Whatever the panic, girls are always victims | Comment | The Times

I think that the loathing of the female puberty and menstruation has always been something many teen girls try to escape, so that anorexia is partly linked to that and so is trying to dress in baggy clothing to avoid suddenly becoming the sexual prey of men of all ages. That is very hard at the age of, say, twelve, when the girl can still be a child inside her head.

But I also think that this might be worse today with the way teen boys watch porn on their phones and when the idea of women as sexual beings is more objectified than it probably ever has been and when porn has created the idea that women and girls will want to be slapped or choked or treated with violence. Hard to handle this even as an adult, and I really feel that we are letting girls badly down.

Elsewhere I read threads about children's clothing. Clothing meant for girls is pink and has glitter and unicorns and 'be kind' over and over on it, while clothing meant for boys has dinosaurs or cars or 'trouble' written all over it. Yet it's girls and women who are already expected to be kind and to have no boundaries, while boys get their boundaries reinforced and respected.

And then we get this 'be kind' shit from those who want women to hand all our rights over. It's all linked, though I make the connections somewhat stronger here than they might be in the real world.

key take aways:

"There is something that all these phenomena have in common. As the historian of psychiatry Andrew Scull wrote recently, there were 12,296 lobotomies conducted in the United States in the 18 months up to July 1951, but although a majority of the patients in the wards were male, “nearly 60 per cent of the psychosurgery had been performed on women”.

The same was broadly true of electroshock therapy. During the period of the great multiple personality fad, up to nine times as many women as men were diagnosed with the condition. And now this striking and sudden imbalance in diagnoses of gender dysphoria.

Puberty for girls is not like puberty for boys,As a sceptical Tavistock therapist reminded Janice, “most anorexics are natal females who reject their femininity and are repulsed by their secondary sex characteristics”. It’s not entirely surprising. I’ve seen one estimate that nearly 140,000 girls in the UK miss school each year because of a lack of access to sanitary products. Parents of girls I talk to have, in recent times, seen this temporary physical self-loathing sometimes turn into a desire not to become a woman at all."

Really good comparisons! Wish he had also mentioned the assisted writing scam of the '90s, when a whole arm of the psychiatric profession sprung up that insisted it was possible for severely brain-damaged people to express themselves by having an assistant hold their hand with a pen in it. Even video after video showing the brain-damaged person staring off into the distance while the assistant looked intently at the paper and moved their hand wouldn't convince people this was pseudoscience. There are still people today who believe in assisted writing, the Anna Stubblefield case being a late outlier (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield.html?_r=0). But in the '90s, it was scorched earth. These people would not hear any critique of what they were doing.

This got my brain going along analogous lines. How did these other panics play out? When did we decide only dangerous quacks prescribe shock treatment and lobotomy? When did the tide turn against recovered memories and belief in widespread ritual abuse? Unfortunately, in every case, it took people risking their reputations to speak out.

Also, there's a reason, as Aaronovitch writes, that it's always girls. There's a real problem underpinning most of these manias that most people do not want to face head on, and that is misogyny and internalized misogyny (less so with the assisted writing thing, but it's notable most of the proponents of this idea and the assistants themselves seem to have been women). Some women in the comments chipped the surface of this a bit, which was very satisfying to see. The comments, in general, were a breath of fresh air.

And one of the biggest "children know their gender when they are toddlers" proponents was a key figure in the satanic sex abuse fraud.

Most of the comments are sensible, but man, there are some stupid ones there. I'm 90% sure these assholes going on about how sex and sexuality are a "spectrum" and "aren't black and white" are just trying to smugly make themselves seem "enlightened".

Can we get an archived link? We can never read The Times articles without being subscribers