And yet again your anecdote tells me all about your character … because the issue of a last name being mispronounced is something I’m all-too-familiar with, since virtually no one who’s not Eastern European puts the accent on the correct syllable, and yet again, the difference between you and me is that I don’t let it get to me. If someone asks how to pronounce it, I tell them, but if they don’t, their mispronouncing my last name is no more significant to me than their mispronouncing some other word or the name of the street on which I live. I don’t correct people in either circumstance unless they’re very good friends with me or something of that sort. There have been a few cases, actually, where someone I knew casually for years and who had been mispronouncing my last name finally happened to hear me say it to someone else and turned to me shocked, “Wait, why didn’t you tell me I was saying your last name wrong all these years?” My answer, with a smile, “You know … it wasn’t a big deal, and you never asked.” Then we laughed about it, and he said it right from thereon in. (And, in any event, even to say it completely “right” would really entail mastering a Slavic accent, so much so that I don’t even bother saying it totally correctly when I say it to English speakers.)
My point is that you seem to have a worldview in which you expect the universe to cater to you, coddle you and accommodate you, whereas I have a worldview in which I’m largely at peace with the fact that the universe will go about its business, and if it occasionally stops to take notice of me and my needs, that’s just gravy. And that difference in worldviews extends to the issue we’ve been discussing as well. You want society to cater to women as if they’re helpless children in need of coddling. I want society to treat people, women and men alike, with no more and no less than the respect they deserve through the face they show to the world … which brings me to your other point:
The change isn’t zero-sum, because women are gaining more rights and men are losing some of their privileges. (I trust you remember your contracts class.) We’re coming off a very long period (perhaps back to the Agricultural Revolution) in which women were basically appendages to men’s property. A scant few centuries of improvement, or less in many parts of the world, leaves us with a loooong way to go. Emotionally, it’s hard to tell the difference between losing a privilege and losing a right, that’s all.
We live in an age of overcorrection for real and perceived past injustices. I think that kind of overcorrection is almost always a mistake. It just keeps the cycle of oppression going in a different form. It doesn’t change the basic paradigm at all. The way society is treating black people right now as helpless victims of white supremacy who have no responsibility for their own life paths and need a leg up in every aspect of life simultaneously robs blacks of agency AND alienates whites, thereby perpetuating racism on every front. The same is true of how the #MeToo movement wants us to treat women. I thought the whole post-War sexual revolution was about women taking charge of their sexuality and saying, “I can play this game too.” Now we have these women (like the absurd “Grace” in the Aziz Ansari incident) first using their sexuality aggressively to tempt and win the affections of a powerful guy and then starting to play damsel-in-distress and crying to society via the media, “Protect me! Protect me!” And I’m just making a similar point to the one made in this excellent article by Leslie Loftis, viz., that women can’t have it both ways. Either they, like men, are expected to tough it out and deal with it, so long as no actual crimes are committed, or else, if they want to play the part of dainty damsels, then they can choose that path, but they need to understand that it entails a dramatic retreat from the kinds of freedoms they fought for in the first place.
