The Feminist Figure & the Spirit of Revenge
In a recent Stack we looked at the change in the figure of feminism since 2016, in the shadow of Donald Trump. For the first time, the figure has change from the white middle-class, educated, married women. This democratization of the movement has come at a cost. On the one hand, the pseudo-medical discourse on toxicity created a collective personality symbolized by the personality of Trump. This collective personality was diagnosed a threat to the nation, to democracy and to women. Without a policy or plan to inspire women, demonization was necessary to unite women in a collective identity against a common danger. On the other hand, new methods of public shaming, cancelling, and drugging were employed to destroy scape goats. While smart phones democratized group chat membership, a new elite had took over leadership. Today we take a closer look at the figure who out beat on this new path in the spirit of revenge.
It is a mistake to think that the spirit of revenge is born from a painful experience that was to much for the person to handle. By handle, we mean ‘to deal with’ at the moment of excitation. We presume that when the pain was suffered, a riposte was not formed because the victim had not the strength for it. Any attempt to react to the excitation of pain was abandoned because of the overbearing impact of the external force. This is a mechanistic understanding that claims an external impact is necessary to compel someone to vengeance, or activists into movement. This mechanistic understanding of the spirit of revenge is at the root of ‘victim blaming’. We do not just assume that something must have triggered the vengeance, but also a direct relation between the external cause and the resulting vengeance. The pain suffered is presumed to equal the victim’s measure, the figurative ‘pound of flesh’.
The call for revenge implies a fateful blow from a superior force that denied the victim any agency. This mechanistic understanding of the issue only considers the problem from the perspective of quantities. The victim is only a quantity of force at the moment of excitation. This interpretation excludes the qualitative aspect of the problem, the character of the forces involved. When the problem is put in solely mechanistic terms, the ‘reaction’ that never was, but is now called for, or now taken with cold calculated machinations, is presented as a natural consequence that follows by necessity and is justified by law. Which is to say, rhetoric is employed in a variation of the argument that fallaciously derives an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Even if the appeal to mechanistic laws of causation where anything more that a figure of speech, in any case, as Hume demonstrated, that something is the case, does not prove that it ought to be the case.
It might be counter intuitive that the self-proclaimed victim, who accounts for her victimhood within the mechanistic understanding of revenge, does not suffer from victim blaming. However, this is a result of the intuition that some prior violence must have been the external cause of revenge in an otherwise passive innocent being. This points to the issue from the perspective of quality. The victim who demands or takes revenge presents themselves as the passive victim, even after they have taken violent revenge. They are, in truth, neither passive nor active in taking revenge- they are reactive. They are not a passive victim propelled by the impact of an external force. If this were true, anyone who denied their victimhood at the point of violence would be blaming the victim, when the victim is only subject to the universal laws of causality, like everyone else. The mechanistic understanding is employed to mask the reactive type and be-night their violence in the mystification of divine retribution. The role of the eternal feminine is now called upon to mystify the passive divine women who has no need of revenge, pride or sexual pleasure, in the same breath as the call to revenge.
The benefit of all of us getting to finally tell the truth + the impact on victims FAR outweigh the lies of any one man’s reputation”
If some innocent men’s reputations have to take a hit in the process of undoing the patriarchy, that is a price I am absolutely willing to pay.
How many of our reputation have suffered unfairly? How many of our lives have ALREADY BEEN destroyed because of physical violence against us? Why was that acceptable, but now one man’s (potentially) unfair loss of career opportunity is not?
Emily Linden of Teen Vogue, Twitter.
It is true that there are women who have had their life taken away from them by acts of violence. Nothing I say in this article is to diminish this loss or the injustice of violence against women. It is only the justification of violence that I put into question here. In this case the justification of destroying the life of innocent men in the spirit of revenge.
Notice the mechanistic imagery of ‘weighing out’, ‘impacts’, ‘losses’, ‘take a hit’, ‘pay the price’. Notice that on one side of the scales we have one man contra women ass essentially victims. Advocating an international campaign in which millions of women make anonymous accusations about men on a platform that leave men incapable of responding will create hundred of thousands of male victims. This is true even when we presume that innocent men are not being intentionally framed for things they have not done. This is something we cannot presume when the suffering of innocents has already been pre-emptively justified, by the Teen Vogue columnist above.
If the goal of the network is to take revenge on men and intimidate them, qua men, as a form of deterrence, no proof of guilt, and indeed no wrongdoing on any man’s part is necessary. Demonstrating the power to destroy a life by documenting the downfall of some innocent scape goat is just as good a deterrent as any. Some women may not be willing to report men of power, wealth and influence, regardless of alleged claims to anonymity. Meanwhile men who are easy prey provide a more efficient source for the network to feed off. A larger proportion of the public can take part in the abuse of someone of low income and low status, and a larger membership emboldens the whole network.
The desire for revenge sees the whisper network spread the gossip where it will most damage the persona non grata. Not just workplaces, but future employers, so that finding alternative employment is difficult. When the victim does find employment it will be in a workplace that is ready and waiting to abuse him, just like the prior workplace he was forced to leave. Soon bars and coffee shops will have their own group chat affiliated with the network so they can force the men out of their establishment. There is a lot more to tell about the systematic organisation of the revenge that goes beyond raising awareness and destroying reputations. This will be dealt with elsewhere. Take a look at: 9 ways to drug someone
Suffice it to say, there is a problem, in principle, with punishing innocent men. The mechanistic language evades the problem, as well as the boundaries of any moral theory. Even in the same breath as justifying the abuse of innocent men, the Teen Vogue feminist claims that women are the only real victims because they are essentially passive. Women are ‘impacted’ by the male, connoting penetration from the Latin past participle of “to push, drive into”. They are in essence the one who is penetrated, and thus essentially the victim of superior force. Consider in this regard how the modern sense of “strike forcefully against something” and especially, “have a forceful effect on” is employed figuratively.
In the first tweet, we see that women are passive to superior external forces. While men ‘lose’ something, but not by an external force that overpowers them. What men are said to lose, is always external to them. Reputation is only what people think of you, not what you are. Men lose something that never belonged to them in the first place, a good reputation. Men are not impacted in any real sense, there is no external force that causes their loss. At most they only encounter friction because of their own rapine, and their forceful social ascendency. Which is to say, even men with good reputations are being pictured as rapine abusers who are rewarded for taking what they want in a patriarchy.
Sexist stereotypes of women as passive objects that are only compelled into movement when impacted on by essentially active male force. Men are thus translated into a different language from the mechanistic understanding of the world. The masculine is translated into the world of energetics, being an endogenous force that strives for dominance in the social hierarchy and the reputation that attends ascendency. Men are not impacted by women, external causation does not compel men, according to sexist stereotypes of masculinity, and its mythical potency. The masculine is an endogenous force that transforms itself, but it naturally loses something in the process. This is not justice, or revenge, but entropy. It seems natural then that men’s reputation should ‘take a hit’, as the second tweet claims.
Note that people do not ‘take a hit’, things take a hit. When the feminist calls for violence against men, she dehumanizes them. ‘Sales, shares departments, battalions, or submarines’ take a hit. Of course, these can all be viewed as extensions of men’s ego, and used in expressions of their courage, resilience and sacrifice. Even in this figurative sense nothing suffers a loss in real terms. There is only an experience of an anticipated resistance on the path to a goal. So, in a similar turn of phrase, we often think of someone taking a hit ‘for the team’ in a noble sacrifice on the path to victory. The traditional masculine virtue of courage and bodily sacrifice are evoked, but while denying any real (bodily) suffering occurs.
The feminist taunts men, “I am absolutely willing to pay the price of men’s suffering”. We are supposed to believe despite the aforesaid that the suffering of men or the degradation of shared moral values concerns the feminist gripped by the spirit of revenge. The anonymous unaccountable members of whisper networks will pay nor price, no matter how much life they steal from society. The truth is, the Teen Vogue feminist is talking about women destroying the life of men because from their perspective, “many of our lives have ALREADY BEEN destroyed.”. This feminist rejects the equal moral value of any human life. The merits of anyone’s behaviour, judgement ad virtue are obliterated on social media. Linden is no a passive victim, she is the reactive aggressor seeking revenge for a way of being, her being reactive.
The call for revenge implies a fateful blow from a superior force that denied the victim any agency. This is what lies behind ‘victim blaming’, which women have pointed out as the victim of male violence. However, the gender stereotypes prejudice society against male victimhood, while a prejudice against women as weak and vulnerable props up the dogma that women are always the victim. This mechanistic understanding of the issue only considers the problem from the perspective of quantities, masking the qualitative aspect of the problem, the character of the forces involved. While some people are more inclined to react immediately, which is to say, they act on their painful reaction to an experience. Others are more inclined to re-act to their reaction, that is, the pain. They hold on to the pain of the experience and return to it. The reaction is not turned outwards to the experience of the world in order to change it. Rather the reaction is turned inward and invests the pain with force.
Speaking of it in this way, gives the false impression that it is an intentional conscious act to react. In fact, this is a biological process whereby stress hormone engrave those memories. Even this does not require an impactful event at the hands of men but could be a result of neglect or father absence. In any case, the reactive person does not act her reaction but feels the reaction endlessly. There is, therefore, no need for her to have had an excessive excitation to trigger pain and her be gripped by the spirit of revenge and commit act of violence on any man.
Sadly, this is not all. It is not only the trace of past pain that the person reacts to, even when she has the power to react. This very process invests another trace, the trace of powerlessness. However, this powerlessness is not that of a weaker power being abused by a greater power. It is her own powerlessness to invest anything but the trace, e.g. the trace of pain, which is a typical powerlessness. As Abigail Schrier has reported, Generation Z is reporting this sense of powerlessness.
This generation has the lowest sense of efficacy. They report an external locus of control, meaning, they do not think they can improve their lives.
Where once there was a such to get mental health issues taken seriously and parent to seek support for their children, the worry for many Psychiatrists such as Professor Haidt is that mental health problems and victimhood have been valorised. In 2016, the CDC revealed that 1 In 6 children between 2 and 8 years of age were diagnosed with a mental health problem. However, studies have suggested that talking about pain endlessly is not as good as therapies to reconnect to the body such as EMDR, yoga, sport, or cognitive behavioural therapy. No one seems to be asking why people who are getting traditional forms of therapy, e.g. psychoanalytic therapy, are not getting better. No one seems to be tracking the possible negative effects of therapy.
Another related issue is the negative impact of social media. People are not just talking and reliving their mental health issues with therapists. The valorisation of victimhood and mental health issues has incentivized talking about them online. People form group chats in which trauma, victimhood, and mental health issues such as depression and anxiety are shares. Given the metrics of social media, the most extreme stories gain the most traction in the discussion. Anyone who challenged this trend risks being ostracized from the group. Some people talk of these groups as support groups, but Professor Haidt claims that this is disastrous for the mental health of young women, but also boys. Without having a professional in the room guiding the discussion, people will likely only entrench the negative cycle of thoughts and behaviours, as well as the perception of others. This will lead to even more extreme behaviour. Professor Haidt cites the sever rise in self-harming since the popularisation of social media as one metric of damage to support the banning of mobiles in school. Other types of more extreme behaviour could be the harm to others, as anything is justified in response to the violence experienced by women. More on this next time…