1. Introduction
Thesis statement of this paper is the proper acknowledgement of some distinctive types of phenomena, such a form of usually idealized and heavily historicized oppression from cis-male to cis-female by itself seem to prohibit the ability to “get out” of the traumatic cycle set in motion, and by itself necessitate antifeminist conditions. “Idealized” is used here in the sense of being frequently theorized about or implicitly participating theorizing efforts, rather than in the sense of “romanization”. To able to “get out” and to be able to become feminist, there always seem to need something else to enable one individual to assume an epistemic position and power to speak comprehensively about a large enough portion of those antifeminist conditions. This however seems like a difficulty to considerable to be definitively taken down. The paper at last takes for example the phenomena of moral asymmetry between a relationship under the oppressive forces of patriarchy in relation to Kate Manne’s Down Girl, showing how the thesis statement is supported and reflected.

2. Adversarial structure of human relationship
The ready and prevalent adversarial nature of interpersonal relationship becomes locked (as if beyond time and contingency) in the adversarial relationships prescribed by forms of past and present oppressions. This crucially contributes to the gap gender pessimism centrally pays attention to, because the proper apparatus and language by which one truthfully recognizes the oppressive conditions one’s in, (without, of course, having a pre-established, foreseeable end or agenda for this one’s recognition), by themselves are repetition and perpetuation of those conditions.
As one is partially defined by the struggles one has underwent and has been destroyed by, the felt inability to “let go” is part and parcel of the urge to “own” one’s past sufferings. In other words, by way of identity formation and trauma-coping (or trauma-averting) mechanisms, the structure of oppressive adversarial human relationships become written and embedded in the oppressed. A similar urge to own the most extreme and worst parts of oneself, the possible close vicinity between personal identity and “turmoil, suffering, and unhappiness” (2007, pp.264) are alike observed in Robert C. Solomon who writes in much agreement with the Romanticist tradition. The same point is illustrated by Sara Ahmed in the context of melancholic immigrants and racism: “refusing to let go of his suffering, as incorporating the very object of his own loss” and “suffering becomes a way of holding unto the lost object.” (2010, pp.142). Ahmed then identifies the false logic behind the charge against the immigrants that they “preserve its[racism’s] power by not getting over it”: the presence of the systemic ills such as sexism and racism can be gone simply by one’s “get[ting] over it”, by one’s choosing not to attribute one’s personal ills to those systemic ills (2010, pp.143). The real power of choices one has in regard to one’s experienced suffering, distinctive of a larger historical, transhistorical issues or not, stretches no farther beyond keeping one’s attachment to said suffering or choosing to let it go. And within the choice of holding unto one’s suffering and identifying oneself with it, it’s apt to add to Ahmed that the sufferer also ultimately has the power to choose as what should these sufferings be held and identified, as systemic /institutional /conditional or subjective /personal /existential. Yet we would see in the next passage that power and the sense of having power is still more usually associated with being in the position of privilege, coming from a past of accumulated favors.

Extending from Ahmed’s melancholic immigrants, it doesn’t come as surprising that it is the oppressed who more often harbors and inherits the history of oppression, while the oppressors are suspended in a more privileged position with freedom to choose to adopt, deny or ignore oppressions. The moral demand of the public to those outliers such as the feminist killjoys or melancholic immigrants to stop insisting willfully on being unhappy operates on the underlying condition that the more advantaged public simply doesn’t see the cause and presence of outliers’ suffering. Judging by the appearance (as the creation and maintenance of that appearance were precisely for the sight of the advantaged), the advantaged fails to see the gesture, report or bond-breaking declaration of suffering as comes from somewhere, therefore contrived.
It seems to correspondingly be the case that, in the sphere of idealizations and self-construal, the ones that regard themselves as oppressed inherit histories of oppressions seemingly beyond their choosing (or even beyond their best efforts to try to ignore). In contrast, for the ones who regard themselves as oppressing, a sense of freedom is afforded by past oppressive acts and favoring, which in turns affords them a freedom in their relations with histories of oppressions (which they personally have not actually lived through). Innocuous in their emptiness, these histories of oppression are free for them to be disowned, ignored, or casually picked up for use of moral self-advancement. It must be admitted that this is a highly affect-laden and radicalized presentation of the difference between the two positions of the relatively disadvantaged and advantaged. But at least in terms of general direction, it’s highly conceivable that one finds it natural and attractive to construe one’s oppressed/ oppressive self along the similar structure.
It is in this sense this paper speaks about, (albeit tenuously, as it depends heavily on whether one intimately and genuinely sees oneself as oppressed or oppressing, as opposed to an empirically testable fact), an inevitability of perhaps, the “binary view of gender” takes place before the idealizations/ discourses about feminism can take place, and therefore harder to track with language. The cisgenders become in the first place an idealized “binary” from one’s actual and lived moral experiences. The efforts to disentangle oneself from the oppressive relationship one’s born into and policed into, became in the first place reincorporated and render as yet another form of the oppressed participating in their oppression. These are all in effect working to prohibit a possible emergence out of the roles, the mindset that help perpetuating patriarchy and the prospect of seeing through these mechanisms prescribe one’s possible intelligent and active horizon.

3. About Down Girl
Kate Manne correctly identifies the realm of the tacit, implied and de facto asymmetrical distribution of powers, social and personal goods, services has an immediately moral dimension to it, termed by her as “asymmetrical moral support relations” in which people (or more accurately, the roles people play) harbor different moral mindsets, different “default presumption[s]” as well as “wrong moral standards” (2017, xv, xvi). What in Strawson’s language as a general base-level manifestation of good will and lack of ill will certainly varies its base-levels when in contact with characteristically cis-genders (of course, also being intersectional with other distinctively imbalanced models of relationship).
Against the language of oppressing and policing conditions of excessive moral obligation, Manne also speaks of, lovingly for the feminist tradition by which she identifies, in a language of transcendence, freedom and opened up field of possibilities: “as I can now see, to free myself of a sense of various spurious obligations, so that I might glean and better meet other, real ones” (2017, xxii). This paper of course recognizes the real possibility of putting one’s morally entangled past of relative oppressions and sufferings behind, yet it’s wants to bring to notice that such a release readily faces the looming challenges of unease, self-doubt and outright resurgence, and the binding moral oppressions are in the ready reach to bind once again. Adding to the horizon of our enacted “social forces” (that had been put into effect in the past), often far surpassing our possible “conscious awareness or even ability to recover” (xxiii), a less palpable horizon of possible future oppressive events, and worse, of possible past oppressive events resurfacing in the future, is simultaneously present.
We can take the imaginary perspective of an advantaged, newly lifted of his/her “veil of innocence” and for the first time, catching an actual glimpse of, coming into a lived confrontation with the asymmetrical structures that had been favoring him/her far more than he/she was consciously aware of or imagined. This witness or encountering has a rippling effect internally in terms of epistemological limits and moral deficiency. To what extent should he/she, now having been partially made aware, expect his/her witness to be yet a shallow one? On the condition that such an encountering is able to foster in him/her an urge to renounce the position that automatically disadvantages others, personally as well as systemically, to what extent should he/she estimate the past wrongs he/she had inflicted, he/she is morally responsible for? This is what the paper means by the idea that there is conceivably always a ready possibility of future events that can unveil to about the fuller extent of one’s asymmetrical moral relationships, of the streams of powers channeling underneath, constituting a horizon of impossibility to know, impossibility to dedicate oneself to react exhaustively to one’s full range of moral indebtedness or subjugation. Past traumas of distinctive types of oppressions casually resurge to lock one back into an oppressive relationship (even if the other party of the relationship is never any particular person, or even outlined with any clear ideals as Manne identifies about Elliot Rodgers), simply because there is this sense in which they do not actually retreat.

4. Possible opposing arguments
In this section I list and treat a couple of arguments against the insisting position of antifeminism or pessimism about ever breaching the gap created by gender norms. However, as the conceptual pessimistic position of refusing to be feminist (contradictorily in a feminist sentiment) is a rare one and requires new justifications to firstly establish itself, no traditions of thought had been concentrating in arguing against it.
An immediate response might be that the central subject matter many streams of feminism care about is not the dissolution of all and all possible gender-laden traumas, conflicts and asymmetrical relationships. If set by so unrealistically high standards as this one, the response also seems to imply, any position would be dwarfed into paralyzing pessimism. The goal of feminism as a social or political endeavor instead is much more focused on institutional and systemic issues, more realistically workable and less ambitious in concept: the equality across sexes and genders in political, economic and social aspects. The paper fully agrees with point but would like to clarify its position to be identifying a conundrum separate from workable issues, persistently located in pockets of nuances underneath the visible, practicable feminisms.
Secondly, a potent argument against the view presented so far is simply one within a distinctive oppressive relationship might not feel and see in the opinion of gender pessimism. A conceptual release from oppressions can be not so chronic as dictating horizons that mark one’s possibility to know and act morally, but instead be really total, and only open up realms of previously smothered and silenced possibilities. This argument the paper also wholeheartedly agrees with. Nothing described or tried to establish in this paper had been more than how lived experience can be like for the melancholic bunch who are reluctant to step outside their fixed and fixatedly moralizing oppressions in virtue of their perceived sense of inability, impossibility to do so.

Works cited:
Solomon, R. C. (2007). True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press.
Ahmed, S. (April 2010). The Promise of Happiness. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Manne, K. (2017). Down Girl: The Logic of misogyny. NY, New York: Oxford University Press.

Shared by: Anonymous