Readercon: On "Socially Awkward"

I don't know how many people who are currently reading me have any feelers in the SF fandom community, something which I have been on the fringes of in the past and may again, someday, if I ever get back to working with fiction routinely.

But in any case: there was a recent convention called Readercon, which happens to be located about five or ten minutes from where I lived until last fall.  I never managed to attend; I had always been Meaning To Do So Sometime (one of the founders was enthusiastic about my potential enjoyment of the con; eventually, I also had a friend running programming), but honestly my social resources are sharply limited so I don't get out much in general.

Genevieve Valentine, an author attending the convention, was sexually harassed by a Big Name Fan, Rene Walling.  Readercon had a policy of lifetime bans for harassers, which had been implemented previously; Walling got a two-year suspension.  The internet exploded.  You can find a collection of posts on the subject here.

Among the many things that has been said is, roughly, "But but but but what if this man is an Aspie!", a matter which has been responded to by others.  And people have even noticed that, y'know, maybe this particular "sexual harassment is done by socially awkward people, so we have to be forgiving of their disability" strawman is perhaps the prime way that geeky/nerdy subcultures forgive assault and rape.

And a couple of people said something that i'm frankly embarrassed to have not come up with on my own:  if we're going to make spaces that are extra-forgiving of people who are socially awkward, how about the socially awkward women that are getting hit on, huh?

You know why this is embarrassing?

Because the fact that I'm a socially awkward woman is kind of a big chunk of why I have GODS-BE-FEATHERED FLASHBACKS.

(And is not unrelated to why I haven't had the spoons to go to Readercon in the first place.)

I actually saw a conversation that raised "Well, what about socially awkward women?" as a question that was promptly derailed into "Well, they shouldn't be touching people without consent either!"

As if.

As fucking if.

There's this goddamn myth that women are all fucking supergeniuses about body language, about indirect and oblique communication, about communicating in fucking smoke signals.  That, for example, "autistic" is something that only happens to people marked "male", and that the rare woman who is socially inept is the Creepy Stalker Ex type.

And apparently the fannish communication system doesn't have space for the wallflowers, the lurkers, the people who spent too much time reading to actually know how to talk to people easily.  At least ... if those people are women.

Don't know how to communicate - either subtextually or verbally - that attention is unwanted?  Get very flustered by social contact that is outside of a reasonably small comfort zone?  Tend towards that often-ignored 'freeze' response instead of fight-or-flight in social situations that go over a very low stress threshhold?  Only able to communicate with anything resembling fluidity with people one knows well and has had time to build a cognitive model for?  Get completely overwhelmed with anxiety when a situation might lead to any form of negative response?  Highly dependent on sidelong watching of other people to figure out whether or not behaviour is inappropriate?

You might be "socially awkward"!

And you might be all of that and appear female.  'Cos that there?  That's me at the age I was nearly raped.  It's still me, in a lot of ways, I just have much more sophisticated coping mechanisms than I did twenty years ago.

Now let's imagine someone like that.  (For some of us this will be easier than for others.)  They don't have to be "on the spectrum" or anything; as far as I know I'm allistic.  Let's imagine that she's participated in fandom online, gotten to know a few folks, and been convinced that a convention is a social gathering for people basically like her: sharing enthusiasms, probably a little socially awkward in some ways but we understand that and it's okay, we make allowances.  She checks her budget and decides to try a con.  Maybe she travels for it; maybe there's something local to her.  Doesn't matter.

She makes it to the con.  She makes it to registration, picks up her badge, gets a program, looks at interesting panels.  She finds a few names she recognises, makes note of them, wonders anxiously if they will remember her, if they'll actually think she's worth spending any time with in the vastly more energy-investing meatspace.  She lurks at the back of panels, completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of people present - and even a small con is gigantic.

(Back when I went to cons, I don't think I ever did more than two a year.  They completely wrecked me, in that 'that was fun while it was happening but now I have a hangover that will last at least two weeks from just the amount of social management it required to get through that without dying of mortification'.  I actually had an easier time with larger cons, energy-management-wise, due to the sense of anonymity they provided me.  Get to a certain size and the standard billing of fandom as being a place for people-like-me who should be treated as extended family becomes the giant laugh that it actually is, and I stop trying to figure out if I'm going to offend Distant Cousins Francis and Alex with something about my posture, my lack of conversational segues, my incorrect jargon terms (like saying "sci-fi", gasp), my tendency to fall totally silent, or my interruptions.  Or, you know, any of the other weird things that I tend to do and don't know about and thus have inchoate anxiety about whether or not I'm causing distress by.)

So.  She's at the con.  It is completely overwhelming, beyond what she entirely anticipated, but she is at least more or less enjoying herself, in a stressy kind of way.  Eventually she ventures out of the more regulated spaces of the panels or the anonymous free-for-all of the dealers' room into the consuite, or a room party where some of her online friends said they might be hanging out, or something.  Yes: she is brave enough to venture ...

... socialising.

Maybe someone notices the unfamiliar face and strikes up a conversation.  Maybe there's a Moxie-drinking station set up in the corner (for those not in the know: Moxie tastes like flat root beer with a Listerine chaser, and I would not know this if it weren't for a con).  Maybe she gets some cheese and crackers and sits down to amiably listen to the conversations, because that's comfortable and reasonably safe.

Now: someone approaches.  He's a little too close, a little too familiar, maybe a little handsy.

And she freezes.  Maybe she looks around to see how other people react: whether they're standing too close to each other, touching each other, or indeed whether they notice how this guy is behaving and find it notable.  She doesn't know if she feels unsafe because he's violating social norms or because she's socially fragile, and she knows that she's socially fragile, so hey - that's probably the way to bet unless there's countervailing evidence, right?  Because that's definitely true.  And nobody's finding the guy out of line, so....

This isn't me.

But I damn well know it could have been.  Fuck, I had a six month relationship that started basically that way and ended in attempted rape; all I would need for this to be actually me would be to have done that a little older and in a different venue.

And I damn well know that if it had been - and by some miracle I had managed to try to report it or even talk about what happened in coherent terms - someone would have come out with "You know, there are a lot of socially awkward people in fandom.  It could just be that."

Because, I guess, being the person trampling someone's boundaries is more awkward than being the person who can't figure out thing one about defending those boundaries?

(It couldn't possibly be that those people are more 'people' or more 'in fandom' than their targets.)

L is for Love

I touched on this briefly when I wrote O is for Obligation, but, y'know, advantages of writing things out of sequence or something?

There's this really common narrative in understanding of religion around here, the whole 'god is love' thing.  Now, again, I'm just going to note that this is one of those places where Christianity is leaking into other things and leave it; it's a thing that's out there.

Love and the divine is complicated.  Let's start there.

One of the reasons that I drifted out of Christianity was that divine love wasn't satisfying to me.  The love of that god was something that I could recognise, but it was far too generic and impersonal for me. "I love you because you exist" mostly left me wanting some sort of personal relationship, something that cared about me as something beyond a breathing entity.  Yes: the divine powers love existence.  The divine powers are working to uphold and support existence, that's what They do and what They are, which means that you - as a thing that exists - are precious.

But that doesn't mean all that much.  The mosquito that got swatted yesterday was equally precious, because it was equally in existence, and now its remains - which still exist, are just as precious.  As those remains decompose, become part of the humus, and support a new life that will feed on their nutrients, that will also be precious.

"The gods love us" as a generic is a very, very, very low standard.  And I think the people who say it mean something a whole lot more significant than "We exist in the matter/energy matrix that the gods preserve".

We're used to that sort of anthropocentric thinking.  We talk about being a danger to nature, as if - should we make the planet uninhabitable to ourselves - it will destroy the world, rather than simply ending ours.  Or how the world was made for us, as the special pinnacle of creation, even though our knees are laughable from a structural engineering standpoint and our retinas are all installed backwards.

The idea that gods might not always have humans as their prime concern - or indeed that there might be gods with no particular interest in humans at all - is an uncomfortable one.  "But the gods love us!" is a shield against the indifference of the rest of the world to our individual uniqueness.  But, like I said before, 'A storm god taking a fancy to ya is not going to give you electricity resistance 10; this isn't D&D. If you're lucky, it'll give you the sense to keep in out of the rain.'  The love of a storm god doesn't keep you from getting electrocuted; the love of a war god may very well get you killed.  Probably gloriously.  But even so, from your point of view, you're still dead.

This isn't to say that gods don't form personal bonds with individuals, because They obviously do.  But that's not something that comes from god-dom, it comes from individuality.  It is of necessity a personal thing, not a generalisable one.  And that's something that will come of individual resonances, attractions, dedications, needs: it's not an entitlement.  Treating it as an entitlement is a good way to discourage it from happening, for much the same reason that guys who whine about how all the bitches would rather go out with jerks don't attract a lot of women.  But it's better to look for love from people who live in your world - which means to expect to find it among people who live the life you do, not glamorous movie stars, and not gods.

A lot of myths talk about gods forming personal relationships with humans.  It tends to make that human's life harder, overall, whether because of being brought more intimately into divine conflicts, being expected to shoulder more of the weight of the universe, or simply having more stuff to deal with.  It's genuinely a whole lot safer, in a lot of ways, to only have the level of interest from a deity that's along the lines of "I am doing this profession, and thus the god who is particularly interested in that profession appreciates me".

Not that safety is high on the list of standard human motivations. ;)

I will conclude with a major flip on the concept of love and gods.

I was once asked by an atheist something like, "What's the point of worshipping a god that isn't omnipotent?"

Which I didn't know how to answer, on multiple levels, starting with, "Well, it's a lot more useful to deal with entities that actually exist than ones that don't"....

But really, the core of the question comes down to being asked "What's the point of love?"

And someone who would ask that question - or who doesn't know that's the question they're asking - I don't know how to begin to talk to.

O is for Obligations

A post I made on a message board got reposted - with permission - recently, and made a bit of a stir in a certain corner of the pagan blogs.  And part of that was, I think, that I talked about the big scary O: obligations.

It's all well and good to say you want a relationship with a god or goddess, that you want to be special and important in your religious practices, but that's not something that comes for free.  You may love and adore that particular entity to amazing levels, but your adoration does not obligate a response.  If you want a close relationship, there's going to be something you have to do.

"But the gods love us!" some people cry, in that usual kum-ba-yah kind of way.  But when love is generic - when you appeal to the concept of agape in the divine - it isn't that sort of intense, personal connection that some people want to have.  That's not "my god loves me because I am me", that's "my god loves because I am", and that's a different sort of thing.

The sort of thing that gets personal connection is personal work, personal dedication.  It doesn't just come for the wanting.  It doesn't matter how much you want if you're not stand-up enough to do what it takes to get it.  (And really, if you fill yourself up with desperate need, there are plenty of entities out there that will say "That looks like a tasty snack!" and will happily impersonate whatever deity you fancy in order to nosh on your spicy brains.)

I was seventeen or so when I fell in love with a god, and you know something?  He wouldn't fucking speak to me.  There were things that I needed to do to be worth His time (one of which was "get out of this Wicca phase and start actually paying attention", as it happens).  And that's only the beginning.  It doesn't get easier with more intimacy, and people don't always get what they want immediately.

And even if it's not a relationship with a deity that commands obligations, there are obligations that come with religion itself.  Some of those are devotional or ritual acts.  Some of those are social behaviour standards.  Some of them have to do with relationships and how one conducts them, with care for friends and family, with relationships one forms with entities native to the unseen realms.  Some of them have to do with self-care and taking responsibility for one's own actions.  There are various things which, if you say you are part of a religion, if you just don't do them, eventually people will wonder if they can take you at your word.  (At a bare minimum, if you, say, routinely defraud people, you're bad at most religions.  Incompetence may not be a sin, but it's certainly not a virtue.)

The sort of relationship you have with anything has dependencies on the sort of work you're able to do for the relationship.  Just like you're not gonna be an appealing date if you never bathe, never pick up the check, and never show up on time, you're not gonna be an appealing devotee if you don't do things that a deity values, offer useful veneration, or otherwise act like a worthwhile investment.  The first responsibility of deities is to maintain the useful running of the cosmos, and if you're not contributing to that actively, you're not helping, and you're not going to get the sort of personal caring attention that gets given to people who actually contribute something to the work.  (You might get the sort of personal smiting attention that gets given to people who are actively in Someone's way, but that's probably not what you're hoping for.)

Religion isn't something that you put on like a set of earrings and then get showered with adoration from the cosmos.  It comes with obligations, and the deeper you want to go, the more you'll be expected to carry.


Related reading, this post that I saw at Aedicula Antinoi while I was thinking about writing this one.

N is for Nice

You're so nice.
You're not good,
You're not bad,
You're just nice.
I'm not good,
I'm not nice,
I'm just right.
I'm the Witch.
You're the world.

"Last Midnight," from Into the Woods


I am not sure if Graydon would mind me quoting something he said years ago in another internet universe, so I will paraphrase instead:

"Nice" is behaviour which is socially unobjectionable.  It does not have to intersect with truth, and thus it cannot be a virtue.

I commented earlier in the PBP about one form of expectation of 'niceness', but that's far from the only form that ever puts in an appearance.  It's not even the first one I've talked about in this project thing.

It bothers me a good bit when people try to nice up paganism.  (This came up in a discussion, mostly in referring to dealing with deities.)

Let's get real.

One of my patron deities is best known for fratricidal murder.  This is not nice.

One of my religious paths is unabashedly and unashamedly sexual.  This is not nice.  (The fact that there is social objection to eroticism is a whole other barrel of rant, but it's still undeniably true.)

I have a religious obligation to the development of personal power.  This is not nice.  (The fact that there is social objection to genuine power, also.)

I don't even have a clue whether or not I'm technically a fucking Satanist, but regardless this is not commonly considered nice either.

(And that's not getting into the fact that polytheism itself is a matter of the socially objectionable, because that's a level of social objection that I don't generally grant the legitimacy of addressing.  But nonetheless, this is a genuine factor: being pagan, itself, in some environments, will be taken as being not-nice.  This is why people hang out in the broom closet.)

You know?  I could go on.

It does no good to not acknowledge these things.  Deities, for the most part, are not nice, though some may be more often than not pleasant, at least so long as you don't call upon them in one of their epithets that specifically isn't.  The natural world is certainly not nice; that charging bull will not respond to a citation from Miss Manners about how goring people is indecent behaviour, and aconite will stop your heart even if you ask nicely if you can pick its flowers.  A spirit doesn't have your best interests in mind just because it's not got a body.  Being socially unobjectionable can be useful - in certain social situations, so long as you can achieve your goals that way.  In non-social situations, or social situations in which it's impossible to get what you need by being nice?  Nice and five bucks will get you a latte.



There's a bit in Terry Pratchett's Maskerade where Granny Weatherwax draws a hatpin from her witch's hat, grins the sort of ferally savage grin that rather suggests that she is enjoying herself profoundly, and declares, "Let's do some good."

Granny: not nice.

Damn good witch, though.

N is for Names

Be careful what you name yourself.

As you take on a name, a title, a role - assuming that you achieve basic competence at living up to that name, of course, as opposed to blowing it off entirely and treating it as a triviality - you grow to become that name, to embody it, to bring it into being.

When I changed my name socially, I picked one that I wanted to grow into.

But here is another thing: you will find yourself with responsibilities that grow into the whole name, not just the bit you find shiny.  Not just what draws you at the beginning, but what sustains you through the end.

Names are a complicated and powerful magic.  The name of the thing is what it becomes, its manifestation, its strength; some are secret and some are not.  Things have many names, and thus is the complexity of the world layered.

But when you choose a name, you choose the whole name.

And that will have consequences for a long time.

M is for Mythology

I sometimes get the impression that a lot of people are confused about mythology.

I suspect that growing up in a Christian-dominated culture is part of this.  I commented recently on this elsewhere, actually.  The question of the historicity of Jesus is a constant thread of discussion about Christian mythologies, with a whole lot of people basing their comfort with the theology of the religion with whether or not a particular person lived, died, and was resurrected in a particular way.  It's a fascinating frailty, and one that I think promotes the nutcaseries of Creationists, who, too scared to imagine a universe in which their historical figure may not have been precisely as depicted in their mythology, have a need to literalise all the rest of their myths, too.

(Yes, there exist a number of religions with historical founding dates and known personalities involved in their foundings, but very few of them are strongly focused on the particular person of the founding figure as opposed to their teachings.  It's my very unstudied understanding that this is one of the reasons that Islam finds Christianity to be an imperfect implementation of the teachings of that particular god - that Christian theology got hung up on the messenger, rather than the message, thus requiring another prophet to come along and correct the more egregious mistakes.)

(Though it is of course quite common for outsiders trying to demonise groups to start accusing them of being effectively idolaters worshipping their founding figure - that is, after all, how "Gardnerian" became an appellation for a particular denomination of Wicca.)

So on the one hand, there's this strange notion that a myth has to be a statement about history and the world in order to be functional, which is a legacy of a cultural rooting in a religion that has mythologised history as foundational; on the other hand, there is the post-Enlightenment idea that what is important is the verifiable, the factual, and that is all that counts as "real".  So not only are myths historical, but they have to be factual to be valuable.

Can we kinda drop this nonsense and actually pay attention to the function of myths?

Someone who deals with this stuff sociologically will tell you, more or less, that mythology is the corpus of sacred stories dealing with cosmic truths.  (And 'religion' is the translation of sacred story into functional belief and action.)  And cosmic truths are not the same thing as facts, because facts can never provide you with meaning.  "Meaning" is one of those things that can only happen inside your head - or someone's head.  The structural processes of meaning can be codified into story, possibly even sacred story, but they will never be intrinsic in the scientifically measurable modern world.

In Terry Pratchett's Hogfather, the character of Death made this point quite sharply when he said (if you will forgive my lack of smallcaps):  "Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder, and sieve it through the finest sieve, and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy."  These are things we make, not things that we find; our stories tell us how to make them, or how to fail.

The realm of meaning is one that is navigated in part through shared cultural landmarks, and I think in the modern day a lot of that has been separated from the spiritual.  We may still think that 'red' is a good mark for danger or peril, and use it to say 'stop' as a result, but we don't have that laced through the rest of our lives, we no longer have our ritual procedures written out in red ink above our liturgies, nor is the red and black of the land something that most of us are living with every waking hour.  When folklore comes up that ascribes meaning to events or makes connections between things, the ordinary thing to do is to say "superstition" and dismiss it.

And the gods get turned into big cosmic babies, or the sneering "beard in the sky", because the stories about them become more and less than they are.  Because the ancients must be idiots, Thor is just "Oh, this is the story people told to explain why there was thunder", and now that we have science, we don't need Him.  The most trivial, superficial aspects of the gods are thus all that remain, and the concept that we can know how thunder happens according to science and hear the rumbling of that goat-drawn chariot just doesn't appear to cross the mind.  We do not care, anymore, about the coming rain in partnership with the lady of the wheat-gold hair, so the meaning of the marriage of Thor and Sif isn't something that anyone bothers to think about; our boisterous common folk are schooled into nine-to-five jobs or inappropriately, well, common, so their large-appetited and raucous defender becomes unworthy of honor.

And that's not even one of my gods.  I'm sure if I actually, like, knew something about Norse powers I'd be able to do more in-depth things.

But these are ways of expressing things within the world.  If the moment of creation - call it the Big Bang if you like, it doesn't matter - was the orgasm of a deity, what does that mean about our relationship with sexuality?  If humanity is the tears of a deity, do we care about whether they were shed in joy or sorrow?  If the sun becomes weak and frail when His daughter leaves in a snit, what does that say about the importance of women, of family, or of harmonious social relationships?  If both order and chaos stand to place the crown upon the king's head, what does that mean about power, rulership, the nature of government?  If a powerful, beautiful god becomes terrible and destructive when not aligned with the hand of love, what does that mean about power, about beauty, about awfulness, about love?

These are sacred stories.  They are not a periodic table of deity, a historical recording of events, or an engineering plan.  We humans are creatures primarily of kronos; They are primarily of kairos.  In Egyptian terms, we function primarily in djet, linear time; They in neheh, cyclic time.  Every time is, or can be, the First Time; every moment is simultaneously unique.

In religious work, we combine djet and neheh into a spiral of time, and become cosmic.

H is for Handholding and Headpatting

Every so often, some little kerfluffle goes around, about how the poor fragile newbies really need to be coddled and condescended to so that they will not flee from the big scary pagan world, and how people who are more established in their religion have some kind of obligation to provide education to others solely because they are more established.

Back to being the dancing monkey and listening to people sound like they got their social cues out of Derailing for Dummies.

When I am in various pagan communities, I am there to hang out with other people with religious perspective kind of like mine.  That doesn't make me a resource you can mooch off of, your own personal pagan-oriented search engine.  You cannot plug search terms into me and get the secrets of the universe.  I have other things to do with my life, even when I'm talking to other pagans.

I am not in the mollycoddling business.  And, too often, I hear people talk about how newbies need to be mollycoddled, wrapped up in cotton wool and never, ever questioned, jostled, bumped, or unsettled, lest they flee for more welcoming environments that will not correct their errors, contain substantial conversations about significant matters, or treat them like adults.

Apparently we are supposed to hearken back to when we were new and terrified of all this ookyspooky religion stuff, much like in order to do other basic tasks in our lives we are supposed to hearken back to when we were hot pink badgers with an unfortunate skin condition and a desire to sing Gilbert and Sullivan.  (Remember: learning things is horribly, horribly dangerous and should totally provoke an adrenaline reaction at all times.  That is why they shoot off cannon at irregular intervals on school grounds.)  We are supposed to remember all those kind and patient elders who took us under their wings, guided us to our true destiny, and informed us about everything we wanted to know, until they vanished in a cloud of rainbows and butterflies and released us into the world with the fading cry, "Now, pay it forward!  It doesn't matter if they do the work!"

Be nice, they say.  Because being mousy and inoffensive is a virtue, after all.  None of us have moral codes that value courage and discipline, or truth, or pride in oneself. Nothing should ever be questioned, fact-checked, confronted, or discarded.  It is all about who has the nicest little china tea sets with petits fours.  (I do not knock petits fours.  I love petits fours.  But I am looking for more than children's tea parties in my religion.)


So a few things to straighten matters out.

I was not put on this planet to make your life easier.

If you are seeking out religious services in particular, it would be contrary to my duties and obligations to make your life easier.  In the short term, at least.  If you want my services as a priest, then expect to have your ass kicked, because that is the service that I offer in that role.  I do not do confession and absolution.  I do not offer warm blanket snuggles and affirmations as to your special place in the universe.

I am also not going to pat you on the head and feed you babyfood because you have decided that you're not up for interacting as a functional adult.  I have kids.  You are not one of them.  If you cannot actually interact from a framework of basic competence, if you insist that you aren't worthy of my time and attention, I am going to give you the basic respect of agreeing with you and not investing in you before you are worthy.

I was not spoonfed.  I did the same damn thing you did - I got books, I read them, I tried things, I played around with what did and didn't work, I stumbled across people who had some stuff in common with me, I did things with them, sometimes I hit something that really resonated, I worked from there.  You want your next step?  Here are mine:  I found organisations that did instruction at some point, and I did their coursework - and critiqued it.  I started to do independent research.  I broadened my field of study.  I read poetry.  I started to cross-reference things I knew with other things.  I thought about what I needed in order to get what I had to have.  I found individuals who were offering training, and I made agreements with them because I met their standards as a student, and I did their work.  Go, and do likewise.

I am not doing universalist religion.  I do not care whether or not you put your name on the dotted line. I am not a pimp for the Divine, nor am I a door-to-door theology salesman.  It is up to you to decide whether or not you buy, and what terms you're willing to put in that contract.  I really, genuinely, completely do not give a flying fuck at a rolling donut whether or not you think that I am too mean for you to join one of my religions.

I am not your teacher.  I am not anyone's teacher right now.  That isn't to say that you can't learn anything from talking with me, given that I know a bunch of Stuff, but I do not have any obligation to give you any of that Stuff.  I certainly don't have an obligation to give you the particular thing you're asking for - and being your teacher wouldn't give me that obligation either, given that if you're asking for something that I know to be useless or counterproductive I'm not going to bloody well encourage you.

In the event that I do, in the future, become your teacher, you do not set the lesson plan.  I will know what I am attempting to convey, and what you get from me will be angled toward conveying that, not whatever shiny shit you are chasing around because you think that the right goddamn crystal will solve your personal problems.  If you don't like what I teach, in that case, you are 100% welcome to find a compatible teacher, because I am not going to change the instruction just to satisfy your neuroses.  If you don't want the lessons I'm actually offering, you don't want me to be teaching you.

I am not going to express contempt for you by assuming that you're incapable of participating in a conversation among equals as an equal.  I don't care if you're new; I probably don't notice if you're new, being not privy to your life story and unlikely to read your engaging and detailed personal introduction (and if I do, I'm quite unlikely to remember that engaging and detailed personal introduction was you, specifically, as opposed to 'some random person on the internet somewhere').  If you want someone to treat you as a little child who isn't capable of knowing any better or hearing the truth, you want someone else.