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rmhttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/fashion/11talk.html
I hate the New York Times with such a seething passion. And the whole medicalization of the state of being female.
Because having close friends is why girls obsess on their problems and are unhappy. It couldn't possibly be every single media image they see telling them worry about this stuff. Oh no, we make it up, and then spread it like contagion.
I know it must seem at least marginally weird to some of you when I get all defensive about hideous articles and studies that seek to define the female condition, since my experience of it is at least marginally atypical from my privilege to my sexual orientation to my playing with gender.
Certainly, I know I worry that my own distance from perhaps a more typical female experience comes from some sort of internalized self-hatred or bias that is rooted in these utterly grotesque attempts to understand the female by science and the media (and what is up with that? We're a slim majority on this planet, so why in bloody hell are we always treated like exotic and poisonous birds).
But regardless, I know that I feel the pressure of my female gender in nothing so much as the ways in which I am expected to be broken. But I am not broken in those ways. And I have to believe, fundamentally, that this is not a result of my own peculiar gender identity, but my very strong suspicion that everything these studies tell us about girls and women are lies.
Because if they weren't, I couldn't be all these people I am, and I would have folded in on myself a long time ago.
I hate the New York Times with such a seething passion. And the whole medicalization of the state of being female.
Because having close friends is why girls obsess on their problems and are unhappy. It couldn't possibly be every single media image they see telling them worry about this stuff. Oh no, we make it up, and then spread it like contagion.
I know it must seem at least marginally weird to some of you when I get all defensive about hideous articles and studies that seek to define the female condition, since my experience of it is at least marginally atypical from my privilege to my sexual orientation to my playing with gender.
Certainly, I know I worry that my own distance from perhaps a more typical female experience comes from some sort of internalized self-hatred or bias that is rooted in these utterly grotesque attempts to understand the female by science and the media (and what is up with that? We're a slim majority on this planet, so why in bloody hell are we always treated like exotic and poisonous birds).
But regardless, I know that I feel the pressure of my female gender in nothing so much as the ways in which I am expected to be broken. But I am not broken in those ways. And I have to believe, fundamentally, that this is not a result of my own peculiar gender identity, but my very strong suspicion that everything these studies tell us about girls and women are lies.
Because if they weren't, I couldn't be all these people I am, and I would have folded in on myself a long time ago.
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-14 02:03 am (UTC)Not that I totally disagree with that idea. I saw a therapist for years for depression and noticed a marked improvement when I decided to stop going to therapy, but that probably had more to do with the type of therapy (analysis) and the cause of depression (clinical/disease related). But that's a total aside.
But really, do you think girls tend to be more anxious and depressed because of the unique pressures of being born and raised female? Hmmm, I wonder?