A couple of years back, I quoted HP Lovecraft’s line that “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” And that this is why many Americans flinch from dealing with the mass of misogyny, racism and other hates out there: contemplating how bad it is, how horrible many women are treated and how unfairly, is too nightmarish to think about. Isabel Cooper, on her blog, makes a similar point: seeing people she knows and trusts turn viciously misogynistic given slight prompting is horrific.
Or as Andrea Dworkin once put it, “Do you remember pictures that you’ve seen of European cities during the plague, when there were wheelbarrows that would go along and people would just pick up corpses and throw them in? Well, that is what it is like knowing about rape. Piles and piles and piles of bodies that have whole lives and human names and human faces.”
Consider the Giselle Pelicot case in France, where Pelicot’s husband drugged her and invited other men to rape her. As in 47 men have been convicted of rape. Almost 100 rapes in total, stretching over 20 years. Or Nicholas Shumaker, who’d been friends with Emma Top since childhood — which didn’t stop him raping her on a high-school trip. Understandably Top was shaken: “I was scared of the dark, scared of being alone, scared of being in a room or house with the door unlocked. He made walking on the street exhausting.” (the judge gave Shumaker a year in county jail instead of the four years in state prison that sentencing guidelines recommended. That’s it’s own kind of horror).
No, not all men do this shit, but it explains why women think they’d choose the bear. As Celeste Davis says, how do you trust men when a woman’s husband, her friend, does shit like that? Or when judges give the rapist a slap on the wrist. Which didn’t happen in the Pelicot case — yay! — but I’m less optimistic this will create a wave of change. Too many people get uncomfortable at the thought of change. They hate the tension that comes when we work to liberate the oppressed from bondage. Plus, of course, a lot of people know they don’t have stainless records themselves and taking this stuff seriously scares them.
It’s this sort of thing that induces hopelessness and despair: we’re irredeemable so why even try? I love Buffy and still do, but Joss Whedon’s ugly conduct takes some of the fun out of it. I know Neil Gaiman fans who are shattered by him being a sexual predator. Social media in some ways makes it worse because there’s always a negative opinion out there. LGBTQ Ruby Rose playing a lesbian superhero on Batwoman seems like a win but I read criticism on one website that she wasn’t the right kind of LGBTQ to match Kate Kane. A friend of mine was arguing the other day that reading Lovecraft or Gaiman is not justifiable. Read enough and you start to feel Immanuel Kant was right — out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever built.
I find some comfort in the words of James Baldwin: “”It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.” We must, because to let the present reality continue or grow worse is unacceptable.
Or as Italo Calvino puts it in Invisible Cities, when you realize the world is hell “There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
To that end, some links that may be useful:
Indivisible, a guide to defending and improving democracy.
Contact information for your senators. I will keep demanding positive action from our Republican senators even though they won’t deliver it. I’m also contacting Rep. Valerie Foushee to let her know when I appreciate her work, like not voting for the latest anti-trans bill.
How to fight book bans.
Kristin Kobes duMez on where we go from here. More from LawDork on using Jimmy Carter as an inspiration. These are more inspirational than specific but there’s virtue in those too.
As I said in a previous post, there’s no cause that doesn’t have organized, experienced groups fighting for it. If you want to act, join them; if you can’t act, donate. Money matters.
Now I’ll add a point from Indivisible: it’s not all about Washington DC. Trump and his appointees will wreak horrible damage but lots of damage happens at the state and local levels. Conversely resistance at the state and local level can make a difference. Learn about local politics and speak up if they start to turn rancid. Encourage them if they’re doing right. I will be calling NC Gov. Josh Stein next week to say thank you for his pro-choice executive order.
Civil rights activists beat the Jim Crow south. Women won legal equality in the last century, despite the many failures to deliver on it. Humans built the dystopia we’re moving into; humans can unmake. Not easily and not quickly but the game is not over. Let’s play.
