Anti-bullying

Coming from a background where bullies were people who threatened and sometimes used real physical violence against others I have a low opinion of those who talk about speech as a form of bullying and nothing but contempt for those who claim we can unconsciously hurt others through words alone. I've just read a great blog post that clarifies matters brilliantly.

In Defence of the Bad, White Working Class

Read the whole thing.



It also got me thinking about the other side of the equation. To me anti-bullying is stopping bullies, with violence if necessary. It requires identifying aggressors rather than victims. It does not require a lot of posturing and loud declarations that we need to have important conversations. It requires us to recognize that bullies use their power and prestige to gain leverage to gain power over others. If you want to identify the bullies in a school setting start by looking at the teachers' favourites; every teachers' favourite is not a bully but most bullies are teachers favourites. And it requires observation and confrontation.

The insidious effects of approval seeking

I was listening to a podcast on the Art of Manliness in which Brett McKay interviewed another favourite of mine, Jordan Harbinger of the Art of Charm.  The whole podcast is worth a listen but I was particularly struck with an issue that came up starting around 45:44.

The discussion is going to go to a really interesting observation about setting boundaries but it begins with giving generously. Jordan* has been pushing the notion of always be giving generously". What he means by that is that when you're networking you should simply give without establishing a covert contract whereby you expect a return for what you give. I'm pretty sure he gets this from Robert Glover's No More Mr. Nice Guy although he has done some development. Bret agrees with this but wonders about setting boundaries. He raises the issue of what he calls give-a-mouse-a-cookie syndrome.

"If you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to ask for glass of milk. If you give him a glass a milk, he's going to ask for a napkin."

Jordan takes that and uses it to zero in on something really important: the challenge of saying "no". He says it's about setting boundaries and not about saying no. We feel guilty about setting a boundary because we worry that other people are going to have a temper tantrum when they don't get what they want. Again, we're back to a principle originally set by Robert Glover: don't seek approval.

Think of what Jordan has said here. I've set a boundary. Is it a fair boundary? The honest answer to that is, "I think so but I also know I've set boundaries before that I realized were unworkable or unfair but seemed fair to me at the time." Certainty, in this context, is an emotion and not an epistemological statement. I need to be open to other people's arguments that my boundaries are unjust. What I don't need to be open to is other people's feelings about my boundaries.

This is even more complicated because we typically don't lay out our boundaries to people at the start of a relationship. Some people do but it ain't good reckoning. For example, a woman I knew in university used to break the flow of conversation with men as soon as it started to get flirtatious to run down a list of what she wouldn't do sexually. The effect of this was that normal men, the ones who would have treated her in the respectful way she sought, would quietly back away and the type of creeps she was hoping to avoid were the only ones who stuck around. Normal, healthy people rely on existing social conventions to get us by. At the same time, we should have boundaries that we don't normally tell others about but should spell out to ourselves. So what happens when it's time to enforce one of these boundaries and someone responds by having a temper tantrum?

If I am all about getting approval from others what is going to happen is that I'm going to cave completely. And I won't cave because they have advanced a convincing argument that my boundary is unwarranted but because I need their approval.

This is also important when people seek apologies or when you seek forgiveness. If I think that the measure of whether I've responded adequately is the other person's emotional state I'm not seeking to apologize and make redress so much as I am seeking their approval. And that (another insight of Robert Glover's) that is to give away my power. What I should be doing is deciding what is right and doing it. What I am actually doing is giving another person the power to decide what is enough.


* I listen to these guys so often I feel like I'm on a first-name basis even though I don't know them.

It's a white thing: individualism

The target of this exercise—I mean of the podcast Seeing White but not just it—becomes clear in the episode called "Chenjerai's Challenge". The challenge comes from Chenjerai Kumanyika and it is simply this, as a white person trying to figure out what it means to talk about shite goodness, when was white ever good?

He kind of gives the game away after that by saying, "When was America ever great?" So it's just a partisan cheap shot. It's cheap because it equates "good" or "great" with "perfect". As I've noted before, this is a popular argument with five-year-old children. It shouldn't be acceptable from anyone over the age of seven.

That part isn't interesting. What is interesting is what is underneath it all. We've been told that race distinctions are artificial. That's not as profound as the people behind the show thing because all categories—animal, plant and mineral, for example—are artificial. And the people behind the podcast while pretending to want to discredit race categories, are very determined to keep using them.

Indeed, as we see above, the point seems to be to want to paint one race category, whiteness, as always and uniquely evil. Whiteness is artificial. On the other hand, you and me, as white people have something to answer for. How does that work?

Kumanyika says that he felt this need to think of his graduation from college as a victory for black people. And then he says that, even though he tries not to, he sees every crime committed by a black person as something he is a part of.

Okay, I get that. As a guy with a thoroughly French sounding name living in Canada, I sometimes feel like I am being called upon to explain Quebecois separatism. I have a sister and an uncle who go to extremes condemning all forms of Quebecois nationalism in an attempt to make it clear that none of this has anything to do with them. When I went to graduate school, a great aunt who had never spoken to me before contacted me ti congratulate me for being the first person in my family to do so. No one on the Irish side of the family did that or felt that.

And then our host John Biewen spells it out. This is "how whiteness works in a white-dominated society, that one of our privileges, one of our benefits, as members  of the white club is that we get to see ourselves, and to be seen, as individuals." Again, I get that.

But that also raises a question for me: Why not aspire to create a society where everyone gets to experience that?

For the purposes of the people behind the podcast, the answer is that they want to use whiteness  as a category to blame you for what happened and to make you pay. When I say "pay" I mean that literally as the issue is reparations and I say "you" and not "you and me" because, as a white Canadian, I'm not a target. That's weird, if you think about it, because if there is no such thing as white goodness, why not make every white person pay.

In any case, the reason Kumanyika doesn't want white people to be able to think of themselves as individuals is because that would give them the right "to release yourself as an individual from that." "That" here meaning culpability for the historical wrongs against blacks in America.

I'll stop here because this has to stop somewhere. Suffice to say, the podcast fails because it doesn't really want to succeed. The whole thing is an exercise in virtue signalling. As I've said before, I don't think virtue signalling is evil. It's a way we have of showing others that we're in their group. This podcast is a way of showing people you are one of them or, if you are not one of them but aspire to be, of learning how to be one of them.

That's ironic, don't you think?

What white women expect

The New York Times published a series of articles called “Was that racist?” For consumers of the mainstream media most of it was a familiar shaming exercise in which white people are encouraged to believe that we are unconsciously being racist all the time. In the middle of that usual nonsense, however, there was one genuinely interesting bit.

There are many times in a day when a person is walking toward me and in my path. In these situations, we both generally make minor adjustments upon our approach. Sometimes, and especially with pedestrians who are black, as I am, there’s eye contact or even a nod. Almost always, we shift our bodyweight or otherwise detour to make the pass easier for the other. Walking courteously doesn’t take much, just soupçons of spatial awareness, foresight and empathy. In seven years of living and walking here, I’ve found that most people walk courteously — but that white women, at least when I’m in their path, do not.

The writer, Greg Howard, goes on to say that everyday day white women force him to move out of their way and that at least twice a week they force him right off the sidewalk.

Let me start by saying that I am sure this is true. I am absolutely certain he is accurately reporting what happens to him. Where it begins to go crazy is when he tries to explain it.

Do they refuse to acknowledge me because they’ve been taught that they should fear black men, and that any acknowledgment of black men can invite danger?

What?  These women successfully dominate a man who is physically stronger than them and he imagines it's fear that drives them?

Here's what I think is happening. Howard, who is a New York Times reporter is being ignored and, therefore, forced to get out of these women's way because he is successful. It's not only not racism, it's an example of how little race enters into these women's interactions and, conversely, of how Greg Howard tends to see everything through a racial lens.

What Howard does not seem to know is that white women, especially young and attractive white women, are normally deferred to by white men. Everyday, white men defer to white women by, among other things, getting out of their way on the sidewalk. The white men and women themselves probably aren't even aware that this goes on. They just do it instinctively. Is this a good thing? That's a long discussion. I don't know. What I do know is this, it is part of the unconscious  assessment women make of the men they meet on the street and it affects there subsequent behaviour.

When a white woman sees Greg Howard coming on the sidewalk (and she always sees him even if she seems preoccupied with friends or her phone) she quickly makes an assessment of him. It's a predictive assessment. That is to say, her brain scans for unusual signs and everything else becomes background. She's not doing anything unusual, we all do the same thing. Walk into your house and you will not notice all the stuff that's there everyday. Your brain has predicted all that stuff will be there and it sends a signal to relax to your body when the prediction is correct. If there is something in the room that your brain didn't predict, like a dog when you don't own a dog, and your brain will quickly put you on high alert. To return to Greg Howard of the New York Times, as a woman walks down a sidewalk in downtown New York, her brain will quickly scan men to see if they fit into familiar types. Greg Howard does, successful, college-educated professional man is the category. No threat, therefore she just keeps walking in a  straight line expecting that he will get out of her way the way all the other successful, college-educated professional men do.

Now the interesting thing from a race angle is that Greg Howard is being subjected to pressure to accept the norms of white people here. I'm sure that he knows this on some level, which is why he rankles at being treated this way.  The white successful, college-educated professional men who share the same sidewalks are used to be treated as invisible by white women. They are no more unhappy about this than I am the New York Times didn't personally contact me to respond to Greg Howard's writings. Howard coud just go along with this but he's elected not to.

The plain fact is that there will be a dominant culture. Currently, white culture dominates. Black people have had a gigantic influence on entertainment culture but the base of the culture remains white. What Howard is signalling here is that he no longer is willing to accept that. And he's not alone. The media are largely on his side of that debate/struggle. Either side might win.

A final question, why the focus on white women? White women are getting a lot of criticism lately. There is no reason why this shouldn't happen. Just about every group will have it's day of unwelcome attention someday. But why Now?

Who is afraid of sex dolls?

Ann Althouse does a nice job of exposing a fraud. Tabi Jackson Gee writing in the London Telegraph wants us all to be very concerned about sex dolls.

How would you feel about your ex boyfriend getting a robot that looked exactly like you, just in order to beat it up every night?

Is she worried about dolls or does she just like stereotyping men?  Anyway, Althouse counters with this:

How would you feel about your ex boyfriend getting a robot that looked exactly like you, just in order to shower it with all the love and conversation you never seemed to want?

And that is the real issue.  Some women look at sex dolls, or prostitution, or strip clubs, or porn, and see a threat to their power. They want a world where women can use sex to obtain power over men.

That's kind of funny because that is also what Victorians wanted.

But here's the thing, no sex doll would stand up in competition to a real woman who wants to be loving and giving for two seconds. If you believe that relationships on marriage should be based on loving and giving, you have nothing to worry about. If you don't believe that, you're a moron.

"You're important to me"

Have you had the experience of someone telling you that you're important to them but somehow they never manage to find time to be with you? Or the only times they ever invite you to see them are events to which they have invited several people and they hardly get any time to see you during the dinner or whatever it is? I've gotten a lot of it and it's only in the last few years that I've stopped going along with it.

I think we, or at least I, tend to go along with such things for two reasons. The first is that nobody wants to be a loser and seeing people you've come to think of as family or friends drift away makes us feel like losers. Life moves on and it feels like it's moving on without us when people who once were a huge presence in our life no longer have time for us. The whiny, needy little child inside us clings to whatever tiny morsels of attachment and recognition are offered us. The second reason is that the professions these people make to care for us are sincere. The people who say these things to us really mean them when they say them. They fully believe that they intend to get together with us and reconnect when they say they do. 

As I often say,  when our friends tell us lies they aren't necessarily lying to us. They could be lying to themselves. Indeed, the person who lied this way most often to me was my mother. I doubt she'd have been able to admit to herself how little I meant to her—I'm certain she felt a strong emotion that she was convinced was love for me but the plain fact is that she never had time for me. The only times my mother ever arranged for the two of us to be alone together was when she wanted to influence me to do something or stop doing something. But, and this is the important part, she was utterly unaware of this. Her feelings told her that she cared a whole lot about me, about my siblings and about my father. Her actions, however, rarely lived up to those feelings.

Of course, I've also done this to other people. More often, however, I've been on the other side of the equation. Robert Glover has argued that we tend to seek out relationships like those we had in childhood or, worse, that we tend to transform what should be successful relationships into the unsatisfactory ones we are familiar with. Looking back, I can see that I did that.

But how do we get out of that trap? I don't want to sound more authoritative than I am here as I am still figuring a lot of this out. The first thing is to train ourselves to get to the point where we can be honest about how our relationships actually work without getting angry about it. Psychologists often say, "Name don't blame." I don't think that's quite right because I think it's necessary that we blame. I think one of the reasons that some of us shortchange ourselves is that we're afraid to blame. When people tell us that we're important to them but are never available to us except when they have some ulterior motive we need to be honest enough to blame them, see my above remarks about how a fear of being a loser leading us to accept treatment from others that we should not accept. The issue is not whom we we blame but how we express that blame. The key is to express that blame in a meaningful and useful emotion and not as impotent rage. Then, and only then, will we be able to act in a more positive manner.

The opposite of impotent rage in this case would be cold-heartedness. We might, for example, experiment with withdrawing ourselves in the hope that the other person will reach out to close the gap. I don't know what would be worse, that such a strategy would fail or that it would succeed. Either way, we'd be training ourselves to be monsters. 

On the other hand, there is no point in investing a lot in such a relationship. We should be polite and civil because that is how we should behave to everyone who is not actually attacking or threatening us. We can nod politely and warmly agree that it would be great to get together sometime. We should even suggest an opportunity to do so. It's important to make it clear what we want. If I want to get together with an old friend and talk, just the two of us, I should make an overture. If the overture is never taken up and no counter offers are made, we need to have the courage to accept that we are not actually important to this person and adjust our attitudes appropriately.

I think the real test of that is when that later, inadequate invitation comes in. I had to deal with this recently with a  friend of mine from university days. When we ran across one another, he would great me enthusiastically and we talk about how we ought to get together. I suggested something and he agreed but then stood me up. He apologized and promised to set up another opportunity. A month later I was included in a group email inviting me to a book launch party for a mutual acquaintance of ours. I didn't go. The temptation to go just one more time and maybe we could arrange an actual encounter was still there. It always will be. But I just let it go.

I think what motivates people to tell us that we're important to them when they actually care very little for us is narcissism. It's not the monstrous sort of narcissism we read people ranting about on the Internet. Google "narcissism" and you'll get a whole bunch of hits where someone will rave that their mother or former boyfriend or girlfriend was a narcissist and how they've lived miserable lives as a consequence. But the truth is that very few people suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder or anything vaguely like it. Most people who tell someone they are important to them and then neglect them are simply projecting. They feel a strong emotion towards you because they need to feel special and they want you to see them as important. You are important to them because you validate their feeling of being special. To borrow from Robert Glover again, what my mother gave came from a place of emptiness inside her and always had strings attached. That's unfortunate but it's ultimately sad and pitiable rather than monstrous. To pretend that it was monstrous would be to be a whiny little victim (see those Internet hits I mention above) rather than to accept that the only person who needs to do anything about this is me.

I was wrong

I've long believed, and often said, that it is very rare for both parties to a failed relationship to be at fault. I now know that is wrong. I now think it's very rare to find a case where only one person is at fault.

Why was I fooled? Part of the reason was that I leaned heavily on the fact that certain facts about what someone has done are indisputable. We learn that, "X had an affair." Well, it's all her fault then!

My point here is not that people who have affairs do so because the relationship is going badly. That happens sometimes but other times people have affairs because their just selfish little shits. My point is that when the other person in a relationship unilaterally does things that are really crappy those facts can easily be manipulated into telling a very one-sided story. This story usually starts with an easy lie we tell ourselves (I did this once upon a time). It goes like this: "My biggest mistake was trusting you." That's what whiny little victims say.

To believe that you have to believe that there was some really big betrayal or a series of betrayals that came out of nowhere and caught you completely off guard. That seems possible or, rather, the first part and the last part seem possible. I can believe there was a huge betrayal or betrayals and I can believe these caught me completely off guard. What is a bit more of s stretch is the second part, that these "betrayals" came out of nowhere. To put it bluntly, "betrayal" is just "warning sign" writ very large.

Why did I not see this before?

•  For a long time I was a whiny little victim about bad treatment I'd received from women in my life, most notably from my mother.
• Every time I got into a relationship, or even just a good friendship, with a woman I told myself that I was incredibly fortunate. I spent too much time worrying that she might reject me and not nearly enough time asking if she was a safe bet.
• I knew that while everyone has faults, you can only control yourself, so I focused on working harder on myself when things got difficult. That sounds sane but is actually insane. I was a fixer. I had come to believe that a bad relationship can be fixed by one party unilaterally deciding to work harder at it. 
• I didn't ask the hard question. One reasonable safety check to apply to a relationship not only at the beginning but all along is to ask yourself whether the other person really wants you. That is a different question from do they really want to be in a relationship. Most people (desperately) want to be in a relationship. But do they want you just as you are?