The Joys of Victimhood (1989)

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/02/magazine/the-joys-of-victimhood.html?pagewanted=2&pagewanted=all

by imartin2k • 9 years ago

93 54 9 years ago

nytimes.com

shawndumas• 9 years ago

one page view

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/02/magazine/the-joys-of-victi...

dang• 9 years ago

We've changed to that from http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/02/magazine/the-joys-of-victi.... Thanks!

PhasmaFelis5• 9 years ago

I love how he thinks that Israel bulldozing Palestinian neighborhoods and killing civilians doesn't count as oppression because there's more Arabs than Israelis in the general area.

nl7• 9 years ago

This was written in 1989. Settlements were much less of an issue then, and the demographics were dramatically different.

Avshalom• 9 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_Heights#De_facto_annexat...

dfsegoat• 9 years ago

The number of parallels between now and 1989 are striking: victimhood == top social currency, etc... It really is almost like we have these 20-30 year social cycles... Perhaps this is known to the sociological literature - but that's not my area. Just the same I find it fascinating.

GarvielLoken• 9 years ago

Doesn't cycle imply that it went down in between?

moneytide13• 9 years ago

Here in the South, there is this air of hospitality. But there is an irony because everyone always rejects each others volunteer assistance out of pride for their ability to take care of themselves. I see charity directed towards me almost as an insult, or subtle attempted ownership, and there is this competitive air about needing less than others.

But I suppose in more densely populated areas, there is more victimhood at play. This is an education problem, because these people were never raised to take care of themselves. Instead, they want to be owed something. This "something" usually comes in the form of tax handouts, and when it is distributed, I'm certain it is quite mismanaged. Think of all the impulse-buy items near checkouts that are purchased with food stamps, when these people could be combining this resource to buy in bulk and get much more out of it.

My mantra is to be a provider, not a consumer. It's not about how much you make, it's about what you choose to spend it on.

It seems like these types of problems can only exist when there are too many people living in close-proximity.

matt40772• 9 years ago

"The South" is neither morally superior, nor more independent/self-reliant, etc..

Guess which states get more than twice the taxes they pay to the federal government back? Alabama, Mississippi, New Mexico, and other rural southern states are taken the handouts from California and New York: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vby1dJlsXmM/VtkJnusdGXI/AAAAAAAAJ...

Guess which teenagers are incapable of not getting pregnant at 14? The southern, rural christians. Guess which states' citizen are dropping from Opiod addiction like flies? Again, the south (plus similarly rural Appalachia). Guess where food stamps are most used, where people are unable to control their eating and are morbidly obese, which people smoke more, where drunk driving is socially accepted, etc etc: the US South, and some rural northern states, are worse than the large cities in almost any measure you can think of.

nugi• 9 years ago

So someone said something about the south, that does not make it okay to go on a bigoted diatribe. Wtf.

moneytide13• 8 years ago

I should not have said "everyone" or "always", and I agree with your first sentence - I do not wish for my statement to be seen as a declaration of superiority.

What I do wish to convey is my personal ideals, as a native of the region. I work for a rural ISP, and while there are some homes I enter that seem to validate these values, there are plenty that embody the statistics that you have linked.

Whenever I see these broken places, with all the evidence of obesity, addiction, smoking, drinking, etc that you have mentioned, I am bothered at how this came to be. Some of these people clearly do not care about anything more than having their working internet and Netflix (as well as the aforementioned vices) - trash all over the yards, cockroaches all around their networking gear, an abundance of unfinished projects, abandoned community gardens. Scatterbrained.

I want there to be order and community where it seems to be dissolving. This article caught my attention because I want to dissolve the crusade of victimhood that is growing like a tumor.

mherdeg• 9 years ago

Epstein's powerful prose captures well the New York intellectual views of a certain culture and a certain generation. It's a fascinating perspective on what people were thinking then. I was equally fascinated by the deep view of the popular psyche shown in his September 1970 essay for Harper's Magazine, featured on its cover ( https://harpers.org/archive/1970/09/homohetero/ ):

Yet if heterosexual life has come to seem impossibly difficult, homosexual life still seems more nearly impossible. For to be a homosexual is to be hostage to a passion that automatically brings terrible pressures to bear on any man who lives with it: and these pressures, which only a few rare homosexuals are able to rise above with any success, can distort a man, can twist him, and always leave him defined by his sexual condition. The same, I think, cannot be said about heterosexuals. With the possible exception of prostitutes and heterosexuals driven by abnormal appetites, the general run of heterosexuals are not defined by their sexuality at all. Although the power of sex is never to be underrated, in the main for most heterosexuals sex beyond adolescence becomes a secondary matter, a pleasure most of the time, a problem only in its absence. Homosexuality, on the other hand, is a full-time matter, a human status—and that is the tyranny of it.
…
I am not about to go into a liberal homily here about the need for private acceptance of homosexuality, because, truth to tell, I have not privately accepted it myself—nor, I suspect am I soon likely to. In my liberal (or Liberal's) conscience, I prefer to believe that I have never done anything to harm any single homosexual, or in any way added to his pain; and it would be nice if I could get to my grave with this record intact. Yet I do not mistake my tolerance as complete. Although I have had pleasant dealings with homosexuals professionally, also unpleasant ones, I do not have any homosexuals among my close friends. If a close friend were to reveal himself to me as being a homosexual, I am very uncertain what my reaction would be—except to say that it would not be simple. I clearly do not consider a man's homosexuality, as certain ihomosexuals would argue, merely a matter of sexual preference on his part, something vestigial to him, but instead I think it goes deep within him, that it cannot but have affected him strenuously, making him either a stronger man or a weaker, a better man or a worse—whichever, at all events, an essentially different man than he would be if he were not a For this reason, and from an absolutely personal point of view, I consider it important o know whether a man I am dealing with is a homosexual or nut. Not long ago the BBC did a retrospective on the art of Sergei Diaghilev. Every aspect of Diaghilev's illustrious career was covered from every possible angle, when the last man to be interviewed for the show, an aged Russian homosexual who was a friend of Diaghilev's from the 1920s, said: "Ze ting you must remember about Servei vas dat he vas a very aggressive homosexual." I think anyone who would ignore a fact of this kind in intellectual criticism or in life, is a fool.
If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of this earth. I would do so because I think that it brings infinitely more pain than pleasure to those who are forced to live with it; because I think there is no resolution for this pain in our lifetime, only, for the overwhelming majority of homosexuals, more pain and various degrees of exacerbating adjustment; and because, wholly selfishly, I find myself completely incapable of coming to turns with it.
…
They are different front the rest of us. Homosexuals are different, moreover, in a way that cuts deeper than other kinds of human differences—religious, class, racial—in a way that is, somehow, more fundamental. Cursed without clear cause, afflicted without apparent cure, they are an affront to our rationality, living evidence of our despair of ever finding a sensible, an explainable, design to the world. One can tolerate homosexuality, a small enough price to be asked to pay for someone else's pain, but accepting it, really accepting it, is another thing altogether. I find I can accept it least of all when I look at my children. There is much my four sons can do in their lives that might cause me anguish, that might outrage me, that might make me ashamed of them and of myself as their father. But nothing they could ever do would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual. For then I should know them condemned to a state of permanent niggerdom among men, their lives, whatever adjustment they might make to their condition, to be lived out as part of the pain of the earth.

poster123• 9 years ago

It is normal to want grandchildren, and therefore it also normal to be distressed if your children are homosexual.

doomsauce• 9 years ago

Sure, but replace each instance of "homosexual" in the above with "person who does not want children" or "barren person" and see if you think that's why the author is distressed.

PhasmaFelis5• 9 years ago

Not many people disown their kids or send them to abusive camps because they don't want to have children.

loorinm• 9 years ago

Dude is gay. No one is this tortured or obsessed unless they themselves are repressing their own - to use his revelatory and judgy phrase - “abnormal apetites”. How people can mistake this wordy tortured coming-out essay as “a credible view” is beyond strange.

Also his obsession with victim-shaming? He is a victim and won’t allow himself his victim feelings. The fact that this article was published in a major publication shows how problematic “real journalism” can be. That’s my main takeaway from the 3 paragraphs I could stomach.

chickenfries• 9 years ago

So much projecting about how miserable it must be to be gay. Truly the thoughts of someone who cannot admit it to themselves.

engine_jim• 9 years ago

"...heterosexuals driven by abnormal appetites." Like there is any shortage of those.

TimJYoung• 9 years ago

Nice catch, very enlightening read.

He seems to want to simply ignore the historical context in which homosexuals were "conflicted about" or "tortured by" their homosexuality. If society makes one's sexuality the defining aspect of one's personality by railing against it and excluding/tormenting/harming people based upon it, then of course it's going to result in psychological pain for those that are the subject of such treatment. He's completely mixing up cause and effect...

alexandercrohde2• 9 years ago

Such a situation could never have come about without certain fundamental confusions having been firmly established, and these begin with language itself. Victims have traditionally been minority groups, but in fact women, who in the United States are a slight majority, have been deemed victims, whereas the Jews and the Chinese in America, though clearly minorities (and vastly less numerous than blacks or Hispanic people), are not usually counted as victims and thus rarely get included in affirmative action or other quota favoritism programs. A victim, then, is someone who insistently declares himself a victim.

I was just wondering about this last year. I still haven't had anybody explain it to me in a logically-consistent way. I think it's a fair ask.

nl7• 9 years ago

Minority status does not define victims, and instead it is about power.

There were a lot less British in India during the Raj than there were Indians. It is pretty clear who the victim was then.

alexandercrohde2• 9 years ago

I'm not sure that explains why Chinese immigrants would be portrayed as victims less than hispanic immigrants, as just one example off the top of my head.

oceanghost• 9 years ago

The focus on "power" in late stage cultural marxisms is nonsense.

I am white. I can gurantee you white people are not acting in concert to achieve anything. The people are the top are fking everyone below them, regardless of race or creed.

Taniwha• 9 years ago

Bear in mind this was written in the very same year that the same guy traded on his own "victimhood" after being fired from his 20yr job for writing a homophobic rant.

PhasmaFelis5• 9 years ago

When these people complain about others being special snowflakes and expecting special treatment, what they really mean is that they deserve special treatment.

arionhardison• 9 years ago

I have always thought this to be true. I find it ironic when whites complain about programs like affirmative action when through laws such as Jim Crow, Red Lineing, etc... they have been receiving affirmative action for hundreds of years. What whites are really saying when they speak out against programs like that is: "We deserve to be the only protected class of people".

stcredzero• 9 years ago

The pleasures of victim-hood include imbuing one's life with a sense of drama. The drama of daily life is greatly heightened if one feels that society is organized against one.

This sounds very, very familiar!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcP0WmGB78A

owenversteeg• 9 years ago

Look, I see that it's a relevant article today. But I don't think it's saying much, and it has a weird homophobic/racist current running through it. For example, Epstein mocks the idea that the US government exacerbated the AIDS crisis (which it clearly did.) He says slavery ended "more than a century" ago - slavery effectively continued several decades after the Thirteenth Amendment was passed.

Now, I don't like the idea of tearing down a good article just because the author is an asshole. But in this case, I think the article isn't very good, and the author also happens to be an asshole: this is the same guy that was "revolted" by the idea of "fags" (both his words, though he later switched to using "homosexuals".) The same guy that criticized people writing candidly about death, the same guy who constantly thought he was being hunted by "men with strange appetites, men whose minds were twisted". And the same guy who, upon learning an acquaintance was gay, was "angry at being victimized by his duplicity."

Oh, and the same guy who thought it was better for a gay man to commit suicide than act upon his unrealized gay desires. It'd be very interesting to read a good article on victimization from someone who isn't so horrible, though: it is an important topic, and there are many interesting things, which are frequently left unsaid, to be said about it.

dkural• 9 years ago

He lost me when he lumped every non-Jewish group in the Middle East as "200 million Arabs" and equated it with the Palestinians; and tried to justify the mistreatment of Palestinian children. The organization Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence), founded by veterans from the Israeli Defense Forces, have also corroborated these accounts - not just western academics, international observers, and journalists.

CydeWeys3• 9 years ago

Forget all of that even, there's plenty of places where the opinion piece collapses under simple faulty logic. Here's one example:

Such a situation could never have come about without certain fundamental confusions having been firmly established, and these begin with language itself. Victims have traditionally been minority groups, but in fact women, who in the United States are a slight majority, have been deemed victims, whereas the Jews and the Chinese in America, though clearly minorities (and vastly less numerous than blacks or Hispanic people), are not usually counted as victims and thus rarely get included in affirmative action or other quota favoritism programs. A victim, then, is someone who insistently declares himself a victim.

There have been times and places in the history of the world where the majority of the people in certain places were outright slaves, including in the United States and especially in the Caribbean. And yet are we to believe that these powerless, enslaved people weren't victims simply because slavery was such a vast institution that there were more people suffering under if than committing it?

WalterBright• 9 years ago

including in the United States

"In the Confederacy, the population was listed as 5.5 million free and 3.5 million enslaved."

https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/facts.htm

averagewall• 9 years ago

It was more acceptable to be homophobic back then so you have to cut him a little slack. They wouldn't publish a new article like that today. There isn't some fundamental truth about good and bad things to write - it depends on how people judge you, which depends on the arbitrary changes in culture.

PhasmaFelis5• 9 years ago

It was more acceptable to be homophobic back then so you have to cut him a little slack.

No, I don't.

This guy was not writing from an era where homosexuality was hidden and secret and accurate information was impossible to find. By '89, the gay rights movement was in full swing. Any intelligent adult who was still ignorant about what it meant to be gay chose to be ignorant.

krrrh2• 9 years ago

The same author in a 2015 article I linked to elsewhere in this discussion:

“In 1970, some 45 years ago, I wrote an essay in -Harper’s on the subject of homosexuality. The chief points of my essay were that no one had a true understanding of the origins of human homosexuality, that there was much false tolerance on the part of some people toward homosexuals; that for many reasons homosexuality could be a tough card to have drawn in life; and that given a choice, owing to the complications of homosexual life, most people would prefer their children to be heterosexual. Quotations from that essay today occupy the center of my Wikipedia entry. In every history of gay life in America the essay has a prominent place. When I write something controversial, this essay is brought up, usually by the same professional gay liberationists, to be used against me. That I am pleased the tolerance for homosexuality has widened in America and elsewhere, that in some respects my own aesthetic sensibility favors much homosexual artistic production (Cavafy, Proust, Auden), cuts neither ice nor slack. My only hope now is that, on my gravestone, the words Noted Homophobe aren’t carved.”

mazelife• 9 years ago

When I hear someone (having, by their own description, a front-row seat for these events) reduce the civil-rights movement to this:

“What I saw was a number of bad laws called into question and ultimately removed by acts of courage and wise restraint on the part of the victims of those laws.”

…as though the white-supremacist, apartheid state that existed in the south at the time was nothing more than a few pesky laws that had all gotten cleared up by 1968, I have to seriously question that person’s powers of observation. It’s such an almost perverse misunderstanding of history that it has be deliberate, right? Any time someone starts out with a premise like, “the civil rights movement, like a spiritual oil spill, left a vast residue of guilt in its wake,” and then proceeds from there, you know it’s going to be a long read.

Sure, there’s an attempt to graft some sort of philosophical backbone to the piece through this (nonsensical) distinction he makes between “appeal[s] to conscience” and ”appeal[s] to guilt,” but it’s confusingly handled and doesn’t go anywhere. Mainly what stands out for me is the relentless lack of empathy that runs throughout this article, which is really more in the way of a rant the a serious argument, anyway.

I think there’s a philosophical and moral argument to be had about victimhood, and the problematic nature of it, but you need to argue honestly. One sentence after he glibly absolves the government of responsibility for the AIDS crisis, he says, “whereas once the idea was to shake off victimhood through courage and organization, nowadays the idea seems to be to enjoy it for its emotional effects,” as though ACT UP never existed. In other words, you can make an argument, but you don’t get to rewrite or erase history that’s inconvenient to your thesis, which he does consistently. It’s disappointing this made it to the front page of HN, it’s a pretty unpleasant, dishonest piece of writing.

kadenshep• 9 years ago

It’s such an almost perverse misunderstanding of history that it has be deliberate, right?

It is. I'd call it being disingenuous, but that seems too forgiving. It's fundamentally dishonest, it's lying.

7952• 9 years ago

This anti-victim view seems to ignore the fact that the actions were actually malicious on the part of the government and various citizens. Homophobia was not not just a legal accident, it involved intentional acts of cruelty. As a society we are very reluctant to acknowledge that fact, perhaps because it goes against the authoritarian leanings that have become so prevalent. It makes people question why government's should have the right to control people in such intimate ways.

Until we acknowledge this malice it is very difficult for people to really forgive the crimes committed against them. Especially when the perpetrators shrug of their acts in such a philosophical way. We will just commit the same crimes against other groups in the future because we haven't learned the lesson. When you hurt someone you must face your own failings head on and not just give excuses. Maybe then we can ask for forgiveness.

classicsnoot• 9 years ago

Did you have a "front row seat" to the civil rights movement, or were you exposed to it by a university professor? I ask because from your use of words and barely restrained anger it appears that you deem that era as some sort of holy crusade against evil. It may be that (i wasn't there) but as i study it more it feels as if the the disenfranchisement of black folks was used as a political motivation to exert state control over lifestyle choices. I know that that sentence is blasphemy at my university, but the truth has a delicious way of ignoring sentiment.

mercer• 8 years ago

Could you elaborate on that? I'm very interested in that thought and I've heard similar statements before.

krrrh2• 9 years ago

The same author on similar themes in 2015:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/unassailable-virtue-victims/ar...

matt40772• 9 years ago

This is a hateful diatribe that only serves to show that today's mocking of calls for justice as "joyful victimhood" is not as new and creative as many seem to believe.

the "victim"-narrative is lazy yet insidious: because anyone mentioning a perceived wrong can be painted with the same non-argument, mocked, and ignored.

How are people like this author, bemoaning the loss of white male supremacy, never accused of playing the victim card? They are, after all, claim to somehow be personally harmed from the mere exposure to other people just mentioning poverty, discrimination, violence, etc.

The Joys of Victimhood (1989)

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