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On abuse and atonement
A reply to this post about the importance of paths to redemption.
I agree with this but think there’s a few important things it misses that don’t go without saying. Specifically: no matter how much someone atones, the people they hurt have a right to want to avoid them anyway, and people in general are individually within their rights to still not like or trust someone post atonement.
I mean afaict people who’ve actually atoned generally accept this and are fine respecting those boundaries as long as they’re not so restrictive that it makes their life impossible eg they can’t find anyone willing to hire them. (And I don’t consider blanket mistrust of, say, anyone who’s been to prison to be reasonable or socially responsible)
So what causes problems is abusers who have learned the language of atonement but just use it as a weapon to silence anyone who criticises them or wants to avoid them. See: Hugo Schwyzer. These people are generally sneaky enough to avoid prison or any real negative consequences for their actions, but there’s no sure fire way to recognise them.
That doesn’t mean we don’t value redemption: if nothing else, abusers are great at taking advantage of this too, spinning one bad thing their critics did once into a excuse to dismiss them. It just means we can’t value redemption above all else.
This isn’t really a criticism of the original post, which was written as part of a broader argument. Afaict the OP and I agree very strongly on the basic principle that you can’t ever ignore all the real people involved in a situation in favour of simplistic political dogma. I’m just engaging with the post as a reblog shorn of that context, because tumblr. Also given the subject of the post, I do think it’s important not to use “abuser” as a synonym for “being of pure irredeemable evil”. I am using it to mean “someone who is currently abusing people”.
I agree with this but think there’s a few important things it misses that don’t go without saying. Specifically: no matter how much someone atones, the people they hurt have a right to want to avoid them anyway, and people in general are individually within their rights to still not like or trust someone post atonement.
I mean afaict people who’ve actually atoned generally accept this and are fine respecting those boundaries as long as they’re not so restrictive that it makes their life impossible eg they can’t find anyone willing to hire them. (And I don’t consider blanket mistrust of, say, anyone who’s been to prison to be reasonable or socially responsible)
So what causes problems is abusers who have learned the language of atonement but just use it as a weapon to silence anyone who criticises them or wants to avoid them. See: Hugo Schwyzer. These people are generally sneaky enough to avoid prison or any real negative consequences for their actions, but there’s no sure fire way to recognise them.
That doesn’t mean we don’t value redemption: if nothing else, abusers are great at taking advantage of this too, spinning one bad thing their critics did once into a excuse to dismiss them. It just means we can’t value redemption above all else.
This isn’t really a criticism of the original post, which was written as part of a broader argument. Afaict the OP and I agree very strongly on the basic principle that you can’t ever ignore all the real people involved in a situation in favour of simplistic political dogma. I’m just engaging with the post as a reblog shorn of that context, because tumblr. Also given the subject of the post, I do think it’s important not to use “abuser” as a synonym for “being of pure irredeemable evil”. I am using it to mean “someone who is currently abusing people”.
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Nnng, yeah, those kinds of stories are so gross.
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Dude wielded his righteous anger like his hammer and tongs, and never let go.
Hera threw him off Olympus because he was born deformed?
Fine. He's not gonna think of her as him mother, and instead accept Thetis (the sea-nymph who helped him recover from the fall) as family, instead.
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I didn't know about that, that's lovely :)
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Here's a detail from a fresco from Pompeii, showing Hephaestus, Thetis, and Aglaia in his workshop.
Now, Hephaestus has sided with Hera, on occasion, when she's fighting with Zeus ('Cause Zeus), but he very pointedly lives as far from Olympus as possible, simply because he does not want to put up with the other gods' mockery.
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Thank you, that was an interesting read! As a sign of my ignorance, I had a moment of "Wow, his face was just a blank shape??" before realising there was just a hole in the mural :)
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The one with his face missing is a cyclops, and helper in Hephaestus's workshop (the god had a habit of employing cyclopses and dwarfs, and other peoples who were marginalized by the Olympian gods -- solidarity, and all that, also: if you can't do it all yourself, hiring personal/professional assistants is perfectly okay).
Hephaestus is the one who's sitting down behind the shield ('cause he can't stand up very well -- and I notice that the fresco painter probably couldn't decide what his deformed feet actually looked like, so painted in a conveniently placed marble plinth instead. /artist work-arounds).
Here's another picture of Hephaestus that's one of my favorites (with normal looking feet). It's about 2 and a half millennia before the invention of the wheelchair proper, but someone asked themselves: "If I had trouble walking, and needed a personal transport tool, what would it look like?" and imagined a wheelchair (with wings, 'cause divine).
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Ah, that's lovely! I got more of a kick out of seeing a mythological figure using an ancient wheelchair-y thing than I would have expected, thank you :)
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using an ancient wheelchair-y thing than I would have expected
Yeah. Me, too.
Also, there was a recent Tumblr post in praise of Hephaestus, and part of the praise was (natch): "He was never really crippled or deformed! That's just people who don't understand him trying to badmouth him!"
And I wrote a long reply saying: "Yes, he was too crippled!" and... I got unexpectedly teary-eyed when I wrote down how I felt when I first encountered the name "Hephaestus" in a mythology book, and how he was disabled "like me," as I thought about someone taking that away from me.
Having our existence acknowledged on the cosmic/Divine scale matters.