Perspectives And Viewpoint (Possibly Part One, If I Can Organize This Mess Better Later)

This is likely to be a bit unorganized utterly chaotic and without any internal logic that will make sense to anyone, and will almost certainly make people angry.

So, having said that, fair warning: if you are incensed with anger upon reading this article, congratulations; you're perfectly normal. I expect no other response, because I know that viewpoint bias is a stone-cold sonofabitch to overcome. And this will likely be quite long.

That said, here goes.

It's really hard to walk in someone else's shoes, either literally or figuratively.

I mean, I have damn big feet. Trying on other people's shoes hurts.

I know, obvious, groan-worthy bad joke, but it will become relevant later, I promise.

See, something I think about a lot - a lot more than you might expect - is how to do that in a figurative sense.

For example, I have a fairly gruff set of features, and a similarly gruff voice. Despite that, I am basically a pretty laid-back guy, most of the time. This blog may not give that impression - in fact I am certain it gives the impression of endless, fulminating fury - but that's because I use this forum to vent, when something really bothers me; it's not what I'm like all the time. Shut up, Thomas, I am not.

Because of my face, and voice, most people, meeting me the first time, have a really difficult time parsing my sense of humor. They tend to react to me as though I am verbally assaulting them, especially when I open with stuff like "good morning," or "how are you today," or even a fist bump.

So, I have developed habits to compensate for that. Pretty routinely, when I meet someone new, I will tell a joke that relies on comical, stupendous exaggeration of some obviously minor thing, and then conspiratorially tell my hopefully new friend, "You can laugh. That's a joke. I know I look scary, but I came from the factory like this. They didn't give me an option package."

I'm pretty sure most of the people I meet have no idea how honest I'm being right there.

So, in the past I have written articles about a host of sensitive topics, and some with a fairly rough tone.

Rape.

Racism.

Gay marriage.

Abortion.

I'm not exactly a shrinking violet when it comes to tough conversations to have, ok?

But here's the thing. Regardless of my opinion, regardless of your opinion, one thing needs to be perfectly clear, in everything I write, everything I say:

I am not you.

Watching the way the discourse on practically everything has changed over the last ten years, as I have been blogging that long and goddamn does that make me feel old, I am keenly aware that we've forgotten that critical point.

I am not you.

You are not me.

We share commonalities; we're both people, fifty percent or so of us are the same gender, most of those people have the same orientation and gender identity I do within that subset, many of them are the same race I am, a lot of those people are from similar economic circumstances, some of those people are even from the same town, and share similar early family life.

You know what?

With all that in common, they're still not me, and I'm not them.

Some of those people from my same town, who grew up in a split, sometimes abusive home in greater poverty than they knew, who are the same race, gender, and orientation I am, also like the same music I do, eat the same kinds of food I enjoy, and like the same movies I do.

You know what?

They're still not me, and I'm not them.

And generalizing experience is a fool's game.

It seems these days, every issue has to come with an endless, heckling circlejerk about the "correct" viewpoint.

So, I'm here to break that myth.

There isn't one.

The "correct" viewpoint, does not exist. If you think it does, you are simply wrong.

There are, for example, perfectly valid arguments on either side of virtually any point of politics, social life, religious belief, or literally any other human experience you can have.

What viewpoint any individual expresses, and supports, depends almost entirely on that person's individual human experience.

I tend to disagree with some kinds of ideas fairly violently. I do so because my experiences, and my understanding of those experiences, leads me to seeing those things in a negative way.

I'm not you; you may not see those things in that way.

Ronald Reagan once said, in a speech, "facts are stupid things."

He was right, because facts don't contain a moral component. They don't make decisions; they simply exist. Something either is a fact, or it is not. No amount of argument turns an opinion into a fact, and no amount of argument turns a fact into an opinion.

You can, for example, say that something is categorically wrong when it comes to the legitimacy of the facts.

Anthropogenic Global Warming is a case of this; and frankly as long as the world takes its climate data from the NOAA, there's going to be significant argument about whether or not the facts support the idea, or don't.

You can argue facts.

What you cannot do is argue viewpoint.

I see a lot of that, and it's stupid, and needs to stop.

For example, you have white people, who have not grown up black (obviously,) saying "all lives matter!" in support of protests against police brutality.

And black people, who have not grown up white, telling those white people to shut up because they don't understand the struggle.

Fair enough. I'm not black, and I'm 100% sure that I never will be, either. It's not like I was suddenly dipped in bleach on my 18th birthday and magically thereby made immune to jackbooted thugs.

But you know what? I'm also 100% sure those black people telling white people to shut up are also not white. They have totally different life experiences, and you don't get to, in the same conversation, say "you don't know my life experiences so shut the fuck up," while blithely ignoring the fact that you also don't know theirs.

That particular example is funny to me, because the anger over "#alllivesmatter" is so badly misplaced.

Do you seriously not get the irony of your own anger, here?

Let me break it down, black people.

You go on about how white people are immune to police brutality, and unaware of your life experiences, all the time. It's literally impossible to be on Facebook or Reddit these days without seeing something about how white folks just don't get it.

So, these people, who have lived in this magical immunity bubble their entire lives, not sharing your experiences and not suffering the same circumstances, are aware there's a problem, and have stepped outside of their life experiences enough to agree with you that something is deeply wrong and needs to be fixed, and your response is to tell them to shut up because they're not angry enough?

Not focused enough on you?

Guess what? They're not. Because - just like you said - they don't have your life experiences. They have different ones, instead, but they've managed to step outside that just enough, and just long enough, to at least try to identify with you.

Don't tell them to shut up. If you want to educate, educate. But don't tell them to shut up. When you do that, you confirm the exact type of negative stereotypes you're telling them they have in the first place.

When you've fallen, and you're lying in the mud, and someone offers you a hand up, you don't bat their hand aside indignantly because they don't also want to hear your entire life story after you're on your feet.

You gratefully accept the help, and maybe you can engage them in dialogue.

Maybe get a new friend. That'd be awesome.

This happens a lot with gender identity, too.

"Shut up, cis-people! You're just a shitlord!"

Way to educate a huge swath of society that doesn't really understand your experiences because they fucking can't.

Transgendered people have an opportunity to take life experience from the other side that is literally unparalleled in human terms.

It's not TRUE transformation - until genetic engineering and genetic surgery gets a bit better, anyway - but at least you can try out the other team's hormone loads.

Try this out, womenfolks.

Think of how many times you have said, of a male you know, that he cannot understand you because he doesn't have your plumbing.

Do you honestly think that doesn't apply in the other direction?

I assure you it does.

I see, a lot, women complaining about being "overly sexualized" by men while wearing perfectly innocent clothing that reveals most of their bodies.

I hate to break it to you, but to most men, the act of looking past your sexuality when you are dressed in revealing clothes is either a constant effort, or flatly impossible. It has nothing to do with your clothing, and everything to do with our hormones; but that doesn't actually change the fact that no matter how offended you are that someone stares you in the cleavage, your cleavage is a fucking eye magnet that is practically impossible to resist - and the act of resisting that magnetism is such an effort for most guys that if they put in the effort to manage it, it actively detracts from their enjoyment of their time with you.

You are thinking that I am just a complete idiot, right now.

Surely it's not like that!

We're not just great swarthy beasts, unable to control ourselves!

This is true, we're not. But this is why rape is a crime that draws some very different responses from people. Rapists make men furious in very different ways, and for very different reasons, than they do women.

See, for a woman, or at least most women, this is a tremendous trauma. Your autonomy has been violated; your sense of safety in your person has been violated; your body has been possibly injured, and in a lot more cases than people admit to has betrayed you by responding sexually to the act of rape, which can double down on the emotional trauma and damage; you could be facing an std, or an unwanted pregnancy; you could - most likely will - suffer tremendous difficulty with intimacy with your partner going forward, not to mention nightmares, panic attacks, and years of therapy.

Compounded by which, you have - and I am using this term advisedly, as you will soon see - people who are not you - offering advice, unwanted "comfort," and intentional or unintentional offense in a myriad of ways as they try to comfort you.

Not fun.

Of course, to be fair to them, a lot of those people are trying to reach across that divide in experience, trying to offer you support in any way they can find that they think you will take positively.

They may be absolutely wrong in their assessment of your needs. But they're trying to support you.

"Fuck off!"

For most men, there are three primary traumas associated with rape.

You have the obvious health risks; you have the obvious potential monetary risks - because courts will quite happily award child support to a woman who got pregnant by raping a man - your autonomy has been violated, as a result of the actions of someone you and other men perceive as weaker than you. This does catastrophic, horrifying damage to your internal concept of autonomy and self, and literally every interaction you have from then on with other males who have not had a similar experience is tainted; on their end if they know about the event, or on yours, if they don't, by shame.

How could you have been raped?

What, did that 100-pound girl overwhelm you?

How did you get it up, if you didn't want it?

See, if these things happen to a woman, the assumption is that she was unable to protect herself.

You're welcome to think that every person on earth who thinks that is a condescending douchenozzle.

But that's the assumption, nevertheless.

And you know what? Guys, who have an organ that quite visibly responds to such stimuli as a passing pretty girl, a vague daydream while distracted, a stiff breeze, being in a pool, being out of a pool, standing up, sitting down, or seeing new eye shadow on your wife, will assume that you couldn't have had a physiological response that you could not control.

So, when these things happen to a guy, other guys, who have that same organ, will sympathize with that aspect alone, and totally bowl you over with how utter their contempt is for the idea of you having been overpowered by a mere girl.

And girls, who have an organ that responds with much less visibility but no less demand to such stimuli as "two hot guys in a movie kissing," that cologne some rando on the sidewalk is wearing, or someone firmly gripping your upper arms (or, as Lovely Wife just said a second ago while looking at houses, "that kitchen almost gave me an orgasm,") will assume that you have perfect control over that organ of yours at all times and therefore you must have wanted it.

Because none of us, not one, can step outside our experiences to see what, in that, we share with others.

And we mostly don't try.

And we mostly don't think about it.

How fucked is that?

Stepping outside your experiences is hard.

Think about what people call "the cycle of abuse," because the label makes it easy to reduce. Someone gets beaten as a kid. They grow up, they have kids...

...And most of the time, they beat their kids.

Does anyone here honestly believe that those people, when they found out they were going to have a child, said to themselves "I can't wait to whip my kid's ass until they go to the hospital!"?

Of course they didn't. But that's the example of parental discipline they had, and it takes years of therapy to overcome it.

Years of effort, to change that response.

Viewpoint is a hard goddamn thing to break.

I have big feet. If you have more normal feet, you don't know my struggle. I have to go to a very limited number of stores, and buy custom-fitted shoes, for my giant-assed feet. Normal shoe stores always, always, always try to suggest smaller sizes, because after 40 fucking years I have no idea what size my feet are, and must be making it up. It's so outside their experience, as people who don't have similarly-sized pontoons on the ends of their legs, that they not only don't understand but can't believe it's real.

I have a hard time imagining what life would be like without feet this big.

And that's something minor.

Something simple.

Something, relatively speaking, that's easy to look past.

None of us is exactly alike.

We're not supposed to be.

We're not capable of being exactly alike.

We shouldn't want to be.

What we should do, and mostly don't, is two things.

We should, always, try to step outside the cage of our experience and see things as much as we can from the viewpoints of others.

And we should, always, try to accept people's efforts in that regard no matter how successful they are. 

Or aren't.