Humoring
Besides, it’s not actually respect, is it. It’s humoring. It’s nervous humoring, the way you would humor a jittery angry terrorist who was holding you captive and claimed to be the reincarnation of Charlie Chaplin.
We don’t humor other people’s fantasies that way unless they’re jittery angry terrorists. That’s not a thing. It’s not something adults do. It’s certainly not considered respect – if people did do it it would be considered pity, not respect. We play along with children’s games of pretend, but that’s it – we don’t do that for anyone else. Once past childhood people are expected to keep their fantasies private.
I wonder if the weird (to me at least) development of adults taking various entertainment industry fantasies seriously, going to conventions about them and dressing up as them and talking about them, has been a bridge to this ridiculous new version of “respect.” If people in their 20s and 30s can go to Star Wars conventions maybe it then seems reasonable to pretend that people can change sex to live out their fantasies.
It seems horribly pathetic to me, the way Sheldon on Big Bang Theory is pathetic albeit funny.
Yes, it’s self-defence in the face of outsized threat.
We’re being asked to find their behaviour acceptable, with the equivalent of a jaunty soundtrack where ominous music would be more appropriate, and would alert people to what is going on. So many feminists and allies are, in fact, trying to play exactly such a soundtrack, but are being drowned out by the activists.
Many years ago, after being pestered by several people to try it (including one of my sisters, who thought it hilarious) I tried watching an episode of Big Bang Theory. It was dire. I didn’t manage to watch much of it. I must be missing the part of the brain which, in normal people, tells them that something is funny if other people are laughing at it. So I asked those people to watch the extracts on YouTube which had the laughter track removed – they immediately understood my point about it. Without the solidarity of other people finding it humorous, they too found it cringe-worthy, embarrassing, and even cruel.
Okay, full confession time–I’m one of those convention nerds (or would still be, if it weren’t for tight cash and pandemic concerns). Specifically ye olde “living a fantasy” thing–Dungeons & Dragons, and other table-top role-playing games.
But the fact is, most of these fandoms aren’t actually “lifestyles”, and they certainly aren’t believing their fantasies. Hell, within the fan communities I’m most familiar with, even talking excessively to folks outside a given hobby are is considered something to be disparaged, because of COURSE your co-workers don’t give a flying rat’s ass about your 15th level Half-Elf Paladin.
Now, i will say that back in the day when I started playing these games, the folks playing them were as sexist and racist as you’d expect ANY pastime involving suburban white adolescents in the 70s and 80s to be. Specific manifestations were a bit different than among, say, sports fans (I’ll spare you the cringe-worthy details), but in the decades since then, the hobbies have mostly grown up–in no small part because most of us discovered that the games were more fun with some genuine diversity in the hobby, and that that wouldn’t happen if we were a bunch of asshats.
Which, of course, isn’t to say we don’t have pockets of stubborn and very, very loud resistance, their seeming numbers amplified (as is so often the case) by the nature of the internet. I’ve definitely met ‘Sheldons’, but trust me, they were not liked, or regarded as humorous–more often than not, they were seen as pathetic throwbacks who never got out of their parents’ basements.
Unfortunately, most fandoms, being centered around a pastime that outsiders regard as weird, have a higher-than-is-healthy tolerance for bullshit among their own ranks. So people who should be loudly criticized or even ostracized are more often than not just given subtle brush-offs that they rarely comprehend as such. It takes direct offense to produce direct action, in more cases than not.
Back in my student days I knew a man who taught chemistry at a prestigious Western university, and was also some kind of aristocracy in the SCA, which was the framework of most of his life. He wore SCA garb, including his pewter tankard on a thong attached to his belt, everywhere. In that place and time this was considered delightfully eccentric. But he didn’t demand that everyone he encountered address him as ‘your grace’, or expect preferential treatment at the campus cafeteria or the DMV; despite doing what he could to ‘live his fantasy’ consistently in his life he knew the behavioural boundaries between an SCA setting and a non-SCA setting because he was a rational mature adult. But now that actual reality-impaired fantasists have spoiled it we can no longer have nice things.