The Goddess's Contempt

One of the cultural tropes that inspires the most outrage inside me is the idea of the Woman as Goddess. It outrages me for two main reasons: 1) It elevates the woman to a superhuman, magical, do-no-wrong status, and 2) It strips "mortal" men and women of their rights to have human emotions and attitudes that (subjectively) negatively impact the goddess.

"I'm arbitrary and whimsical, but it's ok because #entitled#divinerightofbitchess"

The goddess's attitude is: He who does not worship Me is against Me. Everything in the universe is subservient to her magical inner world. Her opinion of others defines their objective worth, and her good opinion is a magnanimous gift that people should be grateful to obtain and desperate to keep. People who do not accord her whims the divine respect they demand find themselves the object of contempt—and the goddess is keen to make her contempt publicly and conspicuously known.

Where do I even start?

Why do I hate the idea of womanhood as something magical and idolized?

Because it is a practice of contempt, of inequality. It's a poisoned attitude, no matter how well-intentioned. It reflects the hierarchical attitude of everything-on-a-spectrum that I've written about before, and the ultimate arrogance of placing oneself at the top of that hierarchy.

"golden rulez r 4 other ppl"

This contemptuous attitude is the kind of garbage that infests online spaces. It's often met with reactions like "OMG SO TRUE," and gets interpreted as some profound epiphany. Bad enough that it exists in the first place, but the way that it's upheld as some pillar of magical truth is despicable and damaging.

It's also a hypocritical attitude, a practice of double-standards. The entitled woman can "cut people off without hesitation, no explanation, and no warning." People in her world are required to be perfect, and if they show any imperfection they have lost her good opinion irrevocably. But if she were to be in the wrong, you can be sure that she would expect to be accepted flaws and all; she would demand another chance again and again, and "anything less [would be] bullshit".

(but not anybody else's worth)

It is the most beautiful thing in the world to realize and embrace that you are human, and to live in a world connected by all kinds of people, treating one another with the equality that is fundamental to the very idea of being human. Why would you want to transcend that, and thereby break it? What is it about humanity that makes you think you're above it? What is it about yourself that makes you think your emotions and needs are more precious and valuable than those of others? What makes you deserve second chances while others don't even deserve explanation? When did the word "bitchess" become a word to own and flaunt as though it were a royal title? When did memes become the authority on acceptable social conduct, and why do we attribute so much meaning to them when they're often the thoughtless ramblings of a self-centered mind?

It's a sociopathic attitude. Setting yourself above others is an act of violence and ugliness, and extreme mistreatment of the people you emotionally affect through your contempt.

I've mentioned the ill-fated Roman triumvirate before, but it's relevant again. The triumvirate consisted of three men: one who could tolerate being paralleled, but not surpassed; one who could only tolerate being supreme and therefore unparalleled; and a third who was content to be average. The triumvirate crumbled because of the first two members' incompatible views; if it were a logical puzzle, it would have no solution.

That's what the goddess/bitchess attitude is: illogical. Incompatible in a society worth living in. Monopolizing all value, worth, and validity. Contemptuous, toxic, and emotionally abusive.

Privilege

The following story recently cropped up on my Facebook feed (see the full comic):

The Pencilsword: On a plate

I do appreciate the point that the comic makes, but there are two problems that I think are important (enough to compel me to blog about it).

Firstly, it's a work of art with an agenda to express and inspire a particular emotion/reaction. It has a clear protagonist, and focuses on detailing her life experience to the exclusion of the other life experiences in the story.  This isn't to say that the message is unimportant—but it's not the whole story. The 'antagonist' is, quite frankly, monstrous; his own humanity and feelings have been removed from him. The comic is highlighting a particular inequality between the two characters, but relies on equivocation/elision to do so. The situation it depicts does not objectively exist in the real world; there is no such thing as an antagonist, and there is no such thing as an uncomplicated or single-faceted human. Manufacturing one certainly strengthens the artist's argument, but it also strengthens a culture of comparison and disrespect for the Other. And, it's the kind of artificial tug-at-your-empathy story that feels morally right, and as such becomes cultural currency that informs how we feel it's appropriate to treat others.

Secondly, the comic's side-by-side comparative depiction goes against every anti-inequality fiber inside me, and upsets me on a fundamental level. The insinuation is that people's feelings matter in comparison to other people's feelings (or are irrelevant/unimportant by the same token). That some people's lives, troubles, triumphs, experiences, paths, and feelings are more precious and worthy than those of others. Why can't they matter in their own right, on their own merit? Why create antagonism and resentment? And why, for god's sake, are the antagonist's feelings and hard work illegitimate? (And don't make the mistake of believing the one-dimensional portrayal of his life as perfect and free of hardship.) It's nothing short of a fallacy.

Privilege is an ugly thing when it comes into focus. Nobody likes a privileged person if they flaunt that privilege gracelessly. But how often do we even realize how visible our privileges are to others?

White privilege. Thin privilege. Pretty privilege. Rich privilege. Gender privilege. Maternal privilege. Age privilege. Social privilege. Popular privilege. Academic privilege. Athletic privilege. Opportunity privilege. Language privilege. Emotional privilege. Peace privilege. Religious privilege. Connection privilege. Relationship privilege. Health privilege. Geographic privilege. Occupation privilege. Privileges we don't even think of as privileges unless we don't have them.

Nobody has a monopoly on privilege, or on hardship, or on virtue. There's not some limited reservoir of compassion, where it's necessary to divert the flow of compassion away from one person in order to receive a portion for yourself.  Compassion can only come by recognizing how very similar we are to each other, and how every struggle is real in its own right. Carving out victims and antagonists is destructive rather than productive.

Holding a person's privileges against them is akin to the thin-bashing that undermined Dove's Real Beauty movement, which manufactured its own curvy-love legitimacy by belittling skinny women as unattractive. Isn't this the nature of bullying? To gain your own sense of worth through diminishing someone else's? To measure something via comparison and establishing a hierarchy or spectrum?

The truth is, we all have some kind of privilege, and privilege by its very nature sits in our blind spot when we possess it. It's easy to see other people's privileges, and difficult to recognize our own, or its impact on our lives. We resent people who have certain things—things we want—"handed to them on a silver platter." But we don't acknowledge the things we ourselves have had handed to us, and these can take many forms (see my examples of privileges above, which excludes the ones I'm blind to myself). None of us is an island, and we are all who we are through the actions and help of other people: family, friends, strangers, predecessors, ancestors, passersby.

We all exist in our own bubbles of world-view and experience that begin to grow from the moment we're born. A lot goes into the bubble, and it informs the way we relate to the world outside for the rest of our lives. It's hard to see outside the bubble, and harder to see that other people have bubbles of their own—but they're there nonetheless. Like everyone else, I'm woefully inadequate in this respect. But human experience is one of few true passions in my life, and reading the world as if it were a textual artifact is the most important thing I gained from my brief years in academia.

What's the solution? You can change your own reactions, but you can't really change other people. It's demoralizing to cling to ideas of emotional equality when the world loves to pick sides. Ask yourself: what are my privileges? Those are the areas where you should be particularly compassionate towards others. Toward the people you resent: realize that they are human at the core, that they are just like you, that they have fears and troubles and dreams and triumphs, and that those are just as beautiful and mysterious as your own. Don't measure yourself against others; and don't measure others against yourself. Yes, recognize privilege and talk about how it affects others; but don't deny the humanity inside every person.