Concepts Abusers Weaponize As Tools

A non-exhaustive list of things White manarchists and abusers weaponize against targets and communities:

• Activist terminology.
• Language and linguistics (as a main tool for manipulation).
• „Restorative/transformative justice“ and liberal abolitionism.
• „Feminism“ and „intersectionality“ (and Black feminists like bell hooks). Just like rulers/capitalists co-opt revolutionary ideas in order to defang them, misogynists weaponize feminist ideas in order to reduce their revolutionary potential and justify paternalism with radical-sounding vocabulary.
• Being an „organizer“ or „activist“ (as a sort of shallow identity/label, a performative activity, or something that can score points and shield from criticism).
• „Communication skills“ and „conflict resolution“. Abusers thrive on conflict and antagonism. ‘Conflict’ ‘resolution’ is supposed to shift blame, excuse their abusive behavior and let them off the hook.
• Language of psychology and mental health.
• Sanism and health.
• Ableism and illness.
• Mental illness and „trauma“.
• „Healing” and therapy.
• „Forgiveness“ and reconciliation.
• „Positivity“ (toxic positivity) and „compassion“. Basically, cloaked liberalism and neoliberalism.
• Self-care and boundaries, as a way to avoid accountability or responsibility.
• Liberatory frameworks in general (also pseudo-liberatory and spiritual crap that’s used as manipulation to keep victims trapped or in denial).
• Spirituality and New Age bullshit.
• Monogomy/polyamory. (Every model exploitative cis men engage in tends to lose its subversive power, it simply becomes another form of patriarchal relationship, except that the victim(s) can’t push back against harmful dynamics if a model is portrayed as ‘inherently liberatory’. Cis men exploit people of marginalized genders and treat them with utter carelessness and cruelty in polyamorous arrangements, as disposable objects they can quickly get rid of when they’re hold accountable for their sexist behaviors, they usually pit partners against each other or change their targets swiftly; it’s convenient for them because their needs are taken care of, but they don’t have to provide the same reciprocity. Monogomy, however, is used by cis people as a justification to restrict/control their partner and police their relationships to others. Both models can be used to exert control over another person.)
• Romantic love (as a site of control, manipulation and exploitation; people are more cooperative and vulnerable, if they have positive feelings for someone).
• Intimacy (rushed „intimacy“ in the form of love-bombing; manipulation and punishment in the form of withholding communication and affection: silent treatment, sulkiness, sullenness, cold indifference and subtle devaluation).
• „Sexual liberation“ (sex as a hook and a form of faux intimacy, or as a way to have very direct and immediate access to another person (and their body, psyche, mind); and later, after creating a dependency, sexual violence as a means of punishment and control).
• Friendship (also as a site of control, manipulation and exploitation).
• Solidarity (demanding/expecting care, emotional support and compliance from marginalized genders while draining their empathy and resources).
• Loyalty and betrayal (the survivor speaking up is framed as „betrayal“, enabling the abuse is framed as „loyalty“ or „friendship“).
• Mysterious and nebulous „movement history“ abusers cryptically gesture towards to conjure up outdated and chauvinist concepts around “accountability” and „healing“. (A strange nostalgia for the Good Old Days where activist men could manipulate the outcome of „accountability processes“ and get victims of sexual assault ostracized/sidelined, pathologized or driven out of the movement).
• Revolutionary texts or frameworks, feminist theory and anticolonial theory. (The writings of Black and Brown authors are misappropriated and cited in a shallow and dishonest way, by abusers and their friends; firstly, to sound radical while trying to escape the consequences of their own actions, secondly, to explain away fundamental contradictions, discrepancies and inconsistencies in their personal and political lives.)
• Collectivism and community (with terms like „collective survival“ the abuser imposes themselves in our struggles and feigns a shared goal or common struggle, while simultaneously clinging to their power/authority in interpersonal settings and acting in direct opposition to actual liberatory goals and values).
• Individualism/egoism and individual freedom (emphasis on the importance of ‘personal choices’ while harming people in their immediate surroundings and getting away with it; a rather liberal or right-libertarian notion of what constitutes “freedom” — the freedom to abuse, violate, dominate and exploit the people they have structural power over).
• Class society and poverty, sidelining of feminist struggles. („I can’t be abusive – or a patriarch – if I belong to the ‘proletariat’. I’m your ‘comrade’, irregardless of how I treat people in private. Eat the Rich.“) Although, abusers usually do hold informal and systemic power and lead a pretty bourgeois life, since they tend to seek prominent positions, leadership and fame, which allows them to exploit (several) communities, extracting resources from everyone while relying on privileges which were granted to them by White society’s oppressive structures.)
• Communism and Indigenous cultures (excusing their entitlement and contempt for other people’s boundaries with ‘socialist’ argumentation: exploiting marginalized community members with arguments like „you’re obligated to share your food/housing/body with me, we’re supposed to be ‘collectivist’ under capitalism“).
• „Alienation“ or atomization (as an excuse to exploit or con vulnerable people in the community, like elderly people or the youth, commonly in the name of ‘intergenerationality’).
• The state and the FBI: Fed-jacketing victims and referring to them as „snitches“ or „carceral“ while framing the state as the supreme enemy, deflecting from their own abusive, exploitative, sexist, predatory and oppressive behaviors in interpersonal contexts.)
• Obsession with ACAB and the fight against „Leviathan“. (They fear the state¹ and its monopoly of violence, mainly because they’re concerned they could be arrested/prosecuted for sexual assault and domestic violence.)
• „Nuance“ (being myopic in public discourses around survivor autonomy, instead of allowing people to look at the whole picture, and condemning opponents (survivors and their supporters) who factor in complexity; concentration on an irrelevant, dishonest or meaningless tiny piece — which could lead to their absolution/rehabilitation — is passed off as ‘nuance’.)
• „Inclusion“ (the rapist/abuser and their enablers insist on remaining in activist spaces and having access to potential victims; as a result, survivors and their supporters are expelled from radical spaces where the culture of abuse and rape persists or becomes even more rampant).
• „Unity“ (an attempt to silence victims of interpersonal violence in the name of supposed unity). Our fight against agents of patriarchy is never ‘infighting’ because we’re not in community with patriarchs (abusers and rapists) who’ve infiltrated political movements under absolutely wrong pretexts.
• Outright reactionary talking points with conspiracy theorist undertones like „cancel culture“, „mob justice“, „political correctness“, „censorship“ or „puritanism“ and other sexist or racist right-wing speech which is skillfully woven into social justice language: The community of survivors is, e.g., referred to as „cult“ by the abuser to discredit their feminist critique via a common misogynist trope which implies feminists were a scary monolith that shared a hive mind and were unthinking and unintelligent malicious bad actors that, despite their claims of independence and autonomy, couldn’t arrive at their feminist analysis without the help of a leader or groupthink; a lazy attempt to denigrate feminists who fight against the core tenets of patriarchy (rape culture and abuse). This represents merely an attempt to attack, vilify and defuse the collective power of feminists that poses a real, menacing threat to the oppressive power of patriarchs.
• Mutual aid (predatory cis men use „solidarity“ and „mutual aid“ as a cover to reproduce oppressive dynamics, on a small scale, while pretending to do „community work“ – with the implicit expectation of receiving sexual favors in exchange for ‘aid’ from the vulnerable party, treating „solidarity“ as a transaction rather than a reciprocal and respectful relationship among equals; they intentionally seek out or manufacture situations of extreme power imbalance where they can prey on vulnerable people who are too powerless to reject „aid“ that comes at the cost of their autonomy, I’m speaking from personal experience with manarchists in my city; in other instances, movement celebrities, often the very same people as the group above — self-serving celebrities who are merely tourists in activist spaces — use their social clout, online parasocial relationships and a bastardized version of „mutual aid“ (fundraising) to ask community members at the bottom to give their resources to those at the top of the (informal) hierarchy. I’d urge you to stop giving your sparse resources to powerful movement celebrities. Instead, consider donating to single parents who’ve escaped domestic violence, give your excess money to disabled/unhoused/traumatized members of the community, give it to transitioning trans youth of color, and to Indigenous families who live on reservations, or to refugee children in camps and detention centers. Don’t pay for the lifestyle of the materially powerful vanguard, that’s not what mutual aid is for! There’s zero ‘mutuality’ between the vanguard and those languishing at the margins, the relationship to those at the top is one-sided and parasocial at best, and exploitative at worst — no matter how hard they try to co-opt our struggles).
• Last but not least, ironically, abusers’ obsession with „memory“ and „history“, even though they are gaslighters who undermine and re-write the memory of their victims. (Shaming younger generations for rejecting outdated and chauvinist practices, or guilt-tripping young survivors for taking things to their last conclusion, i.e. insurrection against patriarchs, abusers and rapists, doesn’t amount to honoring the „memory“, it’s revisionism, it’s nostalgia for more regressive times, and it’s deliberately thwarting the liberation of future generations. Stop being a manipulative fuck, dude!)

Abusers and rapists co-opt simply everything, even the most sacred things in life, without which life would be less beautiful or meaningful, like liberation, joy, care, solidarity, friendship, love, belonging, community, healing, kindness, autonomy, agency, freedom and justice. They instrumentalize these things, often as empty phrases, but more importantly, as a bait/manipulation to hook (inexperienced, young, marginalized, traumatized) people, whose vulnerabilities they perpetually seek to exploit.

Please, feel free to add more things I may have forgotten to mention in the list or other suggestions/corrections. Thanks! :)

Footnote: ¹Abusers are not interested in the liberation of the people who are the main targets of the state, because they themselves target those same marginalized people, interpersonally, and pick their victims from these groups: refugees and immigrants, racialized people, queer and trans people, mentally ill people, Indigenous people, young and destitute femmes, and everyone sitting on the intersections. They only show ‘interest’ in the ‘well-being’ of these people, if they’re, firstly, the victims of the state, the supreme enemy, which lets abusers/rapists appear as a much tinier “evil” in comparison, and secondly, if these marginalized people can be used as props in endless White-man-sob-stories. The manarchists themselves are the tragic heroes of their sob stories, while everybody else is an extra that is in need of saving or helps them look good.