The Other McCain

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

The Internet Is Making Kids Crazy

Posted on | March 13, 2022 | Comments Off on The Internet Is Making Kids Crazy

Selfies from Helena Kerschner’s ‘male’ phase.

Saturday was Detrans Awareness Day, calling attention to cases of people who formerly identified as transgender before “detransitioning” and re-identifying with their biological sex. Ed Driscoll at Instapundit called attention to the case of Helena Kerschner, now 23, who began testosterone injections at age 18 and continued for more than a year before the mental health issues — testosterone is a helluva drug, y’know — forced her to quit. From her account of her college experience:

The anger started as a smoldering anger at first. I found myself feeling more irritable, less able to put up with the little things that bothered me about other people. I was uncomfortable with my newfound tendency to get bent out of shape at everybody so I started isolating myself, trying to hide this awful person I thought I was turning out to be. I didn’t make the connection between this and the testosterone, I just thought I was a bad person. I didn’t feel like being around people, and when I was, I felt so unlike myself that I didn’t know how to relate to them. . . .
I had always had emotional problems, but this was different. In high school, I had always banked on the future where I would be in college, transitioning, and part of me genuinely thought testosterone would somehow make me into this outgoing male jock archetype and I would be handsome, have lots of friends, and love life. That wasn’t really panning out. I was lonely, enmeshed in toxic and stressful relationships, on academic probation, in legal trouble due to substance use, and feeling possessed by some sort of demon I now recognize was at least partially the testosterone’s worsening grip on my mind.

Checking out Helena’s Twitter timeline, I found her expressing great sympathy for men, perhaps due to her hindsight realization of what men have to deal with in terms of their rage issues. Boys must be taught to restrain their temper, and the common feminist complaints about men “not being in touch with their emotions” is misguided, if you understand that men’s natural “emotions” are so often an urge to strangle somebody or pound them into a bloody pulp. You want to see a guy “in touch with his emotions”? Do a Google search for “mass murder suspect.”

You think of me as a happy-go-lucky guy, but you’ve never seen me in a traffic jam, yelling obscenities at the top of my lungs, and struggling to restrain my urge to ram those idiot drivers off the road. These are the feelings — our beastly primal nature — that every man has been dealing with since he was 12 years old, and those of us who didn’t end up in a prison or an early grave can congratulate ourselves on our success in this basic struggle of manhood. The idea that teenage girls would inject themselves with testosterone to become “men” strikes most people as completely crazy, but the transgender movement has created this myth of people being “born in the wrong body,” which is accompanied by a “transition-or-death” propaganda. Pointing to high suicide rates among transgender youth, the movement blames this on “transphobia” so that the regime of synthetic hormones and surgery is presented as “lifesaving treatment,” and if you are opposed to this, well, you just want teenagers to kill themselves. Never mind, of course, the fact that research indicates that “transition” doesn’t cure these suicidal tendencies; if self-hatred is at the root of transgenderism, you’re not going to solve that problem by medical interventions. But I digress . . .

Helena Kerschner is not an unattractive woman. She has a certain pre-Raphaelite beauty — the kind of face you might find in a Rossetti painting — and yet she spent her adolescence feeling ugly:

By the time I was thirteen, I was isolating myself, self-harming, and had developed an eating disorder. In eighth grade, I lost touch with most of my school friends, and was too self-conscious and preoccupied with my eating disorder to put myself out there again. I started skipping school, spending lunch in the bathroom, and in general just keeping my head down, trying to get through the day unnoticed.

She found a “community” in the Internet’s septic tank — Tumblr:

Between sharing photos, drawings, and fanfiction, these girls were posting about their lives and going into deep detail about their struggles. Many were social outcasts like me, also struggling with things like self-harm and eating disorders. Finding a community of such like minded people felt amazing, and I quickly began spending nearly every waking moment on Tumblr or messaging some friend I had met on there.

The self-selecting nature of online communities is insufficiently understood. To be part of such a “community,” after all, you have to spend a lot of time online, whether it’s ranting about politics on Twitter or sharing “fanfiction” on Tumblr. And the people who become obsessed with this — the core of any such online community — tend to be “social outcasts” who lack healthy real-world connections with actual human beings. Kerschner recognizes this factor in hindsight:

Being such a secluded platform with a fairly homogenous user base not only demographically (mostly teenage girls, many of whom white and middle to upper middle class), but especially in terms of personality type, [Tumblr] developed its own culture, distinct from the youth culture of the general population. Because many of its users were like me, using Tumblr as an all-day alternate reality escape from the real world, this “culture” should be understood in the most literal sense of the word. One should think of Tumblr, especially from 2009-2016, as a secluded island nation whose people rarely interact with the outside world, and thus have language, customs, hierarchy, and history that is entirely unique and at first incomprehensible to people from other nations visiting the island. There’s something about it that almost selects for a particular type of person, and I’ve heard so many times from normal people (for lack of a better word) that they “tried Tumblr, but couldn’t figure it out.”

It was within this environment — an online hive of unhappy, introverted teenage girls — that transgender mania took hold. Under the weird “social justice” peer pressure, Kerschner found herself seeking “evidence that deep down, I wasn’t really a girl”:

I hated my body; it must be because I don’t like that its female. Boys have never been interested in me like they are with other girls; well, maybe I would be attractive as a boy, and then I could be like all these cute “gay trans boys” I saw dating each other online. I didn’t have many friends, it must be because being a girl isn’t my “authentic self”, and that was getting in the way of my social life. Plus, people were nicer to me since I said I was trans so that must be an indication that being trans is the right thing to do to make friends.

Strange as this might seem, it gets even weirder:

Female sexuality is hypersexualized and pornified, yet it’s supposed to be “empowering” for women to do porn, be prostitutes, or have dangerous, kinky, scary sounding sex with many different men. I heard that my discomfort with this made me “vanilla”, and a girl who is vanilla has no chance of really pleasing a man when competing with “empowered” women.

WTAF? Where are girls getting this message? But this was the kind of liberal “pro-sex” feminism that was in vogue 10 years ago when eighth-grade Helena Kerschner was struggling with her adolescent awkwardness. Of course, in just a short time, by 2014, there was a drastic shift into a very different sort of feminism, as the “rape culture” hysteria took hold on university campuses and suddenly any guy who so much as looked at a college girl was guilty of harassment. Any attempt to get to second base with a girl was almost certainly sexual assault, and as for actually hooking up — well, “PIV is always rape, OK?”

The craziness of feminism, which communicates contradictory messages about sexuality, could be confusing to anyone, but imagine being a socially awkward middle-schooler trying to make sense of it while immersed in a hive of teenage Tumblrinas. But like her Tumblr comrades, Helena Kirschner was also getting confused messages about sexuality from another source on the Internet:

Online pornography, which studies show most kids are now exposed to by the age of 13, has become virtually inescapable. Faster than we can even measure its impact, this new world of porn is drastically changing how young people form their perceptions of sexuality and adult relationships. It would be foolish to think that it wouldn’t have major consequences. In my own life, I can see how being inundated with pornographic imagery as a young woman, much of it violent, and being repeatedly told that this was normal and even cool led me instinctively to look for an escape from womanhood. . . .
As a young woman who both identified as transgender as a teen and grew up in a very online, pornography-influenced environment, I believe there is a profound connection between this new way of exploring sexuality and the identity confusion that we are seeing in so many young people today.
Many young girls today, including those that identify as trans as I did as a teenager, internalize a hyper-sexualized caricature of what a girl or a woman is. It mirrors the image of women as extreme sex objects that boys derive from porn, but whereas for boys that may be titillating, for some girls it becomes the reason why they feel they aren’t really a “girl.”
On social media, it’s become normal for women to farm engagement and money by either presenting a highly sexualized image of themselves or outright selling homemade pornography. . . .
Most of the explicit content online isn’t about healthy sex between two people who love and trust each other; it’s about bizarre kinks and degradation.
In these porn-saturated circles, submission, degradation, abuse, and suffering are all highly associated with women.

The mainstreaming of S&M “kink” captured public attention when Fifty Shades of Grey first became a bestselling book (2011) and then a movie (2015). It is obvious that this phenomenon has been fueled by the prevalence of Internet porn. When I was in college in the 1970s and early ’80s, there was a joke: Masochist says to the sadist, “Hit me, beat me, make me feel pain!” To which the sadist replies, “No.”

Joking aside, however, nobody I knew back in the day was into that kind of whips-and-chains stuff. If there was any kind of widespread “kink” subculture in America back then, I never encountered it, and certainly I was no prude. But the Internet seems to have changed that, and the mainstreaming of BDSM culture through online pornography has spawned all manner of real-world consequences.

One of these consequences appears to be that girls are afraid to become women because, in the porn-warped view, being a woman means being something that no one in their right mind would want to be. Having imposed this fear via Internet pornography, the online world then offers “transition” as the solution. Satan himself could scarcely have imagined anything more wicked. Y’all need more Jesus.

Turn off the Internet and pick up a Bible.




 

Category: The Transgender Cult

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