sex ed taught me that cigarettes are bad and never look at a cigarette and cigarettes WILL kill you and they forgot to teach me what a period was
What would a lawyer be without their Weird Girl
I have thoughts about the whole feminist anti-interrupting thing. Like I agree, men do talk over people and it is disrespectful, but I also think there are cultures, specifically Jews, where talking over each other is actually a sign of being engaged in the conversation. It’s something I really struggle with in the south, because up in New York, even non-Jews participated in this cooperative conversation style, but down here, whenever I do it by accident, the whole convo stops and it gets called out and it’s a whole thing. Idk idk I feel like there’s different types of interruptive like there’s constructive interrupting where you add on to whatever is being said - helpful interrupting, and then there’s like interrupting where you just start saying something unrelated because you were done listening. I have ADHD so I’ve def done the latter too by accident, but I’m talking about being more accepting of the former.
I think a lot of the social mores leftists enforce around communication tend to be very white. Like Jews are not the only group of people that have distinct communication styles. Like the enforcement of turn-based communication, not raising your voice (not just in anger but also in humor or excitement), etc. it’s always interesting that the most pushback I get about how I communicate come from white people (mostly women actually, white men just give me patronizing looks because they don’t feel like they can call me out in same way). Like I’ve been teaching these workshops, and a few of them have been primarily black people, and I’ve noticed black people will also engage in cooperative interrupting (and I love it!). This isn’t a developed thought and I welcome feedback. Idk I think there should be space in leftist organizing for more diverse communication styles.
Here’s a source:
As a linguist: overlapping talk is not the same thing as an interruption!
An interruption is specifically intended to stop another person from speaking so you can take over. Other reasons that talk might overlap:
- close latching -- how much time should I give between when you stop talking and when I start? Very close latching can feature a lot of overlaps.
- participatory listening -- how do I signal to you that I’m engaged with what you’re saying and paying attention? Do I make any noise at all, or do I limit myself to minimal “backchannel” noises (mm-hmm, ah, yeah), or do I fully verbalize my reactions as you’re going? Maybe even chime in along with you, if I anticipate what you’re about to say, to show how well we’re vibing?
- support request -- this can shade into interruption as a form of sealioning, but if someone interjects a request like “I didn’t catch that” or “What’s that mean?” it’s not really an interruption, because they’re not trying to end/take my turn away, they’re inviting me to keep going with clarification/adaptation.
- asides -- if there’s more than two people involved in a conversation, a certain amount of cross-talk is probably inevitable.
The norms around these kinds of overlaps vary -- by context (we all use more audible backchannel on the phone; an interview is not a sermon is not a casual chat), by culture, and yes, by gender, which is why it’s a feminist issue. But gender doesn’t exist in a vaccuum! Some reasons overlaps might be mis-interpreted as interruptions when they’re not intended to be:
- norms about turn latching: someone who’s not used to close-latching conversation might feel interrupted or stepped on when talking to someone who is. The converse is that someone who’s expecting close-latching might feel the absence of it as awkward silence, withdrawal, coldness, etc.
- norms about backchannel: if you’re not expecting me to provide running commentary on your story or finish your sentences (or if I’m doing it wrong) then you might feel interrupted. But if you’re expecting that level of feedback you might feel ignored.
- neurodivergence: If I have auditory processing problems, I might take longer to respond to you than you’re expecting. If I have impulse control problems, I might blurt something out as soon as I think of it, but I don’t necessarily want you to stop. If I have trouble with nonverbal or paralinguistic cues, I might not latch my turns the way you expect, or my backchannel might be timed in a way you don’t expect.
- Non-native speakers of a language may need more time to process speech; may speak more slowly and with pauses in different places than native speakers; may not pick up the same cues about turn-latching and backchannel, resulting in a timing difference; may need to make more requests for support.
Norms around conversation tend to be super white/Western/male/NT; even among linguists, the way we talk about analyzing talk usually presupposes discrete turns, with one person who “has the floor” and everyone else listening. It even gets coded into our technology -- I thing the account’s gone private, but someone recently tweeted, “For the sake of my wife’s family, Zoom needs to incorporate an ‘ashkenazi jewish’ checkbox” because the platform is programmed to try to identify a “main speaker” and auto-mute everyone else. Most of the progress on this front in linguistics has been pushed by Black women and Jewish women, or else we’d probably still be acting like Robert’s Rules represent the natural expression of human instincts.
And it’s very White Feminism to recognize how conversations styles have disparate impacts across gender lines without also recognizing other axes along which conversation styles vary, once that empower us as well as oppress us. Just because I feel interrupted doesn’t mean I am interrupted, and it definitely doesn’t mean I have the right to scream “EVERYBODY SHUT UP!!” until I’m the only one talking.
I don’t ... have a great way to end this? Just that it’s good to recognize competing needs in communication, and have some humility and intentionality about whose needs gets prioritized and how.
Another thing; as someone who expects overlap because of my cultural upbringing, when someone doesn't overlap me I just start looping and repeating myself because I'm waiting for them to interrupt and they're "politely" waiting for me to finish speaking.
Okay nobody ever put that into words but the looping is exactly what I do in therapy - I should tell my therapist about this so I don’t need to say the same thing over and over again lol
when you tell your mother you dont want to shave and shes like ok so you hate me? you hate this family? you want me to kill myself
Be real with me. Do you have a…
Bat-sona
Robin-sona
Different DC family persona
Standalone DC insert
Zero fun and imagination whatsoever
See ResultsAfter seeing all your characters in the tags, let me tell you about Minimum Wage Jimmy.
Minimum Wage Jimmy is a Marvel/DC character I created when I was 16 and is basically like Stan Lee in that he appears everywhere. He is an 18-year-old pizza delivery guy working part-time to pay off his college tuition and lives with his two dogs named Kevin and Randy. (They're strays he adopted and gave human names to make it seem like he has friends.)
His adventures include:
- Running over Black Mask on accident while making a delivery on a rainy day
- Getting a hundred-dollar tip from Tony Stark
- Accidentally uncovering a mafia operating out of a rival pizza place and just… doing nothing about it (I never finished it)
- Pretending to be Red Hood's boyfriend
- Changing the menu for no apparent reason
- Getting mugged for his pizza supply
- Falling in love with both Deadpool and Wade Wilson but neither of them know he exists
- Sleeping in an arcade in a FNAF crossover
- Having the Flash run straight through his car and mess up the engine
- Almost dying in the walk-in freezer
- Getting arrested for pantsing Captain America only to be bailed out by the Falcon in exchange for doing it again
- Surviving the near heat death of the universe because it felt just like standing next to a pizza oven
- Marrying the younger cousin of Damian's math teacher only to divorce when he finds out she was cheating on him with his best man
- Being outed on live TV by Vicky Vale
- Traveling to Italy in a pizza delivery exchange program
- And finally, his happy ending when his boss/store owner retires and he inherits the pizza parlor because it turns out his boss was his long-lost grandfather
So I ended up with free time at the end of my first class today, so I was like "do yall wanna see a vintage meme?" and turned on "what does the fox say". Expected like. A laugh from the kids, or even just a "wtf is this mx?" which is. A reasonable reaction to What Does The Fox Say.
But instead of a reasonable reaction. all of my students watched the first 60 seconds with jaws agape. And then this one kids turns to me like the fucking eye of Sauron and literally goes:
My husband told me I also should share the next part of this story, where I, feebly trying to defend my honor against a child, said, "No, this video was just big when I was in college!" and he scoffed, rolled his eyes, and absolutely obliterated me by saying, "So did you go to furry college?"
To everyone pointing out my icon: do I have a fursona? Yes. Does that make me a furry? Almost definitely. Do you admit that to a 12 year old who has just accused you of being a furry, in front of 23 other 12 year olds, with 25 instructional days left in the year? Absolutely THE FUCK not!!!
