not ready for this sort of thing
Aug. 12th, 2013 04:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseI 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."
I thought, if I endured my Ex's abuse patiently, without judgment, if I could only get him to understand how much he was hurting me, and how wrong he was to do so, if I could only educate him about the sociological and psychological structures that made me a safe and convenient outlet for his misplaced anger - eventually, he would see that he was doing something wrong, and he would change it. I made him masculinity studies reading lists. He wouldn't let himself kill me.
The only time I've acted toward suicide, he was egging me on - playing suicide chicken, daring me to put his pills in my mouth. He did make me spit them out again, but nothing else changed, and sometimes I wonder if I really could have ended up dead trying to prove to myself that he cared about me.
This Hugo thing, though - god, it's shifting all my paradigms. It's like, it's like, like getting the resolution that I know I'll never get from my Ex, that I've given up hoping for, that I won't go looking for because I'm afraid of getting pulled back in. He always had an excuse. I told him when he was being abusive and he always acted horrified but he still always had an excuse. But watching Hugo spill I can see all the parallels. I feel like, for the first time, I actually get it. What was wrong with my Ex. What made him do those things to me. What made my parents reject him as soon as they met him - I never understood it, I could never see what they found so offensive about him, I thought they were being snobs. Well, they can be snobs, really. And they were being weird about me and sex. But now I think they also must have seen his capacity for this sort of thing, the way that he was willing to dodge the truth in order to feel good, no matter what it did to other people. To me.
And, god, what Hugo says about the fantasy of men changing for the better. Oh god I know that fantasy. It's the Luke Skywalker fantasy, but with a whole bunch of sex and gender stuff thrown in for kicks. And then politicized. Did I get fucked over by my kinks? Maybe, but I don't like the way that "codependence" or whatever shares the blame for abuse out. Maybe - definitely - I was primed to take it. But it was still 100% his choice to engage and perpetuate that shit.
But all of a sudden I'm less sure about the representational ethics of the sacrificial lamb. I've always been attracted to lamb characters: Luke, Frodo, Buffy. Will Stanton. I tend to prefer characters driven by loss, sacrifice, and the weight of burdens to characters driven by desire for personal gain; the quest to give up the object has somehow always seemed a better story, to me, that the quest to obtain it. Not always, but often, I choose stories about self-abegnation. I have a big button there, but it's also a political thing, definitely, a naive utopian impulse. I was taught that greed was the worst sin, the root of all suffering; so generosity has to be the greatest virtue, and generosity means being patient and not judging. Which is all well and good, until being patient slides down into passive suicide. Which is, pretty much, what Luke Skywalker commits in the end.
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."
I thought, if I endured my Ex's abuse patiently, without judgment, if I could only get him to understand how much he was hurting me, and how wrong he was to do so, if I could only educate him about the sociological and psychological structures that made me a safe and convenient outlet for his misplaced anger - eventually, he would see that he was doing something wrong, and he would change it. I made him masculinity studies reading lists. He wouldn't let himself kill me.
The only time I've acted toward suicide, he was egging me on - playing suicide chicken, daring me to put his pills in my mouth. He did make me spit them out again, but nothing else changed, and sometimes I wonder if I really could have ended up dead trying to prove to myself that he cared about me.
This Hugo thing, though - god, it's shifting all my paradigms. It's like, it's like, like getting the resolution that I know I'll never get from my Ex, that I've given up hoping for, that I won't go looking for because I'm afraid of getting pulled back in. He always had an excuse. I told him when he was being abusive and he always acted horrified but he still always had an excuse. But watching Hugo spill I can see all the parallels. I feel like, for the first time, I actually get it. What was wrong with my Ex. What made him do those things to me. What made my parents reject him as soon as they met him - I never understood it, I could never see what they found so offensive about him, I thought they were being snobs. Well, they can be snobs, really. And they were being weird about me and sex. But now I think they also must have seen his capacity for this sort of thing, the way that he was willing to dodge the truth in order to feel good, no matter what it did to other people. To me.
And, god, what Hugo says about the fantasy of men changing for the better. Oh god I know that fantasy. It's the Luke Skywalker fantasy, but with a whole bunch of sex and gender stuff thrown in for kicks. And then politicized. Did I get fucked over by my kinks? Maybe, but I don't like the way that "codependence" or whatever shares the blame for abuse out. Maybe - definitely - I was primed to take it. But it was still 100% his choice to engage and perpetuate that shit.
But all of a sudden I'm less sure about the representational ethics of the sacrificial lamb. I've always been attracted to lamb characters: Luke, Frodo, Buffy. Will Stanton. I tend to prefer characters driven by loss, sacrifice, and the weight of burdens to characters driven by desire for personal gain; the quest to give up the object has somehow always seemed a better story, to me, that the quest to obtain it. Not always, but often, I choose stories about self-abegnation. I have a big button there, but it's also a political thing, definitely, a naive utopian impulse. I was taught that greed was the worst sin, the root of all suffering; so generosity has to be the greatest virtue, and generosity means being patient and not judging. Which is all well and good, until being patient slides down into passive suicide. Which is, pretty much, what Luke Skywalker commits in the end.