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Joe Canimal's avatar

James Thompson had a piece about similar — in short, female entryism tends to ruin male institutions, such as science, art, etc., since female worry and equalitarianism, while felicitous in the domestic sphere, is anathema to greatness, or even, in the end, mere competence.

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TGGP's avatar

By coincidence, Slate recently published an interview with Mary Gaitskill, which led me to this:

https://marygaitskill.substack.com/p/writing-about-rape

Some relevant discussion of how bad the feeling of exclusion can be compared to other bad experiences:

"what I saw on playgrounds and in classrooms was nice, normal, popular children hurting vulnerable children by making them feel ugly, inferior, shut out of the world of goodness and normalcy, and doing it routinely for years. At the same time I was learning about the far worse cruelty of groups in the adult world, race-hate and anti-semitism (also deployed to shut people out of “goodness”), lynch mobs made up of “normal” people who seemed to me larger versions of those nice, normal kids, normally looking to discharge their normal aggression on someone.

What the rapist had done was an acknowledged wrong; it would’ve been different if he’d been a normal member of my community—whatever that might’ve been for a runaway teen—but he wasn’t, he was an obviously mentally sick criminal destined for a world of shit. He was bad officially and as such he could terrify me and hurt me physically. But he could never make me feel as worthless and humiliated as my officially nice peers—along with some nice teachers, more or less decent close relatives and child psychiatrists—had made me feel, in many different contexts previous to my unfortunate run-in with him. Nor for that matter could he make me feel as bad as some officially nice men I voluntarily dated long after.

It bears repeating: A physical attack on what I called female life force is a serious thing but so are psychic attacks on an unformed child by essentially the child’s entire community; so are many forms of cruelty. By the time I was raped at age 17 I knew something about it, personally and generally—enough that I was not shocked by the fact of this violent assault. Given what I knew, I could not understand why I had been brought up to see rape as the ultimate evil. And I was sick of hearing that women are destroyed by rape, sick of it. The idea was profoundly offensive to my pride. Yes the experience was terrible, yes it caused me to carry fear in my body that could unexpectedly surface. But it did not come close to destroying me. It hurt me. But not as much as other things. "

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