00:11
So, this episode comes from コメント、感想をいただいたの。女性の活躍の回のやつで。 The female empowerment one.
And I had a line somewhere in that episode. Context of it is just like, to answer a common sort of criticisms that women in predominantly male space get, which are like, oh, you got here because of your diversity card, right?
And to that, I had one answer, which I'm not quoting word to word, but something along the line of, well, look at all the other time, mediocre men got the opportunity to do things that, you know, we have been denied, women have been denied to do.
So, like, you know, do I have to be like a Nobel Prize laureate in order to occupy your position that you have historically given to mediocre men? Like, no, I think we deserve just as much opportunity was basically my answer or some sort of like, you know, something along the line of.
And the listener was one asking, what did I exactly say? Because 聞き取れなかったから。 And then so I spelled it out. And then, but as I was replying to her, like, I mean, I'm not regretting saying that I still fully believe in what I said, but like, I don't want to take a responsibility of you saying that to your colleague.
And like, being labeled as, I don't know, snappy or as...
Well, I mean, if somebody were to label her, for instance, I see your concern there. I would say that the problem lies with the person now labeling her, right?
Of course, like, I have no regrets. But I also don't want to be responsible for any harm that might come your way if you choose to, you know, repeat my phrase out of context. Right. And, and she reassured that, oh, no, don't worry. Like, I'm kind of just looking for phrases, snappy, one liner that I can go for as a way to protect myself.
And assert my boundaries. Yes. Okay. Okay. And, and she's adding my little line as her variety of, you know, lines to go to. I was like, yeah, well, you know, if you have a library building phrases for that, I will be honored to have my little phrase added to it.
03:14
And just to sort of give you the peak of behind the scene, I didn't, I don't have that in the back of my pocket. I don't, it's not a phrase that I keep close to my heart to whip it out whenever I need it. Right. But it's more just an accumulation of sort of thoughts, experiences.
Like every time I hear these words, these seem to be like the repeated thoughts that come to my mind. And, and that just formed the sentence in that way. And maybe something about my delivery, something about the way I said it sounded like, you know, a clever, snappy comeback.
And, and that was the dramatic effect that I went for. So I'm, I'm fine with that. I'm fine with it doing the thing I intended to do.
But that got me thinking. Well, one, she feels that this listener feels that she wants to collect all these sort of like, spicy, you know, one liner that she can like, throw at and draw clear boundaries, you know, maybe sting them, sting the other person a little bit, make them feel a tad bit guilty, bit embarrassed for saying misogynistic things.
I really relate, because oftentimes, these are afterthoughts more than like the thoughts at the moment, like, when it's happening in the moment, you kind of freeze, or you like, kind of go more defensive mechanism of like, shutting down or smiling, even, you know, like, ha ha ha ha ha, and then let it slide.
That's, I think, very common for most women. And then you go home and then like, realize like, I should have said something there. And so I fully understand the desire to have a library of snappy comebacks to go with.
And on the other hand, I also notice, I don't want to use snappy comebacks for the sake of snappiness. I want the snappy comeback. Like to me, what makes a good snappy comeback is something that makes the other person in this case,
somebody who made an inappropriate comment, make them reflect and think, huh, she has a point, you know, like, that's, that's what I want. Well, that's what my snappy comeback to have an effect of, like, I don't really care about hurting their ego.
06:18
I don't really care about embarrassing them. I don't even really care about drawing my boundaries there at the moment, I would really just want to use my snappy comeback as a way to be like, do you hear yourself, you know? And, and on that, I'm just thinking out loud at this point.
One of the more effective ways to draw a boundary that is non confrontational is asking the offender to explain their offense by directly asking, I didn't hear that. Can you repeat?
And usually, if, if a person needs to explain twice, their comments, they're forced to think about it. They're like, Oh, I know, nevermind. Don't don't take you know, people if they have a conscience that, oh, I shouldn't have said that they will be appreciative of you giving them the opportunity to withdraw their comments, rather than being publicly embarrassed.
Appreciative is an interesting choice there. Continue.
Appreciative. I don't know. Right. Yeah, I don't know if that's the word.
Go ahead.
If it was an honest mistake, if it was an honest mistake, from otherwise conscientious person, they would appreciate the opportunity to decide, you know, like, oh, I take it back. Or like, you know, at least the ball is on their side, so that they can say, I'm sorry, the wording was bad. I shouldn't have said that.
Like, they also have an opportunity to apologize by being being thrown the ball in their side. Right. And as sort of a person on the receiving end of the offense, we can ask them, not say it again. But like, I didn't hear it. Can you repeat? Right? Like, that's a much more soft and non confrontational way to urge them to repeat.
And if they repeat again, you can just not or like, you know, you can make a face, you can do whatever you want. I feel like at that point, if that doesn't work for you, you have no hopes. Like, I'm sorry. Like this, this whole phrase of I didn't hear it. Can you repeat? Or any version of that?
You can do it as a receiver of the offense. But you can also do it as an interrupter. If you were the observer at the table. You can also do that to help the person being on the receiving end of the offense. And, you know, have the same effect. And not that I haven't really had to exercise this technique. But when I heard it, I was like, that's really smart.
09:13
I like because I like that there's a way to both protect yourself, but also urge your offender to think twice about it. And, you know, relying a lot on giving a benefit of doubt that these are mostly coming from honest mistakes, or like, just ignorance.
I don't know, ignorance is a choice at some point. So I cannot say just ignorance. But you know what I mean? Like, like, you know, maybe this person just like don't have the right education background to really grasp today's standard of, you know, what counts as misogyny and whatnot.
In that case, you can still give them a space to think about it, while also protecting your boundaries. And I think, and it's pretty versatile, I feel like it's very usable in a lot of different situations, asking them to repeat, you're not attacking them, at least at the word, you know, you could be attacking them with your delivery and your facial expression and body language.
But you can, the thing you said was not attacking. And you can still sting them a little bit. And you know,
There's so many things here. I took notes, by the way.
Thoughts. Yeah.
I, I, well, let me let me say this first, which I think is when you began with this idea of like, maybe you want to use it for getting the other person to reflect, I think we've moved away from getting the other person to reflect and we've moved into shaming and making the other person feel bad in order to reflect, maybe.
Which, which I, to be clear, I'm sort of chuckling because this is one way in which we as humans do attempt to, like, deliver lessons, right? Discomfort can deliver a lesson in cases.
I, to also caveat this up front, I don't advocate for that. Because when I'm talking about educating, like, you know, students, I do not believe that that is the space in which to like shame a student in order to get them to learn something.
No, no, no, no, no.
It doesn't.
We're talking about people who are well past.
Yeah.
Like, things they should have learned.
Yeah.
And picked up along the way.
There's like, I also would like to say that I don't think it's necessarily my space to speak on this in particular, because I'm less likely to receive the type of situation, right? The sort of like masculine to female, like, just straight up misogyny.
12:12
But you did bring up the point about a bystander. And I think that is a place where anyone can help to play that role to be like, hey, that wasn't cool. Right.
And I really like to stick with sort of wording, like how to, how to begin to send the, the offender, the person who has said something, which has notably upset you and perhaps others in the room, to sort of return it back to them.
This can be done in a myriad of ways, right? It can be done in a way that is, you know, extraordinarily gentle if one wished to do so. And it can be done in a way that is extraordinarily aggressive if one wished to do so.
I have done both when it comes to certain situations, because sometimes it's not worth beating around the bush and being nice about it. But I have a different position, right, that I that I come from.
Right. And it really depends on the power dynamic at that very specific group, or how safe you feel in that dynamic. And so I'm, I'm kind of assuming a lot also in that we want to have these kind of phrase banks ready to go.
In case you feel vulnerable, right? In case you feel like you need to fend for yourself. Yeah. Which I really, which is usually not always the place where you feel comfortable saying, you, did you hear what you say? You know?
Yeah, right. Um, it's not always like, yeah, if you can say that you probably don't need a lot of protections, right? Right. Sound like you're good on your own. Yeah. But like, you want to hold on to these phrases, because you might not know about this person very well, you're still gauging if this is a habitual, misogynistic comment that this person makes, or if it's an honest mistake, maybe you don't know, you don't have enough information about it.
Right. So I think I found this asking them to repeat, asking them to explain the joke, like that type of like, throwing the ball on their side. And you can do it as aggressively, like you said, you know, hit them with your 160 kilometer per hour type of ball. Or you can, you know, give them a nice little throw that they can definitely catch.
Yeah. And like, see where that takes them to. It's hard. And again, these are things that like, hypothetically, I exercise in my head. These are things I'm gonna say. And like, doesn't matter how many times you do it in your head, how many times you relive that one moment. Sometimes when you encounter the same situation, you freeze the same fucking way.
15:23
Yeah.
to do that at the spot. So I really feel and understand why this listener wants to have like a glossary of phrases to fall back on so that it's like automatic reaction almost.
Yeah, this, I feel like I wish I had started actually saying this, because I got distracted by the sort of dynamic between sort of speaker and interpreter and stuff. I really like the question approach that you've just introduced, because it does, well, it does exactly what you described it doing.
Anybody can use it. It's technically easy enough to implement, even if it requires practice. And sometimes it just doesn't work.
It's a little bit lower bar. Yeah.
Yeah, and it's something that I wanted to add to it, because I think, I think you sort of mentioned it. And so I want to highlight this for anybody using it. You can use phrases like that to buy you time.
So, like, instead of it just being, I suddenly have to, because these are emotional responses that you have in response to somebody saying something, then there's intellectual work to like try and communicate something.
If you have a semi reflex of, hold on one second. Can you, can you say that again? Like, did I hear you right? Or even something as simple as just like, looking at them and going, huh? You know, like, like, huh? Like what? Hold on.
I, you know, maybe I don't recommend people do this, but sometimes for those that are in a situation where they are also maybe very self reflective, or they may have a tendency to turn things in on themselves anyway.
I don't really recommend this, but if you're comfortable with yourself, you can, you can do one of the like, hold on. I'm sorry. Maybe, maybe it was just me. Maybe I might have misheard you. Right. It could be my fault.
18:01
But could you say that again? Would you mind, like, sort of explaining that to me one more time? You can, if you feel confident enough in yourself to do that, you can add to that question phrase, right? And take even more weight off to give them a chance, and to demonstrate to the room that you're like, I'm not trying to tear this person down. I'm giving them a fair chance, right? We're all, we're all in agreement.
I'm giving them a fair chance, right? And then you can tear them apart. If like now you have time, and you've set your ground, and like, see how they react, right? It gives it gives that space.
Yeah, that's it for the show today. Thanks for listening and find us on X at Ego de Science. That is E I G O D E S C I E N C. See you next time.
