Recently I’ve had several interchanges with women on Twitter that have concerned me. I’m talking about a fellow tweep personalizing a point I made, taking exception, becoming resentful, interpreting my point as an arrow I’ve flung at her. Not only have I had this happen in my online conversations, but I’ve also witnessed this happening in Fem2pt0 Twittercasts.
I understand feeling targeted or called-out, needing to defend yourself. Had I not trained in psychology and learned how not to take things personally, I’d be reacting all over the place with outrage directed at individuals who hold differing opinions. What I hope comes across from my online activism is outrage at the issues, not at individuals who follow me on Twitter or who are friends on Facebook.
I frequently make what some people consider to be provocative statements. I have many radical ideas. I also have many critiques of the way we live and the assumptions underlying our culture. I express these in dialogues with people and I welcome spirited disagreement. In my opinion, dialogue on Twitter is a powerful CR (consciousness raising) tool, and I prefer it over blogging as a tool in my activist feminist toolkit.
When I recently discussed the concept of a birth strike (women stop having babies and leverage this to get their needs met) with a tweep who happens to be a mother, I was not condemning her decision to have children; I was discussing a systemic issue. When I said to my fellow tweep that needing to have a baby look like you and act like you is a form of narcissism, I was not calling her a narcissist. Narcissism is an issue driving many choices in our culture (an important issue for consideration, imo), but why would I want to call out a friend on Twitter as a narcissist? Those who know my work will recognize that this is inconsistent with my practice.
This is why I say It’s Not About You. When you think it is about you, feelings get hurt, positions get defended, an us v. them impasse takes over the conversation. Recent witnessing of this misplaced personalizing was a conversation involving feminists with children and feminists without. It was ultimately a useful conversation, but could have done without the ego defenses. I’m suggesting that you can state your experience, your bias, and own it as simply being that: your opinion. One of my stepsons used to love to come back at me with "Opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one." At the time, it was hurled at me with snotty hostility meant to wound me (and it did), but I think it helps people see relativism with a sense of humor.
Most of what a person perceives to be "out there" is their own unrecognized, unintegrated, disowned self. You know those people who call homosexuality an abomination? In my opinion, these people are desperately trying to deny who they really are. They are so ashamed of their own homosexuality or the possibility of their homosexuality that they attack it (publicly) while practicing it or fantasizing about it (privately). This is a loaded example of disowning unintegrated issues and then fighting them in other people.
A way to take responsibility for your beliefs is to preface what you say by owning your own bias. So, for instance, if you are a woman without children involved in a group discussion with women who are mothers, you might say "I don’t have children, and when you make an assumption like (fill-in-the-blank), I feel you are belittling my place in the world." The other woman might then ask "How can I talk about my experiences if every time I do you feel marginalized and defensive?"
Good question! There is responsibility on both ends of the dialogue to realize that when your feelings get hurt, or you are feeling silenced, marginalized, or somehow dissed, the first place to look for the source of your discomfort is to your own psychology. Ask yourself why you feel so defensive. If you have some insight into this, share it with the group and own up to being wounded by it. Going straight to owning the pain usually circumvents the need to blame the person in the room with you. Chances are good that the real offending event(s) happened in the past. The offending statement is a trigger, but probably not a good reading of what is happening in the present.
I’m not minimizing real, hurtful, longstanding divides among groups of women. There are deep divides between women who are mothers and those who are not, between feminists and womanists, between women of color and radical women of color, and more. Divides abound. Humans still think in binary code. In my judgement, this is because human intelligence is still evolving and because internalized misogyny has made all women patriarchally disordered. All men, too. How this plays out and creates divides is too big a topic for me to undertake today, but I’ll address it one of these days…soon…
AMEN. I agree.
When you make statements like, “I disagree with people who do x, y, and z,” you shouldn’t be surprised when people who DO do x, y, and z take offense. We’ve all been around someone who’s made statements that negatively generalize a group that we are a part of. When you call them on it, though, they respond with, “Well, I didn’t mean YOU.” Well, why didn’t you mean me? And if you only dislike SOME people who do this, or only dislike this action in SOME people, then why did you make a blanket statement?
I feel like making the argument, “It’s not about you,” is a cop out. It’s refusal to take responsibility for your own offensive statements, which are more than likely a miscommunication on your part rather than misunderstanding on theirs. No one is responsible for what you say but you, and if you misrepresent your beliefs or opinions in a way that is insulting to someone else, you can’t blame them because they took your word at face value. I recommend that rather than blaming those who misunderstood you for your own inability to properly communicate your thoughts, you think about how you could have stated your opinions more clearly and made a more positive impact on readers.
I don’t follow you on twitter, so I can’t really speak to the subject any more specifically than this, but as a person who maintains a blog and a twitter and does frequently address controversial issues, I know that when someone takes offense to something I’ve said, particularly if I’ve made a blanket statement, I consider it MY responsibility to clear up the misunderstanding, usually by clarifying the blanket statement. It’s not their responsibility to read between the lines when I make a statement that very bluntly criticizes something they do or think and decide whether or not I mean them. And if I actually am critical of something they do or think, I will not shy away from telling them so just because they are someone I like or because I want to avoid confrontation.
Honestly, if you are getting enough criticism from people on this that you feel the need to write a blog post about it, perhaps you should consider whether they are the ones with a problem of understanding or you are the one with a problem of communicating. Assuming everyone else has a problem when you are the common cause for that problem? Sounds like you’ve got your own “unintegrated issues” to address.
Katie–I wrote the piece because I’ve been observing this behavior in women for over twenty years as both a feminist and someone who trained in feminist psychotherapy. Much of what I wrote about were miscommunications that I observed other people having in Twittercasts, not all stemming from my interactions. Yes, I agree with you that clarifying the statement is always in order, and I always do.
Your tone is so hostile and raw! And you jump to so many conclusions not borne out by my post! Why?
I actually rarely get hostile replies on Twitter or my blogs. The couple of times I’ve been able to engage the other person in dialogue, it all turned out great! We got through it and became better friends. One time the other person unfollowed me and that was the end of dialogue. This is a systemic problem among women, imo–they get their feelings hurt much more readily than men do, and I think it’s an important feminist issue.