A Cure for Plural Piss-fight Poisoning
Apr. 22nd, 2024 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeA Cure for Plural Piss-fight Poisoning
Summary: “She was so afraid, so certain that she was a terrible, sick person. When it all came out, though, there was not that much to it, nothing to match those years of knotted-up silent grief. It’s usually like that, you know. We’re rarely as terrible as we believe ourselves to be.” –Dorothy Allison, “Public Silence, Private Terror”
Series: Essay (Plural Relationships)
Word Count: 3000
Notes: You know, I was worried this essay was completely superfluous, but this was the overwhelming victor of the LiberaPay/Patreon poll this month. Y’all sure showed me.
Hello, friend! Are you exhausted by plural piss-fights about tedious minutiae nobody outside a very tiny subculture knows or cares about? Does trying to explain this soul-shriveling nonsense to others only make them stare at you in bewildered incomprehension? Have you felt like you personally are making things worse for multis everywhere, just by existing?
If so, this one’s for you!
Summary: “She was so afraid, so certain that she was a terrible, sick person. When it all came out, though, there was not that much to it, nothing to match those years of knotted-up silent grief. It’s usually like that, you know. We’re rarely as terrible as we believe ourselves to be.” –Dorothy Allison, “Public Silence, Private Terror”
Series: Essay (Plural Relationships)
Word Count: 3000
Notes: You know, I was worried this essay was completely superfluous, but this was the overwhelming victor of the LiberaPay/Patreon poll this month. Y’all sure showed me.
Hello, friend! Are you exhausted by plural piss-fights about tedious minutiae nobody outside a very tiny subculture knows or cares about? Does trying to explain this soul-shriveling nonsense to others only make them stare at you in bewildered incomprehension? Have you felt like you personally are making things worse for multis everywhere, just by existing?
If so, this one’s for you!
First: How Do Piss-Fights Happen?
Most plural piss-fight arguments are not logically convincing, nor are they supposed to be. The hook is emotional, and you cannot logic someone out of an emotion. This is why excising this nonsense from your head and explaining it to outsiders are equally crazy-making—if you aren’t in the right emotional position, with the right anxieties or insecurities to exploit, it just sounds ridiculous! If you are, though, no matter how much you reason at it, it still feels true.
Why might it feel true? Because it…
• Confirms pre-existing beliefs. If you believe you (or someone else) is evil, then hearing how awful they/you are will inspire a, “sounds right,” rather than, “wait a minute…”
• Has black-and-white morals. There’s no complexity, just Right and Wrong.
• Inspires intense emotion—especially rage, guilt, shame, disgust, and loathing (towards self or other, doesn’t matter). These emotions drown out that voice in the back of your head that goes, “Wait a minute…”
• Treats as a moral failure a lack of said intense emotions. If you’re not apoplectic with rage, you’re part of the problem! Don’t think, don’t pause to check, there’s no time for that! They’re torturing puppies! Don’t you care about the puppies?
• Provides an easy “good guy” identity. You’re not harassing people on the Internet; you’re fighting oppression! If this bullshit becomes a load-bearing pillar of your identity, trying to get rid of it will cause a collapse. (“My god, I’m not a noble crusader at all! I’m an asshole!”)
Sometimes things happen that do indeed confirm pre-existing beliefs. Morally black-and-white situations also sometimes occur. There are certainly subjects you can’t help but feel upset about—but there’s a difference between getting naturally het up and a demagogue intentionally stoking the blaze. If saying, “Hey, this is getting intense for me, I need to calm down and think this through,” gets the response, “Well then, clearly you don’t truly care,” or, “do you think you just get to quit when it’s convenient for you?” that’s when things get suspicious. Do they truly think being emotionally overwhelmed will make you a better freedom fighter, or do they think it’ll make you easier to control, a raging bull manipulated by a toreador? And if they want you not only emotional, but extremely invested extremely quickly, to the point of hanging your identity on it… it’s time to look askance. What kind of people intentionally use self-loathing, disgust, and emotional overload as motivators?
Over the years, I’ve gotten better (though not necessarily good) at, whenever I see something that whips me into an emotional frenzy, stopping and asking myself, “Are these feelings coming from me, or is this person/organization trying to make me feel this way? What do they have to gain from those feelings? Why might they want me to feel this way?”
Also, Certain Environments Help
People have discovered that nothing gets attention like things that make folks really angry or upset, and when something (be it a website, a printing press, a social group, or a government) relies on attention, that means it has an incentive to make you as angry and upset as possible, all the time. (Read Timothy Wu’s the Attention Merchants if you want to know more about this.) Even noble causes aren’t above mass-mailing guilt fodder to try and score donations; even a putrid group can maintain cohesion, if they have an enemy to fight.
Online virality isn’t necessary for this process, but it sure does help. Let’s imagine some piss-purveyor saying some nonsense: “people experiencing spirit possession are appropriating a medical condition and are thus ableist.” Let’s pretend hundreds, or even thousands of people share it, putting it in front of more and more people—who agree, laugh, debunk, historically analyze, doesn’t matter. The point is, sheer omnipresence gives it an illusion of legitimacy: why would people be talking about it if it didn’t matter? The argument feeds on existing soul-scars from oppression, fears of abuse from the greater culture—all of which are likely to make at least one person fly off the handle in a hurtful (or “entertaining”) way. That becomes more fodder for the fire: “look how unreasonable and awful that person was! This proves we’re right!”
Even people who pile in to debunk the whole mess expose still more people to the original, constantly reminding people just how much the uberculture hates them. That takes a psychological toll. Maybe the debunking just makes some people even madder: “clearly you don’t care about ableism/racism.” Maybe, if the piss-fight really takes off, it becomes the battleground for a moral struggle, with designated sides: The Ableist Oppressors vs. the People With a Serious Medical Condition, or the Racist Assholes vs. the Colonized. (And woe betide those who don’t easily inhabit either side or wish the whole piss-fight would go away.) Worst case, the fight becomes socially unavoidable: “so, racist or ableist? Pick one.”
We’re using a purposely fabricated example for illustration, but we’ve lived through at least two piss-fights that reached that final, socially unavoidable point: the Memory Wars (arguably the most successful, and overwhelmingly offline), and the Genic War.
So now we’ve discussed how this shit happens. Let’s talk about detoxing from it!
Go Somewhere Else and Get a Life!
If you went to a party where the punchbowl was forever filled with piss, you probably wouldn’t go back. And yet sometimes, we keep hanging around social battlegrounds filled with rage-bait and misery-makers. If we’re really unlucky, we make the piss-fight such a part of our identity that we not only accept the pissy punchbowl, but start pissing in it ourself because we feel it’s morally necessary or “for our own good.” (Think of the politically single-minded friend you have probably had or been at one point, the one who cannot bake cookies without turning it into a political sermon. Even if you agreed with them, you probably didn’t like hanging out with them.) I’m not saying it’s always easy, but maybe it might be worth finding a better place to hang out.
The world’s a big place. If your favorite group has the Piss-Fight Platoon in charge, try hanging out somewhere else with just the people you like. Go to a different bar or website or whatever! It might require some creativity, but you can do it! I’m terrible at writing letters or postcards, but I’m pretty good at phone calls and email. You can make a group email, a chat room, or an offline park meet-up for free. Get a little crew together and play Charades or something. Go do something that has nothing to do with the piss-fight, mutually agree to this beforehand, and take a squirt bottle to anyone who tries to bring it up afterward.
(If you find yourself wanting to say, “But people will only speak to me in the Eighth Circle of Piss-fight Hell,” then you have a deeper problem, friend. Even guys in prison write letters!)
Build hobbies and relationships that are completely outside the piss-fight. Join a bird-watching group or MMORPG; befriend people who have no dogs in the fight. They don’t have to be your best friend forever! Maybe you just knit socks every Sunday and discuss yarn, or go fishing and never catch anything. They don’t have to be multi either; you’d be surprised whose company you’ll enjoy! When we found ourself stranded in a completely new city and state, knowing nobody, we joined the local gay church, despite being mostly non-Christian. It gave us community service and Bible study to do, the old regulars had a lot of great stories, and one took to greeting us with, “and who are we today?” We don’t regret our time there at all. Meanwhile, there are some folks of nigh-identical demographics to me who you couldn’t pay me to sit in a room with.
Piss-fights run on an us-vs.-them mentality. Don’t let them enforce more social limitations on you than you’re already dealing with.
Become a Student of the Forbidden!
Think about whatever piss-fight poison has really gotten under your skin: all forms of many-selvedness are racist, False Memory Syndrome, fictive BS, whatever. Now go read, watch, or listen to something that kicks it in the face—the more forbidden, the better.
Since a lot of piss-fight arguments are emotionally based, not logical, many don’t pass a basic sniff test, and thus learning even rudimentary history proves a great vaccination—an ounce of prevention trumps a pound of cure. Read older books that predate the piss-fight (libraries are great for this). Dig through old website archives; I have a massive list with links here. Find some chatty old fogy who’s been around a while and listen to their stories—really listen, even if you’re not sure you believe them. If you find yourself wondering about something, good! That’s something to research later! (If the old fogy tries to persuade you not to do your own research because it’s hopelessly “problematic” or whatever, get the fuck away from them.) Read Plures House’s three-part Divisions in Plurality series and read about the pissing fights of yore. Take comfort in that amazing feeling of, “Wow, these people are frothing over things I have never once even considered worth it…. will people twenty years later feel the same way about my bugbear?” (Yes, probably.)
Wander farther afield. If you’re a medical multi, go read about spirit possession, and vice versa. Read stuff from a country or culture different from your own—try Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti (either book or film), Laurel Kendall’s the Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman, Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater or Dear Senthuran, Megan Rose’s Spirit Marriage. If you feel a frisson of, “Ooh, I’m not supposed to be reading this! I’m doing something wrong!” that’s probably a sign you’ve been piss-poisoned. Take in the most challenging material you can manage without turning it into a way to hurt yourself—if you don’t know how to recognize that “scratch till it bleeds” feeling, try to learn over time. Take note of what does give you that feeling, especially if it’s unexpected; it’s a treasure map to deeper self-understanding.
It’s overwhelmingly likely your nonfictional explorations will confront you with things you find gross, bigoted, or baffling. Instead of dismissing it as trash (remember, piss-fights thrive on black-and-white thinking), make mental note of it for further investigation. No research is worthless. A lot of multi books I read are shitful, but they still have value, sometimes because they’re shitty. I don’t regret reading Elizabeth Loftus, because it familiarized me with the False Memory Syndrome arguments. What I regret is believing her so unreservedly for so many years until I finally thought of the search query “‘false memory syndrome’ + ‘debunking.’”
You can also use fiction for this purpose! In the last few years, I’ve been seeing an amazing flowering of many-selved art in different genres, and I’m so glad! When I came of age, most everything was about heartbreak or hamfisted educational or political manifestoes, even the stuff that was ostensibly lighthearted. Obviously, that stuff matters—look at my job—but man, sometimes I just want to cozy up to a good yarn about a multi saving the world, falling in love, or solving a murder without it being a carefully sanitized political statement.
Have you had the message beaten into you that the only multi art worth reading is about politics, victimhood, and suffering? Go find some good happy comfort reading, like Fern Bedek’s Back Flow. Been trapped in a pastel-colored hug-box forever where all multis must be perfect angels? Go dig into something nasty and offensive, like the Binding of Isaac. If you’re sick of purity, find yourself some multi porn. We have a whole catalog of plural stories with over 150 entries; surely you can find something you won’t hate! If you find your punchbowl-pissing inner voice constantly lambasting every single thing as too flawed, too problematic, too unacceptable, congratulate yourself on catching the poisoning before it became terminal and remember that perfection is the enemy of goodness.
If you truly feel you are doing something forbidden and evil, go do it in private! No one has to know! I promise not to tell on you! In the style of Kate Bornstein, I hereby give you permission to learn anything you want to learn, as long as you aren’t mean to anyone. If you get sent to Bad Multi Jail because you read the forbidden tome, I promise to do your time in the cell for you! Intentional ignorance is never a virtue!
The Personal Doesn’t Have To Be Political 24/7
Take it from me, a professional multi: don’t make the politics your life. You will destroy yourself and be the world’s worst party guest. Let yourself have at least one multi thing that makes you happy for nonpolitical reasons, especially if it’s the kind of thing you feel politically embarrassed about. I do this for a job, and if I didn’t take breaks to reread Net Dreams or Romantic Illusions, I would lose my few remaining marbles. Life is more than mugging for your oppressors or nipping at their heels.
If you really have a hard time letting go the feeling that “(everything) personal is (always) political,” read Dorothy Allison’s essay about the lesbian sex wars, “Public Silence, Private Terror,” from Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature. Think of those ‘80s feminists, ripping themselves and each other to shreds over how their personal harmless masturbatory fantasies were secretly misogynist and proof they were male-identified. Do you truly think this made them better feminists? Do you truly think that kind of wound-picking navel-gazing brought more kindness and liberation into the world? Is that what you want in your life?
No one can do battle 24/7. Those who try burn out, sometimes catastrophically.
Make Your Peace with Ambiguity and Uncertainty
Plenty of people hate admitting, “I don’t know,” but piss-fight-purveyors especially. There has to be an obviously correct moral answer; otherwise, how could they justify shaming you for disagreement? If the answers aren’t obvious, the whole thing falls apart. A lot of people become part of piss-fights out of the fear that everyone else knows the right answer, that the only people who don’t know are bad or stupid.
But what if there is no hard and fast right answer? The world is full of mystery and wonder, and that’s a good thing! Make your peace with “I don’t know.” Here, I’ll start:
What is really going on in my head with all this weird stuff? I don’t know!
How true is it? I don’t know!
Is trauma truly associated with plurality, spirit-possession, tulpamancy, MPD/DID/OSDD etc., or is that confirmation bias—we expect there to be trauma, so we go looking for it? I don’t know! The more research I’ve done, the less sure I am!
Does plurality even really exist as a discrete thing, or is just a name some people use to organize their experiences that others don’t? I don’t know!
No theory ever completely survives contact with reality. There are always exceptions, edge-cases, surprises, and entropy. And thank goodness! Imagine how boring life would be if everything worked exactly the way we thought they should! How small and mean that would be!
Don’t Be Mean
I swear by Kate Bornstein’s maxim “DON’T BE MEAN. Anything else goes, anything at all” (Hello, Cruel World, 96). Distrust anyone who insists that you or anyone else is mean for existing. I don’t have any deep logical argument or sources for this, only decades of life experience: I have never met someone pulling this argument that truly cared for the other person’s well-being. Not once. “Their existence is a blight” is an abuser’s argument. It’s the argument of the Nazi Final Solution. It reduces someone to an abstract symbol of evil. It is not a loving or compassionate argument, it brings nothing good into the world, and I distrust anyone who says it outside of a private, regrettable emotional outburst.
People indulging in piss-fighting may attempt a fig leaf of, “oh, it’s not their being that bothers me, just their actions,” but too often those actions translate to “existing,” “existing in public,” or “not expressing enough shame about existing.” In other cases, even if someone repents or disappears (or even dies), it’ll never be good enough for the piss-fighters—because to admit it’s over would mean giving up the identity and having that “oh god, I’m an asshole” collapse. So let’s dispense with the idea that piss-fighting is some altruistic act of reform. It is, at best, a statement of total cultural failure to deal with a problem. What kind of reform can only be obtained via hounding, shame, and self-loathing? Is that truly the best we can do?
There is a comfort to me, though: I’ve seen piss-fighters grow and change, even the ones who ostensibly hated my guts. You’d be surprised how many people have apologized to me over the years! (You’d be surprised how many people I’ve had to apologize to myself.) And when they (or I) changed their minds, it wasn’t from logical arguments or passionate fights. Often, all that was needed was someone quietly existing that broke the preconceptions, and the time, space, and privacy to mull over those newly-broadened horizons.
Changing minds is an inside job. And isn’t that just so much better?
Most plural piss-fight arguments are not logically convincing, nor are they supposed to be. The hook is emotional, and you cannot logic someone out of an emotion. This is why excising this nonsense from your head and explaining it to outsiders are equally crazy-making—if you aren’t in the right emotional position, with the right anxieties or insecurities to exploit, it just sounds ridiculous! If you are, though, no matter how much you reason at it, it still feels true.
Why might it feel true? Because it…
• Confirms pre-existing beliefs. If you believe you (or someone else) is evil, then hearing how awful they/you are will inspire a, “sounds right,” rather than, “wait a minute…”
• Has black-and-white morals. There’s no complexity, just Right and Wrong.
• Inspires intense emotion—especially rage, guilt, shame, disgust, and loathing (towards self or other, doesn’t matter). These emotions drown out that voice in the back of your head that goes, “Wait a minute…”
• Treats as a moral failure a lack of said intense emotions. If you’re not apoplectic with rage, you’re part of the problem! Don’t think, don’t pause to check, there’s no time for that! They’re torturing puppies! Don’t you care about the puppies?
• Provides an easy “good guy” identity. You’re not harassing people on the Internet; you’re fighting oppression! If this bullshit becomes a load-bearing pillar of your identity, trying to get rid of it will cause a collapse. (“My god, I’m not a noble crusader at all! I’m an asshole!”)
Sometimes things happen that do indeed confirm pre-existing beliefs. Morally black-and-white situations also sometimes occur. There are certainly subjects you can’t help but feel upset about—but there’s a difference between getting naturally het up and a demagogue intentionally stoking the blaze. If saying, “Hey, this is getting intense for me, I need to calm down and think this through,” gets the response, “Well then, clearly you don’t truly care,” or, “do you think you just get to quit when it’s convenient for you?” that’s when things get suspicious. Do they truly think being emotionally overwhelmed will make you a better freedom fighter, or do they think it’ll make you easier to control, a raging bull manipulated by a toreador? And if they want you not only emotional, but extremely invested extremely quickly, to the point of hanging your identity on it… it’s time to look askance. What kind of people intentionally use self-loathing, disgust, and emotional overload as motivators?
Over the years, I’ve gotten better (though not necessarily good) at, whenever I see something that whips me into an emotional frenzy, stopping and asking myself, “Are these feelings coming from me, or is this person/organization trying to make me feel this way? What do they have to gain from those feelings? Why might they want me to feel this way?”
Also, Certain Environments Help
People have discovered that nothing gets attention like things that make folks really angry or upset, and when something (be it a website, a printing press, a social group, or a government) relies on attention, that means it has an incentive to make you as angry and upset as possible, all the time. (Read Timothy Wu’s the Attention Merchants if you want to know more about this.) Even noble causes aren’t above mass-mailing guilt fodder to try and score donations; even a putrid group can maintain cohesion, if they have an enemy to fight.
Online virality isn’t necessary for this process, but it sure does help. Let’s imagine some piss-purveyor saying some nonsense: “people experiencing spirit possession are appropriating a medical condition and are thus ableist.” Let’s pretend hundreds, or even thousands of people share it, putting it in front of more and more people—who agree, laugh, debunk, historically analyze, doesn’t matter. The point is, sheer omnipresence gives it an illusion of legitimacy: why would people be talking about it if it didn’t matter? The argument feeds on existing soul-scars from oppression, fears of abuse from the greater culture—all of which are likely to make at least one person fly off the handle in a hurtful (or “entertaining”) way. That becomes more fodder for the fire: “look how unreasonable and awful that person was! This proves we’re right!”
Even people who pile in to debunk the whole mess expose still more people to the original, constantly reminding people just how much the uberculture hates them. That takes a psychological toll. Maybe the debunking just makes some people even madder: “clearly you don’t care about ableism/racism.” Maybe, if the piss-fight really takes off, it becomes the battleground for a moral struggle, with designated sides: The Ableist Oppressors vs. the People With a Serious Medical Condition, or the Racist Assholes vs. the Colonized. (And woe betide those who don’t easily inhabit either side or wish the whole piss-fight would go away.) Worst case, the fight becomes socially unavoidable: “so, racist or ableist? Pick one.”
We’re using a purposely fabricated example for illustration, but we’ve lived through at least two piss-fights that reached that final, socially unavoidable point: the Memory Wars (arguably the most successful, and overwhelmingly offline), and the Genic War.
So now we’ve discussed how this shit happens. Let’s talk about detoxing from it!
Go Somewhere Else and Get a Life!
If you went to a party where the punchbowl was forever filled with piss, you probably wouldn’t go back. And yet sometimes, we keep hanging around social battlegrounds filled with rage-bait and misery-makers. If we’re really unlucky, we make the piss-fight such a part of our identity that we not only accept the pissy punchbowl, but start pissing in it ourself because we feel it’s morally necessary or “for our own good.” (Think of the politically single-minded friend you have probably had or been at one point, the one who cannot bake cookies without turning it into a political sermon. Even if you agreed with them, you probably didn’t like hanging out with them.) I’m not saying it’s always easy, but maybe it might be worth finding a better place to hang out.
The world’s a big place. If your favorite group has the Piss-Fight Platoon in charge, try hanging out somewhere else with just the people you like. Go to a different bar or website or whatever! It might require some creativity, but you can do it! I’m terrible at writing letters or postcards, but I’m pretty good at phone calls and email. You can make a group email, a chat room, or an offline park meet-up for free. Get a little crew together and play Charades or something. Go do something that has nothing to do with the piss-fight, mutually agree to this beforehand, and take a squirt bottle to anyone who tries to bring it up afterward.
(If you find yourself wanting to say, “But people will only speak to me in the Eighth Circle of Piss-fight Hell,” then you have a deeper problem, friend. Even guys in prison write letters!)
Build hobbies and relationships that are completely outside the piss-fight. Join a bird-watching group or MMORPG; befriend people who have no dogs in the fight. They don’t have to be your best friend forever! Maybe you just knit socks every Sunday and discuss yarn, or go fishing and never catch anything. They don’t have to be multi either; you’d be surprised whose company you’ll enjoy! When we found ourself stranded in a completely new city and state, knowing nobody, we joined the local gay church, despite being mostly non-Christian. It gave us community service and Bible study to do, the old regulars had a lot of great stories, and one took to greeting us with, “and who are we today?” We don’t regret our time there at all. Meanwhile, there are some folks of nigh-identical demographics to me who you couldn’t pay me to sit in a room with.
Piss-fights run on an us-vs.-them mentality. Don’t let them enforce more social limitations on you than you’re already dealing with.
Become a Student of the Forbidden!
Think about whatever piss-fight poison has really gotten under your skin: all forms of many-selvedness are racist, False Memory Syndrome, fictive BS, whatever. Now go read, watch, or listen to something that kicks it in the face—the more forbidden, the better.
Since a lot of piss-fight arguments are emotionally based, not logical, many don’t pass a basic sniff test, and thus learning even rudimentary history proves a great vaccination—an ounce of prevention trumps a pound of cure. Read older books that predate the piss-fight (libraries are great for this). Dig through old website archives; I have a massive list with links here. Find some chatty old fogy who’s been around a while and listen to their stories—really listen, even if you’re not sure you believe them. If you find yourself wondering about something, good! That’s something to research later! (If the old fogy tries to persuade you not to do your own research because it’s hopelessly “problematic” or whatever, get the fuck away from them.) Read Plures House’s three-part Divisions in Plurality series and read about the pissing fights of yore. Take comfort in that amazing feeling of, “Wow, these people are frothing over things I have never once even considered worth it…. will people twenty years later feel the same way about my bugbear?” (Yes, probably.)
Wander farther afield. If you’re a medical multi, go read about spirit possession, and vice versa. Read stuff from a country or culture different from your own—try Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti (either book or film), Laurel Kendall’s the Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman, Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater or Dear Senthuran, Megan Rose’s Spirit Marriage. If you feel a frisson of, “Ooh, I’m not supposed to be reading this! I’m doing something wrong!” that’s probably a sign you’ve been piss-poisoned. Take in the most challenging material you can manage without turning it into a way to hurt yourself—if you don’t know how to recognize that “scratch till it bleeds” feeling, try to learn over time. Take note of what does give you that feeling, especially if it’s unexpected; it’s a treasure map to deeper self-understanding.
It’s overwhelmingly likely your nonfictional explorations will confront you with things you find gross, bigoted, or baffling. Instead of dismissing it as trash (remember, piss-fights thrive on black-and-white thinking), make mental note of it for further investigation. No research is worthless. A lot of multi books I read are shitful, but they still have value, sometimes because they’re shitty. I don’t regret reading Elizabeth Loftus, because it familiarized me with the False Memory Syndrome arguments. What I regret is believing her so unreservedly for so many years until I finally thought of the search query “‘false memory syndrome’ + ‘debunking.’”
You can also use fiction for this purpose! In the last few years, I’ve been seeing an amazing flowering of many-selved art in different genres, and I’m so glad! When I came of age, most everything was about heartbreak or hamfisted educational or political manifestoes, even the stuff that was ostensibly lighthearted. Obviously, that stuff matters—look at my job—but man, sometimes I just want to cozy up to a good yarn about a multi saving the world, falling in love, or solving a murder without it being a carefully sanitized political statement.
Have you had the message beaten into you that the only multi art worth reading is about politics, victimhood, and suffering? Go find some good happy comfort reading, like Fern Bedek’s Back Flow. Been trapped in a pastel-colored hug-box forever where all multis must be perfect angels? Go dig into something nasty and offensive, like the Binding of Isaac. If you’re sick of purity, find yourself some multi porn. We have a whole catalog of plural stories with over 150 entries; surely you can find something you won’t hate! If you find your punchbowl-pissing inner voice constantly lambasting every single thing as too flawed, too problematic, too unacceptable, congratulate yourself on catching the poisoning before it became terminal and remember that perfection is the enemy of goodness.
If you truly feel you are doing something forbidden and evil, go do it in private! No one has to know! I promise not to tell on you! In the style of Kate Bornstein, I hereby give you permission to learn anything you want to learn, as long as you aren’t mean to anyone. If you get sent to Bad Multi Jail because you read the forbidden tome, I promise to do your time in the cell for you! Intentional ignorance is never a virtue!
The Personal Doesn’t Have To Be Political 24/7
Take it from me, a professional multi: don’t make the politics your life. You will destroy yourself and be the world’s worst party guest. Let yourself have at least one multi thing that makes you happy for nonpolitical reasons, especially if it’s the kind of thing you feel politically embarrassed about. I do this for a job, and if I didn’t take breaks to reread Net Dreams or Romantic Illusions, I would lose my few remaining marbles. Life is more than mugging for your oppressors or nipping at their heels.
If you really have a hard time letting go the feeling that “(everything) personal is (always) political,” read Dorothy Allison’s essay about the lesbian sex wars, “Public Silence, Private Terror,” from Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature. Think of those ‘80s feminists, ripping themselves and each other to shreds over how their personal harmless masturbatory fantasies were secretly misogynist and proof they were male-identified. Do you truly think this made them better feminists? Do you truly think that kind of wound-picking navel-gazing brought more kindness and liberation into the world? Is that what you want in your life?
No one can do battle 24/7. Those who try burn out, sometimes catastrophically.
Make Your Peace with Ambiguity and Uncertainty
Plenty of people hate admitting, “I don’t know,” but piss-fight-purveyors especially. There has to be an obviously correct moral answer; otherwise, how could they justify shaming you for disagreement? If the answers aren’t obvious, the whole thing falls apart. A lot of people become part of piss-fights out of the fear that everyone else knows the right answer, that the only people who don’t know are bad or stupid.
But what if there is no hard and fast right answer? The world is full of mystery and wonder, and that’s a good thing! Make your peace with “I don’t know.” Here, I’ll start:
What is really going on in my head with all this weird stuff? I don’t know!
How true is it? I don’t know!
Is trauma truly associated with plurality, spirit-possession, tulpamancy, MPD/DID/OSDD etc., or is that confirmation bias—we expect there to be trauma, so we go looking for it? I don’t know! The more research I’ve done, the less sure I am!
Does plurality even really exist as a discrete thing, or is just a name some people use to organize their experiences that others don’t? I don’t know!
No theory ever completely survives contact with reality. There are always exceptions, edge-cases, surprises, and entropy. And thank goodness! Imagine how boring life would be if everything worked exactly the way we thought they should! How small and mean that would be!
Don’t Be Mean
I swear by Kate Bornstein’s maxim “DON’T BE MEAN. Anything else goes, anything at all” (Hello, Cruel World, 96). Distrust anyone who insists that you or anyone else is mean for existing. I don’t have any deep logical argument or sources for this, only decades of life experience: I have never met someone pulling this argument that truly cared for the other person’s well-being. Not once. “Their existence is a blight” is an abuser’s argument. It’s the argument of the Nazi Final Solution. It reduces someone to an abstract symbol of evil. It is not a loving or compassionate argument, it brings nothing good into the world, and I distrust anyone who says it outside of a private, regrettable emotional outburst.
People indulging in piss-fighting may attempt a fig leaf of, “oh, it’s not their being that bothers me, just their actions,” but too often those actions translate to “existing,” “existing in public,” or “not expressing enough shame about existing.” In other cases, even if someone repents or disappears (or even dies), it’ll never be good enough for the piss-fighters—because to admit it’s over would mean giving up the identity and having that “oh god, I’m an asshole” collapse. So let’s dispense with the idea that piss-fighting is some altruistic act of reform. It is, at best, a statement of total cultural failure to deal with a problem. What kind of reform can only be obtained via hounding, shame, and self-loathing? Is that truly the best we can do?
There is a comfort to me, though: I’ve seen piss-fighters grow and change, even the ones who ostensibly hated my guts. You’d be surprised how many people have apologized to me over the years! (You’d be surprised how many people I’ve had to apologize to myself.) And when they (or I) changed their minds, it wasn’t from logical arguments or passionate fights. Often, all that was needed was someone quietly existing that broke the preconceptions, and the time, space, and privacy to mull over those newly-broadened horizons.
Changing minds is an inside job. And isn’t that just so much better?
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Date: 2024-04-23 03:53 am (UTC)[Janusz]
This started off being about plural piss-fights but ended up being about detoxing from toxic social justice brain worms in general. Definitely an important thing to talk about.
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Date: 2024-04-23 03:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-23 04:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-23 12:58 pm (UTC)"Do you truly think this made them better feminists?"
Also adding, did it make the feminist movement, better? Just like, has the medicalist movement actually helped plural recognition in medical field, or has it made it worse? But that's often a hurdle that's difficult to cross early on in the pissdom. Since that's the whole crux of most of movements like it 'we're doing this to get better care/recognition to the wide world' and that can be a much tougher pillar to topple.
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Date: 2024-04-23 04:10 pm (UTC)Also, Dorothy Allison's writing about the lesbian sex wars helped clear my head of so many other things that seem unrelated, clearly a lot is generalizable!
EDIT: also, I'm not sure I've met ANY singlet mental health worker who even KNEW about most of these piss-fights, never mind was influenced by them. The Memory Wars are a glaring exception, but they were overwhelmingly staged by singlet lawyers and medical personnel; multis were playing defense in that fight, and I'd argue we mostly lost, for a while anyway.
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Date: 2024-04-23 06:34 pm (UTC)even if we’re all able to recognize the internet isn’t not real life, we aren’t super capable of emotionally internalizing that when we hate someone on a different continent for how they’re different or wrong. a group for people in your state (on any topic), in person or virtual, can help our silly brains remember real humans are involved.
literally just finding any space where you are not in danger and meanness is not tolerated that involves physical proximity works wonders. being in discord servers for local student advocacy groups (where i often lacked identity overlap) did a lot for my ability to leave piss-fights behind.
and having something like DMV Plurals (have we said thanks for sharing it by the way? because thanks!) forces people to realize there are for example Spiritual Multis Near You and they’re real people who do not want to kill you and the puppies or whatever.
no subject
Date: 2024-04-23 06:44 pm (UTC)[Janusz]
On the flip side I think this is why separatist communities seem to always go bad
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Date: 2024-04-24 03:17 am (UTC)I see them roughly every year at that con, and now it's been like four or five years and they said that my quietly existing at them helped them realize that maybe being hardcore about trauma isn't necessarily for the best. They're nice folks, I look forward to seeing them.
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Date: 2024-09-15 12:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-09-15 08:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-05 12:50 am (UTC)My system does a lot better off when we don't interact with the plural community, but we end up spiraling back into it whenever we get lonely or want to try to connect with others about it. The system kids/teens usually end up doing this the most because they want to connect with others in their peer group and can't with singlets, and I don't really blame them for it. I think the other thing is we seem to have a bad reputation in some parts of the plural community for how we acted in the past when faced with conflict and people bring that expectation unto us.
We have gotten a bit better at finding peace in our own head though and trying to find online communities that worked for us. Especially since we realized we were a system at 15 and are 23 now, and a lot of the stuff that bothered us as a teen/young adult isn't relevant now.
no subject
Date: 2024-05-30 01:27 am (UTC)As I read this, though, there was a part of me going "Okay, but what if these slap-fights are valuable some of the time?" Unfortunately for me, I picked up a lot of concepts around liberation movements and oppression in very slapfight-y environments. (I think this is true of a lot of people.) There are some very well-meaning and reflective people with life experiences I appreciated hearing about, who are also involved in these discussions at one point or another. And I've definitely gotten a lot of opportunities to develop my own positions and practice critical thinking by responding to other people's posts (generally in private with friends). Overall, I would say there isn't a bright line between posts that impart good concepts or spark fruitful reflection, and posts that are part of discourse conversations that tend to inflict a ton of psychic damage on everyone.
Upon reflecting on this question of overall value of participating/not participating, though, I think the analysis and advice in your post is still generally solid. The slap-fights and attendant social environments can contain ANY good in them at all, AND some percentage of people in them can be engaging with them in ways that are really bad for them and that they wouldn't do upon reflection about their actual values and priorities. They may be vaguely aware that it's unpleasant and that they think about it a lot, but not just how much it's fucking them up.
In the interests of giving people tools to introspect with...
Things Discourse Poisoning Has Looked Like For Me:
- Spending hours a day responding to discourse-related posts.
- Feeling regularly stressed out and upset about people's bad takes.
- Feeling like I literally couldn't, in the sense of ability, stop thinking about discourse topics, even when I was doing something unrelated or putatively relaxing, like taking a walk.
- Feeling like whenever I saw a post expressing a position I disagreed with, I needed to "solve" the underlying issue immediately by rebutting it mentally.
- Feeling like if I was wrong about a discourse topic, something terrible would happen.
- Feeling like I couldn't just, like, have a negative reaction privately to something someone said. I needed to "show my work" and rebut them, or I was harming them in some way (?!) or being "close-minded". At one point I invented the unicorn emoji, which meant (in my idiolect) "I'm expressing a subjective emotional truth but maybe it's not true." (I didn't want to mislead anyone.) I felt very ashamed when I used the unicorn emoji.
- Having trouble relating to people who didn't have the same takes and "sufficiently good" reasoning behind them. Judging people as basically the sum of their opinions on Tumblr discourse.
- Envying people who had strong interests and hobbies, but finding I couldn't relate to their motivations.
- Simultaneously, feeling like a lot of things were just plain frivolous compared to my fixations.
- Feeling a weird sense of self-consciousness about how much I thought about this stuff; I joked about being "cursed by a wizard".
- Feeling a sense of involuntary, harsh evaluation of everyone. Getting genuinely angry and scared; lashing out at people around me over small, inconsequential disagreements. If people make mistakes, Something Terrible Will Happen.
- Feeling like the most important thing in my life was subtracting small impurities from my thinking and speech.
- Feeling like I had literally no worth outside of my critical thinking skills.
- Assuming other people viewed me this way as well.
- Covering this up with a lot of ~ironic~ self-deprecation, "haha I can't believe the hellsite", etc.
All of this persisted years after I was like "Tumblr SJ had some problems, but luckily people have learned from them and we're generally doing better! My relationship with discourse is totally normal now! I learned the word scrupulosity!"
Which, like, buddy.
Anyways, if reading this list makes you wonder, yes, I have OCD. I also previously had(?) a lot of traits associated with repeated interpersonal trauma (negative self-image, hypervigilance, trust issues, can't calm the fuck down syndrome) and I think they played a role here as well. Regardless of whether the experiences fit in a diagnostic box, they're pretty obviously negative. I didn't realize how pervasive their effects were until I moved away from the habits (mental and behavioral) that reinforced them.
What's It Like Not Having This Problem:
Some of these happened with other life changes that make it hard to identify cause, but also like, I don't think they're totally wild benefits to claim you got from uprooting a stressful and probably-compulsive habit that consumed hours of your life each week.
- I feel much calmer on average now and enjoy life more.
- I feel a greater sense of agency over my own life.
- I've developed my own interests and some new skills. I have a finite amount of free time, and I don't want to spend it looking at bad posts.
- I'm no longer flinching away from a way I was spending time that didn't align with my values.
- I'm able to have enjoyable interactions with a wider range of people, since we can talk about more than a bad post I saw once.
- Nobody yelled at me, or otherwise looked askance, for Letting Down the Team. I still have the same number of friends (if less to talk about with some of them).
Downsides and Side Effects:
- I'm probably missing out on some good posts (or interestingly bad posts) alongside the brain-meltingly bad.
- I feel more emotionally and socially distant from contexts where people talk about Discourse all day. (Not sure if this is really a downside.)
- I'm not as good at the mental motions I associate with analyzing posts, and my motivation has decayed, so I'd have to rebuild that if I wanted to rejoin conversations about social issues. This is the part that feels least aligned with my values, since I value critical thinking.
- If there are some people who felt educated, validated, or persuaded by my posts, they aren't getting that anymore.
Overall, though, I'm hopeful that I'll find ways to address some of the downsides, and even if I don't I'm a much happier and chiller person for having changed my habits around this.
no subject
Date: 2024-06-01 09:50 pm (UTC)Also, I too learned some social justice concepts from Tumblr... but it also kinda gave me a bunch of SHIT ideas about those very things too, which has at times made it harder to learn further! I've also been able to squeeze good information from truly heinous places; that doesn't mean those places were good.
I kinda quit social media years ago, and also had a meltdown a couple years back that led to me locking up the only social internet area I remained on: here. I felt a pressure to stay, for fear that if I didn't keep up, nobody would be interested in my work. In fact, the opposite has happened: instead of focusing on slapfights (which may or may not have use), I'm able to focus on other stuff, which is less glamorous but way more useful, like digitizing old books, digging up old citations, and cataloging plural stories. And people have stuck around, my stuff still gets spread, just now I have fewer popcorn-munchers eagerly waiting for me to hurl myself into bloodsport.
It's true, there isn't a hard line between "challenging but useful" and "poison," but part of detoxing, I'd argue, is figuring out where that line lies FOR YOU, and putting it into practice. Obviously there are people who CAN exist on social media without being a vibrating ball of tension! I'm just not one of them.
no subject
Date: 2024-06-11 07:53 pm (UTC)I'm glad you've been able to distance yourselves from keeping up social media presences that were bad for you! Sounds like it's given you the time and energy to focus on other projects!
no subject
Date: 2025-05-18 08:45 am (UTC)We felt we were being "dishonest" and, therefore, "unethical" by openly being plural, but not immediately baring our souls about who we were and how our system worked, like so many of the noob groups on Tumblr seemed to be doing. We were suspicious of any platform that didn't allow any kind of privacy control on who saw your posts, or made it an all-or-nothing thing, but then we felt we were "bad and dishonest" for caring so much. We were not Being A Good Citizen And Sharing With The Group. (Istevia: I have so many thoughts about "share your feelings with the group" and how it's used to harvest weaknesses from you, as someone who's also been through that in a formal therapy setting, but all of those thoughts are bitter and resentful.)
Another thing I'll mention really briefly: We actually first learned most of what we know about liberation and oppression as a lonely teenager without internet access (this was in the mid-90s) who developed a special interest in "social justice" topics, so we voluntarily spent a lot of time reading about them before we got online. (It definitely was not a perfect education, especially in the 90s when centrism was the cool kids' philosophy, but no one's education ever is.) Yet on Tumblr, everyone was treated like they were starting from zero, and Needed an Education. Which would be provided partly by people experienced in using Tumblr, and partly in the form of the books and websites that inevitably were mentioned when "IT'S NOT MY JOB TO EDUCATE YOU, GO AND EDUCATE YOURSELF!!!"
...oh, and another chronic problem: we, as a queer, gimpy, working-class, plural group with mostly female main fronters (but not necessarily the kind of women that come to mind in this world when people say female), very often did not like or agree with the information contained in the links you were supposed to pass on because you were "too busy to educate people." Their values (e.g. making a big deal about the linguistic distinction between "trans person" and "transperson") were not always the values most important to us. And sometimes, like with multiplicity, there was no really comprehensive guide out there that said everything we wanted to say and that we wanted our friends, in particular, to know! We HAD to do the "educating" ourselves, in order for them to know how we really wanted to be treated! We knew a lot of people who were okay with "so you're separate people sharing a body," but didn't know how to respond to things like nonhuman or fictive members, otherworlds, etc, or how autism interacted with it and why some of us would rather type than speak. We haven't found anything out there that really expresses what we want to tell our friends about these things, to the degree we can just point them at it and say "read this." So we DO have to do the "educating" ourselves.
...we might write more about this later, in our own journal. A lot of this really, really resonates.