Cheating Wife Reads Esther Perel

For the fuck of it, I did a bit of a dive on Esther Perel’s MO and background a while ago because part of what I did for several years was researching and writing humorous “psychological” profiles on various nasty shills for the chemical (cough, toxic shitstorm) industry.

It wasn’t just gratuitous snark so that eco activists could scoff at the opposition (though that’s always fun and maybe even life-extending) but because humor/sarcasm is one of the key strategies outlined in Gene Sharp’s bible of nonviolent resistance used by resistance groups like OTPOR who ousted Milosevic and Arab Spring activists.

Humor can have a very serious purpose (who knew CL is a revolutionary and the UBT is an instrument of resistance!). It can also be a way of fighting psychobabble fire with fire. For instance, before it was absorbed by Bayer, Monsanto actually hired mercenary psychologists from shill hubs like the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (which inspired Professor Jennifer Freyd to coin the DARVO acronym) and academic anthropologists to “study” the environmental movement as if it was some primitive tribal culture and then publish weaponized collective profiles casting watchdogs, activists and whistleblowers as delusional, disordered, memory-impaired, unhygienic, anti-science philistines suffering from parareligious worship of nature and quasi Freudian issues with authority.

Or whatever. The weaponized psychobabble would have been funny if the same social science whores weren’t– as anthropologist David Price documented in “Weaponizing Anthropology”– simultaneously working for the petrol industry to psychologically denigrate the populations of third world oil rich countries as part of the war-footing building up to invasion and drone campaigns but yet framing the denigration as “helpful concern” for these poor dirty, silly, backward– ergo “drone-able”– people.

The psychobabble aimed at eco targets was pretty much cut and pasted from attacks on third world cultures and would also have been funny if those targets weren’t, say, scientific whistleblowers who’d been driven into coronaries after having their careers destroyed, Keystone activists who got their arms blown off or industrial disaster victims who’d lost children or organs. To quote a journalist, shills are “the people who come down from the hill after battle to shoot the wounded.” Their job is to shut down victims who speak out or seek restitution while ensuring that westerners don’t care when their children are fried in white phosphorous attacks.

It’s just not funny when people die as a result of victim-blaming junk science. But you know what is funny? The shills themselves. It’s not just individual abusers who tend to project their own creepy, embarrassing flaws onto victims but institutional abusers. Lots of humiliatingly checkered histories there (a surprising number of shills started shilling to resurrect career tracks after failing out of ivy league schools due to club drug or heroin addiction– things along those lines). What’s also funny was how much these types– just like Milosevic and his henchman– would wail, cry and rage over being laughed at by their own targets.

Anyway, Perel strikes me as being cut from the same cloth as a lot of industrial shills and hacks, particularly the she-shills who are usually only trotted out to disguise especially flaming misogynist agendas. For example, Perel has some of the simpering giggly bimbo mannerisms that educated women in thrall to spooky power often adopt to avoid setting off patriarchal rage. She also similarly veils her denigration of victims as “helpful concern.”

But, aside from it still being unclear exactly what spooky patriarchal power Perel is groveling for (the streaming porn industry and cheater dating websites which arguably rely on adultery for market growth? Adulterous media sponsors?), the problem in trying to do a send-up of Perel is that the disturbing stuff in her background really isn’t funny.

Basically Perel admits to being permanently desensitized to horror as a child because many of the relatives in her parents’ generation were Holocaust survivors who would frequently recount violent and gruesome experiences from the death camps and would do it in front of small children. She even admits to reenacting the same behavior in the next generation by traumatizing her own son with gory details from the war or her research or something (don’t remember). All of this is pretty messed up but there’s zero fodder for humor in it. She also states that the inspiration for framing cheating as an “exuberant act of defiance” is that the Holocaust survivors who committed serial adultery seemed to live better or longer lives than the ones who got mired in despair.

Never mind wondering how the above extreme trauma model could possibly apply to some cheating suburban dad whose worst traumatic experience was getting dumped before senior prom. What Perel doesn’t mention anywhere is that the chumped spouses the exuberantly defiant camp-survivors in her family circle were fucking over were quite possibly also death camp survivors.

There’s no way to tell from Perel’s cagey representations but it’s possible that part of the reason some of the survivors Perel knew who got mired in despair was that they’d escaped the camps only to be stabbed in the back again by their own supposed allies and kin. If this were the case, it smacks of what many camp survivors testifying at Nuremberg identified as the worst trauma they experienced and the thing that finally killed their souls. That’s actually the theme of Holocaust documentary trilogy The 81st Blow– how survivors would return from the camps expecting to be supported by their families and communities but instead being rejected, criticized and having their experiences minimized or disbelieved.

It’s easy to see Perel has chosen the side of abusive power since she’s made a career of spinning exalted apologias for betrayal, pathologizing and silencing victims and minimizing fallout which, though hardly analogous to what death camp survivors suffered, does tie in to sometimes lethal domestic abuse (Jennifer Dulos, Lacey Peterson, Shanann Watts, etc.) not to mention little things like life-shortening STDs, traumatized children and financial ruin.

Again, I really can’t find humor in any of it. But maybe Perel can. Just like she giggled in a TED talk about traumatizing her son with violent gore, she may be so desensitized by epic horror that what domestic coercive control victims endure at the hands of partners may be almost silly to her.