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The original was posted on /r/twoxchromosomes by /u/ThisDudeisNotWell on 2023-08-12 04:15:24.
TW: Mention of SA
If you’re looking for the TL;DR: self-hatred and shame. I know, what a twist, the exact reason everyone thinks women become pick-mes is exactly the reason why they become pick-mes.
I was a queer kid who was always dreadfully bad at hiding I was queer even before I came out and I grew up in a very conservative environment, which is a recipe for making someone monumentally adverse to being shamed.
I went from that kind of hyper conservative environment to art school, which as you can imagine, was something of a culture shock for me. If you’re ever wondering how POC, queer, women or any oppressed minority becomes so steadfastly, aggressively willing to “bootlick” and have that subsume their whole personality, it’s a traumatic response. The animal chewing their own leg off to get free of the bear trap.
Not really having the space to get properly “deprogramed,” if you will, from the conservative brain rot I didn’t even realize I had internalized at the time. I don’t want to make excuses for myself but you see how this happens to a person. It’s no one else’s responsibility to re-education someone else, I totally understand why so many people don’t have the energy to explain to every misinformed rando they come across how bigotry goes a lot further than explicit violent hatred, but, you know.
What really drove me down the deep end ended up being when I got sexually, emotionally and eventually publically, physically abused in college by a woman. Now, like most sexual abuse victims I did myself no favors in going through a long period of denial, defending my abuser, that whole song and dance. I was ashamed, couldnt face the reality of the situation, and this wasn’t the first time I was sexually abused in my life so I came pre-groomed for this kind of treatment, which is exactly why she targeted me. Our relationship started AFTER she had already had unconscentual physical contact with me a few times and had intercourse with me while I was unconscious. But to save you a long and messed up story, the hard-core leftist, proudest, loudest, feminist “believe all women” peer group around me decided that when it came between two women, believing the more traditionally feminine, dainty, physically smaller one was the one to believe— which wasn’t me. I understand I was seen as the much more abrasive one superficially to them, but even after it became clear which one was abusing who as she became more and more erratic as to desperately tried to get away from her, they just quietly stopped attacking me and enabling her behavior instead of keeping true to their principles on believing and supporting victims.
Don’t misunderstand me though, the conservative “friends” who were so happy to use me as a triggered-snowflake-feminist-owning atom bomb to dunk on the libs were just as shitty to me as my peers were. It’s just the narrative of an art school lesbian who was bullied by a bunch of “SJW” hypocrites for being abused was really useful to them. Their sympathy was just as hypocritical and superficial, considering how many of them were straight up sexually harassing me through our entire friendship. All of them knew I was straight up not attracted to men from the beginning of us knowing each other, yet a substantial amount of those friendships ended with them hurling abuse at me for not being interested in them. Constant comments about my body or about how much they wanted to bang me, all “jokes” I willingly and stupidly tolerated and pretended to be okay with because God knows I’d be raked through the coals less I even politely try to explain to them why that made me uncomfortable. I so badly wanted to be “one of the guys,” accepted into the bros club. I tolerated and perpetuated an absolutely horrific amount of bigotry as a “reasonable argument” and a “valid perspective.” Especially against myself. Here’s something not often discussed: it’s extremely alluring (all be it profoundly self-destructive) to victim blame yourself. It being your fault gives you some illusion of control, security that you’re not as vulnerable as you really are, and some sense of direction that all you have to do is punish yourself into never being so weak again/at all. Accepting that it really isn’t your fault is accepting it’s all out of your control, which can easily send you spiraling that you’re going to be hurt again if you’re not in an environment to properly heal.
The absolute worst, ugliest opinions I ever held as my own were against women, and gender non-conforming trans people. To the surprise of probably no one reading this, I might as well out myself now: a few years after college I came out as a gender non-conforming transman. Of course not every pick me is secretly transgender, but, all pick mes are absolutely suffering from radioactive levels of projection for some deep seeded insecurity. In my specific case was drowning in the social pressure to conform to first the gender role forced upon me at birth, and failed miserably. Then I started acting like a starved animal to get my masculinity validated by others without having to go through the public humiliation of getting real treatment for my gender dysphoria and medically transitioning. It’s not like I had a single healthy male role model growing up either. I was packed to bursting with the same toxic masculinity and volatile insecurities cis men are, the kind that i’m sorry but a lot of women don’t realize how unempathetic they can be towards, so I was left festering with my conservative male friends about it like so many other young men are. Of course it manifested differently in me presenting as a woman for so long, but still.
Social progress is always messy. Especially now with the way social media has inadvertently changed the way people express complex ideas. I don’t think it was anyone’s fault I got lost in the vortex of it all, but these complex systems of social control really are kind of like abusive partners. It’s pulling teeth trying to liberate yourself from them, it’s not a linear process, and people don’t escape unscathed. That’s not to excuse people’s behaviors, not even mine, but it’s something to keep in mind.