as small as a world and as large as alone, What *bad* advice does Captain Awkward give out?...

3:23am August 31, 2014

skulgun asked: What *bad* advice does Captain Awkward give out? For men and for women?

dendriforming:

youneedacat:

madeofpatterns:

ozymandias271:

madeofpatterns:

ozymandias271:

I got super-mad about and quit reading her after this post (which she apologized about, but still. ANGER ANGER ANGER.) And the links I’ve seen to her since then have mostly made me somewhere between “eyerolly” and “ragey.” But I’m glad that that link made me neither!

I have so many mixed feelings about that.

Like - there’s a lot about Captain Awkward that really, really bothers me. (Among other things, her insistence that everyone should go get therapy NOW NOW NOW).

But… everyone’s wrong about something important. And it’s not possible to write an advice blog long-term without occasionally giving horrible advice. I think that, if it was just that one post, the fact that she apologized for it and took steps to avoid repeating that particular problem would have been good enough.

There are other things that are… pervasive, though. But she also explains a lot of things really well that no one else is talking about in any clear way. So I’m not really sure what to think.

Yes.

To be clear, the reason I was ANGER ANGER ANGER about that post was.pretty much 100% Personal Issues? I don’t think that’s the rational response to have to that post.

But there are also… things that I think she gets wrong, and some things that she gets importantly right.

I think ANGER ANGER ANGER was a completely appropriate response to that post. That post was horrible.

Good blog in a lot of ways; shovel of salt needed.

Blogging is hard though.

Note that I’m not excusing anything this particular blogger has done because I know nothing about them, I’m just discussing something I’ve seen happen a lot lately, that seems at least tangentially related to what y’all are discussing.

Yeah I have pretty extreme feelings about the thing where someone makes a mistake once. Or doesn’t even make a mistake, sometimes just goes against the echo chamber of the day. And the person may or may not apologize, or whatever, but often does apologize, because whether or not they think they were wrong, they realize people were hurt by what they said. And then, even in the scenario where the person apologizes, people treat them like they are always and forever a Bad Person To Follow and a Bad Person To Reblog because they said that one thing, or have that one belief, or whatever.

In my eyes… anyone who doesn’t understand that they themselves have a fair number of shitty beliefs that result in pain, suffering, and even potentially death, for other people, that they will not change even when confronted… anyone who doesn’t understand that they themselves have this going on, because everyone has it going on… is in some kind of denial or something.

So like… even if someone really does have a shitty belief that hurts people, I still don’t think that’s automatic grounds for electronic shunning, for always announcing what a horrible person they are before apologetically reblogging the stuff of theirs you like, or for other things that basically mean that no matter how many good things the person does or says, the focus will always be on the bad (or presumed bad) stuff they believe. Because you can do that to anyone. I guarantee you I could pick any tumblr user at random and do that to them and be accurate that they have shitty destructive beliefs that they aren’t interested in changing.

And… it’s not that I think those things should be totally ignored. (Although I do think they’re often blown out of proportion or even outright fabricated. Not in this case, mind you — but I’ve seen it happen where a belief materializes out of thin air, that the person doesn’t actually hold, but “everyone knows” they hold this belief because they heard it through the tumblr grapevine.) But there’s got to be some way of dealing with it beyond this black and white Good Person/Bad Person way of looking at the world. Where everyone is busy proving what good people they are, by being sure to point out what bad people other people are.

It also doesn’t help when there are community norms that say if you reblog from someone who once said something bad, then you’re just as bad as they supposedly are, even if you have no awareness of the bad thing they said, or even if it’s just not relevant to anything right then.

I’ve been on the receiving end of this myself. It isn’t pleasant. It isn’t useful, either. It doesn’t make me into a better person. It doesn’t make the person calling for my cyber-shunning a better person. It just makes for a whole lot of confusion and unhappiness on the part of everyone involved. And I honestly don’t think most people who believe I’ve got horrible beliefs, even know what my beliefs are. It’s almost always a mental widget that they’ve created that resembles my beliefs without actually being them. Not that I’m saying I can’t say horrible stuff, everyone can, and everyone does. But a surprising amount of the time, there’s a huge misunderstanding involved. And I would not be surprised if this were the case for a lot of other people, too. (In my case I know that my particular flavor of autism contributes to a lot of the misunderstandings, because of language problems.)

At any rate, my personal preference is to give people some slack for even really horrible opinions because we all have them, and sometimes they’re more visible than others. But it doesn’t mean that I want them to get away with whatever they’re saying, it just means that I rarely write someone off entirely, based on one opinion, or even one whole set of opinions, they hold, that is destructive. And I think the culture of writing people off, and of encouraging people to write people off, and of saying “if you don’t write people off you’re as bad as they are”, is toxic and poisonous. It’s one thing to make a personal decision not to read or reblog a person again because you can’t handle their stuff, but it’s another thing to try to turn that into an act of public political piety and encourage others to do the same.

There’s also this assumption of interchangeability that goes along with this a lot of the time. Where it’s no big deal if you’re supposed to shun someone, because you should be able to easily find someone less ~problematic~ making those same points. And sometimes that gets boiled down to statements as oversimplified as “other people talk about ableism too!”

And yes, lots of people talk about the types of oppression they experience. But there isn’t One True Oppression Experience. People are too complicated for that. There are lots of important points that there aren’t lots of people making. It’s not as simple as “just go find someone else.” Sometimes you can’t.