I’ve been musing about how I would order the world once I am in charge of it. Which will be never, by the way. Yesterday, I veered into family dysfunction and empathy, which were related (hah), but not the main point I wanted to talk about.
In my ideal world or my diversity town, I would come up with a way to show people how they are privileged. I mean, that’s the whole point of diversity town. For those in a position of privilege to realize that what they consider normal is, in fact, privilege.
One thing I remember was being in a diversity training (not as the trainer) in which we were talking about how people of minority are treated on the daily. Microtrangressions, if you will. I mentioned being followed in stores plus other microtransgressions, and several white people tried to argue each incident and why it might not be racism.
One incident I mentioned was that at the Cubs I’ve been going to for all my life, I was once asked to show identification when writing a check (yes, this was in the Stone Ages), and I watched the next several people after me check out. One, a white woman, wrote a check, and she was not asked to show ID. Yes, I made sure to test this because I wanted to make sure the hunch I had was right. I wasn’t going to do anything about it, but I needed to check it for my own sanity.
In the training, a white woman trotted out the tired excuse that maybe the checker was having a bad day or maybe she was checking everyone. I mentioned that I had watched her NOT check a white woman, which shut down that vein of conversation. While maybe the checker was having a rough day, it’s not a coincidence that she chose the Asian person to exert a bit of power on. As I said, I had been shopping there for several decades and had never been asked for my ID before. It was racism, pure and simple.
One thing that is so frustrating about any ism is when a person of the majority simply will not believe the words of the minority. I am not saying never to question someone who is speakng on the topic, but the first thing a non-minority person should do is listen. This is something that is emphasized more these days, much to my appreciation.
I’m back to talk about my ideal world once again. In the last post, I went off on a rant about sexism. I can’t promise I won’t do it again. I have a lot to say about gender especially as it’s becoming an issue again with the expansion of gender as we currently define it.
One thing I got into yesterday was how I don’t get gender. I don’t get a lot of the arbitrary categories we throw people into. I get (even if I don’t necessarily agree with) racial categories. I get religion, obviously, and disabilities in general. I mean, I understand that disabilities are…I was going to say each one was a discrete thing, but that’s not even true. There are things that spill over or are shared between differing disabilities. And the fact that there is such a thing as hidden disabilities–I’m just all over the place, aren’t I?
My point is that it’s not so easy to say someone is abled or disabled when you get past what we think of as obvious disabilities (being in a wheelchair, for example). Nobody is 100% healthy. Well, very few people. But that’s another post altogether.
In my ideal world, I want people to be aware of other people. It’s really that simple. But not that easy to get there. It took me so long to realize that people don’t automatically try to understand people who are not like them.
Side note: I have had to do that all my life. I was taught at a very young age that I was the keeper of my mother’s emotions. She would pour out her pain to me for hours every night–mostly about my father cheating on her. I don’t remember if she mentioned his cheating explicitly, but we all knew that was what was happening.
My father did not hide it, by the way. He didn’t see any reason to hide it because if he was doing it, then it was fine. I’m not being snarky or hyperbolic, by the way. My father is a narcissist in the classic sense of the word, and he didn’t feel the need to justify anything he did. If he wanted to do it, then he did it. Why would he not?
Side note: Here’s the fascinating thing. I used to thinki that my father did not love anyone other than himself. Then, I thought maybe he loved my mother if he loved anyone. Now, howeve,r I don’t think he even loves himself. He certainly does not (or did not) enjoy life. He never had anything positive to say about anything, and I can’t remember many times when he smiled in delight about anything.
When I was in my twenties, my relationship with my parents was very rocky. That’s putting it mildly, by the way. Every time I talked to them on the phone (they had moved back to Taiwan when I was in my early twenties (father) and late twenties (mother). Or maybe early thirty for my mother), I was suicidal by the time I hung up. That’s not me exaggerating, either.
One time, my father was here after a conference in the west somewhere (can’t remember where). We got into a fight about something. Again, I can’t remember, but it’s not important. At some point, he demanded to know if I was grateful for all he’d done for me (home, money, etc. It was a lot. I’m not denying that). I told him that I wasn’t because I was a raging ball of anger at the time. Plus, he had pushed me so hard, I wanted to hit him where it had a chance of hurting.
He looked at me with such hatred in his eyes, I mentally recoiled. He spit out at me, “Then why should I love you?”
I died inside at that moment, but it also was a moment of such clarity. I had a sense by the time I was seven or eight that he did not love me. I knew it by the time I was in my early twenties. To hear him say it with such spitefulness was a blessing in disguise. I didn’t have to question it any longer.
Even though I knew it on some level, and even though I felt numb about my parents at that time, it still broke my heart. I simply said, “You’re my father. It’s your job to love me.”
I could not believe I had to say that to him. But that’s part of being a narcissist–the idea that you could love someone just for themselves is beyond you (or might be. I know it’s not the same for everyone).
My fdather is in the late stages of dementia, and it’s pretty grim. It’s weird talking to him now because he’s more expressive than he was earlier in his life. After I told him that he should love me because it was part of his job as my father, he started telling me he loved me when we talked on the phone, but it was very stilted.
Now, he’ll tell me with emotion in his voice that he loves me. I believe he actually believes it. Or at least that he loves the person he thinks of as his daughter. This was something I figured out after my medical crisis: neither of my parents love me as a person. They can’t because they don’t actually know me. And what they do know, they don’t like. I don’t think there is a single aspect of my personality that they think is a good thing. I made my peace with their disapproval, well, mostly.
How did I end up there again? My point is that I have had to soothe their emotions for all my life. I don’t know if I’m innately empathetic, but I have honed that skill over forty-plus years. Itt’s become second-nature to me, which is a positive AND a negative. Would I have chosen it for myself? I don’t know.
Back when I was in my twenties, it was the rage to say that bad things happened to people to make them have empathy. That enraged me because I didn’t think I needed to have gone through the horrid things I did in order to be empathetic.
I have realized, however, that some people do need to go through bad things in order to get empathy. Mainly, people who have been born into several categories of privilege and have not experienced the hard knocks many of us suffer through.
It’s so hard to explain privilege to people who have it because it’s normal to them. You can’t show the absence of something as easily as you can add to an experience/equation.
Ed. Note: I’ve finished Boyfriend Dungeon and I’m going to be talking about the controversy surrounding it, which means spoilers.
Boyfriend Dungeon by Kitfox Games came out with much fanfare and as soon as people finished it (the same day or the next; it wasn’t very long), a controversy exploded. In the beginning, there is a content warning about stalking and manipulative behavior, but it was pretty tame. I mentioned it in my last post, but to expand, I hated Eric from the moment I met him. I refused to have anything to do with him (and missed a weapon until after I beat the game. My second-fave, by the way, after the cat) and worried I had missed important information or anything that was game-critical.
I couldn’t do it, though. I could not interact with him because he repulsed me so much. I’m not someone who’s been stalked–well, not really. Not in the conventional way and he still creeped me out to the point where I refused to interact with him. I was also confused because the tone of the game is “Let’s go to the dunj! Smooch some swords! Have all the fun!” It’s very light and silly (though with some real emotions) and to have this stalker-character in it was jarring. Was he supposed to be a joke? Was he supposed to be menacing? I didn’t know. In addition, the other characters mostly treated him like a benevolent nuisance (which, to be fair, is how stalkers are treated in real life) so in the first half, I just ignored Eric when I could and gritted my teeth through the scenes he had to be in.
In the second half, however, and this is where I put out a really big spoiler, the game took a turn for the strange. So, ok, in the first half, you learn that someone is kidnapping weapons, damaging them, and leaving them in the dungeons. It did not surprise me one bit to find out it was Eric. In addition, he was using their bits to create an uber weapon of his own. He called it Matsume or something like that, but everyone else called it Katana. I was really confused because, again, I hadn’t done any of the Eric stuff. After I beat the game, I went back and did the Eric stuff. He says some really foul bullshit about how the ‘pure’ humans are superior to the ‘hybrids’ and that he was dreaming of making his own ultra weapon that would earn the name Matsume or whatever.
That made the denouement make more sense, but it wasn’t really necessary. Plus, I felt vile after reading Eric’s bullshit and wish I hadn’t. But, in the end, I was able to brush it aside. Here’s the issue. Many people were traumatized by the stalking part and I can understand why. It’s really well done (I mean, true to reality) and gives the player a sense of what it’s like to be stalked. He shows up everywhere and you can’t escape him. Plus, he ends up being the big baddie and you have to kill him (his sword, but really him). I can see why that would be horrible for people who had gone through it.