Yesterday I posted the first in my series for paid supporters, called “Open Manuscript Notes.” Those will be frequent discussion threads about thoughts I’m having while writing my upcoming manuscript on the woke (tentatively titled The Trace, though that’s just a working title).
These won’t be the only chances to discuss some of these ideas, however, as I’ll continue to do my monthly “open thread” posts, including this one.
I want to throw out a question for you all in this one, something that keeps coming up in many discussions about this here and elsewhere.
You’ve probably noticed there’s a tendency among those who are deeply invested in social justice, Antifa, or general woke ideology to say “that’s not really happening” whenever abuses or extremes are brought to their attention. One example that comes immediately to mind is the belief that anorexics have “thin privilege,” an idea I saw many people deny (“no one actually thinks that”) and then later come to actually support and defend on an essay I wrote. Another example is the pressuring of gay men and lesbian women to expand their “dating pool” or change their desire to include trans people. Often times people deny this ever happens, and then in the face of evidence then defend the behavior. Yet another example relates to “interracial” marriage or adoption. When it is brought to some people’s attention that some anti-racist activists are arguing all interracial marriages and adoptions involving white people are abusive and oppressive, usually the response is denial. But then soon after a social media post by an anti-racist activist (however that is defined) making that very claim will go viral, leading to the same people who denied such a thing was being said to suddenly defend it as if it was the most obvious conclusion in the world.
Of course, much of this is internet-related, and this cannot be dismissed as a factor. Usually these ideas themselves originate on the internet, as for example “animatesexuality” (previously animesexuality or mangasexuality), the sexual identity of people who are only sexually attracted to anime characters.
That’s their flag, by the way. And yes it really exists. You can purchase one on Amazon. And I had a roommate who identified this way, so as much as I would like to pretend it’s not really a thing, I cannot.
There’s also ideas like “retroactively withdrawn consent” that originated not in academia but on the internet, yet nevertheless became prominent in woke discourse. As explained by one of the most popular iterations of it, from a short essay called “Yes, You Can Take it Back:”
In such a model, if Bob and Andy have sex, and Andy says, “Yes,” “Sure,” “Okay, fine, whatever,” or even, “Ooh baby, do it to me!” but still wakes up the next morning feeling like he was raped, that means Andy was raped.
And yes this is also a thing. I was in a very disorienting conversation with a person who explained to me how they were struggling with the “trauma” of realising that their six-month relationship with someone, which had at the time been in their words fully consensual, was in retrospect rape because they no longer would consent to sex with their ex-partner. Their ex-partner, incidentally, had also come to the same conclusion, so they both agreed they’d been raping each other the entire relationship.
To speak of such things can feel really maddening and a little crazy, but to understand the problems with woke ideology we have to look at such things. And as absurd as this stuff can get, becoming reactive and outraged in the way a right-wing news commentator might is deeply unhelpful as well.1
Of course, there’s no canon here. No Council of Nicaea has ever yet met to decide what ideas should be included in woke ideology and which ones are heretical. Also, as I alluded to in the Open Manuscript Notes post, there will always probably be a large gap between the academic theories around gender, race, consent, and justice and the populist enactment of these theories. Again like religion, it’s difficult to define what the “true” iteration really is. Is it the stated beliefs and teachings of the priests, clerics, or professors? Or the actually-lived experience of those who believe in them?
That’s what I’d love to talk about in this post. Where do these lines get drawn, or should they even be drawn? Is the original iteration of ideas like intersectionality and identity politics to be privileged over the way those ideas are being enacted? Should we even try to separate out the mass politics of woke ideology from the theories behind it?
And also, what’s something you’ve encountered lately that you’re trying not to scream about?
That being said, there are maybe occasional times screaming is probably justified, as for example at this illustrated comic explaining how everyone is being too mean to narcissists.
Coincidentally, over this last week I've been engaged in a dialog with a good friend of mine about this topic, or a similar enough one--That Which Makes You Want To Scream. I think I will contribute my opening salvo in that conversation, although it is long, and feels like it might only be partially related to the conversation you are looking to have.
Warning: The following contains many ugly, unbecoming thoughts and feelings. I am not proud of the map it draws of my own mind and mental state. It focuses on anger, and mostly the anger I feel against a particular group of self-identified people; but my intention in writing it isn't so much to break down and examine the self-identity in question, but to break down and examine my anger, the reasons for it, and effect it is having on me and my politics and spirituality. Within this complicated nest of issues, I want to know: How much outrage is actually justified in situations like this? How far am I willing to go, to change my own thinking and values, just to be able to nurse a satisfying contempt? And can a spiritual and political evolution driven by contempt ever actually bring you to a more noble place than where you started?
--
I’ve never said this where anyone could hear me before: I have a problem with how queer the left has gotten.
High-school-age-feminist me would be horrified to read such a thing written in my own hand. I was every kind of ally back in the day—although in my high school years, the only group really visible enough for a middle-class suburban teenager to ally with was gays and lesbians. Then, into my college years, as gay acceptance became pretty unquestionably mainstream, activist efforts shifted toward trans rights. I was still on board: How tragic, the excruciating mental illness afflicted upon a small, disproportionately oppressed segment of the population! Hated just for being different, based on arbitrary standards for what is right-and-wrong per the traditional roles of men and women! And no, admittedly, the stubbly 40-year-old wearing a skirt in the student center does not in any sense register to me as a woman, whatever “woman” even means—but I’m not threatened by that presentation. I just see a sad, confused person who deserves at very least the polite courtesy of being called “she” if that would make her happy.
Then sometime around 2016, trans activism expanded in the public eye to include non-binary people, and my heart and brain came to a screeching halt.
Excuse you? ”Non-binary?” Like you think you’re too good, too special and unique, to just be a man or a woman?
Fuck you. Absolutely fuck you. You fucking snowflake.
My negative reaction to the very concept is visceral, of-the-body. I can feel it in my pulse, a bit in my arms, definitely in my stomach: churning distaste, frustration, anger. The idea of “non-binary” as something which anyone could desire to be, which any third party could take seriously as a chosen identity, makes me feel trickling rage. I can’t even talk about this without it coming through in my voice; it goes so far as to have become personal for me—I assume that anyone who identifies as non-binary is certainly a mindless trend-follower, terminally-online, and overall insipid. It goes so far that I automatically think less of creators for so much as depicting non-binary-identified characters in their works, for bowing to this metastatic cultural creep, to the abyssal notion that a person can choose to be a genderless *nothing* if they just announce it to their friends, because modernity has taken out all the safeties that allow grown-ups to shut down the puerile whims of the anxiety-riddled shut-ins who learned to read from YouTube closed captioning.
It’s nasty. Oh my God, this thing inside me is poisonous. I recognize the rage: it’s the same anger I felt when I was a child, maybe 9 or 10 years old, dealing with my younger siblings who refused to just *sit down and shut up already.* It’s the rage that made me hit them, because I didn’t like how disordered they were in comparison to me, because they were kicking up a fuss when we could otherwise have been enjoying pleasant silence at our restaurant table. I had no patience for them and no temperance to keep myself from lashing out in retaliative anger. I’d forgotten that I used to be this way. I thought I’d grown out of it.
And it feels really fucking good. That’s the most dangerous part—I enjoy the hate, as much as it terrifies me. It feels good to have a someone, a group, an identity, to look down on, who reassures me that, sure, I might be an insufficient, broken woman, who doesn’t like babies or astrology or Instagram and can’t stand to wear a dress without lacquering her ego in seven layers of disassociation and would absolutely take the opportunity to turn into a man if I had three wishes from a genie... But at least I’m not so neurotic as to think any of that makes me not-a-woman. I’m not such a dysfunctional freakshow as to start identifying with the things that are wrong with me. I won’t lionize my own weaknesses.
And that makes me *better* than all of them.
(cont'd)
First, my I'm-not-screaming-about-it evidence, which I hope to make germane to your posting. I don't want to make a mess, eh...
Someone on my FBk feed just posted a link to an article in American Theater magazine about talkbacks, which are a ritual in the U.S.A. As a playwright, I have done talkbacks.
Here is the assessment by the oh-so-whiny writer:
"They assume polite speakers and polite listeners. And we have to acknowledge that that structure—a binary opposition of talking and listening—is one that is inherently Western, colonialist, and patriarchal."
Really? Tell that to Japanese audiences or Arabic audiences... Tell that to playwrights, who tend to write in, errrrr, dialogue.
Note, though, the use of several degraded words: binary. opposition. Western. colonialist. patriarchal.
And we're talking about talkbacks, which are a chance for an artist to interact with an audience. But the idea that talking and listening to the other person and then talking in response is somehow binary and colonialist is simply daft.
This person, who works for a theater in NYC, really should not be in the arts. I'm sure, though, that she'll have a glorious career as an arts administrator.
I would like to see the word "binary" retired. It came out of computer programming and it can stay there. A human being isn't code or a light switch.
The questions: Why would someone writing for people in the theater think that this is helpful? Why would she use word salad as a signal of a certain elevated consciousness? No character written for the stage would talk like that. Why is high dudgeon considered an appropriate moral stance? Why is the culture of being offended taking up so much of our time?
The great value of the theater is that it is about sentimental education--we learn to have emotions. It is about the body--a place where we can watch others' physicality--and in some plays, physical suffering. Is that some of the problem with the woke--that cultivation of emotion and learning the fragility and wonders of the body are just too fraught for them?