#and/or a victimhood complex etc

[dwellordream]

"she's patriarchy-pilled" and why it doesn't apply to fictious pseudo-medieval women

a pretty common meta commentary leveled at certain female characters in ASOIAF is that you can divide the women of the setting into two groups.

the first group is full of strong feminist women who resist the patriarchy in all corners, and who refuse to submit to victimhood. the second group is full of placid, smug sheep, who enjoy being weak and condescended to by men.

reasons why this is bullshit:

comparisons between modern day 'trad wives' or 'red pilled women' who advocate for rejecting feminism and returning to lives of happy homemaking and female submission and fictional characters living in a pseudo medieval world just... don't work well.

Westeros has never had a feminist movement. there is no sense of 'getting back to tradition' because they are still living in a feudal patriarchy. while internalized misogyny can still be displayed in the books, and women certainly judge other women, these characters aren't actually 'rejecting their own freedom', because they quite literally have no choice in the matter.

for example, while a woman in 21st century America might willingly quit her job or drop out of school for a relationship with a man, a female character like Catelyn or Alicent or Cersei... isn't actually sacrificing hopes of a career or an education. they are being shunted down a path with little to no alternatives.

sometimes fans go "well, they could have run away! they could have joined the Faith?" how? with what money and resources? who is going to protect them on the road? how are they going to subvert the will of their fathers/brothers/etc?

don't get me wrong. there are absolutely unironic examples of internalized misogyny in ASOIAF. Cersei, for example, spends much of her time sneering at and degrading other women for being victims or weak-willed. HOWEVER, what many fans don't seem to grasp, is that being sexist towards other women doesn't magically make Cersei 'win' at the patriarchy. she herself is still abused, demeaned, and used as a political pawn, well into her tenure as Queen Regent.

in the endless battle of Sansa versus Arya stans, for example, Sansa stans will often claim that Arya is 'not a victim' and 'deserves less sympathy than Sansa', because Arya for a time is treated as a young boy and has training with a sword. yet this ignores the fact that Arya is still constantly threatened with or exposed to sexual violence, even while masquerading as a boy, and while she can defend herself in some instances, is far from this super-powered action chick on a 'fun road trip in the Riverlands'.

conversely, Arya stans will insinuate that Sansa 'deserves less sympathy than Arya' because 'being at court is what she always wanted' and 'the patriarchy favors her due to her self-serving, submissive ways'. yet this ignores the fact that while Sansa has more material privileges than Arya, being afforded regular meals, a soft place to sleep, and the veneer of civility, she is still regularly viciously abused by Joffrey and his Kingsguard, and ostracized and isolated from the rest of the court. Sansa's not winning any competition here.

to move on to Catelyn, many of Catelyn's proud 'antis' will claim that Catelyn is a woman who willingly and knowingly profits off the patriarchy while condemning women who do not fit that mold. yet while Catelyn and Arya's relationship is complex, we also see Catelyn treat Brienne and the Mormont women, all female warriors, with warmth and kindness, and there is an underlying current of resentment and anger in her chapters towards the men in her life, even though she is in many ways the 'ideal Westeros wife'.

finally, to dabble briefly in HOTD, Rhaenyra and Alicent's different reactions to the prospect of marriage and motherhood are often compared to triumph Rhaenyra's strong will and sense of rebellion. while Rhaenyra's determination to choose her own spouse and her disregard for the ridiculous notion of 'virginity' should be admired, she is also actively groomed by her uncle, a man thrice her age, and she ultimately does agree to an arranged marriage with Laenor.

meanwhile, Alicent is often derided by fans for 'allowing herself to be used as a pawn', yet this ignores the fact that Alicent is a 14/15 year old girl with no incomes or property of her own, who does not even have the threat of a dragon to demand respect. what was Alicent meant to do? kick and scream as she was dragged down the aisle? defy her father and the King, and be, best case scenario, permanently ostracized from court and her family for it? this sort of blatant victim-blaming dominates in the tumblr HOTD fandom.

in conclusion: to claim that women play no role in promulgating patriarchal and misogynistic views is silly.

women do play an active role in shaming and abusing other women, and this is often handed down from mothers to daughters. it allows patriarchs the veneer of genteel nature, in that the 'dirty work' of berating young girls for not conforming is passed off on mothers, sisters, and aunts.

however, in fandom discussions, the the woobification of male characters is so strong that we spend most of our time blaming women alone for patriarchal restrictions and values, as if it were something girls developed in their free time, purely for their own amusement.

to imply that a character in a fictional feudal patriarchy has the same range of choices and autonomy as modern day women do is absurd. the trad-wife movement is defined by its knowing, pseudo-intellectual rejection of second and third wave feminism. the entire point is to turn away from abortion, from birth control, from reproductive and LGBT rights, to leave behind women's suffrage, sex positivity, and criticism of gender roles.

but what do Westerosi women have to 'reject', exactly? they're not playing with the same full deck.

[spot-the-antisemitism]

I think disturbing aspect of some leftist groups is fetishization of victimhood. They don't see ethnic and racial groups as people, they see them as victims defined by historical tragedies.

So Jews are defined by Holocaust, Blacks by slave trade, Natives and Latino Americans by colonization, etc.

Thing is, since this is a phenomenon present mostly in Western societies, people observing the world like this don't have much to show in terms of victimhood.

So they have several choices and all indirectly lead to antisemitism these days.

Self loathing since they are not as victimized as other groups. This leads to some variation of noble savage trope since they view those groups as automatically better than them. And viewing current war through the lens of noble savage trope leads to either conclusion Arabs are enlightened browns oppressed by evil white Jewish colonists or whites manipulating Jews and Arabs into fighting each other (former way more common). So they either demonize Jews or absurdly infantilize them, both fairly offensive.

Inserting themselves into historical tragedies of other ethnic and racial groups. This is usually "If I were in that time period I would have been (insert good guy group name) and saved (insert oppressed group name)." In this case, usually bragging how they would have saved as many Jews as possible during the Holocaust and be part of the Resistance. However, they are now also roleplaying as Palestinians on campus. Another thing that piqued my interest is current Miku trend. Whenever they draw "Palestinian" Miku, she is usually wearing regular clothes with keffiyeh and activist slogan. Their "Palestinian" MIku is not Palestinian, they are drawing themselves as Palestinians. And since they are roleplaying as Palestinians, then Jews are their enemy and oppressing them.

Just make shit up and make yourself a victim. Just pretend there is some secret cabal controlling everything and making your life miserable. And more often than not, it ends up being some shadowy Zionist organization. All of a sudden, they are the biggest victims, barely surviving under oppressive regime that censors their social media (they've sent death threats to countless people), brutalizes them (cop smacked them with baton after they threw a Molotov cocktail at them) and jails them for dissenting opinion (attacked random Jews on street). Of course they are the biggest victims, not those people under enlightened rule of Maduro, Xi and Putin.

Either way, I'd like Western leftists to see Jews as people instead of either defining them as just Holocaust victims or just bloodthirsty child murderers.

Dear anon,

thank you for your essay,

the canards are as follows

White guilt

Cultural appropriation

persecution complex

Not much to add here

Nice spotting!

Please write again,

Cecil

[alaynestone]

not to be overly applying real life concepts to a silly cw show lol but there's also something very perfect-victimy about the way people dismiss dean's victimhood vs sam's. like because dean's sarcastic or represses a lot of emotion or something people dismiss the things he went through. like obviously HE wants to forget about it and pretend it didn't happen, that's the point! but why are so many people dumb enough to hop right on board with that and literally erase/ignore things that happened to dean in the show (oftentimes in favor of pretending they happened to sam instead lol)... idk it's just a very weird thing that makes me feel protective of dean's character and what he represents in a way i don't usually with fictional characters. i love sam too but some of the samgirls or whatever take on a very cutting and aggressive tone that's slightly upsetting sometimes ngl. it just feels weirdly personal, not even at dean as much as like. anyone who dares to relate to dean as a character

i happen to think this "silly cw show" is actually far better at depicting complex trauma than people give it credit for.

but yeah, you are spot on here. it's absolutely about creating a perfect victim in sam and hyperfocusing on that while throwing nuance and context out the window entirely. even going all the way back to their childhood where dean is held fully responsible for the ways he responded to john's abuse by adapting rather than rebelling. dean is either considered responsible for his own situation or not a victim at all. he "liked" it, he perpetuated the "cycle", he was a lost cause, he was inferior to sam (and people loooove being classist about this, they think they're comedians) etc. which of course is NOT AT ALL the narrative presented to us by the show and erases the fascinating ways the brothers' arcs were paralleled throughout the seasons. for example, in season 2 you have dean only starting to confront the million ways john messed him up when he's not around anymore, just as sam is confronting his own destiny. the show explicitly links these two things yet dean is somehow generally viewed as the brother who's in charge of his own life. dean, who was controlled by his father until he was 27 and already in 1x11 admitting to sam that he admired him for making his own choices. i can't stress enough how "the one and only victim sam who completely lacks autonomy" is a fandom invention. and for what?

what you said about feeling protective of dean i think has always been part of his appeal. sam always had dean looking out for him, dean had no one. sam, even at his lowest, fundamentally valued himself and his own personhood, dean could never afford to because the survival of his family was up to him. he never coddled himself or let himself off the hook for a single perceived failure and i'm supposed to pile on? nah. his anger is so explosive in later seasons because he was never free to express his own feelings growing up and go through the regular stages teenagers and young adults do. i think there's a big effort to erase these nuances because if the actual story is taken into account, then it's impossible to forget how much dean went through so sam wouldn't have to. that sadly also ignores the impact it had on their relationship with dean's buried resentment towards sam, as well as sam's guilt for not always being there for dean in return. nearly every terrible traumatic thing sam experienced over the duration of the show is something dean had experienced already. at my most cynical, i think the purpose of reframing dean as this all powerful oppressor is because sam can only win the trauma olympics if dean is no longer vulnerable at all, no longer dean. and yes the trauma olympics approach is pointless, but if they're gonna insist on going there first, i'm not gonna hold back.

i mentioned sam's flinching and how it's valued as a trauma response compared to dean's anger but the thing is...before the cage, sam used to rage at dean and the entire world. his own anger nearly ate him up which he acknowledges multiple times. yet again, back when dean was fresh out of hell and sometimes genuinely freaked out by sam, including when he flinched at sam using his powers, it's still perceived as dean being cruel and abusive to sam. if sam feels bad about the moral implications and consequences of his actions it's because dean won't instantly get over it and support him. if dean doesn't trust him, it must be dean's fault alone. sam is the only one whose pov is taken into consideration and the only one whose feelings can be hurt. so it is a perfect victim thing but also about how only one of them gets to lash out and be vindictive and messy and remain sympathetic and good. essentially, sam gets to be a person but dean can only ever be sam's own personal giving tree.

it's classic fandom woobification with the childish "my fave can do no wrong" rhetoric, but since it's 2024 it's now hidden behind words like autonomy/cycles/abuse and passed around as objective analysis.

[mumms-the-word]

i think 'groomed' in the mystra context is a little bit like 'groomed to become a leader' in the sense of being prepared for a role. the elements of a huge power imbalance and manipulation make that negative where it could've been a positive thing. so instead, 'gale was groomed to become mystra's chosen' becomes 'gale is groomed to die due to his folly'. not getting into the pitfalls of being a chosen, but that's how i see it mostly. i suppose he was also a child at one point there and that then brings in the other definition. but mostly the former. i think.

That's another good and complicated facet in this complex issue! The difficult thing is everyone disagrees on the exact definition and parameters of Gale as a victim of grooming, if they believe that at all.

If you believe BG3 ignores 5e canon and Mystra revealed herself to him as a child, then it’s Child Grooming. If you believe she revealed herself when he was a late teen or young adult and was his mentor first, then it’s Teacher-Student Grooming. If you believe he was a consenting adult for most of their relationship, then you get a thorny kind of Adult Sexual/Emotional Grooming thing, which is extremely hard to pin down because we weren’t there to see all the details, and Gale isn’t being open about how much he consented at certain steps of his relationship with her. He may not even personally know how much he did or didn't consent himself, if he hasn't processed the trauma yet.

We can’t even agree on a timeline as a fandom. Of course we're not going to agree on a particular "brand" of grooming.

So it gets fuzzy, especially because no two “Gale was groomed” interpretations are the same, and that’s just among people who aren’t fighting over whether he was groomed.

The other difficult thing is that for most of the word's history (assuming "groom" was coined around the late 1700s), the use of “groom” as a verb meant either the care of an animal, plant, or location (grooming a horse, a cat grooming itself, grooming a lawn), or it meant personal hygiene (grooming your nails, your hair, etc), or it meant “to prepare a person for a role" without as many of the negative connotations (i.e., a politician grooming his successor, a situation where the person being groomed likely is consenting and finds no issue with the arrangement).

So, hate to say it, but there's a scenario where Gale could admit he was groomed--he was groomed to be Mystra's Chosen, a role he may have willingly walked into (kind of related to your point as well). That complicates the "Gale was groomed" narrative, doesn't it? Where does victimhood lie?

Apparently the term "grooming" didn’t have sexual connotations until around the 1980s.

Like not to be all Academic on Main but the Oxford English Dictionary, which tracks the (relative) earliest known uses for definitions, says the definition to prepare or coach a person for a career or role (paraphrased) has been around since the 1830s, while to gain the trust of and influence over a person for sexual abuse, exploitation, trafficking, drug-dealing, terrorism, etc (paraphrased) first came around 1984.

Granted the OED doesn't always find the exact first usage but the gap between 1830 and 1980 is pretty telling.

So this could not only be a language divide, but a generational divide. The concept of grooming as a sexually/emotionally predatory thing is pretty new by language standards. Most people playing BG3 would know the concept of grooming-as-predatory if they grew up in an English-speaking country, but at what point did they learn that definition? It will obviously vary.

These days it's a buzzword, thanks to all the shit coming out about Nickelodeon and child actors and celebrities and so on, so younger millennials and Gen-Z and beyond might be a bit more "trigger happy" about using the term than older millennials and others for whom the term is still relatively new and hard to grasp. Also, as completely different aside, I think people are quick to diagnose/label based on vibes, and that's part of the problem with all the fighting too, because how do you compare vibes?

Language is and always will be slippery. I guess in the end I just wish people would be more open about explaining why they go with a specific term, or why they disagree, without attacking people or completely dismissing whole narratives/arcs/experiences simply because it “doesn’t fit the definition.”

As a final related but side note, I think the biggest thing that bothers me about people erasing the Gale-as-grooming-victim is that it inevitably harms actual victims of grooming by insinuating that it's a scenario that could never possibly happen. But that has less to do with the weirdness of language and more about how people view trauma, abuse, and victimhood.

[horizon-verizon]

So Rhaenyra’s downfall is gonna be some divine karma as she is gonna become a fanatical cult leader with a god complex that sacrifices the masses for a prophecy instead of having it be a tragedy caused by misogyny, they gonna make it seem like she brought her own end. Truly groundbreaking storytelling, thanks Ryan Condal.

If not exactly Dany S8 degree of "lost mind" cult leader "fanatical, it will be that she lost sight that Targs are not Gods and she "lost herself" bc she was desperate & had been deprived of the access to male graces her entire life. which is problematic not only bc bk!Rhaenyra seemed to feel little to no real jealousy or wish to do "masculine" stuff or to adopt a more "masculinized" identity, but bc it poses masculinity as both an inherent, immutable and prime desireable state of being rather than a thing that develops from socialization.

They seem to think that they are giving respect to Rhaenyra's end by not really thinking about women=victim and instead focusing more on how said woman "escapes" victimhood by doing what she can only ever do, and that is massive malicious takeover that she can no longer see as inherently evil. Somehow this is their "necessary" compromise with woman-eternal-victim with "feudalism is always bad and we shouldn't care about nuances of living in such a system": a woman fails bc she decided to the biggest-baddest thru weapons of mass destruction and manipulating 1000s to believe these creatures are gods to get where she has always been told she doesn't deserve.

Here's the thing. Cersei is a NLOG and did think that she needed to become a literal man or adopt ONLY masculinized phenomena (looks, behavior, practices, like sword fighting) in order to ever consider herself capable of being a creature of power. Of being an agent of change, influence, power, formidability, authority in her society/community/etc. Something that many people want or develop to want. And most women have ta one point felt this way whether it was a sustained (years long), "momentary", or something we still feel reflexively from time to time. Because we have been socialized that way. To think man = prime/only source of human power/"naturalness". It is inevitable that there will be Cerseis and such...but to make as if women are monolithically going to turn out to be Cersei is itself sexist to maintain that idea that maledom is a unquestionable "prize" or grace.

I see Cersei as both a tragic figure who portrays how fallible and futile it is to deny your own traits or eschew exploring what you are truly affined with at any given moment, or at least be flexible there in one's expression, be it gender or not. Bc Cersei is a figure of extreme repression to fit something she can never be bc it will always be denied to her on account of having a vagina and looking like an ideal of female beauty. It is why she is funny and tragic (to some, just hateful or that and pitiful). But To make as if every single women MOST women will fall into this trap society makes is to make as if women are also pretty weak of mind or whatever counts as "soul". Which again, counts to reaffirm masculinity's superiority and women's place as needing the "protection" of men.

BK!Rhaenyra was an example of a woman who may not have been perfect but she never felt as if she had to deny who she was to prove her deserving or hide her traits to have access to such. She demanded and didn't give in enough when she was nonverbally and socially compelled to and was killed for it. HotD wants to stray from this to seemingly reaffirm all that I just described, even as its writers might not really understand the gravity of what they are doing.

Both are tragic figures. But they are not the same women and their womanhoods' developments/how they created their womanhoods within the system give them their own separate flavors of tragedies that also go under the super-category of "women are damned" archetype in fiction. It is also bc these writers haven't really understood agency in gender relations.

Ryan Condal seems to dream of creating parables. He should stick to those. (these aren't "uncomplicated, either, btw", to write a good parable you need to have a good command or knowledge of some cultural ideals and be able to use them to make a very memorable image while conveying your point instantaneously...but Condal seems to favor the simplicity of a parable's one-shot allegory).

[the-world-of-nai]

birth chart analysis: ariana grande

hi yall! today i am in the mood to do a celeb birth chart analysis. if u have any celebs u want to see next, leave in the comments below <3

. *. ⋆ . *. ⋆ . *. ⋆ . *. ⋆

ariana grande, or as i like to call her: the manifesting queen.

i am a new astrologer, so i will only be focusing on the big 6. i am still learning about houses and sextiles and all that, so i won't be including too much of it.

sun in ♋︎, 5 degrees + mercury in ♋︎

this makes ariana a first decan cancer: the most cancer of cancers. i like to say the sun sign is the sign of ego and how we view ourselves. ariana is someone who has a tough shell to crack, but once you're in her squad she will take care of you like a mother does her child. cancers are like crabs: sharp and pointy claws, but very nurturing and caring to her children. in this case, children = loved ones. cancers can exhibit mean girl energy in that way. they have a clique of close friends that they give everything to, but if they don't know u they can be quite cold/closed off. with this placement, ariana is emotionally in tune with those around her. she knows what you need if you're feeling down. sun in cancer people can also be quite moody, temperamental, sensitive, and romantic. like i said earlier, quite caring and loving. cancers are not as psychic as other water signs, but they are very compassionate and sensitive, and always want to give and help their loved ones (at least the developed cancers). cancers can also be quite vindictive, and they can have a bit of victim complex as well. think self pity parties. that is one of their shadow traits. they can wallow in their own victimhood and sadness every now and then. this can make them emotionally manipulative, moody, and hard to deal with on their off days.

moon in ♎︎, 6 degrees

this makes ariana a first decan lunar libra, again the most libra of libras. the moon indicates are inner-most self and our emotional regulations. with the moon being in libra, ariana is a social butterfly. she is very charming, fashionable, artistic, and cares a lot about aesthetics. she really values looking good and presentable. high social status and being well liked are also very important things to her. moon in libra folk are hopelessly romantic and really value romantic relationships (this explains her back-to-back relationships). this placement can easily make someone fear being alone. moon in libra folk are very diplomatic as well. they value justice and harmony, and will do what they must to sustain it (this can explain why ariana never publicly speaks about her scandals!!). she knows what to say and how to say it to make people adore her. effortlessly attractive and pleasant to be around.

venus in ♉︎

the venusian influence is strong here! with moon in libra and venus in taurus, ariana is very attractive and alluring to other people. venus in taurus folk are friendly, grounded, charming and they are they type who attract suitors instead of going and pursuing them. they are the ones who are pursued. ariana takes her time getting to know people. she is very friendly, charming, and grounding to her loved ones. venus in taurus people can be artistically inclined because venus is at home in taurus. it gives you a good eye for aesthetics and beauty. venus in taurus also has developed senses, so it can make you very good at cooking, singing, fashion, etc. arianas tastes are refined and lavish. she values luxury and the simple yet good things in life: think a nice steak (i know she's vegan) with some red wine and satin silk bed sheets. venus in taurus folk are thorough and slow moving at times. they value peace and comfort, as well as hard work, sensibility, and stability.

mars in ♍︎

this placement makes ariana a very detail oriented person. it can also mean that she is rather self-critical. someone with this placement may be very health conscious and body conscious. also with venus in taurus influence, they care a lot about their body looking good. she is meticulous and organized. once she decides she wants to do something, she will plan it out and do it thoroughly. once again, she values hard work and organization, similar to the venus in taurus influence. this placement can also make her a clean freak!! and a bit of a nagger too LOL

༶•┈┈୨♡୧┈┈•༶

ariana has been receiving hella backlash lately, but i am such a big arianator like i love that b*tch to death!! manifesting to meet her one day

anyways, so that's it for this analysis. let me know your thoughts in the comments and which celeb you want me to do next <3

[iamnmbr3]

Can I ask about Snape for "give me a character" ask?

Sure can!

How I feel about this character

Snape is a complex, flawed, emotionally compelling and morally grey character - which is why he's one of my favorites. I find him deeply fascinating and also very tragic.

All the people I ship romantically with this character

Shipping isn't that central to my interest in Snape's character. That said, I actually think snily has some fun potential and I'm always surprised there's not more written for it. I think Snape/Sirius as a dark or semidark (depending on the exact iteration) ship also has a lot of fascinating potential for something a bit messed up and very interesting. I also think Snape/Lupin has some very interesting potential as well though I've yet to find a fic that really explores the aspects of that ship that I think would be most compelling.

My non-romantic OTP for this character

I think Snape's relationship with Voldemort is really interesting. He and Tom Riddle have a lot in common - both from poor backgrounds, both with accents that they later worked to change, both very magically talented and creative, both half-blood, both with Muggle fathers who they disliked (and possibly whom they both killed), both highly intelligent etc.

I think to the extent that Voldemort likes anyone, he likes Snape. I mean he actually expresses some regret about killing him and apologizes to Snape. He also offers Lily a chance to live as a favor to Snape. And doesn't kill him on sight when he shows up late following the events of book 4 (though he is initially furious). And of course while Snape definitely fears Voldemort he doesn't grovel as much as some of his Death Eaters do, which I think Tom actually likes and respects.

On the other hand Tom has some reservations about Snape (partly probably just because he has trust issues) - even in book 7 I think part of the reason he kills Charity Burbage in the way that he does is to test Snape's loyalties by gauging his reaction. And of course Snape is actually not loyal to him at all and blames him for the death of the love of his life. I find the whole dynamic super interesting.

My unpopular opinion about this character

Regardless of Snape's later actions, what the Marauders did to him in SNW was utterly inexcusable. (This is only an unpopular opinion in some circles of course.) Snape's later misdeeds do not take away from his victimhood in that scene, nor does his victimhood take away from his flaws or subsequent bad choices and actions.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

I think Snape's arc is pretty well done. I would've liked to have seen more of his time as a double agent. I understand this would be difficult given the constraints of the series mostly being from Harry's POV, but it could have been accomplished with visions through Harry's connection to Voldemort. Especially in book 7 more visions that showed what the Death Eaters were up to would have been a lot more fun than camping and endless wedding planning imho.

[la-pheacienne]

Rhaenyra is objectively a victim, but to people in the fandom, sob story olympic is about self projection, it’s about MY victimhood. They don’t think Rhaenyra is a victim because she’s not a character you can use as a vehicle to talk about your own problems. You can make posts about Alicent and moan about low confidence, anxiety, feeling useless, resenting other people's success or people trying to take control of their lives, projecting your inferiority/victim/martyr complex, etc. At the core of it, it’s narcissism, it’s thinly veiled self glorification and baits for validation. But you can’t really talk about Rhaenyra’s sob story and make it about yourself. Most of them don’t have very exciting lives or ambitions. Rhaenyra is sexually autonomous, has three bastards, and had her throne stolen because she was a woman. Not relatable.

"At the core of it, it’s narcissism, it’s thinly veiled self glorification and baits for validation".

"Rhaenyra is sexually autonomous, has three bastards, and had her throne stolen because she was a woman. Not relatable".

Yep, you said it all. Not relatable. Relatability is the number one quality a fictional hero should have in the current context of american media. Traditionally, or at least in my culture, what you go for -mainly- is exceptionalism. In order for me to care about a character they need to give me something exceptional, something particular, something that nobody else has. I am not looking to see myself on screen. I don't give a fuck about that. Give me something different. But be careful, exceptionalism doesn't mean lack of realism, not at all, I am all about realism, I just don't like characters just because they have weaknesses I can relate to. I need more.

Irrelevant but also kind of relevant : when I was little I read Little women. I loved it. So if you are not familiar with the story, it's a poor family with a lot of sisters, end of 19th century. Jo is one of the sisters, an Arya type of person we could say : she hates the discrimination against women, she wants to live like a man, doesn't want to get married, she wants to become a successful writer. Then you have her sister Amy, perfect little lady, accepts her position as a female, doesn't want to challenge anything, wants to get married to a rich husband, can be vain and self-centered, kind of manipulative etc. The heroine of this story is Jo. We are supposed to root for Jo. Amy serves mainly as a foil to Jo, even if in the end the two manage to get along. Yeahhh except that in the latest movie adaptation, guess which one of the characters people obsess with. Did you guess it? That's right. And why is that? Well because the actress that plays Amy is an absolute cutie with a sexy sultry voice, dresses perfectly and excells at what society expects of women. She conforms, she doesn't challenge, but she succeeds. So, relatable but also idealistic, the perfect combination. But Jo, who gives a fuck about a girl who was scorned all of her life for wanting something different for herself, for not accepting her context, for thinking out of the box. People don't want to see that. They don't want to be that. What they want is to play by the rules and succeed.

Same fucking shit with the tragedy of Antigone. Antigone is the heroine, she challenges the status quo, she sticks to her own moral code, she doesn't give a fuck about what the men around her want, she does her own thing and she is punished. Her sister, Ismene, serves as foil : she is coward, she is a conformist, she bows her head. In the end she regrets not helping Antigone because she loves her sister and she wants to share her punishment. Antigone denies her in disdain, she does not consider her worthy. Because she isn't. Ismene loves Antigone, yes, but she does not share the same exceptional traits that Antigone has and for which she is punished. So she does not deserve to have a place beside her. She is inferior. Ismene is actually more popular in Tumblrina culture than Antigone because people relate to her weakness.

People don't relate to these exceptional heroines because they are not looking for exceptional characters. They are looking for a more successful or a more glamourous version of themselves.

[likeadog]

yanking this from what i said in a server earlier but like this is just sort of my speculation from my own personal ride and stuff so i could be off but i think. when you grow up in the church, as a white american, and then you leave it, you sort of get stuck in a mental rut where you feel disconnected from a cultural identity or community. i know personally even now i struggle to relate to the regional culture where i live, because i was pretty sheltered from it. because mormonism is built for white people (and esp white americans), you slot in so well that when you leave it feels like youve got nothing to look back on, in terms of family history or tradition or food etc which yknow, again, isnt the same as the violence inflicted on poc in the church, but its just part of it being a cult and having such a parasitic involvement in your life

the problem though is that for mormons, its not just a culture of self-inflicted suffrage, its a downright victim industrial complex. and since thats what weve leaned back on to lick our wounds our whole lives, we make 'victimhood' our new culture. its the same mormon mindset of self-soothing, echo chamber shortsightedness, but because in our minds we're 'against' the church, we feel as if we're already absolved of the heavy lifting to unpack that until it starts making us personally feel sad. and thats how you end up with culturally mormon fuckwits on tumblr making coffee jokes and explaining their coming out story on a post about the church's history of racism or getting mad when they aren't immediately presumed to be entirely without remnants of those beliefs

[dirtytransmasc]

Your 'stop blaming the victim' is referring to alicent and her children only or also rhaenyra?

I say it mostly referring to Alicent and her children, especially when it comes to the war, but there are instances in which Rhaenyra is a victim as well, and of course it still applies.

while I don't love Rhaenyra, I don't hate her either, and I can acknowledge that she is a complex character.

so while there are a lot of situations where she created the problem for herself, there are situations where she was victimized as well. She was Daemon and Viserys's victim.

Daemon groomed her, used her for his own gain, manipulated her, and abused her. she was a victim all of those times. I think Daemon doomed her in a lot of ways, and definitely set her on a path for failure after their marriage.

She was Viserys's victim cause he failed her as her father but also as her king and predecessor. he did not prepare her for the throne, didn't teach her how to be queen, didn't protect her as an heir. he let her do what she wanted, didn't teach her about the consequences of her actions nor how important it was to prioritize her image over her pleasure, etc. He doomed her as well.

so while I think Alicent and her kids where a lot more victimized, that doesn't erase the fact that Rhaenyra was a victim of her circumstances and the men in her life too.

what I do think is that people often forget and/or straight up ignore and mock Alicent and her kids being victims, and especially the fact they were victimized by Rhaenyra and Viserys. all the while, people hinge a lot of their arguments defending Rhaenyra on her victimhood, blowing certain moments out of the water, making up moments of victimhood, or ignoring that fact she has a long trail if victims behind her.

the fandom situation with these two when it comes to their victimhood is wildly different, which is why I tend to emphasize Alicent's more than I do Rhaenyra's.

[luulapants]

Hey there, it's the anon who talked about growing up in a dv household. Regarding the part of your answer about people not wanting their moral purity challenged, I think there's almost this sense of... People want to feel invulnerable both to becoming a dv victim and to ever doing anything in a relationship that can be deemed abusive. Do you ever notice how people talk about children who come from abuse and don't repeat the cycle as examples of why there's "no excuse" for an abused child to turn into an abuser? In a very "well, if they turned out okay, everyone can" way that just flattens the incredibly complex experience of living 18 years under abuse and trying to become an adult with healthy emotional processing and emotional responses. The line is a lot finer than people would like to think, and I think they don't like to think about how fine it is because then it would be acknowledging that they too could be capable of things they never thought themselves capable of, trapped in situations they consider to be for "other people," capable of things they would have eternal shame about, etc. And considering the cycle of guilt and "everything is my fault, I am inherently a bad person" mental loop an abusive childhood usually instills in a person, it sort of makes me extra heartsick to think how many people confirm that inner monologue if one of those kids slips up in adulthood.

I appreciate you talking about those erroneous "expert" claims that classes of people are incurable too because I've noticed a HUGE uptick in "abusers will always weaponize therapy language in order to become better abusers so therapy is never allowed for them" talk. And yes, I've had abusers in my family who did that! But again, echoing what I said in my first ask, if I can have that experience and recognize that it's more complicated than that, that that's not a 100% guaranteed outcome, that painting all therapeutic options/techniques in one big broad stroke instead of thinking that maybe those people had bad therapists who couldn't see through the bullshit or gross malpractice as you mentioned or that there's a spectrum of how much a person can be helped/how much they want to be helped just like there is with anything else, if I can see all that, I think people who haven't endured the kind of things I can should be able to take a step back and see this as well.

Anyway, sorry to flood your inbox again, but it's just something that's always on my mind and again it's just... one of those things that isn't allowed to be discussed in most places. Grateful that I've at least had really good therapists over the years who were well-voiced in all of this as that's definitely not always the case.

Oh, please don't be sorry!! This is all so real, and so important. There is this standard of model victimhood and model recovery that completely ignores the systemic structures that do or don't support people in moving away from cycles of abuse.

I think a lot of it comes down to control issues and the need to believe that one has absolute agency in the outcomes of their life. I like to remind people that if you were born with the exact same biology as another person and had the exact same life experiences as them, you would be that person. There is no magical spark of moral goodness that lives in you that would allow you to do better given identical circumstances. But that threatens our ideas of free will, and that's frightening for many people.

Anyway, I'm really glad you've gotten the therapy and support you needed, too.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jaco van Zyl

Published: Sept 2, 2021

The increased popularity of Critical Social Justice Theory (CSJT, commonly referred to as Woke ideology) and the different ways in which it manifests in academia, the media, politics, and private life necessitate not only a historical analysis of its evolution but also a psychological formulation thereof, based on adherents’ behavior, affective states, and what they reveal about their interpretation of the world today. The historical development of Critical Social Justice Theory in its current form has been well established thanks to the research by James Lindsey, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian. This developmental map describes the historical moments and philosophical checkpoints that ultimately led to CSJT, as it is applied today. In addition to its purely philosophical roots, there is a psychological structure underlying this worldview that requires certain psychological processes and intrapersonal dynamics on the part of its adherents for the ideology to be maintained, updated, and propagated. This article explores these processes.

Key Features of the Critical Social Justice Worldview

In their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt categorize social activism into two types of worldviews, namely common-humanity identity politics and common-enemy identity politics. The former describes a type of social religion where the well-being of all humans is prioritized based on shared human values and common goals. It is a “social religion,” where all humans are equally included, and members of society are often referred to in familial terms. Historically, common-humanity identity politics has aimed to unite and harmonize racial, gender, and other strata of American life—and not to destroy, “dismantle,” or “cancel” any cultural artifacts of American heritage. The latter worldview, however, endorses a value system where an ever-growing list of aspects in American society are identified as “problematic” and consequently deserving of destruction. People who live by this worldview are vigilant and alert, ready to identify an enemy: a historical figure, an academic subject, language use, religious doctrine, a specific religion, a tradition, or a demographic based on immutable properties (gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc.).

The common-enemy position has a well-established equivalence in psychology. Dividing people and human artifacts into all-bad or all-good categories is a basic feature of the Woke worldview. By virtue of a person’s immutable features, he is assigned a group-identity and is either classified as belonging to the evil oppressor class, the common enemy that needs to be exposed, humiliated, and cancelled or the virtuous, innocent victim class that deserves emancipation and social justice. To the Woke, the individual gets superseded by the group classification from which he cannot escape. Broadly, the categories carrying historical and current culpability include the categories of male, white, heterosexual, and able-bodied. Alternatively, categories carrying historical and current victimhood and moral innocence include the categories female, black/people of color, LGBTQ+ and disabled. This worldview in which every individual is classed as either all-bad or all-good actualizes a defense called splitting. Splitting is a primitive defence of young infants and in character constellations of some adults according to which people are either seen as purely evil and hostile, or purely innocent and loving. 

Within this split worldview, certain qualities are attributed to the Other, including feelings, intentions, wishes, and character traits. The attribution of such mental and character traits onto someone else can be described as the defence mechanism known as projection. Prejudice of any kind (be that sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, ableism, etc.) may be seen as the result of people projecting hostile aspects to whole groups of people. Once this split worldview has been established, guilt and innocence of the role players within every incident are determined by gender, race, or sexual orientation. Critical Social Justice Theory does not ask whether racism or sexism or homophobia took place; it assumes that it inevitably did:

“The question is not ‘did racism take place’? but rather ‘how did racism manifest in that situation?'” 

An appropriate question here may be framed as: “Where do the feelings, intentions, wishes, or character traits projected upon the other originate?”

There is no better a person to answer this question than the author of the Woke text White Fragility herself, Robin DiAngelo:

“I was invited to the retirement party of a white friend. The party was a pot-luck picnic held in a public park. As I walked down the slope toward the picnic shelters, I noticed two parties going on side by side. One gathering was primarily composed of white people, and the other appeared to be all black people. I experienced a sense of disequilibrium as I approached and had to choose which party was my friend’s. I felt a mild sense of anxiety as I considered that I might have to enter the all-black group, then mild relief as I realized that my friend was in the other group. This relief was amplified as I thought that I might have mistakenly walked over to the black party!

Patrick Rosal writes poignantly about the pain of being mistaken for the help at a black-tie event celebrating National Book Award winners…I have made this assumption myself when I have been unable to hide my surprise that the black man is the school principal or when I ask a Latinx woman kneeling in her garden if this is her home.”

The above admissions of her own prejudice assumed to be universal experience of all white people demonstrates the projection defenses CSJT adherents employ in their categorization of perceived oppression in each encounter. It is the contention of this piece that the feelings, intentions, wishes, or character traits projected to the Other originate with the person himself. These can be devaluing projections or idealizing projections (concordant with the primitive split into all-good and all-bad objects). With devaluing projections, aspects of the person they find internally intolerable, repudiating, or immoral within themselves get projected onto the bad object. Engaging the devalued Other with projected parts of themselves gives such individuals a greater sense of control over the otherwise intolerable aspects present yet denied within themselves. Often, those who employ this defensive splitting and projecting of bad aspects of themselves to the devalued Other, oftentimes manifest the exact type of projected characteristics themselves.

In contrast with devaluation and dehumanization of the Oppressor, the victimized Other is necessarily endowed with the opposite: all-good status of innocence, virtue, moral privilege, heroism, and essential purity. What is noteworthy is that some of the most passionate and devoted adherents of CSJT are also the most privileged elite of society. It seems that a vast number of these adherents belong to the category of white, often male, and heterosexual, frequently occupying prominent corporate, teaching, celebrity, or political positions, and belonging to middle- to upper-class households, having graduated from privileged schools and colleges, with concomitant great social influence, thus corresponding to CSJT’s definition of unearned privilege thanks to a most unjust, racist, and oppressive system. It is, therefore, logical to conclude that guilt about their shared perpetration of oppression may be too intolerable to bear. This anguish is solved in two ways: 

By projecting the guilt onto non-adhering members of the same devalued category, pointing out the racism in others, resorting to call-out and cancellation campaigns, and terrorizing individuals suspected of non-adherence (which is tantamount to endorsing racism) online, in the media, and especially before the suspected perpetrator’s employer. 

By employing a defense called identification with the victim, they act as allies to victimized minorities, describing themselves in self-deprecating terms, confessing their own racism and oppression, and vowing to commit to the Woke cause of dismantling systemically oppressive racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic systems. This allyship may, in fact, be described as a conscious or subconscious strategy to rid oneself of one’s own sense of complicity in the believed perpetration of oppression, by demonizing the devalued Other and, thus, camouflaging oneself through self-debasement and virtue-signaling behavior.  

A further appeal for such passionate endorsement of the CSJT comes from the social incentives. In the media, in centers of higher education, as the ethos of many corporations, at museums, in demonstrations by sports stars, at social events, and in the public statements by celebrities and artists, CSJT is framed as the moral goal of society—a new social religion. Not only is this worldview presented as morally superior to currently competing alternatives, but there is also a sense of prestige attached to it by virtue of the status associated with society’s trailblazers of trends—a Thorstein Veblen Theory of trendy morality. Through narrative saturation in the media, the appearance of consensus, fear of ostracization, and association with what is prestigious, classy, and trendy, a moral ideal is created: A mass movement has been formed consisting of individuals of apparently one mind, striving toward the same indisputable and prestigious ideal. In his 1921 volume, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Sigmund Freud expounded on the idea that everyone identifies with a parent, teacher, or other admired figure, according to which certain personal goals for the future are set. In committing to these goals, the individual makes certain sacrifices, while feeling motivated by the imaginary pleasure he would enjoy from attaining these goals. In addition to identifying with the victim as an object of sympathy, the subject is also seduced into identifying with the idealized object (admired celebrities, artists, athletes, etc.) endorsing a worldview portrayed as morally prestigious. In doing so, the adherent to the CSJT enjoys the comfort of moral bliss, a sense of triumph, and the enhancement of self-esteem.

This state can only be maintained for as long as the all-good versus all-bad split is maintained. Psychologically, this is a much simpler maneuver compared to a more difficult alternative: namely, to tolerate ambivalence. It may be more bearable to condemn whole demographics, whole cultures, and whole histories as all-evil on the grounds of the despised aspects of such persons and their artifacts (also called part-object representation) than to deal with the complexities of appreciating that people of all races, genders, sexual orientations, histories, and cultures consist of both positive and negative aspects to various degrees (i.e., whole object representation). 

CSJT ensures the maintenance of the psychic split in various ways. The assigning of privilege and perpetration, on the one hand, and disadvantage and moral purity, on the other, is not based on alterable factors but on static, immutable characteristics framed in totally offensive terms. One  does not and might never hear of authoritative-parenthood privilege; addiction-free household privilege; disease-free childhood privilege; or early-trauma-free privilege; nuclear family privilege. These categories (whose correlations with improved development into adulthood have been confirmed) would weaken the split between unchangeable categories and turn it into a more workable framework in which those concerned with social justice could work. Adherents of the Woke worldview disallow this more complex approach to social issues (psychologically, an ambivalent position) and, instead, succumb to the simplistic and often pleasurable permission to demonize entire categories of people according to immutable traits.

Adherents of the CSJT also have a conspicuous relationship with world history. Central to their worldview, historical research, as recounted by the oppressor (heterosexual white male), cannot be trusted and merely perpetuates oppression and hate. In response, the Woke engage in a process of historical revisionism, applying the principles of postmodernism (evidence has no objective value, only subjective benefit) and cultural Marxism (oppressor-victim dichotomy along racial, gender, sexual orientation, and other categories) as their methodology to arrive at preferred, predetermined conclusions. Therefore, the white heterosexual male is an evil oppressor, and the minority class is the tragic hero. Historical empathy, or the ability to appreciate the complex reality of history, is no longer applied. Instead, history is used to remind one of the oppressor class’ inherent evil. Whatever can be said of the historical white male may also be claimed of the white heterosexual male today: He is greedy, oppressive, violent, unjust, and immoral. Since the past is also present in the CSJT worldview, historical culpability is also present culpability. To the Woke, history does not exist as history; history is current, and representatives of history are to be judged according to today’s moral values (also called, presentism).

A fundamental flaw in the CSJT worldview of history is that it cannot adequately account for the historical record when white nations have been the victims of defeat and oppression. These include the enslavement of Europeans by North African and Middle Eastern nations as well as by other European nations. Similarly, the Woke switch strategy is applied when presented with well-documented history involving the imperialism, warfare, genocide, and enslavement of Native American and African tribes by other Native American and African tribes. Shaka Zulu, the warrior king of the Zulus in the 19th century, displaced Jele, AmaHlubi, Swati, Matebele, and Makololo people who settled in other regions in Southern Africa, or were assimilated into other tribes. Similarly, the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade involved non-European tribal warlords like Tippu Tip of East Africa and others who participated in the oppressionof other non-European subjects. Whole kingdoms like the Hausa and Igbo Empires of Nigeria flourished during the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade and virtually collapsed when Napoleon brought it to an end. History reflects the complexity of human society in which moral judgments can hardly be made in black-and-white (or all-good versus all-bad) fashion. Current research has not found an application of CSJ doctrine implicating non-European nations in a social matrix of oppressor and oppressed demographics. 

Tangential to the CSJT worldview is the strategy employed when current social affairs are reported. Politicians, Big Tech companies, university lecturers, and legacy media resort to narrative selection and narrative saturation by creating a perception of today’s world that closely resembles the CSJT “reality.” The aim appears to be the manipulation of the listener’s perception of social reality, heightened selective awareness of incidents, and perceptual blindness to aspects of reality which do not fit into this precise narrative. This narrative follows the same split in which members of all-bad object-categories are pre-emptively devalued and rendered culpable as the oppressor, and members of the all-good object-categories are overvalued as innocent and unfairly oppressed. Thus, Eric Kaufman explains:

“At the extreme, minorities are viewed as hyper-fragile children than must be protected from all harms, however microscopic or imaginary. The majority is hated and feared as a vicious predator against whom one must constantly stand on guard, and which should be attacked remorselessly.”

But contrary to the totalizing narrative, the latest evidence shows a significantly more complex picture in terms of: 

The income gap among ethnicities and genders in the United States

Hate crime statistics in the United States

Police brutality in the United States

State of suffering (as opposed to comfortable privilege) facing men 

According to Kaufman, this selective maneuvering by CSJT adherents in dealing with historical and social information reveals a concerted effort to perpetuate a social narrative in which the evil white male-dominated West is in toto responsible for the oppression and suffering of the innocent, noble, morally pure victim classes—not only historically, but also presently.

What follows from this? CSJT adherents are clear: Through a process called problematizing, every aspect of European/Western society is to be combed to make visible its inherent oppressiveness. CSJT provides the doctrinal blueprint for how evil Western society is, and every single aspect of society should be interpreted accordingly to confirm its inherent evil. In this process of dismantling all traces of “whiteness” or of the “hegemony of heteronormativity” from Western society, nothing escapes the devaluing gaze of the CSJT activist. Dismantling is a euphemism for destruction, and the moral rationale for this is due to Western society’s inherent badness. DiAngelo herself writes:

“There are many approaches to antiracist work; one of them is to try to develop a positive white identity. Those who promote this approach often suggest we develop this positive identity by reclaiming the cultural heritage that was lost during assimilation into whiteness for European ethnics. However, a positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy…Rather, I strive to be ‘less white.’”

No credit is given to Western society as the locus of the Enlightenment, and the same standard of blanket disqualification is not consistently applied to other cultural groupings. CSJT adherents have demonstrated their disgust for the West, problematizing everything from Shakespeare and Beethoven to mathematics and science. The above excerpt is a clear admission that ambivalence cannot be endured; that there can only be one approach to dealing with Western society, and that is to dismantle it. Anything softer than that would be accommodation (also referred to as maintaining the status quo). Just as splitting into immutable categories ensures that the split is immutably secured, stating that non-racism can never be achieved ensures that dismantling is an endless process: There will always be something more to destroy. To those familiar with psychodynamic theory, this final defense of actively engaging in violating and spoiling even cherished (socially idealized) aspects of Western society is a defensive constellation called pathological envy.

In 1957, the British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein published her ultimate work Envy and Gratitude, in which she meticulously maps out the infant dynamics of greed (or appetite for pleasure), envy, and jealousy. She describes the conditions under which these dynamics result in pathological envy in adulthood and, conversely, how resolution results in gratitude and creativity. In this paper, she describes primal envy as “the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something desirable—the envious impulse being to take it away or to spoil it.” Due to the frustration of not getting their desires satisfied, the subject projects destructive impulses into the Other, who is perceived to be withholding what the subject desires. Excessive envy is accompanied by excessively destructive and spoiling impulses. Once the admired/idealized Other has been devalued (even irrevocably destroyed), it is difficult for the subject to regard this spoiled object as valuable and obtainable again. The ultimate loss of the once-idealized Other leads to gratitude impairment.

Persons who have character constellations dominated by envy come across as bitter, demanding, entitled, insatiably dissatisfied, critical, nonreceptive to compliments, pessimistic, and aggressive. Since relief from frustration is obtained from destroying the envied object, the satisfaction of gratitude is not achieved. Instead, the pleasure from devaluation and sadistic spoiling of coveted resources (to the Woke: privilege, power, and normativity) becomes irresistible. The subject also enjoys the bliss of self-idealization as it is no longer subjected to the limitations, criticism, and judgment of the now-devalued Other. Granting the devalued Other even the slightest bit of accommodation could result in unbearable ambivalence. Such ambivalence would threaten the narcissistic perfection of the subject and would expose him to unbearable guilt. Instead, the person resorts to splitting and devaluation, as ambivalence would remind him of the once-enjoyed valued object of which he is currently deprived due to his own destructive violation of that object. 

From the CSJT perspective, what is the coveted “something” that the Other possesses and withholds that justifies the envious destruction of the Other? It is, according to Douglas Murray, among other things, power:

“[E]verything is viewed solely through the prism of ‘power.’ Of course power exists as a force in the world, but so do charity, forgiveness and love. If you were to ask most people what matters in their lives very few would say ‘power.’ Nevertheless for a certain type of person who is intent on finding blame rather than forgiveness in the world…absolutely everything in life is a political choice and a political act.”

At a collective level, adherents of CSJT and their obsession with power manifests this psychoanalytic formulation of envy observably. Every individual is capable of disgust and bitterness due to his own privately-experienced frustrations and defeats. Crowded together around a socio-political cause like CSJ and fueled by narrative-creation and saturation from legacy media outlets, such individuals can easily align their grievances and demand the utter dismantling, destruction, and violation of an imperfect yet evolving system consisting of categories of people deemed unfairly advantaged, oppressively powerful, and protective of their privilege.

The aggressive utterances by CSJT activists and their destructive behaviour toward dissidents online, on university campuses, and at places of employment, belie their self-justifying claims that they repudiate hate, intolerance, and oppression. Such behavior betrays more a burning hatred toward those perceived to be privileged than concern for those perceived to be disenfranchised.

The Future of CSJT

As explained above, CSJT is a radical worldview under which more destructive trends can be expected. From a psychodynamic perspective, the CSJT worldview drives individuals to desire a particular resource: “systemic power.” CSJT has provided for the perpetual devaluation of the Other by formulating its utter intolerance of negotiation and accommodation of anything less than a commitment to destroy (or dismantle) Western civilization. Its totalizing nature drives it to ensure that not a single aspect of society is left untouched by its dismantling commitment. The outcome will be a three-fold experience: first, the enjoyment of brute primal pleasure from destroying the envied Other, primal narcissistic bliss of moral self-idealization, and, third, unbridled access to resources (“systemic power”) on CSJT terms with severely limited reflective ability. 

A worldview so voracious for power, with no capacity for self-reflection, is a recipe for totalitarianism. CSJT’s failure to usher in a worldwide “anti-racist” utopia will not disillusion its adherents. Instead, hunger for power and the pleasure of envious destruction will greatly weaken restraint. Maintaining a de facto conviction that their own position is above all scrutiny, adherents of CSJT will scapegoat yet another devalued and oppressive Other as the reason for society’s disintegration, and the reason for Theory’s “failure” will be sought elsewhere. Theory will be elevated to scriptural status, and, as a result, it will be immune from criticism. 

One extreme response to the failure of CSJT to turn the West into an “anti-racist” utopia will likely be a defensive maneuver familiar in psychoanalysis. Following Sigmund Freud’s observations in Group Psychology, devotees of radical religious and political movements identify with an external idealized individual or cause. The psychological investment into the idealized Other can be so extreme that, should the Other or their cause disappoint, devotees will much rather resort to masochism than to bear failure. It would, therefore, be no surprise if, even after the failure of CSJT to transform society into an “anti-racist” utopia, the most extreme adherents still seek a kind of heroic martyrdom in service of Theory.

Since CSJT is essentially hostile, envious, and ultimately necrophilic (destruction-oriented), what does the  alternative look like from a psychodynamic perspective?

The Burden of a Complex Reality

One of the greatest psychological milestones an infant achieves is to integrate good and bad within the Other and eventually the good and bad within the self. Prior to such an achievement, it perceives the Other entirely represented by its parts: the Other as the all-good breast, or the all-good hand, or the all-bad face, and so on. Healthy psychological development involves progressing from experiencing the world within this defensive split (and projectively engaging the world within this split) to gradually realizing that the same Other contains aspects that are both good and bad.

Developmental progress is, therefore, the infant’s ability more fully to perceive and respond to reality with all its complexity. This, undoubtedly, leads to greater restraint in instinctive responses. Within the more primitive split, the infant perceives and responds instinctively with destructive aggression, or with spoiling envy, or with engulfing adoration, etc., of the Other. More developed psychological representation of complex reality as a mixture of both good and bad aspects curtails such unbridled responses and leads to a more moderated affective response: 

When the primitive split representation of the Other is not adequately resolved, instinctive responses to reality will be the default mode of response. When any collective (family system, community, subculture, or society as a whole) fosters and rewards such regressive representations of the world, it will be increasingly difficult for individuals, especially those growing up under such poorly-structured systems of representation, to advance to a worldview that more adequately takes into account the full spectrum of complexities. A worldview consistent with a primitive psychological system of representation would be one of in- and out-group arrangements, highly tribalized interactions, stereotypes, and gross generalizations.

Conclusion

According to psychodynamic theory, when the early, more primitive position of crude splits and projections have been adequately resolved, the individual will appreciate more naturally that every person is an imperfect mix of both good and bad traits. This reality is true not only of the Other but also of the self and of  society, as it is made up of such “blended” individuals.

Such a worldview would likely fall within the category of a common-humanity social justice, as opposed to the common-enemy worldview of CSJT. A common-humanity worldview recognizes the failures—even dismally so—in tribes’ and nations’ histories, but it also appreciates their successes and accomplishments. It celebrates these triumphs, while acknowledging and committing to learn from the failures. A common-humanity worldview appreciates that while past eras may have consisted of social structures where a specific gender or certain religions or races were more dominant than others, their failures cannot be ascribed to such categories, nor can specific categories be essentially evil or essentially good.

Contrary to the common-enemy worldview, the common-humanity worldview is hesitant to resort to simplistic categories of saints and monsters. It appreciates the complexity of humanity, of society, of communities and of individuals, and reflects this in interactions and expressions. The common-enemy approach in CSJT (and the accompanying wholesale designation of culpability and characterization attributed to certain races, a genders, sexual orientations, and cultures) is a regressive response to social challenges. A more adaptable and psychologically mature approach is a common-humanity worldview, positioned to improving developmental and social factors such as family dynamics, parenting styles, adequate basic education, and living environments.

Jaco van Zyl is a clinical psychologist in South Africa.

==

One of the things that's thematically apparent from the Critical Theory-based, ahem, "scholarship" is the resentment and jealousy the authors hold towards the real domains, such as the sciences. Buried under the postmodern nonsense are petulant children who are envious of the fact they'll never produce anything as meaningful or important or even objectively useful. They could see how influential and well regarded the sciences are, but since they were incapable of participating or competing, they pivoted to attack at the level of epistemology - how we determine what's true - and demanded that it was bigoted for them to be excluded. That's why there's deranged, bogus fields and fraudulent papers like "Feminist Glaciology" and "Queer Agriculture."

It's not just Grievance Studies because the domains are based on hatred, envy and resentment of specific categories of people - men, heterosexuals, white people, healthy people, etc. - but because those embroiled in those areas are like the jealous Cain to the scientific Abel.

[kohinoor4u]

Rec: The Woman King (2022)

If you love movies like Braveheart, The Gladiator, The 13th Warrior, Troy etc, you will LOVE The Woman King.  It’s got all that feel-good badassery you like from those movies:

Great swelling soundtrack/music designed to inspire and uplift

Historical fiction.  Is it accurate?  WHO CARES?! It’s EPIC AS HELL, JUST ENJOY THE DARN FILM and then you can internet history later

A lovable ensemble cast of characters you want to cheer for!  The cool happy drunk, the cool mystic, the cool young upstart, the cool imperious King, you got it all here dude

Can’t forget the stoic, broken leader character bound by duty and honour that’ll make you puff out your chest and tear up (but don’t actually cry) and be like ‘YES I want to be her when I grow up’

Montage and/or training scenes where the protag Learns Stuff™

Surprise twist, almost Dickensian so you know it’s joy when it happens

Mythological callbacks to legends and myths about gods, it’s really cool and makes it feel larger than life

Comedy bits, awww omg lol they have fun sometimes amidst the battles! That’s cute.

Fortune-telling.  It’s necessary and real in history ok.

BATTLES!! DID I MENTION BATTLES??  AMAZING BATTLES that leave you satisfied and cheering on the underdogs in the end

(no spoilers but) tragic, brave, strong conflict for a beloved character that makes you like nO? NO! NOOOO MY FEELINGS

The enemy is very evident, so there’s a lot of that yummy good vs bad schadenfreude that historical fiction movies require

White men die.  Literally all these movies I’ve listed, white men die ok, so that’s not political it’s just a fact :)

Gorgeous vistas and loving details of complex and sophisticated cultural stuff that makes you feel really cool and majestic watching it. like oh hell yes, I’m immersed af and this is REAL and I want to be there

But wait, there’s more!  

Maybe you’re like “but Gigi, I’ve seen enuf historical fiction movies about ‘exciting’ battles and ‘lovable’ underdogs, I want something new and different.  Maybe something that subverts that trope without compromising the cool-factor of kickassery.  Something to recapture my nostalgia for pseudo-historical cinematic sagas without pandering to me like I’m a basic child’.

Have I got news for you!  Here’s the kicker, the bonus, the cherry on top.   The main cast:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  And in case you’re worried, this movie is as thematically violent as Braveheart or Gladiator, treated with that lens of heroic strength, rather than graphic victimhood.   The tragedies in the plotline spur the story forward rather than mire you in titillating abject, disturbed despair. If you’ve watched enough shows/films about black/African history, you’ll know what I mean. It all comes down to the perspective the story is told from and this story is about being REALLY COOL AND AWESOME EVEN IN THE FACE OF ADVERSITY.

So if you’re into this genre but tired of the same-old, same-old ( if you know what I mean, then you know what I mean) this movie will breathe fresh, clean air into the genre!

I want more historical fiction movies like this! Bring back this era but make it better and updated and 2020s cool!

[faint-petrichor]

wild how in the past 8 months so many of the prominent left-lib queer bloggers on this site have came out as zionists and transmisogynists. I've had a lot to reflect on about perceived victimhood and weaponized innocence on both counts, and how they feed into broader structures of violence. i used to focus more on the primary instruments of imperial violence; bombs, cops, sanctions, etc. but now I think about how that violence legitimizes itself despite its abject horror—these things effectively cannot continue to pass without manufactured consent. it is almost always through fear. and when it is not through fear, it's innocence. one says the violence is right and the other absolves you of complicity.

it amounts to nothing, but nonetheless every day I am sick with grief for all the horrible things happening in the world. i struggle to understand how people can be so small minded to think only of themselves at times like these. but the temptation to give in to a judgement on their character is a false one, however horrible their actions are. these attitudes are being produced, instrumentalized and rewarded by power, not arising from uniquely immoral and selfish individuals. but yet, you cannot change the mind of someone with no intent to listen, with a material interest not to. it has driven me mad to try. and in fact, every instance of conflict seems to drive these people further into their hate as their feelings of persecution heighten. a few years ago, my mother was radicalized into a violent gun-toting neonazi off her fox news instilled fears and her white lady persecution complex. nothing I said to change her mind since I was a teenager ever stuck. and then I think, what about all these saccharine liberals? they put so much effort into aligning themselves with incontroversial goodness. that "good" is so easily manipulated, a goodness that is based on no material analysis and eats out of the hand of imperial power. where will they stand tomorrow if this is already where they stand today? i think it's an easy mistake to see people like that as closer to allies than not, especially if they are queer or something like that. more often than not, they have no material interest to change their mind and no true alignment with justice. i guess what i mean to say is, it's clear to me now that committed liberals are not allies and never will be. they will cheer at the dropping of bombs not out of cold misanthropy, but because it makes them feel safe.

it's sickening watching queer community in the imperial core be successfully split and mobilized into a reactionary force, but that is very much what is happening and is necessary to acknowledge as such, between pinkwashing and rising institutionalized transmisogyny. now the gambit is to put trans women to the stake in an attempt to get a pass in the oncoming violence, and yet all that accomplishes is giving them a head start at putting us all in the grave.

fear, safety, comfort, discomfort, disgust, indignance... lately I am acutely aware of how all these emotions are weaponized. these are feelings one must be intensely critical of. emotions are so easily manipulated and instilled in others, so easy to consider uniquely your own when it has been informed entirely by external influences.

the logic of emotion cannot and never will be a logic of justice. it is a reactionary force through and through. both because emotions are so myopic and manipulable, and because they do not produce more than momentary responses. that is why we have materialism, and why we rely on conviction instead. emotional reasoning begins and dies with the individual. it is an atomizing lens to view the world through. this is very useful for imperialist propagandists, fascists etc., and utterly useless for organized and disciplined action. and when it comes to knowing who is an (even potential) ally, I am becoming increasingly sure it is those who regard emotions critically and can decenter themselves.

[maciek-jozefowicz]

[57] “Sitting on the Edge” Oberon brush, Drawing group (Procreate app). Some people like to sit dangerously. While I was not consciously thinking of it when I was creating this image, looking at it now makes me recall Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog”. This drawing is not similar to the painting, so I can’t explain the association. Actually, I think of this drawing as an amalgam of the Friedrich’s painting and Rodin’s sculpture “The Thinker”.

The black and the white background can be interpreted as metaphors — as night and day; as evil and good; as female and male forces (as in yin and yang). Whichever way that one chooses to interpret them, the edge is where the two meet.

To better understand the kind of artist that I want to be and the kind of art that I want to create, I was thinking about the purpose of art — what is art used for? Here’s my list:

1) Art is used to decorate. It is used to decorate private residences, usually walls, and public spaces, both interior and exterior.

[Creating this type of art doesn’t interest me for two reasons. One reason is that art for private residences is art of privilege. It is so because only people with wealth can buy original art. I don’t want to create art strictly for the rich. Another reason is that art for public spaces need by necessity be banal and meaningless. Public art doesn’t have to please anyone, but it absolutely cannot displease anyone. It has to be “inclusive”; in other words, vapid.]

2) Art is used to illustrate. It is used to illustrate stories, poems, books, magazines, websites. It is used to illustrate information, directions.

There isn’t much difference between an illustrator and an artist. One key difference is that an illustrator illustrates someone else’s ideas; an artist illustrates his own ideas. The crucial difference is freedom — the artist has it, the illustrator doesn’t. One reason I love creating art is the experience of freedom I feel when I do. Another reason is that I have my own ideas that I prefer to illustrate. When illustrating ideas of others, I feel like a hired laborer; a hired craftsman, not an artist.

3) Art is used to entertain. But with the exception of single panel cartoons, single images, no matter how complex and detailed, offer limited entertainment. Sequential art, whether in the form of comics or in the form of animation (as in film or as in video games), has the most potential to entertain. But, strictly speaking, it is not the art that entertains in these instances, but the stories and words. Art is used to illustrate, or decorate, the words.

[ I have had a passion for comics since I was a child. I still have it. One reason is that sequential art, combined with words, has great potential to entertain and to express complex ideas. An artist can express his world view with comics in a way that s/he cannot with single images. ]

4) Art is used as propaganda. Or to put it in another way, art is used to express beliefs, or a system of beliefs that forms an ideology. Usually, art expresses religious beliefs, whether the religion is monotheistic, like Christianity, or polytheistic, like Greek mythology, or atheistic, like Buddhism, Liberalism or Progressivism. Communists in Soviet Union and in China, for example, used art to express their beliefs, their vision of what the world should look like, what the world that they are attempting to make would look like. Christians have used art to illustrate the Bible and through those illustrations express their beliefs. One of the most iconic, and most replicated, images in the history of Western art is the crucifixion of Jesus.

Today, much of fine art in the Western culture expresses the Progressive religion (Progressive beliefs or Progressive “truths”; Progressive interpretation of the world, society and life) — from identity power politics to “climate apocalypse”; “social inequality”, “social inequity”, “social injustice”, “human rights”, “victimhood”, “love”, “gender”, etc.

[Since I do not believe in the existence of God, I can’t consider myself a Christian. But while I acknowledge its flaws and its sins (no religion is free of sins, i.e. crimes committed in its name), I also appreciate and respect Christian wisdom, which, in many ways, complements physical reality, social reality, biology, and science.

I dislike Progressivism vehemently. I think of it as a religion of depravity, devoid of wisdom, that contradicts physical reality, social reality, biology and science. Its few insights are as shallow as a pool of spit. And the mindset that it represents is toxic.

I’m also not a communist nor a socialist nor a globalist nor fascist. Needless to say, I cannot sincerely be a religious artist. But art as a social commentary, or social critique, often presented through satire, interests me.]

5) Another purpose of art is self-expression. Art can express both feelings and/or thoughts. It can be used to express a personal vision of the world. It can be used to express ideas. It is believed by some psychologists that creating art can have a healing effect on persons suffering from some mental unhealth. (I use the clumsy word “unhealth” because I suspect that the word “disorder” will soon be deemed politically incorrect.) The creation of art is believed by some to lead to catharsis, the purging of negative emotions. Some psychotherapists have their patients create art in order to bring to the surface repressed memories, thoughts and feelings that are believed to be causing harm to the mental health of the patient. This process of releasing of hidden emotions is like a detoxification.

Ancient Greeks believed that watching tragedy (tragic drama) can lead to catharsis. If that is so, then one does not need to create art to benefit from its healing effect. Viewing art created by others can have similar effects. In other words, artists, through their art, can express our feelings and thoughts.

(An idea: isn’t Political Correctness a form of forced repression? It forces us to bottle-up certain feelings and thoughts that have been judged to be “inappropriate” or “wrong”. These “inappropriate” feelings and thoughts (and ideas) have become social taboos, the transgressions of which is punishable. We seem to be going through a kind of neo-Victorian period, in which we are expected to strictly adhere to a plethora of Progressive social proprieties, or be ostracized.)

[For me, art is an antidote to materialism; creating art is a rebellion against materialism (and against greed and avarice). This is one reason why I have so enthusiastically embraced digital art tools — digital art is not a one-of-a-kind precious object that materialists can treat as a commodity to be used as an investment to make profit.

But art is a popular form of rebellion that can be turned against anything one wants to rebel — generic things like stupidity, ignorance, narcissism, deceit, etc., or more specific social ills. Many artist seek notoriety by creating “shock art”. While shock art represents a type of rebellion, its purpose is usually to get attention, to be noticed. Generally, in the past four or five decades, shock art has been Progressive art that demeans Christianity. (Not surprisingly, Progressivism is a religion that wants to eliminate all other religions. Starting with Christianity.)]

[duck-in-a-thrift-store]

Maybe some unpopular opinions in here but oh well

Does anyone else feel like Will was supposed to be the main character but keeps getting treated like a side character instead or is it just me

(Added a cut bc this turned into kind of just a Will-centric rant and got a lot longer than expected, lol)

Like please stop making him your background whumpee with barely any actual screen time or lines

Seriously for the love of god address his massive amounts of trauma*, yes, but also, let him be his own person beyond his victimhood

*(abusive dad, homophobia/bullying, being trapped alone in the motherfucking Upside Down, getting flayed, being exposed to way too much death and violence at a young age, getting lowkey abandoned by his friends and then ripped away from pretty much everyone and everything he's ever known to move across the country, watching his best friend/the guy he's in love with fall prey to comphet and stay in an unhealthy relationship with Will's own sister, etc)

Let this boy be happy, let him be a hero, and for fuck's sake let him be honest

Instead of always having to be rescued/cured, being used as a monster detector and otherwise basically left out of the narrative, or being put through heartbreaking bullshit and lying about his feelings

I'm tired of them wasting his potential and squashing this potentially very complex character down to an oversimplified and repetitive plot device

Stop showing me a Will who's sad or scared or just kinda there and show me a Will who's happy without it getting ruined, who's angry without it getting brushed aside for the newest monster attack, who's loved and supported and appreciated and noticed by the people around him in a normal everyday sort of way instead of just in life-or-death situations

ALSO

I wanna see more of him and El as siblings

I really think we should get more of their dynamic, I feel like they've been connected since the beginning and there has literally been so much potential for them to bond and navigate the horrors of adolescence together but the warm cozy family vibes I crave are overshadowed almost into non-existence by the stupid fucking love triangle or whatever we're calling it with Mike