Continuation of this thread.
I asked him to consider why, despite having been anti-abortion for a long time, he never bothered to learn about the effects of pregnancy and childbirth on women’s bodies and whether that constituted a severe failure to prioritize on his part. He told me to, basically, shut up and stop talking about it. At this point, I agreed with him that I would not change his mind and told him that I’d rather not speak with him anymore, for the same reason that
CW: Misogyny, SV
I would not want to associate with someone who supports legalizing maritalremoved.
A few minutes later, I got this email:
You know, I tried to say “Let’s avoid this topic.” And then you make ridiculous statements such as accusing me of “not caring about women.” Something you damn well know is false. And you rage quit when you get upset.
The bottom line is that you are a narcissist. You are a person who cares about no one and nobody except yourself and your own self-gratification. I’m sorry, but you really are. You take pleasure in putting other people down knowing they will come crawling back to you because they need a friend. Only so that you can abuse them some more.
Well, there is no hope for ever fixing a narcissist. So you are right, this relationship is toxic. You cannot be fixed. And I am done being your victim.
I think what you’re saying is broadly true, but false consciousness can also reach lower than that, to basically an aesthetic level where someone has given up on substantial material benefit (or such pursuits are very siloed to them) and otherwise now just seeks to subjugate people for their own pleasure, and nowhere is this more obvious than with misogynists who seem to just want to abuse women not because of complaints about wage deflation but because they get pleasure from it happening. It also happens with immigrants, where similar complaints about things like wage deflation rapidly devolve into a theater of cruelty that doesn’t always have clear economic intentions, even incorrect ones.
In both the cases of misogyny and xenophobia, it is not about wage deflation. That’s just a deflection talking point. I don’t think people actually believe in lump sum of labor.
The goal of xenophobia and misogyny is to create an exploitable underclass. The material benefit for right wingers is that they exploit these groups of people. Exploitation is the use of power to extract value. Right wingers seek to make immigration difficult so that migrants are forced to work for lower wages. This is why migrants get punished but not the businesses who utilize the labor of undocumented migrants.
The material benefit of the misogynist is that they force their will over a woman or women. A misogynist has made the calculation that oppressing women is more personally beneficial than liberating women. The pleasure is part of the material gain.
I am saying that you can not change the mind of the person who has made this calculation through debate. They’re making the decision to be a misogynist, not because it’s right but because (1) they can get away with it and (2) they get stuff from taking advantage of women. Nothing can be said to the misogynist which will change those 2 deciding factors.
Society has to be changed so that oppression is not rewarded and that oppressors do not “get away with it”.
I don’t think pleasure is itself a material benefit, even if you can circle around that point by talking about labor exploitation and such.