

But some of them stood out for me.

"When you have a hostile disagreement with someone," Clementine Ford, credited as being the originator of the campaign, asks, "is it common for them to say you’re angry because no one will fuck you?"

And my first thought was: "Not anymore." But I remember this accusation from my late teens and twenties. I don't know if it happened often enough that is qualifies for Ford's definition of "common," but I dealt with similar accusations back in the day. I didn't have a girlfriend as a young adult, a piece of information that I was careful about, because as Jacob Wiesberg once noted in Slate, "Today we find the idea of nonsexuality more bizarre than deviant sexuality." (Whether or not he understood "today" to reach back to 1990, I don't know.) To be sure, I didn't have to deal with the accusation because of my gender, but because of my behavior (or lack thereof), but when people set out to be hurtful, they'll take potshots at whatever target presents itself.

In a job interview have you ever been asked how you will juggle work and home?

Well, yes, actually. There comes a point in time where the assumption that one is married and likely has children becomes the default, and once, when I was interviewing for a job, it was very clear that the interviewer wanted to know if my home life would interfere in my ability to be available whenever needed. (It was a very strange interview - the interviewer took great pains to avoid directly asking any questions that may have gotten him into hot water, but, as a result, the questions were so abstruse that there was another person in the room whose only role seemed to be translating the questions back into English.)

[D]o you walk home with your keys placed in between your fingers? are you constantly looking over your shoulder?

This question stood out for me for a different reason. As I noted a couple of years ago, once, while I was walking home from the grocery store, a White woman walking towards me on the sidewalk made something of a show of taking her keys out of her purse and readying them for use as defensive weapons. For years, what seems to many people to be a perfectly reasonable response to the risks posed by casual sexism struck me as a prime example of casual racism.

Do you get told 'you'll change your mind eventually' when you say you don't want to have children?

This one surprised me, because as a single man, I'm told all the time that I'll eventually want to be a father, even though I'm far past the age when any sane person would want to deal with a newborn, infant or toddler full-time. I figured that every single person in the United States has to put up with this particular form of inanity over and over again.

These last two questions illustrate for me the isolation that dealing with prejudice - especially when it's backed up by violence - inflicts on people. Of course, it would be bizarre for a woman on the street to strike up a conversation with a man she fears means to attack her, but the fact that we couldn't know each other's minds prevented us from understanding the patterns that we were playing out that day in Chicago. By the same token the separation between people that the woman who asked about attitudes towards children experiences cut her off from a wide variety of people who would likely happily commiserate with her over the constant presumption that the desire to be a parent is simply a random epiphany away.

In the grand scheme of things, perhaps the separation produced by prejudice is a minor thing. I'm sure that it beats most of the other effects that our overall willingness to force people into boxes of our choosing visits upon people. But perhaps the invisibility produced by its lack of overt consequences is just as much a tragedy as anything else, along with the irony of millions of people being united in being alone.

Just A Little Bit

"I have learned in recent years about the concept of microaggressions (first named by Derald Wing Sue), which can occur when your statement to or about another person or actions, even if entirely well-intended, causes hurt. A classic example is telling a person of color 'you are so well-spoken!;' on the surface this may sound like a complement, but in fact has the underlying message that because of the hue of his/her skin, the fact that he/she speaks good English is surprising or notable. There is an underlying negative stereotype being communicated."
“Mama, what is THAT?” a guide to microaggression

I, for my part, have been on the receiving end of "you are so well-spoken" (although the actual term that most people use {and have used} is "articulate") since I was in grade school. And have been told, countless times, of the underlying negative stereotype there. But only twice has it been by someone who actually subscribed to said stereotype - and both times, it was to admit that they'd held it out of ignorance, and that they were wrong.

When I was young, I would bask in the compliment of being told how articulate I was. It was what everyone around me wanted and expected of me. My parents, my teachers, my aunts and uncles - all of them remarked positively on my academician's command of the language, and family members were especially quick to show it off to others whenever they could. They taught me that it was a Good Thing and the mark of someone who was a cut above ordinary. That is, until White strangers began to take notice. As, when I was in Junior High School, the circle of adults that began to interact with expanded beyond people my family directly hoped to impress, the compliments started to come from people who were unfamiliar. And my parents and other family members were no less vigilant about Stranger Danger than anyone else. And that's when they began to teach me about the code.

As a pre-teen, the well-meaning adults in my life began to teach me that the compliments of Whites were often false - that many only commented on how articulate I was because they expected worse, much worse, from me. The "underlying message" was introduced into my reality. Suddenly, the very compliments that I had spent so much time carefully collecting became daggers, wielded by wicked people who hated in secret and spoke in a vicious code. Everything became a competition and the color of one's skin marked which team you were on. Many of the people who would say to me, or to whichever adult I was with, "you are so articulate" seemed to be nice, polite, well-meaning people. And, I was told, not all of them were vipers in human skin. But you never knew which ones. And so every one of them was suspect. And as much as their compliments were veiled criticisms, intended to remind me of my place, their criticisms were also driven by racism, spiteful lies hatched to maintain their sense of racial superiority.

And so, I was told that it was the words of other people like myself that counted. Their compliments were genuine, and their criticisms not driven by animosity.

But in my first year of college, at a Historically Black University, there were few compliments. The way of speaking and interacting that I had been taught to value immediately became a liability. Almost all of the other students, drawn from mostly urban backgrounds, saw me as snobbishly affected - "acting white" - and made their anger at my rejection of them clear. I answered in kind, sneering at their lack of erudition.

In short order I was left with nothing but the understanding that Whites only complimented me to put everyone like me down and other Blacks felt betrayed. The facility with language that I had worked so hard to acquire was worthless.

And so, rather than pride, there was hurt. But that hurt was not caused by people who were well-intended, but ignorant. It was caused by people who saw the compliments paid to me as coming at their direct expense, and demanded that I pay, too. It was caused by the well-meaning, caring people in my life who taught me that marginalization, embarrassment, stereotyping, silencing and disempowerment were the norm between people who were unlike one another and to not expect this at all times, no matter how nice, polite or complimentary someone was, if they were Other, they could not be trusted. It was caused by people who sought to protect my self of sense from being torn down but wound up cutting me off from the majority of sources that would build it up. Looking back on it, that's where the unintended, and mislabeled, "aggression" lay.

I've said this before - the answer to our feelings of "you're different, and that's bad" does not lie in forcing those whose opinions of us we feel matter to bow to a carefully curated way of speaking to and about us. It lies in freeing ourselves from the idea that those opinions, in and of themselves, matter. If Jim Crow is truly dead, then the opinion of among Whites that we don't command the language as well as they do will not resuscitate it, and if it is not, shielding ourselves from the knowledge that others think poorly of us will not keep the coffin closed.

Three Quarters

Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) stirred up something of a firestorm with his contention that vaccinations for children should be voluntary - decisions made by the parents of said children based on their priorities, and not those of the state, or society at large.

Of course, we all like choice - there are things about our lives that we feel are our own prerogatives, and we resent other people levering us into surrendering our choices. But when we talk about choices, who should have them - who should not, and what things should be subject to personal choice, we run into an interesting situation - because while the argument is often framed as being a dispute over choice, it's really about the choices under consideration right at that moment - and what justifies the given positions.

Typically, disputes about choice break down into three camps: those people who are fighting to preserve or obtain the right to make a particular choice because they want to make it, people who wouldn't make the choice themselves, but wish it to be available to others and those people who have no use for that choice themselves and do not wish it to be available to others. The debate over marriage equality for same sex couples here in the United States tends to break down this way - you have same sex couples who want the right to marry, you have people who have no intention of ever marrying someone of the same sex who want same sex couples to have the right to marry and you have people who have no intention of every marrying someone of the same sex who want to deny same sex couples that choice. When the people who want a particular choice are a small enough minority, they can become, interestingly, bystanders in a public debate that they are ostensibly the subjects of - again, same-sex marriage comes to mind - the primary warring factions in this Culture War campaign (one which is rapidly drawing to a close) are straight people who support same sex marriage equality and straight people who want the practice to remain (or, quixotically, return to being) illegal.

The "to vax, or not to vax" debate lacks that "allies" faction, and so primarily pits those who wish to opt out of vaccinations against those who wish to make vaccination either effectively or literally mandatory. But both arguments lack a fourth facet - people who want, and would make, a given choice, but fully support the right of the society at large to restrict it. So we don't see, for instance, a vocal group of gays and lesbians who argue that while they would like to marry any partner of their choosing, society is perfectly within its rights to deny them this choice. By the same token, there isn't a vocal group of anti-vaccine activists, who similarly accept that the final choice isn't theirs to make. (Note this is different from doing something under protest, or vocally submitting to the threat of punishment.)

And this, I think, is why politicians, like Senator Paul, can move these social arguments into an area of "freedom versus tyranny." While many people tend to argue that societies have the right to restrict choices, it's rare to hear people openly argue that societies have the right to restrict choices that they actively wish to make.

Affirmative

When I was younger, affirmations struck me as vapid, cheesy and, perhaps most importantly, inaccurate statements that people would use to sugar-coat reality. One of the benefits of maturation is that I've grown past the idea that the world is a nasty and dark place of necessity. So, today, affirmations strike me mainly as cheesy.

But I still find myself indulging in them sometimes when I talk to people. I think that it's more about learning not to take myself as seriously as I tend to otherwise. But a part of me also thinks that they work, at least somewhat. The idea that someone believes in us, I think, gives us license to be ourselves - which, unsurprisingly, is what we're best at.

Fair's Fair

It does not surprise me that human beings visit so much misery upon one another - I have seen enough instances where a difference of opinion has prompted someone to wish for the blood of the innocent just so that they might witness the tears of the guilty to understand that one person's tragedy is another person's just desserts. And once you arrive at that point, all one needs for an atrocity is for someone to decide that they are unwilling to wait for Nature, Fate or their god to make that tragedy come to pass.