Today I Learned...

Via Captain Awkward, I would like to present this perfect, succinct definition of Ask vs. Guess culture, which I am going to rename the Ask-Guess Continuum because why have a dichotomy when it could be a continuum?

Given the choice, I think I'd push my culture further towards the ask side. And yet, my immediate response to this article was to list the ways Ask culture is terrible. I think what I'm actually reacting to is the fact that people can be jerks under both systems, and either ask-jerks are more obnoxious, or I've just run into them more recently.

First, there are the people who say (implicitly or explicitly) they are participating in ask culture, but get really mad when they don't get the answer they want. Presumably they would be just as mad about not getting what they want under a guess culture system. Given the guess level of the current system, saying direct nos to these people feels worse than indirectly refusing guessers. This is on my mind recently because there is someone out there who is very angry at me, and phrases it as a reaction to me being rude and uncommunicative, when I in fact very clearly and respectfully communicated something they didn't want to hear. Okay, fine, I communicated it imperfectly but way clearer and more respectfully than they are giving me credit for. And it hurts, knowing that I pushed myself out of my comfort zone a bit, and it was taken so poorly.

Second, there is the issue I talked about here, in which my main thesis was that when you are operating outside a social norm, you incur some extra obligation to engage in smoothing behaviors, even when the norm is stupid. That holds true for ask/guess culture.

Third, no matter how far on the ask continuum you are, there is always information in the asking. Take this letter from Carolyn Hax. A woman asked her fiance if they could shorten a date so she could catch up with a friend. He said yes, but later expressed unhappiness that she had even asked. On first glance, it looks like he expected her to be psychic, which is unfair. But on second, I think he actually had a reasonable point. First, his complain wasn't "I said yes and you believed me", it was "you asked." Hax unpacks how this unfairly places the decision burden this places on him, and it's all true.

But there is also the fact that the asking contains information. She isn't definitely saying she values her friend more than him, but it that is one reasonably possible condition that could lead to that question, and she isn't doing anything to alleviate it. [date proceeds without being questioned] > [Fiance blows off date to talk with friend] > [Fiance honors date, but you know she's rather be talking with her friend] is a valid preference set.

Another angle: asking to reschedule communications potential data on three things:

1. How much he would enjoy spending that time with her
   
2. His perception of how much she enjoys spending time with him
   
3. His perception of how much she values his time

Even the most graciously accepted no would only remove questions about #1, leaving #2 or #3 in doubt. Which doesn't mean you can never ask, or never reschedule. But it does mean that if you don't take time to address *all* the issues asking brings up, they're justified in drawing some data and having feelings about it.

More generally, both foot-in-the-door and door-in-the-face techniques are real phenomenon. Asking a question has an effect independent of the answer, and I want to keep that in mind as I personally transition into a more ask-oriented world.

I am very glad to see people acknowledging and examining social norms, and pushing back when appropriate. Many social norms don't work, or don't work for particular people, or used to work but could be replaced by something better now, and I'm glad we're calling them into question.

But.

The fact that social norms have been used to oppress people for a long time, and that fighting back against those is good, is not carte blanche to pretend they don't exist. Let me give you a few examples.

I had a professor whose "I'm thinking about your interesting question" face was indistinguishable from most people's "I'm in incredible pain" face. He could have tried to conform to the social norm of what an "interested face" looked like, but it probably wouldn't have worked. He could have spent a lot of time lambasting students for not accepting his facial expressions as they were, or just wondering why kids these days were so quiet. What he actually did was announce his pattern in the first day of class, that in fact the more pained he looked the better we should feel about our question. And he lived up to that, and found other ways to demonstrate his appreciation of all questions throughout the class. To me, this is the perfect example of how to be when you don't fit into social norms in ways that are keeping you from getting what you want (in this case, student engagement): acknowledge the norm, explain how you are different and how you hope people will interpret your actions, and go out of your way to affirm people's code-switching efforts.

A PT I saw would be an example of a bad handling of divergence from norms. This PT charges for things other PTs don't. I'm okay with this, and in fact think that the current model of medical business where you charge for face time and only face time is harmful to all parties. I think you can do that without nickle and diming patients or in any way operating in bad faith. But. Given that face-time-only is the predominant model, I think she has an ethical obligation to go very out of her way to warn patients about her policy ahead of time- and that warning them means doing so in ways that are unambiguous in the current climate, where people will assume certain services are included for free unless explicitly told otherwise .

Lastly: I have a friend of a friend who brides herself on keeping good boundaries. Like all people who talk loudly about being good at something, she is terrible at it.* She thinks she is good at boundaries because when someone says a clear, unambiguous no, she doesn't fight it. In some contexts, that would be sufficient. In current American culture, dodging a question five times and displaying avoidant body language is understood to be an unspoken no. Missing/ignoring that is not only rude, it's informative. People are allowed to conclude from her behavior that she is a person who does not hear no, and to make predictions about her future behavior based on data from other people who don't hear no. Such as "she is not safe, and something so rude as a direct rebuke will make her even less safe."

There's a lot of room for debate here on when the aggrieved party is expecting boundary-violator to be psychic and sense the boundary without any clues, and when the boundary violator is refusing to respect "nos" except for those given in very specific formats (which can very easily be used as cover for violating boundaries until the risk of social punishment is sufficiently high). There are people who have sufficiently different zones of comfort that they can't be functional friends, and that doesn't automatically make either of them bad.

ASDers are the obvious example of people who just can't pick up on socially-expected cues, but I don't think you need to fit into an established pattern in order to avoid having your weaknesses viewed as moral flaws. Under my paradigm, the correct thing to do is what my professor did: tell people you miss these cues**, but respecting their boundaries is really important to you, so please tell you as directly as possible. You acknowledge that this is asking them to do some additional work to accommodate you. And then you accept it and thank people when they do so, even when it hurts. You accept a duty to respond well to very direct statements of discomfort beyond what would be expected from others***, because you have removed a set of options from people's toolboxes. You do not insist that they are rude for violating a social contract you have walked away from.

In some ways this is unfair, and I think I might have gone too far. I cherrypicked examples where either the norms were well intentioned, or there was some affirmative moral obligation on the part of the norm-violator to be extra straightforward. Lots of times norms are used to oppress people and it's not fair to say they can only get out of them by doing more work. There's a lot more here to work through.

*She also hates drama.

**As opposed to "these cues are stupid".

***There are limits, of course.

You're allowed to have novels with strong characterizations but weak world-building, why not the reverse? Twice in the last month I've read books with really interesting settings, settings I would happily have read novel-length descriptions of, but found anything involving the characters' actions or emotions terminally dull. Come to think of it, that's how I read Song of Ice and Fire: I gave up on the novels, but I will spend hours on wiki pages explaining the world. And yet I don't want to name the two books I'm thinking of now, because describing them as "Awesome if you just skip the 1/3 of the book where things happen" feels mean.

Another metaprinciple is "equality." What do you do if you have an opportunity to advance one of your principles, but only for some people? For example, the GI Bill that sent WW2 veterans to college. I haven't thoroughly researched it, but my gut feeling is that was a pretty good idea: it rewarded people for risking themselves in the one war no one has moral qualms about, it was short term economically beneficial by mitigating a post-war recession caused by a sudden glut of labor during a simultaneous demand drop, it was long term economically beneficial by raising the education level of the country at a time when we had a shortage of educated workers.

The G.I. Bill as written was race neutral, but it was implemented by people, and people implemented it in a racist way. Black soldiers were guided/nudged/pushed disproportionately into trade schools, sent to worse trade schools for worse trades than their white equivalents, and disproportionately denied aid entirely. Even if aid distribution had been truly proportionate, you had to be admitted to a school in order to attend, and universities admissions were still quite racist. There are some very good HBCUs, but not enough to absorb so many new students.

So the bill will disproportionately help poor white people over black people. It may well widen the wealth gap as measured in dollars. But the poorer you are, the more utility you get out of each dollar, and poor black people have fewer alternatives than poor white people. Trade school isn't Harvard, but it might still be better than nothing. Tressie Cottom says functionally the same thing about grad school. It might have a terrible average payoff and have an even worse payoff for black students, but it still might be the best option for some black people, at a higher rate than it is the best option for white people.

[Please also read this account of a VA bureaucrat trying to talk a black veteran out of attending a 4 year school he was already admitted to. The counselor couldn't legally say no, but he did everything he could to deny the man his rights. Now read Tressie Cottom's post on how dressing "up" enabled her mother to convince government workers to give her benefits she was entitled to but otherwise would have been denied. ]

So if you're president in 1944, what is the moral thing to do? Is helping some worse than helping none? What about minimum wage laws that exclude primarily-black occupations? Great Depression public works programs that will only hire white workers? A universal health care program that leaves care of the absolute poorest to the states, and states with high numbers of poor POCs are refusing to participate?

[Full disclosure: I opposed the Affordable Care Act act at the time for many reasons, but I have to admit I was against universal health care. Now I see a place for it, but maintain my belief that the ACA was one of the absolute worst implementations that could possibly exist.]

You could be forgiven for thinking that getting "The HPV Vaccine", or worse, "The Cervical Cancer Vaccine" means you will never get HPV and/or cancer, because that's what a lot of news coverage has indicated, and because public health workers tend to overpromise and obscure details in order to motivate. The truth is that there are many strains of HPV (NIH says >100), there's no reason to believe our list is comprehensive, and a vaccine against one is not necessarily effective against another.

That's okay. HPV is incredibly common, to the point that some scientists think some strains be commensal. That makes it hard to prove what it's effects are: does increased prevalence of strain in renal patients mean it causes renal disease, that it's harmless but increases in prevalence in response to renal stress, or that it's harmless in healthy patients but harmful in the quantities seen in renal patients?

What we can agree on: some strains cause warts. Warts won't kill you, but they can hurt and create a vulnerable point other infections could use. How bad is that? For a modern American who wears shoes all day, plantar (foot) warts are more likely to harm you through bad ergonomics than an opportunistic infection.* If you are poor and shoeless in a sub-saharan Africa that vulnerability is a really big deal. Genital warts make it easier to catch another STD, but the exact probability HPV leads you to another STD you wouldn't otherwise have caught depends on the STD status of the people you have sex with.

We also agree that HPV can cause cancer. You can't prove it's impossible to get cervical cancer without it, but it's probably safe to say that if you do so you've either been storing nuclear waste in your vagina or severely pissed off a vengeful deity. Now that we're looking for it we're also finding certain strains associated with penile, rectal, and oral cancers.

Given that there are a large and growing number of identified HPV strains, some of which might even be beneficial**, and each strain must be separately cultured, increasing expense how do you decide which to vaccinate against ? When making Gardasil, Merck chose four strains, two of which caused 90% of genital warts, and two of which caused 70% of cervical cancer.

Or did they? New data is out suggesting that the vaccine is less useful in black women than white women because black women are more likely to have strains the vaccine doesn't cover. Some people are describing this as "less effective in black women", but that's misleading. As far as we know the vaccine is equally effective against the strains it claims to be effective against*** on a biological level. It's just not useful because black women are much more likely to be exposed to strains the vaccine doesn't protect against. By far the simplest explanation is that whatever study generated the prevalence estimates oversampled white women.

This demonstrates a couple of things. One, the importance of sampling across the entirety of the population you want the data to apply to even if you are really, really sure they're genetically identical. I would not be at all surprised to discover geographic differences in strain distribution. But if I'm correctly interpreting this newspaper article with no link to the underlying study, participants were recruited at the same site and so roughly the same geographic area. Assuming no racial influences on susceptibility or response, this suggests that white and black women, and their partners, are swimming in entirely separate sexual pools.

I'm not that naive. I knew people tended to have sex primarily with same-race partners. But my epidemiology intuition says it shouldn't take *that much* cross over for strains to reach prevalences much closer than what's being reported here, because once a strain has crossed over, it should rapidly colonize a wide open pool.

Alternate possibilities:

exposure to one strain makes you resistant but not immune to another, so which you strain you have is correlated much more heavily with early sexual partners than later ones. Without looking it up I'm pretty sure people's first partners are much more likely to be the same race as them. This suggests that the wrong-strain vaccines are still likely to be some helpful, but not as helpful as the right strain.

People who engage in interracial sex are atypical in their engagement with their own race. They might have fewer partners, observe a higher standard of sexual safety. or have sex nearly exclusively with members of that race, making them part of that cluster.

the true clustering is around a factor other than race but with a heavily non-random distribution, like location or SES.

*True story: the only time I've ever used crutches is after having a plantar wart burnt off.

**Commensal is defined as one side (HPV) benefiting and the other side (humans) receiving no benefit. However, if harmless HPV is taking up space on our skin that would otherwise be occupied by something damaging, that's a benefit, like those spiders that avoid humans and eat black widows. Or the HPV could be involved in some weird but ultimately beneficial cycle with the bacteria on our skin. We don't understand the ecosystems within our own bodies at all, and our overconfidence at what can be safely removed has caused a lot of trouble over the years.

***Never say never, but I'd be shocked if the per-strain effectiveness differed significantly between races, because even if there was a genetic component, race is a stupid categorization that tells you very little about an individual's genetics.

Like rape jokes, I think jokes about racism are powerful and important, and follow roughly the same rules: kick up, don't minimize, don't use it cheaply, and remember that people are worse than you can possibly imagine and your obvious caricature of how awful an opinion is is someone else's reality. I have less freedom to joke about race and racism than rape, because I'm white (which is totally fair and not me being oppressed), but that is not the same as saying white comedians can't talk about race. For example, please enjoy this clip from my go-to social justice comedian, Louis CK*


[Louis CK: Being White]

Key phrase: "I'm not saying that white people are better. I'm saying that being white is clearly better"

Or Wanda Sykes on reverse racism:

Key phrase: "That's not reverse racism. What you're afraid of is called karma"

Or Chris Rock on when white people can say the word nigger.


ETA: Lenny Bruce on the word nigger.


On the other hand, I have really limited sympathy when your entire schtick is using emotionally charged words, and someone becomes emotional in response to them This seems to be Sarah Silverman's problem. In her autobiography The Bedwetter she talks about telling the following joke on Conan:

I got jury duty … and I didn't want to go, so my friend said, "You should write something really really racist on the form when you return it. Like, you should put 'I hate chinks'." And I said, "I'm not going to put that on there just to get out of jury duty. I don't want people to think that about me." So instead I wrote, "I love chinks." And who doesn't?

Note: the original slur was nigger, but NBC made her change it to chink. So it's not like anyone was unaware what the driving force of the joke was.

In her autobiography, Silverman is really upset at the idea that anyone was offended (i.e. hurt) by this joke. She defends it as not being about Chinese people (or black people) at all, but about her being an idiot. I don't think that's a good defense. At a bare minimum, just using the world chink is reminding every Chinese person who has ever been a victim of overt racism (and I would be shocked if there was anyone who had been completely unscathed by racism) who hears it that racism exists and it is hurting them. That hurts. That invokes pain. And it's not incidental, it is the entire point of using a racial slur. Every joke involving race or racism invokes that pain, and it is their duty to have a point that is worth that cost. Louis CK's joke does: he's making people more aware of how racism is not a thing of the past.**

Here is the thing: just like jokes can reinforce rape culture without being about rape or sex, and without anyone wanting to imply that penetration without consent is okay, jokes can be racist without being about race. Kayne West (about whom I know almost nothing) said some batshit things on TV. Jimmy Kimmel did a bit on his show where he reenacted the interview with 9 year old children. I didn't see it until after I read the the criticism of it, but if I was seeing it fresh, I don't know if I would have picked up on the racial overtones. It would have been equally funny if it had been a white person spouting nonsense. But as Cord Jefferson points out, calling a black man a boy has a very long and specific history. I knew that intellectually, but I have no faith I would seen the implications in this particular instance. I was going to say that is many ways the greatest white privilege, but generations of accumulated wealth and not having my neighborhood torn apart by militarized police are pretty neat too.

My comedian boyfriend interpreted Jefferson's article as saying that any mockery of West was off limits. I don't think that's what he meant. I don't think he said anything about jokes one way or the other. I think he was trying to convey that West's abnormalities are not randomly distributed. West doesn't just live in a world where he's discriminated against, he lives in a world where people refuse to acknowledge he's discriminated against. Where the burden of proof is on him to prove the discrimination was racially motivated and not random noise. Which is just about impossible to do in any one instance- some people are universally assholes, some people are nice but having a bad day and sharing it with everyone. And yet over the some total of her life, a black woman will be the victim of a lot more of other people's bad days than I will. Telling black people they're not experiencing racism unless they can prove it is gaslighting.

For a really good, pure example of this, see the comments thread on a BoingBoing post about a Biology Online editor asking black female scientist Danielle lee, who blogged under the name "Urban Scientist" to write for him for free, and calling her an "urban whore" when she refused (she didn't name him, so I'm not going to either). One of the first comments is someone asking why BoingBoing mentioned her race. From there, the conversation devolved into "but you can't know for sure he was racist! It's a parallel to her blogging name! The fact that he was already using a misogynistic slur has no relevance to his argument! I am so logical and you are being ruled by emotions! Being offended is a choice!". The message being that 1. this man's intentions were the only thing that mattered. Pain caused by a slur used unintentionally is a moral failing of the victim. 2. some people on the internet incorrectly believing this man did something racist is a million times worse than some people on the internet incorrectly believing he didn't do something racist.

And it's all so focused on a word. Even as they made themselves look like ignorant, racist buffoons, his supporters successfully prevented the conversation from reaching the deeper issue of the severe entitlement issues this man displayed towards Lee, much less the fact that lots of other people, people in power, have those same entitlement issues and the good sense not to call their victims whores in a recorded medium.

To return to the subject of comedy and subtle racism: let's talk about the Smith kids. Everything I know about them I learned from Suri's Burn Book, but I'm prepared to admit they probably are arrogant little fucks whose parents are buying careers for them. That's what happens when your parents are that rich and famous and beautiful. Are they worse than white children would be, given similar parents? Do they receive more criticism than white children in the same situation displaying the same attitudes? Is that the right question, given that the situations are not the same, that these kids are growing up in a racist world? Are Willow and Jaden entitled to more leeway over attitude problems than white kids? Isn't that the path to infantalizing and invalidating black people?

The best answer I can come up with is that abstract opinions and interpersonal interactions are very different thing. A young black celebrity offspring is not entitled to cut in line at the DMV (an example I just made up), and if they did the people involved have every right to tell them to cut it out. Race blindness is sufficient to get the not-racist merit badge. But celebrity news sites should go softer on them*** , and adults as well. And yet, coverage on celebrity news can help a celebrity's career. But it seems entirely possible for coverage to be net positive for the individual celebrity but net negative for black celebrities as a whole, or black people as a whole, because it reinforces negative stereotypes.**** But it's the fault of a racist system that black celebrities idiotic actions hurt black people in ways a white celebrity's don't.

There may not be a fair outcome here. And I hate that. I want there to be something I can do, now, that means I don't have to think about hundreds of years of oppression or violence. Contemplating that there may not be, or that it may require sacrifice of things I feel like I earned, is really scary.



*Who I learned while researching this post is Mexican. As in, born in Mexico, learned English when he came to the US at age 7, still has Mexican citizenship. Ethnically he's 1/2 Irish, 1/4 European Jewish, and 1/4 Spanish/Indigenous Mexican. HH looks white, and his schtick is very much privileged white guy so I still feel like this is a valid example of how you can talk about race while looking white, and also I didn't want to rewrite 3 paragraphs, but it does complicate the point somewhat.

**I know I'm spending a lot of time praising Louis CK, but see also this clip on how recent slavery was. "Every year white people add 100 years to how long ago slavery was. I’ve heard educated white people say, ‘slavery was 400 years ago.’ No it very wasn’t. It was 140 years ago…that’s two 70-year-old ladies living and dying back to back. That’s how recently you could buy a guy. And it's not like slavery ended and then everything has been amazing”

***To the extent they are talking about children at all. I mostly don't they should, except for Suri's Burn Book, because that is really making fun of the rest of the media. But like I said about feminism last week: being not-racist is not the same as being good.

****See: the Flavor Flav Minstrel Show.

Feminism is a very broad term. Every time I start trying to describe how broad I freeze up, because I know I'm only familiar with the kinds you find on the internet, which is not perfectly represented, and even then I'm much more familiar with some parts than others. Mostly the parts that are relevant to me, like consent culture and paying highly educated women more money.

Feminists make fun of the term "I'm not a feminist, but...", implying that the speakers want the benefits of feminism without the social cost of admitting it. My own mother said I was spitting on the back of Susan B. Anthony when I (age 14) said I wasn't a feminist. This only makes sense if you consider feminism synonymous with equal rights and opportunities for women. That's a pretty bold claim to make. A lot of poor and non-white women have criticized feminism/The Feminist Movement for focusing exclusively on the problems of upper middle class white women (e.g. the leaky pipeline in academia) while ignoring problems affecting them (e.g. the mistreatment of pregnant women in prison). At times their goals can be actively contradictory because their situations are so different- rich white women are denied sterilization they request while poor black women are sterilized without their knowledge. When these women refuse to identify as feminists, they're not saying they're okay with the status quo, they're not failing to give Susan B. Anthony her due, they're just refusing to pretend that TFM is working for them. Which is probably why mainstream feminists get so upset about it.*

That is a really charged example, but there are lots of other ways that people can disagree about what counts as "advocating for women". I wish I was informed enough and clever enough to point out ways this is happening that no one else has thought of, but I'm a dilettante with a lot of privilege, so I can't. The ways I can think of are things other people have already pointed out: the second wave fought for the right to say no to sex, the third is fighting for the right to say yes. People are simultaneously fighting for the right to have children (and have the costs of those children subsidized by other people**) and fighting the stigma against childlessness. The second wave fought to get women into corporate jobs, parts of the third are fighting for greater respect for the work of childrearing. None of these are strictly opposed, but supporting one without hurting the other requires an inconvenient level of nuance.

Ultimately the question is: do we want the same world we have now, except without gender based-proscriptions, or do we want a different world, and if so, which one? If feminism were strictly about equality, than success would be black women being discriminated against exactly the same as black men, and racism itself would be orthogonal. I of course think racism is bad and being racist makes you a bad person***, but it's not clear to me it should make you a bad feminist. Feminism is not a synonym for good things.

The Feminist Movement seems to be a lot of more socialist than I am, and finds severe income inequality in and of itself problematic. I believe that income inequality is often symptomatic of a problem, and extreme poverty is a problem, but do not care if some people make truly ridiculous amounts of money in a fair system. And while I think gender-based discrimination is morally wrong, I dislike a lot of anti-discrimination laws on both practical and moral grounds. I should be able to disagree about means without feminists accusing me of secretly hating women or not caring about discrimination.****

I wish Lean In had taken a little bit wider view and discussed the work system as a whole. I think the live-to-work mindset is hurting women and men both. I really wish Sandberg had talked about why she finds striving for the top so rewarding, instead of taking it as a given. As I was typing this a friend sent me a link to The Messy Link Between Slavery and Modern Management and before I finished the description I dismissed it as "that's not fair to tar trade by mutual agreement with the same brush as slavery, just because the same tool can make both better." It took me a few minutes to question "why is maximizing number of widgets the goal?". I know why it's the goal of any given company, but how did the system end up that way? I have this nagging feelings that there are systems where that wouldn't be the case, but I can't conceive of them any more than a fish can conceive of brachiation.

If I have a point, it's that I wish more people questioned more assumptions, and I wish that was decoupled from the feminist movement. I may even wish there wasn't A Feminist Movement, but that feminist was an adjective applied to other movements, like socialism and anarchism and especially libertarianism and/or free market socialism, whichever one I end up going with.

*I tried to find good blog posts to demonstrate this. The first page of results for "feminism racist" is exclusively white feminists and mainstream news, plus one by a PUA. The white bloggers linked to black bloggers: almost all of their blogs were either gone or restricted access. Part of this is that I still pine for 2007 and have failed to adapt to a post-twitter world, but part is that race and gender bloggers have a frighteningly high burnout rate.

**My belief is that once the kid is here, it's a defenseless person and society does have an obligation to give in a decent shot at life. But I'm very uncomfortable with that framed as the right of the mother to have as many children as she wants, regardless of her ability to take care of them.

*** to the extent that being bad person is a thing, which it mostly isn't, and it's even less rarely a helpful framework, but I really want to risk condoning racism and it makes for a really nice parallel sentence structure

****Something no one has said to me personally, but is often said about people with similar beliefs. People who may well be acting in bad faith, but the idea that someone could believe in gender equality but think preserving the right to free association and the commerce clause was more important than the marginal benefit from this particular law is never even considered.

I thought this article by an feminist Orthodox rabbi grappling with the traditional daily prayer to thank G-d for not making him a woman was really interesting. I'm not big on observing tradition, but that almost makes me appreciate it more when other people spend a lot of effort upholding it. Both because I think there's some value in the continuity for its own sake, and because things often become traditions for reasons, and those reasons may still be around even if we've forgotten them. And there is something beautiful about submitting to something larger than yourself even when you disagree with parts of it.

OTOH, I think it's disingenuous to say "but tradition!" when you can see a lot of the social forces that formed the tradition, and they are things you claim to reject. Wedding traditions are the perfect example of this. Asking a woman's father for permission to marry her clearly arose from the tradition of women as property AND is clearly treating her as property now. I don't think there's a feminist way to do it. But even though engagement rings are descended from the same system, and I still think they're sexist and reinforce a lot of bad patterns and I don't want one, I do think it's possible to do engagement rings in an aware, feminist way that, if not ideal, falls well within the realm of compromises we all have to make to live in the world. And I will accept "yes, it's sexist, but the ring makes my life easier because men respect it far more than they respect the word "no"" in a way I wouldn't accept "yes, it's sexist, but it meant a lot to my dad".

On the third hand, it's not realistic to expect people to go from sexist to perfect. I want to give this rabbi points for thinking about these things even if he hasn't come to a conclusion I like yet, because just thinking about them is hard. I thought his first few paragraphs were really great, honest, explorations of the difficult choice in front of him. If he had just done that, I'd think he was pretty cool. But I found the second half, where he listed all the reasons the being a man was awesome and pledged to make that less true, really evasive. The blessing won't be any less traditional if sexism is solved, is he still going to say it then? All the things he lists are true, but they're also secular- is he working to diminish gender inequity of Orthodox Judaism in other ways? A lot of those are traditional too.

I came on this article via this response, via the author's blog where she talks about Judaism and gymnastics. I had no idea gymnastics could be so interesting.* Anyways, her response was basically "you don't get to tell women this isn't offensive", and more generally "you don't get to tell the less privileged what is and is not oppressing them." Which are very fair points, somewhat wider in scope than mine, and yet also reflecting that fact that the author (Jewish, formerly Orthodox) has much more invested in this particular fight than I (never Jewish) do.

*The Judaism part is interesting too, but that didn't surprise me.

In American culture, it's rude not to give someone 100% of your attention. I think this is the root of a lot of the problem. Extroverts people who have bought into the American value system, who can be of any persuasion because culture is like that, think they are simply asking for an acknowledgement when they say hi, and I agree with them that a lack of any acknowledgement would be rude. But I feel like what they are actually asking for is for me to drop everything I am thinking about and give them 100% of my attention until they choose to return it, and that is horrendously unfair. It's like walking into a factory where people are working and demanding they scrap everything they are doing (including widgets that are 95% done), pushing one whosit through the production line (necessitating leaving workers idle or throwing away unfinished whosits at the end), and then letting them go back to the original widgets. And being mad at them for being inefficient, although that's probably internal pressure in my case.

If people would agree that a distracted nod was sufficient to fulfill my social obligations when they held the door for me, I would not resent when they did so.

It's an issue even with people I like though. I have a good friend with whom I have many fascinating discussions. I tend to clean my house while we're talking. She herself is notorious for having a variety of fidgets in her house. I've taken to doing puzzles while talking with my boyfriend sometimes. It looks like multitasking, and I do feel somewhat less responsive. But what I'm actually doing is taking the energy they're giving me and turning it into something else immediately, so I have more room and can keep talking to them. Going back to the assembly line metaphor, I'm keeping a full pipeline going so I don't get a pile up at their station.

This makes me wonder if context-switching is less expensive for extroverts than introverts. Maybe they can hold things in their head better, maybe they find it less costly to wind up and spin down. Maybe they are more like craftsmen than assembly line workers, so trashing all in-progress work is less costly.

I am tired of hearing "alone time" and "social time" referred to as distinct, fungible buckets. There are lots of different kinds of alone time and people time and they cost and give different things. A teacher friend has described teaching as rather lonely because even though you're surrounded by people all day, they're children, and the energy flow is almost unidirectional. I don't play MMOs because they invoke the worst parts of dealing with people- having to negotiate with them to get a thing I want- without making me feel connected.

There are kinds of social activity that I need other social activity to recover from. Most noticeably when I'm around my parents for significant lengths of time, I start reaching out electronically. My first choice is chatting with good friends, followed by posting to facebook and livejournal, but when desperate I'll resort just to reading blogs and commenting on them. If you think of all social interactions as energy exchanges: I can't participate in the kind of exchanges that make me feel like me with my parents. It's not even a matter of hiding who I am, it's that they are incapable of seeing it and therefore can't react proportionally. Participating in exchanges with my friends makes me feel more whole.

Incidentally, I'll do the same thing when pushed into the introvert wall and forced to socialize (such as at work). Work is not such a violation of my sense of self as talking with my parents, but I am more actively suppressing certain aspects. As is appropriate for a professional situation and is totally fine as long as I have the cope, but when I'm depleted than g-d damnit, someone is going to hear the funny innuendo about what my boss just said.

Alone time that I've planned or deliberately turned down an invitation for is scored differently than incidental alone time. It feels worse, because everyone is hanging out without me/I'm a loser for wanting to stay in/I'm missing an opportunity I may never get again/I genuinely wanted to do that fun thing. But if I'm able to fight through that, it's also more restorative. There's is more flow when there is an event I have separated from than when I am merely adrift.

So if you assume everyone has some equilibrium they wish to maintain, and no one can balance those perfectly immediate, extroverts whose ballast or rebalancer tends to fall under the broad category of "social time", and introverts are those whose ballast or rebalancer falls under "alone time".