bcholmes | WisCon: Moments (Reply)

A moment from a panel on Saturday night. I was attending a panel about doing political work on limited resources. One panelist[*] was talking about those moments where you just don't have the energy to go all educate-y. He used an example of coming out as bi to a colleague who then made the comment: "You must have lots of threesomes." The panelist's response was to smile and say, "oh, honey. You were doing so good. 95 out of 100. Maybe tomorrow you can try this again." Me, I loved the lightness in the response that said, "No, I need you to know that you screwed up but I don't have the energy for a full-on education about why you screwed up."

In one way, the point was marred by a woman in the front row who asserted (annoyingly) that the response was terribly rude and at one point said "If someone has said the wrong thing and you have the correct information, you have an obligation to provide the information." Hello. Have you heard the phrase, "It's not my job to edumacate you?" But the panelist's deft way of handling the deferral of an argument about it served as another example of how to avoid energy-draining stuff when one doesn't have the energy.

Through circumstances not of my choosing, I ended up having dinner on Sunday with the woman who objected, and Ian and I had a nightmarish argument with her. She seemed to believe that we shouldn't disapprove of anything that someone might say that might fit in to the cultural norms of wherever they might come from and that we are obliged never to be angry in any response we might give because that "poisons the well" for any future attempt to educate about any particular issue.

Many of the things she said lead me to believe that she believed that the only way to get a fair, oppression-free society is to act, at all times, as if there were no oppressions. At one point, I quoted a poem that I first heard on alt.poly:

Sure I'll go
If you go to
But I'm polite
So after you.

Another moment: at the joy of fat sex panel. kalmn inspired me. We'd been talking about online dating, and we'd become stuck in a bit of a "everyone will love you if you love yourself and embrace the power of positive thinking." (I do believe in faeries. I do. I do.) I think kalmn really well-articulated that while loving yourself is good, and while we shouldn't internalize fat hatred, we're still negotiating our way through a fat phobic dating scene and one should be prepared for stuff to be hard. I think I often admire people who are willing and able to swim against the current, but who are able to do so with a light touch (is that a mixed metaphor? It sounds odd, at the very least.)

Moment the third: it was Sunday night, and I was wandering the party floor with jiawen and we'd just wandered into the room that was originally going to be the LiveJournal party. Moments after we got there, a fellow on the other side of the room started shouting. Me, I felt, "Oooo. Uncomfortable scene." And we wandered back into the hall. No sooner was I in the hall than I thought: he was shouting at a woman sitting on a couch. And I recalled that people were wearing "backup" ribbons on their badges in honor of the Open Source Women Back Each Other Up Program. I said to jiawen that I think that maybe we didn't demonstrate good backup behaviour. So we went back into the room and jiawen went over to the woman who was on the couch and made sure that she was okay. The fellow was apparently venting his frustration about the WisCon troll situation that had just come to light earlier in the evening. There was no hostility aimed at the woman, and she did not feel in danger.

I don't know how it is for everybody else, but I find it really easy to be won over by grand ideas (so long as I'm sympathetic to the place where they're coming from). In fact, more easily than making those ideas part of daily choices. But I really like the part of ideas that involves them being incorporated into daily choices.

* I know who the panelist is, and he's very cool, but I'm uncertain about whether or not he wants to be identified