Taking refuge in a headscarf showed me that no matter how progressive and understanding we think we are, and how noble our intentions, sometimes we can be ignorant hypocrites. I will never understand what it’s like to live in an oppressive culture like the Middle East where women are deprived of basic human rights, but at least I was able to finally understand that it could be more complicated than that, and that I certainly didn’t know more about their experiences and emotions than they did. Or maybe there’s absolutely no connection at all between these two experiences, and I’m just desperately trying to make sense of something that can never make sense to me. Obviously my going to the grocery store in a scarf had absolutely nowhere near the same stakes as a woman in the Middle East wearing a burka, but I had to be in that particular situation to finally understand what those girls were trying to tell me, which is that wearing what I thought was a freedom-denying hijab is actually what made them feel free.
I don’t know if this situation was a lesson or a warning. Maybe those girls were showing me our natural tendency to normalize or acclimate to our oppression, even spin it as positive so we can get through the day. Maybe the lesson was to expose me to brainwashed people to illuminate how brainwashed I am. I don’t know. One thing I do know is that my generalization that all Middle Eastern women were broken and defenseless led me to commit the exact transgressions I so disdained: These women told me their truth, and I invalidated it. While thinking they should be taken more seriously, I didn’t take them seriously. While thinking their voices should be heard, I wasn’t listening to them. While wanting them to be seen, I was ignoring them. The truth is that I was wrong about a lot of things. Goddamn it, I hate admitting that. I don’t know if the girls were right either, but I do know that I was wrong to assume I knew more than they did.
I know this is not news to you guys—you probably think I’m wrong all the time—but it was breaking news to me. I don’t know if it was being American, being a comedian, or watching too much or too little news, but my trip to the Middle East taught me that I had a very strong resistance to being wrong or changing my mind. I update everything else in my life obsessively—my phone, my computer software, my car—but I wasn’t updating my ideas. I realized that if my thoughts were clothes, they’d be the oversized flannel shirt I wore as a dress in 1996.
I went to the Middle East with a very Anglocentric, naive idea of what these women’s lives were like. When the girls tried to explain to me that their culture is more complicated than one sweeping statement, it was a threat to my worldview to have to delete all the old files in my head. It’s like that old phone you have in a drawer that you know you’ll never use again because your fingers are twice the size of the buttons now and they don’t even make chargers for it anymore, but you can’t bring yourself to throw it away because, well, it’s yours. You’re emotionally attached to it. The same thing happened with my beliefs. I became attached to my opinions, which live in a drawer in my dark labyrinth of a brain. My generalizations were an anesthetic that protected me from a much more complicated reality, and I was not willing to wean myself off that painkiller.
Going to the Middle East didn’t liberate any women or instantaneously revise their culture. It certainly didn’t change the world, but it did change my world. It made me notice how my paradigm is composed of a bunch of generalizations that I used to make me feel safe and superior. Our survivalist reptile brains love to put people and things in neat compartments. For me, these compartments ended up being “all men lie,” “all police officers are good,” or “all food goes well with ranch.” If you’re anything like me you’ve learned the hard way that only the last one is true.
From what I gather, generalizations and stereotypes were very important in tribal times, before alarm systems and locks on doors. Thinking “all noises in the bushes signals danger” was a very useful stereotype. What used to give us actual security now gives us a false sense of security. Don’t get me wrong, my generalizations served me very well early on in life; for example, when I deduced that “all kids are going to make fun of your last name,” I was pretty much right and planned a defensive strategy accordingly. I mean, I don’t blame them, but it was helpful for me to be prepared. Conversely, positive stereotypes helped me gravitate to healthy situations. For example, deducing that “all horses are awesome” and “you can always rely on MTV” ended up making me very happy because I was able to escape my real world by watching, well, The Real World.
Now that I’m an adult, my generalizations no longer serve me. I’m no longer in an unsafe situation, so I no longer need to protect myself in the same way. When we continually compartmentalize people, cultures, and genders, we tend to find what we’re looking for even if it means projecting a mirage onto whatever you’re seeing to manifest your assumption. I found myself actually ignoring and doubting any contrary evidence and looking for proof to substantiate my theories. And as we all know, we always find what we’re looking for, whether it’s actually there or not. See what I mean? That generalization isn’t even valid because I can never find my keys no matter how hard I look.
From what I understand, this instinct has been around as long as our survival has been threatened, so I guess forever. I’m not a neuroscientist so I thought I’d quote someone who is so you don’t think I’m bloviating about things I have no business pretending to know. Taxonomist and neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal wrote about six psychological flaws that keep talented people from achieving greatness. I would have loved to pretend that I just sit around reading old leather-bound books by famous neuroscientists from the 1800s, but I know you’d never believe me, so the truth is that I follow BrainPickings on Twitter and Maria Popova wrote an article about this. Santiago was complaining about how we look for evidence to support our theories back in 1897!
There are highly cultivated, wonderfully endowed minds whose wills suffer from a particular form of lethargy, which is all the more serious because it is not apparent to them and is usually not thought of as being particularly important. . . . As soon as they happen to notice a slight, half-hidden analogy between two phenomena, or succeed in fitting some new data or other into the framework of a general theory—whether true or false—they dance for joy. . . . The essential thing for them is the beauty of the concept. It matters very little whether the concept itself is based on thin air, so long as it is beautiful and ingenious, well-thought-out and symmetrical.