Spot the Misogyny: My Ex-Friend Wim Soetaerts (3)

In the first post of this series, I describe how W. and I met, were friends,  fought and broke up.  In the second post, I analyze some of the emails he sent me afterward.  In this final post, I analyze more emails and come to some conclusions about W.

Spot the Misogyny: My Ex-Friend Wim Soetaerts (2)

In the first installment of this series, I introduced my ex-friend W. and explained how we met, became friends, fought and broke up.  This installment describes what happened after that.

Spot the Misogyny: My ex-friend Wim Soetaerts

“No one is born a bigot.  Hate is learned.”

This is a old childhood picture of someone who used to be my friend.  This cute little boy, smiling so brightly, surely deserved to be happy and loved.

But W. was viciously bullied.  He wasn’t athletic and the other kids constantly made fun of him.  Home wasn’t much of a comfort either, because his mother would punish him for trivial things by sending him to his room.  He spent much of his childhood immersed in comic books.

He grew up believing that people in general were just cruel to one another.  This cruelty affected him to his core: inwardly he aligned himself with the bullies and learned to take pleasure in other people’s suffering, and call it humor.  But you wouldn’t see it if you know him only casually, because on the surface he can be very kind, generous with gifts and time.  You might think he has a dark, twisted sense of humor, but you’d probably overlook it because he seems so good in other ways and is devoted to his friends.

He seems like a nice guy – as long as you don’t get too close.

10 Reasons To Kill Your Television

Banksy. [Source]

I hate TV, and watch it only rarely, so on a lark I just googled “People Who Watch Too Much TV” and came up with an interesting article over at The Minimalist.

This particular reason for not watching TV resonated with me:

It is taking you away from the real people all around you. The characters on television are not real. They are thought up in an office building and given life on a piece of paper. In contrast, you are surrounded everyday by real people living real lives. These real people are facing real problems. They need you. And you need them.

Have you ever met people who can’t seem to talk about anything other than what they saw on TV?  I meet them all the time.  How much of our lives do we waste watching fake stories about fake people, soaking up advertising slogans and piss-poor values, rather than living our own lives, getting to know real people, and thinking our own thoughts?

Read the whole article here.  (Skip the stupid comments; they seem to be unmoderated.)

Quote of the Day: Worthlessness

Blue, White 2 by M.K. Hajdin

I feel like I’m being more true to myself by being essentially worthless in this society.

—Tyler Funk

Me too, Tyler.

Artists are basically worthless to society; there are too many of us, and we produce luxury items that no one really needs in a world with too much luxury for too few.  Disabled people are considered worthless because they can’t slave away to make our corporate overlords even richer.  So being a disabled artist entails double the worthlessness.

But the society we live in is so sick, and its priorities so twisted, that I would hate myself if it ever embraced me, for then I would know I’d gone wrong.

I’m proud not to fit into this sick, sad world.

Solitude as a way of life

Forest Pool by M.K. Hajdin

There are two kinds of people:  those who have spent most of their adult lives partnered, and those who have not.

I’m one of the latter, and I feel like we’re a minority among all the happy (or happy-seeming) couples out there. But I have found a number of other people who have spent their adult lives alone, too, and it helped me to feel less weird about it.

I wonder if there are any reading my blog and if they’d like to share their stories. It doesn’t matter if you are willingly or unwillingly without a partner.

No person is your friend who….

On horrible friends

 

People with horrible friends tend to be horrible people themselves.

People who take pride in being horrible, as in the Cards Against Humanity crowd, tend to be overprivileged white males who are severely lacking in empathy for anyone other than overprivileged white males.

Good comedy punches up, not down.

 

On gaslighting

From the 1944 film Gaslight. (Source)

Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse in which the abuser tries to undermine his victim’s sense of reality.

“The gaslighter’s overall goal is to modify evidence then falsify information for the purpose of making their intended target(s) question their own recollection, memory, analysis, and perception of events and/or behaviors. In other words, they reject reality and substitute it with their own for personal gain and entertainment. In short, they enjoy inflicting psychological pain onto others and will stop at nothing to psychologically abuse their targets in order to get their own way. So what is it that they do?  The primary behaviors are listed as follows:

On abuse

Untitled by M.K. Hajdin

Abusers want to keep abuse secret, so they can stay in control.  If the victim of the abuse starts to speak out, connecting with other people who’ve had the same experiences, and recognizing the patterns of abuse, the abuser starts to lose some of his power.  So the abuser says, “Don’t you dare tell anyone.”  The abuser says, “You’re a liar, no one will believe you.”  The abuser says, “You are crazy, no one will believe you.”  The abuser says, “You’re a manipulator, no one will believe you.”