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Internalized misogyny — 59 Comments

1. Yes, “internalized misogyny” is not the proper term, but the case of Ellen Page is certainly very disturbing on many levels. The smart and charming Kayleigh McEnany had no choice but to undergo the kind of horrifying surgery which this mentally-disturbed/brain-washed young actress chose of her own volition. Future generations will look back towards the insanity of our contemporary culture in utter horror. It is also likely that the current deconstructing of the “feminine” into ugliness plays some role in this madness; the very sensible Lauren Chen has often pointed at examples of young women looking normal or pretty upon graduating high school, only to enter college and soon to make themselves as visually unappealing as possible as an assault on “hetero-normativity” and the “patriarchy” and traditional norms of beauty.

2. Ellen Page / Elliot Page is deeply disturbed and the doctors who facilitated her “transition” are guilty of malpractice.

   Adolescent girls have been crazy for some time. It’s true insanity to let them make irreversible changes to themselves based on adolescent insanity. Admittedly, I was a crazy adolescent. But I wasn’t anorexic, and I didn’t cut myself. I just decided I was ugly because no one wanted to date me. I got really depressed, and during my senior year of high school, I put on a lot of weight — stuffing my face was my route to “self-harm.”

   (The reality was, there were guys who did want to date me, but were too shy to ask. And when I look back at my teen photos, I was pretty attractive, if I may say so.)

   The world, well, mostly the US, has gone nuts about sex. Almost FORTY PERCENT of Brown students identify as something on the LBGTQWERTY spectrum. Really?!?! Twenty-odd years ago, the sex insanity had girls “hooking up,” regretting it, and then charging the boy with “sexual assault.” (“Mattress Girl,” eg.) Now, we have infused young people with this nonsense about “non-binary” BS, etc. Is this what any of them REALLY want? Really?

   One thing about children in Hollywood: Many of them grow up to be disturbed in some way, especially when it comes to sexuality. I suspect — and I suspected this before the two Coreys — that children are “passed around.” To some degree, their parents may be actively complicit, some may may be turning a blind eye, and there may be some who may just be clueless. There are soooooo many who grow up to be pretty crazy. Page is a prime example. I think Miley Cyrus’s exhibitionism maybe because of that. I don’t think her parents were actively complicit, but I bet it happened.

   So, I have to wonder….

3. Females who cut have almost all been molested.

   It’s either ongoing or not.

   The perpetrator generally is somebody close — dad, stepdad, big bro

4. neo,

   I read Brendan O’Neil’s opinion piece on Ellen Page and medieval female saints a few days ago. It was difficult for me to read parts of it, especially some of the excerpts from Page’s book, but it is well reasoned and I recommend others read it.

5. I think you mean the people you knew were anorexic, anorectic means appetite suppressant.

6. There is a story from SF writer Connie Willis about a girl so upset about puberty that these fears outweigh her fears about the coming end of the world.

   Daisy, in the Sun

7. I think I was similar to you, neo, in that I tended to accept what life gave me and roll with the punches through adolescence. I seem to have always had an innate gift to know what age I and my peers were and was never in a hurry to get to another phase, nor remorseful to leave one.

   Puberty and adolescence are their own challenges for boys and young men, but it seems tougher for females. Boys don’t always have a lot of control within their peer group, but boys likely have more potential to engage or not engage.

   A women in the flower of youth is one of the most powerful things on the planet. You can see it when one enters a room. Poets write about it. Songwriters sing about it. Film makers produce films about it. Painters paint it. Sculptors sculpt it.

   For a young girl “coming of age” must be incredibly challenging. She is on display even when she doesn’t want to be on display. She is judged whether she chooses to participate in a beauty/poise/manners/wardrobe/speaking/weight/hair style contest, or not.

   A society should prepare girls for this and be honest with them. And boys and men should be raised to respect girls and women. Our society no longer does any of this.

   My children went to a Catholic grammar school and wore uniforms to school. They were instructed and tested on table manners, dance steps, how to ask/be asked to dance, how to write a thank you note, etc… They went to single sex High Schools with strict dress codes and the majority of their instructors were their gender*. Adolescence was still a struggle. It’s unavoidable. But my kids came through it fairly unscathed.

   *A generation earlier I learned all these things in a public school system. No uniforms or religious instruction, but strictly enforced dress codes.

8. “Adolescent girls have been crazy for some time. It’s true insanity to let them make irreversible changes to themselves based on adolescent insanity. Admittedly, I was a crazy adolescent. But I wasn’t anorexic, and I didn’t cut myself. I just decided I was ugly because no one wanted to date me. I got really depressed, and during my senior year of high school, I put on a lot of weight — stuffing my face was my route to “self-harm.””

   “(The reality was, there were guys who did want to date me, but were too shy to ask. And when I look back at my teen photos, I was pretty attractive, if I may say so.)”

   Wife had a similar problem – she was rarely asked out on dates by her classmates in HS. She later found out that her brother had declared his younger sisters as “untouchables”, and had the size (solidly muscled 230 lb) and fighting ability (their father was a Golden Gloves boxer) to enforce it. He was able to intimidate even most of the football players. He had asked her whether or not she wanted to date any of their HS classmates, and she had said “no”, then thought nothing of it. Her brother didn’t. She did wonder at times in HS why no guys approached her. Was she ugly (she wasn’t – winning, then turning down, Homecoming Queen)?

9. I often find myself thinking that the whole sexual revolution thing was just a bad idea. I mean apart from any appeal to morality–disregarding the question of whether sex outside of marriage is morally right or wrong, is the whole attempt to treat sex as an enjoyable leisure activity that should be readily available to everyone from mid-adolescence on a bad idea in a very practical down-to-earth way, something that is more likely than not to make people, individually and as a society, unhappy?

   I think the answer is most likely yes, which is not to say that more restrictive codes are without problems and are bound to produce happiness. That’s intrinsic to our nature.

10. Neo very interesting column as I have no clue what women are like inside themselves.
    I am sure Page still has no clue how to be a guy.

11. Most of the girls I’ve known who did cutting or anorexia/bulimia were suffering some other stress — family stress, abuse, or something of that type. As with the new sudden gender dysphoria, therapy to work on the underlying problems and/or removal from an abusive situation is usually the right approach.

    I was a miserable adolescent. Like Neo, I was taller than all the boys. Dance lessons and school dances were humiliating. I did extremely well in school and was the “brain” that no adolescent boy would dream of dating. I’m still taller than half of American adult males. Coming from a stable family, though, I didn’t go into self-damage.

12. I agree that feminism had a lot to do with the gender confusion. Women who had families were inferior. This drive to achieve male careers confused their minds and relegated their female characteristics to secondary. Not all were affected negatively. I went to medical school with a zero female class. Still, I knew a woman who was a year ahead of me who handled the situation effortlessly. She was about 30 when she started, divorced with a 9 year old daughter. I had started school with her but got called up by the Berlin Wall crisis in 1961. We had become friends and continued so when I returned a year later. There was a small group who hung out together. One was a former Air Force pilot with a name very similar to mine. Another was a dentist and oral surgeon who got tired of having to have an MD sign off on all his hospital cases. So, he went to medical school, graduated in the top 10% and then went back to his oral surgery practice. Bernice was the fourth of our little clique.

    During medical school, with which she had no problem, she got married again and did a residency in Ophthalmology. For years, she was a top eye doc in LA. Sadly, she died a few years ago after we had lost touch. Remember, this was in the 1960s.

    Another was my high school girlfriend who graduated from Purdue in 1960 with a BS in Chemical Engineering. She married a guy I knew from high school who was a classmate. We socialized a bit after they moved to CA. She had her kids, then went back to work in the aerospace industry and had a successful career.

    Most female docs now work part time. And they have families.

13. Here’s Bernice.

    Here’s my old girlfriend. Still going strong.

14. Pogo,

    I disagree. Do you have any stats on that? When my kids were going through High School it was an extremely common fad.

15. DisGuested, I looked up “anorectic” and found several sources who treat it as a synonym for “anorexic.”

    On abuse and cutting: A couple of girls I’ve known were upset about their parents’ divorces. No abuse known.

16. Lee Also: “Adolescent girls have been crazy for some time.”

    There does seem to be a correlation with adolescent girls and historical, mass hysteria episodes. Brendan O’Neill’s piece touches on that issue.

    Thinking about Salinger’s, “Catcher in the Rye,” maybe Holden should have been Helen? Salinger’s short story, “Zooey” seems to capture a wonderful young woman trying to navigate adolescence while avoiding insanity. I found it very haunting.

17. I read Holy Anorexia in my last years of grad school, and I recall that one common criticism of the book was that Bell overlooked the many examples of self-starvation on the part of medieval men seeking holiness. It was more common, however, for medieval male ascetics to punish their bodies by flagellation in order to beat their sexual desires into submission; there was even a movement in 14th-century Europe known as Flagellantism that involved laymen as well as clergy and members of monastic orders. Even today there are groups of male penitents in Spain and Italy that practice flagellation; they wear masks in their public processions in order to avoid drawing attention to themselves as individuals.

    One admittedly strange recent case of males seeking removal of their sex organs in order to cure sexual temptation was the Heaven’s Gate cult, whose members committed mass suicide in 1997. Marshall Applewhite, the leader of the group at its end, went with six other male members to Mexico for surgical castration. Applewhite believed that sexuality is the most powerful force binding humans to their bodies, and that surgical removal of the testicles is a legitimate way for men to overcome their sex drive. It’s likely, though, that Applewhite was worried about his homosexuality as well as his sex drive in general. He had been married at one point and fathered two children, but left his wife after he was fired from his position as a music teacher at the University of Alabama when he was discovered to be having an affair with a male student.

    Anyway, I think self-hatred discharged on the body has more complex causes than just internalized misogyny.

18. There was a girl I knew in college who had anorexia nervosa and died of it. She was Sandy Crabbe, the daughter of Buster Crabbe and she was a pretty girl. We didn’t know much about it then but we all thought it was a tragedy.

19. I had seen the movie White Christmas (1954) a couple times in my younger days, but it wasn’t until several years ago that my wife & I watched it during the Christmas season that I was a little shocked by one of the dancers. The actress/dancer Vera-Ellen is visibly anorexic in a couple scenes.

    She made it to age 60, but her bio claims that she battled anorexia in the ’50’s before the medical community knew what it was.

20. Many problems in living are iatrogenic, and I mean that in the broadest sense. Joseph Epstein was once asked in a job interview what he intended to do for youth. His response: “I intend to let them grow older”.

21. This post unexpectedly dredged up all kinds of memories. I remember hearing once, from a psychologist on a radio program, that something like 90 plus percent of all teenage suicides are either, girls who went through puberty early, or boys who went through puberty late. His bigger picture point was that the pressures on young people are almost entirely sexual. Makes me very afraid given our current environment.

    The other memory is a documentary on anorexia that completely freaked me out. It’s all truly disturbing. The craziest thing was a young woman who ultimately died from it. Evidently in the end stages of malnutrition, the body starts to feed on its muscles causing the stomach swelling that we’ve all seen from people starving in Africa. When this happened to this young women she is literally screaming and freaking out because she thinks she’s gaining weight! That is how irrational that disease is.

22. Mike K–

    I remember when Karen Carpenter died of complications of anorexia. There is also Michael Krasnow, who published a book titled My Life as a Male Anorexic. He died at the age of 28 in 1997; he stood 5’9″ and weighed only 64 pounds when he died. A detailed account of Krasnow’s anorexia and his eventual death can be found at https://www.browardpalmbeach.com/news/the-hunger-artist-6332189?showFullText=true

    It’s a strange story but an interesting one– Krasnow’s doctors described him as “the most devout [sic!] anorexic [they] had ever seen.” Krasnow had a normal childhood, but started to “feel fat” around age 11, and gave up trying to date girls because he was “too scared” that a girl would say no to him. Both of Krasnow’s parents were decent and affectionate people, so it’s hard to know why his life took the course it did.

    Well, anyway, maybe you’ll have some insights or suggestions about anorexia in men.

23. From Pogo to Rufus T Firefly:

    1. I understand and certainly respect that everyone is entitled to their opinion.

    2. I’m retired board certified psychiatrist , 25 years experience seeing patients

    3. If you don’t ask the questions, you generally won’t get the answers

    4. My personal experience and that of the people whom I worked with over the years is that if you ask anyone who has cut , “Have you ever been molested or abused?” the answer is virtually always “yes” or they don’t want to talk about it. It is not a comfortable subject, obviously

    5. Once a psychiatrist transitions from training to private practice or group practice , the incentives to avoid this subject become extremely powerful. I am aware of a male patient who was so angry to be asked if he’d ever been molested or abused that the clinic paid him a few thousand dollars outright, in order to get him to drop threat of litigation.

    6. If you have ever gone to a psychiatrist you’ve probably not been asked the question. Outside the ER setting , it just pusses people off. Even though it does — ahem! — matter.

    7. The published research literature from back in the day was basically — roughly half of females have been molested/abused. , and roughly a quarter of males. That’s all comers to pediatric clinics. The exact numbers vary depending how you ask the questions. Yes I understand that a one time experience with a baby sitter is a different than an ongoing experience with a dad or stepdad.
    And whether the numbers are 40%/20% etc it’s not that important — the point is that it’s a lot higher than is generally acknowledged

    8. In clinical mrntal health inpatient and or drug-alcohol treatment settings the numbers roughly double. That’s per research literature. My own experience is that it is unusual for a female inpatient addiction patient to say “No” if asked whether she’d ever been molested or abused as a child. Before being introduced to drugs or alcohol.

    9. With males, the rates of childhood molestation go way up in prison populations. As does history of addiction and alcoholism. I’m not sure re: females.

    10. Working in the 80s 90s and 00s, I cannot recall any female patient with a tattoo or a facial piercing who did not have a history of childhood sexual molestation.

    11. I’m old now, I don’t really care whether you believe any of this or not. I do not say this in anger. It’s just reality.

    12. Nobody makes money discussing any of these topics. In fact, quite the opposite. It is so incredibly uncomfortable.

    13. You want an example? There was a tatted up British singer. Quite gifted. Quite popular. Quite addicted. Sang about rehab treatment. Self destructive. Seemed good hearted. Her dad was so publicly supportive. Including after her death. That’s the kind of thing that one sees. In her case, who knows what the private details were I don’t know. I never met the lady, may she rest in peace.

    None of this is to excuse “bad behavior.” Not atall. I’m telling you it’s a huge problem, and it’s not really acknowledged . Look at Joe Biden — the guy clearly behaves one way in public, a different way in private. Tara Reade has fled to Russia, the guy punched the nipples of little girls in public, his kids are drug addicts. This is what one sees in the real world of psychiatry — if one looks for it. and is willing to see it.

    Commercial psychiatry and commercial psychology have always avoided this subject

    Bass and Davis THE COURAGE TO HEAL made important contributions , and were mostly shunned for a long time. Likewise TRAUMA AND RECOVERY Judith Herman

    Godspeed to you Rufus T. Firefly

24. Addendum: Badically there’s two types of people in the world

    (1) those who don’t realize how casually common Evil and Exploitation can be

    (2) those who do, because they’ve lived it

    My own impression is that Category (1) people are sadly clueless — and incredibly annoying sometimes lolol — whence dealing with Category (2) people. If you want evidence for this, just take peek at the thousands and thousands of homeless in Philly, LA, etc

25. My childhood was unbelievably fun. Lots of friends in high school. Lots of freedom from parents. Had a car, motorcycle, model T fire-engine. Lots of time at Santa ‘Monica beach, skiing in local San Gabriels and near Mammoth, McGee Creek. Science major at UCLA. Just missed WWII.

26. Pogo was asked for some facts, stats, or anything to back up his/her/its sweeping assertion regarding maladaptive behaviors in young girls and young women. But nope, the assertions get even more profound (fantastic).

27. I’m watching “The Rocketeer” (1991), sort of the Indiana Jones film you never saw, based on 1930s pulp fiction and serials. (BTW Alan Arkin, RIP, plays the gruff, older mentor to the handsome, square-jawed hero.)

    Apropos this topic and neo’s remark that feminism “has helped to make women more afraid of men”:

    In Rocketeer I notice an easy sort of understanding that Guys Are Going to Get Handsy and Gals Will Have No Shame Fighting Them Off … or Not.

    I was born in 1952. I have no idea how accurate Hollywood and graphic novels are about the 30s or 40s or 50s. But it did seem there was more realism in the past about this stuff, than the current cancel culture in which one wrong male move can kill one’s future life.

28. Google “men don’t approach women” for some interesting hits.

    Perhaps it’s an internet meme, but these days it looks like men don’t.

29. I was (and still am) extremely shy. Very bookish and quiet. As an adolescent, I believed that I was extremely ugly and would never have a boyfriend nevermind a husband.

    It never occurred to me to punish my body or myself for being how I was though. There was a rash of suicide attempts among the girls in my eighth grade class. The first girl was genuinely disturbed but the rest were all “copycats”. We were reading The Crucible in class and I thought at the time that attempting suicide was a very foolish way, just like naming your friends witches, to get attention and it really convinced me that girls were NOT to be trusted. Too dangerously dumb.

    I did find a boyfriend, my only one. Actually, he found me.

    We have been happily married 44 years.

30. Just Lily:

    That is really quite wonderful.

31. Pogo:

    I’m not any sort of psychiatrist, but I grew up in a marginal situation and your catalog sounds spot-on.

32. Currently there’s a lot of elevating in what constitutes trauma.

    And the list up front is missing aunt, mother and sister. Those categories overlap the Venn diagram of the torture class as well.

33. Situation comedy.

    Ms Mulvaney and Mr. Page. All About Me.

    They own a B&B. Everybody has to listen to their issues. Every week a special guest star. Rachel Maddow, Don Lemon. Geraldo. A very special Christmas with special guest star, Hunter Biden. They sing “Let it snow” and start an orgy. Then Joe and Jill come in with the granddaughter and things really get crazy.

    I’ll call it…Aristocrats.

    Must be under 10, parents not admitted.

    Who needs Hollywood writers?

34. Just Lilly,

    Wonderful story. Thanks for sharing it!

35. Pogo,

    I appreciate you sharing your experience. Unfortunately, I don’t have a disagreement with your percentages. The number of humans that suffer sexual abuse, especially while minors, is sadly very high.

    However, I do think your being older you might have missed a huge shift in tattooing, piercing and, sadly, cutting as fads that young people feel a great deal of peer pressure to engage in. Also, as has been discussed with anorexia, self harm like cutting is sometimes done by teens with extremely high expectations of themselves as punishment for falling short of their academic or athletic goals; similar to the Saints Brendan O’Neill writes about.

    None of this is to disagree with your professional experience or training. It may very well be 100% of teens you saw who cut were sexually abused. That doesn’t mean there was not also a group of non-abused teens you weren’t seeing who were also cutting.

36. And so we’ve made incredible progress:
    One doesn’t have to self mutilate anymore.
    No more cutting, no more branding, nope it’s no longer necessary.
    That’s right, you can self-mutilate with the blessings and assistance of the AMA, and have the operation—subsidized, of course, with all the bells and whistles—performed by a team of caring professionals.

    Have some doubts? No problem (we’ll walk you through the process.)
    Underage? No problem!
    Seriously underage? No problem!
    Parents object? No problem! (We’ll deal with your recalcitrant, racist, white supremacist, Trumpist, INSURRECTIONIST parents in precisely the way they deserve to be dealt with.)

    Remember, The Big Guy loves you… All of you.

37. I read the very thoughtful post by Rufus Firefly, and I thank him for his insight.

    I read the response from Pogo, also a very thoughtful post.

    I know nothing about the female experience. I am a male and accepted that fact without question at a very early age. Over the decades. I have considered the advantageousness of being male over female or vice-versa. I have always concluded that neither sex has an overwhelming advantage over the other. We just are what we are. Live your life as the way you were born.

    I do have an opinion regarding the medical doctors who are endorsing this ‘transitioning’ nonsense. They need to stand up as a group, through the AMA or whatever organization they put forth to represent them, and say, “We don’t do this. It doesn’t matter what the law says, we don’t do this.”

    I have taken a deep dive into the technical details of the surgeries that the ‘gender transition’ surgeons do and have determined with 100% certainty that it is fundamentally wrong, immoral, a Mengelian abomination.

    The surgeons in particular must say “No more. We don’t do this.” I’m not holding my breath.

    Any person presenting with sexual dysphoria needs to be referred to the psychiatric wing, not the surgical wing.

    Erronius

38. Pogo says, “With males, the rates of childhood molestation go way up in prison populations.”

    Which goes a long way to explaining why child molesters sent to prison have very short life expectancies.

39. Elliot Page as Sam Spade in “The Maltese Falcon”.

    Elliot Page as Frank Bullitt in “Bullitt”.

    Elliot Page as Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull”.

40. Boot55555: Love it! Not sure I’d watch it, as it would creep me out, but it would be fun reading all the protestations from audience members that life is not like that, all the while supporting transgender treatment for 8 year olds.

    Just Lilly: Wonderful recollection. Thanks for sharing.

    And to everyone who commented about childhood sexual abuse: I am surprised at its frequency. But I should not be: my closest friend from sixth grade through college and beyond was sexually abused by his “uncle,” which I never suspected. But I should have, as he was always a little sexually precocious and everyone in the family knew about and talked about the uncle’s homosexuality. This was in the fifties and sixties, when homosexuality was somewhat rare. I believe my friend then went on to molest one of his daughters, who ended up a hard core drug addict from her teenage years.

41. Salinger’s short story, “Zooey” seems to capture a wonderful young woman trying to navigate adolescence while avoiding insanity. I found it very haunting.

    Fiction writers are loons. News at 11.

    Joking aside – Salinger himself was certifiable.

42. Remember, The Big Guy loves you… All of you.

    Barry hits on some points here, directly or not.

    The medical establishment has decided that being crazy is not a show stopper, and in fact encourages it. This all of course just adds to the confusion young people have about the issues they may be going through, and whether they should feel as though they need help or not.

43. I Callahan,

    Salinger’s relationship with Joyce Maynard is certainly curious.

44. Joking aside – Salinger himself was certifiable.
    ==
    Cold, self-centered, idiosyncratic, with an unfortunate attraction to women far too young for him.
    ==
    His daughter mistreated him, and this damaged her relationship with her brother.
    ==
    Joe diMaggio had his failures in the realm of human relations, but he was quite deft at protecting his privacy while not being abrasive and disagreeable to strangers. Salinger couldn’t manage it.

45. It occurs to me that, as has been discussed here before I believe, women are quite prone to pressure from their peer group to fit in. Adolescent girls in particular.

    This need to be loved and part of the group manifests itself at the mean girl table in the school cafeteria and mean girl shows like The View.

    If you have been particularly blessed, as I have been, with a family (especially a father) who loves and supports you, and a spouse who does the same, you are much more likely to be able to weather the storms of adolescence and its aftermath, be you boy or girl.

    Sadly, forcing students to spend hours a day trapped with their age mates has led to worse educational outcomes and and outsized emphasis on peer groups. With the advent of social media young people can no longer escape to the safety of home evenings and weekends. One way to stop the bullies is to become part of a “socially approved” victim group. Then suddenly you are Stunning and also Brave and the toast of the school. Or at least off limits for hazing. You are now free to accuse others and make them PAY! Bullying in schools has taken a devastating turn and now involves 24 hour surveillance of your every utterance.

    That and there is a lot of money to be made by “treating” with surgery and expensive life long treatments by the medical professionals.

    When the day of reckoning comes psychiatry in particular will have much to answer for from their part in the moral panics they have fostered over the years.

    Also, thanks for the kind words about my reminiscing. I have been truly blessed.

46. Putting together my own life and what I’ve seen of kids since–parent, coach, occasional teacher, mentor, helped wife with some high school teacher stuff, chaperoned….

    Is it easier, a lot easier, to be a boy?
    Boys are expected to become men. Goes without saying. But, as difficult as some stages may be, there’s nothing new.
    Somebody’s going to give you a few pointers about playground combative for third grade. Father, neighbor, older brother.
    Back in the day, somebody would show you how to change your spark plugs.
    Scouts taught a lot of competences from first aid to survival. Had to learn Morse Code.
    Point is, it goes without saying and society has myriad formal and informal institutions to move a kid along.
    A man is expected to have some muscle, since imposing some force on the environment–lift, twist, punch, haul–may be necessary. If a kid thinks he needs more muscle, he doesn’t need a complicated class of instruction to do some pushups.
    He’ll hear a story from a man ending with something like, “went and puked in the bushes”, “stayed drunk for a week, afterwards”, “washed my hands for an hour”. Implication is that you can fall apart after whatever it is that’s so bad it would make you puke in the bushes. But not until it’s over. You stay on top of it until you have it handled. That kind of story isn’t just to pass the time and amuse the boys. It’s got a purpose.

    Whatever difficulty each stage may present–some more and some less–there’s nothing new about it, and nothing inside you. It’s the outside stuff that you learn and are judged on and judge yourself on.

    Can the same be said for girls turning into women?

    Earlier mentioned was the phenomenon of girls who seemed quite attractive going by their high school year book pictures looking kind of frumpy in college.
    Back in the Sixties, the campus left asserted that good-looking women were shallow and superficial. Double for sorority women. No evidence needed, simply asserted. So, in the realm of if-some-is-good-more-is-better, lefty women went maximum frump. In some cases, it seemed to take an effort to make oneself look that bad.
    This put the lefty women in a sort of bind. Whatever they said, lefty men lusted after sorority row (who wouldn’t, it’s biology). The lefty men didn’t have much luck there, ostentatious bad hygiene was not a good look.
    In retrospect, the amount of self-imposed misfortune was staggering. This, I suggest, had a self-reinforcing effect on the motivations of the left. Lots to resent and some they’d done to themselves but couldn’t stop.

    I worked in a field project mostly lefty but one woman was quite attractive, not left and, I later found from a mutual acquaintance, might have been homecoming queen in high school had she run with a different crowd. Things were a little rougher for her than necessary on the project.

47. Related (in an unusual—but eminently sensible—kind of way):
    “[MTF] Transgender cyclist wins female race to prove males are physically superior to women, has message for trans athletes: ‘They’re being selfish’ “—
    https://nypost.com/2023/07/14/transgender-cyclist-wins-female-race-to-prove-males-are-physically-superior-to-women-has-message-for-trans-athletes/
    Key grafs:
    ‘ Born a biological male, one South Korean has continued her passion for completive [sic] cycling after transitioning to a woman against biological female riders — not for glory, but to prove a point to “selfish” trans athletes….
    ‘ Na secured a victory at the Gangwon Sports Festival in June but had an out-of-character reason for racing and winning — she set out to prove biological men are physically superior to biological women….
    ‘ Na is not “honored” by winning the race but [she] used her moment on the podium to send a message that athletic committees should include a “third gender” category for transgender athletes.
    ‘ “It could be like how we have many weight divisions in some sports … Under the current binary system, women athletes will be discouraged, and their hard work might not be recognized due to the participation of transgender athletes,” she relayed….’ [Emphasis mine; Barry M.]

48. Our kid had frequent UTIs throughout childhood. The UTIs meant frequently having wet pants at school and, when there was an infection, she smelled. She never talked about being teased or ostracized, but she must have been.

    Then came puberty, which brought with it sometimes painful periods. Around then, she started losing weight, eventually ending up hospitalized at 21 because she became critically underweight. After that she disappeared into the world of anorexia therapy. Two years later, she came out as trans.

    For us, it’s clearly all the same thing. When an anorexic restricts food, they lose their period. When a woman goes on male hormones, she loses her period. Additionally, a high percentage of anorexics had traumatic experiences as kids. Our kid’s story is on a different level, but it is still a form of trauma. Pain, embarrassment, ostracization, etc, all took their toll.

    Our problem and frustration is due to the therapy world she has been consumed by being all-in on the trans craze. The second she mentioned transgender, she was embraced and directed further down the path. To the therapy community, being trans explains everything else. She isn’t suffering from painful periods and a body that has caused her pain and embarrassment her entire life, no, she’s really a guy in the wrong body.

    She has barely spoken to us since she came out, and we’ve never been able to have a real conversation about it. The only time we’ve talked about it, there was a therapist there doing all the talking, and who clearly hadn’t actually looked at the research herself. We asked at that meeting for the science that she based her therapy on, and got advocacy groups’ takes instead. What science she referred us to was crap.

    The last our kid mentioned anything, she said she had put off going on hormones, but we think she has gone ahead. No idea.

49. Pogo,
    There are two kinds of people in the world; those who believe that there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t…;-)

    Om,
    Pogo related his clinical experiences and stated that he’d asked his patients who abused their bodies if they’d been molested in their youth and invariably the answer was yes…

    “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

50. Elliot is still presumably attracted to women. The queasiness about feminine anatomy doesn’t prevent that. His/her own body and the things he/she was going through might have disgusted him/her, but perhaps the disgust solidified a “masculine” identification in Elliot that made it possible to assume a masculine identity and role in relationships.

    Ellen was a boyish girl. Elliot is a girlish boy. Was the change really worth it? It’s all confusing to me. Like those male to female transsexuals who struggled with the nature of their relationship to femininity — being with or having a woman versus being a woman.

51. The documentary Salinger is very good and gave rare glimpses of the older irascible Salinger (grouchy Jerry isn’t captured on video, but in the reminiscences of those who had encounters with him).

    Salinger’s religion led him to want to stand outside and against the world. You can see some of that desire to avoid engagement in the adult world in Holden Caulfield and Salinger’s other characters. I wonder too, if Salinger’s withdrawal wasn’t a reaction to his own sensitivity — keeping the world at a distance to save oneself from being swallowed up in the chaos and complexity of life. Announcing his own sensitivity and receptivity in his writing attracted a lot of lost souls to him that he needed to avoid to keep his sanity.

    The Charlie Chaplin biopic made much of Charlie’s search for his first love (or perhaps his mother) in all the young women he was involved with. Something similar seems to be true of Salinger, and his first love, Oona O’Neill, was the woman who became Chaplin’s last wife.

52. Geoffrey:

    Did Pogo “actually,” look up the word, provide any citations? Nope. He has opinions and observations to share but no data was presented.

    There are none so blind but those who halucinate? You believe what wasn’t shown.

    As you will, Geoffrey.

    And as to asking questions, how you ask and what you ask is a big deal in getting reliable results, especially in softer sciences and more subjective fields of inquiry. But you know that, right?

    Carry on Geoffrey.

53. @Geoffrey Britain: Pogo related his clinical experiences

    Mike K relates his too and rarely is asked “cite please”. Some commenters focus way too much on personas. But on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog. Relation of personal experience simply can’t count for much. I have no reason to think Pogo isn’t sincere and honest, and I also have no way to know that what he says is true…

54. Re: J.D. Salinger

    Salinger was quite a complicated fellow. I would remind conservatives that no small piece of the Salinger puzzle is that Salinger was in the Army during WW II. He fought his way across Europe from a few days after D-Day to V-E Day. Then he stayed longer as part of the Anti-Nazification effort.

    The clues are clear enough in his writing. He spent time in a mental hospital as in “For Esme–With Love and Squalor.” His breakthrough story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” was about a returned combat veteran who vacations with his new wife in a Florida beachfront hotel, then alone shoots himself in their room.

    I now read Salinger as, among other things, a veteran profoundly affected by his combat experiences.

    Which isn’t to say he wasn’t a right SOB too.

55. Frederick

    The value, at the very least, in comments such as Pogo’s is that one might find something worth further research.

    Although we know from Covid and from earlier changes in medical wisdom–or publishing–that pressures other than most recent data sometimes affect what is known or allowed to be known.

56. I’m inclined to regard some of Pogo’s remarks with skepticism.

57. @ Frederick > “I have no reason to think Pogo isn’t sincere and honest, and I also have no way to know that what he says is true”

    That applies to all of us.
    We tell our stories, and readers take what they want out of them.

58. A Nonny:

    I’m so sorry.

59. A Nonny,

    My God! I am so, so sorry! I pray your daughter comes to realize the love you have for her and you are able to have a relationship with her.

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