Life is not all rosy.
You moved into a shared apartment and your new landlord/flatmate seemed to be a nice, educated, middle-aged, and “cheese-and-wine” kind of guy. You might even have some friendly conversations and a couple of beers together.
Before long, he turned out to be grumpy, bossy, increasingly abusive and bullying you around because he owned the place. You started to wonder why a supposedly shared common area became his exclusive territory seven days a week; you couldn’t stop his loud music (with the same playlist every single night) from intruding your room, even he claimed it was only 45% or so of the sonic power of his laptop speakers; and you couldn’t block out his sudden and rather frequent swearing/laughter, even you shut your door and wore a pair of noise-blocking earplugs. You could neither relax in your own room nor concentrate on other things (e.g. reading) that you normally enjoyed.
When you wanted to talk, you couldn’t tell whether he was sober or not, judging from the smell of alcohol every night when you came back from work. You also had to be cautious when you were cooking in the kitchen when he suddenly burst into a very loud and hysterical laughter in the lounge and you might slip and cut your finger or knock over a hot pot (which might happen a few times during a short cook). And he might just stop you when you were preparing food on a public holiday or doing the dishes on a regular night, sometimes because he had work to do and sometimes without offering any explanation–it looked like he was just in a bad mood and didn’t want any sound or motion in the shared common area.
You might be very understanding and let him get what he wanted–your chores were not urgent anyway–until he once again turned up the volume of his laptop amid his loud, random swearing and you realised that you couldn’t do anything in your own room for the whole night due to such distractions. It didn’t look like that he would be attentive to the well-being and proper needs and rights of his flatmate in a shared place of abode, and you wouldn’t believe that one day he would also use the problem you encountered in your life to verbally attack you when you were going through some very difficult and stressful time.
You would never forget what happened on a particular day. You thought that home should be a safe place and human beings should live in dignity and free from fear. You were wrong. You could not get any of these when you were staying in this hell.
You began to search for new rental properties and wanted to move out. But this could be very time-consuming, not to mention the financial cost of relocation. It was also difficult to find another large room in a prime location within a short time. You had to stay here with Mr. Bully until you had the chance to move to a better place. You became yet another victim of abuse in an inherently imbalanced power hierarchy.
Soon you realised it was more than that. Nothing seemed to make him genuinely happy–not the TV news/sports that were constantly on, not his swearing at the television or over the phone when he was talking loudly to someone, not all the bursts of laughter towards the “stupidity” of public figures, politicians, or whoever he seemed to be very interested in and paying attention to all-day-long on TV and YouTube, and definitely not the comments he made towards certain people that you inevitably overheard (you wish you didn’t).
For some, bullying and degrading others seem to be a (perhaps unconscious) way to assert their power and authority, either towards their co-tenants at home or towards other people in the wider society, without acknowledging that their sense of power and authority to a great extent derived from the social privilege that they were born with. At some point, you would start to put all the pieces together and realise that you were probably sharing an apartment with a certain type of “angry white man”–swearing all day, drinking all night, abusive to others and yet often posing themselves as victims in the changing society, and sexist in their comments towards women (probably without any self-awareness of that), among many other things.
In this case, the education they received seems to have only deepened and further legitimated their sense of entitlement. Bullies can use their acquired educational capital and inherited social privilege to defend what they believe and how they behave; no matter what they claim publicly, they do not seem to have any true respect or compassion for their fellow human beings, especially towards those less privileged in any power relations that appear hierarchical (e.g. landlord/tenant, old/young, local/non-local, white/coloured, etc.).
I still remember Michael Kimmel’s resounding remark that “privilege is invisible to those who have it”, while his book Angry White Men offers some thoughtful observations relevant to what I have discussed here. What I have learnt in theory has vividly and convincingly materialised in front of my eyes.
I don’t want this to be a stereotype of the “middle-aged heterosexual white man” whose taken-for-granted privilege and traditional male authority and entitlement have been challenged by various social progressions–who hence become increasingly grumpy and unhappy. At any rate, the person I met is not only an “angry white man” but also a bully who is very difficult to live with, although the whole situation starts to make more sense once you put two and two together and look at it from a holistic point of view. I also have to caution myself to not become someone like him when I turn his age. After all, others are mirrored reflections of ourselves who remind us of what we want and don’t want to be–especially when the “reflection” is living under the same roof in a shared rental place.
When you finally had the chance to move out, unsurprisingly, Mr. Bully wouldn’t make it easy for you, either. That would be another story.
Nonetheless, I am still grateful to have had this kind of experience, so I know what people can do to others while simultaneously claiming and presenting a completely different outside image. This was eye-opening, even after I had spent over a decade renting and flatting with many different people across several countries when I was pursuing international education. You live and learn.
shortbread 
.jpg){kind=link}