Feminism, Agreeableness, and Sidewalks.

A long, long time ago, like a year or something like that, I promised audrawilliams that I would write a post about feminism and agreeableness, because this is a concept which as a feminist she finds occasionally problematic[1] and then I never got to it, because nothing I wanted to say about it would come out right.

And then there was a discussion on james_nicoll's lj about crowds and moving through them, and getting walked into and pushed and about how as a woman I have had to unlearn a lot of behaviour around getting out of the way of men, because, frankly, men are often inclined to subconsciously expect that non-men things will move for them[2], and someone asked me how to do that without being a jerk -- without being, basically, disagreeable -- and I didn't really have a good sort of step-by-step answer, but I did what I could (I said, what you do is you become conscious of your space and what's in it and how you manage it, and then you can decide how you want to manage it) and then forgot about it for awhile.

But I was standing at the bus stop on Rideau Street today, holding some parcels and waiting for the bus and sort of negotiating my spot in the crowd, as you do, and thinking idly about "what does agreeableness have to do with feminism?" and less idly about "how do you keep your space in a crowd without being a jerk?" and realised that these are basically aspects of the same question.

So, here is how the sidewalk thing works.

First, you notice that people seem to push you out of the way a lot, or walk into you, or, in extreme cases, put their hands on you and move you out of the way. (A young man did this to me in the food court today. Unfortunately for the beauty of the teachable moment, I have both a high startle reflex and a real and deep dislike of being grasped by the upper arms, especially from behind, so in fact I let out a piercing scream and he backed up very rapidly. This may discourage him from doing it to someone else in the near future, but it's hardly elegant. C'est la vie.)

Next, you notice that you have certain conditioned reflexes, yourself, which allow this behaviour to pass unchallenged: a trick of stepping aside whenever someone is headed straight at you. A few well-practiced evasive manoeuvrers. A certain tendency to avoid eye contact or other actions that may draw you to the attention of gentlemen who are about to saunter into your personal space. The ability to fold your neither short nor skinny self into one-half of a seat on public transit to accommodate the skinny guy beside you whose knees are a solid three feet apart. A complete and utter unfamiliarity with the actual feel of an airplane armrest against your elbow.

So you stop. You just stop. You make eye contact. You figure out where you're going on the sidewalk and you just go there. You sit down in the middle of the bus seat. You start saying, possibly in a small and overly ladylike way at first, things like "excuse me, but you're crowding me." You get to know your own space. You get to own it. You start to use it. It feels good.

But when you become aware of your space and how you're using it, you will begin to notice something else: there are people getting out of YOUR way. There are people whose space YOU are not respecting. People who your programmed reflexes automatically interpret as less entitled than you are, just as other people's programmed reflexes do to you. People whose needs, considered objectively, are often considerably greater than yours, because they are very small, or very old, or somewhat physically or mentally fragile, or greatly burdened, or somewhat lost, or simply because their space has been systematically disrespected by a large number of people for a very long time, for one reason or another, and their dignity has been somewhat tattered by this experience, and having their psychic space invaded bruises them the way that having yours invaded bruised you.

And that's when you really start making conscious choices about your space, and about how you're going to manage it. That's when "your space" actually becomes yours; when you fire all of your spinal reflexes from their management position and start running it yourself, because you've learned to respect it enough to respect other people's legitimate claims on it, and to consciously practice good management of the conflicts therein.

Somewhere in there, you may even find that you have acquired a bit of relaxed goodwill about the whole process. Someone looks you straight in the eye and heads straight for your left elbow, and you find yourself thinking that you could just leave said appendage there, maybe even angle it a bit more towards his ribcage and "teach him a lesson", and then you remember that you're not terribly well qualified to teach that particular lesson, yourself, and you cut him a bit of slack and shift a little, because, sure, he's being a bit of a jerk, but you're a jerk sometimes yourself.

You don't jerk back into your old habits and cringe out of the way. You don't drop your eyes, or step off the curb. But you let the man by. And sometimes, when you do that, he shifts over a bit, too, just enough that you don't actually collide. Sometimes you even get a little flicker of acknowledgement: "Err. Oops. Sorry. Thanks." Sometimes it doesn't work that way, of course. But sometimes it does.

There's a temptation, of course, to want to hurry it up, to go straight to the final stage – the nice satisfying one where you're all mellow and rational, and, yes, agreeable, because you have Risen Above your crap – but that trick never works. Garbage doesn't go away because you decide it's ugly and shove it under something and ignore it. It just sits there, getting stinkier and stinkier while you spend yourself broke on air-freshener, until one day there's a nasty brown oozing stream coming from somewhere, and you can't even necessarily remember where, but you have to deal with it if you're going to keep living in that house. In the meantime, it's gotten a lot ickier.

You can't do a good job of managing what you haven't yet decided to take charge of. You cannot honestly share or sacrifice any part of what you haven't yet learned to regard as yours to control and dispense.

Contrariwise, there's the temptation, once you're not only in touch with your anger but actually curled up around it, all warm and cozy, to just stay there and bask. I mean, hey. You're entitled. Every single one of us who's made it to adulthood alive is probably, if their case were considered fairly, entitled to be right royally pissed off every day for the rest of their life about their pile of garbage, and there's always someone you can dump that garbage on, someone who can't do anything about it, someone who (you tell yourself) may not even really notice your contribution to all the garbage that's been dumped on their lawn.

Unfortunately, that trick never works either: if someone's been dumping psychic trash on your lawn, moving it to your neighbour's lawn – along with a bit of your own garbage – doesn't actually diminish your problems; you think it does, for a bit, but basically it doubles them. Because now you have an upset neighbour looking to move some garbage, and the neighbourhood is still covered in garbage. (See zingerella's excellent This Crap Is Not My Crap)

Recycling and composting – my metaphors do tend to get away with me – takes longer than just flinging it back and forth, and it involves a certain amount of heavy lifting, but when you're done there's actually going to be less garbage.

So that is what feminism, reclaiming (and then redistributing) the sidewalks, and agreeableness have to do with each other, and I hope audrawilliams considers it worth the wait.

[1] Actually we were talking about an entry she'd written about Al-Anon and how one of the leaflets she had picked up there said this:

6. JUST FOR TODAY I will be agreeable. I will look as well as I can, dress becomingly, keep my voice low, be courteous, criticize not one bit. I won't find fault with anything, nor try to improve or regulate anybody but myself. and when I say she found it problematic what I mean is that her instinctive and very healthy reaction was "Fuck That Shit" and when I read that just the way it is my basic reaction is Fuck That Shit as well, but nevertheless.

[2] If you wish to argue at this point that I am being terribly sexist, let me save you some time: you may yet prove to have a point. Nevertheless, it is a thing I have noticed, and continue to notice, so you're fairly unlikely to change my mind, or even get me to argue with you, at this time. If you don't do this, you don't do this. Carry on. "Quite a number of men", if you prefer to substitute that phrase, do. Further, I shall not go.