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So true! Another double bind are all the rules about self-defense. I used to live with my sister and bil back in the day, briefly. He was a marine in the MPs. He used to give me lectures on just how much was legally allowed or I would be the one carted off to jail: I had to warn repeatedly that I had a loaded weapon and would use it; perp had to enter the premises by force; I was to retreat to a locked room and wait for perp to beat down the door; I couldn't shoot until perp was at least five feet from me with the declared intention of doing bodily harm; etc. I was 17 at the time and terrified I'd forget some technicality.
Oh, yeah. Not just the variable and inconsistently applied rules on the use of lethal force but all the other double-binds women are put into in case of attack.
Police routinely criticize women who resist too forcefully (like the little old lady who bashed the intruders over the head with a pot, or the one who held a robber at gunpoint) because "you might be hurt" but they also tell women to resist abduction...
They're very uncomfortable with women who don't act what they consider "normally" (i.e., as pure victims, sheep in need of a sheepdog protector) but also contemptuous of women who do.
And then there are their rigid internal rules on how family members should act after a tragedy...which allows them to suspect foul play if anyone in the family doesn't follow their particular script. I have enough experience in emergency medical situations to know that yes, family violence is a major cause of trauma...but I also have no faith whatever that the police (or anyone else) can tell from any particular grief reaction whether it's genuine or not. Some people are hysterical, some are stoic, everyone does it his/her own way, progressing through grief at his/her own pace. Every time I see some TV program (news or fake-news) where a policeman is declaring that so-and-so wasn't upset enough, or was too upset, I think "You idiot. Wait til it happens to you."
And then there are their rigid internal rules on how family members should act after a tragedy...which allows them to suspect foul play if anyone in the family doesn't follow their particular script. I have enough experience in emergency medical situations to know that yes, family violence is a major cause of trauma...but I also have no faith whatever that the police (or anyone else) can tell from any particular grief reaction whether it's genuine or not. Some people are hysterical, some are stoic, everyone does it his/her own way, progressing through grief at his/her own pace. Every time I see some TV program (news or fake-news) where a policeman is declaring that so-and-so wasn't upset enough, or was too upset, I think "You idiot. Wait til it happens to you."
John Strong I think his name is, the author of "Mindhunter" and one of the first FBI profilers, is of your opinion as well.
(I recommend all his books for research whether I've gotten his name right or not. He tells what happened and why and what it means, but without the near-prurient tone of a lot of true crime writers.)
I was in a foster home for the better part of a year. the other boy in the room drilled a hole in the wall to spy on the girl in it.
When they went after both of us, I got told I must bre guilty because I didn't protest enough at first.
Gee, I didn't protest because I knew I was innocent and it didn't occur to me that they were *seriously* accusing me at first. Duh!
And you just know that if I *had* made strong protests from the start, I'd have been accused of protesting too hard...
If anyone ever attacks me I'll probably end up killing them, because with my lack of size and strength it'll be the only way to make sure they won't kill me first.
As someone with a prescription for opiates, I definitely feel that pain.
When I wanted to refill my vicodin prescription early, though, a fax of my plane ticket was enough to get it early, but that was a planned emergency early refill. Natural disasters don't give you advance warnings.
Right now, I've got 5-1/2 pills, and I can tell you that's not a two-week supply, though I could make it work for two weeks if I had to.
Some chains of pharmacies are better than others about communicating throughout the network for away-from-home refills. I have heard good things that way about Walgreen's and WalMart both.
Another tactic for people who live in the Hurricane Belt might be to ask for spare original prescriptions from their MD's, to keep packed in-with their bug-out kits. Would the MD be able to write a script that is time-limited [e.g. get it written sometime in May and it is not fillable after the end of that calendar year]?
I tend to keep one on file, though since my doctor's retiring apparently I can't right now.
Depends sometimes on whether you are on medicaid/medicare, etc = or a really stingy insurance. My mom, who is disabled, can only get her medicines in 30-day, 60-day, etc periods - if something happens like the medicine bottle gets tipped/spilled or damaged and her script boxes can't be filled - she can't refill until that time is up.The doctor might give samples, but the only way to get more of a prescription in that situation is to have the doctor call it in.
My late partner introduced me to the concept of the double bind (theory, not through practice) and I have been grateful ever since, as it taught me to really watch out for them. And there are so many kinds of double bind that people try to lay on you, as you've outlined above... Very insidious.
Although there are certainly control-freak abusers who try to trap people in double-binds, I think the more common occurrence is "innocent" (though no less painful): sometimes individuals who haven't thought through their own criteria (such as the clinic that has never really considered if it's possible for a mother to tell one sniffle from another) and sometimes rules made by groups who never got together and compared notes. Each may have had a reasonable (at least on the surface) goal in mind, but when both have or claim the right to make rules for the same recipients...double binds are certain to result.
At least, I like to think that most double-binds aren't intentionally placed.
Run into the "setup" double binds before. I finally just say, "Okay, pick one, you can't have both."
*cough*mom*cough*
I just ran into yet another one from the insurance company. Adverse reaction to insurance-santified form of prescribed medication resulting in another form being prescribed. Insurance company refused to pay for second 'script, claiming they had already paid for it. Faxed a copy of the FDA Warning Letter to the first form's manufacturer (public record), plus the message that the insurance company would be invited to explain to various regulatory agencies why they were promoting the use of substandard drugs. They paid for it.
Various regulatory agencies will still be contacted.
Yikes! That sort of things sure turns on my flame-thrower.
You've seen me in "fighting the system" mode, when "icy" doesn't begin to describe it.
OMG, I was allergic to one of the components of the old formulation of Zyrtec, which was VERY expensive and not OTC at that point. I was forced by my insurance company to do mail order prescriptions. My doctor sent in the wrong form on the renewal. I got a bottle of pills I couldn't take, and the mail order company rightly said, "We filled it as ordered", and my doctor's office said, "Oh, you should have reminded us" (even though it's huge in my file AT MY ALLERGIST'S OFFICE that I'm ALLERGIC to that version) and the insurance company said, "We only pay for one prescription per month."
I was NOT well off at that point and could not shell out $100 or more for a medication that should have been paid for.
I raised holy hell. The allergist's office gave me samples to cover me for a week or two. The insurance company finally agreed to pay for it. But it took a whole lot of hell-raising.
A couple of lovelies from the welfare and related agencies.
First is back in the 70s, but I'm told this part of the rules is essentially the same.
I was trying to work thru the explanation of how they calculate your "food stamp income". First part was pretty straightforward.
Take monthly income after taxes, subtract medical expenses. That's your "adjusted income". Call it X.
Next was the odd part. You do some weird calculations (I had to sit down with a sheet of paper and treat them as an algebra problem, then simplify.
What the simplified form came down to was a shocker:
subtract the *allowable* rent and utilities (there were maximums for them) from 1.3 time your "adjusted income".
That was your foodstamp income. And to get full benefits, it had to be 0 or less.
Note that for it to be zero, your rent and allowable utilities hd o be 30% above your adjusted income!!! In other words, you had to be losing money, and not slowly!
The other one is more recent (mid 90s). Seems that on welfare (at least in this state) you are not allowed to have more than $50 is "resources". So technically, between the time you get the check and you pay your bills, you are in violation!
On top of that, if you are earning money and it's not a fixed X per week/month, you have to turn in copies of your pay stubs before you can get your check.
The catch is, they have to include the last day of the previous month. Which means it'll be several days to a couple of weeks before you can do it. Add in a few days for them to check and issue a check with the *gross* income deducted from the "normal" benefits.
Since folks trying to work their way out of welfare are apt to start out with part time jobs or irregular hours, this hits them several ways.
First, that delay means they'll be late on all their bills the month they start working. Second, they lose money because their benefits get reduced by their *gross* income, but all they get is the "after taxes" part. And I think there's another "gotcha", but it isn't coming to mind.
I seem to recall that several studies have shown that all they "make sure they don't cheat" measures cost more than the cheating they are intended to stop. (and don't get me started on the fact that much of this crap is just an excuse to rub people's faxes in just how "bad" they are to *need* help)
Oh god. Welfare. I was on it for 3 years from 1993-1996. Talk about gotchas.
And *attitude*.
The classic "you must be moral scum to need help" bit.
Or the social workers that tell people, "We could help you more if you were to get pregnant by a minority. We know you are a single mother with three kids and a father who doesn't pay child support, but you are white and we can't help you. But a mixed child would automatically double your food stamps." Pissed my mother off to no end. All she wanted was for them to stop taking the child support money out of the food stamps.
The suggesting a pregnancy ought to be grounds fotr getting the social worker *fired* . Talk about playing to stereotypes!
All she wanted was for them to stop taking the child support money out of the food stamps.
Alas, it's not that they were taking the child support out of the stamps. It's that the support counts as income anfd income reduces the stamps. Period.
It was annoying. Food stamps buy food. The child support could have bought clothes or sent us to summer camp. Instead, it went to compensate the drop in food stamps every time he bothered to send something.
Argh. The excessive concern to be certain the poor do not exceed a pittance--cannot save, cannot ever have a treat unless it's given by someone else, cannot have choices if that can be prevented...that's meanness.
At one point, we didn't qualify for Habitat for Humanity, too poor. My mother fought to get us better opportunities. She worked crappy jobs, second jobs. All of the rental properties we lived in were better when we moved out. Bug free, new and better paint jobs, improved yards, etc.
I can see why you would not want to make it pleasant to be poor. If the handouts exceed what you can get at a beginning job, why work? The current system is too easy for dishonest people to game and too hard for honest people to get temporary help.
Of course - they really treat you badly when you are the minority... watching that happen over and over again is why I have avoided both welfare and food stamps like the plague whenever possible - when i qualified for them. I remember people looking at people of color like manure on their shoes for using foodstamps; my mom had to have it for a few months when I was little when she was a starving college student because she was a single and struggling mother, but she got off quickly.
Most minority mothers caught in the cycle NEVER get out of it, and it's humiliating to be treated that way and to watch it happen to others.
It's equally wrong what happened to your mother - the system was just as unfair to her.
God, yes. I was on SSDI for a few years. As is typical with most clients, it took roughly two years from when I applied to when I was approved, so I got a lump-sum payment going back to my initial application.
My father was thrilled, said great, you can save some of it, maybe put it towards a car or something.
Then we found out that if I had $xxx in assets in six months, I'd be uneligible again. We were stunned, he was indignant, and said, "They've basically set it up so that there's no way to get off it!" I knew from some college reading that the welfare systems really are set up to keep people down, but I think it was his first exposure to it.
I'm about halfway thru SSI waiting period (another year to go). Because I'm surviving by selling off the old gaming and computer stuff from my storage locker, I have too much in assetts to qualify for SSDI.
Even though the value is highly variable (ire depends on what folks on ebay are willing to pay the week I list something) and I *can't* realize the value in anything but small chunks, because it costs money to sell it!
It's stupid. There's a program now people can apply for that's part of a plan to get them off disability entirely--they can accumulate a little more than the allowed amount, to save up for tuition, that sort of thing, but it has to be approved ahead of time and the time-span's very limited.
As a guy, I have run into the same problem. I have to be sensitive or I am considered a neanderthal. Too sensitive and I am considered gay. If I open doors for women, I am "oppressing" them. And if I don't, I am ungentlemanly. I actually had a lady get mad at me for holding the door open for her.
I've never gotten mad at someone for opening a door for me, though I've had men get annoyed when I opened a door for them, despite their being heavily laden. That happened years ago; now they just say "thank you" and so do I when someone opens a door for me. (I don't like it if they make an antifeminist comment as they open the door, of the "I hope you don't mind if I'm not politically correct..." variety. And that's happened.) OTOH, if I'm a passenger in a car, I don't want to sit in the car and wait while someone comes around the car to open my door unless I'm wearing something that makes it difficult to get out on my own. I want out of a car as soon as it stops, unless it's pouring down rain. It's a car-specific thing...I'm often uncomfortable by the time the car stops and need to move.
Guys, in general, seem to have troubles with the awareness/courtesy/sensitivity axis.
And that was incomplete. What I meant was, I've known a lot of guys who don't get the difference between being aware of someone else's probable feelings and falling into someone else's feelings.
It was ludicrous when I was growing up, because both men and women were presumed to be very sensitive on some subjects and not on others. Women were supposed to know what guys were sensitive about and avoid touching on those topics in those ways. Guys were not supposed to show sensitivity or (other than considering women "too sensitive, too touchy-feely") understand what women had sensitive feelings about (other than appearance, maybe.)
Thus it was inevitable that both men and women regularly (and innocently) stamped on each others' toes, because the sensitivities weren't mapped accurately, so people got the wrong information.
Fact is, both are sensitive about some of the same things. Girls were considered laughable-at by boys when I was growing up--and yet boys hated to be laughed at. Well...girls didn't like it either, but had to put up with it from boys. Most people don't like being ridiculed. Most people don't like having their reality denied. Simply teaching us that what bothered us probably also bothered others and thus we should avoid those things would've helped...but that's not what we were taught. Girls were taught to worry about everyone's feelings (a girl from my era was explicitly taught that it was her responsibility to make everyone feel better.)
It's going to take a long time--if we can arrive at a social consensus on how to go at it--to overcome the millenia of bad socialization that lies behind us. That bad socialization caused deep resentments in both genders--each feeling itself ill-used, and then ill-used again with the changes that came in the Sixties and Seventies. I don't yet see the kind of wide-spread teaching/modeling in society that will get this done.
I think if more people would talk to each other and acknowldge that there physical differences in how men and women think, then there would be fewer problems. There will always be problems, just because everyone is different.
A lot of guys are taught that they should open doors to be polite and its a failing on their part if they don't. Sounds like the pc comment was a way to disfuse a possibly upset person. A lot of guys have had ladies get mad at them for what is usually an automatic reaction. (Task interrupt. Open door for lady, wait till she enters, return to previous task) I understand the car door issue and vary rarely open or close a car door for someone unless A. clothing issue, B. ground issue C. environment issue (i.e. I don't like something about the area we are in and I want to insure safety before we continue on. Personal quirk, not a he-man idiocy)
You know--not to deny your experience, which I accept as valid--but in many many years of traveling and being out in the world, and both having doors opened for me and seeing other women have doors opened for them, I have *never*, not once, heard a woman get mad at a man for opening a door for her. Not even at a university in the early 1970s, when women would sometimes rush for a door, or grab for a door--but if a man got there first, they didn't berate him.
I have seen women react to rudeness while opening the door: a snide remark about themselves personally, or about feminism or political correctness, yes. But that's a reaction to the rudeness, not to the door-opening.
This has led me to be curious about the percentage of occasions on which a courteous man opening a door for a woman gets an angry reaction. My husband says it happened once to him, over thirty years ago. That's once out of a lot of door-openings...certainly well below 1%. What do you estimate your percentage is?
Pretty low, I think. I can remember for certain at least two, I vaguely remember that there were a few more. Some of those were non-verbal angry reactions. The ones I remember all seemed to be the same age range. Old enough to have been involved in the original hardcore feminist groups.
Like Elizabeth, I open doors for men and women alike, especially I see them having trouble with the door, disabled, elderly, etc. I give up my seat when possible for older folks [or a mother carrying a toddler] when I ride the bus when I can... I consider it the HUMAN thing to do. I have gotten odd looks for it - I've also gotten 'thank you' too.
I do it because it's the right thing to do for me - a random act of kindness that might brighten someone's day, and a way to remember that there are good people out there, and not all of them will look like June and Ward Cleaver - a lot of the most courteous people I met were Goths, looked like gang members, etc - but they remembered their manners... I've met equally uncool people wearing Armani suits that made a old person stand when they could have let them have the seat too.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/19558585/3030907) | From: ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) galbinus_caeli
2009-07-14 06:58 pm (UTC)
Feel free to delete, I just wanted to bring this to your attention | (Link)
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![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/61118309/12815053) | From: e_moon60
2009-07-14 08:17 pm (UTC)
Re: Feel free to delete, I just wanted to bring this to your attention | (Link)
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My, my, my.
I do find it amusing (and annoying: both) that the definition of "hard SF" nearly always involves only certain areas of physics. Accurate and science-based biology, medicine, etc. don't count. And it should be written by males, unless a female has a doctorate in physics.
I was on a new space opera panel years ago, the only woman on the panel, and no female writer and only one US writer were mentioned by the editors and other writers on the panel as having written new space opera. All they wanted to talk about was young, male British writers. It was like the time I was on a panel in disability in SF and another panelist claimed never to have read any of Bujold's Miles books. I have nothing against young male Brit writers, but they aren't the whole universe of space opera with or without a hard SF basis.
| From: galbinus_caeli
2009-07-15 05:56 pm (UTC)
Re: Feel free to delete, I just wanted to bring this to your attention | (Link)
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Amazing how arbitrary the definitions can be.
From: (Anonymous)
2009-07-20 03:31 pm (UTC)
Doctors feeling smug, | (Link)
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Your blog entry made me remember what my poor mom went through with me and my brother. I whined and whined and my mom would take me in and they would roll their eyes and say my ears were fine (but they gave me antibiotics "just in case") my brother never complained when he was sick. We have a family portrait of him with pneumonia because he showed no symptoms other than a runny nose! You'd think with seeing a billion kids a year Docs would get that children all have varying pain thresholds:)
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