The New Garage Chronicles

Ohhhhh man in the spirit of "I am not going to give bad posts notes, even just to respond to them", I'm gonna use my journal for The Purpose It Exists

and complain about a bad take I just saw

namely, a bad take inspired by the recent article about how the thin membranes between public and private spaces on the internet are causing children to stumble upon porn from kids' shows. Someone I follow reblogged a post saying that the obvious solution people are suggesting -- that parents teach their children responsible internet-usage and supervise them if necessary -- is not a good solution...

... because the OP has trust issues from their parents going through their internet history.

And, like, I'm sorry I guess? I'm sorry about your trust issues, but what do they have to do with kids needing healthy boundaries? If anything, I feel like that supports the point that parents should teach their kids about boundaries, because if your parents had adequately explained what you should do if you see something disturbing online instead of treating you like you had no right to privacy, you probably would have had much less adverse experiences online... right?

This treatment of parents taking responsibility for their kids' online habits being conflated with being a controlling helicopter parent is some prime responsibility avoidance in action, tbh. Just because your parents did a bad job with you, it doesn't mean that everyone else is now responsible for raising you. Learn to enforce your own boundaries like the rest of us, who just learned to click away when something disturbed us.

Look, just... eventually, we're all going to see or experience something that is going to disturb us. We are born with nothing, and need to learn everything, and that also includes learning about the unpleasant and harmful things we all genuinely wish didn't exist. And if you have parents who you don't trust and can't go to for support when that happens, that is genuinely rough. I know -- I practically raised myself, and I genuinely had some fucked-up ideas about how life worked because turns out a mentally ill teenager raising themselves is gonna make some mistakes.

But it's important to recognise that in that instance, it was your shitty parents who failed you (and possibly the person who sent you the thing that disturbed you, if it was done maliciously), not the person who made the thing you stumbled on. You can't just say "I don't know how to cope with this so you need to stop doing it". Telling other people to stop is not a coping mechanism you can sustain very far. This is why you learn boundaries -- learn to go "I never want to see this again -- please go do it somewhere else where I don't need to see it" or better yet, leave the space where people are doing it.

Not everywhere on the internet is for kids and we shouldn't act like it is. This is not just about porn of stuff kids watch (lest we forget, kids also watch stuff that is made for them and the rest of the audience) but also about other things kids aren't ready to deal with. (Graphic violence, for example. It's really convenient how everyone who talks about porn forgets about that.)

Ugh. Time to go watch some kitten videos until I stop being annoyed at being drafted to raise someone once they're already fully responsible for their own internet experience.

Talking about the goings on with my friend, it made me realise that if there's something I wish was better understood to be a conflict of needs, is that indulging people's fear-based behaviour is not an option for some people.

Being treated as a threat, being treated like you're a bomb that might go off, has just as much of an effect of putting anyone even a little more outspoken who gives a shit about how they treat people in walking-on-eggshells mode. We should be capable of sympathising with anxious people without indulging their coping mechanisms if those coping mechanisms are maladaptive and harmful. Jumping, flinching, being startled all signal things to the environment, and unless contextualised, the person doing that is ultimately responsible for how they're received.

Someone projecting their inferiority onto me and apologising a lot as a result is harmful for me because it fucks with my read of and expectations for that person. Someone treating me like I'm out to take advantage of them has the same effect. Someone treating me like I'm aggressive and dangerous is literally doing the exact same gaslighting thing that was done to crush my sense of self when I was younger. These are not value-neutral behaviours just because they're defensive.

Just because someone is behaving defensively because they think their needs will not be accommodated doesn't mean their defensive behaviour should go entirely unexamined. Just because someone expects to be mistreated doesn't give them a pass for treating people like they're personally responsible for that trauma.

Poor self-esteem needs to stop being treated as a pass for a lack of prosocial behaviour. You get treated the way you treat others, and nobody is under obligation to wrap their own issues up just so they can treat you better.