Taking Offense: Ogden on Georgian Sensibilities

OPED

There's been an article floating around Facebook this week written by an expat woman that has caused a bit of unrest amongst some Georgians on my newsfeed. She basically claims that foreign women should not date Georgian men due to their attitudes towards casual sex, marriage and 'ownership'. I'm going to assume that anyone reading this is more or less familiar with the Georgian male culture being referred to, and if not, read my article from a few weeks back.

While I felt that the Facebook article was not particularly well written, the author made some valid points, and although she received the inevitable abuse from a few Georgian males, she was vindicated by a number of Georgian women agreeing with her, especially a particularly vocal one who claimed to have an English husband (huzzah! Sensible girl).

However, Georgian males are not what I want to write about today. What surprised me is how people reacted to the criticism; not the men leaving offensive comments on this woman's blog – there was nothing particularly surprising about that - but people in my own news feed.

Essentially, my Georgian Facebook friends were not best pleased with what this woman had to say, and seemed to be deriding her post as simply the complaints of another know-nothing foreigner; I recall there was a similar reaction to another post last year which claimed that Georgian females intrinsically prefer foreign men. Both were filled with platitudes along the lines of 'I know not all Georgian men are like this, but...' which did nothing to mollify the people who took offence, but then – as now – there was little by way of introspection.

The Georgians on my Facebook friend list and the others who creep into my newsfeed tend to be educated, middle-to-upper class sorts, who work professional jobs and live lives not so different from people in Europe; they are, of course, nothing like the men described in the blog posts that caused so much keyboard rage, yet for some reason still seem to think they are somehow being targeted.

I shall make myself a little clearer. If someone wrote about the problem of football hooligans in England who live on benefits, drink beer all day and fight all night while ramping up a number of teenage pregnancies that even the most conservative Georgian grandmother would think is excessive, my response would be a shrug and 'Fair enough'. Those people do exist, but since we share a nationality and nothing more I have no right or reason to be offended when they come under fire. I am well aware that any criticism directed towards them does not reflect on me.

Georgians, however, are a sensitive folk, and react badly to any criticism of their country and people. I understand that entirely, but what I don't understand is educated Georgians being offended by posts that clearly do not refer to them or their friends. Surely they can't be so removed from society that they're entirely unaware of the national problems with attitudes towards women amongst some men; even if they were so ignorant or remote, if they read the post and the comments then they surely could not discount the comments of Georgian women (and even some Georgian men) agreeing with the blogger.

I suppose it all comes down to how one takes criticism, and being introspective enough to recognize that comments directed towards some sections of society are not a damning condemnation of the collective. I’ve heard that EU and NATO reform workers – whom Georgia claims to want here to help the country develop – have encountered significant resistance when trying to make the changes they were invited here to implement. I originally came to Georgia with my mother when she was asked here to work on legal reforms, and she – along with others before and since – struggled to deal with the paradox that the Georgians desperately wanted everything brought up to 'Western standards' but were angered by any suggestion that Georgian methods were not good enough.

I'm no psychologist, but there's something here that needs examining. National mentalities do interest me, and as much as I'd love to discuss this further, the word count is looming like the Grim. R Reaper. That, though, was a waste of words. And so was this. And that.

Tim Ogden