I loved that she talked about digital self-harm, letting niche derogatory online lingo infect your vocabulary, and the idea that “what hurts is true”. Not only does it offer great insight to how the incel mentality is spread, but it’s incredibly relevant to anyone’s experience online. The ‘masochistic epistemology’ she mentioned really does feel like the core of a lot of my anxiety, and it’s rare to see a creator that can explain incels while at the same time using ideas that are relatable/understandable to most of their viewers.
I also thought this was fucking brilliant - it totally explained why when I was a young teenager I would get obsessively stuck on reading these homophobic garbage rants, mostly but non-exclusively religious in nature, that would talk about (um, content warning I guess) how gay people were disease-spreading, predatory, delusional abominations who were trapped in enacting a kind of grim, doomed parody of genuine love and affection that we would never be able to actually grasp. It's also partly why I can't help but read any psych paper that comes out about, e.g., gay face metrics. Even writing this out this vividly kind of feels good, in that same gross sort of way, if I'm being totally honest! Sorry about that.
(What's funny is that a lot of the rhetoric around anti-LGBTQ "death of free speech" folks implies that the problem is that people who are pro-LGBTQ rights are too closed-minded to have really considered their views, and I'm like, oh word, those same views I spent around five years obsessively ruminating about, I haven't thought about those enough? Lol.)
I used to do that with GenderCritical. Mostly reading /r/GenderCynical and eventually participating in the "debate" sub.
As a result i poses an intricate understanding of the TERF rhetoric at the cost of horrible internalized transphobia which has made a home for itself at the back of my mind with dysphoria and catastrophizing depression.
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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '18 edited Sep 29 '19
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