De-escalation

[rowyn]

This article, "Why Women Smile at Men Who Sexually Harass Us", has been going around my Twitter feed.

One of the things that fascinates me about it is that I don't generally do this, myself. When someone is annoying me in public, my go-to strategy is "ignore them". This is what I was taught to do, over and over again, starting in grade school. It is not particularly effective, but still better than anything else I've tried, so I've stuck with it. I do sometimes fake-smile to be polite rather than making a scene, but that's a strategy for people who I judge are trying to be friendly but I don't particularly want to engage, not for ones that make me feel unsafe. Unsafe provokes "run away/avoid/do not acknowledge" in me.

As far as I can remember, I've never been in a physical fight*, not even as a kid. I've not experienced the "man [or other bully] escalates to violence because of being ignored" that the article author refers to.

I don't say this to imply that it doesn't happen, or that the author is wrong about the best strategy for preventing a violent conflict. But I do find it fascinating that the rules she was taught are so different from the ones I internalized. I think she's right that her approach is more likely to avoid conflict. I can't help wondering if the reason that boys are more likely to get in physical fights than girls is that girls are socialized to de-escalate, and boys are socialized not to put up with crap. What would the world look like if everyone was socialized to de-escalate instead?

* I did once swing my book bag at a girl who was harassing me in junior high school. I don't recall if I hit her. She didn't try to hit me in return, so not sure this counts as a physical fight.

Comments

[3rdragon]

I think that my experience is somewhere in between. I would not say that I frequently find myself being polite to people who are harassing me because I am afraid of where the interaction may go if I do not. (Generally, I don't deal with nearly the level of harassment she describes, and I don't know to what extent this is because of my choices about where and when to go (For example, I don't like chatting to drunk strangers, so I tend to avoid situations that are likely to involve dealing with drunk strangers. And I've never had to work in food service or retail.) and how much is my physical size and reasonably well-developed "don't mess with me" vibes, and how much is the fact that I don't align particularly well with current ideal of a cute girl.)

I do sometimes react politely, mostly when ignoring or confronting doesn't feel like an option, but I wouldn't say that it's my go-to response, and there are a lot of factors that affect how I'll react.

However, the way in which that article did resonate with me is that I have on more that one occasion felt that I was trapped in an interaction that I did not want to be in because I felt compelled to be polite. In recent years, I have increasingly been aware that it's happening, but still unable to end an unwelcome conversation by either word or action because to do so would be rude, and somehow I have internalized this message that it is more important that I be polite than that I feel comfortable. And this despite the fact that if I asked my mother she would tell me the exact opposite, and my grandmother who would stand on men's feet or poke them with her fingernails if they thought they could get away with something because the pastor's wife couldn't object to their bad behavior.

I very clearly remember an incident at an internship I had in high school, where I wound up far closer than I wanted to be to a strange man who was probably homeless, because he asked to use my desk phone and he should only have been able to get in with a key card and when put on the spot, I could not come up with a polite way to say no, so I said yes.

My roommate and I wound up talking to a crazy guy on the train* for close to an hour because his first remark was innocuous and we made the mistake of responding, and then there was no way out without being rude. (I did consider trying to switch train cars, but we were in the middle of our car and didn't have a good way to coordinate, and I wasn't sanguine about being able to make it to the next car and didn't want to have to wait for the next train if we missed it.) And sure, I could have ignored him, or I could have confronted him on his crazy views, but we had already escalated from normal train activity, to guy talking to other people on the train (a little unusual, but it was a weekend and people are friendlier), to crazy rants (uncomfortable and I wanted to leave), and I didn't want to take any actions that might escalate it further.

[3rdragon]

That's the most egregious example that comes to mind, but I have definitely thought, You're trapping me in this conversation by making me be polite, and I don't want to, and continued to be polite, because women are taught to be polite and it's too hard to break that conditioning, and maybe sometimes because I am a little bit afraid of what will happen if I do anything else.

And I don't think that this is a problem that only I have. In college, I had friends who taught me "the loser dance" -- a specific set of moves to summon your female friends to come and physically separate you from a guy you don't want to be dancing with. And we were all competent, empowered, twenty-first-century women's college students and grads. And yet a signal like that exists because we're incapable of getting ourselves away from a man we don't want to dance with.

I never had to use the loser dance. (I don't go in much for clubbing.) But I really wish that my employer was better at teaching us how to deal with harassment from clients, because I know that several of my colleagues have encountered it, and most of us have enough trouble getting out of these situations when we aren't trying to navigate a client relationship.


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*For a definition of crazy that means holding views that make no sense and imposing them on other people. I won't venture to evaluate his mental health otherwise.

[rowyn]

I've seen men suffer from the "I want to leave but I am trapped by my own politeness", though yes, I definitely think it's drilled more into women. The whole business of telemarketing and door-to-door salespeople is predicated on taking advantage of the willingness of people to be polite to strangers. And probably has made our society less polite overall as a result.

That "loser dance" reminds me of the way security at some cons now are taught to keep an eye out for women who might be cornered and offer them a graceful way out of a conversation or situation. It is definitely a real problem.