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.
