ABSTRACT
Publicly affirmed victimhood becomes a new source of identity. And it is the pursuit of identity and community that is the most striking common denominator of the different types of victimhood. Even people without the familiar ethnic-sexual claims to victimhood have been eager to join the better recognized victims: white, heterosexual, middle class people of both sexes who discovered how their unloving or inattentive parents performed various psychic mutilations on them at an early age disfiguring them for life. The most momentous development in the recent social history of victimhood has been that ascertainable disadvantage, or evidence of tangible, willed discrimination ceased to play a part in the inclusion in a victim category. A major source of the widespread cultural susceptibility to claims of victimhood is the belief in the social-cultural determination of personal lives — a curious and unexpected phenomenon in a society as dynamic, individualistic, and non-fatalistic as American society used to be.
