Why Does Everyone Want Women to Prove Their Kindness by Becoming Less Protected?

Credit: lascapigliata

Some people do not ask you to understand them. They ask you to stop understanding yourself.

Women have historically been asked to perform enormous amounts of kindness: caregiving, smoothing conflict, accommodating discomfort, giving second chances, maintaining relationships, tending children and elders, volunteering, listening, forgiving, making room, keeping families connected. Then somehow the cultural diagnosis keeps arriving at: women need another lesson in kindness.

You ever notice how often it is the most non-violent people that “need” another lesson in kindness? Similar to growing up in abusive homes where the abuser always has lessons and punishments for the occupants trying to keep peace and live their lives.

Compassion can sit beside reality. Any compassion that requires reality to leave the room has become something else.

But often what is being called “kindness” is not kindness at all. It is access.

Access to your time. Access to your body. Access to your emotional labor. Access to spaces where you feel safe. Access to another explanation after you already said no. Access to the benefit of the doubt after your judgment has already told you something is wrong.

And sometimes, remarkably, access to your agreement about what you yourself can plainly observe.

That last part is a trespass. Compassion should not require a woman to sever her connection to reality. You can understand another person’s feelings without agreeing with every conclusion they draw. You can respect someone’s humanity without surrendering your own perception. You can be generous without pretending you did not see what you saw.

And people thought holiday dinners were awkward. Hollywood keeps making films about tension at dinnertime, and people aren’t connecting the dots. This is what it is sometimes to be a woman, abused child, and/or minoritized person. At least dinner is a few hours. Nothing like living in a society that wants you to move through life pretending nothing happened, nothing ever happens, and you are not seeing what you clearly see.

Discernment is what keeps compassion from becoming self-abandonment.

A boundary isn’t the opposite of kindness. A boundary tells kindness where you end and another person begins.

There is also something almost backwards about repeatedly directing the kindness campaign toward the people already socialized to accommodate. If somebody has spent her whole life being told, Don’t embarrass him. Don’t make a scene. Give him another chance. Maybe you misunderstood. Think about how he feels. Don’t be mean. Be welcoming. Be forgiving, then another sermon about becoming more accommodating may not make her kinder.

It may simply make her easier to override.

Women don’t need kindness stripped from us. Kindness is beautiful. Keep it. But kindness often requires some sturdy companions: discernment, memory, observation, self-respect, and the ability to say no.

Otherwise somebody will keep showing up with a pair of scissors, cutting pieces off women’s boundaries, and labeling every little clipping compassion.

That’s not a kindness campaign.

That’s a negotiation for access.

Affirmations

I can be kind without becoming unprotected.

My compassion does not require the abandonment of my judgment.

I am allowed to notice what is happening, even when naming it makes someone uncomfortable.

I do not owe endless access as proof that my heart is good.

I can understand someone’s pain without volunteering to become the place where they put it.

I trust the wisdom that experience has earned me.

A boundary does not erase my tenderness. It gives my tenderness somewhere safe to live.

I do not have to become confused in order to make someone else feel understood.

I can forgive without reopening the door.

I can wish someone well from a distance that keeps me well.

My “no” does not cancel every “yes” I have ever given.

I am not cruel because I finally stopped negotiating something that was costing me peace.

I will not measure my goodness by how much discomfort I can absorb for other people.

I am allowed to change my mind when new information changes what I know.

I do not have to betray yesterday’s lessons to prove today’s compassion.

I can remain softhearted without becoming easily handled.