Did Anyone Get Pregnant During the Affair?

Yes, amazing to say but those OW subreddits did exist. The ones I saw didn’t last long but I haven’t been on Reddit for awhile and maybe new ones cropped up. I also saw gaggles of OWs or OW apologists who’d brigade feminist subreddits, typically railing about how putting any blame on sidechicks is “misogynist” lol. It was fun watching those arguments get shot down but it was kind of creepy how the poacher types seem to form coalitions and create their own culture. Guilt is ugly I guess and takes a lot of energy and constant affirmation to stuff down.

Speaking of which, if your ex had enough executive functioning to avoid consequences, elaborately deceive or blameshift to get you off his scent or terrorize you into paralysis, then he’s not mentally ill but probably more criminally disordered. At least according to the best clinical arguments I’ve read, criminal disorders are acquired and learned, not genetic.

In any case, neurogeneticists have never pinpointed a single “crime gene” or “low empathy gene” despite the occasional headline or book proclaiming some (always unreplicable) finding and despite trying to hunt these elusive genes down like Wile E. Coyote for more than a century. Furthermore, the pursuit of this is mostly for horrible and highly monetized reasons. Like in service of some “Minority Report” law enforcement or antiterrorist scheme or pharma schemes to “prophylactically” and forcibly medicate whole “at risk” populations (naturally marginalized an poor people and naturally with on-patent blockbuster drugs paid for with– tada– tax dollars), all of which inevitably have racialized underpinnings. Another obvious motive behind the crime gene obsession is for various war profiteers to “manufacture public consent” for the collateral of violent western hegemony on the theory that the civilians– especially children– the west drones to oblivion were “born terrorists” anyway so no biggie. Of course these aims are never openly touted and studies like this are always framed within kinder-gentler, touchy-feely motives (like alleviating “genetically inherited trauma”!). But any careful follow-the-money search of relevant study funding or review of citations always uncovers all sorts of bad actors, blatantly racist supporting research and weaponized agendas behind the curtain.

Mostly I get impatient with the weaponized genetic clusterfuck because it tends to shift attention away from more interesting and useful findings and evidence that could encourage the channeling of resources towards protecting children from the things that create adult monsters and help people identify abusers before they get entrapped or preempt escalation and more safely escape. For instance, the idea that abusers, though they typically have a capacity for empathy, instead manage to make it highly selective or tamp it down through all sorts of elaborate mental tricks, means signs of this are observable. One of the theoretical “tricks” is something called “neutralization”– a learned thinking process (probably passed from generation to generation starting from the cradle) observed in a wide range of serial offenders (from college exam cheats to domestic batterers to serial killers) that involves things like denying or justifying the offense, negating the victim, blaming the victim, condemning the condemners, etc. It can become so rote that it’s barely conscious but people who know what to look for might see flashes of it in time to protect themselves.

A researcher who studied batterers in prison settings for twenty years also found that most abusers avidly but sometimes stealthily collect alibis and “palliative comparisons” from the culture which justify or even applaud their criminal conduct as part of the “neutralization” process. People might start to pick up clues of this from the kinds of films people prefer or books, articles or podcasts they consume, the celebrities or presenters they follow, etc.

In other words, a giveaway could be all the ways in which these abusers channel energy into “neutralizing” guilt or a sense of negative stigma for their behavior to suffocate any remaining affective empathy and leave only the cognitive empathy that helps to manipulate prey and the perceptions of bystanders. In any event, all that energy expenditure is going to come out of other types of mental functions and one clue may simply be that someone seems oddly spaced out most of the time or is a fuckup or particularly triggery and defensive when hearing anything that contradicts their constant self-exculpation.

At the very least the acquired view of abuser mentality argues that many abusers are so hyperfocused on entrapping victims, pour so much mental energy into quelling any internal obstacle against this goal (like shame, empathy) and engage in such elaborate mental processes to these ends that even abusers of middling intelligence or those who are stupid in other aspects of their lives have an almost genius ability to coerce and control. So, rather than victims being viewed as self-defeating for not being able to easily escape, it starts to seem like a miracle that any get out alive.

Also if abusers actually do have the capacity for empathy but just a selective form of it, it explains why so many normal people get sucked in. The empathy is real enough but unfortunately was equipped with an “off switch.” Once that switch goes fully off regarding a particular victim because the predator has internally rehearsed all the ways that the victim is not deserving of human status, victims may have the impression that there could never have been empathy there to begin with because what they see are just the empty shark eyes of a monster. That impression could seem to argue that that coldness was always there to be seen– meaning the victim was somehow being foolhardy or masochistic for ignoring it. But the snuffing of empathy might and achieving “antisocial” status have been a process that took time and practice, meaning there was little initial “warning vibe.” Plus that compassion may “turn back on” quite suddenly on a whim, simply because the abuser has not yet mentally dehumanized a particular target (give ’em time).

Basically the acquired view contradicts a lot of traditional victim-blaming theories. I also think the acquired view, aside from showing the real scale of the generational and cultural roots of abuse and how this is the training grounds for other types of criminality, just makes great art. If you get a chance, watch the documentary on the making of The Sopranos series. The creator of it, David Chase, and several of the series writers wax brilliant and staggeringly candid at times about the role of family violence and dysfunction in creating adult monsters, sometimes drawing from their own dysfunctional upbringings and the secrets they uncovered in their own families by accident (because secrets are kept secret and we don’t always learn of them). All of this got poured into the series which, to me, sometimes reached the level of modern Shakespeare. The sense is that these writers were passionately trying to inoculate the public from being charmed by or feeling sympathy for the charismatic devils among us by exposing all the roots and guts of it. Like “Yeah these freaks genuinely suffer, genuinely love, genuinely feel empathy for ducks and horsies. But it doesn’t matter because they’ll still cut your throat like peeling a potato.”