"Female Self-Pity"

I was reading a column by Heather MacDonald last week that contained this striking phrase. (I admit I don't always look at the author's name before reading the column, so it was only at that point that I realized I must be reading a female author and went back to check who it was: probably no male journalist would dare to have used those words.) 

She was talking about the wave of hysterical protests on college campuses that have gotten so much attention lately.

The female tilt among anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria. True, when activists need muscle (to echo University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s immortal call during the 2015 Black Lives Matter protests), males are mobilized to smash windows and doors or hurl projectiles at the police, for example. But the faces behind the masks and before the cameras are disproportionately female...  Why the apparent gender gap?... [note] the sex skew in majors. The hard sciences and economics, whose students are less likely to take days or weeks out from their classes to party (correction: “stand against genocide”) in cool North Face tents, are still majority male. The humanities and soft social sciences, the fields where you might even get extra credit for your intersectional activism, are majority female....

Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatizing, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity. 

The phrase struck me, though, and I've been trying to decide whether or not -- or to what degree -- it is fair. On the one hand, I think that social media is responsible for giving women a skewed view of reality that leads them to conclude, on the basis of that skewed information, that they ought to view themselves as genuinely oppressed. 

For example, I saw a short clip on Facebook of Taylor Tomlinson talking about how women have to fear never getting home alive when they go out at night. I often see social media stuff that repeats that memetic point: women are in grave danger from men, who by contrast are happy-go-lucky in going abroad in the dark. 

Yet, as is often pointed out in this space, the statistics show the exact opposite: men suffer much higher rates of all forms of violence than women, including rape if our society's prison violence is included in our count. Indeed, the male experience of violence is so different that it can account for why some sex between men and women is thought consensual by one party and rape by the other:

My guess is that this didn't seem like violence at all to him. She invited him in, she didn't fight, she didn't curse or spit, perhaps she didn't even argue when asked "Why not?" In the morning she made him breakfast and carried on as if there was a romance. He may well have no sense of her experience of the evening at all, and can't be expected to without having it explained to him.

The markers that he would rely upon to know that he was entering the territory of violence are not present. In the world he likely lives in, if it's anything like my world, violence and force are accompanied by clear markers of rage and reaction. She showed no sign of either.

These female rage "sessions" are, I think, the product of a similar market function. There's money to be made teaching women they ought to be angry (and therefore pay for what the seller is pleased to describe as "therapy"). People tend to believe what those in authority tell them, and "therapist" is considered a position of authority even when the therapist's training is that they practice yoga and provide "intuitive," psychic, and speak-to-the-dead medium services on the side. (I personally know such a therapist, one highly praised by Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop network.) So of course they ought to be angry: their therapist says they've got a lot of anger to "heal." 

On the other hand, women aren't helpless victims of social media: they're active participants in telling each other these stories about how miserable their lives are. This Mother's Day weekend produced an endless stream of videos by women complaining about how horrible motherhood is, especially while the children are young. There does seem to be some self-pitying going on there, one that doesn't acknowledge or accept that the tough parts are shared by fathers too (another person I know, a younger father, spent ten hours in the ER with his son after a baseball injury this weekend). 

Women aren't given the data fairly, but the data is there for them to see and reflect upon if they wish. 

There's doubtless male self-pity as well, especially among younger men (as younger people in general are more neurotic and therefore less happy; and what makes people happy is weird anyway). It doesn't have the cachet, though: crying women at protests may move mountains, but crying men aren't going to persuade anyone of anything except that they're losers. That may explain why we see a lot less of it on social media: not that men are less inclined to self-pity, but that it doesn't help young men to display it in the same way that it seems to be an important part of advancing the displaying young women's agendas, whether on Climate Change, anti-Zionist, or pro-Progressive/Socialist/Communist. 

In any case, it caught my eye in MacDonald's piece, and I wondered what the rest of you thought about it.