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You Don’t Owe it to Anyone to Engage With Their Harmful Ideas
People often act like they are entitled to a debate. They are not.
The other night an acquaintance at dinner was laying out his anti-vax arguments to me. I had no desire to get involved in a debate in which one party refuses to acknowledge basic science, and so I told him, in what I felt was a polite tone: “I’m sorry, but I don’t have the energy to engage with anti-vax arguments right now. I think we should talk about something else.” He was furious. He told me I was rude and disrespectful for refusing to hear his arguments.
Your attention is yours to give
He felt entitled to be listened to, and to have me engage with his ideas. By acting upset, he was trying to gaslight me into feeling guilty for not letting him talk. As a woman, I have been raised to be a people pleaser, and so I did feel really terrible, at first, but then I realised: you don’t owe it to anyone to listen to their harmful ideas. You don’t have to debate them. You don’t have to give them an outlet for their toxicity. You don’t need to lend credibility to their ideas by deigning to discuss them. You are perfectly within your right to not engage in a conversation you don’t want to have. No one has a right to your energy or your attention.
He was so mad that he yelled at the waitress for bringing his sausage out late, and later that evening turned to Facebook to call me a “dumb so-called journalist.”
The importance of boundaries
When it comes to it, this was just another incident of a man being upset that a woman set a boundary. Just yet another man who felt entitled to a woman’s mental space, her time, her consideration. Who felt like I was in the wrong for refusing to coddle his emotions.
I have taken the decision, this year, not to waste my energy debating people whose ideas hurt me. I don’t want to get involved in conversations with misogynists who want me to educate them, even though they refuse to learn, and who will at the same time say things that reduce me and my gender to objects. I don’t see the point in talking to anti-vaxers, because argument is pointless if one side is refusing to believe in science. I will…
