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sus

sus

Moderator
sus said:
People want too much, they want everything, but they can't have everything and they don't know what they want more, because they don't have good models for what to choose, so they can't choose, because the culture doesn't provide them these models
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The above is my best answer to the below, with the additional guess that models of what a woman can and should be are way more incoherent and self contradictory than mens
Mr. Tea said:
That's really quite desperately sad. If you had to guess why this was a particularly female phenomenon, what would you say?

I suppose it's one of those things that's equally good opinion-piece-fodder for progressives and conservatives: the former will say it's because feminism hasn't gone far enough, or that its gains have been reversed in recent decades, while the latter will say it's because the freedoms these girls' mothers and grandmothers fought for are making them miserable.
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sus

sus

Moderator
Tea I don't know if you've read the Ross Douthat piece on Lena Dunham's Girls but it's really great and illustrates exactly this double susceptibility to conservative or liberal interpretation. I think when a culture is in a transitional phase, both back and forward are better than the transition zone of confusion and incoherence
 
sus

sus

Moderator
as a mirror held up to American culture, [Girls] showed something very different than its prestige-TV peers, something equally important and arguably more forward-looking and distinctive.

The typical prestige drama, from “The Sopranos” onward, has been a portrait of patriarchy in extremis, featuring embattled male antiheroes struggling to maintain their authority in a changing world or a collapsing culture. Usually these stories are set somewhere Out There, in landscapes alien to the typical liberal-ish prestige-TV viewer: In flyover country, in copland and gangland, in George R.R. Martin’s Westeros, among Mormon polygamists, on Madison Avenue in the last days of the WASPs.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
On “Girls,” though, something very different was going on. The fall of patriarchy had basically happened, the world had irrevocably changed … and nobody knew what to do next.

This (and many other things) distinguished the show’s storytelling from the superficially similar “Sex and the City,” in which the remains of the patriarchy still provided a kind of narrative order. In theory the women of “Sex” prized their freedom and their friendship more than men — but they were also oppressed by and obsessed with toxic bachelors, they still pined for Mr. Big, and they ultimately settled down with decent working-class guys or gorgeous male models or nice Jewish lawyers or Big himself.

But “Girls” was a show in which any kind of confident male authority or presence was simply gone, among most of the older characters as well as among the millennial protagonists. The show’s four girls had mostly absent fathers (the only involved and caring one came out as gay midway through the show) and few Don Draper-esque bosses to contend with. The toxic bachelors they dated were more pathetic than threatening, and the “sensitive” guys still more so; even the most intense relationships they formed were semi-pathological. A few men on the show (the oldest of the younger characters, most notably) exhibited moral decency and some sort of idealism, a few were genuinely sinister — but mostly the male sex seemed adrift, permanently boyish, a bundle of hormonal impulses leagues away from any kind of serious and potent manhood.
 
other_life

other_life

bioconfused
sus said:
models of what a woman can and should be are way more incoherent and self contradictory than mens
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hmm. i think this means we are more resistant to the stubborn habit of recurrently thinking the identical. and better adapted to/resilient against what capital has mutilated human subjectivity. Or what have you
 
sus

sus

Moderator
other_life said:
hmm. i think this means we are more resistant to the stubborn habit of recurrently thinking the identical. and better adapted to/resilient against what capital has mutilated human subjectivity. Or what have you
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I don't think my anecdote shows better resilience no offense. And I don't think women are the sole or main ones producing these models
 
linebaugh

linebaugh

Well-known member
It was after her campaign so it wasnt as big of a story as it could have been (or atleast i didnt hear about ), but Elizabeth Warren found out that the 1/16th native she built so much of her brand around was a filing error and shes actually 0% native and had to apologize for it.


Similarly I knew a guy who loved being german so much he spent hundreds of dollars on a real pair of liederhausen only to find out he also was no parts german
 
sus

sus

Moderator
Thinking about the phrase “I’m in my X phase” where X is jazz or wine-o or “metamorphosis” or “metaphysics” or “Grimes dating Elon Musk.” “I’m in my ‘reply guy’ phase and I identify as a ‘reply them’”
 
shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
sus said:
The above is my best answer to the below, with the additional guess that models of what a woman can and should be are way more incoherent and self contradictory than mens
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Spendo is dropping truth all over dissensus these days
 
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luka

luka

Well-known member
sus said:
The bit about the race-faker is hilarious, I hadn't heard that one.

I get the sense from 70s discourse, films that psychoanalysis was a status symbol then. But for whatever reason, it doesn't feel that way to me now.



When I moved to New York from small town California one of the most striking things was that every girl I knew was either prescribed antidepressants + benzos, or else abused xannies recreationally. Often with copious drinking. If you know anything about drug combinations, these do not mix well. Frequent blackouts, reckless decision-making, unprotected sex. These were often the same girls that wanted to be hit and choked during their anonymous Tinder hookups. I found it really bleak and sad. They didn't know what they wanted; they didn't understand the structure of their desires; they found themselves constantly slipping into gender roles that bred self-contempt; they found themselves subsidizing behaviors that hurt them, etc.

Often, they have bad enough judgment / are confused enough that their relationships with their therapists become quite power-laden and problematic. They're advised to end relationships or cut out family members.

There's also a class of sensitive boy I know who has been fairly guarded his whole life, and sincerely wants to explore his emotions and his relationship to his parents or whatever. They aren't especially troubled; by most standards, well-adjusted; but they make good tech salaries and can easily afford it, and are curious, and end up find it rewarding for a time.
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fairly sure Gus has never met a human being and gathers his information of them off of the internet
 
sus

sus

Moderator
It's actually far more damning than that, I dated at least a half dozen of these luvvly ladies
 
V

version

Well-known member
sus said:
... with the additional guess that models of what a woman can and should be are way more incoherent and self contradictory than mens
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Something along these lines came up when the article was posted on RSP too,

"Lately I’ve begun to notice the content women are constantly being offered online, through articles like this one, and from the surface it seems very confusing, contradictory, and anxiety inducing. There’s a whole genre of books/articles/podcasts/Instagram accounts, etc. written by unhappy women, for an audience of unhappy women, which isn’t exactly new, but it seems like there’s very little room in the world that content is building for the idea that sometimes you’ll be unhappy, and that’s normal. Maybe it’s a pendulum swing, put in motion by decades of women being told to accept unhappiness as their natural lot in life, but it seems like the culture has overcorrected now, to the point where unhappiness is unacceptable."
 
V

version

Well-known member

Medicalisation

I read something a while back about there being no concept of certain mental illnesses in Japan until American pharmaceutical companies set their sights on the Japanese market and watching The Trap (Adam Curtis) recently there was a fair bit on the DSM resulting in a number of people believing...
www.dissensus.com
 
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