On Eternal Vigilance

Long-time commenter Bunny42 had this to say:

It feels like a crappy way to live, to anticipate negativity everywhere. That seems to encourage a victim mentality. I’ve always believed there’s a kind of aura around people who live in fear, and baddies can home in on that state of mind. A strong, confident woman is much less likely to be accosted than a retiring little mousy woman.

To which I replied:

Seems like a crappy way not to live.
I have many good friends. The reason I have many good friends is that I constantly have a filter up of, “Are these people taking advantage of me? Are they involving me in unwise decisions? Are they hurting people unnecessarily?”
You’re all like, “But you must be a mousy woman!” No. I’m actually the strong, confident person who’s much less likely to be accosted by drama-freaks – and I am that way because I continually check. I’d be mousy if I did as you suggested and didn’t actually interrogate reality on a regular basis, and then got abused at what seemed like random intervals because I didn’t bother to look. I’d feel uncertain because life would feel out of control, thinking why are some of my friends so crazy? and feeling like drama was like thunder, just appearing sporadically with no warning at all. I’d be afraid, because bad shit would happen and I’d have no incoming radar at all to see it coming.
I don’t live in fear. I live in honesty. And yes, I’m watchful, but I think it’s the sheerest foolhardiness to abandon safety just so you can relax.
There is a distinct difference.

I am constantly on-guard for some things.  But that doesn’t make me a negative person, because one can be on-guard for relevant questions such as, say, “Am I about to be fired from work?” without letting that become a fearful future.  I can acknowledge that yeah, being fired is a possibility, and as such keep checking in with my bosses to make sure I’m doing my job to their liking.
That’s not living in fear of an uncertain future: that’s gathering feedback, and reacting appropriately.  Because there have been a couple of times I’ve displeased by bosses mightily by not doing the work they expected of me.  Staying aware let me get back in the groove.
I think that one of the keys to good relationships is to always keep in mind that your friends can fuck you over, whether they mean to or not, and patrolling that boundary to ensure that things don’t get out of hand.  That’s not a negative thing.  I don’t expect them to do it, because they’re my friends.  But if something makes me go “Hrm,” then I follow up on that.
It doesn’t make me continually afraid.  It makes me one of those confident people.  I’m confident if something starts to slide south, I’m ready for it.  Which makes me enjoy the good times – which are the bulk of my time with my friends – all the more.

"So Why Didn't You Do Anything?"

The other day, I wrote about an incident with my goddaughter, wherein we were at a restaurant when a strange dude asked “Aren’t you the cutest girl?”, patted her belly, and moved on.  And a fair number of people asked:
“Why didn’t you yell at the dude for touching the kid?”
Good question.
The strict answer is, “I totally should have” – and before anyone attempts to frame this essay otherwise, let me be crystal clear: going, “Hey, dude, don’t touch her without asking first!” would have been the right thing to do.  It’s a failure on my part that I didn’t.  I screwed up by not setting a good example of how to police appropriate boundaries.
Yet the question I’m going to field here is, “Why did I screw up?”  And the answer is simple:
Because I was shocked, and the incident was quick.
Had I been braced for incoming belly-patters, I would have absolutely done the right thing here.  But like a lot of incidents of harassment, this arrived when I was waiting in line to get breakfast, prepping for a nice day with a kid I loved, having a nice conversation.  If you’d asked me, “So is a random person going to invade your private space?” I probably would have been so surprised by the question that I would have asked you to repeat yourself.
So when this happened, I acted suboptimally.  By the time my brain had processed Wait a minute, this is pretty crazy, this shouldn’t be happening, dude was already out the door.
And so it was that I fucked up.
Problem is, “Fucking up when presented with surprising new situations” is actually a chronic human behavior.  It’s why purse snatchers are so effective – by the time someone registers Wait, did somebody just yank my purse off my shoulder?, the snatcher is long gone.  It’s why you don’t have a good retort when a stranger says something nasty to you in public.  It’s why, despite machismo gun-owners telling everyone how they’d drop a gunman if they saw one, in fact most people (gun-owners included) don’t react heroically to a public shooting; they’re still shocked by all of this new and horrifying input.
We’re all awesome quarterbacks come Monday morning.  But when you experience something weird for the first time, your brain is often locked up trying to figure out what’s happening – and by the time the brain gets around to determining how you should react, the moment has passed.
Now, there are people who are really good at handling purse snatchers, and really excellent at snarking back to mean strangers.  Sadly, most of them are good at it because of  experience.  They’re not gifted with natural instincts; they have, instead, been abused enough times that a) this is not new to them, and b) they have developed coping mechanisms.  This is why we train soldiers – you can get a guy to be a very good shot at a gun range, but that’s very different from maintaining accuracy when the target is shooting back.  We put people through combat training because we need them to have that adrenaline rush not be a surprise.
And again, I’ll repeat: I should have called the dude out.  I had good excuses, but my goal in life is not to provide good excuses – it’s to emulate the kind of change I wanna see in the world.  In that, I failed.
Yet there are people – mostly women – who would have called this dude out instantly.  This is likely because they have lots of experience in handling creeper dudes, and are continually braced for moments like this, never relaxing no matter how joyous the day.  In other words, they’ve developed a healthy defense mechanism because they’re continually being assaulted.  Which is, you know, not awesome.
The danger is wandering into the trap of “should have done.”
In a lot of cases, “Should have done” provides a healthy way of modelling future behavior.  People saying, “You should have called the dude out!” helps me to create a mental model for the next time this happens, so if I encounter Creeper 2: Electric Boogaloo, I’ll have societal expectations backing me to go “Yeah, this what you should do in response to an abnormal situation, get ready to mix it up.”  Which means that next time, I’ll (hopefully) be prepared with a more helpful reaction.
Yet the danger is in conflating a substandard response with substandard intent.
I’m hip-deep in science-fiction conventions, where harassment charges are sadly routine.  And one of the most common reactions when someone says “This person harassed me at a party” is “Well, they didn’t say anything at the time – so they weren’t really offended!  They’re just making a fuss in retrospect!”
The problem is that when you are presented with a shocking situation, you often don’t do what you “should”.  You react in weird ways – and the more shocking the situation, the more time it may take you to figure out emotionally how to process this.
(This is why I tell people “There’s no right way to grieve for a death” – you’ve just run into a situation that few people encounter often enough to get used to, and you may react in super-odd ways.  All those people telling you how you should be sad is not helpful when you’re numb, or angry, or needing to get out and party.)
If someone ruins a party for you with some unexpected sexual pressure that comes out of nowhere, you might deal with that in ways that you’re unhappy with in retrospect – ways that seem bizarre to others, who “know” how they’d react if they were in that situation.
Except they don’t know how they’d react.  They know how they think they’d react when presented with a situation they read about in an essay, but that’s often very different from how they do react if and when it happens.  How they’d react when presented with Surprise Harassment is often very different from how they’d react if they had time to contemplate it in advance.  (Which is why harassers often use a lot of pressure to get what they want – they know that sometimes, the Surprise Harassment response that springs from politeness and not wanting to offend is much more positive than the studied negative reaction they’d get later.)
Now, in my case, I’ll state for the third time that there was a clear best-case scenario here, and I failed to achieve it.  I don’t excuse that failure.  Best I can do is take that lesson and be braced for future impact.  That’s the way I process failure, and I don’t claim that’s the best way for everyone, just me.
But all too often I see people conflating reaction with intent: “Well, they didn’t reject it violently at the time, so they clearly were okay with X happening!”  And no.  My point here is that people often react weirdly to weird situations.  How they react in that moment doesn’t necessarily reflect who they are or what they really believe, but rather reflects a brain that’s rapidly trying to piece together a big batch of WTF.
And by the time they are really good at handling the exceptional cases, they often forget that they live in a world that’s different from what other people experience.  I’m lucky enough not to live in a world where people routinely invade the personal space of people I love.  Others don’t get that.  That’s a thing we call “privilege.”
One downside of privilege is being potentially blind to the hazards that others routinely encounter.  Another is that we’re shocked when we step outside the bubble.
I stepped outside.  I got surprised.  And I’m not overly shamed by my reaction, because I wasn’t prepped for it – to be shamed by that is to agree that I did something shameful, when in reality it’s belly-rubbin’ dude who did the shameful thing.  I feel pretty thoroughly that the shame falls upon the shoulders of the jerks.
But the responsibility for fixing it?  That’s something I feel personally.  I can recognize I did something suboptimal that allowed that shameful behavior to continue, and vow to try to do better next time.  I don’t blame myself – but I do recognize an opportunity to model better behavior in the future, so that shameful jerks like that don’t walk away from other stunned people, thinking what they did was fine.
That’s not necessarily what everyone wants to do.  Nor would I expect it of them.
But I expect it of me.

In Which Chris Rock Nails It

Chris Rock is one of the more incisive people in America when it comes to nudging out the truth.  And his interview in Vulture Magazine is solid gold from start to finish, making several cogent observations about American culture and Obama’s success and the nature of comedy.
But he fucking slam-dunks it with this thought:

Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.
…So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

Aaaaaaand nailed it.
In case you’re a right-winger foaming at the mouth now, Mr. Rock also goes on to make some observations about college campuses that I think you’d agree with.  But whatever.  Read the interview.  It’s awesome.

Fine, Here's My Amazing Cover. Wanna Win A Copy Of Flex?

All right, well, I tried to funnel you over to SFSignal to get a sneak preview of the cover for my upcoming book Flex, because they’ve got some of the best damn sci-fi book blogging in the business, and I think your life will be embiggened should you read them.  (Seriously. They’ve won multiple Hugo awards for their coverage.  They are unadulterated awesome.)  But I’ve already plugged this damn contest on my blog, and several times on Twitter, and I’m pretty sure if you haven’t clicked the link to go see my cover, it’s possible you are eternally resistant to clicking foreign links.
So here.  Look at my cover!

But! You can still win one of five electronic free copies of this sucker, merely by entering one of the easiest-to-enter contests I can imagine!  (It consists of sending an email.)  This contest is only open through Wednesday, and a lot of y’all have been “When can I read this?”  The answer: Earlier than March, if you’re lucky.  But to do that, you’ll need to go over to SFSignal (like, you know, sane people do) and read the contest rules.
*Kermitflail*  What are you waiting for?  Go now!

Maybe You Start 'Em Young: Boundaries

I was out getting breakfast with my goddaughter when a dude just poked her in the belly.
“Aren’t you the cutest little girl?” he asked.  My goddaughter was adorable, as she is now; she was also nine.  And the dude reached over, patted her tummy affectionately, and moved on.
We sat down, chatted with the waitress, got some orange juice.  And I kept waiting for my goddaughter to complain.  Some asshole just invaded her private space.  He just touched her without her permission in a crowd, like she was some kind of breathing doll to play with as he saw fit.
But she just shrugged.  It was obvious she hadn’t felt complimented by the dude; her response to pokey-man was perhaps the most lifeless “thank you” I’d ever heard from her, and my goddaughter is a spotlight-stealer, thirsty for every drop of attention you can rain on her.  When she’s happy you’ve paid attention to her, she beams and does dances to get more attention.  (Seriously.  Kid goes to dance classes.  She will drop the beat at the slightest provocation.)
Instead?  Meh.
I eventually asked her about it, and she shrugged again.  “Old guys do that,” she informed me, in the same sense that she might inform me that teachers gave homework.  Not a thrill, to be sure, but what could you do?
And I thought back to my boyhood.  Couldn’t remember any stranger ever just touching me against their will because they approved of my look.  Aunts, sure, uncles, sure, but never just someone “HEY! CUTE BOY! LEMME PINCH YO CHEEKS.”
Whereas for my goddaughter, well, at nine – nine – that’s just the sort of shit she had to deal with.
You could say that’s my childhood memory being poor, which it is, but… I also don’t recall women just sneaking pinches of my butt in crowded elevators, or grabbing me at bars.
As a dude, I have a pretty set autonomy over my body, and I haven’t really had to reinforce that.  Whereas I know a lot of women who if they wear the wrong thing in public – or sometimes, if they don’t – they’re gonna have some dude grabbing them without even asking them if this is something they want.
And I think of the struggle a few of my friends who are parents have.  They inform their relatives that yes, little Dora is three years old… but if she says she doesn’t want to hug you, she doesn’t have to.
Grandparents get pretty put out by that , when the kid doesn’t wanna hug him goodbye.  That’s what Grandparents get!  They get hugs!  Because the child is adorable, and what adorable children are for is to satisfy the needs of the Grandparent!
Yet realistically, I think you have to start them young.  It seems ridiculous, taking a kid who would drink bleach without a second thought and saying, “Okay, you get to make decisions about who gets to touch you, and when.”  Especially when there are times when the kid doesn’t have an inalienable right to bodily control – you got to have that diaper changed, girl, whether you think it’s a big deal or not.
Because I think all kids need to learn boundaries: that you do, in fact, have control over what happens to you.  And that people touching you randomly just because they want to isn’t something you have to tolerate.
And on one level, it’s a pretty silly line in the sand to draw.  I mean, shit, so Grandpa wants a hug.  The kid’s little.  She’s moody.  She’s rude.  Pick the kid up and shove her into Grandpa’s arms!
On the other hand, I think it’s a fractal lesson that girls in particular need to learn: this flesh you own?  It is yours.  Nobody has a right to access it unless you have explicitly granted them permission.  If someone takes that right from you and touches you, you have a right to get angry.
Because on one level, patting my goddaughter’s tummy is just a show of affection, what’s the big deal?  But on another level, the level that few people like to process, it’s telling her that My desires can override your desires without a moment’s notice.  It’s telling her that her opinion isn’t worth asking.  It’s telling her that she’s on display to entertain others.
That’s a a fractal lesson.  Because on the one hand, I can try to have an awkward breakfast conversation with my goddaughter about feminism and bodily rights and subtle messages… and she won’t really get half of that.  (Trust me, I know.  Nine-year-olds wanna talk more about Arianna Grande’s voice than they do weird topics like that.)
But if I tell her that nobody has the right to touch you without getting your permission, then all those other hidden messages get subverted automatically.
I don’t know.  I thought it was weird at first, when my friends said “No, Dora gets to decide if she hugs you.”  And it was sad, when I really wanted to scoop that kid up in my arms and feel that glory of the little kid hug around the neck.  It felt sort of anticlimactic, getting a wave goodbye instead.
But sometimes I don’t wanna hug people goodbye.  And I have the option to go for the handshake or the wave.
So what if she’s three?  So should she.

Why I Love My Family

ME: “So I know you’re hypersensitive to ‘the dog dies’ in a movie, Erin, but you might almost like John Wick.”
ERIN: “Oh, God, no.  I’d cry for weeks.  Poor puppy!”
ME: “I know, but… the dog dying is the whole reason for the movie.  John Wick’s a retired hit man, someone kills his dog, and he spends the next ninety minutes murdering people for that in a roaring rampage of revenge.”
ERIN: “Well, I could get behind that.”
ME: “The rest of the movie is alternating scenes of John Wick shooting motherfuckers in the head,  and terrified mobsters going ‘You did what to his dog?!? You fool!'”
MATTIE: “Completely justified.”
AMY: “Yet if he’d murdered ninety people because someone killed his cat…”
MATTIE: “Yeah.  Society is weird.  Make it a cat, people would think he was some unbalanced crazy cat lady.”
ERIN: ” ‘He killed two hundred people over his dog? Well, sure – oh, wait, it was a cat?  Dude’s got some issues.'”
AMY: “I mean, we like cats, but there’s a pet hierarchy here.”
DAD: ” ‘JOHN WICK: executed a thousand men after someone strangled his parakeet.'”
MATTIE: ” ‘Someone killed my goldfish. Now a city lies smoking in ruins.’ ”
ME: “Of course I bombed Russia!  They forgot to feed my hermit crab!”
*laughs*
GINI: “…you realize we’re terrible people.”
ME: “Well, we’ll get ours once John Wick kills us for murdering his pet turkey.”