Back when I first began waiting tables, a few of us went out for drinks in St Kilda one night. One of the other new guys was a Nepali dude, and the kitchen hands were picking on him. One guy, Adrian, made a crack implying that the Nepali guy was gay (he isn't). The guy got defensive and said, "I'm not gay!"
Adrian replied, "Dude I could follow you home and fuck you, and that would make you gay cos everyone knows that the guy who gets fucked is gay, not the other guy."
Nobody said anything. I wish I had, but I was kinda terrified to. I didn't know if speaking up would entail outing myself, and if outing myself to this bunch would be very smart. And I needed the job.
This weekend I was chatting with a good friend of mine from college, who told me about this huge fight she had with a friend. It started off with a few friends having a silly argument about a TV show, and very quickly escalated into a full-blown, heated debate about gender parity, with this guy, David, insisting that women were now on an equal footing professionally with men.
The girls at the table said, uh, we still don't get paid the same as men do. Dude goes, "But you girls would find it easier to find a job like, say, waitressing, and they wouldn't want to hire me cos I'm a guy." At which point, Vye pointed out that they probably wouldn't hire him because he wasn't an international student desperate enough to work for below minimum wage and without any benefits or protection. And that it was routine for girls at these places to be harassed, groped, and bullied by customers and co-workers alike.
At this point if the dude had dropped the whole thing and backed off, the situation could have been salvaged. Did he, and was it? No and no.
Chat with Vye:
[...at which point she hooked me up with some awesome retro g@y p0rn - "guns blazing" indeed]
Over the weekend, while I was mulling this turn of events, I also happened to read a very sweet and poignant book, Saints of Augustine by P.E. Ryan, about two friends, Sam and Charlie, and a particularly rough summer before their senior year in school. Towards the end of the novel (and I won't give away the plot) Sam realizes that people don't always fulfill your worst expectations of them. Sam is taken aback when his mother gives him an apology and a talking-to, and an explanation for why she kicked her bigoted loudmouth boyfriend out:
“So there’s Teddy’s mistake, my mistake, and yours. But we all make mistakes, and I know that. What matters is what you do when you find out you’ve made a mistake... It’s called rising to the occasion. But, well, Teddy didn’t do that.”
And neither did this David guy.
Here's the thing: we all say stupid shit sometimes. When someone gets hurt by the stupid shit you say, you can be a pigheaded jerkface and insist on "sticking to your guns" whatever that means, or you can just as easily back off, apologise and redeem yourself somewhat. And then be careful not to say shit like that again.
For instance, say there's a discussion about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Say you make a thoughtless, offhand remark implying that maybe the magnitude of the Holocaust was exaggerated to justify the creation of Israel. Maybe no-one around you says anything, or maybe someone disagrees. Or someone says, "You know what, my grandfather was in a concentration camp and survived the Holocaust." At this point, what do you say?
It's not that hard. Remember, you're not losing anything by eating some humble pie: nobody with half a brain would think you could "win" that argument. You can remember not to bring up stuff like that in general conversation, and maybe you can go a step further and actually do some research and read up on the Holocaust. (Research does not mean trawling neo-Nazi websites on the internet.)
For the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, your off-the-cuff remark can be a chilling, deeply unsettling reminder of the sort of prejudice, denial and apathy that allowed it to happen in the first place. Your statement puts them in a spot where they either remain silent and feel ashamed about it, or step up and wave a card that says "I'm different", putting you in a position of power because you can use the knowledge of their "difference" to hurt them. The fact that nobody says anything does not mean everybody agrees with you or thinks you're funny and cool and smart.
It is the same with race, religion, gender, sexuality. If you're a straight white male, this may not spontaneously occur to you, but before you dismiss the existence of discrimination (from the little humiliations we face to the heightened risks we live with), remember that you don't speak from experience. You can afford not to know: it's called being in a position of unexamined privilege. But your not knowing doesn't make these go away for us. And if you insist on being remaining willfully ignorant, at least shut the fuck up and don't be a prick about it.
Knowing Vye, she'll probably shrug this off in a few weeks and give the appearance of being friends with this guy again, for the sake of maintaining group harmony or some such shit. There's a part of me wants to shake her and tell her to drop him entirely, because there ARE guys that get it, and are awesome and supportive and feminist and chilled out. Guys like Joss Whedon and Jonathan McIntosh. Guys like my friend Ned, who, when I came out to him, responded by saying, "Dude, I don't care what sort of underwear you wear, and I don't care who you take it off for."
So when it comes to friends, no-one needs to settle.
Adrian replied, "Dude I could follow you home and fuck you, and that would make you gay cos everyone knows that the guy who gets fucked is gay, not the other guy."
Nobody said anything. I wish I had, but I was kinda terrified to. I didn't know if speaking up would entail outing myself, and if outing myself to this bunch would be very smart. And I needed the job.
This weekend I was chatting with a good friend of mine from college, who told me about this huge fight she had with a friend. It started off with a few friends having a silly argument about a TV show, and very quickly escalated into a full-blown, heated debate about gender parity, with this guy, David, insisting that women were now on an equal footing professionally with men.
The girls at the table said, uh, we still don't get paid the same as men do. Dude goes, "But you girls would find it easier to find a job like, say, waitressing, and they wouldn't want to hire me cos I'm a guy." At which point, Vye pointed out that they probably wouldn't hire him because he wasn't an international student desperate enough to work for below minimum wage and without any benefits or protection. And that it was routine for girls at these places to be harassed, groped, and bullied by customers and co-workers alike.
At this point if the dude had dropped the whole thing and backed off, the situation could have been salvaged. Did he, and was it? No and no.
Chat with Vye:
[...at which point she hooked me up with some awesome retro g@y p0rn - "guns blazing" indeed]
Over the weekend, while I was mulling this turn of events, I also happened to read a very sweet and poignant book, Saints of Augustine by P.E. Ryan, about two friends, Sam and Charlie, and a particularly rough summer before their senior year in school. Towards the end of the novel (and I won't give away the plot) Sam realizes that people don't always fulfill your worst expectations of them. Sam is taken aback when his mother gives him an apology and a talking-to, and an explanation for why she kicked her bigoted loudmouth boyfriend out:
“So there’s Teddy’s mistake, my mistake, and yours. But we all make mistakes, and I know that. What matters is what you do when you find out you’ve made a mistake... It’s called rising to the occasion. But, well, Teddy didn’t do that.”
And neither did this David guy.
Here's the thing: we all say stupid shit sometimes. When someone gets hurt by the stupid shit you say, you can be a pigheaded jerkface and insist on "sticking to your guns" whatever that means, or you can just as easily back off, apologise and redeem yourself somewhat. And then be careful not to say shit like that again.
For instance, say there's a discussion about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Say you make a thoughtless, offhand remark implying that maybe the magnitude of the Holocaust was exaggerated to justify the creation of Israel. Maybe no-one around you says anything, or maybe someone disagrees. Or someone says, "You know what, my grandfather was in a concentration camp and survived the Holocaust." At this point, what do you say?
It's not that hard. Remember, you're not losing anything by eating some humble pie: nobody with half a brain would think you could "win" that argument. You can remember not to bring up stuff like that in general conversation, and maybe you can go a step further and actually do some research and read up on the Holocaust. (Research does not mean trawling neo-Nazi websites on the internet.)
For the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, your off-the-cuff remark can be a chilling, deeply unsettling reminder of the sort of prejudice, denial and apathy that allowed it to happen in the first place. Your statement puts them in a spot where they either remain silent and feel ashamed about it, or step up and wave a card that says "I'm different", putting you in a position of power because you can use the knowledge of their "difference" to hurt them. The fact that nobody says anything does not mean everybody agrees with you or thinks you're funny and cool and smart.
It is the same with race, religion, gender, sexuality. If you're a straight white male, this may not spontaneously occur to you, but before you dismiss the existence of discrimination (from the little humiliations we face to the heightened risks we live with), remember that you don't speak from experience. You can afford not to know: it's called being in a position of unexamined privilege. But your not knowing doesn't make these go away for us. And if you insist on being remaining willfully ignorant, at least shut the fuck up and don't be a prick about it.
Knowing Vye, she'll probably shrug this off in a few weeks and give the appearance of being friends with this guy again, for the sake of maintaining group harmony or some such shit. There's a part of me wants to shake her and tell her to drop him entirely, because there ARE guys that get it, and are awesome and supportive and feminist and chilled out. Guys like Joss Whedon and Jonathan McIntosh. Guys like my friend Ned, who, when I came out to him, responded by saying, "Dude, I don't care what sort of underwear you wear, and I don't care who you take it off for."
So when it comes to friends, no-one needs to settle.
