Power, Agency, and Subjectification
Women, famously, are objectified sometimes. Objectification renders us passive and helpless in our life stories; things are done to us or happen to us, and all our actions are futile because we are weak against the forces of the world. And on top of that we are sometimes treated like slot machines for sex.
Contrast this with the subjectification of men, and of the highly agentic. People who are subjectified don't get to be broken by the world. If they are churlish or unpleasant or abusive, it can only ever be a skill issue, a thing they consciously decided to be. Some of the subjectified like it that way; they actively build that mythos around themselves. I, and many women I know, much prefer to be seen as subjects, and have agentically taken the steps required for this to happen more.
Others have no choice: black children are subjectified more than their white peers, and their actions are interpreted with undue malice from a very early age, with lasting consequences.1
Reality is of course a messy mix between the two poles; sometimes you act upon the world and make things happen. Sometimes, the world acts upon you, and it can overpower you, and it can traumatize you.
Things that happen to powerful people (things that traumatize powerful people) don't tend to make it into the cultural narrative, unless the powerful person manages to turn it into a thing they did/overcame, or a controversy, or a view they have — unless it is written in the tenor of subjectification. Otherwise, it is written off as apologism. Powerful people only do things, get entangled in controversies, have ideologies they impose upon the world.
I think this is, like, actually deeply fucked up. There are people who are extremely villainized in our culture right now who grew up under truly harrowing circumstances, and it's never felt right that they end up as cultural punching bags.
The truth is that children who were abused in childhood grow up like the rest of us, and then we stop seeing them as abused children. Instead we expect them to be functional adults, with functional coping skills. Perhaps this is the only thing we can afford to do right now, because our civilization is not post-scarcity, and cannot afford to heal all of the broken around us.
(I harbor a suspicion that we haven't even directed enough resources into understanding how to heal many mental wounds, even the most common ones; that's how poor we are. Instead we ask everyone to hide their wounds, because it is wounding to be around the wounded and feel helpless.)
But this is a cruel thing to do. It's fine if you don't want to look at the staggering amount of suffering in the world, if you need to compartmentalize, if you need to objectify the billionaires or the tech industry or whoever else in order to carry out some important political project. But if you compartmentalize, it's important to recognize that that is what you are doing, rather than taking your cope as ground reality.
Lots of people have been broken by life, including very powerful people. Hoarding power is a rather attractive coping mechanism.
Literature on this generally uses the term "adultification".↩