Thoughts from advice columns: take a number

Returning my cable box at the Time Warner store, I arrived to find 30 people ahead of me in line. Begrudgingly, I took a number (as you do at the deli counter) and waited. A woman turned around and told me she could no longer stay. She offered me her ticket, five numbers away from being called. At first I said no — it wouldn’t be fair to everyone else who was waiting — but she insisted. I took her ticket, returned my cable box and walked out of the store while everyone else kept waiting. Was it right to take the ticket?

The ethicist says he shouldn't have taken the ticket, but I disagree. What LW should have done is accept the number from the lady, then passed his number on to someone with a higher number. That person would then, in turn, pass their number on to someone with a higher number, and there would be a ripple effect throughout the entire line.

No one person would be any worse off than they were going in (if you have #47 and no one offers you a lower number, there are still 46 people in line ahead of you), and a bunch of people would come away from the situation with their day brightened, feeling like they've gotten a stroke of good luck AND feeling like they've been charitable to someone else.

Thoughts from advice columns: passive-aggressive responses to bring your own dinnerware

Dear Miss Manners:

My husband and I have been invited to dinner at a friend's house who is very "green" conscious. After accepting her invitation, we've been asked to bring our own dinnerware since she is not sufficiently equipped as she has recently moved into the city.

She says that because she is very environment-conscious, she shuns disposable dinnerware. Although I respect and admire her efforts at being "green", I am surprised that guests will be asked to get their own dinnerware when invited to dinner.
I almost want to take my own disposable dinnerware because the idea of carrying my plates, bowls, and glasses to her house, eating in them and cleaning them and bringing them back makes me feel uncomfortable.

One's contribution towards a greener planet is their own personal choice and in this case I feel pressurized into following her ideology of being green. Will it be bad etiquette for me to take disposable plates when the hosts shuns them? Am I making a big deal out of it?

My first thought was to bring disposable, but Miss Manners vetoed it. However, a surprisingly wide assortment of other passive-aggressive responses came to mind. In order from most to least productive, (and without presuming that any of this is consistent with etiquette), they are:

1. Buy her a set of dinnerware big enough to accommodate the party as a housewarming gift.

2. Bring your own and leave it behind, leaving her with all the annoying clean-up work (and saving yourself from having to schlep dirty dishes home).

3. Bring your own, but have them accidentally get broken in transit. You get there, greet everyone, open up the bag they're in, and find shards.

4. Bring your own, but have them accidentally get cracked in transit without your noticing. So you go to pour red wine into a glass, and it leaks out of the glass through the crack that you didn't notice and dribbles all over her rug.

5. Cellphone call at the last minute: you got bumped on the subway and broke your dishes and now won't be able to come.

Me, I'd either get dinnerware as a housewarming gift (at about the Kitchen Stuff Plus price/quality point), or I'd say "I'm terribly sorry, I won't be able to accommodate you" when she asks me to bring my own dinnerware, or, if I was together enough to carry it off, I'd go with "Oh no, I can't possibly impose on your hospitality before you've finished setting up housekeeping. We'll reschedule for sometime after you're settled in, I insist!"

What I can't fathom - as in it doesn't compute at all and I cannot even begin to imagine how a person thought of it - is how the hostess came up with the idea of having a dinner party when she didn't have the equipment. Why doesn't her brain process the number of plates in her cupboard or forks in her drawer (or the number thereof that she can reasonably acquire by the date of the dinner party) as the maximum number of people she can have over for dinner?

Thoughts from advice columns: sperm donation

Q. Letting Wife Know About Sperm Donation: My wife and I are very good friends with a lesbian couple who is trying to have a baby. They asked me to donate sperm to conceive the child. After discussing it with my wife, I declined. They were very understanding and we remain good friends. However, in the course of our decision-making, my wife commented how odd it would be for me to have a child "out there." I agreed with her out loud, but the truth is, I have donated sperm. (I stopped before I met my wife, however.) For all I know, I could have several children "out there." I never told her about it because I never imagined it coming up and when I donated it seemed like I would always remain anonymous. After doing some research, however, it seems possible that a child that resulted from my donation COULD find and contact me. Should I tell my wife about my donations, and if so, how?

(This question is originally from a Dear Prudence chat, but I linked to the CF Abby entry because my thoughts are stemming more from the discussion.)

1. LW doesn't mention whether or not he and his wife have children or plan to have children, but if there is the potential for children in his relationship, I think he should tell his wife, just in case he one day decides to tell his children. There are reasons why you might tell your children that you've been a sperm donor (for example, so they know that they might have biological half-siblings out there and keep this in mind when making decisions about their own sex life), and different people have different ideas about whether this is a sufficient reason to disclose what some perceive as a private part of one's personal history. But, if it's a secret from your wife, that makes telling your kids harder. If your kids know, your wife should know first. And if you ever do have to tell your kids, it will be much easier to do so if your wife has already processed the information.

2. Some of the CF Abby commenters seem to think that it's not right for Wife to get a say in what Husband does with his sperm, citing his sovereignty over his own body. I question whether this really is a question of sovereignty over his own body (it makes no difference to his body if his sperm are donated or not), but, regardless, I think it's fair for Wife to at least express her opinion, and not unreasonable for Husband to take it into consideration.

What marriage has always meant to me is a deliberate choice to be each other's #1 person. If you didn't want to be each other's #1 person, you wouldn't get married. And, I think, part of being each other's #1 person is that you get first dibs on using their DNA to make children. There are arguments for or against whether the wife should be able to veto the husband's sperm donations, but I think it's completely reasonable and entirely within the spirit of marriage for her to have first dibs on bearing his children, because she's his #1 person. If Wife and Lesbian Couple all needed a kidney donation, Husband should offer to Wife first. If Husband, Wife and Lesbian Couple were all walking down the street one summer evening and it was a bit chilly, Husband should offer his jacket to Wife before he offers it to either half of Lesbian Couple. If Husband has two tickets to a concert, he should offer the other ticket to Wife before he offers it to one of Lesbian Couple. If he were to offer these things to Lesbian Couple without giving his wife right of first refusal, that would be completely inappropriate. Procreation is far more personal and intimate, so it would be even more inappropriate to let someone else bear his children first.

Another part of being each other's #1 person is respecting each other's emotional needs. This means that even if Wife's desire for Husband not to donate sperm isn't 100% rational, he might opt to respect her feelings rather than pushing them aside in favour of Lesbian Couple's desire to have a child (which is also not 100% rational). It's fair to express your emotional reactions to your partner without having to censor them for complete rationality, and it's anywhere from a valid choice to a loving choice to respect your partner's emotions without nitpicking them for rationality.

3. Personally, if I were to discover long after we got married that my husband had donated sperm in the past, I would feel that he had withheld important information. It would be kind of like discovering that your spouse had been a prostitute, or votes for The Worst Party. This is the kind of thing I'd want to know early on, because I find the egotism inherent in thinking it's a good idea to make new people out of one's DNA rather distasteful, and I'd have to work through it before I could potentially get involved with a person who has that specific shade of egotism. I'm sure some people reading this object to my distaste for sperm donation. And, if sperm donation is so important to you, wouldn't you want to know if I have such objectionable opinions before getting entangled in a relationship with me?

Teach me how arts donations work

From The Ethicist:

I was excited to take my granddaughter, Rachel, to see a local production of “The Nutcracker.” But this season, the production was being underwritten in large part by David Koch, a billionaire who supports numerous political causes that I think harm our nation. He also supports many worthy medical, educational and arts organizations, but I think those good works buy the complicity of the institutions in question. I’m sure my granddaughter would have liked to see the show, but rather than validate this patron’s actions and beliefs, I boycotted it. Should those who feel as I do have joined me?

Does the donor get anything out of higher ticket sales? I was under the impression that he's out of pocket the same amount regardless of whether the tickets are sold or not, and I can't see how boycotting would have any impact on him. What am I missing?

Wherein a monogamist presumes to give advice on how to handle adultery

Dear Annie: I recently found out that my 27-year-old married daughter is having an affair with her 40-year-old boss. He is married and has two children. She doesn't know that I know.

I warned her to be careful when I noticed that she and her boss sometimes work late. I told her that when I was her age, I did some things I was not proud of. I also sent her articles about people having affairs. I told her it was wrong and people would get hurt. I have tried to give her as much advice as I could without letting on about what I know, but now I think it's time to tell her.

I do not want to do this over the phone, so I am waiting for the vacation we are taking with her and her husband in a few weeks. This has truly been a shock to me because I thought I had taught her better than this. Before she married, her father and I separated for a year. I never told her that he was seeing someone else.

So far, I have told no one about my daughter's affair, but I want to confide in my husband. How should I handle this? -- Puzzled

I think the best approach here would be for the mother to simply inform the daughter of what she knows and how she found out. No judgement, no advice. Simply let her know that her ass isn't covered (if indeed it needs covering - some commenters in CF Abby suspected that it might be an open marriage) and that any interested party who is at least as competent as her mother would be able to find out about the affair.

The mother's first duty in this matter is to her daughter. Even if, as a general philosophy, she doesn't want adultery to happen or marriages to break up, her loyalty should be to her daughter over her daughter's husband or her daughter's boss. Simply pointing out what she knows and how would fulfill that loyalty to her daughter, and at the same time make her point about the pitfalls of having an affair far better than nagging or passive-aggression ever could. And, as an added bonus, doing so completely without judgement and advice sets her up as someone her daughter can confide in should it become necessary.

Of course, in this particular letter, it's too late for that. The LW has already given her daughter lectures and unsolicited advice and passive-aggressive newspaper clippings. At this point, her only hope is probably just to come clean. "Listen, I've been making a complete ass of myself and handling this really poorly and I understand completely if you don't want to talk to me any more. I'll just tell you this one thing and then leave you alone. All this started because I googled your name and the word Facebook and found a post in the Citizens Against Bad Puns facebook group in which you appeared to be flirting with a guy named Bill, so I clicked on his name, [etc.] In any case, all I wanted to do was point out that this information is publicly googleable so you can protect yourself accordingly. I truly am sorry for acting like such an idiot and making you uncomfortable. The only explanation I can offer is that I've never been in this situation before and couldn't figure out what to do, although at my age I really should know better."

Then drop it completely.

What to do when your pre-teen daughter wants to remove her body hair

There was recently a letter in the Globe and Mail's Ask A Pediatrician column from a parent whose 8-year-old daughter wants to start shaving her legs. As a former hairy 8-year-old myself, I felt compelled to respond.

Short version for busy parents: Anyone who has body hair is old enough to remove said body hair. In my personal experience, a No!No! is the best hair removal method for beginners. For more information on how I arrived at this reasoning, keep reading.

My credentials

You're probably thinking "You don't have kids, what do you know?" What I know is what it's like to be a hairy little girl. I have more body hair than most women, and started puberty earlier than most people. I seem to remember more clearly than most people what I thought and felt as a child, and I can now articulate those feelings with adult vocabulary and nuance, and without feeling the need to hide or sugarcoat anything like a younger girl might out of awkwardness or shame. I also have 20 years' experience managing my body hair, and have tried literally every home hair removal method currently in existence.

When you should let your daughter start removing her body hair

Short answer: as soon as she has body hair that she'd like to remove.

Your first thought is probably "But she's too young!" But when it comes to taking care of our bodies, we have to work with what our bodies are actually doing, not what they theoretically should be doing. If your daughter started menstruating, you'd provide her with feminine hygiene products and make sure she knows where babies come from. If she began developing breasts, you'd provide her with the foundational garments she needs to maintain her comfort and modesty. If she started having strange vaginal discharge, you'd get her gynecological care.

In fact, her young age makes having prominent body hair even worse, because she and her peers aren't accustomed to this, and might not even know that it's normal. (One of the greatest humiliations of my life was being the only person, male or female, with hairy armpits at the Grade 5 pool party. Neither I nor any of my classmates knew at the time that hairy armpits were a normal part of puberty. It took until adulthood for my self-esteem to recover.) She's likely the hairiest person in her class, male or female. If her mother removes her body hair, and if her sisters are either young enough that they don't have prominent body hair or old enough that they remove their own body hair, then your daughter probably thinks she's the only person in the world who has this very visible, very humiliating problem. Her self-concept will be defined by it. And, because for her entire hairy life she has not been permitted to remove her body hair, she cannot help but to feel like she will have to spend the rest of her whole life experiencing this humiliation.

However, being able to remove your body hair gives you control over this. You aren't sentenced to be the ugliest person in the room any more. You are no longer defined by your hair. You once again have control and sovereignty over your body and can look as feminine as you feel. I am telling you from my firsthand experience as a hairy girl, it is outright empowering!

Because your daughter specifically asked you about shaving, we know that she is bothered by her body hair and that she knows you can provide her with a solution. If you do provide her with a solution, she will learn that if she goes to you with questions or concerns about her changing body, you will give her solutions that make her feel empowered. However, if you tell her that she's too young, she will feel even more ashamed of her body hair, as though she's being bad just by being hairy at too young an age. The shame compounds: she feels ashamed because she has ugly masculine hair, and she ashamed at having hair at an age you consider too young, and she feels ashamed at wanting to remove the hair when you think she's too young. Again, these bad feelings are even worse for especially young kids, because they still want to Be Good rather than rebelling against their parents. You can save her from this shame spiral and reward her for coming to you with her concerns about her changing body simply by providing her with the solution she came to you for, which what any good parent does when their kid comes to them with any problem.

While it is normal for a younger kid to go to their parents for permission to do something to or with their own body (and such permission is often also logistically necessary), we all know that it's really a question of sovereignty over one's own body. Denying her this sovereignty will introduce the idea that it's normal for authority figures to overrule her sovereignty over her own body. Do you want to take that risk? Then, as she gets older and starts thinking about it, she'll extrapolate that your rules are arbitrary and lack credibility, and will proceed to do whatever she wants without consulting you.

In summary, letting your kids remove their body hair as soon as they want to will increase their self esteem, empower them, assert their sovereignty over their own body, increase your credibility in their eyes, and teach them that coming to you with any concerns they might have about their changing bodies gets good results. Not allowing them to remove their body hair has the opposite effect.

At this point, you're still thinking "But what if she hurts herself with a razor or hot wax? And I don't want her to have to commit to a beauty routine for the rest of her life, not at such a young age!" That brings me to...

Why I recommend the No!No!

If you clicked on the link above, you're probably thinking that the No!No! looks expensive and infomercially. It is a bit pricier than parents normally spend on pre-teens (although you can often get deals on ebay) but it does do the job. Here's why I like it, and why I think it's especially suitable for particularly young users:

1. The No!No! is safe. It's impossible to injure yourself with it. The only harm can come from if you get loose skin caught in it, and the one time I did this (I ran it over my elbow with my arm straightened instead of bent, so the skin wasn't anywhere near taut) I got a red line on my skin that disappeared the next day. No blood, no pain, no scar, just a red line. It's contraindicated for genitals and breasts, but can be used on the rest of the body, including the face.

2. The No!No! is easy. It's just as fast as shaving, but without any of the mess. You don't even need to be in the bathroom to do it. (I do mine in my bedroom - no water required!) Even in cases where it doesn't get every single hair, you always finish with fewer hairs than you started with. It's never a frustrating waste of time.

3. The No!No! is painless. It doesn't pull the hairs out, it zaps them in place. You feel a slightly warm thing passing over your skin, and that's all.

4. The No!No! can be used on all types of hair. It works on stubble and on longer hairs. You don't have to wait for the hair to grow to a certain length like you do with many epilatory methods. You can do it every day or once a week. It doesn't work on full-length pubic hair (you need to trim it down first, and it is contraindicated for the genitals anyway, although it's okay for the outer bikini line), and I, personally, struggle to make it work for armpit stubble (have never tried it on virgin armpit hair), although I struggle with all epilatory methods on my armpits because the layout of my breasts makes it difficult to get the skin taut. People with smaller breasts who carry less towards the outside tend not to have this problem, although I don't have any testimonials specific to the No! No! It does work on my leg stubble, as well as on regrown waxed hair and virgin arm and face hair.

5. You can stop using the No!No! whenever you want without any unpleasant regrowth phase. This is the reason why I so strongly recommend it for younger users specifically. Hair removed with a No! No! doesn't grow back as stubble. It isn't prickly. It doesn't get all ingrowny. It simply grows back as a kinder, gentler version of your own hair. Not every single follicle regrows, some regrow more slowly, some regrow finer or paler. Virgin hair (i.e. hair that has never been removed before) regrows looking even more virgin. I have used it on my forearms and on my face (mustache, sideburns, chin whiskers), and I have gone up to a month in between treatments. Apart from the fact that each day I have marginally more hair there than the day before, it doesn't look at all like hair regrowth.

When I was a hairy preteen, I alternated between wanting to remove my ugly body hair, and resenting the fact that I had to keep removing my ugly body hair. But if I stopped, I'd get stubbly and itchy. The No! No! eliminates this dilemma. Your daughter can remove her hair every day in the summer and stop in the winter. She can remove her hair once and then decide it's not worth the trouble, and then revisit it a year later. She can remove her hair only for special occasions. She can experiment with removing hair from another area of her body without any drama.

In summary, the No!No! addresses every concern a parent might have about a pre-teen removing their body hair. It's possible you might have to supplement with a razor for armpits, tweezers for eyebrows, or clippers for longer (i.e. longer than an inch or two) hair, but I highly recommend the No!No! as the best starting point.

Wherein I dare attempt to improve upon Miss Manners

I realize it's insanely presumptuous for a socially awkward dork like me to even think about improving on Miss Manners, but I think I have something that could be useful here.

Dear Miss Manners:

A client came in for tax season! We only see each other once a year. Anyway, in she came for her appointment; I came from around the corner in the office, saw her sitting/waiting, and greeted her with, "Oh! When are you due?" She looks about five to six months pregnant, but ISN'T!!!

We proceeded to discuss drinking enough water, medications, doctor visits, blood tests, etc. But the fact of the matter is she isn't pregnant.

How do I apologize for assuming? Should I apologize?

Something that might work to add as an element of the apology: "I'm so sorry! A co-worker of mine was pregnant recently, and she kept wearing a shirt exactly like that one during the stage where she didn't quite want to wear maternity clothes yet - she's such a tiny little thing that she could wear clothes in proper grown women's sizes until practically the end of the second trimester - anyway, she was wearing a shirt like that about three times a week and we were all speculating on whether she's pregnant but no one wanted to be the one to ask, and when I saw that shirt I just free-associated! In any case, you wear it far better!"

Powerlessness and yelling and rudeness and job security and Toronto politics: messiest braindump ever

Last August, I read this Miss Conduct post about how rudeness comes from a lack of power.

My first thought was "This is HUGE! I must blog about it!" And I've had writer's block ever since. I know what I want to say but I can't make it into a blog post, so I'm just brute force braindumping. Each of these points should be developed into a couple hundred words, but I'll just spew now and maybe clean it up later. There's something in here, and I'm not going to get at it unless I braindump.

1. My first thought was about childhood. When you're a kid - or at least when I was a kid and based on my experience with other kids - you yell more. That's because you're powerless. You're completely at the mercy of the grownups and their rules. I've blogged about this many times before. As I became a proper grownup and especially because I started living alone, I found myself yelling much less. It's not that I became more polite, it's that I became better able to be polite. I had the [insert word that's halfway between "empowerment" and "agency"] to be polite, because I had the option of walking away.

2. This became even more pronounced when I got my first proper grownup Good Job. It was easier to be polite, and it was easier not to yell, because I was suddenly in a position that is, by general social standards, respectable. On one hand the world treated me with more respect, and on the other hand I had the security and the confidence, and, frankly, the trump card of paying my own way. More "power" (insofar as this can be considered power - it's more privilege but emotionally it fits the originally analogy) meant fewer people were aggravating me, fewer stresses were aggravating me, and it was way hella easier to be polite and not yell.

3. My second thought was about working in fast food when I was a teen. The restaurant was located in a poshish suburb, where people had big houses and fancy cars. And they yelled. Looking at it with adult retrospect, I can't see where they were coming from. Why would you yell at a fast food cashier? So you have to wait two minutes for fries, or you have to pull around away from the pay window, or someone accidentally drops your change. Why is that even on your radar? As an adult with a proper grownup job - albeit one that's nowhere near posh enough to buy big houses and cars - I can't even imagine caring. So why didn't money/power/privilege buy them the calm that it bought me?

4. At this point, I realized that I'd drifted away from rudeness vs. power and into yelling and anger vs. privilege and respect. But I know in my gut it's the same thing or closely related. So that's why this blog post got paralyzed way back in August.

5. And then Rob Ford got elected mayor of Toronto.

6. Rob Ford yells. People who are inclined to vote for Rob Ford think he's down-to-earth. In my corner of adulthood, down-to-earth people don't yell - that's what makes them down-to-earth. What are these people's lives like that their definition of down-to-earth includes yelling?

7. Rob Ford's target audience is skewed towards houses and cars, which, in Toronto, are hella expensive. They must, necessarily, have several times more money than I ever will. But they're angry. Why are they angry?

8. The non-selfish aspect of my personal politics is focused on Good Jobs. (The selfish aspect doesn't contradict this, it's just focused on very specific things that affect me personally.) I know, from my personal experience and those of my family and friends and everyone I know who's ever had a Good Job, that a Good Job is transformative. And, in my own experience, it's what makes the angry go away. And this might even be multi-generational. If I have a Good Job, and I'm not angry, then my kid not only has a secure environment to grow up in, but doesn't have to face generalized anger at the dinner table every evening, thus making them feel even more secure and less prone to anger themselves.

9. But the Rob Ford people, the people who are angry, are working against this politically. Why? Do they not know that Good Jobs make the angry go away? Do they already have Good Jobs (since they have all houses and cars and expensive things like that) that didn't make the angry go away? Do they not have Good Jobs but have somehow managed to acquire houses and cars that they now have to pay for and they're scared? But, if so, why are they trying to get rid of what few Good Jobs exist?

10. Then I read an article in the Globe and Mail on stress as a serious social-medical problem, and was struck by this quote:

Combatting these feelings is not easy and begins with resilience. Just knowing you have a Plan B for any problem can often reduce the brain’s physical response to stress.

That's what a Good Job does - resilience. It creates opportunities for a Plan B. If my glasses break, I can drop everything and get them fixed without running out of money or losing my job. If I get cancer, all I have to worry about is nausea and hair loss - I'm not going to lose my home or my job. It's less scary, less stressful, and ultimately means that there's less yelling in your life. And, politically, I want that for everyone. I've had a glimpse of it, and I want to share it. But my city seems to be run by people who are angry and yelly and stressed and scared, and yet want the opposite of this situation that creates resilience. I don't understand it. It doesn't make sense.

11. I realize I have no right, authority, or credibility to go swooping in and saying "You voted wrong! I know better than you!" But what I'm saying here is my truth as I have lived and experienced it, as I have observed in those around me and those I admire from afar. Rudeness and anger and fear and yelling decrease as empowerment and agency and respect and social credibility and resilience increase, and all these things increase with good employment conditions.

12. Growing up, I'd probably yell at someone every other day. Now, I can't even think of the last time I yelled at anyone. I like this, and I want everyone else to have it too. But the people who look to me like they need it the most don't want anyone to have it.

I don't know what to do with this.

Non-extraordinariness

From Miss Conduct's National Coming Out Day post:

It is the person who is making the extraordinary claim who needs to produce extraordinary evidence. I’m not going to pretend that the claim of gay equality is the extraordinary one anymore. Those who deny it are the ones who are making the extraordinary claims, not me. They are the ones who have to explain themselves.

When I read this, I realized this is something people tend to do, socially. We tend to pretend something that does not apply to the majority, or does not apply to the dominant demographic, or does not apply to the loudest people in the room, is somehow extraordinary, and therefore needs to be explained or defended or justified.

And that's simply not true. Even if something does not apply to the majority - even if something is outright uncommon - that doesn't make it extraordinary, it doesn't make it something that needs to be explained or defended or justified. I don't know how we fell into the habit of presumably coddling/mollifying the majority/the dominant demographic/the loudest people in the room by doing this, but it's really unnecessary and debases us all.

Analogy: I have green eyes. The majority of people do not have green eyes. But that doesn't make my eye colour extraordinary. It's a perfectly ordinary eye colour. If I were going to get my makeup done professionally, I wouldn't have to call ahead and warn them that I have green eyes and ask if they can accommodate that, and I wouldn't have to settle with a makeup job more appropriate to someone with blue eyes. Green eyes are unusual - according to the first page of google results, they occur in only 2% of the world's population - and I may well end up being the only green-eyed person the makeup artist sees that day, but it's well within the range of Things That Might Happen. It's by no means extraordinary, and it would debase us all if we were to start pretending it is.

This is actually something my instincts have been leading me to for quite a while. I blogged before about my tendency not to mark the feminine. What I was really saying was that being female is not extraordinary, and by not marking it I am choosing not to pretend that it is.

I once blogged about this quote from Tabatha Southey:

"Saying, "I'm a feminist," is almost like saying, "I have no problem with Pakistanis" - we're all just going to assume that one, okay? Unless you say otherwise."

What I really meant when I blogged about it was that being feminist or not having a problem with Pakitanis (or being Pakistani) is not extraordinary, and it does us no service to pretend that it is.

I've blogged several times about my own use of upspeak - how it has a purpose, how I'm not going to not use it and how my choice to use my own natural dialect is in fact a sign of security. What I'm really saying is that talking like (and being) a woman under 40 is not extraordinary, and it does us no service to pretend that it is so extraordinary we need to suppress and/or apologize for our demographic markers.

The Globe and Mail recently had an extended feature that they framed as a "discussion" about immigration, and I found it irritating for reasons I couldn't articulate at the time. Turns out the reason I found it irritating is because they were framing immigration as something extraordinary that needs to be explained and defended and justified.

Belonging to a religion or no religion is not extraordinary. Having a child or wanting a child or being childfree is not extraordinary. Having dietary restrictions is not extraordinary. Wearing what you choose to is not extraordinary. Having a same-sex spouse or an opposite-sex spouse or no spouse or a partner whom you deliberately do not call a spouse or any variation on "it's complicated" is not extraordinary. Being young or old or anywhere in between is not extraordinary. Having been born somewhere else or choosing to move somewhere else or staying in the same place all your life are not extraordinary.

None of these things are any more extraordinary than my green eyes (and, indeed, most of them are, statistically, less extraordinary than my green eyes). They do not need to be explained, defended, or justified. We simply need to be aware of and prepared for the fact that they're part of the reality we inhabit, just like how makeup artists have eyeshadow colours suitable for green eyes in their palette.

Things They Should Invent: penance for cheaters

This post was inspired by this David Eddie column, where a woman who has been in a committed relationship for years finds herself thinking that perhaps she might like to try being with a man.

David Eddie says:

In other words, if you plan on having an affair with someone, you should first break things off with the person with whom you are in love, and have, by your testimonial, a committed relationship.

You could do it nicely, of course. Tell her (a compassionate version of) the truth. Something like: “Listen, I have a little matter I need to get out of my system, this kooky kink called heterosexuality, and unless I do it I’m afraid I’ll always be curious and could not in good faith go through with marrying you. Of course, I understand if you say no. But do you think you could see your way clear to waiting for me while I work this out?”

It occurred to me while reading this that one of the many possible outcomes is that, while Girlfriend doesn't specifically offer to wait, maybe Ms. Bicurious discovers rather quickly that having a male partner doesn't live up to her fantasy and goes crawling back to Girlfriend while Girlfriend still loves her (because you don't just stop loving someone like flicking a switch).

And it occurred to me that if it played out this way, Girlfriend should get some kind of credit or compensation or something. After all, she was a good girl, devoted to her partner, secure in her sexuality. Shouldn't that count for something?

So what they should do is when a couple is trying to save their relationship after an affair, the marriage counsellor should impose a penance on the cheater. It could be something intended to put the wronged party's mind at ease (e.g. they're allowed to snoop in the cheater's email for six months), or it could be punitive (e.g. the cheater has to do the dishes for a year). Both parties agree on what seems reasonable, sign a contract, and when the penance is completed the cheater is deemed to have paid their debt.

This way, the wronged party gets a sense of vindication, but the debt is also considered paid off once the penance is done, so the affair isn't looming over their head to be dredged up in arguments for the rest of their lives.

Why do religious people want other people to say grace?

Ken Gallinger's ethics column in this Saturday's Star (which, weirdly, hasn't been posted online) has a letter from someone whose friend has recently become religious and now wants to say grace before every meal. But rather than saying grace herself, she says to the assembled group "Who's going to say the blessing?", trying to bully someone else into doing it.

I've heard of this happening quite a number of times in different contexts. Religious people put their non-religious guest on the spot by trying to get them to say grace. Even my own loss of faith was triggered by the fact that my parents suddenly wanted me to say grace. It wasn't that they wanted grace to be said, it's that they wanted me to do it, despite the fact that I didn't feel good about the idea. Desperate to be able to explain why I felt so strongly about not doing it (with adult vocabulary, I can articulate that the display of false piety made me feel hypocritical and rather dirty, and I was convinced that we would go to hell for trying to trick God by lying to Him, but as a kid I couldn't articulate this) I started thinking critically, long and hard, until I ultimately came to the realization that I'm an atheist.

So why do they want people who aren't interested in saying grace to say grace? If thanking the deity for the meal is so important, why aren't they eager to do it themselves? Why do they want to make their guests uncomfortable and have their deity get lied to rather than simply expressing their own genuine gratitude with quiet dignity in accordance with their faith?

Things They Should Invent: shyness drugs

From today's Miss Conduct:

Two of my co-workers are expecting. One of the women is friendly to everyone. The other will walk by me without replying to a hello. She does this to many people and only talks to her select friends. One of her friends has planned a dual shower for both (it is suspected that this is the only way people would go to a shower for the second woman). I am not attending because of a prior commitment. I had planned on buying a gift for the first woman and giving it to her at a different time, but some people are planning to buy a joint gift for the second woman. I know I am not the only one who feels uncomfortable buying a gift for someone who does not make any effort to be friendly to everyone.

I've seen this sentiment a number of times before, and what shocks me and baffles me and makes me want to weep every single time is that people think this is snobby and malicious, and don't see that it is so obviously a sign of shyness. (Although props to Miss Conduct for recognizing that in her answer!)

Apparently there are a lot of very loud people out there who have no idea what it's like to be shy. They don't know that eye contact is physically difficult. Seriously, it feels incredibly intense and your first instinct is to look away. They don't know that it would literally never occur to us that a stranger/casual acquaintance might want a hi how are you from us, because they're obviously cool people with their own lives so why on earth would they need us? It's not malice, it's a desire to quietly keep out of everyone's way!

And having it interpreted as malicious makes it even worse for the shy person (and, consequently, even worse for the co-workers who do want an eye contact hi how are you). I do eventually unshy once I feel safe in a particular context, with particular people, but it takes time and external validation. Having it considered malice just makes it worse and puts the barrier towards unshying further and further out of reach. If I were the shy woman in the letter, I wouldn't have thought anything about not getting as many gifts as my colleague. Obviously she's cooler and better-liked, that only makes sense. My feelings wouldn't even have been hurt, I would simply have seen that as the natural order of things. However, because that is so obviously the natural order of things, it would lead me to renew my pattern of eyes down don't disturb anyone. That isn't passive-aggressive, that's just the only response that would ever occur to me. However, if I got just as many gifts as the other woman and was treated as an equally valued member of the team, that might make me feel like they do actually want me and are actually interested in me, which would make me more likely to say hi to them.

I've been working on doing the eye contact hi how are you thing for nearly half my life, and it's still work. Making eye contact with someone I'm not close to is like trying to push like magnetic poles together. I can do it, but I have to struggle against my natural instincts to do so. (I even have a memory of adults getting offended at my lack of eye contact when I was a preschool child. You're a preschooler, doing the only thing that it even occurs to you to do (it feels intense so you look away) and grown adults are taking offence because you're not doing the thing that is so against your every instinct that it would never occur to you. What do you even do with that? No wonder I always felt like the world had a secret set of rules that no one had told me about!) It's like doing the splits. You can train long and hard to get flexible enough that you can do the splits, and if you practice your routine enough you will eventually fall into the splits at the right point. But it will never be natural. You'll never get to a place where you're at home, with no one watching, just sprawled out reading a book, and you end up in the splits.

Anyway, my point: someone should invent drugs that make non-shy people feel shy just temporarily, like for a day or two. So people could see first-hand what it's like when your every instinct has you wanting to walk quickly by, eyes down, so they don't see you and you don't see them. Then maybe we'll all be able to understand each other better and unshy people more quickly.

(And yes, I would be interested in experimenting with the opposite drug to make me feel outgoing, but I'd probably end up becoming an addict.)

Open Letter to Disappointed Mother in the May 6 Dear Prudence column

Dear Prudence,
I have two daughters, ages 11 and 14. It has been my desire to instill in them empathy, compassion, and an eye for supporting the underdog. My daughters are liked by their peers and are popular. I resent popularity and have rallied against it both at work and when I was in school. There are students who are picked on at their school, and in the past both girls have stood up for these students. What I find troubling is that this morning I witnessed both of them laughing at students who they thought were dorky. I asked what was so funny and got the explanation that the students were weird and had rejected one daughter's efforts to be nice. I wonder what I should be doing or saying at this point so that I don't lose ground with them, and so that we can build a lesson from this.

—Disappointed Mother

Dear Disappointed Mother,

Congratulations on raising two kids who can fit in with the cool kids even though you weren't one of the cool kids yourself! You and your daughters are in a unique position here, and you can do a lot of good for them and for the whole social structure of their school by explaining to them, clearly, specifically, and non-judgementally, where the "weird" students were coming from. Prudie advises you to tell your daughters that kids who don't fit in often struggle to figure out how to behave. But you need to go better than that and tell them why and how they struggle to figure out how to behave.

Tell them about how sometimes the mean kids make fun of people by acting like they're being nice to them and then mocking them for thinking that they actually were being nice to them. Tell them about how you have no way of telling if one of the cool kids is being sincere or not, and the more times they're cruel to you the more empirical evidence builds up suggesting that people's intentions are cruel. Tell them about how this messes up your ability to read people's intentions for years and years and years. Make sure they understand where this reaction is coming from and how it's a natural response to the environment, not random weirdness. Then, since your kids are popular AND receptive to standing up for picked-on students you can use this to empower your kids to solve the problem, giving the picked-on kids a critical mass of positive interaction and validation and ultimately unweirding them.

I know it sounds crazy, but a lot of people who weren't bullied have no concept whatsoever of how this works. You're in a unique position of being able to make people who can effect change in their social circle understand. Please use it.

So why aren't you married?

From this week's Ethicist:

I am a 65-year-old gay man who teaches adults English as a second language. Many topics besides grammar come up in a three-hour class, and it’s not uncommon for a student to ask if I’m married and then ask the follow-up “why not?” Is it appropriate to answer at all? To tell my students that I’m gay and that I’m not married “because it’s not legal in this state?”

The gentleman who wrote this letter is a rare situation where he actually has a simple, straightforward answer to the question "Why aren't you married?" He might be hesitant to share the reason, but there is one single, simple, straightforward reason.

However, this is very rarely the case. As we all know, to get married you have to have met a suitable mate under mutually suitable circumstances. If you're not married, it's because this convergence hasn't occurred. There aren't always reasons for the convergence not having occurred, and when there are they're often very complex, very personal, sometimes include very personal information about third parties, and not really appropriate for friendly social small talk. In general, in the rare cases where there is a reason for the convergence not having occurred, anyone in whom it is appropriate to confide the resulting personal drama is already close enough that they already know the personal drama.

So what I'm wondering: what kind of answer are people expecting when they ask people why they aren't married? Because I can't imagine any possible response from which any good could come.

Analogy for today's Anthony Wolf column

Anthony Wolf writes a column about why it's not fair for a custodial parent to remarry against their kid's will.

I agree with his thesis, but I think it could be explained better, so I made an analogy:

Imagine your daughter is a few years older and has gone off to university. She lives in apartment-style student housing, sharing a two-bedroom suite with another girl. Partway through the year, the other girl decides to move her boyfriend into the suite. Your daughter objects, saying she hardly knows this guy and doesn't want to share her home with a guy she hardly knows. She doesn't want a third person on the shower schedule. She doesn't want a strange man she didn't even choose herself into what has so far been female-only space. She doesn't feel comfortable with him seeing her bras hanging up to dry or her used pads in the bathroom garbage can. She doesn't want to bump into him when she gets up to pee in the middle of the night, or lose the ability to sit in the living room in her jammies and watch movies.

But her roommate insists. "You don't get to control my life," she says, "Aren't I entitled to some happiness?" So she moves in the boyfriend. There's now a man your daughter didn't choose living in her home against her will. That's not fair to your daughter, now is it?

It's equally unfair for you to move in your man against her will. "But I love him!" Yes, and your daughter's roommate loves her man. That still doesn't make it fair to your daughter.

At this point, many parents will say "But I'm the adult, I'm supporting her, I'm paying for the house." Yes, and that makes it even more unfair, because your daughter can't move out of your home. She's completely trapped. Plus, because your man is an adult and your daughter is a minor, he technically has parental authority over her. So think back to the roommate situation, and imagine your daughter's roommate is also her landlord, and when the boyfriend moves in he'll become her landlord too, and she has signed a lease that they won't allow her to break. That's not fair at all, is it? If that were an actual landlord/tenant situation, she might actually be able to take them to court!

So if a member of the household objects to bringing a new member into the household (especially when the current household member is a 14-year-old girl in a female-only household, and the prospective new member is a strange man), do them the decency of waiting until they're in a position to leave if they choose. Four years isn't too long to wait.

(As an aside: Personally, I can't imagine four years being too long to wait to get married in a case like this where you have an extremely good reason to wait. You still have the person in your life, they're still there for you, you just can't share a household quite yet. You've found the love of your life! A four-year wait is small potatoes, especially when you can still see them and talk to them every day.

Time goes faster when you get older. While I'm technically old enough to be the mother of a 14-year-old, given social norms the lady in the column is probably somewhat older than me, so four years would seem like even less time to her. I seriously cannot put myself in that mental place of not being willing to wait.)

Worst. Dear Abby Letter. Ever.

Last letter in today's column:

DEAR ABBY: I'm having a dispute with my husband. He thinks that you screw in a lightbulb clockwise. I disagree. I say counter-clockwise. Which of us is correct?

Um, why not grab the nearest lamp and check for yourself?

Advice columns

David Eddie:

I recently moved into a house that is shared by five people. Four of the housemates have been friends for years and have lived together for three. I am the newcomer. I'm usually very shy, but I made an effort to come out of my shell and be involved in the goings on in the house. My efforts to be friendly weren't exactly rebuffed, but they weren't received all that warmly either. For the past few months, I've withdrawn more and more, and feel increasingly isolated from the people I live with, to the point that I find it uncomfortable to be in my own home. My shyness has been an obstacle my whole life, and I don't want to let it rule me any more. Any suggestions on how to reintegrate myself into the house?

I think there are really two questions here: "How can I make friends?" (which David Eddie answered) and "How can I make friends with specific people?" (which the LW was really asking).

The older I get, the more I agree that unapologetically being yourself is an effective way to make friends, because it screens out incompatible people. If you're irritated by the way I play with my hair or how I glom onto words where the presence or absence of a hyphen switches meaning (resign vs. re-sign, for example) or the way I forget to ask how your day was half the time, it's better that we aren't friends.

But LW wants to make friends with these particular housemates, because they live with them. It is possible that their whole and unapologetic self might not be as compatible with the housemates, like how you sometimes have to bite your tongue to get along in family or the workplace or other contexts where a bunch of people a thrust together rather than choosing each other. Unfortunately, LW wants more than to just get along, they want to be actual friends, and I don't know how to make that happen. It's a skill I've never managed to develop.

Carolyn Hax:

I am the only child of my father's current wife, and have much older half-siblings. When I was little, one sister was very sweet to me; over the years, though, as her relationship with our father had ups and downs, she would stop speaking to him and therefore to me. The first time was when I was 7, and I didn't hear from her for five years.

It has happened periodically since. She has ignored most of the major milestones in my life, and excluded me from hers while not doing so with the rest of our siblings.

When I asked why, she told me she could not separate her feelings about our father from her feelings toward me.

I am expecting my first child and am yet again disappointed by my sister's lack of acknowledgment. I would like to protect my child from her alternating warmth and hurtful indifference. Would it be inappropriate to keep her out of his life?

I feel so sorry for this LW, because while she truly (and understandably) does feel like she and the half-sister are siblings and wants her idea of what constitutes sisterly love from her, the half-sister (understandably) doesn't view LW as much more than some random relative you see when you're getting together with your family.

Let's start with the half-sister's point of view. It sounds from the letter like she never lived with their father during LW's life, she just saw LW when she visited her father. When LW was born, half-sister (hereinafter "HS") saw her as a cute little baby whom she saw when she was visiting her father. Then as LW got older, HS saw her as a small child whom she saw when she was visiting her father. If we assume HS is 10 years older than LW (and it sounds like it could be much more), then it would never have occurred to HS to develop a separate relationship with LW, because LW was just too young for it to have any substance. Would it ever occur to you, either currently or when you were in your late teens, to develop a substantive relationship with a six-year-old? Probably not. You'd be perfectly nice to them, play with them and talk to them when you're in their presence, maybe buy them a birthday gift so you have an excuse to shop for toys, but you're just in different worlds and you'd just see them when you see their parents.

On top of all this, it also sounds like HS has full siblings who grew up in the same household as her. If you've lived with your siblings, that is, for better or for worse, what defines the sibling relationship - having shared space, fought over the last piece of cake, tried to kick each other out of the bathroom, messed with each other's Barbies, puked on each other during long family road trips. Someone whom you only see occasionally simply isn't going to feel as much like a sibling. Without that sense of constant competition, they're going to feel more like a cousin, or, if the age difference is significant, like some relative's kid. As cruel as it sounds to say, their relationship simply isn't personal.

Meanwhile, LW only has these much-older half-siblings, so to her that's what a sister is. These half-siblings are all the siblings she has, they've been her siblings her whole life, and to her the relationship is very personal. Perhaps HS was around more in the early years of LW's life because when you're younger (a student or recently launched young adult, for example) you spend more time in parental households then drift away as you get older.

This is so sad because it's really nobody's fault. HS's actions and feelings are perfectly natural and understandable from her point of view, and LW's feelings are perfectly natural and understandable from her point of view. It would never occur to HS that LW might see her as such a big part of her life, and it would never occur to LW that HS could see her as not particularly relevant but it is in no way intended as a dis. HS is the only sister LW has ever known, but HS doesn't see LW as a sister for reasons completely beyond LW's control and that no way reflect either person's worth.

And, once again, it comes down to someone wanting to make another specific person like them.

Thanks in advance

From the second letter in this Miss Manners column (bolding mine):

You could assist an entire profession if you would advise undergraduates on how to compose e-mail messages to their professors.

Like my colleagues, I've received peremptory messages from undergraduates, even entering freshmen, the tone of which might have been used by an aristocrat to a particularly lax and unpleasant waiter. After the remonstrances, there's often a transparent attempt at manipulation, as in "Have a great weekend!" or "Thanks in advance for your understanding."

The thing is, I was specifically taught to use those so-called "transparent attempts at manipulation" in the various business and professional writing courses I took in university. I've been using them for years, both in my own correspondence and in translations of other people's correspondence, under the supervision of instructors and professors and trainers and managers and senior colleagues of every generation, and no one has every suggested that these formulas are ever inappropriate. I've even had people compliment me on managing to work these kinds of phrases in.

It might be the influence of French on my profession. It is perfectly normal and unremarkable in French to close with something like Avec mes remerciements anticipés, je vous prie d'agréer, Madame, l'expression de mes sentiments les meilleurs. I yoinked that sentence right out of my advanced French writing textbook (i.e. advanced French writing for non-native speakers). When I first encountered that in French, I thought "Ooh, isn't that a good idea!" and started thinking how to incorporate it into English. It's quite possible that everyone who has trained or taught me went through the same process.

So what do you think? Are "Thanks in advance" and similarly manipulative structures inappropriate? (Or inappropriate when writing to superiors etc.?)

What's up with people who don't realize that relationships aren't unilateral?

I don't know what advice column this is originally from, so I'll like to Childfree Abby:

DR. WALLACE: We have two children, a 17-year-old son and a 16-year-old daughter. Our daughter is interested in boys and has been for over two years. Our son shows no interest in girls. In his spare time, he only wants to work on his 1959 Chevrolet that we bought him for his birthday. I do everything possible to try to interest him in dating, but nothing has worked.

(more...)

The weird thing about this letter, and advice columnists reply, and the other letter and the comments in reply, is that none of them seem to be questioning the parents' premise that it's entirely the son's choice that he isn't dating and he need to be convinced of the benefits of dating (or, in these particular cases, of dating girls).

The thing is, you can't just start dating unilaterally. You need someone who is willing to date you, and they should probably be someone whom you're interested in dating yourself. But it doesn't seem to occur to anyone that one of the possibilities is that he might not have found someone in which there is mutual interest in dating.

I've seen this in real life to. I've had a number of people ask me why I'm not married (including a relative who thought an interrogation along these lines was the most suitable topic of conversation as we were sitting in the audience waiting for my younger sister's wedding ceremony which was about to start any second). When asked this, I always reply that it isn't something you can do unilaterally. You need at least one other consenting individual. The weird thing is this always - always always always, ever single time - seems to go in one ear and out the other. My interrogators often continue by trying to convince me of the benefits of marriage (which I am very well aware of and agree with them completely on) as though I need to be talked into it, completely disregarding the fact that you simply cannot get married unless you have someone to marry.

The other weird thing is I only ever get this interrogation in the singular. I'm walking around en couple but unmarried, no problems. Walking around alone, sometimes I get interrogated. It's never ever ever an implied "When are you guys going to get married?" When it happens, it's always without exception "When are you, personally, going to get married?"

Analogy for why introverts have trouble with small talk

This started in response to the comments on this Cary Tennis letter but got far too complicated for a comment thread.

Think of the pool of all possible conversation topics - everything you might ever conceivably blurt out - as a well-organized email folder system. The vast majority of the emails are archived by topic. These are things you can say in reply to productive and substantive inquiries. There are a few emails in your inbox. These are new things that you can introduce during a lull in conversation. And there's a bunch of crap in your spam folder. These are things that are completely useless in conversation. (e.g. "There are four light switches in this room." "The capital of Uruguay is Montevideo".) You hardly ever look in your spam folder anyway, it's all the Nigerian finance minister trying to enlarge your penis and sell you fake university degrees anyway. Sometimes you do go into your spam folder for a specific reason, just like sometimes you do need to know what the capital of Uruguay is, but the vast majority of the time you ignore it and it isn't even worth thinking about.

I think introverts have a stricter spam filter than extroverts. We have things in our spam folder that more extroverted people would consider suitable conversational openings. There are fewer things in our inbox, and some of the things that (by conventional social standards) should be in our inbox are in our spam folder.

For example, it would never ever in my life occur to me to ask a casual acquaintance about their vacation plans. The topic was simply in my spam folder, right in between "I have a hole in my sock" and "I had two cups of coffee today." (Yes, these are things I might just announce to a close friend, but, as I've blogged about before, it works differently for close friends.) When I read someone mention that as a possible topic of conversation in the Cary Tennis comments, a lightbulb went off. "Oh, THAT'S why people at work keep asking me that!" Because it was in my spam folder, I figured they were asking me for a particular reason, just like if your best friend sent you a penis enlargement email you'd assume they have some particular reason for doing so.

So where extroverts can just reach into their inbox - the first page you get to in any email interface - to find an appropriate topic, our inboxes don't have enough topics. So first we have to come up with the idea of looking in our spam folder at all. Then we have to sort through it trying to find something that's less crap. We can't give them just anything from the spam folder, we have to sort through the whole thing (and how much crap is in your spam folder right now?) trying to find the conversation equivalent of, say, a shoe sale flyer rather than penis enlargement spam.

And the other problem is, once we find the exact conversational nugget we need in our spam folder, we think "Hey, there's some useful stuff in here, let's filter less strictly so it ends up in the inbox!" Then we set our spam filter too low and end up with all kinds of crap in our inbox, and the next think you know we're walking around offering to enlarge people's penises. This manifests itself in the phenomenon of people who claim to be introverts going off on a babbling rant about themselves or their interests. Because all the stuff in our inbox tends to be stuff we're genuinely interested in, if someone treats one of our spam topics like an inbox topic we assume they're genuinely interested.

So unless you want us randomly free-associating and dumping the entire contents of our mental spam folder on you, you'll have to either tolerate our pauses or take more than your share of the lead.

Edited to add: Having been bullied adds another dimension to all this. My bullies would often ask me questions that would sound perfectly innocuous to outsiders and that adults with benign intentions may well use as fodder for small-talk, but the bullies would use whatever I answered as fodder for bullying.

For example, they might ask me what I did that past weekend. If I didn't do much of anything (which, objectively and outside the bell jar of adolescence, I rather quite enjoy), they'd mock me for not having any friends. If I did something with my family, they'd mock me for spending time with family because I don't have any friends. If I did something with friends, they'd mock me for the insufficient coolness of my friends or our activity. In the weird world of middle school, it was a loaded question to which every possible answer was socially unacceptable.

So because of all this, a bunch of topics that appear benign to outsiders are quarantined in my mental spam folder because they look just like emails that have previously given me viruses. After having been judged so often for my answer to "What did you do this weekend?" I wouldn't dare ask that of an acquaintance or co-worker any more than I would ask them "So are you a top or a bottom?"