Hypothetical Hurt, Real Hurt

Streetlight

In an article from 2015 which has resonated with me ever since, Arthur Chu wrote some very prescient lines on certain feelings of persecution, and the difference between the reality of persecution and the imagination of it. This was in the context of a discussion of feminism and certain responses to it, but which I think has wider currency for alot of social discussion in general. Here is Chu, on the feelings of certain men - in fact, a certain man, Scott Aaronson, who wrote a piece that Chu is responding to - with respect to feminism:

"None of the pain Scott talks about came from things that happened to him. They came from things that happened inside his head. He speaks in generalities about “sexual assault prevention workshops,” or of feeling targeted by feminist literature - himself saying that he was perversely drawn to the most radical and aggressive rhetoric he could find, eschewing more moderate writers for the firebreathing of Dworkin and MacKinnon.

He doesn’t talk about anyone targeting or harassing him personally -- indeed, how could he be targeted by books written by second-wave feminists when he was a toddler? -- but of feeling targeted, of having an accusatory voice inside his mind tormenting him with a pervasive sense of inadequacy, uncleanness, wrongness. It doesn’t seem like anyone in his life was particularly giving him a hard time, but that he was giving himself a hard time and picking up on any critical or negative messages directed at men in general as a way to amplify his negative thoughts."

What struck me especially was the contrast Chu drew with Scott's interlocutor, a woman going by the name 'Amy': "To be blunt, Scott’s story is about Scott himself spending a lot of time by himself hating himself. When he eventually stops hating himself and, as an older, more mature nerd, asks women out, no women mace him, slap him or ritually humiliate him -- instead he ends up with a girlfriend who ends up becoming a wife. So far, so typical. Amy’s story is about being harassed and groped by men in the tech world and, eventually, being raped by a shy, nerdy guy she thought she trusted. So far, so also typical. What’s the biggest difference between Scott's and Amy’s stories? Scott’s story is about things that happened inside his brain. Amy’s story is about actual things that were done to her by other people against her will, without her control."

Abstracting from the context of this particular discussion - feminism and responses to it - my long-lasting take-away from Chu's piece was that one ought to pay attention - close attention - to differences between imagined, projected, and hypothetical hurt, and real, actually-existing hurt. To provide a different context, in Australia we're currently having a debate regarding the legalization of same sex marriage. Proponents of legalization overwhelmingly focus on the fact the the current definition of marriage is causing real, actually existing hurt to the LGBTQI community. Those against, by contrast, overwhelmingly stake their position on the imagined future in which children will be victimized by the legalization of such marriage (a moot point insofar as same sex couples can already adopt children, but I don't want to get into that).

What I want to discuss is not necessarily the merits of each argument - over contentious topics! - but this distinction between real hurt and speculated hurt. I've found this an especially useful distinction in order to assess arguments, especially when speculative hurt is presented as symmetrical to actual hurt. In a great deal of discussion, I've found myself asking: to what degree is your 'hurt' speculative and projected, and is that 'hurt' being leveraged to argue against real, actually existing hurt? I've found this an inordinately useful guidepost to debate - in which I inevitably fall on the side of the latter hurt - and I'd simply like to draw attention to it, and see if others may find it useful as well.

The Chu piece can be read here: https://www.salon.com/2015/01/10/the_plight_of_the_bitter_nerd_why_so_many_awkward_shy_guys_end_up_hating_feminism/

Jamal

This may be more concrete and pedestrian than you're looking for, but...

I find it difficult to draw a clean dichotomy between them, because speculative hurt is also real, not least in the way that it can lead a bitter nerd to cause realer hurt such as rape, harassment, online misogynistic trolling, etc. From this point of view it won't do to dismiss the feelings of unattractive young men who don't know how to talk to women, who feel victimized by what feels to them like an aggressively feminized culture, in which their words are policed by the online mob. Indeed, as Angela Nagle shows in Kill All Normies, the cultural dominance on the internet of political correctness and liberal call-out campaigns, which are often hysterical and puritanical, has contributed to the attractiveness of extreme misogyny and new forms of extreme right thinking, which have thrived on sites such as 4chan. I'm sure TGW could enlighten us further if he were still here.

If the speculative hurt of the misogynistic right-wing nerd is leveraged against the victims of harassment and assault, then it is useful to make that important distinction. But at the same time, if we want to understand what is happening to these young men and do something about it, we also need to take it seriously.

TimeLine

What I want to discuss is not necessarily the merits of each argument - over contentious topics! - but this distinction between real hurt and speculated hurt. — StreetlightX

When you look at the experience of acute stress disorder and PTSD, the latter following a traumatic event such as a car accident (what happened to me actually), for months thereafter one has powerful and yet irrational feelings of anger, fear, anxiety and unnecessary guilt and shame. However, the effect of these feelings stems from a much deeper and "actual" hurt projected into various forms and the reason for this is that the stress hormones glucocorticoid is increased that causes the hippocampus to remain in constant alert and interrupts its function, while the amygdala reacts emotionally as it continues to identify 'threats' and 'risks' that may be imagined. The hippocampus is the area of the brain that turns new experiences into a past-tense memory and therefore the individual experiencing PTSD is unable to correctly consolidate that experience (the shock of the accident that causes a number of different feelings); the result is a person increasingly wound-up, feeling threatened, paranoid, anxious or in a state of constant panic even when there is nothing there.

Spinoza similarly speaks of affectus and therein concludes a variety of forms and our nature is both similar to that of nature itself - causal, spatial, temporal - along with psychological or conceptual. I think what I like about this is the striving toward perfection and the combination of the two, one natural (containing genuine properties) and the other psychological (or imagined) but that is nevertheless consistent with moral views. Our ideas of "perfection" are modelled after nature, and it becomes a formulation - albeit a rather distorted one considering we don't actually know - that is used to correlate or contrast that ultimately articulates a moral language. Morality is somewhat an ideal, something imagined that we existentially narrate or translate perceptually viz., the external world. So, in a way, I don't see there being any difference between speculative and actual as long as there is a consistency with some moral view.

Streetlight

↪jamalrob

Yeah that's fair - it's less a matter of dismissing such speculative hurt than putting it in its place, or seeing it for what it is, as it were. With respect to debates over feminism, one thing I've always been keen to emphasize is that gender issues for men are issues of feminism as well; hyper-masculinity, and the converse feeling of shame at not living up to it (for example), is as much a product of messed up gender relations as female hurt. I remember watching parts of the 'Red Pill' movie and thinking - 'these people ought to be feminism's allies, not their adversaries - they're fighting for the same thing!'

But that's not necessarily applicable in all instances of course. In the case of the same-sex marriage debate, there's little to no complementary there: the projected hurt to children is entirely made up, and it is being leveraged to enforce existing, real hurt. And of course, my not-so-subtle motivation for this thread has to do with the recent gun debates, where fear over imagined futures have been privileged to a hyperbolic degree in disproportion to the actual, life life disproportion of death by gun in order to cast aspersions over even over the vaguest mention of the possibility of regulatory measures.

Streetlight

↪TimeLine

The thing is though, that context matters; I have no doubt that Scott's feelings were real - all too real (as were your PTSD anxieties). He really did feel persecuted, belittled, etc, etc. Perhaps the brain chemistry might have even been the same, or at least similar to that of Amy. But it's equally important to acknowledge the differential genesis of those fears, which in turn require different responses when it comes to policy or attempts at redress. And it's this latter which I want to keep in view: my interest is not in assessing different 'kinds' of hurt 'in-itself', as a point of metaphysical categorization, as it were. It's in what kinds of conclusions we ought to draw from those differing claims to hurt.

TimeLine

↪StreetlightX

Well, no, that was the point of why I included Spinoza in that the narration of those experiences articulate the same moral consistency, the value in those claims. There is no lesser or more, but we tend to assume this as a way of contrasting a moral criteria; the rights of the LGBTQI community are not in question, it is the attempt to contrast with this 'perfection' where we draw such conclusions as a normative status based on the legitimacy of these 'hurt' claims.

Baden

@StreetlightX
I certainly think there is an important distinction: one type of hurt involves being a victim of a third party and the other being a victim of yourself with the third party being a kind of proxy. If you don't have an enemy, you invent one; if you don't have an oppressor, you find one. It's the virtual play of the spoilt modern and should be recognized and identified as such because it obscures very real problems. And yes, the gun debate is a clear example. You identify a problem which involves very real victims and you end up being accused of victimizing those who disagree with you. The nature and degree of the victimhood and hurt, potential or realized, gets lost, and as a result the moral landscape becomes muddied and the problem never gets solved.

I agree with @jamalrob that all these forms of hurt are real and need to be taken seriously, so I'm not sure that the term "hypothetical hurt" is helpful but we should always make recourse to the concept of victimhood and recognize the difference between a true victim, one who suffers as the result of a clear and demonstrable injustice (like Amy or victims of gun crime) and a self-proclaimed victim, one who suffers as a result of a perceived injustice (like Scott and opponents of gun regulation). The hurt is real but the victimhood may be invented or relatively trivial.

Wosret

I don't tend to be super interested in religious debates.

T Clark

What I want to discuss is not necessarily the merits of each argument - over contentious topics! - but this distinction between real hurt and speculated hurt. — StreetlightX

I don't think this is off-post and I don't think I'm violating your request to stay away from "contentious topics." I really dislike getting involved in discussions of feminism vs. whatever the analogous philosophy for men is. I don't feel hurt, either really or speculatively.

I think Chu's examples are misleading and don't effectively make his case. He compares a man who felt bad to a woman who was raped. That's really not fair. Why not compare women to the men who die younger than women, commit suicide and are murdered more often, or get cancer more often. I really don't want to do the my oppression is worse than yours thing. To me, those are arguments from resentment and a failure of empathy rather than from reason and awareness. I think they are intellectually dishonest.

Men are hurt as much as women by the societal roles they are crammed into. That's not a personal complaint, I feel as though I have been treated well and been given the opportunity to have a good life. I am aware that is not true for many - women and men.

Streetlight

I agree with jamalrob that all these forms of hurt are real and need to be taken seriously, so I'm not sure that the term "hypothetical hurt" is helpful but we should always make recourse to the concept of victimhood and recognize the difference between a true victim, one who suffers as the result of a clear and demonstrable injustice (like Amy or victims of gun crime) and a self-proclaimed victim, one who suffers as a result of a perceived injustice (like Scott and opponents of gun regulation). The hurt is real but the victimhood may be invented or relatively trivial. — Baden

Yeah, this is a nice distinction actually, a refinement that you're right, is probably more useful in thinking about this. It does make me think though, of another rubric by which to approach these general issues, which is the question of proportion. I think another, complementary way to assess claims to victimhood is by means of proportionality: one of the things that motivated me to think about these issues was the wildly out-of-proportion response to the suggestion that gun regulation ought to be tightened in the US - it was suggested, among other things, that any move in this direction would be essentially tainted by a nefarious motive to eventually ban all guns, or else make them impossible to access. As if this very motive itself was reason enough to countervail the actual mass death that has been occurring across the country for the last couple of decades.

(I imagine a set of balancing scales, with thousands of actual, real lost lives on one arm, and the hypothetical, almost entirely ephemeral threat of the loss or prohibition of guns on the other, and cannot imagine that the one could even remotely figure as a consideration over the other). Again, it's not the actual arguments that interest me so much as trying to refine my, uh, 'instincts for assessment' when it comes to arguments about social or political issues; what kinds of things I or we ought to pay attention to, the kinds of distinctions we place and the weighting we assign to each. Anyway, again, just hashing thoughts out in the process of discussing them.

Streetlight

I think Chu's examples are misleading and don't effectively make his case. He compares a man who felt bad to a woman who was raped. That's really not fair. Why not compare women to the men who die younger than women, commit suicide and are murdered more often, or get cancer more often. I really don't want to do the my oppression is worse than yours thing. To me, those are arguments from resentment and a failure of empathy rather than from reason and awareness. I think they are intellectually dishonest. — T Clark

I think that the comparison is unfair is exactly the point! Remember that Chu is writing in response to a piece by another person who is not complaining about the threat of dying younger than women, committing suicide more often, or being at a higher risk of cancer or violent death. He is responding quite specifically to someone who was writing about the - for lack of a better word - oppression he felt when having to talk or even interact with women in a romantic way. That's the context of the piece. In a different context I think it may have been appropriate to bring up the issues you mention. But in this one they would be very strange indeed.

T Clark

I think that the comparison is unfair is exactly the point! Remember that Chu is writing in response to a piece by another person who is not complaining about the threat of dying younger than women, committing suicide more often, or being at a higher risk of cancer or violent death. He is responding quite specifically to someone who was writing about the - for lack of a better word - oppression he felt when having to talk or even interact with women in a romantic way. That's the context of the piece. In a different context I think it may have been appropriate to bring up the issues you mention. But in this one they would be very strange indeed. — StreetlightX

From your description of the article and quotes from it you provide, Chu's article sure seems to be more about men's invalid hurt vs. women's valid hurt than about real vs. hypothetical hurt. I guess I misinterpreted.

Cavacava

I was fascinated by the interchange between Scott & Amy, how she was able to draw him out and at the same time reveal a lot about herself.

As far as experienced versus imaginary hurt , at one level I don't think there is a difference, hurt is hurt. However, psychological trauma induced by an actual events one may or may not be able to assimilate into one's conscious psychological make up. If it can't be assimilated then it becomes disruptive and can affect a person's behavior beyond conscious control. I think imagined hurt by definition is part of a person's psychological make up.

Streetlight

↪Cavacava

Yeah, the exchange itself is fascinating - the honesty and openess of it. I suppose what I was trying to get at - having read again some of the exchange - is something like what Amy says here:

"What I’m left wondering is this: maybe the fear, in all these guys, including you, Scott, is not so much that they will commit aggression — it’s that they fear they’ll be seen behaving aggressively, and that there’ll be a price for that. Which really makes me wonder what the hell is going on, because at that point I begin to suspect that it doesn’t really have to do with women, who once again become not-real-people in the scenario, but with how the men will be seen and fare."

It's this sense of occlusion, I think, that I'm trying to put my finger on; a kind of hurt or fear that almost self-generates, and feeds off itself, which in turn obscures other, non-self-generated problems. Perhaps yet another way to frame this is in terms of temporality: the difference between a fear of that which has happened, is happening, and a fear of what will (possibly) happen. To the degree that one can speak of a calculus of fear, I guess I'm trying to say that as a general rule of thumb, it's the 'has-happened' and 'is-happening' that ought to take priority against that which may happen, especially if we're trying to respond or act in the face of such fears, real as they all may be.

--

As an aside, I also very much liked Laurie Penny's response too, which was along the lines of - 'we suffer this too... and more':

"[Scott] Aaronson was taught to fear being a creep and an objectifier if he asked; I was taught to fear being a whore or a loser if I answered, never mind asked myself. ... Scott, imagine what it's like to have all the problems you had and then putting up with structural misogyny on top of that." source

The whole episode attests in general to unhealthy gender relations that can't be 'blamed' on any one gender or movement in particular, but is a matter of cultural atmospherics, almost, in which both sexes are get caught, in their own, specific ways. But again, the trick is in recognising the sources of each, and crafting appropriate responses.

Cavacava

Here is what interested me in Laurie Penny's response:

Women generally don't get to think of men as less than human, not because we're inherently better people, not because our magical feminine energy makes us more empathetic, but because patriarchy doesn't let us. We're really not allowed to just not consider men's feelings, or to suppose for an instant that a man's main or only relevance to us might be his prospects as a sexual partner. That's just not the way this culture expects us to think about men. Men get to be whole people at all times. Women get to be objects, or symbols, or alluring aliens whose responses you have to game to "get" what you want

Finding out that you’re not the Rebel Alliance, you’re actually part of the Empire and have been all along, is painful. Believe me, I know. (Although I always saw myself as an Ewok)

My leap here is that the occlusion you mentioned is due to our inherent fear of the patriarchal prohibition against incest. If so then her mention of Star Wars (Vader, Leia & Luke), and the Ewoks (whose language is a play on the Tibetan language) might provide a key for the deconstruction of what is going on between men & women.

T Clark

Women generally don't get to think of men as less than human, not because we're inherently better people, not because our magical feminine energy makes us more empathetic, but because patriarchy doesn't let us. We're really not allowed to just not consider men's feelings, or to suppose for an instant that a man's main or only relevance to us might be his prospects as a sexual partner. That's just not the way this culture expects us to think about men. Men get to be whole people at all times. Women get to be objects, or symbols, or alluring aliens whose responses you have to game to "get" what you want

Smug, creepy, laughable, ironic.

Hypothetical Hurt, Real Hurt

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