A thought experiment
Suppose that you host a party at which you serve soup. The soup consists almost entirely of vegetables, but you add a small amount of chicken stock. During the party, a few of your guests complain that they are vegetarians, and thus find your soup unpalatable.
Assuming that you don’t have some kind of personal vendetta against vegetarians, which of these do you consider to be the more reasonable response?
A. Apologise; offer some kind of assurance that you will remember that some of your friends are vegetarians the next time you make soup.
B. Complain bitterly that the vegetarians are hurting your feelings by making you out to be some kind of horrible anti-vegetarian bigot, when you clearly didn’t intend to offend them, and when everyone knows that you have absolutely nothing against vegetarians and treat everyone equally whether they are an omnivore, herbivore or insectivore. Complain that you couldn’t possibly have been expected to remember the vegetarians, since there are so few of them. (Go off on a tangent in which you contemplate why so few vegetarians come to your parties; conclude that they must have some genetic reason to dislike you.) Complain that the vegetarians are being oversensitive — it’s just a little bit of chicken stock; it’s not like you slaughtered a cow on the table in front of them — and tell them that they should have just shut up and eaten the soup.
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A.
It is simply the more reasonable response of the two options given to choose from. There are other ways to respond too, but of these two, A is reasonable and B is not.
Unless you are wanting to specifically use the chkn stock you made from a scratch,
C) Use Ina Paarmans Chkn stock: tastes lovely and contains no chkns (in fact all her stocks are vegetarian, I don’t know what black arts she uses to make them taste like meat).
I always try to offer a vegetarian option when I cater, it’s just polite. Not that I’m saying “omg you’re a bad person for not considering the small percentage of your friends who are vegetarians!!”, I’m just saying that if one is catering a party and one knows there will be (or even might be, depening on one’s invite list and who has rsvpd) people with food issues (vegetarian, nuts, whatever), one should cater for all the invitees. If you reallllly want to make a specific dish and it contravenes someone’s food laws, then make another dish that doesn’t. For me a party is about the people attending as much as about the reason for the party, so it’s important to me that everyone is happy.
Just my 2c.
Argh, I apologise for poorly-spelled comment above. Note to self: read through before hitting “submit”
.
This isn’t actually about vegetarianism. It’s an analogy, which like all analogies (as Hodgestar has been quick to point out) is flawed and should be treated with suspicion.
But Ina Paarman’s stock is very nice; I stopped buying actual meat stock cubes ages ago because they’re gross. My unvegetarian vice is fish sauce. Mmm, bottled meat.
Oooh, an analogy for what? You want to have some party games that involve Great Old One-summoning but worry about the tiny fraction of your guests who might be offended?
Clearly this is simply a diatribe lamenting the need to conform to social mores over the desire to indulge in emotional reactions.
No?
Perhaps then outlining mature behavior over a childish response based entirely in embarrassment and a fear of being ostracized solely because one lacked the foresight to consider those that are different.
Closer?
Sadly, the analogy is flawed, as previously stated, due to the business given to both options. The one is clearly being favoured as irrational. But then I suspect objectivity was never your intention to begin with and this is nothing more than a shameless grasp for solidarity towards your own way of thinking.
But hey, who says there’s anything wrong with that? I like you. And since our opinions are not what are being solicited here, rather our validation, I choose the option you would.
Yes, well spotted, Dan; I am in fact showing blatant bias towards one of the options, and the question is intended to be rhetorical.
Why the analogy? I find that comparing sexism to racism is not useful, because people who react poorly to being criticised for saying something kinda sexist tend to react equally poorly to being criticised saying something kinda racist, for the same reasons. They define both racism and sexism to be only deliberate, conscious acts of prejudice, and thus parse the criticism as an extremely harsh personal attack.
I compared sexism to insensitivity towards vegetarians, because I hope most people realise that when a vegetarian is offered an almost-but-not-quite vegetarian meal this is usually because of ignorance or carelessness, not because of deliberate anti-vegetarian malice. And when a vegetarian says “gelatin is made of ground-up hooves, so I can’t eat it”, they are not saying “you must hate vegetarians and you are a terrible person”; they are saying “this might not seem like a big deal to you, but it is to me — for moral reasons, I can’t eat gelatin any more than I can eat beef.”
(Which is not to say vegetarians don’t get pissed off about getting offered not-quite-vegetarian food all the time from people who profess to know what vegetarianism is. And if more people reacted with option B to actual vegetarianism-related situations, I’m certain that there would be a lot more unpleasantness and bad feeling surrounding the issue. And maybe in other parts of the world accommodating vegetarians is already a nasty hot-button issue — but it’s relatively civilised down here in Cape Town.)
It is by no means a perfect analogy — in real life you seldom have to serve the same soup to a hundred people, for a start.
Edited to add: Sorry; just to clarify further, this was specifically in response to an ongoing discussion about sexism in the free / open source software community (or at least parts of it; the discussion is frustratingly vague most of the time). In this context, I am comparing the overall experience of participating in a particular mailing list to “soup”, and the occasional thread in which some dude makes an off-hand sexist remark to the addition of chicken stock / fish sauce / bacon sprinkles. Unfortunately these threads frequently devolve into lengthy flamewars about sexism and who is being more mean (the person making the original joke or the person who criticised them).
C) Tell them nobody is forcing them to eat the food that you made effort with to prepare, and that they are more than welcome to have some of the salad.
Ah, I know this soup and it does taste bitter indeed.
And you’re absolutely right to use this analogy. Either the soup is vegetarian or it is not. I’ll be honest and say that I seldom advocate black and white arguments (for want of better term) but there is no shade of grey here. Either you’re offended or you are not. And not speaking against it only gives it silent sanction.
Long ago I had to learn the hard lesson that if I wanted to advocate being a “good man” I had to accept it when I was told that I wasn’t. It’s hard not to take it as a personal attack. Us blokes are ingrained with the idea that, in this confused society of ours, acceptance amongst our peers is just one inappropriate comment away. Bigoted behavior is almost cultivated in us from an early age. Why? God knows. Fear perhaps.
It’s not as bad as it used to be, granted, but now-a-days there’s this notion that being offensive is alright as long as you don’t offend anyone. Well, to me that’s as bizarre as masturbating with a condom on but the idea here being is that you can be inappropriate as long as you can undermine the response.
“It’s just a joke.”
“You’re being over sensitive.”
“I don’t mind you saying that about me.”
And my pet hate:
“It’s the New South Africa/New Millennium/New Age of the Space Monkey, you can say that now. They’ll understand.”
Now, I don’t claim to be perfect. (I say this through clenched teeth because experience has taught me that this line always prefaces idiocy) I even went to such a far extreme in trying to right myself that I had to be told that I had become condescending. Shock/horror! And I still catch myself saying the most stupid shit. However, I do feel that I am somewhat more enlightened than most.
The point I’m trying to make, in my strange meandering way, is that I never would have come to the understanding I have now if I didn’t have a good woman telling me exactly when I was being an absolute ass. And more importantly, why.
So, more power to your elbow. If that soup isn’t entirely vegetarian, you don’t need to swallow any of it.
Most of us say and think stupid things sometimes. I am not immune to unconscious sexism just because I am a woman, and I’m certainly not immune to unconscious racism or other -isms. And if I say something that sounds kinda *-ist, I would like to know about it. I may not agree that the criticism is reasonable, but I’d rather know that at least one person interpreted it that way than not know, so that I can make an informed decision about my future behaviour.
The trouble is that many people seem to believe that sexism, racism and other -isms were easily recognisable, overt behaviours which are All Over Now and In The Past, and that we are all living in a wonderful egalitarian utopia where no trace of unfair discrimination remains. They believe that they are not capable of behaving in a *-ist way, ever, and that anyone who interprets their behaviour in that way must be deluded / oversensitive / being reverse-*-ist / being PC in order to impress someone / deliberately playing the [something] card in order to gain an unfair advantage.
I would love to live in that utopia, but I fear that we have a long way to go. And we can only get there if we are able to talk about what we’re doing wrong.