Attention tax
Jul. 22nd, 2017 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mrissaOriginally published at Novel Gazing Redux. You can comment here or there.
One of the things that has been making me furious about sexual harassment lately–secondary to all the other things that make me furious about it–is the attention tax it imposes on women. The time spent figuring out whether there’s enough evidence for us to be taken seriously this time, whether the people who were in the “surely you misinterpreted” and “that doesn’t mean what it blatantly means” camp last time will finally take us seriously, the time spent recovering from someone shouting in our faces and someone else grabbing our asses, the time sharing stories and pooling information and cleaning up messes and figuring out what to do, what we can do, what we have the power to do. That is time not spent on other things that are frankly a whole hell of a lot more interesting.
When it’s in convention terms, the time spent discussing who did what and what to do and letting the adrenaline settle and coping is time not spent on ideas for books and stories and where to go with them. It is very directly a tax on attention that could and should be going toward work. And it makes me exhausted and resentful, and then I try to corral my attention back to my work, because that is a far, far better place for it to be. I have directly observed that when I am at a con where people are dealing with an ongoing situation of this type, I come back with far, far less in the way of inspired notes for new projects–not just coming away drained instead of energized, but the specifics of what business are we doing here, where is our attention going.
I’m lucky. I know a lot of good men. I know a lot of good straight, white men. One of the benefits of this is that when a straight, white dude is an asshole, I am clear that it is artisanal assholery that he is hand-crafting by choice, not a trait he can’t avoid by his demographics. And a lot of good straight, white men have been stepping up to share the work of dealing with sexual harassment on a community level. I appreciate it. I do. But that is a choice they are making. Statistically, on average, the nonconsensual part, the part where you have to cope with the fallout of being harassed again, the part where it happens several times in a row and then it’s on your mind and you go into the next professional situation having to have a plan for how to cope–that’s a drain on your time and attention that you cannot have back, that other people can help with structurally but not in the moment. They can donate their time but not hand you back yours, not give you back those hours and days of working on the situation and processing and coping. It can happen to men. It does happen to men. And as one woman I know never loses an opportunity to point out, it does not happen to every woman. But statistically, on average, it is an attention tax that falls much, much more heavily on women, for things that we did not ask for and cannot change.
It’s not just sexual harassment. This is not the only attention tax, and I don’t mean to talk as though it is. Racist bullshit and the people who visit it upon people of color? That is, among other worse things, an attention tax on those people of color. Having to cope with accessibility issues and prejudice against the disabled? Attention tax. Homophobia and other forms of anti-queer assholery? Attention tax. Navigating the world while neurodiverse, even in ways that do not feel like a disability internally, among people who are going to be utter jerks to any hint of non-neurotypicality? Attention tax. And while I’ve talked about men and women above, the amount of attention tax that falls on gender-nonconforming and non-binary people gets mind-bogglingly larger the more gender-policing the subculture they’re interacting with gets. One of the fundamental questions is: how much jerkitude are people going to blithely shovel on you for being you and then skip along with their day, and how much will that pull away from the focus you need to do your stuff that you do.
Do I imagine I’m the first to observe this? Hardly. But “show don’t tell” is hardly new advice, either, and writers get blog posts out of that several times a year. What I’m saying to you is: this is affecting the work of people you know and care about. All the time. It doesn’t have to. It is literally all entirely voluntary. The thing I said above about artisanal bullshit: last month I got very tired of people saying “so that’s a thing that happened” when they were describing a choice someone made. So let’s not do that. Let’s not ascribe to fundamental forces things that are actual bad choices people are making.
And also: people who are doing work through all these attention taxes, who are managing to push it aside and fight their way through to focusing on making something awesome: I see you. I appreciate you. I’m sorry it’s like this. I keep hoping that some of the draining work will gain us some ground and it will be long-term less necessary. But in the meantime, thanks for clawing back some of your own in the face of it. It’s so hard, and it matters so much.
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Date: 2017-07-23 03:12 am (UTC)One thing I've been contemplating over the past month is how, oh, generational paradigm can catch us, or well, me, unawares. Now, I realize I am not the most clueful person, in fact, pretty often I am the last bozo on the bus. I start from, "But that's not so bad, it was so, so very much worse back in [name your decade]," to which the response of course is, "But that doesn't make it right now. It doesn't excuse it now."
Nope, nope, I see that. But it can make it more difficult to be aware of the line being crossed, because the line was once in so different s place that one might not see that the shifting line still means there is a line. And there should not have to be that line, and people wary of that line, braced for it being crossed, avoiding people or places that otherwise they might enjoy because it might be crossed. That is not "safe space," however much safer it feels than in [name that date].
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Date: 2017-07-23 11:32 am (UTC)When people say, "Well, we don't have any examples of x doing y," and you know, you KNOW, that they personally were there for an example of x doing y TO YOU...but it was ten years ago, and it was just in the category of "stuff the girls have to swallow to get by in the world" ten years ago...that can be pretty damned hard to take. Some women take that as "so everybody should keep letting x do y, it's part of what the girls have to swallow to get by in the world." Me? I found my NO NEVER AGAIN in here.
So it's worth a quick internal reminder: it wasn't okay then, and it isn't okay now. It's just we can do something about it now.
And of course, the stuff that was so much worse back in [name your decade] is also still happening some places.
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Date: 2017-07-23 12:58 pm (UTC)The baffled stare was pretty mild compared to the "Well what did you do to cause it?"
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Date: 2017-07-23 02:58 pm (UTC)I don't know whether I feel it as milder or not, honestly. One of them blames me. The other treats me as invisible, as nonexistent. They are both bad.
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Date: 2017-07-23 03:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-07-23 04:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-07-23 04:46 am (UTC)Since I started using a power wheelchair in 2011, I've become aware of the *monumental* attention tax of ableist harassment against wheelchair users.
Back before I got a wheelchair, I have been sexually harassed, but I get ableist harassment about being a wheelchair user about 50,000 times more often than I used to get sexual harassment about being a woman.
Five incidents of ableist harassment in a single day is not uncommon.
I've had a man on a train tell me "people like you [wheelchair users] are everything that's wrong with this world", and try to punch me in the face. (Luckily, a bystander grabbed his arm.)
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Date: 2017-07-23 11:41 am (UTC)But yes, the able-bodied are often stunned and flatly disbelieving about things like having my cane kicked out from under me when I'm using it for balance, things that are very routine when I'm using a cane. Some of it is a question of actual physical safety. Some of it is attention tax, where I am going to have to put my focus. Exhausting.
Hang in there.
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Date: 2017-07-23 12:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-07-23 12:20 pm (UTC)When I got a wheelchair assist at the airport once when I couldn't walk unassisted, the person decided that I needed to wait for a different wheelchair and theirs was called for elsewhere, so they pitched it forward and dumped me out on the concourse on my hands and knees.
Really, you know the harrowing stories that happen when you get a bunch of women together and sexual harassment stories start to flow? Disabled people have that. Disabled people have that A LOT.
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Date: 2017-07-23 12:25 pm (UTC)All I ever get in that dept is snark for taking the elevator up one floor at the Sem. on a bad back day. Because I don't look disabled so it must be laziness. No one person does it to me twice, I can tell you, but then here we are back at the tax on time and attention to be educating future clergy on what not to ever tease people about because RAAAR and you DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW.
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Date: 2017-07-23 12:36 pm (UTC)All of it deserves fury and correction but also folks deserve not to have to stop and administer those continually. Ugh.
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Date: 2017-07-23 03:09 pm (UTC)So I have sympathy when people declare that it is not their job to educate other people, whether it is about gender or race or sexuality or ability or whatever topic. Yes. It is not their job. Sometimes you get to do the things that actually are your job. On the other hand, I know that if I don't take the time to do this job that isn't mine, it will not get done.
It is also why I get frustrated at people who reply to this kind of story with, "Well, that's never happened to ME," in a particular tone, very different from, "I've never had that particular experience, but I believe you, [sometimes: and this is a related experience I've had]." When people are telling stories of the sorts of things that are an attention tax, whether it is racist harassment or sexual harassment or ableist or whatever, what we are doing is trying to make people aware that this happens, and the amount and degree to which it happens.
So, like, if I take the time to say that on the way to meet my agent for lunch last month, some dude got right up in my face and shouted, "SMILE, you've got GREAT TITS!", I am not trying to claim that every single tit-bearing person in the world has had this experience. So having someone say, "Well, that's never happened to ME," seems like...okay? So? But it has happened to me. It happened to me when I was happy about meeting with my agent and talking about these books we are trying to sell. It is a part of my experience of being a person in this world, a woman in this world. It is a part of my experience of being a writer, and no disrespect to my male colleagues' tits, but if you went down the list of male colleagues I was thoroughly happy to see last weekend at Readercon, I bet it didn't happen to any of them in the same circumstance. I bet all of them could have their first in-person meeting with their agents blithely unconcerned about whether some guy was going to escalate from screaming something sexual in their face to something worse.
We have to work here. And by here, I mean: on this planet. There is literally nowhere I can go where I can be sure this will not happen to me.
And from the reactions I get when I start telling these stories--both with gender and with disability--I am pretty sure that the people whose experiences are not like this do not have any notion how pervasive it is. So then when somebody pops up and says, "huh, not for me," I think: do you really think that me telling one story is going to magically make them think that it's more pervasive than it is? I don't think that that's the problem we're facing here. I really, really, really, really don't.
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Date: 2017-07-23 03:37 pm (UTC)No, I don't imagine your male colleagues are getting their tits intrusively evaluated en route to business meetings.
I totally believe you that that happened and that this is a kind of thing that happens a lot and somehow every time I'm still like "...Really?!????!?" Not to you. To them.
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Date: 2017-07-25 01:52 am (UTC)This.
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Date: 2017-07-23 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-07-23 01:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-07-23 02:47 pm (UTC)Holy SHIT I am angry that that happened to you.
I never had that particular bullshit happen to me!
(But I 100% believe that it happened to you, and I am appalled but, sadly, not surprised.)
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Date: 2017-07-23 05:23 am (UTC)I'm fed up with people trying to reduce the negative fallout of harassment to the fear of being assaulted - with the implication that if you're not in a situation where that's likely, you are being a fragile delicate flower if you object to being harassed.
The worst instances of harassment I've had to deal with have had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with that monologue of "Did I handle that right? How should I have handled it instead? Should I have given him the benefit of the doubt? Should I have set firmer boundaries sooner? What did I do that made me misinterpret my intentions? Or did he misinterpret my intentions?"
We're social monkeys. It's upsetting, that sense of losing one's footing in the world of social mores. That sense of being caught between the rules of a society where sexual harassment is normalized (If you didn't want that to happen you shouldn't have...) and the society that you feel you have been promised where you get to go places and do things. And it ripples out far beyond that specific person and that specific situation.
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Date: 2017-07-23 07:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-07-23 11:50 am (UTC)Yes and why should being belittled and undermined be different and more okay when it's sexual harassment than when it's other kinds of trying to put someone "in their place" in a professional setting?
Yes and people who are not in the position of being harassed often seriously mistake the risks of being assaulted. It is literally a no-win situation: if you end up assaulted, you were not careful enough; if you don't, clearly there was no risk and you were being paranoid/a fragile delicate flower.
Yes and we are now in a situation where we get to go places and do things if we fight for them. And only if. And if we're not willing to put that labor in, we must not have wanted them enough, and the whole time there will constantly be some yahoo showing up on Twitter to say that women don't write fantasy. It's whack-a-mole.
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Date: 2017-07-23 07:18 am (UTC)Attention tax came up in a "Muslim Allyship" panel I saw a couple of days ago, too -- one of the women gave the example of the fact that in the past few months she's started noticing that when she stops at a stoplight with her children next to another car, she has a fleeting fear of being shot. And it's not even about whether anyone's actually likely to shoot her; it's about that fear, and the cost of that when she then has to come to work and get work done.
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Date: 2017-07-23 07:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-07-23 11:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-07-23 01:28 pm (UTC)Indeed. Well-put.
And "attention tax" is a really useful phrase, and a useful defense to "it's not really hurting you, why are you being so sensitive?"
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Date: 2017-07-23 04:52 pm (UTC)"Emotional labor" is another tool like this--if you're unfamiliar,
http://www.metafilter.com/151267/Wheres-My-Cut-On-Unpaid-Emotional-Labor
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Date: 2017-07-23 09:51 pm (UTC)P.
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Date: 2017-07-23 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-07-24 03:31 am (UTC)