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 the advances of many other activists at work who were trying to prove I am a cheat. I kept changing cafes and bars, and places in the library where I was harassed. Even my language class was openly abusive towards me, all apart from one Swedish woman who I also rejected. So it went on. 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, and the sexual assault, but that would take us to far afield. I just want to describe the first three years of the campaign- up to the point that I did cheat on a girlfriend-activist. The Chronology of Exposure Part 1 describes how my friends and colleagues turned against me in the first year of the campaign. Part 2 summarizes how two activists played the role of girlfriend to emotional abuse me over a combined two and half years. These two activists coordinated with activists who targeted me at work. Part 3 focuses on the workplace harassment and abuse.

[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 was once a district of east Berlin. Decades after the wall came down it remained a centre for punks, artists and anti-capitalist protesters. There were many squats that housed a bar, a club, or a Vokü (soup kitchen) on the bottom floor. Some of these old haunts remain. For better or worse, it is now full of the hubbub of one of Europe’s most vibrant cities. Boxhaggener Platz is in the centre of Freidrichschain. ‘Boxy’, as it is know, is like a town square composed of a series of boxes within boxes, each inviting different happenings to happen. The outermost box is composed of café that turn into bars as the sun goes down, each with their own vareity of fold away chairs making a terrace on the pavement. Then, accross the street, there is a promenade around the park made from a mosaic of grey, blue and purple cobbles. A scattering of slender birch trees rise from the cobbles to offer a contrast of colour in the autumn and some much needed shade in the summer. Flea markets can be found every weekend beneath the birches. On the inside of this promenade are sparse wild bushes that enclose the park. The bushes are pinned back by benches looking inward onto the ‘greenish lawn’ where musicians play and people throw a Frisbee around during the day. People sit into the wee hours on these benches smoking rollies and drinking 1 litre glass bottles of beer. Then they jump back on their bike to pedal back to their respective Kiez, or neighbourhood. Locals are prone to stick to their own Kiez, but those hungry to discover the city will cycle far through the night. If you are tourist, you are bound to make your visit to Boxy for the streets lined with bars and the odd smallish club of convenience.

Of course gentrification ensues and ever more restaurants, clothes shops and coiffures open up. Now there is a quick turn over of bars because the rent and rates are steadily increased. The local favourites are the few bars still running after 10 to 15 years. The bar where I worked was one of five back then. Decked out with second hand furniture from the eighties so that each corner was unique, the general vibe was as if sitting in your friend’s 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 Friedrichschain. 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 out to each table at night to make a flickering ambience. It was a 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 who 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 German speaking. Nearly all my colleagues were women, as was the proprietor and manager. I was lucky to get a lot of support from everyone at the bar in face of the harassment. More support than I would receeve anywhere post hence.

As I mentioned in the last post, the main antagonist started in the café the day before I got the job. A local cryptically suggested to me that this was no coincidence, but I would not understand what this meant until much 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 when I took over her shift. 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. Even when I realised she was playing games with me, I put it down to her feeling rejected and the mental health problems that she had talked about. About a year in, I warned Alma that her aggression had rubbed people up the wrong way, and some were plotting her her exit. When Alma lost her job in unforgiving circumstances I supported her. She was told on arrival that it would be her last shift, so I sat at the bar for support as shed a few tears.

After she was sacked, Alma would come in and sit at the bar. There was only enough space at the end of the bar for two, or three people, at a push. There was a barstool on the service side for the bartender. This created an intimate space between the lone bartender and whoever sat on the regular’s stool. I was slow to pick up that the days that seemed without guile and hostility were part of the campaign. There were all sorts of emotional abuse and manipulation techniques that feminists knew of from toxic relationships and then there were the psych ops that East Berliners knew from the Stasi. I was green back then and let my guard down. Six months in, the second activist arrived and quickly became a regular. Despite their claims to the contrary, I suspected Alma and Anna were connected even before Anna walked into the bar. I had already met her.

Anna first chatted me up in a café where I was writing my thesis. I had stupidly boasted of getting a free coffee at my favourite writing spot to Alma. Soon after, Anna appeared there. What was more ominous, Anna arrived just 20 minutes after me, and as she sat down she looked to the barrista, and I caught the woman who had been giving me free coffee flick her eyes and head over at me, as if to say, ‘that’s him’. A few minutes later, Anna jumped on the first opportunity to spark up a conversation with me. Obviously I knew something was up, but I could hardly anticipate what followed. I stopped going to this cafe because Anna would chat me up, but then she started to frequent the café where I worked, and she would write her thesis there. This meant she stayed all day, often until I finished my shift, but she also appeared for my night shifts and stayed until I locked up the bar. Anna began working on me around 6 months into my stint at the bar. They had about 6 months before Alma was sacked to double team me. Then they teamed up on me as customers for a while after Alma was sacked. Often performing their script in those hours when they had me and the café all to themselves.

Emails to Ingrid, and a demand for friendship

Alma had an unhealthy interest in my girlfriend from the beginning. I wondered if she wanted contact with my girlfriend to turn her against me. Later I wondered whether it was to make me think that Ingrid was not alreadt part of the campaign, like my last girlfriend, who was an activist performing scripted abuses. It was during the financial crisis in Spain, but Ingrid had left Spain years earlier. Alma claimed that Spanish women were taking German boyfriends but the hated Germans. A blog had just been written by a Spanish woman in Berlin and it was the talk of the town. The blog was dedicated to denigrated German men, all except from the bloggers boyfriend, that is. This was the first thing Alma mentioned to Ingrid, which was strange, given she and Ingrid had talked about becoming good friends. Ingrid knew about the blog and handled the hostile conversation well. All to well perhaps, but I didn’t want to jump to conclusions. Perhaps Alma was just jealous.

Later I would stupidly include Ingrid’s address in a group email to workmates while organizing a BBQ. The day after, Alma seemed to threaten me, ‘Oh, that was trusting, giving your girlfriend’s email out’. My suspicions about her trying to catch me cheating had been muted by her overtures of friendship, 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 that the activists had intentionaly planted. Much later, they sent an email to my girlfriend inviting her to prepare an evening of 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 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 I thought Alma might be a 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. 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 there is such a high turn over of people in Berlin that women are reluctant to get involved in, what will probably be, another summer romance. I mentioned this to my two antogonists, but they had their own reasons to think that some men just don’t like German women. They thought British men prone to this prejudice. I slowly realised this was probably tactic to make me feel guilty, and it worked. Even if you held suspicions that you were being manipulated, you could never be sure. I endured abuse for much longer than I would have, if I wasn’t concerned for them. I thought at this stage that they might stop the abuse if they got to know who I really was.

I felt threatened by this negative stereotype. I was, after all, the only non-native speaker working at the bar. 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 would sit at the bar and chat up women to no avail most nights. Other men where cheating with women in the bar. It might seem to them that I did have a problem with German women. Why else would refuse what the women were offering me? Like most people, I was shocked that people could think me a racist or mysoginist. I was a lefty who had studdied philosophy all his life and wrote about ethics. I couldn’t stand the idea of this perception of me gaining traction. I wanted people to know that I was not racist, nor seixist. I wanted Alma and Anna to know that they are smart and funny. I wanted them to know that I was not rejecting them because they are ugly or horrible, but because I had a girlfriend.

The fact that I was fooled by this might suggest that I find the idea that British men held a prejudice against German women credible, and people might conclude that I am sympathetic or prey to this prejudice myself. It’s much simpler than that. You cannot always rationalize the perception that others have of themselves, or the perception they believe that others have of them. I said it was absurd, but they then talked about how Germans are portrayed in Anglo-American movies. The list of films was longer than you might imagine. They talked about how women in Berlin feel ugly, and connected this to the experience of trauma experienced after the war. They believed the widespread sexual assault that women experienced, and the effect they claimed it has had on women in Berlin, made them unatractive. One also talked about the effect of their parents travelling round Germany doing research to find out what all their family had done during the holocaust. They talked of their own mental health issues and Alma confided in me that she had been talking about me to her psychiatrist. You start to feel you are having an effect on their mental health. You cannot help but be concerned when they are choosing to spend all this time with you. In this way 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 like Berliner women, and that you like them in particular. I tried to have a positive impact on them while I worked the bar on my own. All this prolongs the abuse because the male victims believe that they need to do more to support their abusers.

I genuinely wished at times, that I were single for a period to hook up with them, if it was so important to them. Even if I weren’t attracted 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’. At the same time, I suspected that in that situation, a kiss, or a one night stand, would 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 had all been a coordinated and systematic attack.

The bombing of Berlin

It became more obvious that this hostility was not only born of a sense of rejection when the activists recurrently berated me about the bombing of Berlin. I had been 5 years in the city and never experienced anything like this. 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 all the canal being covered with dead 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, 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.

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 that threatened me in the workplace. Over two years, 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 women cheating. 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. 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. They claimed that men like me 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. Men even behave this way with their girlfriends, which is such a turn off for women. They could imagine me doing this with Ingrid. 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 their partners. I admit that some of these liaison were underway long before the campaign against me had be launched. However, it gradually became ridiculous and those who were playing a part were not as good at acting as they would like to think. 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 chating to me who started to sleep with the man I could see across the street. There was colleague who would, I was led to believe, get their girlfriend drunk so that they would be left to hook up with another colleague…. and so on, the pattern continued, and my prudish lack of sex seemed ridiculous in this context. On top of that, there was the continuous conversation about how relationships do not work in Berlin because people do not stick to monogamy. Everyone the activists knew, who thought they were in a monogamous relationship, were being cheated on. As I explained in my last post about the role of activists who played my girlfriend, the activists at the bar explained why they thought my girlfriend was cheating on me.

Leaving that aside, 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. They would be publicly humiliating themselves in their naïve believe that they are special and that they are loved, that their relationship was unique and monogamous.

British men were especially prone to this, or so they claim. They were prudes and had less sex. The more sex you had, the better you got at it. Alma acknowledge that some of her friends could not be able hold up a long term relationship because of mental health issues. 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 argue, they were not deceiving themselves about ‘their men’ being monogenous. They felt that they had it better than women in a relationship, with a career, with money, and better than the British in general. They said they and everyone else 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. They explained how some interactions with my girlfriend were classic examples manipulation used by women they know to sleep around.

They also 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 previous girlfriend had also made subtle, but direct, unfavourable comparisons with her previous boyfriend.

While they worked on me in this way, they constantly promoted Tinder and to me at the bar. The fact I was not on any dating apps probably put a spanner in the works of many scripted abuses that started with matches online. I would not enounter these activists until four years later. Again, this was something that I might never have participated in if I wasn’t isolated in a foriegn country by a violent camapign for over 5 years. In fact, after the network had something on me, the activists started to tell me in the bar what can happen to British men on Tinder in Berlin, but that’s another story.

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. Asking this question, they were probably satisfied them that they have performed a duty of care to the man they were gong to drug and abuse in the comming years. They checked if he had suicidal tendencies. Other personal questions quickly followed that would help them hone the campaign of abuse that was to come. As I mentioned above, Alma told me very early on that she had been talking about me to her therapist.

Another time she started talking about the book Quiet, which describes the benefits of 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. Obviously, this is all textbook gas-lighting, talking down my suffering and interupting me. All these cues were to make me ashamed of being weak and to prevent me from talking about the harassment to my friends and my girlfriend. As I mentioned in Part 2, When I did talk to the latter about what was happening in the bar with these women, she also gaslighted me. When you are subtely being attacked at all points of contact to other people, it makes know difference whether you suspect you are being abused or not. Even when you understand the technique of this or that instance of emotional abuse, it does not stop the campaign at large having an effect. A new reality is being constructed around you and it does not respond to who you are, and who you had always been. Over years this becomes exhausting as you adjust your behaviour to allay their suspicions or appealy to people’s sense of fairness. All the time you are trying to pretend the abuse is not having the desired effect, even to yourself as you constantly reassert yourself in the face of this campaign.

Both activists asked me to do things beyond the confines of the bar. Before and after she was sacked Alma would come in and talk about exceedingly long and challenging philosophy books. I was told, by the other activst, 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 so she could paint a picture of me a sexist. Both activists did this. However, Anna 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 Anna played the bad cop. She became enraged at times in response to being rejected or overlooked. At times she would be aggressive towards other women. She screamed at a colleague and I when we were discussing thie workmate’s Masters thesis and philosophy. Her mental health may have been part of the ploy against me, but it was weaponizing something she was familiar with and not all the outburst were according to script.

The other activist 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 didn’t drug you, you asked me for the glass of water’). No wonder then that Anna needed to persist in her harassment for over a year in the bar, only to sexually assault me a few nights after the funeral of the woman who had raised me.

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 than I remembered. 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, that you are convincing yourself against sound judgement. I started to wonder whether she did just like me. Perhaps, she had learned in life that this is the best, or indeed the only way, to get her man. Maybe she would learn that I didn’t appreciate being played this way. We did have a lot of time together, more time than I had with my girlfriend. I knew she was working on me as an activist, but niavely thought she would come to see that I was not a cheat, or a mysoginst, or a racist.

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. Despite everything, I wondered whether one of them was putting all this time into courting me because she liked me. They gave me more of their time than either girlfriend had. 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. The 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, there were times when we had the bar to myself, I knew what they were offering, but I didn’t cheat. They felt rejected and I genuinely felt more and more guilty about it all, even if I knew, at other times, that they were harassing me. However, I woudl only understand their techniques retrospectively. After they had done the damage and could boast about what they had been doing the whole time. After I started chasing up the research about emotional abuse in relationships and the psych ops used by the Stasi.

Rejection and Projective displacement

All this hostility and aggression could be an expression of a sense of rejection. This 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 reasons to sustain their campaign against me, when I had done nothing wrong. If anything, they had innadvertingly proven that I was not a cheating cad, because if it takes two girlfriends, and three years of manipulation and abuse, to get a man to cheat, he was never a cheat in the frist place. It’s remarkable that several accusations they made against me in the bar also read as instances of projective displacement. That is to say, they were instance of them projecting what they cannot accept about themselves onto an other, who they then attack. In many cases the aggression of the person suffering from projective displacement often provokes a reaction from their victim that seems to vindicate their judegement.

1. 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 colleague 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. Even while she was activist there to harass me, the sense of rejection after a year of rejection was real. There were many instances of the sudden change of mood in her. It was hard to tell whether she was attacking me because of he mental health problems or because she was a Gone Girl activist who was trying to damage my mental health.

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. Men should not be singled out, 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 not 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 not to know anything of Jordana Peterson, except that some interviews had provoked a reaction on social media from feminists. I knew this much 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 the fuss around Peterson was about. Thye had watched the Channel 4 News interview, which was the big one in the UK. 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 discussions 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. They 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 (GGF) 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, than the other way around. The might also ask themselves if their incapacity to accept rejection or maintain monogonous realtionships is not the toxic behaviour they project on the vulnerable British foreigners, men they target for allegedly cheating on girlfriends and making unwanted advances on women.

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. Gone Girl Feminists harass and abuse the other in the firm belief he is evil, or toxic, until eventually he says or does something in retaliation. 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.