Stop Apologizing!

Posted on by cgill1138

Fuck you, don’t tell me what to do. It’s a free country–don’t tread on me!

A comic on my Facebook feed triggered my wanting to write this, but I’ll save it for the end because it’s substantively different than what’s been irking me. This is one of those thing’s that’s floating around the aether. It usually takes the form of listicles. E.g. “10 Things You Should Stop Apologizing For”.

1. In my younger and more vulnerable years my friend gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my head ever since. “Stop apologizing for everything.” It was good advice, and my tepid prose belies the gravitas with which she exhorted this. She was not looking out for my best interests when she said this. This wasn’t friendly advice. It was a demand, for her benefit. The thing about good friends is that they operate with the presumption that they will be dealing with you until death do you part (or at least the foreseeable future). My friend was having difficulty with this arrangement given my actions. What she said was, “stop apologizing for everything”; what she meant was, “you’re sweating buckets of neuroticism, and it’s gross. Cut that shit out”. She told me to improve myself. In Freudian lingo, she was helping me develop a healthy ego and superego. Her demands laid the framework for objective rules that are too be followed (the domain of the superego), and the requirement that I do a better job controlling my baser urges (the role of the ego). “But Chris, you still come off as plenty neurotic.” Yes, but believe it or not, I used to be worse.

Anyway, this is less about the people taking the advice, than it is about the people giving the advice. There’s good advice and there’s bad advice, but even good advice given for bad reasons can be unproductive. To get a sampling of this advice, I typed in “stop apologizing” to Google and looked through the first 10 results. They vary in their usefulness, but it’s the why/how that counts. One general theme is how  pitched to one gender these articles are. 6 of them have “women” in the title, URL, or website heading. It can be very useful advice for guys as well, but it’s never been my experience to see these kinds of articles shared by or directed at males. That is not to say that it should be, or that it is unfair to direct them towards women. It is an observation, that this is an issue that concerns itself more with female readers than male. On a similar note, of the 9 that provided names that allowed the gender of the author to be identified, 8 were authored by women. 4 were listicles (I am not counting the WikiHow article, as the premise of the site is step-by-step guidelines). 3 were defensive confessionals, opening with some variation of “I apologize for stuff and I shouldn’t have to”.

I’ll start with the listicles, which are the easiest to discuss because they can be dismissed out of hand. I could go through and fisk them line by line, sure but when one of them has a point (#8) that is seven sentences long and has 5 hashtags in it not germane to any realistic subject sorting, it’s hard to treat it as an actual argument or persuasive piece. Advice about altering your personality should take more than two sentences. Moreover, the effort to make larger lists means that the content suffers. You lead with your 3 good points, but the publisher wants 15, you get to 5, they say they’ll take 10, and you just throw something out because the standards for a lot of this are just super low. I’d expect it from Lifehack and HuffPo; I’m surprised and disappointed to see it in Business Insider, which I presumed would be a little more professional. I’ll grab another, related HuffPo piece and sub it in, though.

2. So after burning the chaff, let’s just go in order from 1st to 10th. An Op-Ed in the NY Times portends to elucidate why women apologize, and then impels them to stop. It starts out, as all journalism apparently must, with a personal anecdote–I’m guilty of it myself, in fairness. I suggest playing suitable mood-music to go with the article-reading. Our author reminisces about the time she was at a restaurant and the absolute fuck-up of a prep cook didn’t perfectly wash her salad greens. She explained the tragedy to her waiter, apologized, and asked to re-examine the menu. Then, horror of horrors, when her next dish arrived a galling 20 minutes later (or, idk, maybe that’s impressive in NYC), it had bacon on it! Kick ass! Oh, wait, she does CrossFit is a vegetarian, a trait for which she was “‘very sorry'” (her quotes). But alas, her travails unceasing, her fork became “a casualty in the confusion”. And yet some people still think there’s a benevolent God in charge or the world! In a degrading, humiliating rite far more obscene than any of my bookmarked porn, she apologized to the bus boy. Were Anne Frank around to see it, she would have broken down sobbing uncontrollably. She brings us out of this harrowing tale with the words, “For so many women, myself included, apologies are inexorably linked with our conception of politeness”, which she makes sound like is a bad thing based on the rhetorical structure she’s using, but this sounds like a pretty sensible fact. On the one hand, examples are a tricky thing, and we should not get so caught up in examples as to straw man an argument. On the other hand, the example chosen is a window into the mind of the chooser.

In lieu of an actual thesis as teased by the headline, we get a story about how a woman might apologize in her day-to-day life. We are already told upfront that women should stop apologizing, and it is implicit in our minds when reading about this scenario that the author thinks she shouldn’t have had to apologize for these incidents. Annoyingly, we will never get this stated explicitly, and the anecdote is left to hang, so let no man give me shit for making assumptions about it’s meaning. So the author’s salad was messed up. She apologized to the waiter. And by apologized, she means she started her sentence with an interjection of polite deference, “I’m sorry, but…”. She said this to the waiter, the guy who had no hand in making the salad. It wasn’t his fault, and she is asking him to do work for her, and therefore, she offered up a line of deference. And if the man has been employed anywhere for more than 8 weeks, I will bet you all of my money that he apologized much, much more obsequiously, even though he also bore no personal responsibility for the incident–yes, he’s acting as a representative for the institution, but on a personal level, he is obviously not at fault. Both of these acts are appropriate. While it is the restaurant’s job to cater to your whims, it is still a human interaction, and politeness to strangers is a reasonable expectation. Is it obligatory? No. And one doesn’t need to literally say “sorry”. But a “Pardon me” or “excuse me” is something our parents should have in one way or another trained us into saying out of habit. For the second incident, we have no explanation for who is at fault. Did the menu clearly state that there was bacon on the item, but she neglected to ask for it off? Because if so, that’s on her. And if that’s the case, our author is now asking “why should I apologize when I make a mistake?” The other case would be that she did ask for no bacon, because she is insane, in which case our server is this time at fault. He could be fully at fault if he did not record her order properly, or he could be partially at fault if he relayed it properly but the kitchen staff messed up and he delivered it without a proper audit. Either way, she was still asking the fellow human to do work more work than initially anticipated on her behalf, so she let out a reflexive, flitting “I’m sorry, but…”. Again, if this guy lasted in the business more than a couple weeks, he would have also apologized for the mistake. Servers are by necessity one of the most apologetic professions in existence. Her final incident was her inexplicably missing fork, which, come on, she dropped it. That’s on her, so she apologized to the bus boy, who is not her server and not responsible for dropping her fork. “Ah, a mere trifle, madame” he surely replied, with a humble yet effete bow. Again, all of this falls under politeness that should be reflexive. This is all essentially frivolousness that a quick back-and-forth, rote “Pardon me, sir”… “Oh, my apologies, ma’am” should cover without anyone having to think about it, let alone dwell upon. Yet, here we are. “Politeness is stupid. Why do I have to say ‘I’m sorry’ when I didn’t really do anything [significantly] wrong?” This is a completely normal question for a teenager to ask, and the completely normal response is “because I said so”. It’s worrying, though, when a middle-age woman asks it, and she asks it to the world, and not her parents.

In psychological parlance, politeness is an objective rule. That is, it is a rule that exists outside of yourself (a subject); it is a rule agreed upon by other people (objects). Understanding that there are objective rules that must be followed is, at least by the old standards of developmental psychology, considered a necessary component of maturity. From a philosophical standpoint, we are allowed debating the validity of these rules in the abstract, and politically we can debate the necessity, but as far as psychological stability goes, rules are meant to be followed by adults. Your formative years are your opportunity to challenge these rules; once you’re an adult, you deal with it for society’s sake. Politeness exists for the sake of other people. We can debate the nuances of it, but at the end of the day, adults are still obligated to be polite because that is expected of them by other people. That is, there are other people on this Earth beside you. Resistance to ideas such as politeness stem from an opposition to the notion that the existence of others is not to be taken into consideration. So at its core, that is the message this is projecting: other people don’t matter; your feelings are all that matter in the world. Philosophers are welcome to object to this all they want, but it is not a ministry I support.

Her article continues: “True, this affliction is not exclusive to our gender. It can be found among men — in particular, British men — but it is far more stereotypical of women. So, in the words of a popular 2014 Pantene ad, why are women always apologizing?” British men? Pretty sure the Canadians are a sovereign nation now…. But much more importantly, she is appealing to a shampoo ad to make a point about the human condition. And she is not the only person in this article compendium to do so. It may seem of little consequence, but there’s a lot to that. It’s not the first ad to be appealed to as bearing an upstanding moral message to women. I very much recommend this article on a similar commercial. It’s an ad. Made by a heartless multinational (P&G in this case) who would throw every woman you love into a blender if they thought it would net them a profit after the lawsuits. They are trying to sell shampoo. Multinationals with shareholders to placate do not spend millions of dollars on commercials to raise conscientiousness about the human condition. What they will spend millions of dollars on is commercials that will make you remember their product, and it’s apparently worked. “Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint? We don’t know either, but we do have a nice shampoo. Maybe having a better shampoo will make that pain go away.” The ad is appealing to preying on insecurity. Their pitch is that products will make you feel better. “If I just had _…”. Fill in the blank with whatever you want; it won’t make it better.

She goes on, “One commonly posited theory, which informs everything from shampoo commercials to doctoral dissertations, is that being perceived as rude is so abhorrent to women that we need to make ourselves less obtrusive before we speak up. According to a 2010 study in the journal Psychological Science, ‘women have a lower threshold for what constitutes offensive behavior,’ so are more likely to see a need for an apology in everyday situations.” This “commonly posited theory”, is, I imagine, not one she read from a paper, but just one of those ideas you pick up from the aether. And it’s fair to have those, but what our author does is juxtapose that with an actual “scientific” study, implying that this isn’t just something people are kicking around, but one being posited by actual pyschologists who have a body of literature we can examine. The fact that she links to the study is nice, but considering how glossed-over it is, I think the study exists more so she can pull the quote from its discussion section rather than to actually entertain an analysis of research. It’s a pretty short paper. You can skip the introduction and go right down to methods for the first study. Tl;dr, they took about 60 college psych majors and had them keep a diary of when they “apologized to someone or did something to someone else that might have deserved an apology (regardless of whether or not you apologized)”. Right off the bat, my gripe is going to be that college psych majors represent a demographic with a lot of personality bias compared to the general population, so anything that doesn’t come with this warning label guns-blazing should be tossed out immediately. These are young people who have basically chosen that, for their daily job, they want to listen to peoples’ problems and help them out. These are people who may have a different outlook on concepts like empathy, social obligation, restitution, and other concepts related to the feelings and mores involved with apologies than the general population. Nonetheless, their findings from the college psych major diaries:

  • Women and men did not differ in the proportion of offenses they reported as transgressors versus victims
  • Most offenses occurred between friends (47%)
  • Men and women did not differ in the proportion of offenses they reported in the various relationship categories
  • Women reported offering more apologies than men did
  • Women also reported committing more offenses than men did.
  • Men and Women did not differ in the proportion of offenses for which they apologized
  • men and women also did not differ in how they apologized.
  • Men and women were equally likely to include each of the elements in their apologies
  • Women also reported being the victims of more offenses than men did
  • Men received apologies for a marginally significant greater proportion of offenses than women did (without getting too deep into the statistics, this was a very slight difference

In the discussion, the quote our Times author picked appears, “The diary data suggest that women offer more apologies than men do because women have a lower threshold for what constitutes offensive behavior. If so, gender differences in the perceived severity of offenses may lead men and women to have different views about whether or not an apology is warranted. As both transgressors and victims, women are more likely than men to judge offenses as meriting an apology.” That is, women apologize more because they think situations warrant apologies more than men do. Because otherwise, men and women apologize at the same rate in basically the same manner (and again, this is based on the diaries of a handful of psych majors at a college for a couple weeks). Our Times author never addresses this finding in the paper, because this wasn’t meant to be a discussion, it’s meant to be another round in the magazine to be fired at us.

“Here’s the paradox: Every day, we see more unapologetically self-assured female role models, yet women’s extreme prostration seems only to have increased.” Seems being the operative word there. Look, if this were an 80 year old woman writing this who started out with talking about how things were in the old days, but no, it’s worse today for sure, it might be a little more convincing, but this is a middle-aged woman who opened up about a time she had to be polite in a restaurant.

“Look at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s new ads warning New York straphangers against inconsiderate behavior…. Graphics depict men displaying almost all these behaviors, except… one…. The scenario seems ridiculously unrealistic — and not just because it’s the only one I’ve never witnessed firsthand. The ads are saying that men are far less likely to be conscious (sic) of personal space than women. So why, even after making ourselves physically smaller on the subway, are we still the ones apologizing?”

I agree, I find it ridiculously unrealistic that New Yorkers could even conceptualize of anything approaching polite behavior in public, let alone public transit…. Our author completely misses the logic right in front of her. Men are far less likely to be conscious conscientious of personal space than women, therefore women will notice when a violation has been made more often than men, and therefore react to that more than men. Based on our psych article and her own suspicions, men have a higher threshold for considering something to be impolite, so they apologize less. So if she wants women to apologize less, then she ought to be advocating that women increase their tolerance for what they currently perceive as annoyances and rudeness.

*Aside: “conscientious” means you’re thinking about it and considering it; “conscious” means you are literally capable of thinking and perceiving. Someone who lacks conscientiousness might be inconsiderately blocking a path, oblivious to their rudeness. Someone who lacks consciousnesses might be blocking the path, but it’s not deliberate as much as it is a consequence of them lacking the brain activity necessary to do things like move their limbs, let alone conceptualize their interference with other peoples’ desires. We sometimes use “conscious” metaphorically to mean awareness, etc., but unless you’re trying to be poetic, the word you want is “conscientious”.

“To me, [apologies] sound like tiny acts of revolt, expressions of frustration or anger at having to ask for what should be automatic. They are employed when a situation is so clearly not our fault that we think the apology will serve as a prompt for the person who should be apologizing. It’s a Trojan horse for genuine annoyance, a tactic left over from centuries of having to couch basic demands in palatable packages in order to get what we want.” There is a line between politeness and obsequiousness, and like all lines, it’s specific coordinates may be up for debate. But I’m not seeing any debate about the line here. To me, I’m getting “politeness is hard work. Let’s quit.” We shouldn’t have to be polite, but yet, when we live in civilization we must. Like with most issues, there’s a practical and moral element to it. Politeness makes things easier, and it is also the proper thing to do; it shows respect for your fellow man. And it is fine that we gripe about this burden, as comparatively light as it is. The Amy Schumer sketch she mentions can arguably fill this cathartic role for our frustrations. But that does not absolve us from our duties.

“When a woman opens her window at 3 a.m. on a weeknight and shouts to her neighbor, ‘I’m sorry, but can you turn the music down?’ the ‘sorry’ is not an attempt at unobtrusiveness. It’s not even good manners. It’s a poor translation for a string of expletives…. It comes off as passive-aggressive…. So we should stop. It’s not what we’re saying that’s the problem, it’s what we’re not saying. The sorrys are taking up airtime that should be used for making logical, declarative statements, expressing opinions and relaying accurate impressions of what we want.” If everyone would just be purely logical all the time…. It’s an attractive sentiment. In our late-night woman example, this is far less a moral choice of politeness than one of tactical practicality. And the fact that this woman has chosen to wield it makes the case against the author saying we should drop it. You’re probably not going to have a reasonable conversation with somebody blasting their music at 3 am. Maybe they’re first time offenders and they really are ignorant as to the effects of the volume on the outside world, and a single “Yo, turn the music down!” would suffice. But probably not. In all likelihood, the people blasting music at 3 am are not people who are going to give you a logical exchange on the applications of music volume with respect to time. They’re probably going to be aggressive and hostile. And that’s not worth dealing with. So this woman has made the sensible decision to feign deference and obsequiousness to her uncouth neighbors, thereby hoping to abrogate confrontation all the while effecting a diminution in decibels. And that sucks that she has to do that. And that woman is more than welcome to log onto Facebook now that she’s been woken up and post about how her neighbors are [all sorts of unseemly names]. But that does not mean she shouldn’t have adopted the apologetic tone. Not because she is morally obligated to do so, but practically. And the fact that there are practical reasons for “sorrys” doesn’t mean politeness is a farce.

“Julia Child, a consummate charmer, said it best: ‘Never apologize.’ Probably because she never asked anyone to eat dirt.” Again, we have a citation with a quote, but it seems the context is missing. In context: “If a dish goes horribly wrong, like a ‘vile’ eggs Florentine she once made for a friend, Julia instructed, ‘Never apologize.’ She considered it unseemly for a cook to twist herself into knots of excuses and explanations. Such admissions ‘only make a bad situation worse,’ she said, by drawing attention to one’s shortcomings (or self-perceived shortcomings) and prompting your guest to think: Yes, you’re right, this really is an awful meal. ‘The cook must simply grin and bear it,’ Julia said firmly.”

3. The HuffPo piece I’m subbing in should be briefer. It opens with the author telling the story of the time she was in the mailroom and a colleague entered just after her, and she apologized for being in the way. “Her response [was,] ‘Do not ever apologize for your right to exist in a community space.'” Which is weirdly phrased advice, to the point where I am assuming her friend is some weird marketing or HR execu-bot, or our author is embellishing the dialogue.

“When I thought about how often I apologized, I also began thinking about my students. Many of my students–and especially the young women–apologize for much the same reasons I catch myself apologizing. They apologize for existing in spaces and places in which they have every right to exist… for doing work they need to do… for asking questions to which they need answers… for “taking up” my time; time, mind you, that I am employed (and happy) to give them.” Again, a lot of this is stemming from politeness. Unlike the Times author, this one is not asking to be excused from politeness. It delivers this advice: “Existing in a space is not a privilege–it is a right. Treat it as such, and have the courage to stop apologizing for it…. If your rightful existence in a shared space happens to inconvenience someone, that is not your problem.” What this misses is the why. Most of these apologies amount to reflexive social niceties. And in excess, yes, these can make you look more obsequious than polite, even tot he degree that it will wear on your psyche. There’s no real rule as to what amount of “apologizing” is necessary. A lot of it is personal preference. If you feel that you are apologizing too much, do it less; it’s not that you need to stop all together. That’s the proverbial pendulum swinging in the opposite direction. There’s also a line between assertiveness and haughty. The “I apologize too much” feeling this author seems to be expressing is rooted in insecurity. Compulsively apologizing because you are insecure about your position isn’t mentally healthy. And even simply changing your language from “I’m sorry” to “pardon me” can make a difference. The point shouldn’t be that apologizing is inherently unnecessary, it’s that it serves a purpose. If you find yourself saying “sorry” not out of rote politeness, but out of an urge to avoid negative affect, then by all means change the behavior. But this is unnecessary advice for someone secure in their “excuse me”‘s.

4. Lifehacker, not to be confused with LifeHack, gives a non-listicle approach to the issue. The author makes the common opening that, aside from legitimate grievances which require apologies, we apologize for a lot of little things. The author doesn’t quite seem to articulate that this habit is born from politeness, but nonetheless, he seems to give a respectable analysis. He notes that when apologizing veers into obsequiousness, it can be unhelpful, and recommends behavioral changes such as saying “pardon me” instead, which I obviously endorsed earlier in my own writing. He also makes the astute observation that excessive apologies, when directed at people who are helping you (e.g. when you apologize to your spouse when they do the dishes for you, as if you are obliged to do them) puts a burden on others to think they have to take extra care of your feelings. He does this through referencing other non-academic sources, and does so with effectiveness. Not the way I’d write it, but it’s nice work.

5. The WikiHow article comes well laden with sources–22 of them in all. This gives a substantial amount of referential material to slog through, if we so chose. Unlike the Times article or any number of articles I see on a weekly basis, this author seems to be using the references as actual references, not purely as weapons in rhetorical arguments. She even cites the same article as the one referenced in the Times editorial, but she seems to follow the authors’ conclusions more soundly. At least I’m going to give this author a lot of benefit of the doubt. I could debate the merits of using the various citations, but I don’t think it’s necessary. It’s more of a professorial impulse than one of frustration. I don’t endorse every component of the piece, such as the “Swap apologies for a silly word” method, but overall I would give it a good rating. “When to apologize is always a judgment call; it won’t be the same for everyone.” Good show.

6. Tiny Buddha, which as referenced by the Lifehacker article, provides a quick commentary “that many of us say we’re sorry when it isn’t actually necessary.” The author notes, “While we can never know other people’s intentions, we can recognize that our words influence our state of mind–and apologizing when we’ve done nothing wrong needlessly creates guilt and undermines our confidence,” which is a valid argument, but not one fully teased out. Again, this issue is when apologizing veers outside the realm or rote politeness into unhealthy toadying. To reiterate, it’s not the apologizing itself that does the damage. “It can also create an imbalance in our relationships, since it tells other people we think we are always responsible for any potential conflict or miscommunication; and also sends the message that we’re more interested in being agreeable than being honest.” The danger becomes that honesty morphs into curtness, and then into rudeness. “I’m just being honest” is the classic rationalization for blunt rudeness masquerading as objective truth. The important nuance of civility is at risk of being lost with this advice.

7. Time Magazine opens up right out of the gate with an ad for Pantene in the subheadline: “A new Pantene ad calls attention to how the apology is too often used as a crutch and a way to downplay female power”. AdBlock can’t block that one. Just, not even going to bury that in the article… out in the open and up front with it. *shivers* “Here are a few of the dumbest things I’ve apologized for in the last week:

  • To a waiter, when I asked again for water, after he repeatedly forgot to bring it
  • To the dude who bumped into me at a party, spilling his drink down the front of my dress
  • To a friend of a friend of a friend I agreed to give advice to, when she had to change the time”

TIL women secretly resent waitstaff, apparently.  Again, all of these are instances of social politeness. The waiter should have brought the water fine. Lower your tip and move on with your life. Guy should have watched out where he was going. Or you should have–I wasn’t there. Again, I assume he apologized more profusely, and if he didn’t, fuck him, he’s an asshole. You know what, fine, tell your friend of a friend of a friend to eat shit and die, and start treating all your interactions like that and tell me how wonderful life is for you in five years. I know, I’m clearly runnign out of energy and fairness here. Maybe I should have done fewer of these. Mea culpa. “I started thinking about sorry this morning after watching the latest empowerment ad from Pantene (yes, the shampoo brand) titled ‘Sorry, Not Sorry.‘” The fact that she knows the title for the commercial is downright terrifying. I didn’t even know ads had titles. I mean, I get that the guys who create them probably give them titles, but I didn’t think the public would be interested in that information. “It’s followed by a click moment: ‘Don’t be sorry,’ the ad states, followed by a hashtag sales pitch to ‘Shine Strong.'”.

I…just… I mean… IT’S AN AD! “It really makes you think…” It shouldn’t. If an ad is making you reconsider yourself, run. Run far away. “As far as ads go, this one is good — and yet when a shampoo brand is telling us to stop apologizing, it’s fair to say we’ve reached a sorry tipping point.” Ads are not social commentary, they are ads. “Let’s spend millions on an ad campaign to debate minor social issues” said the board member, right before he was voted out, for some reason. “[A]s the Pantene ad conveys accurately, you’d be hard-pressed to find a guy who says sorry with quite the same frequency.” As the Chevy ad conveys accurately, you’d be hard-pressed to find a gal who understands the importance of first-in-class torque and rugged dependability….

She lays out snippets of insight from people she apparently knows. “‘Sorry is a ritualized form meaning something like, “I hope this is O.K. with you,”‘ says Robin Lakoff, a linguist at University of California, Berkeley…. Some have argued that’s because men don’t want to admit they’re wrong; Deborah Tannen, a gender linguist (sic), has reasoned that men are simply more attuned to the fact that an apology can symbolize defeat.”

-The author is reminded of the time she was having dinner with Groucho and had to apologize to the waiter.

“Still other studies have determined that what we deem worthy of an apology differs. In one from 2010, researchers determined that men are just as likely to apologize if they think they’ve committed some transgression, but men and women can easily disagree on what kinds of things require an apology.” Hey, there’s that same study. Boy, those college kids sure get around. Notice the author does not bother linking to the study. I.e. she is not interested in sharing information for the sake of educating, it’s rhetorical ammo intended to appeal to a higher power. “I’m right; science says so.” The author invokes this rhetoric again with the suggestion “studies have shown”.

“‘Once, I was my trying to leave a bookstore and my way was blocked by a woman who was sitting on the floor,’ screenwriter Nell Scovell tells me….I made her move. Then she bumped another woman who turned around and said, you guessed it, ‘Sorry.’ Three grown women all apologizing to each other for no reason in under five seconds.” I think I’ve seen this one.

She name-drops 8 people by my count. Citations are one thing, but she’s only pulling single quotes, peppering her paper with statements from people who wrote X, or do Y. It’s hard to say whether this is a rhetorical strategy or a bad habit picked up in some sort of journalism class. It is, whether intentionally or not, an appeal to ethos. “This person wrote a whole book on it, so this is a legitimate opinion. This is totally not just my opinion being restated from an authority figure to give it an air of authority.”

-The author just wants to say she knows Woody Allen.

The thesis is actually never supported in the whole article. It’s possible that the headline was not penned by the author (often times those are written separately), in which case there is no thesis in the article, and this is all just stream of consciousness-cum-shampoo ad. It’s hard to even label this as bad advice; it’s no advice. It’s feelings masquerading as argument. It’s weird that the author stumbles upon the whole sorry-is-just-being-polite deal, but it seems very glossed over. “And yet the modern-day apology — at least when it comes to women at work — is rarely an apology at all. We’re not sorry to be asking a question, we’re simply trying to be polite…. Sorry is simply another way of downplaying our power, of softening what we do, to seem nice.” Apparently, only working women apologize to be polite? But politeness is… downplaying female power? It’s not a terribly cogent line of reasoning. The forceful filter of the analysis through the lens of gender displays a lack of perspective: if men do this at all to (which they do, although one could argue the relative extents), then this isn’t a sexual power-dynamic thing, this is something else. Can it be a sexual power-dynamic thing? Sure. But there’s more to it that’s being missed. One can certainly make the argument that apologizing is a sign of servility, and that if you want to assume power, you should apologize less. But that would involve making a value-judgement that power is desirable, and this author doesn’t have the balls to do that. Because that would be making a decision on the certainty of something. And she’s not the type of person to be certain of anything. This is why she references half a dozen authors but never gives them more than a line and doesn’t discuss any body of writing, why she doesn’t actually cite or discuss studies, and why she finds a shampoo commercial empowering. “Those women are so confident!” The gorgeous, sharp-dressed women who are holding their own in the casual business world of men. These women do not exist in reality; they are an impossible standard. It’s not the looks that are fake, it’s the lifestyle. Pantene is selling you that unattainable lifestyle. You’ll never get it. But you just might die trying, and on your way, you know what shampoo to pick to give you that gorgeous hair.

8. The last article is a summary for a self-hypnosis audio recording. I nearly skipped it after glancing at it, giving it up for probable nonsense. But in a hypocritical stretch to get a list of shit into article form, I gave it a read and was pleasantly surprised. It’s pretty concise and fairly sensible. Don’t judge an article by its cover, I guess. The sex of the author isn’t given, but I will bet a princely sum that it is a man.

-Probable author

It’s very direct and unsympathetic. “If you apologize all the time your apology actually loses it’s power of meaning…. Over apologizers also excuse other people. It’s not your role to apologize for others it is, of course, down to them…. If you do this you are sending out the signal that you are a victim and should therefore be treated like one…. if you keep on apologizing people will assume you are not competent…. others are more likely to blame you if they feel you are already blaming your self.” It’s solid, useful advice that is based on rational argumentation and not appeal to your emotions. This isn’t about how you and how you perceive yourself, it’s about how the world perceives you. You are coming off as these, and these are bad. It is advice rooted in objectivity, not subjectivity. My recommendation is to save yourself the $15 and just re-read the article.

9. This is the comic that piqued my interest in making this article. Initially, the same arguments I find myself repeating can be applied. I rolled my eyes as I read on, explaining away each frame, but when I hit the penultimate frame, I completely changed my mind about this one. “I’m sorry I’m such a disappointment”. I recognize that sentiment. Haven’t had it in a long time, but I remember it when I see it. That’s not an apology; this has nothing to do with apologizing. Not like the other articles I’ve covered, at least. Much in the way “I’m sorry” is a colloquial expression of politeness, in this instance, it is an expression of self-loathing. “I’m sorry I’m such a disappointment” is a euphemism for “I hate myself”. I think it’s endemic in teenagers and young adults–or at least they seem to deal with it fairly universally–and I suspect this comic is based out of a teenage experience, but that’s not to say older folks don’t deal with these kinds of feeling as well. The advice the comic gives is a bit overly-simplistic and cornball, but it’s heart is in the right place: it doesn’t want people to hate themselves. And it gets the notion that changing the mindset requires changing behavior, recommending substituting more self-affirming statements in for self-debasing ones. Not bad advice, but probably insufficient on it’s own. Still, I have no gripes with the arguments given with either person involved in this. Our apologizer (clearly distinct from the one giving the advice) is not using terrible arguments to justify not having to be a decent person. Their self-hatred isn’t a rationalization, it’s an emotion, and emotions are harder to fix than actions. In order to, say, be more polite, you simply have to be more polite. It may not be easy, but it is simple. Not hating yourself? I don’t know the simple fix for that. It’s probably going to be multifaceted. The adviser in the comic offers their best, and just because it’s not going to be completely sufficient doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.

There’s a seductive desire to suggest that self-love is the antidote to self-hate. Possibly, but I’ll say that personally, that never worked for me. I never stopped hating myself because I started loving myself. I mean, I think I’m pretty great, but I wouldn’t say I love myself. That just sounds weird. I suppose the best advice I can give is that you can always change. Who you are is defined by your actions, by what you do. If you hate who you are, you can change. It may not be easy, but it is always a possibility. There’s always tomorrow, another chance to do something different, to be someone different. There’s no guarantee of success, but there is the guarantee that you can try. Yoda be damned, at least give it a try.

 

 

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