silveradept | December Days 2023 #3: Things I No Longer Believe Fully: I'm Barely Above Acceptable Behavior

[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]

#3: "I'm Barely Above The Bar Of Acceptable Behavior."

Apparently, the RNG wants me to keep talking about toxic masculinity for the early part of this year's series. (As a sidebar, it's weird to look at a "this is how you generate a random number in a range in bash" command and go 'Shit, I understand every component of what's going on here." Not just the modulo math operation, but the the reason why you add a number to the result of the modulo to establish the bounds of the range. Maybe I'm better at some of these math things than I thought.)

I appreciate the work that's been done into seeding into our conversations and our brains the idea that behavior is the thing that needs addressing, that can change, rather than allowing the conflation of behavior and innate disposition. What a person believes may make them more likely to do certain behaviors, but it is absolutely possible to get someone to behave in specific ways, even if those behaviors don't align with their core beliefs. Even more so if changing their behavior avoids bad consequences and/or courts good ones. It's a very useful frame for when people behave in -ist manners, because you can sidestep the entire derail about how they believe in their heart of hearts that they're not a bad person and keep the focus on the concrete thing that can be changed and needs to be changed.

So, if you've never seen me in person, or a photograph of me, the important part to know about this is that I look like a tall cis white man. I expect people who don't know me well enough to know which of those descriptors above are false to treat me as a tall cis white man, and that means I have to try and keep in mind how the things I am doing and saying come across as if it were a tall cis white man doing and saying them. Sometimes I succeed, but as someone raised as a cis white man, I don't always know all the things that I need to be aware of, or how the privileges that I have with that appearance can distort my view of reality such that I fail to properly understand things. (And thus might suggest solutions that seem straightforward to me, but that would be snarly or impossible for the person who actually tried to implement them. Or do behaviors that I think are harmless that aren't necessarily harmless.) Because of the difference between belief and behavior, I can believe I'm a good person who wants to do well around others and hold healthy suspicion about whether or not my behaviors are helpful and good to others and myself. I don't know what I don't know, so it seems safest to assume that my privileges cloud my understanding sufficiently that I'm not part of the advanced class, or possibly even the basic one. It's above the line of acceptable behavior, but it seems foolish to attribute anything more than "barely over the line" to those behaviors, on the assumption that there are so many other things that I don't even know I don't know that keep me from believing that I might be doing okay.

However, that theory occasionally gets blown out of the water when a partner says offhand things like "thank you for choosing to use toilet paper." These statements appear nonsensical on their face, but the reason they're being made is because they have someone else's behavior or statements behind them. In this particular example's case, it's because some dude believes that putting anything between one's butt cheeks makes them gay. (We are supposed to be sufficiently marinated in toxic masculinity culture, however, to believe without questioning that gay is, of course, anathema to proper manliness.) "Thank you for not driving a Genital Substitute Vehicle." I can't think of many of the other ones at this moment, but they almost always have to do with what some dude just did and there's a post about it. Probably on one of the various Am I The Asshole places or other such.

It's not always partners who make those kind of statements, as well. "Thank you for having consistently helpful suggestions in the suggestions queue." "That feeling when someone gets your pronouns right without you having to tell them." "[She] doesn't come out when anyone's here, but she does when you are visiting." And sometimes it's just "Thank you for understanding." Or it's a general statement out into the world from someone on my social media about being thankful for guys who do not try to control their wives and girlfriends to the same degree as Texas legislators or others who think of themselves as God's representatives on Earth and therefore their pronouncements should be treated with the same authority and reverence as one would have for the deity.

When I come across these kinds of statements, and the receipts that often accompany them, I often have a boggle, because they reveal to me that the place where I firmly believe the floor of acceptable behavior is…well, it's a floor, but it is often the second or third floor's bottom, rather than the ground floor, or the basement. Sometimes that boggle comes from "oog, that's low morals / bad ethics" and sometimes it's "mate, that's poor tactics for what your supposed goals are." So there seem to be plentiful examples in existence where for any of the spaces where I have some privilege of people whose behavior resembles trying to limbo in underneath a bar that's been set on the ground or buried a couple of feet in. That doesn't necessarily translate into a belief that I can give myself a little more slack about not being just above the bar, because I'm hyper-sensitive to the possibility of giving offense. Blame my terrible manager and my evil ex and the fact that I didn't have the Variable Attention Stimulus Trait / Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder framework to help myself realize that things flying out of my head or not pinging until after something reminded me of it is a brain chemistry thing, not a moral failing thing. Other entries in this series may provide some of the situations that helped lead to the sensitivity and helped reinforce the sensitivity, but the important part is it's there, and all of these examples that keep showing up of other people not making the grade, often spectacularly not making the grade, does a little bit of reinforcing trying not to be the person who will be someone else's story of a bad thing. (There will be situations where I am, and it's that I'm the last straw, rather than that I'm spectacularly responsible for all of it. I am trying to acknowledge this possibility without letting it twist completely into "and this is why you're a terrible person," because, self, behavior is the thing that is sought. You can still be a good person and have occasional bad and correctable behaviors. And furthermore, if someone is bringing a bad behavior to your attention, it's because they think you can correct it. There may need to be a sulk first, because oh boy are there likely to be Big Feelings involved, but a relentless desire for self-improvement and to build systems so that mistakes are minimized generally wins out in the end over self-pity and not trying to grow from it.)

There's also a contextual component to some of these things. Out and about in the general public, for example, there are a lot of people who have made hair color choices, or outfit choices, or have neat ink, or a number of possible things that are cute, pretty, sexy, or flat-out neat in the way they're presenting themselves to the world. In contexts like con and cosplay, it's generally more acceptable to say "hey, that's a neat outfit!" and discuss what's shown because most people are making conscious decisions about what they are wearing and they're doing so with the hope that other people will notice and make commentary on it. Outside of that context, though, there's a bit more in the calculus, because if someone who looks like a tall cis white dude compliments another person's outfits or adornments, there's a nonzero chance that's going to be interpreted as flirting. And "getting flirted at by strange dudes" is one of those things that I see regularly on the lists of "could you please stop?" from people perceived as women. Sometimes, the situation works out where someone else in the party will make the comment, and it has a much higher chance of going over well because it's no longer a strange dude flirting, but someone who is much more likely to be believed as having genuine interest in the thing being complimented. I was explaining this particular situation to another person with experience in what it's like to receive "strange dudes flirting at me" a lot (where some of those "flirts" are well past even catcalls into the department of "I'm sending you a message of what I'm going to do to you sexually and I expect you to reply with how hot that is and ask me where to meet.") and she suggested odds would improve if the compliment were delivered about something that the person chose to do rather than about something innate about them. At which point I was reminded that some people really do think a good opening line for someone they've never met before is "nice tits, toots," or something similar in nature. I can appreciate a good body part as well as the next person, but just about all the studying that I've done and actual people I've talked to says the kind of people who lead with that kind of objectification often end up unsuccessful. (And don't get me started on those manosphere types that think of themselves as masters of the pick-up and their advice to do things like neg or otherwise try to establish a sense of dominance and put their "target" on the back foot or the defensive.)

Since I am pretty well convinced that my own looks are not going to get people throwing themselves at me, and have believed that at least since the era of post #1, where I also believed that as a course of reality, I would need to have additional skills and talents working for me to make up for the additional deficiency of being a nerd. So I'm not in the habit of admiring body parts without their context or making comments about body parts outside of their context. Con and hearing cosplayers and other people who are knowledgeable about fabric and accessorizing talk has helped me learn a little bit more about the terminology involved, even if I don't use it fully accurately and effectively all the time. It's nice to be able to give some additional detail and context to my thinking so that it's not just "that pair of leggings is really cute" but to be able to say "those leggings are really cute and they coordinate really well with the other cat-themed accessories on your jacket" or "those leggings are really cute and they work really well with the black-and-white color choices you've made with the rest of your outfit." Or "the purple of your hair matches the purple of your shirt really well." Explaining this netted me a genuinely given gold star, apparently, so this approach is more likely to produce a good result of genuine compliment given, and allowing the complimented person to decide where they want to take the conversation from there. Which is what I want to have happen when I give someone a compliment about something like their choice of costuming and/or accessories.

There are other dimensions to this, as well, the ones where I try to recognize where I might have biases and to try and figure out whether it's a bias or a weasel that's my first reaction to something, and then to work out from there what the desired or appropriate behavior will be in the situation. And that I'm trying to shorten the time and the severity of the reaction that's unhelpful so that I can get to the behavior that will be helpful, at least in the moment, and then, after that's done, if there are still Feelings that need to be had, to have them somewhere away from the situation. It happens to be that the space where I'm most aware of what I look and sound like (most of the time) is in things like giving compliments, or in how I'm presenting myself as an authority figure to others, where the other person's perception of me is probably going to be more important to whether or not the interaction turns out well than other factors.

This is one of the phrases that I don't believe fully, rather than I don't believe at all, because of my developed sensitivities. There's been enough evidence put in front of me to make the case that I'm not barely above the bar, and that where I think the bar is often is above where other people think the bar is. But I have to consciously think about those pieces of evidence to get to that conclusion, or so that I have a chance at smacking brainweasels off of me when they're swarming and biting. Self-forgiveness is not easy for me, as we'll explore later on in the series, and I'm still not great at untangling "what you did" from "who you are." With time and practice, perhaps, it will become easier.