beginning our dissent

In its original context, famed bumper sticker “well-behaved women seldom make history” wasn’t actually an exaltation of revolutionary women. It was historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s way of recognizing the voiceless majority: the women who keep the world running while the rest of us burn it down.

Right now I’m seeing many calls to action in the United States, and make no mistake: I’m grateful for them. It’s high time we instated collective action on this kind of scale. I think everyone can do at least a little. But in the spirit of Ms. Ulrich (who is one of my favorite historians), I think there’s a missing piece we ought to remember.

The wheels of progress have always been greased by invisible labor. Behind every great man there’s a a great woman, they say - more like an entire host of them. For every leader, every hero, every revolutionary who muscles world leaders to the table, there’s someone who makes dinner. There’s someone who lends an ear and a comforting shoulder when the odds seem too high. Someone who pays the bills, watches the children, makes the appointments you’re too burned out to make. For every person changing the world, there’s at least one more quietly running it. 

It’s only within that infrastructure that we’re able to meaningfully organize at all. Even the best and brightest break down without food and sleep. Yet it’s so easy to ignore it precisely because it’s so constant. I take for granted the bus service that delivers me to and fro every day - the bus service that enabled me to attend last night’s protest. I take for granted the warm cafe my friends holed up in to decompress afterward. We’re battling uphill these days, but we forget just how much steeper the hill could be.

fuck being “well behaved”

fuck praising women who conform to patriarchy

fuck this shit! FUCK THIS SHIT

well behaved women don’t make history, women should misbehave, women should rebel, women should stop being feminine and compliant and obedient towards men.

fuck the idea of praising this bullshit.

In its original context, famed bumper sticker “well-behaved women seldom make history” wasn’t actually an exaltation of revolutionary women. It was historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s way of recognizing the voiceless majority: the women who keep the world running while the rest of us burn it down.

Right now I’m seeing many calls to action in the United States, and make no mistake: I’m grateful for them. It’s high time we instated collective action on this kind of scale. I think everyone can do at least a little. But in the spirit of Ms. Ulrich (who is one of my favorite historians), I think there’s a missing piece we ought to remember.

The wheels of progress have always been greased by invisible labor. Behind every great man there’s a a great woman, they say - more like an entire host of them. For every leader, every hero, every revolutionary who muscles world leaders to the table, there’s someone who makes dinner. There’s someone who lends an ear and a comforting shoulder when the odds seem too high. Someone who pays the bills, watches the children, makes the appointments you’re too burned out to make. For every person changing the world, there’s at least one more quietly running it. 

It’s only within that infrastructure that we’re able to meaningfully organize at all. Even the best and brightest break down without food and sleep. Yet it’s so easy to ignore it precisely because it’s so constant. I take for granted the bus service that delivers me to and fro every day - the bus service that enabled me to attend last night’s protest. I take for granted the warm cafe my friends holed up in to decompress afterward. We’re battling uphill these days, but we forget just how much steeper the hill could be.

fuck being “well behaved”

fuck praising women who conform to patriarchy

fuck this shit! FUCK THIS SHIT

well behaved women don’t make history, women should misbehave, women should rebel, women should stop being feminine and compliant and obedient towards men.

fuck the idea of praising this bullshit.

In its original context, famed bumper sticker “well-behaved women seldom make history” wasn’t actually an exaltation of revolutionary women. It was historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s way of recognizing the voiceless majority: the women who keep the world running while the rest of us burn it down.

Right now I’m seeing many calls to action in the United States, and make no mistake: I’m grateful for them. It’s high time we instated collective action on this kind of scale. I think everyone can do at least a little. But in the spirit of Ms. Ulrich (who is one of my favorite historians), I think there’s a missing piece we ought to remember.

The wheels of progress have always been greased by invisible labor. Behind every great man there’s a a great woman, they say - more like an entire host of them. For every leader, every hero, every revolutionary who muscles world leaders to the table, there’s someone who makes dinner. There’s someone who lends an ear and a comforting shoulder when the odds seem too high. Someone who pays the bills, watches the children, makes the appointments you’re too burned out to make. For every person changing the world, there’s at least one more quietly running it. 

It’s only within that infrastructure that we’re able to meaningfully organize at all. Even the best and brightest break down without food and sleep. Yet it’s so easy to ignore it precisely because it’s so constant. I take for granted the bus service that delivers me to and fro every day - the bus service that enabled me to attend last night’s protest. I take for granted the warm cafe my friends holed up in to decompress afterward. We’re battling uphill these days, but we forget just how much steeper the hill could be.

fuck being “well behaved”

fuck praising women who conform to patriarchy

fuck this shit! FUCK THIS SHIT

well behaved women don’t make history, women should misbehave, women should rebel, women should stop being feminine and compliant and obedient towards men.

fuck the idea of praising this bullshit.

Ulrich’s specialty as a historian is colonial women in early New England, so let’s go with that. Say you have a woman in rural Massachusetts who was legally her husband’s subordinate. She lived and died a housewife and did nothing of historical note. Suppose, though, that she was also a wonderful cook, a capable farmer, a kindly neighbor, and an inspiration to her children and grandchildren. Suppose she lived to a ripe old age, and her funeral was packed with people who loved and respected her. Suppose she didn't have a career in the modern sense, but she worked harder than most anyone in 2017 can imagine to keep herself and her family alive. Suppose her descendants still speak fondly of Great-Granny Mildred. Maybe they even use her recipes.

Is this woman’s life meaningless? Is she not worth praising because she didn’t dismantle patriarchy all by herself? Is she insufficiently respectable because her areas of expertise happened to be “women’s work”? Because regarding the latter - running a home and raising a family already get precious little respect. They’re unpaid and undervalued, and they undergird the whole damn world. It is not at all feminist, or even remotely kind, to dismiss the sheer amount of effort that takes because the women doing it aren’t interesting enough.

I am currently working on an article for [women’s website*] about fashion as resistance. I’m leading with the “resistance hats” worn by women in Nazi-occupied France (check out fashion historian April Calahan’s podcast on that here), and I would like to add a modern angle as well. I’m looking for women who employ fashion as visible resistance to oppressive governments, especially…

religious women, hijabis in particular

ethnic minorities

women with something tangible to lose from resistance, i.e. being fired or disowned

Those are just a few of many perspectives, though, and I’m sure I’m missing some. If you have anything at all to say on this topic, please message me! I’m hoping to get all interview subjects lined up by the end of this week, Feb. 4th. Unfortunately, I cannot pay you, but I will try my hardest to do your study justice.

Thank you!

(That’s not to say that your project isn’t useful or interesting. It’s worth waiting to see what you’re going to do before judging it.)

Even when people go out of their comfort zone to do something like protest in the streets, the main thing they get out of it is the sense of satisfaction that they’re doing something, anything. I did it and that’s how I felt! Engaging in an action that makes you feel less powerless while not actually wielding power seems to me to be … circular.

Maybe it’s not my place to say that some hijabi fashion show will never move the needle with the red state voter who buys bulk socks at Costco. Maybe, as we don’t have a vote of no confidence mechanism and impeachment only gives us a different face to the same horrible policies, morale-boosting is all we have.

French women … for almost six years remained as fashion-conscious as they could, in spite of shortages of fabrics and materials, especially leather, as a way of retaining pride in their own identity and of refusing to be humiliated by their conquerors.

Emphasis mine. My focus isn’t really on actively changing policy through aesthetics (I’m skeptical of many such efforts as well) but on using them to maintain a sense of dignity. Existing unapologetically in a society bent on your destruction may not be legislative change, but it’s a victory all its own. It’s announcing that you will celebrate your culture no matter the cost.

Yet I see over and over again a lot of slacktivism, virtue-signaling and just plain business as usual valorized as actually useful in achieving a political goal. Before the election, it was the “[thing I do anyway] is a radical act” nonsense that people patted themselves on the back for. It was self-serving then and it’s self-serving now.

Maybe I’m just projecting because, post-march, I’m paralyzed by indecision regarding what to do next. It felt good to be surrounded by like-minded people, but it also felt like all the signs were aimed at me, a person who nobody there needs to persuade. Seventy flavors of vagina pun do not a persuasive movement make.

My representatives are true-blue from Community Board through both Senators. I see how scheduled, permitted protest is mostly just self-validating. I did the same in 2003 against the Iraq War and that was utterly pointless and probably validated negative opinions of the anti-war set. Disruptive actions just drive people on the margins into the arms of politicians who claim to be able to restore order and normalcy. I’d reach out to Trump voters, but I don’t know any of them outside of a few work contacts I talk to about once every other month. I have no money to donate.

And I think that’s really important, because while I do often see the sort of self-aggrandizing slacktivism you’re complaining about, I also see people settle into inaction because they don’t think they can do anything big enough. I think breaking things down into achievable chunks not only disrupts that cycle of apathy and anxiety, it makes it easier to see the next step. Everyone starts somewhere.

I don’t want to claim that framing fashion as resistance is going to dismantle the Cabinet or anything. But I think that for the specific goal I’m setting out to meet - bringing dignity to oppressed people’s lives - it’s a good effort.

I am currently working on an article for [women’s website*] about fashion as resistance. I’m leading with the “resistance hats” worn by women in Nazi-occupied France (check out fashion historian April Calahan’s podcast on that here), and I would like to add a modern angle as well. I’m looking for women who employ fashion as visible resistance to oppressive governments, especially…

religious women, hijabis in particular

ethnic minorities

women with something tangible to lose from resistance, i.e. being fired or disowned

Those are just a few of many perspectives, though, and I’m sure I’m missing some. If you have anything at all to say on this topic, please message me! I’m hoping to get all interview subjects lined up by the end of this week, Feb. 4th. Unfortunately, I cannot pay you, but I will try my hardest to do your study justice.

Thank you!

(That’s not to say that your project isn’t useful or interesting. It’s worth waiting to see what you’re going to do before judging it.)

Even when people go out of their comfort zone to do something like protest in the streets, the main thing they get out of it is the sense of satisfaction that they’re doing something, anything. I did it and that’s how I felt! Engaging in an action that makes you feel less powerless while not actually wielding power seems to me to be … circular.

Maybe it’s not my place to say that some hijabi fashion show will never move the needle with the red state voter who buys bulk socks at Costco. Maybe, as we don’t have a vote of no confidence mechanism and impeachment only gives us a different face to the same horrible policies, morale-boosting is all we have.

French women … for almost six years remained as fashion-conscious as they could, in spite of shortages of fabrics and materials, especially leather, as a way of retaining pride in their own identity and of refusing to be humiliated by their conquerors.

Emphasis mine. My focus isn’t really on actively changing policy through aesthetics (I’m skeptical of many such efforts as well) but on using them to maintain a sense of dignity. Existing unapologetically in a society bent on your destruction may not be legislative change, but it’s a victory all its own. It’s announcing that you will celebrate your culture no matter the cost.

I am currently working on an article for [women’s website*] about fashion as resistance. I’m leading with the “resistance hats” worn by women in Nazi-occupied France (check out fashion historian April Calahan’s podcast on that here), and I would like to add a modern angle as well. I’m looking for women who employ fashion as visible resistance to oppressive governments, especially…

religious women, hijabis in particular

ethnic minorities

women with something tangible to lose from resistance, i.e. being fired or disowned

Those are just a few of many perspectives, though, and I’m sure I’m missing some. If you have anything at all to say on this topic, please message me! I’m hoping to get all interview subjects lined up by the end of this week, Feb. 4th. Unfortunately, I cannot pay you, but I will try my hardest to do your study justice.

Thank you!

(That’s not to say that your project isn’t useful or interesting. It’s worth waiting to see what you’re going to do before judging it.)

Even when people go out of their comfort zone to do something like protest in the streets, the main thing they get out of it is the sense of satisfaction that they’re doing something, anything. I did it and that’s how I felt! Engaging in an action that makes you feel less powerless while not actually wielding power seems to me to be … circular.

Maybe it’s not my place to say that some hijabi fashion show will never move the needle with the red state voter who buys bulk socks at Costco. Maybe, as we don’t have a vote of no confidence mechanism and impeachment only gives us a different face to the same horrible policies, morale-boosting is all we have.

French women ... for almost six years remained as fashion-conscious as they could, in spite of shortages of fabrics and materials, especially leather, as a way of retaining pride in their own identity and of refusing to be humiliated by their conquerors.

Emphasis mine. My focus isn’t really on actively changing policy through aesthetics (I’m skeptical of many such efforts as well) but on using them to maintain a sense of dignity. Existing unapologetically in a society bent on your destruction may not be legislative change, but it’s a victory all its own. It’s announcing that you will celebrate your culture no matter the cost.

I have no idea where Laurence Iannaccone is getting her information when she says, “We now know that nearly all the anti-cult claims were overblown, mistaken, or outright lies. Americans no longer obsess about Scientology, Transcendental Meditation, or the Children of God.” Scientology, TM, and the Children of God CAN BE dangerous. Perhaps she is referring to the fear of imaginary cults?

Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt are not exaggerated scenarios (except to create humor, in the latter’s case–by that standard, many moments and aspects are exaggerated); they have actually happened to real people. We should not discount cult-survivors’ experiences.

I think one of my problems is that cults don’t just exist in “liminal corner of our collective imagination,” they exist in real life. You are definitely right in the paragraph beginning, “This isn’t to say that alternative movements don’t sow dysfunction and leave lasting wounds. It’s to say that mainstream ones do too.” It’s just that the earlier part of the review seems to downplay cults rather than point out how sympathetic many cult members actually are.

edit: Oh yikes… this is horrible…

“The public, the media, many psychologists, and the courts largely accepted the claim that cults could ‘brainwash’ their members, thereby rendering them incapable of rational choice,including the choice to leave.” (yeah, because they do brainwash members…)

“Though cults, and new religious movements more broadly, no longer hold the terrifying sway they did a generation ago, our fictional treatments of them remain rooted in hyperbole. 2012’s Martha Marcy May Marlene stars Elizabeth Olsen as Martha, struggling with PSTD after her escape from a Jonestownian commune.” (How is that hyperbole?? Any psychologist with experience in cults will tell you PTSD is a normal outcome… as will former cult members.. take me for example!! Also, it wasn’t “Jonestownian” - describing it as such IS hyperbole, the movie was not!!).

of course bustle is like one step up from jezebel in their victim blaming/abuse denying

My point is not that more prototypical cult experiences (Children of God, Scientology, etc.) do not exist. My point is that as cults go, they are comparatively rare. By holding them up as the central example of what cults are, we risk eclipsing more subtle forms of trauma that exist all around us. As I literally say halfway through the piece: 

This isn’t to say that alternative movements don’t sow dysfunction and leave lasting wounds. It’s to say that mainstream ones do too. This is what anti-cult rhetoric so consistently forgets: wherever there is hierarchy, wherever there is community, there will of course be struggle. By narrowing our sense of outrage to fringe societies, we diminish the abuses all around us.

Of children who are abducted every year, only a very small fraction are taken by strangers. The vast majority are abducted by family members. And yet our main cultural image of “abducted child” is “someone who’s duct-taped and forced into a van”. It’s not that such abductions never happen. They do! But by focusing on them to the exclusion of more mundane tragedies, we falsely imply that the one is much more common than the other. And that prevents us from seeing what’s going on right under our noses. 

Which is the whole point of my article: it’s not just those Other people who can be abusive. It’s not just Other people who join cults. It can be anyone, because these abuses exist on a spectrum. When I say there’s no fundamental difference between people who’ve joined cults and people who haven’t, I’m saying that since it can be anyone, we ought to stop Othering them. As I say in the second-to-last paragraph: 

Fact is, there’s no hard-and-fast line between a healthy community and a toxic one. There’s no yellow CAUTION tape, no Greek chorus screaming to abort. The WBC can be both a vitriolic hate group and the home of everyone Lauren Drain has ever loved. Until we get more comfortable with ambiguity, we can’t fully understand or empathize with her story.

Or, to use an example from the article itself: 

In recent years, we’ve come to understand that sexual assault is so much more than a knife-brandishing stranger in the bushes. It’s both more common and less splashy than most media implies; as such, it’s increasingly difficult to spin it into an Other. Real pain is more insidious and more tenacious than that. Convincing the public that many victims know and even love their rapists is a tall order, but we’re getting there.

I agree that studying the mechanisms of cults is helpful in analyzing similar phenomena. That’s what I had meant to get across in my article. You aptly note that Trumpism in particular shares many characteristics of cults. But it’s very difficult to talk about that with people who are stuck on the idea that all cultists live in the woods and summon demons, which is why I think it’s so important to broaden the perception of what a cult entails. It can be subtle. It can be insidious. That’s what I liked so much about Emma Cline’s novel: it shows the mechanism at work, even if things look totally normal on the outside. That’s very powerful and necessary, I think. 

Not to get too deep into it, but the cult I was in was very much like the one Cline writes about. Outwardly, there wasn’t anything wrong, but I was dying inside. It didn’t look much different from your average kinda-cringey New Age group. But it was just as damaging as the more dramatic versions we see in most cult media, and I’m really glad more diverse portrayals are popping up. It’s how I imagine people who were raped by their significant other might feel when it’s acknowledged that rapists aren’t just knife-wielding strangers in the bushes. I didn’t mean that people think cults are more common than other types of abuse - I meant that subtle abuse, of whatever type, is more common than its more obvious equivalent. That’s what I meant by using the word “hyperbole” as well - it’s not hyperbole to show that such groups exist, but it is hyperbole to speak as though they’re necessarily the defining example. 

I’ve already written a novel, so just one more point and then I’ll let you go - my objection to the word “brainwashing” isn’t that the effects aren’t real (I know they are, intimately) but that the word itself draws an artificial boundary. Every single person has some bizarre and unsubstantiated beliefs. It’s a spectrum, like I said. When people writing about cults use the word “brainwashed” uncritically, they’re implicitly letting society at large off the hook. It sets up a dichotomy between “poor gullible people who join cults” and “everyone else”. But it can happen to anyone, and I really hope allowing more ambiguity in how we talk about cults can get people to see their victims as less of an Other. 

I have no idea where Laurence Iannaccone is getting her information when she says, “We now know that nearly all the anti-cult claims were overblown, mistaken, or outright lies. Americans no longer obsess about Scientology, Transcendental Meditation, or the Children of God.” Scientology, TM, and the Children of God CAN BE dangerous. Perhaps she is referring to the fear of imaginary cults?

Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt are not exaggerated scenarios (except to create humor, in the latter’s case–by that standard, many moments and aspects are exaggerated); they have actually happened to real people. We should not discount cult-survivors’ experiences.

I think one of my problems is that cults don’t just exist in “liminal corner of our collective imagination,” they exist in real life. You are definitely right in the paragraph beginning, “This isn’t to say that alternative movements don’t sow dysfunction and leave lasting wounds. It’s to say that mainstream ones do too.” It’s just that the earlier part of the review seems to downplay cults rather than point out how sympathetic many cult members actually are.

edit: Oh yikes… this is horrible…

“The public, the media, many psychologists, and the courts largely accepted the claim that cults could ‘brainwash’ their members, thereby rendering them incapable of rational choice,including the choice to leave.” (yeah, because they do brainwash members…)

“Though cults, and new religious movements more broadly, no longer hold the terrifying sway they did a generation ago, our fictional treatments of them remain rooted in hyperbole. 2012’s Martha Marcy May Marlene stars Elizabeth Olsen as Martha, struggling with PSTD after her escape from a Jonestownian commune.” (How is that hyperbole?? Any psychologist with experience in cults will tell you PTSD is a normal outcome… as will former cult members.. take me for example!! Also, it wasn’t “Jonestownian” - describing it as such IS hyperbole, the movie was not!!).

of course bustle is like one step up from jezebel in their victim blaming/abuse denying

My point is not that more prototypical cult experiences (Children of God, Scientology, etc.) do not exist. My point is that as cults go, they are comparatively rare. By holding them up as the central example of what cults are, we risk eclipsing more subtle forms of trauma that exist all around us. As I literally say halfway through the piece: 

This isn’t to say that alternative movements don’t sow dysfunction and leave lasting wounds. It’s to say that mainstream ones do too. This is what anti-cult rhetoric so consistently forgets: wherever there is hierarchy, wherever there is community, there will of course be struggle. By narrowing our sense of outrage to fringe societies, we diminish the abuses all around us.

Of children who are abducted every year, only a very small fraction are taken by strangers. The vast majority are abducted by family members. And yet our main cultural image of “abducted child” is “someone who’s duct-taped and forced into a van”. It’s not that such abductions never happen. They do! But by focusing on them to the exclusion of more mundane tragedies, we falsely imply that the one is much more common than the other. And that prevents us from seeing what’s going on right under our noses. 

Which is the whole point of my article: it’s not just those Other people who can be abusive. It’s not just Other people who join cults. It can be anyone, because these abuses exist on a spectrum. When I say there’s no fundamental difference between people who’ve joined cults and people who haven’t, I’m saying that since it can be anyone, we ought to stop Othering them. As I say in the second-to-last paragraph: 

Fact is, there’s no hard-and-fast line between a healthy community and a toxic one. There’s no yellow CAUTION tape, no Greek chorus screaming to abort. The WBC can be both a vitriolic hate group and the home of everyone Lauren Drain has ever loved. Until we get more comfortable with ambiguity, we can’t fully understand or empathize with her story.

Or, to use an example from the article itself: 

In recent years, we’ve come to understand that sexual assault is so much more than a knife-brandishing stranger in the bushes. It’s both more common and less splashy than most media implies; as such, it’s increasingly difficult to spin it into an Other. Real pain is more insidious and more tenacious than that. Convincing the public that many victims know and even love their rapists is a tall order, but we’re getting there.

This just in: it’s fucking hard.

I’m hardly exempting myself here: I struggle with instinctive bias as much as anyone. There’s no real “overcoming” - you don’t overcome your deepest instincts; you learn to work with and around them. You’re never “finished”. There is no ultimate salvation, no eschatological end to the work of building compassion.

There is no purity, only process. But, my god, you have to at least start the process.

In many tangible ways, the left is doing just that. We’re fighting tooth and nail for women, for ethnic minorities, for the LGBT community, for the disabled, for the impoverished, for the imprisoned, for the marginalized and disenfranchised of all stripes. We’re fighting like hell, we’ve won in many ways, and we’re going to keep winning. And now we’re going to see just how far our commitment to kindness and dignity extends. We’re going to figure out whether our principles are meta-level or object-level.

Because here’s the thing: women and gay people and black people are not the real outgroup.

Not to leftists, anyway. By and large, we on the blue side of things do not have trouble empathizing with a gay couple denied the right to marry. With a teenage girl denied contraception. With a trans woman harassed in the bathroom. To those of us on the social justice left, extending kindness and compassion to such people is not difficult. Which - don’t get me wrong - is wonderful. It’s nothing short of astounding that so many of us now empathize so easily with people considered universally repulsive a few generations ago. It’s one hell of a win, but there’s still more work to do. Because empathy, real empathy, isn’t only about those for whom it comes easily.

It’s not just about the innocent. It’s about the outgroup.

And rarely is an outgroup so explicitly, cartoonishly distinct as Donald Trump and his “basket of deplorables”. I won’t deny just how deplorable many of them are. I abhor the racism, the xenophobia, the sexism, and the overall entitlement present in too many Trump supporters’ rhetoric. But I also abhor the prison industrial complex in all its iterations, and that includes the idea that a person is garbage once they do something wrong. Many on the left correctly bemoan the inhumanity of our prison system and the dearth of resources available to the formerly incarcerated. I want to take that further. I want to indulge the radical idea that a person need not be a good person to deserve the rights and dignities a just society should accord them.

This is what humanizing the outgroup really looks like. This is what it takes. It’s fucking hard. I won’t deny that for a second. And it’s not about excusing or passively tolerating injustice, as many have erroneously assumed. I won’t take Trump’s, or anyone’s, vitriol lying down. Neither will I forget that a human being is so much more than the worst thing she’s ever done. A just society does not give up on its citizens when they make mistakes. It scolds, but then it teaches. It helps them grow. It welcomes them back, ultimately, to the fold.

First off, I don’t see anger and empathy as inherently opposed. It’s entirely possible to be deeply, deeply furious with someone you still consider a human being and deserving of all the rights that that implies. You can take my advice and still be angry, if that’s what you feel is best. 

That said, don’t confuse anger-the-emotion with anger-the-expression. Feel the hell out of whatever you need to feel, and fuck anyone who tries to stop you. But your very real and very valid emotions don’t automatically justify actions you take in expressing them. I might be so furious at my partner that I want to burst into flames, but if I punch him or lock him out in the cold, that’s still on me. My emotions deserve validation. My actions don’t, not necessarily.