(no subject)

[randomness]

Why is it that well-meaning people fail to understand when people have issues, even emotional landmines, about certain subjects, and still keep banging on about them.

Are they simply clueless? Do they not listen? Or is it that they say things so they can hear themselves talk? What?

Comments

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

There are a aspects of this issue that I can see that haven't been talked about.

Some of it is how one cuts off a disturbing conversation. There seem to be conventions for this, and the conventions vary strongly by circumstance. In a somewhat related case, a woman friend was studying tae kwan do (sp?) and suffering psychologically at the dojo. As far as I could figure out, when she was pushed beyond her physical limits (which seemed to be a regular part of training), her reflex was to ask for mercy (so to speak), which was the one thing that couldn't be tolerated in that culture. She never seemed to decode the correct way to ask her teachers to back off.

Some of it is the assumptions about what the point of the conversation is. Is the goal to include everyone? Then if a topic makes people uncomfortable, we suppress the topic. OTOH, if we have to actually assess an issue, it's more effective if people who can't cope with the topic withdraw. Or if there is a power struggle going on and the goal is to vote half the group off the island, we might seek out a topic that a substantial minority finds intolerable, so as to force them to withdraw. There are also complex passive-aggressive versions of these, where one uses the rules to control some aspect of the situation...

And what one expects from a conversation will strikingly modify how you perceive the same set of facts, as well as how you respond. E.g., if you don't expect the people you deal with to be caring, there are a lot of things that won't bother you.

The weirdest thing that I see is how "gendered" this issue is. Of the white people on my friends list (almost all of it, I admit) who have mentioned RaceFail, women are in the majority by something like six-to-one. I mean I was in a stereotypically male field in graduate school (math.) at a male-dominated school (MIT), and the sex ratio there was only two-to-one. What gives?

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

The weirdest thing that I see is how "gendered" this issue is.

Why is that weird?

(Note that I have no idea what RaceFail is and how it relates to this post.)

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

There is at least one long-running heated discussion about people of color in fandom, how many of them there are, why the feel excluded, etc. One of the issues involved is the idea that if something would make someone uncomfortable, it should not be said -- which resembles the start of this thread. About 5 white women on my f-list have written about RaceFail and no men, unless I count your post, which evidently wasn't actually referring to it.

As for "gendered", I don't recall discussions being that lopsided in sex-ratio of participants.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Huh.

Not having any idea about the discussion in question, I have to say that it sounds like a very different situation from the one I was thinking of when I posted. By and large, the problem I'm referring to is when someone won't shut up about some subject after they've been asked not to bring it up, repeatedly and in various ways.

When you say that you don't recall discussions being that lopsided in sex-ratio, do you mean discussions in general or some subset of them in particular?