thinking about ‘masochistic epistemology’ vs all that leftist theory stuff
i watched contrapoints’s video on incels (it’s a decent video, but fairly long, so like only watch it if you already like contrapoints imo, and cw for discussion of self harm and quoting people expressing a misogynistic worldview), and like, main topic aside...
lots of tw I know have some history of using 4chan (me included, though to a pretty minor extent). what I didn’t know until watching that video is that in the (many) years since I was in school, they added a /lgbt/ board (now derisively nicknamed /tttt/), which has somehow turned into a place for closeted/newly transitioning trans women to go to validate each others’ self-hate and tell each other that they’ll never pass because of bone structure or some other nonsense reading.
that’s like... an entire trans subculture I wasn’t even aware of! i knew about the ‘trap’ thing, but this seems to be different.
and it is also really really fucking sad, and I hope those women escape that space.
but on another level it’s also really weird to me that 4chan, which fancies itself the place where the rules of society are suspended, where people post the wildest porn they can imagine on /d/ etc., would turn out to be the place where tw would recreate the dynamics of the thankfully-dying ‘trans support groups’, obsessed with appearance and ‘passing’ and telling each other to get expensive surgery and shattering each others’ self-esteem.
I mean, I guess it makes sense on some level that 4chan, one of the most ‘reactionary’ (in whatever sense you prefer!) parts of the internet, dominated by the concerns of young white men beyond all else... would be the place that a punishing reactionary dynamic takes hold among trans women who end up there. I guess it would be in less toxic and hostile spaces that we’d find a way to take pride in being trans and refusing to ‘pass’, process our traumas, refuse ‘stealth’ and surgery, build solidarity etc. Far from a hugbox full of disingenuous praise, ‘you look beautiful, hon’, as the ‘tttt’ users would apparently have it, this is a place where we’ve realised our priorities are different.
and yet. there’s still a level where it feels weird to me.
Contrapoints’s discussion of the incels and their fucked up worldview, and the similar attitudes that prevail in ‘tttt’ - what she terms a ‘masochistic epistemology’, a kind of ‘online self-harm’ - also I think kind of underlines just how much difference it’s made to de-naturalise all these categories of sex, gender and so on; to present it as a temporary system of a social relations with its own history rather than ‘just the way the world is, lie down and rot’, to raise the possibility that it could function differently or perhaps even not at all.
which isn’t to say I’m naive enough to think that gender, capital, etc. will end in my lifetime any more than they did in Marsha P Johnson’s lifetime or the lifetime of any of the other tw who struggled with this throughout history; but just knowing it doesn’t have to be this way, that there’s a possibility of defiance, means a lot.
so like... that’s one reason I read all this leftist theory and all that. not because I believe I am going to find the key to changing the world somewhere in a communist journal from Brighton or a dusty book from the 1800s, the Correct Theory that I can hand out to the Masses and and bring about the revolution, but because it helps make sense of all the awful shit I encounter, to change my own priorities, because critical engagement is some kind of antidote in its own right...
and ok, sometimes it can be more depressing, because you learn about all the awful miserable things that happened in history, the genocides and executions and systematised misery. reading history and theory can still be part of the ‘masochistic epistemology’, with a theme of ‘I’m not doing enough, things are so bad and I will never be doing enough to fight them’ or perhaps ‘oppressive social systems are too strong for us to overthrow’, rather than the incels’ obessions like ‘I will never have my socially mandated Wife And 2.5 Kids a Girl Friend(TM)’. it’s not a panacea to ‘masochistic epistemology’.
but still. I think this is a dimension of how like, “online trans women saved my life” etc., that I haven’t really acknowledged. and a better answer to ‘why do you spend all this time reading theory if you can’t do anything with it’. my therapist used to say that i should stop living in my head so much, but I think that’s to fail to acknowledge how all that ‘in my head’ stuff has helped - even if it’s just a temporary coping mechanism.
Marx may have said “philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”. And he was right! But also interpreting the world is important too, I guess, if changing it is to even seem like a possibility.
