At this point, I’d concluded all violations are mainly challenges. Since most people are socially skilled enough to smell weakness from a mile away, they know when they can assert their status by conspicuously disregarding your presumable boundaries, thus advertising, to you and to any bystanders, that you have no credible means to defend yourself and are therefore entirely at their mercy. What I’ve found the hardest to learn is that merely asking someone to respect your boundaries may well be itself a violation of their boundaries (“Noöne replies to me like that!”), which they most assuredly will defend, by escalating the abuse to prove the point that you’re no match for them and have no choice but to yield, unconditionally, forever. Calling abusers abusers offends them.
That’s part of the fight. Bullying works by normalizing the idea that there’s nothing morally wrong with harming the victim. After all, they deserve it for being a victim, rather than a survivor, don’t they?
This is how I intuitively perceive it as well. I feel like to some extent this is a masculine versus feminine kind of difference. Masculine people tend to see boundary violations as potentially benign (perhaps due to not feeling as unsafe generally?) whereas I think feminine people tend to see them as basically malign most of the time. I possibly overuse the concepts of “masculine” and “feminine”—maybe I’m really talking about “bold” versus “cautious,” though honestly I am not sure there’s a big difference, given gender norms across history and culture—but I intuitively associate these patterns with them.
Taking the “this has to do with masculinity” view: boundary violations like this can be both challenges and intimacy-building—between men. If you fail to respond adequately you decrease the respect of your comrades (because you can’t take it like a man or whatever) and thus by proxy decrease intimacy. If you succeed in the challenge, you become accepted more as part of the gang. It’s hazing, essentially.
When women, or males who are not initiated in the culture of manhood, are involved, it no longer has the positive, intimacy-building aspect—instead it’s just threatening and dangerous. This is probably part of where concepts like “toxic masculinity” come from—an inability of people on opposite sides of this divide between “boundary violations are often benign” and “boundary violations are rarely benign” to understand or appropriately respect one another.
If you fail to respond adequately you decrease the respect of your comrades (because you can’t take it like a man or whatever) and thus by proxy decrease intimacy.
Hmm if you lose respect for responding wrongly then it doesn’t really seem like a benign boundary violation anymore? The way I see it, a boundary violation can be considered benign only if you are capable of saying no, and the other person is genuinely capable of accepting and respecting a no. Otherwise, it’s more like coercion. (And the violation shouldn’t have very negative consequences for the person, based on what can be anticipated. )
If your friend takes your things without asking and you tell them to stop doing it because you don’t like it, and they apologise and stop doing it, then that was a benign boundary violation. If they stop but then go around telling others that you are selfish, or they stop and then complain about how they always have to give in to your demands, or they ignore you and tell you that best friends share everything, then that’s not benign at all. You can’t really tell from the boundary violating action though, only from their response when you say no.
People who are more powerful (e.g. physically stronger, higher social status) are more capable of saying no because the consequences of saying no are less severe for them. In that sense, things that seem like benign boundary violations are more likely to be benign for them, so they tend to see it as benign (and may not realise that this is not the case for others). I don’t think it’s benign just for the masculine though, because it works the other way around as well. If the person who is violating the boundaries is responsible about it (e.g. sensitive to potential power imbalances), it can also work. Also, boundary violations don’t have to be aggressive (?). Here are some examples that are milder/more feminine that I think also count as benign boundary violations (if done properly):
affectionate nicknames (For a female version of the faggot example, I had a schoolmate who called people “bitch” only if she considered them a friend, e.g. greeting them with “Hey bitch!”)
playing with/braiding someone’s hair without asking
adjusting someone’s collar when you see the tag sticking out
giving someone very sour candy without telling them that beforehand
untying someone’s shoelaces (making sure they notice it before standing up so they don’t accidentally trip)
asking “Can I borrow your pen pretty pretty please? Just 5 seconds! Thanks!” and taking it before you hear them say yes
asking sensitive questions like salary or asking a woman for her age
playful emotional manipulation like making puppy eyes at someone to persuade them to share their snack with you (only works if the other person is capable of saying no if they genuinely don’t want to do it, and you are capable of truly accepting the rejection, and both parties understand that it’s play)
Most of those examples sound fundamentally aggressive to me. I think that I just don’t believe any boundary violation is benign. And I think you always lose something if you say no to someone—always. It is always coercive. It just may not be visible on the surface—but they will resent you a little bit for it, and the more you do it the more resentment will build up. These violations are tests of your willingness to risk resentment in order to protect your boundaries, and thus of your strength / lack of need for people to not resent you, disguised as “benign” or friendly behaviors. So yeah, maybe it’s more about power dynamics, and the reason I associate it with masculinity is that in most cultures in most contexts, men are likely (and expected) to have more power than women.
Oh I think I see what you mean. If there’s always a cost to saying no, then all boundary violations are basically threats and hence aggressive.
And I think you always lose something if you say no to someone—always. It is always coercive. It just may not be visible on the surface—but they will resent you a little bit for it, and the more you do it the more resentment will build up.
I recognize this, or at least something like it—it’s like when people ask for your opinions. People say that there is no wrong answer and that you should say what you really think, but I always felt that that wasn’t true. There are wrong answers, and you will know that they are wrong because people will respond negatively to them (e.g. they like you less afterwards because your opinion differed from theirs). People don’t really want to hear what you have to say; they just want validation.
To avoid saying the wrong thing, I ended up trying to figure out what people were hoping to hear (e.g. based on how they phrase their questions), so that I could tell them what they wanted me to say. I didn’t even notice that habit until one day when someone asked me a question and I couldn’t tell what they wanted—they were completely blank to me. I ended up giving an answer truer to myself, and was expecting a negative response. Yet they didn’t show disapproval, and more surprisingly, neither did they show approval. They really just did want my answer!
The experience showed me that something I thought was a trait of all humans was actually more like an attribute that varies based on the individual. Some people just want validation, but others genuinely want to hear what you have to say. That changes the game, because it means it’s not actually my job to say what people want to hear, it’s just how some people prefer to be dealt with. I can always keep my true thoughts aside for people who want to hear them.
Some time after, I shared my opinion with someone who responded dismissively. Yet days later, they asked me a question that showed that they were thinking about what I’d said. I learned that just because someone responds negatively, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are upset with me and want me to be different; sometimes it’s just a natural response to hearing something you don’t like or even just something new. What’s interesting is that had I continued saying what I thought others would want to hear, I wouldn’t have realised that people are ok with listening to what I have to say.
There are things I tend to avoid because they weren’t good experiences in the past and when I think of doing them now, it just feels like a bad idea. Sometimes when I’m with the right people or in the right context though, my mind realizes that there is a very low likelihood of something terrible happening, it’s just my heart that’s convinced that something awful will happen. But when my heart wants something badly enough, the risk becomes worth it and so I try it even though it feels scary. So far, it’s paid off every time. Sure, sometimes it doesn’t go the way I hope for, but then again nothing terrible happened either.
I think the difference is that where I used to pay attention to just my negative experiences, I now also pay attention to when there isn’t a negative response, both for my myself and when watching others interact. I notice that the ratio is different from what I’d always thought it was (1:0), because the people I’m with are different, because people change, and because I pay attention to a broader slice of reality. That’s why to feels safer to try (with the right people). (There’s also that I’m more capable now, and can therefore cope better with anything that might happen.)
I think it’s quite interesting how sometimes you can’t tell if your beliefs are wrong unless you are willing to do things that past experiences say you shouldn’t, and create opportunities to prove your beliefs false. It’s like confirmation bias, except I’d never thought to apply it to personal/emotional experiences.
I don’t know, can’t know what your experiences are like—I couldn’t even understand Caperu_Wesperizzon’s and your comments. I want to say though, that I think people who are nice and good with boundaries do exist, and I hope that you get to meet them someday.
I think a miscommunication is happening here, and I think it’s because I used the word “boundary” for two different things (because that’s how it’s used out in the wild).
MSRayne seems to be trying to communicate that any violation of their personal boundary is non-benign. This is not a claim that the OP disagrees with; in fact, it’s a claim that the OP specifically makes.
I think ambigram is trying to talk about violations of the social boundary, and pointing out that those may very well be benign. MSRayne is saying “no, not in my experience,” but afaict MSRayne has also self-identified as being in the set of [people whose personal boundaries already lie outside of the social boundary, such that even things which do not violate the social boundary are already violating their personal boundary].
I think I don’t understand the difference between social and personal boundaries. Like, I read the post, I intellectually recognize the existence of this difference, but I have never noticed social boundaries, only my own personal ones. Presumably because my own are more strict, as you said. At some point I expect I must have absorbed a lot of them from the social milieu—but my social milieu growing up was television and books, and I deeply learned “avoid anything that looks like a situation on TV that made me cringe”, among other things.
MSRayne is saying “no, not in my experience,” but afaict MSRayne has also self-identified as being in the set of [people whose personal boundaries already lie outside of the social boundary, such that even things which do not violate the social boundary are already violating their personal boundary].
Yes I’d read about this in the other comment but I think it didn’t really register until I saw MSRayne’s reply above.
The reply was enough for something to click in my head, possibly because it was a more concrete explanation, but your explanation made the misunderstanding more explicit to me, so thanks!
And I think you always lose something if you say no to someone—always. It is always coercive. It just may not be visible on the surface—but they will resent you a little bit for it, and the more you do it the more resentment will build up.
This is simply and straightforwardly false. Different people live in different worlds. I make no claim about what percentage of people live in the same world as MSRayne; it could plausibly be as high as 90%, given everything I have seen of humans and human society.
But it is absolutely not a universal, in the way that MSRayne’s experience has led them to legitimately believe.
I don’t like this “different worlds” thing. It looks like a copout to me. “Well that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” Either I’m right or I’m wrong, after all. A claim about the world is either true or it is false, and I wish to believe it is true if it is true, and that it is false if it is false. Either people’s opinion of me consistently lowers slightly when I say no to them or it doesn’t.
That said, that’s a great post. I’ve read it before but forgot about it. Particularly when he says “I don’t think of myself as clearly having a ‘type’, but people I date tend to turn out similar in dimensions I didn’t expect when I first met them.” That is actually true for me. I’ve never “dated” anyone but people I get crushes I almost invariably find out later are drug addicts, which is… concerning.
It is not the case that my opinion of people lowers when they say no to me (in many cases I can notice it unambiguously rising).
It is also not the case that the people around me consistently lower their opinion of others (including myself) when those others say no.
But I can’t speak to your experience, and whether you’re correctly perceiving a different thing happening to/around you, or whether you’re misperceiving something. I default to trusting that the thing you report is, in fact, happening, and it’s just … different, from what happens to/around me.
That’s an interesting perspective.
At this point, I’d concluded all violations are mainly challenges. Since most people are socially skilled enough to smell weakness from a mile away, they know when they can assert their status by conspicuously disregarding your presumable boundaries, thus advertising, to you and to any bystanders, that you have no credible means to defend yourself and are therefore entirely at their mercy. What I’ve found the hardest to learn is that merely asking someone to respect your boundaries may well be itself a violation of their boundaries (“Noöne replies to me like that!”), which they most assuredly will defend, by escalating the abuse to prove the point that you’re no match for them and have no choice but to yield, unconditionally, forever. Calling abusers abusers offends them.
That’s part of the fight. Bullying works by normalizing the idea that there’s nothing morally wrong with harming the victim. After all, they deserve it for being a victim, rather than a survivor, don’t they?
This is how I intuitively perceive it as well. I feel like to some extent this is a masculine versus feminine kind of difference. Masculine people tend to see boundary violations as potentially benign (perhaps due to not feeling as unsafe generally?) whereas I think feminine people tend to see them as basically malign most of the time. I possibly overuse the concepts of “masculine” and “feminine”—maybe I’m really talking about “bold” versus “cautious,” though honestly I am not sure there’s a big difference, given gender norms across history and culture—but I intuitively associate these patterns with them.
Taking the “this has to do with masculinity” view: boundary violations like this can be both challenges and intimacy-building—between men. If you fail to respond adequately you decrease the respect of your comrades (because you can’t take it like a man or whatever) and thus by proxy decrease intimacy. If you succeed in the challenge, you become accepted more as part of the gang. It’s hazing, essentially.
When women, or males who are not initiated in the culture of manhood, are involved, it no longer has the positive, intimacy-building aspect—instead it’s just threatening and dangerous. This is probably part of where concepts like “toxic masculinity” come from—an inability of people on opposite sides of this divide between “boundary violations are often benign” and “boundary violations are rarely benign” to understand or appropriately respect one another.
Hmm if you lose respect for responding wrongly then it doesn’t really seem like a benign boundary violation anymore? The way I see it, a boundary violation can be considered benign only if you are capable of saying no, and the other person is genuinely capable of accepting and respecting a no. Otherwise, it’s more like coercion. (And the violation shouldn’t have very negative consequences for the person, based on what can be anticipated. )
If your friend takes your things without asking and you tell them to stop doing it because you don’t like it, and they apologise and stop doing it, then that was a benign boundary violation. If they stop but then go around telling others that you are selfish, or they stop and then complain about how they always have to give in to your demands, or they ignore you and tell you that best friends share everything, then that’s not benign at all. You can’t really tell from the boundary violating action though, only from their response when you say no.
People who are more powerful (e.g. physically stronger, higher social status) are more capable of saying no because the consequences of saying no are less severe for them. In that sense, things that seem like benign boundary violations are more likely to be benign for them, so they tend to see it as benign (and may not realise that this is not the case for others). I don’t think it’s benign just for the masculine though, because it works the other way around as well. If the person who is violating the boundaries is responsible about it (e.g. sensitive to potential power imbalances), it can also work. Also, boundary violations don’t have to be aggressive (?). Here are some examples that are milder/more feminine that I think also count as benign boundary violations (if done properly):
affectionate nicknames (For a female version of the faggot example, I had a schoolmate who called people “bitch” only if she considered them a friend, e.g. greeting them with “Hey bitch!”)
playing with/braiding someone’s hair without asking
adjusting someone’s collar when you see the tag sticking out
giving someone very sour candy without telling them that beforehand
untying someone’s shoelaces (making sure they notice it before standing up so they don’t accidentally trip)
asking “Can I borrow your pen pretty pretty please? Just 5 seconds! Thanks!” and taking it before you hear them say yes
asking sensitive questions like salary or asking a woman for her age
playful emotional manipulation like making puppy eyes at someone to persuade them to share their snack with you (only works if the other person is capable of saying no if they genuinely don’t want to do it, and you are capable of truly accepting the rejection, and both parties understand that it’s play)
Most of those examples sound fundamentally aggressive to me. I think that I just don’t believe any boundary violation is benign. And I think you always lose something if you say no to someone—always. It is always coercive. It just may not be visible on the surface—but they will resent you a little bit for it, and the more you do it the more resentment will build up. These violations are tests of your willingness to risk resentment in order to protect your boundaries, and thus of your strength / lack of need for people to not resent you, disguised as “benign” or friendly behaviors. So yeah, maybe it’s more about power dynamics, and the reason I associate it with masculinity is that in most cultures in most contexts, men are likely (and expected) to have more power than women.
Oh I think I see what you mean. If there’s always a cost to saying no, then all boundary violations are basically threats and hence aggressive.
I recognize this, or at least something like it—it’s like when people ask for your opinions. People say that there is no wrong answer and that you should say what you really think, but I always felt that that wasn’t true. There are wrong answers, and you will know that they are wrong because people will respond negatively to them (e.g. they like you less afterwards because your opinion differed from theirs). People don’t really want to hear what you have to say; they just want validation.
To avoid saying the wrong thing, I ended up trying to figure out what people were hoping to hear (e.g. based on how they phrase their questions), so that I could tell them what they wanted me to say. I didn’t even notice that habit until one day when someone asked me a question and I couldn’t tell what they wanted—they were completely blank to me. I ended up giving an answer truer to myself, and was expecting a negative response. Yet they didn’t show disapproval, and more surprisingly, neither did they show approval. They really just did want my answer!
The experience showed me that something I thought was a trait of all humans was actually more like an attribute that varies based on the individual. Some people just want validation, but others genuinely want to hear what you have to say. That changes the game, because it means it’s not actually my job to say what people want to hear, it’s just how some people prefer to be dealt with. I can always keep my true thoughts aside for people who want to hear them.
Some time after, I shared my opinion with someone who responded dismissively. Yet days later, they asked me a question that showed that they were thinking about what I’d said. I learned that just because someone responds negatively, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are upset with me and want me to be different; sometimes it’s just a natural response to hearing something you don’t like or even just something new. What’s interesting is that had I continued saying what I thought others would want to hear, I wouldn’t have realised that people are ok with listening to what I have to say.
There are things I tend to avoid because they weren’t good experiences in the past and when I think of doing them now, it just feels like a bad idea. Sometimes when I’m with the right people or in the right context though, my mind realizes that there is a very low likelihood of something terrible happening, it’s just my heart that’s convinced that something awful will happen. But when my heart wants something badly enough, the risk becomes worth it and so I try it even though it feels scary. So far, it’s paid off every time. Sure, sometimes it doesn’t go the way I hope for, but then again nothing terrible happened either.
I think the difference is that where I used to pay attention to just my negative experiences, I now also pay attention to when there isn’t a negative response, both for my myself and when watching others interact. I notice that the ratio is different from what I’d always thought it was (1:0), because the people I’m with are different, because people change, and because I pay attention to a broader slice of reality. That’s why to feels safer to try (with the right people). (There’s also that I’m more capable now, and can therefore cope better with anything that might happen.)
I think it’s quite interesting how sometimes you can’t tell if your beliefs are wrong unless you are willing to do things that past experiences say you shouldn’t, and create opportunities to prove your beliefs false. It’s like confirmation bias, except I’d never thought to apply it to personal/emotional experiences.
I don’t know, can’t know what your experiences are like—I couldn’t even understand Caperu_Wesperizzon’s and your comments. I want to say though, that I think people who are nice and good with boundaries do exist, and I hope that you get to meet them someday.
I think a miscommunication is happening here, and I think it’s because I used the word “boundary” for two different things (because that’s how it’s used out in the wild).
MSRayne seems to be trying to communicate that any violation of their personal boundary is non-benign. This is not a claim that the OP disagrees with; in fact, it’s a claim that the OP specifically makes.
I think ambigram is trying to talk about violations of the social boundary, and pointing out that those may very well be benign. MSRayne is saying “no, not in my experience,” but afaict MSRayne has also self-identified as being in the set of [people whose personal boundaries already lie outside of the social boundary, such that even things which do not violate the social boundary are already violating their personal boundary].
I think I don’t understand the difference between social and personal boundaries. Like, I read the post, I intellectually recognize the existence of this difference, but I have never noticed social boundaries, only my own personal ones. Presumably because my own are more strict, as you said. At some point I expect I must have absorbed a lot of them from the social milieu—but my social milieu growing up was television and books, and I deeply learned “avoid anything that looks like a situation on TV that made me cringe”, among other things.
Yes I’d read about this in the other comment but I think it didn’t really register until I saw MSRayne’s reply above.
The reply was enough for something to click in my head, possibly because it was a more concrete explanation, but your explanation made the misunderstanding more explicit to me, so thanks!
Separately,
This is simply and straightforwardly false. Different people live in different worlds. I make no claim about what percentage of people live in the same world as MSRayne; it could plausibly be as high as 90%, given everything I have seen of humans and human society.
But it is absolutely not a universal, in the way that MSRayne’s experience has led them to legitimately believe.
I don’t like this “different worlds” thing. It looks like a copout to me. “Well that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” Either I’m right or I’m wrong, after all. A claim about the world is either true or it is false, and I wish to believe it is true if it is true, and that it is false if it is false. Either people’s opinion of me consistently lowers slightly when I say no to them or it doesn’t.
That said, that’s a great post. I’ve read it before but forgot about it. Particularly when he says “I don’t think of myself as clearly having a ‘type’, but people I date tend to turn out similar in dimensions I didn’t expect when I first met them.” That is actually true for me. I’ve never “dated” anyone but people I get crushes I almost invariably find out later are drug addicts, which is… concerning.
It is not the case that my opinion of people lowers when they say no to me (in many cases I can notice it unambiguously rising).
It is also not the case that the people around me consistently lower their opinion of others (including myself) when those others say no.
But I can’t speak to your experience, and whether you’re correctly perceiving a different thing happening to/around you, or whether you’re misperceiving something. I default to trusting that the thing you report is, in fact, happening, and it’s just … different, from what happens to/around me.
I think that the world you describe is true for you, and for many, but I just … I just live in a different one.