C. Wingate, I didn't think you were defending him, nor am I really trying to get into a discussion about the validity (or lack thereof) of his parenting methods. I was trying to provide a data point for the angle of "He is not actively advocating extreme physical abuse, but what he advocates can have some of the same psychological effects as abuse." But I don't think I made that very clear in my post.
I think that the phrasing "beating into submission" is emotionally loaded, and not what Dobson is explicitly recommending, and a plausible outcome of people following his advice. (Whether it's a common outcome, I don't have evidence to speak to.)
In retrospect, stepping into the middle of a disagreement to say "I think both sides are absolutely correct" was probably not a useful move on my part, especially when I expressed it without any great clarity.
Re: Dobson's book:
My parents read his book after having one child, and switched from "don't stifle the child's natural impulses!" to "any time the child doesn't immediately respond to commands, apply a spanking" pretty much overnight. It wasn't the kind of beating that left bruises, but it sure as hell left emotional scars on the sibling in question.
Anecdote != evidence. But I've seen pretty clearly that, yes, following Dobson's child-rearing advice like it's the word of God can cause some serious problems for a kid. I used to read his books when I was a kid, just out of curiosity, and these days they feel to me a lot like zero tolerance school policies: a way of abdicating responsibility while exercising authority. If you follow the procedures in the book, you're excused from having to actually think about effects and use your own judgment and adapting things for different personality types.
(Dobson did address different personality types among children, as I recall, but the only advice about handling them differently that I now remember was something along the lines of "Some kids, you're just going to have to punish a lot more often.")
Reading this post gave me one of those nasty sorts of moments of epiphany when I realize just how much worse an even in my past could have been, and thus highlighted that yes, I am the sort of person who could be vulnerable to this kind of thing. It would be much more comforting to believe that I'd never be so foolish as to pay a huge sum of money to a charlatan for the privilege of being physically and emotionally abused. And yet...
Early high school, I decided to go on a mission trip. I was full of the gung-ho adolescent evangelical Christian "We must save the world!" spirit, and more so, I wanted an excuse to travel. So I signed up with Teen Spirit, and spent several months diligently raising the few thousand dollars necessary to go on a proselytizing trip with them.
From the moment I arrived on the compound, I was uncomfortable; partly the literal uncomfortable of being in a hot, damp room packed with other people and a lot of flashing lights and loud music going on during the worship service, partly the sheer culture shock. (Missionary culture, where I'd grown up, != American middle-class evangelical culture, despite a lot of overlap.) And it just got worse as the trip went on: the complete control of where you could go and what you could do* and what you would eat and how much you could take with you and what you could say and who you could talk with... I had one of my three books that I'd packed along confiscated as being insufficiently godly, and there was the constant pressure to Obey Authority. Hanging over everything was the threat that if you broke any rules, they could put you on a flight immediately and send you home to your parents, and your family's expense.
Did I mention not being middle-class myself? The cost of a flight from Bolivia back to Ecuador, and then again to the United States for the upcoming furlough, would have put my parents into a few thousand dollars of debt that they certainly couldn't afford. So in the midst of the constant pressure to conform was the knowledge that I could seriously hurt my family's finances, with a debt that would take years to repay, by breaking any one of the many rules.
But that was just the emotional pressure. The physical pressure was that this form of proselytizing involved doing a fairly physically active dramatic performance several times a day, usually out in direct summer sunlight. We were allowed to pack a single water bottle, which would be our only hydration between breakfast and dinner. (Lunch was provided.)
I came down with some mild illness--a cold, probably. When I told the leaders, they insisted I keep performing, though they graciously allowed me to bow out of any entertainment activities they planned. Within a few days, when I was complaining of fatigue and sore throats and coughing constantly, they added praying out the "demons of illness" to the group prayer every evening. When I started running a fever, they gave me aspirin and prayed harder. When I hadn't slept in three days because of the constant fever, and passed out in the middle of a performance... the leaders tried to convince me to keep going as soon as I regained consciousness, rather than throwing off some of the symmetry of the performance by sitting it out.
When I started hallucinating due to sleep deprivation, they let me sit out the rest of the performances for that day. And their one saving grace is that the following day, they finally took me to a doctor.
I wasn't a stupid kid. I was, by day two of the fever, thoroughly convinced that these people were foolish and dangerous. My parents worked with missionary doctors; I knew full well that the appropriate response to illness was not to only pray about it.
And yet it wasn't until I actually passed out in a performance that I was able to argue against their insistance that I continue. And it wasn't until I was literally hallucinating and unable to form any more coherent arguments of any sort that they got medical attention for me; by that point, I was in no state to request it. What if they had just continued praying? Maybe I would have recovered. Maybe I would have ended up as one of those people where afterwards online commentators shake their head and ask how someone could be so stupid as to keep following an obviously dangerous course of action, just because a person in a position of authority over them tells them to.
* To some extent, I'm sympathetic; being responsible for a large group of teenagers you've never met before, in a country belonging to none of you, for a month straight, is no easy proposition, and so you need some rules. But they went well beyond "some" in that setup.
geekosaur @438, "yes man" is probably about right, though I'd discarded it since it seems to carry connotations of employer/employee that were explicitly absent there. But then, since my point was that such uncritical adulation should come with a paycheck, maybe it's the right term after all.
Constance @ 398, My first response would be "You're not her friend, you're her minion." Someone who expects complete agreement with all her opinions and to never have to back down on anything doesn't want a friend: she wants a...I am struggling for a term for someone who is paid to pretend to be an endlessly supportive friend, and not coming up with one that doesn't include either doing one's paperwork or sexual connotations.
But that doesn't sound like friendship, to me.
Whether or not the relationship has enough good points to make it worth continuing anyway, I couldn't know, not being the one in it. But as described? I wouldn't think it's worth it. Not unless she starts paying you for the Good Times Always On Her Terms that she wants. An employer can make an employee insincerely apologize for a situation in which the employer was the one in the wrong; a friend should not. I'm not sure if it's bullying, but it doesn't sound like friendship.
I question the assumption that bullying is inherent and inescapable (which has been expressed more than once here, though not by a majority) among children, if only because my own childhood was largely free of it. I remember a few times when I was a social outcast, but even that was a fairly passive rejection; at its worst, I remember one incident of someone walking away while I was talking to her, and another time when a few girls mocked my clothing. This is not to say that I was full of joy and social adequacy: but bullying? No. It just didn't really happen in the school I went to. It was perfectly clear that being Mean was Wrong, and that was pretty much what it came down to. Neither authority figures nor the other children would tolerate it for very long, and the popular kids were usually the first to tell people to Stop Being Mean if teasing got very far.
In fifth grade, I once shouted a mild insult at a boy in the middle of a freeze tag game, in a fit of anger. And felt guilty about it for years. Good children didn't call each other names, after all.
All of which perhaps explains why I handle online verbal bullying so very, very poorly. I have few skills for coping with people being nasty, and it sends me into a frozen, nervous state of trying to figure out if I misread something, because surely (despite what is now years of evidence) no one would be so rude on purpose... would they? Everyone knows better than that.
Which is why I find it so very, very useful in online bullying if someone else calls out what's going on. I'm not much good at pulling myself out of the shock that someone has pissed in the punchbowl to actually respond, and otherwise my general response is to slink away feeling angry and unhappy and unsure of what to do about any of it.
I'm not exactly making a good argument for bullying-free environments--"Keep your kids unbullied like I was, and they too can be incompetent at dealing with stressful verbal situations!"--but those are my two cents for the thread.
Evan @64: The most effective thing I've seen to work against bullying, online and in real life, is for people who are neither the bully or person being bullied to step up, point out the situation, and say that this is non-ideal interaction. (It helps if they can point out specifically why, but I do realize that in a lot of cases it's hard to pinpoint the exact phrases or what not that are causing the problem.)
This is so far from a cure-all that I don't want to imply I'm suggesting it is. Nor does it address situations where it's not clear to people outside of the dynamic that bullying is occurring. But if not the entire cure, it seems like an important first step. Just having someone else step up and say "Hey, that's not very fair" can reduce some of the frustration; and if someone is engaging in bullying tactics and doesn't realize it, that's also a quick way to get them to pause and think about what's going on.
Balance is such a tricky thing. I think about the "How many times should I forgive my brother?" "Seventy times seven" ideal on the one hand, where there is always hope of redemption... And on the other, the abused spouse who keeps going back to the abuse because "No, really, this time I'm sure he/she has changed and won't do it again."
I'm not sure I believe in essential bullies--unchangeable--but I do believe there are people who are habitual bullies, and derive enough joy from it that the feelings and opinions of other people online are never going to be enough to convince them to change. Or even if "never" is too harsh, "in the foreseeable future" seems pretty reasonable.
I have been told by someone who I had considered a friendly acquaintance (up until that point) that she enjoyed argument, she enjoyed forcing other people into argument, and the fact that other people were upset by her argument tactics was part of the fun. "I enjoy watching other people get upset" does, clearly, work as a point of happiness for some people; if that's the case, "You're upsetting me, please don't use that tactic" doesn't discourage them, it only encourages them to do it more. So...what do we do about those kinds of people? And how do we distinguish them from people who want a reasonable conversation, but fall into bullying tactics when personally upset, or have been taught by other places that they will never be taken seriously unless they use those tactics?
I do wonder if it's a reasonable guideline to say that if someone has it pointed out to them explicitly that their means of argument--not even the content, but their arguing style--is upsetting to more than one other person in the thread, and they ignore this or brush this off, it's not worth engaging with them in that place anymore. They've proven that they are, as it were, going to ignore the No Smoking signs and blow smoke in your face, at which point repeating "Dude, I have asthma" another time will not help.
All this said, I burned out moderating a forum (to the point of asking other moderators to remove my mod status, then scrambling my password and deleting the bookmarks just so that I would never so much as read that forum again) because the verbal bullies who didn't quite cross the official lines in the sand upset me so much I couldn't take the job anymore. So I am probably to be chalked up on the more fragile side of things. I do think everyone should be given a chance to apologize for having misworded something, or given offense carelessly; I'm tired enough of nasty online arguments that I am seldom inclined to grant a person more than that one chance to apologize.
pericat @ 535: Same with the one about near-death experiences, I've forgotten the title, but it's all in what the story is really about that makes the difference.
Probably you mean Passage? I read that about once a year, and just sob through some of the chapters. But I always feel better when I get to the end, which makes that all worthwhile.
...I think I need to go reread The Doomsday Book now. It's been far too long since I have.
James Moar @ 499, I just recently read the book, and it is much, much darker than the movie. I don't believe the body count was any higher--but there are some definite grim tropes running through there that were only touched on in passing in the movie.
I'd be hesitant to call either "better". As with most adaptations, they're very different beasts. But there's a lot more dark underline to everything that happens in the book, and a lot more detail, none of which, as I recall, makes any of it any cheerier, except that the protagonist has one more actual friend than he did in the movie. I'd call it worth a read if you liked the movie, but maybe something to check out from the library rather than buying.
Veering wildly back towards why it came up, it does, in that sense, take that opposite trope, and then run it quite calmly and unapologetically into all its horrible natural consequences. I got a little tired of vampire novels because I found they weren't really horrible enough; there were bodies everywhere, but it wasn't nearly grimy enough for the topic at hand. (Personal preference, as with most things.) Let the Right One In does not have that problem.
pat greene @350: Those messages can be good or ill: several commenters have alluded to ways in which Stephanie Meyers' Twilight series impart unhealthy ideas about male-female relationships to teenage girls. (I would not know, having never read any of them.) But there is still utility in having the conversation.
There's a man in two of the community college classes I'm taking: Poetry (writing, as well as study of), and then Prose (ditto, with an emphasis on short fiction). On the first day of class, in both classes, we all introduced ourselves and talked about what sorts of poetry/fiction we liked to read, which authors we admired and wanted to emulate, what sorts of things we wrote.
He explained that he hadn't really read much poetry. Almost never read books. He couldn't name a single poet, much less one he liked, or any set of favorite authors. But he'd recently read the best book he'd ever read in his entire life, and it had inspired him to do more writing himself. He wanted to learn how to write something that good, and get it published. So he'd come down to the community college and signed up for two classes to do exactly that.
The "best book ever", of course, was Twilight. And however much the gender dynamics in that book creep me the hell out, I really have to admire that it got at least one person to go to all that trouble because it was that damn inspirational to him.
I never managed to get much in the way of lengthy prose finished until I got married, so perhaps I could say that getting laid got me to be a writer. It's as good a working theory as any.
My own experience with writing in "genre" style vs. "literary" style--working on the definitions as they seem to be used above, rather than my usual reading of them--is almost precisely the opposite of the top/bottom divide as described. When I'm writing "literary" fiction, it's with a great deal of consciousness for what the reader might be expecting, and what style I'm emulating, and how I can meet the expectations of that very specific style. Whereas when writing "genre" fiction, I'm generally ambling along having a cheery old time writing whatever the hell I feel like, and hoping that there'll be a few people out there who also want to read that sort of thing. The "literary" reader is the demanding one I need to put a lot of thought into meeting the demands of; the "genre" reader is the one where I figure we'll hook up if we have similar interests, and if not, well, I'm still having fun, aren't I?
abi @12,
That was something of a reflective flinching on my part, and I am more than happy to back down from potential implied hostility.
Besides, I've only just reached chapter 3 of Wheelock's (again), and if this thread goes all Latin, I'm going to be reduced to discussing poets giving roses to girls and announcing that their great country is strong.
Steve Burnap @8: I'm not sure what you mean by "natural reaction." I mean, it's obnoxious when someone comes in and tells a group of friends playing Guitar Hero, "You're not really in a band! You're just playing with toys! That's stupid! You shouldn't be having fun!" So...irritation at that? Sure. But I don't see a lot of people automatically going, "Yeah, well, playing a real guitar sucks, and clearly you aren't enjoying it the way we're enjoying our game!" There's room for people to enjoy all sorts of things, and I'm tired of getting snide remarks for daring to enjoy literary analysis just because someone once had a bad experience with an English teacher telling them that their Sweet Valley High books weren't real literature*.
If by "natural reaction" you mean "people are irked by being told what to enjoy," sure, I agree with you. Of course people are upset when they're having fun and someone shows up to tell them it's not real fun and they're inferior for liking that kind of fun.
If you mean "Therefore they're going to tell anyone who enjoys things differently that they're wrong instead and this is a perfectly valid response," I'm going to disagree. It's an error of the exact same type as what set them off in the first place. The useful response to "You shouldn't enjoy that in that way!" is not "Well, you shouldn't enjoy it in your way!"
* I am not going to try to define Real Literature. And I did read Sweet Valley High books, and I didn't enjoy them, and I consider it very useful to be able to articulate both why I didn't and why my little sister did. It helps when figuring out what books to recommend to her.
B. Durbin, #1: Sooner or later I'd like to see people stop trying to analyze this and just go off and read something.
I dislike the false dichotomy between analysis and enjoyment of a book. I can analyze a piece without enjoying it, and enjoy a piece without analyzing it; however, I find that having better analytical tools at my disposal makes it easier for me to enjoy most of the things I read, and to articulate why I didn't like something. At which point I can better figure out how to avoid that disliked element in the future. Plus, I get to have fun with the analysis itself, even of works I didn't enjoy; it nets to more fun for me all around.
Which is not to say everyone needs to run off and get a college degree in literature to enjoy reading. But I see that pernicious meme of "Unlike people who study literature, I actually read and enjoy books" crop up often enough that it begins to irk me even by implication as much as the fast food jokes do.
My latest swimsuit has begun rapidly fading, and it's from the sun, not from the chlorine in the pool. (I deduce this because the cloth is going rapidly gray on the outside, while the other side of the same fabric is remaining perfectly black on the inside. If there's another explanation for why the outside would go and the inside wouldn't, it's possible I'm wrong.)
I'm still trying to figure out why the manufacturers decided that a swimming suit shouldn't need to stand up to semi-regular exposure to sunlight. Not dealing with bleach almost makes sense, compared to that.
I confess, somewhat sheepishly, to enjoying the Starship Troopers movie. This is not because it was a good movie--it wasn't--but because 1) it was an occasionally entertaining movie, and 2) it made me feel much better about having originally read the book as deliberate satire. Finding out that the book hadn't been meant as a vicious satire of military-obsessed cultures came as a deep disappointment when I was informed of this fact.
I took three programming classes in college, and the main one followed exactly that pattern of 1/3 women in the first semester, 1/15 in the second. What helped me get through it in that case was that of the two women in the second semester, one was a friend of mine--in fact, she became a friend partly because we'd huddle together next to each other in the back of the class out of sheer twitchiness at the Overwhelmingly Male Population of the class--and so neither of us felt particulary like we had to represent Women In Computers. She was also much better than I was at the programming, so I could let her show everyone else up, and just trail along in her wake cheerfully middle-of-the-class.
That was in a college that had around a 60% female population; I can recall at least two classes I was in where there was only one male student out of the 15-30 in the class, though none without any. (Possibly that would have been different if I'd taken any Women's Studies classes.) I recall the professor who taught all the programming classes was very dry and dull, but not discriminatory in any way I noticed. Perhaps it helped that I've never had trouble asking for assistance when I'm having difficulty working something out. Sure, I'll feel horribly guilty for needing to ask, but I'll ask anyway. I still recall spending a good half hour in his office once trying to figure out what was wrong with my very first "real" program. (Turns out I had built the function properly, called it properly... never assigned its output to the variable, since I hadn't realized that sending that variable up to the function to be messed with still left me needing to call it back out again afterward in its changed form.)
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