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not ready for this sort of thing
Aug. 12th, 2013 04:35 pmI was Away From The Internet over the weekend, because driving, and I have to say - I know it's bad to feel gleeful about others' breakdowns, but I am feeling really vindicated by fake male feminist Hugo Schwyzer losing it all over Twitter over the weekend. Partially because Hugo's actually perceptive enough to lay out some of the toxic shit that drives manipulative men, but mostly I think because my Ex left me with a lot of anger about faux-feminist men who manipulate women with redemption narratives.
I had a troubling thought a while back, that I've been turning over and over and trying to figure out what to do about. I've always said that the thing that I like best about Luke Skywalker as a character is the way he wins by practicing nonviolence and nonjudgmental love: he won't kill Vader because he loves him, no matter what, and in the face of that childlike unconditional trust Vader can't hold on to hate or bitterness and the dark side of the Force loses its hold on him, allowing him to die as Anakin, the father to a good son. I always sort of thought of it as being like Gandhian satyagraha, truth-force, confronting the enemy with their own violence and cruelty by accepting it without fighting back and giving violence the pretext to continue; it was a way for me to bring Star Wars, which as Joanna Russ points out has some nasty business what with the One Girl in All The World and the Honky Savior stuff and the thing where the end of ANH is modeled after Nazi propaganda, back in to line with my own personal ethics.
But, the thing is, I'm pretty much having to rethink a lot of my ideas about passive resistance, because truth-force didn't save me from my Ex. Like Hugo, he could take talk of truth and make it immaterial to the real power struggle: most of what Hugo wrote was pretty decent pop-feminist stuff, but it was only the vehicle for the very sexist drama of "Hugo and The Women."
( cut for length and personal stuff about working through abuse; manipulation and suicide triggers )
I had a troubling thought a while back, that I've been turning over and over and trying to figure out what to do about. I've always said that the thing that I like best about Luke Skywalker as a character is the way he wins by practicing nonviolence and nonjudgmental love: he won't kill Vader because he loves him, no matter what, and in the face of that childlike unconditional trust Vader can't hold on to hate or bitterness and the dark side of the Force loses its hold on him, allowing him to die as Anakin, the father to a good son. I always sort of thought of it as being like Gandhian satyagraha, truth-force, confronting the enemy with their own violence and cruelty by accepting it without fighting back and giving violence the pretext to continue; it was a way for me to bring Star Wars, which as Joanna Russ points out has some nasty business what with the One Girl in All The World and the Honky Savior stuff and the thing where the end of ANH is modeled after Nazi propaganda, back in to line with my own personal ethics.
But, the thing is, I'm pretty much having to rethink a lot of my ideas about passive resistance, because truth-force didn't save me from my Ex. Like Hugo, he could take talk of truth and make it immaterial to the real power struggle: most of what Hugo wrote was pretty decent pop-feminist stuff, but it was only the vehicle for the very sexist drama of "Hugo and The Women."
( cut for length and personal stuff about working through abuse; manipulation and suicide triggers )