Chronology of Exposure to Gone Girl Feminism- Part 3
It was around 3 years into the campaign that I first cheated on a girlfriend, but this girlfriend was the second consecutive Gone Girl Feminist to entrap me in an abusive relationship. I experienced systematic harassment at my work for 2 years while in this second abusive relationship. I worked in a quiet café/bar and this allowed two Gone Girl Feminists hours of access to me for 3-4 days a week. The two feminists in the bar, and the activist who played the role of my girlfriend, coordinated the harassment and abuse together for over two years. All this time I lived in flat shares set up by the feminist network. Eventually I would be sexually assaulted in the bar and quit my job. Then I moved into the flat where I was drugged. It was around 4.5-5 years after the start of the campaign against me that I tried dating apps and experienced a series of sinister encounters.
On the rare occasion that people have listened to me, the common response has been: “But no one forced you to cheat!”, “Why didn’t you leave that job?”, “Why didn’t you leave Berlin if it was that bad?”. This suggests that I could have just said ‘no’. However, I said no to one abusive relationship only to be entrapped in another. I cut contact with a friend who had set me up with her and kicked me out. I rejected the activists at my work for years. I tried to find another job, but I was targeted there. So, I quit my job. I confronted my second girlfriend about her gas-lighting. I kept moving flats. I rejected many other activists at work. I kept changing cafes and bars, and places in the library. Even my language class was openly abusive towards me, all apart from one Swedish woman who I rejected. I sensed the hostility towards me everywhere I turned for years before I made my first misstep. All this time, I desperately sought out some human contact. I was a social person and I cared what people thought of me, of what women thought of me. I kept trying to reach out beyond the network, back to reality, back to who I was before. However, their plan was always to suffocate and destroy that person. I could only do my best to pretend that the abuse was not having the desired effect. Of course, there was also the effects of them drugging me, but that would take us to far afield.
[This article is three times the size of my usual article. New readers might want to read my about page to know the stakes of my writing. Part One of the three-part series can be found here]
The Bar
Friedrichschain is district in what was once east Berlin, now full of the hubbub of happening in one of Europe’s most vibrant cities. It was on once a centre for punks, with many squats that doubled as clubs and people’s kitchens and community hub. Boxhaggener Platz, or ‘Boxsie’, is a series of boxes within boxes, each inviting different happenings to happen. The outermost box is composed of the street lined with coffeehouses that turn into bars as the sun goes down. There is a promenade around the plaza made from a mosaic of grey, blue and purple cobbles. Slender birch trees rise scattered around the promenade to offer a contrast of colour in the autumn, and some shade in the summer. Beneath the birches, flea markets can be found every weekend. Sparse wild bushes are pinned back by benches that look inward onto a ‘greenish lawn’ where musicians play and people throw a Frisbee around. People sit into the wee hours smoking rollies and drinking 1 litre glass bottle of beer before jumping back on their bike to pedal to their respective Kietz, or district. Locals are prone to stick to their own Kiez, but those hungry to discover the city will cycle far through the night for something new. If you are tourist, you are bound to make your visit to Boxy, and the surrounding streets, lined with bars and the odd smallish club of convenience. Of course, gentrification follows.
The usual antagonism ensues as more and more restaurants, clothes shops and coiffures open up in Friedrichschain, once the home of punks and protesters. Now there is a quick turn over of bars as the rent and rates are increased. The local favourites are down to the few bars still running after 10-15 years. My work-place was one of five back then. Decked out with second hand furniture from the eighties so that each corner was unique, and the general vibe was as if sitting in your friends living room. It was off the main thoroughfare, and the only bar on the block. The only thing beyond us was a bridge heading out Freidrichschain. People would come to our quiet café to write their thesis, or their novel, or read their paper on the notorious wobbly tables of such retro cafes in Berlin. We served breakfasts on clothed tables on the weekend, and the candles would come to each table at night to make a flickering ambience. It was popular place for first dates, but the mainstay were all the locals who were motley crew, from all walks of life. Some had finished their own shift at a bar, or a clothes shop, just around the corner. Others were maths teachers, accountants, lecturers, bankers, musicians, art columnists, husky morning radio presenters, or actors whom I recently recognised in The Quenn’s Gambit. It was always an interesting place to be. As the only non-native, I was lucky to get a gig that was predominately still German speaking. I got a lot of support from everyone at the bar in face of the harassment- nearly my colleagues were women, as was the proprietor and manager. Little did I know that I would get more support here than anywhere post hence. It was just two women who were there on a campaign of harassment.
As I mentioned in the last post, the main antagonist started in the café the day before I got job. A local cryptically suggested to me that this was no coincidence, but I would not understand what this meant until later. As the shifts worked out, Alma would take over my shift on a Thursday and I would stay for a free drink. She would sometimes stay for her free drink on a Monday or Tuesday. I wasn’t stingy with the free drinks, and I knew the boss didn’t mind. Only the whiskey was out of bounds. This was the only opportunity for the workers to get together because we ran the café and bar on our lonesome. When Alma lost her job in unforgiving circumstances I supported her. I sat with her on her last shift after she had been told on arrival that it was he last. Afterwards, she would come in the days I was working and sit at the end of the bar, where there was only enough space for two, or three at a push. I was slow to pick up that even the days that seemed without guile and hostility were also part of the campaign of harassment. The second activists to harass me in the bar, first chatted me up in the café where I was writing my thesis. I stopped going to this cafe because of her, but she started to write her thesis in my café instead. This was around 6 months into my stint in the bar.
Emails to Ingrid, and a demand for friendship
From the very beginning there was strange dynamic building between this colleague and I in relation to my girlfriend. On the one hand there was animosity expressed towards my girlfriend, but at others an inappropriate desire to met and befriend her. I wondered if she wanted contact with my girlfriend to turn her against me, or whether it was to make me think that my girlfriend was not already part of the campaign. It was unclear whether the hostility was part of a feminist campaign, or whether it should be down to some mental health problems that betrayed themselves. This combined with the fact that I rejected her advances for friendship beyond the workplace. So, my suspicion about a connection between my colleague and my girlfriend began alongside the suspicions about this colleague, and these compounded my suspicions about my girlfriend.
My girlfriend was Spanish at the time of the financial crisis in Spain, when more Spanish women were coming to Berlin. The feminists claimed that these women were taking German boyfriends for pragmatic reasons, when they did not like German men. For my part, I was accused of not liking German women. However, I’ll come back to this aspect of the harassment. Around the time I started working in the bar, a blog written by a Spanish woman about her experiences in Berlin became the talk of the town. She spent most of the blog denigrated German men, all except from her boyfriend, that is. This was the first thing these women spoke to my girlfriend about when she popped into the bar. This was strange because the had already said that they like the sound of my girlfriend and thought they could be good friends with her. Indeed, my girlfriend had said the same thing. I felt my girlfriend handled the situation surprisingly well. She knew about the blog and the two got on OK, despite what I thought was a hostile conversation about Spanish women taken German men.
Later I would stupidly include Ingrid’s address in a group email to workmates organizing a BBQ. The day after, Alma seemed to threaten me with, ‘Oh, that was trusting, giving your girlfriends email out’. My suspicions about her trying to catch me cheating as part of the campaign were only mild up to this point, now it seemed she was openly threatening my relationship. I had to wonder whether Ingrid was not already involved, as Olga had been. I did not want to destroy the only relationship I had in Berlin because of suspicions the activists had planted in me. Much later, they sent an email to my girlfriend inviting her to prepare a Spanish evening with Spanish food for them. My girlfriend cried her eyes out and asked me how this woman had got her email. This is the only moment that still gnaws at me now. Ingrid seemed genuinely upset. This bought our relationship some time from suspicion, but then, Ingrid replied politely, and when Alma invited us to dinner at her place, Ingrid accepted. I didn’t even reply to Alma because, to not put too fine a point on it, I thought Alma might be a dangerous nut job. However, Ingrid convinced me that this email was probably just her way of being nice.
Allegedly hating German women
I was accused of not liking German women repeatedly in the early months of the campaign. They pointed out that I had been in Berlin for five years but my two girlfriends were not locals. One was from Holland and one was from Spain. They pretended not to know about Olga. I did not meet or mix with many local women despite trying. This is a common story. Those that I did try to court were not interested. Each will have had their own reasons, but I’ve heard local women are reluctant to get involved with men who are fresh to Berlin. There is such a high turn over and some women do not want another summer romance taking in the sights and sounds all over Berlin. I mentioned this, but they had their own reasons to think some men just don’t like German women and, for some reason, they were convinced that British men do not like German women. Or, at least, they were trying to convince me that they were so convinced. I slowly realised this may be a tactic to make me feel guilty, and it worked. Even if you held suspicions, you could never be sure, and you did not want anyone to feel this way. I endured abuse for much longer than I should have because I did not want them to think there was anything horrible about them, nor that I was racist. I tried to kill them with kindness.
It struck me also that their idea of British men was one of more general racism, not just towards Germans but to other nations, such that it betrays their xenophobia. Still, I stuck at it. I felt threatened by this negative stereotype. I was, after all, the only non-native speaker working at the bar. Moreover, as the advances became more explicit and the second activist began to stay until the early hours and make explicit advances, the situation became more difficult. One regular who would sit at the bar and chat up women to no avail. Meanwhile other men where cheating in the bar. It might seem to them that I did have a problem, and a problem with German women.
It might sound racist that I could consider that German women think British men find them ugly credible, suggests that I find the idea that British men held such a prejudice credible, and thus that I am sympathetic or prey to this perception of Germans. It shouldn’t need to be said that this is a fallacy. You cannot always rationalize the perception that other people have of themselves or others with any degree of satisfaction. The number of women who are dissatisfied with their appearance is an example that most people will recognise, indeed you have recognise their distress, even when you cannot rationalize it. I told them that I thought it absurd, but they then talked about the movies.
They talked about how women in Berlin feel ugly. The claimed the British hated the Germans, and they felt ugly as Germans. They talked of how Germans have been portrayed in Anglo-American films and how that has had an effect on them. One talked about the effect of their parent travelling round Germany to find out what all their family had done during the holocaust. They talked of their own mental health issues and that she had talked about me to her psychiatrist. The activists use the empathy of men against them. In the end, you want to convince the women that you do not hate Germans, that you do like German women, and that you like them in particular.
I wanted them to know that I was not racist. I wanted them to know that they are smart and funny. I wanted them to know that you are not rejecting them because they are ugly or horrible, but because you had a girlfriend. I genuinely wished at times, that I were single for a period to hook up with them, if it were so important to them. Even if I weren’t attractive to them, it would be a small thing to do, that could mean a lot. I guess this is what women mean by a ‘sympathy fuck’, although I hadn’t thought that far down the line. At the same time, I suspected that in that situation, a kiss or a one night stand might not be enough. They quickly became obsessive, and I knew something was up. I tried killing them with kindness for months, until eventually I realised this has all been a coordinated and systematic attack.
The bombing of Berlin
It became more obvious that this was a hostility not only born of a sense of rejection when they recurrently berated me with the bombing of Berlin. I had been 5 years in the city and never experienced anything of this before. This is unusual and it saddens me to report something so grotesque as the actions of these two activists amongst a city I loved over a decade. These activists had many hours in the week to detail the effects of the bombing in Berlin. Alma might return a couple of days later and pick up where she let off. Probably after scripting the next scene with friends. It was possible to come upon the topic almost by chance. As when there was any talk of the canals- of the pleasant walk, of the marketplaces along the way, or people floating in a dingy with their cool beer- that presented an opportunity for awful incongruous images of the whole canal system being covered with bodies. Talk of the underground system, and it’s development, would lead back to the impact of climbing back out of the underground to discover the devastation of the city. I did accept how terrible it was, I tried to imagine the impact it must have had, but I could not, and I said that I was sorry it ever happened. However, this was early on, and gradually I came to resent this hail of horrors.
This abuse would continue long after I had cheated, more than 3 years into the campaign and a year and a half into my time at the bar. After I had cheated for the first time in my life, but before I was sexually assaulted in the bar, I invited Alma and another colleague to dinner at my place with my girlfriend. My girlfriend and I were trying to kill her with kindness. Soon after she arrived, she started talking about the bombing of Berlin again, and how it affected Berliners today. I was angry that she was attacking me in my own home. I had already said expressed sympathy about the bombing, and that Berliners did not deserve it. But now I said, ‘So what? What’s your point?’. Her point was clearly to attack and antagonise me.
This retort might seem unforgivable, but this was not my instinctual reaction, this was after months of similar harassment. After the dinner, she showed me a journalist-type voice recorder that her mum had bought her years ago. I do not know why she would want one, or want to show me, except to show me the device of my downfall. I believe they took this recording to my PhD supervisor, because he took on a student on who published the work I had already handed in to my supervisor in a different language. I was told after this dinner, that this is something feminists have done to British men in Berlin already. I did not realise the relevance at the time. I did not realise that I was that hated. It was 3 years later, that a women told me over a dating app that someone had published a thesis on my proposed thesis, while working with the same supervisor I was working with.
Stereotype threat
Stereotype threat was weaponized by the activists with each playing a role in a little bit of street theatre. The two in the bar were the most sustained actors out of a large troupe. Each is provided with a script, with certain key lines and a sedge way to the lines which is appropriate to the setting. Pretty much everything is appropriate in a bar. I have already mentioned some negative stereotypes negative that threatened me in the workplace. Over two years, l a series of theatrical scenes were set up around me which eventually opened a chasm between my actual self and the negative stereotype being cast around me. There was no opportunity to be received as the person I was, as the activists swarmed around my private life, workplace, and flat share situations. No matter what I did or said to prove the stereotype wrong, my real self continued to suffocate.
A number of stereotypes were strung out over weeks in the scripted conversations. So, for example, I was surrounded with examples of men and women cheating. The former fed into one stereotype for cheating cads and toxic men. The latter fed into another stereotype of childish men who think they are loved, while their woman cheats on him. The latter was closely linked to a mummy’s boy, but it was more developed as the stereotype of British men.
One stereotype is the bumbling British man that, until recently, Hugh Grant had made a career of presenting par excellence. A man that easily falls in love and easily led on, and easily cheated on. They also talked of the British character in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, as another example of this trope. As a contrast to me and the British men, increasing numbers of men would be betraying their girlfriends or, at the very least, sleeping around. In contrast to me, and the stereotype of British men who have very little sex. The ideas was that British men like me had many female friends because women did not think of them as sexual. Men and women, the claimed, cannot be friends because sex gets in the way. I begged to differ, because I had many female friends, as they knew. They claimed that this is only the case for men who use their female friends to offload their problems on, like men do with their mother. Men would never do this with their male friends, but for some reason women are supposed to accept this. Some men even behave this way with their girlfriends, which is such a turn off for women. They could imagine me doing this. All of which supported their suggestion that my girlfriend might be saying that she should have been a nun, does not need sex, and does not need to see me during the week, because she kept me around for her weekend day excursions. Meanwhile, other men were enjoying the benefits of something more casual and masculine.
As time went on, an increasing number of people were cheating on the partners, and men were enjoying the benefits of something more casual. I still believe some of these liaison were underway long before me and the campaign against me had be launched. However, there was gradually to many points of contact with people, and particularly men getting laid behind the back of their partner. There was, for a while, a male colleague who lived in the building. There was a regular who would have sex with a colleague upstairs regularly. There was a colleague who would have sex in the bar and make no attempt to clean the traces of his shenanigans. There were woman from directly above the bar, who would sit at the bar chatign to me who started to sleep with the man I could see across the street. There were colleague who would, I was led to believe, get their girlfriend drunk so that they would be left to hook up…. So the pattern continued, and my prudish lack of sex seemed ridiculous. On top of that, there was the continuous conversation about how relationship do not work in Berlin because people to not stick to monogamy. Everyone the activists knew, who thought they were in a monogamous relationship, were not.
They were setting up a phantasmagoric paradox for me. I was given to believe, if only unconsciously, that men who are not having much sex will be bad at it. Thus, they cannot hold up a monogenous girlfriend because their girlfriend would stray. However, if they were to sleep around, it would not be a monogenous relationship and they would not a fully satisfying relationship. At least, however, they were not being publicly humiliating themselves in their naïve believe that they are special and that they are loved.
British men were especially prone to this, or so they claim. They were prude and had less sex. The more sex you had, the better you got at it. These women openly acknowledge that they might not be able hold up a long term relationships. Nor could they afford to go on dates. However, from their perspective, they had better sex lives than most women because of dating apps. At least they were not deceiving themselves about men being monogenous. They felt that they had it better than women in a relationship, with a career, and better than the British in general. They said, they could tell I had had less sex because I had so few Facebook friends. When people hook up on dating apps, they normally become Facebook friends. They thought this should have been a source of embarrassment for me, but it was not. They claimed it also explained why I was having problems with my girlfriend. I did talk to them about strange reactions from my girlfriend. They explained these reactions were classic examples manipulation used by women they know to sleep around.
They attacked the male British body type in the bar. The pointed to a study that was featured in the Guardian that depicted the body types that women from different countries found attractive. The British model was scrawny and unimpressive to the women instilling the negative stereotype. On another occasion they referred research on the average size of the penis by nationalities. On average, British men have a smaller penis than Germans and Americans. I was told how women can see this through many types of trousers, mine of course. In some contrived conversation they got on to tell me that one way women try to make the man feel more powerful is to pretend that it hurts when the man extract the penis too quickly. A week later my girlfriend did exactly this. This was coordinated between the two women to have the opposite effect on me. Later they boasted of knowing how women make men feel they have a small penis by playing with it only using open fingers, without making it into foreplay. My girlfriend also made subtle, but direct, unfavourable comparisons with her previous boyfriend.
Being Sensitive
Both my girlfriend and the two women at the bar used stereotype threat to prolong my exposure to abuse. The women at the bar qualified some harsh comment with, ‘is that OK? I am not sure what I can say to you because you are sensitive, kind of like a girl’. Before we even knew each other, my colleague would ask, ‘have you ever thought about committing suicide?... Is this something only a German would ask. I know Germans are known for being abrupt and asking awkward questions’. This made me feel obliged to answer and talk down any negative stereotype of being German. She also mentioned, very early on, that she had been talking about me to her therapist. She had been asking about why I also come in early and I am always in a good mood. I was given to think- whether this was intentional part of the campaign or not- that I had responsibility towards her because I was significant to her in some way. In a related event, she confided in me about how the absence of her father, who had died of cancer, had an effect on her life. I did not ask about this personal information, which makes me think she was working on me, making me feel a sense of guilt and responsibility towards which would help prolong my exposure to her harassment. I was being subtly instructed to be more the man- feel less, soak up the suffering, and be a support to those suffering around you. I thus tried to be supportive and kill these activists with kindness.
Another time she started talking about the book Quiet, which described introverts. She told me that my character and physiology fitted the architype of the hypersensitive type. When I started to confront my girlfriend about the non-response to what was happening the bar, the women in the bar told me how guys stereotypical befriend women to offloading on them, and women are generally fed up dealing with this. Obviously, this is all textbook gas-lighting, but that is another story. All these cues were to make me ashamed of being weak and to prevent me from talking about the harassment to friends and my girlfriend. I decided to soak it up even as it got worse and worse, in the end I became more sensitive as the harassment increased. I realised that it was all coordinated, but there is nothing you can do. There is no way out.
Both activists asked me to do things beyond the confines of the bar. My colleague much more, and much earlier, and in ways that just seemed an offer of friendship at first. It was only as her interest seemed forced, determined, and directed that I needed to ask myself what she was wanting. I was told by the other activist that she likes me and that she was trying to impress me. Before and after she was sacked, she would come in and talk about exceedingly long and challenging philosophy books. I was told that she was trying to impress me because she liked me. I bought this, but knowing what I know now about the feminist aim of attacking men’s self-esteem, she was trying to intimidate me, because I had not read these books and I was the one doing a PhD in philosophy. Increasingly the books were by women- Hanah Arendt’s book on totalitarianism, and Martha Nussbaum’s The Upheaval of Thought, for example- so she could paint a picture of me a sexist, which I did not appreciate. Even the novels she talked of followed suit, e.g. The Golden Notebook, by Dorris Lessing.
Looking back, coming in to discuss these books was a form of harassment that was being disguised as a means to court me and flatter me. Both activists did this. The other activist was excessively flattering and submissive and only occasionally joined in on the cutting remarks. Generally, she remained the good cop who was only interested in having an affair with me, while the colleague-activists was the bad cop enraged at already being rejected in various ways. This was her excuse to be outright offensive, and often making sudden outbursts, even screaming at times.
The other activists was self-conscious the whole time. Looking back, I see that she was doing everything possible to proposition me without making it explicit. The move to have sex with her, had to come from me, it had to be my decision to cheat on my girlfriend. This is one of the most strained and stringent conditions of the whole campaign, and the best means to identify a Gone Girl Feminist. They will repeatedly avoid making the move to initiate physical contact (‘you asked me back to your flat, it was not trap’), or to initiate a drugging (‘I did not drug you, you asked me for the glass of water’). The former to evade the claim of entrapment, and the later to evade the accusation of a being part of a violent campaign. No wonder then that she needed to persist in her harassment for over a year, only to sexually assault me a few nights after the funeral of the woman who had raised me.
She first chatted me up in the coffee shop where I worked on my thesis, then she followed me to the coffeeshop where I worked to write her thesis. We would chat about her thesis which was related to the philosophy I worked on. Coincidence? Perhaps. She would ingratiate herself on me by pretending I knew as much about Foucault as she did. I realised that she was inviting me to indulge my ego. I repeatedly told her that I hadn’t worked on Foucault for years and that she must know more. This exchange became more awkward as I tried to show her that she needn’t handle my ego in such a way. I eventually stood up from the sofa and broke the conversation off. However, it was my workplace and I could not leave, and similar situations would recur weeks or months later. Even if I knew they were harassing me, I could not escape them. The power of gas-lighting in this manner is that you begin to doubt yourself without even realising you are convincing yourself. I started to wonder whether she did just like me, but she had learned in life that this is the best, or indeed the only way, to get her man. Perhaps, she would learn with time that I knew what she was doing and didn’t appreciate being played in such a way. We did have a lot of time together, more time than I had with my girlfriend.
It seemed unreal that they would harass me for 1.5 years knowing that I hadn’t cheated on Ingrid the whole time, nor on Olga before that. The dedication was impressive either way, but I wondered whether they hadn’t seen through the rumours and gossip and decided I wasn’t the toxic beast that they had been told about. Despite everything, I wondered whether they were putting all this time into courting me because they liked me. They gave me more of their time than my girlfriends had. Often with both of them staying late when they had me to themselves. They dropped hints of what they were after, or more to the point, what I was missing out on. They liked performing fellatio for a man, they talked about how women like porn and the sex from porn, they didn’t have a problem with anal sex as long as the men who liked it always had lubricant with them. Th regular had a poetry reading of erotic literature in the bar. She would stay until I closed by the bar when I worked the night shift. I had they keys, we were on our own, I knew what they were offering, and still I did nothing. Ultimately, they had been rejected in everyway and I genuinely felt more and more guilty about it all, even if I knew, at other times, that they were harassing me.
Rejection and Projective displacement
All this meant that their hostility and aggression could be an expression of this sense fo rejection and it played in to their narrative of feeling ugly and unwanted, and of British men hating German women. In truth, the rejection did have an effect. They started to search for different reasons to sustain their campaign against me, when I had nothing wrong. Interestingly, several examples of their attempts to lay blame at my door also read as instances of projective displacement.
1. After my sacked colleague and a regular had both been rejected, they attempted to find different reasons for their resentment and hatred of me. I did not realise at the time just how lucky I was that my colleague and my boss- both women- came to my defence. At times this harassment would have an effect on them as well. For instance, I was having a conversation with another female colleague about her Master’s thesis on dance theory. The colleague who would harass me came over and threw herself down on a chair next to us. We acknowledged her and continued our conversation. This colleague just started shouting at us in the quiet cafe. ‘Keine versteht das!’, ‘No one would understand that’. It was not just strange to suddenly start shouting in this quiet cafe, but also because my other workmate had understood me. She ignored the existence of my workmate who was replying to me and elaborating on her thesis when she exploded. I tried to placate the colleague who had exploded, but by doing so, I only made the other one angrier at being totally overlooked. To cut a long story short, the woman who would come to harass me was jealous of me having a philosophical chat because I was her British friend doing a PhD in philosophy. There were many instances of the sudden change of mood in her.
2. Me and this colleague were talking about Bergman films. She thought it conspicuous that I had not seen any of the film that Liv Ullman had directed, when I am such a big fan. She thought this was because Liv Ullman was a woman. This might have been true in part. I acknowledged this and I was curious, so I asked my colleague, “what are her films like then?”. I intentionally avoided the question whether she had seen them. She responded, “I have not watched any”. We are all vulnerable to the prejudices of a patriarchal culture and men should not be singled out for abuse when their objectionable proclivities are no different from women. I wonder though, if some guilt is not projected onto men when women feel guilty for not finding socially prescribed progressive art interesting. I think men sometimes bear the brunt of a woman’s dissatisfaction with herself as a feminist. Calling me out for not being a feminist, or not feminist enough, or in the right ways helps to justify their campaign and bolster their confidence. This is typical of our age, in which Netflix activism abounds. The activists also claimed that me not watching Homeland suggested I was sexist, that not watching Dark was conspicuously xenophobic given I was trying to learn German, and liking True Detective (first season) betrayed me as a misogynist. Having a well kept beard after Handmaden’s Tale only compounded that issue. Not to mention that fact that the evil patriarchal figure was clearly modelled on Jordan Peterson, and everyone knew that. I had to ask them what Netflix was, exactly, to open them to the possibility that some people have not caught up with Netflix yet.
3. However, the topic of Jordan Peterson brings me to another incident which was just as ridiculous. I claimed to not know anything of Jordana Peterson, except that he had provoked a reaction from some interviews on social media from feminists. I knew this from some women from my Masters in Dundee. One was senior lecturer at the time and is now a professor, another was a very smart fellow student. Both did not see what they fuss was about. They admitted not understanding the distinction made between qualitative and quantitative statistical analysis and that was the only place where they might have had an objection. Otherwise, they thought he had conceded the ground most feminists were concerned about, namely, aspiring to equality even if not exactly 50- 50 representation in every field of work. I relayed this to show that I was not a total hermit and, perhaps to show that I have discussion about such popular feminist topics of conversation with intelligent women. The response from the activists was that it was all a rhetorical ploy to put forward my own opinions while simultaneously disowning them. This showed how conceited and manipulated I was. The suspected that I was a Jordan Peterson fan who down played his more radical opinions by claiming, or feigning, that other women think the same as he does.
4. When a man cheated on his girlfriend after his shift in the bar, I was accused of being sexist for not informing his life partner. I asked the GGF why she had not informed the woman herself, since she had worked there and knew the woman longer than I had. In fact, they had voiced there preference for his girlfriend who they knew and liked. Why was I the one solely responsible for defending this women’s dignity, and thus deserving of punishment for being part of the patriarchal system of the humiliation of women. I had only just arrived at work the day before to find some unseemly remnants of the sex that was had the night before. I had no inclination to do anything about it. I had not even seen the girlfriend since then. The activists never did tell the girlfriend they were so fond of.
5. Gone Girl Feminists are uniquely suspicious of the ‘nice guys’, which means something totally different from what most would assume. We all know about the nice guys who are basically people pleasers. GGFs are exceptional in that they view all people pleasers with the same contempt. Again, they take after the book in this respect, which has a famously acerbic critique of the ‘cool girl’ who knows how to please men. However, there is another conception of ‘the nice guy’. This ‘nice guy’ only pretends to be the prototypical ‘nice guy’ to conquer more women. I was told in Berlin that some men have girlfriends just to help them sleep with other women. They clearly did not appreciate the irony of expounding this theory, allegedly about men like me, after being rejected for over 2 years while offering me sex, anal sex and deep throat, late at night after I had been drinking. Women can project whatever they want onto men. There are endless diatribes online professing ‘open secrets’ and the social science about different types of men. As a man, you cannot prove such accusations false. It is impossible to prove you are a nice guy and not a ‘nice guy’ to Gone Girl Feminists.
6. The other example is when they abruptly asked me if I had slept with any black women, the context pointed to their intent to accuse me of racism. . A question I should never have dignified with a response in the first place, but I thought it might defend me against the accusation of being racist. Luckily, I could answer in the affirmative, but it was pointless. I challenged them because I was getting used to their line of questioning. I asked, “and if I hadn’t, would you take that to mean that I am racist?”. The regular replied, changing from English to German, and addressing my colleague, ‘ah, he hasn’t, he is just saying he has so he doesn’t sound racist’. The implication was that I needed to lie to hide something. However I was alleged to have lied, so they concluded I was probably deflecting racism. No matter what I said or did to show consideration, care and support, they found different reasons to suspect me. These two women insisted that I was ‘of that kind’ that hate German women. So the problem was not with them, it was not that they are not attractive, it is rather the problem was with me, I was a racist. Thus the very ugly feelings and violent actions which followed from their feeling of rejection were camouflaged as justified actions taken against a racist. I was the cruel racist and not them.
Projective identification and my attempts to mollify the feminists
The activiststs do not want to acknowledge that they are racist, nor accept rejection. However, it seems more likely that the women attacking British men are xenophobic rather than the other way around. Of course, being racist and xenophobic is not something a radical lefty would identify with. These women therefore project what is intolerable in themselves onto their victims. They treat the victim cruelly and violently because they cannot tolerate themselves. The two women in the bar should ask themselves if their incapacity to accept rejection is not the toxic behaviour they project on men, and in particular the vulnerable British foreigners they target. Here we already have two examples of projective identification.
Very few of us can cope with being accused, and we often dislike the person who accuses us. Thus, we appear all the more as enemies to them; in consequence they regard us with increased persecutory feelings and suspicions. This creates a vicious circle in which people project aspects of themselves they cannot accept onto others. In a sense, people who suffer from projective identification can often feel vindicated in their grievances because projective identification often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I resented the betrayal of trust by my abusers that posed as friends and by my girlfriend. I was angry with myself for having absorbed the abuse for as long as I did while trying to kill them with kindness. Melanie Klein acknowledges that the ‘killing with kindness approach’ can work, but she warns that it can quickly turn to mutual hostility:
One way of trying to deal with excessive suspicion is to try and pacify the supposed or actual enemies. […] But such a relations easily breaks down and changes to mutual hostility.
These people harass and abuse the other in the firm belief he is evil, or toxic, until eventually he says or does something to express any form of agency he can in his situation. Thus, it can appear like he is toxic or aggressive. The Gone Girl feminists in Berlin may genuinely believe they have an intuition for the toxicity of men. As they go through their life harassing, drugging and abusing men, they believe they in the gift of intuition. In their eyes, this belief is repeatedly vindicated by the reaction they get from men.
The group members encourage one another to believe that they are wholly good, while the victim contains all that is wrong in the world. He is the scape goat to demonstrate their moral status in the tribe. They punish and shame the toxic Other in public and on the group chat. This process begins in Berlin where a small number of violent extremists take on the role of judge and executioner. Noone asks who these people are. No one questions their state of mind. Gone Girl activism is a form of projective identification that has gone viral. People resort to persecuting people to prove that they are pure of those traits that they cannot accept in themselves. This in turn only makes everyone more anxious in an increasingly hostile world. We are creating a society riven with persecution anxiety and mutual hostility is mounting. This has already led to dehumanizing violence against men, and it is becoming normalized. Much more needs to be said interpocula.