Dealing with a fresh wave of grief, today I sorted through my mom’s purse for the second time since I brought it back with me, about this time last year. I’d already taken all the packets of tissues and old receipts–most of the bag detritus that collects over time–out of there, so today I ended up going through her huge wallet. Besides the now-useless collection of things like funky-shaped store credit cards in my biodad’s name (they split up in 1981; I haven’t seen him since 1986) and Blue Cross cards from 1985, I found her store of wallet photos.
Gosh. Stabby describes it pretty well.
One of the things I couldn’t help but notice, trying to distract myself from starting to blubber all over the place, was that in the Shrine to Urocyon 1976-1987 section, that kid looked much leaner than I remembered through the mental filters I’ve since picked up. It’s funny the things that will catch a person’s eye sometimes. (I also didn’t remember my hair going so reddish before all the brown pigment came in on top!) Partly to make a point to myself–and partly to make a larger point in general–I scanned a few photos.
Here’s an assortment of photos from ages 3-6. Looks like the same kid displaying an expected rate of growth, eh? There is one major difference*, though: a few months before the last portraits of this child were taken, she was declared Overweight! (complete with underlining and exclamation point) on paper, when the school/health department collected their regular child measurement data, thus becoming part of the horrible Childhood Obesity Epidemic. You’ll notice that she is sitting up very straight, and looks happy and confident enough. Her strong-looking shoulders and arms already stand out. At that point, she was also the tallest kid in the school’s first grade, and one of only two who were 4 feet tall going in (perception later confirmed by seeing a sample of the health documents**). The only other kids who came close in measurements were members of the same ethnic /racial group.
Going by the available, more recent 2000 CDC data on girls (PDF), she looks to be in the 99th percentile for both height and weight. Fiddling dates to use the CDC’s child BMI calculator, ” Based on the height and weight entered, the BMI is 22.8 , placing the BMI-for-age at the 98th percentile for girls aged 6 years 7 months. This child may be obese and is likely to have health-related problems because of weight and should be seen by a healthcare provider for further assessment.”
I had to fiddle the dates by 10 years, and do not know how these figures have changed from the ones current at the time. There are plenty of claims that BMI has gone up across the board.
The next portrait available is from December 1987, when she is a couple of months shy of 13. In the meantime, she has taken to avoiding cameras, and was upset enough at being forced to sit for Christmas portraits that she refused to remove her jacket. Note the half-grimace, and the shoulder slump. By this point, she insists on keeping her pointed-out-as-fat arms covered, and has developed a habit of hunching in around her D-cup breasts. She has consistently been classified as overweight since the last portrait, and is now verging on “obese”. She stands at 5′7″, close to her full adult height, and weighs a little under 170 lbs. (Again, the only other kids at her school whose measurements came close were others of local Tutelo/Cherokee heritage, including some who identified as Black.) She has started engaging in disordered eating behaviors, with a weight goal of 125. Her broad, flat face is on the verge of sinking in.
Using the same chart and calculator, how do her height and weight compare? By now, she squeaks in at “only” the 93rd-94th percentile for height, and the 94th-95th for weight. “Based on the height and weight entered, the BMI is 26.2 , placing the BMI-for-age at the 95th percentile for girls aged 12 years 7 months. This child may be obese and is likely to have health-related problems because of weight and should be seen by a healthcare provider for further assessment.”
Some school districts are now sending home BMI report cards, based on the measurements they collect. “Critics worry about stigmatization of overweight children, misinterpretation of BMI results sent home to parents, and placement of children on harmful diets.” The methods used to determine BMI for adults are dodgy enough; the CDC’s information on BMI as used for children and teens inspires even less confidence. Neither method has much connection to reality near either end of the scale, nor do they distinguish body fat from lean body mass.
If I didn’t know that the girl in question was me, I would not cringe and start thinking “fat cow” before even starting to look at these photos. Keeping more in the way of perspective is why I decided to use third person references. Looking at them now with a little detachment, I see rude health. Except for the signs of strain starting to show in the last one. Raising awareness of the Dread Childhood Obesity is so beneficial for mental health, in a lot of cases.
Another one that caught my eye, once I started thinking along these lines:
This is one of my younger cousins, probably taken in 1998 judging by the state of his teeth. He was also officially “overweight”–probably “obese”, since they’d started using that distinction–at the time of this photo, though I am not even going to guess at his measurements at that point. Another statistic in the Dread Obesity Epidemic, though–as a boy–he has been socialized to internalize it less. He’s still rated as “obese” by BMI, since at last check he was a little shorter than I am while outweighing me by >40 lbs. Of muscle. He still plays baseball, and has added football (defensive line) and weight training since then. He’s really bulked up a lot the past few years; our family is good at that!
You can probably get an idea of what I think about the standards used to declare a Childhood Obesity Epidemic. (Besides the adult version.) You can probably also get an idea of how I feel about the stated goals of making us healthier and happier through a focus on pointing out and Preventing Childhood Obesity, based on experience. Some people are truly out of touch with reality.
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* Before this, the sense God gave a turnip was applied to measurements and norms. I was about twice the size of my (SE Asian) pediatrician’s daughter of the same age, and he just concluded that I was a very healthy Amazon child. I have yet to reach his projected height of 6′4″, alas. How much of the gap comes from starving myself in early adolescence, I have no idea.
** Circa 1989, when I could not do PE because of a torn knee ligament, I was set to doing something or another with the whole year’s student health files to keep me busy. Yes, I peeked, and got angry even then, when the self-hatred was strong.
I thought I would bring a slightly expanded version of one of my comments on a recent post (Being kind to your body, and nasty assumptions) over to one of its own:
I should probably also add that I know I was lucky in the way I reacted to benzos; an awful lot of people do become physically dependent. I got some psychological dependency going for a while, but they did make life much more bearable. For a while, I did take higher than the prescribed dosage (for the first few weeks of the month, until the pills ran out!), just to try to get some relief.
Not considering/knowing that I might be autistic and experiencing very real sensory issues and overload, doctors assumed that I had a huge mess of anxiety disorders (panic disorder, GAD, social anxiety, and even agoraphobia when I avoided overwhelming stimuli). Some of my overload reactions were even seen as psychotic symptoms, for lack of a decent understanding of what was going on. I didn’t know any other way to interpret what I was experiencing, much less the mental health professionals (ouch). For years, I had multiple “panic attacks” every day. Sometimes the only way I could get to sleep was to wait for the waves of “panic attacks” to completely exhaust me. I now know that this is my nervous system shutting down under sufficient overload, out of self protection. After I crashed out of college, I barely left the house for years, trying to avoid the “anxiety”.
Scarily, the more I see of other people’s experiences, the more common this sort of thing seems. That’s the main reason I keep sharing experiences I’ve been trained to find embarrassing, in hopes that someone else can benefit from knowledge I’ve picked up the hard way!
Anti-anxiety meds will blunt your reactions to sensory issues, but do not address the problem. At all. Nor do the various forms of therapy aimed at changing your responses to anxiety-provoking situations; the sensory stuff kicks in before the anxiety-related thought patterns they’re looking at.
Learning that the sensory issues are real, and how they’re working in my case, let me figure out some ways of coping with them, directly. Even if CBT does not work directly to stop the sensory reactions, you can learn to change your reactions to the “symptoms”, once you know what’s going on. Besides learning to work around overloading situations in the first place, and use things like mp3 players to cope. That’s even without taking into account my previously-unrecognized hypoglycemia/diabetes: eat a piece of fruit before leaving the house, avoid >50% of “anxiety” symptoms while out and about. Between the two problems, they account for pretty much all the “anxiety” I was experiencing on a daily basis. Now I know that I can manage this without uncomfortably sedating myself.
These meds did, however, greatly help the muscle spasms. Very possibly for the same reasons that I don’t have many opioid receptors now (wipe out dopamine receptors, you also wipe out related opioid receptors), and do not get nearly as much relief from opioid pain medications*, I have never had a physical problem stopping taking rather hefty doses of benzos–besides just losing the muscle relaxant effect, which was a ton of help with the very painful tardive dystonia I got from neuroleptics. (Which were also prescribed, in large part, to blunt my sensory sensitivity/”anxiety”.) I have atypical reactions to a lot of medications–not just psychiatric–due to both neurology and ethnicity.
This is the only type of psychiatric medication I would consider taking again, though not for the main reason it was prescribed before. A lot of people do run into problems, and I am definitely not trying to dismiss or minimize their experiences. These are some tough choices.
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* Also probably feel the effects of not getting much relief from endogenous opioids, either, leading to a lot more pain. Both facets are apparently a common problem under the fibromyalgia diagnostic umbrella. I have also been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, for lack of a clue why these things were happening, when my pain is coming from the same old dystonia and associated med-induced problems. I wonder how many other women in particular, now that they’re pushing atypical neuroleptics so hard, are getting diagnosed with fibromyalgia for the same reasons?
I also wonder how many other people are not getting appropriate treatment, especially in the UK, to quote from that previous post:
It’s been much worse since I moved to the U.K., since the NHS is weird about benzodiazepines, thanks to earlier overprescription and a huge class action suit. Flexeril/Skelaxin/etc. don’t work for me. And I just figured out a few months ago that it’s not fibromyalgia, it’s the same old crap! I am also concerned about stigma if I seek specific treatment, since it did come from neuroleptics, and I’ve already run into medical stigma here over the (bogus) bipolar diagnosis. “You brought it on yourself by being crazy, now live with it” is not helpful.
The NHS Direct patient information on fibromyalgia used to mention diazepam/Valium as a useful muscle relaxant. Now it does not.
Beyond Meds: Meditation and brain neuroplasticity, The other side of Mental Health Science — Steve Morgan
- Do people suffer from psychiatric disorders/diseases or do people experience varying degrees of human suffering in their own idiosyncratic ways? — Tim Desmond
- Undiagnosing myself
- Anatomy of an epidemic — Robert Whitaker
FWD/Forward: In which homework is assigned
- Guest Post: Disability and Asexuality
Cat in a Dog’s World: Missing in Causation Talk: Actual Autistics
WITsend: Calling all men who tech – time to speak out for female colleagues
Shapely Prose: Straw Feminist Weekly: The jealous bitch
Reclusive Leftist: House Democrats pass healthcare reform for men
- Sometimes it’s good to pause and remind ourselves that the wingnuts really are fucking batshit insane (open thread)
Retrieverman’s Weblog: Another look at the Goyet cave “dog”
Rolling Around In My Head: Shopmobility, part one
NTs Are Weird: Collateral Damage in the Health Care Debate
LAST WOMAN: #40. Whose Honor Guard? An Open Letter
Whose Planet Is It Anyway?: Protesters Attacked by Flying Burrito Wrap
Furious Seasons: Atypical Nation: Abilify TV Ad Targets Women
- The Zyprexa Chronicles: Zyprexa Good For Teens, Packs On The Pounds In Short-Term Trial
- Fort Hood Shooting: Army Psychiatrist Kills 12, Wounds 31, Fuller Torrey Silent
- “Once Diagnosed, Never Undiagnosed”
I’ve had a couple of posts fermenting in my head, while low on expressive language spoons. This one just occurred to me, hanging around Twitter because it suits my concentration levels today. 
Mentioning Skate, my (recently deceased) goldfish, on there got me a couple of skateboarding-related followers. In this case, it’s less annoying*, since I coincidentally spent the late ’80s and early ’90s as a purple-haired skate freak. (My, how the scene has changed!) Wasn’t spectacularly good at it, but enjoyed it anyway.
For years now, I’ve been too physically decrepit to consider this a good idea, but would like to do it again if I can get some of the musculoskeletal problems worked out enough. Ditto for cycling, swimming, and a few other things. I did start cycling again a couple of years ago, and had to stop with the inner thigh weirdness, exactly the same thing that messed up my knees and made me stay away from bikes before.
Even most of my own family have assumed that skating was what got me into this mess in the first place. Probably because of the “That looks dangerous, and I don’t understand why you’re doing it” factor. Actually, I strained some muscles and reinjured a knee (already with a torn ACL) once. It’s only indirectly responsible.
The more salient bit there: I got out there and did lots of physically demanding stuff, knowing I probably had a (second) torn ACL. And other injuries. Without waiting for proper recovery or rehab. I tended to push even harder because I was having problems. It’s particularly sneaky, since sometimes it can feel like “Shao Lin shakin’ for the sake of his soul” #, when it’s really you persisting in hurting yourself. All this adds up, and cascades after a while.
Treating your body like a balky piece of machinery will not do you any good whatsoever. It can be a form of self injury, the same as cutting yourself; you’re not going to treat your body that way if you really love yourself. I was going to link to an excellent video on the many ways in which self harm can manifest itself, but Jane has removed it from YouTube for some reason. You can also injure yourself with your own mental scripts, and you will not do this if you really love yourself. You will find ways not to generally run yourself into the ground–physically, mentally, or spiritually– if you love yourself.
I still have to remind myself of these things, daily.
In a rather twisted way, all this did have its upside. I finally learned the hard way that pushing myself too hard, past any reasonable point of physical endurance, is not a good idea. I’ve also had to develop a better sense of living in my body, and how to treat it more kindly. The extra layer of mild (compared to how it can present!) generalized tardive dystonia** has not helped matters, but has put more pressure on me to treat myself better.
That’s one of my major personal challenges in working on duyukta. Besides continuing to be mindful of what my body is doing, I’m hoping to start into Tai Chi once we’re settled in CA, to try to balance things out some. It’s too easy to fall into not really living in your body, especially if you’re a woman, and even if you’re doing a lot of athletic stuff.
Considering that a lot of us get ourselves into trouble through pushing ourselves too hard, I got extra honked off again at the apparently frequent perception that people must be causing their own musculoskeletal problems through being lazy slobs. Especially if we’re not small people. And I was a lot fatter from endocrine disruption when I was much more physically active, and also trying to beat my weight (therefore my body, which is me) into submission. I ran into this during my last attempt at PT/rehab, earlier this year:
I’d been a bit concerned about developing a huge dowager’s hump like my Nana had. The hard, muscular “buffalo hump” I have developed is, indeed, apparently the beginning of it. Nana’s was attributed to osteoporosis–as is still common, research to the contrary–but, if so, that was the only sign of it. (This also made me feel safer, then I started getting an obvious hump.) She’s exactly where I got the strong tendency to buzz around like a dyspraxic hummingbird, and you’d think she’d have fractured other things if her bones had been brittle. Being that active and accident-prone is a great way to accumulate and exacerbate muscle injuries, however. She also had a flat back and wonky knees. At least the hump turns out to be preventable, even if it’s a shame she didn’t know that. :/
On a related note, this is one of the reasons it makes me want to scream and throttle professionals when they just assume that I’ve gotten myself into this musculoskeletal mess through being a couch potato, all evidence to the contrary. Messes caused/aggravated by having trouble sitting down*, and by overtraining, require rather different management. (Even if it hurts, I’m going to use it until the muscle refuses to work anymore. Not always good.) This is one of the main reasons I had to discontinue PT recently, besides their neglecting to take obvious trigger points into account with stretching and strengthening. I assumed they would, since the practice claims to treat myofascial problems, but apparently not.
Knowledge is good.
* Frequently literally. Sitting down for long has been uncomfortable since I broke my tailbone 20 years ago and set up trigger points in every nearby muscle, leading to sacroiliac weirdness. This has led to other muscular strains.
What’s behind this, besides “not emaciated==lazy”? I think it’s the same old blaming. If we’re having disabling problems, we must have brought it on ourselves in some way. Even if the proposed explanation makes no sense whatsoever. And hating on “lazy, fat” people sure is popular. It’s weird projection, and it too frequently keeps people from getting the kind of help they need, or any at all.
Which brings me to another post from Womanist Musings I ran across today: Fat Hatred Or Not? You Decide. She offers an excellent example of projecting perceived qualities of one group of people you don’t like onto another group of people you don’t like, as hatefully as possible.
It’s hard not to see the connections with disability.
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* Just try using the A-Word (autism, autistic) and see how many keyword-searching hateful followers that gets you. Argh.
** “Similar to idiopathic dystonia, young patients with tardive dystonia tended to have more generalized distribution of the dystonia” Lots of painful spasms started while I was still on neuroleptics, and the doctor admitted it was related–changed meds, and kept me on extra Xanax or Klonipin as a muscle relaxant–but never said the word “dystonia”.
It’s been much worse since I moved to the U.K., since the NHS is weird about benzodiazepines, thanks to earlier overprescription and a huge class action suit. Flexeril/Skelaxin/etc. don’t work for me. And I just figured out a few months ago that it’s not fibromyalgia, it’s the same old crap! I am also concerned about stigma if I seek specific treatment, since it did come from neuroleptics, and I’ve already run into medical stigma here over the (bogus) bipolar diagnosis. “You brought it on yourself by being crazy, now live with it” is not helpful.
Spending time in front of the keyboard last night, I ran across something else about “honor killings”. They’re depressingly common in some parts of the world.
The terminology used in English still confuses the devil out of me. Like “respect”, “honor” does an awful lot of duty, covering many different concepts. I ran across a very sensible description of what is meant in this case, at Broken Bodies – Broken Dreams: Violence against Women Exposed:
Despite popular perceptions, the concept of “honour” as a pivotal force around which family and society are formed is by no means the monopoly of muslim culture. Research in Latin America, Mediterranean countries, the Middle East, Asia and the Far East, as well northern and sub-Saharan Africa, shows that patriarchal models of honour dominate cultural and social arrangements. The threat to women’s basic human rights and personal safety is severe in these environments, where perpetrators of honour-restoring violence neither see themselves as wrongdoers, nor as seen as wrongdoers by their society. . .
Honour crimes have been described as a “retrogressive patriarchal tradition”/. They are based on the idea that a man’s honour is predicated largely on his ability to control the behavior, especially sexual, of his womenfolk. Institutions that foster male domination and sexual segregation have accordingly become fundamental to the social order in such societies.
In a context that would be considered extraordinary outside of these communities, a father, a brother or uncle may be the perpetrator of femicide and not consider it a crime or anything other than the right thing to do. “This is my daughter’s wedding night and those people are pretending my daughter is not a virgin,” an Algerian father shouts to doctors at 3 a.m. in a hospital emergency room. “I want you to examine her and clear my honour. I swear if she is not a virgin I will kill her right now.” Loss of virginity, or perceived loss of virginity, brings permanent dishonour to an unmarried woman and her family. The only way to cleanse the family honour is to kill the woman.
Not surprisingly, that does not agree with any definition of “honor” I would ever recognize, much less use. While the English word covers an amazing variety of things, it’s quite a contortion to wrap it around that concept. IMO, we should not apply the word “honor” here, at all.
The “crime of passion” description more familiar to our (US and Western European) society is also a misnomer, except in the broadest terms. The perpetrators are letting some “baser passions” (as these cultures might still characterize them, archaic terminology or no) control their behavior to an insane degree. Similar concepts of “honor” are still involved, but are somewhat papered over. It’s no less ugly, for all that. “Vengeance” and “socially expected/excused piss-poor emotional regulation” cover both versions much better.
It’s interesting in a depressingly predictable way that this kind of “honor” is something only men have, and it is partly based on owning other human beings. If a woman can be said to have any of this “honor”, it’s completely determined by relationship to the men who own her and otherwise control her life.
I am trying to write about this calmly (she reminds herself).
In this type of situation, I have trouble seeing any real honor, anywhere. The men are behaving dishonorably on a regular basis, in the way they benefit from the social setup and profit off other people’s misfortune/misery before we even get to the “honor crimes”. I can think of few things that less embody any reasonable variety of honor than vengefully killing people you are supposed to care about. Even more so, when your society is set up so that these people are truly dependent upon you for their lives and welfare. That is abuse of the highest order. Not only do the men treat the women as things, they blame those possessions for getting “damaged”, “broken”, and “ruined”–and punish them for decreasing their own “value”. (Again, we are not exempt from a form of this in the US and Western Europe, as you can ask any rape victim.)
The women are living in a position in which it’s hard to have any honor or dignity as a lot of other people understand them, when they are rarely even viewed as full people. I’m not trying to take away their agency; that’s already been done better than I could ever manage, should I get some strange urge to further kick them while they’re down. One of the worst parts about the whole situation is the way “honor” is defined in a way that precludes other people having any of the “real deal”. They can’t have their culture’s kind by definition, and it’s also hard for them to develop the kind of sense of honor within themselves that actually helps people. Physical violence to enforce this setup adds insult to injury.
It’s no coincidence that Jack Forbes pinpoints around the Mediterranean (and somewhere in China) as where the wétiko psychosis arose in the first place. Jared Diamond has gotten lots of praise and a Pulitzer Prize for describing the same patterns from a very different (and nauseating) perspective, including a couple of other lesser focal points. Look at cultural influences on the clusters of places that tolerate “honor crimes” now.
To put it mildly, that passage helped me see that this is another case in which concepts and the sufficiently different words wrapped around them helped give me difficulties in understanding what other people are talking about.
What concepts covered by “honor” would I have been expecting?
It might help to look to Tsalagi again. I’m just a beginning learner, and the excellent dictionary put out by the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma is necessarily incomplete, particularly when it comes to less concrete ideas. So, I had to rely on a couple of dictionaries that other people have been kind enough to put online.
Looking into the question of “honor”, I found adalvquodi. Given that this is obviously from the same root as “honored” expressed as galvladi (famous or prominent), galvkawetiyu or galv (with more sacred connotations), I don’t think this is what we’re looking for. “Admire” can be expressed as galvquododi.
That doesn’t mean that Tsalagi has no way to describe “honor” as a personal quality.* I started out with my suspicions, but “honor” would indeed seem to be another sense of duyukta/duyukdv. I’m also having trouble finding a word for the proper sense of “respect”.
Besides the “balance, harmony, right living” senses, duyukta also covers a number of other qualities seen to develop out of them. We have the “honesty, honestly, truth” complex (rendered as duyu(yo)dv here, but there is quite a lot of pronunciation and transcription variation).
We also have the “dignity” sense, as expressed in the Tsalagi translation of Article 1 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights**:
Nigada aniyvwi nigeguda’lvna ale unihloyi unadehna duyukdv gesv’i.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
The “right living and conduct” sense of the English “honor” must also be encompassed. That is to say, you can’t have honor without also having all the other senses of the word duyukta; they do not exist independently.
Looking into this set of ideas, I couldn’t help but remember linguist Alexei Kondratiev’s series on Celtic Values, which I first read probably 10 years ago. At the time, I was paying more attention to my Gaelic heritage, both because of continuing White By Default social pressure and because it seemed more accessible, and was an Imbas member for a while. Alexei’s conclusion that “[w]hat emerges from this is a sense of honor and dishonor being very much defined by the community, rather than the individually chosen codes of honor that are more characteristic of our modern way of thinking” did not sit well with me at the time. Now, I don’t think my confusion was so much a matter of “modern” vs. “traditional” thinking, as from one of the areas in which the cultural influences clash. (Those are surprisingly rare, down to some confusing cosmology overlaps.)
Now, in Tsalagi, “saving face” expresses a different concept than it seems to in most English usages. I have also been confused by some of the things covered by the English phrase; now I know why.
Michael Garrett covers this well in Walking on the Wind: Cherokee Teachings for Harmony and Balance–which is all about duyukta, in its many senses, and I recommend it highly. Unfortunately, this book could use an index; I’m having trouble finding the bit I wanted to quote–and it’s hard to find just leafing through, the way themes tie together. It might be in one of the other books from the Garretts, for that matter.
He, no doubt, put it better than I will, but the emphasis is more on maintaining a consistent face–one that you can live with and be proud of–in the way you live and your dealings with others. It’s not so much “What do other people think?” as “How is my own duyukta, or lack thereof, affecting those around me? Am I living right, in myself and in the community?” I have no idea how one would express this concept in Tsalagi, though I suspect duyukta would also be involved here. This is another of the concepts that I am having trouble describing well in English.
One quote caught my eye, as very relevant: “Being in harmony means being ‘in step with the universe’; being in disharmony means being ‘out of step with the universe’.”*** That gives us duyukta as a base state, in mindboggling contrast to some of the pessimistic views of human nature and our relationship to the rest of the world with which we’re all too familiar. We each have the responsibility to maintain this state.
The myriad interconnected senses of the word duyukta are reflected in one phrase from a book description (And Her Father Cried): “What price has been paid for ‘Duyukta,’ (the straight and narrow path)?”
This is also echoed in the Stanley Brothers‘ “The price I have paid to live and to learn,” with “love for God” as English code for one sense of duyukta (“Son don’t go astray, was what they both told me. Remember that love, for God can be found.”). Yes, this has been something of theme for me, the past few years.
More related concepts: not phrasing things in terms of being sorry but in terms of not having intended to hurt the person. From my earlier post:
This is a very important distinction, which ties in nicely with my Nana’s slightly punning “I know you’re sorry, now what are you going to do about it?”…
OTOH, “I didn’t do that on purpose” covers the sentiment well, in cases where apology is actually appropriate. If I have inadvertantly done something which has harmed or upset someone, trying to fix the problem is much more appropriate than trying to gloss over it with by now largely meaningless words. “I’m sorry” will not help me find out what has hurt the other person, either. An apology over something one doesn’t understand does not really help either party.
When I wrote about apologies before, I didn’t specifically look at the grovelling tone of “I’m sorry”, which is also inappropriate unless you’re working within weird power setups. If you’re operating in a proper state of mind (duyukta), you will not intend to hurt someone else in the first place. This goes along with the related idea of “walking above” pettiness and harmfulness, echoed in the Garrett title.
No, I do not have much truck with cultural relativism. If your culture is hurting people, something is very wrong indeed, and it’s just plain sick for other people to excuse that away. Treating other people as things is harmful and morally insane, and I am not going to pretend it’s OK. We’re all in this world together, like it or not. Sometimes I am tempted to take the view Twisty expresses in her Fuck Culture post, especially when I look around and see horrible things like arranged marriages–not to mention “honor killings”–excused in those terms.
But, that’s also an unrealistically pessimistic view; not all cultures in all places in all times have been sick and destructive, crushing women as part and parcel of their sickness. As Barbara Mann and other American Indian writers in particular have pointed out, this idea has been foisted off on Western feminists deliberately, and for clear political reasons, from settler propaganda about the horrors of interracial rape (by “savages” they knew did not rape) onward: to normalize brutality and hierarchical social setups, and make us feel helpless and hopeless. “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.” The same approach is used to normalize porn and the “sex trade” (if that is not a brain-breaking euphemistic construction, I don’t know what is), by flaming racists, and by the old Moral Majority and its more recent relatives. I’m not going to let the evilminded convince me that everyone else on the planet is just as fascinated with evilmindedness, no matter how important it is for them to believe it (and use it as justification) themselves. Whether it’s framed in terms of God’s plan or evolutionary imperative, it’s a crock of shit. We have the ability–and responsibility–to choose how we look at the world, and how that guides our behavior.
This also applies to “tribal cultures”, which are frequently scapegoated by the non-tribally organized. I touched on this in an earlier book review, along with some other culture-related themes. Evolution used as a justification gets more than one mention.
Instead of on the idea of culture itself, I place responsibility on the march and ooze of the wétiko psychosis. Not to mention all the nasty -isms that arise from it, and make people think that it’s only right to go around destroying your fellow creatures on however many legs (fins, pseudopods, etc.).
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* Though Theda Purdue, and too many other non-Native “experts”, might well interpret it that way.
** Given the way in which the U.S. has approached this, you run across portions of the Tsalagi version a lot online.
*** That also reminds me of a fascinating series that used to be on the Clannada na Gadelica site, by Sítheag Nic Trantham bean Bochanan: Thinking In Gaelic (archived). And particularly of one observation in Part 2:
Abair gu bheil uisg’ ann!…(Say that there is rain in it!) What a downpour!
Tha gaothach ann!…(There is wind in it!) It sure is windy!
Tha mi ann an diugh… (I am in it today) I feel at rights with things.
Chan eil mi ann an diugh…(I am not in it today) I am out of sorts today.So, on certain days, a Gael could be ‘in it’ as well as ‘out of it’. To be ‘ann’ one was at rights with things. The weather was almost always described as being ‘ann’ as opposed to the day being described as the weather. So, in English, ‘The day is windy.’ In Gaelic, ‘There is wind in it today!’ This idiom leads us to realise that the Celts a distinct feeling that they were existing in an environment that changed sometimes subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, but on many different levels. And most importantly that this environment that they were ‘in’ had its own agenda, of which they were but a small part. And if someone were not ‘ann’, then where were they? According to the interpretations, it could range from being out of sorts, to being ill, to being insane, to being dead.
So, yeah, more overlap.
I’ve been trying to catch up on some blog reading, and have run across some great stuff, so here’s a link roundup in no particular order of importance.
First, a couple from Lindsay at Autist’s Corner. There’s Psychology Today? More Like Psychology Fifty Years Ago!, looking at the similarity between pop EvPsych ideas about gender determinism, and assertions from the 19th century on; the explanations may have changed, but the harmful conclusions remain the same. “Spencer can be forgiven for making up tales of a Hobbesian state of nature in which the human psyche as he knew it was forged. Today, though, we have more actual evidence to work with than he did, but still the stories that are told about human nature are unchanged.”
In Small Victories, she compares very different approaches to education for “troubled teens”, while pointing out the abusive nature of the boot camp approach and other institutions which openly seek to change kids’ behavior–but not life circumstances–through control (including the Judge Rotenberg Center). “A philosophy like this is practically a recipe for abuse and neglect, because when you treat people who depend on you like enemies to be vanquished, you will react to everything they say or do as if it’s a threat or a stratagem. You’ll learn to ignore their signs of distress, and you’ll let them die — of something as treatable or preventable as a spider bite or overexertion or dehydration — before you’ll risk letting them put one over on you.” Word. I’ll be interested to see if the White Buffalo Academy does turn out to be more humane, or if it falls into the bad institutional hole with more emphasis on “you’re letting down the community with your badness”.
On Twitter, I saw a link to one of Joel’s posts from earlier this year at NTs Are Weird, on Autism and Medical Coverage. He points out the serious problems with proposals to force insurance to cover treatment for autism–not least, that we don’t necessarily need medical treatment for it, much less as defined (ABA, neuroleptics) by people working off the “tragedy” model. Some of the proposed “treatment” is better addressed by overhauling the educational system, which already has responsibility whether or not they’re fulfilling it. I don’t trust any legislated provisions not to support abusive institutions, while continuing to let them off the hook for hurting “sick” people. It also reinforces so many harmful myths that I want to cry.
An aside: Why is this crap excused, besides the fact that it’s frequently tied up in weird power structures? FWD/Forward offers some excellent observations on this in the related context of Outrageous pre-existing conditions: “Which contributes to the very popular cultural myth that people with medical conditions are somehow to blame for them — that they must have done something to earn them, that it’s their own fault they ended up that way, and therefore they lose rights to certain things because they are inflicting the costs of their mistakes on the rest of us. Because if you haven’t done anything wrong, you won’t ever end up sick. If you do end up sick, there must be something you did wrong…We get why these things are done. And they’re done to those people. Over there. Not to me and mine.” They express this the most succinctly I have seen. Whether you’re blaming thimerosol or chemical imbalances, or a refrigerator mother, or being out of favor with God–there must be a working explanation in which someone has done something wrong. That obviously makes it OK to treat those people differently. This applies just as well to any sort of “mental disorder”, which seems to be scarier than a straightforwardly physical disability.
Disabled kids get abused a lot, and not much is done about it. And disabled adult women, mentally ill people, and basically anyone with a developmental disability: “Are we concerned about abuse for everyone? Historically, individuals labeled developmentally disabled (also known as mentally retarded) have been treated with less concern than most people. Is this because they sometimes behave or communicate differently? Unfortunately, many people have been institutionalized because of these differences. Recent surveys (Baladerian, 1991; Crossmaker, 1991; Enfield, 1992; Sobsey & Doe, 1991) suggest an increased risk of abuse in persons with developmental disabilities, especially if they have been institutionalized. Abuse ranges from overt physical attacks to more insidious forms of intimidation and neglect.” A lot of this happens in “treatment” contexts. (As anyone ever confined to a psych unit “for their own good” can attest, short of Stockholm Syndrome.) Autism is also known as Pervasive Developmental Disorder. People who have suffered abuse are more likely to show various symptoms and behave in ways that seem strange in the first place, and are then more likely to be abused because they’re “sick”. As Sylvia Caras points out, It’s Time to Stop Permitting Abuse.
Phillip Dawdy at Furious Seasons also mentioned the medical coverage thing a couple of days ago in House Health Care Bill Contains Autism Training Initiative. I have been meaning to write about this myself, but have had a limited spoon supply. “Combined with $60 million in NIH funding from the federal stimulus bill, this has been a big year for autism advocates with the Congress and Obama Administration. I hope they get some results with all of this money.” OTOH, it pisses me off to see money thrown down a rathole in ways unlikely to actually help anyone, while continuing to present us as “mentally disordered”–unlike people with, say, Tourette’s, which looks like a subset of the same kind of neurological setup (though that still doesn’t stop them from getting neuroleptics to control unusual behavior). Given that a lot of medical “treatment” for autistic kids these days consists of neuroleptics specifically used to control their behavior without addressing why they’re melting down and acting weird in the first place, I am a bit disappointed in his take on this. To those with experience dealing with this sort of thing, it’s no less disturbing than House Health Care Bill Pushes Mental Health Promotion, Nanny State In Workplace, much less House Health Care Bill Contains MOTHERS Act. Big Pharma and ABA providers are the only ones likely to benefit, while a lot of actual human beings are liable to get hurt. I think the old Divide And Conquer may have worked a little too well.
Today, he continues the good work of pointing out problems with the all-too-prevalent childhood bipolar diagnosis (with associated neuroleptic prescription), in Study: Researchers Shoot Down Pre-Adolescent Mania. Some of his other posts on the ridiculousness and dangers are worth searching for. Tying this back in, though I (frustratingly) can’t find a link right now, I was not surprised to find one child psychiatrist in New York saying that a great number of the possibly bipolar kids referred to her are really on the autistic spectrum. I have very little doubt that I’d have been diagnosed as such, and heavily medicated–like my cousin’s way overmedicated, now marginally functional son–had I been born 30 years later. As it was, I got diagnosed bipolar and ended up on neuroleptics at 20 rather than 5. Big Pharma wins, and the kid can hopefully clean up the damage later, either way.
I just found Who is IOZ?, and have been enjoying it. The first post I read there was Newman’s Own Economy, full of great analysis: “Tellingly, no one seems much interested in the fact that an industrial economy is by necessity pyramidal…You know, even in the Imaginarium of Doctress Rand, it is taken as given that the Atlases of the world must at some point employ and direct the debased lumpenproletariat; there are no illusions that every man is a genius. . .You cannot run a society of three hundred million people by requiring that each either invent the iPod or remain broke forever. Which rather brings up a tangential but dearly held point for the whole gang here at Who Is IOZ? Namely: You cannot run a society of three hundred million people.” Exactly.
Another great blog I ran across a couple of days ago is FWD/Forward: FWD (feminists with disabilities) for a way forward. There’s no shortage of recent posts which tickled me: Reclamation: thoughts from a fat hairy uppity lame bitch and the Ablist Word Profile series, Invisible Illness and Disability Bingo 1.0, Law & Order: “Dignity”, Worth, and the Medical Model of Disability, and Focusing on College Students’ Mental Health (For the Benefit of the Neurotypical) just to name a few. Lots of food for thought.
At Geek Feminism, Terri wrote an excellent post: How does biology explain the low numbers of women in computer science? Hint: it doesn’t. The main reason I am one of the few of my friends not working in some computing-related field is active discouragement from studying maths and sciences. I do have dyscalculia and make a lot of transcription errors, but that does not mean that I’m not very good indeed with more abstract concepts. Girl who has trouble with simple arithmetic? Not surprising, tell her she’s incapable of doing hard sciences (never mind that she’s done OK so far, nor her 99th percentile math scores) and shove her into the humanities. Without a shoehorn. Having gotten a female TA with dyscalculia for Beginning Calculus at Virginia Tech–and a 4.0 for the semester–helped me see that, indeed, I can do math. Now I’m actively interested in filling in the gaps, and am still fighting the instilled idea that “it’s too hard for you” rather than sets of interesting logical puzzles.
Jill over at I Blame The Patriarchy wrote another excellent post (No post today, just this long-ass essay), inspired by comments on a previous one. This is one of the better demonstrations I have seen of how much internalized BS we can pick up and pass along, without even realizing it. “You know how when a rapist is prosecuted, and the slutty intent of the victim is so acutely divined by the defense (’she didn’t fight back hard enough; she must have wanted it,’ etc) it may be used as a psychbomb to dehumanize her to the jury? It’s like that… Meanwhile, do even the feminists buy the whole women-are-masochists myth and just sit idly by while misogynists rip the titillators to shreds?…Anyway, intent, schmintent. I would urge the reader to recall how little intent has to do with anything. Particularly with the experience of the end user. The result is all that matters.”
The health care reform theme continues today over at Echidne of the Snakes, with Of Special Interest: Wimminz: “You wouldn’t think that women could be viewed as a special interest group, given that we are the majority. But that’s how the game is played in politics. Wingnuts hate us (they hates us, my precious), and the Democrats would prefer us to be really really quiet. And not to cost them any money whatsoever. Or so I think tonight.”
I was looking for more on that theme at Reclusive Leftist, and had to link to Violet’s post on Gang rape as entertainment. “Like Nine Deuce, I’m a little surprised at myself for being surprised. After all, I’m well aware that the cult of sexualized violent misogyny is at an all-time high. I guess I just keep failing to imagine all the possible ways in which men’s hatred of women can be expressed. These things just don’t occur to me.” I had no idea that it had even spilled over into cheesy haunted houses, having been one of the drama students putting on the plastic ax variety in the early ’90s. A few days late (not to mention dollars short), there is also Take back Halloween!, with some amusing ideas for “non-porntastic costumes”. I, too, have been taken aback by the way Halloween may as well have turned into “Dress Like A Whore Day“.
I haven’t looked at Writhe Safely in months, but spotted a great post there from July (also the most recent one), A word with you. The author talks about recovery from abuse and “safe spaces”. “Everyone I know who has sincerely worked on healing from trauma would laugh at the very fucking idea of a “safe space”, because number one we are beyond safe spaces, and second, trying to create a womblike social milieu promotes the continuing psychosis we’re trying to get over. Recovery is about learning to discern the difference between a benign and threatening stimuli, and how to respond to each accordingly. This is broken in PTSD where everything is coming at you and all of it potentially threatening.” She has some good points, and I have been thinking a lot about some of the same things. Out of a basic urge to be considerate to people with lots of triggers, I will include warnings at times, like in my last post. Even so, approaching things more from the idea of recovery these days, it seems ultimately counterproductive not to try to defuse the PTSD triggers (video from Jane at Bipolar Recovery) in whatever way works, as soon as you can face doing it. From personal experience, if you tiptoe around the snakes, they’re only going to breed. I have found out the hard way that this can be another face of the good old Broke Brain Syndrome, and ultimately do a lot more harm than good.
Here’s a link to a post on some more videos Jane has done. I have found her material very helpful in finding my own ways to work on some of this stuff.
And that’s all I can write for today.
Edit: Or maybe not. I followed the haunted house gang rape link to ND’s original post, and was even more put off. “But now it’s 2009, and we live in a world in which movies like Hostel, Saw 1-76, and the Halloween remakes (which are Rob Zombie joints, in case you didn’t know) make millions of dollars. I should have known that would affect the goings-on at the nation’s haunted houses. Stupid me.” I’d mostly been avoiding Rob Zombie’s films, and particularly intend to continue doing so after reading a review of Halloween II (the theme of “hillbilly misogyny” is a gripe unto itself). Why was I avoiding Rob Zombie, besides generally having been put off by his imagery? A guy blared White Zombie while he raped me and left bite marks, back in 1993. (I got flashbacks and just had to leave a show the Ramones were doing with White Zombie a year or two later.) No attitude connection where rape and mutilation are concerned, I’m sure.
I haven’t been keeping up with other blogs very well lately–limited attention–and only now ran across some excellent ones over at Shapely Prose. Thanks to Lindsay for pointing out one on the everyday kind of harassment and lack of respect we’re just supposed to ignore!
When I was trying to catch up over there–the last thing I read was the wonderful Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced–I ran across one post from August that really got me thinking: “She didn’t fight back because you told her not to”. The comments are well worth reading, too.
Wow. I had wanted to think that I’d mostly escaped this bit of socialization too, in the face of all the evidence. This is what invalidation and learned helplessness will do to you. There’s enough of that going around culturally, when it comes to women getting treated disrepectfully or outright violently. Picking up still more through more personalized emotional abuse does not help.
Warning: this post may be triggering.
One comment, in particular, described some of my experiences to a highly triggering extent–this paragraph in particular:
And it was horrifying to me that people didn’t get that my pain counted. I was upset about it for days. It still scares the shit out of me, because that’s still me. Sure, if someone leapt out of the bushes at me and grabbed me I think I could probably turn the pepper spray on them and kick a few times, but that’s like the “stranger danger” crap for children, it’s not what I really need to be afraid of. How do I fight someone I know? Someone I’ve been talking to all night, who seemed nice enough? Those are exactly the sort of people I am least likely to try and confront. My only defense is that I don’t follow those first rules, the ones where you’re not supposed to ignore a man or walk away. I’m real good at walking away from unwelcome advances and reacting to flirting in awkward, unflirty ways. I don’t know what I would did if I weren’t.
As I mentioned before here, I picked up some very specific (and perniciously victim blaming) training in handling straightforward physical assaults. (‘It took me a while to get it through my head that it is not somehow my responsibility to teach Bubba to keep his hands to himself–through a kneecapping or the old iron skillet treatment, if that’s what’s required–if the people responsible for his raising failed to get this crucial point across. Or, if he’s caught the wétiko and chosen to disregard the “inferior, backward” code of conduct he learned growing up.’) I was very clear on how to handle stranger danger, or blatant physical abuse.
I have given men who threatened/assaulted me physically a good kicking, on more than one occasion. I grew up believing that I had a responsibility to step in if I saw or heard another woman getting hurt or threatened–both as gadugi, and because I’m well equipped to handle it–and have needed to do so more than once. My grandfather made sure that the girls in the family got extra self defense training, starting early, because he knew we were likely to need it. (He died before he could teach me throws, and I’d still like to pick up that knowledge.) If anybody had jumped out of the bushes at me, he’d have been one sad and sorry man, but that has never happened to me. My physical confidence has scared off more than one creepy lurker–and made me feel bad for the next woman to go that way.
OTOH, with my upbringing, I got an extra dose of feeling like I just had to put up with emotional abuse and people disrespecting my feelings and wishes (a wonderful post, BTW). Somehow, men who wouldn’t keep their hands to themselves in a sexual context did not warrant the same response as ones who tried to hit me. This was only reinforced by the sexual harassment/groping* we were expected to put up with–and giggle at–in school, when my initial impulse was to lay hands on them. Three different guys “date raped” me when I was in college, and I just froze up; afterward, I blamed myself for not just kneecapping them, and did not even consider it Real Rape for a good while. It was just paying for my bad judgment. I also did not tell my family for years, because of the blaming I’d heard applied to other people. One of them ended up stalking me, and I had very little idea how to deal with that either. I knew how to say no, and did so repeatedly; I’d just been thoroughly trained that it was better for me to put up with other people completely disregarding my wishes in a lot of situations than to get aggressive about it.
My mom had her own reasons to feel like she needed to live with two different emotionally abusive men. My biodad raised his hand to her once, not long after they got married, and got a heavy stoneware bowl cracked over his head for his troubles. That did not make him less abusive once he came to, just sneakier. (This is also a prime example of how much harm can come from wider societal messages; he did not pick up the idea that it was OK to treat people–especially women–this way at home.) I could recognize the fact that he hit me when he thought he could get away with it as abusive, well before I could see how much more damage the emotional elements did. To both my mom and me. Her own mother’s response to their divorce? “What did you do to make him leave?! I knew you were impossible to live with! [long string of insults about her personality and appearance]“, while my grandfather did his best to calm her down. I heard that with my own ears–Mom’s flaws were apparently so obvious to my grandmother that she started screeching right in front of me–and it made quite an impression when I was 6. (Still, I was tempted to censor it, in case someone in my family, who wasn’t even there, reads this and insists it never happened–or if it did, that the attack must have been provoked. Ouch.) My stepdad was “just” emotionally abusive.
So I got an extra dose of “crazy women letting men beat them, which is entirely unlike my own situation, because they’re weak and crazy”, along with some extra trouble seeing emotionally abusive behavior from men for what it is, rather than just what you have to put up with to be around them. Separatism has looked awfully appealing at times. Especially with my mom feeling compelled to parrot the “of course you want to get married, everyone really does even if they don’t think so” line, when I’d have rather gnawed off a limb than gotten into either of her marriages.
Unfortunately, those examples are not so unusual, and you don’t have to live in seriously dysfunctional situations to pick up a lot of hideous messages about what women are supposed to put up with. That is also part of why some of my posts have been relying heavily on personal experiences of which I was trained to be ashamed. These things happen a lot, and we’re supposed to be afraid to talk about it.
I’m sure that, like Ailbhe, in some ways I screamed “victim”, and functioned as a freak magnet. (Seeing someone I’ve met IRL express the same idea also brought this closer to home, in a weird human way.) For a long while there, I also had a serious problem with feeling like I had to go out with guys who were creepily persistent when I’d made it clear that I was not interested, so was more likely to end up in bad situations.** My self esteem was so bad that I did not always register it when more normal-acting, respectful guys were interested (neurodiversity probably comes in here, too.). That is not self blame, it’s recognition of really shitty programming. Even without more emotional abuse piled on, enough women run into similar problems. It’s screwed up in so many ways.
Things were bad enough that, after multiple assaults and the associated PTSD and helplessness, I completely avoided romantic relationships for better than five years. (And fought feelings of unattractiveness and “loneliness”–i.e., running up against a brick wall of social expections–for most of that time.) Even at a low point, I knew that what had been happening could not continue, and I needed to get my own head straightened out. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made.
When the IBTP forum was still up, women there kept recommending a couple of books: Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence, and Lundy Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (yes, the male author admits that it’s mostly men who feel like they can behave this way). I picked them up, and would have a hard time recommending them enough.
In The Gift of Fear, de Becker keeps driving the point home that if someone ignores our wishes or refuses to listen to us, that’s a clear sign that they do not mean us well. That shows a dangerous mental imbalance, right there. We should pay attention to our perceptions that these men–and he does specifically address most of this advice to women–are indeed dangerous, and they have forfeited any right to politeness. He also offers some excellent advice on dealing with these self-absorbed jerks, including when they start stalking women. One of the best strategies: refuse to engage them at all. Do not answer the phone, even to tell them to fuck off and die; they’re insane enough to take that as encouragement. (I’ve found that just refusing to engage also works in other abusive/controlling situations. You don’t have to help them interfere in your life.) The author specifically addresses the problems of invalidation and learned helplessness, repeatedly pointing out that if you are perceiving a threat from someone else, you’d do well to take it seriously instead of rationalizing it away–and that once you start paying more attention to real vs. imagined threats, you’re unlikely to feel as overwhelmed and helpless. Learning to recognize and deal with true threats lets you take back some power over your life. I wish I had been able to read this book when I was still in high school, or even before that.
I echo the suggestions on the forum that if you are currently in the middle of a controlling, abusive situation, you might want to keep Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That? where the other person can’t see it, lest they go apeshit when they see that you’re onto them. It describes, in excruciating detail, different subtypes of controlling behavior. On the first reading, I kept nodding and getting chest pains, and having to put the book down and take a break. This is a truly helpful book, but can be very triggering indeed if you have been living with (and trying to excuse/ignore) abusive behavior. It forced me to recognize some harmful behavior from family members which I’d tried to excuse away, besides helping me understand the abuse I’d been aware of.
In a similar vein, I’d also recommend Marie-France Hirigoyen’s Stalking the Soul: Emotional Abuse and the Erosion of Identity. Once you get past some of the author’s Freudian slant, it’s not a bad source at all if you’re trying to understand emotional abuse. She stresses some excellent points, including the vampiric element, and the use of purposeful destabilization to discredit the victim and make them less able to resist. I’m not sure where my copy is to quote, but it helped me a lot, seeing the author specifically point out that an emotional abuser sees positive qualities in the victim which s/he does not possess, so just tries to take them–while convincing the victim that s/he never had them in the first place, and making resistance very difficult indeed. This applies to bullying, as well: the victim may get characterized as weak and possessing all sorts of negative qualities after a while, but was actually chosen because this was not true.
Looking more deeply into Native spirituality/philosophy has also helped me untangle some things. J.T. and Michael Garrett have written a decent bit on the psychological end of things, from a Cherokee perspective. Their books are remarkably non-fluffy for something largely intended for an unfamiliar audience. From a mini-review I wrote back in February:
One point I appreciated seeing reiterated–what with the amount I’ve been having to consider similar themes of late–is what they’re referring to as the Principle of Noninterference, and how that relates to respect, honor, and control. (Acceptance also ties in.) This interlocking complex of ideas is also addressed in The Cherokee Full Circle, with a more specific aim of trying to comb out some of the snakes arising from these things, including some of the things other people have managed to put on you.
Michael Garrett expresses this pretty well, in Part Two which he wrote, to the point that I ended up quoting more than intended:
The highest form of respect for another person is respecting his or her natural right to be self-determining. This means not interfering with another person’s ability to choose, even when it is to keep that person from doing something foolish or dangerous. Every experience holds a valuable lesson–even in death, there is valuable learning that the spirit carries forth. Noninterference means caring in a respectful way. And it is the way of “right relationship.”
Interfering with the activity of others, by way of aggression, for example, cannot and should not be encouraged or tolerated. This is not only disrespectful, but it violates the natural order of harmony and balance in which each being has to learn and experience life in his or her own way. Each person, each living being on Mother Earth, has his or her own Medicine that should not be disrupted or changed without that
person choosing it. . .“Pain” is really nothing more than the difference between what is and what we want it to be. To be respectful of all things, we often must sacrifice expectation. This is the real beauty of noninterference. It gives us the ability to release some of the things that would otherwise bind us or weigh us down and disrupt our own natural flow…Besides, what others choose is none of our business, and we should never assume that it is. This shows lack of wisdom and respect. It also shows a lack of trust in others’ ability to choose, to experience, to learn.
. . .
J.T. Garrett does a good job expressing the closely related idea of acceptance, which again requires a fairly long quote:
It was also difficult for me to live the traditional Medicine, then put on the suit and tie and be a hospital administrator in the white man’s way. My first mistake was to present myself the way I was told to do. It broke the Native American way of presenting myself as a helper. I overheard a tribal member say, “He is going to be like the rest,” and I knew that she was talking about control. The Native American person accepts you as you want to be. However, they respect you for how you are with others. Humility and the Rule of Acceptance helped me to cope with criticisms…One of the important lessons for me to learn was having the negative energy move around me, instead of internalizing and reacting to criticisms. The Rule of Acceptance is the ability to accept anything said or done with the realization that it is what another says or does, not what we say or do. In this case, an action does not necessarily require a reaction, but an interaction. This interaction may be with the person or persons creating the action, or it can be with someone else to clarify or resolve a state of nonacceptance. As a student and apprentice, I was to accept everything and learn to listen. This can be very difficult in an environment where we are taught to be assertive, to analyze, critique, and “take charge.”
This was another concept I had trouble understanding, from older relatives, who were no doubt as exasperated in their own way as I was at the time.
It was necessary to quote more than I’d intended there, to make sense.
I’m having to do a lot more thinking about control, noninterference, and acceptance–and learning not to misuse them destructively against myself. It’s more pressing when you’re dealing with the effects of outright abuse, but a lot of other people could stand to develop a better understanding of how these things work together and can be misused. From a similar viewpoint, Thich Nhat Hanh also has a lot of useful advice on healing our own emotional damage, and hopefully the rest of the world.
———
* I still fail to understand how, if one accepts the idea of hate speech, sticking a “Fuck me, I’m pregnant!!!” sign on someone does not count. Oh, wait…
** Heck, one totally whacked-out emotional vampire I met online (in my late 20s) invited himself to come and visit me, and I spent most of the week freezing up and bursting into fits of hysterical laughter and facial twitches. (Which then got criticized.) His behavior was so horrible I had no idea how to deal with it, but I still felt compelled to try to be nice. I had also made it abundantly clear that I was not romantically interested, but I suspect he still considers me his ex-girlfriend. I blamed myself for encouraging him, disgusted as I was trying to deal with this guy. It still makes me nauseous that I did end up in bed with him, just to get him to shut the hell up; not surprisingly, it didn’t even work. Now I know I had a narrow escape, getting shed of this vampire at all, no better than I knew how to deal with things at the time–even after I took that 5 years to breathe. Thinking about it still gives me the shivers.
Even better, I got blamed and called crazy–a manic episode was suggested, even though I have never in my life experienced one***–by the same people who helped train me to accept emotional abuse. Only lately can I see that none of this was my fault. None.
*** No, that did not prevent the earlier bipolar diagnosis. Apparently I couldn’t be trusted to know whether I’d ever been manic.
Looking up statistics for the endnote to my last post got me interested. I initially thought of adding still more info there, but it grew to the point that I thought I’d move it to a different post (with less chance of getting overlooked, as well).
I’ll include the original:
* Actually, I thought it was rather telling that the English-language publisher apparently did not think that a book called Men Who Hate Women would sell in the UK. Which also has a distressing record of rape convictions (up to 7% of reported rapes at last check, from 5.6% in 2002).
Addendum:
Come to find out, “Sweden had a conviction rate of 8 percent from 1993 to 1997, according to data collected by the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University. That compares to Finland’s 17 percent conviction rate, Norway’s 15 percent, Germany’s 17 percent and Czech Republic’s 22 percent in the same years.” By another report (from figures released in 2003, apparently) Sweden and the UK are about even. That did surprise me a bit.Especially since the U.S. isn’t exactly great in this department, but is apparently doing better (at 13% recently):
The higher U.S. conviction rate for rape is attributable both to the higher U.S. police-recorded rape rate [all these are per 1000 population] and to a United States criminal justice system that catches and convicts rapists at a higher rate than England’s system. According to the most recent statistics on crime (1996) and the justice system (1994 in the United States, 1995 in England), the U.S. police-recorded rape rate is three times England’s (figure 5), but the U.S. rape conviction rate is over eight times England’s (.212 versus .025) (figure 20), indicating that a rape in the United States is more likely to lead to conviction than one in England.
The new stuff:
Estimated reporting levels were 16-36%% in the U.S. (depending on source) and 10-20% in the U.K., going by figures from between 2003 and 2005. Sweden’s reporting rate may be 5-10%, and “[e]qually disturbing is the statistic from BRÅ stating that in 2007, less than 13 percent of the 3,535 rape crimes reported resulted in a decision to start legal proceedings.” This is slightly lower than the U.S. conviction rate.
In Sweden, 46 incidents of rape are reported per 100,000 residents.
This figure is double as many as in the UK which reports 23 cases, and four times that of the other Nordic countries, Germany and France. The figure is up to 20 times the figure for certain countries in southern and eastern Europe. . .
The high figures in Sweden can not it seems be explained purely by an increased tendency to report rapes and other more minor sexual offences.
Rape simply appears to be a more common occurrence in Sweden than in the other EU countries studied, the researchers argue.”
Part of this may well be down to the legal definition of rape being broader. The law may be counting more things as Real Rape, but it doesn’t look as though enforcement is keeping up. (Social attitudes may not be doing so either.) I am trying to ignore the xenophobic nutjobs turning up on Google, insisting that Muslim gangs are responsible for all the country’s sexual assaults–alongside the usual “loose women, feminism, and moral decay” brigade.
I’m glad that gender issues really do not seem to be relegated to the Swedish “special interests” (low priority, definitely not human rights) bin to nearly the same extent as they are in the US or the UK: my main points of comparison. AFAICT, saying that men who hate women really do exist outside the Taliban will not get you dismissed as some sort of vulgar bigoted harpy nearly as often there these days; I suspect it’s still not so popular to point out that more than a few are Swedes, however. Backlash has apparently not stopped people from calling themselves feminists to the same extent. Frankly, I had expected better practical results from the (at least surface) more enlightened social policies. Part of this may well come from Nigel’s lens of privilege, though, since he’s the Swede I live and discuss things with. I was particularly interested in running across another side of things, given that context.
This does seem like a good demonstration of how you can’t legislate a change in people’s attitudes. Social policies are a good start; unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the more enlightened attitudes have necessarily filtered into people’s personal relationships. How much lip service has been going on?
From one of the Swedish articles referenced above, Swedish rapists ‘enjoy impunity’: Amnesty International:
In addition to challenging victim and crime stereotypes, perceptions surrounding ‘typical’ perpetrators must also be considered. The UN Special Report discusses how there is a widespread belief that the type of men who commit intimate-partner violence are not typical, ‘normal’ Swedes.
They are usually imagined as somewhat ‘deviant’ – unemployed, uneducated, alcoholic or from non-Western backgrounds, and so on. However, as Ertürk challenges: “In absolute numbers, the vast majority of the perpetrators of intimate-partner violence are ‘ordinary’ Swedish men.”
In a country where women’s rights feature high on the public agenda, there is a pervasive “fear of public shame – being regarded as a tragic failure in a country of supposed gender equality” especially among well-educated and successful Swedish women, which creates yet another obstacle for the victims of violence and rape, the UN report concludes. . .
In its conclusion, Amnesty blames “deeply rooted patriarchal gender norms” of Swedish family life and sexual relationships as a “major societal flaw” and a reason for the continued prevalence of violence against women in Sweden.
Aha. Looks like we’re getting somewhere now, with The Big P getting specifically pointed at. I have seen something closely resembling the “not typical, ‘normal’ Swedes” belief, close up, as an extension of “not typical, ‘normal’ men”. I guess nobody wants to look at who has been physically assaulting the 46% of women who say this has happened because of their gender (we’ll get back to that figure later)–not to mention the fact that nearly half the women they know have been assaulted because they’re female. As one Canadian source succinctly stated, “It is estimated that over 80% of women who are sexually assaulted do not report it due to feelings of shame and humiliation or due to their fear of re-victimization through the criminal trial process.” Similar applies to “domestic violence”. Any extra layer of shame for the victim can only do harm; I know about that firsthand.
Not too surprisingly, stats on the euphemistically termed “domestic violence” were harder to find, and I would not be surprised if the reporting gap were higher there, across the countries. Annoyingly, I couldn’t locate the Amnesty report, which probably does include some figures. I did run across an interesting article, from 2005: Behind Sweden’s Gender Lines, which offers some similar observations:
“There has been a strong women’s movement here that has achieved a lot,” said Lotten Sunna, Stockholm-based spokesperson for Feminist Initiative, a new empowerment movement that is focused on putting feminism even higher on the political agenda. “But that has also led to a false belief that we have reached equality, that we are there, and as a result of that things are starting to back up again.”. . .
Feminist Initiative’s platform describes Sweden as a country that is dominated by a “patriarchical power structure.” It says women are discriminated against, subjected to violence, exploited in the labor market, under-prioritized in health care and receive a smaller proportion of welfare benefits.
“We grew up believing that we would actually be equal to men,” said Sunna, who was a teen in the 1970s. “Swedish women get very angry when you discover that that is not the case.”
In a recent survey directed by Eva Lundgren, a sociologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, 46 percent of women say they’ve been victims of some form of gender violence in their lifetimes. Lundgren’s methodology has been criticized, however, for having too broad a definition of gender violence. Government data puts the number at around 12 percent.
Ah, letdown from the ’70s. I was born in the middle of the decade, and still feel let down in a lot of ways. I can’t say I’m surprised that similar has happened there.
Lundgren’s survey was the source for Stieg Larsson’s stats in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. 46% sounds far more plausible if still low, based on reporting gaps and definitions (and experience elsewhere). Would getting shoved because you’re Black count as racially motivated violence? Especially if they have reason to think they’re more likely to get away with it–and that you’re less able to defend yourself, and that you have less right to be occupying that space than they do–because you’re Black? How about if someone considers it OK to grab your arm, with no sign of permission, because you’re Asian?* Direct substitution works. What counts as gender violence under a patriarchal power structure? Would most women even think of similar assaults as having been based on gender when asked about it? How “serious” does it need to be in order to qualify? Does injured dignity count, if it doesn’t cause visible bruises?
Showing my age again, I can’t help but think of L7’s “Everglade” (‘Said, “Get out of here girly, I`m just trying to have some fun.”‘), not to mention the jerk who shoved me and my walking stick out of the way on the bus the other day. That’s everyday stuff, which I spent years half-purposely not paying much attention to so I didn’t blow a gasket. Some people should have learned to keep their hands (elbows, etc.) to themselves before they were old enough to start school–and that this applies to dealing with all kinds of people.
Somehow I doubt this kind of low-level everyday unpleasantness is uncommon in Sweden. I certainly ran into some in Stockholm. Mostly, I’m feeling silly for having underestimated the deep influence of The P, in part because Nigel’s own personal Sweden has sounded like somewhere I really wouldn’t mind living. Getting some other people’s perspectives would be good.
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* I may well turn violent myself, the next time some condescending and/or controlling dude grabs my arm. Especially trying to keep me from walking away.
Stieg Larsson’s _The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo_ and _The Girl Who Played With Fire_
Recently, Nigel picked up Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire, in English translation (since I don’t read Swedish). We’ve yet to get The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest. I was thinking of writing something about them, but only finished the second book a few days ago and have needed some time to mull things over. Today, I was prompted by Nigel’s bookmeme entry, and some comments there.
They’ve gotten some criticism, including a review at the f-word, Feminist or misogynist?: “But I have difficulty squaring Larsson’s proclaimed distress at misogyny with his explicit descriptions of sexual violence, his breast-obsessed heroine and babe-magnet hero.”
My take on it? Larsson strikes me as remarkably clueful, probably largely due to his background in journalism, and the threats he and his partner received for years from right-wing nutjobs. Somehow I doubt that Swedish nutters shied away from the classic wétiko, patriarchal tactic of trying to get at him through offering to do sick, sadistic things to his female partner (possibly while he was forced to watch). I get the idea that Larsson could not escape the knowledge that there really are a lot of “men who hate women” around, as the first book’s original Swedish title translates.* If nothing else, being a serious journalist, it would be harder to completely ignore the numbers of murdered (and just plain missing) women and girls, getting far less attention than would seem warranted.
He may have been approaching the theme from a position of privilege, and still didn’t overtly make some connections that seemed obvious to me, but I was still tempted to hand him some posthumous cookies.
The section headings of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (a.k.a. Men Who Hate Women) include statistics, such as (just picked flipping through) “46% of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man” and “92% of women in Sweden who have been subjected to sexual assault have not reported the most recent violent incident to the police”. These serve as themes tying together strands of the story, and continue to drive a lot of plot into the following book even if they are not explicitly stated. I can only hope that some of the illustrations get through readers’ resistance; one prime example being Salander’s observation that probably no girl she’s known has managed to reach the age of 18 without being forced or coerced into doing something sexual that she didn’t want to do. That agrees with my experience, and very few people want to think about that any more than the 46% figure.
Abuse of power–and the real damage it can do to people’s lives–is also a major theme in both novels. Various types of institutions are particularly implicated.
As for specific criticisms, I didn’t find that the author approached the violence demonstrating these themes in a salacious manner. They came across as highly plausible developments, not like material for Law & Order: SVU. This impression is only reinforced by the only two characters depicted as pornsick weasels also being sadistic mysogynists who hurt people; violent porn may be specified in those cases, but less overtly harmful types are still not normalized. As for the “babe-magnet hero”, it didn’t strike me as a misogynistic treatment at all. Blomqvist may come across as a bit of a horndog, but he manages to get by without obviously using other people, nor considering them “conquests”. I was actually impressed by the author’s matter-of-fact depiction of poly relationships as actually working for some people, and sometimes being the mature option.
Even if there were some readers who just didn’t get it, I mostly liked the way Larsson approached neurodiversity, as well.
The title character (in the English titles), Lisbeth Salander, is rather hard-bitten, and shows some serious behavioral quirks. It’s only speculated once in each of the first two books that this might have anything to do with her undiagnosed ASD, though. Throughout, the character’s experiences and life circumstances are presented as more than enough to explain “odd” behavior and cynicism. She’s had a hard life by about anyone’s standards, and has been abused in many ways. It’s also made obvious that she has been shown very little reason to trust many other people, much less to trust those in positions of authority to do anything but harm.
I didn’t see Salander’s later choice of breast implants as dodgily gratuitous, but more as the character’s rather sad approach to getting by in this world. Who would expect her to have a great body image? It may be a shame that she felt a need to grasp at an ultimately false promise of control over her circumstances and satisfaction in her own skin, but an awful lot of women do IRL. I know I’ve done some ridiculous things out of similar motives, before I learned what a load of BS the promised rewards are. If anything, I interpreted that (along with some other things) as commentary on the prevalence of hypersexualization, and what options we see open to us. (Though I doubt it was explicitly thought out that far.)
The main quibble I had with the way things developed in The Girl Who Played With Fire was that, IME, no conspiracy is necessary to get someone starting out with neurological differences interpreted as batshit crazy, institutionalized under the control of sadistic people who get off on abuse of power, and declared incompetent. Up to that dénouement, I found Salander’s situation very triggering. Still, I hope I never get suspected of multiple murders, because I am sure that the media could dig up people and incidents from my past which could be easily presented as evidence of my similarly dangerous craziness.
It didn’t initially sit well with me, when two of her allies decided that she really was dangerous in certain circumstances, blaming it partly on her real neurological differences (as opposed to the cooked-up mental illness). It seemed a little too close to the “dangerous, crazy” sterotypes addressed more appropriately earlier. But, especially dealing with PTSD from layered-on life circumstances, I know I don’t have a lot of brakes. Neither do a number of my relatives who have had a hard time of things. If I hadn’t learned a little too much self control, I would have problems with turning violent–nay, vicious–given sufficient provocation and low expectations of help in dealing with a serious situation. Most of that is down to the PTSD and tail pulling, part really is down to just not having a lot of brakes to begin with. It’s uncomfortable, but when everything is too intense, I think a lot of us do have to learn more control over our reactions than average, as happens on a slightly different level with Tourette’s. Salander has spent too much time living in crisis mode to have much chance to do so.
Overall, though, Larsson does a good job at pointing out–to paraphrase Thich Nhat Hanh–that we are all the way we are because other people are the way they are. Whether we want to look at this or not, it’s all interconnected. Not thinking in those terms, he also demonstrates how different threads of the wétiko illness interweave. I particularly enjoyed the media depictions of scary “Lesbian Satanist Anarcho-Feminist” gangs, based on leaks from a disgustingly racist and misogynist cop.
I may have more to say about this later, but that’s my writing limit for now.
Edit (wee hours 10/31): I totally forgot to mention that a major plot element in The Girl Who Played With Fire is an investigation into human trafficking, mostly from the Baltic states. Initially a PhD candidate started interviewing the victims for her dissertation, and her journalist male partner gets into the investigation with the idea of co-authoring a book. They both get killed over it. (I would have liked to have seen the human rights angle gone into in more depth, but the focus turns to the murders.) Larsson presents this as a serious human rights problem, which nobody in authority really wants to look at, much less deal with . Especially given the number of powerful people who, in this story, risk being exposed as “clients”. He makes it clear that the people involved on both the “lure poor women into prostitution under false pretenses” and the “rape and abuse them once they’re enslaved in Sweden” ends are Not Nice People At All. Besides presenting a couple of plausible examples of blatant abuse (and self-justification of the dehumanizing “filthy worthless foreign whores deserve what they get” variety), Larsson clearly presents the punters as caring more about their own orgasm than about other people’s lives, and specifically getting off on abusing the power imbalance. Their actions are openly characterized as sick and abusive.
This also leaves me less inclined to lumping the depictions of sexual violence into the prurient category we do see so much of in entertainment.
Another edit: An excellent post turned up through the “Possibly Related” feature: Give National Attention to End Violence Against Women-Is Gang rape Becoming a Spectator Sport?, inspired by the recent two-hour gang rape of a 15-year-old girl outside a high school dance in Richmond, CA. At least 20 people were involved or watched this happen.
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* Actually, I thought it was rather telling that the English-language publisher apparently did not think that a book called Men Who Hate Women would sell in the UK. Which also has a distressing record of rape convictions (up to 7% of reported rapes at last check, from 5.6% in 2002).
Addendum:
Come to find out, “Sweden had a conviction rate of 8 percent from 1993 to 1997, according to data collected by the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University. That compares to Finland’s 17 percent conviction rate, Norway’s 15 percent, Germany’s 17 percent and Czech Republic’s 22 percent in the same years.” By another report (from figures released in 2003, apparently) Sweden and the UK are about even. That did surprise me a bit.
Especially since the U.S. isn’t exactly great in this department, but is apparently doing better (at 13% recently):
The higher U.S. conviction rate for rape is attributable both to the higher U.S. police-recorded rape rate [all these are per 1000 population] and to a United States criminal justice system that catches and convicts rapists at a higher rate than England’s system. According to the most recent statistics on crime (1996) and the justice system (1994 in the United States, 1995 in England), the U.S. police-recorded rape rate is three times England’s (figure 5), but the U.S. rape conviction rate is over eight times England’s (.212 versus .025) (figure 20), indicating that a rape in the United States is more likely to lead to conviction than one in England.
Estimated reporting levels were 40% in the U.S. and 10-20% in the U.K., going by figures from between 2003 and 2005.
I ran across a comment whose last paragraph got me thinking earlier:
I work to end all oppression and I work to keep my life together, but sometimes feminism is intimidating to me because there are so many strong and independent women (good things!) who seem to be hyper achievers and love work and working and I don’t feel like I am able to do that, though I have tried really hard. I *am* dependent to a certain extent, at least right now, and I feel bad for playing into a helpless woman stereotype. Sometimes I feel implicated for not being able to take care of myself. “Get to Work”? I can’t right now.
And a response:
That last paragraph you wrote could very well be me. I have fought so hard and so long about being dependent, about “needing” help from others when my brain screams at me “you don’t need help, you can do it on your own” and wanting to do things. The thing is, I can, but I find it exhausting and taking every last bit of reserve of energy I have (and then some). So, learning how to let others help me is one of the things i’m still very much learning how to do.
I have been running into a similar problem, and have been thinking about this complex of issues a lot lately. You may remember that I ranted about my frustration with some of these things earlier this year. It’s only been brought home more by some of the search terms which have brought people to that post: “i am a housewife and feel useless and worthless”, “being a housewife sucks”, “being a housewife and depression”, “can i get disability if i a a house wife” (in the US: not SSI unless your husband is absolutely destitute, and not SSDI unless you managed to accumulate a bunch of work credits before you became disabled, and applying as a disabled housewife instead of straight from leaving paid work will not help you–the system sucks), and so on.
I’m still a Housewife By Default, and am continuing to have trouble with it; recently I touched on some of the practical implications. I am particularly uncomfortable knowing that there is a too-frequent set of assumptions about women who do not have paying jobs: we’re lazy, maybe not too bright, probably spoiled, and content to let someone else take control of our lives in many ways.
Funny how that overlaps with common messages about disabled people. Harmful projection abounds in both cases, from people who assume they know what is motivating us more than we do ourselves. Naturally, I have to question the motives of someone who is making these assumptions, in the same vein as someone who assumes everyone else is lying.
The whole thing is wrong-headed. I can tell that it’s skewed and harmful. Still, it’s hard not to let it get to you.
As the author of the original post from which I drew those comments points out, about growing up with an ASD:
The “treatment” for this condition when I was a kid basically consisted of adults yelling at me to TRY HARDER STOP BEING LAZY I KNOW YOU’RE SMARTER THAN THIS YOU IDIOT GET YOUR FINGER OUT OF YOUR DAMN NOSE ALREADY AND QUIT MAKING ANIMALISTIC NOISES AND BUMPING INTO THINGS NO WONDER BOYS DON’T LIKE YOU. Yeah, that helped, thanks bunches.
When you ask for help, and other people assume it’s motivated by your being lazy or just a smartass, pretty quickly you learn to stop asking. If you started out wanting to please, and people around you keep jumping to negative conclusions about your motives, you may come to believe that you’re really a lazy smartass who could really do things without help (or clarification) if you tried.* If you repeately get told that you’re more than smart enough to figure out and do things on your own, you might start thinking this is so. If you’re told that you’re obviously too stupid to do something properly, you might believe it.
I really identified with some of Dave Spicer’s descriptions of how he learned to cope and make sense of things, growing up as an undiagnosed autistic. I’m quoting rather a lot, because it’s excellent:
Over time, I internalized others’ beliefs about me – that “there was nothing wrong with me”, that I only needed to try harder, that if I really wanted to do things differently I could. In order to deal with each of these premises, I had to develop an interpretation of them, to translate them into something I could (at least partly) understand, and then turn into my beliefs about myself.
So “there is nothing wrong with me” became this: “Don’t ask for help, because I’m not supposed to need any. Besides, if anyone looked really closely and still didn’t find anything wrong, all of this really would be my fault. It’s better just to have a small hope than to risk actually finding out.”
And “all I need to do is to try harder” became “The other people around me are succeeding while I am not, and it must be as hard for them as it is for me. So I am never to complain about difficulty or physical discomfort. If anything is physically at all possible to bear, it should be borne in silence.”
Finally, “if I really wanted to change, I could” evolved into “I am deliberately resisting having my life, and the lives of those around me, be any better. I don’t know why this is. But everyone feels this way, and they can’t be wrong because look who they are and how many of them are saying it.” In other words, I was deliberately making the people around me upset and angry. . .
From the inside, not knowing any better, I felt that whatever difficulties I had in relating to other people, in learning abstract material, or in coping with constant change and unspoken expectations were all my fault. If I could somehow “try harder”, everything would be all right. Since I could not, my difficulties were therefore my own responsibility, and I was trapped in them.
A person in this kind of situation has probably despaired of ever receiving support or understanding from the outside, and probably does not have much self-esteem either. And the stress level, internally, is very high.
What came from all of this was, for me, a state resembling post-traumatic stress. Tendencies toward isolation and passivity, not uncommon in autism anyway, were reinforced. My understanding of what was happening around me had to be faulty, because so many things kept going wrong. I lived with a great deal of uncertainty about what was true and what was not. Unable to rely on my perceptions, I instead constructed a model of what I thought the world was, then lived in constant fear that someone would rush in and tell me that it was wrong.
This is straight-up internalized emotional abuse, which he links directly to PTSD and learned helplessness. It’s not just some inexplicable, individual form of “craziness” any more than internalized racism is; hey, “they can’t be wrong because look who they are and how many of them are saying it.” Unfortunately, a large proportion of our society will say these things about anyone who does not fit into narrow prescribed norms.
Not surprisingly, this learned approach to life will make you less capable of dealing with the world around you. It is highly disabling.
This sort of thing also hurts people who are perceived as more “normal”; some of us just get it worse because we are sufficiently different from what is expected. Ettina points out some of how this works in The Social Value of Demand Avoidance. Alice Miller has written a lot about how this kind of thing affects people, and becomes self-perpetuating. Personally, I was absolutely horrified to realize–applying compassion to try to defuse my reactions to some past mistreatment–that some of the worst individual offenders were honestly trying to help their young victims learn to live in their own hideous, zero-sum versions of the Real World. They truly thought they were doing the right thing, providing an important educational service, by spreading the brutality.
I was lucky enough not to be singled out, because of my obvious differences, for an extra dose of this through ABA or other behavioral therapies–but many elementary schools operate along the same lines. It’s not good for anyone.
How does this tie in with the comment which prompted me to write today? Especially if (frequently for good reason!) you’ve developed demand sensitivity/resistance, it’s easy to interpret the “women should be able to support themselves financially” ideal as an additional demand, pointing out your personal shortcomings if you cannot do so. It’s additional social pressure you may not be up to dealing with if you are actually disabled.
Unfortunately, as a lot of other people have pointed out, feminist thinking is not proof against racism, classism, ablism, or any number of other destructive ways of thinking. Most of the people pushing independence don’t mean any harm, but have been insulated by privilege–and have bought into some models of the way the world (and human worth) works that I reject. In this case, a lot of people are not looking at how all of these destructive ways of thinking fit together and interact, and are trying to achieve equality within an economic and ideological system that relies on the existence of various types of inequality.
That’s one of the main reasons that, if pressed, I’d call myself an anarcha-feminist. Working along with a system which defines a person’s worth (and available options in life) in terms of “economic productivity” is banging your head against a wall, to begin with. “The master’s tools”, and all that.
It’s still hard not to let it get to you sometimes. “[L]ook who they are and how many of them are saying it.”
Edit: Bev at Asperger Square 8 just posted another excellent and very relevant cartoon: Square Talk: The Social Model
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* If bad psychotherapy is also applied to your perceived strangeness–based on generalized assumptions about how your mind must work, and what must be motivating you–this can really screw you up. All kinds of harmful interpretations can be placed on why you don’t know, or refuse to admit, that you are a lying, lazy smartass who is afraid of succeeding (among other interpretations based on the professional’s projection). I am still trying to work around some of the training which can lead a person into, as Amanda described it, “Fear of thinking one’s own thoughts or feeling one’s own feelings, and constant questioning of whether they’re real or delusional.” I still fight the drummed-in need to scrutize why I’m really thinking, doing, and saying what I am, to a truly pathological extent.
