The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Sexual Disorientation, Part II

Posted on | February 21, 2015 | 67 Comments

Caitlin Stasey, second from right, as a child star in ‘The Sleepover Club’

Caitlin Stasey (@caitlinstasey) is a former child star who has gotten widespread attention for her feminist website Herself.com.

In her own profile at the site, Ms. Stasey described having “vivid dreams about other women” as an adolescent, “masturbating in secret,” saying she has “known I was mostly gay ever since I can remember” and calls herself a lesbian, even though she currently has “a male partner,” another former child star named Lucas Neff.

Given the high-profile problems of so many former child performers — including Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Amanda Bynes — it is certainly reasonable to wonder if these psychiatric disorders are actually caused by such abnormal childhood experiences of “growing up in the spotlight.” On the other hand, it might just be that we notice these meltdowns more than we do the struggles of other young people. If I had been a teenage celebrity? The tabloids would have had a field day with my adolescent “struggles” (although I don’t think diving headfirst into trouble could be considered “struggling”). A couple of weeks ago, I addressed the problems Ms. Stasey described:

Growing up in a sex-obsessed society seems to be a profoundly frightening experience for many girls nowadays. The decline of marriage and the destruction of moral norms are part of a cultural syndrome that produces what I have called “a sort of social epidemic of bipolar hysteria, in which minds unmoored from cultural tradition constantly shift between utter confusion and radical certainty.”

In terms of documenting this cultural syndrome, Ms. Casey’s website has continued (however accidentally) to do interesting work. Her declared purpose is to advance a feminist agenda, but if you have any knowledge of psychology, it’s just as easy to see feminism as part of the problem described by the women profiled at Herself.com. Here are quotes from two recent interviews at the site:

“I started masturbating at quite a young age but never really understood what was going on . . . Having issues with mental health, I’ve very much struggled with the importance of emotions and feelings. Having Borderline Personality Disorder often equates you with being ‘bad’ in the eyes of health professionals, and it is most commonly diagnosed in women, so understanding that my feelings are valid is a bit of a challenge. . . . Being sexually fluid and more interested in girls, I didn’t learn anything at all about that, and am still figuring it out.”
— LJ, Australia

“I suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder with Major Depression, suicidality, self harm and a fairly antisocial outlook. . . . My mother caught me masturbating when I was around seven years old . . . but I knew that I wasn’t going to stop, just be more clever about where and when I’d do it! . . . Sex used to literally run my life. I was insatiable, constantly seeking the ultimate in sexual experiences. Much of it was very cerebral in nature, involving role play and complex set ups with bondage and corporal punishment.”
— Laura, Canada

What are the odds that, of the first 12 women interviewed by Herself.com, two would be diagnosed with the same mental illness, and that both of them would describe early experiences with masturbation as formative in the development of their sexuality? Is this coincidental or has Caitlin Stasey accidentally stumbled onto a pattern, a psychological syndrome, which might be worth studying from a mental health perspective, if only we could get feminists to stop hectoring us with ideological rants about how women are being victimized by heteronormative patriarchy?

“The personal is political,” feminists have been telling us for decades, but politics is a poor substitute for psychiatric therapy.

UPDATE: Really, you need to read this interview with Caitlin Stasey:

In high school, when boys started to sleep with other girls, these girls’ burgeoning sexuality wasn’t an exciting thing to be explored. It was a shameful secret you lie to people about because people would make fun of you. They would verbally abuse you for it. The men you chose to share this thing with would tell all of their friends and then their friends would treat you like sh*t. It became a really toxic environment and I just didn’t like the way it was heading. I wish I’d had the tools by then to equip myself against those insults and arguments. I didn’t know what to do. It just really hurt.
So I became a feminist, really, out of a desire to not feel sh*tty about myself. Also because I’ve been sexually attracted to women for as long as I’ve known. Growing up in a Catholic education system and going to an all-girls Catholic school at one point, I felt like I was sick. Like there was something wrong with me. None of the girls in my circle reflected that back to me. It was always like, if someone came out as a lesbian, they became the object of ridicule. I hated it. . . .
I had no point of reference… nothing I was watching looked like anything I recognized within myself. There were never any young women or young boys falling in love with each other or anything other than heteronormative relationships, really.

You can read the whole thing, but what I see is a young woman who grew up extremely self-conscious, fearful of men and normal sexuality, trapped by feelings of shame about her female body. These are very common problems you see manifested in the rhetoric of feminists, but the problems they describe are not actually political. You can’t organize a political movement based on “Boys Were Mean to Me in High School” and expect to be taken seriously. Yet this is what feminists have done, and Ms. Stasey’s effort to stigmatize normal sexuality — because she was oppressed by the depiction of “heternormative relationships” in media — is exactly what you would expect when crazy people obtain an ideological platform from which to dictate their own agenda to the rest of us.

UPDATE II: Some things are predictable.

Anyone could have predicted this endgame as early as 1970.





 

Category: Feminism, Sex Trouble

Comments

67 Responses to “Sexual Disorientation, Part II”

  1. Daniel Freeman
    February 22nd, 2015 @ 4:18 am

    It was okay, but they made the classic mistake of reinforcing the opponent’s message when calling out their hypocrisy. Trying to nail her for not meeting a liberal standard kind of implies that the standard is correct. I think that she’s right to not pretend neutrality about how her kid turns out; she’s just wrong about what she wants for her daughter, and that would’ve been a harder-hitting point.

  2. kilo6
    February 22nd, 2015 @ 7:39 am

    What I would love is to just play a woman on screen who is not a woman by definition.
    What does that sentence even mean??
    By definition of her chromosomes (reality) or by definition of who she wants to sexually interact with at the moment (subjective emotions)? I strongly suspect it’s the latter
    She detached the concept from its reference in reality. A detached concept is like a bolder rolling down a hill destroying everything in its path.

  3. Daniel Freeman
    February 22nd, 2015 @ 8:35 am

    I read it as wanting to play something like Ripley in Alien, who I’ve heard was originally written as a man, which is a pretty simple way of making a female character that isn’t treated like one. That would fit with her attempts at making nude photos unsexy.

  4. Coronel Lando Calrissiano
    February 22nd, 2015 @ 9:49 am

    It doesn’t make sense in Greek or Hebrew or Latin because spoiler alert: woman isn’t derived from man in those languages. In fact, in those languages, they’re completely different.

    Actually, woman isn’t derived from man (male human) in English either; were- was dropped from wereman.

  5. theoldsargesays
    February 22nd, 2015 @ 10:22 am

    From Star Trek TNG:
    The Borg: Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours.
    Capt. Picard: Impossible. My culture is based on freedom and self-determination.
    The Borg: Freedom is irrelevant. Self-determination is irrelevant. You must comply.

    Sound eerily familiar to today.

  6. Quartermaster
    February 22nd, 2015 @ 2:21 pm

    Now we arrive at the crux of the issue. You are a theological ignoramus who rejects scripture. That’s why it makes no sense to you.

    Too bad for you.

  7. The Daley Gator | Your Sunday Best of the Blogs
    February 22nd, 2015 @ 2:34 pm

    […] The Other McCain features more Sexual Disorientation […]

  8. Quartermaster
    February 22nd, 2015 @ 3:02 pm

    Might what I’m remembering.

  9. Quartermaster
    February 22nd, 2015 @ 3:04 pm

    Turn up the air conditioning and you’ll be OK.

  10. Fail Burton
    February 22nd, 2015 @ 9:26 pm

    I’d like to play a snow spider. A giant one, with long white hair, like Johnny Winter. And I’d screech like him too. A really high whine to stun my prey. And I’d live in a snow cave.

  11. Coronel Lando Calrissiano
    February 23rd, 2015 @ 10:41 am

    I do reject scripture, especially scripture that looks like it was made up wholesale by speakers of Middle or Modern English.

  12. Finrod Felagund
    February 23rd, 2015 @ 10:49 am

    So learn ancient Hebrew and Greek, loser, and translate it yourself.

  13. arcadius
    February 23rd, 2015 @ 4:24 pm

    Hadn’t heard of Audre Lorde before. Wikipedia describes her as a “womanist” which is a new one for me. Can’t say these people aren’t good at coming up with new words…

  14. arcadius
    February 23rd, 2015 @ 4:30 pm

    There’s some VERY strong competition for that title. Personally, I find the transgender feminists like Brianna Wu to be the most annoying, because they weren’t even born women, but chose to “become” one, if you buy into that, and then never stop whining about it.

  15. SamWah
    February 23rd, 2015 @ 8:42 pm

    I beat my breast/chest as I confess myself to be part of the problem–I ignored the girls in high school and in college. I was (sob) shy. I also had a boy-crazy older sister who was a pain in my tuchus. Took years to overcome that, but I did, and now am part of the white patriarchy.

  16. Daniel Freeman
    February 24th, 2015 @ 2:42 pm

    I had a dream last night that Brianna Wu realized that he was a man, but it was too late for his penis to be reattached, since he’d neglected and even abused it over time. I know that they probably don’t actually send your ice-packed penis home with you as a souvenir; it was just a dream.

    I took it as a metaphor for his masculinity, since the brain is plastic. Everything that you think and do, changes you. The longer he spends trying to think and act like how he imagines a woman would, the harder it will be for him to ever pick his manhood back up, even metaphorically speaking.

  17. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    February 25th, 2015 @ 11:49 am

    Hillary and Kerry’s Pedophile State Department

    and

    Instapundit comments on Kohn How soon till Gay Parents start sending their kids to “therapy” to be gay?