I often dislike myself. She complains about tiredness or pain too much, not ambitious enough, not improving her surf skills quick enough, not achieved anything, CV looks shit, blames her childhood for all the above, no clear life plan, too many ideas and no follow through, spends too much time thinking about herself… etc.
Contradictory and messy: it’s a hoot! Then yesterday I read something by Jacqueline Rose: patriarchy thrives by encouraging women to feel contempt for themselves. Boom. The perfect resource-saving weapon: self-contempt.
To be clear, this isn’t a “just love yourself and you can be all you want” moment. The forces that generate self-contempt are real and external. Social, personal history, genetic evolutionary pressures: they are truly debilitating. To women, but more so to black women, Asian women, immigrant women, LGBTQ+ women. This is instead an acknowledgement of relief. Do we have to despise ourselves for not meeting those expectations? Because it’s not us, it’s you. Carry on.
The climate crisis is looking about the same. We’re being led into a guilty spiral where apparently no one individual is doing enough to make things better. I use too much plastic, I didn’t separate that piece of recycling, I take planes sometimes, I drive once a week, it’s selfish to have children, a particularly wonderful western accusation. The contempt for self flows. And then you read that over half of global industrial emissions since human- induced climate change was officially recognized can be traced to just 25 corporate and state producing entities.
Here I am, bogged down in self-disgust by my tiny piece of un-recycled litter and in the meantime there you are, shitting all over the planet. It’s not me, it’s you. I’ll keep taking my jars to fill with oats and cycling and rejecting plastic bags for frozen items at the supermarket checkout (they’re already IN plastic?) like a smug eco-cotton-vegan-potatoskin-bag lady. I don’t eat mammals, guys! (Ok, chorizo once a year and bits of saucisson.) Oh, whip, whip! No. No self-contempt. I’m not eating sausage, what are you doing, big guy? Those responsible are bigger and uglier and squatting over the rest of us like that thing from Spirited Away. I SEE YOU.
hannahberry.org 