Recently, I offended
someone.
This is, shockingly
enough, not a new experience for me, but it got me thinking: what do
we mean when we talk about giving
(or taking) offense? In thrashing it out with Joel
(who, incidentally, is one of the best conversationalists I know, and
if you aren't fortunate enough to know them in meat-life you should
at least be reading their blog), I realized that there are really two
rather different things conflated in the term “offended”.
On
the one hand, I am easily offended – by the perpetuation,
deliberate or unthinking, of the assorted kyriarchal -isms that
comprise the dominant culture where I live.
On
the other hand, I am almost impossible to offend – by personal
insults, viciously sarcastic banter, slurs on my taste in
entertainment, and the like.
See
the difference? In the first case, my being offended is not
actually the point. The point is
that systemic injustice is being perpetuated; my taking offense is
merely a manifestation of outrage at injustice, which is the real Bad
Thing. The second case, however, turns on personal sensitivity: the
Bad Thing here is my hurt feelings.
Collapsing
all distinction between these two modes of being offended is
problematic. It's what I did as an asshole young teen awash in
unexamined privilege, dismissing all instances of people being
offended as the hurt fee-fees of oversensitive whiners.
But
completely separating the two modes of offense isn't too great
either, and I think that's what I've been doing more recently. In my
zeal to fight the power, I've been separating offendedness into wheat
and tares: being offended at -isms is legitimate and righteous, but
personal sensitivity constitutes an illegitimate form of
offendedness. Of course, on a very basic level this separation makes
no sense at all, because -isms hurt people. The
two forms of offendedness are not identical, but they are
intertwined.
At
a formative age, I learned the hard way to not have hurt feelings. If
you let your hurt feelings show, you gave the people trying to hurt
you the satisfaction of a job well done, and encouraged them to keep
at it. Better to repress those feelings. Better to hide in the
library, fade into the background, turn
invisible. Better to try not to have feelings at all, and if you
must have them, have them in the novels you read, the diaries and
poems and stories you write, the secret world in your head to which
you retreat in every idle moment.
I
was a child with a tenuous grasp on theory of mind as it was, so
“hurt feelings are a weakness and a failing” was not the most
helpful lesson for my preteen self to learn. As much as I've tried
since then to unlearn everything I absorbed from the kids who made my
life so hellish for that couple of years, those things are an
insidious part of who I am. (I am worthless. Nobody could
ever like me. Showing hurt feelings means they've won.)
My brain knows that hurt feelings are a perfectly legitimate reaction
to insults and sarcasm, but my gut still dismisses them as weakness,
oversensitivity, invalid.
I
am, my many past and present failures in this field notwithstanding,
getting pretty practiced at battling the kyriarchy. Even though I
don't always combat them when and how I should, I have at least
gotten quite sensitive to the pervasive presence of -isms all around
me.
But
I am still not at all sensitive to individuals' hurt feelings. Many
times, my personal insensitivity has caused offense, and sometimes I
haven't even understood how. What I've realized from this latest
incident is that I am drawing an artificial dualism that cannot be
maintained. Systemic injustice can cause hurt feelings. Personal
insensitivity can cause hurt feelings. Most of the time, it's kind of
both.
I
will never, I think, be a very sensitive person. I'm too callused by
my childhood experiences to be hurt by a bit of mockery or rudeness;
but I will fight my tendency to assume that everyone else is too. I
will bear in mind that what looks to me like personal sensitivity
might well be influenced by a systemic injustice that my privilege
has blocked from my view. I will remind myself that, even though a
certain joke or comment wouldn't be hurtful me, it might well hurt
somebody else, and that doesn't mean that person is oversensitive or
somehow in the wrong for feeling that way.
I
will learn. I will
get better at this.
This is an excellent breakdown. It helps me to articulate just why I get so angry at the "I'm sorry you were offended" non-apology. It's not an apology, it's a jab at my supposed weakness, my over-sensitivity.
ReplyDeleteI am not weak. I am strong. I pride myself on being strong. I would not be here if I weren't strong. When people say this, it's not just a dismissal of a very real and pervasive systemic problem that directly affects me (and hey, you, you ostensibly care about me, so you should care about this systemic problem that negatively affects my life). It's also the erasure of every single event in my life that has made me strong, which were Very Big Deals.
Very nice post. (Came here via Shakesville. hi!)