Brute Reason on boundaries & tone policing
Why might someone have a boundary about being screamed at or being called a worthless piece of shit? Sure, it could be because they just want to stew in their privilege and avoid any criticism of their words or actions.
Or it could be because of their own abuse history. Some people who were screamed at or called worthless pieces of shit by abusers may be triggered by it now. Or they may just be unwilling to allow anyone to speak to them that way ever again. (Remember that one of the functions of abuse is to make the victim feel worthless, so if you’re using language that’s intended to make someone feel worthless, you are utilizing abusive dynamics, even if the other person has more privilege than you on some axis.)
It could also be because of their mental health issues. Many people with anxiety can shut down and become nonverbal when spoken to extremely harshly. Screaming at someone can trigger a panic attack. Calling a person with suicidal ideation “worthless” or “a piece of shit” can provoke them to harm themselves, since it confirms the worst things they tell themselves.
Unfortunately, when someone has a mental illness, these types of responses are a risk no matter what. Sometimes even the most gentle criticism can cause a person with depression to spiral into self-hatred. But just because we can’t prevent all harm doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to prevent some harm, and a good place to start is by respecting stated boundaries. If someone tells you they can’t handle being yelled at, assume they have a good reason for setting that boundary, because they probably do.
But I’m going to take it one step further to say this: you don’t need to be triggered by something, or experience strong negative reactions to it, in order to have the right to set boundaries around it.
Miri Mogilevsky at Brute Reason
If there isn’t a word for this line of reasoning, there should be.
“Don’t say [obviously mean thing that serves only to intimidate or belittle a fellow human being due to immutable group membership] because they might also be part of [group your in-group considers worthy of empathy].”
A couple of weeks ago, I saw this argument over and over again in an argument on a blog I follow about bi women. “Be nice to bi girls,” it goes, “because they might not even date cishet males. For example, you could be implying cishetmale collaboration/contamination in women who date only NB people!”
In this case, it’s abuse victims as a subset of some other larger group deemed worthy of being called pieces of shit.
Previously, I’ve seen this as, “don’t make horrible blanket statements about men because trans men might think you’re talking about them!”
This sounds like empathy, but it’s really just a complaint that the lines demarcating unpeople were drawn slightly incorrectly. The fact that you’re declaring open season on any class for what is obviously dehumanizing verbal abuse is the main problem. Not that you might catch up someone with ideological protection in the vitriol. That’s just CYA.
So does a word for this word exist? If not, what should it be?
(Slightly less endorsed, the quasi-inverse of this, in which people argue that their group should not be dehumanized because it contains sub-groups worthy of sympathy. The most painfully common example is repeatedly trotting out the poor socioeconomic state of Hmong immigrants to the US just so the suburban-born sons and daughters of Korean-American middle-managers can use their Asian heritage to play Oppression Olympics.)
Getting people to actually sympathize with, say, men is deemed infeasible when they follow an ideology that believes stubbornly in an oppressor/oppressed dynamic, so this tactic is used to try and alter their behavior within their ideological boundaries.
