People Tell Us Who They Are, but We Don’t Listen

Abusers broadcast their cruelty, but their friends, family, and even people who have no reason to feel loyalty towards them, will still deny having seen any signs of it until the evidence is lying bloody at their feet.

This is because we are all trained not to listen to the truth even when it is shouted from the rooftops. We search for ignorance, or stupidity, or coincidence, when a racist is literally wearing their message – plainly visible – for anyone to see.

There’s a line in Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett that stuck in my mind: “The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.”

Yeah, it sounds self-righteous and a little bit like “the innocent have nothing to hide,” but that’s not at all what it’s saying. He’s rightly pointing out that guilty people tend to be big fans of letting other guilty people off the hook. There’s an awful lot of unearned, unasked-for mercy being offered to some pretty goddamn terrible people, and it really needs to stop.

You know what the bad have invented in this country? The idea that beliefs are separate from your inherent worthiness as a person. That is wrong – both logically incorrect, and morally wrong. Nothing you do is separate from your humanity. There is no free pass to believe something and not have it reflect on who you are.

If you support a god who denies the humanity of someone else, you have done your fellow human wrong, and that is the end of it. It doesn’t even matter if they’re real, because power doesn’t make anyone right, not even a god, and believing in them is still your choice.

There’s also the lovely idea that if you do something for money, it doesn’t reflect on who you are, because capitalism exists. If a company or candidate supports inequality for money, none of the individuals who contributed to that are guilty, because any evil can be waved away by saying that you only did it for profit. Sorry, but companies as separate entities don’t actually exist. It’s just a whole bunch of people, all of whom worked together to do something wrong. The fact that they profited is not an excuse, it’s just evidence. They were willing to sell out other people for that amount of money. Congratulations. Capitalism thanks them, and so do abusers everywhere.

Ordinary people will still look around today and say things like: “Trump isn’t actually a white supremacist, he’s just supporting white supremacy because his followers are racist and that makes it profitable for him to act like a racist.” I’ll let you in on a little secret, though: Racism is always ultimately about profit or power, usually both. Individuals might be seething balls of mindless hatred, but that hatred is always fed by people who profit off of it, and that changes nothing about the situation.

Stop making excuses for people who plainly tell you that they choose to prey on others.

 

Entertaining Sea Lions

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that Sea Lions suck. Or at least, it should be.

No, not the graceful marine mammals, but the guys (and some non-guys) who gleefully waste the time and energy of people who respond to their willful ignorance in good faith. The more a person honestly cares about educating and helping others, the more vulnerable they become to these unmitigated trashbags. That’s the worst part, to me, at least. They specifically prey on caring people in order to drive them to completely legitimate frustration and exhaustion, at which point they turn to gaslighting. They were just asking questions. They just want to understand. This kind of behavior is why activists never get anywhere.

Ironically, they’re sort of right about that last part. Working our asses off to educate these malicious garbage cans is not productive. It’s more like cooperating with emotional vampires while they suck our lives away, but we’re required to do it because people who lack privilege are always required to assume good faith on the part of privileged assholes long past the point where it becomes painfully obvious that they’re just dicking with us.

Their tone is always disgustingly condescending to start with, and it only gets more ridiculous as conversations go on. They love to incorrectly accuse others of logical fallacies, while actually using them freely themselves. Their questions are repetitive and can be easily Googled, their super clever arguments are all exactly the same offensive and illogical nonsense, and they blatantly refuse to learn, no matter how clearly anything is put to them. Their protestations of innocence when they’re called on this are similarly cookie-cutter and blatantly insincere.

It’s infuriating that even here, in my own space, I feel obligated to explain what they’re doing and to make my case as to why they don’t deserve our time, when all that should need to be said to this behavior is “No.”

“Intriguing post about your boss hitting on you in the workplace, could you please provide several scientific studies to back up your personal experience and also a psychic to prove that he meant to be sexist in the first place?”

“No.”

“Well then, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I wasn’t asking in earnest.”

“No.”

They lose their shit, I gotta tell you. Sea-lioning jerks absolutely unravel at the seams when someone won’t play their rigged game. They melt down, and desperately try to force reengagement. Their supporters flock to wail about the unfairness of such a harsh response to an innocent question and to bemoan the future of the civilized world when a random person won’t accept their challenge to a word-duel literally anytime they demand one. Truly, human intellect is dead because a woman won’t drop everything to explain feminism 101 for a completely uncooperative and demanding audience. How can her personal experiences with sexism be legitimate if she doesn’t submit to random interrogations at the drop of a hat?

I still personally feel deeply insecure about just saying “no,” because that’s how I have been conditioned to feel. I want to explain what it feels like, as a woman, to have grown up absorbing the inescapable fact that my opinions and knowledge are all subject to challenge and judgment by men. Any man, no matter his qualifications on a topic or mine, can challenge me freely, and if I don’t play, he can declare me ignorant and hysterical and automatically wrong. He can do this, and he will receive support from pretty much any bystanders, because this is totally normalized.

The thing is, though, I shouldn’t have to defend my experience of this. Other women already know the helpless rage this induces, and men just need to stop perpetuating it. Y’all dudes can just take my word for it, that this experience is infuriating and invalidating, and you really should just take my damn word. This same principle also applies to racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and more.

What if that fine inquisitive fellow was actually in earnest, though, you ask? What if he didn’t deserve this cruel treatment? What if he wasn’t literally Hitler?

So what?

“No” is still a completely reasonable answer, and one that should be respected. So is “Look it up yourself, person who clearly has access to the internet and its vast stores of recorded knowledge.”

If I say something true, and won’t explain it to you, it’s still true. Mind-blowing, I know.

If you say something ridiculously wrong, and I point it out, I am not honored bound to become your indentured teacher until you admit your mistake or defeat me.

Refusal to argue has nothing to do with the correctness of a person’s beliefs.

This doesn’t mean that many beliefs are not inherently harmful. Many are. This doesn’t mean that many beliefs should not be challenged whenever they’re expressed. Many should be. Sometimes, this shit gets complicated, but I swear that nobody owes a damn sea lion the satisfaction of a fruitless argument.

You can just say “no.” You can say it at any point in the process, too. That’s kinda how consent works, and those principles extend far beyond just sexual interactions.

Just say “no” to sea lions.

Actual sea lion with a “how dare” expression on its face.

Writing days this week: 1

Status Quo Warriors

There’s this disconnect I’ve seen and felt in specific types of conversations online. (And in person, but this is where I generally observe it in the wild because I don’t often go outside and talk to the flesh people.) I hang out in writing groups a lot for obvious reasons, so lately, the argument has looked kind of like this:

The OP: “Maybe don’t portray autistic people as rude, awkward geniuses incapable of human connection in your books and shows – it’s inaccurate and harmful.”

The inevitable flood of responses: “You can’t police creativity!” and “I do what I want!” and “It’s my book!”

I think about this a lot, because I see and experience it pretty frequently, and I’m not gonna say anything particularly revolutionary, but some of this is new to me. I think this disconnect starts all the way back with the way we raise kids.

In order to get and maintain power over a group of people for more than a generation, you’ve gotta train all the kids to see the world in a way that supports that power structure. To make little boys grow up to be properly misogynist men, for example, we first stunt their empathy and emotional intelligence. We tell them that all their feelings but anger are bad and weak and worst of all – feminine. We teach them that tears will earn them derision, not compassion. Did you know that people are statistically less likely to comfort a crying male* infant? That’s how early it starts. If we could find a way to get at fetuses and start indoctrinating them into gender roles before birth, we’d do it. Hell, we almost do. We throw gender reveal parties to celebrate which of these two narrow categories we’ll be training the future child for.

People do this stuff with varying levels of awareness. It was done to them. It’s the way things are done. This indoctrination was used on them, so it’s right to do it to their kids. Otherwise, they’d have to face some pretty unpleasant things about their own childhoods. They might see some elements of their own upbringing as old-fashioned or ignorant, but they might still tell a little boy with a scraped knee to man up and stop crying. They might still casually slut-shame their daughter on her way out the door to meet friends. Why not pass on these values? It never hurt them. Except it did hurt them.

My point is, we don’t just do this to make boys into neanderthals who are badly in need of a hug, or to keep girls barefoot and pregnant in the sandwich factory. We do this for every form of oppression that our societal structure is invested in. To make a society as mean-spirited as this one, we break kids and then we convince them that they were born wrong and required this indoctrination in order to be good. Goodness is a rigid thing that they earn by following the right authority and only exercising their own power over those who are beneath them in the hierarchy.

There are millions of loving parents who are ready to die valiantly on the “spanking totally isn’t the same as hitting” hill. Is there any parenting mantra more thoroughly engrained into American consciousness than “Because I said so?” If goodness and rightness are, from birth, associated only with the power to enforce them, and if explanation and negotiation is seen as weakness, is it any wonder that we get this weird interaction on the subject of social justice? The basis of social justice is opposing the beliefs and behavior that supports oppression. The original poster is, at least to some extent, not coming from that place anymore. They have no power behind their appeal, and they shouldn’t need any. They’re not exactly giving an order; they’re trying to share important information.

As far as they’re concerned, they’re just waving a shovel and asking for help with the mess that they can plainly see right there in front of everyone. The mess is toxic. It clearly needs to be removed. It would benefit everyone in the long run to remove it. Why wouldn’t you want to help remove some of the mess? In fact, for a start, couldn’t you just stop throwing more garbage onto it? Just a little less? Just one type of garbage? Why are you so invested in protecting this stupid pile? It’s maddening.

And, of course, the response they get for their troubles sounds an awful lot like a little kid shouting “You’re not my dad!” Social justice warriors are accused of seeing everything as a battle, but if they didn’t care about people so much that it hurts, they would not be doing this work. They spend huge amounts of time and energy trying to make change in the world, which requires a deep well of optimism and caring. Whereas, the folks that I will henceforth refer to as status quo warriors, cannot seem to view their efforts as anything but an attack. The replies are almost incredulous in their fury. “Who are you to tell me what to do? You can’t make me. Worse, you’re telling me I’m responsible to a group of people that I was taught is beneath me in the hierarchy. I’m allowed to hurt them. I have the power.”

I know this is kind of a ramble, but given how often I’m told to try to see the other side’s point of view, maybe it’s worth saying. I won’t entertain a world-view that says it doesn’t matter if some people are suffering as long as they’re the right people, but I can try to see why someone would be stuck in that place. If we all start there, and I think we all do to some extent, there must be a way through it. If nothing else, it makes me feel a little less angry to see it this way.

Puppy break.

Epilogue: Yeah, sure, good and bad are subjective, but they’re also kinda not. What if we stopped complicating it? You can go as deep down the ethics rabbit hole as you want if you really enjoy wrestling with the gnarly questions, but functionally, it’s not actually that hard. I really do think we can do so much better for each other and I think it’s always worth the effort to try.

*Assigned male infants, of course. There’s no room in this system for kids who don’t conform to the gender they’ve been assigned.

Social Justice Warriors in Literature and History

Americans love a hero. Whether we’re talking about an underdog who refuses to back down in a fight against the establishment, or a powerful being who uses their strength to defend the helpless, we’re all about heroism. This seems to be a universal human thing, but I think Americans are especially fond of those tropes, and they’re very much a part of our cultural identity. Many Americans imagine our country as being (or at least having been at one point) a powerful force for good in the world that stands up against evil, especially nazis. We hate those damn nazis.

The funny thing is, though, that we as a culture absolutely loathe real people who embody the exact traits that we admire in literary and historical figures. We love that guy who stands up to a corrupt government, unless that guy is real and that government is our government. Then, we hate that guy. We especially hate that guy if he happens to be a woman on the internet. We even have a lovely term for that person: the social justice warrior. This label is often spat at people who try their hardest every day to push back against a culture that has completely normalized cruelty against those who historically had little or no power to protect themselves.

This rosy-but-limited view of heroism also applies to the past. Civil rights? Absolutely important. Everyone who marched was a hero. Suffragettes? Damn right women deserved the vote. Stonewall? Yeah, they probably had a point. World war 2? Let’s beat the shit out of those fucking nazis.* The people who fought against progress back then are increasingly viewed as backwards, ignorant, or outright evil. Especially the nazis. Screw nazis, right?

Wrong.

Well, I mean, nazis have a right to express their opinions, don’t they? It’s a free country, after-all. It’s just intolerant not to tolerate the view that some humans deserve to die or be raped or be socially ostracized for harmless inborn traits and personal choices, isn’t it? It’s literally just MEAN to call someone a bigot for saying and doing racist or homophobic things. It’s BULLYING to argue with people who make fun of those with disabilities that require accommodation. It’s a sign of the sad, close-minded, liberal mind-set that people aren’t willing to remain close with friends and family who “disagree” with their fundamental humanity being socially recognized, and who make dehumanizing jokes about them. While we’re on the subject of humor, rape jokes should totally be protected by freedom of speech, and people who object to them are literally destroying the soul of comedy. Trans women are one of the most at-risk demographics in the country, especially trans women of color, but it is an intolerable cruelty to cis women and children everywhere if they’re allowed to pee in safety. Oh, and of course, it’s just judgmental and rude to tell parents not to hit their property, I mean children.

But of course, that’s all just common sense stuff. Obviously the rights that people have already fought and died for, and the social awareness we have now which was raised inch by painful inch by activists who were shamed and ostracized for their efforts, that’s all a logical baseline for a just society. That was right, and justified. Anything more than that, though… Anything that challenges *current* norms, or demands the redress of *current* injustice, or challenges your personal *current* views of right and wrong, well. That’s just taking things way too far. The thing is, though, that’s exactly what people have always said. Word. for. word.

Every freedom we take for granted as just being common sense was someone’s totally absurd liberal agenda at one point. It was over the line. It was millennials with their made-up genders, and it was black lives matter with their violent demands to not be shot by police, and it was trans women wanting to pee where they’re less likely to get beaten to death by strange men. It was a threat to social stability. It was abusing the majority for the sake of a minority who were just getting above themselves.

Literature has always been used as a mirror held up to society so that we can see injustice that has become invisible due to desensitization. That’s a pretty well known fact, ask any english teacher. How is it, then, that people who would never miss an Avengers movie, and who eat up novels about gritty underdogs tackling evil corporations that profit from human suffering, and who truly believe that they personally stand for truth, justice, and the American way; will absolutely lose their goddamn shit when they hear: “Hey, man. That thing you just said without thinking is actually a slur against a group of people, thousands of whom were gassed to death in living memory, could you change a single word in your vocabulary so that you’re not perpetuating stigma against them?”

*Yes, there are still tons of people who are straight up against all of this, clearly, but it’s no longer considered generally acceptable. You can’t be FOR slavery, that’s just wrong. Prison labor, though, that’s just what they deserve for being black. I mean, criminals.*

* Because there are plenty of people who DO proudly express that view, I feel the need to clarify that that last part was sarcasm. Fuck the racist as hell prison industrial complex.