Disturbing Behavior

The expectations of one side often implicitly take advantage of what is a broken social contract. It works great to do X because you are oblivious to the implicit assumptions and agreements people in the other culture have, so it ends up being a lot of "free stuff" because you aren't paying for that in the ways they expect.

This is problematic enough when it's two cultures that both exist in the here and now. It gets thornier when it's a future culture we are trying to give birth to and current reality interacting.

That's from a piece on this site called Flux which also talks some about a song called You Don't Own Me. It's a song I've written about repeatedly over the years and my first few stabs at talking about it were redacted.

Probably, as a guess about something impossible to A-B test, ANY woman spending enough time on HN for ANY reason to have ANY hope of making the leaderboard was going to rub everyone wrong for existing.

Having CF and being a former full-time homemaker and general all around LOSER probably made the inevitable social gaffs and chronic state of falling on my face more palatable and forgiveable.

So I'm merely in social cyberia and not, say, jail or the morgue. (No, I'm not kidding.)

The Internet tells me gestalt means an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts.

The word disruption means both 1. disturbance or problems which interrupt an event, activity, or process and 2. radical change to an existing industry or market due to technological innovation.

Being a minority actively drives paranoia. You can never be SURE if someone is intentionaly shafting you or not but you can be sure of one thing: You will be left behind and get less out of it than the men/whites/whatever and that pattern will be suspiciously persistent.

The way society works is you have a set of social contracts with a lot of baked in assumptions which form a gestalt, a whole interconnected thing where you don't get to just pick and choose which pieces you like.

In the song You Don't Own Me, she implicitly expects boys to pay for dates but then asserts that doesn't buy them any rights over her. 

Men don't spend their hard-earned money on dates to provide free entertainment to self-indulgent girls who imagine they have a right to have men pay for dinners and movie tickets and what not merely because they are female.

The practice of men paying for dates is part of a larger context and shaped by a society where men are the only ones who have money to pay for dates. She's seventeen and wants a better future than the life her mother has lived. She recognizes men go out with her and immediately want to stake a claim and she doesn't want to be treated that way. She doesn't want to be treated like property from the minute she agrees to eat dinner with you ONCE.

So she protests that baked in assumption and the behavior that grows out of it and most likely gets a lot of pushback from other people. The previous generation likely makes frowny faces about her trollop behavior at seeing multiple boys when she's not necessarily being physically intimate with any of them much less all of them. Boys get mad because they expected something in return for the money they spent on her.

I don't disagree with her that it's a big problem for a woman that this whole thing -- this gestalt -- kicks in like she's practically married with children because she said "yes" to dinner. That means there's little to no opportunity for a woman to get to know a guy before defacto having a serious commitment she probably doesn't want to agree to.

And in a culture where men have most of the money, there's no reason it should occur to her that perhaps they should go Dutch Treat and each pay their own movie ticket or dinner expenses and just share some time together and get to know each other without all that.

I've spent a lot of years trying to figure out how to explain my "no dating policy" which is some version of the song You Don't Own Me but minus the part where she feels entitled to have men spend money on her.

If you are a woman, a Black American, any form of "minority" trying to figure out how to not be a perpetual victim, anything you do to further that goal flies in the face of the expectation that status quo is God and amounts to disturbing behavior which could be spin doctored as disruptive in a positive way if you were a money grubbing company trying to make a fortune off of changing the rules for some particular industry but is highly likely to be viewed as merely bad behavior if you are some money grubbing poor person whose poverty is partly rooted in "Society doesn't want to pay people of your demographic like we pay White males. STFU and stop imagining talent, hard work etc. should allow you to escape poverty."