Meltdown of the Phantom Snowflakes

[No]

http://thebaffler.com/blog/meltdown-phantom-snowflakes-penny#


        Demanding stoic “strength” from an oppressed person is just
        another way of silencing calls for reform

“Are you a strong woman?”

The camera crew wanted a snappy answer. We were filming a short news
segment on the beach in Brighton, with a frigid wind gusting around the
boom mic and seagulls circling overhead, screaming for chips. I didn’t
know how to reply.

The issue of strength comes up a lot these days—for me it’s one of the
standard questions I’ve come to expect when people ask me about
feminism. That day, however, it stung. The fact was that I’d barely made
it out of the house to meet the very nice people from Swiss TV, because
I’d spent the previous three hours trying and failing to get out of bed,
in a pit of seasonal depression darkened by political despair, somewhere
in between where the showering stage ends and the stage in which old
Placebo records start to really speak to you. I didn’t have the
structural integrity to be my usual snowflake self.

“I think that’s the wrong question to ask,” I said, trying to speak
clearly, and letting my eyes drift towards the horizon in an effort to
pass off bewilderment as profundity. I’ve never thought of myself as a
strong person, in any sense—I’m small, sensitive, prone to anxious
overthinking; moved to anger, I’m far more likely to cry than throw a
punch. It used to mystify me when people told me how strong I must be,
until I realized that it’s always after I am harassed in public, which
is something that happens to me on the regular, as it does to most women
who dare to express political opinions online. When the abuse leaves me
broken and wondering how to go on, I am told how strong I am, usually by
people who care and want to reassure themselves that there’s sense and
meaning to what’s happening to me.

When I fight back, though, when I continue to write about injustice in
the face of the bullying campaigns that are daily life for every female
activist I have met, precisely when I feel strongest—that’s when I’m
told I’m weak. A crybaby. Special snowflake. Whiner. Virtue-signaling, I
am told, by people who seem to believe that virtue never exists as a
standard to strive towards, only as a set of empty signs.

As politics turn darker, these slurs have become weaponized. Something
bigger is going on.

“My mother was a strong woman.”

I hear versions of this, usually as a non-sequitur, whenever I talk
about women’s liberation, and the men who deliver it appear to believe
it’s an answer to something. Occasionally the “strong woman” in question
is their grandmother, their wife, their daughter, any woman whose
humanity they reckon with on an intimate level—but usually it’s their
mother. Their mother was strong. Strong enough, it is implied, not to
need liberating. Strong enough to bear unfairness. Strong enough that
her children could come to terms with it, too.

    Much of modern life is traumatic, unbearable, and profoundly
    frightening.

We live in a culture that venerates wellness and self-improvement, both
as industry and personal discipline. Yet the strategies of modern
cultural production are bent constantly towards the repression of
emotion, the obsessive management of general feelings that, unchecked,
might expose two great unspoken truths. The first is that much of modern
life is traumatic, unbearable, and profoundly frightening. Acknowledging
this openly allows for a second truth, more dangerous in the scope of
its possibility: that it might not have to be this way.

I rarely ask whether people’s mothers were strong. The question to me
seems at best an irrelevance and at worst actively rude. But the fact
that this retort comes up so often speaks to a different understanding
of strength, a different positioning of strength against struggle. A
strong woman is a woman who bears oppression with minimal complaint. She
suffers the injustices of her sex and race and class without collapsing,
at least not where others can see.

For black women in particular, “strength” is a stereotype that contains
a demand for compliance. As Jarune Uwujaren writes at Everyday Feminism:

    The myth of the strong black woman, who is distinct from the strong
    black women that really walk this earth, reminds me of the myth that
    black wet nurses enjoyed breast feeding their masters’ children.

    This was a myth designed to make slave owners feel less guilty about
    the socioeconomic circumstances that forced black women to be
    mammies and nannies and housekeepers and maids back in “those” days.

    To be black and strong should involve fighting these injustices, not
    shrugging, concluding “life isn’t fair,” and shouldering on. Of
    course we have to deal with the world as it is in the meantime, but
    black strength is not an invitation for discrimination from others.

    Historically speaking, black women have done what they needed to
    survive, but this myth is sometimes used as an excuse to overlook
    problems of violence and discrimination against black women. “Oh,
    black women are strong, they can handle inequality.”

The corollary to “strong woman” is not “weak woman”; it’s just “woman.”
In the same way, the corollary to “weak man” is simply “man”—this sort
of strength, the strength that comes from emotional castration, the
strength to suffer in silence until you snap, to always punch down,
never out—that strength is assumed to be intrinsic to masculinity. Man
up. Stop sniveling.

The strength lauded in men of power and the strength demanded from
survivors of oppression and violence are part of the same authoritarian
logic, and it’s a logic that has the heart of the world in its small,
angry fists. Men—if they are white or otherwise privileged—are allowed
to express emotion through the vector of rage. Men may lash out. It is
understood that all that strength needs an outlet. They cannot
acknowledge their own intense emotions—hate, shame, pride—for what they
are. This makes them dangerously easy to manipulate.

Nascent fascism is all about the management and strategic redirection of
emotion, the culturing and reshaping of pain into violence, fear into
hate, shame into resentment, guilt into complicity. We think of fascism
as a phenomenon of pure ego, but it has just as much to do with the id:
raw emotion comes first and is justified later.

The placing of strength above compassion, might above morals, not just
in private but proudly and in public, is perhaps the most frightening
shift in popular discourse over the past six months. It is an extension
of the brutal logic of late capitalism into pitiless post-liberal
prejudice: winners are by nature better men, and if what it takes to win
is blithe disregard for your fellow human beings, then that is the
example to follow. 


As Moira Weigel noted at
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-correctness-how-the-right-invented-phantom-enemy-donald-trump>
/The/ /Guardian/
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-correctness-how-the-right-invented-phantom-enemy-donald-trump>,
Trump does not speak about diplomacy—instead, he speaks about making
deals. Dealmaking is different. When you make a deal, all that matters
is who has the stronger position, and who the weaker. If the art of the
deal and the art of politics are to be one and the same, the new agenda
is clear: the mighty are now free to vanquish the meek and congratulate
themselves over dinner.

There may be no compassion in this sort of strength, no decency and
goodness at the core of the “fuck your feelings” brigade, but there is
dignity—and it’s a kind of dignity that has been stripped, in
particular, from those with social privilege but relatively little
power. It is the violent valor of patriarchy and white supremacy, the
logic of conquest.

We like to believe, at least in the West, that we have left the age of
conquest and slavemaking far behind. This is nothing more than a
convenient fiction; it is a fiction, nonetheless, that placed limits on
the political imagination. Not so long ago, you could not simply invade
a country because you had bigger guns and felt like kicking their arse
and taking their stuff: you had to come up with excuses, talk about
bringing democracy, liberating women, ending whatever dreadful
dictatorships happened to be sitting on top of massive oil fields. At
home, if you wanted to confiscate the means of survival from elderly and
disabled people, you had to spend years persuading the public that this
was being done for their own good. That sort of handwaving will no
longer be necessary. All that matters now is who is strong and who is weak.

To demand “strength” from an oppressed person is to excuse their
oppression, to label them weak for voicing anything that looks like
dissent. That’s what we see when young people organizing for change are
labelled “generation snowflake.”  Dissent is called outrage, whining,
crying victim, virtue signaling—unless it’s angry white neoreactionaries
bravely fighting back against basic decency, in which case it’s called
“legitimate concerns.” The concerns of women and minorities can never be
legitimate—still less their pain.

Most of the more poisonous stereotypes about women, people of color and
other underprivileged groups play on the fear of unregulated emotion:
the hysterical wife, the violent, hypersexual black man, the screaming
homosexual, none of them possessing that “strength” that is the solemn
inheritance of the white man, who has learned to control his feelings by
suppressing them. In fact, of course, it is white men whose human
feelings have been treated as legitimate and worthy of analysis over
centuries of art, literature, and policymaking.

Of course, a society that has spent centuries denying the humanity of
women and people of color would struggle to come to terms with the idea
that those people might have real feelings. This is a great way of
acquitting itself from the reality of harm.

If we are to live in a sexist, racist, structurally violent world and
still believe in our own basic decency, the suffering of women and
minorities must be reconfigured as both contrived and trivial. If they
cry out for justice, they are crybabies. If they insist that things must
not go on like this, they are frail, pathetic. The pain of oppressed
people has always been terrifying to people from more privileged groups.
Their reaction is as panic-stricken and exaggerated as they accuse
“generation snowflake” of being. In a spectacular podcast meltdown,
ageing literary shock-jock Bret Easton Ellis flailed at the “little
snowflakes, when did you all become grandmothers and society matrons,
clutching your pearls in horror at someone who has an opinion about
something, a way of expressing themselves, that’s not the mirror image
of yours?”

    The number of articles and speeches condemning trigger warnings
    vastly outstrips the actual use of trigger warnings in art and academia.

The new right can’t interpret intense emotion as anything other than a
fatal flaw. This explains why they are uniquely obsessed with
“triggering” their perceived enemies. “Trigger warnings,” a largely
benign phenomenon that developed in student and online groups who wanted
to share potentially traumatic ideas without upsetting one another too
much, has provoked a hysterical and massively overblown backlash from
those who like to think of young, liberal black and queer people as
somehow weak, oversensitive, censorious. The number of articles and
speeches condemning trigger warnings vastly outstrips the actual use of
trigger warnings in art and academia. Still, the febrile community of
neo-fascists loves to talk about “triggering” liberals, journalists,
feminists, and activists into silence or submission, whilst at the same
time congratulating themselves for their commitment to free speech.

This tendency to frame resistance as “oversensitivity” and right-wing
reaction as an anti-censorship effort is disturbing, but it is also a
little pathetic: the magnitude of misunderstanding of what a “trigger
warning” is and what it’s for comes down to projection. If you have
always and only understood emotion as weakness, if every time you
complained of unfairness or cried out in pain you were told to shut up
and stop whining, then you will interpret those behaviors in others
through the grimy lens of your own learned responses.

One of the most childish tendencies of the new right—including, but not
limited to alt-right and neo-nazi groups—is that they persistently
accuse their perceived foes of the faults they most fear in themselves.
No, /you’re/ spoilt and entitled. /You’re/ throwing in your lot with a
frightening parade of murder-eyed fanatics. When today’s digitally
enabled white supremacists accuse Black Lives Matter activists of “white
genocide,” what else is it but dim and dreadful self-awareness projected
onto the dirty screen of the public sphere?

Donald Trump in particular is a Gordian knot for modern psychiatry: at
once an emblem of violent, impenetrable masculinity—the nasally-rigid,
iron-hearted business Svengali determined to slap America until it stops
sniveling—and a byword for hysterical sensitivity, a wailing man-baby
with a hair-trigger temper who almost nobody feels comfortable having
within five miles of the nuclear codes. Donald Trump is the
personification of hurt male feelings masquerading as strength.

The “special snowflake” jeer comes, originally, from the 1996 novel
/Fight Club/, the film of which is every yammering internet man-baby’s
favorite piece of ultra-violent Randian misogynist eye candy, where the
right and proper answer to boredom and alienation is to take your shirt
off and pummel a stranger. “You are not special,” says Brad Pitt,
shortly before he turns his gun on one of the few characters of color in
the film in a bizarre attempt to make him realize his dreams of being a
veterinarian, as if the only thing stopping a waiter from further study
were the lack of a sociopathic heavily armed white guy screaming Tumblr
motivational slogans in his face. “You’re not a beautiful and unique
snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.”

    Thanks for the structural analysis there, Brad.

Thanks for the structural analysis there, Brad. The snowflake smear
melts into a mess of signifiers as soon as you start to think about it.
Snowflakes are supposed to be unique, sensitive, and fragile: they melt
on your fingers, they are lovely and ephemeral. Atmospheric physicists,
however, contend that it is impossible to know whether or not every
snowflake is unique: the precise way the ice crystal structures form in
clouds makes it unlikely you’d ever find two exactly the same, but how
could you know for sure? Nor is every snowflake beautiful. Depending on
how fast they form, some are quite sloppy-looking, like street-stall
knockoff versions of the perfect stars replicated in pendants and Pixar
films.


Most aptly, snowflakes are not fragile. Yes, many of them melt, but most
of them fall together into something stronger. They pack down into
glaciers that outlive civilizations and carve out mountains; they form
snowbanks that sweep away whole towns. Millions of snowflakes together
can make an avalanche, a hurricane, a killing frost.

It was freezing on Brighton beach, and the nice people from Swiss
television wanted an answer. I should have told them that author and
activist bell hooks speaks of the power of “strategic mourning” —the
difficulty and necessity of acknowledging feelings, letting them move
through you so you can move on—but I remembered this quotation too late.
After the TV people packed up, I spent the rest of the next two days
sitting in front of the Giant UV Lamp For People Who Get Sad In The
Winter. The very presence of the Sad Lamp, the interior decorating
equivalent of the Cone of Shame, makes the whole thing feel more
manageable. The blackest existential dread can’t be taken quite so
seriously if a lamp helps.

The contemporary language of oppression is not about sensitivity and
victimhood, whatever the old and new wish to believe. It is an
expression of strength and knowledge through shared suffering, a cry of
rage and outrage that contains its own demand for change. If refusing to
accept injustice is weakness, then I can only aspire one day to the
weakness of writers and activists with ten times my courage. If being
strong means denying the humanity of others, following tyrants, dealing
out violence, then make me weak. Make me soft. Give me the fortitude of
vulnerability, the might of a flake in a snowbank ready to carve out
mountains.

The new right might feel strong, and be in power this season, but theirs
is a fragile, ugly strength. They have exoskeletons, but no backbone.
They allow their hearts to rot inside a carapace of denial. Their
strength is the strength of invertebrates, of impermeable things that
can bite and sting but cannot stand upright when it counts.

I’ve got no time for that sort of strength. Not now, not ever. Give me
courage instead, the courage to remain permeable, to remain open, the
potential for empathy and learning. Make me brave—I don’t care about strong.

*Laurie Penny* is a contributing editor at the /New Statesman. /Her
new book is /Everything Belongs to the Future
<http://us.macmillan.com/everythingbelongstothefuture/lauriepenny>/.

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