Condescension: A Tale from the Trenches
I haven’t written in a while, so this is sort of a refresher/random story I was thinking about this week/non sequitur. As Jane Austen once said of Emma Woodhouse, you may find that this autobiographical story has “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” I’m okay with you liking me a little less, for the record. I’d rather you know me than like me. Mostly because this story would never have happened if someone had just liked me a little less and known me a little more.
It happened in a history class. Thanks to an excellent European History teacher in high school, I decided to pick up a history minor in college. There was a guy in one of my classes. I will call him Bud, as in, “listen here, bud,” which is what I should have said. Bud was a history major, a Nice Guy, and the perpetrator of the most aggravating instance of condescension that I’ve ever experienced in my life.
I’d met Bud before. During my first interaction with Bud, he made a Calvin and Hobbes reference to one of his buddies. Being both a connecting person and a pop culture person, I added a Calvin and Hobbes reference of my own. Bud’s mouth dropped open, and suddenly he was looking at me the way I imagine Michael Bay looks at explosions. He was looking at me like he was Emperor Palpatine and I had just invented the Death Star. It was a disconcerting look, but it has since become familiar to me. It is the look that someone who doesn’t know you has when he decides that he has a crush on you.
No, it is not bragging to say that men who do not know me develop crushes on me semi-regularly. It is not bragging because it has nothing to do with me. It would be bragging to say that men fall in love with me after they’ve known me for a while, after finding out that I’m moderately flaky and unhealthily obsessed with television and that I often sleep in t-shirts then wear them the next day and that the Kid-Me who was really mean to my siblings growing up still comes out when I’m really hurt or losing an argument. That kind of love, for the record, does not happen with any frequency. But when somebody who doesn’t know you hears you say something as innocuous as a Calvin and Hobbes reference and decides that he loves you, it is because he has decided that you are A Thing He Wants. Anybody who says “you’re perfect” is not paying attention to you at all. He doesn’t care about your hopes and dreams and fatal flaws. He cares about his priorities and interests and desire to date somebody. He doesn’t love you as you, but as a reflection of himself.
I have received this look for things as innocuous as:
Wearing a Community t-shirt
Using a Russian accent
Having seen the Mike Birbiglia movie Sleepwalk With Me
Knowing that Be Thou My Vision was an Irish melody
Saying “correct” instead of “right” as affirmation when giving directions
And, of course, making a Calvin and Hobbes reference
Now don’t misunderstand me: I develop crushes on random people for the silliest of reasons. But a crush is and must always be the problem of the crusher, not the crushee. And if the crush begins to grow into genuine interest, the crusher must understand the crushee as a complex person who may not want what the crusher wants, and be perceptive to that. If the crushee is not interested, of course the crusher must back down, try to control the feelings, and build a friendship if possible. If the crushee is interested, the crusher must make sure to see the crushee not as the reflection of self that the crusher adored, but as a full person. Crushes are often innocuous, but if they attach to the crushee without his/her consent, they can become sinister. If you have a crush on someone, do them a favor and bottle that sh-t up like the rest of us do until it’s obviously reciprocated. It’s just common courtesy. And I feel that it should go without saying that the more interested somebody is in investing in the real, messed-up me, the more likely the interest is to be reciprocated.
I hear you saying, “But Emily, if he has a crush on you and wants to get to know you, but you won’t let him spend any time with you, he’s stuck! The poor guy can’t get to know you, so he has to continue to love you from afar, Lady-of-Shalott style, forever!” A few things with that. First, I have the right to not be interested. Just because someone wants to get to know me doesn’t mean that they get to. But since I am generally pretty open to getting to know people and it’s something I like doing, I’ll proceed to point two, which is that when somebody has an obvious crush on you, hanging out with them can be miserable. You can feel them adoring you, taking in every interaction and tumbling it in their head like a dryer, searching for hidden meaning or signs of interest in the things you say. I’ve been on both ends of this, and they’re both exhausting. But when you’re the crushee, you bear the added weight of knowing that you are going to disappoint this person, and the added responsibility of the fact that you haven’t done it yet. You’ll have to be honest. The fact that you haven’t already makes you more of a monster with each passing day. I mean this is someone’s heart we’re talking about here. You know how it feels, and yet you let the poor crusher languish? He burns, she pines, they perish! And all of this pressing down on you while you’re trying to bowl or eat dinner or play trivia with friends is just all too much. Therefore, if you would like to spend more time with someone, having an obvious crush on them is a terrible way to do so. Thus why I offer the earlier recommendation: “bottle that sh-t up.”
Bud’s crush on me was not quite sinister yet. He was overly friendly and kept pressing me to hang out (which, for reasons stated above, I did not want to do), but it was still in the plausible-deniability stage where he could have read my uncomfortableness as disinterest. But as the semester began, I started to get the sense he wasn’t going to go that direction… which was why I wasn’t exactly ecstatic to find out that we were in the same history class. Even more unfortunately, he was one of two people I knew in the class. The other was Pudding Guy (a legend in his own right, but not someone I was interested in interacting with again, much less sitting near). Since I didn’t think I had a good reason for disliking Bud, I felt like I should sit by him. It would have been very obvious/rude avoidance if I’d sat down elsewhere. So there I sat, in the row next to Bud, hoping that he would take the hints I dropped like Hansel and Gretel if they’d had a thousand loaves instead of a single piece.
So the first issue that I had with Bud was that he liked me but didn’t know me, and seemed determined to make me confront it. But the second (and incomprehensibly bigger) issue was his intellectual superiority.
Listen. We all know that person. The “Well, Actually” Person who can’t go more than two minutes without correcting somebody on a thing they’ve said. Sometimes correction is good (see 2 Timothy 3:16 or @RealDonaldContext). One of the best things I’ve ever seen was my incredibly brilliant buddy Zach using his knowledge to silence a bully in our Botany class who was picking on our professor at the time. (Zach spun around on his swivel stool and declared that “a milliliter of water is a gram” and I’m grinning like a goon just thinking about it.) Other times, it’s a way for somebody to assert his or her superior intelligence in a friendly conversation for no reason other than to gain some sort of bizarre upper-hand. Recently, an acquaintance of mine thought it prudent to explain to me why my enthusiasm for the upcoming Wonder Woman movie was misplaced.
ME.
WONDER WOMAN.
SOMEBODY TRIED TO EXPLAIN TO ME ABOUT WONDER WOMAN.
THIS ME.
THIS ME RIGHT HERE.
I wanted to get on the table and yell that I have forgotten more about Wonder Woman than he will ever know in his sad, unenthusiastic life. But that is unkind, uncouth, and so not what Diana would do. So I gently challenged him on the facts he’d gotten wrong, then changed the subject. A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. And anyway screw that guy, I don’t need him to know how much I know about Wonder Woman. I don’t learn facts to impress people. I learn facts to know more about the world, and to get a better understanding of the things that interest me. Not so with the Wonder Woman Know-It-All, and not so with Bud either.
Bud’s area of expertise was history, and he never seemed to let anybody forget it. He would halt polite conversation to correct the silliest little things, like long-ago dates and irrelevant places. His corrections never came with an air of uncertainty—“are you sure? I thought that she died in 1603”—or humility—“I could be wrong, but I think that battle was in South Carolina.” It was always an air of superiority—”Well, actually, the capital was called Petrograd in 1917, and it wouldn't be St. Petersburg again until 1991”—puncturing whatever was interesting about the conversation in the first place. He would even correct subjective opinions, like the effectiveness of George Washington’s leadership or the importance of Irish literature during the famine. No fact was precise enough, no opinion fully formed enough. And with every correction, a reminder: You might be smart, but you're not smarter than Bud.
The combination of these two issues, the crush and the condescension, was perplexing at best. Bud seemed to like me because I was smart, but he was also constantly trying to prove that he was smarter than me. He wanted me to be intelligent, but he wanted to draw lines around it, contain it so that it didn’t exceed his own intelligence. To this day, I don’t think that I’m smarter than Bud. But he wanted to be sure of that.
Because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings about his unreciprocated attraction, I was polite-but-distant to Bud. And because I knew it was important to him that he think he was smarter than me, I accepted his corrections meekly and seldom (if ever) made my own. And here’s the part where many of you groan and roll your eyes, but I don’t think I would have behaved in either of those ways if I were a man. Girls are supposed to be nice and accept affections gratefully; reject a man, and you’re a bitch for leading him to like you in the first place. And girls are supposed to be intellectually subservient; show that you know more than a man about something and you’ve stepped out of your place. I know many of you will say that these ideas are fading, and I hope you’re right. But they haven’t quite faded yet, and their specters still hang over women, demanding to be kowtowed to or else outright defied. In that situation, I kowtowed. Thanks to that perfect storm of circumstances, I let Bud walk all over me all semester. I wasn’t proud of it, but I thought it was cleaner than the alternative.
And I totally didn’t let that pressure build up and explode to disastrous effect in any way, shape, or form!!
Ugh okay fine I totally did.
One day in our history class, the professor (a female, which will be important in a minute) mentioned in passing that French women didn’t win the right to vote until 1944. Being the baby feminist I was at the time, this sent me into an outrage. 1944?? It took getting liberated from Nazis for women to get the vote? Come on! I turned to Bud to confirm that this was outrageous. He was, shockingly, unfazed. So the delay in French women’s suffrage had already begun to fester in my mind.
Then our professor mentioned that during the French Revolution, there was controversy about how informally one party or another was invoking the name of Jesus. I don’t remember exactly what this was (I think the pope was involved), but it reminded me of something I’d just read about Mark Twain. He told a story that once, to save room in his newspaper, a printer had shortened “Jesus Christ” in the reprint of a evangelist’s sermon, leaving only “J.C.” The evangelist was livid at this informality. He demanded that the sermon be reprinted, snarling, “so long as you live, don't you ever diminish the Savior's name again. Put it all in.” As Twain says, the newspaper man “obeyed, and then some;” the evangelist opened his paper the next day to find the sermon reprinted in its entirety, with every mention of Jesus replaced by “Jesus H. Christ.”
I’m very attached to this story for a number of reasons, including the humor of the newspaper printer, the hubris of the evangelist, and my personal belief that Jesus (who spurned formality and made plenty of jokes) would think this was funny too. So when our professor mentioned the argument over the informality of Jesus’s name, I leaned over to Bud and whispered, “Well, we know which side Mark Twain would have been on.”
Bud clearly didn’t get it. Maybe he hadn’t heard the Jesus H. Christ story, maybe my sentence didn’t adequately convey what I was talking about, maybe he didn’t know who Mark Twain was. It doesn’t matter. Once I realized that Bud didn’t understand, I retreated. I would have explained the story to him, but I knew that he’d be embarrassed that he hadn’t known it before, so I decided not to say anything else. I didn’t want Bud to feel stupid.
He did not reciprocate that desire.
Having felt the loss of intellectual ground, Bud scrambled to regain it. In a brilliant moment of word association, he found a way. Bud’s face went from confused to imperious. “You know Mark Twain wasn’t alive during the French Revolution, right?”
There’s a moment in Clue: The Movie where the great Madeline Kahn as Mrs. White breathlessly improvises a description of her anger:
For a moment, that was all I had. Inarticulate anger, rage, fury, flames on the side of my face. Maybe it was the fact that we were halfway through a class on the French Revolution, so of course I knew it had ended before the 19th century. Maybe it was the fact that since the first time I saw a Jack Russell as Tom Sawyer attending his own funeral, I’d known that Mark Twain was most active in the latter half of the 19th century. Maybe it was the fact that, as an English major with a history minor, one of the few things I was truly qualified to know was that Mark Twain wasn’t alive during the French Revolution. Or maybe, just maybe, it was the fact that I had been so nice to this guy, sparing his feelings and putting up with his condescension and even backing away from my own joke when I could tell that he didn’t understand, and still he needed to prove that he was intellectually superior to me by making sure that I knew that Mark Twain wasn’t alive during the French Revolution. Whichever of those straws broke the camel’s back, the camel’s back was now well and truly broken.
How dare he think I was so stupid? My voice took on Lina Lamont quality as I mocked the idea he had of me. “Oh, really? Gee, thanks! I didn’t know that!” My voice rose, but not much, and the professor was still lecturing, so nobody but Bud could hear me anyway. “Thanks mister! I’m so stupid.” My voice rose again, as I hammered in the final nail. “I’m just a woman! Why do they even let me vote?!?”
Naturally, it was right before those last two sentences that the professor paused, leaving those words hanging in the air of the wordless classroom.
Everyone turned to stare at me. My female professor gave me a quizzical look. I flushed bright red and sunk back into my seat, staring at my paper like Rose watching Jack sink to the ocean floor. I felt stupid for being so easily provoked, stupid for letting my temper get the best of me. But I felt stupidest when I looked up to see Bud, chuckling at me and shaking his head as though there were no less intelligent creature in the world.
Even now, I get flames on the side of my face thinking about it. This guy was so committed to not taking me seriously that I ended up looking more stupid for trying to point that out. I haven’t spoken to him in years, but I still sometimes consider mailing him a copy of my undergrad transcript, my UT Law acceptance letter, or my summer job offer.
Why?
As much as I hate prideful people, I can’t seem to stamp out pride in myself, especially pride borne of being underestimated as a woman. I don’t care if you disagree with me. Sometimes I prefer that. But you have to take me seriously. I deserve that much. Or maybe I don’t. It doesn’t matter. Because for every Bud who writes me off or uses me to prove his own worth, I know a dozen people who want to know me and what I think. The Buds we will always have with us. But the Phillips and Claires, the Alyssas and Ashlyns and Whitneys, the Davids and Michaels and Drews, those are the ones with whom I get to build things. And though we don’t always agree, we’re all moving towards something together. Because as intelligent as we are, there are more important things: friendship, bravery. And it’s not me who’s left out by that equation. It’s Bud.
I hope that a lot has changed since that day in my history class. I hope that I care less about people who don’t care about me for who I am. I hope that I stand up for myself and my knowledge better. Above all, I hope that I’m humbler, and that if I met Bud today, I wouldn’t care what he thought about me or my intelligence. But like a plucky Netflix original series lead, I’m moving brightly forward despite possible evidence to the contrary. What else am I gonna do, ya know?
I'm not sure this post meant anything, but it felt good to get this out anyway. I’m probably leaving a lot on the table, like a piece about mansplaining and a time to reclaim female intelligence and a whole essay about how freaking confusing dating is for a 25-year-old liberal Christian virgin in law school in a big city. But those all sound big and overwhelming, and I think they’re for another day. And who’s to say that I could even tackle them if I tried? After all, I’m just a woman.