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So, I watched Escaping Twin Flames this week. It's basically a documentary about a cult, with a fun twist at the end. The short version is it's a cult/mlm that promises true love to everyone paying in. The leader of the cult claimed he could channel who the soul mate, or "twin flame" to use cult speak, of the members was. Twin flames were often just random ass people in the cult members life. No matter what members were encouraged to stalk, harass and profess their love to their "twin flame". That approach wasn't going so great however. There was a manifest lack of success in the group, with vanishingly few members successfully entering a relationship with their "twin flame". Sensing things weren't going so great, the leader changed the rules so that everyone's twin flame was actually already in the cult. Only problem was, 80% of the members of the cult were women, and there weren't enough men to go around. But the cult leader had a fantastic idea. If you just convince half the women that they are actually "divine masculine", and get them to transition, everyone can pair off as "divine masculine" and "divine feminine". It's genius!
Why can't two ladies just be in a relationship? I donno, shut up. Cult leader says so.
So anyways, the final episode is about the cult forcing members to get "gender affirming care". Cross sex hormones, top surgery, you know the deal. And this is enforced through all the classic cult conditioning you've seen if you've ever watched a documentary about cults. The cult recruits from lonely, vulnerable, often young and impressionable people. You are encouraged to cut off everyone outside of the cult. All dissenters are exiled from the cult, creating a status quo where you must do whatever the cult leader says or lose your entire social support network. A lot of people even derived their income from the cult, making the control even more complete. Lots of struggle sessions breaking down the identities of cult members. Like I said, if you've seen a cult documentary before, none of this will be new to you.
What made this special to me is the many, frequent caveats the documentary included that you are not, under any circumstances, to apply any of the horrific trans brainwashing depicted in this documentary to anything else. This is unidirectional knowledge. You are only allowed to consider it in the context of this specific cult being bad. Now here is random trans expert we've hired to reinforce the point that these trans people have been abused into being trans, and not any other trans people you may have had in your life. Ignore your lying eyes. Especially insulting is that all the moms they interview about how their children were stolen away by the cult still use the new preferred pronouns and names of their abused and brainwashed children. Had me yelling at the screen "Have the fucking strength of your convictions you coward!"
Frankly, the nominal stories a lot of parents tell about their children deciding they are transgender doesn't differ that much from the cult experience. Their child is totally normal, not a hint of gender dysphoria, until a person the kid looks up to or wants to impress, often someone the parents can specifically identify, starts pushing it on their kid. Kid does it to fit in with their friend group, maybe a completely different friend group than they had before, maybe a friend group that only exists online. Then kid is encouraged to completely cut off anyone not 100% on board with their new identity. Most horrifying of all is how often the state involves itself in this, with schools serving as a vector to suggest to children, and glamorize, queer identities, facilitate their secret transitions, and CPS stepping in to take custody from parents who don't "affirm".
But going even deeper, where the fuck is the medical establishment? When the Heaven's Gate cult had members castrated themselves, I sincerely doubt they just waltzed into a Planned Parenthood and had it done no questions asked. How are the diagnostic criteria so wide open that a cult leader can have his members electively mutilate themselves at walk in clinics, no problem?
Most ironic of all, is there is a part of the documentary where they describe an incident where the cult leader had his top leadership watch a documentary about another cult. Then he instructed them to write essays about how he was definitely not a cult leader. This was the moment one of the interviewee's in the documentary realized she was in a cult and left. All the other cult members performed that feat of cognitive mutilation however. Meanwhile, on a meta level, the documentary is pulling the same fucking thing on us, the audience, with it's gaslighting about the explosion of trans youth. We just weren't assigned the further task of completing homework about how nothing we saw in the documentary about a trans cult applies to the other trans cult we see sitting right in front of us.
This part actually jumped out at me:
This seems unexpected because if there were any social group that had a gender imbalance of that degree, AND all the women in question were self-described as looking for love, you'd think this would lead to men joining up to exploit the imbalance until it was wittled down some.
I notice I am confused. Even accounting for women in general being more drawn to weird spiritualist remedies.
Sure the premise that you're looking for one specific person kind of limits the playing field, but that rarely stops motivated males.
Also, the basic description of the group made it seem less cult-like than the central example of cults, but upon looking at some of their background beliefs and their youtube channel yeah, this is definitely a classic-style cult with some slick presentation.
Like, I'm actually willing to tolerate psychic matchmakers because they basically take all the standard tactics and tricks to finding a mate for someone and dress it up in some woo language to make it more palatable.
But the harms being done in the Twin Flames Universe seem pretty obvious even before the coerced transition, and most of the other hallmarks are there.
Are you confused about why most cult leaders are charismatic men?
I presume some of the gender imbalance is linked to intentional recruitment practises by such a cult, especially since I think that most cult leaders (being overwhelmingly male) certainly enjoy having more submissive women around for their sexual enjoyment, and this only ceases to apply when a cult gains some degree of legitimacy or a large amount of growth, where the dude in charge has reached saturation for the number of women he can fuck, and doesn't particularly care who they rope in next. Or they might pass away and hand the torch to other followers, who I suspect are more likely to be "True Believers" and less internally motivated by such.
I also believe that women are naturally more inclined to fall for cultish practises/woo, not that it's exclusive to them. How many men do you see unironically espousing astrology or healing crystals?
I’ve long suspected that such a dynamic actually is what drives recruiting. A group of men cannot attract women to join for the purposes of sexual access. Women can. In fact, in most cases it’s the woman who looks after the spiritual side of things. If she’s devout, then the children and the husband will be in church. If she doesn’t care, then odds are that the family won’t be observant. Even in dating, men are far more likely to play act religion even if they don’t believe it if they think they’ll have access to a woman they want.
Children are more likely to stay in the religion if their father practices than if the mother practices. It isn't obvious to me why
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