Stop Putting Words In My Mouth
A short rant on debate precision
I don’t mind a good spar. In fact, sometimes I quite enjoy it. I’m here on Medium to exchange ideas and I don’t imagine that everyone else I encounter will think just as I do. In fact, it would be kind of boring if they did. I do really value someone who can make their point clearly, support it in some way, and handle critique or a different perspective with maturity.
What drives me absolutely around the bend is people who insist on putting words in my mouth. I select what I say pretty carefully. I say what I mean and I mean what I say. I do not take kindly to having insinuations or assumptions thrown in based on my presumed general outlook. Unfortunately, this happens all the time. Particularly if someone can’t easily refute what I’m saying directly, they will tend to throw in other elements as a kind of red herring.
I really don’t care how some random woman characterizes her feminist ideals. That’s not me and although I hold many perspectives that might fall under the same general umbrella, I don’t speak for her and she doesn’t speak for me. There is no one universal feminist dogma, and although I’m all about equality, I don’t even really identify as a feminist any longer.
Most of the time when someone is putting words in my mouth or willfully misunderstanding what I’ve said, it’s because they don’t actually want to have a discussion; they really just want to have a fight. I admit that there are times I’ve let myself get sucked into that, but more and more, I just won’t go there. Sometimes I continue to talk to people when I should just walk away because I want to understand what is driving them. But usually once I profile them, I’m able to move on to something else.
I have one Medium frenemy that I go around and around with, and as much as I’ve tried to walk away, the way his mind works just fascinates and entertains me. He makes me laugh on a regular basis, even as he often infuriates me, but I truly appreciate someone who can interject humor into their debate. He also includes a lot of pictures, memes, and other visuals to help get his point across and I can’t help wanting to give him an A for effort on that front. We live on different planets, it seems, but at least it’s rare for him to actually purport that I’ve asserted something that I haven’t.
As I’ve said already, sometimes this happens when there is no great rebuttal available, but sometimes it happens because the other person is making a bunch of assumptions. My favorite one of these was in a discussion about my relationship with my other life partner, Nat, there was an assumption made that I was kind of off having an affair with him, forcing my poor husband to accept polyamory against his will. First of all, my husband James knew and knows all about Nat and everything is above board. That’s what ethical non-monogamy is. Secondly, I’ve written often of the the woman that James and I spend a lot of time with, and third, I’ve only ever been with Nat with James present. No matter how many times I said that we only see other people together, this guy just could not wrap his brain around the concept of a three-way that involved two men and me. He just wasn’t able to hear that part because of the assumptions he was making — three-way means a guy and two women.
The other day I made the mistake of defending a friend in a thread about vaccines (I should have known better than to wade into that one). Both of us said that vaccines are largely safe and effective, but that for some people they aren’t. There are vaccine-attributable deaths and injuries every year. My friend, simply commented (in response to someone else’s comment) that to be fair to Jenny McCarthy, she didn’t make up any of her theories herself. They came from the work she did with actual MDs on behalf of her son. Apparently, being fair to Jenny McCarthy is not allowed and daring to make a factual statement like that was tantamount to heresy and a staunch anti-scientific outlook. I get that this is a heated topic for many people, but neither of us expressed any opinion about whether McCarthy’s methodologies were mainstream, were effective, were anything……….. simply that they had been created and supervised by real doctors — which is factually true. None-the-less, drama ensued. On that particular topic, only two opinions are imagined to exist and it just threw some people into a tailspin to have more nuanced things put forth.
One of my most favorite profile descriptors that I’ve seen goes like this, “Opinions expressed here are ready for transformation from new information.” I like to think that I too am someone who is open to changing her mind in the face of persuasive argument or new information. I pride myself in interfacing with other people’s statements, not simply how I imagine them to feel or think. And if from time to time I falter in that regard, I’m open to correction. Words are really important to me; dealing with the actual and not the imagined is really important to me also. I like authentic expressions of perspective and not tribal markers that have been co-opted from someone else. If you can’t really explain to me what a neo-Marxist is, please don’t use that term.
I like and enjoy the writing of plenty of people that I don’t fully agree with all of the time. But if you can’t engage with me based on things that I have actually said, I’m not interested in talking to you. The world is a complex place and sometimes it’s easier to just lump people into prefab categories, but it’s also lazy and disingenuous. If there’s one thing I truly stand for, that’s individuality. I intend to see and treat you as your own person and I demand the same in return. Anything else is just lame and fucking maddening!
