Was She Really Betrayed?

Call it another lesson in the perils of imprecise language. It shows one of the effects that #MeToo is having on relations in the workplace. 

The letter, to the New York Times etiquette columnist, Philip Galanes, reads as follows:

I am a woman, and I have worked with two men for a couple of years. One of them has become a good friend and confidant to me. He and I have had numerous conversations about gender issues. So, when our other co-worker began to sexually harass me, I thought I could turn to him for support. Instead, he told me: “I don’t like to get involved in office drama.” He also told me that he still thinks our co-worker is a “really cool guy” and I should give him a second chance. Do I have the right to feel hurt?

Unfortunately, we do not know what she means by sexual harassment. She does not provide the details and apparently does not feel a need to provide the details. So we don’t know whether he said something inappropriate or did something criminal. The term has sucked up so many different meanings that it is impossible to evaluate the situation without knowing the details.

Besides, don't these two have anything better to do with their work time than to talk about gender issues? This makes her seem overly political and it makes him appear to be someone with whom she felt safe talking about gender issues... a kindred spirit.

She assumes that her male co-worker is as woke as she is and will naturally take her side in what may or may not be a conflict. He tells her that he does not want to get involved.

Perhaps he knows that she is overly sensitive and easily triggered. Perhaps he knows that the cultural atmosphere is toxic. Perhaps he does not want to lose his job and blow up his career to defend a woman who feels slighted. 

If one is allowed to speculate, one suspects that if the situation were on the level of assault he would be more prone to come to her defense. Again, we do not know and we are expected to take her at her word. All we do know is that her male friend has told her to give the other male a second chance. This suggests that the "harassment" is not recurring.

What does that mean to you? Does it suggest that the other male has asked her out on a date? Does it mean that the other male has asked her on a date after she turned him down? Is the other male her supervisor or manager? Did he touch her inappropriately or use foul language in her presence? Or has the harassing male wrongly assumed that she is so cool that he can say things in her presence that he would normally reserve for locker room banter?

And then, what is the woman doing to deal with the situation? Is she so completely disempowered that she cannot deal with it herself? Does she require a knight in shining armor to save her? And if the situation does not rise to the level of serious harassment, the kind that would need to be taken to HR, why should her male friend rush to her rescue?

Such are the questions that arise from a cursory reading of her overly vague letter.

For his part, Galanes decides to take on the role of rescuer. He assumes that someone terrible has happened. He wants to show how seriously he takes sexual harassment, even though he does not know, on the basis of the letter, precisely what happened.

Galanes seems not to distinguish an uncomfortable from a painful experience. Surely, we know that there is a difference. And he is quick to denounce the friend, who is far more privy to the real circumstances, than he is. Galanes considers that the male friend has betrayed the woman in question. This means that he is encouraging the woman to break her relationship with her close male colleague because he is not sufficiently woke.

So, she will be losing a friend and a colleague… over, we don’t know what. How will they all be able to work together then?

Here is the Galanes response:

You don’t have to earn the right to feel anything. I get not wanting to overreact, but that’s a far cry from what’s going on here. You confided in a trusted friend about an uncomfortable, perhaps even painful experience. He brushed you off and told you to let it slide. That’s a betrayal.

But let’s put aside your so-called friend for a moment. My greater concern is whether the harassment is continuing. I want you safe.

I don’t want to be prescriptive about how you handle this, though; every person and workplace is different. If there’s a manager you trust or a human resources officer, consider confiding in her or him. If not, contact an organization like RAINN that provides support to survivors of sexual abuse.

As for your friend, keep your distance for now. When this matter is resolved, let him know what a bad friend he was to you. Characterizing your harassment as “office drama” showed a stunning lack of compassion. And for the record, he also proved that he’s a terrible arbiter of cool.

As we know, most HR managers will only get involved when situations become extreme. We do not know whether or not she went to HR or to anyone else in the company. And we do not know how someone who knew the details would react. Telling the man that he was a bad friend sounds like teenage girl talk to me… and it is not likely to improve relations with the man in question. 

As for being a terrible arbiter of cool, since we and Galanes do not know what happened, we have no business seeing anyone as an arbiter of anything.

What Happens When You Use Incongruous Pronouns

I don’t know who Barra Kerr is. I cannot find a profile or even an internet presence. Google only  knows her, I assume Kerr is a she, by an article entitled: “Pronouns Are Rohypnol.” I am assuming that the name is a pseudonym... because she is expressing some seriously politically incorrect thoughts... thoughts that might cost her a job.

The article appeared on Mumsnet and then on Medium. It was promptly removed for being prejudicial against those who insist on imposing their own pronouns on the population. 

The analogy in the title is obviously excessive. Rohypnol is a date rape drug. Kerr is arguing that using incongruent pronouns alters our perceptions, dulls our emotions, and distorts our ability to deal with reality.

Take this example, my own concoction. How do you respond when you read this sentence:

He was chasing her down the street.

And then, try this sentence.

She was chasing him down the street.

If you are still with me, try this mind numbing modern variation.

They were chasing them down the street.

Or else, if “they” is now a singular pronoun, perhaps we should say:

They was chasing them down the street.

Evidently, in the first sentence we imagine a woman being threatened by a man. Women who read the sentence will feel an emotional reaction to danger and will want to flee it. If the pronouns are degendered, Barra says, a woman will tend to ignore the danger to herself. The human female mind has evolved to be sensitive to real dangers in the world. Using certain pronouns to describe certain situations is part of the adaptation.

In the second sentence, when she is chasing him down the street, we do not assume that he is in danger. We assume that she is seriously angry with him, and perhaps that she wants to have a conversation with a man who is running away from her, and perhaps from his responsibilities.

In the third sentence, when they are chasing them down the street, we picture something like a gang war, a group of men chasing another group of men, with nothing good in mind. We see a dangerous situation, one that we will be more likely to ignore than to join. Though if we are young and male we might well want to join the fight or to protect the victims.

The fourth sentence is functionally illiterate, so it is best ignored.

Anyway, Barra emphasizes what happens when you override your sense of reality in order to mislabel someone with what she calls incongruent pronouns:

Forcing our brains to ignore the evidence of our eyes, to ignore a conflict between what we see and know to be true, and what we are expected to say, affects us.

USING preferred pronouns does the same. It alters your attention, your speed of processing, your automaticity. You may find it makes you anxious. You pay less heed to what you want to say, and more to what is expected of you. It slows you down, confuses you, makes you less reactive. That’s not a good thing.

So, it slows down your mind and confuses you. Thus, it inhibits your mental functioning.

She continues:

They dull your defences. They change your inhibitions. They’re meant to. You’ve had a lifetime’s experience learning to be alert to ‘him’ and relax to ‘her’. For good reason. This instinctive response keeps you safe. It’s not even a conscious thing. It’s like your hairs standing on end. Your subconscious brain is helping you not get eaten by the sabre tooth tiger that your eyes haven’t noticed yet.’

Fair enough, we are often more alert to danger instinctively than we are consciously. Thus, we are obliged, when we feel dread to take a minute and to evaluate the situation, to identify the source of the danger and to develop a plan for dealing with it. If we do not recognize the danger because we are accustomed first to ask whether we are using bigoted language... we might be lost.

She continues that forcing people to use incongruent pronouns makes them mentally dysfunctional:

Incongruent pronouns also make your brain work much harder; not just when you are using them, but when you are receiving them as information. You are working constantly to keep that story straight in your head. Male or female? Which one, again? Concentrate harder. Ignore your instincts, ignore your reaction.

She concludes:

They change our perception, lower our defences, make us react differently, alter the reality in front of us.

They’re meant to. They numb us.

They confuse us. They remove our instinctive safety responses.

They work.

Whether this makes them a date rape drug requires something of a stretch. This does not obviate the fact that Barra has seen clearly that this seemingly innocuous practice is damaging, because it warps our sense of reality.

One might add that incongruous pronouns are like passwords, identifying us as members of a woke cult.

Another Casualty of Therapy

OK, the Daily Cal, the student newspaper of the University of California, Berkeley has a column about… get this… destigmatizing mental illness. Forgive them their innocence, but clearly they are young and naive about these things.

Anyway, the designated columnist, one Salwa Meghjee just got dumped by the psychiatrist she had been seeing for two years. Allow her to explain why this happened:

Last month, after two years of seeing each other, my psychiatrist dumped me. “I feel like we really have a connection, and it’s hard to let you go,” she told me. But she was transitioning to private practice and wouldn’t take my insurance after the end of the year, so even though she really wanted to, she just couldn’t see me anymore. I hadn’t foreseen our relationship ending anytime soon. The call was a shock.

Did you notice, the psychiatrist dumped her patient, a woman she has supposedly been caring for, via a telephone call. This redoubles our sense that she is deficient in moral character. 

Back in the day, psychiatrists and other therapists charged patients according to a sliding scale. They did everything in their power not to reject people on the grounds of reduced income. They felt a real responsibility toward their patients and clients. Therapists did not toss their patients aside because of circumstances that patients could not control. They understood that their patients often have a difficult time dealing with rejection, and thus, that it was bad practice to reject them.

Anyway, Meghjee’s psychiatrist did not understand any of this, so perhaps she is well to be rid of her.

But then, now that Meghjee is graduating from college and going out into the real world, how well have her sessions served her. She explains to us that she consulted with a professional because she was suffering from what I and Emile Durkheim call anomie. She felt socially disconnected and dislocated when she got to college. And the student counseling service naturally pronounced her to be mentally ill.

In her words:

The transition into college isn’t easy for anyone, but my mental health tanked when I first got to UC Berkeley. Trying to balance meeting new people, taking difficult classes and adjusting to life 3,000 miles away from home threw my brain into chaos. 

My therapist and I talk often about my relationship with change. She hopes that one day, I will be able to approach new life changes with acceptance and grace, instead of clinging to what has passed while kicking and screaming, which is my current preferred method of coping.

So as I prepare to transition out of college and formal education and into the real world in the spring, my relationship with change has been weighing on me. I don’t want to fall into deep depression when I leave school, as I have in the past when faced with huge life transitions. I want to enter this next phase of life ready to embrace whatever comes next, instead of mourning the end of my time at university and identifying only as an ex-student. 

Perhaps said psychiatrist should have been teaching her patient how to deal with complex social interactions, with situations where she did not know the rules of the game or the players. One understands that Meghjee liked the psychiatrist who dumped her, but clearly, she has not learned any real coping skills from her treatment. 

She has, however, learned to see herself as mentally ill. And she has doubled down on this appalling branding by writing a column for the Daily Cal in which she labels herself as mentally ill. Thus, she has good reason to maintain her dysfunctional behaviors. If she didn't have them what would she write about. If her psychiatrist did not recommend that she not write such a column, perhaps she should have been fired first. 

How does Mughjee feel about exiting college? Allow her:

The emotional stability and mental clarity needed to approach new phases of life with acceptance feel unreachable; I cannot imagine how not to be devastated by the loss of what has passed. 

Good soldier that she is, Mughjee does try to find a saving grace from therapy:

With three years of therapy, I feel armed and ready with tactics to combat the self-loathing, loneliness and uncertainty that comes with one’s early 20s. But all I have ever known is school; how will I know how to use those skills in the real world, where no one is guiding me, and I am all alone in building my own destiny?

Whatever tactics she has learned, and we wonder how many of them involve medication, she still feels alone and detached, as though she is still suffering from anomie.

She would do well to unlearn the notion that she is mentally ill. She would do well to learn to talk about other things, besides her mental illness. She would do really well to learn small talk or idle chatter.

If psychiatry has been grooming her to become a lifelong user of its services, it has largely disserved her.

Socialized Medicine Is Crashing in France

You probably do not care to hear about how socialized medicine is not working in Cuba or how well it was not working in the former Soviet Union. You set your heights higher, on the glory of medical care in France.

After all, you know how good the French care for their citizens, and you also know that it’s all free. You probably do not know that the medical care system is sucking all of the life out of the French economy. And you might not know that a government that has promised to care for people, not just in hospitals, but through a generous pension system, is going broke.

I am sure you know that the Macron government’s efforts to rein in the French pension system have produced endless crippling strikes… but the French seem to think it’s par for the course.

Anyway, hospital residents in Marseille have just gone on strike… to demand better training, better treatment and a more effective medical system. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren might believe that socialist medical care is spectacularly good in France, but the people providing it do not agree.

Before quoting the Associated Press report, I would point out a source for potential confusion. The striking physicians are variously called interns or medical students. If I remember my French well enough and recall the time that I spent working in French psychiatric clinics, I will assert that the French word interne corresponds to what we call resident physicians, physicians who have completed medical school but who are learning specialties, like psychiatry or heart surgery. 

With that caveat in mind, here is the story:

Nestled in the cinderblock complex of Marseille’s sprawling La Timone hospital stands the intern residency building, home to a community of French student doctors holding an exceptional, open-ended strike to demand a better future.

Protesting interns in white coats and blue hair nets wave signs made from brooms and bedsheets, tooting trumpets and banging drums.

It sounds like American universities, where adjunct faculty are routinely charged with teaching courses to undergraduates. For the universities the virtue of the practice lies in the fact that adjunct faculty are paid so much less than tenured professors. And besides, the students would not know the difference anyway.

So, the problem lies in cost-cutting, in a country that is going broke fulfilling its promise to provide medicare, or its equivalent, for all:

France’s vaunted public hospital system is increasingly stretched to its limits after years of cost cuts and the interns at La Timone — one of the country’s biggest hospitals — say their internships are failing to prepare them as medical professionals. Instead, the doctors-in-training are being used to fill the gaps.

If France cannot make it work, what makes us think that we can.

The Cure for What Ails You, in Mind and Body

Eureka! We have found a cure for aging. Happily, it is also the cure for many mental health problems. 

The cure is: exercise. Yes, indeed, as we have often remarked on this blog, and as our friends over at Maggie’s Farm remind us even more often, physical conditioning is as close as we will ever come to a miracle cure.

OK, it’s not quite a miracle, because you need to work at it, but still, exercise does so many good things for your mental and physical well-being that you have no excuse for not working it into your daily routine.

Gretchen Reynolds sums up the latest research in the New York Times. She begins with the current information about high intensity interval training (HIIT) … considered to be the best form of aerobic conditioning. It means that you should alternate intervals of sprinting and jogging. 

Perhaps most obviously, this has been a decade of greatest HIITs, with multiple studies and subsequent columns reiterating that super-short, strenuous workouts — known as high-intensity interval training — improve fitness and health to about the same extent as much longer, more moderate exercise. Since 2010, I have covered seven-minute, four-minute, one-minute, 20-second and 10-second interval routines, with each workout’s declining length increasing its allure. For many of us, the exercise of choice may be the briefest.

If that is too daunting a challenge, or if you would rather not perspire, other studies have discovered that you can live longer if you move more:

In one of my favorite studies from this year, researchers found that older women who regularly strolled about two miles a day, or a little more than 4,000 steps, lived longer than women who covered only about 2,000 steps, or a mile. Going that lone extra mile altered how long and well women lived.

In various recent studies, active older people’s muscles, immune systems, blood cells and even skin appeared biologically younger, at a molecular level, than those of sedentary people.

As Reynolds points out, it’s great therapy for your psyche. We bring up this point often enough, but apparently not often enough:

… scientists have found and reaffirmed the extent to which movement, of almost any kind and amount, may remake how we think and feel. In one study after another, physical activity beneficially remodeled the brains of children and the middle-aged; lowered people’s risks for dementia or, if dementia had already begun, slowed memory loss; and increased brain volume, tissue health and the quality of connections between neurons and different portions of the brain.

Exercise is good for your moods, such as they are:

Exercise also seems able to buoy moods far more than most of us, including scientists, might have expected 10 years ago. In observational studies, physically active people proved to be much less likely to develop depression or anxiety than sedentary people, no matter what types of activities they chose.

Walking, jogging, gardening, weight training, swimming, biking, hiking or even rising from an office or living room chair often and strolling across the room seemed to make people happier and less prone to mood problems than remaining still.

The greatest remaining mystery is why, given the scientific evidence, so few of us work out regularly:

I hope, too, that scientists might eventually help us to better understand why, with everything we know about the benefits of exercise, so few of us manage to get up and work out regularly.

We can, Reynolds suggests, activate ourselves if we feel that we are doing it for someone else. Even if we are doing it because we have been told that our dogs need more exercise and that we should go out and do it with them.

Other than that, the reason we do not exercise is that we have become soft and decadent. We have been told that we can solve all of our problems by taking a pill or even downloading a new app. Exercise seems so paleo. It seems so retrograde. It seems like work. And we can’t have that.

Pavarotti Sings Adeste Fideles

A special reward for those who listened to Bob Dylan singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" here is Pavarotti singing Adeste Fideles, in the Notre Dame Cathedral in Montreal. (via Maggie's Farm)

Boris Johnson Wishes a Merry Christmas

This seems to be Boris Johnson week over here at HET, what with his Hanukkah message and his recitation of the Iliad in Greek, so we complete the circle by offering the British Prime Minister's Christmas message: