When I began this blog six years ago, the Men’s Rights Movement was little more than a curiosity. I’ve watched, with both amusement and alarm, as this small movement has inspired, and ultimately has been eclipsed by, a broader anti-feminist, anti-woman backlash, online and off, driven largely by the same white male rage.
Each new iteration of this backlash has been more toxic — and, sadly, more influential — than the last, ultimately culminating in the rise of the alt-right. Which is to say, the newest incarnation of fascism.
Now the openly racist, openly misogynistic idol of the alt-right has been elected president. Obviously, not everyone who voted for Trump was white or male. But his candidacy was powered in large part by the same kind of white male rage I have been writing about virtually every day for the last six years.
While Trump’s election is, without question, a catastrophe — in ways I will be chronicling in detail over the next few months and years — Trumpism isn’t built to last. Trump’s victory was a narrow one — indeed, he actually lost the popular vote — and the demographic group that served as the backbone of his movement (white men) is shrinking relative to those groups Trump has railed against.
In many ways, Trumpism seems to be a classic example of an “extinction burst,” a term used by behavior psychologists to describe a weird and seemingly paradoxical pattern of behavior. As Popsugar summed it up in a post earlier this week:
[W]hen a certain type of behavior or action isn’t really getting its desired results any longer — say, a child’s tantrums failing to get Mom or Dad’s attention — there’s often a period when a subject struggles even harder, makes more noise, and generally throws an extremely loud fit. In other words, extinction burst is that last-ditch ramping up before an inevitable flame-out.
Trumpism, like all backlashes, is doomed to fail. Unfortunately, it is likely to do a tremendous amount of damage before it goes, not so gently, into that good night. In the meantime, I will do my best to make sense of the toxic stew of racism and misogyny at the heart of Trumpism, and to provide support for those fighting against it or just trying to get by). And so I’ve changed the tagline of this blog from “the new misogyny, tracked and mocked” to “surviving the Trumpocalypse” to reflect this broader focus.
Don’t worry: I will still be writing about MGTOWs and MRAs and the other strange misogynistic creatures that I’ve been writing about from the beginning. While I recognize they are but a sideshow in the era of Trump, I just can’t quit them, and I suspect that a lot of you can’t either.
Valerie,
First of all, this post is titled “Surviving the Trumpocalypse.” What made you think it was an appropriate time and place for debate? People have a bad habit on the internet of marching into a space, demanding debate, and then clutching their pearls when the people participating in the conversation you’ve derailed aren’t having it. Would you barge in on a conversation to demand a debate offline? Probably not. I’m not fond of demands for education either, but here’s some etiquette 101 for you. Don’t do that.
Second of all, you say you want debate, but all you’ve done is whine about mean we are and how we need to be nice to the people who hate us. If you’re going to demand a debate, at least have something substantive to discuss in mind.
Also, you’re contradicting yourself. Earlier you were saying Trumpkins aren’t racist because the people in your town aren’t racist and cheered for the black and middle eastern football players. Now, in a bid to elicit sympathy you’re going to talk about the racism you and your kids experience? It’s kind of hard to believe you’re here in good faith when you change your story to whatever it’ll take to engage in some guilt tripping.
PS: those people who yelled slurs at you and your kids? They almost certainly are those Trump supporters you’re so eager to bend over backwards to accommodate.
In case anyone doubts me on this, here is Valerie’s first comment
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2016/11/11/surviving-the-trumpocalypse/comment-page-1/#comment-1046904
She explicitly said that people in her town don’t care about racial issues. Just health care and jobs. Because tax cuts for the wealthy and taking away people’s coverage is going to help with that so much. Now it’s all about how dare we say she’s racist (did anyone say that?) because she and her kids are the ones always attacked by the racists. So, she’s clearly being dishonest about something here.
And I find it strange that she keeps talking about her game. How was telling us we need to be nice to Trumpkins a good segue into requesting feed back on her game. Why should we volunteer our time for that?
@Valerie
I had a long reply prepared for you, where I was going to patiently address several issues with the attitude you show by coming in here and dismissing people’s concerns based on your ignorance, then reacting to their anger by chastising them, and after denying the validity of several people’s feelings (while, ironically, claiming you care about people’s feelings), you make the whole conversation about you and your hurt feelings.
______________________________________________________
TW: Depression, abuse, suicidal tendencies, gaslighting, bullying and bullying apologetics, mention of rape.
______________________________________________________
But the more I tried to explain things to you patiently and without antagonizing you, the more I found myself spiraling back into the bottomless pit of self-loathing my entire life has been. Do you know why? Because from a young age, I was the victim of merciless bullying. It was physical, psychological and occasionally worse. I experienced it from my classmates, from family friends, and even from my own beloved family. It changed me. But you know what? That wasn’t even the worst part.
The worst part was how the only help, the only advice I ever got from any authority figure, even from my own parents, was that I should be nice to the bullies. That they probably had problems at home that made them angry and spiteful. That since I was a pretty bright lad, they saw me as a threat and were afraid of me, and that it was my responsibility to alleviate those fears. That I should try to see things from their point of view, that by treating them with kindness, I could make them realize the error of their ways and potentially turn them into friends.
It didn’t work. The bullying escalated. The few times I finally tried to fight back, despite my mom insisting that I should never, ever, stoop to their level, I ended up sharing an equal slice of the blame. I was fortunate enough that our family moved away and I ended up in a new school with a much more open and welcoming general attitude for a while. Eventually, after changing schools a few more times, we moved back and the shit started again, but for many years, I enjoyed a blissful time-out that probably saved my life. Still, the damage had been done. My personality was already irreparably broken. I had gone from a smart, optimistic kid who did everything in his power to make others smile and laugh to a pessimistic, quiet, introverted kid who was deathly afraid of people. This would come to define me as a person forever after.
My teen and young adult years were filled with self-hatred and self-destructive tendencies coupled with stubbornly maintaining friendships and relationships with people who constantly abused me (all the while trying to maintain a facade of ”good Christian” because I didn’t want to worry anyone), but also self-reflection as I started to unravel all the fucked-up lessons I had learned in a society that values the feelings of bullies above the feelings of their victims. Slowly, through many unfortunate life lessons, I started seeing through the gaslighting I had been subjected to and to understand that it wasn’t just me, I wasn’t just making mountains out of molehills, I wasn’t just making things up and being overly melodramatic.
A little over a year ago, I started breaking down utterly. I was having daily panic attacks and couldn’t handle simple, everyday tasks. My brain didn’t work anymore and all I wanted to do was sleep. All day, every day. I was isolating myself from society and I suffered from a terrible body image problem and with it, something that could only be described as an eating disorder that was slowly depriving my body of all nutrition because I would rather be dead than fat. Through some miracle of health care, I finally ended up breaking down in front of a nurse student just making a standard health screening, but who, thankfully, helped me get the ball rolling. Soon thereafter, I was diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety, a diagnosis that had been years overdue because I kept doubting myself and my feelings, telling myself that I was overreacting at every turn.
I’m doing better now, but I’m still far away from being okay. I’m still depressed. I’m still suicidal. I still have anxiety and panic attacks. I still fear people. I still haven’t been able to process the details of my rape because I’m hell-bent on denying that it ever happened. Hell, I’m a man, I can’t imagine how much worse my whole situation would be if I was a woman.
___________________________________________________
/TW
___________________________________________________
I don’t know why I wrote this. I’m crying just trying to admit all these things to myself. I guess what I wanted to say that please please please don’t let your little girl go through this. Don’t tell her to be complacent. Don’t tell her to change herself and deny herself and her own feelings so that others will accept her. Don’t tell her that she owes bullies anything.
And please, just stop with the tone arguments. Bullying will not stop with kindness. Consider that many of us here have tried your method and found that it doesn’t work. You yourself admit you’ve managed to make a difference exactly twice. Bigots don’t care about discussion, they don’t care about meeting us halfway across. I myself have tried many times, and it feels like beating my head against the proverbial wall, with the difference that the wall will escalate its violence. Kindness does not help if the person you’re kind to shows no inclination to change. On the contrary, when you’re being nice to someone when they’re acting like a bully, they’re going to take your kindness as reinforcement of their view that bullying makes people complacent. Your method does the exact opposite of working: it empowers bullies and creates victims. I’m an example of that.
And now I need to go sit in the shower for half an hour, eat a bucket of ice cream while watching some mindless entertainment, and then take a strong sleeping pill so that I’ll be able to sleep at all tonight. My studies and life will just have to wait.
@WWTH
My favorite part was when Valerie was, like, “My friend just wants to be known as AMERICAN which I do OUT OF RESPECT,” even though they called them Native American and just plan Native.
Sure, Valerie, sure. Such respect.
Maybe Valerie is just bad with words and phrasing things, but they could at least have some consistency.
@Anarchonist
Enjoy yourself, buddy, and I hope you get some good sleep.
@Anarchonist
Take care 🙂
@Valerie
My 2nd comment to you contained an itemized list of how you fucked up. My only comment to @Lee pointed out a troubling linguistic failure. Y’all get lessons all the damn time, but we hafta be nice about it or ya don’t actually listen. You’re not the 1st to pull this nonsense, and ya won’t be the last. Just do me a favor, and pay attention to what we’re telling you before you say the line you crossed was unknown. I told you what it was. Unknown my ass…
I’m unclear as to why we’re obligated to provide free etiquette lessons to an adult in the first place.
@WWTH
Granted 🙂
I’m guessing Lee doesn’t know much about feminist history.
@Anarchonist, <3
You're on the way up, friend. Thank you for sharing that, I can understand how hard that must have been. It's gonna get better.
@Valerie,
Hi.
http://www.radiomuseo.it/joomla/images/collector/collection/dischi/lilla%20vacabonda%20%2001.gif
I'm an AI researcher. It sounds fancy, but it's really just a dorky math and programming job. One thing it's given me though is a lot of reason to investigate cognitive neuroscience, consciousness, psychology, and how-our-brains-work. I'd like to help you break down why your post (which I think you posted with the best of intentions) was met with hostility. I'll be brief and there won't be any homework 🙂
You live on a high island. It's typical of the rural midwest – I live in similar circumstances. The culture here is "be nice" – hospitality to strangers, thoughtfulness to neighbours, and a smile for everyone you meet. They're good values. I have them too.
But every culture has negative and positive attributes. I believe that Anarchonist above explained exactly how hurtful that a veneer of niceness can be – it can shield hate, bigotry, racism, misogyny, and more.
There's a few hard facts of being human that very few people have grappled with, and must. People often evade them by saying "I have a gay friend", or they conceal them with a smile and an apple pie.
Humans are racist. It’s biological – our brains take longer to perceive faces that don’t look similar to those of our parents. Those scarce milliseconds are enough to cause confusion, which very easily turns into disapproval and mistrust. All of this is unconscious too – all you are aware of is a feeling of unease. The only way that this can be fought is through explicit, conscious awareness of racism. This is why one can identify a racist when someone says “I’m not a racist”. Our minds betray us.
Humans have a drive to defend. It’s one of the basic drives, it’s something we all need to express from time to time. It’s why we reacted in anger when you questioned us, and why you got defensive when we called you out. It’s innate. It’s also why you’re so quick to defend your home town from an accusation of racism – and, by extension, defend Trump. It’s an instinctual reaction brought on by adrenaline and the fight-or-flight impulse.
People are largely unaware of their motivations. We have emotional reactions to thing before we are consciously aware of them. Our reasons are rationalizations. This applies to you, to me, to everyone. The only way to be relatively sure that ones’ reactions aren’t knee-jerk rationalizations of increasing complexity is to be deeply critical of one’s self. Few people do this. You can get an idea of how correct a person is by how easily evidence sways them and how well they can understand evidence – the easier they’re swayed, the more likely are that they’re right.
(This, incidentally, is why people calling Hillary Clinton a flip-flopper makes me so mad. Changing your mind on something is good!)
Rural midwestern values mask and ignore these facts.
They say that “I judge everyone based on their actions and how good they are, not on their colour”, ignoring the fact that their very brains betray them.
They value defending something, even if it’s wrong, just because it’s from here. Conservatism. We do this because it’s how things are done ’round here.
They suppress emotions and denigrate them, claiming to be motivated by “clear thinking” while ignoring the fact that thinkin’ ain’t clear unless you put yourself through an emotional meat grinder first.
There’s a wealth of knowledge out there on how racism absolutely boils under the surface of places where it doesn’t seem to life. How sexism festers in a workplace with a stated equality policy. How fascism broods within the halls of Democracy.
You have privilege to ignore things that others cannot. Look at that link (Wikipedia) for an overview; the footnote articles on that one are great, too. It’s not an insult, either – we all have different sorts of privilege in different ways. Try to find yours, so that you can see more clearly from the perspectives of others.
Best of luck,
– Scildfreja
Good f–ing gods, I wish that Scildfreja Unnýðnes were my Patronus, but all I got is a seething, barely-sapient ball of rage that has been hissy and biting for the last six days.
Well, Valerie,
really does not seem to me to be an accurate description of what you were doing when you said
and
Is that how you compassionately listen to your biracial kids? No wonder you never hear any complaints from them. You are gaslighting here, you gaslight your daughter with the old “walking thesauruses have only themselves to blame” routine.
@Skiriki, here was my first draft. It was angrier:
Patience is one part anger, one part repetition, one part repetition.
@Skiriki, I can’t be your patronus, but I can be your spirit.
For certain values of “spirit”, anyways.
http://www.popartdiva.com/ProductImages/Fulls/LemonDropMartini1212Canvas-.jpg
@Kat
I’ll thank you to worry about your own health risks and let me gauge mine, if you’d be so terribly kind. If anecdata’s what you want, I have a lot of stories of my own of what people who can’t get health insurance, or can’t afford to use what they have, have to do to get by sometimes. And the occasional faint beats the hell out of suicide, which is where I, for one, was headed before I started HRT. And that’s not to mention the times my coworkers and I were pooling our anxiety meds (those who could get any) to get through the day at the abusive hellhole I used to work for. There were a few suicide attempts on the actual call floor during the time I was there. And that’s just me personally. So, not to put to fine a point on it, keep your damn opinions to yourself here, because not everybody actually has less risky options.
If Roe v. Wade is overturned, are we going to tell desperate women not to get abortions because it’s illegal and unsafe or are we going to create a new Jane Collective?
Okay, I skipped this earlier but Kat, listen, it’s hard enough as it is to get hormones. Many doctors won’t prescribe it unless a patient goes through several years of therapy determine whether or not they’re “trans enough” as it is. You can buy hormones online, yeah, but they’re from an unreliable source and may not even be hormones in the first place.
With Trump and Pence’s policies being anti-trans, those on hormone replacement therapy are going to lose their hormones. Dali has already told you her story and I can’t imagine what it would be like for her to lose her treatment.
Things go back, Kat. Things regress. I can’t imagine the pain of being on HTR, feeling better, getting there, and then having all that taken away from you.
Hormonal birth control is the safest alternative to prescribed HTR when prescribed HTR is unavailable. Before HTR became as available as it is now, women used birth control as estrogen all the time. Is it the best method? No. Does it work? Yes.
So don’t you start saying those things. I understand it comes from a place of concern but it’s misguided. People’s well-being is at stake, people’s lives are riding on getting those pills if worst comes to worst.
On a related sidenote, there are several places where Planned Parenthood will give hormones out without needing a doctor’s prescription with just signing a waver. If any of my trans peep happen to live in any of the areas in the link and need hormones, there you go. Hopefully they’ll provide you some ideas for safe alternatives to your hormone treatment in case of a Trump presidency.
You’re an angel, Jack. Hopefully Planned Parenthood gets enough support to be able to expand that resource, regardless of what happens.
@Scildfreya Unnýðnes
Oh WOW did you capture rural living and “Minnesota Nice”.
*bows in reverence*
I hope you don’t mind but I do try to imitate your argument style. I also take your posts quite seriously, and although I may not know enough about certain topics to believe absolutely everything you stay, I do tend to think about what you say and to incorporate the parts that resonate most strongly with me into my own arguments.
Me too. But in the meantime hopefully I get some call back for some jobs I apply to (crossing fingers for the post office job because government work has benefits like insurance) so I’ll be able to get some birth control for anyone who needs it. Or if things go okay, maybe I’ll be able to save up for my own HRT or getting out of my parent’s place.
Of course, currently I’m on an antsy emotional high right now, I’m feeling both hyper and down, optimistic but anxious. I don’t like it.
@Anarchonist: That sounds like a miserable upbringing. I had a fair bit of bullying growing up myself, but my story is different from yours in two ways:
1) My parents told me to stand up for myself, and that being different is often a good thing, and if other kids didn’t like it, so what?
2) My 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade teachers were all thrilled to let me stay in the classroom and read during recess and lunch *. So, the last time I got in real fights was second grade 🙂
@Scildfreja: I think you put your finger on what bothers me about ‘Iowa Nice’: When everyone is compelled to be ‘nice’, you’ve no way of knowing who will have your back when the chips are down. In Nevada (as an example), it’s being a selfish jackass that is culturally favored, so when people are genuinely nice, you know that those are people you can count on, because there is absolutely no reward for pretending to be ‘nice’.
*My 6th grade teacher thought that was unhealthy, and made me go out to recess. Fortunately, by then I was the biggest kid on the playground, and the bullies left me alone.
One more reason I’ve decided to ask for donations to PP instead of Christmas presents this year.
@Joekster
Quoting Dar Williams’s Iowa somehow seems to fit right now.
But way back where I come from,
We never mean to bother,
We don’t like to make our passions other people’s concern,
And we walk in the world of safe people,
And at night we walk into our houses and burn.
@Belladonna: exactly. I’d never read that before, but after living in Des Moines for three years, it fits. There are a great deal of genuinely good people there, but it’s a lot tougher to sort them out.
And, I’m going to think of you whenever I write atropine drops for a patient 🙂
@dreemr,
Born to families of homemakers and farmers. I’m suburban now, but this place was pretty rural growin’ up.
(My deep rooted anxiety and utter terror at being thought unkind have nothing to do with it, of course, nope nope nope)
I don’t mind and am flattered! You often do better than I do. And oh god I’m such a big faker I don’t know nothin bout nothin
Take the parts that work, leave the parts that don’t. You’ve got a whole lifetime of observation and wisdom to share, more than me. It’s just a question of knowing how to tap it. That’s different for everybody.
I really wouldn’t wish my personal philosophy on anyone, though, cause it’s not really made for emotional well-being.
@Jack, I was gonna be all “Take the compliment, Jack!” and then I went and didn’t take a compliment, so I’ma give you a tiny lizard friend instead.
http://i.imgur.com/H87251B.jpg
Your brain is trying to resolve two conflicting mental states – that indicates that you’re unsure about things. That’s okay! Being undecided is the most wonderful gift in the world. Don’t try to force it.
I mean, try to push it towards optimism and away from anxiety, obviously! But now’s the time when you’re going to be really primed to take in new ideas and new opinions. Now’s the time to change into a different person. Use that anxious energy to do something positive and new, if you can. Just a guess, but I think you’ll find it more effective and motivating than usual.
Go get’em!