What's the Worst That Could Happen?

Our Experiences Are Often Homonyms

CONTENT WARNING: Discussions of sexual assault and abuse.

Like most people in their mid-thirties, I’ve had some bad dates.

“Do you think we can go to a sports bar?” she asked. “One with a TV. UConn’s in the playoffs.”

“Uh, yeah, sure,” I said, figuring she’d probably just check the score every so often. It was after all our first date and I figured she’d mostly be interested in talking and figuring out whether we connected.

Instead she spent the entire evening glancing at the screen, stopping mid-sentence whenever any exciting basketballery occurred, constantly apologizing for being so distracted. Our date ended shortly after the game and I walked her to the subway, and when we were finally able to have an unhindered conversation we discovered we had very similar political philosophies. She told me she hoped we’d have another date, but I figured if I wanted to spend two more hours being ignored I’d call Time-Warner customer service.

That experience wasn’t as bad as the date with an improv instructor who spent the entire lunch mocking everything I said or did. It would have felt like negging if it seemed like she had any interest in me—as it was, we had zero chemistry, but I’d just come fresh out of a five-year relationship and was feeling confused and lonely so I asked her on a second date anyway… which she understandably declined.

I’ve of course been an awkward date for others as well, like the time I invited someone over to my apartment for a second date but was so pettily put off by the fact that she’d spelled “definitely” as “defiantly” in a subsequent email that when she arrived I couldn’t bring myself to make a move, so we just sat there watching Watchmen in awkward silence—all three hours and thirty-five minutes of it—and then I wordlessly walked her the half a mile from my place to the subway. It was a strange contrast from our first date, wherein we stayed at a bar/restaurant all night talking until the sun came up.

Or how about the time I really wasn’t feeling any connection or future with the person I was dating but I was so conflict avoidant that I couldn’t bring myself to break up with her, so I just kept avoiding seeing her and phoning in our interactions whenever I couldn’t avoid her until she finally broke up with me. In my idiot brain at the time, if I dumped her I’d be an asshole, but if I was enough of an asshole to get her to dump me, then somehow I wouldn’t be. (I’m sure I’ll have more to say in future installments about my conflict avoidance issues and my journey from passive-aggression.)

To be fair, everyone who has ever dated has had bad dates. I mean, it’s a universal experience… right?

Obviously there are those—nearly entirely women—whose experience is far, far, far worse. One in five women—a staggering twenty percent—will be raped in their lifetime, and one in three will experience some form of sexual violence. In eighty percent of those cases the victims knew their attackers. These are statistics we hear all the time, and those occurrences are undoubtedly underreported because of the way women are harassed and abused and doubted whenever they come forward about having been sexually assaulted. But the picture is actually deeper and more complicated than that.

In her essay The Female Price of Male Pleasure (a far more interesting response to the Aziz Ansari accusations than my own analysis), Lili Loofbourow discusses the way society trivializes and ignores women’s pain. We tend to refer to women’s experiences in the same ways as men’s without any sort of acknowledgement or understanding of the actual realities described.

The studies on this are few. A casual survey of forums where people discuss "bad sex" suggests that men tend to use the term to describe a passive partner or a boring experience. […] But when most women talk about "bad sex," they tend to mean coercion, or emotional discomfort or, even more commonly, physical pain. Debby Herbenick, a professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health, and one of the forces behind the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, confirmed this. "When it comes to 'good sex,'" she told me, "women often mean without pain, men often mean they had orgasms."

This tendency for men and women to use the same term—bad sex—to describe experiences an objective observer would characterize as vastly different is the flip side of a known psychological phenomenon called "relative deprivation," by which disenfranchised groups, having been trained to expect little, tend paradoxically to report the same levels of satisfaction as their better-treated, more privileged peers.

Disturbing, isn’t it? It makes you question a lot of your own metrics for experiences, like how “I’m hungry” means something far different depending on whether you’re a child in Yemen displaced from her home or an Upper-East-Side foodie who had to skip lunch because of a business meeting.

This denial of women’s pain extends to medicine as well, where there’s alarmingly little research into health concerns that affect only women but myriad studies into how to fix your floppy dick.

There’s a profound double standard that goes almost entirely undiscussed, and it’s only one of far too many in our society, and these disparities are only empowered by our lack of discussion about them. But often there are social pressures against discussion.

Consider for a moment the things we’re told not to talk about—sex, money, politics, religion, power—and then think about who benefits from that silence. Is it ever—ever—a disenfranchised or oppressed group?

When people do start talking about these subjects, only then are the disparities laid bare. Like: Women routinely have a far different—and in fact regularly painful—experience of sex. Or, women on the whole make far less money than men in the same roles with the same experience. Or, black people make far less money than white people in the same roles with the same experience. Or, police are more likely to be domestic abusers.

There’s so much we would never know unless people compared notes—and we’re actively shamed away from doing so. Is it really a coincidence that the things we’re most often told not to discuss are the things the patriarchy and the ownership class most want to control or hide?

I’ve very often heard, as I’m sure you have as well, that one should “never talk about politics or religion in polite company,” but all that really accomplishes is allowing those with cruel or ignorant beliefs to drift along in comfort, avoiding any confrontation over the heinous things they think. In a world where confirmation bias already not only prevails but utterly dominates, where there are no concrete repercussions at all for supporting cruel and hateful policies, why are they entitled to uninterrupted comfort as well?

This is the same mentality that insists awful people should be allowed to eat in peace, that it’s somehow wrong to inflict even the mildest discomfort or unpleasantness on people who’ve devoted their lives to oppression and imperialism and warmongering. The misery they inflict on the world operates 24/7—it doesn’t give its victims breaks for dinner. So why should they live in peace just because it’s “not office hours”?

Obviously not everyone has the privilege or the ability to just call this stuff out every time they see it. Challenging authority always carries a host of risks, and unfortunately you’ll often have to consider whether asserting yourself is worth jeopardizing, say, your job or your relationships with people. I can’t make that call for you, especially in a world where workers are systemically disempowered. And I certainly won’t tell you to always fight for the greater good in every situation regardless the context because I certainly don’t. (Your 70-year-old uncle probably won’t stop being racist just because you laid into him during Thanksgiving dinner, and while you did succeed in making him uncomfortable for a couple hours, you also made all your non-racist relatives uncomfortable as well.)

But I will tell you this: These things won’t get fixed unless we talk about them—frequently, directly, and openly, regardless what we’re told is and is not “acceptable”. Otherwise, crucial differences will remain invisible to those not affected by them.

Stuff I’m Enjoying (No Promo)

Nancy - The latest run of Nancy by Olivia Jaimes is pretty phenomenal. I’m a sucker for clever surrealism and this is right up my alley. I wish they carried it in my local newspaper.

More like Bent Shapiro - It’s deeply satisfying watching overrated man-child Ben Shapiro melt the fuck down.

Books I Read

I finished this a while back, but it’s an important one: Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil. It’s all about how we (often unintentionally or unwittingly) codify certain prejudices in our algorithms and then treat them as though their output is somehow unbiased or scientific. It’s yet another manifestation of unconscious/implicit bias. Such disparities are especially prevalent when engineering teams aren’t diverse, because that lack of perspective isn’t represented in the final product.

(Sort of like how some automatic soap dispensers have trouble detecting dark-skinned people’s hands—a problem that would have been caught long before the product went to market if the engineering and testing teams weren’t just a bunch of white people.)

Thanks again!

This is the second installment of this newsletter and I hope you’ve been enjoying it. If you have been, please pass it along to friends and tell them to sign up. Maybe if I get a large enough subscriber list I’ll put out more frequent updates (though any mid-week ones will likely be much shorter).

Also, if you have anything interesting or weird or important you’d like to send my way, please do. I may even end up writing something about it.

Until next time!