In defense of the tumblr girls who got brain poisoned in the 2010s
An essay from my zine Floating, published in July 2022, about the psychology of girls who got lost to the social justice, neoliberal identitarian side of the culture wars in the early 2010s
If you like this essay and would like to read more, you can purchase the full zine this is excerpted from: Floating. Also if you’d like to read more about the psychological traumas and subsequent unhinged romantic behavior that stemmed from my casually mentioned in the first paragraph 13-year-old hobby of pwning pedos on the 2000s internet, consider buying my book Vow. It’s all about that. It is a disturbing read. It ends in me writing a pleading love letter to God though, which might still be disturbing to some readers.
Here’s the thing. It’s a major L for me to admit that I lost myself to social justice culture or whatever. I find it humiliating. When I was young, I used to consider myself an Independent Thinker and Not Easily Swindled. My hobby online age 13 was outsmarting pedophiles because in my youthful pride and obstinance I refused to be manipulated or psychologically dominated. I found success in these endeavors.
And yet, here I am. Recovering from years of losing my mind and moral compass to politics I learned in college. It’s a major hit to my ego even though I wrote and talked about it so much I found people who are willing to read this zine I’m writing right now.
The thing is, virtually all of these criticisms are ones I knew from the get-go. I saw through this shit because I’m not dumb. I was disempowered and deferring myself to a doctrine I thought was holy. I’m not dumb, I’m just (nausea begins) genuinely an empathetic person (yakking commences). I’m not saying I am An Empath. I’m saying I am a person who happens to care a lot about other people and humanity at large, and the experience of this was psychologically consuming to me when I was a kid and a teenager. When I was young, it was my main orientation to being alive, living through that lens. I always felt an acutely strong sense of responsibility for the world and other people’s pain felt visceral to me. (My mood stabilizer reduced this by ~34%.)
It’s not stupidity that makes people lose themselves to this worldview, it’s their unmastered empathy. It’s their organic orientation to be social and relational in dealing with the world. Someone who is primarily rational or intellectual would not get sucked into woke world the same way, because it would be easy to dismiss on the basis of rational thinking. People who operate primarily from feeling are willing to overlook the philosophical inconsistencies out of a belief in the heart of the matter.
The ideology recruits and retains with guilt and coercion, and it succeeds at that squarely because of a person’s unmastered empathy and compassion, especially if there is a heavy dose of self-esteem issues. It ropes you in by speaking to your deep connection to others’ pain, something you are sensitive to and have the impulse to help alleviate. Once it has your trust, the doctrine and your peers (or actual leaders, self-appointed or real) who enforce it convince you that you are both a scumbag and a hero: privileged and victim, oppressor and oppressed, enemy and truth-teller. It demands that you self-flagellate while fighting everyone around you in the name of justice. It may seem like acting as antisocial as woke kids do demonstrates lack of empathy. I disagree, it demonstrates empathy gone haywire, turned selective.
It takes empathy to submit yourself and be dominated by either a person or a moral system into doing egregious things. The way you become convinced to submit is by being told it is the right thing to do to alleviate the pain others suffer, which you feel acutely. When you’re in it, you believe that you are doing what is right, and you really seriously believe it. Not because you are dumb, because your emotions are being heavily manipulated. Some people involved are genuinely sadistic, near-evil individuals, but the vast majority are just lost and emulating that behavior because they’ve lost themselves to the doctrine, to the herd.
I look back at my younger self sometimes and cringe. Molly, why did you let yourself fall into this? Why didn’t you listen to yourself? It’s like seeing someone caught in an obviously shitty codependent relationship and just desperately wishing they acted on the red flags from the beginning.
I have a lot of shame about this. Once an essay I wrote got posted on Reddit and it got over 200 comments. They were net positive, even glowing. But there were a few that stung. The title of the essay was “My non-binary gender was a cope,” and a comment said “yes molly, we know. kudos for admitting it openly.” That hit me straight in my I-refuse-to-be- taken-for-a-fool ego. You’re so stupid, you should have known better. Idiot.
I tend to harshly judge her—and by inevitable extension anyone like her—as stupid and weak to be so carried away by a crowd or a belief system. That misses the point. In missing the point, I miss identifying the entry through which anyone can properly intervene so this stops happening to other people. That duped girl isn’t dumb, she is young and desperate to love and to serve. She lacked clarity not out of personal idiocy, but out of a lack of guidance. She lacked strength not due to a deficiency in character, but out of a misguided impulse to serve something greater than herself.
So many young girls lost (and continue to lose) themselves to this ideology because of their empathy. It’s a tale as old as time, but instead of losing themselves to cruel lovers (though they probably were doing that too), they lost themselves to a cruel religion. Call it reductive, but I know what I know. After all the defiant haircuts and the theory, sometimes girls are simply just being girls. Obviously this isn’t exclusive to girls, but this phenomenon occurred in a way that is particularly well-suited to the way girls tend to function relationally and emotionally—whether that’s a result of socialization or biology is irrelevant.
We ought to see this for what it was and continues to be: (mostly) girls getting radicalized online. The conversion of former tumblr users into social justice warriors was not due to some deplorable and inescapable weakness of character, but manipulation of their yet-to-be-mastered human strength: empathy.
If you like this essay and would like to read more, you can purchase the full zine this is excerpted from: Floating. Also if you’d like to read more about the psychological traumas and subsequent unhinged romantic behavior that stemmed from my casually mentioned in the first paragraph 13-year-old hobby of pwning pedos on the 2000s internet, consider buying my book Vow. It’s all about that. It is a disturbing read. It ends in me writing a pleading love letter to God though, which might still be disturbing to some readers.
As a former Tumblr girl who also lost herself to emotionally-manipulative social justice politics, I really appreciate hearing your voice on these matters. I know it's easy to feel ashamed of past versions of ourselves, but we were young and didn't know any better. Now we do. At least we got out, Phew!
Appreciate your candidness as a once brainwashed 2010s tumblr girl myself...love your work ❤️