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Current Mood: unconsenting

Yes We Can.

I came upon a terrible website today. When I dirst looked at it, briefly, I thought it was just the kind of life-coaching bad advice that flourishes everywhere, albeit on a very serious topic. As I read further I got angrier, until I was enraged after reading this:

What this site can do for you

* Show you that no one can abuse you without your consent.

That is such a disgusting statement that I don't know where to begin. So let's start here: Bullshit.

But at this point, I got sidetracked, to see what else people can't do without my "consent." Apparently, no one can irritate, offend, intimidate, tease, bully, rush, insult, humiliate, control, judge, swindle or belittle me without my consent. No one can let me down or make me feel small without my consent. Clearly, any time any of those things happened, I wanted it to happen. Deep down, I must be a bad person, or simply a weak one, to be so willing to consent to all of these terrible things.

Also, for some reason, no one can unbend me without my consent. I read the whole thing and I still don't know what that means.

The mother of all these snowclone instances is Eleanor Roosevelt, who is quoted in several places as saying, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." This is, of course, also bullshit. And inaccurate paraphrasings of this saying are the source of many of the snowclones mentioned above. But after a long discussion on the

npl e-mail list about the scholarship of quotation collections (or, more accurately, the lack of them) I'm wondering if she even said it at all. It's rare to see any attribution to a source. The quote doesn't seem to make an appearance on the major official sites dedicated to Eleanor Roosevelt, and it doesn't show up in her writings that are available for search at Amazon. In fact, it's most prominent in self-help/life-coaching books, even before the occasional appearances collections of quotations.

On the rare occasion it is cited, the source is This Is My Story, which is apparently a memoir from 1936 or '37 long out of print. And given the track record of most quotation collection, it might not even be an accurate quotation.

So the quote, though definitely bullshit, may not even be actual. I'm tempted to buy one of the few copies of the book used off Ebay or Amazon just to find out how this whole mess started.

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Actually, in many ways I buy into it.

I stayed with my ex for five years, essentially giving my consent for him to continue to treat me the way he did for the last two years. I could have left, but I didn't.

I obviously don't believe everyone gives their consent. But the quote itself helps me get past a lot of what happened and remind myself never to let it happen again.

This post is, in many ways, a sidetrack of other thoughts that I'm exploring on a different journal. I'm hoping to continue that conversation a bit before transferring the fuller thoughts here. In specific, it was prompted by consideration of an excerpt of a new book about domestic abuse called Coercive Control and by my previous reading of the book Brainwashing

Abusive relationships generally don't star when a guy sees a girl in a bar, smacks her across the face, and the rapes her. Abuse often happens below the level at which one is aware enough to consent or refuse, and much abuse affects the victim in such a way that their ability to respond is compromised. It's not fair to pick a point in the middle of prolonged abuse and try to treat it without the context of what came before. Your ex spent three years laying the groundwork for the other two, and the person you were at that moment was very different from the person you were before and are after.

And it's possible to take this view without depriving yourself of the agency to change. As Kathleen Taylor says in Brainwashing, "Perhaps it would be better to replace 'I could have done otherwise' with 'Next time, I could do otherwise' (because I have changed in the meantime, and the change may have consequences even I cannot predict). The first statement gives us nothing useful; the second gives us freedom."

Hmmm, so I know I am the one that linked to that site, and I stated that the phrase "target" in place of victim, also somewhat implied victim . . . and I have a few ideas about the whole thing--

1) the bad behavior on the part of the abuser is 100% the abuser's responsibility

2) sticking around and living in that cycle is setting a precedence-- so while a person is not actually consenting, a person is not saying "yes I want to be abused" the person is also not leaving. Beyond that, it gets sticky, I think as has already been demonstrated. Because usually after the precedent is met repeatedly the situation escalates and the limits keep getting pushed.

The reason that manipulation works is because a person is buying into it. They are investing something into believing what is being said somehow. I certainly was invested-- I already had the notion I was unlovable/unworthy-- and because I held those beliefs it was easy for me to buy into whatever my X was saying.

irritate, offend, intimidate, tease, bully, rush, insult, humiliate, control, judge, swindle or belittle me without my consent

Let's take tease for example, in the construct of "insult" rather than "friendly". Someone CAN state an unkind opinion about you without your consent, and how you react to it determines what happens next-- you can get upset, OH MY THIS IS HORRIBLE, you can LAUGH what a freakin idiot, or you can walk away, you can 'insult' them back, or you can punch them in the face (but then it is assault and I wouldn't recommend that, but the teasing stops.)

I guess, what I interpret this to mean is slightly different than the literal words-- which is, my reaction/thoughts determine how I feel about someone doing/say X to me, and at the end of the day, most of it is just opinion (even this).

By these comments you can probably see why the article about circumstance prompted a different kind of thinking. From -> self got me into this self get me out TO -> more factors than just self are involved in getting in and more factors than just self were involved in getting out. I don't think either are wrong, just different.

As for judging-- I could really give a shit most of the time if people judge me. They have every right to make a judgement, it is just an opinion. They have every right to not associate with me because of that judgement, but they do not have a right to treat me badly, and I do have some control over whether or not that happens- I may not like my options, but there are always options.

I hope you don't take my failure to link as any sort of passive-agressive tactic. Given the personal nature of your post and the fact that this post is really tangential to what's being discussed there, I didn't feel it was appropriate to unilaterally direct traffic that way.

I think I'm going to expand on the ideas tomorrow, but in short, I think that these clichés, and the ideas behind them imply far more control over emotions and others than it is rational to assume in even the best conditions. None of the clichés adress one's own thoughts or actions, which a person ideally (though not necessarily always) has control over.

oh, not at all-- I was just saying that I know I linked to it and even stated that it was iffy-- and I mentioned it because i was about to mention an opinion that agreed-ish with the site.

There's a difference between 'consent' and 'complacency'. Some apparently believe that that difference is negligible. There is also a difference between 'putting up with' and 'caring about', and the significance of that difference is also frequently undermined. Whenever I hear about something like the website you mention, my response is "they should buy a dictionary" and I move on. They really need to learn to get their actual point across rather than speak in inaccurate terms that make them look like complete dolts. - ZM

I sincerely hope you're not intending to say that victims of abuse are "complacent" about their situation.

The clichés and false platitudes here do more than just discredit their purveyors in the eyes of others. They spread virulently offering destructive false solutions to very complex problems. For a related example, see Language Log's "Etymology as Argument"

I sincerely hope you're not intending to say that victims of abuse are "complacent" about their situation.

I'm thinking preemptively. The original statement you quoted claims people cannot be mistreated without their own permission. This is only guaranteed true if they redefine what they consider good treatment to include every way they are ever treated. That is ludicrous, especially for those currently being treated especially badly. What I'm suggesting is that what they should have said is that people cannot be mistreated unless they let their guard down: only when you stop heeding warning signs do you open the door to being taken advantage of. I believe this is, though not perfect, at least a lot closer to the truth; surely no one invites abuse, but those who show no potential of resistance to it will likely be the first victims. Sad fact of life.

It all boils down to attitudes, really. When comparing two attitudes, the stronger is determined by the greater absolute value. "I'm gonna do something bad" is trumped by "I'm not gonna let that something bad happen" every time. Even if that something bad then happens, it isn't 'abuse' per se - the victim won't start down a slope of despair and will hopefully very much still be in a position to bring the offender to justice, and quickly. I'm NOT saying it's a victim's fault for falling victim - there would be no victims if there were no guilty parties. Those who don't see it coming and/or lured into a false sense of security will have a weaker attitude towards the "something bad" and find themselves not only suffering it, but also suffering themselves, and it only spirals from there.

Once a person actually has been abused, then terms like 'consent' and 'complacency' don't factor in anymore, at least not in individual-on-individual cases. (Government-on-citizens or company-on-customers, sure, but not person-on-person.) A person presently being abused is likely terrified to act in any manner against the abuser unless they "snap" (which is, of course, the survival tool known as the human brain taking what it sees as its only course for its continued existence). Any attempt of changing what the person responds to or thinks about in terms of their attitude towards what happens to them is too late. The source of the abuse must be dealt with at that point, and it'll pretty much require a third party.

I think it's safe to say that your stance can be summarized as "redefining what it means to be abused is not a means of resolving being abused", which is something I wholeheartedly agree with. Forgiving an abuser is condoning the abuse from where I stand, and asking a victim to do that is outright reprehensible. There is a critically positive message to be made along the lines of how people feel about themselves being related to how others treat them, but if not properly phrased it can do far more damage than good, compounding on damage already done. I think we agree that this is the case here. - ZM

Then I think that your use of the word "complacency" isn't ideal in this situation. "Complacency" implies "self-satisfaction" more strongly than "nonawareness," and it was that latter aspect of the word that I found objectionable. I don't think there's a handy word for what you're describing—unconcern, inattention, and any number of similarly prefixed words might fit somewhat.

Similarly, I think it's important to distinguish attitude toward something (a person's mental position regarding a particular outcome) and awareness, sensitivity, or reactance to it (the ability to accurately determine the likelihood of a particular outcome based on the available evidence, consciously or instinctively). If I read your response correctly, you're including both of those in your evaluation of the strength of attitude. But a change in attitude (using my definition, which is generally more prevalent in common usage) is not enough to "raise one's guard," even before abuse starts.

As I said above, most abusive relationships start well below the level of most people's threshold for alarm. This isn't a failure to be properly vigilant, and it isn't the failure to heed warning signs. It's a more fundamental (and extremely difficult to control) inability to raise the alarm in the first place.

Finally, I'm not convinced that your summary accurately portrays my stance. But I've been trying to succinctly explain why for some time, and have been unable to do so. Hopefully, after I write further on the subject, things will be clearer.

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