More Gruesome Anti-ICE Karen Psychoanalysis

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.

Related: 12-Foot Statue of Obese Black Woman Appears in Times Square

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.

They want to be dominated.

They want to be marginalized.

They even, as the clinical literature indicates, want to be raped — but, ironically, on their own terms, of course, to maximum autoerotic effect.

(In the same way that BDSM enthusiasts don’t want to spend their whole lives suspended from the ceiling, anti-ICE Karens don’t really want to live in a world of female subjugation and male domination full-time; they’d like to still enjoy the privileges of visiting Starbucks and ordering their abortions on demand and all the other creature comforts of liberal society after the rape fantasy has ended and they’re basking in post-coitus satisfaction.)

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Which leads us back to the anti-ICE protests staged by the United Karens of America.

It’s my proposition that a lot of this is anti-ICE Karenism and performative resistance to male-coded government endeavors like mass deportations of illegal immigrants is psychosexual.

Related: Yale ‘Fascism Professor’ Flees Country to Escape Trump’s Fourth Reich

The drive to live out rape fantasies in a world where actual rape is illegal and men have been neutered is what drives these absolute fruitcakes to show up at anti-ICE protests in full-on The Handmaid’s Tale regalia, as happened recently.

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For the uninitiated, “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a 1985 low-rent feminist fever-dream in which theocratic Christian monsters — a proxy for ICE officers — hijack society and revoke women’s rights.

Via Wikipedia (emphasis added):

“After staging an attack killing the President of the United States and most of United States Congress, a radical political group called the “Sons of Jacob” uses theonomic ideology to launch a revolution. The Constitution of the United States is suspended, newspapers are censored, and the United States is reformed into a military dictatorship known as the Republic of Gilead. The new regime quickly consolidates its power, overtaking all other religious groups, including Christian denominations.

The regime reorganizes society using a peculiar interpretation of some Old Testament ideas, and a new militarized, hierarchical model of social and religious theonomy is established among its new social classes. One of the most significant changes is the limitation of women’s rights. Women are relegated to the lowest-ranking class and are denied the right to own property, read, and write. Women are deprived of control over their reproductive functions.”

For the purposes of quasi-sexual gratification, dressing up as Handmaid’s Tale maidens to protest The Patriarchy™, ostensibly on behalf of put-upon migrants, is their own very peculiar exhibitionist role-play.

Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (now available in paperback), is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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