“You remember your first love because they show you,prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why.”
“You pick your endings, and your beginnings. You get to pick the frame, you know? Maybe you don’t choose what’s in the picture, but you decide on the frame.”
The Six Swans by Mallory Ortberg A re-telling of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale.
The king’s wife had never been a king’s daughter. She was outranked by her belly.
Now the king’s wife had given birth to a king’s daughter, and he named the girl himself. Her hair and her eyes and her brows were brown-black, her voice was as clear as the waves breaking on the shore, and she was as lovely a king’s daughter as anyone could wish. She ate from a little golden dish and drank from a little golden cup that he had made specially for her and placed right next to his own seat at table.
The king’s wife again turned her plate out for the king’s dogs, but now that she was not growing a daughter, nobody minded.
[…]
“Never have I seen anyone so beautiful,” he told her. Her hand felt dead and alien in his, and she said nothing. The man tore off his cloak and swept it round her shoulders. “You are too beautiful to remain here in these woods all alone,” he declared, as if annexing her. “You will return with me, and I will see to it that you are dressed and honored as befits your station, because as surely as I am a king, you are a king’s daughter.”
Being beautiful had never prevented her from remaining in the woods alone before, but there was nothing she could do about it. Beauty was for public consumption. It was not private property. It gave him the right to talk to her as if they had been introduced, and take her hand, and make her wear his cloak, and take him from her tree and to his home.
They dismounted at the gates of a great marble building, the floors of which were covered in carpets richer and more sumptuous to the touch than her bruised feet could have hoped for. The walls, too, were hung with tapestries dazzling to the eye, but she did not see them for her tears. She could not understand how she was here, when she had never said Yes to being taken. How could a girl who could not speak agree to any of this?
She was beginning to learn the danger of silence, and that someone who wishes to hear a Yes will not go out of his way to listen for a No.
This is lovely.
The Rise of Victimhood Culture by Conor Friedersdorf A recent scholarly paper on “microaggressions” uses them to chart the ascendance of a new moral code in American life.
Victimhood cultures emerge in settings, like today’s college campuses, “that increasingly lack the intimacy and cultural homogeneity that once characterized towns and suburbs, but in which organized authority and public opinion remain as powerful sanctions,” they argue. “Under such conditions complaint to third parties has supplanted both toleration and negotiation. People increasingly demand help from others, and advertise their oppression as evidence that they deserve respect and assistance. Thus we might call this moral culture a culture of victimhood … the moral status of the victim, at its nadir in honor cultures, has risen to new heights.”
Since third-parties are likeliest to intervene in disputes that they regard as relatively serious, and disputes where one group is perceived as dominating another are considered serious by virtue of their aggregate relevance to millions of people, victimhood culture is likeliest to arise in settings where there is some diversity and inequality, but whose members are almost equal, since “a morality that privileges equality and condemns oppression is most likely to arise precisely in settings that already have relatively high degrees of equality.”
I really like this comment by Statetheobvious: “America is a culture based heavily on the idea of the underdog triumphing, on the guy no one counted showing up all his detractors. It’s why every politician will talk about how their grandfather was a working man even as they themselves went to exclusive private schools. Creating a narrative about how everyone is out to get you, for shallow and bigoted reasons especially, is a way of signalling that you’re the hero of the story. This microaggression culture simply takes it to its logical conclusion. It’s obnoxious and makes America a worse place to be, but everyone does it, from all sides of the political spectrum.”
Jonathan Haidt, in his evaluation, Where microaggressions really come from: A sociological account, highlights, “The key idea is that the new moral culture of victimhood fosters ‘moral dependence’ and an atrophying of the ability to handle small interpersonal matters on one’s own. At the same time that it weakens individuals, it creates a society of constant and intense moral conflict as people compete for status as victims or as defenders of victims.”
Again, the paradox: places that make the most progress toward equality and diversity can expect to have the “lowest bar” for what counts as an offense against equality and inclusivity. Some colleges have lowered the bar so far that an innocent question, motivated by curiosity, such as “where are you from” is now branded as an act of aggression.
At universities and many other environments within modern America and, increasingly, other Western nations, the clash between dignity and victimhood engenders a similar kind of moral confusion: One person’s standard provokes another’s grievance, acts of social control themselves are treated as deviant, and unintentional offenses abound. And the conflict will continue. As it does each side will make its case, attracting supporters and winning or losing various battles. But remember that the moral concepts each side invokes are not free-floating ideas; they are reflections of social organization. Microaggression complaints and other specimens of victimhood occur in atomized and diverse settings that are fairly egalitarian except for the presence of strong and stable authority. In these settings behaviors that jeopardize equality or demean minority cultures are rare and those that occur mostly minor, but in this context even minor offenses – or perceived offenses – cause much anguish. And while the authorities and others might be sympathetic, their support is not automatic. Add to this mix modern communication technologies that make it easy to publicize grievances, and the result, as we have seen, is the rise of a victimhood culture.
It’s important to realize that microaggressions aren’t superfluous, though. Megan McArdle, in How Grown-Ups Deal With ‘Microaggressions’, writes, “The debate over microaggressions often seems to focus on whether they are real. This is silly. Of course they’ve always been real; only the label is new. Microaggressions from the majority to the minority are as real as Sunday, and the effect of their accumulated weight is to make you feel always slightly a stranger in a strange land. The phenomenon is dispiriting, even more so because the offenders frequently don’t realize that their words were somewhere between awkward and offensive (once again). On the other hand, in a diverse group, the other thing you have to say about microaggressions is that they are unavoidable. And that a culture that tries to avoid them is setting up to tear itself apart.”
If you establish a positive right to be free from alienating comments, it’s hard to restrict that right only to people who have been victimized in certain ways, or to certain degrees. It’s easy to say everyone has a right not to be alienated. It’s also easy to say “you should only seek social or administrative sanction for remarks that are widely known and understood to be offensive slurs.” It is very, very hard to establish a rule that only some groups are entitled to be free from offense – because the necessary corollary is that it’s fine to worry the other groups with a low-level barrage of sneers, and those groups will not take this lying down. The result will be proliferation of groups claiming victim status, attempting to trump the victim status of others.
Complaints about microaggressions can be used to stop complaints about microaggressions. There is no logical resting place for these disputes; it’s microaggressions all the way down. And in the process, they make impossible demands on members of the ever-shrinking majority: to know everything about every possible victim group, to never inadvertently appropriate any part of any culture in ways a member doesn’t like, or misunderstand something, or make an innocent remark that reads very differently to someone with a different experience. Which will, of course, only hasten the scramble for members of the majority to gain themselves some sort of victim status that can protect them from sanction.
Love in abundance: Hana Low on the intersections between queer human and non-human animal liberation by Animal Voices Many of us have heard of the term “trickle-down economics”, but Hana Low wants to introduce us to “trickle-up social justice”. Coined by Dean Spade, this term is the jumping off point of a talk Hana gives about the connections between fighting oppression for LGBTQ communities and non-human animals.
Hana alludes to a few common struggles that these groups might face, such as the mainstream views that the lives of LGBTQ humans or non-human animals are “cute” or “tragic”. These two judgments ignore the diversity of all human and non-human animals, while also creating hierarchies that suggest that the most relatable to the hegemonic group are the ones most deserving of freedom and justice.
Hana also offers insight into other important topics that animal advocates should be aware of. They speak about the ways in which different groups have their bodily autonomy restricted or removed. Hana also tells us about community and justice-based solutions to crime that are alternatives to the current model of that incarcerates and does harm. Finally, we discuss the importance of having an approach to animal liberation that incorporates social justice for all groups, not just non-human animals, which includes addressing and being accountable for reproducing other forms of oppression, such as racism or heterosexism. Social justice should not leave anyone behind, and we should find solidarity in our pursuit of a more compassionate world.
Hana’s insights and comments on trickle-up animal liberation, the use of intelligence as a measure of an animal’s worth, how the harm in promoting “cute” animals is related to the harm in promoting heteronormative behaviors in the context of homosexuality (i.e. coaxing empathy in terms of similarities harms those furthest from the “norm”), the harm in portraying queer and non-human animals as “tragic beings”, the legal system and restorative justice, bodily autonomy, polyamory, discrimination and oppression in the vegan community, …the conversations in this episode were great. I often struggle with extending compassion towards animals that are not mammals (e.g. insects), so their view on love and the protection of all lives is inspiring.
Tell me what I️ should read next! I’m moving along pretty quickly with The Night Circus and hopefully should be done by the time thanksgiving gets here, so what should I️ read next? The other books on my list for the month are Ari and Dante, Turtles All the Way Down, and Eliza and Her Monsters
17-04-18 Good evening studybloggers! I’m not so active as i was before but still i want to update you guys of what’s happening in my life. I’ve been into reading books nowadays and my cr is: Turtles All the Way Down by John Green. You can check it out on my instagram (@mainimal.feed) since i’m more active there, also if you want to see b&w minimal theme, yep mine’s like that. Have a good sleep everyone!
ps. I’ll be trying to upload some notes next week. :) Post link
I decided to do a John Green art thingy with An Abundance of Katherines kind of layout, with all the little things that remind me of the books he wrote. And ya boi is very proud that they’ve read EVERY SINGLE ONE! And yeah the books are in order, and, yeah hope you like it!
so Turtles All The Way Down is a thing and just like thank god i hung onto this blog bc the biggest difference between now and 5.5 years ago is that i study creative writing now and everyone i know will judge my hardcore john green love. hello again, nerdfigteria. i’ve missed u
