When Victimhood Doesn’t Go the Distance: Narrative Criticism Meets the Pacific Crest Trail
Ben Sargis is from Boise, Idaho and will be graduating this spring with a degree in English Rhetoric and Composition. After graduation he will be working with the Forest Service fighting fire and thinking long and hard about what he wants to do with his future. His career aspirations include worm farming and artisanal kite manufacture. Ben loves to be outside hiking, biking, and running, and he is passionate about music and the guitar.
When Victimhood Doesn’t Go the Distance: Narrative Criticism Meets the Pacific Crest Trail Message Analysis and Criticism
Introduction
The Pacific Crest Trail is a long-distance hiking trail stretching from the Mexican border near Campo, California over 2,600 miles to the Canadian Border near Manning Park, British Columbia. Hikers who attempt to hike the length of the trail in one season are known as thru hikers, and the PCT attracts a sizeable number of thru hiker hopefuls each year. Most hikers who begin the trip do not complete the whole trail. An impromptu community of thru hikers forms during the hiking season, and like any community experiences its share of controversy and drama. I hiked the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail, the Eastern companion to the PCT, in 2016 and became acquainted firsthand with the long-distance hiking community.
The hiking community is a world with shared cultural narratives, and at the center of these narratives is the commandant to Hike Your Own Hike. This is a call for mutual group respect and individual responsibility simultaneous. Individual hiker narratives butt up against this maxim, especially when hikers leave the trail, and especially when hikers leave the trail because of the community.
Narrative in Conflict, Community in Conflict
In the spring of 2017, Vanessa Friedman was among those attempting to thru hike the Pacific Crest Trail. After 454 miles, however, she had quit the trail, and in February of 2018 she penned an article titled “Why I Got Off the Pacific Crest Trail After 454 Miles Instead of Walking All The Way to Canada” in which she attributed her lack of success to “toxic masculinity and bro culture in the hiking community.” In her words, “It exists, it’s shitty, and it fucked me up” (Friedman, 2018).
This article inflamed the online long-distance hiking community, and within days Reddit message boards were filled with both criticism and praise (unfortunately most threads on hiking related Subreddits have been removed). The article highlighted a cultural divide between hikers who see the long-distance hiking maxim Hike Your Own Hike as a call for personal responsibility and a sub-group of hikers dedicated to promoting diversity and inclusion on trail. Along with Friedman, long-distance hiker Carrot Quinn (hikers often go by their ‘trail name’) embodies the push for this new progressive ideology on trail. In Quinn’s article, “Intersectionality and Long Distance Hiking/The Wilderness Is Not an Apolitical Space,” Carrot writes, “If you’re a person of color, or fat, or transgender, or part of any other marginalized group, you can’t just leave that at home. You are directly affected by larger systems of oppression everywhere that you go in every facet of your life” (2018). Quinn later references Friedman’s article, and the backlash it generated, as another symptom of oppression on trail.
Critics of Friedman’s article contend that Friedman was all too ready to see sexism and oppression in the benign actions and comments of her fellow hikers. They argue she glosses over the other hardships that forced her off trail, including missing her girlfriend, hurting her knee, and missing her friends before accusing toxic men and bro culture for her ultimate failure. One particularly pointed Reddit thread on the topic is entitled, “Fat Feminist Attempts to Hike PCT Trail from Mexico to Canada; Quits 1/6 of the Way and Blames Failure on Toxic Masculinity” (2018). Toxic masculinity and bro culture weren’t to blame, critics contend; Vanessa herself was.
This article and subsequent responses illustrate a larger culture divide between ideology stressing personal responsibility and ideology based in systems of oppression. At issue is what a community’s responsibilities are in the face of claimed victimhood. Analysis of Friedman’s critique of thru hiking culture and its reception can illuminate popular disagreements about the responsibility of communities to individuals, ideological disparities in America at large, and conversations about inclusion and representation in the outdoors and elsewhere. The scope of this artifact will primarily be the essay itself but will be informed by reception in the community and other similar posts such as Carrot’s essay on intersectionality in wild spaces.
Method
Narrative criticism is grounded in the idea that humans communicate and accomplish goals through story. Narratives are also a way for speakers and audiences to construct identity, in that we are all the subjects of our own narratives (Foss, 2009, pg. 307). Narrative is particularly suited to this artifact because thru hiking is a unique narrative and cultural microcosm where individuals both construct their own hiking identities and rely on group culture. This research hopes to discover how Friedman constructs a narrative that assigns guilt to the hiking community at large and whether her narrative, presented both to the dominant culture and a sympathetic sub-culture, is successful or whether it undermines itself.
The efficacy of the narrative depends, of course, on the audience. While reception of the article was mixed and highly individual, this analysis will assume two broad audiences: readers emphasizing self-responsibility who are generally critical of Friedman’s article, and readers with progressive ideological views agreeing with Friedman’s identity-based assessment.
Literature Review
Foreman (2015) examines the presentation and construction of two victimhood narratives following the suicide deaths of two teens. The research finds that media narratives attributed both deaths to bullying while other contributing circumstances leading to the deaths were ignored. One victim, Phoebe Prince, was harassed for sexual promiscuity, and the other victim, Tyler Clementi, was harassed due to his sexual orientation. But the author argues that media reports pointing to bullying as the primary cause of the suicides do more to affirm gender and sexuality stereotypes than dispel them noting: “If the narrative was that they committed suicide over an innocent comment or because they were clinically depressed it would be hard, if not impossible, to garner acceptance for their status as bullying victims.” (Foreman, 2015). The author argues that these narratives seek to amplify the teens’ status as bullying victims over other relevant details. To accomplish this, the media reduce the victims to a single facet of identity and portray that identity marker as damaging and alienating.
Foreman’s (2015) research contends that such a victim narrative can often sanction the discriminatory behavior it seeks to repudiate: a victim narrative about sexism on trail, for example, might simply amplify misconceptions about women’s fragility or ineptitude in outdoor spaces. And, the threshold for claiming victimhood is less with the proliferation of microaggressions. Campbell and Manning (2015) note that microaggressions—small, often unintentional slights usually directed at minority or disadvantaged groups—are interpreted differently depending on an audience’s moral culture. The authors identify a shift away from a dignity culture, where major offenses are referred to police and other authorities and minor offenses are ignored or handled personally, to a victimhood culture, where affected parties establish victimhood status and appeal for sympathy and social redress to problems. The authors write, “Today, those whose morality is rooted in the ideals of dignity see microaggression complainants and others who highlight their victimhood as thin-skinned, uncharitable, and perhaps delusional. Those who draw from the newer morality of victimhood, meanwhile, see their critics as insensitive, privileged, and perhaps bigoted (Campbell and Manning, 2015).
This new moral code highlights victimhood, even while victimhood narratives can be self-defeating. Campbell and Manning (2018) note this self-defeating trend in victimhood narrative themselves. “If calling attention to microaggressions increases racial and ethnic conflict, it would seem to be working against the goals of the activists,” They write (p. 8). This inflammation of tensions, they contend, creates new identity-based confict. They argue that victimhood narrative and the microaggression program consists of, “magnifying small offenses, mind reading by identifying subconscious thoughts even the offenders are unaware of, and labeling others as aggressors.” (p. 9). Campbell and Manning, joined by Foreman, outline the ways in which claiming persecution and victimhood in narrative can actually exacerbate tensions between factions, work against the goals of the narrative’s authors, and exaggerate the negative impact of whatever identity-quality was used to elicit victimhood and sympathy. This research helps us understand the moral foundations of narratives that highlight a character’s oppression and victimhood.
Dominant culture on long distance trails, however, tends to eschew victimhood in favor of an emphasis on self-reliance. This self-reliant narrative can be seen in another sub culture: Burning Man. Rodriguez (2014) identifies radical self-reliance and new individualism as tenants of the Burning Man festival, where community is emphasized, but attendees are urged to use and rely on their own innate skills and abilities to contribute to and navigate the experience. This narrative, of a caring community composed of self-reliant individuals, acts as a foil to the victimhood narrative, and resonates with my experience of trail culture. This concept of culture would fit Campbell and Manning’s (2015) dignity culture schema, where individual power and dignity is emphasized, and microaggressions are dismissed as unimportant.
While these larger cultural narratives are informative, it’s important to first understand why someone might undertake such a journey and what they hope to gain. Aside from questions of power, agency, and victimhood, the act of long-distance hiking has been analyzed a sort of narrative performance in itself. Terry and Vartabedian (2013) analyze thru hiking as eminent performance art, or art that “points to the material conditions of its own making” (p. 344). They identify four parameters of the thru hike as eminent performance art: pain, deprivation, weight-based economy, and alone but together sociality (p. 348). This alone but together sociality is described as a group performance that emphasizes independence and interdependence simultaneously. Hike Your Own Hike means in this context that “each individual hiker…take responsibility for the material and aesthetic framing of her or his own hike. Only ‘owned’ hikes, after all, are sufficiently eminent. The material conditions on the trail ask each hiker to ‘own’ her or his own performance, even as they require her or him to rely on one another as coperformers” (p. 354). This view complements the view of thru-hiking culture as radically self-reliant and calls on hikers, as performers, to accept responsibility for their own hikes. Hiking as performance art seems to avoid victimhood in favor of framing struggle and pain as inherent parts of the thru hiking performance
The Mechanics of Victim Narrative
Friedman (2018) begins her essay saying, “I’ve told a lot of stories about why I stopped hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” noting that this story is the one she chose to construct and present to the public. Her narrative uses metanarrative here to acknowledge her own subjectivity and explains that the story she is choosing to tell obscures other potential narrative truths. Among these possible iterations are, “I missed my girlfriend,” “I hurt my knee,” “I missed my community and my friends and my life in Portland,” “and I was scared of the Sierra Nevada mountain range.” These possible narrative truths could have been used to explain the causation of this basic story: woman begins trail but doesn’t finish. And by including these details, Friedman isn’t obscuring potential facts like media reports building victimhood in Foreman’s research. But ultimately, the narrator must select events and exclude others, and Friedman chooses to emphasize “toxic masculinity and bro culture in the hiking community.”
Friedman’s (2018) narrative hinges on establishing herself, the narrator, as outside of the dominant society that the other characters of her narrative inhabit. This dominant society is described as “white, male, able-bodied, straight, cis, and competitive,” leaving those outside the parameters unsafe. The essay works to argue that the trail, due to toxic bros and straight cisgender competitive white people, is “not a particularly welcoming and special safe space” for marginalized identities. Establishing the narrator as marginalized and creating a dichotomous setting, where certain groups are inherently ‘safe’ and others are ‘unsafe,’ shows audiences that by virtue of the narrator’s identity she is unsafe. The events of the narrative work to highlight the Pacific Crest Trail as a toxic and unsafe environment for the narrator.
These events of Friedman’s narrative are a Jeremiad of microaggressions beginning with her pre-hike internet research and concluding with her departure from the trail. She describes encountering online communities that were “hotbeds for misogyny, mansplaining, and casual cruelty.” The on-trail events are described in list form, beginning with such phrases as “This is how it goes:” “Sometimes it goes like this:” and “It can be like this, too:” before explaining the perceived injustice.
Friedman (2018) writes, “a tall man approaches me, bounding up the trail effortlessly. He pauses to take a break too. “What day did you start hiking?” he asks me. Everyone always asks this question. What it really means: how fast or how slow are you traveling? Did I start before you and now we’re in the same place? Am I better than you are? Maybe he’ll ask some other questions, seemingly innocuous but designed to make one feel less than.” As Campbell and Manning (2018) describe, Friedman engages in mind reading to ascertain the sinister motives of characters inhabiting her narrative. Innocuous comments, in the world of Friedman’s narrative, are a thin veneer for language meant to belittle.
In another instance she laments meeting a hiker who thinks the gender pay gap isn’t real. In still another encounter, she resents a fit woman expressing how impressed she is with the narrator’s hike (the narrator being a “fat girl”). “A sweet athletic blonde woman takes a liking to me and slows down her pace so we can hike together for a few hours,” Friedman (2018) writes. She continues describing their conversation writing, ““It’s dumb how competitive everyone is about mileage,” [the athletic woman] says, and I’m about to agree but then she continues, “I mean really, we should be most impressed with people like you! It’s amazing that you’re out here doing this!” I think she thinks she is being nice so I don’t say, “Wow, thanks for thinking it is so amazing that a fat slow lesbian could be hiking this trail with you and all these dumb bros!” It’s hot and I’m tired and fuck, I liked this woman, so I just say, “Thank you.””
The narrator engages in more metanarrative after listing her complaints by writing “I know when I list them here the folks who don’t want to admit this is a problem will find ways to discredit my experiences, call me crazy and oversensitive, insist that I’m the problem” (Friedman). While her first metanarrative owns the subjectivity of her own experience, this passage works to put the narrator in the background. This story is bigger than me, this passage says. This isn’t a story of one hiker, but an entire community of people victimized and made to feel unsafe on the trail.
The effect of this narration is to reduce a 454-mile hike—roughly a month or two of effort for the average hiker—to series of hostile events, in an inherently hostile and unsafe setting. This setting, the Pacific Crest Trail, is seen as unsafe due to the nature of the hiking community and the identities of the people that comprise the community.
In addition to constructing the Pacific Crest Trail as a toxic and dangerous setting, the narrative personifies the trail and its community as an active force. Friedman (2018) describes a conversation between her and her girlfriend, writing, ““I just feel like I failed,” I said to my girlfriend one night, trying to explain why I was so sad. “I wish you’d stop saying that,” she said. “You didn’t fail the PCT; the trail failed you.”” So, the narrator is positioned as an outsider in hostile setting that has an active role in her success or failure. This ensures that the narrator’s sense of agency and responsibility is minimized. The trail as an entity shares responsibility for Friedman’s hike, and this trail failed to accommodate Friedman.
Evaluation of Efficacy
As mentioned, the narrative appeals to two audiences: progressive readers sympathetic to Friedman’s experience, and the dominant hiking community skeptical of her argument. Friedman’s essay was originally published on Autostraddle, an online magazine described as, “an intelligent, hilarious & provocative voice and a progressively feminist online community for multiple generations of kickass lesbian, bisexual & otherwise inclined ladies,” that strives for, “equality and visibility for all marginalized groups” (Autostraddle, 2020). Reception of the piece on Autostraddle is overwhelmingly positive. Users offer agreeance, support, and their own stories of victimization and marginalization in outdoor communities. But to affect change means the narrative must be effective in the dominant hiking community. And the reception among that audience offered a stark contrast to Autostraddle readers.
Carrot Quinn (2018) explains reactions in (at least the online hiking community) to Friedman’s piece this way, “suddenly four different reddit threads and every single facebook hiking page was flooded with hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of comments saying that she was too fat and never should’ve been out on the trail in the first place. Even though two of the reddit threads were in alt-right subreddits, the worst comments were actually on the hiking (PCT, CDT, AT, Women of the PCT etc) facebook pages, which are generally poorly moderated/very tolerant of misogynist/fat-phobic/racist/etc hiker behavior.” What explains this audience’s reaction, given the universally supportive reception Friedman received among progressives? Quinn might argue that dissenters were misogynist, fat-phobic, racist, sexist, or otherwise hateful. But where she and Friedman see hateful rhetoric, Campbell and Manning might identify a difference in moral cultures.
Foreman (2015) argues that creating victim narratives based on perceived marginalities can actually undermine the purpose of the narrator: to empower those marginalities. Friedman, however, through her use of initial metanarrative owning her own subjectivity, seems to offer just one person’s view. Her second use of metanarrative, to extrapolate her experience to other marginalized communities, though, risks undermining her purpose. By establishing her negative experience as the archetypal experience of marginalized people, the narrative seems to suggest that the Pacific Crest Trail is a dangerous space for those who are not white, straight, or cisgender. Ostensibly, the narrative hopes to affect change, but some readers may understand this narrative as meaning that the Pacific Crest Trail, or any outdoor space, isn’t suitable for Friedman or those she includes as marginalized. Why would anybody wish to endanger themselves?
This victimhood culture and victimhood narrative is also antithetical to the philosophical and cultural makeup of the dominant hiking community. As Terry and Vartabedian (2013) argue, a sense of self-reliance and community bonding is part of the performative nature of thru hiking. A performer, or hiker, is supported by a community with the same goal, but fundamentally alone to navigate the hike themselves. By appealing to the entire hiking community for reform, choosing to emphasize actions of other characters, minimizing her own agency, and describing her failed hike as “not my fault,” Friedman rankled a community that prides itself on individual agency and self-reliance. The narrative succeeds in eliciting sympathies of progressives but fails to convince a broader community that rejects the moral underpinnings of Friedman’s argument.
In the final analysis, minimizing personal agency and portraying the narrator as helpless against the forces of toxic masculinity and bro culture, undermines a narrative that would otherwise explain legitimate flaws in the hiking community—a culture that can be cultish and exclusive. Appealing to the community for sympathy and reform so that a narrator who minimizes her own agency might have a more comfortable hike seems to be asking hikers to not Hike Their Own Hike, but instead to Hike the Hike of Marginalized Communities First.
Conclusion
Hiking over 2000 miles is not easy, and each hike (or perfomance of hiking) is bound to be challenging, frustrating, isolating, and yes, unsafe at times. By constructing a narrative that personifies the setting of the Pacific Crest Trail as an unsafe and toxic force for marginalized victims, Friedman might correctly identify that, as Carrot Quinn (2018) says, “the wilderness is not an apolitical space.” But neither is it a safe space for anyone. The cultural narrative and integrity of the hiking community rests on the knowledge that thru hiking is at times a painful and defeating experience but that the agency of the individual hiker, not the community, can carry him or her 2000-plus miles. As Friedman (2018) notes “Hikers are familiar with this concept; the only way to walk to Canada is to put one foot in front of the other. The only way to do this work is to do it.” The dominant community doesn’t feel responsible for a hiker who can’t put one foot in front of the other, and no amount of narration is going to alter the physical reality of the hike. And so, while this narration might spark frustration, agreement, soul searching, denial, or anger in the hiking community, thru hikers will always have one arbiter of narrative truth: a thin dirt strip stretching into the wilderness and the power of putting one foot in front of the other.
References
Autostraddle. (2020, February 9). What is Autostraddle? Autostraddle. https://www.autostraddle.com/about/
Campbell, B., & Manning, J. (2018). The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars. Palgrave Macmillan.
Campbell, B., & Manning, J. (2015, July 24). Microaggression and Changing Moral Cultures. Chronicle of Higher Education, pp. A25–A26. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=108500942&site=ehost-live
Fat feminist attempts to hike PCT trail from Mexico to Canada; quits 1/6 of the way and blames failure on “toxic masculinity.” (2018). Posted by u/Fck-Spez. Retrieved from https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/7x4a8c/fat_feminist_attempts_to_hike_ pct_trail_from/
Foreman, V. (2015). Constructing the victim in the bullying narrative: How bullying discourses affirm rather than challenge discriminatory notions of gender and sexuality. Crime, Media, Culture, 11(2), 157–176. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659015588404
Terry, D. P., & Vartabedian, S. (2013). Alone but Together: Eminent Performance on the Appalachian Trail. Text & Performance Quarterly, 33(4), 344–360. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2013.825924
Friedman, Vanessa. (2018). I stopped hiking the Pacific Crest Trail because of toxic masculinity and I finally wrote an essay about it. Retrieved from https://vanessapamela.com/2018/02/05/i-stopped-hiking-the-pacific-crest-trail-because-of-toxic-masculinity-and-i-finally-wrote-an-essay-about-it/
Friedman, Vanessa. (2018). Why I got off the Pacific Crest Trail after 454 miles instead of walking all the way to Canada. Retrieved from https://www.autostraddle.com/the-pacific-crest-trail-has-a-toxic-masculinity-problem-why-i-got-off-trail-after-454-miles-instead-of-walking-all-the-way-to-canada-408954/
Quinn, Carrot. (2018). Intersectionality and long distance hiking/The wilderness is not an apolitical space. Retrieved from https://carrotquinn.com/2018/04/30/intersectionality-and-long-distance-hiking-the-wilderness-is-not-an-apolitical-space-2/