Oppressor Guilt and Rapist Ethics

Oppressor guilt is a common reaction in oppressor groups to having privileges challenged. The most writing on this subject has been on the form known as white guilt, but it is far from unknown to anti-oppression activists in other fields. Andrea Dworkin, in a speech titled "I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape", later published in Letters from a War Zone, spoke to a group of anti-sexist men about why they hadn't done more:

"Hiding behind guilt, that's my favorite. I love that one. Oh, it's horrible, yes, and I'm so sorry. You have the time to feel guilty. We don't have the time for you to feel guilty. Your guilt is a form of acquiescence in what continues to occur. Your guilt helps keep things the way they are.

"I have heard in the last several years a great deal about the suffering of men over sexism. Of course, I have heard a great deal about the suffering of men all my life. Needless to say, I have read Hamlet. I have read King Lear. I am an educated woman. I know that men suffer. This is a new wrinkle. Implicit in the idea that this is a different kind of suffering is the claim, I think, that in part you are actually suffering because of something that you know happens to someone else. That would indeed be new.

"But mostly your guilt, your suffering, reduces to: gee, we really feel so bad. Everything makes men feel so bad: what you do, what you don't do, what you want to do, what you don't want to want to do but are going to do anyway. I think most of your distress is: gee, we really feel so bad. And I'm sorry that you feel so bad--so uselessly and stupidly bad ..."

Oppressor guilt is self-indulgent. It re-centers the anti-oppression activism so that it is all about the oppressor. It casts the one who feels the guilt as some kind of tragic hero, wrestling with their sins, which are, of course, all about them. It makes him (in the context of man guilt) able to think of himself as Angel. Don't be Angel.

As a character trait, oppressor guilt is harmful enough in its own right. It is, however, always only a step away from being used as a weapon to actively harm the oppressed group whose plight spawned it. When men whine about the guilt they feel over the oppression of women, and when oppressor groups do so more generally, it is not simply an expression of distasteful feelings -- it is an attempt to shift the moral responsibility.

I feel so terribly about oppression. You make me feel so terribly about oppression. It is better to be wronged than to wrong, and as such my part is the worse. I am the victim here. And who does that leave to be the perpetrator?

This is an act on the spectrum of what John Stoltenberg calls "rapist ethics". In Refusing to be a Man, Stoltenberg defines rapist ethics as a "definitive and internally consistent system for attaching value to conduct [ ... in which] the one to whom the act is done [is] responsible for the act." [Emphasis original] The one who whines about his man guilt is like the abuser who tries to further burden the abused with his pain as well as hers. In the case of the abuser, it serves the function of preserving the abusive situation. In the case of man guilt, it serves the function of preserving the status quo.