Thanks, Jenny, for once again reflecting our crazed world in an untarnished mirror.
There may be a flip side to this, as well. One of the things we seem to be seeing in our educational system is a hammering down of masculinity (certainly the little boy kind). If so, is it any wonder that so many immature males want the acceptance of being female? When society uses terms like "toxic masculinity" and feels the need to curb their boyish boisterousness with drugs. When society is so steeped in the identitarian (what an ugly word!) that it seems to have forgotten how to treat even (especially?) its children as individuals. When there are too few truly male role models in their lives. When their biological rites of passage are so much less pronounced than a woman's, and valued - if at all - so much less.
Yes, truly a tragedy, not just for them but for us all.
It is a tragedy for us all. It's frustrating that so many progressives/libs think that it's just an individual's choice, when the ripple effects are so damaging. You are 100 percent correct that it's partly a lack of positive masculine role models -- it's not by accident that they have disappeared.
This would be the perfect place to re-tweet a wicked tweet from Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert, a rare quasi-celebrity who is anti-Left) as somehow apropos:
"Ladies, if you thought you could abuse nerds for a hundred years and they wouldn't invent replacements for you, you were not planning ahead."
The images, actions, the words (like WAP by Cardi B) and attitudes of women have become so overly sexualized in the name of liberation that we handed men just what they wanted us to be - EASY!
So now this young generation of men are saying-yeah, hey we own you because you are cheap. Womanhood is so cheap that now we can even have that too. We can take it all over. We played right into the hands of the basest of male thinking towards women. Of course some powerful and bad men wanted us to be cheap, wanted tons of sex with no responsibility- what a joke and we fell right for it, led on its' face by some really big mouth feminists in the 60's and 70's who did not love the true beauty of woman at heart nor the importance of masculinity at its' heart. Both were thrown away and put down.
That is what we, culturally speaking, have become as women in the west. We do not guard our beauty with humility and our sex lives with love and responsibility. We do not revere our homemaking and motherhood which is the pinnacle of our sex. We all just want to have a good time and pretend to be virtuous because, yeah, uh, feminism- a vile ideology that violates our very purpose as women, reloading it with free love, jobs in offices and no idea who we are at the core of our God given female bones.
I agree with you, but not that it's men's fault. We played into our own basest instincts as well, not just men's. I think women's ids are wildly under examined or over idealised or both. We reflexively blame our bad behaviour and perverse desires on men. This is a generalisation but I think women are the moral centres and men follow our lead. Eve and the apple and all.
Yes, yes, yes. So agree. - also we have agency - we must not feign victimhood in the mess. Your generalization about women being the moral centers is a darn good one.
I don't disagree, but I would just point out that the men who are destroying themselves trying to become women are almost certainly not the same ones who might think of women as cheap sex objects available at their beck and call. Culture might tell them that that is how their relationship to women could or should be, but it's only the top sliver of men for whom that is a reality (the mythical 5% of men that 50% of women are apparently after on Tinder).
For a lot of young men, who see women overly sexualising themselves everywhere but still get rejected by them all the time, you can see how that could lead to all kinds of hangups, frustration, anger and distrust. It's very hard to embody masculinity if your experience of interactions with women often revolve around humilitation.
Great insight! I always appreciate your sensitive analyses of cultural issues.
As an old man who came of age shortly before the onset of second wave feminism, I have always been acutely aware of "the quasi-magic power of . . . young women," a wonderfully evocative phrase incidentally, yet I also sympathized with those suffering from Friedan's "problem without a name." Back then, the adjustment of sex roles [not "gender" which is after all a linguistic term derived form the Romance languages], triggered I suspect by the wide availability of the pill, seemed like a simple thing. It has proven however to be anything but, suggesting instead that there is an extraordinarily delicate balance between the two.
If a lot of young men seem to be utterly confused about their sexuality, the same seems to apply to many young women. It is almost as though there is a sort of Newtonian law of sexual identities which holds that for every modification in sexual identity and role by one sex there is an equal and opposite reaction in the other.
Accordingly, I suspect that the reverse of your concluding remark that "Society threw away true feminine beauty. So a bunch of confused young men picked it up," is also true. Society has thrown away masculinity, so a bunch of confused young women have picked it up.
When was the last time you read the book? I read it again to review it for its 50th anniversary, and was struck by how mediocre it was. It reads like an article from Redbook (remember Redbook?) in a lot of places. I came to the conclusion that it was probably the right book at the right time more than something with any great original insights.
But what she and a lot of other feminists of that era have in common is that they weren’t anti men or anti family. That in itself is worthy of note.
I have never re-read the book. Once was enough for me.
True, nothing special about the book. In fact, I believe I read somewhere--can’t remember where, and can’t verify that it’s true--that she did write for women’s magazines like Redbook!
Brilliantly stated, but one quibble. The left hasn’t quashed feminine values accidentally or haphazardly. That’s the goal. If it’s meaningless, then who cares if someone takes it up.
That Reddit post gave me flashbacks of my early teen years... *shudder*
I do agree that we have certainly ruined growing up. Boys no longer have their coming-of-age rituals; girls feel terrible for growing into women...The result is the same: a truly lost generation.
I used to spend a whole bunch of time on Pinterest and forums basically doom-scrolling and reading posts from transfolk. (Pinterest is filled to the brim with Reddit and Tumblr screenshots.) Stuff about "gender envy" or "transition goals" or even pure, existential dread about being one sex over the other--the works! It was like dipping my mind into a vat of acid every time I started scrolling. A vat of colorful, lonely, angry acid.
It all certainly made me want to transition, and brainwashed me for a solid 2 or 3 years until I quit social media (when I was about 15-ish). (Remained brainwashed for an extra 2 years. Deprogramming has taken an additional 2.)
There is indeed something profoundly sad about feeling that we need to pretend to be something that we are not. Whether it is the young adult with "practical" parents pretending to be a corporate type when he or she is really an artistic type or whether it is the more extreme stuff that is becoming ever more apparent these days, it is important to remember that God knew what he was doing when he created us. God created us male and female in the image of God, and the Holy Spirit endows those following God with "different gifts but the same Spirit."
I think you're on to something, at least for some of these men (moreover the young ones). More widely I suppose they're looking for a role and a sense of belonging and value that they otherwise lack, or think they would lack. It's all gone a bit wrong.
This isn't a recent phenomenon. Gender dysphoria is documented throughout human history. What's new is the intensity and extent of public attention being paid to this issue, as well as the cosmetic medical interventions that make a social transition to the opposite gender possible.
No one needs medication or surgery to ‘transition to the opposite gender’. Gender is just presentation, and most of us change it from day to day without thinking. What these fey men are trying to do is actually change sex, which is of course impossible.
Wearing stereotypical clothes of the opposite sex is cross-dressing and the men who do it are autogynephiles. This is the ‘euphoria’ part of it that they all talk about - it’s pure sexual arousal. And yes, this ’dysphoria’ may have been around for years & yes they are now told they can actually BE women, but they are not & never can be. Being a woman is the sum total of experience, how the world (mainly men) reacts to you as you grow up, the body preparing itself for womanhood as menses start. Nothing a man ingests, injects, chops off or adds on can replicate these experiences (they don’t usually go for the chop, because where’s the sexual pleasure going to come from then? But if you ask, then they say that YOU’RE the one obsessed with genitals)
We don’t tell anorexics (also a kind of dysphoria/dysmorphia) to keep on starving themselves, even though they ‘feel’ as if they’re fat. We treat them to see their bodies in reality, not as they are in their mind. Mutilating the body to fit the ravings of a disordered mental state is grotesque.
Totally agree with medicalization and surgicalizarion of gender dysphoria, a sub form of body dysmorphic disorder, being an inappropriate response, most especially in children, 80% of whom wil revert to birth gender by the end of puberty with no intervention other than emotional support. Surgery doesn’t cure mental illness. Lobotomy experiments proved that.
This comment makes me realise I should have done a better job differentiating btw the young men who feel disassociated from their male bodies from a young age, and those who develop it as a sexual fetish later on -- the AGP's. Though I wonder if childhood is so dominated by the internet and sexual imagery (just from everyday life) I wonder are the two categories bleeding into each other? Hmm...food for thought.
This is nonsense. A tiny minority of gender dysphoric individuals will benefit from medical interventions, but interventions for adolescents are to be avoided. You are grossly over-simplifying a very complex issue of which you almost certainly have no real personal or clinical experience.
I expressed an opinion that is not in accordance with yours and your immediate assumption is that I must know nothing about the subject.
Funny how often this happens.
So, not that it really is anyone’s business, but in the name of clarification, my brother-in-law has taken this route at the age of 58. You may say that it is his right to do as he must, and yes, he has taken all the ‘interventions’ ie oestrogen for life, fake breasts, pumped up lips (as if that’s a sign of womanhood?) lasered facial hair etc etc and he apparently feels the - ahem - euphoria. All paid for by the taxpayer. Lucky him. I don’t suppose anyone really cares about the emotional devastation he’s left behind for his family. Their pain doesn’t seem to matter to anyone at all.
And by the way, what I said about anorexia is not nonsense. It is a mental illness that affects thousands of mainly girls & women every year. It has a devastating physical effect but it is the mental illness that is treated, to enable them to accept their bodies in reality. What do you think ‘affirmation’ would do to them?
You might be right as I haven't studied all of history. The Romans, for example, engaged in cross dressing, etc. and were extremely decadent. Our western culture has also become very decadent. I don't live what most people would consider a decadent lifestyle, however. In my experience, tg people exhibit the same range of behaviors as the rest of the population, from moral to decadent. I think it is possible to be a gender dysphoric person and lead a conventionally moral and socially responsible life.
What's new is the intensity and extent of people identifying as trans/dysphoria. What's new is the social contagion element, but also clinicians, authority figures of various stripes, and every HR worker in the land telling people that they really are the opposite sex or even neither male or female if they say so.
What's new is the people suffering with dysphoria being lied to, and the rest of us told to give up our right to tell the truth or have boundaries, all in the name of pretending people can change sex.
'Social contagion element'. I'm no part of that and don't agree with it, but to use that as an excuse to destroy gender dysphoric people would be equally vile. Would you rather people killed themselves than 'change sex'? BTW did you read my comment? I have never encouraged people to transition, and never would. I'm a self-employed professional, not an activist of any kind. Treating all gender dysphoric people as if they are violent and misogynist activists is like accusing all gypsies of being thieves, all black people of being lazy, all men of being rapists or all Jews of loving money. The vast majority of tg people I have known just wanted to be left alone and not suffer abuse, as I have done in the past.
If they don’t want to suffer abuse then they ought not to dole it out as they do. No one cared about what these pretenders wore, or did, until they started encroaching on women’s’ spaces and then hurling vile abuse at them when they said ‘No’. Men may wear what they like - they don’t lose any rights by doing so. In fact they are pandered to by almost every institution in the country, because of the vitriol , cancellation, abuse & violence they are threatened with if they don’t.
If all they want is to ‘just get on with their lives’, they wouldn’t be making such a fuss. But being the victim is a such rich seam…
When they say they want to get on with their lives, they mean "get on with their lives while using women's spaces". Notice how Ramon tactful avoids addressing which bathroom he uses, or more generally how we reacts to anyone who won't play along with his charade of being a woman.
I don't dole out abuse to anybody and I'm not part of any activism or movement of any kind. You do realize that the vast majority of gender dysphoric people are quietly getting on with their lives and are not activists? It is extremely dangerous to assume that all members of a certain social, ethnic, etc. grouping engage in identical behaviors when that is almost never the case. I don't condone violence against anybody and never would.
I wasn’t directing any of my comments at you directly as you must surely know. Of course not all people who wish to present as a different ‘gender’ are by any means abusers or violent. And we all know (or should) that not all men are abusers, or rapists, or violent. But no woman knows in a given situation of vulnerability - like a ladies toilet - which man *could* be. So it is for the avoidance of doubt that there are some areas that are exclusive to women as a sex-based right. As a reasonable person I’m sure you can get behind that.
I replied to your comment, which funnily enough had little to do with mine. You are being melodramatic and dishonest - there has been no discussion of "destroying" anybody. Having said that, indulging somebody's impossible fantasy of changing sex is hardly a good method of preventing suicide, not that your mental health is my responsibility.
That's all the time you'll get out of me. I don't indulge fantasists, and you are projecting your victimhood fantasy quite clearly.
Killed themselves rather than change sex? The "transition or suicide" threat has been proven to be a myth. It's a lie used by activists and fellow travelers mainly to frighten parents.
It is pseudoscience, and saying otherwise doesn’t make it so. It seems to me, just so, that a lot of people are what I think of as gender nom-conforming, and is perfectly normal. Nowadays though, the trans cult people insist that any female who enjoys a “masculine” endeavor is a transgender who hasn’t been outed. It’s just not so. It is handy for the New World Order to insist otherwise, so the long march toward nihilism can proceed forthwith.
If Hollywood (and the Alt Cinema that pretends to be outside Hollywood but no longer has the independence it once had up to the 90s) were honest and open in Art, they could produce a new Batman villain, Trans, as an amalgamation of Heath Ledger's & Joaquin Phoenix's Joker + Dustin Hoffman's Tootsie.
Jenny raises a lot of interesting issues, as usual, and I like her theory that these young men are desperately seeking proximity to femininity/femaleness which western society, imbued with extreme forms of feminism, largely denies them. Growing up as a boy, I remember being intensely jealous of girls from about the age of nine. I think gender dysphoria is a very complex phenomenon and Society seems to be struggling (understandably) with accepting the existence of gender dysphoria. As a so-called 'male to female transexual' I can only say that transitioning socially to 'live as a woman' a) saved my life by making me more psychologically stable after bouts of severe depression and suicidal ideations, b) restored my social functionality, and c) was the best thing I ever did! I'm not part of any trans movement and I don't believe you can magically 'change sex'. The issue is that some people (male and female) experience acute and often psychologically debilitating gender dysphoria and a means must be found of palliating that dysphoria; the issue is not whether transpeople are 'really' the gender/sex they wish to be. I abhor the excesses of intimidation, violence, etc. adopted by some extremist trans activists, as well as the rabble-rousing mass hysteria/witch hunt being engaged in by the British and North American media. Please remember that most of us are not like that, and we're just living (fairly) ordinary lives like you. I'm absolutely OK with being transsexual but would never encourage anyone else to go down this path, especially not kids. It was right for me, but very few people should do this. I transitioned in my late 20s, after years of psychological difficulty and soul-searching, not on a whim.
Thankyou for sharing that. It is important to hear how you feel and to try and understand why it felt necessary for you. I appreciate that you are not expressing any of the activist rage against women, nor are you recommending or promoting transition. for teens. Activists don't discuss it in these terms - I wonder if their motivation is entirely different from yours.
TYVM. I don't have any contact with these activist groups, gender critical or trans, so I can't really comment on what their motivation is. I can only speak and act on my own behalf.
Thank you very much for writing this, and even more so for reading this! It's very interesting, and important, to hear you perspective. When you say "I'm not part of any trans movement" -- I believe you, and I worry for you, too, I hope that doesn't sound condescending. I worry that you will end up being at the most dangerous intersection in a coming profound conflict between individual rights -- which you are availing of, I'm guessing privately -- and collective fury brought on by the extremists who falsely claim to represent you. This puts me in a complex position, because I share that fury. I'm also very interested that you find something to my theory about the powerful allure of femininity. Would like to discuss this more with you, actually.
Having said all that, and while I appreciate the difficulty of your position, and you express that difficulty very well, I cannot see how this conflict of needs and rights can be resolved without one side thoroughly losing. Had the extremists never existed, this may have been possible, but they do, and they are doing huge damage with the large amounts of power they have been given, and I have no idea where we go from here.
There is no 'charade' involved. Gender dysphoria has to be resolved in some way. You do not have the right to dictate what someone else does with their body.
Do what you want with your body. Just don't expect me to play along and refer to you as "she" and "her". That's not reality, and I won't be made to pretend it is.
Are you referring to Ramon's comment above? (These long threads confuse me! lol) Because I totally agree with you, that popularising transgenderism, is a terrible idea, but Ramon, who is MTF, says that exact thing. Which is very interesting to me, because I share that view completely, and I've expressed in a YouTube conversation I did with Radical Center about "ethical non-monogamy." I grew up with that concept (from my parents) and I have seen that it can (with major caveats) kind of work. But it should not be normalised and shown to everyone as a short cut to happiness. Kind of joking, but not really, "alternative" lifestyles are not for normies, most people cannot live in that space, and I, a person who has lived with an "alternative" lifestyle (before everyone was doing it) understand that it should be kept on the margins. I'm swapping ethical non-monogamy for trans here, but there are legit parallels.
Well controversial or not, I agree with you. I think society and how we raise children has become so indulgent with feelings that now we have young and not-so-young adults who equate feelings with needs because they have never been shown anything remotely resembling emotional discipline, forbearance, acceptance of pain and/or how to handle disappointment. As a result, many people are walking around in adult bodies with the emotional intelligence of toddlers. Having said that, to the people who are in that sorry state, many probably do genuinely think feelings=facts (or whatever) so the question is: how do we deal with that? On an individual level, person to person I think blunt speaking and telling them they can't always have their way (on any issue, not just trans) might work, but all of society is now run by the equivalent of the devouring, overprotective borderline personality mom -- so I do not know where we go with that.
"I feel we’ve gone to far in the direction of caring about feelings and emotional ‘suffering’ to the point that people are essentially calling wants a need and acting like the survival depends on getting what they want, societal norms and structure be damned."
100 percent. The loss of our old moral framework has turned out to be catastrophic for young people.
Are we part of some greater thought process? I have been thinking about the same sorts of things. How as a young woman I was always told that ambition and art were incompatible with having a family (but what they meant was womanhood). As you say, it was an obstacle to be overcome.
My generation went off to have *careers* (nothing as crass as a job) and were expected to behave and often to dress like facsimiles of men, and then, outside of work, to don ultra “feminine” clothing which wasn’t even designed to look good on normal women but on tall, rail thin models who were either very young girls or — incredibly — biological males with androgen insensitivity syndrome, who develop the secondary sexual characteristics of women but have a more masculine physique — which is why they are tall, broad shouldered and seldom developed things like cellulite, which is the way women (because estrogen).
And speaking of cellulite, I remember its “discovery” in the 70s. There were feature articles about the scourge of cellulite and how hideous it was. Looking back it seems like pure misogyny. (Fat studies is its evil twin).
We never really have come to terms with womanhood in an era where having children is no longer just a normal part of women’s lives but weirdly fetishized statement about ourselves.
And then we laid all this on our daughters. But that’s another story.
"We never really have come to terms with womanhood in an era where having children is no longer just a normal part of women’s lives but weirdly fetishized statement about ourselves."
There was a time when English speakers were more honest about labeling things. For generations, this sickness was known as Transvestism. The day Transvestites became Transgender was an Orwellian moment similar to the transformation of the American War Department to the Department of Defense after WWII. The label Department of Defense marked the transition of the United States from a great power to a imperialist superpower. Similarly, the term Transgender entered the English parlance with the Obama administration, marking the victory of the New Left ideology over traditional Western values.
What is more interesting about this phenomenon is the realignment of forces which appears paradoxical at first glance. The New Left split from the Old Left because New Leftists believed that the way to destroy capitalism was to degrade Western culture. This was a tactical change, but the ultimate goal was the same, the downfall of capitalism. Somewhere along the line (how this happened is worthy of multiple thousand page dissertations) either capitalism swallowed up the New Left or vice versa.
The end result is that with the help of New Leftist intellectuals, multi-national capitalism has embraced the destruction of Western society for profit. Big business embraces the latest New Left theory to destroy the family and the nation state in order to create a nihilist world where gratification of the self increases corporate profits while at the same time bringing to reality the wildest dreams of Nietzschean nihilist intellectuals.
It's fair to ask whether big business "incorporated" the New Left through the Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie and myriad other foundations sponsoring their policies since the 60s. Perhaps it was the New Left that shaped the minds of elite Americans by infiltrating the Ivy League professoriate after WWII. Either way, as Orwell brilliantly wrote in Animal Farm, it is impossible to distinguish between the two (New Left nihilist and the Fortune 500 capitalist) today. Perhaps the answer is irrelevant, as long as most honest people realize that the New Left (aka far left/progressive) and multi-national corporate interests are two sides of the same corrupted coin.
> It's fair to ask whether big business "incorporated" the New Left through the Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie and myriad other foundations sponsoring their policies since the 60s.
The foundations have been operating independently of the capitalist organizations their founders also created pretty much since their founding.
Woman. Or woman not. There is no cis.
Of all the “support” flooding these twisted young men’s minds, your article is quite possibly the most truly compassionate.
All the rest of the nauseating public display is simply very thinly coated self interested, self congratulatory Performative Bullshit (TM).
You actually see them as humans - you honestly try to understand their anguish.
Thanks, Jenny, for once again reflecting our crazed world in an untarnished mirror.
There may be a flip side to this, as well. One of the things we seem to be seeing in our educational system is a hammering down of masculinity (certainly the little boy kind). If so, is it any wonder that so many immature males want the acceptance of being female? When society uses terms like "toxic masculinity" and feels the need to curb their boyish boisterousness with drugs. When society is so steeped in the identitarian (what an ugly word!) that it seems to have forgotten how to treat even (especially?) its children as individuals. When there are too few truly male role models in their lives. When their biological rites of passage are so much less pronounced than a woman's, and valued - if at all - so much less.
Yes, truly a tragedy, not just for them but for us all.
It is a tragedy for us all. It's frustrating that so many progressives/libs think that it's just an individual's choice, when the ripple effects are so damaging. You are 100 percent correct that it's partly a lack of positive masculine role models -- it's not by accident that they have disappeared.
This would be the perfect place to re-tweet a wicked tweet from Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert, a rare quasi-celebrity who is anti-Left) as somehow apropos:
"Ladies, if you thought you could abuse nerds for a hundred years and they wouldn't invent replacements for you, you were not planning ahead."
This is a truly great tweet. Thank you for sharing it!!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Great essay.
The images, actions, the words (like WAP by Cardi B) and attitudes of women have become so overly sexualized in the name of liberation that we handed men just what they wanted us to be - EASY!
So now this young generation of men are saying-yeah, hey we own you because you are cheap. Womanhood is so cheap that now we can even have that too. We can take it all over. We played right into the hands of the basest of male thinking towards women. Of course some powerful and bad men wanted us to be cheap, wanted tons of sex with no responsibility- what a joke and we fell right for it, led on its' face by some really big mouth feminists in the 60's and 70's who did not love the true beauty of woman at heart nor the importance of masculinity at its' heart. Both were thrown away and put down.
That is what we, culturally speaking, have become as women in the west. We do not guard our beauty with humility and our sex lives with love and responsibility. We do not revere our homemaking and motherhood which is the pinnacle of our sex. We all just want to have a good time and pretend to be virtuous because, yeah, uh, feminism- a vile ideology that violates our very purpose as women, reloading it with free love, jobs in offices and no idea who we are at the core of our God given female bones.
I agree with you, but not that it's men's fault. We played into our own basest instincts as well, not just men's. I think women's ids are wildly under examined or over idealised or both. We reflexively blame our bad behaviour and perverse desires on men. This is a generalisation but I think women are the moral centres and men follow our lead. Eve and the apple and all.
Yes, yes, yes. So agree. - also we have agency - we must not feign victimhood in the mess. Your generalization about women being the moral centers is a darn good one.
I don't disagree, but I would just point out that the men who are destroying themselves trying to become women are almost certainly not the same ones who might think of women as cheap sex objects available at their beck and call. Culture might tell them that that is how their relationship to women could or should be, but it's only the top sliver of men for whom that is a reality (the mythical 5% of men that 50% of women are apparently after on Tinder).
For a lot of young men, who see women overly sexualising themselves everywhere but still get rejected by them all the time, you can see how that could lead to all kinds of hangups, frustration, anger and distrust. It's very hard to embody masculinity if your experience of interactions with women often revolve around humilitation.
Great insight! I always appreciate your sensitive analyses of cultural issues.
As an old man who came of age shortly before the onset of second wave feminism, I have always been acutely aware of "the quasi-magic power of . . . young women," a wonderfully evocative phrase incidentally, yet I also sympathized with those suffering from Friedan's "problem without a name." Back then, the adjustment of sex roles [not "gender" which is after all a linguistic term derived form the Romance languages], triggered I suspect by the wide availability of the pill, seemed like a simple thing. It has proven however to be anything but, suggesting instead that there is an extraordinarily delicate balance between the two.
If a lot of young men seem to be utterly confused about their sexuality, the same seems to apply to many young women. It is almost as though there is a sort of Newtonian law of sexual identities which holds that for every modification in sexual identity and role by one sex there is an equal and opposite reaction in the other.
Accordingly, I suspect that the reverse of your concluding remark that "Society threw away true feminine beauty. So a bunch of confused young men picked it up," is also true. Society has thrown away masculinity, so a bunch of confused young women have picked it up.
The young have been the primary victims.
The young have been terribly victimised by this. It's a crime that us grown ups have allowed it happen.
Great comment. Friedan's 'Feminine Mystique' is a masterpiece of reasoned, balanced feminism. I wish there were more like her today.
When was the last time you read the book? I read it again to review it for its 50th anniversary, and was struck by how mediocre it was. It reads like an article from Redbook (remember Redbook?) in a lot of places. I came to the conclusion that it was probably the right book at the right time more than something with any great original insights.
But what she and a lot of other feminists of that era have in common is that they weren’t anti men or anti family. That in itself is worthy of note.
I have never re-read the book. Once was enough for me.
True, nothing special about the book. In fact, I believe I read somewhere--can’t remember where, and can’t verify that it’s true--that she did write for women’s magazines like Redbook!
Misandry had to wait for another generation!
Brilliantly stated, but one quibble. The left hasn’t quashed feminine values accidentally or haphazardly. That’s the goal. If it’s meaningless, then who cares if someone takes it up.
I agree.
Both you and Jenny are right and wrong -- easily clarified if we notice the Left is not monolithic but divided essentially into two categories:
1. Malevolent Communists with a project to subvert the West in order to replace it with some nefarious new world order.
2. The Useful Idiots of #1.
#1 probably constitutes less than 5% of Leftists; the remainder (over 95%) are #2.
It is deluded to think that the world can simply be divided into 'left' and 'right'. People are more complex than that.
But "left" and "right" dominate discourse and action at this time, especially in the U.S. Unfortunately, left is more dominant.
Thank you for this. It perfectly explains what is going on in society today. A wonderful piece.
Thank you!
That Reddit post gave me flashbacks of my early teen years... *shudder*
I do agree that we have certainly ruined growing up. Boys no longer have their coming-of-age rituals; girls feel terrible for growing into women...The result is the same: a truly lost generation.
I am very curious to know in what way this reminded you of your teen years?
Ah, yes, the dark ages! (Lol)
I used to spend a whole bunch of time on Pinterest and forums basically doom-scrolling and reading posts from transfolk. (Pinterest is filled to the brim with Reddit and Tumblr screenshots.) Stuff about "gender envy" or "transition goals" or even pure, existential dread about being one sex over the other--the works! It was like dipping my mind into a vat of acid every time I started scrolling. A vat of colorful, lonely, angry acid.
It all certainly made me want to transition, and brainwashed me for a solid 2 or 3 years until I quit social media (when I was about 15-ish). (Remained brainwashed for an extra 2 years. Deprogramming has taken an additional 2.)
There is indeed something profoundly sad about feeling that we need to pretend to be something that we are not. Whether it is the young adult with "practical" parents pretending to be a corporate type when he or she is really an artistic type or whether it is the more extreme stuff that is becoming ever more apparent these days, it is important to remember that God knew what he was doing when he created us. God created us male and female in the image of God, and the Holy Spirit endows those following God with "different gifts but the same Spirit."
Such an insightful & compassionate piece Jenny. As a fellow TERF I acknowledge the misogyny, but also understand the desperation a bit more.
Your welly story made me smile in recognition!
Thank you!!
I think you're on to something, at least for some of these men (moreover the young ones). More widely I suppose they're looking for a role and a sense of belonging and value that they otherwise lack, or think they would lack. It's all gone a bit wrong.
This isn't a recent phenomenon. Gender dysphoria is documented throughout human history. What's new is the intensity and extent of public attention being paid to this issue, as well as the cosmetic medical interventions that make a social transition to the opposite gender possible.
No one needs medication or surgery to ‘transition to the opposite gender’. Gender is just presentation, and most of us change it from day to day without thinking. What these fey men are trying to do is actually change sex, which is of course impossible.
Wearing stereotypical clothes of the opposite sex is cross-dressing and the men who do it are autogynephiles. This is the ‘euphoria’ part of it that they all talk about - it’s pure sexual arousal. And yes, this ’dysphoria’ may have been around for years & yes they are now told they can actually BE women, but they are not & never can be. Being a woman is the sum total of experience, how the world (mainly men) reacts to you as you grow up, the body preparing itself for womanhood as menses start. Nothing a man ingests, injects, chops off or adds on can replicate these experiences (they don’t usually go for the chop, because where’s the sexual pleasure going to come from then? But if you ask, then they say that YOU’RE the one obsessed with genitals)
We don’t tell anorexics (also a kind of dysphoria/dysmorphia) to keep on starving themselves, even though they ‘feel’ as if they’re fat. We treat them to see their bodies in reality, not as they are in their mind. Mutilating the body to fit the ravings of a disordered mental state is grotesque.
Totally agree with medicalization and surgicalizarion of gender dysphoria, a sub form of body dysmorphic disorder, being an inappropriate response, most especially in children, 80% of whom wil revert to birth gender by the end of puberty with no intervention other than emotional support. Surgery doesn’t cure mental illness. Lobotomy experiments proved that.
This comment makes me realise I should have done a better job differentiating btw the young men who feel disassociated from their male bodies from a young age, and those who develop it as a sexual fetish later on -- the AGP's. Though I wonder if childhood is so dominated by the internet and sexual imagery (just from everyday life) I wonder are the two categories bleeding into each other? Hmm...food for thought.
This is nonsense. A tiny minority of gender dysphoric individuals will benefit from medical interventions, but interventions for adolescents are to be avoided. You are grossly over-simplifying a very complex issue of which you almost certainly have no real personal or clinical experience.
I expressed an opinion that is not in accordance with yours and your immediate assumption is that I must know nothing about the subject.
Funny how often this happens.
So, not that it really is anyone’s business, but in the name of clarification, my brother-in-law has taken this route at the age of 58. You may say that it is his right to do as he must, and yes, he has taken all the ‘interventions’ ie oestrogen for life, fake breasts, pumped up lips (as if that’s a sign of womanhood?) lasered facial hair etc etc and he apparently feels the - ahem - euphoria. All paid for by the taxpayer. Lucky him. I don’t suppose anyone really cares about the emotional devastation he’s left behind for his family. Their pain doesn’t seem to matter to anyone at all.
And by the way, what I said about anorexia is not nonsense. It is a mental illness that affects thousands of mainly girls & women every year. It has a devastating physical effect but it is the mental illness that is treated, to enable them to accept their bodies in reality. What do you think ‘affirmation’ would do to them?
> Gender dysphoria is documented throughout human history.
Not in anything resembling its modern form. And the closest approaches tend to be in extremely decadent times and places.
You might be right as I haven't studied all of history. The Romans, for example, engaged in cross dressing, etc. and were extremely decadent. Our western culture has also become very decadent. I don't live what most people would consider a decadent lifestyle, however. In my experience, tg people exhibit the same range of behaviors as the rest of the population, from moral to decadent. I think it is possible to be a gender dysphoric person and lead a conventionally moral and socially responsible life.
What's new is the intensity and extent of people identifying as trans/dysphoria. What's new is the social contagion element, but also clinicians, authority figures of various stripes, and every HR worker in the land telling people that they really are the opposite sex or even neither male or female if they say so.
What's new is the people suffering with dysphoria being lied to, and the rest of us told to give up our right to tell the truth or have boundaries, all in the name of pretending people can change sex.
In addition to the totalitarian turn, they’ve also lurched into insanity! Apparently it is contagious!
'Social contagion element'. I'm no part of that and don't agree with it, but to use that as an excuse to destroy gender dysphoric people would be equally vile. Would you rather people killed themselves than 'change sex'? BTW did you read my comment? I have never encouraged people to transition, and never would. I'm a self-employed professional, not an activist of any kind. Treating all gender dysphoric people as if they are violent and misogynist activists is like accusing all gypsies of being thieves, all black people of being lazy, all men of being rapists or all Jews of loving money. The vast majority of tg people I have known just wanted to be left alone and not suffer abuse, as I have done in the past.
If they don’t want to suffer abuse then they ought not to dole it out as they do. No one cared about what these pretenders wore, or did, until they started encroaching on women’s’ spaces and then hurling vile abuse at them when they said ‘No’. Men may wear what they like - they don’t lose any rights by doing so. In fact they are pandered to by almost every institution in the country, because of the vitriol , cancellation, abuse & violence they are threatened with if they don’t.
If all they want is to ‘just get on with their lives’, they wouldn’t be making such a fuss. But being the victim is a such rich seam…
When they say they want to get on with their lives, they mean "get on with their lives while using women's spaces". Notice how Ramon tactful avoids addressing which bathroom he uses, or more generally how we reacts to anyone who won't play along with his charade of being a woman.
I don't dole out abuse to anybody and I'm not part of any activism or movement of any kind. You do realize that the vast majority of gender dysphoric people are quietly getting on with their lives and are not activists? It is extremely dangerous to assume that all members of a certain social, ethnic, etc. grouping engage in identical behaviors when that is almost never the case. I don't condone violence against anybody and never would.
I wasn’t directing any of my comments at you directly as you must surely know. Of course not all people who wish to present as a different ‘gender’ are by any means abusers or violent. And we all know (or should) that not all men are abusers, or rapists, or violent. But no woman knows in a given situation of vulnerability - like a ladies toilet - which man *could* be. So it is for the avoidance of doubt that there are some areas that are exclusive to women as a sex-based right. As a reasonable person I’m sure you can get behind that.
I replied to your comment, which funnily enough had little to do with mine. You are being melodramatic and dishonest - there has been no discussion of "destroying" anybody. Having said that, indulging somebody's impossible fantasy of changing sex is hardly a good method of preventing suicide, not that your mental health is my responsibility.
That's all the time you'll get out of me. I don't indulge fantasists, and you are projecting your victimhood fantasy quite clearly.
What's new is the industrial component managed from the top down.
"Jennifer Bilek | Who is Behind the TRANS AGENDA?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLXdoqXbC6k
I'm not part of any 'trans agenda', so I can't help you. I don't like this latest wave of trans activism, and the mass hysteria it has generated.
Killed themselves rather than change sex? The "transition or suicide" threat has been proven to be a myth. It's a lie used by activists and fellow travelers mainly to frighten parents.
It is pseudoscience, and saying otherwise doesn’t make it so. It seems to me, just so, that a lot of people are what I think of as gender nom-conforming, and is perfectly normal. Nowadays though, the trans cult people insist that any female who enjoys a “masculine” endeavor is a transgender who hasn’t been outed. It’s just not so. It is handy for the New World Order to insist otherwise, so the long march toward nihilism can proceed forthwith.
If Hollywood (and the Alt Cinema that pretends to be outside Hollywood but no longer has the independence it once had up to the 90s) were honest and open in Art, they could produce a new Batman villain, Trans, as an amalgamation of Heath Ledger's & Joaquin Phoenix's Joker + Dustin Hoffman's Tootsie.
Jenny raises a lot of interesting issues, as usual, and I like her theory that these young men are desperately seeking proximity to femininity/femaleness which western society, imbued with extreme forms of feminism, largely denies them. Growing up as a boy, I remember being intensely jealous of girls from about the age of nine. I think gender dysphoria is a very complex phenomenon and Society seems to be struggling (understandably) with accepting the existence of gender dysphoria. As a so-called 'male to female transexual' I can only say that transitioning socially to 'live as a woman' a) saved my life by making me more psychologically stable after bouts of severe depression and suicidal ideations, b) restored my social functionality, and c) was the best thing I ever did! I'm not part of any trans movement and I don't believe you can magically 'change sex'. The issue is that some people (male and female) experience acute and often psychologically debilitating gender dysphoria and a means must be found of palliating that dysphoria; the issue is not whether transpeople are 'really' the gender/sex they wish to be. I abhor the excesses of intimidation, violence, etc. adopted by some extremist trans activists, as well as the rabble-rousing mass hysteria/witch hunt being engaged in by the British and North American media. Please remember that most of us are not like that, and we're just living (fairly) ordinary lives like you. I'm absolutely OK with being transsexual but would never encourage anyone else to go down this path, especially not kids. It was right for me, but very few people should do this. I transitioned in my late 20s, after years of psychological difficulty and soul-searching, not on a whim.
Thankyou for sharing that. It is important to hear how you feel and to try and understand why it felt necessary for you. I appreciate that you are not expressing any of the activist rage against women, nor are you recommending or promoting transition. for teens. Activists don't discuss it in these terms - I wonder if their motivation is entirely different from yours.
TYVM. I don't have any contact with these activist groups, gender critical or trans, so I can't really comment on what their motivation is. I can only speak and act on my own behalf.
Thank you very much for writing this, and even more so for reading this! It's very interesting, and important, to hear you perspective. When you say "I'm not part of any trans movement" -- I believe you, and I worry for you, too, I hope that doesn't sound condescending. I worry that you will end up being at the most dangerous intersection in a coming profound conflict between individual rights -- which you are availing of, I'm guessing privately -- and collective fury brought on by the extremists who falsely claim to represent you. This puts me in a complex position, because I share that fury. I'm also very interested that you find something to my theory about the powerful allure of femininity. Would like to discuss this more with you, actually.
Having said all that, and while I appreciate the difficulty of your position, and you express that difficulty very well, I cannot see how this conflict of needs and rights can be resolved without one side thoroughly losing. Had the extremists never existed, this may have been possible, but they do, and they are doing huge damage with the large amounts of power they have been given, and I have no idea where we go from here.
> I abhor the excesses of intimidation, violence, etc. adopted by some extremist trans activists
But you still insist on taking advantage of it to force everyone to play along with your charade of being a woman.
There is no 'charade' involved. Gender dysphoria has to be resolved in some way. You do not have the right to dictate what someone else does with their body.
Do what you want with your body. Just don't expect me to play along and refer to you as "she" and "her". That's not reality, and I won't be made to pretend it is.
I don’t think he was? He was just trying to share his experiences. I appreciate hearing from someone who genuinely has struggled.
Well, he tends to lash out when pressed on the subject.
And you do not have the right to demand anyone else indulge your delusions.
Are you referring to Ramon's comment above? (These long threads confuse me! lol) Because I totally agree with you, that popularising transgenderism, is a terrible idea, but Ramon, who is MTF, says that exact thing. Which is very interesting to me, because I share that view completely, and I've expressed in a YouTube conversation I did with Radical Center about "ethical non-monogamy." I grew up with that concept (from my parents) and I have seen that it can (with major caveats) kind of work. But it should not be normalised and shown to everyone as a short cut to happiness. Kind of joking, but not really, "alternative" lifestyles are not for normies, most people cannot live in that space, and I, a person who has lived with an "alternative" lifestyle (before everyone was doing it) understand that it should be kept on the margins. I'm swapping ethical non-monogamy for trans here, but there are legit parallels.
Well controversial or not, I agree with you. I think society and how we raise children has become so indulgent with feelings that now we have young and not-so-young adults who equate feelings with needs because they have never been shown anything remotely resembling emotional discipline, forbearance, acceptance of pain and/or how to handle disappointment. As a result, many people are walking around in adult bodies with the emotional intelligence of toddlers. Having said that, to the people who are in that sorry state, many probably do genuinely think feelings=facts (or whatever) so the question is: how do we deal with that? On an individual level, person to person I think blunt speaking and telling them they can't always have their way (on any issue, not just trans) might work, but all of society is now run by the equivalent of the devouring, overprotective borderline personality mom -- so I do not know where we go with that.
"I feel we’ve gone to far in the direction of caring about feelings and emotional ‘suffering’ to the point that people are essentially calling wants a need and acting like the survival depends on getting what they want, societal norms and structure be damned."
100 percent. The loss of our old moral framework has turned out to be catastrophic for young people.
Are we part of some greater thought process? I have been thinking about the same sorts of things. How as a young woman I was always told that ambition and art were incompatible with having a family (but what they meant was womanhood). As you say, it was an obstacle to be overcome.
My generation went off to have *careers* (nothing as crass as a job) and were expected to behave and often to dress like facsimiles of men, and then, outside of work, to don ultra “feminine” clothing which wasn’t even designed to look good on normal women but on tall, rail thin models who were either very young girls or — incredibly — biological males with androgen insensitivity syndrome, who develop the secondary sexual characteristics of women but have a more masculine physique — which is why they are tall, broad shouldered and seldom developed things like cellulite, which is the way women (because estrogen).
And speaking of cellulite, I remember its “discovery” in the 70s. There were feature articles about the scourge of cellulite and how hideous it was. Looking back it seems like pure misogyny. (Fat studies is its evil twin).
We never really have come to terms with womanhood in an era where having children is no longer just a normal part of women’s lives but weirdly fetishized statement about ourselves.
And then we laid all this on our daughters. But that’s another story.
"We never really have come to terms with womanhood in an era where having children is no longer just a normal part of women’s lives but weirdly fetishized statement about ourselves."
YES TO THIS
There was a time when English speakers were more honest about labeling things. For generations, this sickness was known as Transvestism. The day Transvestites became Transgender was an Orwellian moment similar to the transformation of the American War Department to the Department of Defense after WWII. The label Department of Defense marked the transition of the United States from a great power to a imperialist superpower. Similarly, the term Transgender entered the English parlance with the Obama administration, marking the victory of the New Left ideology over traditional Western values.
What is more interesting about this phenomenon is the realignment of forces which appears paradoxical at first glance. The New Left split from the Old Left because New Leftists believed that the way to destroy capitalism was to degrade Western culture. This was a tactical change, but the ultimate goal was the same, the downfall of capitalism. Somewhere along the line (how this happened is worthy of multiple thousand page dissertations) either capitalism swallowed up the New Left or vice versa.
The end result is that with the help of New Leftist intellectuals, multi-national capitalism has embraced the destruction of Western society for profit. Big business embraces the latest New Left theory to destroy the family and the nation state in order to create a nihilist world where gratification of the self increases corporate profits while at the same time bringing to reality the wildest dreams of Nietzschean nihilist intellectuals.
It's fair to ask whether big business "incorporated" the New Left through the Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie and myriad other foundations sponsoring their policies since the 60s. Perhaps it was the New Left that shaped the minds of elite Americans by infiltrating the Ivy League professoriate after WWII. Either way, as Orwell brilliantly wrote in Animal Farm, it is impossible to distinguish between the two (New Left nihilist and the Fortune 500 capitalist) today. Perhaps the answer is irrelevant, as long as most honest people realize that the New Left (aka far left/progressive) and multi-national corporate interests are two sides of the same corrupted coin.
> It's fair to ask whether big business "incorporated" the New Left through the Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie and myriad other foundations sponsoring their policies since the 60s.
The foundations have been operating independently of the capitalist organizations their founders also created pretty much since their founding.