Please Start Working On Your Bad Habits
I do not pretend in any way that I am unbound by cause and effect. I know the thing that caused me to look into this, and the thing that stirred these thoughts tonight into motion. The events are another trans woman being banned off Tumblr because she had the wrong opinions and a bunch of people harassed her for them until she snapped at them and was rude enough they could mass-report her.
The thing is, by the time this article goes up — and I have thrown it fairly forward into the future so I don’t have to worry too much about being seen as trying to comment on an ongoing situation and making life worse for the actual affected party in this situation — is that it’s pretty much guaranteed that whenever I put this up, you might think that this was written a week ago.
Content Warning: A general problem, and I refer to some slur words.
The thing that I keep coming back to when considering this in terms of lines of cause and effect is how often a lot of these problems that people have on these pressure cooker, brain pickling, infinite engagement web sockets, is they do nothing to discourage your bad habits and they give you ways to convert your bad habits into a kind of social virtue.
The example I’m going to focus on here, because it’s an easy one that semi-affects me and I have a pretty much ironclad opinion that I think I is 100% correct, is that guys is not a gender-neutral group term. Anyone who wants to come at me and argue that, actually what I mean is — first gets sprayed with a hose, and then gets the uniform response of I don’t fucking care.
Guys is not a gender neutral group address, and you know it, and you know you know it because you’re already trying to come up with a rationale as to why it’s not and you know that rationale runs into ‘it just is,’ which isn’t actually a reason. Guys is a masc-gendered word that all the societies using it have been using to refer to men. When someone asks you to not use guys if you want to refer to them, that’s because they recognize that word is masc and they don’t want you to use it. Your reaction to this is where we start on bad habits.
Fundamentally, using this term in this way, this lazy, all-crowds-are-pretty-much-male, that is a bad habit, and it’s okay to have bad habits. We all have bad habits. I interrupt people more than I should. I try to answer questions that haven’t been completely asked and in the process lose nuance and take control of the conversation away from the person I’m talking to. Those are a bad habit and I try to work on it, and I hopefully do them less now than I did before I tried.
Using guys as a group term is a habit you probably picked up very young. That means you’ve probably done it a lot and now getting rid of it feels like you’re losing something, or that you’re referring to your past self as wrong, or maybe even feeling like you’re being rebuked by someone who doesn’t have the right to do that. These are defensive positions of an injured ego.
I’m old enough that I also picked up some words when I was younger, and used them pretty freely for a time, until I grew up a bit and learned more about how people like to be treated and the ways that how I communicate lead to meaningful connections. For example, when I was young, faggot and retarded were extremely common terms. I don’t use those terms now in my general language, because I have slowly but steadily got myself out of the habit of thinking of those words as useful places to go when I want something to express those feelings (bad and foolish, respectively).
It is hard to break a habit.
Shifting these terms out of your lexicon is ultimately a matter of consciously choosing to use them less, over and over, until you stop using them. Some people can do a hard cut, but it’s a word, you’re in the habit of using it, and that means not using it involves changing that habit.
A pretty reasonable response, when you’re dealing with people you actually want to be in community with, is when you notice a bad habit of yours – that is to say, something you don’t actually think is a simple good you want to do, but something you are aware negatively affects people for no meaningful gain, – is to acknowledge it and try to work on it. This doesn’t mean you get one chance then you’re out, and it doesn’t mean you get infinite chances and there’s no point trying. It means that you want to acknowledge the problem and work on getting better about it, but that work is largely to just find alternative behaviours.
Social media wants us to make social media into a habit. It is a pretty bad habit too. This enmeshment means that the system has a clear incentive to encourage us to not change bad habits. And I get it, changing bad habits is hard. As I say this now, I know that there is a plate in the sink I should have put in the dishwasher. By mentioning it, I might get around to doing it when this article is finished being written. The problem with bad habits like this, though, if you’re not prepared to recognise and reflect on them, puts you in a position where your only response to encountering a negative reaction to a bad habit is treat your bad habit like it is a virtue, and that it is unreasonable for anyone to criticise it, and that it is, actually, not a big deal. These three incompatible defenses are what we call a kettle defense. If you think all three of those things about what you’re being told, then chances are good, you are not actually thinking through what you’re being told and you’re pre-emptively escaping the reaction.
I get it! It can suck to feel bad about calling a woman ‘guys,’ and then having her point that out. Makes me feel like a bozo when I do it (and I have done it!).
The bad habit wants you to keep doing it, because it wasn’t wrong to do it, and that means you need to do something to deal with the thing that makes you feel like it was wrong to do it. The unreasonable defensive response needs to be dealt with, and needing to be dealt with requires action and that action is probably aimed at discarding, hiding, or destroying the thing that caused the hurt. It ultimately escalates into harassment campaigns. You can’t be wrong, so the person pointing out the problem must be wrong. They made you feel bad, so you want to make them feel bad. And you want to retaliate against them somehow but maybe not them, because they have a big following? And they’re kinda mean?
Such a sequence of urges and resistances creates a sorting mechanism that means that just coincidentally, these bravest soldiers swinging out of petty, bad-habit hurt over things that you can really just handle by talking to people like normal humans, will have to find black people or trans women to wear their ire. Those two people who have just the worst combination of visibility and vulnerability.
Your habit wants to encourage your habit.
I do wish to offer you a tiny off-ramp.
Well, the modest sized off-ramp is going ‘oh yeah? Guys probably is masc. Okay, I can work on that,’ and then just use it less, or at least be mindful of if you’re using it with anyone who want to be called ‘guys.’
The tiny off-ramp is that because bad habits want you to keep engaging with them, the first step to changing them in my experience is full-blown acknowledgement and embrace of the badness of them. That is to say, don’t try and cold-turkey not doing the thing you want to do, but instead consider that it is a bad thing you do, and therefore, you need to make sure you’re doing it well and safely. Smoking’s a bad habit but as long as you do it in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone, I don’t care.
To continue with our example of ‘calling people guys,’ it seems to me the main reason people prefer to use it is because it’s an easier thing to say. English linguistics has lazy language, really evidently. There’s this whole vowel sound we use to replace whole words because it’s easier (it’s called the schwa, and it’s why you wanna go to tha store). Guys is an easier thing to say than ‘all of you,’ especially when you’ve started with ‘you’ (which is a thing we natively do). I’m not gunna help you with your elocution, but y’know what’s super easy to segue into from ‘you?’ ‘y’all.’ It’s gender neutral, it skips guys, and it uses the lazy schwa sound.
Is it a bad habit to say ‘y’all’ to people? Probably. I imagine it makes me sound a bit like rural hick to my cohort at work, but I don’t imagine they want to hear me say ‘you guys’ to the room including my bosses who are women.
And look, this is not really, ultimately, about ‘guys.’ It’s about people whose bad habit is enjoying bullying people. It’s okay, it’s a really normal thing, a significant percentage of the population like having a feeling of power and control over other people without any responsibility, and that’s where bullying steps in to give you all the rush you want. The normal solution of the sorting mechanism is that instead of trying to say, bully a crocodile or a horse, something hard to bully, they instead move on to bullying something that they can manage, that’s weaker than them, more vulnerable than them, that can be affected by their love of power and control without responsibility. The alternative is looking at themselves and realising, just honestly, ‘hey, I like being mean to people. For fun.’
It’s funny how many of these folks are puritanical about kinks though because they’re just describing a particular type of sexless dominant. There are lots of people out there who are mean to people, for fun, and everyone involved in the conversation enjoys themselves and you don’t have to write a 75 page google doc manifesto about how rooting through someone’s garbage justified rooting through their garbage.
Hell, know how easy bullying and findom are? There are AI girlfriends that exist to bully and findom people, and they work, and are successfully getting goobers to send them money. They can find consensual partners because they can keep their interest and pleasure in power and control without responsibility contained to a reasonable space.
I dunno, maybe like, ask yourself if the ways you’re awful, the things you’re doing to enjoy yourself, can be replaced with a chatbot, that maybe you could be using it to do something better? Displacing chatbots at least.
Look, I appreciate that what I’m describing isn’t actually easy. Habits are hard, so much so we have an entire study of them and it’s a well-populated field where some truly awful people are getting paid lots of money to convince you that you actually prefer the flavour of Coke Zero. We exist in a landscape where people are trying to take control of us through our habits, and make their enforced engagement in our lives into something we can’t help but do, and love, and defend.
Just there’s gotta be better targets, which are more fun for everyone, and funnier, than conspicuously, Another Trans Woman who was trying to live her fucking life talking to her friends.
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