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whitehotharlots · 4 years

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Woke liberals and the occult

You may have noticed recently a proliferation of identity-centric liberals who also embrace magic and mysticism. They often, for example, argue (completely ahistorically) that belief in astrology is an inherently feminine practice, and so mocking someone for believing in fairies or wood nymphs or whatever is a sign of toxic masculinity. Where, you might wonder, does this come from?

I've been wanting to write something about this for a long time, but it would take a lot of work, and attaching my real name to any such piece would make me unemployable. Here's some raw notes:

Legitimizing the occult allows authoritarian feminists to exert power over the people they dislike, and to do so in a way that nominally exempts them from the problematics of engaging in straight-up carceral feminism or other regressive politics. And I don’t mean this in a metaphoric or loose sense. There’s real-life precedence of authoritarian feminists doing exactly this.

Satan's Silence (1995), a book by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, does an excellent job of detailing many prominent iterations of the 1980's "Satanic" sex panic. Their work displays some concerning parallels between the 80′s panic the current sex panic gripping the mainstream left.

Nathan and Snedeker unflinchingly connect the 80's-era satanic sex panic (SSP) to an alliance between authoritarian feminists and weirdo conservatives who worked in psychology and sociology. Pointedly, these tendencies were not native to earlier generations of feminism, but came about when creeps from other fields made a politically opportune pivot. One of the key architects of early SSP was Dr. Roland Summit, a Freudian psychiatrist who was the head physician at LA County’s child protection services in the 70’s. Early in his career, Summit was renowned for being sympathetic toward incestuous fathers, whom he believed were driven to rape their children due to the inadequacy of their wives.

This sounds unbelievable, I know. But bear in mind, up until pretty recently, sex crimes were conceptually medicalized, understood as mental disorders rather than as pure violence. “Rape is about power, not sex” may be the first principle for all contemporary analysis of sexual assault, but back then, experts were more keen on understanding these acts as stemming from purely sexual perversions. (This might make the outrageousness of that Abducted in Plain Sight documentary a bit more explicable). Dr. Summit didn’t exonerate incestuous fathers, but he did view parent-child attraction as a fixable disorder that stemmed from the breakdown of the traditional family structure. His beliefs were echoed by many prominent child abuse prevention programs, which tended to have “a strong bias toward preserving marriages” (22): the belief being that strong, two-parent families would result in a sort of psychological equanimity that would blot out any inclinations toward sexual abuse.

Of course, this is the opposite of first and second-wave feminist thought, which almost universally regarded traditional families as incubators of violence. However, prominent anti-violence feminists of the early 80’s “were willing to excuse these gaffes for various reasons. For one, they knew they could not get the government to support antidomestic violence efforts if they talked about skewered power, whether it derived from maldistribution of wealth or, even more unmentionably, from patriarchal inequality” (22). The psychology-dominated violence prevention agencies may have been patriarchal, but they had ample funding, and tremendous amounts of social clout. Most importantly, they had raw power: they could take away a family’s kids, and they could put men in jail.

If I was writing a longer piece, I’d include a caveat here that of course we shouldn’t conflate regular feminists with authoritarian feminists and point out the obvious conflicts going on here. But let’s just look at one of the authoritarians real quick: Judith Herman. Herman was one of the loudest and least repentant of the Satanic Panic/Repressed Memory therapy grifters, and she became involved with Summit’s institute in the late 70’s. She was drawn to the pro-family rehab programs because of their ability to retool male behavior and make men regard all of their sexual impulses as sources of shame. She even approvingly compared these men’s therapy sessions with “forced political reeducation programs in revolutionary societies” (23). (If you’re at all familiar with wokeism in the late twenty-teens, you already know how much shaming and reconditioning are considered the means and ends of feminist praxis.)

The authoritarian feminist/pro-family psychology alliance was based on a simple proposition: abusive men could submit to re-education therapy, or they could go to prison for a very long time. The former option was of course the one most chosen, and suddenly a carceral program based on regressive notions of sexuality and domesticity was given a woke gloss. This set the stage for the full-bore panic, and segues neatly to another tenet of our contemporary sex panic: the supposed moral imperative to believe every account proffered by every victim, no matter how implausible or impossible their stories may be. (Unless, it turns out, the accused is a prominent neoliberal Democrat).

Summit believed that, in his own words, “children never fabricate the kinds of explicit sexual manipulations they divulge in complaints or interrogations.” This meant not only that kids should be believed if they, for example, say their mom and dad murdered 20 babies in front of them, but that it was okay to foster a therapeutic environment in which caseworkers asked leading questions to coerce these kinds of stories out of kids. A father could find himself in counseling for something heavy (beating his wife) or minor (drinking too much and yelling), his kid could run into a caseworker who got them to describe profane abuse, and then the dad had a choice: he could admit to every allegation and enter into reeducation, or he could face multiple felony charges. This led, naturally, to an explosion of such cases. And the hucksters who had installed this system had created a feedback loop that validated their practices.

Demonology and other superstitions could easily infiltrate this milieu. Behavior modification programs have always been cult-like. Entering into them requires patients and practitioners to suspend all forms of critical thought that may undermine the group’s practices and presumptions. Once an empowered group loses all recourse to rationality and critical thought, it becomes quickly indecent. Absurd assumptions snowball. What were once understood as misplaced libidinal drives become overtaken by ghosts and devils. Family violence and personal unhappiness are caused not by social structures or simple interpersonal conflict, but by the presence of mystical evil. And it all makes sense to the people who are caught up in it: what good is empiricism, after all, when we are battling demons?

I could say a lot more here, but I encourage you look up the figures I've mentioned in this piece. To this day, Debbie Nathan is a pariah in most feminist spaces, while Judith Herman is a celebrated mental health professional who has received multiple awards from prestigious organizations. The latter's work led to dozens of people going to prison and thousands of children being badly traumatized, while the former did nothing more malignant than document professional abuse. When neurotic but marginalized people formulate a way to glom on the violence of powerful organizations, they are heavily rewarded. Other vicious idiots rush in and seize the opportunity to harm the people they hate. Sometimes their anger is righteous, sometimes it's entirely misplaced, but that's all beside the point. The point is power. Occult bullshit is an easy way for violent people to hurt others.

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