Few things irk me more on a social justice level than, “If you reverse the situation, then–” I’m not saying it’s the most important, but it’s fingernails on the chalkboard annoying to me. To clarify, when someone snidely says, “Imagine if a guy did that to a woman! He would get so much shit for it.” The latest time I read about it was on an Ask A Manager post was when I was re-reading old letters. There was one from a young woman with ADHD and autism who had a crush on her boss. Either on the letter on the update, someone HAD to say that if the genders were reverse, people would have different advice for the OP.
First of all, everyone told her that her boss was being correct to step back and establish firm boundaries. They took her to task for looking for love in all the wrong places and gave really good advice on how to tackle her issues with a strong suggestion of getting therapy specic to her issues. More than one person mentioned Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, and even though there were several people who just didn’t recoginize the importance of the autism/ADHD, no one gave her a pass on her behavior at work.
So what advice would have changed? The person who made that comment said something about the boss havinvg to do emotional labor (if it had been a young man crushing on his female boss), but…here’s the thing about doing the ‘what if it was the reverse?’ You can’t just flip the genders and call it a day. Part of the issue with isms is that it isn’t just discrete events in and of themselves with zero context. It’s about environment, history, and so much more.
I mean, it’s pretty obvious if you think about it. Things don’t happen in a vacuum. Context matters. This isn’t rocket science. It’s like when dudes say, “Hahahhahah I would love if women were constantly hitting on me” when brushing off catcalling. That’s because they are thinking of attractive women hitting on them and them having the ability to say no without consequence. They are not thinking it’s a woman they are not attracted to who could also kick their ass if she wanted. And they weren’t assured a way to get away from her. Nor did they have the history of not knowing if any interaction with a woman was going to end in being insulted, raged at, or attacked.
There’s a mystery book I read once. I can’t remember the series or the author, but the basic premise was a female cop as the protagonist living with her male cop boyfriend. At some point, he had to go help a victim of a mugging–a woman who was jogging at night. I think this was NYC in the ’80s. When he got home, he remarked to his partner that the victim should not have been jogging at that time of night. He didn’t mean to, but he was essentially blaming the victim.
The protag–Susan Dunlap. It just popped into my head. The character is Jill Smith. I think the book is Death and Taxes, but I’m not sure about that. I’m very sure about the author, though. Apparently, allowing my brain to relax is what does it.
Anyway, the protag…am I sure it’s her? I’m pretty sure. Anyway, she was upset, but her partner couldn’t see why what he said was a big deal. He was saying it wasn’t smart of the woman to go out in the dark. Jill stopped arguing, but she decided to show him what’s what. To that end, see, it’s like this. He had a plot of land in front of their house. Oh, and it’s Berkley, not NYC. He was meticulous about this piece of land and made sure to tend to it all the time. So, Jill decided that would be the center of the lesson she would try to teach him.
She messed up this piece of land. I can’t remember how, but maybe she poured in weed killer or something like that? I tihnk that was it. At any rate, sh emessed it up, but good, and her partner lost his mind. He started staking out the land to see who did it. He might have even put up surveillance cameras. The point being that it ate up all his brain space. he became obsessed with it and I don’t remmeber how many days she let him think a stranger had come and ruined his grass. I want to say three or four days. She finally confessed that she was the one who had done it as a way to show him how it felt to have something he loved ruined through no fault of his own and how it would make him feel. She did NOT think it would make him react like that (I don’t think), but it was a lesson for both of them.
It’s so true, though. It’s impossible to make other people see things they don’t have to experience. That’s the problem with telling someone to check their privilege–how would they do that? I’m not being snotty. I’m pointing out that you can’t check something you don’t know you have. I used to get tailed in stores, asked for my ID when using a check (yes, ages ago), and searched every time I traveled–‘randomly’. If someone does not experience this in their daily life, how on earth are they going to know what it feels like?
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t try to explain it, sometimes in very forceful words. It’s just that it’s the start of the conversation–not the end of it. Check your privilege, I mean. And, sometimes, checking my privilege means I use said privilege to get shit done. I mean, good shit–not bad. What’s the point of having privilege if I don’t use it for good?
Anyway. Back to reversing the ism. You can’t just reverse the example and ignore the context. In the case of the young woman who had a crush on her male boss–yeah, it’s not good. Yeah, he should (and did) set strong boundaries. And SHE should back the fuck off and not hit on him or flirt with him. But it’s simply not the same as if the genders were reversed. It’s just not. That’s the whole point! Context matters. If it was a young dude who was crushing on his boss, the actual advice probably would still be the same, but it would affect the boss differently because of course it would.
When I was in my twenties, I was talking to a guy about the Equal Rights Amendment. I was talking about equality, and he said smugly, “Oh yeah? Would you be willing to be drafted?” I wanted to punch him in the face because of how he sounded so ‘gotcha’ about it. I blasted him, I’ll admit. I listed a dozen things women had to deal with that men didn’t (including feeling unsafe walking alone at night, being groped by men on the regular, unequal pay, unfair expectations of how women should look, being constantly told to smile, lose weight, etc., and a bunch more. Oh yeah, getting married and having children, too. Like a broodmare.). After I was done, I looked him in the eye and said, “If you can promise me that all of that will go away if I can be drafted, then yes!”
He shut the fuck up and never brought it up again. Same with the guy (yes, it’s usually a white dude) in college with whom I was talking about novels. I mentioned that I was only reading women of color at the time–specifically Asian women if possible–and he said that was just reverse discrimination. I looked at him and said that I bet I had still read more dead white men than he had women of color, and he had nothing to say to that.
I don’t always speak my mind. In fact, I let things slide more often than not. But I felt really good on those two occasions and it showed me that I could speak up and did not have to remain silent.