A taste from November 2018: A stream of consciousness as I decide to leave online radical leftism, to retreat from online feminist spaces
I posted this on my now RIP website back in my Firebrand Witch days in the midst of my manic breakdown.
Originally published October 2018 (revised April 2020)
To what degree does systemic privilege attenuate the impact of interpersonal abuse?
How do we define progress? Justice? Change? What are the metrics for justice? What are the roles of relationship and the body in social justice?
Do we simply accept that personal trauma inflicted on those who occupy dominant social locations is a necessary evil on the road to justice? Or do we seek to reduce harm?
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Maybe it's a sign of the times. Or maybe it's my age.
I'm trying to remember who I was before ideology. Or if I ever was before ideology. Or who I could become outside of ideology. Or if it's even possible to somehow transcend something that is so basically human: belief, dogma, zeal, and organized religion.
And anyway, we are all indoctrinated to ideology. The dominant one, at least. Is there really any escape from the impact of ideology?
At age 17 my sociology professor seemed like a beacon of truth in a world that was muddy. The system is broken. The system exploits you. The system privileges you. The system oppresses you.
The more I learned, the more I wanted. The more radical I wanted to become.
Enter tumblr.
Enter leftbook.
Enter...witchstagram?
The last seven years have led me into the depths of queer anti-capitalist intersectional feminist Internet ideology and spat me back out where I am now: paranoid, isolated, and afraid to talk about how the culture of feminism (which overwhelmingly takes place online) failed me and every single human being that I know who also rode the bandwagon for their late-teens-early-adulthood.
Why else would we feel obligated to hang our heads in shame and apologize profusely through panic and tears before we admit I don't think this is working for me, but I'm afraid to talk about it, and I feel like if I stop engaging in all of this, people are going to call me out and I can't handle that. if this culture hadn't, in some fundamental way, failed us?
Though maybe it didn't "fail."
Feminist culture does not intend to nurture, hold, and tend. Ideologically-rooted culture is more of an experiment than an answer.
Any culture that coalesces around an ideology doesn't really intend to be a community.
It says it does, of course.
It posits itself as a solution:
It says that you are allowed to be too much.
It says that you are allowed to take up more space.
It says that your voice matters.
But...then...it also says You are taking up too much space. Stay in your lane. Shut the fuck up and listen instead of talking for once in your life.
Feminist culture, like any ideological community, functions like a sociological test drive.
How far can we push dominant culture until it breaks, until it gives into our demands?
It feels energetically similar to being a teenager, seeing how far you can push your parents before they either snap at you and double down on their No, you can’t. or break down and say Ok, fine, go ahead.
When you interact with it, on a psychological level, it feels like being on the receiving end of a person who is splitting. One moment you’re a goddess—the next, the scum of the earth.
And ultimately, I think, may it simply must be this way in order to effect collective radical change. But for the individuals involved…
You might see how wires can get easily crossed for a 17-year-old desperate for a solution to the horrifying conditions of the world, for purpose, for identity, when the church at which they worship manages to tell them all in one breath that they are both the chosen one! and useless dogshit.
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It took me a long time to wrap my head around the theoretical idea of "queer," this amorphous, norm-aversive, always-fluid, non-state that exists as a challenge and antidote to cishetero-normativity.
So I got obsessed with it. I wrote about it in college, I researched and talked about and forged my intellectual world around queer theory.
But the application, when it comes to identity and the social world of queer culture—still not getting it.
To be queer is to be anti- cishetero-normativity, is to be anti- white supremacy, is to be anti- capitalist.
What is the metric by which we measure this state of being anti-? How do we know when we are being adequately anti-normativity?
New norms. How well we adhere to those new norms. And when we don't?
We must hold each other accountable.
“Accountability” is a word that makes my skin crawl. It’s like a dog whistle that warns: You better fall in line fast or you’re about to get beat and there’s nothing you can do to stop it other than sit back, take it, and apologize. If you fight back, you’ll just make it worse.
I don't know if it's just me who misunderstood, or if it was really a load of false advertising when I was being recruited.
I thought, for whatever reason, we were against social norms. Because it is from social norms that normativity emerges! And it is from normativity that oppression emerges!
And so if we are anti-oppression, should we not be anti-norms?
Here is where I get lost and my obsessive loop never finds a point of closure.
The rigidity of social expectation in the world of feminism is so much more challenging for me to navigate, the norms so much more challenging for me to adhere to, than they ever were in the mainstream world.
It's not that it's hard for me to understand and perform Good Feminist Behavior on account of my neurodivergence, per se.
Rather than floundering with social scripts and cues, I am hyper-sensitive to them. It feels more like...the stakes in feminist culture feel so much higher than they do in the mainstream world, precisely because of this hyper-sensitivity.
That's because you're finally being held accountable for your behavior in feminist culture, instead of getting away with it on account of your privilege!
Yeah, maybe in part. But what feels increasingly more accurate is that the stakes feel so high because they are.
The ever-looming threat of public humiliation and exile and "call outs"—by people who are also desperate to avoid punishment for their own perceived social transgressions, or perhaps who are craving the rush of power and praise afforded by unmasking a hidden enemy, or whatever—is actually a social nightmare for someone with my psychological constitution.
(If you feel so guilty and afraid of being found out, there must be something you did wrong that you’re afraid of being discovered.)
Do you have any idea how mental illness works?
Maybe even when someone does egregiously fuck up, “call outs” more often than not transform into community-wide abuse with unnecessarily painful social and material ramifications that fails to incite change at a deep enough level to produce long-lasting transformation. It serves primarily to ramp up fear-based mob mentality. It keeps order, maybe, but is order induced by fear of punishment keeping community safe or just obedient?
Don’t we know what happens in a world that expects obedience to authority? Don’t we know people are not meant to merely obey? Isn’t that why we are where we are? Aren’t we the disobedient ones, defying authority? Why are we recreating that which we seek to defy?
And then there are those of us who misuse the concept of fragility, by using it to ridicule and dismiss and punish the pain and anticipatory anxiety associated with these “accountability” practices.
Do we not see how dismissing the fear of exile and abandonment as “fragility” is reifying and weaponizing the same oppressive bullshit mainstream society uses to justify the psychological brutalization and marginalization of neurodivergent and mad people?
We’re too fragile. Too weak. Too sensitive.
We need to toughen up.
We need to act normal.
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Whenever we talk about coddling men, coddling white people, coddling cis people, I can’t help but think:
Are we all secretly fighting about the best way to raise children? To handle emotions?
To deal with mental health issues that don’t just look like simple mood disorders? Like the Big Scary Ones, that actually interfere with interpersonal relationships? Life the ones that cause those who suffer from them to engage in deviant (from the norm) behavior?
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What I do know is that for all that we like to wear our Sociological Imagination Hats on the left and claim we have achieved ultimate enlightenment for understanding the impact of systems of oppression on the individual, our minds seem to go blank when we are tasked with distinguishing the relational level from the systemic level.
Here's what I mean:
Online feminist community sucks.
But I am still committed to justice.
It’s like, I love feminism, but I can’t stand the fandom.
It makes me feel like I can't open my mouth in public;
like I always need to be walking on eggshells with my closest friends;
like I need to hate my family for their fuck ups instead of understanding and reconciling them AND loathe them for what care they did provide, because they are emblems of unearned privilege;
like I should feel guilty, but then I shouldn't feel guilty because that’s inappropriately centering my feelings, but if I don’t feel my guilt then it erodes my insides like the acid reflux I developed 6 years ago, but then if I say social justice is hurting me I should feel guilty because I’m inappropriately centering my feelings, but I can’t talk about that guilt because I’m inappropriately centering my feelings, but then I;
like I'm one newsfeed-refresh away from losing every single social tie I've got because someone probably has an errant screenshot of me not
towing the party line and has developed some hell bent fixation on “knocking me off my high horse.”
Navigating the social world of feminism is like the worst parts of dysphoric mania.
Intrusive, racing thoughts of impropriety and compulsive behavior to try to make the unrelenting looping fears of imperfection and all-of-your-friends-turning-against-you go away yet still they get louder and louder and your voice gets quieter and quieter until the only way you feel entitled to speak is when you’re type-screaming at a random cishet white dude on your high school friends Facebook post lecturing him on his shitty political views and commenting "poor wittle boy with his fragile male ego is afraid of giving up his privilege! wahhh" and when he says “jesus what the fuck is wrong with you? do you actually think it’s ok to talk to me that way?” you say something about tone policing that effectively amounts to “cis men aren’t allowed to have boundaries because privilege” and screenshotting it and laughing with your friends (this is bonding right?) to make the exile-fear quiet down until your brain reminds you that one day you could be in the screenshot they’re all laughing at if you don’t watch your mouth, you know--so you quiet down again
and again
and again
until you are called on (out) to utilize your social privilege to post on social media about yet another tragedy that “no one is talking about” (though somehow everyone is?) and to be quiet is to be weaponizing
your privilege because silence is violence and so I must speak or else I am committing an act of violence and will be Held Accountable—
why does something about this feel off? like a performance? like a shallow automated version of what resistance ought to look like? like a lot of people with over-activated nervous systems desperate for safety and control and a promise that their immediate response to injustice will avenge another wrongful death and prevent the possibility of another one?
—stop it. why do you feel compelled to question this? do you doubt lived experience? what makes you think you know better than the people who this impacts directly?
why are you so tired?
you must practice self-care.
why are you so emotional?
self-care is for privileged people who want to turn a blind eye to reality. why are you so numb, do you not care?
are you not paying attention?
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Being disillusioned and demanding an end to abusive behavior disguised as righteousness is not a social crime.
Expressing concern about the psychological toll of maintaining the social order of a community isn’t a Secret Red Flag that that person is a Traitor to the Cause.
Criticism of norms with regard to interpersonal relations isn’t the same as decrying the end goals of feminist movements.
I wonder if we can stop dismissing criticism of feminist culture as the same as a stance against justice.
Resenting this culture that claimed to be liberatory, but ended up making people petrified of voicing one note of doubt in its dogma, is not even close to being the same thing as hating women and being a white supremacist.
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Guess it's time to find a new community with a new set of norms. Because I guess we will always need norms.
And so I wonder if we will always need norms, if we will always have people who exist on the margins, who suffer, and if that is true, then what does that mean for feminism?
What does that mean about my beliefs?
Can a world exist without oppression or human violence if we always have normative expectations that require Reward and Punishment for maintenance?
Can there really ever be a paradigm beyond Reward and Punishment, or are our reptile brains too strong for us to outgrow this?
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When did I lose sight of my values?
Who replaced values with rigid behavioral expectation? Who replaced community with ideology?
I guess, ultimately, I did.
I guess, sometimes, there is no system that fucks you over, but your own series of poor decisions to relate to the wrong people, to follow the wrong rules, that you made in a desperate search for meaning. Your own brain hell bent on obsession and compulsion and fear-avoidance in the form of a desperate search for perfection.
And I guess that's just growing up.
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What is a life beyond strict adherence to revolutionary ideology? Is it willful ignorance? Is it abandonment of justice?
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does the tree make a sound?
If I feel shock and outrage at injustice and I don't publicly condemn yet another act of violence to my 2,500 followers on social media who are all doing the same thing—do I actually feel shock and outrage?
Of course I do.
Of course I feel it.
Of course we who are emotionally invested in justice are all feeling the weight of a world that is falling apart and failing us at every turn.
Of course we are not all "feeling" it equally, but...do we need to?
Do guilt and shame for “having a choice to tune out” fill this gap? Does public or private repentance for undue privilege get food into anyone's mouth or sunlight on an incarcerated person’s skin? Does reminding the socially privileged of their privilege reduce our suffering? Does any of this dismantle systems of oppression?
Does the echo of our rigid adherence to social norms of the Social Justice Internet reach the ears of those with the money and power to change shit overnight?
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It's actually possible to live a full life outside of the song-and-dance of the 24/7 cycle of social media outrage.
It's actually possible to embody your values and just use social media to post updates to your family about your dog, or whatever.
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I am 24 years old and somehow, already, my digestive system is crumbling.
I cannot breathe at night under the heaviness of my own corporeal form. I can no longer metabolize carbohydrates normally, it seems.
I've gained so much weight over the last 5 years, and it fucking sucks. It all around fucking sucks. It hurts, I ache, I’m slow, it sucks.
I want to lose weight, but I am afraid of being perceived as fatphobic for doing so.
I am riddled with cognitive dissonance, knowing that
This body is dying too quickly, it’s damaged and I need to change it—but also “the science” that says fat is unhealthy is “biased” and “fatphobic” so maybe I’m actually fine and it’s just anxiety. I’m not sure. I mean, I don’t really buy into the idea that the science about weight loss is “fatphobic,” but...Maybe I should change my diet? No, restriction is dangerous. But also, apparently science suggests that a hypocaloric diet is the most effective way to heal insulin resistance and Type II diabetes? God I hope I don’t have diabetes yet. I don’t know. Now I know I have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and the treatment is weight loss. Is that fatphobic? But I want to do it. Is that my internalized oppression? I don't think so. Fuck. I just need to listen to what my body wants to eat. But when I do that I eat fast food three times a day and feel like I'm about to have a fuckin heart attack. Ugh, stop shaming yourself for enjoying food. But it’s not shame, it’s...fact? My body doesn’t need this much or that kind of food. Why am I so constantly hungry? I didn’t used to be this hungry all the
time. Something feels really off. Stop shaming yourself for hunger! It’s ok to honor your hunger and feed your body what it wants! ...But I think my hunger hormones are completely off...and that year I started running and lost 20 pounds made my apnea and reflux better. But I should be fine how I am? But I’m not. Fuck.
Self-love.
Self-love.
But isn’t prioritizing my health self-love?
Health is possible at every size!
But I didn’t have sleep apnea or reflux at a lower, “normal” weight.
STOP FAT SHAMING.
SELF.
LOVE.
(“Ugh, this criticism isn’t even fair, they don’t understand fat positivity well enough. They’re not doing it right.”)
I confide in a friend that I am thinking of losing weight.
She tells me I should love my body no matter what! Fuck diet culture! You can be healthy at any size.
To quell the special blend of guilt of the desire, agitation from the intuitive sense that this ideological stance isn’t lining up with what my
body tells me it needs, shame for “still not getting it”, I say it’s time to honor my hunger cues. I buy Burger King. I am calm.
I'm not sure my pancreas, esophagus, or bowels give a flying fuck what ideology I subscribe to.
I’m not sure illness onset or evidenced by a shitty diet and excess abdominal weight cares if I love myself or not.
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Systemically, I am privileged as fuck. White, wealthy, educated, from the northeast, cis appearing.
In mainstream culture, following mainstream norms, I am privileged as fuck.
And yet, none of this social privilege has protected me from the psychological impacts of abuse I've endured from people in feminism, who managed to con me and others into believing their (textbook) abuse and manipulation was justified on account of my privilege. Or on account of my failure to comply and fall in line.
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Isn't it wild how, in an outraged quest for liberation and belonging, we act like everything that we decry?
How we act like the police?
How we act like the oppressor?
How we act like the abuser?
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The most absurd part of identity politics in the US is how disgustingly American it is. It's sopping wet with American exceptionalism and individualism and neoliberalism.
We, with all of our wealth and global power, have a Sacred Duty to ourselves and the rest of the world to model what it means to be Good. To be Pure. To be Just.
Which like, it is what it is. That’s just context.
But I wish we would just talk about it, ya know? Because then maybe we could realize...our current state of affairs isn’t perfect, it is just one more iteration of a movement that is informed by context. So much context. So much history.
Like, when will we talk about how identity politics effectively is a collective call for us to privatize the responsibility of addressing systemic oppression? We are individuals privately taking on the weight of guilt and rage and responsibility for repairing hundreds of years of SYSTEMIC violence, and believing that “change starts by looking inward.”
This is the internalization of neoliberal ideology, shaping the way we talk about and form community expectations for anti-oppression work.
And shit, what has driven the discourse around the "Right" way to do social justice, but a handful of content creators on blogs who are driven by a motive to drive up traffic and go viral so they can profit off their work and scrape by on meager wages? The most captivating--read: morally declarative, confidently outraged--voices are the ones who have driven this conversation.
All...for an end goal...of...profit. Of exerting influence...authority.
And also, are we really that full of hubris that we think suddenly, we in 2018 have all of the answers to what it means to do justice and be perfectly human?
I mean, yeah. And I guess we always will be. We’re human, after all. ------
I no longer want to measure the worth of my words and behaviors and relationships as how “radical” they are.
I just want to speak my truth and believe that is worthy enough. I just want to fucking exist and believe that is enough.
I don’t think we can live healthy full lives if we are mired nonstop in self-conscious thinking and self-scrutiny.
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Your perspective seems really warped by untreated mental health issues...this sounds like a personal problem?
<s> Then so does your issue with your self-worth. Then so does your rage against patriarchy. Then so does your anxiety about your body.
I guess all of that is a personal problem too.
Because, like feminism clearly states: Our personal distress and psychological dysfunction aren't at all a reflection of the dysfunction of the culture and religion we adhere to, regardless of if they are dominant or not.
Right? </s>
Pick one.
Reconcile the doublethink.
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I spent one day a week for a year entering my therapist's office and exclaiming, "I feel like I'm leaving a cult!"
The psychological toll it has taken on me to give myself permission to make space for myself to privately pull away from feminism is inexplicable.
At the end of our time together, my therapist told me, "You really opened my eyes to the human collateral of social justice work.".
No more of that. For me or for anyone else, thanks.