Glosswitch new letter/blog

[ScrimpshawTheSecond]

For anyone looking for longer, thoughtful reads on feminism.

tinyletter.com/Glosswitch

New series of letters/blog/thing from Glosswitch. Latest one on anorexia and social contagion.

thank you have signed up and read the archive so far!

I really enjoy her writing.

I just read her most recent letter. It gave me a different perspective on social contagion. Very useful lens through which to understand it. Recommend!

Yep. Nuanced and layered.

Thank you for this!

Very interesting read. Am going to look forward to more of these.

Letter 2 is brilliant! This bit in particular:

"Given what the world thinks of women and girls, I don’t think it’s particularly strange or aberrant to insist you’re not like all the others, or even to disidentify from femaleness completely. As a response to misogyny, it’s perfectly rational; I’d find it weirder if women weren’t doing it. Even so, that doesn’t make it any less annoying to those of us who’ve already tried that particular exit door and found it sealed shut.

"It reminds me a little of those times when you find yourself in a long queue for the ladies’ loos, and one cubicle door is wide open because the toilet is out of order. There’s always someone who saunters in late and heads straight for that open door, clearly assuming that everyone else lining up must just be a complete idiot. “For fucks’ sake!” you want to shout. “We already tried that one! Don’t you think we’d be using it ourselves if it worked?” The “get out of caricatured womanhood free” door is a bit like that. You get why the latecomers try it; they’re probably desperate. It doesn’t make their efforts any less of a slight against those of us who tested this stuff out decades ago (I did consider extending this metaphor to the stage where feminism is where we all, collectively, fix the toilet together rather than choose between passive waiting or venturing into the cubicle alone. But in practice, what you’d really do is call the manager…)"

Her discussion of Adrienne Rich later in the same letter also really, really speaks to me: I was that grad student too, totally misunderstanding the second wave's discussion of the place of biological lived experience in women's oppression as being some sort of misguided "bio essentialism" (only in my case it was Greer's Sex and Destiny that I misunderstood, not Rich):

"Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born was first published in 1976, when I was one year old. Hence it is not the feminism of my generation, but the feminism which my generation was destined to deride. As a postgrad student I’d have taken one look at that book and asked why, if second wave feminists thought biology was not destiny, were they writing about bodies at all? Weren’t we more than walking wombs? Thus I only picked it up five years ago, by which time I’d reached forty and was pregnant with my third child (both shameful acts of biological essentialism, I know). Reading it felt like a slap in the face. “Ha! You thought this shit would never happen to you, but look, it has!”"

That piece on anorexia is so excellent.

This quote, in particular, resonated.

“People at a given moment in history in need of expressing their psychological suffering have a limited number of symptoms to choose from […] When someone unconsciously latches on to a behaviour in the symptom pool, he or she is doing so for a specific reason: the person is taking troubling emotions and internal conflicts that are often indistinct or frustratingly beyond expression and distilling them into a symptom or behaviour that is a culturally recognised signal of suffering.”

If you read that against the quotes from Adrienne Rich about women’s dissociation from their bodies, and the trauma of teenage girls becomes clearer.

Instead of thinking “I can be more, we’ve somehow taught girls that their only path is other.

Perhaps also it offers a more compassionate perspective on adult male “transitioners”, trapped in their own version of inadequacy. I struggle here, because I find TRAs so toxic, but we’re probably not going to solve this mess until men confront their own trauma in the face of masculinity.

.....until men confront their own trauma in the face of masculinity.

err..... you might want to put the kettle on while you wait.

reminds me of Freud's hysteria...