Malicious & Benevolent Hierarchy Are Two Sides Of The Same Dehumanizing Coin

"My marriage is permanent! We place the relationship above the people in it! All other relationships are expendable as long as the marriage lasts forever!"

"Wow, that's not cool. Anyone my spouse and I date will automatically become an equal member of our triad! They're not expendable, they're exactly as permanent as the marriage!"

*sigh*

OK, so, I suppose it's a step up that you don't consider other people to be disposable or expendable. Yay? But you're still making the relationship more important than the happiness of the people in the relationship and you're still removing people's agency by deciding ahead of time what each relationship *will* look like, whether the people in those relationship want it that way or not.

I know it's really hard to see, because benevolent sexism is also really hard to see, and these are analogous things, but this is still problematic.

Benevolent sexism is where we switch from thinking that women are money-grubbing sluts who can't do math and shouldn't vote or talk in public and should be stoned to death for showing their ankles to unrelated men, to thinking that women are goddesses and need to be coddled and revered and pampered and who are better at nurturing and domestic tasks than men.

"But wait, isn't it a good thing to treat people well and to compliment their skills?"

Well, yes and no. it's a good thing to treat individual *people* well, but "well" depends on the recipient's definition, not yours. And it's not a "compliment on their skills" to say that "women" as a group are better at things when we all have different levels of ability and interest and especially when those things are things that society doesn't value highly and certainly doesn't pay for the way that we pay for everything else that requires specialized skills.

Malevolent sexism and benevolent sexism are two sides of the same coin - both versions put all women into a box and all women are required to fit into that box whether they actually do or not. And, especially in the case of benevolent sexism, if they don't fit into that box, they are punished for it. So women are still hindered, limited. A gilded cage is still a cage and my wings are still clipped even while sitting on a padded swing.

Plus, studies have shown that benevolent sexism is very strongly correlated to malevolent sexism - meaning that the society that has one also has the other. So just because a single person might think that women are "goddesses", that attitude only exists in a culture where someone else thinks women are "demons". So the benevolent sexist has to contribute to the overall culture of sexism that ultimately harms the women he claims to love (assuming he doesn't directly harm women as well by punishing women for not behaving goddess-like).

This "our third is an equal" attitude is basically the same thing as benevolent sexism. It might *seem* like it's a compliment or benefiting that "third", but it's still putting people into boxes and still expecting them to conform to an externally imposed role. A more ethical way of doing things is to just meet people, see how you click, and then talk to everyone involved to see what each person wants out of each relationship and allow each relationship the freedom to develop however it wants to.

My relationship with Franklin has always wanted to be what I used to call "emotionally primary" (before I dropped all ranking terms entirely, because I learned that even "descriptive primary" still contributes to this whole problem), meaning that our relationship has always pulled us towards stronger emotional connections with each other. But our lives have pulled us physically apart. If we had given up on the relationship just because it didn't meet our preset expectations of what a relationship with strong emotional connections *should* look like, we would have had to break up more than a decade ago.

But then I would have missed out on the last 15 years of a very emotionally nourishing relationship and I would be missing out on the very exciting future that we are trying to plan now.

I wish we would just erase this whole "equal" language from our poly vocabulary because people don't understand how to use it ethically. "Equal" is more often used as a blunt object to bludgeon people into predetermined roles, than out of any sense of equality or egalitarian values.

I am not "equal" to Franklin's other partners and they are not "equal" to me. I am equal to FRANKLIN. He and I have the same amount of power in our relationship to negotiate our own personal boundaries and the direction of our relationship, and *only* he and I have the power to negotiate our own boundaries and the direction of our relationship.

I cannot determine how his relationships go with anyone else, he can't determine how my relationships with others go, and nobody we are dating can determine how mine and his relationship together can go. This is what is meant by "equal".

People who talk about "equal" in this prescripted sort of way, much like people who defend hierarchy, tend to mix up all sorts of elements into the word "equal". The criticisms are almost exclusively about power structures. But these defenders want to throw in strength of emotional connection, time / attention priorities, and financial obligations.

Our relationships with other people are too *different* to be ranked as above, below, or equal to another. Franklin and I both care about our other partners very deeply and we cannot quantify our emotions to say who we care about "most".

So that's the emotions part that most people who talk about "equal" usually get confused about. I think it's foolish, at best, to even bother trying to rank how much you "love" each person, and at worst, it leads to the mindset that allows you to think of people as "disposable" and "expendable" because you don't "love" someone as much as someone else.

Priorities like time and attention are all different because we are all different people. Trying to make everyone "equal" is to dismiss their individuality, which dismisses their very humanity. Even identical twins are still unique individuals. We all want different things, and we all place importance on different things.

And there are *so many* things to account for here! My "quality time" isn't going to be the same as your "quality time" - it depends on our Love Languages, our preferences, our interests, and even our mood at any given moment. Spending time on the couch watching TV together might count as "quality time" most of the time, unless there's some other issue in our relationship that's coloring the experience for us, and then it won't "count".

There are just so many variables and so many unpredictable things to account for, that to even attempt to tally all things up and make them "equal" is an exercise in futility. And, in my observation, usually just tends to make the insecurities about priority worse when you start micromanaging relationships to make them "equal".

Financial obligations are pretty much the same thing - too many variables. People like to winnow it all down to "we have a mortgage and kids", but there are so many different things to consider like income disparity, cultural power differentials between gender and economic class, tax breaks, unpaid emotional labor, other relationship status, other support networks, other dependents ... there's a reason the US tax code is basically inscrutable without a degree in accounting. Finances are complicated.

To start ranking a relationship's importance based on only a few financial criteria is to ignore the impact that all these other criteria have on a relationship. Which is basically how we got to the point of women complaining about emotional labor in the first place.

A relationship between people who share a mortgage shouldn't be automatically more "important" than other sorts of relationships, just make sure that one obligation is cared for, like all the other obligations. That doesn't mean that the relationship overall deserves a higher ranking, or that one who doesn't share a mortgage deserves a lesser ranking. Relationships that don't involve mortgages can be every bit as "serious" and "committed" and "entangled" as those that do.

Just ... stop with the "disposable" shit and stop with the "equal to my other partners" shit. We. Are. Different. Each person is a unique individual, and consequently each *relationship* is a unique entity because the people in them are unique. Even *you* are a different person in the context of one relationship vs. another relationship. Pretty similar, sure, but that relationship influences who you are, which changes who you are.

Which relates back to a recent post I made about how you can't "add a third to our existing relationship" because that relationship no longer exists, having been permanently altered by the change in status. You have created all new relationships, including with your preexisting partner. *Everything* is different now - your relationships and the people in them.

They. Can't. Be. Quantified. Or. Ranked. Without. Dehumanizing. Or. Objectifying. Them.

Which is why even insisting that "our third will be equal in all things" is just the other side of the coin of the "disposable" perspective. It's a prettier side, to be sure. It feels kinder, it feels fluffier, it feels nicer. It even feels more ethical. I remember the first relationship I was in that espoused this canard, and I remember feeling valued at the time. And then I learned the dark side of what this actually means.

Because it comes from the same place - disregarding the uniqueness, the individuality, and the agency of the people in the relationships and valuing the relationship itself over the people in them.

For more discussion on this topic, here is the FB thread that sparked it.

The Vilification Of Gaslighting

Something I want to be careful of is the vilification of gaslighting. And by that, I mean that I want to draw a line between "this behaviour has harmful effects and we need to stop doing it" and "the people who gaslight are evil manipulators deliberately trying to drive you insane".

The reason why I want to draw that line is because characterizing it as the latter makes it too easy for people to distance *ourselves* from acknowledging when we do it. "I am not an evil manipulator, so I can't be gaslighting anyone." Even "evil" abusers see themselves as the victim in their stories.

The reason they abuse is because they have a *belief* that the actions they take are genuinely right, good, acceptable, appropriate, or warranted. Many of them feel that they are a good influence on others or that they are trying to better their victims or doing what they do for their own good. They can't change until they recognize that they are doing something wrong.

So when we use the latter definition, we give them justification room in their minds to excuse their actions. But if we use the former, then we ALL have to take a look at our own behaviour and keep working on bettering ourselves, and we can do that without the cognitive dissonance fighting us and telling us that we are a "good person" so this can't apply to ourselves. This makes it harder for outright abusers to excuse their own actions if the culture around them encourages this kind of reflection and correction of everyone.

Gaslighting is such a normal part of our society that we're mostly all raised with it all around us. That makes it difficult to identify when we do it ourselves.

One of the classic examples I use to illustrate non "abusive", well-intentioned gaslighting is a mother trying to get her child to eat her vegetables, the child says she doesn't like them, and the mother says in exasperation, "yes you do, now just eat them."

We likely have gaslighted people in these kinds of minor situations many times over our lives and never realized it, so never recorded it in our memories. Why should one of these totally normal conversations stick out in our minds, especially years later? It's *the way things are* in so many circumstances.

I can't remember anything specific but I'm sure I've said to people at various times "oh, yes you do!" when they said they didn't like something or didn't want something, and I'm sure I had good intentions when I did it. I'm not "evil", I'm a meat body driven by a belief engine and a product of my environment, which means I'm flawed.

The best I can do now is to be mindful of my language and try not to contradict people when they tell me their inner landscape. If I have reason to doubt them, such as suspecting *them* of trying to manipulate me, maybe I can ask for confirmation or I can point to conflicting *behaviour*, but I will try not to outright tell other people what they are feeling.

In this post, I want to be clear that I'm doing something that I often rant against doing - stretching the definition of a very importantly narrow term. Gaslighting is not simply remembering things differently, or even *just* telling someone with confidence that their memory of a thing is wrong, even if the "thing" in question is part of the other person's inner landscape. The original term "gaslighting" is, in fact, the second definition I used in my opening paragraph.

In the movie Gaslight, which is where the term comes from, a husband is *deliberately* changing the level of the lighting in the house (created by gas lights, not electric lights), and when the wife comments on the change in light, he *deliberately* says there is no change, so that the wife comes to doubt her own senses over time. The husband does all this *deliberately* so that he can have his wife committed to an asylum so he can access her money. This is a 1940s villain caricature, an evil mustachio'd villain who knows he is doing evil and doing it maliciously and selfishly.

The problem is that this is not how real life "villains" operate. And that's the point that I'm making here. It's important to keep a narrow definition of terms like "gaslight" and "abuse" and not round up just anything uncomfortable to these terms. But we have to *also* make sure that we don't keep the definitions so narrow that it only applies to people in black hats cackling in their lairs and stroking their white cats while they plot world domination.

Because that leads to everyday, ordinary people doing horrible things and justifying themselves because they are not evil villains. We have everyday, low-key examples of people trying to convince other people that they are not experiencing the things that they are experiencing. This is not the same thing as correcting people's flawed memories or understanding of factual claims, although that can also be weaponized. I'm talking about "yes, you do like broccoli!" when you do not, in fact, like broccoli.

These small little disregards of our inner landscape *lead* to large disregards of other people's inner landscapes, because it's the same thing but a manner of scope. The mother *believes* that it's in her child's best interest to eat veggies. And she's right, it is in her child's best interest, and the mother is, in fact, in a position of authority and power over the child to do "what's best" for the child. This is the nature of that relationship.

So it's a very small step to go from a parent / child power dynamic who uses an agency-dismissing tool to manipulate and control one's behaviour, to a romantic partnership dynamic who uses an agency-dismissing tool to manipulate and control one's behaviour *for one's own good*. This is a tool we have been given by our society, so it's a tool we may not even notice that we are pulling out and using because our brains are little more than belief justification engines.

And if our society has also encouraged us to see villains as black hatted evil caricatures of people, then our giant justification engines are going to work overtime to make sure that we are not Bad People(TM). And since we are not Bad People(TM), we therefore cannot be doing the things that Bad People(TM) do.

And THAT is the point of this piece. Gaslighting, the action, needs to be understood as a Very Bad Thing, but it needs to be separated from our personal identities as a thing that only Very Bad People do. The action is a tool that we have all been taught how to use. It's normal and reasonable for people immersed in a culture that uses this tool to reach for the tool themselves. It is an *inappropriate* tool, but the people who use it are regular, everyday people who have understandable reasons for reaching for it.

And now that you know it is a common, ubiquitous even, tool in all of our toolboxes, we ought to be on the lookout for when *we* reach for this totally normal, common but unhealthy tool. Gaslighting is not a tool reserved only for the most evil of all evil people. It's a tool that everyone has been exposed to, and taught how to use. All you have to do now is teach yourself how to put that tool down and reach for another one.