i am so tired of radical vulnerability discourse that locates empowerment in divulging personal pain and i really worry about the implications of a young creative culture where your influence and your popularity and your follower count is implicitly tied to your willingness to talk about your personal trauma, your willingness to let thousands and thousands of strangers know what happened to you, your willingness to make your most private pain public.
like i really worry that our culture is commodifying trauma? a band i really like, led by a young woman about my age, they released a song in early 2015 that was quite clearly about sexual assault. and it was a great song, and it earned a very deserved warm reception, but interviewers would persistently ask the lead singer if it was “a personal account,” and she would always say that it was an observation on rape culture and leave it at that. and then about a year later she released a personal essay saying that, yes, it was about her own experience of sexual assault, and then there was another wave of secondary clickbait-y thinkpieces congratulating her for being so brave and so open.
so we have a great song addressing sexual assault, which can more than stand on its own as a piece of art. and we have a young woman who, after a year of getting the same question from reporters, says, “i was raped; the song is about me.” and then we have another wave of reporters coming in to write identical stories repeating her words, calling her brave, and collecting ad revenue.
and that’s what i mean: for every act of personal disclosure of trauma, there is this weird media apparatus that feeds on publicizing that trauma and collecting fat stacks of ad money. publications are taking what might be an empowering process for some people and they’re incentivizing and monetizing public trauma disclosure. it’s deeply fucked up.
so like. you don’t owe the world the story of your trauma. you don’t need to make your grieving and healing a public process. you are not less courageous or less creative or less empowered because you choose to go through something privately. and you should be very wary of publications that traffic in underpaying marginalized young people to describe their trauma in detail. imo.
Bless this fucking post.
OP, have you read this article by Sarah Ditum? Relevant excerpt:
So many confessionalist pieces of writing tell stories about women having their limits overridden. Rape and coercion. Abuse and assault. Being talked over and ignored. But the logic of the perpetual confession journalism machine is the same: everything about a woman should be available to use, nothing a woman has to say is valid without a personal claim to authority, repackage their guts as shiny sausages and call it an “identity piece”.
This is not only happening in journalism etc. It speaks right to what I said in this post recently: a lot of people on tumblr feel entitled to know other people’s private stories, to dismiss them and not take them seriously if they don’t divulge their private experiences with sex(uality), mental health, identity etc. And it’s not feminist, it’s not progressive, it’s not okay, period. It is possible for people to make valid contributions to a subject by merit of their argument alone, without divulging whether or not they are in any way personally affected. To insist that their contribution is without value - or worse, that it’s hurtful -because they lack the personal experience (which is assumed simply since they don’t mention it on their about page or blog about it) is a form of coercion and abuse. “If you want to be able to have any discussion about this, you will have to divulge to us your most private/painful issues - otherwise what you say is worthless or even evil.” At best people recognise this abusive technique and stop engaging - but often enough (even when they do recognise it) they become distraught and share things they then wish they hadn’t. And at worst this knowledge is then used against them because they happen to disagree with the people they’re discussing with. It’s terrible, because it makes people feel dismissed, silenced, invisible, and unsafe. It makes people feel that their experience doesn’t matter, that working through it for themselves is not okay, not an option, that all their thoughts and feelings on the issue only matter if they put their story out for the world to see. It’s not helping people in any way; on the contrary, it’s destructive. And this is coming, ironically, from people who think of themselves as paragons of social justice, of fighting abuse, of feminism, when in truth they keep silencing and discouraging people who’re uncomfortable with everyone knowing about their trauma, illness, identity issues etc. This is a destructive culture where only “out and proud” people count, and those who are not get negativity from BOTH sides: people who don’t know the experience and don’t understand - and people who do know the experience and make them feel they are doing it wrong by not shouting it from the rooftops. Don’t do this. Don’t pressure people into discussing things they’re not ready for discussing in public. You’re not entitled to anybody’s story.
