Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, December 28, 2015

Not Redeemed

Severus Snape was just another racist geek who seemed to think his creepy, awkward inhabitation of patriarchal masculinity in high school was a get out of being called on bigotry free card.

2 comments:

jimf said...

> geek who. . . [acknowledged his] creepy, awkward inhabitation
> of. . . masculinity in high school. . .

Hm. Did you catch this dust-devil from about a year ago?

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/the-blog-comment-that-achieved-an-internet-miracle/384539/
--------------
Fear and Self-Loathing in Puberty

At age 12, as other boys experienced more typical variations on
puberty and attraction to girls, Aaronson developed feelings of
guilt, fear and self-loathing that would last more than a decade.
He had crushes just like his peers. But he was terrified "that
one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I
sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would
be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even
expelled from school or sent to prison," he wrote. "And
furthermore, that the people who did these things to me would
somehow be morally right to do them—even if I couldn’t understand how."

Whenever he desired someone, he reproached himself for not
having any right to his feelings. At undergraduate orientations
or workshops to prevent sexual-harassment, he reacted differently
than male peers who were less credulous, less over-scrupulous
and better at understanding ambiguous social dynamics. "With
their endless lists of all the forms of human interaction
that 'might be' sexual harassment or assault, and their refusal,
ever, to specify anything that definitely wouldn’t be sexual
harassment or assault," he wrote, "I left each of those
workshops with enough fresh paranoia and self-hatred to
last me through another year."

Without hard rules, he felt a moral duty to error on the side
of extreme caution, to never act toward women in a way that
might be considered patriarchal or oppressive.

"My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been
born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual,
so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero
Paul Erdös did," he wrote. "Anything, really, other than
the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which
for me, meant being consumed by desires that one couldn’t
act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming
an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other
creature of the darkness." This self-loathing caused him
to have constant suicidal thoughts and to pursue other
radical remedies. "At one point, I actually begged a
psychiatrist to prescribe drugs that would chemically
castrate me (I had researched which ones)," he wrote,
"because a life of mathematical asceticism was the only
future that I could imagine for myself. The psychiatrist
refused to prescribe them, but he also couldn’t suggest
any alternative: My case genuinely stumped him."
====

Reminds me of people having nightmares about Roko's Basilisk.

Trigger alert! Trigger alert! Danger: memetic hazard ahead.

I find it hard to wrap my head around anybody being quite
so tightly wound up. I tend to reach for the pop-psych labels:
autistic spectrum, OCD. But I guess being over-ethical (if
it's real and not a pose) is a source of real pain ("first-world"
pain, for sure -- high up on Maslow's hierarchy ;-> ) for
some people. What do they call it? Ah yes, "scrupulosity".

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/triggered/201211/struggling-scrupulosity

Dale Carrico said...

"...the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which for me, meant being consumed by desires that one couldn’t act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness."

Jesus Fucking Christ.