One more time for the people in the back, white privilege does not mean that because you’re white, you’ve never struggled. It means your struggles are not BECAUSE you’re white.
If you’re straight and you struggle, it’s not because you’re straight. Queer people have the same struggles you do, but they also struggle because they’re queer in a world that favors people who are straight.
If you’re a man and you struggle, it’s not because because you’re a man. Others have the same struggles you do, but they also struggle because they’re not men in a world that favors people who are men.
And if you’re white and you struggle, it’s not because because you’re white. People of color have the same struggles you do, but they also struggle because they’re people of color in a world that favors people who are white.
It really is that simple. Are there exceptions? Sure. But straight people, white people, and/or male people have power that those who are NOT straight, white, and/or male do NOT have.
Privilege is not worrying that your “ethnic” sounding name will get your job application tossed or that your “ethnic” hair will get you fired.
Privilege is not having to sweat every election because the next crop of lawmakers might get enough power to strip away your bodily autonomy, the validity of your marriage, or your right to not get fired because your boss doesn’t approve of your “lifestyle,”
Privilege is not fearing for your life every time you get pulled over and not needing to have serious discussions with your children about how to keep the police from killing them.
Privilege does not mean your life is easy and that you never struggle. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It doesn’t mean you should be ashamed, or that you have no right to complain about the injustices or disadvantages you DO experience.
It just means that you are exempt from experiencing certain systemic disadvantages that other people are not. Some of those disadvantages are frustrating (microaggressions). Some can literally mean the difference between life and death.
When someone tells you to check your privilege, they’re telling you to remember everything I just wrote here. It means there are things in this world that you don’t have to worry about.
It means there are very real problems in this world and in this country that are not about you.
Lori Gallagher Witt (As always, okay to share, but please don’t remove my name.)
What is the scientific, or at least verifiable, qualifier for the ‘recognition’ of ________ privilege’? How are privilege politics simply not reducible to a reliance on the self-appointed ‘arbiter’ of the Truth? This takes the form of: a relationship of 'faith’ between the arbiter and the condemned (e.g. “I believe that you recognize your privilege, now”) b) an admittance of epistemological incompetence (e.g. “I can never know your oppression, so I need you to verify my own admission of eternal ignorance”) c) self-castigation (e.g. “please forgive me for my privileges.”) Again, all of this is a reliance on a presupposed clear-sightedness of the self-appointed ‘arbiter’. It is an assumption that a judgement is even possible in the first place, and in the second place, only by the those in judgement (I’m the REAL person from ________ group). I’m not saying that ‘privilege’ isn’t real, but that the concept, and how its used, often is expressed in an idealist manner. Then people are too scared to critique the ritual, at the risk of being accused of having X privilege, and that X is supposed to be the reason the person simply can’t understand the privilege (sin) in the first place.
The romantic notion of home paints it as a nurturing, safe place; a haven or refuge from tensions that disturb the outside world. It is a space of comfort and belonging, of warmth and affection. It is where one feels at ease the most, and as the old cliché goes, a place like no other.
In this exhibition, Yeo Kaa unsettles the sense of security and content felt at home through an outward gaze that exposes the perils and menaces hidden or distant from one’s comfortable abode. The phrase “from the comfort of my own home” draws irony from the stark contrast between inside and outside conditions, with the outside as the site of danger and harsh realities of life. Central to this opposition is the attempt to confront the vantage point of a privileged existence—being sheltered or immune from the difficulties and suffering of others by virtue of one’s social position. The home here refers not only to the immediate household, but extends to larger communities—from posh apartment buildings to gated, self-contained residential zones—which similarly detach society’s privileged few from the experiences of the common people. Recent events, such as the ongoing pandemic and the string of calamities that besieged the artist’s native Philippines, have rendered the disparity between the lives of the rich and the poor more pronounced. The works interrogate this gap and the former’s filtered encounter of the latter’s struggles.
The disjuncture among lived realities shaped by social inequality is conveyed in the glass enclosures that blur the depicted imagery in each work. On a remote control’s cue, clear images of natural calamities like floods and forest fires, pollution and environmental decay, are revealed, shifting the audience back and forth between the shielded view of privilege and the more vivid and gripping accounts of difficult life out there. Like the white overlay that covers the scenes of tragedies and devastations behind it, privilege may sanitize one’s picture of reality and disengage us from the plight of society’s margins. These pieces remind us to constantly assess the lenses through which we access the wider world, and to look beyond our positionalities that may conceal truths outside the convenience of our social spheres.
i see a lot of trans men and female nonbinaries often say things like “i face misogyny because people still see me as a woman! i don’t deny that!” but male nonbinaries and trans women would rather be caught dead than accept that they have male privilege … why is that
^ Adding the above answer to my request for clarification on what “male privilege” for trans women means here, as it would be too cumbersome to respond via replies.
So the simple answer to this is we don’t experience male privilege because we’re not men. We may have physiological similarities to cis men, and we may be socialized (often against our will) in similar ways, but as trans women we experience all of these things through a transfeminine lens. Nearly every single aspect of what is thought of as being a boy/man is intrinsically inseparable from this lived experience, and most advantages in this regard come with associated costs that outweigh them on the whole.
Biological advantages like not having to worry about getting pregnant, come not only with dysphoria and its associated mental health issues, but are also used as a bludgeon by society to “prove” we’re not “real” women. We are inundated with messaging, both through personal attacks and through society at large, that the ability to produce eggs and carry children is an intrinsic feature of womanhood (which is a damaging narrative to all women, obviously, but is harmful to trans women in much the same way as it is to cis women who do not have the ability to get pregnant.) Trans girls forced to go through “male” puberty experience increasingly severe dysphoria, suicidal ideation, and find it ever more difficult to pass which furthers ostracism.
Social advantages for being raised as male are more ephemeral, and are better described as “passing privilege” than male privilege. We are treated as boys/men not because we *are* boys/men, but because we *pass* as boys/men, and that preferential treatment largely vanishes the moment we come out as trans women. In fact, out trans women by and large face gendered oppression in similar ways to cis women, with things like violent victimization, sexual abuse, poverty, employment discrimination, wage gaps, etc. experienced at rates commensurate to or in some cases even higher than cis women. Further, passing for cis men is deeply traumatizing for most trans women, and is often done to avoid abuse, ostracism from family, or worse.
In the same way that I’m sure you wouldn’t consider a cis girl who passes for a boy to have male privilege, or a gay person who passes as straight while closeted to have heterosexual privilege, closeted trans women do not have male privilege. Privilege granted at the point of a gun and at the cost of denying who we are is no privilege at all. While I do not deny that trans women have some advantages, with all factors considered it clearly does not meet the bar to qualify for privilege in human society any more than the advantages associated with being a woman equate to female privilege.
Lastly I’ll say to your original point, I don’t really see trans women not having male privilege and trans men suffering from being perceived as women as being in fundamental opposition, it’s all a function of cisnormative patriarchal forces that value manhood and devalue anyone perceived as not being a part of that. However, as I am not a trans man (similar with non-binary people) I can’t fully speak to their experience, so I will leave it there for others to weigh in.
what is a man? what is a woman?
i am aware that dysphoria is a real and debilitating condition, but why does incongruence between the mind and the body warrant the denial of social conditioning based on biology? trans women didn’t grow up being taught how to “become women” which is NOT something to envy. little girls are forced into femininity, face discrimination and bias in school (and, depending on geographical location, are denied the right to an education because of their sex), are face cat calling and street harassment from pre-puberty ages, etc. the descent from girlhood into womanhood is something that the vast, vast majority of trans women do not experience because of the ages of their transitions. childhood socialization is incredibly difficult to unlearn and becomes a core part of ourselves. while girls are going through this, boys (referring to male children including trans women) are taught to be strong and smart and powerful. they are masculinized, which gnc boys find undoubtedly uncomfortable, but it is true that they grow up learning that they are worth more than girls and they do not face systemic and interpersonal misogyny.
male privilege is an axis of oppression that exists outside of our minds. i am white, and i am also an immigrant. i face discrimination due to my immigrant status and i do not have the same internal thoughts and beliefs as a huge majority of white americans, but that does not erase my white privilege. when my whiteness grants me privilege i am uncomfortable because i know i am not the intended benefactor of this privilege—many of my family are refugees and we escaped our home country because of extreme poverty. this does not erase the privilege i have when people are unaware of my immigrant status. i am still white. trans women are still male.
trans girls are not forced to go through male puberty, they simply do—it is a sign that their bodies are working properly.
and honestly? masculine girls who can pass as men and gay people who can pass as straight do not have privilege in the same way that male humans have male privilege. a masculine woman (such as myself) has still undergone female socialization. everyone in our lives knows we are women. we are treated as such. i also choose to dress myself up and lie about being a lesbian when i’m around extended family members and in my work environment, because it’s easier. this does not change the fact that i grew up being told that i, as a woman, must like men. heteronormativity has been a part of my daily life since the moment i was born. male children aren’t taught that they can’t be women—they are taught that they are better than women. there is a difference.
i do think that trans women who pass as women face misogyny. i do think that violence against trans people is abhorrent and trans people have a right to safety. what i do not think is that feelings are more important than biological and social truths. i also do not think gender should be a part of our society; whoever seeks to uphold it is a misogynist.
A woman is a person of female gender, vice versa for a man. And respectfully, it’s clear that there is a fundamental ideological difference between us on how that is defined, so I’m not particularly interested in arguing the point.
I agree that the way cis girls are forced into womanhood is not something to envy. It is oppression, I never stated otherwise. Further, I agree that boys are taught to be strong and smart and powerful. That they are better. The difference here is, once again, that trans women are not boys. We were never boys. We were trans girls perceived as boys, who are taught that this idealized male version of ourselves is strong and powerful. But that person is not *us*. We are “lesser”, lesser in some cases even than cis women but most certainly lesser than cis men. We are an imposter. We speak the truth at our own peril, a peril which often includes abuse. Homelessness. Conversion therapy. Murder.
How does our internalized power, our inherent privilege, actually manifest in society? Not by preferential treatment in employment. Not by being favored for governmental positions. Not by an increased likelihood to avoid poverty, to avoid being sexually abused or fetishized or forced into the sex trade to survive. Not by better opportunities for education. Not by preferential treatment in the eyes of the law.
We only have access to those things if we stay in the closet. And being forced to deny who we are to get benefits does not equate to privilege any more than a cis lesbian “just marrying a man” to pass as straight equates to heterosexual privilege. We are not boys who just decide one day to become women, we are women, and our journey to recognizing this within ourselves is as unique and varied as a gay person’s journey to recognizing their sexuality. Neither is diminished by not understanding ourselves until a later age, especially when the ways society, family and peers seek to deny our identities are completely outside of our control.
You claim that denying this is adhering to biological and social reality, but to do so you have to completely ignore our social reality and lived experiences, otherwise it falls flat. I’m not saying these things to minimize the oppression of cis women, but to show that we are both being oppressed along the same axis but in different ways. Our oppressors are the same, and always have been.
I don’t expect you to agree, again because of the fundamental ideological differences between us. My goal was to explain why trans women do not feel that we experience male privilege with good faith arguments, which I hope you can agree that I have done.
Some followup points since this is winding long:
* Cis girls being raised and socialized as boys, with their true identities kept secret from friends and close family absolutely is something that happens! It doesn’t mean they have male privilege, any more than trans women do.
* Likewise, trans girls *are* sometimes forced to go through male puberty, as gender affirming care is restricted in many areas of the world. Several states in the US are taking great efforts to do so by passing laws to forcibly detransition all trans kids in their jurisdiction. Our bodies are doing what our hormones tell them to do, but it doesn’t mean those things are right in all cases, and it is standard medical practice to make adjustments were necessary.
* Biological reality is far more complex than we once thought, as decades of medical research into gender affirming care has shown. There is a reason why every major international medical organization endorses gender affirming care for trans people: because it works the vast majority of the time.
i am interested in arguing that point though—what is the female gender? why do you think gender should exist?
how can trans women not go through male socialization if so many of them don’t come out for years, often decades? socialization is how we are treated by society, not how we feel about the way we are treated by society
bio women are also at an increased risk for homelessness and murder—in fact, one thing that led me to gender abolition was how many trans women are being prostituted/trafficked. i know that gender identity does play a role in how society treats people and i don’t think anyone should have to be a victim of violence or trafficking for any reason—the concept of gender/gender roles is the oldest and most deeply ingrained system of violence that exists in the world. why anyone would want to contribute to it is beyond me
you still say that trans women are women without giving me a concrete definition for what a woman is. someone of the female gender makes no sense because female is a biological category, not a gender. would trans women still be women in a hypothetical alternate universe where gender and gender roles do not exist?
i do agree that that trans women may feel that they don’t have male privilege—that is exactly why i made the original post. of course life is hard for you—i never said it isn’t. but the way we perceive things is not usually the way things really are. trans women who do not pass or who are in the closet are treated better by society and that is a fact. when i choose to pass as straight i am treated better but it would be illogical to say that i have privilege because i am still denied the rights to life in multiple countries, would be shunned by some family members, only recently got the right to vote, etc. these are concrete, material reality. gender as something separate from sex is a fickle and fluid thing that no one can ever give a good definition for and everyone “experiences differently.” we can talk about rates of violence and abuse towards trans women while acknowledging that they also live in a society that values males
and every major medical organization endorses transitioning because it is a huge source of money. trust scientists but also have critical thinking skills about the economic state of the world
It’s not a matter of whether I think gender should exist. It’s that the cultural notion that sex and gender identity are both a.) binary and b.) easily divisible into entirely biological and entirely social does not match our current understanding of human development. This is reflected not only by studies of very young trans children whose behaviors are almost entirely indistinct from their cisgender counterparts, but also by the dissonance experienced by both transgender people AND cisgender people who had their sex non-consensually reassigned in infancy, which in both cases can express itself both as positive knowledge or through discomfort (of varying degrees) with one’s apparent sex. The purely ideological belief that there is no innate sense of gender rooted in biology means that this is a topic that, in my experience, we would typically go round and round with no hope of reaching an agreement… which is why I said that I’m not interested in rehashing that experience.
Note that this is different from gender roles and gender-based discrimination, both of which we all agree should be abolished! But trans women are not gender roles, there are many butch trans women, androgynous trans women, etc. Many do follow cultural feminine norms, but this is because we exist in society and are subject to the same pressures as everyone else (along with additional pressure to “pass” to avoid transphobic harassment.) In a future world where gender roles no longer exist, trans women would still be women, and would ideally have easier access to more advanced treatments that will resolve the mind/body incongruence in a way that makes their outward sex indistinguishable from both their sense of self and cisgender members of said sex. But their social lives and their roles in society would be whatever they wanted them to be, just the same as cis women.
Your replies thus far have constantly skirted around the points that the purported privilege received while closeted is functionally indistinguishable from the way straight privilege is temporarily “granted” to closeted gay people (after all, are gay kids not socialized as straight, taught that being straight was superior, morally righteous and the de facto norm?), and that this purported “male” privilege does not offer a meaningful systemic advantage to trans women in modern societies in which trans people are consistently amongst the most marginalized minorities, with no institutional power to speak of. Without that, how can you make the claim that we experience gender-based privilege, much less male privilege?
I readily acknowledge that society favors males. What society does not do, however, is favor out trans women, or treat them as males in a way that can meaningfully be described as privilege outside of certain edge cases. Because, again, trans women also experience the concrete, material realities of being shunned, being killed, and of having rights restricted in many areas of the world. Hell, in the US many trans women alsodidn’t have the right to vote until half a century *after* white women!
Lastly to address your final paragraph:
“and every major medical organization endorses transitioning because it is a huge source of money. trust scientists but also have critical thinking skills about the economic state of the world”
This is a thought-terminating cliche, because it doesn’t meaningfully address the argument that gender affirming care is the only treatment that actually works for trans people. All it does is give you ideological cover to ignore scientific consensus and the efficacy of these treatments, in much the same way as anti-vaccine or climate science denial does.
i see a lot of trans men and female nonbinaries often say things like “i face misogyny because people still see me as a woman! i don’t deny that!” but male nonbinaries and trans women would rather be caught dead than accept that they have male privilege … why is that
^ Adding the above answer to my request for clarification on what “male privilege” for trans women means here, as it would be too cumbersome to respond via replies.
So the simple answer to this is we don’t experience male privilege because we’re not men. We may have physiological similarities to cis men, and we may be socialized (often against our will) in similar ways, but as trans women we experience all of these things through a transfeminine lens. Nearly every single aspect of what is thought of as being a boy/man is intrinsically inseparable from this lived experience, and most advantages in this regard come with associated costs that outweigh them on the whole.
Biological advantages like not having to worry about getting pregnant, come not only with dysphoria and its associated mental health issues, but are also used as a bludgeon by society to “prove” we’re not “real” women. We are inundated with messaging, both through personal attacks and through society at large, that the ability to produce eggs and carry children is an intrinsic feature of womanhood (which is a damaging narrative to all women, obviously, but is harmful to trans women in much the same way as it is to cis women who do not have the ability to get pregnant.) Trans girls forced to go through “male” puberty experience increasingly severe dysphoria, suicidal ideation, and find it ever more difficult to pass which furthers ostracism.
Social advantages for being raised as male are more ephemeral, and are better described as “passing privilege” than male privilege. We are treated as boys/men not because we *are* boys/men, but because we *pass* as boys/men, and that preferential treatment largely vanishes the moment we come out as trans women. In fact, out trans women by and large face gendered oppression in similar ways to cis women, with things like violent victimization, sexual abuse, poverty, employment discrimination, wage gaps, etc. experienced at rates commensurate to or in some cases even higher than cis women. Further, passing for cis men is deeply traumatizing for most trans women, and is often done to avoid abuse, ostracism from family, or worse.
In the same way that I’m sure you wouldn’t consider a cis girl who passes for a boy to have male privilege, or a gay person who passes as straight while closeted to have heterosexual privilege, closeted trans women do not have male privilege. Privilege granted at the point of a gun and at the cost of denying who we are is no privilege at all. While I do not deny that trans women have some advantages, with all factors considered it clearly does not meet the bar to qualify for privilege in human society any more than the advantages associated with being a woman equate to female privilege.
Lastly I’ll say to your original point, I don’t really see trans women not having male privilege and trans men suffering from being perceived as women as being in fundamental opposition, it’s all a function of cisnormative patriarchal forces that value manhood and devalue anyone perceived as not being a part of that. However, as I am not a trans man (similar with non-binary people) I can’t fully speak to their experience, so I will leave it there for others to weigh in.
When we say you are racist. We do not refer to a certain person. This is not a personal attack but rather an attack on the society we live in. Trust that when we, as “nonwhite people”, say racist we are indeed addressing society along with all its social and institutional frameworks that allow a person of white culture to believe that they rank from a place of higher order albeit being a person of colour has been dictated as being a person of endless limitations. Racism is more than just a snarky comment, it is the laws and cognitive condition that suppress a person of colour. It extends far past racial prejudice and because of this Society… YOU ARE RACIST.
I have another meta-analysis before getting into the plot content of The Midnight Gospel episodes. This time, I’m exploring the recurring motif of Clancy’s taking a pair of shoes with him as souvenirs of his trips to the virtual multiverse, again, highlighting as I did in my previous post that the planets and people he visits are indeed virtual.
But before getting into the shoes at the end of each episode, it is relevant to discuss how each episode begins. Clancy orders Computer, his home A.I., to bring up worlds for him to visit. After which, Clancy gets to choose from a series of custom avatars what he wants to look like for his trip.
The act of shopping for universes and customising exactly how you appear to the world is the epitome of convenience. Clancy isn’t just realising he can buy a product on the Internet instead of going to a store, he’s acquiring a planet and all its natural and artificial riches.
This isn’t a stretch either. Later on in the series, we meet a family of Multiverse Simulator farmers, who mine each world for its expensive artefacts and sell them for money in the tangible reality where the show takes place.
On top of that, each episode has a familiar flow, with Clancy entering the world, conducting his interview, and the world coming to its apocalyptic end, with Clancy hilariously getting caught up in the middle of things. Despite this, Clancy is in no real danger, because at any time he can summon Computer to take him back outside the simulator. Moreover, his body is safely in his home the entire time.
Then Clancy simply proceeds with the rest of his life. He uploads the space-cast and lets the view (yes, singular) roll in.
“Computer, do it NOW”
What’s striking is how transactional Clancy’s relationships with those around him are for majority of the show. He listens to his interviewees and offers them a modicum of respect, but that’s also because for the most part he finds himself agreeing with what they’re saying. The times he doesn’t like what he’s hearing, such as with David, there’s so much resistance, so much tuning out. It’s only David’s patience and gentle prodding that Clancy opens up enough to listen to what he has to say and calm down.
Two things to note on that. First, David is under no obligation to teach Clancy anything. He doesn’t have to put up with an angry octopus who just ruined his painting, came into his place, and started screaming at him. It just so happens that his personal philosophy makes it less likely for occurrences like that to faze him. Second, Clancy wasn’t planning on doing an interview with David. There’s a chance he wasn’t planning to do an interview at all. He was trying to get into the simulator to escape a call he did not want to hear.
Computer calls him out on it as well, saying,
It’s become clear to me that you’ve been avoiding dealing with the real world by going into my many universes.
All the while Clancy is talking over him with the same dismissive attitude, tuning out what advice Computer is giving, just like the phone call or voice messages he’s been avoiding.
Though we don’t know what Clancy’s life was before the events of the first episode, we do know that since then, he’s been living in a way that suited him. Doing the things he more or less enjoyed. Despite this, he still had responsibilities and generally, just things he didn’t want to do. The most evident in the episode was his severe neglect of Computer, causing the malfunctions that threw him into a fit of rage in the first place.
It’s in this episode that he finally interacts with people outside the simulator. We are introduced to his neighbours, the aforementioned simulator farmers, We meet Bryce, the fidgety Multiverse Simulator repairman. And his interactions with them are transactional. He calls on them because he needs something– a way to fix his simulator. He humours them because he thinks they can offer him what he wants, and when they didn’t, he left them immediately.
In my first post of The Midnight Gospel analysis playlist, I talked about how it was so easy to respond to your own need to be comfortable and satisfied because your needs are immediate and urgent to you. You feel them and when you don’t answer them they gnaw at you and caw at the back of your mind until you satiate them.
I want to emphasise that the harm is not that we are born self-centred. No, that’s a fact of life. We need to take care of ourselves as individuals before we can function in the world we live in. It’s a survival instinct. It becomes problematic when self-preservation and self-comfort are where we stop.
It’seasy to focus on yourself and only yourself, forever. It’s convenient. On top of that, it’s enabled by all our new technology. In the show, it’s having a semi-sentient home A.I. and a multiverse simulator to escape to and profit from.
There are a lot of parallels to this in our world. Digital spaces, personalised content, economic privilege. In these cases, you can just stay in your comfy warm bubble and never leave it.
The Extreme Comfort Zone
Some concrete examples involve the consumption of media. I don’t want to sound like a crotchety old person and I’m not disparaging anyone. Something I’ve noticed, though, is how my younger family members only watch video streaming sites. Exclusively they watch content that caters to their very niche interests. This stands in stark contrast to when cable television monopolised home entertainment, because you couldn’t decide which shows would air and you couldn’t decide when they would air. You’d have to make an effort to make time for the series you wanted to watch, and in the act of waiting around for a show you were interested in, you’d stumble upon other channels, movies, or series that were interesting.
This is not to say that the democratisation of entertainment is a bad thing. I’m glad that people now have a greater say in the content they consume, they way my younger self did not, and I’m glad people have more spaces to share their niche interests in a way my younger alienated self could only have dreamed. However, this setup brings to the forefront our very transactional relationship with not only mainstream media but individual and independent content creators.
Watching movies is another example. In a theatre, you either sit through an entire movie or you walk out if it’s too unbearable. If a scene is too tense or suspenseful, you have no way of knowing whether or not you’re close to the end or if there will even be a happy resolution.
A habit I’ve noticed with family and friends, especially the younger ones, easily lets me know when they’re bored or uncomfortable. When we’re watching a video or streaming a movie, they’ll tap on the screen to see how much time is left in the running.
And there’s an underlying message to that. If what we’re seeing or hearing isn’t something tailored to our specific interests, then it’s not worth consuming. If it’s too long, then I didn’t read it. If the art is kind of weird, then it’s not enough to keep watching, no matter the message. (This is real. I know people who tell me they refuse to watch a show like Adventure Time or BoJack Horseman or anyanime because they don’t like the art).
It’s perfectly within one’s rights to skip to end of a book or a film. Life is short. We’re always busy. The modern world has a lot of demands and sometimes you just want to turn off your brain and enjoy something.
But on the rare days you have free time and energy to spare, you can venture outside the realm of what is reassuring and self-affirming. Yes, you can stay in the extreme comfort zone because you don’t have to leave it. You don’t haveto face other people or be confronted by things that make you second-guess your entire way of thinking. But I think you should. Not every moment of every day, because that gets tiring. But once in a while, definitely.
Now how does this all tie back to The Midnight Gospel?
Walking in Virtual Shoes
When we get deeper into his backstory, we find out that Clancy has been running away. He’s been refusing to face the relationships confronting him. Like his sister. Talking to her on the phone, she tells him he can’t just keep starting over without facing himself, and it leads him to an angry meltdown in the David episode.
If our worldviews are never challenged, if we are always in our comfort zone, then we never have a reason to turn outward. Because the default setting is to focus on ourselves.
But Clancy does encounter people who regularly challenge his worldview. Even if they’re created by a computer program. And he listens to them. Some more easily than others, but in every episode, eventually, he listens. And they, in turn, affect his emotions and changes the decisions he makes in life.
Again, this is nothing against the younger generations or against current technology. Because I think every generation is guilty of this: Retreating into a comfortable worldview where we don’t realise what other people go through, or don’t think that other people are capable of understanding us. It’s incredibly isolating. In the end, it leads to so much frustration and dissatisfaction, that when our bubble is even slightly threatened, we’re sent into an angry meltdown much like Clancy was.
So, I think it’s very poignant that at the end of every episode, Clancy always manages to take a shoe or two back with him, and these are what he keeps as souvenirs of his trip. This recurring image is significant.
There’s that idiom about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. Though I think it relates to The Midnight Gospel tangentially, I don’t think it’s exactly what the metaphor of the shoe in each episode means. Clancy doesn’t always take the shoes from the interviewee of the episode. Sometimes it’s just a random shoe he finds on the ground. Sometimes, he takes it from another character. In the last episode, the shoes were pretty much handed to him.
Therefore, I wouldn’t say that Clancy is walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. In fact, in every episode, Clancy remains distinctly Clancy. Each of his avatars have his same color scheme, his eyes, and even his signature hat. During the interviews, he interjects with his own opinions and experiences.
That’s the essence of active engagement with the world, including other people and the media we consume. We listen and then measure it against our own beliefs and values. We re-examine ourselves but that entails having a self to re-examine in the first place.
The shoes represent stepping, quite literally, outside your comfort zone. Even when we’re sitting at home or comfortably, we’ll probably be wearing clothes. But we don’t need to wear shoes if we don’t have to.
The meta is supported by Clancy’s character always presented as being barefoot. In his current lifestyle, he doesn’t need to interact with anyone else. He doesn’t need to do most things he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t need to challenge himself. But in the end, he chooses to, whether he realises or not. Just being open to what the world has to say, especially the people in it, is enough of a first step.
So, to me, the shoes represent having to make that conscious effort of having to put on shoes and go outside. It’s a decision to engage instead of disengaging and curling up inside yourself. You can’t just be thrust into that, or accidentally end up with shoes on and find yourself outside.
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If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy my other analyses in The Midnight Gospel playlist:
“As I listen, I like to keep Sabina in mind, with her severe critique of the stupid motherfuckers who came and ruined everything, and her staunch, nearly unfathomable conviction that certain forms of wisdom belong to everyone.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
