addendum
This is a direct follow-up to my last entry.
Ultimately it is just inner monologuing about what it would mean to live my own life as authentically as I can, in what is an increasingly scary environment; it contains a description of my own experience of specific roles and expectations1, and my own pain points, which I am still deconstructing and processing. I do discuss gender, gender roles, and fascism, so reading this may be unpleasant or even unbearable. Above all, this is just a diary.
I am noticing that, here on the eve of a potential American dictatorship, a lot of movies coming out (none of which I've watched) are about megalomania—about masculinity and ego and grandiosity and all-American exceptionalism—and also about the clinging "trauma girls2" who attempt to hitch their own stars to these powerful men's.
Spoilers follow for one such movie I have not seen (it's Megalopolis):
Megalopolis is currently viral on TikTok for its feverish audacity and inscrutability. The kids have been sharing (in addition to hallucinogenic fancams of Adam Driver) two specific movie scenes; in each scene, a paranoid scion dismisses a woman (at the top of his lungs). In one, an elderly, infirm, and impotent Jon Voight reveals that his "boner" is actually an arrow, poised taut against the string of a bow, and he lets the arrow fly, killing Aubrey Plaza while shouting that her character is a whore.
This is very Godfather-coded to me. I'm thinking about other movies in which a woman serves a wealthy capitalist—commodifying herself, making herself appealing or useful to authority in order to survive—but then she begins to thrive, or maybe she is too ambitious (the ultimate betrayal!), and the real authority figure murders her for it. (There's also something Freudian, the way the lust for power and privilege—for the ability to move safely and autonomously through a hostile environment—is interpreted by Ford Coppola as literal "penis envy.")
I don't remember the movie Blow, but I guess this same trope repeatedly turns up in movies about drugs and kingpins and machismo: "Watch out! That b**** is trying to take what you have!" It's always kings and their b****es, their Iagos or Jafars (?) trying to steal their riches and/or authority away. I'm fascinated by how the accumulation of wealth makes rich people paranoid that everyone else is coming to take what they earned (or didn't earn); that's why they can only be friends with people who are richer than they are. But wealth alone isn't necessarily what makes you paranoid, I guess. Truly, truly, we are all victims of late-stage capitalism:
In America, the gap between haves and have-nots is enormous, and has been widening for years. What’s less well-known is the growing body of evidence, summarized this month in a Lancet report, suggesting that inequality harms us psychologically and physically, no matter our tax bracket or the size of our house. It makes status hypersalient, weakens social ties, and encourages us to choose prestige over purpose.
I've used a lot of gendered language here because the GOP weaponizes the concept of a gender binary, because Francis Ford Coppola uses a gendered visual architecture, because the vocabulary of capitalism, exploitation3, and oppression tends often toward gendered terms4.
There is, as they say, no ethical consumption under capitalism, but it seems as if there is also very little authentic creation under capitalism: the pressure to conform, to perform the expected role5, to be marketable, to eat, to survive, is overwhelming. And then there are those who are wealthy or resource-rich enough to not care what others think—to self-fund their own directorial efforts or presidential candidacies, or to purchase social media platforms and turn them into disinformation rackets—some of whom actually seem to relish in revealing to others, as a display of their own power and autonomy, that at heart they really are antisocial and anti-human, and deeply immature, who care only about ensuring their own security and never others', and the only thing that was ever keeping them minimally on the straight-and-narrow was the slight gravity of the expectations of others (shame, validation).
On the flip side there is "existential courage" ("hardiness," "authenticity"), which authoritarianism strives to keep us from cultivating in ourselves so that our exhaustion or hopelessness will imperil others. Hardiness is what empowers us to resist this immense pressure and retain our individual shape—the structural integrity of the self. I have been trying hard to rebuild trust in myself. But how do I grow "hardy"? Of course I know resilience can be measured—resilience is a counterpart to the ACE, or Adverse Childhood Experiences scale—and I know that developing your own community and support system is crucial. Everything seems to boil down to self-differentiation ("boundaries") and self-determination. But that's as far as I have gotten.
Early on, my trauma therapist asked me for a concrete goal to work on. "To be able to write again," I said.
"Okay," she said. "Do you mean writing about video games? Because I can't ethically help you with anything that might endanger you or cause you harm."
"I don't even know." I hesitated. I looked at her quizzically. "But all writing is dangerous," I said, confused. (Bad news for verbal processors!)
I didn't always know I was agender. Or, rather, I did always know; I just thought that was the default, "normal" experience, to feel like nothing. I didn't know that feeling that way had a name. The better I've gotten to know my self, the more I've felt, "wow, I had myself right all along."↩
"Trauma girls" is just a silly expression that comes from a dream I had; J.D. Vance is a trauma girl. He's like if Harley Quinn were speaking at Yale and met the Joker. I am reminded of the new photos of Elon Musk hopping around at Trump's rally like a fascism cheerleader. In those photos, Musk is wearing the same shirt—"OCCUPY MARS"—that he wore when he was the surprise special guest speaker at Twitter's OneTeam event in January 2020. Musk illustrates that trauma girl and megalomaniac can be one and the same: an antisocial menace who romanticizes the "lone wolf" but who himself is codependent.↩
The GOP's platform of transphobia, xenophobia, "critical race theory," and gender essentialism—and its invasive obsession with "biological sex"—is explicitly designed to make it easier to tell who to subjugate and exploit, whose achievements or contributions to diminish or rewrite, who to marginalize or erase.↩
Those who prefer to protect their peace should skip this footnote. In trauma therapy I've been open about not knowing or understanding, from earliest cognizant childhood, what gender I am supposed to be. Complicating matters was the violence I witnessed my birth father suffering at the hands of my sometimes-gun-wielding mother. So my earliest gender model was inverted from the social norm (and this is probably true for a lot of cisgender men who are fearful or aggrieved), where "woman" or "mother" is persecutor and "man" or "father" is victim, stripped of agency. And then there was me: as child and witness, I was the third person, unidentifiable, a secret third thing. More recently, when reading about Bob Altemeyer's right-wing authoritarian scale, as well as the Bowen family systems model, I would learn about the Karpman drama triangle, a model for understanding the scripts for human conflict and our "roles," and about this "third actor" (described in various literatures as performing the "bystander," "observer," or "rescuer"). The problem arises when we are too attached to our identities as the disempowered or as the rescuer to recognize we are the oppressor.↩
So far I feel like I've just been declining roles and responsibilities I never wanted in the first place: a persistent drive for autonomy, it's sometimes called. But as I continue to question, well into the autumn of my life, how living authentically might look for me, I am realizing that I think I "want to throw away every societal norm and start from scratch, like, uh, when you're trying to figure out what you're allergic to. Um, an elimination diet," I said to my trauma therapist.↩