the subjectivist ethics of “refusing to be a victim”

The topic of victimhood came up yesterday in two entirely separate groups devoted to Catholic feminism. In one group the emphasis was on “badass feminism” – in the other, it was on the irrelevance of words and images.  In both cases there was an insistence that refusing to be a victim is not only an option, but a morally superior option. This viewpoint I find untenable from a philosophical, from a feminist, and from a Christian perspective.

Badass feminism is fun, but open to criticism, since it draws upon the rhetoric and theatricality of the warrior-queen mythos. The problem here is not so much that it is a war-like mentality; but rather that it is completely unwarlike. Play-acting militarism obscures the reality of war. Whether one is a radical pacifist or an adherent to just war doctrine, there’s a moral seriousness about war that shouldn’t be reduced to the kind of carnival-ride action sequences seen in so many movies (Peter Jackson, I’m looking at you). The training and mental disposition of a warrior is not something that can (or should) be playacted after one has passed the stage of childlike innocence. I enjoy running about hitting things with swords as much as anyone, but this is, in terms of material reality and mental disposition, far more like playing tennis than like being in battle. I have no idea what it is like to be in battle, but I am going to guess that the feeling one has afterwards has nothing in common with the feeling one has after taking down ragweed with a machete. Badass feminism of this sort is a pose, a theatrical performance that reveals nothing about the nature of war or warriors, or even of queens.  And as a pose there is a dimension of self-objectification about it. Notice that in stylized images of badass warrior queens, or memes about “a queen to fight by my side,” the women are invariably young, beautiful, long-haired, ornately clad, and tiny in the waist.

Though I am a pacifist, I have tremendous respect for real women warriors past and present, and am uncomfortable with this subversion of their identity into fetishized objects in the category of the traditional feminine. The traditional archetypal feminine is, after all, passive and submissive, or at best receptive, so taking the image of passivity and putting a sword in her hand has a subtext that draws upon male desire, not on female action.

This is another way in which female attributes are valued for their “hotness.” I am fine with being hot, if this happens to occur as an afterthought to my actions, but the clock is ticking and if I pursue intelligence and virtue simply in order to capitalize on the hotness thereof, at some point I will look in the mirror and realize it isn’t working anymore. Then, I suppose, I shall curl up in a closet with a bottle of bourbon (not hot. Not badass).

But in reality, most of us have our curling-up moments. Easy enough to be a badass feminist on the internet, by posting memes and loudly refusing to be a victim. Is this, one wonders, something that one maintains every moment of one’s life? Does the badass non-victim rise from her bed every morning with a barbaric yawp, ready to conquer the world? Is she ever caught bleary-eyed in yoga pants? Let’s hope that she never uses anything so pedestrian as a break-up or a death in the family to curl up in fetal position and whimper, or seek a shoulder to cry on. Nothing less than the extermination of her entire planet should topple the feminist warrior queen from her pedestal of badassery.

But, of course, it’s just a pose.

Philosophically, this whole business of refusing to be a victim is ethically irresponsible. It reduces victimhood to a state of mind, thus wiping out the objective evil of the countless ways people are genuinely victimized. To be made a victim of genocide, war, rape, domestic abuse, or racial discrimination is an objective state of affairs. How you think about it is certainly up to you – what you do with it, on that you have a choice – and obviously, no human being is ever reducible wholly to “victim.” But to say that victimhood is simply a matte of mindset is to suggest that the onus of the moral reality – and the obligation to change it – rests with the one to whom violence has been done. This, obviously, leaves the perpetrator free to perpetrate.

It’s an approach that can work for very mild modes of victimhood. If one is subjected to subtle forms of emotional abuse, or racial discrimination, and there’s no realistic way to change the situation immediately, there is indeed much to be said for changing how one feels about it. It can be helpful to say “this doesn’t define me.” But, it is also helpful to recognize “I am a victim” – because in this one acknowledges that the situation is not one’s fault. And this is important, since abusers like to cultivate guilt in abusees.

From a feminist perspective, this attitude lacks empathy. Intersectionality, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, implies recognizing that there are many different lines of oppression at work in situations of injustice. A woman who has the kind of body that men deem worthy of respect, a woman who has a supportive partner, who has a supportive family, who has decent health, who has never been subjected to abuse, who has never suffered extreme trauma, may fall into the trap of thinking a) all her successes were the result of bootstrap independence and b) that such bootstrap independence is something everyone ought to be able to imitate. This is very naive. The fact is, when one is mentally and physically healthy, one has absolutely no idea of the utter debilitation, the emptiness, the despair and darkness of depression, or the exhaustion of daily illness. The bootstrap mentality does not survive in a vacuum – it exists with an invisible social safety net – and can’t be trasnported from that state to the state of the woman in desperate straits. Similarly, when one has never been subjected to constant racial profiling, it is easy enough to speak of occasional insults as things that can never hurt you. If someone calls me bitchy or snotty, of course I can shrug this off. But these insults don’t come with a whole weight of historical depersonalization behind them, as do racist epithets.

Words and images absolutely have power, because we are metaphysically incapable of excusing ourselves from a world of human interaction which uses words and images.

We like to project into a variety of scenarios our speculations about what we would do to survive in such cases, but here we end up creating a kind of fantasy movie-reel, emphasizing moments of opportunity, seeing ourselves from the outside. It’s the self on the inside that makes a difference. One who has never been subjected to emotional abuse can easily say “words don’t hurt” – but that is because she hasn’t had to deal with years and years of verbal battering. One who has only ever been moderately poor might come up with creative schemes for pulling oneself out of radical poverty, without knowing anything about what radical poverty entails. An example: organic food guru Joel Salatin’s utopian proposal that an inner-city woman could make money to survive by growing vegetables and selling wholesome broths to her neighbors requires utter ignorance of the conditions of radical urban poverty (including what should be obvious to a food guru:  that most inner city neighborhoods are probably too polluted for anything grown there technically to be organic). Now, I am very much in favor of making organic food available to everyone, but one needs to be realistic about it.

I believe we need collective responsibility in order to deal ethically with life issues –  and am troubled to see how far we are from this, given that so many fairly well-off people take credit for their own success without acknowledging their luck (yes, luck, not blessing). “I did it, so you can too” is the mantra. Well, not necessarily.

Lastly, the idea that refusing to be a victim is somehow morally superior is not a Christian idea. What would Jesus do? Well, we know what he did. He was perhaps the only human ever in history who had the radical option not to be a victim at all – and in the most radical sense he agreed to be a victim.  The idea that being a victim is shameful is rooted deeply in both Greco-Roman and Hebrew ideology, which is why being raped was considered so shameful one had to kill oneself, and why the sick were regarded with suspicion in Israel – but Jesus’ salvific act changed that utterly. The meaning of being a victim has changed.

Rene Girard writes: “The Cross is the equivalent of the Ephesus stoning. To say that Jesus identifies himself with all victims is to say that he identifies himself not only with the adulterous woman or the Suffering Servant but also with the beggar of Ephesus. Jesus is this poor wretch of a beggar.” (I See Satan Fall Like Lightning).

Our goal as Christian and pro-life feminists must not be to deny victimhood, because in so doing we deny Christ.

(Image credits: flickr, wikimedia)