It Gets Better

So I'm in college now. I guess this makes me officially old. You'll laugh at that, of course – not old, but in truth an independent adult. And of course, all the changes to my life right now mean that this blog is going to be changing as well. I no longer have the single theme of living abroad to focus on, nor do I have an internship that requires me to blog about my everyday life. Instead I'd like to write more about what already inspires me most – politics, culture, feminism, and people-watching (social observations!). Obviously I haven't hesitated to do so during this past year, and these posts have also been the most successful, with my most-read posts being, in order, I have a massive crush on humanity on the negativity of radical feminism, 5 things about feminism I agree with, my personal favorite The American Essence on American intellectualism, ambition, and competition (which I consider a summary of all my thoughts on living in France), and finally Charity, discussing how to rationally make the world a better place. Clearly my faithful readers agree with me on which topics are the most interesting. With that being said, I'll be writing much less about my day-to-day life and more about the interesting stuff. Today I'm going to write about what it's like to be awkward, a topic I've been meaning to cover for ages (and covered briefly here).

Imagine that you are a martian. You are trying to fit in on Earth, even though you are very unlike the Earthlings. And you are terrified that they will find out your true identity, that you are Not One of Them. You get the feeling that everything you do isn't the right (well, normal) way to do things, right down to the clothes you wear, the lunches you eat, the things that interest you, and the way you staple your homework together. Ok, maybe that last one is an exaggeration, but maybe not. I was joking with my dear friend May about “not getting the memo” – that is, when I was in middle school I didn't get the memo that stretchy pants weren't socially acceptable, I didn't get the memo when everyone started shaving their legs, etc. Maybe other girls have mothers who explain these things to them, or maybe they're just more aware of their surroundings, I don't know. But either way, I never got the memo, and somehow this contributed to the feeling of being not the same species as those around me.

One thing I always admired is how people with confidence acknowledge their differences without thinking it's awkward or special. People have lots of variations in their everyday lives, and sometimes they don't learn all the same things at the same time. Some of my new friends in college just learned how to do laundry this weekend, whereas I've been doing mine since age 11 or so. Some people drink a lot of juice, some people like milk. These personal differences are even more obvious when we're all living in the dorms together. But a few years ago, I never would have been able to say “I don't know how to straighten my hair” and be comfortable with it. Being under the impression that every other girl on the planet had obtained this skill, it would have seemed like an admission that I was a different species, and not a simple “I am a person who has never felt the need to straighten my hair before.” At best, I would have made a big deal out of it, turning it into a label – I've always liked labels way too much. It would have been “I am not a stupid valley girl/fashionista/preppy girl, so (since I am proud of being different and a nerd), of COURSE I don't know how to straighten my hair!” when in reality it is silly to either be ashamed of or make a statement out of such a simple difference.

I don't know what makes people get this feeling. I've heard feeling that we are very different from those around us is one of the classic signs of an introvert, but it also has a lot to do with confidence (a trait not particularly correlated with introversion or extroversion). A lack of confidence was a big factor in making my middle school years (and my year in France, for that matter) unpleasant. Fortunately, this is a trait that can be developed. I remember really wanting to write about this topic a few months ago, but since coming back to the US I have had much less difficulty with this, and no longer feel as strongly about it. The whole reason I am still dedicating a post to it is to talk about how it gets better.

In case you aren't familiar with the It Gets Better project, it's a project to reach out to LGBTQ youth and tell them that life really does get better. Don't give up. It won't always be this bad. I wish this project existed in a more generic form, just to tell all adolescents struggling with depression that it'll get better. I certainly had a very painful middle school experience, and each year with the possible exception of France has been better than the last. Talking to the younger siblings of my friends, I can tell everyone goes through the same things. We all have been hormonal, alienated, mean to others or bullied by others or both, and constantly on the brink of giving up. I wish I could talk to myself from five years ago just to give myself a little hope. And that is also something I'd like to do with this blog, but for those who come after me.

Step number one is just to realize that everyone is human, not robots. They all have differences and awkwardnesses as well. Maybe the kid sitting next to you put on his T-shirt inside-out this morning and only fixed it when someone made fun of him. To you, you don't even question whether it's “weird” or not, but he might feel as mortified about that as you feel when someone thought you were weird for not plucking your eyebrows. And maybe the girl who discovered you don't pluck your eyebrows now feels weird wondering if she is the only one who does. Who knows? The point is, when it happens to other people, you don't notice. It seems normal, because it is normal for humans to have lots of variation. So when it happens to you, don't react like someone just saw through your eyes into your naked soul. Just be cool. Laugh it off. There is no normal.

Another thing that helps sometimes is to break open your boundaries and talk to people about routines – things you wouldn't normally talk about. Some people are very good at the kind of everyday humor that comes with being comfortable with this, for example, telling a funny story about tripping on his own flipflop and faceplanting in front of some cute girls. If someone else can tell this story and it's hilarious and makes you feel closer to them, why can't you do the same? Answer: you probably can. The other day I tripped walking to the dining hall and a group of people were walking behind me. A few years ago I would have kept going without saying a word, wishing the ground would open up and swallow me. But then, I looked back and said “You didn't see that, right?” with a conspiratorial wink. They laughed and we ended up having a really nice conversation. Bonus social points for me! So if this is a problem you suffer from as well, go tell someone about putting too much milk on your cereal this morning and how it got soggy and sucked. Maybe they'll even think you're funny.

When I originally intended to write this post several months ago, it was going to be solely about the odd sensation of being a complete outsider, both as an explanation to those less socially challenged than I and as a request to know if others experience the same thing. But I've been losing interest in this topic. At first this disappointed me – darn, I should've written it when I first had the idea – but it's actually a very good thing. I lost interest because I don't usually feel like this anymore, because everything's been getting better. (I really need these messages of hope right now because a friend of mine is going through some serious depression and I feel the need to broadcast the It Gets Better message, so bear with me.)

I have often worried that life is nothing more than a waiting game. In middle school, I just waited for high school so all my problems would go away. In high school, I waited for the beginning of every marching band season, I waited for summer, but most of all I waited for college. Junior year I found out I was going abroad, and I waited to leave everything I knew, start over, and I assumed that from there everything would be perfect. In France, I just waited to go home. The obvious concern here is this: what if it never does get better? What if I spend my whole life waiting, but happiness is not actually dependent on the particular situation of the present, and I'll never attain it?

But now I'm in college. I've never looked forward to something beyond college – never longed for a family or a grown-up job. So this is the endgame of waiting, the final test to see if the waiting is forever or if it gets fulfilled. And guess what? I'm not waiting anymore. I never catch myself thinking “It'll be better when X is over,” or “It'll be better when I get to do Y.” Sometimes the days pass slowly, because there's too much to do and it can be stressful and overwhelming. More often the days disappear like will-o'-the-wisps, as full of laughter as of stress, fulfilling even when they're wearing. I've only been here two weeks, but I've met some amazing people and I even feel like I belong. A dieu, my life as a martian. Welcome to feeling like a real person. This isn't to say there are never hard moments. I know I'm going to struggle with two of my classes this semester, and some days life just isn't as cheery as I wish it could be. But I'm where I'm supposed to be, in a pretty ideal environment for doing what I want to do.

This has been a scatter-brained three pages. I didn't know what I wanted to say, and life has been overwhelming. But what it comes down to is this: If life sucks, hang on. I believe that it'll get better. I believe that one day you'll be happy where you are. Yesterday was World Suicide Prevention Day, and recently I've been hearing about way too many suicides or attempted suicides. I know that sometimes life seems hopeless, but I don't think it is. Even if it takes a really long time to get there, it will get better. Have hope.

5 Things About Feminism I Agree With

I've been blogging a lot about the things that feminism does wrong. But I don't want to give the impression that I'm an anti-feminist, either, because that would be pretty far from the truth. So here are some reasons we need feminism:

1. Birth control and abortion rights. These are the two most legitimate issues on the feminist agenda in my mind, because they are two issues that must have showed up in a time machine from the 19^th century because who the heck thinks that women shouldn't have a right to decide what to do with their own bodies? Granted, I could write a much more coherent political post specifically about these issues, especially since I know not all of my readers agree with me, but it's been done many times before far better than I could do. There are many reasons for which I consider these issues no-brainers, but the biggest one is that women are sentient human beings and can decide what to do with their own bodies without the rest of the world chiming in. If you are a woman and are against abortion, great. Don't get one. (Similarly if you are against gay marriage, great, don't get one. Ditto for contraception.) But leave the rest of us alone to make our own decisions. My body belongs to me and me alone.
   
   
2. Read this article: How ‘Slut Shaming’ Has Been Written Into School Dress Codes Across The Country. This is a weird issue because it combines sexism and ageism, a concept I'm going to write about... soon. Whenever I get the time. (Note that my list of topics to write about is getting longer faster than I can cross them off the list.) I am aware that this does happen in adult work environments, but is much less common and much more shocking. We consider it perfectly normal if a kid says “At my school, we aren't allowed to wear spaghetti straps because it shows too much skin.” But if an adult says the same thing it sounds really weird. “Isn't that a little sexist and overly controlling?” you might respond. Perhaps the worst is the reason given, that it's “distracting.” To whom is it distracting? Example #4 from the article is: 'A kindergarten student in Georgia was forced to change her “short” skirt because it was a “distraction to other students.”' In kindergarten I really don't think the boys are going to be distracted by a little girl's ballet outfit. In kindergarten I'm pretty sure my brother still wanted to wear dresses to school so the two of us could be matching. (And my mom let him, because she's awesome.) Kindergarteners don't give a rat's! So really what this is about is trying to teach girls from a very young age to cover themselves up because their bodies are sinful. In an exercise in charitable thinking, it's trying to teach girls that there is a respectable way to dress that follows certain societal rules and expectations. It's for their own good so that they don't dress like sluts later on in their professional life. It's just when you think about what the gesture actually means that you realize we're installing the belief in girls' heads that their bodies are shameful, they have to cover up or other people will be distracted, and eventually that if they get raped or sexually assaulted, it will be their fault for dressing provocatively. It is fortunate that these sorts of rules are much less common after high school, but the damage has been done.
   
   
   
3. Read this Cracked article: 5 Ways Modern Men are Trained to Hate Women. I don't agree with all of these points, especially not the end that makes it sound like men think only with their dicks. I don't know, I'm not a guy, but I was not under the impression that that's how it works. Anyway, points 5 and 4 I especially agree with. It's not anyone's fault, but it's true that all the romance stories we've ever seen since we were born tell us that the average-looking main character guy deserves a hot girl in the end when he deals with his problems, defeats his childhood bullies, and becomes successful. And since everyone sees themselves as the protagonist of their own Hollywood film, they often feel like the world (or the girl) has been unjust when their advances are refused. Again, I don't think this was an intentional move by the misogynistic media or the patriarchy or something like that. It was just sort of an unintentional thing that happened from our historically sexist society. So blame is dumb and that's where I think a lot of feminists are getting it wrong, but we should realize the message here. In general heroines don't vanquish their enemies to be awarded with the muscled man-toy of their choice.
   4) The other point I liked the best was “We're trained from birth to see you as decoration.” Truth. And it's not just the men who are trained this way. Read this article on How to Talk to Little Girls. Even very young girls are told every day that they're pretty or well-dressed, while young boys are told that they're getting big and strong. The problem with this is that we're socializing these kids to believe that looks are very important, especially girls being pretty.
   
   The other day I met a 5-year-old French girl who immediately upon meeting me explained her wardrobe choices for the day (I chose the gray pants because the blue pants didn't go with my top and the black leggings are getting too small!) and told me that I had a weird face and told my host sister that she was beautiful. (I was very tempted to answer her question “Why is your face like that?” with a very blunt “Some people are just ugly, but they tend to take it badly so you should learn not to say it. Some day you might even be ugly! You never know.” Fortunately I restrained myself and her mom sat her down and explained the concept of acne.) Anyway, my gut reaction to her thoughts about her wardrobe was that there was something wrong with her, that she had already at such a young age been conditioned by her parents and society to care about things she shouldn't care about. I certainly didn't care about being pretty when I was her age, and adults didn't tell me I was pretty – probably because I made insulted faces at them if they did, cause looking back at my baby pictures I was pretty adorable. But then I was forced to admit that she is probably like many of my friends – actually genuinely interested in fashion. Fashion, after all, is like an art, so why should an interest in fashion not be legitimate? Just because I've never liked fashion and have always felt pressured to try to like it doesn't mean that a large percentage of girls aren't genuinely interested in it. So this topic is difficult for me to write about, because I'm not sure how much we're socializing girls to like fashion, and how much fashion is an art form created by girls that many girls happen to be interested in, just like how math was invented by nerds and nerds continue to like math. (There's nothing oppressive about math, even though nerds are often considered to be the bottom of the high school totem pole.) But even if young girls have a perfectly legitimate interest in fashion, I do think we emphasize the idea that they are decoration too much, since standard adult conversation to little girls consists of little more than “What a lovely dress!” 
   
   
   
   
   5) Girls can't do leader-stuff: Remember the thing in that Cracked article about how we judge Elena Kagan by her looks even though that has nothing to do with the job she's supposed to do? Same goes for Hilary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, two of my favorite female politicians. (I've never heard anyone insult Elizabeth Warren's looks but that might be because she's less well-known and so the only people who know about her are more sophisticated thinkers.) Criticizing Hilary Clinton's looks is such a non-sequitor, such a breach of logic that I really don't how you ended up there. We weren't talking about her looks, we were talking about her ability to run a country and make rational decisions that represent the will of the people... Speaking of Clinton, the word “bitch” has been used to describe (probably; this is just my best guess) the fact that she's a woman in a position of power. Since this is a minority opinion, I'm not going to address that issue. But what I am going to address is the underlying psychology that spawned it, in my humble, completely uneducated-in-psychology opinion.

Guys who are leaders are often seen as powerful, intelligent, arrogant, horny, charismatic, ambitious, etc. The negative qualities (arrogant, horny) often just contribute to the general picture. They can be excused by the man's greatness. Steve Jobs was allowed to be an asshole because he was inspirational and a Leader. I guess I can't claim that men are allowed to have sex scandals, considering what that did to Bill Clinton's career, but it's not shocking. Many, including myself, just sort of shrug and say “Oh well, I guess all politicians are horny.” I have no idea how we would react to a female politician with a sex scandal. (Update: Apparently, either we don't really care or it doesn't happen to really prominent female politicians because it happens less often in general.

But if female leaders exhibit some of the same qualities – let's go with the ambition/arrogance/confidence cluster because it's easier to deal with and analyze – they tend to be called bitchy. Like Hilary Clinton. In my estimation, Clinton is no more ambitious or confident or arrogant than any other politician during the 2008 elections, but she was the only one to be called names for it. It's sort of our gut response to females trying to take power. We question it, because it doesn't feel right. Personally, I tend to get along very poorly with female coaches or teachers. A female English teacher is the most likely to get on my bad side, because I often disagree with English teacher's comments, provoking sentiments like “Who does she think she is, anyway” and “Who is she to tell me what to do.” I've never had a male teacher in English, but I've always gotten along wonderfully with my male history teachers. I respect them for their history knowledge and let them tell me what to do in my essays because I feel they have the right to. In sports, I have a terrible time accepting orders from females, and tend to doubt their qualifications. If a female senior marching band member told me what to do, I might well have thought to myself “It's not like she knows how to march well anyway! And she should treat her fellow marchers with more respect.” But a male coach can scream at me and humiliate me and I'll generally feel terrible, but accepting of this discipline. I'm assuming that this is not just me. It could be something to do with wolf pack psychology, that as a somewhat dominant female I do not like other alpha females, but am fine with (and even tend to like) alpha males. Or it could be something to do with the fact that all of us have trouble accepting female leaders.

This really sucks. I'm not sure what to do about it, because I really do believe it's a natural phenomenon that has a lot to do with wolf packs and testosterone and having “being a leader” engraved in our brains as “muscle-y and virile and able to fight off enemies” and nothing to do with a conscious and deliberate hatred and oppression of women. So is feminism useful? Who knows. I'm sure there are some things we can do to fight against our brains, but I don't know what they are. But that's one of the biggest reasons I don't like being a woman, because I'm aware that being arrogant and ambitious and self-centered are all things that are more acceptable and attractive on a man than a woman, and it's way harder for us bossy females to look leaderly than it is for men.

I guess what would be more accurate to say is that these are 5 reasons it sucks to be born a woman. I do not feel that all of them are causes for feminism. Abortion rights, birth control rights, and the one about school dress codes definitely qualify: Go kill school dress codes, feminists, with my blessing! These are all issues for which I am a fire-breathing feminist. But the others are more deep-rooted psychological issues. It sucks for me that I will never look as leaderly as a tall, imposing man, but it's no one's fault and I don't know what, if anything, we can do to fight against it. I think my primary objection against a lot of things that radical feminists do and say is the hatred and blame that they use. I find the term the “Patriarchy” confusing and blameful. I find they are too negative, seeing sexism and rape culture and other terms I don't really understand when I never would have thought of that, and have to squint my eyes and smoke a little concentrated feminism to even start to see what they're getting at. (See my last week's post on the negativity of radical feminism.) But I am aware that I've been pretty lucky and have never felt discriminated against for my gender in ways that are institutionalized and not psychological. When other feminists go on rants about things that I found perfectly normal, they are probably reacting that way because they have a different history than I do, have been more abused by our sexist society, and have learned to have a trigger response that looks a little crazy to me. Anyway, so I managed to end on yet another negative note, but this was supposed to be my post explaining why I do consider myself a feminist among all the other posts I write criticizing the movement. I'm not trying to be a horrible anti-feminist person! It's just that I actually am a feminist, and I started reading a lot of feminist blogs and feel the urge to pick on all the things in their logic that I don't like! My apologies, feminists. I am on your side. Now let's go convince people that abortion rights and birth control rights would be great things to have.

I have a massive crush on humanity

This is an argument simultaneously in response to republicans, radical liberals, and radical feminists. It is not a very rational argument, but it is one of the principals by which I try to abide that has very little to do with rationality and utility but is really really important to me anyway.

Here are three arguments that I don't like:

1. Welfare is bad because there are a lot of people who take advantage of the system and abuse it. We shouldn't support those lazy people who just don't want to work.
2. (From my crazy leftist US gov teacher at De Anza): Society is falling apart and going to hell because of these evil evil republicans who want to keep women and minorities in a quasi-slavery position and because the socialization of our children today teaches them about violence and drugs and rape and not enough about love and family values.
3. Men (the “patriarchy”) are evil and trying to suppress women and want to rape them and deny them their rights. The media and makeup/clothing companies are evil and want to make women have Lots of Issues by making them insecure about their bodies to sell them products.

What is the common element? Quite simply, that people are evil. This is something we should always avoid thinking, because it mis-portrays our opponents. How do I know this? Tell me this: have you ever met someone who actually thought of themselves as evil? Someone saying to themselves “Mwahahaha, I am now going to oppress women for my own advantage”? No, I didn't think so. The point I'm going to make here is that your model of the world will be much better if you have a sense of charity to your political opponents; that you should remember to be optimistic about people because everyone (with the exception of psychopaths) is well-intentioned.

So first of all, let me destroy these above points one by one.

1. Do you know anyone who wants to live on food stamps? I don't. Standards of living are much better if you aren't on the US's pathetic version of welfare, and working is a fairly good predictor of happiness. As this Cracked.com article points out, misery is sort of humans' default setting, and working is one of the best ways to fix that. People on welfare are therefore probably pretty miserable and don't want to be in that situation. Furthermore, there are actual scientific studies that show the negligible percentage of “people who cheat the system” and how we spend way more money trying to find them than they would've taken away from the system in the first place. [Citation here]
2. ...I actually have nothing to say. This teacher's argument is so incoherent I don't even know where to start, except that it sounds roughly like the good old geezer's complaint “Kids these days! Society is falling apart because of video games!” which a few decades ago must have been “Kids these days! Hippies and pot will destroy society!” and a few decades before would've been “Them flappers and their bobs and pants will destroy society!” and a way long time ago must have been “Kids these days and their new hunting techniques with frigging bows and arrows must be making them lazy!” I have news for you, old geezer: society isn't falling apart. By many measures, it keeps getting awesomer.
3. I just don't think anyone planned for the oppression of women. Sure, the media has some negative effects. But do you really think that the people who design makeup commercials and put unrealistic plastic photoshop women on their ads were thinking “Haha, I will make women feel terrible about themselves!”? Personally, I think it's more likely that they were thinking “We are making a commercial for makeup. Therefore, it would make sense to have a really attractive woman in our commercial.”

I want to elaborate on this one a little bit, because this post was primarily inspired by the radical feminist blogs I've started reading. I just think they're doing it wrong, out of pure negativity. There is a recent internet buzz about Dove's Real Beauty campaign. Watch this video, but if you're too lazy it's a forensic artist who drew women based on their own descriptions of themselves and then on a stranger's description of themselves. I thought it was pretty powerful, and gives all of us hope that what we see in the mirror every day is not an accurate representation of what we look like to others. Our faults are magnified, and we should all break all of our mirrors remember that we're more beautiful than we think. Dove has a history of good feminist campaigns. I liked their last one even better: a time-elapse video showing how the women on makeup billboard ads get so beautiful and ending with “No wonder our perceptions of beauty are so distorted.”

Anyway, people on the internet immediately started making a huge fuss about the Real Beauty campaign because the women involved were primarily young-ish, thin-ish Caucasian women with blue eyes and blond hair. I definitely remember seeing a black woman on the video, but whatever. Details aren't important. I definitely remember seeing a woman who was about 40 on the video, too, but I guess that doesn't count either. The main point is that they're doing it wrong. They aren't giving Dove credit for what is a well-done campaign that is touching and empowering for a lot of women. So maybe if you, radical feminist, were on the design team, you would have included fatter, more diverse, older women. But does this neglect make it a bad campaign? Maybe I'm the only one not shocked by this because I too am a young Caucasian woman with blue eyes and blond hair. But I also don't think I would have noticed if it were all black women, or all Asian women, or all Latinas. I recently watched a different video on Youtube that was a short touching romantic film that had only Asian people and I literally didn't notice until I scrolled down and saw in the comments an exchange that went roughly like this: “Wow, Asians.” “But would anyone have said anything if it were all white people?”

I'm not trying to get all up on my high horse saying that I am above racism. I recently took a bunch of Implicit Association Tests which I recommend you do as well and it showed exactly what I would have predicted: I have little or no association with Asians as foreign or bad, and a strong automatic preference for whites over African-Americans. No, I wouldn't have predicted this because I'm secretly a horrible racist, but because in our scared little human brains, unknown is bad. Where I grew up in the Silicon Valley, I know just as many Asians and Indians as whites, and therefore I see them as just another brand of Californian, just as “ blond” and “brunette” might be two different brands of Californian. I don't look at Asian people and think “Hey look! An Asian!” because I am used to them and that would be ridiculous, like a New Yorker getting excited every time they see a Jew. However, there are very few black people where I grew up, and I'm pretty sure I've never had a close friend who was African-American. (I say African-American, not black, because I do know a Cameroonian who is one of my favorite people ever.) Just like how I disliked beautiful popular girls until I got to know some of them, I think my brain is normal to be suspicious of a group of people I haven't gotten to know.

However, it also is possible that these tests show nothing at all, because I just took the Gay-Straight test, where I honestly expected to get “slight automatic preference for gays over straights” and they gave me “strong automatic preference for straights over gays.” What? I am aware that my internal stereotype of gays is of kind, creative intellectuals who are awesome and share my political viewpoints, like a certain lit teacher at Homestead, or my history teacher now, or my friends from Campbell UCC, or any of my gay friends from, you know, everyday life. I know the “ I'm not racist, I'm friends with a black person!” claim gets shot down a lot, but let me just say I had no reason whatsoever to expect this result. So who knows what the IAT measures or whether it's accurate or whether it only works if you've drunk enough coffee in the morning and have fast reflexes and it's Tuesday.

The point is, I'm not above racism and I don't think anyone is. People have implicit preferences for people of their own race: “88% of white Americans (and 48% of black Americans!) show an implicit racial preference for whites on this test.” Clearly there is some weirdness going on here where everyone is secretly racist in the traditional sense of the word (against blacks), but it also shows that people just plain like their own people better. I think most people date within their broad racial/cultural spectrum (not sure if this just works on a white/black/Asian/Latino level or on a more specific Polish/American/Brazilian/Jewish sort of level). And this seems normal to me, pretty much like how I'd only date nerds because I'm a nerd and nerds understand each other.

That was a tangent. Sometimes I do tangents for an entire page or two and then realize that I'm not talking about the right topic. The thing I actually decided to write about was that a lot of the time, people make arguments (political or otherwise) that don't make sense simply because their enemies don't actually think that way. This is called strawmanning, and it is bad because it prevents people from rationally discussing issues to compare pros and cons and make decisions. When we aren't familiar with people, it's easy to assume that they're evil. This sort of ties in with racism: if you aren't familiar with a certain ethnic group, you probably don't actively think “Black people are horrible!” but subconsciously you might trust them less. It's very easy for me to assume that pro-lifers are horrible, misogynistic people without remembering that they actually believe that a fetus is as important and valuable as the mother (often more so, because the fetus hasn't sinned yet) and therefore it would be murder to abort. Everyone is the hero of their own story. No one plays the evil villain, except mentally ill people. And whether or not they are wrong, it works much better to treat them like the well-intentioned people they are.

I was inspired to write this post partly by watching youtube videos of this CMU a capella group my best friend sent me. Watching it just gives me the feels, this wonderful feeling that humanity is just awesome and that there are so many beautiful, kind, quirky, special, intelligent, fascinating individuals out there to discover and I can't wait to meet as many of them as I can. This is an odd feeling for me: I am an introvert and meeting people terrifies me. I have a lot less social anxiety than I used to, but it's still stressful to be among people.

Still, I get this feeling fairly often. Theater and music both give me the feels, and even when I've been in the pit orchestra for musicals, I never dare to talk to the actors because I don't want to destroy the perfect image I have of them. I've done HMS Pinafore, Pirates of Penzance, and South Pacific. Every single time we in the pit romanticize the actors and talk about them, without ever daring to talk to them. It is easier to have heroes when you don't know too much about someone. I idolize Gustavo Dudamel, and I know nothing about him other than what orchestras he conducts, and Danzon no 2. Just look at that smile, that fervor! Tumblr is a great example as well: they know quite well what unreasonable infatuations are. They are obsessed with Benedict Cumberbatch/Sherlock Holmes. They are obsessed with David Tennant/Doctor Who. They are obsessed with lots of beautiful and creative people, and you know why? Because people can actually be really cool. Granted, sometimes when we get to know them they aren't as perfect as we hoped they would be, but sometimes they're really really cool anyway and sometimes they're even cooler than we could've imagined. People are fascinating and complex and beautiful and they're what I want to study in college. Everything we do revolves around people, and generally if we feel like we have no one, if we feel alone, we're pretty depressed creatures. People are what makes us laugh, and cry, and love, and everything else that we obsess about and write poems about and live for.

So the flaw in these arguments about welfare and the patriarchy and all that is that these people are forgetting the humanity of their enemies, and they're confusing the issue by misrepresenting their opponents. People aren't trying to be evil, I promise. The patriarchy, if you insist on using the term, is not a club of straight white males who are trying to suppress your liberties. The patriarchy is a system of cultural traditions and norms that need to be overthrown because times are changing. A lot of the enemies of change (those who oppose subsidized birth control and abortions and gay marriage and all that jazz) are exactly that: people who have trouble with the notion of change because they were quite comfortable with the world in its previous state, having never felt disadvantaged by it themselves. They have reasons to oppose it, but a lot of it is just being conservative, which means reluctant to change the system, and with not being gay/female/an immigrant themselves.

I know quite a few people who are homophobic, but they know just one or two gays and insist that these gays are not like the rest of these (sick, perverted, drag queen, whatever their stereotype is) gays. One of them sent me a chain email with a picture of two fat men walking hand in hand in a gay pride parade, wearing pink high heels and thongs and nothing else. The caption was “And we'd let these people adopt children?” And suddenly I understood. He doesn't like gays because he doesn't know enough of them. He knows one or two, thinks they fall outside the norm, and thinks that the norm is the flamboyant cross-dressers in gay pride parades. With so little information, it doesn't seem surprising that he would conclude that gays are just really kinky people who probably shouldn't be trusted with children. (Sorry, trans people who are excluded by LGB media because you're too weird and we're trying to emphasis the normality of many gay couples! But... one step at a time, ok?) So when he says he's against gay marriage, it's not against my gay friends or my awesome history teacher. It's against “those people” because he's taken away their humanity. Just like how I often take away the humanity of pro-lifers before I remember that they, too, are in fact well-intentioned. So whenever you find yourself hating a particular group, try to imagine yourself what their rationales might be. Try to remember that they could be your parents, or your “That's my uncle Bob – he has some weird political opinions so don't get him started on communism, but he's really cool! He taught me how to hunt squirrels!” Try to imagine the little quirks about them that would make you like them. Maybe they hum off-key all the time and it's simultaneously annoying and endearing. Maybe they are gluttons for chocolate. Think about what they ate for breakfast, and whether they are a cat person or a dog person. Think about the things that make them human, the things that make them awesome, and remember that no one is evil. Some people are wrong, but no one is evil.