you're young until you're not

Day 1: Sirens, merfolk, pirates

Inspired by this post, from the insightful @darthnostra.

Following their victory at the Battle of Endor, the New Republic places the planet Arkanis under siege. They have their reasons, of course; home to Commandant Brendol Hux's officer academy, whose reputation for churning out model servants of the Empire is well-established, and "lack[ing] the 'social unrest' that plague[s] other Imperial worlds" (Wookiepedia), Arkanis appears to be populated almost exclusively by Imperial loyalists—or, at the very least, by citizens unwilling to challenge the regime. An assault on the planet’s surface, therefore, can be considered an assault on the Empire itself; to borrow the words of the New Republic’s Colonel Ward: “They chose a side, and it wasn’t ours.”

This is a convenient oversimplification.

because, let’s talk for real, the problem isn’t just direct violence — it’s the dehumanization of children, which feeds prejudice against childhood, childism, and adultism. this logic IS NOT neutral, and it’s one of the most sophisticated ways prejudice gets perpetuated.

“not liking/hating children” reinforces the idea that they’re annoying, dramatic, inconvenient... less human — and therefore easier to discard, silence, or sacrifice for adult comfort.

elisabeth young-bruehl defines childism as prejudice against children as a social group, comparable to racism, sexism, and homophobia. it functions like any other -ism: an ideology that legitimizes treating a group as property, as inferior, or as available for exploitation. she also shows that childism isn’t limited to extreme cases of violence — it shows up in a whole range of practices that aren’t in children’s best interest: neglect, underfunding of schools, the abusive use of medication on children…

saying “i don’t like/i hate children” isn’t an innocent preference or just a phrase — it’s literally the biased expression of a worldview that dehumanizes and diminishes this group. that’s exactly what childism is.

young-bruehl emphasizes that adults who practice childism “all rely upon a societal prejudice against children to justify themselves and legitimate their behavior.” [p.1] a lot of people may not consciously “hate” children or raise a hand to hit them — but the prejudice allows them to tolerate structures that harm children on a massive scale (child poverty, incarceration, violence, abuse, exploitation, neglect, etc.).

rebecca adami uses the concept of childism to analyze adult resistance to actually implementing children’s rights: prejudice against children gets translated into laws, policies, and practices that deny basic freedoms and normalize their subordination. just like a racist can say “i don’t want to see black people getting hurt” while supporting policies that harm them — an adult who “hates children” is, in practice, feeding the cultural climate that makes violence against children thinkable, justifiable, or dismissed.

adami also shows that childism helps us understand how children are exposed to “prejudices, negative attitudes and discriminatory structures in society” — and how this connects to the weak implementation of the un convention on the rights of the child.

the old idea that “children are just mini adults” has been challenged by childhood sociology, and children are now recognized as rights-bearing subjects who deserve to be heard and respected in their choices.

claiming it’s “fine to dislike and/or hate children” means refusing them that status — putting them back in the position of nuisance, of “noisy things,” of objects. which is exactly what critical theory identifies as the core of adultism and childism.

madeline lane-mckinley argues we live in a world that is “deeply against children,” where they’re treated as extensions of the family, the state, or capital — not as autonomous people. she also talks about “adult supremacy” and proposes a politics of solidarity with children, understanding them as comrades in the fight for a better future.

lane-mckinley also points out that the figure of the child has historically been weaponized in service of white supremacy, empire, and political projects that decide which children deserve protection — and which ones can be abandoned to poverty, war, forced migration.

in other words, discourses of hatred and contempt for children participate in the symbolic economy that makes some children’s lives more exposed to violence.

and finally — in ethical and political terms, there is no way to separate “hating” (or “disliking”) children from passive participation in structures that authorize harm against them.

the only position that’s coherent with children’s rights and with critiques of childism is to let go of that hatred and commit to recognition, listening, and active solidarity.

So. The thing is. In real life, it isn't uncommon for people who've experienced abuse by men to develop an aversion to men.

But the other thing is...people in real life are also existing in a world where violence and abuse are frequently (a) gendered, or at least (b) socially framed as gendered. In a society that is systemically patriarchal and misogynistic, people are taught basically since birth that men have a monopoly on physical strength, authority, violence, and the ability to inflict trauma. People are taught to view "violence" as something distinctly male. This is part of why abuse by women isn't taken as seriously; society doesn't treat women as fundamentally capable of being perpetrators of real, serious abuse or assault.

So, when a person who has been abused by a man develops a fear or distrust of men as a result, it's not just their individual trauma that influences that fear; it's the combination of (a) the fact that they personally experienced violence at the hands of a man, and (b) the fact that they are taught over and over and over again since day one that this is basically normal and inevitable and something any man might do.

(This isn't intended to discredit such trauma responses or deny any gendered violence statistics in real life, for the record; it's intended to illustrate that there is a strong socialization factor in why "I was abused by man/a man" so often translates in victims' minds to "therefore, I cannot trust men in general not to hurt me.")

The reason why I don't believe that Hux would develop a similar fear/distrust of men is because, as he was not raised in a society that treats violence as a Male Thing, he would have no reason to see his father's gender as a significant factor. In his culture, violence is something everybody is expected to be both a victim and a perpetrator of. The notion that "victimhood = feminine & perpetration = masculine" is simply not culturally present.

What is very much culturally present is the idea that violence is tied to hierarchy and rank. In the First Order, there is no societal expectation for women to endure mistreatment by men, but there is a societal expectation that citizens will endure mistreatment by their superiors. That authority gives people the right to treat their subordinates however they like, up to and including physical violence--and, while this one isn't touched on in canon as far as I know, likely sexual violence as well.

Abuse occurs (or rather, is commonly believed and expected to occur) not on a male-female axis, but on a superior-subordinate axis. We also know that most of the high-ranking officer ranks in the First Order are occupied by older officers, especially Civil War veterans who previously served the Empire.

What this means is that in terms of who Hux would have been conditioned to see as "potential abuser" material, it makes very little sense for him to associate his father's gender with that abuse; it makes a lot of sense for him to associate it with his father's age group, though. And with the idea of not being in charge. Any situation where Hux isn't the ranking officer in the room is, in his mind, a situation where somebody could feasibly hurt him, and those situations are likely (until he takes over the army) to involve older staff.

Barbie in a Mermaid Tale (2010) au

First encounter