{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "The ubiquity in social media progressifkult of narratives and frameworks of \u201cabuse\u201d and \u201cabusers\u201d worries me.\n\n Not because that...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/120304292008/", "html": "<p>The ubiquity in social media <em>progressifkult</em> of narratives and frameworks of \u201cabuse\u201d and \u201cabusers\u201d worries me.</p>\n\n<p>Not because that stuff doesn\u2019t happen, I\u2019ve 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\u2019t hate her \u201clike everyone else\u201d 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\u2019t) said to my friends about her and telling me her suicide would be my fault.</p>\n\n<p>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\u2019t yet ready to accept it.</p>\n\n<p>I\u2019ve got a similar thing with a guy in my extended friend group, everyone likes him because you don\u2019t see the dark side in public or until he feels he has power over you, there\u2019s just a handful of us who won\u2019t have anything to do with him and I\u2019m sure he tells stories about our failures as friends and people to explain why.</p>\n\n<p>So that stuff\u2019s 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.</p>\n\n<p>Which at best is a kludge (like how it was decided we shouldn\u2019t \u201cblame the victim\u201d and then the concepts of enabling and codependency were puffed up to do the necessary work of identifying victims\u2019 agency in their victimization), and at worst, which is a nontrivial fraction of the time, a venue for some impressive abuse itself, given it&rsquo;s only acceptable to dislike or reject someone when it&rsquo;s mandatory.</p>\n\n<p>Plus honestly, you get the sense that people are being gathered into choirs and taught how - in perfect, multipart harmony - to cry wolf.</p>"}