Somebody told me that in North America male identity is formed through competition with other men and female identity is formed through serving and pleasing other people. As a result, male identity thrives on being disliked (as a result of winning the competition) and female identity thrives on being liked.

I have no idea how much of this is true because I’m not North American. And we all know how badly I suck at pleasing anybody.

Some people progress in their development while others regress. See this example of somebody who infantilizes herself and stunts her own growth between the ages of 17 and 25:

You see, I had an abortion in 2004 when I was 17-years-old and [my parents] found out about it nearly a year later when my mother read my diary. They confronted me about it, and while we eventually got past this rough spot in our relationship, we didn’t really ever discuss all our feelings with one another. At the time, I was so furious that my privacy had been violated that I had absolutely no regard for their feelings. In fact, I didn’t even think they had a right to have feelings. It was my abortion and my secret and it had been shared without my consent. If they were sad or upset then well, that was their punishment.

It has been eight years since that all happened, and while I can still relate to the teenager in me who was so enraged, I have come a long way in forgiving my parents and finally understanding that the friends, family, and partners of women who have abortions also have complex reactions to the abortion and deserve an outlets through which to process them.

I don’t blame this woman for “growing down rather than growing up” (I’m using Annis Pratt’s apt terminology). With this kind of horrible parents one doesn’t stand a whole lot of a chance to develop into anything but a beaten down, zombified creature. The story of female Bildung over the course of the last 100 years has been this: a woman tries to grow and liberate herself from the constraints of her patriarchal environment, discovers that the task is insurmountable, and willingly infantilizes herself. This is how stories of female development (or, rather, stunted development) always end:

I’m so glad that I finally got a chance to clear the air with my folks. As it turns out, they’re pretty insightful people, and I learned a lot from what they had to say. I also got a chance to apologize for being defensive and resentful when they needed love and support.

The poor idiot has her privacy violated in the most egregious way, and she is the one apologizing because she allowed her personal issues to matter more to her for a second than her parents’ need to cannibalize her existence. Instead of parenting them, she dared to take care of herself and has now repented of this grave sin against the patriarchy.

I have read over 100 female Bildungsromane in the past 6 years and, starting in early XXth century, they are all like that. This tendency towards self-effacement and stunting one’s own growth becomes more and more pronounced with every victory of the women’s liberation movement. Simply put, a heroine of a 2013 Bildungsroman sacrifices her growth and stunts herself far more easily and willingly than a heroine of a 1913 Bildungsroman.

As you might or might not remember, the name of my department was changed to a more PC version because everybody except me and one other person voted for the change. People agreed that the word “foreign” in the department’s name was offensive to foreigners and the word “literature” was alienating to students.

Yesterday, the Chair reported that all of the paperwork for the name change had been submitted a while ago but the bureaucracy is moving very slowly so we still have our old name.

“I’m sorry, does anybody remember what the new name is?” one colleague asked.

It took everybody quite a while to remember. And I’m not sure we remembered what the name was correctly.

Now we are stuck with a name we can’t even remember just because we are terrified of the words “foreign” and “literature.” And I cringe whenever I imagine that I will have to tell people I work at a department called “World Languages and Cultures” (or something of the kind.)