minxy

I have seen two things in the internetly media lately that have been speaking to some issues of misogyny and racism and also to some of my real life experiences in the workplace. Being the personality that I am, which we will likely be gazing at to some extent in this essay, I can’t usually be found on the front lines of confrontation, of anger or announcement or identification. You’ll find me quietly weighing in with my vote, with my feet or with my choices, but in terms of the great path of change, I am not built to be active in the fighting part. I may, may be able to contribute something a little later on, though. I will contribute possibly over-cerebral navel gazing at this moment, but who knows? Later on the world may have adapted so much that I might shine as a beacon of, I don’t know, role-modelship or something. I think you have to be the change you wish to see in the world, though. Someone really smart said that.

I don’t have the guts to run for president, is what I’m saying. I do have the guts to fight for a career in academic biochemistry and biophysics, though. It’s a personality thing. And at the moment I am brave enough to navel-gaze in public, but if you're wondering why I'm not outraged and yelling? Personality.

So lately I read a rather badly written, possibly satirical-in-intent, argument that women are shooting themselves in the foot in terms of respectability when they do absurd things. The absurdity of the opinion piece is resoundingly pointed out in this rebuttal, but it is interesting to me that so much of the reaction to this is ‘if you meant to say this, you failed. Do better.’ Which is ultimately a statement both about communication and the demands placed on someone making an argument for change (do it well.)

This pings a couple of recent debates in the blogosphere that I’ve been peripheral to lately involving tone (in both a racial and non-racial context.) Tone being something that’s okay if everyone understands it to be satire, to be sarcastic, or to be appropriate. If a person either directly or indirectly involved takes exception to the topic, they can become defensive or antagonistic, and suddenly the credibility of the speaker comes down to tone. Not logic, not facts, but how you said it, and whether the people involved were capable of hearing anything else. We'll leave aside whether they have any right to judge (and not because it's not important, for the record.)

If you want an extraordinary example of a person making an important argument extraordinarily well, you might read this article at Kenyon Farrow.com by Tamara K. Nopper, but notice the irony of how the author’s word choice changed the entire experience.

My reaction to that story is two-fold. The first is probably a combination of a personality trait of most first-borns to sweep in and fix something if it goes wrong, to lead in the absence of proper guidance, but it’s also likely a product of sympathy and white privilege. My first reaction was: why didn’t someone speak up for that woman? I would have done (because I am noble and a knight in shining armor, lo.)

This is not helpful, obviously, because the author of the second article was doing a damn fine job of speaking up for herself in an emotional situation that was handled supremely and shamefully badly by almost everyone else. But we all have our issues. I like to think that mine are unobtrusive to others, but that’s probably wishful thinking.

My second, and probably far less directly emotional reaction is to try to figure out how the hell that situation went so wrong, and if it were me in that situation (as the victim, not the knight in shining armor in this thought experiment,) could I have controlled the behavior of the people around me? So the question for me, then, is what could have been done differently? How could that outcome have been avoided by the author, and would Ms. Nopper have been selling out to utilize any of the tactics? Would I?

If you were to draw conclusions from the first article, by a woman named Charlotte Allan who for the moment we shall assume was trying to make an earnest point, you would have to conclude that Ms. Nopper failed to gain the respect of those around her because she wept after the fact, or perhaps because she was frivolously talking on the phone when it began. None of these arguments is even remotely rational, and they contradict entirely the fact that Ms. Nopper is taken to task during the experience for the strength of her language used. No, the respect Ms. Nopper was not afforded had nothing to do with whether her cell-phone had fake rhinestones on it, or whether her clothes suggested that she would be willing to be a doormat and whipping boy. No, those arguments may be dismissed. It comes down to tone, and this is something that my mother would whole-heartedly agree with.

Lately, and in no way uniquely, I have been having trouble communicating with my supervisor. My mother, in the pragmatic and disturbing way of mothers, has been offering remarkable advice apropos and constructive to dealing with the situation. Because she is who she is and I am who I am and we know each other rather well, our conversations commiserating on the subject of my mistreatment (mild, common, in no way unique, but unfortunate) jump very quickly to what I might do to change the situation, control the reactions of those around me, and effect a significantly more favorable outcome in the future events, which will inevitably occur unless change is effected. Should I have been insulted in my workplace by my supervisor? No, certainly not. Should Ms. Nopper have had to bear witness to the ugly human behavior she did? No, she should not. But there is nothing, you see, that one can do about other people’s opinions and minds and actions except to try to influence them with your own.

Misogyny exists; racism exists. Ageism, weightism, homophobia, poor tolerance for disability or any sort of other… these things all exists and we must deal with them, repetitively. The question is, what can you do about it, if, like me, you violently dislike anger and you are an eldest child (and troubleshooting the problem with your Mom, who is also an eldest child?) You deal with the things you can change, and you work around or tolerate the things you cannot change.

Here is what I think cannot be changed: people react emotionally sometimes. My supervisor, for example, gets defensive and attacks when he feels threatened or insecure. He is a man and he is shorter than I am. He reacts to a lot of what I say when I’m standing as though it is inherently more aggressive. I react emotionally to perceived insult to my competence in the workplace, I am unable to continue a conversation in a civil manner past the point of a statement like that, and I am not terribly confrontational, so my reaction is to freeze and leave. My advisor’s reaction is to grow progressively angrier that I’m not talking to him and not opening up a dialog when he expresses his concerns. Stalemate.

Here is what I think makes working through the problem tenable: good intentions, a likely ability, if not willingness, to work together.

Here is what I think we must overcome: the fact that he has no idea how little he contributes by way of constructive suggestion. The problem that I respond to positive motivation (very well) and not his instinctive negative; that neither of us will be able to compromise without going against our instincts. And both of us have had long careers believing our instincts to be effective and correct.

The plan, as worked out by my Mom and I and countless other really smart people: to begin a dialog, when everyone is calm and not defensive, that involves a lot of use of “I feel…” phrases and absolutely clear roadmaps on my preferences re: motivational tactics. This is my working style, let me show you it. No statements about how I could make twice as much elsewhere (at least, dear God, but we will not mention that we have looked) or how much information would leave with me if I cut bait. Sitting, not standing. Use of the phrase ‘normally, you are really pretty fair about this kind of thing, but…’ as an opener for any criticism; ‘if you recall, we discussed…’ as a stand in for ‘because you fucking told me to, you bastard.’

I’m kind of jesting here, much as I am stating these intentions somewhat simplistically. I do not expect this conversation to be comfortable or easy, but I do think it’s necessary. I also feel somewhat manipulative going into a conversation with a tetchy advisor and doing something as calculated as not wearing heels that day. Because it is one thing to use a preconstructed sentence to say something you are really having trouble communicating on your own, it is another to compromise style and strength and clothing choices and emotion. Isn’t it? It feels like it. Then again, those emotional responses are hard to control.

Would Charlotte Allan have gotten a different response if she had made professional, calm, fair arguments about the perception of silliness and respect in women? Undoubtedly, since the main problem with her article is that it is mind-bogglingly controversial over how she made her point (whatever her point was) and whether she made it in the way she intended.

Would Tamara Nopper have experienced a significantly different kind of flight if she had used an ‘I feel…’ phrase rather than ‘Don’t fucking speak that way to me”? I suspect she would have from at least one of the key players. What I don’t know is whether she would feel better or worse having subsumed her natural inclination to express offense, and avoided a lecture.

I think it’s worth considering. I’ve deliberately avoided discussing the racial aspects of this subject, largely because I don’t want to get my ‘white person, shutting up’ t-shirt mussed, but race undoubtedly strongly influenced Nopper’s experience. The argument of tone has come up consistently in dialogs about race missteps and whether or not it’s appropriate the burden of appropriate tone gets leveled on the person arguing for something to change. This becomes a different problem, though, with emotion being clouded with privilege, paternalistic crap, and an inability to make the assumption that both parties recognize a problem and have the best intentions of fixing it.

Would a white woman like me, tall and with some good muscle definition, have had my personal space so cavalierly shoved, or so quickly been physically threatened like Ms. Nopper, who is an Asian-American woman? It’s really hard to say, race and gender are in indivisible part of how the world perceives her and all of us. Would a tall man of any race have had an older white man pressing a leg up against his the minute he sat down in a plane? I doubt it, though I don’t know and clearly I’ve reached the limits of my thought experiment.

Here is my point, though: some things you can change, like laws and whether you speak up and how, but some you can’t, like the fact that people react badly to being told they’ve done something wrong. The laws about voting and discrimination and such, a lot of them have been changed and we have a woman and a black man competing for the democratic presidential nomination, and it’s not enough. We hit situations, and they aren’t unique to us, as tragic as it is, where we will have to compromise and we will have to decide if it’s worth it (and, for the record, my preference may well be switched to the democratic hopeful who stops lashing out at the other first). For me, it’s worth working the thought experiment ahead of time so that I know whether I’m committed to working through an interpersonal problem or not, because when I’m emotional, I’m just incapable of making some kinds of decisions.