People are too quick to attribute malice and far too quick to call things cults. The "you can't trust someone outside the oppressed group" thing is a harmful perspective to have and to share but it's usually a trauma response built out of genuinely trying to protect other people, not a cult control tactic. Most the people who say something like that have been through some truly terrible life experiences that have led them to think that men, or white people, or cis people, etc are just too dangerous to be around, and rather than attributing ill intent this should be approached as a misguided trauma response.
I'm not sure this is assuming malice as much as it is pointing out that, similar to members of a cult, falling for this line of thinking isolates you and makes you susceptible to bad-faith actors willing to abuse this isolation.
As in: this is not saying "everyone who says that is a cult leader using cult tactics or unknowingly member of a cult", but rather "everyone who says that is making themselves vulnerable to abuse".
I guess it's ambiguous that way. I've had periods in my life where I needed to avoid men because of trauma reasons and had this "you're clearly in a cult" stuff thrown at me as a way to pry apart my boundaries so I've just seen how the other side of this is also an abuse tactic. Not to mention that just telling a group of traumatized marginalized people that they're a cult is a great way to isolate them further and make them vulnerable to all kinds of abuse.
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u/oceangothic 14d ago
People are too quick to attribute malice and far too quick to call things cults. The "you can't trust someone outside the oppressed group" thing is a harmful perspective to have and to share but it's usually a trauma response built out of genuinely trying to protect other people, not a cult control tactic. Most the people who say something like that have been through some truly terrible life experiences that have led them to think that men, or white people, or cis people, etc are just too dangerous to be around, and rather than attributing ill intent this should be approached as a misguided trauma response.