It’s interesting how people tend to mis/use ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and ‘toxic masculinity’ in identical ways– they’re supposed to describe society-wide patterns of socialization as they relate to sex/gender and power, but people have transformed both of them into ‘conditions’ from which an individual may ‘suffer’ and then be ‘healed’ through enlightened thinking.
A lot of people are being like, uhhhh are u saying that i can’t talk about how misogyny has impacted my life??? and no, that’s not what i’m saying. I will expand on the mis/understandings of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and ‘toxic masculinity’ as individualized internal conditions in a way that will hopefully be helpful.
When people talk about ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and ‘toxic masculinity’ as ‘conditions’ that have ‘symptoms’ whereby the ‘afflicted’ ‘suffers’ and then is ‘healed’ or ‘cured’ through a ritualized process*, the rhetoric turns ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and ‘toxic masculinity’ into pathologies that explicitly invoke the standard western medical narrative of illness. In the standard western medical narrative of illness, illnesses are understood as things that deviate from the baseline of a ‘healthy’ state to which a person returns after a bout with illness, and illnesses do not have social dimensions. Most people who will see this post are likely to have encountered criticism of the standard western medical narrative of illness (friends’ struggle to understand what life’s like for people with chronic illnesses, minority stress is real) but obviously it’s powerful because people keep using it as metaphor!
But I don’t think it’s a useful metaphor. First, the idea of a ‘healthy baseline’ to which one can return to, even in one’s own mind, is preposterous. I have no idea what that would look like, because I and everyone I have ever known has lived their whole lives in a patriarchal society**. Second, and and why someone can’t return to it outside of their own mind, is that the individualized metaphor encourages the individuals who theorize about ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ or ‘toxic masculinity’ to remove themselves from the broader misogynist social structure– that is, the thing both theories were developed to analyse in the first place. But they can’t just opt out, social behavior doesn’t work that way. Also, more specifically, I think that the idea that one can be ‘over’ ‘toxic masculinity’ discourages continual critical examination of one’s own or another’s actions.
*in the standard western medical narrative, the “ritualized process” is going to the doctor and doing the prescribed treatment regimen, when people talk about ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and ‘toxic masculinity,’ it usually involves, from what i can tell, pretending read theory and then discoursing about it.
I dont want bethesda to ever get rid of how fo4 does cutscenes because there is just something special about talking to someone and having a vertibird kill you both in the middle of it
I snorted
I don’t think there’s a better example of the above than this:
Uh excuse me, how can we forget this classic and masterpiece
callanswall 