Category: Rants

There’s a person on Tumblr

who I don’t follow but whose posts I’ve come across a few times. They like to talk about how (their particular experience of) autistic issues with empathy-ish things are actually a blessing, because their “lack” of certain kinds of empathy means they aren’t vulnerable to emotional manipulation.

Small justified complaint: They call this THE autistic problem with empathy, which… it’s not? There isn’t one single way autistic people experience empathy. They shouldn’t talk like their experiences are The Way Things Are for everyone.

Feelings that aren’t a proper complaint:

I know that they’re trying to deal with the truly awful things people say about people who “lack” empathy. I’m sure turning it into a positive helps them. And regardless, autistic people talking about our actual experiences is a good thing. I get it. I do.

But it pisses me off because here’s this person saying “I don’t fall for your silly manipulation, I’m so awesome, go me” and here I am feeling so vulnerable.

I’m not even sure if the kind of manipulation they’re talking about is the kind I actually am vulnerable to! But it bothers me!

The split attraction model

aka the concept that romantic attraction and sexual attraction are completely separable and a person can e.g. be romantically attracted to people of one gender but only sexually attracted to a different gender.

[People seem to be finding this post through searches for information about the split attraction model, so I feel like I need to add a better introduction than the little one-sentence explanation I put here originally. I didn’t expect this post to be widely read, so I hurried straight through to my opinions without really explaining the situation I was responding to. Here’s a more detailed explanation.

The basic idea of the split attraction model is that sexual attraction and romantic attraction are separate things. On the level of attraction to indivudal people, this isn’t an unusual or controversial idea– being sexually attracted to someone but not in love with them is a pretty common experience.

But the split attraction model involves applying this idea to sexual orientations. It says that everyone can be described as having both a sexual orientation and a romantic orientation. For most people, these two orientations “line up” and they have sexual and romantic feelings about the same group of people, but some people’s sexual orientation and romantic orientation are different.]

 

So like, some people are going around acting like “lesbian” and “gay” only refer to sexual attraction and not romantic feelings, and that’s bullshit and very clearly disrespectful. It is 100% obvious that that’s not how people use those words, and it’s extra disrespectful because acting like same-sex relationships are only about hedonistic sex and not about love or commitment is a common homophobic trope.

But then I also see people saying that the split attraction model shouldn’t exist at all, and I’m just like ????

It describes an actual thing people experience. If you aren’t offering a better alternative way to describe that thing, then what you’re saying is that some people aren’t allowed to describe their experiences. Because of how their experiences fit into stereotypes or could otherwise be used against other people.

I don’t think that’s justifiable. There has to be an alternative beyond “you can’t describe romantic and sexual attraction as separate, period”.

And if a personal story is what’s needed, to counter the set of personal stories I saw about women who felt pressured to identify as anything other than lesbian, anything that included attraction to men (which you know perfectly well happens in lots of ways and would keep happening without the split attraction model, because sexism and homophobia!)

Well, here’s my story: not knowing about the split attraction model was what fucked me up when I was trying to figure out my sexuality.

I thought that the only difference between friendship-love and romantic love was sexual attraction, that romance and sex were necessarily connected. I thought that if I couldn’t look at the person I was in love with and feel sexual attraction, then that meant I wasn’t really in love. That what I felt wasn’t anything more than friendship. That my feelings weren’t worthy of notice, didn’t mean anything.

Thinking of romantic and sexual attraction as unsplittable pushed me away from realizing I was attracted to women. (And I am both romantically and sexually attracted to women, as it turns out.)

I don’t think my experience trumps the negative experiences other people have had with the split attraction model. But I also don’t think their experiences trump mine?

I think the split attraction model is not any more wrong or more misuseable than most ideas. And we can explain it with caveats (and we can definitely talk about sexist/homophobic/heterosexist pressure on women to be available to men, in general) without getting rid of it completely.

Sparkly is going to be away for the weekend again– ey’s taking Numbers Guy to visit eir mother.

Ey also got a big disappointment today, because eir bosses for eir internship don’t want em to come back for the fall semester– essentially, ey was fired, even though ey wasn’t being paid. It seems like, rather than eir immediate coworkers having anything against em, or there being any significant issues with the quality of eir work, it was mainly just a conflict of personality or expectations with eir supervisors (one of them more than the other.)

None of the reasons they gave really amount to a suddenly-firing-someone reason, and some of them are downright petty and passive-aggressive– e.g. apparently it’s okay for the real attorneys to wear jeans in the office when they’re not going to be in court, but interns should be too conscious of their precarious not-real-attorney status to ever wear anything less than a suit, and Sparkly should have somehow intuited this without being told, rather than following the norms set by eir coworkers, like anyone would normally expect to do. This was never important enough for eir supervisors to actually tell em this, yet it was important enough to bring up while firing em. Grr. As far as I’m concerned, “Here’s the main reason I’m firing you; also, here’s every little thing about you that ever annoyed me” is an extremely unprofessional way to handle that conversation.

I keep seeing posts wherein people are angry about criticism of Fifty Shades of Grey that runs along the lines of “Christian Grey isn’t Ana’s dom, he’s her abuser.” People see this kind of statement as implying that abuse never happens within BDSM relationships.

And I see their point, but I also feel like that’s deliberately reading statements like this in the most negative way possible. If you heard somebody say “He’s not her boyfriend, he’s her abuser,” would you really take that as a denial that “boyfriends” can be abusive?

Or how about something like “That kid says he’s your friend, but he’s not really your friend, he’s a bully”? Would you really think someone who says that is denying that people can be abused by people they trust as friends?

I feel like the intended meaning is very obvious, namely that the relationship in question, whatever people call it and regardless of whether it fits the broad shape of what we expect that kind of relationship to look like, is not a good relationship, it’s abusive.

I get that on this particular topic, it sounds like people distancing themselves from something they want to avoid thinking about, i.e. that abuse happens in their communities. But that distancing doesn’t reside in this statement about FSOG. Denial that abuse can happen in BDSM communities is a significant problem, but that problem doesn’t live inside this set of words.

“Christian Grey isn’t Ana’s dom, he’s her abuser” is a quick little slogan, and it’s not a great one because nothing that short can be great. Of course it’s open to negative interpretations. Of course it’s not nuanced. For the most part, people don’t use a slogan because they believe every last thing its wording implies, but because it’s a quick and simple way to say one thing. Whether someone says this kind of thing in this kind of way about FSOG is not really going to tell you one way or the other what they think about the overall topic of abuse and BDSM relationships. If you want to find people who are doing the whole “It doesn’t happen here” thing and call them on that, criticizing people who use this slogan isn’t going to help you.

—————

And also… you are aware that there’s a reason some people involved in BDSM feel a need to distance themselves from abuse, and it’s not that they’re any more callous or influenced by rape culture than the average person, right?

You’re aware that a significant number of people think BDSM is always just a sneaky name for abuse? That there are people who think, and loudly say, that everyone who calls themself a dom is abusive? Who think that no one in their right mind could ever consent to any kind of kinky sex?

Lots of communities have a “It doesn’t happen here” problem when it comes to rape and abuse, and by “lots” I mean pretty much everything you can call a community, from small towns to the Catholic Church and everywhere in between. The reason BDSM has both “It doesn’t happen here” resistance to discussions of abuse, and also “BDSM isn’t abuse” infographics? Is because other people insist on saying that BDSM is abuse, inherently.

Your statistics don’t prove what you say they do

Oftentimes the issue is not that people disagree about what the problem is, but that we disagree about how to solve it. People often act like proving a certain problem exists is equivalent to proving we should respond to it in a particular way, when there are many other possibilities and their choice of solution is very much affected by their own beliefs and biases.

I just stumbled across someone arguing that high rates of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections among gay men show that… I’m not 100% sure what he’s arguing for. He seems to have a positive view of conversion therapy? Maybe he just thinks gay men should be celibate, I’m not sure.

My point is.

We can agree that the problem exists! (Though you might want to use data more recent than 2009, and you might want to admit that there’s disagreement about some of the points you used. Yes, the FDA has decided that forbidding all men who’ve had sex with men from donating blood is the only safe thing to do, but other countries have different policies and various US organizations keep asking the FDA to reconsider.)

But you are making a choice about how to address this problem.

There are all sorts of angles we could take on STI infection as a problem.

  • Promote condom use:
    • make sure condoms are inexpensive and easy to get
    • change negative opinions that might make people avoid condoms even though they’re available, e.g. that it’s embarrassing to buy them, that they’re too uncomfortable to be worth using
    • improve condoms so that they’re less likely to break, more comfortable to use, etc.
  • Promote regular STI testing:
    • make it affordable and easy to find, again
    • change public opinion that getting tested is scary, shameful, etc.
    • improve STI testing so it’s more accurate, faster, less physically unpleasant
  • For HIV specifically, promote awareness of PEP/PrEP– medications that prevent someone who’s been exposed to the virus from contracting HIV
  • Promote caution about having sex:
    • change negative opinions people may have about asking their partners about STIs, e.g. that it’s rude or embarrassing
    • inform people about how STIs are transmitted and what actions put them at risk, with a focus on stopping people from assuming e.g. that oral sex is safe
  • Or take the opposite tack and promote openness on the part of people who have STIs, rather than fear on the part of people who don’t. This all fits in with making STI testing less scary- when people see a positive test result as a horrible, life-ruining thing, they’re sometimes too scared to get tested at all, and end up with a higher risk of getting an STI and passing it to someone else.
    • change negative opinions about having even careful, protected sex with people with STIs, so that people with STIs aren’t afraid to disclose them and their partners don’t react badly
    • inform people on the specifics of how STIs are transmitted with a focus on reassuring people that certain things are safe, e.g. that you won’t get HIV just from being in the same room with someone who has it
    • inform people about condoms and treatments for STIs with a focus on reassuring people that they’re effective
    • promote research into more and better treatments and methods for preventing transmission
  • If you think anyone is likely to listen, you can even try to promote monogamy, or promote having fewer partners.

If you hold up “Men who have sex with men have increased rates of HIV and many other STIs” and ignore all the above possibilities to instead say “Therefore, sex between men is wrong,” you are making a choice about where to lay the blame for this problem, and it’s a very revealing one. CDC statistics about HIV are not sufficient to lead you to that conclusion. You are choosing to write off the entire idea of sexual relationships between men, because you’re against them for other reasons.

Your choice shows that you don’t see STIs as simply a public health concern like measles or the flu, but as a punishment for having (the wrong kind of) sex. Your choice shows that you see sex (perhaps just between men, or sex in general) not as a normal or natural thing that’s part of many people’s lives, but as something suspect and dangerous that people should be willing to avoid entirely. If you think “Gay men should stop having sex” is better and more reasonable than “We should stop the spread of infectious diseases”– something modern medicine has actually had a fair amount of success with– you have something against gay men! It’s that simple! You are choosing to assume that sex between men can’t be safe from STIs, because you have other reasons for believing it’s never going to be safe or right in general. STI statistics are not why you’re advocating this. Don’t be disingenuous. They just let you hide behind concern instead of admitting to bias, or to using religious reasoning that you know many people don’t believe.

The thing I really don’t understand about people’s reactions to the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo is…

In terms of its laws, France isn’t actually all that committed to including the freedom to say offensive things in freedom of speech.

These are the main exceptions to freedom of speech in the US:

  1. Child pornography specifically, and other “obscene” sexual things, more vaguely defined.
  2. Speech that very immediately provokes or incites someone to break the law. You can advocate doing something illegal if you say it in a general way.
  3. Genuine threats against a person’s life or physical safety. Threatening things other than physical harm is okay. Threats that are obviously joking are okay.

And the footnotes are:
In some circumstances, you can be punished for lying, and freedom of speech doesn’t protect you from that– e.g. if someone sues you for defamation*, or if you sell a product and lie in your advertising.
Freedom of speech doesn’t let you use someone else’s copyrighted words/music/etc. without permission.
Certain groups of people can have other limitations put on their speech– e.g. government employees and people serving in the military.

*Slander, libel, and defamation all mean deliberately lying in a way that harms a person’s reputation.

I can’t seem to find a similar complete list for France, but here is a list of the exceptions that I’m here about: France has a number of laws that outlaw bigoted or hateful speech. This isn’t about slander– it’s not about whether it’s true or whether it affects the person’s reputation, it’s specifically about insulting someone based on their belonging to a marginalized group. Denying the Holocaust is also specifically outlawed. And these laws actually do get enforced– there’s a list of cases in that article, although a lot of the ones about religion end with a ruling that it wasn’t actually hate speech.

But racism is apparently a different matter. I remember reading about this case when it happened:

Jean Marie Le Pen, the former leader of French extreme-right group the National Front, has been fined €5,000 for suggesting Romanians were “naturally” inclined to steal. … The French politician has repeatedly been convicted under France’s racial hatred laws, as well as for Holocaust denial after he described the Nazi gas chambers as a “small detail” of World World Two in a BBC Hardtalk interview.

And when I searched for “French politician fined for racist remark”, because I couldn’t remember Le Pen’s name, I also came across this:

A former far-right candidate in France’s recent municipal elections who likened the nation’s justice minister, who identifies as black, to a monkey was sentenced to nine months in jail for hate speech. The National Front, a party that has often come under fire for its leaders’ incendiary comments about the nation’s immigrant populations, was fined almost $68,000 and the candidate, Anne-Sophie Leclere, was fined more than $40,000 on top of her prison sentence.

In October 2013, Leclere, the National Front’s candidate for the northern municipality of Rethel in March’s elections, posted a photo of Socialist Justice Minister Christiane Taubira — originally from French Guiana, a French overseas department in northern South America — next to a photo of a monkey. … “I prefer to see her swinging in a tree than to see her in government,” Leclere told TV channel France-2 in an interview, echoed across French media.

So the woman who called Taubira a monkey went to prison for it, meanwhile Charlie Hebdo published a caricature of her as a monkey and we celebrate satire and freedom of speech.

I can’t actually comment on whether Charlie Hebdo was in fact using satire to protest racism, not trying to promote it. I don’t know enough French to be confident of fully understanding whatever they said about that cartoon, and actually if there was a longer article accompanying it, I can’t find it because the link to the part of their website that might contain such a thing now redirects to a page about the attack.

Regardless, my point is, “You have freedom of speech even if you want to say hateful things” is not actually a principle that’s particularly supported by French laws. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to have laws like these about hate speech. But a strong committment to freedom of speech it’s not.

Empathy

As it turns out, I have a whole lot of feelings about this whole “scary dangerous people who lack empathy!” thing.

First, to be clear. I don’t feel like I’m at all lacking in empathy myself. This isn’t personal for me in that way.

But I have really strong feelings about how people act like “lacking empathy” (in whatever sense) makes people evil/dangerous/criminal.

The bottom line for me is this: I cannot accept a system of thought in which evil is inherent to certain people.

I can’t. People cannot be biologically determined from birth to be evil. Evil is a choice. Everyone can try to treat people well, and no one is exempt from having to try.

My other quick response goes like this: Oh, sure, because typical empathy totally makes all of us who have it kind, nonviolent people. It totally stops us from knowingly and callously hurting each other, from deciding certain people’s pain isn’t worth caring about, from stealing and cheating and thinking it’s justified.

Are you fucking joking?

Being capable of of spontaneous, visceral empathy for others doesn’t mean we actually have it all that often. It certainly doesn’t mean that it pops up to stop us every time we might hurt or upset someone. Normal people with perfectly functional, normal empathy are assholes to each other all the fucking time.

We decide (or absorb from society, or are explicitly taught) not to empathize with certain people, all the time. Lack of empathy leads people to do terrible things, absolutely. But (the overwhelming majority of the time, at least) it isn’t a complete, innate lack, it comes from all the dehumanizing beliefs we have about each other. It’s about the belief that “those people don’t matter,” in all its forms.

In order to treat people decently, everyone has to make a conscious effort, every day, to fight those things. Occasionally having spontaneous, visceral empathy does not make us superior. It does not make us exempt. I cannot stress this enough. It does not make us exempt from working to understand and respect people.

And lacking empathy, or struggling with it, or having to consciously puzzle out how someone might be feeling instead of understanding intuitively, does not make anyone inherently incapable of treating people well.