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?
no subject
Date: 2024-04-23 04:04 pm (UTC)