While it shouldn’t be a privilege to escape abuse in this life, there are trappings of privilege for those who have been so lucky. I know it’s an odd thing to say, and it’s a realization I’ve been slowly moving toward since childhood, but it works like this:

• 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.

I just got notice that my landlord is raising my rent by $500 (after a $130 increase just this February, and an increase every year since my lease expired and he refused to renew it). Interestingly, this is above market value for what the building offers. This is an increase well in excess of 25%. There is no logical way to justify the price, and it’s called “rent gouging.”

It is also 100% legal in California, given the building was built later than 1978 (otherwise rent control limits increases to 4-5% per annum). Now I finally understand why dozens of older buildings in my neighborhood have been demolished in the past few years, only to have new apartment buildings constructed in their place: you make up the enormous cost of construction pretty quickly by skirting laws that regulate what you can charge for rent.

“Oh,” you say, “but the free market balances. Supply and demand! It’s only fair!”

Not so much when the item being sold is a life necessity. If I feel a Wii system is overpriced, I can shop for a bargain, buy it used, or not buy it at all, and I’ll live. With housing, frugalities eventually become dangerous as you chase affordable living into dangerous areas and dilapidated buildings that qualify as “slums.” And even in those conditions, you remain at the mercy of a landlord who legally has the right to charge you anything he wants.

I mentioned that this increase puts my building above its market value. By that I mean: for what he intends to charge, I could get any of a dozen nearby buildings that have far better amenities. He’s totally outclassed in this new price range. While lots of apartments in L.A. are suddenly raising rents by $100, he’s going for this insane amount, and why? Obviously, I don’t know, but I’m guessing he’s gambling that other owners will look at his prices and bump theirs up accordingly. After all, that’s what they normally do.

Because the suppliers only look at each other for their cues. The demanders don’t even enter the equation. And that’s how you get an entire housing market that is “overvalued”. Suppliers looking at their costs, and passing on the costs of fixing their stupid mistakes (ARM mortgages, anyone?) onto the demand side rather than having to sell or let the bank foreclose. If they built Playstations that weren’t worth what they charge, people would stop buying. But with an essential like housing, there’s infinite room for “whoops” on the supply side - it can always be passed onto the demand side.

Think about it: how do you get “overvalue” in a free market? How can all housing be getting sold at prices above its value, if the market works like its average proponent claims? Answer: it doesn’t work the way people want to believe. Not on necessities.

“But shoes are necessities,” you muse. “Why are there always cheap, affordable shoes available in Los Angeles, but not cheap, affordable housing?”

Because shoes are portable. I can order them from another country, if no store will sell what I want at a price I find acceptable. Even life-saving medicines can sometimes be bought on the cheap from elsewhere. But housing is part of the landscape. It’s tied to our jobs, which also aren’t portable. It’s tied to our kids’ schools, which represent their chance of future economic success. It’s tied into everything we need to survive, and that makes it infinitely exploitable - but only from the supply side.

My situation is atypical. What we’re seeing right now in L.A. is a lot of buildings raising rents by $1-200/month. Because they’re all doing it at once, of course the market will bear it: the demanders have no cheaper options. But why did they start raising the rents? Did the demand side do something to trigger it? No.

• A lot of landlords have those insane mortgages because they opted to tear down old buildings in the past 5 years and put up new ones to avoid that 1978 cut-off date. While individuals who took out those mortgages are losing their homes, landlords just pass on their huge business mistakes to the demand side. There’s infinite room for stupid on the supply side when it comes to housing.
• Unavoidable costs for things like water and electricity are also going up - there, I don’t have a problem with landlords raising rents, as the retail cost is still based on the wholesale cost. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen rents go down when the cost of water or electricity does, which bears examination.

Regulate the market just a little, and profits can still be thrilling without individuals being at the mercy of a subtle version of price fixing.

If anyone’s concerned about me, I’m lucky. My friends who’ve recently had $100 increases in rent are unable to find cheaper housing anywhere nearby, and either have to start paying more or commuting further (taking more time from families, spending more on gas, releasing more gas waste into the atmosphere, having less time for exercise and healthy cooking). Because my building was already overpriced, this was just the kick I needed to go hunt down something significantly cheaper so I have that much more savings per month to throw into my downpayment fund. I intend to buy a house in a couple of years, when the market is at its bottom and housing is actually something like its real market value.

But for those who got drummed out of the housing industry a long time ago - those homeless people who live on all our streets here - that option isn’t available. While some of them may have made bad choices that caused them to end up homeless, the hard reality is: it could happen to anyone in this town. And once you lose your home - even a rented home that was never really “yours” - you lose that address you need to put on a job application. You lose a place to receive mail and communications. You lose touch with the entire world.

All because in a country that could easily provide modest living arrangements for everyone, it is so much more important to have a race to see just how much profit can possibly be made. Isn’t it ever enough?

If you find yourself in agreement with a dominant belief - the most popular religion in your culture, a love of the favored local sports team, or the belief that life is mostly neat and people are mostly good-hearted - you may occasionally have trouble distinguishing someone who doesn’t lick your butt in agreement from someone who is actually attacking you. This post includes tips on how to tell various members of “Them” apart.

First of all, let’s discuss the source of your confusion. The most common reason for thinking people are either with you or against you is that you don’t realize that some people actually arrive at their own opinions rather than just adopting other people’s opinions in a show of solidarity. If you’re an opinion adopter, you may tend to assume another person’s shifting opinions are meant to passively-aggressively signal shifting loyalties. You may feel the person is abandoning your team for another team. In fact, some people engage in a process called “thinking” by which they evaluate how much logical sense an idea makes. They may re-evaluate the idea when they obtain new life experience or knowledge. It doesn’t mean they hate you or want your beliefs to fail or want you to stop believing as you do.

Remember: there are other ways for a person to be a good and loyal friend or colleague to you than by mirroring your beliefs back to make you feel good about yourself.

When your adopted opinions and beliefs are mainstream, you feel safe. You believe that everyone feels the same pressure you felt to conform, and that everyone is shares the weakness that forced you to conform. Therefore when someone doesn’t conform, you think they’re some kind of crazed monster - a dangerously fucked up nutjob. You feel entitled to lash out in attack. In fact, some people have a trait called strength which enables them to feel pressure from others without giving in. They know people want them to echo their beliefs back to them like a tape recorder, but they have their own ideas. They’re (usually) not doing it to spite you; they just really see things differently.

Critics

Critics break down ideas into chains of logical thought, then evaluate how sound that logic is. For example, the critic will not accept that “the hole in the ozone is for Jesus to come through” as a logical precept because there is no logic: it’s just an idea you’ve chosen to embrace. The critic is not saying you can’t embrace it, nor is the critic (necessarily) saying it’s a stupid thing to believe (though I have made the argument that if Jesus needs help from hairspray manufacturers to make His Second Coming, perhaps He is not All That). The critic is merely saying you have offered no persuasive reason or fact to compel him to agree with you. It would be absolutely inappropriate at this point to spray paint his car with the word “Fornicator” or similar.

Non-supporters

Boy, these guys have it rough. They don’t even want to criticize your beliefs or debate with you. They just want to live and let live. Unfortunately, they’re a Democrap in a Repubican region or vice versa. Or they’re a Muslim in Christian redneck heaven. Or they’re a woman/person of color/gay person/etc. who, when asked for an opinion, gives one instead of saying cheerily, “Gosh, I dunno, but I sure trust Mr. Cracker to know what’s best for me. I’ll just go over here and be harmless, ‘kay?”

My advice here, based on years of personal experience and careful consideration, is simply leave these people the fuck alone. I mean, what damage do you actually think they’re doing to you? They don’t even want to talk to you! You just come over and start telling them your opinions with the expectation that because everything you think is mainstream they will say, “Oh yeah, me too!” and when they don’t, you’re so bothered by the fact there’s somebody on this earth who just blithely doesn’t have to agree with everyone else to function, you can’t stand it, so you decide to harass them daily. And even if they say they agree with you to make you go away, you know it’s not true, so you keep harassing them for no other reason than punishment.

Can you not see that you need psychiatric help? You do. Not them - you.

Hostile people

Now, there are indeed people who are hostile to mainstream beliefs just to irritate you, or to maintain the belief they are cool, or whatever. These people are rare, but they exist. These are the people you can feel entitled to fight with or dislike, and you will recognize them because:

• Unlike critics, they can’t offer logical arguments about their beliefs/opinions, i.e., can’t tell you why they think what they think.
• Unlike non-supporters, they change their beliefs again if everyone starts agreeing with them
• Unlike both critics and non-supporters, they harass you with their beliefs all the time in order to irritate you. (Note: “harass” doesn’t mean “expresses their weirdass beliefs right out in public instead of in darkened basements, where such ideas belong”; it refers to an actual pattern of intentionally bugging the hell out of you, specifically, on a regular basis.)

In other words, they’re exactly like you. Except they feel they’ve got a score to settle, and their chosen method is rebellion. It’s not a sincere rebellion, it’s just rebelling to annoy people. Because they’re pricks and you’re a prick too, I highly recommend that you guys engage in an escalating pattern of violence until you remove each other from the overburdened ecosystem.

I recently described compulsory voting as “fascist” to a friend the other day, which got me thinking about the term and wondering just how well I understand it. I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that Mussolini used it to describe putting the state ahead of the individual to such a degree that any needs the individual had that didn’t get met by meeting the state’s needs… that was just too bad. But there’s some debate over what “fascism” means, and it was this paragraph that got me:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

What part of that isn’t a description of the years in the US since 9-11? Breaking it down bit by bit:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline,

Family values going to hell, weirdos runnin’ around expecting to have rights just like normal people - check.

humiliation,

Bin Laden got us with out pants down! Oh, noes! Yeah, loss of life and property damage and stuff - yeah, really sucks! But mostly people think our national penis is small! Argh!

or victim-hood

Well, we are victims! In fact, we’re the biggest victims ever, and anybody who says we can’t torture people and stuff is just an unfeeling bastard!

and by compensatory cults of unity,

Hey, you’re either with Bush or you are against every decent worthwhile thing in human experience. It’s your choice.

energy, and purity,

And in these awful days where terrorists run amok, one of our biggest concerns is female virginity! There’s nothing at all creepy or objectifying about purity balls. They help remind fathers that hymens are their property, and it’s their duty to protect those fragile membranes from, you know, terrorists and foreigners and, um, that boy that works at 7-11.

in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants,

What would you call a group of people to whom it makes complete sense to go after Hussein because he might have WOMD when we had almost cornered Bin Laden who, you know, actually committed mass destruction?

working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites,

That would be Bush, Cheney, and most of the cabinet. And then some.

abandons democratic liberties

Hey, we’re at war here! In order for us to protect your liberated American way of life from terrorists who want to destroy it, we’re going to have to… well, destroy your liberated American way of life. I’m sorry, but that’s just how it works.

and pursues with redemptive violence

Action Item: kill Hussein. Check! Now we’re even for Bin Laden. Um, just trust us on this.

and without ethical or legal restraints

We prefer the term “Patriot Act.”

goals of internal cleansing

But it really was the gays and the feminists that made God abandon us! We have to punish the weirdos so God will protect us again.

and external expansion.

Welcome to the United States Territory of Iraq. Be sure to visit Halliburtonville (formerly Baghdad) and observe as we violently force freedom on people whether they want it or not.

When I was a teenage girl who wasn’t shy about pointing out the advantages I didn’t have, I was surrounded by teenage boys who weren’t shy about telling me, “Stop whining and just do something about it.”

I took their advice. I studied the people who had the social standing I wanted, which in my part of the world was white middle to upper class men, ostensibly heterosexual. I learned the vocal tones and pitches they use and avoid (almost the opposite of what most women do). I learned how they stand, how they approach one another, how they negotiate. I learned what they’re allowed (in their social contract as members of the dominant group) to express and how they’re allowed to express it. And I discovered that by merely using these techniques, I got taken about 300% more seriously than far more competent women who didn’t. And all that well before the age of 20. It’s easy hard to learn if you have a natural talent for reading people, which I do.

What’s hard to do is to apply it. Because even though I could walk into a crisis situation, take charge, fix it and win kudos even from the most neurotic misogynists in about five minutes flat, there was always a backlash. The better I performed, the bigger the backlash. During the crisis, all people saw in me was an individual who projected leadership and competence and showed them how we could all work together to fix the situation. Afterwards, many of the men saw an unmistakably female of unimposing size, and they were ashamed of having “taken orders” from her, so to even that score they’d play tricks on me, or yell abuse at me, or just ignore me (by “ignore” I mean to the extent of mowing me down in a corridor rather than step aside). A lot of the women, too, would have second thoughts about me after the fact and join in with the men.

I’m not looking for sympathy - I got over this bullshit years ago. But the other day on a website, I saw someone saying that women don’t get paid as much as men because women don’t negotiate like men, and it reminded me of all this. When women do negotiate like men, they risk being shunned by a community that doesn’t believe they should negotiate like men, but wants them to stop “whining” when they don’t have what they want. It’s a perfect catch-22.

And of course, a lot of men don’t see it because they’re not even conscious of the way they react when a woman does approach them the way men are trained to do. They think they’re perfectly fair, and it’s just a coincidence that every woman who successfully commands men calmly and naturally is later realized to be difficult, intimidating, unapproachable or a just plain mean ol’ bitchy man-hater.

Is it any wonder history fails to record any effective women in history? Fails to recognize them now? Is it a surprise that Hillary Clinton can do no right in a society where the only “right” way to be is male/white/etc., and women aren’t allowed to be that? Is it any surprise that when women react well to an effective woman because we don’t have any manhood to feel threatened by them, it’s suspicious, a conspiracy, an illogical emotional malfunction?

This is a must read thread. It’s unfortunately closed down now, but the comments alone gave me immense amounts of ideas to think about.

You go to a doctor, and she or he treats you like you’re a disgusting waste of time because you should’ve known that rash you have that looks exactly like eczema was actually some obscure parasite from the Bolivian jungle (where you’ve never been). Your car’s broken into, and even though you locked it and parked it in a secured, lit garage, people chastise you for not having an alarm (even though 1987 was the last time anyone actually responded to a car alarm, except perhaps to yell “Shut the fuck up!”). You get dumped and your friends tell you they have no sympathy because if you’d really been serious about keeping him, you’d have lost that last 10 pounds (upon which your entire value as a human apparently rests). You get raped and people ask what you did to make that happen to you. You get tried for a crime you didn’t commit, and the jury assumes if you were really innocent, you wouldn’t be here at all.

It comes in a lot of flavors, but one thing victim blaming relies on is a privilege distinction between the blamer and the victim. As illogical as it is for a doctor to spend six figures on her education and then act like patients who don’t know all she knows are lacking in intelligence, really we’re barely sentient enough to realize how stupid we are, and therefore it’s a very human logic: “I can do this; why can’t you?”

As specious as it is for someone to look at a break-in that happened despite every reasonable precaution and invent a whole new precaution lapse to explain the event away, it’s what humans do: we invent rules by which we imagine ourselves safe. When someone sails a plane into a building anyway, we invent a bunch more rules until eventually we’re all hunkered in cellars wearing gas masks and thinking, “I’m sure we’re safe now. Yep.”

As ignorant as it is to blame crime victims for getting themselves into this position, we do this because it’s convenient. They’re at hand, whereas the perpetrator might not be, and we want to separate ourselves from them (”Oh! So if I never wear a whorish skirt like she did, I’ll never be raped! Yay!”). And even when the perpetrator is at hand, we’re more scared of him or her than we are of the victim. Safer to blame the victim, and after all, it’s all about whatever makes us feel better, right?

As common sense defying as it is to assume no one could be really falsely accused of a crime, we do it because otherwise we’d be able to picture ourselves in the defendant’s position.

The one thing all these examples have in common is a power imbalance between the blamed victim and the blamer. Ironically, the less powerful the victim is, the less likely they are to have had any real influence over their situation, the easier they are to blame. It makes no sense, but it’s not about sense. It’s about comfort. And privilege is a great comfort.

“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.

What happens in your mind when you’re a small child and you notice that Santa brought the rich kids much nicer stuff than he brought the poor kids? I’ve always wondered about this. (I don’t know because I was never taught to believe in Santa.)

It seems to me there’s a potential for the whole Santa myth to reaffirm for kids the idea that rich people deserve better at such a young age the kids are mentally defenseless against it. Because here’s an outsider who’s not supposed to be an asshole bigot, who’s not constrained by financial limitations, and even he thinks the poor kids should be content with much-needed new underwear while the big kids get giant, flashy, expensive stuff that flaunts wealth through impracticality.

But I don’t know. Maybe for those of you raised to believe in Santa, there are enough suspicions and rumors abounding for you not to take it so seriously?

Apparently my spam filter got hold of some steroids a couple of weeks ago and proceeded to filter every comment. I believe I’ve recovered everything. Sorry about that! I’m not sure why it did that, but I’ll monitor it every day until it’s straightened out.