I had this strange behaviour I've been puzzled about for my whole life, and I'm wondering if this is a common thing amongst people or if I'm just odd.
Embarrasingly, I used to be an anti-feminist when feminism was becoming more overtly mainstream during 2010's. However, what got me out of this phase was learning about terfs and how feminist women can be horribly transphobic and wrong against trans women. Even though I'm no expert on feminism, I find value and liberation with feminism when it is utilized in liberatory way. My hatred of feminism came from the harmful belief that "feminism is de-humanizing women by only allowing women to exist as people who are opressed by the patriarchy and men, therefore robbing agency and power from women", and it was learning that women and feminists aren't inheriently more innocent and harmless that made me more feminist. And that goes the same with other types of identities and activism, like anti racism and queer politics. Strangely, I feel more empowered when I see people with marginalized identities that I share with act horribly than when they're just talked about as the "opressed figures in opressive society". In fact, I feel dehumanized by the latter. I'm in NO WAY encouraging people with marginalized identities should be deliberately horrible, but this is more like how my mind functions. Why does my mind work like that? I'm a Gen Z person who grew up internalizing neoliberalism that is so prevalent in our contemporary society, so maybe that's the reason? Maybe seeing women behaving badly gives me some sort of illusion of liberation and empowerment because our society forces us to think in absolute binary of "the opressed and the opressor" amongst other things?
I didn't know how to feel about this mindset because it's 100% problematic, but I've been reading and enjoying your substacks lately (the one where you talk about how closeted trans people don't consider themselves as real people who have their own preference hit WAY TOO HARD for me) and thought maybe you would be interested in what I have to say.
I relate pretty heavily to what you say.
I found mainstream liberal feminism absolutely nauseating as a kid growing up in the 2000's, and in fact found chauvinistic, hookup-culturey anti-feminism/post-feminism far more alluring because it allowed me to think of myself as a free agent making a choice, rather than a 'victim' of circumstances.
A lot of systemic analyses of oppression can feel really disempowering and dehumanizing. Most theorizing about patriarchy, sexism, racism, etc, they don't offer you a hopeful route out of how you are being treated if you are marginalized, for one. And because we existing an ideologically very Christian and moralizing cultural milieu, we tend to equate suffering with goodness, and therefore are encouraged to see the marginalized as more pure and less complexly human than those who are not marginalized. But "positive" dehumanization is still dehumanization. To deny that a person can be as complex and shitty as anyone else simply because they are a victim of sexism, anti-Blackness, or ableism is to not allow them to be a full person.
Often the supposed moral superiority of the oppressed is used as an argument for the oppressed to be liberated -- as if their acceptance into society as full human beings is conditional. This is a burden that many marginalized people carry and internalize themselves. They think they must always behave patiently, understand others' perspectives, hold all the right opinions on all topics, and be perfect bastions of solidarity and political awareness if they are ever going to win freedom or be treated with any shred of respect. And if they falter from this pedastal on which they have been placed, they are punished far more severely than a non marginalized person would be, and they already have more to lose. This means talking about anything negative they feel or have done gets
Even as oppressed communities make some small social gains that take the form of improved media representation, things kinda get worse, because then there is a confused pressure placed on media depictions of marginalized people to make sure they are not stereotypic or even at all negative. To show a marginalized character being selfish, violent, crazy, or messy is assumed to be offensive innately. This means that the handful of women main characters, Black protagonists, etc that we see in our stories are unfailingly good and not very interesting or human, whereas our white boys get to be gritty and unfair and lashing out of trauma and just far far easier to relate to. This also gives us less opportunity to really flex our empathy for women, Black people, and other marginalized groups, because the narratives we consume literally ask us to do that less often than they ask us to take the perspective of a compelling sexy evil white boy.
I personally find really shmoopy, feel-good, simplistic depictions of members of my community to be just tooth-rottingly insincere. Most of the trans people that I know are fucking train wrecks and have hurt one another deeply! We do things like cheat on our partners, alienate our family members out of anger at past hurts that we never articulated and never offered a chance at redemption from, use substances to excess to cope with dysphoria, cast one another as villains in our traumatized minds' shadow plays, use our marginalized status to gain social media attention or fame, present our singular lived experiences as emblematic of our community as a whole, lie, act incredibly fucking racist and ableist, adopt pets we do not have the capacity to care for, and just about every other very human thing. I do not like a Love Simon style media depiction. I like my trans characters like Ames in Detransition, Baby, or the toxic couple of Joker the Harlequin and Mister J in The People's Joker.
I like when we fucking suck. I support women's wrongs. And in real life, I feel better and safer when I find myself in a community where people are allowed to fail. I hate AA because it's so forcibly Christian, but I *love* a lot of trans people who are in recovery, because they have a tolerance for bad behavior and a storied past of fuckups (and a tendency to romanticize those fuckups) that allows room for someone like me, a BPD-coded psycho trans person who has cheated, lied, cast normal people as villains when I was triggered and confused and stood to gain from having such a narrative of myself, started hormones and changed my name without telling anybody in my life for months, lightly stalked partners *and* has been stalked, and just generally is a human who has done a lot of crazy shit and learned from it.
There are sympathetic reasons why I did some of the more fucked up stuff I have done, but I fundamentally do not think of myself or other people as moral agents, rather I see us as social animals who will do nearly whatever we can to preserve social ties when those things are under attack, because ostracism feels like death and often literally is for us. I resonate the most with the girlies and gays who have also been kinda vile and desperate under such circumstances, I think oppression does contribute to it but that it does not excuse it or fully explain it, and I like that human beings are just animals akin to any other. We are all capable of harm and hurt and silliness and chaos and that is so much more interesting than being good.
There is nothing problematic with you liking what you like. Having emotions is not a moral action. Having preferences is not a moral action. Those things are just feelings, and they exist within you regardless of whether you acknowledge them as real, but it's generally better to acknowledge them.
And I reckon you probably have a lot of good reasons to feel most comfortable among terrible women and problematic people of color etc.
Do you feel more safe when there is room to make a mistake?
Do you like being around people who don't require you have a harsh filter placed upon yourself?
Do you find it easy to forgive others, but not yourself?
Do you think all marginalized people deserve grace and the dignity of a comfortable, safe life, even if they have been pieces of shit?
If your answer to these questions are generally yes, then it's no wonder your prefer the problematic among us to the virtuous! None of us really are virtuous after all. We're just living things. And that's enough! It's gratifying and humanizing to see that side of things, not just us being talked about as angels.
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