@ceanothusspinosis asked me to explain how internet community harassment is spiritual abuse. long post is long, caveat lector, hit J to skip, you know the drill.
first, we need to define some terms. spiritual abuse is a specific form of emotional abuse that most often happens in religious communities and/or cults. it's a colloquial term, so there's no official definition of it.
the best definition of spiritual abuse I can find is that it's emotional abuse that uses your spiritual beliefs to make you comply.
the classic examples of spiritual abuse are things like "a cult leader demands you give them your stuff/sex/personal information because God Wants You To", "your religion demands that you pray the gay away", and "the members of your religion shun or harass you if you break the religion's rules."
the thing that's uniquely damaging about spiritual abuse, beyond the usual consequences of emotional abuse, is that a spiritual abuser re-defines your most deeply-held beliefs specifically to hurt you. if you want to, say, be a Good Christian, a spiritual abuser will tell you that being a Good Christian means giving up your freedom of choice, your sense of right and wrong, your right to your own thoughts, your consent, your personal possessions, and sometimes even your body. You have to choose- do you accept your abuser's definition (and let yourself be hurt), or do you reject it (and thus reject what you're being told are your most deeply held beliefs)?
this can get even nastier when an entire community is abusive, or when you don't share the same beliefs as the spiritual abuser. you are under an intense amount of pressure to change your beliefs into a more convenient shape, one that makes you easier to control. if you don't change your beliefs, they hurt you. if you don't let someone else define what's important to you, how you think, how you act? they hurt you. with every tool they have and with everything that matters most to you. over. and over. and over again. your only choices are to give in or leave your community. and both feel like dying.
change your beliefs, the spiritual abuser says, or you are Bad, and we must hurt you.
the really shitty thing about spiritual abuse is that it's not actually about any given belief, it's about control. it's about making sure the individual never questions the leader or the community. it's about keeping everyone in line. it's about giving the community a safety valve- somewhere to put all their rage at having to live up to an abusive religion, a target that they can hurt with malevolent glee. it will never end, because an abuser will never be satisfied with the amount of control they have over you.
you will always be asked to twist the things you believe into a shape that makes you easier to control, always asked to find some new thing that you're not allowed to enjoy, always told to hate a new group of people. it won't end unless you leave. and if you leave, there's the threat that they'll hurt you even if you never speak to them again, because you're Forever Bad Now.
...ideological internet harassment, especially intracommunity harassment, works on the same goddamn principle.
let me give you an example. say you're a trans-positive feminist. you post something on twitter that's trans-positive. a TERF mob finds you and starts harassing you- arguing with you while constantly moving the goalposts, insulting you in every way imaginable, and maybe even sending you death threats. they'll accuse you of being an anti-feminist or a libfem; they'll tell you you're not really a feminist at all.
if you're a feminist, obviously, this is extremely distressing. for a lot of us Extremely Online Folks, our belief in justice and equality is way more important than any religious beliefs we might hold. you're being told that you're bad at living up to your most fundamental beliefs, by a huge group of people. and if you don't immediately apologize and go full TERF, they threaten to never stop.
there is an implicit ultimatum with TERF harassment: change your most deeply held beliefs, or you are Bad, and we must hurt you.
if you don't change your beliefs, they hurt you. if you don't let someone else define what's important to you, how you think, how you act? they hurt you. with every tool they have and with everything that matters most to you. over. and over. and over again. even once the great mass of the group has found a new target, you'll still get some shit from the most fanatical haters. until you publically grovel or log off, they will keep hurting you.
and the more I think about it, the more I see the same pattern in just about every kind of intracommunity internet harassment. change your most deeply-held beliefs, or you are an acceptable punching bag. let us define what's important to you, or you're Bad and we'll punish you. and it's never about a specific belief- it's about control. it's about making sure that anyone who steps a little bit away from their specific microcommunity's consensus gets Punished. there's that same malevolent glee to it, that same pressure-release that lets a toxic community keep being toxic without turning that anger inward. and there's that same never-ending cycle of harassment, of some new Problematic thing that you have to hate, of someone who's the main character of twitter Forever Bad Now and Must Be Hurt.
you see it in queer communities. you see it in feminist and ~alpha male~ communities. you see it with TERFs and trans folks, antishippers and proshippers, tankies and anarchists. this kind of ideology-focused spiritual abuse is fucking everywhere, and if there's any overlap between a community you're in and someone who has any difference in strongly-held beliefs? you might fall victim to it.
the reason I've been thinking about it is that, as An Internet Creative Person, I'm real likely to fall prey to this kind of harassment. if you ask for any kind of visibility, you make yourself a target. if you're part of any kind of ~community~ - and on the internet, "being visibly trans" counts- you make yourself a target.
...I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to avoid this kind of harassment. there are stories I've floated around writing that I've just avoided writing, because they will make people Mad At Me. fuck, I'm scared to write anything with a transmasc protagonist, much less one who isn't Traditionally Heroic. because i will get harassed for it. i'm scared about talking about the game i'm doing freelance work for, because some of the costume designs are.... Problematique. i spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to keep people on the internet from being mad at me.
you can't negotiate with spiritual abusers. there is nothing you can do to make them not be mad at you. they do not care what you're actually doing or why you're doing it. they want control; they want a pressure release. you're just a means to an end.
and like, i knew this intellectually before. but framing it as spiritual abuse really drove it home for me, y'know? it's not just ~bullying~, it's not just ~being problematic~. it's a system of abuse i've seen before. i know how to deal with it- the only way to deal with it is Not Giving A Fuck What They Think Anymore and ignoring every word they say.
