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Monday, August 19, 2013

My feelings on being called "Overly PC"

In a nutshell:

I don’t understand why racial/ethnic/cultural sensitivity is seen as “overly PC” behavior. It’s not about political correctness. It’s about not being an asshole. 


Ethos

So.

My first several blog posts contain some stuff about feminism, and more specifically, they contain some not-quite-but-almost-generalizations about womens' experiences, and offer a lot of blanket advice to "men" about how to not be perceived as sexist. 

Here is what I learned from sharing my blog posts with some people I care about, and who I know care about me: while statistically speaking, not-quite-generalizations about bias may be more true than not, I've learned that statistics tend not to matter when I'm trying to empathize with a person, or share a personal story, or get someone to understand what I'm feeling. Particularly if the person I'm interacting with is not (or doesn't consider her/himself) included in the statistic. 

I also realized that I make a lot of proclamations, and giving advice to an audience who didn't really ask for it feels wrong for me. I'm very anti-guru. Plus, I know that I personally can be given a piece of good advice a dozen times and still never really "get" it until I am at a point in my life when I'm ready to learn. 

I've decided to set a sort of standard - an ethos - for this blog, going forward. 

I want to try to be as clear as possible that anything I write about is based on my own, personal experience. I can only tell my own stories, and my readers can only relate my stories to their own, personal stories. 

I want to stop making proclamations that dictate how I want people to behave. Instead, I want to encourage people to recognize that choices about how we interact with other people do exist, and that they get to "choose how [they] construct meaning from experience". 

I want to communicate that everyone's personal experience - and the emotional conclusions they draw from them - are valid. The logical conclusions may not be right, but the feelings they feel can never be wrong.

In other words - more empathy, more productive conclusions, less offense and anger. That doesn't mean I won't express being offended or angry - it just means I won't approach my blog from a jumping off point of offense or anger. I want a positive thing to reflect who I am!

Sunday, August 18, 2013

Post Summer Sabbatical

Gentle readers, I have not written in a long time. And now that my summer job is winding down, it's time to start writing again. So much to say - where to start? Brainstorming seems necessary. What do I want to write about? I suppose the things I've been thinking about all summer.

I want to write about wanting what I want, and not being afraid that my wants are "wrong." I want to write about my goal to stop the process of self-editing EVERYTHING. 

I want to write about loneliness. And my relationship with it.

I want to write about being “high maintenance” and whether I am or not. About whether wanting to be treated with a certain level of courtesy is “high maintenance” And about whether there are different standards of 'acceptable" maintenance for a submissive. And whether my standards are too high. And whether I’m afraid to enforce them because I wonder if I’ll have anyone left.

I want to write about how, as the only female supervisor in my department at my summer workplace, I was constantly asking myself whether my workers’ performance and working relationship with me were swayed by the fact that I’m a woman. And how all the other women department heads at my organization either ran female-majority departments, or were more butch than femme.

I want to write about marriage, and polyamory.

I want to write about why I, a 36-year-old woman, still feel rejected and socially awkward when women nearly a decade younger than me don’t want to hang out with me. And whether this signifies that I’m immature, or just come from a unique social dynamic that looks more at other factors, or if it signifies how I may spend my entire life trying to make up for my lack of social standing in high school.

I want to write about what Ashton fucking Kutcher of all people said about success looking an awful lot like hard work, and what he said about being sexy, and about how a message directed at 13-year-old girls resonated with me still, and how fucked up that is. 

So there you go. I guess that's what you can look forward to the next few months?