The Whet

The following is a[n attempt at] translation of the Trilema piece Exceptionalismul femenin.

You've doubtlessly come across at least one side or another of these strategies/social psychopathologies in day to day life (depending on where you've found yourself, on the outside or the inside of the disease), even if it didn't seem in the respective moment that they'd make up part of a structured and describable whole, just as not everyone who trips over a mastodon bone sticking halfway out of the ground will start to reconstruct the entire animal with its habitat and everything. Excusable, but man've we got work to do, and man'll it be tough.

Feminine exceptionalism begins, as the name suggests, with an exception. "Sure, smoking's not allowed here, but can't I smoke?" "Sure, it's written on the card not to tell anyone the PIN, the bank sent letters to remind you not to tell anyone the PIN, on the ATM screen there's an advertisement to not tell anyone the PIN, but you'll tell me, won't you?" The list, in principle, is neverending, but in practice it always reduces to a very simple pattern. The rule is X, surely it's so, but the girl doesn't consider it to be the case that it applies to her.

She doesn't contest that in truth the rule exists, she doesn't contest either that it's a good and necessary rule. In fact, any discussion of whether the rule is good or bad doesn't interest her at all; on the contrary, such a discussion would detract from the real point of interest for her. She doesn't contest either that she makes up part of the category of applicability of the rule. On the contrary, for feminine exceptionalism to function, a valid, useful rule whose applicability she falls within is absolutely necessary.

Why? Here we arrive at the true psychological reason for the whole operation: the girl suffers from a problem of self-esteem. She feels, she considers, or she was taught to believe herself to be inferior. Eventually all three. Inferior not just to the other men, and not just to the other women, but even to she herself, to her own "potential".

To combat this psychological sequela, she feels it necessary to prop up her existence with special treatment. Every valid and applicable rule which is broken offers her a bubble of oxygen: maybe she's not a piece of shit, because hey, in that moment she's that special.

The poor form of asking to smoke somewhere the owner doesn't, of the same species and class of asking for vegetable oil when the table's having butter doesn't interest her, because she is not in fact well-mannered, but on the contrary, she still carries under her nails the filth of the existence of the low to (about) the middle class which blessed her with the stretch-marks and soul-marks of which we speak.

And of course, like any psychological problem of the transactional class, this complaint exhibits two specific particularities. Firstly, it is progressive. If yesterday she's been allowed to smoke though smoking's not allowed, it's no longer sufficient today, it no longer produces an effect, so she'll smoke two, four, eight, sixty cigarettes. Until the end, the stimuli have to progress geometrically in order for the receptors to be stimulated in arithmetic progression.

If yesterday you've waited on her five minutes, today you'll have to wait half an hour, and tomorrow we'll be forced to go to another city instead of the cafe we'd planned on, for no other reason than that the girl doesn't feel so great. In the head.

And secondly it is, like any transaction, prone to disproportionate reactions. If the girl has negotiated in her mind that for today proof of the fact that she isn't a piece of shit will be manifested through letting her drive the car, and you don't let her drive, for whatever reason, no matter the reason, like for instance that the car's fallen in a lake, or it's been stolen overnight, wasps have made a nest in there or whatever else, the girl's head is going to explode, and she'll bawl on about how could you say that she's a good for nothing piece of shit.

Which, honestly, she is, preferably to be shat onto a cart headed somewhere in the direction of a hospital for nervous disorders, where who knows, with attentive care and the help of experts, something else might be done with her.