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I followed this link back from Amanda at Pandagon and ended up in the comments section of Hugo’s original post. You can either read the comments too, or you can just read the title of this post–same content.

My ex-husband and I tried the marriage counseling routine. Clearly it didn’t work or I wouldn’t be referring to him as my ex-husband, but bear with me here, I have a point to make, darn it–it wasn’t the counsellor’s fault it didn’t work, it was mine and my husband’s…but anyway, one thing I remember the counsellor talking about was the mistake of ever using “tit-for-tat” arguments. (Well, a mistake if what you’re trying to do is genuinely resolve the conflict– it’s quite successful if what you’re trying to do is cause more discord and strife.) It doesn’t work for two reasons: (1) It constantly refocuses the argument on you, rather than the grievance the other person is trying to air, and (2) “tit” never does actually equal “tat.”

In (1), you are clearly demonstrating to the other person that you not only don’t care about their issue, you don’t care about them personally either. Of course you deserve equal time to air your grievances, and your grievances are just as worthy and deserving of resolution as their grievances, but by trying to take away their individual time to air and making it yours instead, you’re saying very clearly that you don’t think theirs ever deserves individual consideration–and by extension, they don’t deserve their own time to be the focus of the conversation and your caring attention. This naturally causes them to cease trusting you enough to communicate openly and honestly and also removes from them any desire to ever give you any individual time to air your specific grievances in return.

In (2), you are simply wrong. No two people ever actually have the same experience, not only because the details of the experience always and inevitably differ to some degree, but because every person is different and feels even very similar experiences to different degrees. The closest you can ever come to truly feeling what someone else feels is to shut your mouth, open your ears and really listen. And, rather than immersing yourself back into whatever issues you personally feel you’re having, genuinely try to be them,, with all their personal experiences and personal way of being, and feel whatever it is they are saying they felt.

I’m sorry Hugo closed the comments on that thread, though it’s very understandable that he did–he specifically stated that he wanted commenters to discuss his post from a feminist or feminist-friendly point of view, and instead was swamped by MRAs who apparently thought if they refrained from outright raving about bitches or cunts, what they had to say would somehow look feminist-friendly instead. (Kind of like toddlers who think they are successfully playing “Hide and Seek” by sitting in the middle of the floor and covering their eyes with their hands, cause if they can’t see YOU then..! except that, like many behaviors practiced by small children, it’s cute when they do it but rather disturbing in an adult.) The specific situation of women with serious health conditions being encouraged by large swaths of society to become pregnant and carry to term regardless of the crippling-to-fatal results for themselves–sometimes to the point where they may be outright obstructed by the law and/or medical professionals from terminating any pregnancies or even more bizarrely, made into official foci of worship by major organized religions after they die–is a fascinating and unique social dynamic. I would have liked to discuss it in of itself.

However, the aforementioned MRAs could not…literally could not…bear that.

If the comments had remained open, I could have jumped in and pointed out the fallacies of their various arguments in that specific instance–as in, there is no situation where terminally ill men are encouraged to refuse lifesaving treatment so that others can use their bodies to live that does not also occur for women, but there is a situation where terminally ill women are, this one! that never occurs for men–or, that the draft is not an example of men being discriminated against based upon their gender, it’s an example of poor men being discriminated against by rich men and young men being discriminated against by old men based upon their socioeconomic status and age–but why? That would simply have been buying into the “tit-for-tat” argument–that would have been agreeing it has any relevancy or legitimacy at all. And it doesn’t, any more than the recent Oppression Olympicsfest during the Democratic presidential primaries did.

A while back on here, Antigone provoked a minor shitstorm of MRAs when she dared criticize an article by Glenn Sacks, and one of them suggested that she (or possibly the rest of us heathens, since she’d already stated that she did) visit Glenn Sacks’ site and read what he had to say. I didn’t feel in the least tempted. Not because I don’t find men’s issues and the points of view of those focused on them fascinating and relevant and moving–indeed I do! But why would I want to discuss them with people who make it abundantly clear that they don’t care about my issues and my interests, that their only interest at all is to shout their way into them declaring that NO one but no ONE has suffah’d as they and their fellow men have suffah’d! Now, there’s nothing wrong with having your own personal space to vent and there’s absolutely no requirement of any kind that you give equal air time to anybody…in your own space…but why on earth would you invite someone in and THEN behave like that..?

Well, like me and my ex-husband, obviously their desire to hurt and obstruct are stronger than any desire to heal and come together. I decline to be fodder for that–why should I be? I don’t demand that anybody else come be my whipping boy. I don’t even try to tempt anybody into it with false promises of civil and rational discourse. Quite, quite mad.

Busting into somebody else’s space and deliberately violating their polite request that their own actual issue be discussed is the same dynamic. I’ve been trying to come up with a phrase to characterize the state of mind of the types that do this and all I can come up with is “narcissistic rage.” Unsettling, unpleasant and frankly uninteresting. And transparent. It’s clear what they’d really like is to make us all submit, bleh! Luckily, that ain’t legal. (And these are often guys who wonder why their marriages didn’t work out…imagine.)