On Compassion

Some Sunday post-Twitter musings. 

Why do some women see compassion as a quality that has been imposed on them to ensure their compliance within the patriarchy or various forms of phallocracy? 

If women are indeed socialised into being more compassionate, surely that's a good thing and should be encouraged. 

If we shrug off female compassion as a mere outcome of patriarchal / phallocratic social relations – what are we saying about the quality of being human? 

Being compassionate and having empathy are human qualities; in a healthy society we'd all be socialised into them, and people who lacked them would be a cause for concern or would be ostracised. 

Could it be that it these essentially cooperative qualities have to be socialised out of people?

To me, the very essence of being human is the capacity for compassion and empathy – especially extending beyond your own ‘kind’ ie kin / ethnic group / religion / country etc.

It's an essential ingredient in the glue that holds people together in groups, and it's only in groups that we become fully human. 

How those groups function internally powerfully influences how they function externally. The dominance of aggressive competition within a group or society increases the likelihood of that group or society being in aggressive competition with others.

There's too much glorifying of the stereotypically masculine and denigrating of the stereotypically feminine in our world; it's what liberal feminism has capitulated to – the eulogising and reifying of some ultra-feminine stereotypes, especially related to appearance, combined with the uncritical adoption of some masculine stereotypes, especially related to aggressive competitiveness.

I can get as infuriated with the self absorbed, heedless machinations of social media influencers,  identiactivists and smug beardy-bros as anyone, and on a gut level I might want to punch them; on a more intellectual level I see them as products of a dysfunctional society. 

There has NEVER been a more dangerous time than this moment in history; never has humanity faced challenges on a scale of those we face here at this precise point in our existence as a discrete species. And such is the impact we have had on the planet, what adversely affects us also affects all other living creatures.

To hear a person I once admired hugely for his style of gentle, targetless humour (so rare in our world) talk about the 21st century as if it was a thing of which to be proud because he, now she, can be in permanent "girl mode", is a tad annoying. 

As is knowing that someone has become famous and hugely influential by donning the most crippling of gender straitjackets ...the ones that depict women as airheads and bimbos. 

Only narcissists and psychopaths fail to accept the fact that life involves a series of compromises. Properly socialised people accept there are a number of triaging processes going on, and sometimes someone else gets priority. 

All those who are lining up to fight for sex-based or for identity based rights need to ask, am I in this because I really care about vulnerable people?

Outside of pointing out and opposing the additional risk posed to those vulnerable people by malignant or vexatious actors, what have I done, what am I prepared to do to make their lives less vulnerable?

What would I be prepared to do and to give up to ensure poor, marginalised, abused people are better placed to protect themselves, to make their own choices rather than continue to be the objects of state aid or private charity? 

Tragic answer is, quite a few not only do sod all, they're not prepared to give up anything.

The rapidly widening schism in what had the capacity to be a re-energised women's liberation movement, has given rise to those who are on the political right and those who need justification for allying with it, referring to themselves not as feminists but as "femalists".

This is a forelock tug to the simple, if ingenious, marketing strategy of Posie Parker – placing the standard dictionary definition of woman onto a range of "merch". 

(I don't know about you but I find that word to be intensely irritating. Merch, schmerch.)

Honestly, can it get any more surreal? 

If you have no commitment to structural change, or if you are anti-trans in the sense of finding trans people to be unnatural and unacceptable, then I have to repeat, I'm not your ally.  

But, if you are so mired in your desire to be woke, or so fearful of being branded a TERF you refuse to look past the immediate issue to what's really at stake, I'm not your ally either. 

Someone recently accused me of sitting on a burning fence; I prefer to see myself as having climbed a small prominence nearby in order to be able to keep a better eye on the antics of both extremes. Of course, being stuck up there also makes me an easy target for both. 

Ho hum.