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I'm really glad DeeLight's post Let’s stop treating each other the same way we’re treated by scrotes. addressed the need to counter the toxicity that was rising here on FDS.
I think it's important to understand why it's important to support women in a misogynistic culture that tears women apart for trivial things like wearing something someone doesn't like while men literally get away with rape, sexual assault, murder, and overall being total insufferable man children.
When women ask questions and share their experiences and people respond in a "you should know better" and "you're obviously wrong" way, you're belittling their concerns and blaming them for their situation.
From Brene Brown's book: I Thought It Was Just Me where she studied how shame affects women.
"When we hear others talk about their shame, we often blame them as a way to protect ourselves from feeling uncomfortable. Hearing someone talk about a shaming experience can sometimes be as painful as actually experiencing it for ourselves."
"The less we understand shame and how it affects our feelings, thoughts and behaviors, the more power it exerts over our lives. However, if we can find the courage to talk about shame and the compassion to listen, we can change the way we live, love, parent, work and build relationships.
Like the growing epidemic of violence, for many, shame has strangely become both a form of self-protection and a popular source of entertainment. Name calling and character assassinations have replaced national discussions about religion, politics and culture. We use shame as a tool to parent, teach and discipline our children. Television shows promising cutthroat alliances, backstabbing, hostile confrontations, exclusion and public humiliation consistently grab the top ratings. And at the same time we use shame to defend and entertain ourselves, we struggle to understand why the world feels so scary, why politics have turned into blood sport, why children are suffering higher levels of stress and anxiety, why popular culture appears to be sinking to all-time lows and why a growing number of us feel alone and disconnected."
Examples of shame and how it silences women and prevents us from empowering each other and most importantly, helps to trap women (all from the book):
“I don’t tell anyone about the things I’ve gone through—I don’t want them to feel sorry for me or think differently about me. It’s easier to keep my past to myself. Just thinking about being blamed or judged for my past causes me to lose my breath.”
“No one knows how bad things are with my husband—they’d think less of him and less of me for staying with him. I’m constantly lying and making up stories to cover up. When I lie, I feel sneaky and ashamed.”
“My life looks pretty good on the outside. Nice husband, nice house, cute kids—the whole package. On the inside it’s another story. If we didn’t care so much about what other people think, we’d get a divorce. We barely talk to each other. Both of our kids struggle in school. We have to make these outrageous contributions to the school just to make sure they don’t get kicked out. It’s getting harder and harder to keep it all together. Every now and then I know my friends see glimpses of the truth— they have to. It literally makes me sick when I feel like they can see through it all."
“I constantly feel judged as a mother; like nothing I do is right or good enough. The worst is when other mothers put you down. One disapproving look from another mother can cut me to the core.”
"The constant struggle to feel accepted and worthy is unrelenting. We put so much of our time and energy into making sure that we meet everyone’s expectations and into caring about what other people think of us, that we are often left feeling angry, resentful and fearful. Sometimes we turn these emotions inward and convince ourselves that we are bad and that maybe we deserve the rejection that we so desperately fear. Other times we lash out—we scream at our partners and children for no apparent reason, or we make a cutting comment to a friend or colleague. Either way, in the end, we are left feeling exhausted, overwhelmed and alone.
We spend an extraordinary amount of time and energy tackling the surface issues, which rarely results in meaningful, lasting change. When we dig past the surface, we find that shame is often what drives us to hate our bodies, fear rejection, stop taking risks or hide the experiences and parts of our lives that we fear others might judge. This same dynamic applies to feeling attacked as a mother or feeling too stupid or uneducated to voice our opinions. Until we start addressing the role shame plays, we may temporarily fix some of the surface problems, but we can’t silence the old tape in our head that suddenly blares some version of “something is wrong with me.” For example, that imposter or phony feeling at work or school rarely has anything to do with our abilities, but has more to do with that fearful voice inside of us that scolds and asks, “Who do you think you are?” Shame forces us to put so much value on what other people think that we lose ourselves in the process of trying to meet everyone else’s expectations.
To understand how shame is influenced by culture, we need to think back to when we were children or young adults, and we first learned how important it is to be liked, to fit in, and to please others. The lessons were often taught by shame; sometimes overtly, other times covertly. Regardless of how they happened, we can all recall experiences of feeling rejected, diminished and ridiculed. Eventually, we learned to fear these feelings. We learned how to change our behaviors, thinking and feelings to avoid feeling shame. In the process, we changed who we were and, in many instances, who we are now.
Our culture teaches us about shame—it dictates what is acceptable and what is not. We weren’t born craving perfect bodies. We weren’t born afraid to tell our stories. We weren’t born with a fear of getting too old to feel valuable.
Like courage, empathy and compassion are critical components of shame resilience. Practicing compassion allows us to hear shame. Empathy, the most powerful tool of compassion, is an emotional skill that allows us to respond to others in a meaningful, caring way. Empathy is the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes—to understand what someone is experiencing and to reflect back that understanding. When we share a difficult experience with someone, and that person responds in an open, deeply connected way—that’s empathy.
The prerequisite for empathy is compassion. We can only respond empathically if we are willing to hear someone’s pain. We sometimes think of compassion as a saintlike virtue. It’s not. In fact, compassion is possible for anyone who can accept the struggles that make us human—our fears, imperfections, losses and shame. We can only respond compassionately to someone telling her story if we have embraced our own story—shame and all. Compassion is not a virtue—it is a commitment. It’s not something we have or don’t have—it’s something we choose to practice. Can we be with someone who is in shame and open ourselves up enough to listen to her story and share her pain?"
We are all learning. We have all made stupid mistakes. We have been gaslit and tricked to terrible situations. Let's show some grace to the women here trying to do better and not blame them the way society does.
Enough. Really, enough with tone policing the women here. It's beginning to feel an awful lot like gaslighting. We aren't therapists. This place is not "toxic". The expectation that women have to perform in a pleasant manner at all times according to some random standard lest someone end up offended is ridiculous. This happy horseshit of emotional servitude is what society shoves down our throats every goddamned day. Women are more than capable of supporting each other here without this tone-policing nonsense, AND IN FACT have been doing so since we got here. It isn't the job of the women here to be the welcoming committee for every stubbornly clueless pickme who wants to have a tantrum because we aren't validating her delusions about some scrote.
Continual calls on women's compassion, empathy and emotional labor just perpetuates the sexist expectations on how women must behave to be accepted.
This has proven to be a failing strategy for women:
exhibit A- the empowered libfems
exhibit B- the be kind brigade
Shame to enforce conformity isn't uniquely applied to women. Extorting compassion in exchange for acceptance IS a strategy uniquely applied to women.
I think this is good advice that a few users have had a knee-jerk reaction to. Overall, I don’t think we shame women for being in abusive situations, but I do see that there is very little patience for women who have recently left an abusive situation and just need some encouragement to keep going. If you think someone’s spending too much time whining about her ex, and don’t want to hear it, then block her. Don’t continually go after her in the comments until she snaps. A lot of women who find us are still reeling from recent experiences, and are feeling a lot of raw, unfiltered emotions.
And while I think therapy is a great idea for many women, I understand that not everyone lives in a culture where therapy is available and affordable for regular people. It also isn’t an instant fix. Therapy takes time to schedule and benefit from, so it isn’t an instant fix that some people think of it as. Don’t be mad if someone asks what to do in the meantime (or do get mad, I’m not your therapist—just don’t be hostile).
We also need to remember that some of our members are quite young, and don’t have the life experience we have. They may not know how to recognize that whether their entire friend group is toxic, or just one person. They may not know if ghosting them or confronting them is the better option. And they may not have any idea how to do either of those things. Again: not saying you have to hold her her hand and walk her through it, just that blocking her or not replying at all is easier than yelling at her for not thinking for herself.
i'm very confused... was there an influx of rude commenters or something? this is the second kumbaya post i've seen in the past couple of months.
yikes at these comments. Me and other long term FDS users feel the call to take a break from here bc these hostile users feel triggered when it comes to BASIC RESPECT for other women. Just because this is an internet forum doesn’t mean you can go off on other women. Please check your internalized misogyny and consider therapy.
aka: try not to become the thing you hate.
I agree we don't need to purposefully pile on the mountain of shame already existing in most people's (and women's) minds, but at the same time we can't delude ourselves into thinking we can solve others' internalized shame with kindness. Kindness helps, but in the end, everyone has to tackle their shame on their own. It's a sad and lonely truth but it is true. We all have seen countless people who are constantly told they're amazing by their loved ones and STILL don't like themselves. And I bet it's not because of some random online comment, it's because of unresolved trauma. Fleeting validation doesn't solve that. By all means, be kind and supportive to the women in your life. But you can't do their work for them. And you can't blame yourself for not being able to "love them into emotional safety". We can't love people out of addictions and we can't love them out of impostor syndrome or shame. It's on them to purposefully collect evidence that they aren't as bad as they think they are. They need to prove it to themselves, no one else can prove it to them. That's why it's exhausting to me to read the continuous reminders to "show some empathy" as if there was a simple solution to this problem. And I also don't like this idea that all women are catty with each other and each other's harshest critics and that this is what's holding them back. Yes, many women exhibit internalized misogyny and that's not good, but let's not forget who and what is the true source of women's shame.