Traumas and Infinities: How Math Sharpened My Feminism

On my 90-minute train commute this morning, I came across a post in my beloved ‘weird Facebook’ group that pulled me out of a cramped-middle-seat-stupor and into the woke world of lively discourse. In a black sans serif font the image read “Rape isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you” across what appears to be a childhood picture of the op (original poster). This macro (a picture superimposed with text) fit with the general aesthetic of the group, a community of 17,000+ people from around the world who come together to share original pieces of what I like to call “internet art,” or anything fit for artistic online consumption that is NOT already a meme.

Posts in our group are usually self-deprecating, offensive to the outside (and often inside) world, or cater to thoughts of depression, sexuality, vulgarity, anxiety, irreverence, suicide, anti-normativity or existentialism. The posts are known to regularly reflect points of view that range from outright absurdist to apocalyptic. “Rape isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you” had little shock value in a group like this, but it touched something in me. It struck a nerve, one might say – a sensitive spot that has grown deep and wide over a lifetime of coping with the fallout of my own trauma; a cavity filled to the brim with pained empathy for friends and strangers alike who are surviving through everything from sexual assault to the death of loved ones on a daily basis. Commenters responded with questions like, “You’re right. 20 years of torture is worse. Or is that the same? Idk” and “ive met ppl who say “if i was raped id kill myself” or sincerely try to say with a straight face that “rape is worse than murder lmao ok.” They felt compelled to rank things like murder and torture against rape, as if to say that one is definitively and objectively more ideal than the others.

I took great issue with the op’s callous evaluation of rape; the very act of assigning greater value to one person’s trauma over another’s in a game of whose-worst-experience-is-actually-the-worst did not simply lack in sympathy, it lacked in logic.  I wanted to respond to the image in a way that dismantled its argument without taking an exactly opposite stance. I did not want to fall into the trap of deeming rape the worst possible thing a person could endure, despite the fact that for many survivors, it was and is. Despite the recent years of my life spent focused on feminist, gender and sexuality studies at college, the op’s use of faulty comparative reasoning sent me spiraling back to a course called Mathematical Explorations, a class during which I mostly slacked off with other non-STEM students but hoped to fulfill a math requirement nonetheless.

MATH 1300 was an experiential approach to mathematics (hence the name), a 3-credit attempt to expose students in various humanities and social science disciplines to the fundamentals of mathematical thinking. We did not crunch numbers, but we did attempt to adopt the mindset of someone who can evolve mathematical ideas; it was all about imagination, but not necessarily technique or calculations. It was during one of our class sessions that our TA, a PhD student with a background in both math and philosophy (not an uncommon pairing), spoke about the concept of infinities – yes, plural – and that some infinities are bigger than other infinities. Many might recall this concept from John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, a YA novel I admittedly own but failed to read before I saw the 2014 film adaptation in theaters.

When I felt the need to respond to the op’s “Rape isn’t the worst thing” post and the comments that followed, infinity seemed like an excellent stand-in for trauma. Here is my unedited comment, so you might experience my argument in its first iteration:

Jamie Zabinsky I feel like a decent analogy is that traumatic experiences are like infinities. Some infinities can be bigger than other infinities but that’s not quantifiable because they’re all infinities, abstractions, and greater than all other things in life. For a rape survivor, that is likely the worst thing – the biggest infinity. For someone who gets killed, well, that’s automatically the biggest, final infinity. For me it’s something else, and the same goes for others. To compare trauma across different lives makes as little sense to me as the futile concept of comparing infinities whose values are boundless and largely equitable though technically unequal.

So far the likes on my comment are in the double digits, which excites me as a feminist, an arguer, a person who cares greatly about the ways in which trauma is discussed, and a social media-obsessed millennial who lives for online validation from friends and strangers alike. Many people will never understand trauma or infinity. But I’m a feminist and a writer, not a mathematician – so it’s my job to educate people about the former, not the latter.