Shocked and amazed

There is a play by Moliere (The Bourgeois Gentleman, 1670) in which an unsophisticated character is astonished to learn that he had “been speaking prose all my life, and didn’t even know it!”

Like him, apparently, about half the population of the United States—the male half— is shocked and amazed to learn that the other half of Americans have been living with sexual harassment, pressure, innuendo, and sexual assault, since puberty or before.

Once we wise up to the situation, as women or girls, we mostly realize that we are in fact prey and men are the predators. Wherever we go some of the men around us are undressing us mentally, fantasizing about doing things to us, just waiting for the moment alone in the elevator, or the back office, or behind some bushes, or in his car, when they can act on these impulses. Of course until the looks or leers or remarks or lecherous acts begin, we might not know for sure about a particular man. But if there are half a dozen men in your workplace you can feel pretty sure at least one of them is in this category, and a certain intuition may pick up on clues. Or perhaps someone else, male or female, will bravely let fall a remark about being careful around so-and-so.

But they’re still the ones with the power even if you’re forewarned. It is not merely that most men are physically stronger than most women, it never comes to that in most of these events. It is that men with power, even a little bit of power, target women that they have power over. It might be the woman’s timid personality, it might be her youth and inexperience, or the man’s position. He doesn’t need to be Harvey Weinstein or Bill O’Reilly or Donald Trump or Bill Cosby or Bill Clinton, doesn’t need to be famous or rich. If you’re a counter worker or a sales clerk or a babysitter for his kids or someone whose life will be made very difficult if you speak up, that is all that is necessary.

And let’s face it, the flood of accounts of abuse that have come out over the past couple of years, over the past couple of months, mostly haven’t come as any big surprise to people who’ve been around these men or known of them for years. But the women knew what reception they’d get if they spoke out.

At least if you’re raped or humiliated by a rich corporate guy you might be able to get a lawyer and negotiate a settlement which will of course include a non-disclosure clause. Your silence for his immunity and continuation of the behavior. But right there, in that sort of case, it’s not just the woman and the man who groped her and made her feel demeaned who are in the know: quite a few people know something or everything, her lawyer and his corporation’s lawyer, and the bosses and co-workers of those people, and his corporation’s financial officer and risk management person and on and on. Maybe she tells her best friend, or her sister (not her husband, that’s a quick ticket to being damaged goods in his eyes) or maybe she just makes nonspecific warning remarks to other women she sees being drawn into the attack zone.

But mostly women keep quiet. And so, it seems, do boys and men who’ve been harassed or assaulted. As with children who are mistreated or sexually abused, the power and credibility is all on the other side. The coach, the scout leader, the church youth group pastor, the friend of your dad’s, your uncle or grandfather—when they deny it who will believe you?

It’s a jungle out there, guys, and it’s mostly you XY chromosome humans making it that way. Women as prey, women as property, women as less than whole powerful people; we’ve always lived with it. Now you men know about it too, or should I say, have no excuse for pleading ignorance any more. What happens next?

Predatory men will not go quietly

 

 From splinternews.com:

On Tuesday night, The New York TimesPolitico, and The Atlantic all published stories detailing numerous sexual harassment allegations against Leon Wieseltier, the New Republic’s famed literary editor for over 30 years before he left the magazine in 2014. Wieseltier had been accused of “workplace harassment” on an anonymously crowdsourced list of “Shitty Media Men” that was circulating among women in the media. Over the past week, after the list was brought to the public’s attention, a group of female ex-TNR staffers started exchanging emails about their own “Leon stories.”

“I wouldn’t call it an ‘open secret,’ it was just the way he was,” one former female TNR staffer told me. “Open secret implies that anybody else in management understood it was shameful and shouldn’t be done, which was definitely not the case… It was a culture there, there were a lot of other problems. There’s a reason why someone like Leon has lasted as long as he has at a place like the New Republic—that doesn’t happen by accident.”

This was the statement that Wieseltier provided to Politico, which first broke the news:

For my offenses against some of my colleagues in the past I offer a shaken apology and ask for their forgiveness. The women with whom I worked are smart and good people. I am ashamed to know that I made any of them feel demeaned and disrespected. I assure them that I will not waste this reckoning. And I am profoundly sorry to my extraordinary collaborators at the journal we began together that the misdeeds of my past have made it impossible to go forward. My gratitude to them is boundless. 

" I am ashamed to know 
that I made any of them
feel demeaned and disrespected."

Good choice of phrasing, there. Women, their feelings, all that stuff is quite foreign to me, a powerful male animal. I’m shocked, shocked, that any of them could have felt that way. 

So much smoother than, “I am ashamed that I thrust my hand down the front of her clothing and grabbed her breasts”. So much less disturbing than, “I am ashamed that I pushed her up against the wall in a dark corridor, reached under her clothing to put my hand inside her underwear, and…”.

And so much less susceptible to criminal charges, too!  

These men are unrepentant alpha males, at least where women are concerned.

Weaseldick

Sometimes they even look the part, mane and all. (Photo of Wieseltier)

Note, in the excerpt above from Wieseltier’s disdainful self-exculpating statement, that he begins by offering a “shaken apology”. Shaken, surprised, caught unawares. The apology of an innocent man, who finds the rules have been changed without him knowing: he thought it was civil to force a woman, physically and by the power of his position and the circumstance, to submit to an assault of her person. Of course he did. He was  “the New Republic’s famed literary editor for over 30 years”, how impossible that he could have been aware that his unwanted “advances” were brutish and criminal.  Poor unschooled fellow, ignorant of the nuances of language and social behavior, he couldn’t have known.

The Oxford thesaurus, in the online entry for “civil”, says:

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/thesaurus/civil

O my sisters, O my brothers, must women remain the never-to-be-freed slaves forever? 

As a young woman forty years ago I thought so. Nothing so far has caused me to change my mind. 

Beyond Harvey Weinstein

When are we going to stop thinking about rights in regard to this group today (women) and that group (say, male actors harassed sexually by male executives) tomorrow?

Yes, some groups suffer more from certain kinds of harassment than others do, and sometimes specific legal protections are imperative. But must we work our way through each kind of discrimination with every conceivable group? There really isn’t time for that. How about generalizing it to two rules:

  • Respect the rights of other human beings in your words and actions. Insults and vicious gossip are cruel. Zip your lip, walk away.
  • Obey the law, which establishes minimal standards that are usually pretty clear. Assault is illegal. Compelling someone to submit to unwanted sexual activity is illegal.

No need then to teach your children, or yourself, to be kind & respectful to people who are a different color/religion/gender/nationality/political party, who support a different team or speak English with a regional or foreign accent, who are richer or poorer than you, more or less educated than you…See what I mean? The list of differences goes on forever. Cut the crap, be civil and compassionate to everybody. You can still disagree with them but you don’t get to insult them or assault them. Can you live with that?

[My last post was 3 years ago almost. If you are curious why, the “Speak, nosleepingdogs!” page, on the black menu bar above, explains.

Daydreaming—my brain didn’t get that module

Until I read an article in Scientific Mind this month about daydreaming (“Living in a Dream World” by Josie Glausiusz; not available for free as far as I can find), I wasn’t aware that I lack this mental activity. Definitions vary; one used in the article is that daydreams are “an inner world where we can rehearse the future and imagine new adventures without risk“. Another is “imagining situations in the future that are largely positive in tone”. I would add something to differentiate daydreaming from planning—perhaps that daydreaming includes emotional reactions.

It’s not clear in the article whether research results apply only to positive fictional imaginings or to routine planning and review, as well. The latter is much more common. Also the author conflates daydreaming and the mind’s use of off-task time to solve problems non-consciously.

People can daydream in extravagant adventures à la Walter Mitty, or more mundane imaginings of how good that hot bath will feel after work, or how happy one’s child will be when she receives her Christmas present. Most people, the author says, “spend about 30 percent of their waking hours spacing out, drifting off, lost in thought, woolgathering, in a brown study, or building castles in the air.” And it’s important to our sense of self, our creativity, “and how we integrate the outside world into our inner lives”.

I remember, as a solitary child, pretending to be Superman or Tarzan, but not often; I read, instead. After the age of 10 or 12, I don’t think I had imaginary adventures at all. Not surprisingly, I’m also unable to visualize scenes: “Imagine yourself on a tropical beach” is impossible for me to do. I can think, okay, I’m on a tropical breach, it is warm and sunny, and so on, but there’s no sensory aspect to it, just words. Similarly, my memories of the past (mostly gone now due to fibromyalgia cognitive damage) are all just words, as if someone had described a scene to me rather than my having experienced it. There’s no “mind’s eye” in my mind. In novels I usually tune out while reading the descriptions of landscapes and people; no corresponding mental pictures rise in my mind.

Daydreaming can be escapism but it can also be a way of trying out different futures, and experiencing the associated emotions. I think this could also help motivate a person toward a chosen or hoped-for future, by allowing advance tastes of its rewards or of the misery of its alternative. I make decisions about future choices and I make plans but I don’t try them out mentally in advance, and I also (in jobs, for example) tend to stay where I am rather than striving for something different. I’ve thought of myself as lacking in ambition, but maybe it’s more that I don’t have a way of modelling the future choices with emotional content. Mostly I’ve stayed in jobs until they became intolerable, then moved on, sometimes with no replacement in mind. I can’t even really visualize ideas for a vacation or a trip, especially to someplace I’ve never been.

So, what do I do with that 30% of my waking hours that other people use for daydreaming? Not enough. Sometimes, for a couple of minutes, it seems nothing is going on in my mind, or merely observation, without commentary, of what’s happening around me; I have no idea how typical that is. But mostly the engine’s running, chewing over what’s in front of it. Why are things this way, how could this activity be done better, how does this work, that sort of thing. I used to do a lot of sequential thinking, as if working through thoughts with pen and paper, exploring ideas and putting things together, taking them apart, finding correlations and causes. I could continue working on different mental projects during intervals across days and days, and sometimes wrote that way—at the end of the mental work I’d have an outline and some exact wording to put down on paper. Then I’d revise and expand, but I could work out a lot of it mentally and recall it. No more, since fibromyalgia. Thinking is often slow and I can’t remember from one day to the next what I came up with. Sometimes thoughts flit through and are gone before I can even try to remember them. This is one of FM’s major losses, for me, both a loss of pleasure and a loss of what I can accomplish.

Maybe reading fills the role of daydreaming for me. I read a lot, about equal amounts fiction and non-, and if circumstances prevent me from reading for a couple of days I feel the deprivation. The article mentions non-daydreamers only in passing: “Cognitive psychologists are now also examining how brain disease may impair our ability to meander mentally”. If my impairment is due to a brain disease, it’s one I’ve had since early on.

Others, it turns out, suffer from the opposite disorder, daydreaming that is a compulsion or simply so enjoyable that real life takes a back seat. Some have a second life in an alternate world where continuing characters age just like people in the world the rest of us live in. They may fit this narrative into available mental down-time in their lives, or spend up to 90% of their time “away”.

I find it strange that it took me so long to discover that other people spend a third of their waking hours on a mental activity which I lack entirely. It goes to show how little exchange there is among us humans regarding how we think, how our individual minds work. Humans yo-yo between xenophobia—members of other groups are different, dangerous— and “we’re all really just alike”, but a study of psychological research found “significant psychological and behavioral differences between what the researchers call Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies and their non-WEIRD counterparts across a spectrum of key areas, including visual perception, fairness, spatial and moral reasoning, memory and conformity.“ Maybe in daydreaming as well. But nearly all psychological research is done on WEIRD subjects, for both practical and ethnocentric reasons, so who knows? Same for neuroscience; who’s going to airlift fMRI equipment to the lands of the Yanomamo and then persuade them to lie down with their heads inside?

ScytheSharpeningLeighton

Still, the article raised in my mind some questions we could look at right here in the post-industrial West. If people were prevented from daydreaming, by some technological device probably not yet invented, how would they feel? (Recalling the familiar ‘fact’ about deprivation of night-time dreaming making people hallucinate, I looked to see if it was true, and apparently not.) What proportion of people don’t have imaginative daydreams, and is this always a sign of brain disease or dysfunction or just a normal mental variation? We characterize one sort of excessive negative daydreaming as “catastrophizing”; what about individuals making deliberate use of negative or positive futures, to influence their behavior? And how can “daydreaming” be more precisely separated out from other mental processes such as planning, brooding, brainstorming, and worrying?

Muse on it all, and see what your daydreaming mind comes up with.

King vulture

King vulture photo by Tambako the Jaguar, flickr.