This reminded me of yesterday’s discussion about a person finding non-existent “rape culture” in a cartoon.
It’s like when your finger is hurt and everything rubs against that poor finger. It takes on an oversized role in your life. It throbs and pulsates. This is how it is for neurotics. Life itself becomes about their neurosis.
“I have made/acquired this minutely detailed set of social rules dictating how the world is supposed to work, to protect and nurture my abnormal, irrational vulnerability: now I can display my righteous offendedness every time someone violates those rules.”
I mean, f*ck that.
I have PTSD. It’s gotten a lot better over the years, but emergency-vehicle sirens still make me uncomfortable, and neighborhood children screaming (for fun) still set off an adrenaline reaction and make me fairly miserable for a few hours.
I COULD become that neighborhood crazy lady calling up govt. offices trying to get ambulances to turn off their sirens, and screaming at neighborhood kids for yelling, but I don’t, because I understand that the problem is ME and my abnormal reactions, and that my task here is to finish working through that s**t so I can stop overreacting to normal stimuli as if it was an emergency. I’m like 90% of the way there– I’ve achieved normal response baselines for a whole bunch of other associated things, that’s good, I’m proud of how far I’ve come, and you know… if I never kick that last 10% it’s not the end of the world. But I’m also not going to insist that the entire rest of the world accommodate it and tiptoe around and mute their children to avoid making me uncomfortable.
The cartoon discussion reminds me of something Camille Paglia brings up now and then: she talks about the phenomenon of upper-middle-class white women getting all het up about the normal behaviors of working-class men. This is not a feminist thing: it’s a class thing. These coddled middle-class college gals think they’re being feminists demanding that construction workers stop noticing them, or start acting like upperclass twits around them, to protect their very delicate virginal feelings. That’s ragingly classist. And runs on the assumption that women are all delicate virginal flowers, which is not remotely feminist. No, that’s middleclass and rich women LARPing as characters from gothic romance novels, doing performative delicacy as a way to make sure we ALL know they’re not one of those dirty poors with uncouth manners. I’m inclined to take it as a social signal in the same class as perfectly-manicured long fingernails: it’s how you announce to everybody that you don’t do any kind of manual labor.
aw, shucks.
LikeLike
A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
Leave a comment