Petulant Vulnerability and Victim Culture
Three recent essays on power and shifts toward complaint in our culture
I have recently seen three essays and papers that fit together to explain a victimization power dynamic emerging in our society. The newest essay, “This Isn’t Your Old Toxic Masculinity,” defines a new form of complaint called “petulant vulnerability” and shows it is actually an exercise of power. An earlier paper, “Microaggressions and Moral Cultures,” outlines a societal shift toward “victimhood culture” which is a cultural context that normalizes using victim status to solve problems. And a third essay, “The Woke Meritocracy,” reports on how young people are now frequently being indoctrinated into wokeness, and rewarded for performing victimization and victory-over-oppression. It also points out how wokeness is internalized as a performative skill that is now almost required to gain access to jobs and influence, at the cost of a mature self.
Petulant vulnerability
The first, “This Isn’t Your Old Toxic Masculinity,” is a NYT op ed which clarifies how vulnerability, or experiences of trauma or pain, are being weaponized as an exercise of power and domination:
I’ve watched male vulnerability curdle into something toxic: Let’s call it petulant vulnerability.
Think of the boyfriend professing loneliness to ensure his partner never sees their friends. Or […] men who express their feelings[…] as a form of manipulation or passive aggression. [… Or] The courtroom tears of Kyle Rittenhouse, [… Or how the Jan 6 mob participants] later wept as they expressed shame, offered excuses or complained about jobs and friends they lost.
Insightfully, McElroy distinguishes petulant vulnerability from authentic vulnerability by saying that petulant vulnerability is about power.
Petulant vulnerability, however, uses the language of vulnerability as a cudgel. If true vulnerability means accepting change, personal fallibility and the human condition of reliance on others, petulant vulnerability feigns emotional fragility as a means of retaining power.
McElroy frames this purely as an attack on the political Right: toxic men, Jan 6 insurrectionists, white nationalists and other conservative fringe groups. But as is often the case with the pathologies on the far Right, far Left (woke) extremists innovated and cultivated the technique, so it applies to both sides.
Let’s, then, look at how the Left has originated victimhood culture and uses it to establish cultural dominance.
Victimhood Culture
The second paper, “Microaggressions and Moral Cultures,” provides a helpful context that McElroy misses: the broader societal shift toward the use of one’s own pain and hardship to gain power and status. As summarized in The Atlantic, “Microaggressions and Moral Cultures” argues that a societal shift toward victim status has emerged which the authors define as “victimhood culture.” In such a culture, people settle their differences by adopting victim status and appealing to authority with the goal of getting a powerful person, institution or Twitter mob to resolve the conflict for them.
Victimhood culture elevates and legitimizes running to the teacher, HR department, or some other authority figure to solve a problem. (The paper also clarifies and contrasts with previous cultural norms. In earlier “honor culture,” people may fight or even duel to protect their honor and solve a conflict; in more recent “dignity culture,” stoicism reigns and suggests that while “sticks and stones may break my bones” a verbal slight can be ignored. In contrast, in victimhood culture, microaggressions are serious and appeals to authority are a primary way to resolve (and win) a conflict.)
This is related to the idea of petulant vulnerability in that victimhood culture normalizes the pursuit of power by performing victimhood, and petulant vulnerability is one technique within that broader context.
Far-Left history of petulant vulnerability
What are the societal consequences of this? Blake Smith, a professor of History at the University of Chicago, reports in “The Woke Meritocracy” about what he sees on a day to day basis. He finds that by the time academically-trained cultural elites (Ivy League grads and educated overachievers generally) enter college, many have been indoctrinated into victimhood culture — or what’s worse, almost forced to perform victimhood whether they believe in it or not.
As this professor writes in Tablet:
Young people whose self-understandings are organized by narratives about their heroic resistance against racism and sexism, and excellence in the face of adversity, are rewarded by the university — and will be rewarded by employers, media, and other sources of legitimation — for their deft combination of meritocratic and woke discourses. […but] far from racism and sexism holding back their access to elite spaces, they are being invited in on the basis of their ability to perform triumph over oppression. Given this sort of legitimation, which combines the thrill of transgression with the self-righteousness of moralism, future elites [will] make sense of themselves and the world through a combination of meritocracy and wokeness. (emphasis added)
I really feel the power of Smith’s psychological observation that this performative exercise feels transgressive and yet also moralistic (two rewards that are usually in conflict), which helps explain why wokeness is appealing to so many. Adding the financial and material success available to those who perform wokeness well makes it a trifecta.
Academic roots of these cultures
We see victimization being used as a technique to exercise power in Critical Race Theory (which has evolved into a sham that I have written about before) as well. CRT “centers” race to gain new understandings of the world (which is great) but also works to build a political narrative of oppression that can be “used as a cudgel” against political opponents (not so great).
Let’s look at some ways this is done. Entire academic departments have grown up to establish, leverage and nurture this sense of victimization, and to police who gets to be a victim and who does not, with layers of sophisticated rhetoric and reasoning. In these departments, such as Women’s Studies, Black Studies, White(ness) Studies, and so on, rules are created and enforced. As these papers illustrate, rules about who can and cannot be a victim are actually and implicitly rules about who can and cannot have power within a victimhood culture. Some specific CRT power plays include:
- “White privilege” discourse invalidates any oppression or victim status of non-BIPOC people
- “Fragility” discourse invalidates any objections to the definitions and victim categories demanded by the victim studies practitioners
- Racism and bigotry are defined as only applying to certain groups — typically exactly the academic victim studies groups of: women, Black people, and LGBT people. Asians, Jews, rednecks, rural poor, and class-based groups are explicitly excluded.
- Arguing that the definitions above are invalid or inapplicable is policed using accusations of racism, effectively gatekeeping who can enter or join the victim studies groups
- Attempts by the wrong people to claim legitimacy or power through vulnerability (petulant or otherwise) are dismissed as using “white tears” or inadequate “allyship” or having an invalid desire to “feel comfortable;” they should suffer, and we should not care.
This clarifies why most people dislike CRT (and political correctness generally). It is because they are being clubbed with it rather than uplifted and informed by it, and they know at a gut level when someone is asserting power over them.
Regular people may not know postmodern analytic theories, but they know when they’re being had. Rural, working people have been assailed by urban, elite fast-talkers for centuries. Some people may not be able to argue the finer points of an argument, but we all have a finely attuned radar for this kind of manipulation and exclusion. As I wrote about earlier, stacking the deck against working class folks drives them into a feeling of being on the losing end of a culture war. In this case, they are being denied victim status, and without victim status in a victimhood culture, we can now see they are denied power as well.
Is this just oppression olympics?
A lot of this is old news. We know people now compete to be the victim in many situations. But new ideas of petulant vulnerability, victimhood culture, and performative triumph-over-oppression clarify the mechanisms and distortions involved.
These insights help us understand when victimhood and vulnerability are important and legitimate, and how to react to victim status claims. Alex McElroy gives us a great test: is this being used as a cudgel? I would add: is anyone being torn down or denigrated, and is the speaker seeking power and advantage? Do they want to educate and illuminate, or do they want to win?
Any true story of victimization highlights a real problem or even a change we need to make in society. Yet the complainant may also be manipulating us. We can look for petulance and “using vulnerability as a cudgel” to better understand how to react. Many of us read or hear sad stories and painful narratives, and are yet left uneasy rather than called to empathy or action; often this is because we are being manipulated, and at some level, we know it.
References
“Microaggression and Moral Cultures” / Comparative Sociology, Jan 2014 / B. Campbell and J. Manning
