The term "victim" and victim mentality is getting way out of hand. Take control of your life
I used to think the term victim was meant for someone who had suffered some sort of serious wrongdoing e.g a victim of murder or a victim of fraud, now it seems everyone is a victim in some way and the victim mentality is slowly killing our functioning society.
"Victim
noun
a person harmed, injured, or killed as a result of a crime, accident, or other event or action."
The term victim should be reserved for people who have suffered some sort of severe trauma or damage, whether physically or emotionally/psychologically. Instead these days people have become "victims" of bullshit terms like micro-aggression, or the victim of racism even though no racism occurred.
We will often associate peoples critiques of bad situations as "victim blaming", quite possibly one of my least favorite terms in existence.
Victim blaming
Victim blaming is the idea that someone was asking for or brought on the bad thing that happened to them. The problem these days is the term is thrown around so loosely it's essentially lost all meaning.
For example a 14 year old girl gets raped on her way home from a party late at night and people ask "why was she walking through a park at night alone?"
These kinds of comments often end up with the commenter being labeled as a victim blamer, rather than just someone asking a justified question.
Now before i go on i want to say No woman(or man) is ever asking for or deserving of rape regardless of where they are or what they're wearing.
That being said it is not victim blaming to ask a justified question.
Why was a 14 year old girl walking through a park alone at night? it is dangerous, hell its dangerous for a grown man to walk through a park at night in some places albeit far less so.
This sort of question isn't designed to attribute blame to the victim, this is simply a reasonable question as to why someone would put themselves in a dangerous position unnecessarily. Does it mean she was asking for it? of course not. Does it mean it is her fault? 100% no. Was it possibly a foolish decision? yes.
We need to encourage safe behaviors because being honest with ourselves we cannot fully stamp out violent or sexual crimes. Yea we need more education but the best type of defense against this sort of thing (at least for now) is avoidance, until society and men in general have a massive change in behaviour.
The victim mentality
Moving away from true victims we get to the victim mentality.
People with victim mentality will refuse to take responsibility for their own actions or failures, they allow life to just happen rather than trying to take control of it. It's true we have very little sway over life itself but the decisions we make can have a drastic impact.
Life has a way of throwing curve-balls at us but the way we handle these is what decides the outcome.
People with victim mentality will always find someone else or something else to blame, whereas successful people will take this failure or disappointment as it is and work on ways to prevent or minimize it happening again .
We all know someone with victim mentality, whether its at work, at home, or one of our friends there are more and more of them these days.
Look for these signs of being a “victim,” either in yourself or in others.
• The victim is more of a passenger than a driver of his or her life. He goes where life takes him.
• To the victim, bad things just seem to happen to her.
• The victim can give you a list of reasons why things didn’t turn out well, none of which are his fault.
Playing the victim is popular these days and is an easy way to get out of taking personal responsibility, extreme cases of victim mentality will even have the so called victim make up lies or exaggerations to make the situation seem worse or make them seem more helpless than it truly is.
Everyone is guilty of having victim mentality sometimes, its human nature but there are plenty of ways to help move away from this and start to take more control of your own life.
Problem is most victims don't want that, they enjoy being able to feel sorry for themselves and feel like nothing is their own fault.
We should be reserving the term victim for people who have truly been victimized by someone or something, it takes away from the seriousness of real victims. It starts to alienate people and turn them against each other, i hate when people play the victim card and it can easily make me dislike them entirely.
Take responsibility for yourself.
Bad things happen, sometimes its your fault, sometimes it isn't.
Learn to accept your failures as just that and don't try and lay the blame on anyone else.
Don't just accept bad things happen to you because you're unlucky.
Create your own luck.
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I wouldn't be asking "why was the 14yo walking through the park alone at night" I would more be asking "why did that [insert expletives here] think they should get to do that" and "why isn't it safe for even a grown man to be walking alone through the park at night seriously wtf is wrong with you people".
But that's just me and I apparently never ask the right questions XP
yea i get that, but those questions don't solve the problem, like educating men that they don't have the right to do it wont change things. We all know murder and theft is wrong but people still do it because shitty people are shitty. Whether they think they should get to or not some people will. I personally wouldnt ask why she was walking alone at night in a park but i dont see it as victim blaming thats all.
Asking questions triggers answers/solutions. What kind of question leads to different answers/solutions. Stuff like your specific examples need lots of different solutions because it's pile of intertwined problems rather than a nice easy one.
To get back on topic with your victim mentality (which I completely forgot to address in previous comment due to getting distracted by the example, sorry about that XD): after you filter out the victims, I associate victim mentality with learned helplessness, and find both kind of annoying.
yea i dont actually know why i put the victim blaming bit in there it was a little off topic from what i was trying to talk about, but i guess as an example of a true victim
I agree with what you said, but it goes even further. I am a victim of a truck driver texting while driving. Didn't walk for 3 years, lost most of my vision and now, 10 years later I still scream at a suddenly loud noise (PTSD). But none of that matters. I still have to live.
Since my husband died, I still need an income. I still have hopes and dreams I plan on filling. But I am the one that needs to do it. I cannot expect anyone to do it for me. I will not find a man to support simply because it is hard to start over at 60 years old. I would not get on disability even if I qualified for it in my state. I will not draw social security early, just to get by. I will not sell my house (it's paid for), just to pay medical bills. These are all my responsibility, not the government, not the tax payers. I will survive.
Ah see you are an actual victim though, you deserve compensation for what happened to you in the case of the truck driver. that truly is of no fault of yours.
Im sorry to hear about your husband, life likes to test us but you obviously have a great mindset about things, i hope you do get to achieve your hopes and dreams because it sure sounds like you deserve it.
To address the rape victim analogy (and she is a true victim), I think the reason people talk about "victim blaming" is because the question of "what was she doing there" is usually one of the first questions asked, and I don't know that it is a legitimate question. Yes, the world is a dangerous place, but does that mean that we should allow for that danger to impact our decisions? If we do, doesn't that mean that we are just as caged as any animal? If a man walks through a park at night and gets violated, that question never comes up. It's specifically designed to imply that women don't belong in certain spaces, on threat of violence. I struggle with that idea, myself.
well if we want to be safe yes, i dont walk through certain places at night and im 6 ft 4 and 100 kilos, we let lots of things affect our decision making everyday and safety should definetly be one of them
also i understand it never gets asked if it happens to a man, i would ask though, if that has any impact on anything..
I just shared your blog to my Facebook page (4,547 friends), because people need to see and begin to understand that everyone is responsible for how his or her lives end up. This isn't a matter of everyone being against an individual, as much as a person being against themselves.
Great writeup,
<3 shello
oh awesome, shanks :)