Our current cultural understanding
The 21st Century Salonnière explains that there are universal conditions such as anxiety, and there are culture-bound explanations for those conditions.
It’s really easy to point this out when it happens in other cultures. Only if you live in a culture where the extreme anxiety related to becoming a cannibal is “a thing” is it possible for your own wired-in extreme anxiety to find a home in that fear.
It’s harder to point this out in our own culture, though. Only if you live in a culture where cutting yourself to express your emotional pain is “a thing” is it possible for your own emotional pain to find a home in cutting yourself. That seems less [more?] intuitive because it’s the water in which we swim. (Isn’t that “just what people do”? No, it’s not.)
I have to say it’s never been the water in which I swim. Cutting seems very odd to me, and not something it would occur to me to do as a response to emotional pain.
This might explain, for example, why there was no such thing as being “triggered” by emotionally difficult lecture material in 1975, and yet we’ve heard about it often in recent years. Our current cultural understanding is that it’s possible to have a trauma response to upsetting educational content—it’s now become a thing for us, just as the fear of becoming a cannibal is a thing in another culture—and so if a lecture is upsetting, it can (really) result in being triggered now.
Again – that’s not my current cultural understanding. I’ve heard of it of course, along with a lot of mockery of it – which is kind of my point: it hasn’t really “become a thing” for us, at least not yet, because too many people find it absurd or exaggerated. It’s a thing for some of us, but far from all.
There’s always a human universal underlying these phenomena. The human universal here is that humans sometimes have extreme responses to traumatizing events. But the specific ways they respond, and even what they consider to be trauma, change depending on time, place, culture, and context. Trauma responses are very real. But culture lays a lot of things on top of it. Culture tells you how to respond, but you’re not aware that’s happening, so the response feels like it’s coming from inside you.
Emphasis added. Yes, for a lot of people this is clearly the case.
Cultural definitions, cultural beliefs, and cultural expectations are really powerful. They influence people’s beliefs and behaviors in ways of which we ourselves are often unaware. Culture essentially tells us how to behave, and we comply without perceiving that we’re complying.
Which is one very good reason for being aware of how that works, and watching out for it, so that you can resist if it doesn’t suit you, and maybe even help others resist if it doesn’t suit them. Anorexia for instance – that doesn’t suit anyone, so it’s good to resist it. Violent porn for another instance – how about if we stop letting culture tell us that’s sexy and ok?
Culture-bound syndromes are not just for quaint, unaware people in other places. They are very much alive. Cultural beliefs exert powerful effects.
Note that no one is play-acting—no one is pretending. But people in our culture—not just other cultures—adopt sets of beliefs and behaviors without being aware of it, in response to cultural expectations, in ways that feel completely organic and genuine.
Indeed, but that’s why learning to think critically can be so useful.
So when we look at human suffering and how to address it, it can be helpful to ask ourselves: What part of this thing is a human universal? Which parts did we make up?
And now we get to it.
To hear the modern Western media tell it, transgender identity and gender dysphoria (extreme emotional distress related to aspects of your sexed body) have always existed among humans.
Uh huh, and I’ve never believed a word of it.
Not only is trans identity a human universal, the current narrative goes, but our current 21st-century response to it is the universally decent way—the only right way—to respond to someone with such an identity.
Thus, the 21st-century Western narrative calls for affirmation of everyone with a trans identity, changing the names and pronouns we use for people, providing puberty blockers and hormones, offering surgeries, changing single-sex spaces and sports to single-gender spaces and sports, and endorsing simple catechistic slogans with which every decent person is supposed to agree (e.g., “Trans women are women”). The reality is so settled that there is to be “no debate.”
And all in the space of – what – ten years? Fifteen?
What part of this thing is a human universal? Which parts did we make up? They’re important questions.
That essay (plus extensive comments) is excellent. It repeats a lesson often taught in the skeptic community regarding socially-constructed “explanations:”
Frankly, I get as annoyed by the GC as much as by the TRAs on this point. The vast majority of trans people are not “lying.” It’s absolutely possible to mentally rewrite your own history using a culturally-bound template and be convinced that you experienced and felt things you didn’t. That’s not being “crazy,” that’s being human + susceptible. And we’re ALL susceptible under the right conditions.
Back in the 90’s, my teenage daughter revealed to me that she’d been “cutting.” Her inner arms were a heartbreaking mess of jagged red scars. Yes, her boyfriend was a cutter but that had NOTHING to do with it. And NO, MOM it WASN’T something in the culture that she picked up. A LOT of people did it. She was depressed; it helped.
I took her to a therapist who diagnosed her in 1 visit with Seasonal Affective Disorder. No, the fact that she started getting depressed right after her swimming team was over and she went from strenuous exercise, schedule, socialization, and diet to virtually zero of each wasn’t relevant. The therapist had SAD, too. She knew. Not enough sun.
My daughter is fine now (and living down South) , but it has often occurred to me that, had this occurred 20 years later, the cutting could well have been gender dysphoria and the Seasonal Affective Disorder diagnosis “She’s A Boy.” We live up to expectations, and discover explanations which fit.
As a recovered anorexic (during the period Sastra’s daughter was cutting, I was starving), I am not sure I accept the idea that “everyone is doing it”. I never felt that. The other anorexics I met never felt that. It did feel like a reasonable response to my pain, yes, and I am very aware that it is culturally bound, but everyone does it? I think to some extent it is the opposite…not everyone does it. My pain is unique, no one can understand it, and my response to it is to starve myself. I don’t think it was narcissistic (at least on my part, I can’t speak for others) because I didn’t want people looking at me or thinking about me. I didn’t think I was special, and that was part of the thing perhaps that drove me to the edge of starvation (and over the edge), that I didn’t think I mattered. I do know some anorexics who only starved when people were looking, so I suppose that could be narcissism driven, but I often thinks it’s because they want help. Make the pain go away. For me, the more my body disappeared, the more I believed I would escape pain. It doesn’t work that way.
I still struggle with body dysphoria (and now have a name for it), but I learned to cope, if only imperfectly. It’s hard to cope with it in a world full of mirrors, but I still manage to avoid.
I don’t think self harm in any form is considered healthy or the right thing to do, even by the people who have done it, even if it is a relief of sorts, or a call for help, which is why the trans ‘affirming’ mutilations are so sinister. Is not having one’s sex organs or breasts horribly mutilated and rendered useless a form of self harm also? Some people don’t see it that way of course. It reeks of bizarre religious practices, from self flagellation to human sacrifice. How this can be going on in the 21st century is astounding.
Great original post + commentary. It seems self-evident to me that social “stories” are what are behind a lot of these things, and as a result I often have little or no tolerance for people who succumb to them. It’s a useful reminder that I, too, am susceptible in my own way to such stories (just not necessarily these).
Someone else (Abigail Shrier?) had noted the same trends, that in the US the rate of anorexia dropped as the rate of cutting soared, then cutting declined in popularity as transgenderism rose. Interesting that all three involve harming the body.
I knew someone who cut, and I was very unhappy with her therapist, who told her that she would continue to cut herself because the urge would be overwhelming, but they would work on reducing the frequency, then eventually over a long time they could get it down to zero. How could something almost unheard of just a few years previous now suddenly be an irresistible biological urge (as the the therapist seemed to be framing it). (Eventually she did stop cutting, so apparently the therapy worked, so I suppose I should just be grateful for that.)
I don’t think it’s “everyone’s doing it” but rather it becomes known as “something that can happen to you”, so your emotional pain can end up taking you to that place.
I also agree that most people aren’t faking it. Even the ones that seem clownish (such as the “it’s MA’AM!” person or even Veronica Ivy) probably really believe they were born the wrong gender.
I am reminded of the pop singer Karen Carpenter, who sadly died almost forty years ago of anorexia that was fed by the culture of the time and its emphasis on thin women. Remember Twiggy? Sometimes it’s just sexist bullshit, not something medical.
So is there a treatment modality that whisks a person into some kind of radically accepting community? You’d think there would be some science behind this by now.
Apparently Tumblr had a bunch of dark corners where the “Pro-Ana” and pro-cutting communities adopted anorexia and cutting as positive “identities” and egged each other on with posts and photos trying to outdo the last one. That eventually began to seem a bit toxic even to Tumblr (or word got out) and both groups were shut down — though not after having “flourished” for years.
I’ve read that both anorexia and cutting have long histories in different forms — especially religious ones. Self-starvation or flagellation could make a holy saint. There was also I think a fad among young women in the 19th century for eating so little you looked ethereal, as if you might blow away with a breath. It was a sort of purity ritual. Starvation Heights detailed this as a medical cure.
The whole essay which is the subject of this post is excellent — sensible and thought-provoking. In a comment under the post the author goes into more depth on the risks and harms to children of too-easily turning to “gender-affirming health care”. This is long but I think you’ll like it:
It is indeed an excellent article. I’ll have to read the commentary too – I ran out of time this morning. I’d never heard of The 21st Century Salonnière before; must read more.
Skeletor wrote in #5:
Sastra wrote in #8:
Bingo.
David Karp, the founder and former CEO of Tumblr, joined the Planned Parenthood Board of Directors in 2014. Now PP is the main USA supplier of testosterone to minor females, effectively letting girls diagnose themselves and prescribe to themselves by answering a survey and signing a form of informed consent.
Maybe I’m all wet, but I thought content warnings were instituted as part of a recognition of PTSD, especially among Vietnam veterans. That’s the context in which I first heard of PTSD. Vietnam veterans were not supported in the same ways that veterans of other wars had been. Recognition of the service of Vietnam veterans did not come until at least a few years after that conflict had ended. Vietnam veterans, like other veterans, had GI Bill educational benefits, and many entered university after their service. Content, or “trigger,” warnings, in my understanding, were not intended to prevent anyone from reading, or hearing about, or learning psychologically difficult material, but were to give advance notice, so the individual could be mentally prepared to deal with it, without causing a sudden PTSD “reliving” episode. It was meant to toughen preparedness, not to soften or water down content. Eventually, psychological, medical, and sociological experts proposed that traumas other than battle experiences could lead to PTSD. Rape trauma, racial violence, other crime victimization, experiencing natural disasters, and other events could also cause PTSD. As with war experiences (“shell shock,” “battle fatigue”), these additional traumas were included in content warnings so students were prepared to receive and deal with horrible facts, events, and images, not to prevent exposure to anything that might be shocking. I don’t know when it changed to the latter.
So, I’m not sure that the addition of content warnings is any kind of license or justification for extreme reactions to traumatic events. It doesn’t make traumatic events “normal.” It doesn’t make extreme reactions “normal,” either. How is it a “human universal” that some people may have extreme (i.e., unusual, atypical) reactions to traumatic events? The purpose of “trigger warnings” was to DECREASE the incidence of extreme reactions to psychologically- or emotionally-charged information.
I don’t get what the author is trying to say.
I don’t know about the situation with the troops returning from Vietnam, because my country wasn’t involved. I do know, however, that there was no mental health support for the men and women who returned from WWII with PTSD (which wouldn’t be an available diagnosis for at least another generation) or for their families; and soldiers with PTSD during WWI were often shot by their own side for ‘cowardice’. Given that dedicated mental health care of any kind only started to be widespread within the last two centuries, and largely confined to members of the upper classes (the working classes could barely afford basic life-saving healthcare, such as it was), it’s unlikely that soldiers in any prior conflicts were given any support whatsoever.
I suspect that veterans of the war in Vietnam were actually the first to be treated for PTSD, if rather belatedly, and after suffering years or even decades of ill-health related to their trauma.
maddog @ 12 – from what I’ve seen (which is bound to be incomplete and could be wrong or slanted etc) that is how the warnings got started but then younger students, with no history of war trauma or racist or sexual violence, adopted the language for more trivial or debatable forms of “trauma.” Appropriation, in short.
maddog,
Yes, that is the justification behind the initial conception and promotion of trigger warnings, but there is an emerging consensus that this idea may well be simply wrong. Keep in mind the caveat that all science reporting is horrendous, and pop-psych perhaps especially so — though pop-psych’s reporting issues usually spring from the issues of pop-psych itself, mainly that the questions studied and groups sampled are posed by and and composed of western University students; since this is precisely the group for which “trigger warnings” are most vociferously promulgated, this question is perhaps more salient than the norm.
More broadly, the author is insinuating that as trigger warnings proliferate, they are applied to more and more classes of activity in lockstep with ever-broadening notions of trauma. This is quite plausible; we have all heard of or read as many anecdotes as we can stomach about Ivy League students melting down over mild inconveniences or simple misunderstandings, claiming to be traumatised on behalf of themselves or others. Fully-grown adults worrying themselves sleepless over the horrendous violence they have perpetrated by accidentally misgendering a super-special-gendered stranger, or even having been accused of doing so, are exactly the sort for whom trigger warnings can act to amplify and direct internal reactions to either sharpen or invent new traumas in response to consuming a piece of information or entertainment. This, as our collective western society is more-or-less continuously breaking new frontiers of how safe and well-fed and free from the vicissitudes of nature it is possible be.
And, of course, the policing of “appropriate” trigger warnings is another tool in the box for wannabe-authoritarians who like nothing more than dictating what other people are allowed to read, express, or even think.
Ironically, this could be an example where “intent isn’t magic”. Trigger warnings were arguably developed to a noble purpose, and it is quite possible that even if everyone implementing them is acting in good faith, their implementation can be directly counter to the purpose; given the certainty of at least some amount of bad-faith implementation, and it is not a wonder that the evidence for them is mixed at best.
Another thing, in my experience as an educator, is that education has moved on from education and is now considered a business; students are no longer students or learners or scholars, but customers and consumers. This has spurred a lot of colleges to do what the kids want, rather than focus on educating them. Trigger warnings proliferated because students demanded them. Then we turned to the even worse elephant in the room: censorship.
Trigger warnings were not deemed adequate to protect our fragile youth, so many institutions started not teaching things deemed traumatic by even one student on a campus if said student complained. I have no beef with removing some dead white males from our reading curriculum; some should have been removed a long time ago. I have no beef with including diversity in our reading curriculum; this should have happened a long time ago. But I do have a beef when we cannot read or mention anything that might have some propensity for causing discomfort. Students should experience discomfort during the learning process. That is part of learning.
One of the classes I teach is Theatre (I know, weirdo iknklast, teaching hard science and fine arts). I have been informed that my reading list, and any plays we perform, must not include “bad” words. Catholics and Lutherans control this town. But I work at a public institution, and theatre is chock full of “bad” words. Some of the best works have challenging ideas, which is as it should be in college.
I was also told at one point that I should not teach the environmental impacts of agriculture in my Environmental Science class, because a lot of our students are farmers, or studying AgBiz. This was a shock (I ignored the instruction) because no one told me while I was in Texas not to teach the environmental impacts of oil and gas. The shift was rapid and in many cases extreme.
@ Tigger #13
I didn’t mean that veterans of other wars were supported in their mental health issues while Vietnam veterans were not. I meant that Vietnam veterans were treated with general hostility because of the political and moral opposition to that particular conflict. I agree that PTSD sufferers among veterans of other wars went untreated and unrecognized as suffering from legitimate mental health issues.