Our Society Is Determined to Forge New Monsters
Photo by Patrick Collins on Unsplash
There is a song that I came across recently that I cannot get out of my head. It’s part of the lineup for the Broadway musical The Century Girl, which aired in 1916 during the midst of World War I. The title is You Belong To Me, sung by Edward Royce and Leon Errol, and it is quite literally about a man deciding he loves a woman and fixating on her, singing:
And now don’t imagine I’ll let you go
Because you say “No” to me
“No” often means “Yes”
I'll make you confess
In time, just wait and see
The thing about this song is that it’s being sung unironically as a romantic overture. We are not meant to think that the lead is creepy or obsessive but in love. It’s a reminder of the fact that a little over a century ago, men were literally being indoctrinated with media that told them it was okay to possess other women.
We live in the shadow of some pretty harmful ideologies, and they do not just hang in our past. Downright toxic worldviews shape our present. Some of us spend our entire lives trying to deprogram ourselves from these awful lessons, and many more learn to be comfortable with being monsters.
The United States has been experiencing a bit of reckoning when it comes to social justice. More Americans recognize the existence of racism within the US than they have in decades. The concept of feminism likewise is enjoying high popularity as well. It seems as though we are living through a political realignment, and although much work still needs to be done, conversations once thought to be impossible are beginning to occur.
Less than two decades ago, however, people were outright debating if well-documented problems such as racism even existed. “Are We Living In A Post-Racial America?,” began a segment for NPR. It may seem laughable in the wake of Donald Trump and the resurgence of neo-nazism, but shortly after the election of Barack Obama, there were those claiming we now lived in a post-racial society. As scholars, Michael C. Dawson and Lawrence D. Bobo wrote for Harvard University in 2009: “…the majority of White Americans have held for well over a decade: that African Americans have achieved, or will soon achieve, racial equality in the United States…”
For the longest time, America has been deadset on ignoring many of its foundational problems, multiple of which were in their very recent past. Slavery and segregation only ended roughly in 1865 and 1968, respectively — 156 and 53 years ago — and neither of those developments did away with racism. According to a 2018 estimate, a third of the US population was alive when the 1965 voting rights act was signed into law (i.e., the legislation widely cited as the beginning of the end for Jim Crow). Some Americans who fought for segregation are still alive today, and the same logic applies to the children they raised.
Likewise, many of the sexual assaulters we rightfully demonize now were raised in a society that actively reinforced these behaviors. Marital rape, or the idea that a spouse could have sexual intercourse with their partner without their consent, did not become an official crime in all 50 states until 1993. The concept of date rape, although used by academics decades earlier, did not even begin to impact public consciousness until the late 80s and early 90s. The sexual assaults committed by men such as Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump are chilling to many of us in the present. Still, they were very much products of their time, which isn’t an excuse as much as a condemnation of our larger society. These toxic men had their behaviors reinforced at every stage of their development, and that problem is still happening today.
Some of the battles we talk about being “over” aren’t even ten years old. A few commentators have labeled discrimination of same-sex individuals as a settled issue because of policies such as the legalization of same-sex marriage. The Struggle for Gay Rights Is Over goes the title for one article in The Atlantic. “From a legal standpoint,” the article states, “the movement has achieved nearly everything it needs for gay people to prosper as equal citizens. Instead of fighting this pointless war over wedding cakes, it should declare unilateral victory.”
However, same-sex marriage only became law-of-the-land in 2015 (less than six years ago) with the Supreme Court ruling Obergefell v. Hodges. Religious exemptions still exist for employment discrimination. Protections for housing discrimination are only tenuously maintained by executive order. Are we really expected to believe that the same people who claimed that same-sex relationships were a threat to the natural order have gone away?
We are not far removed from any of these battles. The people who fought them didn’t vanish into the ether. In some cases, they never left. They remain our politicians and business leaders. They were nominated to the Supreme Court. They raised a new generation of children content to believe in similar things that they did. Those youngsters are now on TikTok sharing racist memes and ranting about how being “super straights” lets them discriminate against trans people.
Yet, this problem does not stop and end with vocal bigots. It’s so easy to label homophobes and racists monsters, but no one escaped that indoctrination. These people also created laws and art that impacted how we see the world. You Belong To Me was not the last problematic song to grace our culture. The same message can be seen in James Bond movies, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and millions of other pieces of content across the decades.
We all internalized our society's problematic messaging, including even the most leftist and progressive among us.
At the risk of sounding paternalistic, there are toxic aspects of your worldview that you have not even begun to unpack. There is this tendency for people who are deprogramming themselves, especially those at the beginning of their journey, to want to delineate clear lines between themselves and those still indoctrinated.
I see this with the recent trend of my fellow white people dunking on other white people as the worst. “White people be like: Taco Bell is too spicy.” riffs a white Twitter user. This commentary is all over the web, and it comes from a real place. A paper released not too long ago in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General posited that when white liberals learn about the concept of white privilege, it doesn’t always generate more empathy for Black and brown people but rather creates less empathy for poor, white ones. As we can see here, even people who want to do better will sometimes find ways to psychologically distance themselves from proper accountability.
It would be nice if learning about our biases on an individual level was the only thing needed to destroy oppressive systems such as white supremacy, but this is work that cannot be done in a single lifetime. When so much of our worldview is toxic, you eventually realize that you will be unlearning this damage for the rest of your life. The bigger examples of discrimination (i.e., hate crimes, harassment, etc.) may be easier to ward against. However, in many cases, our colonized brains are still thinking monstrous thoughts — a reality that impacts some of the smaller things we do and say.
In the activist discourse, these are often referred to as “microaggressions” or brief words or actions that reinforce negative attitudes towards people with marginalized identities. Stereotypical examples include asking a brown person if you can “touch their hair” or asking a queer person “who in the relationship is the man and who is the woman.” I can’t say what these microaggressions are for you because they obviously vary by person. Maybe you talk in a condescending tone to blacker or browner people or ask trans people when they will have “the surgery.”
For me, I think misogynistic and racist thoughts all the time, especially when I am particularly hungry or having a bad day. The word “bitch” will come to the forefront of my mind a lot, and although I rarely say it, it will sometimes impact how I treat the women around me. Even if I am not ranting misogynistic tirades, I can occasionally be demeaning and condescending towards the women in my life in ways I do not intend. I will constantly have to push back at these impulses, and I need the people in my life to hold me accountable for this behavior.
I say all of this as a nonbinary person actively working to demasculinize their body. My brain is colonized by white patriarchy so much that I can harm those in my own community. Sometimes I will judge other nonbinary people for being too mannish or womanly. I will trivialize their identities for not adhering to norms that I actively hate. That indoctrination doesn’t go away simply because you wish it to. It sits uncomfortably in the back of your mind, slowly and painfully being chipped away over the months and years.
There are countless ways that we devalue others, and some of them only seem small. For example, a huge part of our society is founded on the belief that you must “earn a living” to subsist, and as a consequence, hundreds of thousands die every year in the United States to satisfy this norm. Tens of thousands of homeless people die every year in the US. Possibly hundreds of thousands die every year because healthcare costs delay them from addressing serious medical conditions. We are so quick to demonize the racism and sexism of the past, and we should, but many of us are not as quick to scrutinize how our core organizing principles contribute to that inhumanity. Our society would rather people die the right way than to live at all.
Even the ones who survive are left with intense psychological damage over having to prove themselves every moment of every day. “Today is just one of those shitty days where I feel completely hopeless,” reads one post on the Unemployed subreddit. “I’m sitting here crying again bc I just don’t know what else I can do to get a job or even a fucking interview. I can no longer visualize a path forward.” Another one goes, “This situation is closing in on itself. I’m going to either be homeless or in a prison.” We talk so much about increased burnout, depression, and suicide, but a bitter truth we must internalize is that many of these instances are byproducts of our society’s foundational beliefs.
In 57 years, maybe we too will be lambasting the darkness of this time for all the problems it brought (e.g., the people we killed, the planet we destroyed, the animals we slaughtered, etc.). The water we swim in is toxic: sometimes it weakens others enough for us to swallow them alive; other times, we are the ones left weaker for it; often, both are happening simultaneously.
The point here is not to nihilistically claim that humanity is terrible, but the opposite. Humans are the product of their environment, customs, biology, and norms. A realization that is as sobering as it is optimistic. It means that we exist in a society that churns out monsters but that that we have the potential to be something else too.
I want to stress that the burden of monsterdom is not shared equally. You should not walk away from this article with an Avenue Q-styled message that “Everybody is a little bit of a monster.” Certain groups of people have done more harm than others. Some people are the monsters rampaging across cities and countrysides, while others have been locked away in cages and malnourished, only able to harm those who stumble in. We have all been impacted by these toxic systems, but our proximity to privilege and power has increased our ability to harm others.
This society had two plans for you — to be a vapid monster snacking on others AND to be eaten. If you are fighting against that mold, it can be unsettling to realize all the hurt caused by that. You have to come to terms with both the scars you have and those you have inflicted on others. This task is painful and uncomfortable to do, especially for people who are bigger monsters. There is a tendency for people, particularly more privileged people who have eaten more than they have been eaten, to point to the scars they have received and use those as a protective shield against accountability. I truly understand that impulse. I can empathize with it, but it’s one rooted in denial.
Forgive yourself for being a product of this broken society. Realize that you were trained to be both monster and prey — to devalue and be devalued —and do the work to be better. Commit yourself to undo this terrible system. Give both yourself and others the grace to learn and heal from that indoctrination.
You were not born a monster. Society has done its best to make you into one, and like all roles, we can learn to be something else.