Dear Reader,
If you haven’t noticed, I’m an overthinker by nature. This has been a hell of a week for it.
One thing I think about a lot is the way that we think about how we think about what we think we think about. That is, there’s what you actually think about, the whole mess of your perceptions and reactions and speculations and stray idle thoughts and sneaky cognitive biases. And what you think you think about is mostly just barely skimming off the top of that. And then most of our discourse in society comes from people hashing out opinions taken from that bare skimming of the mind. So then how you think about that social discourse is where it’s very easy to get disheartened about what shitheads people can be. But there’s also opportunity to take a breath and reframe, to look at what assumptions or fears or priorities are implicit and unspoken in the ways that people express their opinions, which also requires airing out your own assumptions and fears and priorities if you’re going to think about any of this properly.
Last week, before the news of Friday, Lyz Lenz published a really excellent interview with Regina Bateson, who is currently a professor of public and international affairs. In 2017, Bateson ran for Congress, and in her campaign she repeatedly encountered the barrier of the perception that women are less electable because “other people are sexist.” After Bateson lost that election, she went on to study this phenomenon of perceived electability as “strategic discrimination” to better understand its effects as well as how it might be overcome.
Bateson’s field is political science, but for me, this lights up the part of my brain with a passion for behavioral economics. Politics and public policy and economics are pretty innately entwined, after all. I first got interested in behavioral economics when I was in college, not through any class but through an article I stumbled across in The Economist which I was idly reading during my late shift working the front desk of a dormitory. The article talked about a study on the sometimes unintuitive collective impact of individual decisions. The researchers had created a simple computer model of households moving within a city map to examine the effect of bias over time. The map started as a randomized mix of yellow and blue households. The question was, how much bias does it take on the part of the movers to end up with neighborhoods that self-segregate into yellow versus blue? And it turns out: it didn’t take much at all. If moving households were assigned a preference of having even one neighbor of the same color, then over a not-very-large number of moves, neighborhoods would begin to look dramatically segregated.
It feels unintuitive because our tendency is to think, “If we remove most of the bias, then results should be mostly unbiased.” But really, it shouldn’t be that hard to grasp that any bias is going to lead to biased results. We wouldn’t say, “If I remove most of the arsenic from the sugar bowl, then it should be fine to set it out for tea.”
What particularly fascinates me about Bateson’s research is her finding that individuals significantly overestimate how racist and sexist other people truly are. Call this what we think about how other people think about what they think they think about. We’re not actually very good at understanding “them.” If what defines “us” versus “them” is that “us” are those having views that we approve of, presumably “them” must have lots of views that we object to. But everyone is part of an “us.” There is no “them.”
But of course, yes, I’m very aware that I’m writing this on the heels of the US Supreme Court overruling Roe v. Wade, and indeed, I do feel the creepy avaricious gaze of the religious right trying to stare directly into my uterus. Maybe sometimes there’s a “them.” Sometimes other people are sexist or racist, and it doesn’t matter that they aren’t very sexist or racist. Any arsenic in the sugar bowl is too much arsenic.
Roe v. Wade protected the right to abortion before viability of the fetus, but if you ask a lawyer about Roe v. Wade, they had better talk about “penumbras and emanations,” or you should get your deposit back. I’m not much of a scholar of constitutional law, but I do at least recall that much. Patients’ privacy is not directly protected in the Constitution; it’s not an enumerated protected right in the Bill of Rights. But the Court found that a right to privacy was implied by the penumbras of rights explicitly protected. This “penumbras” framework originated in Griswold, in which the Court struck down a state law against contraceptives as an unconstitutional intrusion upon the right of marital privacy. In Roe, that implicit right of privacy is what was held to protect individuals from state interference in their personal medical decisions including the decision to terminate a pregnancy pre-viability. (That may be a bit of an oversimplification, but damn it, this is not a legal brief, and I can be a little loose with my summation.)
Pro-life conservatives have been playing a long game to overturn Roe, which has finally paid off. And the thing is, the law is a game. It’s a game of rules, where some of the rules give the players the power to make up other rules. As a player, you can play by navigating the rules as you encounter them, or you can play by seeking to circumvent the rules, or you can play by introducing rules more favorable to yourself. But there are consequences to playing like that. When all the poker chips are piled at one greedy corner of the table, when the Jenga tower is teetering at the slightest breath, what happens next?
Under the superficial gamesmanship, the law is, at its core, a system of reckoning with consequences. And the reason this is important is that consequences exist. They always exist, independent of what we want them to be or think they should be or wish they weren’t. We tend to think of the law as determining the consequence of certain actions. But that’s not really how it works. Actions have consequences, and then as a society we use the law to shift the burden of those consequences one direction or another.
People are very prone to magical thinking. We think things should be a particular way and somehow that means therefore they must be. We mistake the feeling of certainty for actual truth. But being certain of something is no guarantee of being right. Fundamentally, we are not very good at distinguishing fantasy from reality. Our brains are made for fantasy. That’s the main show in your frontal lobe, even when it’s all very mundane, even when it’s just thinking about what you’re going to have for dinner, or what that shelf from IKEA is going to look like in the living room, or that conversation you need to have with so-and-so. Imagination is a very powerful tool. But it can also be deeply misleading.
Right now there is some pro-life cishet couple in Alabama or Kentucky or Arkansas or Ohio congratulating each other on this hard-fought win that protects the precious unborn. And next week or next month, one half of that couple is going to develop an ectopic pregnancy or have an incomplete miscarriage that leads to sepsis. And they are going to have to come to grips with the fact that their moralizing did not protect them from this outcome. Maybe she just dies and leaves him picking up the pieces. Or maybe he figures out how to get her, in hideous pain, transported to another state where she can get the medical treatment that might save her life. I am not wishing this on anyone: I am just pointing out that this happens. Consequences exist. This is going to be a consequence of an absolute ban on abortion in these and other states.
The way pro-life people think about abortion has almost nothing to do with the realities of biology, and it’s really only loosely aligned with morality, from one extremely narrow vantage point. There’s what they think they think about, and all their righteous justification around what they think they think, and almost none of it has any relationship to the actual reality of the world as it is.
There has also been a lot of fist-shaking against the injustice of a Supreme Court flying in the face of majority opinion, but that’s not a bandwagon I can jump on. Since when is majority opinion a good measure of justice? That is literally the foundation of the doctrine of substantive due process (which is what Justice Thomas attacked in his how-can-I-be-more-of-an-asshole concurrence). Many of the civil rights victories won in the Supreme Court have broken with popular opinion. The problem with banning abortion is not that most people support access to abortion. Dobbs framed the question as whether the Constitution confers a right to abortion, but that’s not really the question either. The issue is to what extent the state may abridge a person’s fundamental right to bodily autonomy, including whether a state can impose laws restricting a person’s ability to seek safe medical care to terminate a pregnancy… as well as whether individuals whose pregnancies don’t end in live birth can be prosecuted by the state for not carrying their pregnancy to term.
If Congress doesn’t step in to codify protection of individual medical decisions including abortion and the privacy of information relating to possible pregnancy, and to bar prosecution of individuals for pregnancies not ending in a live birth, then this question is going to return again and again to the courts. And it’s going to happen in the form of that bereaved husband whose wife died while her doctor was on the phone with the hospital’s lawyer, trying to sort out whether the hospital could provide the treatment that would save her life. Or it’s going to be an appeal of a criminal conviction for a woman who gave premature birth to a stillborn child and was then prosecuted based on her anxiety-fueled internet searches for “what causes miscarriage.” Or a trans man who is prosecuted for trying to commit suicide while pregnant.
I could keep coming up with scenarios. As any lawyer could tell you, there will always be another set of facts to argue.
Consequences exist, and that includes consequences of injustice. In an unjust system, the ethical choice is to fight the system, to engage in resistance and civil disobedience. There are lots of ways to get organized. Maybe consider contributing to a legal defense fund. Brush up on your rights as a protester. I’m not saying you should start a riot, but if you do, call me for bail.
And when you’re tired and aching and you can’t think about this train wreck for one more fucking second, ground yourself in something that gives you joy. I mean, take a minute to wallow in your feelings first. Take a deep breath, holler a good what the fucking fuck (aloud or in your mind), heave that breath out on a sob, and maybe do that a couple times. Then press the heels of your hands to your eyes on one more deep breath, and drop your arms, roll your shoulders a couple of times, and go look at pictures of cute animals for a while. Go hug someone you love. Take a walk outside and look for birds and flowers. Fix yourself a nice beverage and drink it slowly. Read a book.
Reading is my safe place. There are lots of ways that I’m in love with the world, lots of ways that I can seek grounding in a breath or a touch or a good cuppa, but books are my refuge. When all else fails, I hide in a book until I can breathe again. I am so grateful that I live in a time and place where I have access to such an incredible universe of other people’s imaginations and knowledge and experiences. It has been a rough couple of years, and I mean that on a personal level as well as the raging collective dumpster fire that we all have been living through. Stories remind me of the things worth fighting for.
Last week I read You & Me by Tal Bauer. And then I read it again, and then I read it again. It’s a romance between two 40-ish single dads of varsity football star sons. I am clueless about football, but then so is Luke, whose perspective the book is told from. Luke’s marriage had already been fractured before his wife died the previous year, and he is desperate to rebuild his relationship with his angry and distant son. He meets Landon when Luke shows up at a football practice (previously his wife’s sole domain), and Landon gets him to volunteer with the booster club. They hit it off as friends immediately, and then Luke has a literal bi-awakening moment and realizes he’s completely fallen for his new best friend.
And ok, if I describe this story, honestly it sounds like nothing I would ever voluntarily pick up, because I’m generally not into sports, or Texas, or things that might be blurbed as “the tender tale of two people who heal their hearts and learn to love again,” or “a beautiful story of fathers and sons,” or “the truth might tear them apart… or just might make them stronger than ever.” But I picked this up based on a recommendation, and I’m so glad I did because I just absolutely loved the hell out of it. The characters are great, and the relationships among all the characters are truly lovely. The friends-to-lovers arc is beautifully done, and the dynamic between Luke and Landon is sweet and heart-warming and sensuous and hot. Also I learned about a wine that I now want to try, and a cool job that I didn’t know anything about, and ok, I even liked the football stuff.
Also, the bi-awakening moment hit remarkably close to home. Not quite the same, but the feeling of it. For me, I’ve known pretty much all my life that I could find women physically attractive, but I hadn’t ever met a woman I was seriously interested in having an actual relationship with. I was comfortable identifying as straight because it accurately reflected my dating history. At that time, it felt to me like I wasn’t really “bi enough” to call myself bi, as if it’s a title you have to earn (which today, I recognize as internalized bi erasure, but we get to learn these things about ourselves and that’s ok). I had ended a relationship at the start of the year, and a few weeks later, a friend started to invite me to hang out with her and a couple other work friends, one of whom was funny and smart and could wear the hell out of a black v-neck t-shirt. We got to be great friends. I remember that when I bought a bottle of her preferred brand of liquor for a friendly birthday celebration in the spring, I was just thinking about what would make a nice gift for my new friend who I really liked. And then somewhere a couple weeks later it struck me that I was, in fact, absolutely and completely head over heels in love with her. Not falling in love, but straight up gone. She was still entangled with her previous girlfriend at that point, and I thought, oh god, I’m her straight friend who she knows isn’t going to hit on her because she’s expecting me to be straight, and she has a girlfriend, and now I’m going to come over all schmoopy and cow-eyed at her, and it’s going to be so uncomfortable and ruin our friends’ night hangouts. And then I just buckled in for the ride of having this funny, amazing friend with only the small price to pay of having to regularly restrain myself from climbing into her lap because that would be uncool.
And then, you know, more stuff happened. A soggy music festival, an overturned kayak, spending two hours looking for each other for lunch in the park. Going to the movies together. Panicking and running away and then texting to say, Sorry I freaked, can we talk about this?
Reader, I married her. And if I were Charlotte Bronte writing Beasley Eyre, that’s where the story would end, with a charming epilogue about our dinosaur-and-robot themed wedding. Because that’s how romance novels work.
Love,
Beas
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