The ubiquity in social media progressifkult of narratives and frameworks of “abuse” and “abusers” worries me.

Not because that stuff doesn’t happen, I’ve got experience myself. My first relationship in 9th grade - we were the two weird and alienatedly smart kids even in the smart kids class, she was the first to feel like she understood me as a peer, also kissing and boobies. Ended up with her demanding I come with her to things as the only way to prove I didn’t hate her “like everyone else” only to tell me to stay away from her lest people think we were together and get in the way of her pursuing other guys, with her going dark for days and eventually saying it was because of nasty things I had (as in, hadn’t) said to my friends about her and telling me her suicide would be my fault.

It keeps going. That fucked me up for a long time. Years of maturation later she too delivered an apology out of nowhere but I wasn’t yet ready to accept it.

I’ve got a similar thing with a guy in my extended friend group, everyone likes him because you don’t see the dark side in public or until he feels he has power over you, there’s just a handful of us who won’t have anything to do with him and I’m sure he tells stories about our failures as friends and people to explain why.

So that stuff’s real, I know it, and it still bugs me because at least half the time I see abuse rhetoric applied it seems to be as an escape hatch to a moral imperative to love and accept everyone exactly as they are (or conceive themselves to be), allowing people to reject or simply dislike each other without themselves becoming the villain.

Which at best is a kludge (like how it was decided we shouldn’t “blame the victim” and then the concepts of enabling and codependency were puffed up to do the necessary work of identifying victims’ agency in their victimization), and at worst, which is a nontrivial fraction of the time, a venue for some impressive abuse itself, given it’s only acceptable to dislike or reject someone when it’s mandatory.

Plus honestly, you get the sense that people are being gathered into choirs and taught how - in perfect, multipart harmony - to cry wolf.