On whether intentions matter

In my last post I talked about coming to terms with mom's overbearingness and having to prioritize my own sanity over her feelings. I've become a huge proponent in prioritizing one's own needs--safety, sanity, etc.--over the feelings of others, and nowhere is this more of an issue than in interacting with dudes. In the roundup, I linked to a Carolyn column about abuse/control creep--about confronting controlling behaviors immediately (also known as setting boundaries). Abusive or controlling people will often audition borderline behaviors to test your response. Borderline behaviors offer them plausible deniability: if called out, they can fall back on how they had no idea they were being inappropriate. If not called out, they keep going. Sometimes they really do have no idea they're being inappropriate, which brings us back to the issue of whether intentions matter. When your safety and sanity are at stake, they don't.

I spent a lot of time wondering whether RM was just a bumbling idiot, and I can't help but keep wondering whether the dude I went out with a few weeks ago was the same. As I noted in that post, the similarities are remarkable; even their mannerisms are similar. I was thinking about how much I still resent--more than the fact that we found ourselves in a restaurant after I made it explicitly clear that I did not want to be in a restaurant--the fact that the dude didn't see anything wrong with this. I wasn't hiding my annoyance at that point. So much like RM: going directly against a boundary I'd established, and then being confused about why I resented him for it. BE also did that from time to time, though more stealthily--he would withhold information strategically to manipulate situations. He manipulated a situation so that we once ended up (1) spending a morning together and (2) giving the impression to multiple people in a community to which we both belonged at the time, that we were an item. It was a situation I couldn't have prevented because I couldn't have forseen what he was doing.

I said this a lot when I was blogging about RM and I'll say it again: women are socialized to defuse tension and make people comfortable. People like RM and worse bank on that. Don't let them. Call them out. Maybe their intentions are good but the bottom line is that their intentions don't matter. I've seen way too much creepiness creep in my time--I've learned to recognize how these things start--and it's better to err on the side of overreacting. Reinforce your boundary the second someone crosses it. Don't let anyone guilt you into discomfort over having boundaries. Stand your ground.