Worlds of difference
Esther Vilar’s The Manipulated Man. (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1972. ISBN 0200718754) Ken's on top.
I've been cataloguing many many sex education works, from the explicitly clinical to the psychologically instructive, and beyond into mess up socio-econo-polio-anthro-opinio… —culture wars are not new.
The period ranges from the 1920s and earlier, but peak in the 1970s, with titles like Naked Yoga, with not a yoga mat in sight, mind you. The horror.
One of so many books that caught my eye, is about women by a woman providing the low-down on women to men. No doubt a publisher was thinking there was money to be made selling this book to the grandads of today's incels. So I snuck in for a peek or two.
Esther Vilar’s The Manipulated Man. (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1972. ISBN 0200718754)
This rather dated book reminded me of an ally seeking co-worker telling me I didn’t understand women, and that you ‘should listen to me, meika, you don’t understand the games women play’
Poor me, poor blighted fool.
For while I didn’t have the language then to see this as a ‘red flag’ but my bullshit detector was screaming at me. Narcissists think they are crash-hot, they think the world of themselves after all, so they actually make a lot of mistakes in this over-confidence, and which people give the benefit of the doubt in maintaining the world (which is them — the narcissist) with an is an emotional labour the narcissists then parasitise).
So, like this old work colleague of mine, Esther Vislar does not describe women, or men, of course, but the ways and wiles that narcissists and psychopaths project as badness onto their enemies while:-
doing the very same thing (bullshit baffles brains),
building allies through creating binary win-lose (mind-)games (in this case women evil, men poor fools) that create hierarchies that can support their careers so to speak, into/on/through the world as their oyster (even while use egalitarian or victim vocabularies),
deflect attention away from their own behaviour and agendas (in my co-worker’s case claiming sisterhood privileges while working with women, and no doubt denigrating me, while doing the exact opposite in my presence),
all the while boosting their narcissistic supply.
Lots of narcissist survivor jargon in here. Sorry about that, but it is always in the background. The foreground for this is laid in the world-building framework, and the narcissism revelations lay the background for the empathy chat to come.
Just a reminder I am not diagnosing anyone but merely discussing what might be happening.
This is in great contrast with other titles from the same period, not so much with the works by the second wave feminists that Esther Vilar was crowd-surfing on a surfboard made of shock-value, but the more supportive rather than world-changing focussed works. Those that worry-at women’s role and life and work in status and tactics, rather than a pessimistic nihilism that separatists and cult leaders are drawn to to make sure there is no escape for the chosen. I.E. psychopathic leadership that tells you how great they are because these peeps over here are evil.
We are all doomed. I can save you.
What all these works forget in the detail, for good, ill, or betrayal, is that we all world build, all the time, and we do that by making-do with what we have, and what we are allowed, and that these are negotiated positions.
Negotiation is something that the pessimists say can never happened, all power is in the structures. While with writers like Esther Vilars who invertedly agree with this but put the victim on top, where they already are. Narcissists love a hierarchy.
(Besides the empathy chat, there are posts on ‘animism’, ‘gnosticism’ and conspiratorial thinking coming up)(Intersectionality that focusses on layers of power structures (from a subjective POV of all things) makes the same mistakes just in more dimensions).
Back to the contrasting non-structural more agony aunt self-help style and kind nurse instructor tomes…
For if peeps are constrained to a (domestic) sphere, and peeps make do with what they have, and other peeps denigrate that effort further, in order to boost their career-building versions of the world (every monarch and emporer eva) then the real world, the real emotional labour that actually creates people that actually creates the possibility of the world, can then be easily be (be-)laboured as manipulative or self-hating by every psychopath and\or trolling narcisisists, male or female, manly or self-othering on every block, and indeed in every inclusive pronoun or not.
Behaviour is as does.
What we really need are not pronouns for the noun class of ‘gender’, more or less, but pronouncements on psychopaths and narcisisists. Not more categories and alphabet soups prepositioning our speech in identity, for all that can play into the narcissist’s hands. Yes the empowerment is good, yes, the stories are good, and yes, more questions that seek to share the world of difference will make a world of diffference.
Calling that in as identity is an error. For the world doesn’t care about identity, doesn’t even care about denying it.
The shitty world-building is up to us, and that means calling out narcissism.
Updated version at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com
I'll add as a comment the work that needs to be done in recognition that empathy is a negotiation of bodies in their places, & minds intheir worlds.