Enough freedom for everyone

[First published 2024]

I've been seeing a few comments on Fetlife recently where someone posts a picture or writing that shows vulnerability or courage, and gets a lot of lovely supportive comments about it; and then someone posts something demeaning in an attempt to negate that positive vibe. The classic "tearing others down to make yourself feel big" thing.

I've been digging into the complexity of that, and the following series of propositions is where I've landed. Obviously they are generalisations but hopefully they capture something real all the same.

I found this exercise useful because I don't want to get reactive when someone is hateful toward me; but to stay in that calm space, I need a compelling, humanising story about what is going on for them that enables me to feel empathy for them. This is my version of that. I share it in case it's useful for people with similar goals to mine. If you don't share these goals, that's fine, zero judgement!

Lots of people have been raised in environments where they lack body-positive (more often women) or emotionality-positive (more often men) role models.
They have wanted to feel good about themselves (as we all do), and have done that by trying to conform to the stereotypes held up by their society as desirable.
Stereotypically this means women who are slender, insecure about their looks, desirous of male approval, publicly chaste, and privately some complex mix of innocent yet slutty; and men who are self-reliant, physically strong, willing to fight, horny, and for whom the only acceptable emotions to display are patriotic love and anger.

(I could write a whole essay about the historic cultural origins of these stereotypes and the capitalist, patriarchal and war machines that now perpetuate them, but I won't, because my bestie is waiting for me to drive us to Wanaka to hit the opshops. I will note however that the stereotypes are harmful to all genders - maybe not equally, but no one grows up undamaged if these are their only role models.)

When bad things happen to these people that their gender stereotypes tell them should be their due, and par for course - as when a woman is made to feel her body is not acceptable (through criticism or abuse, for example), or a man is made to feel he is not strong enough (through being physically or sexually assaulted and/or, shock horror, having emotions of fear or grief) - and the person feels hurt, they experience that hurt as a character flaw. That is, they feel ashamed of feeling hurt, and afraid of others seeing their shame. Far from deserving comfort and reassurance from others, it feels to them like a personal failure that they are even hurt by the experience.

Then these same people see us on Fet saying things like, "This bad thing happened to me and I feel vulnerable about it. I want to share the story with you as part of my emotional processing and healing." Or doing things like posting pictures of ourselves that say, explicitly or implicitly, "I am not ashamed of my body. I love it, I feel good in it, and others' opinions can't change that." And then they see loads of lovely people supporting us and cheering us on and offering kindness and encouragement! All that positivity and love directed toward us! Lovely, right?

Well, no, not for them. My thesis is that when they see that, they feel a complex and intense mix of envy, resentment, jealousy and misplaced anger. I think they think we're cheating and it makes them mad, and sad. We are not playing by the rules, which state that women are not allowed to feel proud of their bodies, to disregard male judgements of them or to be publicly unashamedly sexual, and men are not allowed to feel (let alone show) sadness or vulnerability.

Crucially, they feel that these options are not available to them and it feels deeply unfair that they're available to us.

And they're right! It is unfair. It is unfair that some people grow up without good opportunities to defeat the forces that keep them trapped in traditional toxic gender paradigms. It is unfair to them, and it is unfair to us, because as a result they can sometimes act like TOTAL CUNTS.

They're wrong that their predicament is our fault, though. They feel like we're taking something valuable from them, that we're attacking them - but of course we're not. There's more than enough love and freedom to go around. Everyone can have as much as they need, if they have the skills to ask for it, the self-awareness that they need it, and the nurturing that makes all this possible. But many just don't.

I see these tearers-down as being like people trapped in cages who are directing all their anger at the people who've escaped and whom they see enjoying freedom, rather than directing it at their own guards (who more often than not are mainly in their heads). It's illogical and unhelpful. Freedom isn't a finite resource. It's not like, if we have it, then they can't. But their reaction is nevertheless not, I think, unnatural or hard to understand.

And it does make me feel empathy for them. I can't feel angry at someone who is trapped in a cage I've escaped from, even if they're throwing shit at me. Even if they're being really toxic and awful. At the end of the day, I am still the lucky one. I have all of you.