Death to Gentleness: An Anti-Anesthetic of Language
Find your edge and keep it close to your heart.
Compare these sentences:
Things need to change.
Things need to be changed.
We need to change things.
The first sentence is a neutral generalism. It means nothing. In linguistics, we call a bare-plural like “things” a generic term. It doesn’t really apply to anything. It’s simply the conceptual representation of the word “things.” It has no power, no application, and no resistance to refutation. The second sentence is pretty much the same, but it’s passive—it lacks an agent. Who is meant to change these “things?” What deus ex machina is supposed to come down and rescue the tragic stageplay? In the last sentence, there is someone acting. “We” are our own saviors. There is no magic entity which will suddenly appear to fix things. We must be our own fixer, and to do that, we must kill our gentleness.
For much of my life, I have been accused of being sharp, abrasive, rough… even mean. I tried my hardest to work on it. It was a personal failing of mine which got in the way of many relationships. The people who criticized me were right to do so. I was weaponizing my language to harm those I cared about. But now, I think I can make an argument to retain some of that edge. Now, post-election, I think we all must find our edge and use it.
In these few days since the election, I have seen countless posts about self-care, community, support of others, love. I find this all largely useless. I saw an insultingly trite image of two Jesuses washing the feet of both Trump and Harris, accompanied by a paragraph which boiled down to “Love Thy Neighbor” (regardless of politics, you must love the person voting to dehumanize you… Gotcha). The JP Brammer tweet which inspired this dispatch contained a screenshot of an anonymous email advertising a “nurturing space” where participants will explore “gentle boundary-setting,” “honor[ing] your needs,” “mindful strategies,” and “self-care rituals.” Brammer is right to call them “profoundly useless.” I am sick of this: sick of the dilution of therapeutic language, sick of the infantilization of ourselves, sick of being gentle.
Let me first say that therapy is work. Therapy is not going to gab with your girlfriend who will tell you to take an Epsom salt bath and drink herbal tea. You should be going to therapy to work through something. Your therapist should be pushing you toward a productive direction. The sanitization of therapeutic language for the sake of deflection is a plague. What do you mean your mindfulness practice is to be completely ignorant of the politics of this country? You’re going to vote knowing nothing? No Trump-supporter is out there afraid to see what’s going on with CNN, even if they’re going to write the most inane diatribe you’ve ever seen grace the godforsaken wasteland of Facebook. Karen in rural wherever doesn’t need a little treat to vote away your basic human rights. To you, you’re setting boundaries, overwhelmed with the world. To everyone else, you’re turning your back on reality.
Likewise, “Self-care” has mutated into an amorphous concept encapsulating basic hygiene, reckless spending/cheap dopamine rushes, total isolation, disregard for others, and more. Getting up and doing the dishes is not self-care. It’s hygiene. Getting a little boba tea every day is not treating yourself, it’s just getting tea, and associating it with treating yourself means you’re associating it with some kind of accomplishment. What’s the achievement? Surviving the afternoon slump and emailing a client? I’m all for fighting against capitalism, but getting an afternoon treat isn’t that. And avoiding commitments and responsibilities to others because, oh, the world is just so scary? Get real. If you dare to use the word “community,” your self-care practice better not be composed of disregarding others.
And what I’ve realized here is that this idea of “gentleness” of things like “reckless optimism” (which I always rename to “toxic positivity”) are only available to whiteness and privilege. In a world where you can retreat into yourself for days on end and ignore the news, you must have a certain amount of distance—knowledge that, to some degree, these things won’t really affect you. Despite outcry over reproductive rights, 53% of white women who voted did so for Trump. How many of those voters do you think post graphics about hydrating, agreeing-to-disagree, girlbossing, etc? I’ve seen a lot already. This empty language doesn’t discriminate against who uses it. So even when these white women will be directly affected, there is an underlying sense that, should something horrible happen, they will have the money, the sympathy, the opportunities to fix whatever might come to be. There is no real risk for a white woman to vote for Trump, much less any white man.
Yet, “gentleness” hangs over liberal spaces like a chloroform-soaked cloth. It’s an anesthetic to everything happening in the world. We need to kill gentleness. Gentleness is truly a slippery slope. Gentleness leads to passivity, which leads to tolerance, which leads to appeasement. In essence, it boils down to the paradox of tolerance, an oft-cited proposition by Karl Popper that a society which tolerates everything, including intolerance, will one day be dominated by that intolerance. In order to preserve a tolerant society, it needs to be intolerant of intolerance. This is what I mean by finding your edge. Do away with “love thy neighbor” and “be kind; you don’t know what they’re going through” and “give everyone grace.” When you know that person is a Trumper or voted against basic humanity, cut them off. Cut them out. Don’t give them space, time, breath. Be kind to others, but don’t do so ignorantly. Care for your fellow human, unless they don’t care about you. Stop extending yourself to protect others who will hurt you under your protection. Find your edge and keep it close to your heart.
There has been outcry for ages from centrists and right-wingers that the so-called “tolerant left” isn’t so tolerant, or that those who preach inclusivity aren’t so inclusive anymore. Damn right we aren’t! We shouldn’t be! We should not tolerate the proliferation of hateful rhetoric. We should not include those in our space who would commit acts of violence toward us. Inclusivity and tolerance work on the basis of accepting others for who they are in terms of race, religion, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, nationality, (dis)ability, etc. It does not operate by accepting those who espouse beliefs in direct violation of that acceptance. Inclusivity is for the person, not the rhetoric. Diversity of opinion is for how exactly to go about progressive change, not for a tête-à-tête on human rights. To engage in discourse about whether or not trans or disabled people deserve rights, recognition, and protections is to allow the possibility that they don’t. We must not allow those possibilities. They do deserve rights. Period. Our discussion should take that at base value and explore, then, how best to go about it. That is where diversity of opinion enters.
I am making this appeal to reshape your language and to take action in your communities to excise harmful actors. We need to cut these people off. We need to make it clear that we do not give space to these people, and then shore up those boundaries. We need to reserve our softness for each other. We need to stop appealing to others for the sake of kindness or respectability. We need to learn when to stop listening.
The anesthetic language which has percolated into our spaces has uniquely targeted women and femmes (including femme gay men). It is appealing to set the masculine-coded resistance of activism against the feminine-coded gentleness of self-care (and thus to say that self-care is feminist resistance), but this is a false dichotomy. This dichotomy perpetuates the idea that women should not be active participants in their own liberation, that to be an activist means to give up femininity. That is an age-old tactic to set women against each other, to regard feminist activists as man-hating, bra-burning, childless lesbians. We should be past that nonsense, and yet underlying linguistic structures like this persist. We need to decouple the link between self-care and resistance. Self-care is simply surviving. Resistance is fighting to live better. You resist nothing by reading a cozy romantasy book. You resist everything by not tolerating harm.
The personal is political. I have believed this ever since Laura Passin spoke those words to me in class on Feminist Poetry. But I have also noticed a misunderstanding of the phrase. Hanisch is saying here that our personal lives, the goings-on of our personal day-to-days are also marked, reinforced, and shaped by Politics (not merely electoral politics, but Politics on a grander scale as having to do with power relationships). Her point is that everything we do and encounter has a political resonance. Thus, we need to understand that resonance and make the progressive changes required to better our lives, including our personal ones. But I have seen this point poorly interpreted as “Everything I do, no matter how small and personal, is a political act of resistance.” I hate this interpretation. Again, this leads to a kind of passivity, where passivity is linked to resistance. To claim you are resisting simply by existing is to allow everything else around you to continue on as it pleases. When your idea of resistance requires nothing more from you than to breathe, you allow others to command how you breathe. Capitalism will always allow a body (no matter how much it hates and punishes that body), because it can still extract profit from it. To simply be a body isn’t resistance, it’s capitulation.
I know that what I’m saying here might come off cold and callous. You might say that people with anxiety need to disconnect from the news, that I’m fomenting hatred, that disregarding softness is misogynistic, or I’m ignoring those who aren’t safe to act. So let me be clear:
Anxiety does not preclude you from being socially and politically aware. Fine, don’t watch the pundits on CNN, but don’t hide away either. Sorry, but we do need to do things we don’t always like. Reading the news is one of those things… at least while some of our journalism is free.
I am not telling you to be violent. I am telling you that allowing relationships in your life, no matter how complex, in which someone is actively attempting to harm you, will only lead to more harm. End it.
The softness of femininity is wonderful, but it is not radical, and it is not resistance. Softness should be reserved for those we care about, those in our community who have been wronged and hurt. It should be a salve for the wounded, not a cushion for the cruel to land. Remain soft but keep a hard shell.
Yes, there are those who are trapped in circumstances beyond their control: disabled, queer, and trans folks, women in domestic violence or controlling situations, undocumented individuals. Do whatever you must to survive. Disregard everything I or anyone says if it keeps you safe. Make plans. Get out as fast as you can. Then get sharp.
A last note: I am not blaming anyone for falling into this trap of language. I was/am not immune to it either. But if you’ve read this far and gotten to this point, then we need to do better. Resist the anesthetic.
Yours,
Teo