You know what that’s exactly like? It’s exactly like when I write a post about women and how awesome women can be and how we don’t always get the credit we deserved and male commenters flood in with “You said men suck, you are prejudiced.”

Of course, privilege leads people to unconsciously assume everything the less privileged ever say is a dig at them. Privileged men read claims that Women Are Cool Too and get nothing out of it but “Hey, this bitch isn’t worshiping my cock! How could she be so cruel! Mommy and Daddy promised me everyone would worship my gorgeous cock!” The extroverts in that thread are reading a post that basically describes how Introverts Are Cool Too and getting nothing out of it but “Hey, where’s the extrovert worship I’ve been promised everywhere I go all my life?”

Thanks, guys. I never could have demonstrated your privilege better with any amount of writing. You put on a great show for the benefit of everyone trying to examine their own privilege.

To be clear, here are the actual things I actually said about extroverts in the original article:

• “Extroverts are people who need external stimulation from others.” One commenter wanted to quibble over the definition, which is okay, but for some reason she took it as an insult, which I’m still not getting. What is so insulting about saying someone needs external stimulation (from others, or from whatever, per her definition)?
• “They’re more often in output mode than input, while extroverts are the other way around.” They meaning extroverts.
• “Introverts are less likely to engage in damaging relationships because they’re content to be alone.” Oddly, no one took offense at this, which is surprising, since with this comparison I am contending extroverts are more likely to put up with unhealthy relationships for the sake of not being alone. I anticipated this being controversial, but apparently it was not. Oooookay.

Related posts:

1. Extroversion privilege
2. Personal Privilege List
3. Niceness privilege

Your happiness is entertwined with your outlook on life.

For the first time in my life, that sentiment did not piss me off. In the past, it always did because it blithely dismisses the fact that if you don’t have much power over your own life, your happiness is mostly entertwined with other people’s outlook on your life, and what they think it’s worth, and whether you’re someone they mind stepping on to get theirs. A positive outlook doesn’t keep a slave from being beaten to death. A positive outlook doesn’t keep a child from being murdered, raped or otherwise harmed by a sick adult in his or her life. A positive outlook doesn’t put food on the table.

But for the first time in my life I actually have some power, and that does change things. Now I understand why happy shiny people told me “Just cheer up!” Sure, if your basic needs are assured and you have some bargaining power over your existence, determination and courage and other positive attitudes are helpful.

Take my current situation as a renter. I’ve relayed stories before about how my theoretical rights as a renter just don’t enter into reality in a market as hot as the L.A. rental market. Normally in L.A., you’re so lucky to find a vacant apartment at all that you take it (at whatever price) and hope your landlord isn’t an asshole. Landlord ethics have an inverse relationship to booming rental markets – the bigger the boom, the less ethics they have. So my last three have been scum.

But for the first time in anyone’s memory (that I’ve talked to, anyway), L.A.’s vacancy rate is up. Suddenly, landlords are having to compete. Not only do they have to lower prices, they have to actually do those pesky things California law insists they do, or suddenly the renters have power over them. We can get them in trouble with city agencies. We can sue and win. We can find another place that’s cheaper and/or better managed. If they want to keep us, they have to actually do their jobs well for a change.

It’s a total paradigm shift for me to find the system working for me. Now I get it – the happy shiny people who always told me my attitude was the problem didn’t get what it’s like to be someone the system is designed to work against. How could they? They’re insulated by privilege.

No related posts.

• Once you survive abuse or violation, you have a knowledge of the human capacity for nastiness that others around you don’t share.
• It is your duty to keep them blissfully ignorant at the expense of your own soul.
• When they chatter on about how disgraceful it is for a child not to be on speaking terms with his family, you are a rude asshole if you remind them that the abuse rate in the US and most countries is staggering, so maybe the child had good reason.
• When you’re the child they’re complaining about, no one will take your side if you try to explain to them six ways from Sunday why it’s much, much better for everyone that you have no contact with your parent/family/ex-husband, or eventually give up and tell the person to mind its own business.
• If you try to tell your friends that their latest crush shows signs of being violent or abusive, they’ll hate you. If you turn out to be right, they’ll hate you more.

And so on, and so forth. Honestly, if I go through every example, I’ll get too depressed to finish the article. Most of them come from personal experience.

And this – more than anything – is why I hate human beings. Because out of those of you who’ve had the good fortune not to be abused or violated in your lifetime, maybe 1 in 1,000 can be bothered to muster sympathy for those who have. Oh, if you see an abused child on Oprah you cry your heart out, sure. But I’m talking about putting the feelings of a survivor ahead of your own when they’re right there in your face.

When they’re someone you know; someone very much like you. When you get that crumpled feeling in the gut that it’s only random chance it was them and not you, and your first instinct is to explain away why it happened to them (and could therefore never happen to you). Or deny that it happened at all. Or have the awkward sympathetic moment you find yourself trapped in, but immediately pull back to superficiality with this person you once called friend.

When you make some ignorant comment about abuse and someone corrects you with a story from her own experience and your first instinct is to prove her wrong, maybe the “greenest” thing you could do for the environment is become part of it already. Yeah, I’m so gosh darn mean, but goddamnit, this needs to be said.

Those of us who’ve experienced abuse, rape and other violations don’t keep it quiet because we’re ashamed. Or because it’s intensely personal. The main reason we keep it quiet is because we know how you’ll treat us if we tell you. We know you have a culturally-granted privilege to remain ignorant. To not know, and therefore not to be responsible. Not to bother. Not to think about it.

And certainly not to do anything that might help stop or at least curtail it somewhat in the future.

But you are responsible. If you’re not aware that statistically a certain percentage of the people you know must have experienced physical, emotional or sexual abuse at some point in their lives, you are helping the perpetrators of those crimes keep working in the shadows. Because as long as you imagine the problem doesn’t really touch anyone you know, the problem stays hidden.

I saw on a forum the other day some people discrediting a study about rape statistics. “If this study is true,” one poster said, “then about a fourth of the women I know must have been raped at some point, and that’s just not true.” How can anyone think that because a fourth of the women he knows haven’t told him, “Oh, by the way, I’ve been raped before” they must not have been? The answer is: they can’t. They’re beating the knowledge to the punch. They’re shouting in every way they can, “You will not drag me kicking and screaming to the realization that life isn’t fair and I’m one lucky shit not to have suffered worse than I have!”

He might as well help round up victims for abusers. He’s perpetuating the unfairness by perpetuating the silence.

As long as you’re more concerned about your right to be in la-la land denial than someone else’s right not to go through hell, you are fighting on the abuser’s side.

The fact that this is a privilege you are granted through the culture which dictates that abuse victims should lie rather than tell Nice People an uncomfortable truth says something odious about the culture. We are a culture of abuse. We believe strongly in the rights of the best-funded 5% to rule over the less-funded and harder-working 95%. We convince ourselves it’s only natural if certain people, defined by such superficialities as gender and skin color rather than important traits like capability or good judgment, should rule. We convince ourselves that cleaning lady who works two jobs just to make ends meet couldn’t possibly have had the cure for cancer locked in her brain behind a lack of education, so no big loss of potential there!

It’s all part of the same thing. As soon as you decide it’s okay for some people to carry double and triple burdens so that others may carry nothing at all, you have decided abuse is pretty neat and you’re all for it. And if that’s the case, all I’m asking is that you shuck off your privilege and take responsibility for the decision you’ve made and the side you’ve taken.

Ignorance is not “nice.” It’s not “good people.” It’s not “I was just trying to have a nice dinner party, why’d she go and bring up a thing like that when all we were doing was saying how gosh awful wonderful the person who abused her is and how much we’d all like to see him elected God.” Ignorance is the hammer in the hand of oppression.

Related posts:

1. Niceness privilege
2. Abused kids can’t really sue their parents
3. Extroversion privilege

“Won’t somebody please think of the children???”

- The preacher’s wife on the Simpsons

I recently made the mistake of engaging in a business transaction with a Christian who believes that, because s/he is a Christian everything s/he does is unquestionably the Lord’s work, s/he cannot possibly have done me wrong. It’s not the first time this has happened to me, and sadly, it caused me to revisit my tolerance policy and decide that, until things in the US change, I will not engage in business with Christians if I can avoid it. It’s unfortunate since some of them are genuinely good people, and Christians are certainly not the only ones operating with that sense of entitlement. But as it happens, Christianity is a great disguise in the current US climate for people who want to screw folks right over with impunity.

Here’s the mechanism I perceive to be at work with these individuals. They have a powerful streak of entitlement they’re not comfortable expressing overtly, so they subvert it into the service of a cause they perceive as so noble no one would ever take issue with their actions, then they go forth and fight for their cause in exactly the way someone who thinks himself God’s gift goes forth and fights with anyone who won’t bow down to him.

Some of these people get in your face with their cause, relying on your desire not to “make a scene” to trap you into listening to their spiel, maybe giving them some money to go away. Others lie, cheat and steal, and justify it all with “But it’s for the children/God/the poor/the hungry.” In the worst case, they start crusades and holy wars. All with a perfectly clean conscience, because they believe they’re being unselfish.

But they’re not; they’re just transferring their “self” onto a cause, and then behaving in a privileged, entitled manner on behalf of of the cause rather than on behalf of their own ego. But the cause is their ego-extension, so they’re really no better than someone with a hugely swollen ego feeling entitled to take whatever he wants from lesser beings.

Related posts:

1. Response entitlement: you don’t have any
2. One privilege Christians don’t always realize they have
3. What Christians could learn from feminists

And yet we put huge amounts of value on that label. “Nice” young men can avoid rape convictions even when the jury admits they think they forced sex – because the jury can’t see that forcing sex makes a person not nice, even if he dresses preppy, has a great smile and helps old ladies across the street. Conversely, “nice” young women don’t get raped, and if a woman is raped, it’s instantly taken as proof by these very same people that she wasn’t nice after all. (Of course, many people are not that dense; I’m just illustrating a point with what I hope are examples familiar to us all.)

And then the jurors in this situation are also “nice”. They clean their teeth, are good neighbors, maybe go to church. Juries who flat-out state that they believe there was forced sex but that’s what the slut deserved somehow do not get disqualified from “nice”. They don’t go home to find their neighbors turning a cold shoulder… because the neighbors are also “nice”.

Throughout history, “nice” people have had slaves when it was the trend. “Nice” people have decided to believe other “nice” people incapable of abuse when accused (usually by women, children, or people of lesser race, class, orientation or other privilege). “Nice” people think it’s rude when, after they’ve nosed into someone’s personal business with the question “Why don’t you love Christmas like nice people do?” and the person tells the all-too-common truth: “Because my family always had knock-down drag-out fights on Christmas”.

Gosh, “civilization is supposed to shield “nice” people from unpleasant truths! How dare someone violate the sanctity of ignorance! Never mind that something like 1 in 5 children are sexually molested before they reach 16, and the vast majority of “nice” people are deluded into thinking they know no one who either was molested or committed molestation. Thus perpetuating the cycle.

“Nice” in this context means “privileged” – nothing more, nothing less. It’s the mechanism that allows raging maniacs to declare that they’re super-nice guys and women are stupid, filthy hos for not begging to suck them off and get all sorts of sympathy. Being “nice” alleviates your responsibility to fix a system which benefits you at the expense of others.

“Nice” allows that minority of truly evil people – the ones who actively create situations of slavery, abuse, discrimination, etc. – to go much further than they would have without the enabling of nice folks who “see no evil”, and imagine they can “do no evil” just because they never forget birthdays.

I hate “nice” people. I know that’s not very nice of me, but I prefer someone whose motto is “see all evil, hear all evil, fight all evil.”

Related posts:

1. Non-survivor privilege and silence

This all started from a comment made by DNi on my post, Personal Privilege List. I started thinking about it, then some stuff happened, then I thought some more, and then I reached a conclusion: yes, there is a definite privilege extended to extroverts for no good reason.

First, a definition session since people often use “introverted” to mean shy and “extroverted” to mean friendly.  It’s not that simple. Extroverts are people who need external stimulation from others.  Introverts are people who are stimulated by their own thoughts and ideas, and sometimes need to limit external input because they’ve got so much going on internally.

When I tell people I’m introverted or that I enjoy time alone, I tend to get a couple of negative responses.  The first is boredom, because I’m talking to an extrovert and my response to “what did you do this weekend?” isn’t providing them any external stimulation.  They have every right to find me dull.  Unfortunately, society takes it one step further, inviting them to judge me as lesser because I don’t provide the stimulation they want.  It’s considered normal that introverted kids who do well in school – “nerds” or “geeks” – should be bullied by extroverted jocks or popular girls.  It’s considered okay to promote a less qualified employee with a “better personality” (read “extrovert”).  And so on.

The other negative reaction I get is the assumption that I’m emotionally damaged, and that’s why I’m introverted.  This assumption rests on the assumption that everyone is naturally extroverted.  In fact, there’s data to indicate that extroverts and introverts may simply be wired differently; brain chemicals in introverts may simply be a lot more active than in extroverts.  They’re more often in output mode than input, while extroverts are the other way around.

Furthermore, while I agree that emotional damage can lead to introversion, in my observation it leads to extraversion even more often.  Ever met someone who can barely function without a romantic partner?  Will lie to people to maintain friendships just so they always have someone to hang out with?  Constantly steps on people to get with a “better” crowd?  These aren’t exactly functional examples of extraversion.  And what about functional introversion?  Introverts are less likely to engage in damaging relationships because they’re content to be alone.  They’re less likely to get bored and frustrated when there’s not much going on.  They’re not going to create drama just to get something going on.

As I see it, the world needs both kinds of people.  My theory on why extraversion is considered normal and introversion aberrant in the US is that introverts are independent thinkers, and that doesn’t make for good little consumers, obsessed with “keeping up with the Joneses”.  It doesn’t make for the preferred type of voter, either – one who puts candidate likability ahead of capability.  One who votes for what their friends or family vote for, instead of examining the issues.  Introverts are likely to notice those rather simple solutions you’ve been avoiding out of laziness or because your real motive has yet to be revealed.

And most offensive of all, introverts don’t want your approval badly enough to torture themselves to get it.

Related posts:

1. Extroverts provide a privilege demonstration
2. Non-survivor privilege and silence