Social Justice 101 Part 2: Agents of Kyriarchy

Someone might notice that, when I talk about kyriarchy, the passive voice happens a lot. “People with disabilities are denied accommodations.” “Queer people are made to feel weird and outcast.” “People of color are sometimes asked to speak for their entire race.”

Sometimes it’s not passive voice. Sometimes I use “society” or “cultural narratives” or “the kyriarchy,” which are, if you think about it, basically passive voice too. I mean, someone has to be doing the accomodation-denying and the queer-making-feel-weird and so on. It’s not like it just happens. There is a person behind all this kyriarchy nonsense!

Indeed there is! And NSWATM can exclusively reveal the identity of the kyriarch.

There’s this one dude, okay, and he has a Hitler mustache and a really nice hat, and he lives in an orbital satellite and shoots death lasers at people, and one day he woke up and was like “I know! It’s a good idea to oppress everyone on the entire planet! Muahahahahahaha! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

Unfortunately, a depressing number of people think of the world this way.

Instead of saying it’s one dude with a death laser, however, they say it’s “white cis able-bodied straight men.” Or it’s “feminists.” Or it’s “Democrats.” Or it’s “Republicans.” Depressingly commonly, it’s “the Jews.” That group of people have decided to fuck over everyone on the planet purely for the lulz! Gasp at the enormity of their malice!

If you’re going to be arguing that, you might as well just argue in favor of the existence of Death Laser Guy. At least Death Laser Guy is cool.

“Evil” is an entirely meaningless term, psychologically. Inside a person’s head, evil looks like “making the hard decisions for the greater good,” or like “defending yourself and your way of life from attackers,” or like “not wanting to know about this bad stuff going on,” or like “fighting Group X, which by the way is evil and caused all these problems,” or like “being realistic,” or like “doing a little thing that won’t make that much worse anyway,” or like “following orders,” or like “not knowing that X could cause harm,” or like… well, a lot of things. But very few people’s actions are motivated by the desire to cause harm, and those people almost never manage to accumulate sufficient followers to cause damage.

In the real world, there is no Sauron.

“Hey, wait a minute, Ozy,” some random dude says. “You’re saying no one is evil. But you just postulated the existence of this really terrible social system, the kyriarchy. How could the kyriarchy exist if there aren’t any evil people propping it up?”

Well, there are people propping it up. Everyone is propping it up.

People are surprised when they hear about, say, circumcised women taking their daughters in for circumcision against the wishes of the father of the child. That should not be surprising! The women are part of the same culture and got the same messages about the relative worth of circumcised and uncircumcised girls, and then they pass along the same messages to their children and friends. In fact, if you take a minute to think, instead of falling into a Hollywoodized Evil Oppressor/Saintly Oppressed dynamic, the opposite would be even more bizarre: as if a societal message could only trickle down to half a population!

And don’t even get me started on people who think that being a member of one oppressed group keeps you from being shitty to members of other oppressed groups. Black people can be homophobic. Black people can be racist against Asians or Hispanics or Native Americans. Being oppressed does not give you some kind of magic Get Out of Being An Oppressor Free Card.

I hold up the kyriarchy. I buy a shirt from a corporation with abusive labor practices, or a phone components of which were mined by slave labor. I listen to misogynistic metal music. I call things lame. I say awful things without entirely meaning to about people with mental health issues other than mine. I fuck up other people’s pronouns. I think people are stupid when they can’t use apostrophes correctly. There is not a single day in which I don’t do a single thing that isn’t kyriarchal, and I have been a member of the Social Justice League since before I had motherfucking tits. What hope do well-meaning other people have?

Everyone is an agent of the kyriarchy, and it’s only when we begin to recognize that that we can start to change. It doesn’t mean you’re bad or wrong or evil; it means you grew up in a kyriarchy, and you naturally perpetrate the memes you were born with. The question is not whether you believe fucked-up things, but whether you work to overcome them.