Thread by @radley_ms

Anyone doubting the assertion that postmodernist theory such as that propounded by Foucault and Butler grooms women to accept male abuse should look no further than the recent documentary on the sex cult NXIVM and its leader, Keith Raniere. (Thread)

In the documentary there is footage of Raniere repeating almost verbatim Foucauldian ideas about rape and child abuse, and how the roles of victim and abuser are discursively constructed by society rather than being objective realities.

He recounts a story about a 6 year old child who enjoyed her father’s sexual abuse and only suffered later when she learned that society viewed it as a bad thing.

Part of the grooming of the women who would eventually serve Raniere as sex slaves involved telling them over and over that victimhood was a choice, and that they should work through sexual boundaries so they could handle sexual situations that they found...

..traumatic, unsettling, uncomfortable or painful.
In the women’s group, Jness, female submission was presented as desirable, inevitable and empowering. Sound familiar? That’s because these narratives are everywhere in modern liberal feminist discourse,

albeit in a less extreme format. We see them in narratives about how kink shaming is wrong, that there is no moral objection against men being aroused by rape, that prostitution is a desirable career choice and wearing makeup and heels is in fact...

..an empowering decision that women are lucky to be able to make. Women in Raniere’s cult were showed videos of horrific acts of violence committed against women, including rape and murder, in order to help break them down, desensitise them and prime them..

..for abuse - just as women are groomed from birth with billboards of objectified, hypersexualised female people everywhere we look, and later on, porn featuring obvious scenes of rape and sexual sadism, which we fail to recognise due to this grooming.

The women in Raniere's sex ring were made to starve themselves on diets of 300-500 calories, a situation which will be familiar to most or all women in modern western society. This starvation was not just to make their bodies attractive to Raniere -

- it was used deliberately as a tool of control. When questioned about it by a male associate regarding actress Allison Mack he explicitly said “I’m trying to break her”.

In the Jness Castings courses, women were told that men were naturally non-monogamous and that they must accept this, a narrative similar to current progressive debates around polyamory, which is increasingly seen as an immutable sexual orientation

requiring the same protection as others under the LGBT+ umbrella.
Raniere characterised any female complaint about rape and abuse as abuse in itself, reversing the roles of victim and abuser. In the postmodernist worldview, the victim has all the power.

she can choose to view her rape as abuse, or as a neutral event that did not harm her. If she chooses the former she is now cast in the role of abuser for the trouble she causes in protesting; but the man who raped her is never asked to take responsibility..

..for his own resulting "victimhood". And just as these “empowerment” vs “victimhood” narratives were only ever employed by Raniere against female abuse victims and never the male abusers, they are only ever employed by the left against women and girls.

Nobody in the progressive movement is telling black or ethnic minority people that they should learn to love their structural and social oppression, or to see it as empowering and desirable. The trans movement encourages trans males to lobby aggressively...

for access to women’s sports, spaces, political shortlists and sexual access to the bodies of same-sex attracted women; they appear to be exempt from the urging to simply thumb their nose at oppression, to rebrand it as empowering & to just “have fun with it”

- as women and girls are repeatedly told to do. In further parallels to NXIVM's teachings, female people who resist these attacks on their sex-based rights and protections are derided and cast in the roles of abusers, villains and transphobes.

Similarly, kink shaming only appears to refer to desires that accord with male supremacy; women who are exclusively same-sex attracted are derided as “genital fetishists” and told they must work through their repulsion towards for male genitalia so as...

..to be better allies to trans people. They aren't permitted the defence of “kink shaming” because their sexuality is deemed to be materially, objectively harmful to transwomen.The obvious material harms to lesbians this causes are apparently considered moot.

In this respect NXIVM can be seen not just as a discrete phenomenon that was separate from modern neoliberal society, but an extreme version of it - the ideology of postmodernism taken to its logical conclusion; driven by male sexual appetites, and..

..used to groom women and girls to be subservient and compliant in their own abuse. It’s no real surprise that the excesses of Raniere’s cult were possible, however outlandish they seem;

society had already amply laid the groundwork for it by the time these women came into contact with him. End