Gone Girl Feminism and Victimization
The quintessential Gone Girl Feminist (GGFs) has a degree in the arts or sociology and focuses on a particular set of issues in feminist politics. Certain issues are ubiquitous among Gone Girl Feminists in Berlin: trauma, father absence, alcoholic parents, or a strict religious upbringing. The latter is conspicuous given that Brandenburg is the least religious of German federal states. However, the majority of GGFs are not born and bred Berliners. A lot of women go to Berlin to escape home knowing they will find a network that shares an experience of victimization. Even among this group, few can be called Gone Girl Feminists. A term I reserve for those who take things further; for those who make decisions to mislead thousands of their happy casuals in group chats; for those who knowingly frame and abuse innocent men. The milieu in Berlin is ground zero for this Gone Girl Feminism.
The number of GGFs in Berlin can be counted on two hands but this group administrates an army of thousands online. This movement began as the broader women’s liberation movement began, with a circle of friends who share the main goal and method of consciousness raising. Gone Girl Feminists are elites in the sense that Joreen Freeman described in the context of feminism in the 1970’s:
Elites are nothing more, and nothing less, than a group of friends who also happen to participate in the same political activities… These friendship groups function as networks of communication outside any regular channels that may have been set up by the group.
Modern activism is organised on secure group chats online and, as such, it sees itself as wholly outside the regular channels. Activist members believe they are inside the informal channels of communication in which information is shared symmetrically and transparently without distinction. They are in the in-group, so they believe, simply because they are in the network. Like all elites, GGFs know that they must not become known or risk facing scrutiny. Their power resides in the trust granted to the network and the number of people willing to take orders from the network.
However, there are occasions when this type of feminist wants to make clear that they know more about ‘their issues’, women’s issues, than anyone else does. This might happen if they have behaved conspicuously and betrayed themselves- abruptly asking personal questions or screaming at someone in public. They want to take ownership of their issues. Sometimes they are just responding to people who have recoiled from their more extreme views. ‘They just don’t get it’. This is understood by the GGF as a failed attempt at consciousness raising. However, these incidents also serve as an impromptu process for vetting men or women for the movement.
The Gone Girl Feminist does not always appreciate how she acts defensively and with passive aggression. She reacts to someone who makes her feel like she has betrayed herself or like she has been rejected. She is thus already projecting onto someone who is a target before the vetting process has begun. This reaction is particularly acute when a GGF fails to entrap a man and prove he is a cheat. GGF do not take to rejection, and the network does not accept defeat. The target is not considered innocent after he rejects these women, rejecting these activists sometimes for years. Like so many, this man will never pass the vetting procedure. Instead, the failure is put down to one of two things.
First, the personal rejection is taken as a judgement on their mental health. Second, the rejection is as a token Berliner women or German women. Both accusations are employed self-consciously to protract the campaign of harassment. This works because their aggressive behaviour is excused as the result of the issues that they are dealing with. Issues that Gone Girl Feminists have learned to weaponize.
When I was targeted, I was working in a bar that was unusual for the area in that the bar staff and regulars were locals, except for me, that is. They knew that I had been offered fellatio and anal sex by these women who would sit there every shift until I locked up the bar on my own, sitting hoping that something would happen. A few regulars were jealous, others were eager to curry favour with women, and some might have genuinely believed that I hated Germans or Berliner women. A hostile environment was only avoided by me proving myself considerate of those women. Women who I knew were suffering with different mental health problems. I genuinely tried to have a positive impact on these two women, and I forgave all their aggressions for a long time. Meanwhile my colleagues, almost all German women, were on my side for the same reasons. They never knew I was sexually assaulted by one of the women.
These two feminists in the bar had other means of sexually harassing and abusing me. They inverted the personal and token rejections that that they accused me of. They psychoanalysed my personal failings in a relationship with a woman who, it turned out, was also part of the network. She was the second ‘girlfriend’ who was part of the campaign. They also attacked my sexual incompetence and inadequate body as a token British man. Meanwhile the effect of the bombing of Berlin was a regular topic of conversation. Indeed they would sometimes pick that conversation up where they had let off the previous day. There is so much to tell of the harassment. However, this is not what I want to discuss in this stack.
I want to talk about how they take ownership and weaponize ‘their issues’ as a smokescreen to disguise who they are, and what they do, to the network. When they discussed their issues with me, they brought up certain texts. They could expect me to go and seek out these texts, and they may have wanted me to. They could have been helping me along to the unfashionable observation that women are framing and abusing innocent men. They might have been goading me on to ‘attack’ those who have already been victimized by men. They anticipated that no one will be ready to receive this message. Indeed, in certain circles it will be used to incite violence against me.
They might now claim that this article is just another humiliation: If I make these claims about the issues that drive Gone Girl Feminism, after they have predicted that I would make these ‘false claims’, then the fact that I make the claims ‘proves’ that they were right, and the claims are false. They might also claim that I am just sexist to presume the leading women must be mad, that I do not realise all women are just as angry, or just as capable as they are.
There are two problems here. First, they actively mislead people about what they do and thus the network does not know what they are capable of. Second, all this is not proof of anything. They take ownership of their issues, anticipate what will be said about them, and feed their victims certain lines from certain texts. Texts that they encountered while researching the mental health issues that they know effects their own behaviour and shapes their campaign against men.
To put this second point differently, this is not a disjunctive syllogism. It is not a situation where: ‘either it is true that they suffer from father absence and trauma, and they have not tricked me into believing that they do, or it is false to say they suffer from father absence and trauma, and they have tricked me into thinking they do. As is often the case, a conjunctive synthesis of two seemingly contradictory things is possible. The women are genuinely suffering, and this suffering is employed as part of the campaign, a campaign that is driven by this suffering.
These women know their activism is driven by their health and behavioural problems, but that does not allow them to change it. In fact, they self-consciously employ this knowledge as part of the campaign. As they see it, their suffering is caused by men, and their hostile behaviour is directed at men. They affirm their victimization and hostility because their violent campaign holds a poetic justice for them. This form of activism is a tragic example of making virtue of necessity. They present the behaviour they cannot help but act out as an expedient measure, selected to counter another kind of illness- toxic masculinity.
It's worth pointing out here, before I present my argument, that experiencing trauma and victimization does not necessary lead people to be violence or abusive. Neither has every feminist who choses Gone Girl Feminism experienced trauma and victimization. There has been a general social shift from a dignity culture with its characteristic ethic of restraint and tolerance, to a victimhood culture. The latter is characterized along four main dimensions, a) constantly seeking recognition for one’s victimhood, b) moral elitism, c) lack of empathy for the pain and suffering of others, and d) frequently ruminating about past victimization (see Rahav Gabay). While it is important to keep that victimhood mindset and the experience of trauma separate, they do often overlap. I suggest in the next Substack that social media have compounded the effects of trauma, mental health and victimization, amplifying the victimhood mindset, the polarization of extreme moral emotions. I argue that this has generated a violent bigoted form of feminism.