and it is getting worse.
The prevalence of depression is most likely up about ten times over the last century in the US(pdf). Why? In principle, if you live in the US at this time you’re one of the luckiest people in history: music and other entertainment on demand; horseless chariots; good and reliable heating and cooling in summer and winter; a cornucopia of food which also costs far less than in the past, and various consumer luxuries that were unimaginable 100 years ago, let alone two hundred.
This should be the promised land.
Holefield brought to my attention this article on girls and young women cutting themselves:
researchers at Yale University recently reported that 56% of the 10- to 14-year-old girls they interviewed reported engaging in NSSI at some point in their lifetime, including 36% in the past year. I know of no community survey of boys in any age group which approaches that kind of prevalence…
(another study) find(s) that 24.3% of girls were self-injuring, compared with 8.4% of the boys.
In California, the most recent killing rampage, by Elliot Rodger was based on a stunning level of misogyny.
Meanwhile, students at a California school have put out a petition to rehire a security guard who was caught on tape beating a teen with cerebral palsy for slapping him and spitting on him (admittedly, a provocation.) This may be a racial matter: with those petitioning being primarily black, while the teen was hispanic.
All of these things are indicators of social pathology.
Let us start with attitudes towards women, and the unhappiness of women. Though the assertion is made that the increase in cutting is due to girls being more aware of cutting, an increase from 3% to somewhere between 30 to 50% shouldn’t be dismissed so lightly. A lot of young women are frantically unhappy.
Cutting provides an endorphin rush, and it is often associated with self-punishment. A young woman who feels that she has failed, or is inadequate, will cut herself. This is a disorder very similar to anorexia: it is triggered by failure to live up to norms. Young men and boys rarely cut (though when they do, it is far more likely to be a prelude to suicide.) The young women who cut aren’t losers, they are often the most attractive and/or accomplished of their cohort. They are, to outward appearances, playing the game successfully.
The simple explanation for cutting is that norms are too strict for women, especially young women. They have to do well in school, they have to take on more social management than men, and they have to meet an ideal for beauty which is extremely high. None of this is new, young women 20 years ago had the same requirements. So what has changed?
One possibility is the rise of easily available online porn. Up until the late 90s, porn just wasn’t that easy to get your hands on as a youngster. Sure, every teenager had seen a tape or two and some magazines, but the society wasn’t awash in it. The nature of the porn available has also changed: online porn, as a class, is much misogynistic than the previous generation of porn. Really rough sex is common; shaming of women is common, treating women as “fuck-toys” is common. The titles of porn clips often call the actresses sluts and bitches and worse.
A lot of this porn is nasty stuff, and it inculcates in young men some very nasty attitudes. Put simply, Pavlovian conditioning (orgasming to mistreatment of women) in porn, for young males, is very strong. Young girls are viewing this stuff too, and are taking their cues from it: both in terms of some conditioning (arousal is automatic for women when viewing sex), and in terms of learning that this is how they should behave, and this is how they should look.
Young women are learning, in effect, that to get men, they have to not only meet a very high and often unrealistic standard of appearance (which men don’t have to meet, many males in porn are fat and ugly), but they have to allow themselves to be mistreated. Because of conditioning, they may even learn to like being mistreated. (Yes, some people have always liked rough sex, no there is nothing wrong with that, but the emphasis in much porn on rough sex, humiliation and treating women as disposable sex toys is far more intense than previous generations were exposed to.)
So young women have to look great, they have to allow themselves to be treated in ways that many will find humiliating at best, and in hook-up culture, casual sex, often with other people watching, is the norm. (Not only do you have to look good, but your performance will be judged by others.)
It is hard for me to see any of this as good, or as conducive to happiness for most young women; to self respect, or to a sense of autonomy which allows women the right to define their own standards, looks and sexual preferences.
Everyone in America except the rich is under more economic pressure, and for the middle class and above, that has become an educational race: credentialism is in. To get into the best universities, you have to have had good grades virtually forever and you must also engage in approved varieties of extra-curricular activities and sports. Combined with the helicopter parenting so in vogue the last 30 odd years, you have little time to yourself. This isn’t a primary driver of cutting in particular, but it is a driver of pathology in general: people who are constantly under surveillance (and having adults constantly watching you, then peers is surveillance) means a person does not develop an adequate backstage: an understanding of who they are that is not fully mediated through other people’s views of them.
Their self-worth, then, is based on others opinions of them to an even larger degree than normal (and humans are hypersensitive to social approval in the best of times). Perfection must be maintained at all costs, because social approval is based on it, and ostracism, our ancient heritage tells us, is death.
Women now outperform men in general academics, but they also have to. A woman needs to be better than a man in many fields, just to stay even.
So the pressure, on young women, is on: at school and socially (and later in work).
To be sure, it is on on men, as well, but they are not held to nearly as high standards of appearance and behaviour as women are.
They also, outside of prison, fear rape and violence much less. Anyone who is trusted by their female friends knows that the worst stats are true: more than half of women, by their mid 30s, have been raped. Men, outside of prison, fear rape far less (because of the US prison population and the perception that rape is part of the punishment, men are actually a little more likely to be raped than women in the US, but that is concentrated in a small portion of the male population and to a particular place and time.)
Men, especially young men, have been taught to view women as fucktoys, to treat them badly in bed, and to judge them by appearance norms that most women can’t meet. The widespread view of rape as “punishment” means that many men feel they are justified in raping women (and often men) if they don’t like how they behave. And many women, sadly, agree with those men.
And, as with the students who wanted the security guard who beat the teenager with cerebral palsy reinstated, their idea of proportionate is wildly out of whack. The kid slapped the guard and spit on him, the guard hit him repeatedly in the head. (This is not to say rape is EVER justified, I do not believe it is. Only that those who think it is, also have weird ideas about proportionality.)
Rape threats have become normal. Men on the internet seem to assume they have the right to threaten to rape any woman they don’t like. Other women and men will tell those women who were threatened that it’s no big deal, and they’re over-reacting.
Now I’m in my mid 40s and grew up in a different world: my father was a forester, my uncles farmers and the sort of engineers who supervised projects by rough types. My reaction to someone threatening to rape someone, is what I consider proportionate: if I thought I could win, I’d beat the fucker who made the threat to fucking pulp. I certainly would have nothing to do with such a person in the future, I would try and have them fired, and anyone who wanted to be their friend would have to choose between me and them.
There was plenty of rape when I grew up, and tons of child molestation. And it was often covered up. But I do not recall that it was considered publicly acceptable to threaten to rape someone.
That is a change. And not a change for the better.
The pathology levels in American culture are off the charts. This is visible in many, many ways, from depression, to how American soldiers act overseas and to the regular mass shootings, but nowhere is it more visible, to my mind, than in prisons and in the attitudes towards women which are now prevalent: now the norm.
American society, simply, is barely civilized any more. The idea of basic consideration, of respect based on kindness, is dying. People “deserve” rape, they “deserve” torture. Vastly disportionate punishment is the norm for some crimes, while the crimes of the powerful are generally ignored or given a slap on the wrist. The attitude is to do what you can get away with, and that power makes it all ok. This may be true in all cultures, to some extent, but in America it has reached the level of pathology.
Nor is this limited to America, it is spreading.
A civilized society has lines: you don’t drive the banking system to collapse and expect to be bailed out, you don’t publicly threaten rape and expect to keep your job or the respect of any decent human being; you don’t torture.
America doesn’t.
(Edit: the section on Amber Lee Frost Jacobin article has been removed as I am convinced she was unfairly slurred, including by myself. My apologies.)
