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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28110 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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https://quillette.com/2019/02/14/the-boy-who-inflated-the-concept-of-wolf/

Paragraphs 2-4 are particularly relevant.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/16/against-lie-inflation/

A few months ago, a friend confessed that she had abused her boyfriend. I was shocked, because this friend is one of the kindest and gentlest people I know. I probed for details. She told me that sometimes she needed her boyfriend to do some favor for her, and he wouldn’t, so she would cry – not as an attempt to manipulate him, just because she was sad. She counted this as abuse, because her definition of “abuse” is “something that makes your partner feel bad about setting boundaries”. And when she cried, that made her boyfriend feel guilty about his boundary that he wasn’t going to do the favor.

We argued for a while about whether this was a good definition of abuse (it isn’t). But I had a bigger objection: this definition was so broad that everyone has committed abuse at some point.

...when everyone is an abuser, nobody’s an abuser.

Right now, if I hear that someone is an serial abuser, I would be less likely to date them, or I might warn my friends away from them, or I might try not to support them socially. The world is divided into distinct categories – abuser and non-abuser – and which category someone is in gives you useful information about that person’s character. I’m not saying that every abuser is an awful person who is 100% defined by their misdeeds and can never be redeemed. But I think the category contains useful information about a person’s character and likely future actions.

But if everyone used my friend’s definition, and we acknowledged that everybody is an abuser – the category stops being informative. “John is an abuser”. So what? Doesn’t mean you should worry about John, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t date John, doesn’t even mean you shouldn’t set your single friends up on blind dates with John. It just means John is a human. Maybe he cries sometimes. So what?

Broadening the definition of “abuser” this far doesn’t help fight abuse or make anybody nicer. It just removes a useful word from the English language. I can still eventually warn someone that John is cruel or violent toward people close to him. I just have to circumlocute around the word “abuser”, in order to find some other word or phrase that hasn’t been rendered meaningless.

Nagging someone on Tinder to meet you for a drink may be obnoxious or irritating, but I don't think it has anything meaningfully in common with stabbing someone. The idea that if a guy nags a woman on Tinder to meet for a drink, and another man violently rapes a woman at knifepoint, both women are therefore victims of sexual violence - well, I just find that preposterous and insulting. To be a real concept, "violence" has to mean more than just "inconsiderate behaviour".

Violence does have a real meaning in this abstraction. It's the antitheses of alignment. Anyway I agree it's early to extend the word like that, and I suppose if you had your way we'd use a new word? But the implication that we extend the old cultural unacceptability to the new concept here is intentional.

I think everyone here knows that and this is precisely what they do not want to do yes?

If I drop something on the floor indoors, but I say “I dropped it on the ground,” everyone knows what I mean.

If then I say of my childhood, “Every night I went to sleep on the cold, hard ground,” but a moment’s research shows that I slept indoors, in a middle class household in a bed, it would be obvious hyperbole or straight-up lying, depending on how charitable my listeners decided to be. If I said it was a metaphor, perhaps some people might consider it a valid part of the class war against the ultra-rich.

If then I play the role of an activist, defining anyone who sleeps on less than a queen size mattress to be sleeping on the ground, and defend it not as a metaphor but an abstraction, anyone who is poor enough to actually be forced to sleep on the floor and anyone homeless who sleeps on the ground would rightfully be angry at me for minimizing their struggles by putting my meager suffering at the same level of theirs.

No idea what you're trying to say, sorry.

She told me that sometimes she needed her boyfriend to do some favor for her, and he wouldn’t, so she would cry – not as an attempt to manipulate him, just because she was sad.

I agree this isn't abuse, but it's definitely concerning behavior. An adult human being that gets sad to the point of crying because they were told "no" when they asked someone else to do something for them? Apparently on a regular enough basis to be considered a pattern of behavior worth discussing? If this person isn't lying to themselves (or Scott) about their motivation for crying, they have the emotional fortitude of a 5 year old.

they have the emotional fortitude of a 5 year old.

Agreed. Definitely not abuse though.

How would you define "emotional abuse", in particular from female to male? I agree that the situation described isn't violence in any reasonable sense of the word, but if you consider the toolkit of many women, this sort of tears-as-weapon has to be categorized as something, (or I suppose it doesn't, but if it were...) For me, emotional abuse seems to fit. From my point of view she is right to feel at least a pang of guilt (though if her bf is older than a certain age he should at least have an inkling what's going on).

Maybe in place of "abuse:"Manipulation? Manipulative behavior? Where a man might resort to strongarm--which only fails in the presence of a stronger arm or someone willing to take the pain--many women, when faced with a situation where they need to ply their partner in ways where for example seduction won't be effective, do not have the confidence or strength to be physically intimidating, and thus resort to these emotionally manipulative tactics. And let's be frank: Guilting someone in this way can take its toll. Boymen everywhere whose mothers pulled this stunt are walking around with serious neuroses (this kind of talk is outside my wheelhouse but hopefully you know what I mean.)

If a mother did this to her child, would you consider it closer to abuse? I'm just trying to clarify my own opinion here.

If we take the woman at her word and she's genuinely just crying because she's sad, then it sounds like she's just really immature and bad at emotional self-regulation. Describing this behaviour as "emotionally manipulative" implies that it's calculated and deceitful - some people can consciously choose to turn on the waterworks on command, and abuse this skill in order to get what they want from other people. If that's what she was doing, I would have no problem describing the behaviour as emotionally manipulative, maybe even abusive. But if she really is sincerely bursting into tears because she's sad and it's not calculated and intentional, then it's something else.

I think "selfish" or "inconsiderate" might be better words, and neither one is as grave an accusation as "abusive" or "manipulative".

As to the broader question of what constitutes emotional abuse from a woman to a man, I think that most of the red flags people are warned about are gender-neutral. Harsh insults, extremely harsh criticism, controlling behaviour, attempting to isolate your partner from their family/friends, paranoid jealous behaviour, gaslighting, failure to respect boundaries, lashing out, threatening suicide if you don't get your own way - women can be just as guilty of all of the above as men.

Ok, clear. Yes, it's possible she is just a hair-trigger weeper, but I suspect that's learned behavior with a touch of lack of self -awareness. Like the polar bear who hits a button and a fish cake falls out the chute might grow to just like red buttons.

I had a student (female) once whose boyfriend, if he realized he had offended her, would become violent... against himself. Like punch and slap himself until she became vocal enough to get him to stop the self-harming--often this took the form of her acquiescence to some need of his. Very bizarre dynamic.

Jesus, that's the kind of thing non-verbal autistic children do when they're upset.

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