When dealing with dominator culture, it is important to remember that there are multiple ways to be wrong.
I have mainly focused on how it is easy to want to control others and exert authority over them, even if it is only a matter of judging them.
A different, related problem is to defer to those exerting authority that they don't have or are using incorrectly.
There is a lot to unpack.
You may be familiar with the subReddit, "Am I the Asshole?"
I don't even go there myself, but notable threads are frequently shared, so I am familiar with it that way.
What I notice is that the questions generally fall into two categories. Some who are asking are facing incredible abuse and questioning because they pushed back a tiny bit and got berated for standing up for themselves at all.
Others are the abuser, shockingly justifying horrible actions that can only place them in the realm of a narcissist.
I know these descriptions seem extreme. Sometimes questions are about behavior that is merely petty, or reasonable confusion, and sometimes there are multiple people being awful, but my description is not the exaggeration one would hope for.
I believe it can be very difficult to have a correct sense of one's place in the world and one's value. It's too easy to think that you are worse than everyone else, or better than everyone else.
The essence of dominator culture makes it normal to fall into hierarchies. Your idea of your position probably has a lot to do with your parents, quite possibly being more about how they feel about themselves than how how they feel about you.
We all start out equally valuable, but we get different resources and are treated differently based on birth circumstances. What matters are our choices, but not everyone has the same options. Some don't even have the opportunity to know about various options.
Those are reasons to have compassion toward others, especially if you know they have had disadvantages.
Too often, though, it becomes the reason we allow those who believe in their own superiority to run roughshod over others.
Sure, the obvious correlation is allowing a convicted felon to run for president, but that can also included not speaking up about racist jokes or having a stronger commitment to prison abolition than holding a rapist accountable, therefore excluding the person he raped from the activist group.
I realize, that's a fairly wide range.
I also realize I am posting this quite late, and it wasn't what I planned on writing today. However, as I was going to write about things like what could be appropriate and inappropriate use of authority, it turned into this.
It may be very easy to defer to awful people, because they seem to expect it and you want to be nice, and maybe when you have tried speaking up it hasn't gone well.
If there is any point in writing this series at all, though, it should lead to being able to recognize when things are wrong, and how to respond to some wrong situations.
Under current world circumstances, there are things that are clearly one and one can easily feel justified anger, and then react in a way that is not only not solving the problem, but exacerbating it.
And of course, my writing method is to give lots of examples and background that I hope will combine to lead people to their own understanding, where they are finding the logic of it rather than just trusting me. I believe that is a more effective way of teaching.
Of course, I have spent most of my life feeling less than, so it is hard to be more assertive than that anyway.
Request: If you have found my writing helpful or enjoyable, please consider making a donation at https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/sultryglebe
No comments:
Post a Comment