Purple-haired people eaters

Library culture is consumed by the toxic feminism of the Devouring Mother.

AI-generated image for the prompt “angry one-eyed flying purple people eater with one horn at a library desk”.

Leave it to librarians to ruin a perfectly good thing.

In a profession singularly dedicated to the collection, curation, and cultivation of the record of human thought, in which every action we take, no matter how mundane, ultimately advances the understanding and appreciation of the human condition, how can so many of us be so miserable?

And how is that misery distorting our stewardship of the human record?

Elsewhere at Heterodoxy in the Stacks, writers have diligently debunked the reigning myth that librarianship is dominated by racism and fascism — but there is another ism consuming librarianship: the toxic feminism of the Devouring Mother.

Eaten Alive: The Devouring Mother

The Devouring Mother is the shadow haunting the duality of Carl Jung’s Great/Terrible Mother archetype. The inversion of the Gaia goddess, the Devouring Mother exploits her care-giving role to destroy her dependents. This destruction takes many forms on a spectrum from over-protective coddling and co-dependency, to nagging, catty gossip and cliquishness, to lying, manipulating and controlling, to false accusations and character assassination, and, in extreme cases, physical abuse and murder, ultimately consuming under the guise of caring.

For skeptics of analytical psychology, these behaviors are not merely assigned to the so-called fairer sex by a Dead White Guy, but manifest in humans and other species as typologies of female competition and aggression with deep evolutionary roots. We women are less likely to engage in overt or physical altercation, deploying a range of passive-aggressive strategies to achieve the same ends, including the cold shoulder, reputational harm, undermining others' success, forming cliques, and social exclusion. A particularly skilled female aggressor can maintain anonymity and plausible deniability while she tears another person’s life apart. Owing to our physical vulnerability, women are also much more prone to perceive threats when none are present.

We can likewise look to clinical psychology, which finds women significantly more likely to exhibit neuroticism (“the tendency to experience negative emotion and related processes in response to perceived threat and punishment; these include anxiety, depression, anger, self-consciousness, and emotional lability”) but also agreeableness (“traits relating to altruism, such as empathy and kindness”; prioritizing “maintenance of social harmony, and consideration of the concerns of others”). Left unexamined, this empathetic concern elides into the psychological distortions idiot compassion and ultimately suicidal empathy.

While women are, on average, susceptible to the insatiety of the Devouring Mother to some degree, a specific class of women appears particularly afflicted: liberal white women. Liberal white women are significantly more likely than any other demographic group to be diagnosed with a mental health condition and to score high for depression, loneliness, and self-derogation; all comorbidities of the neurotic personality trait. Neuroticism also correlates with political liberalism, and increases along with liberal political sentiment. What’s more, “critical social justice attitudes” are correlated with political leftism, being female, and anxiety (a facet of neuroticism). College-educated Democrat women voters also forsake friendships at astoundingly high rates in the wake of political upsets.

In a profession dominated by liberal white women, the Devouring Mother is eating us alive.

Death by Empathy: The Abdication of Intellectual Freedom

The coexisting tendencies toward threat vigilance and empathetic concern surface implications of particular import to libraries: how they shape our relationship to intellectual freedom. Political liberalism and gender are the best known demographic predictors for the likelihood that someone will perceive speech as harmful. Women are consistently more censorious than men, although that Censorship Gender Gap is closing in younger generations which increasingly favor speech codes and the heckler’s veto over counterspeech and live-and-let-say.

A study to create and test an instrument for measuring critical social justice attitudes included the following examples, annotated with the largest share of responses by women compared to men:

• “University reading lists should include fewer white or European authors.” (23.4% women somewhat agree; 55.4% men completely disagree)

• “Microaggressions* should be challenged often and actively. (* = verbal communication or act, which can be seen to reflect negative attitudes towards a minority group, regardless of original intent)” (33.4% women somewhat agree; 44.8% men completely disagree)

• “We should have more safe spaces in society.” (37.3% women completely agree; 42.6% men completely disagree), and

• “You should not say things that might offend an oppressed person.” (35% of women somewhat agree; 34.8% of men completely disagree).

In the academy, women scholars exhibit a greater commitment to “moral goals” — “equity, inclusion, and the protection of vulnerable groups” — than to truth-seeking and knowledge-creation at the risk of someone’s discomfort. The rise of women in academe tracks with the emergence of safe spaces, speech codes, trigger warnings, and other forms of student ‘coddling.’

In libraries, the Devouring Mother presents with a particularly sinister twist: while we seek to ‘protect’ adults from potentially harmful ideas through decanonization, bystander training, content warnings, anti-racism, and the often censorious condemnation of purported misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, we simultaneously celebrate the exposure of our youngest readers to a potential bibliogenic cycle of harm in which picture books and sexualized (sometimes predatory) guest readers are the vectors of questionable ideas regarding familial relationships, gender dysphoria and its so-called ‘care,’ including amputation and chemical castration.

It’s down with Dead White Men, up with Drag Queen Story Hour. We’re coddling the adults and simultaneously corrupting our kids.

And we got here by undermining our commitment to intellectual freedom — upheld, in part, through a professional practice of neutrality in the service of the many public interests inherent to diverse, pluralistic societies — and replacing it instead with postures like “radical empathy” and “trauma-informed response.”

Both radical empathy and trauma-informed response invite the Devouring Mother. Radical empathy calls to mind Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s idiot compassion, the enabling of destructive behavior motivated by immediate self-interest rather then the long-term well-being of another. Idiot compassion fuels virtue signaling, “a favourite game — especially of the upper classes — of generating a feeling of emotional ‘solidarity’ with a particular minority group, the more fringe the better,” and whose “virtual solidarity may actually prevent us from paying attention to the local world [and] that which needs our real presence and care.” Idiot compassion occurs when we stop serving individuals and replace them with abstract categories of victimhood — much like the identitarian underpinnings of the library neutrality debate — and it dispossesses individuals of their agency and intellectual freedom.

Taken to the extreme, idiot compassion unravels into suicidal empathy: “the inability to implement optimal decisions when our emotional system is tricked into an orgiastic hyperactive form of empathy, deployed on the wrong targets.” Suicidal empathy is evident in growing concerns about library worker health and safety, stemming from “lack of support from management and patrons acting out due to mental health and addiction issues.” Guided naively by “the philosophy of ‘the customer is always right,” library leaders are faulted for maintaining insufficient guardrails for patron behavior and “leaving frontline library workers ‘vulnerable to abuse.’” On college campuses, suicidal empathy enabled political extremists to occupy and vandalize academic libraries in response to the Israel-Gaza war. Tinged with vocational awe, suicidal empathy leaves libraries prioritizing the unhoused and political extremists above the safe access of students, youth and families, and library workers.

Demography and Destiny: Undoing Toxic Feminism

The Devouring Mother is more Karen, less caring. Critics — including on the political left — characterize toxic feminism as tone policing, aggressively shutting down dissenting views, hostility to open discourse, imposing a gendered oppressor-oppressed worldview, and exhibiting a patronizing savior complex.

These characteristics reflect toxic workplaces more broadly, described as professional environments that harbor gossip, harrassment, bullying, and ostracism. There’s no shortage of works examining the subject of libraries as toxic and dysfunctional workplaces. As in the case of collection decanonization co-occurring with Drag Queen Story Hour, library dysfunction often assumes eyebrow-raising forms, including the librarian who was cancelled by colleagues for showcasing the ‘wrong’ kind of Black intellectual. The special blend of toxic feminism with library dysfunction cultivates self-censorship and repression in the one profession that claims “a special obligation to the free flow of information and ideas.”

Libraries are in a death spiral of toxic feminism. It’s proclivities for censorship and suicidal empathy are putting our collections, services, spaces, employees, and singular commitment to intellectual freedom at risk. We must subdue the purple (or pink, or blue)-haired people eater in us all, lest we smother the wonder of libraries and snuff out intellectual freedom in the gullet of the Devouring Mother.

Note on artificial intelligence use: Substack’s native image generator was used to produce the feature image with the prompt, “angry one-eyed flying purple people eater with one horn at a library desk.”

Sarah Hartman-Caverly is a reference and instruction librarian with Penn State University Libraries at Penn State Berks. She’s a white, libertarian-leaning woman and mother, but her hair has never been purple (or pink, or blue).

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