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Pinned Tag Master Post because the Tumblr Search Function is Awful
the legally blonde mentality isnt just for law students. u can bring that attitude with you into every field of work. be the whimsical force of positive change. wear that neon outfit. snaps for us all.
this post was inspired by my boss telling me she couldnt "take me seriously" in a pair of dinosaur print overalls. sorry i have two degrees and a dope wardrobe. you dont need to take me seriously but You Will Take Me.
Homemade Vanilla Cake Recipe
Quick egg recipe
X
Remember to eat, my loves!
went to a new optometrist today wearing my squid facts ‘save our freaks dont mine the deep’ shirt from @sarahmackattack that has a strawberry squid on it. and i wasn’t even thinking about it but the optometrist walked in and he was like ‘oh what does your shirt say’ so i showed him and he was like ‘oh that’s neat!’ and then i thought he might like to know about strawberry squid eyes since they have weird eyes and he is an optometrist and all. so i was like ‘yeah it’s actually a real kind of squid called a strawberry squid, their eyes are really cool because they have one big yellow-green one and one small blue one’ and he kind of gasped and went ‘oh my god that’s so interesting i wonder why they have that. do you know what their retina composition is like?’ and i watched as he minimized my chart on the computer and started looking up images of strawberry squid and then he googled ‘strawberry squid retina composition’ and he was like ‘sorry we’ll get to your eye exam in a moment i just really want to find out’ LMAO 10/10 optometrist experience will be returning
it genuinely melts my brain watching people take sith monologues at face value like they’re TED talks instead of… you know… villain speeches.
like. these are not neutral historians. these are not unbiased narrators. these are men who wake up every morning and choose manipulation as a lifestyle.
and yet people hear palpatine whispering into anakin’s ear like “the jedi are hiding things from you… they don’t trust you…” and go. wow. compelling. source: dude in a hood who has never told the truth once in his life.
HELLO???
of course he’s going to say that. what else is he supposed to do. sit anakin down and go “hi yes i am actively trying to emotionally isolate you from your support system so i can turn you into my apprentice and ruin your life” like be serious 😭
same with maul going “you’ve been indoctrinated by the jedi” as if HE wasn’t raised in a sith pipeline since childhood. sir. that is not a revelation.
and dooku. walking around like a philosophy professor going “the republic is corrupt” yeah okay, we know, and your solution is… fascism with extra lightning???
like yes. the jedi made mistakes. but, they’re an institution, not a divine being. but the leap from “the jedi aren’t perfect” to “the sith are telling the truth actually” is INSANE to me.
truly like. to have a successful mutually beneficial interpersonal relationship with someone its very important that you believe that they are a full real entire person just like you are, really believe that. and then you have to successfully communicate that to the other person. and they have to believe the same thing, AND successfully communicate it to the other person. and then you have to decide how you want your relationship with each other to be and you have to agree on most things, or else it doesn't make sense. and you have to actually believe it and not just want to believe it in order to be able to believe you yourself are a good person. you have to actually believe it.
i think those are most of the. the ones you can't do without, if you want it to be relationally healing or whatever. people will be able to tell if you do not really think they are a person with interiority in the way they are. they will not like it.
most of us flatten others to some degree and we do this bc we need psychologically to be able to justify the fact that our brains only have so much social categorization capacity. if you're doing it to the people directly around you, they'll notice.
I didn't understand why people were reacting to me the way they were until I understood what my behavior had been saying to them! then it made perfect sense and I was like "oh shit that's not what I wanted to communicate to you at all, geez, I have to get better at understanding this language so I can make sure I'm showing the things I believe with my behavior in a way this person will understand and that will not instead harm them! i definitely do not want to be harming people but I was sort of unpersoning this person to justify how I was acting because I was making choices based on what I wanted and not what they wanted. if someone asked me straight up "do you want to have interpersonal relationships where you're always making choices based on what you need and discounting what the other person needs and wants?" i would say "no! i don't want to have those kind of relationships! i value not hurting people!" but in those individual instances I was ignoring behavioral communication that I was receiving to just go ahead with what I wanted.
i don't think it's evil to say things like "look buddy I don't care if you're having a bad day, I really did NOT like being spoken to that way" to dismiss someone's feelings. but if someone you claim to care about is behaving in a way that YOU CAN READ as hesitant or reluctant to bring up what you are doing and how it is hurting them, then you better respond to that by saying "hey if you don't want the same things that I want, that's okay. i just want to know the real answer so we can be on the same page. i really value you and it is important to me that you be able to trust me. i have not behaved in a way that has made you feel that I am trustworthy. i will behave differently in order to communicate that to you better"
like sometimes someone's answer is truly "well I don't really see you as a full human person with interiority" like for real for real. and boy howdy that can sure change your interactions if you can read it, right? like when a doctor has shown me that I can't trust them to believe I am a person who is accurately reporting what is going on with my health, that changes EVERYTHING about the interaction. And if someone i LIKE and who I VALUE tells me that they weren't considering me to be a real person, that's a whole different thing.
I'm not saying everyone is always telling you exactly how human they see you as at all times. but like. its there subconsciously! some people are fine with this and some people grapple with it. i grapple with it a lot. its really hard right? sometimes not seeing yourself as uniquely different is hard. sometimes you know that it is important that you see others that way all the time because it's what is true; we are all human beings. no one can value every single other human the same as themselves or the people they love because we would go insane I think. sometimes it's easy to slot someone you like a whole lot into that grouping a little bit, sometimes, because you want something. sometimes you want that person to play a role in your life that they are not prepared and don't want to play. if people feel like their needs don't matter to you as much as your own, they will not feel fully safe in the relationship, and they'll be right.
this can describe a lot of dynamics and obviously one end of the spectrum is abuse but stuff that isn't abuse can also involve an amount of doing this. its just that the amount and kind of harm it causes depends on the specific circumstances in each case.
this is my most truest hottest deepest cptsd hack. all trauma is relational. you have to regain your own personhood not by denying the personhood of others, but by believing in the personhood of the people around you. and then include yourself.
now maintain that.
that's my ego death recipe! enjoy
this bit
sometimes someone's answer is truly "well I don't really see you as a full human person with interiority"
is sooo difficult to confront when you are the one doing this because you've been conditioned to believe thats how everybody is interacting. like as a child I struggled to feel seen + understood as a real person by nearly everyone around me, and I think ultimately that led to a rejection of my own responsibility to see others as whole people in their own right. I started to assume that all my social interactions would involve my personhood being ignored and by assuming that I was implicitly refusing to see others as people themselves! So no wonder I was never overcoming the canyon between myself and others and felt incredibly alone.
Over-extrapolating a perceived pattern like that is very easy to do I think. I only interrupted that tendency in myself after fully leaving home and my social context (and growing up lol). And even then it wasn't like a switch flipped, it took practice and commitment to trying to see people as people, and the good luck to meet people who were also trying to connect on that level.
yes yes! I think most people who habitually do this have been taught that how you get your own needs met involves dehumanizing others/denying that they have needs that are as important as your own. I grew up being the only person who would consider my own needs so it made sense for me as a child in that situation to be able to disregard the humanity of the people controlling me to prioritize my own narrative. however! ☝️ ONCE YOU ARE ADULT interacting with PEERS this becomes unfair and harmful! you HAVE to stop treating the people you love like your abusive parents. has been my takeaway. sooooo many of us have noooo idea that is what we are doing when it is absolutely what we are doing. we ascribe people who we feel our selfhood threatened by for whatever reason as having some authority we are justified in resisting, even when that is absolutely not at all the case and we in fact simply don't know how to navigate stressful situations where that ISN'T the case.
this harmonizes very nicely with what I've been thinking of as the role of curiosity in relationships. as I see it, if I acknowledge someone else's personhood and interiority, that also carries a measure of curiosity - or at least a lack of certainty, because I can't assume they follow the patterns I've already seen.
curiosity is hard. it takes a lot of energy, and admitting I don't know is very vulnerable, and I think that effort is part of the reason why it's sometimes downright easier to flatten people. which relates, to me, to the role of fear in dehumanization, because when my trauma made it harder to be vulnerable because I was so guarded, I could not bear the idea of being wrong, especially about other people (not to mention that, to me, being wrong about someone felt dangerous).
I think the closest I've gotten to an internal solution with this is to remember that curiosity is tiring, but it's not all or nothing - I can be passively open to being wrong without actively looking for it, the way I do with my loved ones. but dear lord did it take me a long time to get there.
yeah!!! and I had to get over a bump when learning this where I realized I was getting better at reading people which sometimes meant I could conceptualize why they were acting a certain way than they could, because I was thinking about it and they weren't. and I had to figure out how to square that with the fact that every person is the only person with access to their own interiority. and even when I am Quite confident that the guy screaming at the cashier is doing so because he's insecure and embarrassed about making a mistake, that doesn't mean that I know better than him what his experience is feeling like to him in that moment. i can guess! and some situations I'm more likely to be right than others. but I'm still building a system to approximate being able to imagine what someone is experiencing and feeling based on behavioral clues and pattern recognition. that comes with a necessary caveat that my information can be (and in fact will always be to some degree, even if I'm correct) incomplete. and THAT necessitates me prioritizing continually gathering the information that will help me modify my models and equations which necessitates CURIOSITY yes yes I love curiosity thank you for bringing up curiosity :)
Wow! This sounds a lot like what Nonviolent Communication is trying to do. It never says it quite as clearly tho. It has scripts centered around explicitly stating that you're guessing the other person's emotions, but in the literature there's a sort of '????? ... Step 4, Profit!' where they don't really say why it's helpful. Not that the personhood thing is the only reason, but it's significant!
this has been my huuuge frustration with NVC as a framework! its prescriptive but it doesn't explain what things are most important to prioritize or why, which is often different depending on the specific situation. it doesn't give you the tools to make those determinations yourself, only the tools to Follow Directions. or at least the literature I have read about it does that.
and this is not the FAULT of the framing NVC uses, but not for nothing: I've had people weaponize the concept of NVC frameworks to justify why they don't have to listen to me when I am expressing that something they do has hurt me or someone else, because I "didn't say it right" by which they mean "in the way specified in the NVC guide"
i think sometimes people in the Process of Trying to Heal can latch onto anything prescriptive about interpersonal interaction to use as an excuse for not receiving feedback that they don't like. and I think it's an issue that NVC can be easily utilized this way
that's been our experience of NVC too - that there are people who use it creatively to improve communication, but there are way too many people who latch onto it as a set of Social Rules and then use it (consciously or not) to manipulate other people, by framing whatever they want to happen as "my needs" so their "needs" somehow always trump others' needs
Outstanding!
Reminds me of the time we dared a brick oven pizza restaurant to make a pizza with so much garlic we couldn't finish it.
Boy did they deliver. The pizza had (no exaggeration) a solid inch of chopped garlic on top. It was fucking delicious. Multiple times we spotted restaurant workers peeking at us from the kitchen, with an obvious "my god they're actually eating it!" energy.
Of course we left a massive tip. Leaving the place we felt like triumphant Olympians gold-medaling the Pizza Event.
Only one problem.
This was a lunch time experience, and we worked at a small software development firm and there was a scheduled all-hands meeting after lunch. Our supervisor (politely) asked us to leave the meeting because we reeked of garlic.
That sounds more like a solution than a problem to me, the meeting hater
Shhhhhh, don't tell Management.
I wanted to get a video of this ghost crab but every time I got close to their hole they scuttled back in, so I tried getting clever with it. I made a little sandcastle and shoved my phone into it, hit record, and walked away. Crab was VERY suspicious of this addition to their environment.
girl you erected a mysterious black monolith that contained all the knowledge your culture had ever collected were you hoping he'd develop rudimentary tool use
he's a crab, he already has factory-fit rudimentary tool use
now we want to see him slowly remove the phone's memory chips while the phone plays daisy daisy
Can I be honest with yall I don't want to hear SHIT against cishets at pride this year
"But it's not FOR them!!!" The biggest military power in the world belongs to a christofascist nation overseen by a felon found guilty of 34 federal crimes and has greenlit a gestapo with more direct funding than the entire military of Canada for the purpose of ethnic cleansing. Let Hetero Jessica throw some biodegradable glitter at a municipal parade
At this point if anyone is trying to exclude anyone benignly pro-queer from a pro-queer space I'm just going to assume you're a fed or something idk like something something destabilize the movement from within or whatever
The assholes openly admit it. The whole point of college is to enforce the hierarchy. When those who were supposed to be low on the hierarchy started going to college, the assholes get angry and want to make them suffer for challenging the hierarchy.
Yet another reason this is insanely revisionist is that it pretends the whole reason millennials felt so much pressure to go to college wasn't that conservative politicians had spent the eighties and nineties wrecking the shit out of labor unions to the point that by the time millennials turned eighteen, it was suddenly a lot harder to count on being able to work at a working-class job all your life and still have a good living.
College, all of a sudden, went from "something I'd like to do if I can get in" to "a lifeline in an economy where blue collar jobs are going to shit."
The wheel's turned long enough that now college students are being treated the way union workers and union-adjacent workers were treated in the eighties and nineties, so now college grads are the ones that it's fashionable to shit on, and the new fix-all solution is supposed to be "go into the trades!" Which means that by the 2050s at the latest, we'll be coming up with some new lie to blame people in the trades for the fact that now they're in trouble. And we'll have some new job that everyone should have been doing instead.
i think we might need to eat the rich
And it's amazing that no one yet has mentioned just how much tuition and fees in relation to income increased since the boomers went to college.
It is so much more expensive than it used to be. Incredibly, prohibitively, ridiculously, onerously, fucking stupidly expensive.
It used to be that you could pay for a 4 year degree at a state university with money you earned during the summer, and maybe a part time job you worked at the rest of the year.
Now that same university will put you in debt for life.
we think of ourselves as "busters" - people born right in the cusp of the end of boomerdom, so we went all through our schooling being told "yes you must get good O levels so you can get good A levels so you can go to university and get a degree so you can get a good job"
and then in our final year at school Thetcher got in over here and did what Reagan was doing Over There and our teachers were suddenly like "um yeah okay so there aren't any jobs anyway but you might as well carry on, sunk cost and all that"
and our brother had a friend who got an engineering degree and then couldn't find work and ended up on a street cleaning crew in Glasgow, and his first day on the job he was in their communal shed drinking tea with the team and found out he was the least qualified person there - the rest had MAs and there were a couple of PhDs
and now it feels more like "you have to go to college because at least that's a few more years before you have to venture into the Job Market which will try to hunt you and kill you"
i think it's important to acknowledge that the reason why mastercard/visa has such a stranglehold on american society is because cash is not the main form of payment in the usa. the predominance of card has effectively privatized currency
in japan, one of the reasons why dlsite and other similar websites are able to just remove visa as a payment option instead of changing any of their merchandise (aside from the fact that visa doesn't have a monopoly here) is because cash payments for online transactions remain an option. even if you don't have a jcb credit card or paypay or whatever, you can still pay for your online purchases using cash by taking your barcode to a convenience store, and you can do this for essentially every online vendor, meaning credit card companies can't just impose their moral judgments on your purchases with much repercussion
How does that barcode system work? I've never heard of something like that.
1. you add whatever porn games or movies or books you want to your cart and go to checkout
2. you select cash payment at conbini as your payment method
3. youre emailed a barcode that you take to the conbini
4. you show it to the cashier, they scan it, and you pay what you owe. note that the cashier does not see what youre buying
and the transaction is complete
in Brazil we have Pix, a form of payment that is incredibly easy and free to make from any bank to any bank, usually done by mobile app, and so online payments are being done more and more by pix. it was created only a few years ago and it caught on like fire because its cheaper than cards (since you don't have to pay visa or Mastercard to use it)
This year trump is pressuring Brazil to destroy Pix. It won't happen, of course, but the very idea that a foreign country can try to pressure us into making all our financial transactions through companies from their country pisses me off. Pix is superior to credit cards in every single way, but right now I'm just glad we still have payment options even when credit card companies are being obtuse. pity the US doesn't have anything like that, and so we are all subject to bullying by credit card companies
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one of the most difficult things about deciding you want to write a fictional doctor (of the non-who variety) is writing actual medical scenes. we all know that medical dramas are notoriously cliched, and i for one fully understand how unimportant factual accuracy can be to the emotional importance of a scene. sometimes you don’t have to get it write for your story to work. i have a disclaimer on my blog that i myself am just a layman, but i like to at least know what i’m writing about! in the interest of being as accurate as i can, i would like to spread that love around. here’s a list of medical fiction/fantasy writing resources i’ve found!
surgeonsblog
article i found this from^ (w/even more resources)
redwoods medical edge
^article where i found that
this article is short/basic/doesn’t link anywhere else, but i found it very helpful anyway
supposed to be good but to me, seemed difficult to navigate. (dp lyle)
this on the otherhand, is the jackpot (novelmalpractice)
tumblr blog centered around this topic
this is more about the common pitfalls/anachronisms of medical fiction but still helpful
writing medical scenes: useful links by paul anthony shortt
the last one im going to include is an article by a doctor about common mistakes in popular medical shows, i liked this one
tagging who liked the interest check on this @hesjustcarter @prodigiumamare @frankengeeks
and this isn't even getting into harm that's genuinely necessary! i read a book recently that was intended to educate people in healthcare about medical trauma, written by a medical professional who found that there weren't existing resources to help her cope with the aftermath of the extremely traumatic c section that saved her life. the whole tone of the book was "i know you've never thought about this before, but walk with me through this case study" and it's aimed at other medical professionals! it's aimed at the people who are doing this harm, and so many of them think that people aren't allowed to find it harmful just because it's necessary!
so many trauma resources assume that your trauma is from a specific person or people who treated you in a way that society deems unacceptable. if your trauma doesn't fit that profile then you're left sitting there like. idk i dont think most of this stuff applies to me. where are the resources for people like me.
if you were ever scared or in pain and were told that you had to grin and bear it because it's necessary for you to do the thing that scares and hurts you, you are allowed to say that that was traumatic. you are allowed to say that you were scared and in pain and that even if this was the least bad option, even if it was lifesaving, it still was not okay. something being necessary does not inherently make it okay.
Foreigners tend to assume that the big cultural confusions between Australians and most other countries are gonna be based on our food, or social services, or weather, or weird animals. But it’s never that. In my experience, the real cultural confusions re: Australians are about The Respect Thing almost one hundred per cent of the time.
? I realize im proving your point but what
The broader Australian culture doesn’t, as a whole, have status-based respect. Some individual groups might, because they’ve brought it from other cultures they’re involved in, but the general culture doesn’t. There’s no sense that your boss or scout leader or the guy in charge of your country deserves more respect than you, or that you should behave differently to them than you would to any random person you know similarly well. (The very rare exceptions include ritualised settings, such as courtrooms, and for some reason the fact that children use “Miss/Ms/Mr” honourifics for teachers at school.)
I don’t mean Australians are a “stick it to the man, fight back against those in power” kind of people – we’re generally not. And I don’t mean we have a “we’re going to do the status thing but pretend we don’t and pretend to all be equal in mixed company” thing that middle-class Americans do. I mean the status-respect system does not exist, and if you try to use it, it weirds people the fuck out at best, and insults them at worst. Treating someone most countries would say is ‘above’ you differently in Australia is basically telling that person that you hate them; it’s saying “I’m forced to interact with you due to our current circumstances but I don’t see you as a person and won’t grant you the basic respect of treating you like an equal”. (When I was in America, I was constantly suppressing the instinct that random service people were sassing me because they overuse honourifics and were so keen to help me.)
This makes interacting with foreigners really baffling in a lot of circumstances. In university, my international friends would often describe Australians as “friendly, but very rude”. They thought we were all arseholes because of the way we spoke to our PhD supervisors and soforth, and wouldn’t believe us when we explained that our behaviour was respectful and that being deferential would be weird and awkward and insulting to them. Learning Japanese had a similar problem; everyone in the class could get the concept of different levels of formality and deference in language, ans was happy to memorise the usage of various words for Japanese people, but using them on each other was super weird, and we’d only ever use the most casual form of anything unless specifically instructed otherwise by the teacher.
The reason I’ve been thinking of this lately is because I’ve recently become aware that a lot of countries have like… a special respect for their country’s leaders? I don’t just mean “yeah, that guy makes the rules”, but that having that office makes them better than everyone else, somehow. Which I expect from countries with royal families, because Tradition, but I’ve recently found that Americans feel this way about their President, too. (Except the current one, who seems to be enough of a dick to break the system.) Like, if six Americans were in an aeroplane that was going down and there was only one parachute and one of the Americans was A Generic Non-Trump President, it’s just assumed that that guy gets the parachute? Like he’s automatically the life worth saving over the others, and they’d just give up their chance in favour of him? And that’s so weird to me. An Australian prime minister would have a 1 in 6 chance at the parachute; however the people decided, “this guy happens to be the leader of the country” wouldn’t be a factor.
When Americans don’t like a President, they usually feel the need to work in how he’s “not my president”, either through sheer denial, or by finding some way he’s theoretically illegitimate (different ways votes are counted, wild conspiracy theories about birth country, etc.), and while making sure those rules are obeyed IS extremely important, I’ve recently noticed that part of the motivation seems to be that they’re invested in whether he’s Really The President because being the President somehow makes someone Special rather than just a normal dick who’s been put in charge of the group project. (You see the same thing in “THIS IS TRUMP’S AMERICA!”, like him becoming President gives him superpowers or something).
This is getting off-topic. Point is, in Australia you can run into the Prime Minister and ask him to help you fix your phone and if he’s not busy but refused to help you out he’d be kind of a dick; of course he should help you out. And if I walk into your restaurant and you act like I’m a movie star and you’re going to be super attentive to my every need because I’m The Customer, I’m gonna get creeped out. We’re suspicious and insulted by what most people in the world consider to be basic manners, and vice versa. And it makes interacting with foreigners super weird because I always feel like they’ve got some invisible heirarchical flowchart in the back of their minds that I don’t.
I have long noticed that Americans have absolutely the same cultural attitude to the President as they would to a serving monarchy. They just think they don’t on a technicality.
Can confirm that if I call someone ‘Sir/Madam’ I generally mean ‘asshole’ (unless talking to an animal or tiny child) and that if I get called Ma’am I feel like I’m being called the asshole, which made time in Atlanta, Georgia suoer weird.
Australians have a very good attitude to respect
…so this explains why I have spent the last fourteen years low-grade pissed off at nearly every Australian I meet, because every time I try to be American Polite at them it pisses them off. And, for that matter, why my second boss here, the one I was so careful to be Formally Respectful of and always called “sir,” took such an intense dislike to me.
Yeah, even if that boss understood that you were American and what that meant, their instincts would’ve been screaming at them the whole time that you were being a dick. It’s a difficult thing for us to get used to even when we know the culture is different’.
As a Brit visiting Australia, the most vivid experience I had of this is: in the UK it’s really uncool to get into the passenger seat of a cab - you’re expected to get in the back. In Australia the reverse was apparently true.
… I am only just now realising that inAmerican and British movies and stuff, people don’t get in the passenger seat of a taxi.
covid update: you’re now meant to get in the back seat for social distancing and IT FEELS SO RUDE. sorry taxi person I AM NOT TRYING TO SHUN YOu just I know there are rules and we’re protecting each other. let’s be intensely awkward for a while.
Reblogging this because I just remembered the time Molly Meldrum absolutely horrified Prince Charles by describing meeting the Queen as “I saw your mum last week”.
One of my favorite travel books described humanity as, broadly speaking, having two types of culture: one where formal is respectful and informal is rude, and vice versa. Australian culture sees formality as hostile or unfriendly and familiarity as warmth. It’s decidedly not the case in USA as a whole, though as with any broad category the dichotomy changes as the group gets smaller.
YOU PUT THE THING INTO WORDS!
Different cultures are fascinating.
Look there’s honestly a lot of history that build our culture today to be like this. We never really had a true aristocracy or class system in Australia and was still considered the dirty colonies up until federation in 1901. Even when we had the gold rush in the 19th century there were rich people but also anyone could dig up a nugget and get rich so no one really bothered with the rich = better than you thing because old johnno down the road who normally is on the piss all day and lives in a swag just picked up a 2lb piece of gold that’s worth thousands of dollars so now he can go buy his own pub and sell his own beer but everyone will still think of him as that guy who was always cracking bad jokes at the end of the bar and drinking a minimum of 8 beers a day. Sure we have rich people but we also pull them back down to earth when they get hoity toity. Australia is one of the most unionised countries in the world and yeah its true we dont get upset by much but when we do, all hell breaks loose. Look up some of Australia’s biggest protests and union movements like the convict rebellions, Eureka stockade, the campaign for the 8 hour day, and he general history of our Australian Labor Party. Australia was the second country in the world to grant women’s suffrage. So many unions and strikes and demands we made in Australia demanding equal and fair rights to working class in the 19th century that by federation in 1901 we were ahead of the world with workers rights and equality. Really the only class system we had was the employer employee divide but we still never bowed down and took it from them just because they boss. I’m not going to go into what happened in the 20th century but if you’re interested definitely look up post war Australia, the women’s working unions in the middle of the century, definitely look up the late Bob Hawke and his legacy, the nurse’s strike in Victoria in the 80s, the land rights movement and Eddie Mabo, and go from there.
I remember in school we were always taught to treat others how you wanted to be treated. You were no better or worse than anyone else. You want to be treated equal to everyone else and that meant being polite and showing decency and helping each other out. It’s true we only use titles for teachers or elders (indigenous Australians use “Aunty” and “Uncle” as a show of respect to their elders) but outside of that if someone calls you Miss y/n or sir or whatever it’s just uncomfortable. In hospitality and retail some of us will still use sir/ma'am mainly because we don’t know customers names but even then that’s rare and usually applied only to elderly. We personally don’t want to be addressed by titles or even surnames (unless it’s a nickname which I’ll get to) so we don’t use the titles or surnames for other people. With surnames often we use them as a nickname if we dont/can’t shorten their names. Getting a nickname (a good one, not one that is intentionally meant to bully you ofc. E.g. ScoMo is the nickname for our PM but he’s a piece of shit and ScoMo sounds a lot like Scum-mo) is the biggest show of respect in Australia. Usually it’s simply just adding a vowel or changing it up a little. I.e. John = johnno, Darren = Dazza, etc. If we can’t do it to your first name we do it to your last name. If we can’t do it to your last name it’s either a feature or behaviour and we put it in a good light. You ever notice that Australians like to make fun of each other and “insult” each other? There’s a very subtle difference when it’s truly meant to be insulting but that’s our way of being affectionate for each other. We will point out your flaws and make fun of you (and stop if you say no) and we will give you a nickname and it’s all in good humour. It’s one of the things I find foreigners get really upset about because they dont understand why we are so rude to each other. You build up a hard skin in this country and forget hat sometimes that stuff IS a bit insulting.
It’s a very backwards system of respect but it is a very honest one. No one is better than you. No one is worse than you. We are all humans.
We treat our acquaintances like friends and our friends like family. Teasing your friends is expected the same way it is for siblings. If you act like someone is above you, in a not-joking way, that’s basically declaring that you don’t see them as potential friend material—that something about them repels you and you want as many barriers between you as possible.
It would hurt my dad so badly if I ever called him “sir.”
Yep, and the automatic assumption that you think I’m an idiot/bitch if I’m called ma'am. The only time it has ever happened and I haven’t taken offence has been brand new army recruits/cadets, who are required to use it while in public to show deference to civilians.
I legit take less offense from being referred to as a pigdog cunt than I do being called ma'am. Getting a sweary character reference or having a friend call you a mad cbomb is totally fine in Aus. Ma'am is not something I associate with respect, being included as part of the group, or acceptance in any way - it’s pointing out rather emphatically that you are “other”
This is interesting as hell as an American raised in an Active Duty environment. As a kid I called everyone Ma’am or Sir and I wonder how jarring that child would be in Australia
Whenever I watch an American show and a kid calls their parents ‘sir’ and/or ‘ma'am’ I immediately assume that the intention is to clue the audience in on the fact that that child is being very severely abused. Addressing an elderly neighbour or something like that would be seen as charmingly respectful from a kid, but doing it to all adults would set off alarm bells in the heads of any Australian adult who wasn’t familiar with your past. They’d get it once they learned you were raised around American soldiers though, and expect you to grow out of it.
That’s why calling someone a cunt is friendly?!?!?
Calling a stranger ‘cunt’ isn’t, but calling a friend ‘cunt’ can be. Every culture in the world includes teasing as a gesture of intimacy to some degree, but it is very prominent in Australian culture. On a fundamental social level, teasing is social playfighting; it’s creating or reaffirming intimacy by demonstrating the option for aggression and not taking it. It’s saying “I trust you by showing that I’m not afraid to posture aggression because I know that you won’t dangerously escalate. I’m demonstrating that you can trust me, by not escalating and hurting you. We’re so close and so chill together that I can say this about you and you don’t even care.” It’s the vocal equivalent of a playful punch in the arm.
Australian general culture can’t really rely on the dropping of status indicators as a demonstration of intimacy, because we don’t use them, so we rely a lot more heavily on teasing as a demonstration of intimacy than many cultures. The risk of this, of course, is that if you do hurt someone, you’ve gone in the opposite direction. And there’s always the risk that you’ll hurt someone and they’ll brush it off because they don’t want to escalate, and doing that accidentally sucks for everyone and doing it intentionally is just bullying.
So yeah, calling someone a 'cunt’ can be friendly, or it can be a declaration of war, and the context and other terms used indicate which is which, because that’s how teasing works.
same in certain parts of britain - certainly in essex and some parts of scotland, saying “alright, cunt?” is very friendly, and it’s all about tone of voice whether you’re insulting people
