I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
I had a recent disagreement with a neighbor in which he put unbagged trash into my trash bin without asking on the morning of trash day. I took his trash out and put it near his trash bins where I thought his service might pick it up, then filled my bin up with the trash I still needed to dispose of. He was very angry and said, “I would never do that to you,” despite the fact that he had, in fact, put unbagged trash onto my property. He had done exactly that to me, only with his own trash. I merely returned this trash to his property.
When I approached him to later discuss the situation he had many excuses besides, “I would never do that to you.” He said, “we always did that where I grew up,” and “I’m a doctor and I’m very busy,” and “you didn’t need the space; you live alone,” and “I generate a tremendous amount of trash because I have everything delivered even my meals,” (he lives alone too). Also: “I’m dealing with a terrible raccoon problem.”
He eventually apologized and said, “well, I will never ever put trash in your bin again!” with a tone implying that I was missing out on something, when that was the expectation I intended to set.
Middle-aged women — sometimes called Karens — find themselves in situations where they are discounted, mistreated, and overlooked, perhaps more than younger women and certainly more than middle-aged men. Middle-aged women are expected not to be confident, bold, and assertive but rather kind and motherly and, ideally, quiet. The Karen label functions to put middle-aged women back into their place. And it serves to obscure the ways that middle-aged women are put in situations where their best alternative may be to speak up, demand proper behavior, and let go of the lifelong lesson they’ve been taught to make nice.
Simone de Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” To Beauvoir, femininity is a social construct and not an inherent biological state. She analyzes how women have historically been defined as the Other in relation to men, who are considered the norm, or the Subject. My neighbor certainly considered himself the Subject of his trash situation: “I have a difficult raccoon problem,” “I am a doctor and very busy” (he is a dentist), “where I grew up we always did that.”
Unfortunately at the time we were talking I was so taken aback by his ranting that I didn’t think to say, “I am a doctor too.” I have a PhD, which I think counts as much as being a doctor as his dentist-hood. But I was thrown into defensiveness by his steadfast belief that he was right and I was wrong. He was important and I was not. His trash could migrate to my property under his control but it could not migrate back, under my control.
He questioned my need for the full capacity of my trash service twice, first saying, “you live alone, I knew you didn’t need a lot of bin space,” and later saying, “why would you need to put extra trash out after the bin was already out?” when I told him I had more refuse to put out that day. In his mind, my life and needs shrank to whatever he wanted them to be. He expected me to passively accept his trash and allowed no role for my own agency.
In her later work The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir develops an existentialist ethics, arguing that human freedom comes with a responsibility to promote other people’s freedom, not just your own.
She argues that each person is fundamentally free to make choices; each person is a subject of their own. Also, each person is a thing, a “factitity,” for others, an object. Each person is both radically free, able to transcend herself, and factical, constrained by the situation she finds herself in, by her history and temperament, and by the culture she lives in, by the circumstances of daily life. To Beauvoir, authentic freedom requires taking responsibility for the choices you make within your facticity.
My neighbor treated me as pure facticity. Women are, in general, more likely to be turned into objects only, into factiticy only, than men are. That was Beauvoir’s main argument in The Second Sex. My neighbor treated my male neighbor as a subject, apologizing to him and allowing that neighbor to tell him, “You know what I do when I have too much garbage? I hold it until the next week. Next time ask.” Then he ranted at me, discounted my need for my trash service, told me how important he was, and only grudgingly apologized.
I regret that I treated my neighbor as a subject, and I won’t make that mistake again. I went yesterday to talk to him to try to close the loop and rebuild the relationship. I was shocked and taken aback at his insistence that he was right, that it was ok for him to put trash into my bin without asking but not ok for me to return it to him, that it was his place to determine whether I had need of my trash bin capacity or not, and that he was more important than I was by virtue of his being a doctor with a busy schedule, as well as a raccoon problem.
In the classic game theory setup the prisoner’s dilemma, two suspects are interrogated separately and must choose between cooperating (staying silent) or defecting (testifying against the other). If both cooperate, they both receive a light sentence. Each prisoner has an incentive to defect, because if they betray their partner, they can go free while their partner receives a harsh sentence. If both defect, they both receive a moderate sentence, which is worse than if they had both cooperated but better than being the one who stayed silent while their partner defected.
Each prisoner has an incentive to betray the other, regardless of what the other does. A rational, self-interested choice is to defect, not cooperate.
My neighbor defected by putting trash in my trash bin–he took advantage of something thinking that he would come out ahead (get his trash picked up without having to bag it or keep it for another week, at the cost of filling up my own trash bin with dirty unbagged trash). But then I followed my self-interest and defected right back. I put his trash by his own trash bin, unbagged, thus freeing up my trash bin space for my own use. He expected me to cooperate. Women are brought up to do just that. But I’ve always been an uncooperative sort, especially when people are uncooperative with me.
In repeated plays of the prisoner’s dilemma, it’s been shown that a tit-for-tat strategy leads to the best outcomes. If I cooperate and I’m met by defection, then my best next step is to defect. If I cooperate and I’m met by cooperation, then I can cooperate and we are both better off.
Now I know that there is no cooperation possible with my neighbor so that’s that.