On shame, reassurance, and doing the work

[commodorified]

"If you trust yourself and believe in your dreams and follow your star … you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things..." Terry Pratchett, Wee Free Men.

I've been thinking about a thing that happened recently. Which I am going to disguise the details of, because it's a very common thing that people do and I have zero desire to put it on anyone specific because, well, "because" will become clear, I hope.

So someone asked for advice on writing a story in which one of the romantic leads has a marginalised identity, which the writer does not share.

And a lot of people responded helpfully, and a lot of people responded helpfully and encouragingly, and a number of people responded reassuringly: you're a good person and a good writer, you'll be fine, just go ahead.

It's that last response that I want to talk about, because it didn't sit well with me, and it hasn't sat well with me when I've seen it before — and I've seen it a lot. But I couldn't pin it down, what was bothering me, beyond the basic fact that it nearly always seems to be offered from, and to, the side with the privilege. I had observed repeatedly that asking for or taking that particular reassurance tended to lead to bad outcomes, and I had a rough notion of what was going on, but I couldn't have told you what was specifically wrong with the reassurance, or the context of it, or what. So I chewed on it a bunch.

This is a common problem for me — I don't know if it's a common problem in general — when it comes to thinking about oppression and marginalization and privilege. It's a difficulty, not of believing people, but of believing people and then not knowing what to do next: learning that a thing is wrong doesn't necessarily gift me with an understanding of why and how it's wrong, and not knowing what is wrong with a thing makes it hard to address effectively.

In other words, a desire not to hurt people is not, in and of itself, a toolkit for not hurting people. You have to do the work of understanding what hurts, and why.

I mean, "don't do that, it hurts people" is an incredibly valuable thing to be told. I'm not saying it's not. It just doesn't give you a lot of help in avoiding the many, many related ways of hurting people that you will, probably, move on to next if you leave it at that.

I have spent quite a lot of time fighting the despair that comes with the notion that the only way to address my privilege, in areas where I have it, is by systematically harming the people I come into contact with and then apologizing and making amends until I run out of problematic behaviours or, much more probably, friends. Eventually - much more slowly than seems reasonable, looking back, but I am a slow thinker - I realized that I didn't necessarily need to be a better person: I needed to be a better-informed person. Then I moved myself out of a lot of then-ongoing conversations and did a lot of reading, and then I asked some more questions and then I did more reading, and this has been working much better. For everyone, I think.

Again, this might just be me, in which case this isn't going to be as generally helpful as I might have hoped, but one can only try.

So. The "you're a decent person" problem.

Well, the first thing is that in that context it's invalidating, while looking and sounding like validation: "Can somebody tell me how to fix my front brakes? I never learned." "Oh, sweetie, you're a good person. You'll be fine."

You won't though. Try to teach yourself how to fix brakes without doing the reading or getting the right tools or getting someone to teach you, and you'll probably crash, actually, and you may well hit and injure or kill someone. And the thing is, you know that, or you wouldn't be asking. So while responses like that sound much more supportive than "that's too complicated for you, you can't fix your own brakes", they're functionally the same: they ignore the question and in doing so they invalidate the asker's reality, while making it harder for them to learn to do the thing well.

Telling someone who is asking for pointers to acquire the tools they need to do the work they've set themselves that they can just go out there and fake it because they're a good person is obscuring the point, and profoundly unhelpful at best, dangerous at worst.

(You don't ask someone who makes their living as a mechanic to drop everything and teach you for free, mind you, unless you're really good friends who regularly do each other large favours. But you ask someone, in person or via a manual or both, paying as appropriate for that instruction.)

(Related: the "you're a good writer" problem, the shaming flipside of which is often expressed after a failure of representation as "that's just bad writing." (Allowing the person who says it the self-reassuring corollary: "I am a Good Writer, so I am safe from that and related errors.) Which isn't wrong, exactly, except for the word "just". There are a lot of kinds of good writing and a lot of kinds of bad writing and even if we all agreed on which were which, which we do not, that's a bit like telling someone that their spelling is terrible and not mentioning that there are such things as dictionaries: you're not obligated as a casual critic to mention the dictionary thing, or go find them a suitable one, but I do think you shouldn't tell them they just need to Try Harder at Being A Better Writer. You do need to Try Harder to be a better speller, or writer - or a better anything - but you also need to know what, specifically, to try harder at.

Fail Again and Fail Better is real, and true, but it's not everything. And now I am tempted to derail myself with a whole discussion of how we overvalue "originality" and the individual and the iconoclast and the autodiadactic in writing and elsewhere and how that hooks into a number of deeply messed-up paradigms and if someone else wants to write about that please do because it is outside my current scope but oh wow I want to read that. Anyway. Where was I?)

So again, what happens when someone says, oh, I don't know, "I'm thinking of hiking the West Coast Trail, with a group of friends, they want me to organize the trip, I've done these kinds of hikes in these places, got any advice?"

What doesn't happen is this: people aren't overwhelmingly inspired to respond with "well, you're strong and brave and your heart's in the right place, just head out, you'll be fine." I mean, there are people who do say and believe things like that — right up until they try it, generally, at which point the Search and Rescue people usually get involved.

Mostly, though, what happens is this: people who have done the trail will — assuming they don't take one look at your current skill and experience and fitness levels and suggest you pick a different route — post links to their entire packing lists, which will feature discussion of the number of milligrammes to be saved by removing the handle of your toothbrush (no, seriously) and in-depth comparisons of blister treatments and merino vs synthetic baselayers and extensive discussion of bears and they will show you their extensively annotated maps, and they will look at your estimated km/day and tell you where you're being unrealistic, and in general people will school the heck out of you, partly because anyone who has hiked the West Coast Trail can and will discuss the topic for hours at the drop of a (waterproof, deet-stained) hat but mostly because when someone expresses an intent to hike the West Coast you probably, even if you do not hike yourself, understand that this is an incredibly difficult undertaking which is going to require not just courage and determination but a large amount of data, a number of slightly unusual skills, some fairly specific equipment, and a lot of physical conditioning, because if you try to do this thing without knowing what you're doing and how to do it, you or your companions will get seriously hurt or quite possibly die.

So when that person asks for help and information and advice and the benefit of your experience, you give it to them. You don't try to tell them that they can do the trail in their gardening sandals, armed with good intentions and a single bottle of water.

(Originally I was using the Appalachian Trail as my example, but random pointed out that you can do quite a lot of the Appalachian on guts, brute force and ignorance without doing yourself or anyone else a serious injury. Most people who nope out of that trail make it out on their own feet - however bloody and bruised. Which is a different, if related, metaphorical thingy, also somewhat relevant here.)

Now, look, you say.

And it's true that if one more piece of fiction makes it into the world with some regrettable assumptions left intact it is unlikely on its own to directly cause serious, long-lasting harm to someone. Nevertheless, somebody might - very likely will - get hurt.

And the regrettable assumptions themselves? Yep. You caught me. I'm not only using car repair and hiking as a way to talk about writing, I'm using writing as a way to talk about anti-oppression work in general. The regrettable assumptions, and their perpetuations, absolutely can and do injure and kill real people.

Being a decent person in an indecent system is not enough. It's necessary, but it's not sufficient. A decent person who is easily fooled by indecent arguments is functionally indistinguishable from a bad person, alas.

That approach also leads to the assumption that all failures are failures of decency, which just isn't so. Some are, for sure. We've all encountered that situation. But many, maybe even most, are not.

Trying to introspect, or abuse, yourself - or someone else - into becoming "more decent" is missing the point, badly: that is not what "educate yourself" means. It really isn't.

I suspect that the two things - the shame-driven endless quest to root out every scrap of evil from your own heart and the reflexive reassurance of our own basic goodness that misses the point - are not only related, they're the same thing at heart: heart-searching and self-criticism, if that's all you do or if you do it without finding some kind of support for yourself, eventually bottoms out and then - because it is a basically very healthy response to realize at some point in that cycle that you're not that horrible person, you're really not - feeds directly into the mutual reassurance cycle: it feels good to tell your friends that they're good people, decent people, people who want to do the right thing. It feels good to be the sort of person who has friends like that, and says things like that to them. It really does.

And there's a time and a place for doing that, for reminding each other of our basic decency. One of the things about unlearning privilege — any kind of privilege — is that it's extremely easy to take a wrong turn and end up stuck fast in the Pit of Shame. There are excellent reasons why this is often treated with, hrmm, brisk unhelpfullness by the unprivileged, mainly that it doesn't actually help them, you, or anyone and when a privileged person has a meltdown it usually takes up a lot of space which the people they have harmed were possibly intending to use, and makes a lot of noise, which often drowns out the conversation that was going on before the meltdown started - but it's still a shame-based meltdown and shame-based meltdowns are painful and awful and destructive and just because it's not the job of the people you've harmed to walk you through it and look after you and remind you that you're valuable doesn't mean you don't deserve those things at all.

Besides, it's not like people never do valuable work from a place of deep self-loathing, but it's sporadic, unreliable, inefficient, usually ends in a spectacular flameout and is basically the least effective way of creating real positive change ever.

Shame is not a sustainable power source. Sort of like alcohol, it acts as a stimulant in the short term, but is ultimately a depressant. Also, it impairs your judgement and reflexes.

In order to make useful change, you have to a) genuinely desire it ("be a decent person") b) believe that you are capable of learning how to make that change, and that your basic motives are reliably good, which is to say, you can't be, or can't continue to be, swamped in shame and self-loathing, because it doesn't matter how much you want something if you believe yourself to be incapable of it, and then you can c) learn the information and practice the skills required.

You can't skip b), any more than you can skip a) or c). If you skip b) you end up ping-ponging uncontrollably between "I am an awful person and must fix everything about myself" and "I am a good and caring person and need fix nothing about myself." Both are bad for you without being good for much else.

If you skip c) you can end up stuck at performing decency and anti-oppressiveness to your own personal choir, at the expense of practicing them and of getting better at them, or as a way of avoiding admitting that they require work, because you've made a basic error about the correct use of decency, that is, to give you a desire for the work, not to replace it.

And that's what's wrong with responding with reassurance when somone's asked for help.

Don't be the anti-oppression version of the hiker who ends up in a Medevac helicopter, and don't encourage other people to be that person.

And carry extra water. It never gets heavier.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Anon for citing personal details.
This is incredibly clarifying for me, since I've been stuck in this rut in terms of including CoC in my smut. (I don't write a lot of romance without smut.) Every time I see a post that says "Why doesn't anyone include Sam Wilson? Or Rhodey? Look at all these 2 white guy ships! And you say fandom's not racist", I cringe, because I love a lot of CoC. I want to include them in my writing.

But some individuals in my family are under-the-radar racist, and a huge portion of my family is Black. My brand of porn is almost all fetishization and objectification. Which I'm obviously fine with; it's fiction. However at some point of fleshing out these characters, I feel very keenly the weight of how Black people's bodies are objectified and devalued. In a personal sense. Not, oh, this unjust system, which I do think of intellectually -- but a visceral sense that someone out there could reduce my cousins, my niblings to this. So I stop. I have to. Porn is not something to write when you're uncomfortable. However the net result is my fandom portfolio is full of 2 white guys porn.

Clearly my good intentions do not work on their own.

Do I write these characters into other situations? Of course! I do my best not to leave out or flatten CoC. But it's a *lack*, because I know I'm in the minority in terms of how much quality smut I can produce, and these characters deserve their sex scenes. ('Write them in schmoop, then!' The irony is it's harder for me to write a good kiss than several K of sloppy sex. It's been maybe one described kiss in the past double-digits years. Fade-to-black is not something I do. And the lack of porn still stands.) They deserve to have the same desires and passions played out. And I can't figure out how to do it.

Because how would I even ask that question? I can't even phrase it. I don't know who to ask. I have to get to the point where I'm not second-guessing myself, not because this is fiction, but because this is *porn*. You have to be shameless. It's not as simple as knowing better than to use food descriptors for physical attributes. But it's likewise unfair of me to ask someone else to hold my hand until I get comfortable with it, because they'd be living it.

This isn't like me getting over my Roman Catholicized internalized homophobia of xx years ago. That took personal growth, and I hope that it shows in my writing today, or at the barest, absolute *least* in the way I tag my smut. I can read 'Hottentot' which is a great fic, a million times and look up its references, and it's not going to get me there. I need something more. I honestly don't know how to get it. And in the meantime, my Completed Works fills up with white guys getting naked. I'm still part of the problem.

[commodorified]

Yeah, that.

Porn is so intensely personal and at the same time intensely political, and it's always hard to articulate exactly where the juice is, so these are more thought experiments than prompts, okay?

But, hmm:

What if Sam, or Rhodey, or Nick, got to be the one doing the objectifying?
What if the focus on Sam were about his wings, or if Rhodey's suit was the hook?
What if the appeal of Nick was his secrets, or if it were about age difference?

They're three extremely attractive men, in ways that their blackness informs but doesn't define.

[recessional]

What if Sam, or Rhodey, or Nick, got to be the one doing the objectifying?

This was my first thought.

[commodorified]

And, again, writing is so individual; ultimately, none of those may be the story in the end, but considering them opens things up, I think.

[graydon]

I think you're totally correct about "reassurance isn't help", but may be having trouble thinking about it because some of the postulates are the inherited-iffy ones.

It's totally right, proper, and legitimate to hurt people. Turning someone down for a date hurts them; turning someone down for a job hurts them. Telling a child that no, they can't do that, it is necessary at this time to do this other thing instead hurts them. Hurting people is not merely unavoidable it's necessary to having a functioning anything-social.

So "don't do that, it hurts people" isn't inherently an operant reason to not do something. (Telling an eight year old in your care not to eat sugar with a spoon could easily be something you're not supposed to say using a "hurts people" rule.)

"Privilege" is similarly unhelpful because it's a passive construction. (It's one of the the evidences of oppression that it's a passive, and thus ineffectual, construction. It's often worse than ineffectual because it (as you note!) doesn't give you tools for decided what to do and it dumps you in a pit of shame and generally makes doing anything much more difficult.)

Nor is there any such thing as positive change; change is alteration. Whether or not is seems good to you is a function of the context you apply to that change. (Which is how people who realize they know some gay people go from being against to being for gay marriage, etc.; their perception of the applicable context alters.) I think it helps buckets to consider the context explicitly.

So, certainly, "I need help with this" can't be answered with "you're good" because good has a context and the writer has already specifically disclaimed ability in the context of interest. (So "I'm sure you'll do fine" is presuming a context of insecurity that may well not apply, and a context of competence that certainly doesn't. Your hiking example is all about discovering, establishing, and expanding a (quite specific) context of competence.)

The thing about oppression is that it's not accidental. (It might be automatic or systematic but it's not accidental.) One of the ways in which it's not accidental is by constraining or ordering the contexts in which an action is examined, and in that context "you're a good writer" can be understood as "context of the marginalized less important than your context" which (I think) is appropriately viewed as unhelpful.

"Unhelpful" because this is a context in which we already know that the author's objectives include treating the (statistically, customarily, automatically) marginalized context as significant. (If you're a member of the overclass and fine with that you have a very different view, which, well. That might be where some of the "good writer" is coming from, considered or unconsidered.)

(There's also the whole giant problem that there's no way off a local maximum without becoming worse off. But if I want to write about that I should do it somewhere else.)

[commodorified]

I think you're broadening the context in a way that doesn't quite work.

I'm happy with my postulates; it's possible I ought to have grounded them more fully, but this is already a long piece.

It can certainly be legitimate to cause someone hurt, but in this case we're not considering those cases, but a specific one where "how do I do this thing (without causing hurt or harm)" is the original question.

Privilege is certainly a passive construction, intentionally - I'm talking about unwilled and unavoidable as well as willed and avoidable consequences of a particular ascribed status. I'm also trying not to pick a particular case out, which constrains my word choices.

[zillah975]

I just kinda wish DW had a "like" and a "reblog" button because I have nothing worthy to add but I like this and thank you for articulating it.

[commodorified]

Thank you! If you chose to link it, I would not take it amiss. :-)

[princessofgeeks]

Thanks for this.

I think this is a branch of ethics, but I am not an expert -- but the idea that "I am a good person, therefore what I do is also good" can lead to a whole lot of evil. And a whole lot of confusion on the part of the person who believes that, when their actions in fact do cause not only hurt but harm. 'How could that be bad?,' they think. 'Because I am such a good person!'

[amorettea]

Yes! I have gotten to that point that things make me uncomfortable and I'm pretty sure they are offensive but how and why and what to do about it, that I'm struggling with.

[commodorified]

It's a useful, if frustrating struggle. I spent a fairly long time at the "if I have all this privilege why can't I trade it in for a comparable reduction in overall injustice?" stage, which was dire at the time but in retrospect valuable.

There's a line in Bujold's Curse of Chalion I found helpful: roughly, privilege confers only a right to be protected. Power confers a right to effect real change.

[recessional]

. . .reading that I think there is actually a really, really rich vein to be explored in differentiating privilege and power, and how the reality of privilege is often conferred the moral obligation of power (by persons of all different opinion stripes) despite not necessarily giving the "privileged" any.

I'm not up to making words around it, but it reeeeeally clarified the root of a lot of conflict for me.

[commodorified]

So you'll have gathered that I reread old comments a lot by now :-)

Here's a thing: privilege is not power, but the protection it affords is always influential and frequently decisive when it comes to who is able to GET power. How well-protected one is in daily life affects how easy it is for to build up and claim and use economic power and political power and public authority and coercive power. And it functions as a set of protective gear while one exercises that power: it tactfully blurs your errors and magnifies your achievements and blunts your enemy's weapons.

So it can't be considered entirely apart, either.

[recessional]

No, but right now I think they're very often outright conflated, which I think is both an error, and also really unhelpful.

[commodorified]

Oh, absolutely. Sorting that one out was and is huge for me.

Sadly, I can't at the moment think how to get a post out of it. I shall park it and let it simmer a bit, which with me means 'I may have something concrete by '17"

[muccamukk]

Ha. I immediately had several technical issues with the WCT analogy, but it really does hold up pretty well. I like it.

Did you see the Jay Smooth TedX talk about the tonsillectomy v. the dental hygiene visions of anti-racism?

[commodorified]

I have not!

I did think of you, when I went with the WCT. :-)

[muccamukk]

You'd probably enjoy it. It's very funny, and may be found here.

No one's died on the trail since the '80s! (eta: unless you count shipwrecks, which, actually I'd count unprepared boating as much more dangerous than unprepared hiking, as the hikers usually realise they're licked and turn back by day two, and the WCT is an Indiscriminate Destroyer of Joints, striking experienced and ill-equipped alike).

[stultiloquentia]

I immediately thought of Jay Smooth too! But I've only seen his five minute video on the subject; I didn't know he did a whole Ted talk! Will track down.

[muccamukk]

His Ted Talk is basically a follow up to the video you saw, and is very much worth watching.

[krait]

So. The "you're a decent person" problem.

This was what I zeroed in on, immediately. "I need to know how to be a good person" is not answerable with "you are a good person" - because the unspoken corollary there is, and therefore whatever you do will be good. That is demonstrably not true; doing good things makes you a good person, not the reverse.

The world doesn't operate by the hat system. You can't assign yourself a white hat and expect your status as "good person" to make all of your actions correct. (Nor, conversely, can you assign somebody a black hat and declare that all of their actions as bad; but that's another tangent.)

To use a fandom metaphor: Statements like "You're a good person, so whatever you write will be fine" are the real-life analogue of the Protagonist-Centered Morality trope.

[commodorified]

With the caveat that I feel like "I need to know how a good person ought to approach this situation" is maybe a more useful way of putting it, yep, absolutely.

[commodorified]

Coming back to this after more thought: what I'd like to do, I suppose, is - I don't think the whole 'good person' question can be gotten entirely out of the way but I'd like to at least create some space between it and the whole issue of confronting privilege and oppression. Because I think it's mostly a big confusing red herring in this context - what sort of person you are, in the individual, private sense that most of us mean it, is vitally important to you, but it doesn't actually mean all that much in the public context.

You can be a basically decent moral person who urgently wants to do good in the world and make people's lives better, and at the same time believe things that are horribly wrong and thus do awful things.

You can be quite an unpleasant, basically self-centred and selfish person and accept that there is a conclusive, evidence-based case for ending oppression and act on that.

Because there is. The ultimate case for ending oppression is rational, evidential, and objective: stopping people from living their best lives and concentrating power in the hands of a few individuals chosen on prejudiced grounds makes for injustice and misery.

Doing something about it requires knowledge and skill and clear, careful thinking and determination and patience and will.

[recessional]

You can be a basically decent moral person who urgently wants to do good in the world and make people's lives better, and at the same time believe things that are horribly wrong and thus do awful things.

With a slight de-intensifier on the negatives ("wrong" rather than "horribly wrong" and "bad/harmful things" rather than "awful"), this describes so many men I know.

And it makes me so sad.

[neolithicsheep]

I know so many people who need to read this particularly the parts about shame and self-loathing. Thank you.

[commodorified]

I'm glad it's useful! Sometimes - ok, often - I think these things are Just Me.

[nenya_kanadka]

I feel as though this describes what a huge amount of fandom has gone through in the last five years or so. Not that these discussions and processes aren't always happening/haven't always happened, but I've personally seen it a lot in the last few years. I kind of want to pin this to the top of the page at Tumblr, for example, because there is a lot of self-loathing going on sometimes, along with people mixing up "Am I a good person?" with "Do I have the skills appropriate to what I intend to do, eg, fight oppression and write good fiction that makes people's day better rather than hurting them?" And then there's "This person failed at executing what they intended, or avoided failure mode A but stepped right into failure mode B...therefore they are A Bad Person forever." And the whole miasma of "I want to do better but I don't know how."

Anyway, I like this approach of thinking of it as skills and knowledge as well as empathy. Decoupling "here is a thing I need to learn how to do" from the shame spiral is really, really helpful, at least to me. I really LOVE your point that writing or working from a place of self-loathing is not sustainable in the long term. It's something I struggle with a lot, and not just in anti-oppressive contexts, but like...being able to accept that I can be bad at something or have a character flaw I need to work on without either going "Oh it's FINE nothing to see here I'M FINE" or "I SUCK 5EVA no point in trying ALL IS LOST." Neither of which actually gets me anywhere, but plays happily with anxiety and depressive tendencies in the Shame Pit!

So, yeah. This was full of very good and helpful thoughts, thank you.

[recessional]

It's something I struggle with a lot, and not just in anti-oppressive contexts, but like...being able to accept that I can be bad at something or have a character flaw I need to work on without either going "Oh it's FINE nothing to see here I'M FINE" or "I SUCK 5EVA no point in trying ALL IS LOST." Neither of which actually gets me anywhere, but plays happily with anxiety and depressive tendencies in the Shame Pit!

I think this is actually a really important context? Because I think in fandom contexts particularly, almost all of us are struggling with that to some extent or another. And sometimes some of the worst conflict comes from people who have for one reason or another been beaten into the "I suck 5eva" pit and are working their way out hit what looks a lot like people telling them they should go back down, and then the self-protection kicks in in a big way.

Which makes me also think of commodorified's post on how good survivors are at fucking each other up.

[nenya_kanadka]

and then the self-protection kicks in in a big way

And then people who are still being hurt by the harmful/bigoted beliefs/actions are watching all this go down and going, "WTF that is awfully self-centred of you, we're over here still hurting and you're getting defensive?" Which is perfectly fair from where they are standing, obviously. But it doesn't...fix what's up inside the head of the person trying to climb out of the shame pit. And not the job of the oppressed, etc, but surely the job of somebody? Hopefully other privileged people who have been through this mess before and can give some advice, I guess.

Like I sometimes feel as if there are intra-white, intra-straight, intra-cis (etc) conversations like this that need to be held where we're working though these processes and figuring out our shit so that we can get positive work done...without piling it all on the nonwhite/queer/trans/etc people and making them pat us on the back. (There are men's groups that do this, aren't there? The "how to be a good partner/father" stuff where guys can learn all this stuff and unpack their own gender-related pain without dumping it on women unless the women are specifically there on purpose to help run the group. I feel like I've heard about such things. I think they're a brilliant idea.)

So, basically, this post and others like it.

Which makes me also think of commodorified's post on how good survivors are at fucking each other up.

Ayup.

[recessional]

Honestly at that point we’re hitting a really messy intersectional thing, because an awful lot of the people hitting that pit are mentally ill or are abuse/trauma survivors, and now we’re playing “whose disprivilege/trauma/pain is more important than whose” - and the thing is there isn’t an answer for that and mental illness (anxiety disorders, PTSD, depression, etc) is one of those lovely areas that very much plays “two people on the same side can be harming each other horribly” stuff as noted about survivors.

And it’s quite complicated to figure out, and people like to default to Oppression Points Picking (“okay you have severe major depressive disorder but this person is queer AND has severe major depressive disorder so clearly their pain is bigger and more important!”) however much people like to insist they don’t.

(And I’m saying this as a feminist and mentally ill person who thinks most feminists are absolutely shite at handling interactions with disabled/mentally ill men, because we like leaning on “BUT THEY HAVE MALE PRIVILEGE! So we don’t even have to think about that other angle! WOMEN HAVE MENTAL ILLNESS TOO HOW DARE YOU IMPLY IT’S IMPORTANT.”)

And I don’t think there’s an easy answer to that, because that being a problem doesn’t erase the institutional oppression problems of any group and those also need to be addressed and it’s all very complicated. But I actually kind of think that realizing there’s no way to apply rigid “you’re not allowed to be upset about the thing” across the board but that situations will inevitably be different is a first step.