You Don’t Own Me
I think one of my biggest issues is with control. For example, I just got an email that had 3 neutral sounding sentences but ended with, “Figured using our funds to help with salary was a good thing, but let me know.” This seems to me, a passive aggressive sentence. I imagine most people would barely even realize it is there. Maybe it registers as being a little manipulative, but when it gets down to it it isn’t a big deal – nothing more than a slight frustration that dissipates minutes later.
Me, on the other hand, sees this sentence and immediately hears, “I’m doing you a favor, so you’d think you’d be a little more grateful and would keep helping me out.” I hear, “You owe me.” And, “you owe me,” directly translates (to me), “I own you.” (Even if it is only just a part for a second.) I obsess.
Literally, if he had left the rest of the email the way it was, I would have been more than happy to help out. I’ve always been a people pleaser of sorts. The only time I’m not is when someone feels the need to try to manipulate me, to use a perceived advantage they think they have to get me to do something for them – whether that be guilt, obligation, reciprocity, money, or whatever else. And then I push back. I whole-heartedly believe it is only from a position of superiority or an attempt at superiority that a person tries to control (i.e. manipulate) another.
And I fervently believe that we’re all equal. Maybe your experience is more than mine; maybe your education is higher than mine; maybe your emotional capacity is wider than mine, but you bleed the same red. You aren’t better than me just because you have a currently convenient skill set that is better than my current skill set. You can’t control me just because the situation currently suits you better than it suits me. That’s some false weird-ass societal belief that we all seem to have succumbed to.
The only thing your better skill set means is that I’d be unwise to not listen to the likely valuable information you have inside your head. And I’m here for that.
Don’t get me wrong. I totally get why we feel the need to control others. We’re scared. (Illusion of) Control = (illusion of) predictability. (Illusion of) Predictability = (illusion of) safety and comfort.
Meanwhile, it’s unfair to the other person. I’m already counting them out without even giving them a chance to support me on their own. I’ve already decided on who they are and what they’re capable of without letting them show me and without letting them figure it out for themselves. Or even worse, I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter who they are and what they’re capable of, so long as they can get me to where I want to be.
Controlling others robs them of being autonomous people capable of making their own decisions. It’s the ultimate objectification of another, in my view. And I think the motivation for it is completely drenched in fear and low self-esteem.
Two months earlier this same guy made a similar attempt to assert himself from that same superior position. When my boss, via a group email, expressed concerns about a mouse having pups for the second time in a month, she absentmindedly suggested one of the her pups might have impregnated her, as they were the only current males in the cage. With a gestation period of 20 days and the first litter being 23 days old, that would have required one of the pups to have impregnated their mom at 3 days old – an impossibility (never mind these mice don’t reach sexual maturity until 50 days old).
The only conclusion had to have been that after she gave birth, she was nearly immediately impregnated by one of the male mice before we had a chance to separate them. I didn’t respond to her email because I didn’t want to insult her by correcting her; I was sure that upon further reflection she realized her mistake. I know too well that embarrassment and hoped she wasn’t taking it hard on herself. It happens.
And I was fairly confident everyone else in the email was on the same page as me. They’re all smart people and could easily come to the conclusion that I had. However, the professor in charge of the mice emailed back, addressing me specifically. He lectured me on the importance of separating the mice before they reach sexual maturity, stating, “These pups should have been separated earlier and I think you’ve figured out what happened with the pups getting old enough to breed.”
It is the height of privilege when you can live under the impression that it makes sense to be condescending to someone, speak from a place of intellectual and moral superiority, without even bothering to take in what has been said in the email. Obviously a 3 day old mouse cannot impregnate his mother. This man has a PhD. There is no way he couldn’t have come to this conclusion himself.
To be fair to him, I don’t mean this as a direct criticism of him as a person. He seems like a cool guy, and I have genuinely enjoyed the few times we’ve spoken. Rather, this is a comment and emphasis on our behaviors (I have them too, as Nick knows more than anyone) that are meant to make others behave a certain way and the positions we must see ourselves holding vs the positions we must see others holding in order to have the audacity in the first place.
My reply was one of my prouder, more constrained moments of simply stating the facts about mice that I gave above (which I found through a quick skim of a Wikipedia article about these specific mice). His defense of “I’m not the pro at (mouse) breeding” seems irrelevant to knowing that mice can’t breed at 3 days old. Yet, while this acknowledgment of having no idea of what he’s talking about would have been more useful to him earlier (i.e. before he sent the first email), using this excuse now comes across as disingenuous and defensive.
Another example that is slightly less obvious is being told to smile by a man I’ve never met as I walked past him to my car (or any of the other several occasions men have told me to smile). Or being told that the contents of my binder for school (at a university, mind you) will be checked to make sure I have all my assignments, like I’m a child. Or being given homework that isn’t intended to test or further your knowledge, rather it is meant to make you skim the slides to mindlessly regurgitate information, like giving me a choice between studying and not is something they should have a say in.
You might think, “These are all such little things. They hardly matter. They’re not worth fighting over or getting upset over.” Sometimes, I’d agree with you. You know. Pick your battles. Stop trying to micromanage the micromanaging. After all, aren’t I trying to control the action of controlling others? Aren’t I just being hypocritical? And that’s fair. You’d be right to state such points.
At the same time, when we have a corporations that try to use our data to manipulate what we buy, how we act, and what groups we’re exposed to (and thus confine ourselves into tighter and tighter boxes with harder and harder lines); when we have the government trying to tell women what they can and cannot do with their bodies, trying to tell people what they can and cannot put into their bodies, and we have 50% of the population that agrees with them on these issues; when we have people who don’t understand the current need for feminism, for LGBT+ activism, for civil protests – for these adamant stands all come from this idea that one’s beliefs, one’s position, one’s morality, one’s intelligence in this one area, in this one thing, is so superior to that of another’s that it warrants forcing someone else to be who they are not, to live in some other ideal – then I can’t help but see the relation, the tiny little atoms that make up a molecule that make up organelles that make up cells that make up tissue that make up organs that make up organs systems that make up an organism. These little gestures of control and superiority in our tiny little lives make one neural connection, then another, and another until our brain becomes so used to fighting for that control and fighting to convince itself that it’s better that the need for control over others becomes just a thoughtless habit formed by a society that kicks others down as it uses them to just barely keep its head above the water. Without ever wondering if there was another way.
Or maybe I’m just overthinking this. It’s an easy neurological pathway for me to follow at this point. Maybe these levels of constraint simply come with the territory of interacting with other people, an inseparable part of coexistence. And maybe this is all just a projection of my own pathological fears of being controlled in a world where maybe control doesn’t mean superiority and maybe superiority doesn’t hold a permanent quality. Maybe these two perceived evils are just for our own biological and evolutionary benefit. Competition and cooperation, not mutually exclusive to one another, not so black and white. Maybe… I’m being too sensitive.