Consider this the addendum to Dystopian Science Fiction vs. the Anti-ICE Karens.
Time and energy being finite resources, I wasn’t going to cover them anymore because there’s so much going on in the world — but they had to go and triple down on the crazy, thus forcing my hand.
In a perverse inversion of social hierarchy, victimhood and oppression in the modern liberal democracies of the West counterintuitively confer higher rather than lower social status — a curiosity we’ve explored ad nauseam here at Armageddon Prose.
Oppression — or perceived oppression, rather — is social currency, and every social climber wants to cash in.
Unfortunately for the white women of the middle class in the upper Midwest, demand for oppression greatly outstrips supply — an economic dilemma.
So any opportunity, no matter how flimsy the pretext, to claim victimhood status for oneself — or, as often happens, to claim it vicariously through the real or imagined suffering of more legitimate oppressed minority groups, like BIPOC migrants — is golden and must not be squandered.
So there’s the social angle — but the anti-ICE Karen phenomenon runs much deeper than mere social striving.
There’s a psychological element that no one in respectable society wants to talk about, which is that victimization and oppression is a source of sexual titillation for huge swathes of the female population — which is not my opinion, but, as we’ll see, empirical fact.
Let’s consider “The Nature of Women’s Rape Fantasies: An Analysis of Prevalence, Frequency, and Contents,” via Journal of Sex Research, 2009 (emphasis added):
“This study evaluated the rape fantasies of female undergraduates (N = 355) using a fantasy checklist that reflected the legal definition of rape and a sexual fantasy log that included systematic prompts and self-ratings. Results indicated that 62% of women have had a rape fantasy, which is somewhat higher than previous estimates. For women who have had rape fantasies, the median frequency of these fantasies was about 4 times per year, with 14% of participants reporting that they had rape fantasies at least once a week. In contrast to previous research, which suggested that rape fantasies were either entirely aversive or entirely erotic, rape fantasies were found to exist on an erotic-aversive continuum, with 9% completely aversive, 45% completely erotic, and 46% both erotic and aversive.”
Which might explain why pornography disguised as literature like Fifty Shades of Grey is wildly popular, or why Western women who fancy themselves enlightened feminists develop an expected fetish for ultra-fundamentalist Islam.