Assuming motives and getting it wrong

Presuming nefarious motives is the mark of othering. One is free to ignore annoying people, but one shouldn’t presume to know them, unless one truly does.

In my experience, people have often attributed to me motives which I might reasonably have been thought to have had, had I been brought up in the same environments as they. I hadn’t though, so my drives, meanings and ambitions were misaligned with the expected norm.

In my experience, most people in the contemporary First World can’t imagine what it is like to fight for values when it seems like a matter of life and death. They assume that one who feels this way must necessarily be being silly. I can tell you that I’m not a ridiculous or silly person, and yet I did feel this way.

To make sense of why I felt so, one must go back into history. In fact, my father’s history holds the key. He’d fought a war for particular values, which were based squarely on valuing whiteness, patriarchy and Christianity. When he lost the war in historical, tangible form, he had to win it in other ways. That is, he was driven to win it symbolically, by enforcing these values as the patriarchal breadwinner. I was to have no choice in the matter because, you know, people had died for this ideal. We had lost close family members, killed in action.

In order to be free, I had to do battle with the patriarchy in a most extreme and fundamental way, which had to do with my cultural history and familial relationships.

Whilst the degree of anxiety I experienced in this might have seemed silly or disproportionate to an outsider, the outsider didn’t have to fight my battles. In fact, no outsider could really understand what this battle was about. You would have to read a bit of Freud, to understand how patriarchal values are internalized. You’d have to know a lot about the ideology of the Rhodesian cultural system and the isolationist politics the society adopted. You’d also have to have had similar experiences, or at least be able to imagine what it means when people literally sacrifice their lives for an ideology and then expect it to be upheld, above all by closest family members.

Understanding all of these points would enable an outsider to begin to grasp the degree of my anxiety. Not understanding any of them, an outsider would presume that I was a delicate little flower, overreacting to normal, First World gender relations. But my reaction to everything was influenced by this structure of anxiety.

My initial feminism was therefore very fraught and uncertain. It involved a sense of freedom at the expense of partial self-annihilation. I had to sacrifice the past and its value in order to obtain my freedom.

I wasn’t an overreacting feminist — but that didn't stop people from seeing me that way.