The New Figure of Feminism and Trauma
In the last stack I explained that a feminist network which drugs and abuses men is led by a small group of women in Berlin who suffer from a mixture of father absence, neglect, and trauma. These activists know more about their issues than most and they guided me to the literature. In this stack, I want to use this literature to explain their behaviour. They may have been laying a trap for me, goading me on to ‘attack’ them as victims, knowing I would be pilloried by the predominant victimhood culture. Nevertheless, I want to set their campaign in the context of their mental health problems.
Social media amplifies their mental health problems and their outrage across secure group chats. However, the broader network that follows their every instruction does not know who the leaders are, what they do to the men they target, and why. Ultimately, I want to argue that we can have compassion for victims, and people suffering from mental health problems, while also refusing to countenance a campaign of violent retribution.
The Body Keeps the Score, a book by Dr Bessel van der Kolk, was mentioned a lot in conversation with Gone Girl Feminists. It spoke to them in relation to the experience of trauma and father absence in Berlin. However, there is a lot in the book that they denied or deflected. Van der Kolk talks about the self-damaging impulsivity that father absence can lead to, including the promiscuity that is employed in Gone Girl Feminism. Even if these activists know the statistics, some simply reject patriarchal science. Others justify their behaviour. Knowing that they struggle with rejection and abandonment, some claim to chose promiscuity to avoid the threat of abandonment. On a deeper level though, their behaviour is not fully informed and freely chosen. Their behaviour betrays a state that Dr. van der Kolk refers to as ‘ knowing not knowing’. No matter what they know of their suffering, their
“body is likely to remain in high alert, prepared to ward off blows, deprivation or abandonment”
BKS, p124
There were other passages in the book which I recognised from our conversation in the bar, passages that the women clearly drew upon. One passage in particular stuck out. Only when I read the passage did I realise how she simultaneously knew a lot about herself, but also didn’t know. The passage is worth quoting in full. It is about a nurse who had experienced trauma and neglect as a child. She is named Marylin in the book.
She was convinced that men did not give a damn about people’s feelings and they got away with whatever they wanted. Women couldn’t be trusted either. They were to weak to stand up for themselves, and they’d sell their bodies to get men to take care of them. […] She was suspicious of the motives of anyone who was kind to her and called them out on the slightest deviation from nursing regulations. As for herself: She was a bad seed, a fundamentally toxic person who made bad things happen to those around her.
BKS, p128
Let’s take those five sentences in order from a) to e). Each expresses views that the Gone Girl Feminist shared with me.
a) Just as Marylin from the book was convinced that men did not give a damn about people’s feelings and get away with everything, Gone Girl Feminism tries to justify their abuses of men rationally, if not soundly:
‘Misogyny is not a problem with a few individuals. Misogyny is structural. Any man you meet will be playing the role of either a husband, a father, an employer, or a landlord to a woman. For that reason, anything you can do to that man, should be done on behalf of the women who are powerless against him.’
The irony of telling me this, as their latest victim, as a foreigner serving them cappuccinos for under minimum wage while stuttering in foreign language seemed to be lost on them. They knew I was not partaking in the privileges they claim all men enjoy over women, but they persisted in their harassment and presented their argument, simply because they could.
b) The idea of women being to stupid to stand up for themselves does not sound like a feminist dogma, but it is central to Gone Girl Feminism. It justifies keeping most feminists, women and normies out of their in-group. It’s most famous expression can be found in the book Gone Girl, by Gillian Flyn:
“I know women whose entire personas are woven from a benign mediocrity. Their lives are a list of shortcomings: the unappreciative boyfriend, the extra ten pounds, the dismissive boss, the conniving sister, the straying husband. I’ve always hovered above their stories, nodding in sympathy and thinking how foolish they are, these women, to let these things happen, how undisciplined. And now to be one of them! One of the women with the endless stories that make people nod sympathetically and think: Poor dumb bitch.”
In the film, the lead character is willing to lie to everyone to reap vengeance on a man who has cheated on her. She refuses to be another dumb bitch and plays on the sexist perception of women as innocent victims. She falsely accuses men of rape out of revenge and to ensure her husband will not get out of the zero-sum war between them. Gone Girl Feminists falsely frame men for being cheats and misogynists, among other things.
c) The main character of Gone Girl looks down on married women as ‘poor dumb bitches’, just as her feminist namesake looks down on women who live with men in monogamous relationships. Gone Girl Feminists also consider marriage a particularly unfavourable form of prostitution for women to choose. This is worth saying because thousands of group chat members who follow their instruction have no idea what contempt the Gone Girl Feminist has for them.
The activists in the bar explained that the only reason to share a house with someone is financial. Whatever people enjoy together, they can bring to a commodious end by returning to their own home. Many Gone Girl Feminists see the life of legal voluntary prostitutes in the west as preferable to marriage because they at least enjoy their own space. It’s worth mentioning that Gone Girl Feminists do not think men and women can be friends without sex ‘getting in the way’. That is to say, men and women have relationships based only around sex and living together is only necessary due to the financial vulnerability of women. It is no surprise to them that women are perennially treated disrespectfully under these conditions. Women are thus considered stupid for believing in their man and their relationship as anything other than a sexual-financial transaction.
The attempts to entrap man is done on the part of activists who cannot maintain a long-term relationship themselves because of their mental health problems. Other activists suffer from father absence or neglect. They want to believe that other people’s relationship is a lie- that the husband is a lie, that the father is a lie. Their attempt to entrap a man can go to extremes and last years because they cannot accept rejection or defeat.
d) 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.
e) They constantly picked faults with me while I worked at the bar. Obviously, they picked faults with my German and my work, which are too tedious to recount here. They also made bizarre accusations. They claimed I was sexist because I loved Ingmar Bergman but I had never watched the films directed by Liv Ullman. I copped up to this, and asked what Liv Ullman’s films were like, but the feminist had never watched one either; 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; They claimed I lied when I said I had slept with a black woman. 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. 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.
f) Their tendency to do bad things to those around them is affirmed as something chosen and directed towards a political goal. Meanwhile, the toxicity that she would not deny was in her was projected onto men, her victims.
Sharing Victimization and Activism
The Gone Girl Feminist is a unique example of the social justice activist. The latter focuses on the individual as unique creation that is subjected to various intersectional forces. This understanding depicts a generic and hegemonic white heterosexual male enjoying privileges over others. The others are unique in different ways. In this political view, the forces that constitute our personal uniqueness are forces which divide us. The intersectional understanding overlooks the extent to which our brains are all wired to help us function as members of a tribe. Most importantly, most of our energy is invested in connecting to others. This fundamentally attunes us to the humanity of others. Whereas a pronounced hostility to others, and other tribes, is often a symptom of mental suffering. While the long list of symptoms that might lead to a formal psychiatric diagnosis is very confusing, if we look beyond this list, van der Kolk sees that “almost all mental suffering involves either trouble in creating workable satisfying relationships or difficulties in regulating arousal (as is the case of habitually becoming enraged, shut down, overexcited, or disorganized). Usually, it’s a combination of both.”
The problem is that because Gone Girl Feminists view themselves as victims of dehumanizing violence by a dangerous toxic tribe, they will not overcome their searing sense of isolation, aggression and impotence. While this experience binds Gone Girl Feminists together often in rage and disgust, they hold others with contempt and incite hatred and violence. Their contempt is for women and feminists, as well as for heterosexual men.
Focusing on a shared history of trauma and victimization alleviates their searing sense of isolation, but usually at the price of having to deny their individual differences: Members can belong only if they conform to the common code.
Isolating oneself into a narrowly defined victim group promotes a view of others as irrelevant at bet and dangerous at worst, which eventually only leads to further alienation. Gangs, extremist political parties, and religious cults may provide solace, but they rarely foster the mental flexibility needed to be fully open to what life has to offer.
BKS, p79
Social Media and the Militancy of Victimization
It is easy to think that a network of victims, like the one in Berlin, will offer their members valuable support, but this is not the case. Increasing evidence shows that without a professional in the room, or in the group chat, these groups can seriously damage the health of young women.
Professor Jonathan Haidt has demonstrated that a sudden and dramatic increase in rates of depression and anxiety in young women coincides with the rise of social media use, not to mention the rates of self-harming and suicide. While the health of young men is suffering, it is not quite as alarming as it is in young women. Studies have shown that women are more prone to emotional contagion that has increased not just the number of adolescent girls identifying with a mental illness or form of victimization, but also increased those suffering from these issues. People who have suffered victimization and suffer from mental health are particularly prone to the negative effects of social media which can intensify the negative impact of such health issues and amplifying them among other women. Women are also more engaged and victimized by relational aggression, as opposed to the physical aggression between boys. That is to say, that women will destroy people’s reputation and relationships. Often joining in a gang to attack one person who is isolated and shamed. These vulnerable people are now being targeted with campaigns of spiking and intimidation on top of the ostracism and public shaming.
Social media algorithms promote content that provokes anger and outrage in people because these people are more likely to share and produce more content that produces anger and outrage. The polarization of society is driving many people to ever more extreme views, and to experience moral emotions that demand action from us. This drive has resulted in groups taking extreme measures to exercise their hatred and disgust on vulnerable individuals. Gone Girl Feminism is driven and controlled by a small core group who have similar experiences of victimization and mental health issues. Amplifying these issues is no longer a matter of consciousness raising, but of organising violence and dehumanizing abuse.
Under these circumstances, we can no longer believe that women provide a moral conscience in our society. We cannot believe feminist networks when they say their drugs only make men sleepy or anxious, or that they would only give him so much of the drug, or that they would never target an innocent man, or that they would never lie or manipulate you, or they would never sexually harass or sexually assault a man. It is exciting and empowering to be part of a secret network that allows you to humiliate, dehumanize and drug someone. Of course, you would not participate unless you were informed of the many disgusting things about the victim. However, it is very important to know whether these things are true. More important still, we must challenge the desire to abuse and dehumanize others. This means women to.
Trauma does not have to define us. Victimhood does not need to form the core of our identity. It is possible to grow from trauma and be an example to others. It is possible to have pride in your group and not hate the out-group. It is possible to show that we are all worthy of being treated as human beings.