Why "The Internet Is Terrible" Doesn't Console Me

[Content Note: Harassment; sexual violence; social anxiety; terrible bargain.]

One of the things about this job is that it comes with a lot of shit. And that shit is hard to talk about, not just because of my own personal hang-ups about burdening my friends with my problems, but also because very few people know what to say, even when I do talk about it. Unless you're in it, day after day, it's difficult to understand how bad it really gets.

I get that. I once went to a very nice and smart and clearly compassionate therapist and spent the entire session trying to explain what a blog is and what social media is and what the current shape of laws governing online harassment are, so she could even begin to wrap her head around what I'm dealing with. She took notes, and asked lots of questions about how the internet works. I never went back.

Because I get that it's hard to totally understand, I appreciate the friends I have who, upon seeing some public display of harassment, invite me to talk about it and just listen and offer what supportive words they can, without offering me futile suggestions on how to fix something I cannot fix. I value anger; it feels good when people get angry on my behalf, because it makes me feel like people give a shit, and because it validates my own anger. Those are great responses.

What is not a great response, though a frustratingly common one, especially from strangers who have seen one public snowflake of the avalanche I navigate every day, is some variation on: "The internet is terrible."

That might be a great response—validating, consolatory—for someone else, but it is not for me.

And I daresay I'm not alone in being a person who makes her living on the internet, who has community on the internet, and who thus finds a generalized denunciation of the internet to be more harmful than helpful.

Following are some reasons why "The internet is terrible" is a construction that doesn't work for me, based on my particular set of lived experiences. This is certainly not intended to be a comprehensive list of reasons why people might find it problematic, nor to suggest that everyone who may share some or all of these circumstances necessarily also finds it problematic. It's merely intended to provide some thoughts about why it shouldn't axiomatically be considered a statement of support, and how, in fact, it may serve to be precisely the opposite.

The Internet Is Made of People

The internet is not separate from culture, but a reflection of culture. It's not "the internet" that is terrible, but the terrible people who comprise a global community that inhabits the internet who are terrible.

And it's not the internet that makes them terrible: It takes a special sort of cultivated ignorance to imagine that the anonymity of the internet creates the urges that underlie bullying, rather than merely empowering bullies to be uglier, meaner, bolder than some of them would be face-to-face.

It's not like no random dude ever called me a fat cunt before I started a blog.

To lay the blame for harassment and abuse at the feet of "the internet" is to absolve people who exploit its nature. And further to redirect blame at me—because if the issue is really "the internet," then it's my fault for participating in the first place, and the only option for me is to disengage from it.

Blaming "the internet" and disappearing that it is people and their choices that make the internet what it is, is a way of distancing oneself from responsible participation. If the internet is inherently and immutably terrible, then none of us are obliged to hold harassers and abusers to account.

Which is really just a cowardly way of telling me: "You're on your own, kiddo." That doesn't feel supportive, for what I'll assume are obvious reasons.

I Contribute to the Internet

A universal pronouncement of how terrible the internet is always a "Swallow shit, or ruin the entire afternoon?" moment for me. Because here is how that goes:

Option A: "I am being threatened by scary people because of my job." "The internet is terrible." Long pause. "Well, my site is part of the internet." "I didn't mean your site!" "You may not have meant it, but if you're writing off the entire internet—" "Jesus, don't take it so personally. I'm just trying to be supportive!" "I know, and I'm trying to explain why that doesn't feel supportive to me." Exasperation and escalation, leading to the conclusion that I am even more terrible than the internet.

Option B: "I am being threatened by scary people because of my job." "The internet is terrible." "Uh-huh." "Hey, check out this YouTube video…"

Heads they win; tails I lose.

It's a shitty position in which to be put, to feel defensive about the very existence of my own work when I'm seeking support for the steep costs of my work.

And, the truth is, it's just as easy to say, "I'm angry people do that to you" as it is to say, "The internet is terrible." But the latter, unlike the former, doesn't necessitate even a momentary contemplation of the costs I, and other content providers, bear about which consumers of that content don't want to think.

All of which is to say nothing of the fact that the internet allowed me to build something from which I make my living when I was laid off during an employment crisis and could not find traditional work, and continues to allow me to make a living in a nontraditional way regardless of health issues that might have negatively impacted my ability to stay employed.

I Learn from the Internet

One of my major visceral reactions to the idea that the internet lacks value lies in my regard for the internet as an absolutely stupendous educational tool. No, the internet is not wholly terrible; there are parts of the internet that are amaaaaaaazing.

I have learned—and continue to learn—so much from resources available to me only through the internet. Not just fact and figures and news (although I cannot overestimate the value of those), but all the things I learn about other people and their lived experiences.

Communicating with and listening to people whose lives look fundamentally different from my own has made me a much more empathetic person than I was when I first got online. It is incredible to be able to connect with people in faraway—or near—places talk in their own voices about what's going on in their communities and in their lives.

I'm more sensitive to the needs and desires of other people; I'm far less judgmental about other people's choices; my language is more inclusive—all of this is because of the global community of which I can be a part courtesy of the internet.

I've learned vast amounts about other people, and I've learned about myself. I am more content in my own skin because of the internet, where I encountered, for example, fat advocacy.

That is about as far from "terrible" as it gets.

I Am a Turtle

For me, one of the most precious advantages of the internet is that it keeps me connected. I don't mean the ability to keep up with the goings-on of old friends and distant relations—although that, too. I mean that it keeps me from disappearing.

I disappear easily, vanishing from social interaction like a retreating turtle into its shell—long stretches of desired lonesomeness during which I am perfectly content to be my only company. It's not because I love my friends any less, or because I'm depressed, or for any Important Reason at all, except that I am who I am, and that is someone who is very shy.

The first 13 years of my life, I was so painfully shy that I never laughed out loud at school, ever, which is difficult for friends made after that time to believe, because I laugh loudly and easily and often now. I still remember the first time I tried an out-loud laugh, hesitatingly and consciously, in Mr. Martz's social studies class, and Garth Miller looked at me from the next desk over with an expression one usually reserves for events like alien invasions and said, "I've never heard you laugh before!" Bless him, I had such a crush on him, and if he'd said it with less wonder and more judgment, I might never have laughed out loud again.

That is who I am, in the deepest roots of myself, the girl who had to summon the gumption to laugh out loud in class. And that is why it's so easy and so comfortable for me to disappear.

And disappearing, as I have a wont to do, was different before the internet. It read, quite understandably, like avoidance, when I stopped inviting people to socialize and picking up the phone. Even during a disappearance, I might still accept invitations and answer the phone to chat, but I stop reaching out. All of my limbs and my head and my tiny little triangular turtle tail get tucked inside the shell. And it isn't kind to be a friend who disappears without explanation, so I explain, as best "I am a shy turtle girl right now; no it isn't personal; no I am not depressed; no nothing is wrong I swear" can be explained, which I've found depends a lot on how inclined to turtliness the listener hirself is.

The internet has made disappearing easier, in the sense that I don't totally disappear. I can maintain the necessary indulgence of my introvert nature and still be the one doing the reaching out. Sometimes, it is during a disappearance that I write the most meaningful emails, have the most wonderful tumbling conversations via text, give my friends the biggest laugh by posting some elaborate Photoshopped monstrosity of their favorite things on their Facebook walls. Dispatches from the shell.

That is a life that feels real to me, and fuller than my life without the internet, which is a tool that helps me actively maintain relationships with my dear and deeply valued friends, in spite of the social anxiety that constantly invites me to retreat.

I find less need now to attend events during periods when my shyness and anxiety conspire to engulf me; I have fewer instances of sitting at the end of the bed, ostensibly deciding what to wear, but actually contemplating whether it is worth risking a panic attack in a crowded space in order to avoid having to make a call to a friend who would totally understand that I'm not coming. Not disappearing completely helps me engage in self-care.

Which is to say nothing about all the friendships I have made via the internet, not a few of which are with people who are shy in the same way I am. I value beyond measure my extroverted friends, but they can't totally relate to the part of me that does the disappearing act. It feels good to be understood intimately, by people who disappear, too.

It is a combination of in-person and online communication that lets me be who I am actually am.

That, I realize, it what gets under my skin about the diminishment of online communications and friendships as "not real"—because the internet has helped me become my realest self.

I Met My Husband on the Internet

Obviously, saying the internet is a wasteland is perhaps not the best thing to offer to a person who's met the most important person in her life via the internet, but it's not the slight to the origins of my relationship that particularly bothers me: It's the indifference to how the internet facilitated our safe meeting.

It's not just that we met at all, but also that we met safely.

Because we met online, there was a lot more hand-wringing among friends and family about Iain's and my first in-person meeting than there would have been had we met at a coffee shop and I'd agreed to go on a date with him. (Approximately: A metric fuckton of hand-wringing vs. none.) But, realistically, neither proposition was inherently less safe than the other.

I had good reason to trust Iain: We spoke on a daily basis for months before we met; I had his telephone number and address, to which I'd sent packages he'd received; he happily trekked to an internet cafe to speak with me via webcam when he didn't have one at home. What measures he could take to ensure I knew to whom I was speaking, he took, without my even having to ask. Before we met in person, I knew his parents' names, his friends' names, his pet's name, where he worked, his favorite books, his birthday... More, way more, than I ever knew about someone with whom I went on a first date.

And, once upon a time, a person I'd been dating for months, after meeting in a "real way," raped me.

It's not, of course, that internet meetings cannot lead to heartbreak and even danger. They certainly can. But so can relationships formed in person. Trust is not established sheerly by proximity.

All of the trust we built, we two people who each had our own reasons to want to establish deep trust with any potential partner, was made possible by the internet.

I Have Community on the Internet

To state the obvious, there is just a fuckload of cool shit on the internet. It's not all terrible. It's just silly to say that it is, really.

Let's be honest: Some of the worst things on the internet are heinous responses to some of the best things on the internet.

And among the many, many cool things on the internet is the potential for community.

Among my internet community are a number of terrific acquaintances, brilliant colleagues, and remarkable friends who make me feel like the luckiest person alive. I have made friends over the internet who are an integral part of my family of choice.

My internet-made friend Mannion once wrote a pair of lovely posts about human connection and its being one of the great mysteries of the universe. Connection is one of my favorite topics; I could endlessly discuss the many ways that humans find to connect, and all the little intricacies of connection—what love feels like, how love between friends feels different than between lovers, coincidences of meeting, the strange things that happen among people of like minds and hearts. I love stories of meeting, of how great friendships and affairs and marriages came to be, because they are so often rich with mystery and providence, gilded with an intangible promise to abide, the inducement of which cannot be recognized.

My grandmother, who lived her life nearly in its entirety before the internet, was a passionate jigsaw-puzzler, with hundreds of the things crookedly lining overstuffed shelves in her cellar. I can't see a jigsaw puzzle without thinking of her, recalling the ever-present card table with a semi-completed puzzle on its top that she would carry from room to room. I have in my closet a 500-piece panorama of the skyline of New York City—the city she called home her whole life—that I bought her the Christmas just before she died. It's so many years ago now that the skyline still includes the World Trade Center, but when I look at the box, still in its wrapper, it's my grandmother that I miss.

Sometimes her puzzles would have an extra piece that didn't go anywhere; the puzzle would be done, but there would be this one odd piece. It was almost always a middle piece, instead of an edge, so it wasn't until the puzzle was complete that the odd piece out revealed itself. She kept these odd pieces, throwing them all into a faded old coffee canister, as if one day, perhaps, they'd all make a puzzle of their own.

I'm a bit of an odd puzzle piece. But I don't mind. My life has become a canister for collecting other odd puzzle pieces, and if we don't fit perfectly anywhere else, we are nonetheless joined by the inscrutability of how such odd pieces came to be. Among odd pieces, the awkwardness of not fitting anywhere else takes a new shape, a sort of sameness, a warm familiarity. Or so it seems to me.

In his posts, Mannion isn't necessarily talking about odd pieces, but he does mention a friend who he met online, which has a peculiar but wonderful way of connecting people, many of whom probably consider themselves odd pieces. "Before it happened to me," says Mannion, "even for a long time after, I'd have said it was impossible to become real friends with someone you never touched."

I was once as dubious as he was about the ability to forge friendships via the internet, also before it happened to me, but here I am, with a life full of friends made both offline and online across the course of my life. Some of my friends from childhood have become virtual friends with people I've met through blogging.

Last year, for my 40th birthday, a roomful of extraordinary people joined by their connection to me came together for a grand party. How each of us had first connected did not matter, in terms of the quality and ferocity of the connection. It only mattered insomuch as it was only the internet which ever could have delivered many of us into each other's lives.

The truth is that humans are adaptable creatures, and if you give them a new way to make a connection, even one that lacks a lens into precise circumstance or physical contact, they will find a way to make a connection. Not all of them. Surely there are people for whom falling in love with someone the way I did, before I ever even saw his picture, or forging a lasting friendship, is simply not possible, for one reason or another. Maybe such things are dependent on a transcendent imagination. Maybe they bloom in the soil of need.

Odd pieces tend to struggle with connection, which can be brutal—watching the beauty of connection lay itself across the faces of people to whom it comes so easily, over and over, and always just out of your reach. But the experience can be informative. Odd pieces uniquely appreciate connection, and thusly connect in a different way.

I was maybe six when I tried putting all my grandmother's odd puzzle pieces together. "If you stick those together," she told me, "they might not come apart, because they weren't designed to fit." She was right. They were tough to connect together, but even tougher to break apart again.

* * *
The internet is not terrible, not to me. There are terrible people on the internet, like there are terrible people everywhere. But without the internet, I would not have my work, my marriage, many of my friends. The first picture I ever saw of Dudley was on the internet; we filled out his adoption form online, with a greyhound rescue we found via the internet.

The internet is not so much a thing as it is a place. Bad things happen in places, and so do good things.

"The internet is terrible" is about as helpful to me as "boycott Indiana," for very much the same reasons. I don't want you to write it off, and claim that it's for my own good. I want you to help me fix it; I want you to see the things that are good, and the things that aren't; I want you to believe with me that it's possible to make it better.

I want it to be okay for me to expect more, and I want you to expect more, too.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Harmful Communication: The "I Love You" Defense

[Content Note: Abuse; gaslighting.]

"I love you" can be a beautiful and welcome turn of phrase, when it's said to someone who wants to be loved by the person saying it, whether in a romantic or non-romantic context.

It can also be a fraught phrase, especially between two people with different expectations about when and how it should be used—as inside a relationship where one person wants to say and hear it often, and the other person thinks it ought to be held in reserve for special occasions.

It can be a weirdly obligatory phrase, compelling people to reply, "I love you, too," in accordance with embedded expectation, personal or cultural.

One's individual comfort with saying and hearing "I love you" is neither right nor wrong; it's just something that has to be negotiated with other loved and loving people in one's personal sphere.

This post, however, is about a very specific deployment of "I love you," which is always wrong: Saying it in one's own defense.

Example:

Person A: I am upset by X behavior toward me, and here is why, and I would like you to not do that, please.

Person B: But I love you.

That's a very simplistic representation of a type of exchange that will be familiar to many of us. It might go something a little more like:

Person A: I am upset by X behavior toward me, and here is why, and I would like you to not do that, please.

Person B: You are wrong to feel that way. Intent argument. Gaslighting.

Fight fight fight.

Person B: I'm sorry if your feelings were hurt. But you know that I love you.

Person A: BRB going to read the Terrible Bargain again.

Here's the thing: Love is a verb. (So is "care" in the similarly deployed "I care about you.") It's not a fixed state of mind, where as long as someone has decided they love another person, that's all there is to it. Love is an action—or, better, a series of ongoing actions that constitute loving behavior. The act of loving somebody.

When "I love you" is deployed as a defense, an invoked reminder, it functions to communicate the idea "I can't hurt you, because I love you."

In refusing to apologize, and to be accountable, and to listen to someone who is articulating a boundary, and instead "reminding" them that you love them, that you have always loved them and always will, you are effectively, even if unintentionally, communicating these things:

1. That love and harm are mutually exclusive capacities.

2. That love is static, and does not require the active work of negotiating boundaries.

3. That the person is saying they don't feel loved, rather than saying they don't feel respected.

This last one is a biggie. And it's a biggie because, while certainly there are times that a consistent subversion of safety and/or respect can undermine one's belief that someone loves them, mostly people who are willing to take the time to address an issue of safety and/or respect with a loved one is aware that the person loves them. (Otherwise, there's little incentive to invest the time to address it.) So "I love you" thus functions as a red herring, to make the issue about something it patently isn't.

As a result, treating "I love you" as a defense or resolution may also function, inadvertently or maliciously, as a way of implying that the "real" issue is that the person with a rightful complaint is the problem—a broken person who just doesn't have the capacity to accept love.

When the problem is not feeling unloved, but unheard.

The response to "this thing you do makes me feel unsafe or disrespected" is "I hear you, and I will not do that thing that makes you feel unsafe or disrespected anymore." It isn't "I love you." Listening is the required act of love.

"I love you" comes after that love is in evidence, and not before. Or instead.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

On Being a Thin Friend to Fatsronauts

[Content Note: Fat-shaming; body policing; bullying; gaslighting.]

Last night, in the comments to Big Fat Love, Shaker rvh asked, in response to a line in my piece:

"maybe your thin friends passive-aggressively use your weight to make themselves feel better about their insecurities"...

How does this work? I am asking because I wouldn't ever want to do it and I genuinely don't know what behaviour would fit into that category.

This is a particular issue for women, since "diet/weight talk" and body policing are so central to much of female communication—it's a source of solidarity or contention (or both) between mothers and daughters (and sisters, etc.), a means of bonding between female friends and colleagues, a competitive frame between women, a means of auditing inclusion and exclusion in female groups—and is thus the source of a lot of good feelings and bad feelings among women. It is not, however, exclusive to women. One of the worst examples of ongoing, explicit, and profoundly harmful body policing around weight that I know is between a father and a son.

First, a caveat: Fat people police one another, too. (See Brian's great post, "Fat Isolation," which addresses some of the ways in which fat people engage with fat-shaming narratives.) This post isn't about how fat people are perfect saintly victims of meany thin people: Some of the most vicious fat-shaming ever directed at me has been by fat people who just weren't as fat as me, and boy howdy was their fragile self-esteem wrapped up in simply not being the fattest person in the room. And fat people even have their own special narratives of shaming one another, like the old "at least I'm proportionately fat!" chestnut, used to shame anyone whose fat body is fatter on the bottom, or on top, or in the torso, or the limbs, or some variation on failing to be a perfectly plump version of a thin person.

But, what we don't have is thin privilege, of the sort that gifts one the luxury of never having to consider the ways in which our language, and our public participation in the culture of weight-obsessed "diet/weight talk" and body policing, can inadvertently hurt and dehumanize the (other) fat people around us. That's central to the question rvh asked, and that's the question I'm going to answer.

Sometimes, it's just a function of unexamined privilege. It may not be your conscious intent to use a fat friend's weight to counterbalance your own insecurities, but that can be an unintended communication in habits like constantly referring to yourself as fat, or saying you "feel fat," or announcing that you need to lose weight, or body policing other people in front of a fat friend.

If you're saying things that could quite reasonably make your fat friend think, "Jesus, if zie thinks that about hirself/that other person who is not as fat as I am, what must zie think about ME?!" that's a problem.

If you're saying things that oblige your fat friend reassure you, "No, you're not fat; you look great!" that's a problem.

If you routinely talk about "looking good" and "being fat" as mutually exclusive concepts, e.g. "Oh, I look terrible in that picture—look how fat I look!", thus implicitly conveying to your fat friend that zie can't be fat and look good at the same time, that's a problem.

And, if your fat friend points out one of these unintended communications to you, and your response is either gaslighting ("I didn't mean it that way; you're putting words in my mouth because you're just sensitive about your weight!") or trying to create some secondary beauty standard just for fat people ("It's not that fat people can't look good; you just good look in a different way, but you really know how to work what you've got!"), that's a problem.

One of the things that thin friends have done to me my whole life, often without any malicious intent, is treat my general (but not total) lack of participation in the unwinnable game of achieving the beauty standard, as either evidence of my having "given up" or the logical response given how far outside the privileged aesthetic I am. Why bother, when you so obviously can't achieve anything resembling beauty, anyway? Oof.

There is truth to the fact that deviating so wildly from what is culturally regarded as "objective" beauty failed to inspire in me any ravenous desire to attain status on my appearance (though feminism was frankly a greater disincentive; I was still a small in-betweenie when I formed boundaries around how much I was willing to conform to imposed norms). But thin friends have often unintentionally conveyed harsh messaging about how (un)satisfied I should be with my body, by remarking on how evident it is I don't care. A lot of backhand-complimentary messaging verging on "letting yourself go" memes.

That's a problem, too.

And if you react differently to a thin friend's self-policing than to a fat friend's, if you figure that a thin friend wants to hear, "Oh, I hate my body, too!" and a fat friend wants to hear, "Oh, but your face/hair/blouse is so pretty!" that's also a big problem. Not only does it convey that fat friends should hate their bodies, but hey here's a weak compliment, it also conveys to fat friends that the body policing which is an invitation for inclusion in a sisterhood among thin women does not extend to us.

Your flaws are so big or multitudinous, we don't even know what do to with you. Often, thin women, in a failed bid at sensitivity, exclude fat women from self-policing with platitudes, instead of just not doing it at all. One of the least obvious but most common ways thin women hurt their fat friends is with pity.

Sometimes, it's evidence of an agenda. Most of us have thin friends who do this sort of thing out of thin privilege—simply not considering what it unintentionally communicates—and many of us also have thin friends (or family members, etc.) who do this sort of thing with an agenda. That is, they fat-shame with the desired objective of feeling better about themselves.

I have a thin friend who incessantly gripes to me about how "fat" she's getting. She will examine herself in a mirror, or look down at her leg while she's wearing shorts, or grab her flesh and say things like, "Look at this disgusting cellulite!" She then looks at me pointedly, waiting for me to "compliment" her by observing the manifestly obvious: That she is not fat.

(I trust I don't need to elucidate why obliging me to treat "You're not fat" as a compliment is no fucking fun.)

Or she'll grouse about having not accomplished some professional goal she thought she'd have accomplished by her current age, or about getting grey hair, and say, "Well, at least I'm doing better than X. I just saw her at the store and OMG she has gained SO MUCH WEIGHT." She then carefully scrutinizes my face, searching for evidence that I feel terrible about being fat, so she can feel better about herself because at least she's not fat and feeling terrible about it!

Inevitably, I disappoint her by saying instead, "Your body is strong and healthy, which is such a privilege for which to be thankful!" or "Oh, I'd love to run into her. She was always so nice/funny/smart/whatever."

I disappoint her by failing to give her the satisfaction of seeing me crushed at the implication I'm a monstrous wreck in comparison to her—an implication that cannot be overtly challenged, because, of course, she gives herself plenty of room to say, "That's not what I said! You're just being insecure!"

We are old friends, but I don't see her very much—for reasons that I'm guessing are obvious, but I will state it plainly nonetheless: My body does not exist to make other people feel better about theirs, and I do not consider my fatness the negative benchmark on a competitive scale.

You may be wondering how you're supposed to convey that you're unhappy with your body in a way that doesn't effectively imply there's something wrong with your fat friend's body. And the truth is: Maybe there isn't. Like other forms of privilege, thin privilege means that complaining of some aspect of that privilege, even if it is a legitimate complaint, can make you look like a real asshole to people who don't share it.

"My raise at work wasn't enough that I can buy the dream home I wanted, and I'm super disappointed!" is a valid thing to express, when you've worked hard and laid plans and been given promises by an employer who didn't deliver. But it's also something most of us realize isn't a concern about which we want to oblige consolation from our unemployed friend who's just lost hir home to foreclosure.

Body policing and "diet/weight talk" are so pervasive, and fat hatred so accepted, that it's not considered bad form for people with thin privilege to oblige commiseration from fat friends. (In fact, some thin people get miffed when fat people object to being drafted into such conversations: "I thought you of all people would understand!") The first step in avoiding trading on thin privilege is simply to acknowledge that even participating in policing, of self or others, can convey negative, judgmental messaging to fat friends.

Obviously, every friendship is unique, and some fat friends are completely comfortable discussing body image with thin friends. But that should not be assumed, even if fat friends have previously joined in weight talk and body policing. Fat people are expected, and often pressured, to join in, and can use that participation as a self-defense mechanism, even if it makes them anxious and unhappy.

(For me, as one example, I'm comfortable discussing body image with some friends, and not others, based on individual levels of empathy and sensitivity, and the quality of the discussion—attention-seeking negativity I can't abide, but straightforward or humorous self-evaluating is something I value with many of my friends.)

If you want to discuss body image with a fat friend, my recommendation is this: Talk to them explicitly about their comfort level with that subject. If you're not good enough friends to have that conversation, don't discuss it all.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Harmful Communication, Part Two: Emotional Auditing

[Trigger warning for harmful language, emotional manipulation, rape culture.]

The language of defensiveness, projection, emotional auditing, non-apology apologies, false choices, and magical intent is ubiquitous in social justice spaces—and pretty much everywhere else. This series is intended to really examine how this brand of accountability deflecting language manifests as harm in everyday interactions with the people around us. In the same way that discussions of consent as a broad concept beyond sexual interactions have inspired people to reconsider other consent issues, even something as common as posting photographs online, I hope that this series can make us more sensitive to what we're actually communicating when we engage accountability deflecting language, or what's being communicated when we're on the receiving end of it, and underline why it is inherently harmful.

In Part One of this series on accountability deflecting language, I addressed "Magical Intent," the principle by which someone who has said or done something upsetting argues that the person to whom they've said or done it has no right to be upset because their intent was not to generate that reaction, i.e. that intent is more important than effect.

The convention of magical intent first deflects accountability by seeking to make a harmed person responsible for our having hurt them, by asking them to respond to what we were thinking rather than what we were communicating. ("That's not what I meant; it wasn't my intent; you're taking it the wrong way; you're getting it all wrong.") It then asks them to accept that their feelings are irrational, because all that matters is what we intended them to feel.

That is Emotional Auditing.

Emotional Auditing manifests in many different ways, from dismissing people's responses as "oversensitive" to claiming ownership of people's emotions by asserting to know better what they think or need, but it begins with the presumption that we can control people's reactions. To be sure, we absolutely influence the way that our communication with others will be perceived: The language we choose, the honesty of our communication, the time and place we broach subjects, whether we engage in good faith, the medium we use to deliver information, etc. all have a meaningful effect on how any communication will be received. Even the most casual of relationships exist on a continuum, and situational awareness—including being aware of past communication successes and failures, and being conscious and respectful of individuals' particular needs, experiences, triggers, boundaries, and sensitivities—is important.

But the objectives of being sensitive to other people's needs should be respect for the individual and clarity of communication, not an attempt to try to control other people's responses. In other words, we shouldn't seek to use people's vulnerabilities against them to try to manipulate getting a reaction we want.

Once the desired outcome is: "I want hir to respond like this," we're already on the road to a harmful communication, because to try to control other people's reactions is, in effect if not intent, an attempt to try to control the emotions underlying those reactions.

We cannot (neither pragmatically nor ethically) control other people's reactions—which should not be mistaken for an argument that every conceivable response is equally valid; abuse is always inappropriate. Here, I want to draw a distinction between drawing boundaries for oneself to set off-limits abusive responses, and marking out a spectrum of acceptable emotional response for someone else to set off-limits any and all responses that we wouldn't like. There is a meaningful difference between communicating, "You are not allowed to engage in accountability deflecting language (like 'Magical Intent') with me, because it's harmful," and communicating, "You are not allowed to react to what I said with hurt or anger or sadness, because negative emotions make me feel yucky."

Only the latter constitutes emotional auditing.

(Indeed, drawing clear boundaries about communication preferences is often a necessary response to emotional auditing and/or emotional manipulation.)

So: We cannot control other people's reactions, and to approach communication with some notion that we can, with some expectation that another person should respond in a specific way, with a strategy to elicit an expected and desired reaction, is an inherently harmful communication, because it presupposes there is only one "right" reaction.

We mustn't mistake a reaction we want for the right reaction.

There are certain situations in which most decent people will agree, and be quick to say, that there's no one right reaction. After the death of a loved one, after an assault, after an unfortunate diagnosis, after a job loss—most traumas are met with reassurances that there's not a right way or a wrong way to react.

Fewer people, but still a significant number, will acknowledge there's no one right way to react to things typically regarded as joyful events, either: Becoming a parent, getting married, graduating college, getting a new job. Not everyone is as undilutedly thrilled as we are expected to be in such circumstances, and, irrespective of the void of axiomatic reassurances that it's okay to have various reactions, it's true all the same.

And so it is in most situations: An unexpected reaction is not a wrong reaction.

(Again, to address a notable exception: Abusive responses, which include the disregard of previously communicated boundaries, are clearly inappropriate reactions.)

The ubiquitous urge to make other people responsible for our communication, however, makes most of us less inclined to give across-the-board application to the idea that there are rarely "right" or "wrong" reactions. That would, of course, steal a pretty useful tool out of the accountability deflecting toolbox.

And so instead, we learn how to respond to evidence that we've upset someone with: Don't feel that way. Or: You shouldn't feel that way. Or: I don't want you to feel that way. Or: It doesn't make sense to feel that way. Or: You're being ridiculous. Or: You're being irrational. Or: You're being oversensitive. Or: Your reaction is disproportionate. Or: You're looking for things to get mad about. Or any variation on: You are wrong to feel that way.

And/or an assertion to know another person's mind better than they know it themselves: You're really mad about something else. Or: You're really just trying to punish me. Or: Your hurt, anger, tears are an attempt to manipulate me. Or any variation on: Your emotions aren't authentic.

A healthy and productive reaction to someone expressing hurt or offense is not to audit whether that reaction meets our standards of acceptability (again, with caveat that no one is required to tolerate abuse), but to try to understand why it is that the person is reacting the way zie is. Empathy is the best response to causing unintentional hurt.

Naturally, there are people in the world who are manipulative, people whose perceptions can be affected by mental illness, people who overreact because they're having a goddamn bad day. But none of those are reasons to justify dismissing someone's reactions out of hand as illegitimate: Their existence is, in fact, an argument for the necessity of empathy.

To respond instead to evidence of our mistakes with emotional auditing can be profoundly harmful—and over the course of a relationship, holding another person responsible for our hurting them instead of owning our own harmful communication can cause irreparable damage: After someone communicates enough times that you're exclusively responsible for the hurt they cause you, the only choice with which you're left to break that cycle is to disengage.

Owning our fuck-ups is an integral part of stopping the cycle of harmful communication, not only because it allows for real accountability but also because making authentic amends depends on acknowledging responsibility.

Apologizing in a meaningful way necessitates viewing oneself as a complicated person, with virtues and flaws, good instincts and bad habits, the capacity for kindness and a reservoir of internalized ugliness. It requires fully embracing the idea of knowing and caring about oneself in all one's often regrettable aspects. It rests on the capacity to exist comfortably as a person with visible and acknowledged flaws.

To relieve oneself of the burden of trying to project perfection is to take the first step away from the reflexive use of accountability deflecting language.

And the failure to do so, giving oneself permission to prioritize being right over being compassionate, letting the instinct to say things like, "You're being oversensitive" and "I'm sorry, but…" linger, tends to lead to a cycle of abuse—because if we resist seeing ourselves as someone with flawed communication about which we need to be vigilant, we make the same mistakes over and over, then deflect accountability, again and again, with harmful language.

As I'm sure is evident by this point, a big part of avoiding engaging in harmful communication is being honest about how inclined we are to try to deflect accountability, about what less than productive, effective, and kind strategies we use ourselves, and about where we need to be vigilant and make changes. In other words: Being honest about who we are.

Which brings us to projection, and that will be part three.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Harmful Communication, Part One: Intent Is Magic

[Trigger warning for harmful language, emotional manipulation, rape culture.]

This is the first post in a series about language. Specifically, harmful language.

We talk about physical and emotional abuse a lot in this space, and, to some extent, we also talk about abusive language: Under the "this shit doesn't happen in a void" refrain, I've frequently addressed hate speech, and we acknowledge that bullying is abusive even without any physical violence.

We also recognize, in discussions of rape culture and in conversations about institutional oppressions, that systemic harm is not limited to physical violence, but additionally manifests as harmful language in the form of rape jokes or slurs or violent rhetoric, as examples.

In discussions of privilege, we also begin to get at the ways in which language that is not explicitly violent or marginalizing can also be oppressive, and we recognize how a failure to own one's privilege using accountability deflecting language extends and exacerbates the hurt, anger, and alienation caused by privilege and expressions thereof.

The language of defensiveness, projection, emotional auditing, non-apology apologies, false choices, and magical intent is ubiquitous in social justice spaces—and pretty much everywhere else.

This series is intended to really examine how this brand of accountability deflecting language manifests as abuse in everyday interactions with the people around us. In the same way that discussions of consent as a broad concept beyond sexual interactions have inspired people to reconsider other consent issues, even something as common as posting photographs online, I hope that this series can make us more sensitive to what we're actually communicating when we engage accountability deflecting language, and underline why it is inherently harmful.

We begin with Magical Intent.

Magical Intent is the principle by which someone who has said or done something offensive, hurtful, rage-making, marginalizing, and/or otherwise contemptible argues that the person to whom they've said or done it has no right to be offended, hurt, enraged, alienated, and/or otherwise disdainful because their intent was not to generate that reaction.

In other words: "I didn't intend for you to feel that way, so if you do feel that way, don't blame me! My intent magically inoculates me from responsibility for what I actually said and how it was received!"

This is one of the most harmful—and common—manifestations of accountability deflecting language, rooted in the false contention that intent is more important than effect. It is a most curious habit, given that most of us would readily acknowledge that "I didn't mean it" isn't an excuse for not having to apologize when we bump into someone or accidentally step on someone's foot. Yet we have nonetheless created an entirely different standard for things we say that inadvertently hurt other people.

Intent does not, in fact, magically render us unaccountable from the effects of our communication, no more than not intending to step on someone's toes magically renders us unaccountable from the effects of our movement. Pain caused unintentionally is still authentic pain.

And, although it's true that sometimes our communication is simply misunderstood, more frequently, the (mis)communications that led to the invocation of magical intent are the result of implicit intent not actually matching what is being explicitly communicated. To illustrate what I mean, some examples:

Example One: Alex has a PhD in Subjectology. Jamie knows that Alex has a PhD in Subjectology, yet, during a discussion of Subject, Jamie, who has an interest in and is reasonably knowledgeable about Subject, condescendingly explains basics of Subject to Alex without regard for Alex's demonstrable proficiency. Alex expresses that Jamie's insistence on explaining basics makes Alex feel as though Jamie does not respect Alex's competency or intellectual capacity. Jamie, whose intent was actually to impress Alex, insists that hir intent was not to make Alex feel that way. Alex makes a valiant attempt to explain why Jamie behaving as though Alex doesn't know the basics of Alex's professional field is disrespectful, at which point Jamie gets miffed, reiterates that the intent was not to make Alex feel bad, accuses Alex of looking for things to get mad about, and misrepresents Alex's good faith attempt to address demeaning language as a personal attack on Jamie.

Thus, what had started out as an inadvertent slight becomes a harmful exchange, as Jamie refuses to acknowledge that the effect of the action irrespective of its intent was hurtful to Alex, and deflects accountability by casting Alex as unreasonable.

Example Two: Kelly and Terry are friends. Kelly is fat; Terry is thin. Terry routinely expresses disgust with hir body by saying things like, "I am so fat" and "This cellulite is disgusting." Kelly tells Terry that such expressions are hurtful and make hir wonder what Terry must think of hir, since zie is much fatter than Terry. Terry, whose intent was actually to solicit support and validation from Kelly, insists that hir intent was not to make Kelly feel that way. Kelly makes a valiant attempt to point out that even if it was not intended to make hir feel bad about hir body, it does, because Terry is associating fatness with something bad. Terry reacts defensively, reiterating that the intent was not to make Kelly feel bad and accusing Kelly of being jealous and oversensitive.

Thus, what had started out as a misguided attempt to connect becomes a harmful exchange, as Terry refuses to acknowledge that, despite a lack of intention to be hurtful, zie was hurtful nonetheless, and deflects accountability by projecting hir void of sensitivity onto Kelly as an abundance of oversensitivity.

Example Three: Jesse has a habit of casually using the rhetoric of sexual violence ("I got raped by that ATM fee"), even around hir friend Jordan, who was raped. Jordan has asked Jesse not to use those phrases around hir, explaining that they are triggering and make hir feel unsafe, to which Jesse agreed. Jesse nonetheless slipped up, and Jordan expressed hurt both over the use of the phrase and also over the disregard for hir previous request. Jesse, whose intent was not to hurt Jordan, responds belligerently and insists zie just forgot and hir intent wasn't to hurt Jordan and doesn't Jordan know that? Jordan says zie does know that, or else they would not still be friends, but adds that it was hurtful all the same. Jesse storms off in a huff, but not before hurling another accusation of bad faith at Jordan.

Thus, what had started out as a hurtful mistake becomes a harmful exchange, as Jesse refuses to own hir mistake or acknowledge that the effect was to disregard the feelings of an ostensibly valued friend, then further escalates the situation by attributing to Jordan accusations of ill will that Jordan did not make.

In the first example, Jamie's implicit intent was to shape Alex's perception of hir, but Jamie's explicit communication was a display of hir knowledge of Subject. In the second example, Terry's implicit intent was to elicit validation and fish for a compliment from Kelly to assuage Terry's anxiety about hir body, but Terry's explicit communication was a negative expression about fat. In the third example, Jesse's implicit intent was merely to communicate a frustration about something, but hir explicit communication went beyond that to include triggering language that broke an existing friendship agreement with Jordan.

In all three cases, there was a significant gap between intended communication and actual communication, leaving room for a grave misunderstanding.

Now, mismatches between intended communication and actual communication happen all the time, even when one endeavors to communicate as straightforwardly as possible, and it's not always a problem. (Sometimes, in fact, it is a source of great humor.) But a harmful exchange is most likely when the discord arises from seeking something for oneself without empathizing with how it's being received by the person from whom one is seeking it.

That's the danger in trying to communicate need in indirect ways. It's easy to lose sight of what you're conveying tangentially, because you're so focused on accessing approbation, reassurance, validation, support, the placation of internal distress because you know you've fucked up, or whatever else for which you're searching.

And in instances where it begets an unintentional offense, the worst possible response is to try to shift accountability to the recipient of the communication.

It's an understandable impulse: Deflecting accountability—that is, asking the listener to be responsible for the genesis of the hurt, because they misunderstood your intent—feels a lot better than being accountable.

But seeking accountability-free absolution from whom you've wronged, asking to be let off the hook so you can let yourself off the hook, only serves you—it does not serve the person that you've hurt.

It is not merely unfair (although it is that, too) to deflect accountability by casting someone to whom you've done wrong as unreasonable, oversensitive, or alleging malice ("How could you think I intended to hurt you?!"), when they are being or doing no such thing. It is abusive.

And it is abusive because it is emotionally manipulative.

That's a difficult notion to accept for most of us, because most of us have engaged in this type of harmful communication at some point in our lives, even if it's not a regular habit. Even being presented with the idea that common defensiveness can be abusive is likely to elicit, in some readers, a magical intent response: I don't intend to abuse or manipulate people, so there's no way I'm doing it!

But that's why this conversation is so important—because a lack of intent to harm doesn't guarantee that one will never harm.

The convention of magical intent seeks to oblige a harmed person into accepting accountability for our fuck-ups. It asks them to accept that their feelings are irrational, because what matters is what we intended them to feel.

Which brings us to the auditing and asserting ownership of someone else's emotions. And that will be Part Two.

[Note: It is not incidental that, in all examples provided, the harmed parties responded to unintentional offenses done by trusted people with the good faith assumption that there was no intent to harm even when harm was done. As all communications, this particular issue has two sides: One is assuming good faith in criticism when deserved, and the other is assuming good faith in response when approached thus.]

Open Wide...

Shut Up!