Stuff I Read That You Might Like, Vol. 1

An e-reader with a cup of coffee, a notebook, a pen, and a pair of reading glasses.
Photo by Aliis Sinisalu on Unsplash

For a long time I’ve used Tumblr primarily to share quotes from my favorite articles that I read online (and sometimes books, too). Since I’m no longer using Tumblr due to their atrocious, sex-negative decision about adult content, I haven’t been able to find a better way to do this. Most so-called Tumblr “replacements” are pretty barebones and/or nonfunctional.

So, clunky as it is, I’ll be doing it here! Every so often I’ll post some quotes and links to stuff you might like.

Starting off with a very topical one:

Tumblr made sex a community experience.

—Vex Ashley, “Porn on Tumblr — a eulogy / love letter

Now that the full scope of this administration*’s political vandalism and base criminality is largely being copped to in broad daylight in various federal courthouses, a good chunk of the elite political press is moving into the Hoocoodanode? stage of political journalism. This is best exemplified byThursday’s New York Times podcast, the headline of which—“The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, and How We Missed It”—got dragged like Hector’s corpse all over the electric Twitter machine until someone at the Times sharpened up and changed the last half of it to “…and How Law Enforcement Ignored It,” which is a little better, but not much.

To take the simplest argument first, “we,” of course, did no such thing, unless “we” is a very limited—and very white—plural pronoun. The violence on the right certainly made itself obvious in Oklahoma City, and at the Atlanta Olympics, and at various gay bars and women’s health clinics, and in Barrett Slepian’s kitchen, and in the hills of North Carolina, where Eric Rudolph stayed on the lam for five years and in which he had stashed 250 pounds of explosives for future escapades.

—Charles P. Piece, “‘We’ Did Not Miss the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism. You Did.

Inspired by online recipe sites, he’d sit down to dinner and then let me know what rating I earned. “If I give you five out of five, you’ll quit,” he joked. And I laughed because when I was in my 20s, I believed that you were supposed to laugh when someone hurt your feelings. I thought you were constantly supposed to be trying harder.

—Lyz Lenz, “Now That I’m Divorced, I’m Never Cooking for a Man Again

“As you become more acclimated to the cold, your body becomes more effective at delivering warm blood to the extremities, your core temperature goes up, and all that contributes to being more resistant to the cold,” Leonard told me.

That means the only cure for hating winter, unfortunately, is just more winter.

—Olga Kazan, “Why So Many People Hate Winter” (ugh.)

Mattis saw it up close. He bore it as long as he could, in hopes of mitigating the damage. But when Trump broke America’s promise to the Syrian Kurds, he stained Mattis’s honor, too. That, apparently, Mattis could not accept. He leaves and takes his honor with him. And now the question for Congress is: The Klaxon is sounding. The system is failing. What will you do?

—David Frum, “No More Excuses

It’s called Star Wars. Not Star Trek, not Star Peace, not Star Friends, not even Star Tales. This gargantuan fictional universe is labeled with a title that guarantees the ability to travel space… and near-constant warfare.

We can debate the relative okay-ness of this focus from a moral standpoint, sure. But in reality, I think that Star Wars is accidentally teaching us the greatest lesson of all: It’s depicting what a universe looks like when you dedicate all of your research and technological advancements to war and destruction, and unwittingly showing us what an incredibly dark place that universe is. Because the Star Wars universe is a fun fictional playground for sure, a great place to build weird and wonderful stories… but it’s not a good place. Not by a longshot.

—Emily Asher-Perrin, “Star Wars is Really a Cautionary Tale About Devoting All Technological Advancements to Death

It’s no longer socially acceptable to believe that women are somehow less than especially not during a time when feminism is wielding so much cultural power. But arguing that women are just naturally better at caretaking or domestic work has become a clever way to shirk living up to progressive values while claiming you are simply complimenting women on their stellar ironing skills.

One way to combat this line of thinking is to highlight how fully capable men are in the private sphere. It is true that American culture relishes in portraying men as dolts when it comes to parenting and cleaning, and it’s an unfair stereotype.

But for women to make real progress in and out of their homes, men must give something up: the backwards dream of holding onto their feminist bona fides while seeking out female partners willing to limit their own aspirations to the home.

—Jessica Valenti, “The ‘Woke’ Men Who Still Want Housewives

So yes, forced birthers and [Status Quo Warriors], if you’re going to play it like that, I am OK with the idea of a world into which you, personally, were never born. I am equally as OK with the idea of a world where I don’t exist, either. Neither you nor I personally matters that much in a universe so vast and a sea of human experiences so rich. You and I both are accidents in our existence, possibly unhappy ones.

I would’ve rather your mother not have been forced to carry a pregnancy she didn’t want to term. I would’ve rather your father had approached your mother respectfully in an appropriate setting, or not at all. I dare to love your mother as a fellow human being more than you do and to dream of a better world for people like her. It’s rank misogyny and not very humanist at all to think otherwise.

—Heina Dadabhoy, “Why I Don’t Care If You Wouldn’t Have Existed

It is maddening to watch adult men respond to revelations of endemic sexual harassment in the workplace by instituting a series of ludicrous personal codes, rather than by learning the relatively straightforward lesson on offer: Don’t sexually assault or harass anyone.

At best, these “rules” are reflective of employers’ woefully incomplete approach to sexual harassment. Employers have long done the absolute minimum to comply with the law, relying on trite videos focused on what you can and cannot say or do in the workplace (“don’t give back rubs” or “don’t offer promotions in exchange for sex”) and sexual harassment policies designed primarily to protect them from lawsuits. The sweeping scale of the Me Too movement makes it clear that no mere set of rules is sufficient to prevent workplace harassment, especially when those rules fail to speak to all of the various power imbalances that make the critical distinctions between genuinely consensual workplace romances and harassment.

—Tahir Duckett, “Avoiding Women At Work Is A Childish, Cowardly Response To #MeToo

When you are terribly afraid of being held responsible for the emotional well-being of others, it feels very mature and responsible to decide that you should “work on yourself.” It becomes both a way of retroactively absolving yourself (wow, can you believe all of the ways my issues manifested before I decided to work on them) and a rather elegant little trick to exonerate ongoing bad behavior (dang, those pesky issues again! I guess I must keep working on them). This is especially true for those too-clever-by-half motherfuckers who think that nobly warning someone in advance they “are working on their issues” mitigates any way in which they might disappoint or harm. And even with the best of intentions, it obviates the fact that relationships themselves are a process of being made ready, not something you come to static and fully formed.

[…] We need each other desperately, in ways none of us can be ready for.

—Brandy Jensen, “Ask A Fuck-Up: I’m still in therapy. Should I be dating?


Brute Reason does not host comments–here’s why.

If you liked this post, please consider supporting me on Patreon or Ko-fi!

Stuff I Read That You Might Like, Vol. 1
{advertisement}

Why I Told My Clients I Have Cancer

Self-disclosure–what to share about yourself with a client, and how–is a big topic of debate among therapists. Some old-school psychologists think that you should share as little as possible, and be a “blank slate” to avoid distracting the client from “the work.” Other therapists, especially those who operate within a feminist or relational lens, tend to believe that appropriate self-disclosure can strengthen the professional relationship and move the work along.

Most agree on a few things, though–don’t share personal medical details with your clients, and don’t share anything that you haven’t fully worked through already. It’s one thing to mention to a client that you went through a divorce years ago and that there’s no shame in it and that healing will come; it’s another to tell a client that you’re actually on your way to the attorney’s office after work.

I was, until recently, completely on board with these general guidelines. Then I got diagnosed with cancer, and suddenly they didn’t work for me anymore.

Almost immediately, I dreaded having to explain my absence to my clients somehow. I didn’t know anyone in my field who’s ever gone through anything like this. Neither of my supervisors at work did, either. Most of the time when something medical interferes with work, it’s rather more straightforward than cancer treatment–for instance, a surgery. You tell your clients, coworkers, and supervisors varying degrees of detail about the fact that you’ll be out for 6 weeks, and gently shut down any inappropriate questions.

I, however, was about to start chemo and I’d be working through it. I wasn’t sure how much, and I knew that might change as I went through treatment. As it turns out, it’s uniquely impossible to be vague or coy about cancer treatment. I knew right away that if I tried to spin some bullshit about how I’d be off a few days every other week for “my treatment” and then start showing up in wigs, I would come across like I’m either ashamed of it, or think my clients are children. People know what it means when you miss work every two weeks and lose your hair.

Unable to get any clear direction from professionals with more experience, I went next to Google. Here I found a number of articles by therapists who’d had cancer. They all told their clients that they’d be “leaving this position” and referred them to other therapists. I was confused. Were they not planning on returning to work? Would they have to just build up an entirely new client base? That sounds like a lot of fun on top of recovering from chemo.

One article described a therapist processing her imminent departure with her clients and having to pretend that she was moving on to another job, and reassure her clients that it wasn’t because of them and that she really valued working with them.

Later, she received an email about her own former therapist, who had terminated treatment with her the same way. He’d died of cancer.

Ultimately I decided that this level of deception and fakery not only goes against my ethical values, but would literally be impossible for me to manage. Telling my clients I had cancer was painful enough; I couldn’t imagine having to also pretend that the cancer was actually a cushy new job. Having to apologize to my clients for leaving our work unfinished as if it had been my decision, rather than a horrible thing that happened to me.

So I went for the opposite extreme. I told every single one of my clients that I’ve been diagnosed with breast cancer and would be undergoing chemo followed by surgery. I invited them to ask me any questions they wanted about it and reassured them that I wouldn’t answer anything I truly felt uncomfortable with. Some didn’t ask for any details at all. Most asked if I felt okay to be at work. (I did.) A few wanted to know more–what stage, what type of surgery, what chemo feels like, if cancer runs in my family.

Was it awkward? Sometimes. Did it distract from the client’s therapeutic needs? Maybe, in some ways. Is that ideal? No.

The problem, though, is that therapists are in fact human, and we have human bodies that fail in the same glorious ways as everyone else. I don’t believe I could’ve continued to do this work effectively throughout my chemotherapy while actively deceiving clients about what I’m going through. I also don’t think that would make me a very good role model.

A lot of surprising conversations came out of it. One client revealed his own battle with cancer, years ago. He’d never talked about it. A few mentioned that they really ought to be doing breast self-exams because it runs in their families; I told them where to get more information and explained that when caught early, breast cancer is extremely treatable. One client, surprisingly, brightened and smiled when I told her. She explained that a beloved relative is a survivor of breast cancer several times over and that this relative is her mentor and source of inspiration.

Another client said she was glad I told her. “I’ve been working on being more vulnerable and open with the people in my life,” she said. “If you’d tried to hide this, it would’ve sent the wrong message.”

That conversation was a reminder that while therapists often keep personal information from clients in order to “protect” them or to avoid distracting them, clients may interpret this secrecy as a product of shame, callousness, or both.

That’s not to say that my transparent approach hasn’t had its downsides. It does sometimes make my clients feel awkward about sharing their own problems; cancer tends to be that thing people remind themselves at least they haven’t got, so it can be weird to vent about your shitty job when someone’s just dropped cancer into the conversation. But I always reassure my clients that 1) I’m here because I want to be, and 2) I still see their problems as valid and important even though I have cancer now. The awkwardness usually doesn’t last.

It does sometimes make things harder for me, though. When I was first diagnosed and didn’t know the staging or prognosis, I could hear the unasked question on many of my clients’ minds. No, I didn’t know if I was going to survive or not. (Even now, with chemo going swimmingly, I can tell you that I’m pretty unlikely to die of cancer, but recurrence is a thing and it could happen anytime.) I could only tell my clients the same thing I could tell myself–that I had no reason to expect the worst, so therefore I’d hope for the best.

Sitting with uncertainty is one of the most difficult things in life, and probably the most difficult thing about cancer especially. Yet it’s also one of the most important skills to develop, for me and for my clients too.

As treatment went on, I often found myself having to be a bit performative when clients asked how I’m doing. It’s true that chemo isn’t too bad and that I feel okay most of the time. But some days are very hard. Yes, there were days when I wished I’d stayed home from work, but I didn’t because I wanted to be as consistent as possible with my schedule. (There were other days when I called off even though I’d planned to be there.)

Most days, I’m not my best self at work. I’m just not. It’s just impossible. The only other option would’ve been to take all four months of chemo off work entirely, but that would’ve been worse for my clients, worse for me, and ultimately impossible. I don’t have enough medical leave for that.

So although I don’t tell my clients many details about treatment, I continue to be transparent. I’ve told them that I feel tired a lot. I’ve mentioned that chemo sometimes leaves me with bone aches, which is why I stay home a few days after each treatment. I keep a positive attitude and tell them that many chemo side effects are very well-managed with medication and that chemo isn’t what it used to be. My hope is that if any of them end up being diagnosed with cancer, or having a loved one who is, they’ll remember that, and they’ll remember not to be afraid and to ask the doctor for help if they need it.

Disclosing this to my clients a week after diagnosis–telling 40 or so people that I have a potentially lethal illness and then taking care of them around that disclosure–is the most difficult challenge I’ve faced in my professional career so far. I found myself having to reassure people about something happening to me, something I found (as most people would) horrible and terrifying.

This situation turned the usual ring theory inside out. Normally the person at the center of a trauma or tragedy is the one who gets taken care of by everyone else. But as a therapist, it’s my job to take care of my clients. Which is probably why the conversations were sometimes so raw and awkward–my clients sensed that they “should” be the ones comforting and reassuring me, but they also understood that that’s not their role. And because of the strong therapeutic relationships we’ve already cultivated, we were able to talk about that directly.

I had my last chemo treatment this past Monday, so things are going to be more straightforward from here on out. But that doesn’t mean I’ll be able to stop having conversations about this with my clients. I have multiple surgeries and other procedures in my future and it could drag on for years. I may not be able to be at work as much as my clients (or I) would like, but I hope that by being open and honest I can reassure them that help is available even when I’m not there and make sure they know how much I wish I could be there with them.

Over the past four months, I’ve had to radically redefine what professionalism and appropriate self-disclosure mean to me. As it turns out, vulnerability isn’t just good for my friendships and partnerships; it’s good for my professional relationships too.


Brute Reason does not host comments–here’s why.

If you liked this post, please consider supporting me on Patreon!

Why I Told My Clients I Have Cancer

Why Employers Love Advocating Self-Care

Text reads, "If you can afford to relax today, I 100% recommend you do. Stay in bed, treat yourself, watch movies, & try not to focus too much on stressful matters. Take time to be good to yourself. You deserve it."
Credit: Positive Doodles on Tumblr

Last week, feeling irritated during a training, I posted this on Tumblr:

Every professional training I go to includes a section on burnout and self-care. My thought is always the same: just pay me what I’m worth. Pay me what I’m worth. Pay me what I’m worth. And give me enough paid time off.

That’s it. I don’t need bubble baths and chocolate and massages and silly TV. I need more money. And I need more rest.

Because many people derive some sort of satisfaction out of interpreting others’ words as uncharitably and narrowly as possible, I was immediately inundated with a bunch of condescending remarks about how money isn’t everything and with that attitude you’ll burn out before you know it. So I’ll expand on my spur-of-the-moment rant.

I don’t think anyone would seriously deny that everyone needs to do things that help them replenish, maintain, and/or care for themselves. Self-care can look like many different things–taking a shower, cooking a nice meal, listening to music, spending time with friends, playing with your kids, reading, taking a nap, remembering to take your meds. Self-care looks different for different people at different points in their lives, depending on what they need in those moments.

When someone has a very stressful job or caretaking role, self-care becomes especially important to prevent them from burning out, developing mental or physical health problems, or dropping the ball in ways that harm others (clients, patients, children). It makes sense to emphasize self-care for people working in fields like mine.

Lately, however, the self-care concept has become very popular for employers to throw around as a solution for all sorts of employee issues and as a way to continually extract more and more productivity from their workers. Stressed? Do self-care! Poor? Do self-care! Forced to work 12-hour shifts with no paid time off and no guarantee that you’ll still have a job if you stay home sick one day? Do self-care!

At that point, self-care is less about actually caring for yourself and more about forcing yourself into compliance with dehumanizing and intolerable conditions. It’s less about making things better for yourself and more about surviving things the way they are without making anyone else uncomfortable by forcing them to witness your struggles.

Continue reading “Why Employers Love Advocating Self-Care”

Why Employers Love Advocating Self-Care

Being Extra Nice To Abusers Doesn't Stop Abuse

[CN: abuse]

So I’m reading this Washington Post article about some recent research on abusive bosses and come across this perplexing bit:

But the researchers also found something they didn’t expect. They predicted that acts of compassion and empathy—employees who assist bad bosses by going above and beyond, helping bosses with heavy workloads even when they’re not asked—would be negatively linked with abusive behavior. In other words, such acts of kindness might help lessen future rude or abusive behavior.

The study, however, found that wasn’t true. “Abusive supervisors didn’t respond to followers being positive and compassionate, and doing things to be supportive and helpful,” said Charlice Hurst, an assistant professor at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business who was a co-author on the paper. Their findings, she said, seem to “clash with common sense.”

To put it mildly, these findings only clash with common sense if you’ve never been abused or bullied. If you have, then you know that abuse is not about persuading people to do nice things for you. It’s about controlling them: their feelings, their thoughts, their self-esteem, their experiences, their behavior, even the course of their lives. It is also about asserting power publicly to control bystanders as well.

That’s why bullies and abusers “win” almost no matter how you respond. If you lash out in anger, they get to use their higher status to get you in trouble for your anger. If you cry, they get to ridicule you. If you ignore it and walk away, they get to paint you as a coward–and, regardless, they still get to influence bystanders even if they haven’t influenced you. If you start being extra nice to them, then they reap the benefits of your niceness while reinforcing their dominance over you. The only way to “win” in an abusive situation is to find a way to get out of it entirely and never look back, and that’s exactly what abuse is designed to prevent you from doing.

And in the event that a boss is deliberately choosing to be abusive in order to elicit “supportive and helpful” behavior from you, then behaving in a supportive and helpful manner would only reinforce the abuse*. It would be like feeding scraps to a dog that begs at the table, except that dogs that beg are at worst annoying and bosses that abuse are at worst life-ruining. I am absolutely horrified at the idea that people are advising victims of workplace abuse to perform “acts of compassion and empathy” towards their abusers, because if anything, that’ll only teach the abusers that abuse is an effective method of getting people to kiss your ass.

The article continues:

In the paper, the researchers say one explanation may be that bosses just see all that extra work as part of the job, something academics refer to as “organizational citizenship,” and therefore don’t feel the need to treat their employees any better because of those efforts.

I submit that it’s not that at all, but rather that people who abuse, whether they do it in a school or their home or their office, do it because they reap some psychological reward from it. Why would they give that reward up just because you did some of their paperwork?

One might protest that this is making it seem like there’s nothing that victims of workplace abuse can do to stop the abuse. Indeed, the article notes that the researchers have so far “only discovered what not to do” to stop abuse, and nothing to do to stop it.

While that might aggravate those who believe strongly in a just world, it makes complete sense. Abusive situations are abusive precisely because they involve a significant imbalance of power. The person with less power does not have the capacity to influence the situation significantly. If they did, they probably wouldn’t have been abused in the first place. And the thing about having relatively little power is that you can’t just decide one day to have more power. That’s not how power works.

That’s why telling victims of abuse and other power-based acts of violence (such as sexual assault) to prevent that violence is not only hurtful and condescending, but also totally useless. That’s why comparing abuse and sexual assault to other situations, like stolen bikes, doesn’t work.

The researchers in this particular study seem to have wised up a lot about abusive dynamics over the course of their research. Co-author Charlice Hurst says that in order to prevent workplace abuse, “Companies have to create cultures where abusive supervisors are not acceptable, and they have to implement policies for employees to report being bullied.” In other words, the responsibility for preventing bullying rests on the shoulders of those who have more relative power within the workplace, not those who have less. The way to stop bullying is to implement reforms at the systemic level, not at the individual level.

(And no, before anyone jumps in with “but some employees are just terrible and rude and bad at their jobs, so shouldn’t they improve,” that’s completely irrelevant. The solution to a bad employee is to tell them how to improve and if they don’t, fire them. It’s not to abuse them.)

While victims of abuse do not have much control over the abuse itself (unless they manage to extricate themselves and leave), they do have some control over their emotional reaction. It is very important that I said “some.” I didn’t say “complete,” or “a lot.” And that control can include, for instance, going to therapy to learn coping skills. But the reason I bring this up is that “passive-aggressive retaliation,” one of the reactions the researchers showed to be ineffective in terms of stopping abuse, was also shown in a different study to be effective for a different purpose: helping employees cope. In sum, “Employees felt less like victims when they retaliated against their bad bosses and as a result experienced less psychological distress, more job satisfaction and more commitment to their employer.”

Of course, retaliation of any sort can be dangerous, you know your situation best, take all psychology reporting with an appropriate grain of salt, et cetera. I’m hesitant to do some sort of “coping with abuse” advicepost because I don’t want to come across like I’m condoning abuse or being fatalistic about it, but on the other hand, 1) abuse happens and 2) it’s already been demonstrated numerous times that you cannot prevent your own abuse. Using whatever coping strategies work for you seems like a good idea.

I hope that studies like this one bring more awareness to the psychology community about the dynamics of abuse. Too often, psychologists fall into the trap of focusing overly on individual factors (like what abuse victims can/should do) as opposed to structural factors (like what communities/systems can/should do). This causes them to make ridiculous assumptions like “it’s just common sense that being nice to an abuser would make them stop abusing!”

It makes sense that only someone with more power (whether individual or collective) than an abuser can make them stop abusing, although that may not always be sufficient. If an abuser holds such absolute power in your workplace that nobody and nothing can hold them accountable, you’re going to have issues with abuse no matter how nice the abuser’s victims are.

~~~

*I want to be very clear here that sometimes being extra nice to an abuser feels like the only safe thing to do, in which case you should do whatever makes you feel safe first and foremost. I will never pass judgment on the ways in which individuals choose to cope with their abuse. However, I also don’t think we should advise people to do things that seem like they’d make abuse worse, so, that’s what I’m getting at here.

~~~

If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting me on Patreon!

Being Extra Nice To Abusers Doesn't Stop Abuse

Is Passion Necessary?

Lately I’ve been finding the idea that your work should be your passion about as oppressive as the idea that work should be boring well-paid drudgery or that you should pick your career based on what your father and his father and his father’s father did for a living.

I’m not even talking about the fact that only certain fortunate people even have the privilege of being able to choose to do something they love, although that’s also something that the Do What You Love crowd ignores.

I’m talking about the fact that when we accept the idea of your work being your passion, we accept unfair treatment of workers as a reasonable price to pay.

Whenever I mention (in some relevant context) that my field is underpaid, the response is often, “But at least you get to do What You Really Love!” They’ll sigh, and add, “I wish my work actually made a real difference. Instead I just sit in an office and move people’s money around.”

When I talk about the difficulties of living on a low salary and the lack of institutional support for the self-care our employers all patronizingly insist we prioritize, they say, “Well, that’s a small price to pay for getting to Follow Your Passion.”

(Actually, my work isn’t my passion. My passion is reading books and spending time with people I love, but nobody’s monetized that yet.)

I do love and enjoy my work, but I also really get a kick out of being able to pay off my student loan debt, take the occasional vacation, be allowed adequate time off to do all those Adult Things that can only be done during business hours, have my own apartment, and not worry about money all the time. That would really be fulfilling. You could almost say I have a passion for it.

The idea that Your Work Should Be Your Passion seems empowering on the surface. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone could get paid to do something they really love? How great would it be if you could spend most of your day actively making the world a better place, or whatever it is you care about most?

But if your work is your passion, then it won’t matter so much that it doesn’t pay that well…right? If your work is your passion, you might want to miss your kid’s sports game or musical performance so that you could stay a few hours late and keep working. And if you want to, surely it’s not too much to expect you to.

If your work is your passion, but suddenly you’re asking to work remotely or part-time because you just had a baby, maybe you’re just not that into your work anymore and your job should go to someone who’s more passionate.

If your work is your passion, then “attitude” matters more than actual competence. “Passionate” people are more fun to work with and we assume that they’ll be more dedicated to their job, so we hire people who are “a good fit for the company” rather than people who have a proven record of getting shit done.

Which leads into the other way that this emphasis on passion becomes counterproductive and ultimately harmful: the idea that “passion” is ultimately the reason people succeed.

Erik Devaney breaks this myth down in his article about passion and work:

Ultimately, the role passion plays in a person’s success depends on the context of that person’s unique situation.

For some folks, the road to success is smooth and straight, and being smart and hardworking and passionate can help those folks travel down that smooth and straight road even faster.

For others, the road to success is full of hurdles and potholes, and even if they’re just as smart and hardworking and passionate as the folks on the other road, they’ll never be able to catch up.

Life, as we all know, isn’t fair. But that doesn’t mean that the folks with the unfair advantages get to decide how everyone else thinks and feels.

Besides the fact that people with relatively little privilege face roadblocks that no amount of passion can overcome, this idea that passion is what makes for success also masks the often massive amount of practice and skill-building involved. And that, ironically, is easier to do than to force yourself to feel passionate about something you’re just not passionate about. Changing behavior tends to be easier than changing feelings, and pretending that your feelings are other than what they are can be counterproductive. Ferrett writes:

“Look,” I said.  “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to stay in better touch with your friends.  But what you’re doing is this fucked-up equation where you go I miss my friends == I need to use the Internet == I want to use the Internet.  And because you think the only way to do something is to be the sort of person who wants to do it, you’re psyching yourself up to be something you’re not.”

“…this is like the way you hate exercise, isn’t it?”

“Fucking loathe it.  Went for a hard twenty-minute workout on the elliptical this morning.  Hated it every step of the way.  I realize I hate exercise so much I literally have to do it right after I wake up, because if I hold off until my brain comes online I’ll manufacture good excuses why I don’t have to work out all day.   I can only get exercise because I’ve acknowledged that I fucking hate doing it.”

You can, in fact, do things you’re not passionate about–even things you dislike–in order to achieve something you do really care about. You may not be passionate about playing scales on the piano for hours, but you’re passionate about the beautiful music you’ll create as a result. There’s no point in obscuring the fact that becoming a talented pianist requires more than just PASSION, but also a lot of rather boring hard work.

Many people would argue that if you don’t enjoy doing something, you shouldn’t choose it as your job. But that comes from the idea that Work = Passion and that things you’re not passionate about can never be things you’re good at and would be satisfied doing for money so that you can spend that money doing the things you are passionate about. In fact, the entire concept of being satisfied with your job rather than LOVING your job seems all wrong.

But it’s not. I know people who have pretty boring but acceptable jobs, who then go home and enjoy not worrying about putting food on the table. Instead, they do their hobbies, take vacations, spend time with their families, and donate to causes they care about.

The problems endemic in our approach to work were not caused by the idea that passion is mandatory, nor will they be fixed by taking a more reasonable view on passion’s role. (And they won’t be entirely fixed by better vacation policies or workplace discrimination laws, either.) Unfortunately, it’s a lot more complicated than that.

However, it pains me to see progressive folks perpetuating the myth that passion should be central to work. That makes it too easy to disregard unfair, exploitative, or even abusive working conditions. It asks people to accept receiving less than a living wage because getting to do What They Love ought to somehow make up the difference.

Loving my job doesn’t pay the rent. Loving my job won’t help when my job has taken over my life to such an extent that I can’t care for myself. Even if I love my job, it’s not the only thing in the world that I love.

~~~

If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting me on Patreon!

Is Passion Necessary?

The Perils of Facebook as a Hiring Tool

My new post at the Daily Dot is about Five Labs, an app that analyzes your personality based on your Facebook profile.

Some employers already try to use Big Five personality tests to assess prospective hires under the assumption that certain traits make good employees. At Jezebel, Hillary Crosley suggests that Five Labs could eventually become a hiring tool:

The tool is still in the beginning stages and isn’t a hardcore hiring weapon yet, but it’s clear how it could be. It could also poses problems because who you are online might not be who you are in an office setting. Maybe you’re awesome at work, but you like to go home and be crazy on the Internet? Technically, non-friends can’t see what you post on Facebook—but let’s be honest, the Internet is open to whomever is interested enough to crack your code.

That last sentence raises some concerning and frankly creepy implications. While it’s generally a good idea not to put things on the Internet (under any privacy setting) that would be particularly deleterious if they were to become widely known, we also shouldn’t consider it ethically acceptable for employers to hack into interviewee’s private online accounts in order to test their personalities.

I’d also question the hiring skills of any employer who’s that desperate to access a potential employee’s Facebook; their education, references, certifications, past work experience, and interview should really be sufficient.

As Crosley points out in her piece, most people do not behave the same way at work as they behave elsewhere. This is normal. In fact, this is preferable. I don’t think I would be effective at work if I acted the way I do at home or out with friends, and I also don’t think I would have any friends if I acted with them the way I act at work.

The expectation that many employers seem to be operating from when they stalk potential hires’ social media accounts is that people should not only leave their personal lives out of the office, but also take their work lives out of the office to everywhere else.

This is dismaying, but not surprising, given that the U.S. seems to have a uniquely work-obsessed culture. For instance, Americanswork more than residents of any other industrialized country, and they take the least vacation time. The U.S. also lags behind other comparable countries in terms of laws regulating sick leave and parental leave.

Being expected to take your office self home and into your online life isn’t nearly as bad as not being able to take paid leave to take care of your baby, obviously. But the two could be symptoms of a general cultural inability to recognize that it’s healthier to work to live rather than live to work.

Read the rest here.

The Perils of Facebook as a Hiring Tool

Confidence Is Not the Solution To Gender Inequality

My latest piece in the Daily Dot discusses research on the double bind that women have to navigate in the workplace, and why I’m so fed up with all the demands that women Just Be Confident and Ask For What You Want at work:

Women face a classic double bind: if they confirm female stereotypes of gentleness, communality, and physical attractiveness, they are liked more but presumed less competent. If they disconfirm female stereotypes and act confident and assertive, they are liked less and presumed to have poor social skills. Both being liked and being considered competent is vital for getting hired, retained, and promoted.

These effects are especially pronounced in domains that are considered traditionally “male,” which would include most of the types of fields that everyone’s always wringing their hands about female underrepresentation in: law, business, politics, science, and technology, to name a few.

Another study suggests that interviewers evaluating women who behave in a more stereotypically masculine way emphasize social skills more than competence in their hiring decisions, but when they interview men (or women who are more stereotypically feminine), their hiring decisions hinge more on competence and social skills.

Since we already know that women who are more confident and less feminine are perceived to be lower on social skills, this seems like a convenient way to penalize them in hiring decisions.

In a study published in Research and Organizational Behavior, researchers Laurie Rudman and Julie Phelan described the multiple ways in which women who act contrary to female stereotypes face backlash in the workplace.

For example, women are constantly being exhorted to self-promote so that supervisors and managers notice their skills. However, while women who self-promote may be considered more competent, they are alsoconsidered less likeable and are less likely to be hired. In another study, men who used an “assertive style” in their job application materials weremore likely to be hired than women using an identical strategy, and the actual job applications were identical except for the fictional applicant’s gender.

Once hired, women continue to face this double bind over and over again.

Read the rest here.

For the record, I did not choose the headline or the header image, and I apologize if either is offensive.

~~~

Liked this post? Please consider donating so I can speak at conferences.

Confidence Is Not the Solution To Gender Inequality

Promoting Mental Health in the Workplace

[Content note: mental illness, including eating disorders]

This post was requested by Kate [not FtB!Kate], who donated to my conference fundraiser. She wanted to hear my opinion on mental health in the workplace and how employees and employers can foster a culture that values and promotes mental health. She had some of her own suggestions, which I’ve incorporated into this piece with her permission.

Work is often a concern for people who suffer from mental illnesses. They might worry, for instance, that their struggles will impact their work performance, that coworkers or employers will find out that they have a diagnosis and stigmatize (or even fire) them, or that offhand comments at work could trigger eating disorder symptoms.

I wrote about this topic much more generally in this piece, which was about how to prioritize and promote mental health in one’s community. Workplaces are particular types of communities, so a lot of this still applies. At the same time, workplaces present particular challenges to promoting mental health, as well as particular capabilities that might help.

Note that I’m writing this as a person with a mental illness, as a person who works, and as a person who observes human behavior. I’m not writing this as someone who’s ever been a manager or a supervisor, so while I can speak to what I would like to see from managers and supervisors, I don’t have firsthand knowledge of what it’s like to be one. If you have that experience and you’d like to weigh in in the comments, feel free to do so.

For employers/managers/supervisors

1. Ensure that the assignments you give your employees and the culture you foster in the office encourage and allow employees to take good care of themselves.

Every workplace that expects people to skip lunch or sleep less than 7 hours a night is a workplace that is detrimental not only to physical health, but mental health as well. Sleep deprivation can dangerously exacerbate many mental illnesses, and having to skip meals can cause people with eating disorders to relapse. Obviously this is unavoidable with certain jobs or when a big important project is nearing completion, but it’s avoidable with most jobs most of the time.

(At the same time, recognize that this is a problem with American culture at large, and companies feel pressure to pressure their employees in this way because if they don’t, a competitor will, and it’ll reap the profits.)

2. Make sure that new employees understand the health coverage they’re receiving under the company’s benefits plan, especially as it pertains to mental health.

Explain in as little legalese as possible what the coverage includes and doesn’t include, and where they can go to find more detailed information or look up specialists in their area. In my experience, many people are worried that if they see a mental health professional using their employer-provided insurance plan, their employer will somehow have access to their medical records. Emphasize that it’s none of your business as an employer what your employees do with their health insurance and that providers cannot disclose such information to you without a patient’s consent. For extra points, give a short overview of HIPAA.

Going over this information not only improves the odds that employees are able to get the mental healthcare they need, but it shows that you’re comfortable discussing mental health with employees and that your company thinks it’s important.

3. If you choose to have health-related contests at the office, focus them on fitness goals or healthy eating, not weight loss.

Personally, though, I’d avoid these altogether because many people consider health a personal matter and feel pretty uncomfortable about having to discuss it publicly and competitively. Even if the contest is optional, keep in mind that people will feel a strong social pressure to join in. Who wants to be the only person in the office who doesn’t seem to care about staying in shape?

In any case, framing weight loss as an intrinsically healthy and positive goal is harmful and counterproductive. You can weigh little and be very unhealthy, and if you lose weight in an unhealthy way, you’ll probably gain it back anyway. A better way to structure a health contest is by encouraging participants to achieve goals that are proven to be healthy and doable.

4. Make sure employees understand the policies and processes about taking time off for medical reasons (and remember that mental health is a medical issue).

It’s especially important to find a way to emphasize that mental health is just as important as physical health, and little gestures make a big difference. For example, you could say something like, “If you know in advance you’re going to need time off, like for a physical or a therapy appointment, you can submit the form to me at at least a week’s notice.” That provides important information while also implicitly conveying the fact that you consider therapy to be a legitimate reason to leave work an hour early.

For employees

1. Consider your own mental health when choosing responsibilities to take on at work.

It’s understandable, especially in this economy, to try to impress your boss by offering to do as much as possible and overworking yourself. However, good mental health should be seen as an investment. If you take good care of it, you’ll ultimately be more productive than if you neglect it and burn out.

This applies to all those little volunteer opportunities that aren’t directly job-related, either. If you have social anxiety, it might be a bad idea to offer to organize a social outing for the office. If you have an eating disorder that makes it really stressful to choose food to buy, it might be a bad idea to offer to bring snacks for a meeting. You know yourself best.

2. If you feel safe and comfortable, let your boss know about mental health issues that may affect your performance and how you plan to deal with them.

The “if you feel safe and comfortable” is the key part. I’m absolutely not suggesting that everyone can and should come out about their mental illness to their boss, since I know that in many cases that’s a really bad idea. (It shouldn’t be, but it is.) But personally, I know people who did this and found it really helpful because they were able to work collaboratively with their boss to make sure that they can get the time off they need and that they can fulfill their responsibilities rather than having to keep it a secret and try to solve potential problems on their own. Disclosing also makes it possible to receive any accommodations you may need, which brings me to:

3. Educate yourself about laws related to mental illness and the workplace.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is obviously a major one, but so is HIPAA, which I mentioned earlier. The definition of “disability” in the ADA is intentionally quite general, but mental illnesses are included: depression, anxiety, PTSD, ADHD, and so on. Title I of the ADA concerns employment. There’s a lot of useful information in there; for instance, an employer cannot ask you in a job interview whether or not you’ve been treated for mental health problems, or which medications you’re taking. Keep in mind that the ADA only applies to businesses with 15 or more employees, however. Here’s another useful article about it.

For everyone

1. When someone asks you how you’re doing, be honest (within reason).

In the piece I linked to earlier, I wrote:

This is something I’ve been really making an effort to do. This doesn’t mean that every time someone asks me “What’s up?” I give them The Unabridged Chronicles of Miri’s Current Woes and Suffering. But I try not to just say “Good!” unless I mean it. Instead I’ll say, “I’ve been going through a rough patch lately, but things are looking up. How about you?” or “Pretty worried about my grad school loans, but hopefully I’ll figure it out.” The point isn’t so much that I desperately need to share these things with people; rather, I’m signaling that 1) I trust them with this information, and 2) they are welcome to open up to me, too. Ending on a positive note and/or by asking them how they are makes it clear that I’m not trying to dump all my problems on them, but I leave it up to them to decide whether or not to ask more questions and try to comfort me, or to just go ahead and tell me how they’re doing.

At work, there are obviously different standards than in other communities, or with friends and family. But even at work, there’s room for honesty and mutual support.

2. Be mindful of using language that relates to mental illness.

Casual usage of diagnostic terms (“That’s so OCD,” “You’re being delusional,” etc.) hurts people with mental illnesses by trivializing their conditions and turning them into the butt of a joke. It also makes it more difficult for people to disclose mental illnesses because it keeps people from taking them seriously. If “ADHD” is what you call it when you can’t focus on a boring project and someone tells you they have “ADHD,” you’re not going to think, “Oh, this person has a serious condition that makes it neurologically impossible for them to focus on a task unless they get treatment.” You’re going to think, “Oh, come on, they just need to close Facebook and get focused.”

3. Remember that talking about dieting and weight loss can be very triggering for people with past or current eating disorders.

Fat talk (as it’s called) is so ingrained in our culture and communication patterns that it’s hard to imagine that it could be such a serious issue for someone. But anecdotally, it seems that eating disorders in particular are very easily triggered by offhand remarks like “Ugh I need to work off this cupcake” or “My thighs are huge.” Even when not actually triggering, these comments encourage unhealthy behavior and create a social norm of dieting and preoccupation with weight loss.

I sometimes dread being around groups of women who are not my friends because more likely than not, I’m going to hear these comments. And it’s not like you can avoid your coworkers. So if you must do it, try not to do it to a captive audience.

4. Respect others’ privacy when it comes to mental health issues.

Just as you should never out an LGBT person without their permission, you shouldn’t discuss someone’s mental health with others at the office. Although I generally encourage people to be open about mental illness if they feel they can be, that has to be on their terms, not someone else’s. If you’re concerned that someone’s mental health problems are causing them to be unable to do their work, do the same thing you’d (probably) do anytime a coworker isn’t pulling their weight: talk to them about it in a kind and considerate way rather than going straight to the boss.

(An exception to this is if you’re worried that someone may harm themselves or someone else. In that case, please call 911. )

When it comes to structural issues like ableism and stigma, no community can be an island, unfortunately. There will not be stigma-free workplaces until there is a stigma-free society. But the more power you have in a workplace, the more influence yo have over its culture.

Thank you to Kate for her donation and for this prompt. 

~~~

Liked this post? Please consider donating so I can speak at conferences.

Promoting Mental Health in the Workplace

It's Okay to Lean Out of Silicon Valley

I have another Daily Dot article. This one’s about the the guy who wrote an article saying he doesn’t want his daughter to work in Silicon Valley. I talked about why he’s probably taking it too far but also why the counterargument–demanding that women sacrifice themselves to make sexism go away–is misguided.

Excerpt:

Arguably, you can’t change an industry simply by leaving it. You’d think that women fleeing Silicon Valley in droves would get the men running it to realize that they’re driving women away, but the Valley’s almost religious adherence to the theory of meritocracy will prevent that from happening. If women aren’t working for us, they’d think, that’s just because they’re not good enough—or strong enough. And that’s assuming anyone notices or cares about the lack of female representation to begin with. Therefore, women who want Silicon Valley to change should occupy it, not leave it.

But this view, too, often puts the onus on women to expose themselves to sexist microaggressions and harassment for the greater good. The idea that women (or, at least, feminists) “should” force their way into spaces like technology, business, and politics to “fix” the sexism within places the needs of others before the needs of those women, especially since any complaints they make about the sexism they encounter are likely to be met with, “Well, you knew what you were getting into.” Ironically, the expectation that women always put their individual needs last is a key component of sexism.

Furthermore, it’s not necessarily the case that getting more women into a given space makes that space friendlier to women in general. As Segan points out, women who want to work in Silicon Valley are expected to demonstrate the same stereotypically masculine traits as men are—with, of course, the added double bind that feminine women are considered incompetent while masculine women are considered unlikeable. Neither incompetence or unlikeability is a huge help when it comes to getting a job.

Women who do manage to break into and succeed in Silicon Valley are likely to be women who gamely laugh at sexist jokes and brush off harassment in the office—and expect other women to do the same. AsAshe Dryden describes, women who speak up about sexual harassment in the workplace risk retaliation, such as firing. Success for a woman in Silicon Valley therefore seems to depend partially on keeping quiet about the mistreatment she encounters, and the easiest way to keep quiet about mistreatment is to not view it as mistreatment at all.

Read the rest here.

As a sidenote, this Daily Dot gig is really making me write more, which is great.

It's Okay to Lean Out of Silicon Valley

Unpaid Internships Are Exploitative

It’s that time of year when many people my age are starting to desperately look for summer internships so that they can eventually be qualified for an entry-level job and aren’t screwed and broke forever.

Too real? Maybe a little.

In many fields–journalism, politics, film, social services, and even many areas of academic research–paid summer internships are the exception, not the rule. Being paid to work full-time is the exception.

It is very difficult, almost impossible sometimes, to explain this situation to people in different fields, people who had paid summer internships starting with their freshman year of college, who got recruited and hired in the middle of their senior year, who started with a comfortably middle-class salary and good benefits in their first full-time job. “Just find a paid internship, then!” they advise me, unhelpfully.

Those of you who have never had to navigate this hell will just have to believe those of us who have.

People who otherwise support living wages (or, at least, wages) bend over backwards to justify unpaid internships. One frequent justification is that they provide valuable experience that looks very good on one’s resume. While that’s true, so do most (paid) jobs. Jobs look excellent on a resume and you often learn a lot from doing them. That doesn’t mean it’s reasonable to ask you to do them for no pay.

Unpaid internships are exploitative. I won’t go as far as some do and call them slavery or indentured servitude, but they’re exploitative all the same. Sure, nobody’s “forcing” people to intern without pay, but if you can’t get a job in the field without it, you’re as good as forced.

“Just choose another field” isn’t an answer. An excellent writer who can’t get a job in journalism because they can’t afford to work for free doesn’t necessarily have the skills to get a job in computer science. And why should only rich people be able to work in journalism, politics, activism, entertainment, or social services? (Don’t even get me started on the dangers of having only rich people working in journalism and social services.)

Sometimes people defend unpaid internships by saying that they did one and found it very fun and educational. That’s nice. I don’t mean that sarcastically; it really is. But that doesn’t make it non-exploitative. Enjoying something–finding it useful, even–does not mean that thing is not part of a system that devalues young people’s work and shuts the gates to certain professions to all but those with lots of resources.

I’ve also had people tell me that unpaid internships are great because that’s how they got jobs afterwards. Right, that’s the problem.

Unpaid internships, at least when run legally, can easily be rationalized as “fair.” The idea is that your supervisors expend a lot of time on educating you and don’t really benefit from your being there, at least not nearly as much as you benefit from being there. What does that sound a lot like? Yup, college, which most people who have to do unpaid internships have already done or are doing (and paying a lot for). Except that college students are often eligible for federal financial aid or scholarships from their schools. Very few sources of aid are available to unpaid interns. (College, by the way, is still vastly unaffordable and exclusionary.)

Sometimes unpaid internships offer academic credit in lieu of payment. However, it seems pretty rare that this credit can replace coursework and facilitate early graduation, and as I just noted, the financial support available during the academic year is often unavailable during the summer.

Regardless, in many cases unpaid internships are illegal–anytime there isn’t a substantial educational component. (Anecdotally, that seems to be most of the time.) I’ve heard people be like “Yeah well internships like that are illegal,” as though that matters. (It’s similar to how people try to use “Yeah well rape’s illegal” as an argument against rape culture.) What intern is going to completely destroy their career prospects and spend a fortune they don’t have on suing their employer? Nobody*. Employers know this.

Unpaid internships don’t just suck because it sucks to work without pay. They also suck because they keep important professions full of the sorts of people who can afford to not have to support themselves until their mid- to late-20s. That also means that they’re a self-perpetuating problem, because until more politicians, journalists, activists, social scientists, and social service workers take on this issue, it’s not going to get better, and the people who succeed in these fields tend to be people who didn’t have all that much difficulty working for free.

(We spend a lot of time in my social work program talking about how it’s still not diverse enough, especially not socioeconomically. Of course it’s fucking not. The cost of attending Columbia’s MSW program is $70,000 a year, plus all the unpaid internships it took to get accepted in the first place.)

I don’t know how to fix this problem. Right now, all the parties involved are acting pretty rationally. Of course organizations, especially non-profits, will opt out of paying their interns, cash-strapped as they often are. Of course interns will accept unpaid internships, knowing that’s their only shot at a job someday, although it’s often still not enough. Of course graduate programs and employers will choose applicants who have relevant work experience, even if it was unpaid, over those who spent their summers working as baristas and lifeguards and babysitters. Of course, of course, of course.

I do know that fixing a problem begins with recognizing that it exists. Recognize that unpaid internships are exploitative.

~~~

* Not actually strictly true anymore. Some interns have been filing lawsuits. Unfortunately, this seems to lead employers to stop offering internships altogether rather than to start offering paid ones.

Also, read Sarah Kendzior’s fantastic take on unpaid internships.

Also also, I’m going to give a shout-out to two organizations that offer paid summer internships despite being nonprofits: the Secular Student Alliance and the Center for Inquiry. If you know of other secular/progressive organizations that do the same, leave them in the comments.

Unpaid Internships Are Exploitative