As a cisgendered, melanin-lacking, imperfect female I’m often considered to have privilege and thus not to be worth listening to on any topic you care to mention. Apparently, and without irony, because society is designed to cater to my every whim – not that it feels that way. However, there is at least one arena in which I can be considered an oppressed minority and that’s the arena of mental health. I’m not neurotypical.
OK, I prefer to speak straightforwardly and I can’t keep that up for much longer, so let’s cut to the chase.
I am mentally ill, if functional, in that I suffer from moderate to severe depression. Having inadvertently seen my doctor’s notes I know that I’m on record as being much more at the severe end. This doesn’t mean I’m cuckoo for cocoa puffs, just that my brain is broken in such a way that I have an incredibly low self image (resistant to outside reinforcement and support), have trouble experiencing joy and happiness, have a naturally quite pessimistic outlook and am frequently indescribably miserable and unmotivated for no reason that makes sense to someone who hasn’t had a bout of depression. I have been depressed to the point of being suicidal a handful of times in my 37 years, though I’ve only been diagnosed and treated for a handful of years now.
Enter the controversy du jour in nerd circles. The Harley Quinn sexy-suicide competition.
Suddenly it’s not my whiteness, maleness, age, first-world geography or regrettable lack of obvious gender/sexuality minority status that’s important. It’s my broken brain and the fact I’ve been a victim of my own desperation (or rather, a ‘survivor’).
This is a fucking weird experience.
I’ve written about my depression but not so much from a position of authority but one of empathy and understanding. I’ve been there. I know what it feels like. This’ll pass, you just have to hold on. Tea and sympathy for other people feeling the same way. I’ve also written scenes of desperation and self-loathing in my stories, especially in the book that’s still in editing. In fiction, my experiences can lend writing about that sort of scene an authenticity and reality that improves the writing and draws the reader in. I’m not a huge believer in only writing what you know, but it can help.
The temptation is to thrust my mental illness into people’s faces while they’re talking about this, in a sort of vengeful ‘HAH! You have to listen to me now! I’m the victim! My opinion is the only one that counts!’ It’s also a rush to be in this position of… well, unlike claims of privilege made for being white/male/cis this genuinely does feel like privilege.
I’ve made a few comments here and there but I’ve also felt held back a bit. After all, my personal and deeply subjective experience creates bias in me and despite suffering from bouts of depression and having come to the point of suicide several times, that doesn’t actually make me an expert on the issue. I’m also uncomfortable with the way swinging the fact of my issues around like a club reduces me to that issue, rather than a whole person.
Personally I feel that I would rather have discussions and depictions of mental health issues out there in public, even poorly done, even comedic, even flippant. Anything to familiarise people with the issues, reduce the stigma and stop people feeling so isolated. In the few comments on this I have made people seem to have leant weight to my opinion simply because I’m a sufferer, not because I have made any particularly cogent argument.
So I stopped myself, took a deep breath and a step back and did a bit of research.
Turns out that the question of whether media depictions of suicide are helpful or harmful is still a bit up in the air. In factual media there is an effect, called the Werther effect, where information about methods of suicide or high profile cases (such as celebrities) lead to copycat suicides. With fictional media the effect is not so easy to discern and it’s unclear whether it has a genuine effect or not. It’s further unclear as to the effectiveness of media on de-stigmatising, provoking people to seek help, or directly helping them cope and find the resources to survive.
My opinion is now a bit better qualified due to reading up on genuine scientific research in the field and isn’t that much changed from what it was before. Still, I take a few lessons from this:
- It’s dangerous to lend too much weight to someone’s opinion because of their victim status.
- Victim status can be a more powerful and effective privilege than many others.
- Having this privilege is an addictive rush and it’s tempting to use it aggressively to shut people down.
- Having victim status can make people afraid to argue, even when you’re wrong or ill-informed.
- Knowledge trumps emotion.
For the record, I don’t see the problem with the Harley suicide competition thing, other than that it seems an odd and difficult topic to run a competition around.
Grim's Tales 
Very good post. I am also a white male heterosexual, and I have a… thing too.
When I was younger, I got drunk and subsequently suffered a head injury. While significantly incapacitated, a woman I know who was accompanying me to the hospital undid my trousers and performed a sexual act on me. I was unable to consent (or resist).
She was trying to be nice, to make my evening better.
I don’t hate her. I am not even upset at her. Actually I am numb about the whole situation. I don’t know what to think or feel.
Did you know it’s not rape under uk law if you aren’t being penetrated? It’s sexual assault.
What does upset me is the bullshit. Elevator gate, victimhood as a lifestyle. I respect you for your strength when brain chemistry fucks you over. I am someone you know pretty well, and like you I am not a victim, but being a straight white male does not make the world easy mode, that kind of talk comes from people who want someone to blame.
Stay strong, and please remember that you are someone I admire for who you are.
What you have encountered here is a concept known in social justice circles as “intersectionality.”
Intersectionality becomes an issue when a group of people is privileged in one way, and oppressed in another. And the dirty little secret of intersectionality is that very nearly everyone is privileged in one way and oppressed in another.
The only group that isn’t is the very tiny minority of wealthy, white, cisgender (not cisgendered btw) mentally and physically able, Christian, healthy, heterosexual, neurotypical, married.men. As we’ve seen from the news, many of the people we think fit this profile, don’t.
The axes of oppression at play in the Harley Quinn affair are mental health and gender. People are upset because the panels portray depression in a flippant, humorous way, and that they use Hayley’s female body for titillation.
My answer to this is that Hayley Quinn, as a character, view death in a flippant, humorous way, so why wouldn’t she approach her own death with the same attitude? And as for being nude in a bath, I wouldn’t put it past HQ to get into a bathtub nude, in her usual bells-and-motley, in a scuba outfit, or a wedding dress, depending on the context and her own whims. Everything in these panels is described fairly true to her character.
We don’t know, from these panels, why she wants to off herself; from the limited context they provide, but she does appear to be approaching it from her usual angles. It may simply have been an offhand comment from “Mistah Jay” that her highly unusual brain decided to run with, in her usual style.
So I agree with you that the HQ thing is overblown.
On your conclusions, I have a few comments to offer.
1> You are correct on this, but not for the reasons you suppose. Victim status isn’t a simple binary condition, because of intersectionality. They’re usually more subtle than simply privileged/oppressed.
2> “Victim status is privilege” sounds an awful lot like “oppression is power” — there was an author who published a book warning about this kind of thinking way back in 1949, and I think the message is worth remembering.
3> I agree that there’s an emotional component to any moral panic, and it’s one people need to keep an eye on. People who are high on brain chemicals don’t always have smiles on their faces. Sometimes they have grimaces of anger.
4> Any time there’s a moral panic going on, it can be dangerous to speak out against it, to attempt to moderate its bull-in-a-china-shop nature.
Finally, as for the competition, if I were running the competition, I would give the most difficult, complex scenes I could–not just artistically, but also emotionally. I’d put down scenes that were extremely hard to get right. Which is what DC has done here.
What you have encountered here is a concept known in social justice circles as “intersectionality.”
Intersectionality becomes an issue when a group of people is privileged in one way, and oppressed in another. And the dirty little secret of intersectionality is that very nearly everyone is privileged in one way and oppressed in another.
The only group that isn’t is the very tiny minority of wealthy, white, cisgender (not cisgendered btw) mentally and physically able, Christian, healthy, heterosexual, neurotypical, married.men. As we’ve seen from the news, many of the people we think fit this profile, don’t.
The axes of oppression at play in the Harley Quinn affair are mental health and gender. People are upset because the panels portray depression in a flippant, humorous way, and that they use Hayley’s female body for titillation.
My answer to this is that Hayley Quinn, as a character, view death in a flippant, humorous way, so why wouldn’t she approach her own death with the same attitude? And as for being nude in a bath, I wouldn’t put it past HQ to get into a bathtub nude, in her usual bells-and-motley, in a scuba outfit, or a wedding dress, depending on the context and her own whims. Everything in these panels is described fairly true to her character.
We don’t know, from these panels, why she wants to off herself; from the limited context they provide, but she does appear to be approaching it from her usual angles. It may simply have been an offhand comment from “Mistah Jay” that her highly unusual brain decided to run with, in her usual style.
So I agree with you that the HQ thing is overblown.
On your conclusions, I have a few comments to offer.
1> You are correct on this, but not for the reasons you suppose. Victim status isn’t a simple binary condition, because of intersectionality. They’re usually more subtle than simply privileged/oppressed.
2> “Victim status is privilege” sounds an awful lot like “oppression is power” — there was an author who published a book warning about this kind of thinking way back in 1949, and I think the message is worth remembering.
3> I agree that there’s an emotional component to any moral panic, and it’s one people need to keep an eye on. People who are high on brain chemicals don’t always have smiles on their faces. Sometimes they have grimaces of anger.
4> Any time there’s a moral panic going on, it can be dangerous to speak out against it, to attempt to moderate its bull-in-a-china-shop nature.
Finally, as for the competition, if I were running the competition, I would give the most difficult, complex scenes I could–not just artistically, but also emotionally. I’d put down scenes that were extremely hard to get right. Which is what DC has done here.