The other night I went out for dinner at a place I've been to a few times before, though I’ve not been for a year. It's a great restaurant: delicious food, great setting, brilliant staff... so it was an obvious choice when a friend came to town and wanted to go out for dinner.
The meal started out fine - we ordered, were served some amuse bouche, got a lovely wine... fine fine fine. My starter was good - truffle risotto, how you you go wrong with that? The chaos really started with the main course.
Brian and I ordered the same thing for our main: beef ravioli. It's not something I'd normally order, but it sounded great- it had pine nuts and sage in a brown butter sauce- and was the 'lightest' meal on the menu. The food started to come to the table and the waiter put about 6 pieces of plain ravioli on my plate and a minute later spooned a bit of thin brown sauce around the plate. Not only was this nothing like what I was expecting based on what was said in the menu, but it just looked insipid and unappetising. Literally just some plain ravioli with drops of brown sauce on the plate. Next, the waiter placed a pan of ravioli on the table in front of Brian. His looked like what the menu said. As the waiter was serving the delicious-looking ravioli to Brian, I asked him what the difference was between my ravioli and Brian's ravioli. He said, 'It is the same.' 'But mine doesn't have anything on it.' 'It is the same.' And then I said it:
'But I can see.'
And as I said those words, I had this flash of all of the times that people have tried to tell me that what I was seeing was, in fact, NOT what I was seeing... and it made me so angry.
Luckily, I wasn't the only one at the table who saw that I had been served a beige, pathetic, limp, bare, feeble excuse for a meal. Everyone could see it... and they were equally as annoyed as I was by the waiter trying to tell me it was the same. Brian called the boss over and asked what was going on. The boss asked the waiter, again the waiter said 'It is the same.' The boss repeated to me with a shrug, 'Well, he says it is the same.' Again I said, angrier this time:
'But I can see!!!'
...soooo... we're not going back there again and we're telling everyone else we know who've been there not to go.
Why do people think they can tell others to disbelieve their eyes? I can guess why in my example: the waiter was out of his depth. It's like they'd hired someone who'd never worked in a restaurant before to serve a table of 8 of us at dinner as his very first experience. He'd messed up loads of things throughout the meal, so maybe he had only put in an order for one ravioli and when he realised his mistake, secretly cobbled together some pathetic version of it and tried to pass it off to me (but, obviously, didn't try it on with the MAN who ordered the same thing!) rather than own up to his mistake. I would have been 900 times happier if he or the boss had said 'I'm so sorry, there's been a mix up in the kitchen and your order isn't ready. We will get it to you as soon as we can. In the meantime, please accept our apologies...' Et cetera et cetera rather than trying to tell me that I wasn't seeing what I was seeing.
But why do people do this generally? And I don't mean trying to convince someone that their opinion about something or their interpretation of something is correct, those are different things. I mean, why do people try to tell others that they are not seeing what is clear to anyone who can see? Furthermore, why do some people go along with being told what they are seeing is NOT what they are seeing? (Actually, that’s probably due to this)
It's kind of a step on from gaslighting, a kind of Gaslighting+. The common or garden gaslighting- "But you said [X] yesterday!" "No, I didn't" - is an extremely common occurrence within abusive relationships and/or with narcissists. 99.9999999% of the time, you are not going to have anything other than your own memory of them saying [X], so the veracity of your claim becomes impossible to confirm. It's also why gaslighting messes with your head so much: you feel like your memory is flawed or your grasp on reality is slipping because the other person is just so confidently matter of fact about it all. "No, I didn't say that."
Next up the gaslighting scale is someone trying to tell you what you think, believe or feel - again very common with abusers and narcissists- which is also more and more common in the wider world now.
I was talking to a friend recently about how I find the whole idea of 'non-binary identities' to be pretty ridiculous. He asked me why I was 'so offended' by non-binary people. Now, I'm not in any way implying he was being abusive or is a narcissist, but I wasn't expressing my opinion in an angry or heightened way, I wasn't shouting, I wasn't scowling, I wasn't swearing (more than usual). I wasn't behaving as if I were "offended". I was just stating what I thought in the same way I might say 'I find the whole idea of an oxygen bar ridiculous.' No one would think I was OFFENDED by the idea of an oxygen bar. They might think it was strange because ‘isn't oxygen good for you??’, but they wouldn't attach any kind of morality to my statement...
I tried to tell him that I wasn't offended by people who call themselves 'non-binary' at all, but that the insistence that 'non-binary' was somehow 'special' (when I think no one is purely masculine or feminine, so everyone is non-binary) is ridiculous. I don't think he was able to comprehend that fully because it seems that for many leftwing/liberal people the only conceivable reason one would question anything within the gender realm is due to being offended, right? Right?! There can be no other option… The thing is, insisting that the only way it's possible for me to question, disagree with, object to, dislike something is because of 'moral repugnance' or even 'hate' is gaslighting - it is negating my perception. I know what I think. I know my reasoning. I know my own experience... This widespread form of gaslighting is based in an inability of others (men?) to expand their worldview or their understanding of how others experience the world to include the minds of others (women?).
Women are constantly being told we aren't seeing what we are seeing. And a lot of women- having been socialised to be kind, selfless and compliant and who haven't (yet) interrogated this- just accept that they are wrong about what they are seeing and go along with the cultural gaslighting. They internalise the idea that women are inherently mistaken about or incapable of understanding their own experience unless they view everything through the lens of 'male socialisation' and they work to uphold the idea that men are the only ones who have the 'proper' way of viewing the world. This lens views the idea of 'Woman' as a 2-dimensional surface- without an internal dimension, but very definitely with boobs- onto which 'non-women' can project anything they want. This lens allows the viewer to stick any label they want onto a woman as if she were a canvas hanging on a wall and believe they are looking at reality.
Because men's experience of existing in the world is different to women's, this lens allows them to confidently tell us that we are not seeing what we are seeing. They can say to a woman 'The ravioli dishes are the same’ as easily as they say 'No, you aren't seeing a pattern of male violence against women. I mean, sure the statistics show that 95% perpetrators of physical and sexual violence against women are male, but they're all just individuals acting independently. It’s just a coincidence. It doesn't mean anything. There's no pattern. There's nothing to see here. Nope. You are not seeing what you are seeing, women. Move along now. Move along.'
This lens also views the whole concept of 'A Woman' as simply an idea in a man's mind, after all She is purely and merely the labels that HE decides to stick on the canvas. His thoughts. His experience. His labels. And you better not believe there is anything else other than that… or else…
The accusation that you were offended is a tactic similar to telling someone to "calm down" or that you don't like their tone. It is actually used by both men and women to divert attention from the substance of an argument they are losing.
I’m enraptured by the precision of “But I can SEE!” I think that of all the things you might have said, it’s the least expected and yet most biting, the most difficult to debate.
A great phrase that deserves to be deployed much more widely. Kudos.