Heather Mac Donald on the feminised university and its pathologies:

Female students and administrators often exist in a co-dependent relationship, united by the concepts of victim identity and of trauma. For university females, there is not, apparently, strength in numbers. The more females’ ranks increase, the more we hear about a mass nervous breakdown on campus. Female students disproportionately patronise the burgeoning university wellness centres, massage therapies, relaxation oases, calming corners, and healing circles. Another newly installed female college president, Dartmouth’s Sian Leah Beilock, claims that the two “most pressing challenges of our time” are the “mental crisis among young people” and climate change.

Female dominance of the campus population is intimately tied to the rhetoric of unsafety and victimhood. Females on average score higher than males on the personality trait of neuroticism, defined as anxiety, emotional volatility, and susceptibility to depression. (Mentioning this long-accepted psychological fact got James Damore fired from Google.) Victorian neurasthenia has been reborn on campuses today as alleged trauma inflicted by such monuments of Western literature as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Hearing an argument that chromosomes, not whim, make males male and females female is another source of alleged existential threat.

When students claim to be felled by ideas that they disagree with, the feminised bureaucracy does not tell them to grow up and get a grip. It validates their self-pity… The most far-reaching effects of the feminised university are the intolerance of dissent from political orthodoxy and the attempt to require conformity to that orthodoxy. This intolerance is justified in the name of safety and “inclusivity.” 

Christopher Rufo has some related thoughts:

Individual pathology is valorised as a form of marginalised identity. So when you have this victim narrative… all of a sudden individual psychopathologies, individual traumas, individual problems, individual personality disorders, something even like obesity, a kind of physical disorder or dysregulation, are elevated into marginalised identities that provide the moral centre of these new victim narratives… When you take the victim narrative… and you elevate individual pathology into a form of marginalised identity, you create a social system that incentivises certain kinds of behaviours.

Apparently, the way to entrance others and to suddenly become fascinating is to make yourself your own go-to subject.

And Anna Slatz on “inclusivity” and questionable role models:

Among those males included in the [Smithsonian] Women’s Museum will be Monica Helms, the designer of the trans pride flag. Born Robert Hogge, Helms designed the first trans pride flag in 1999. In his memoir, More Than Just a Flag, Helms – who named himself after a fictional battle in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings – described himself as an “enlightened” being who is able to “float” between multiple worlds.

Helms once admitted to wearing his mother’s underwear as a youth and stated that he “studied” girls at his school with an obsession that slowly turned to “lust.” While serving with the US Navy during the 1970s, Helms began stealing the undergarments of female neighbours living in his apartment complex in South Carolina after seeing a bra in the washing machine of the laundry room… “As I stood watching the bra swirl around in the dryer, I sensed a growing desire to dress as a woman and to see the hidden woman within me.”

The recap of Mr Helms’ adventures in bra-thievery and fetishistic cross-dressing starts as merely farcical, but it does venture into territory that, shall we say, casts doubt on his selection as an inspirational figure, a person to emulate.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

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