Two things happened recently that reopened one of my little hate boxes. The first one had to do with some asshat who decided Twitter was the perfect place to start making hateful comments to Felicia Day. He questioned what use she was to geek culture and called her a booth babe. Naturally, people responded by ripping him to metaphorical pieces.
In his kind of apology, he said something like, "oh, well I made these comments before I looked at your portfolio." I guess he thought this was some kind of acceptable excuse, but it wasn't. "I'm sorry, I was totally ignorant of this stuff I could have looked up in two seconds and formed really shitty opinions of you anyway" really isn't a good apology. Or even any kind of apology.
However, I've noticed it is a fairly typical thought pattern with a lot of people. They don't take the time to understand even the most basic truths of who you are before they start assuming the worst. This might have even been an excuse back before the internet when people actually had to put out an effort to do research. These days though, it really isn't that difficult to click a link or use Google.
The other example of this happened in the comments of this post. Two girls in their 20s, long time Harry Potter fans, posted a video parody in support of House Hufflepuff. Some guy's comment is 'Should be retitled, "Reasonably attractive girls pander to Harry Potter Fanbase".' His assumption, based only on seeing the video, was that these two girls (who he decided to judge as only 'reasonable attractive,' which was insulting enough) ONLY did this video to pander to impressionable and horny male Harry Potter fans. While he doesn't state that he sees this as a horrible thing, the word 'pandering' has become one of those buzz words people use to slut shame women.
Oh, she is sexy and claims she likes Star Trek. But she really doesn't like it. She's just pandering to the men who do like it to earn favor/money/attention from them.
Now, if this gentleman would have just clicked the link to learn about the girls who did this video, he would have found that they have a huge collection of Harry Potter fan videos. They love Harry Potter and do these videos because they are the fanbase. Someone who knew the girls pointed this out to him and he gracefully admitted to being wrong.
Now, while I used two examples of misogyny, I don't think this is something that only happens to women. In fact, I think this is something almost all of us do from time to time. When someone presents themselves to us, we react. Certainly, we can't help what our first thoughts about them might be. That's just how our brains are wired.
HOWEVER . . . I think before we take that next step, the one where we begin to publicly bash them and air our opinions about them out there for everyone in the world to see, it might be a good idea for us to take a few moments to do some research. If we look them up and read about who they are and where they are coming from, we might realize they're not really what we assumed they were. In the process, we may discover some very interesting people . . . or at the very least, keep ourselves from looking like assholes.
It amazes me sometimes how often people spew their ill-formed opinions based on nothing but the most cursory knowledge of a person. I know we all, to a certain extent, carry our own prejudices into our meetings with people. But it seems to me that, as you take time to listen to a person, get to know them, your prejudices alter, and you begin to see people as individuals, not as some stereotypical representative of their group. But lately I've noticed a lot of people doing it the other way around: trying to force people to fit into the little boxes they want them to fit into. And they become outraged when a person doesn't actually fit there.
ReplyDeleteI think you're very right about that. There seems to be a deep and abiding anger when someone doesn't fit into the little box, as you put it. It's almost like people have their own little narrative going and if you stray from their story, they hate you.
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