Against Violating Boundaries, Hormesis, and Punch Buggy
So I held off on posting thoughts on Duncan Sabien’s In Defence Of Punch Buggy, largely because I didn’t like it too much and didn’t think my thoughts + the original post in conjunction were a valuable enough thing to post. But I’ve recently crystalised a disagreement I have with one of its models, with noticing that a lot of people’s actions could be explained by them implicitly holding this model.
The tl;dr of my reaction to the overall thing is “agree on social ownership of the micro being bad, disagree on hormesis model of boundary violations, disagree on punch buggy being micro, disagree on the object level question of whether I want to play punch buggy, update in the direction of carrying mace if I ever visit CFAR to exploit a weakness in the no-punchback rule”. The part I want to respond to here is the hormesis model of boundary violations, though, setting the rest aside.
The hormesis model of boundary violations says that minor violations of your boundaries are good things- they prevent you becoming more sensitive to boundary violations. As such, it is good for society to have a lot of non-consensual touch with the responsibility being on anyone who wants to opt out to find a way to communicate that which doesn’t stop non-consensual touchers from touching everyone else. It would also be, on the same model, good to have minor boundary violations of other sorts- I assume the childhood game of setting prank backgrounds on other people’s computers would be endorsed, for example. This model says that as people learn that boundary violations which are unpleasant in the moment don’t lead to any long-term harm, they’ll be more relaxed and less sensitive to touch, or to people touching their things, or similar.
I think this model overlooks the possibility of sensitisation. In a sensitisation model of boundary violations, when something happens and proves unpleasant, even if in the long run they’re okay, people become more alert to that thing happening again. This model predicts that if you regularly punch someone by surprise and then tell them they can’t hit back, they will become more, rather than less, sensitive to unexpected touch, even if there’s no long term consequences beyond the punch. That if you regularly fiddle with someone else’s stuff in aid of a mocking joke, even if there’s no long-term damage, they will become more concerned rather than less of other people interacting with their things.
I’ve had a friend who was subject to regular privacy violations as a child by their parents. As an adult, they’re now very protective of their privacy, wanting private space even in the context of a potential marriage- whereas I was basically left to handle my own finances from age 16 and largely unmonitored even prior to that, and I actively want an intimate partner to be someone I trust with access to everything of mine.
And I think this is typical- in every example I can think of where someone had a Boundary, and it was Regularly Violated With No Long-Term Consequences, they became an adult who was very sensitive on that boundary. I think the hormesis model of boundary violations is simply wrong, and the reason we have so much sensitivity on boundaries is not that they’ve been violated too little in people’s pasts but that they’ve been violated too much.
Now, Duncan was, at one point, a teacher. And the hormesis model explains a lot of fairly arbitrary decisions I’ve heard described when people talk about their childhoods. Teachers ignoring requests or stated preferences, taking things from children, forcing them into unpleasant experiences, or permitting unpleasant treatment from their peers. And the informal justification was often that it’d toughen them up to get used to it, never explained in sufficient detail to criticise. This article I think shines some light on the thinking behind this- consider that it identifies one of the targets of its criticism to be an “overswing in the (less obviously correct) reduction of schoolyard violence“.
As a young child, I wanted to avoid being with other children, as they behaved extremely unpleasantly towards me, but was forced into their company for reasons of social development on a daily basis- the result was that even after I moved into high school and it stopped, I remained more or less asocial in terms of real world friendships until I was about 16. I appreciated that humans who thought in the manner responsible for this must exist, but didn’t actually encounter one personally or expect them to be curriculum director at CFAR.
So it is quite important to me, personally, to highlight that I think this model is fundamentally wrong-headed, and responsible for a considerable amount of trauma in the world today. We have people dumping buckets full of tarantulas over people while shouting “I’M HELPING! I’M HELPING!”, not even to remove a fear of spiders but out of some idea that doing this generically makes for people who are less fearful, and it’s working on a model of how humans respond to boundary violations which is in complete contravention of all observable evidence.
