Category: Uncategorized

Note for people on diets

Real Social Skills

I’ve noticed that often, people who diet assume that everyone else around them either is or should be dieting. This can cause problems when they are responsible for feeding others.

Some examples:

  • If someone is planning a conference and all the food they make available is low-calorie
  • If someone is hosting a speaker from out of town in their home, and they only offer them a very small amount of food, and it’s logistically difficult for the speaker to get other food
  • A babysitter feeds active kids a green salad and nothing else for lunch

So, here are some things to keep in mind:

Other people’s nutritional needs might be different from yours. When you’re feeding someone, it’s important to feed them according to *their* nutritional needs.

This is particularly the case if you are on a low-calorie diet. When you are responsible for feeding others, it’s quite likely that they will need more calories than you do. Especially if they are children. Double especially if they are teenagers. (And this is especially important for teenage girls, since they’re often actively being pressured into diet culture.)

Low calorie food isn’t inherently healthy. It’s healthy in a particular set of circumstances. It’s unhealthy and dangerous in others.

If you’re feeding people, meet their nutritional needs. Don’t feed them according to yours.

Don’t tell me my pain is beautiful

Real Social Skills

I’ve seen this happen a lot:

  • Something awful happens to someone
  • Or they see something awful happen to someone else
  • Or they notice a thing that’s awful in the world
  • And then they write something about it
  • And they put a lot of effort into writing it, so it is really polished

And then a lot of people comment along these lines:

  • What a beautiful piece
  • That was so eloquent and moving
  • You’re such a good writer
  • I wish I could write like that

And often, those are the only or the primary comments a post like that gets, especially if it is written in highly personal terms.

I think there is something really wrong with that. Because when someone wrote something like that, the point was to communicate something important. And often, people completely ignore the content and focus on some sort of beauty unrelated to what the writer was actually saying.

When someone’s trying to tell you about violence, the right response isn’t “you’re so awesome at describing this violence in an asthetically pleasing manner!”; it’s “That shouldn’t happen,” or “What can I do to stop this?” or even “I think you’re wrong,” because sometimes you will disagree and sometimes you will be right. In any case, it’s important to take the content seriously.

It’s ok to be happy

Real Social Skills

Sometimes people in abusive or damaging situations feel like they’re not allowed to be happy, or to enjoy anything.

Because, like, if you’re happy and growing, that feels like evidence that maybe the things people are doing to you must be ok. Because if the things were actually bad, you’d be miserable all the time. But, it does not actually work that way.

It’s ok to be happy and like things. It doesn’t mean you’re wrong to object to what they are doing to you or what they did in the past. It doesn’t mean things are ok. It just means that you’re finding some good things, too.

A reason it can be dangerous to compliment people on weight loss

Real Social Skills

Some people struggle very unpleasantly to get enough to eat.

Some of these people are fat. 

Sometimes, being mostly unable to eat makes people lose tons of weight quickly.

This is not a good thing. It’s awful.

And dangerous.

And it can make things worse for people. Talking that way can make it harder for fat people to understand that something is actually wrong when they don’t eat.

And even if they do know, it can send the message that you’re not a safe person to discuss this with, or that it’s not safe to eat substantial food in front of you.

Journalists

Real Social Skills

Journalists are not your friends or advocates when they interview you.

They might maintain a really friendly affect. They might sound really sympathetic. They might be really good at making you feel heard. This is often a way of manipulating you into saying things that are useful to them. Sounding friendly doesn’t mean that they are on your side.

Journalists write the article that they want to write. It is for their benefit, not yours.

If you keep that in mind, it’s a lot easier to avoid getting into trouble when talking with them.

Don’t take the accessible seats if you don’t need them

Real Social Skills

A lot of places have a few designated accessible seats, for instance:

  • Movie theaters will often have some seats next to wheelchair seating areas.
  • Bathrooms often have one accessible stall and several more inaccessible stalls
  • Busses usually have designated seating near the front for folks with disabilities

If you don’t need the accessibility features of the designated seats, it’s important not to sit in them. 

Because even if you’re willing to move, people don’t know that. A lot of people who sit in those seats are not willing to move, and become belligerent when people ask them to, particularly if they are not using mobility equipment. People who need the seats have no way of knowing how you will react. By sitting there, you are putting people in the position of having to decide whether risking asking you to move is more dangerous than risking going without the seat.

Do not do this to people.

Rhetorical might doesn’t make right

Real Social Skills

Not knowing how to articulate something doesn’t mean you are wrong.

Being elequoent doesn’t mean you are right.

Making someone look stupid doesn’t mean you are right.

Words are tools. They aren’t everything. They aren’t all of knowledge either.

So if someone tells you something that sounds plausible, and they’ve articulated it well, you still might know they are wrong even if you have no words for it.

They might try to intimidate you into agreeing by insisting that if you can’t give a clear explicit answer, then you must just be too irrational to accept a valid argument. But, it doesn’t work that way. Knowing something is not the same as knowing how to use words to describe that thing.

Words are very useful tools for communication. But being good at words just means being good at words. Don’t conflate it with being right, being insightful, or being exceptionally rational. Those are separate issues.

“Just pretend I’m purple”

Real Social Skills

If you want to talk about racism, you have to acknowledge that racism exists.

And that people of different races are affected by it differently.

Everyone is equal, and that’s an important starting point. But not everyone is treated equally, and that affects everything.

Including what it’s like for people to listen to you talk about racism. When you talk about racism, it matters what race you are. If you want to say worthwhile things, it’s important to acknowledge that. Don’t try to pretend that you can just decide that it doesn’t matter for the purposes of the conversation you want to have.

In particular, if you say “just pretend I’m purple,” that will usually be understood to mean “I’m white and I’m not interested in thinking about how my white privilege affects other people.”

What it means when kids aren’t allowed to know about bad things

Real Social Skills

There are a lot of things kids are often considered too young to know about. For instance:

  • Rape
  • Violence
  • Racism
  • Sexism

The problem is, almost every bad thing kids are considered too young to know about happens to some kids.

The rule that kids should be shielded from these things has some really negative effects on the kids who are most vulnerable.

It hurts kids who have been abused, because they’re considered dangerous to other kids if they ever talk about it. Their peers aren’t supposed to know about it, so they’re supposed to just never talk about it ever. That creates a lot of shame, and living with that kind of shame hurts people.

It also hurts kids who are currently being abused. They get the overwhelming message from everyone that kids are not allowed to talk about these things. That makes it hard to tell adults what’s going on, especially if they don’t quite know the right words. If they try to tell indirectly, they might even be hushed and told that they’re too young to be thinking about that kind of thing.

It hurts kids of color, because they’re often required to put up with racist things rather than have the white kids find out about racism. Because they’re old enough to have to deal with racism, but their white peers aren’t considered old enough to be told about it.

There’s also parents who don’t want their kids to play with disabled kids, because they think their kids are too young to know about disability or serious illness or injury. Or even, to the point that a kids’ show hosted by an amputee actor got a lot of complaints that her missing arm was upsetting to children. This kind of attitude is all over the place.

Preventing kids from thinking about bad things hurts all kinds of kids, all kinds of particularly vulnerable kids. And I don’t see how it does much to protect the safer kids, either.

I’m not sure what the solution is. But I think it is a problem.

Getting real about physical accessibility

Real Social Skills

Something I’ve noticed:

There are a lot of ramps, seating areas, lifts, and other such things that aren’t available to wheelchair users because they are constantly full of people pushing children in strollers.

Sometimes, this is because people are astonishingly inconsiderate, but often it’s the result of terrible design.

People assume that accessibility features are only useful for chair users. Then they design them to only have enough capacity for the (small) number of chair users they expect to be there. Then, everyone with a stroller uses them, and the building remains almost as inaccessible to wheelchair users as it was before.

When you are creating an accessibility feature, do not fall into this trap! Design it to have the capacity for all of the things it will be used for.

Some concrete examples:

  • If your building has multiple high-traffic entrances, it needs to have multiple ramps
  • Elevators need to have enough capacity to accommodate the number of kids in strollers, chair users, and people with luggage who will come through on a regular basis.
  • Family restrooms should be accessible. So should some of the stalls in the regular men’s/women’s/unisex bathrooms.

Just, generally speaking, keep in mind that in order to make an access feature usable, there has to either be enough to go around, or enforcement preventing unauthorized use. Unless you want to chase mothers and infants away from your ramp, make it big enough to accommodate traffic from both wheelchair users and strollers.