That is from a brilliant and hilarious post by Ballasexitenz. Reeducation thought it was wrong that I should be an intellectual and a successful academic. But the reason I am no longer a successful academic is that since Reeducation and a few other events turned it into a space of pain, I have to force everything so hard. This takes extra time and I have to work through persistent nausea, headaches, and dissociation. I have to try to channel past selves and future lives to perk up for the present.
Most of the people closest to me have never understood that I am really unhappy, or that there is a difference between being depressed and being unhappy. They do not appreciate that I am not just complaining. And some believe unhappiness is normal. They have never been happy, and they do not have serious interests in life, so that sighing and getting through the day is normal for them.
These are the people who worked on me so hard not to leave academia, because, according to them, I was so good at it and also not good enough for anything else. Most days I do not feel like an adult but like a sad child on a treadmill at the workhouse: you must be good at this, and you are not good enough for anything else. It is worse if I spend a weekend away and realize how I can feel.
But I have recently realized that the more important reason people will not believe me when I say I am unhappy with this is SEXISM. Girls are always just complaining and being dramatic. The solution is to condescend to them and patronize them. You say, “There, there, isn’t it terrible,” but you do not have a real conversation. This is why I appreciate Ballasexistenz’‘ post.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I’ve just spent a night away in a place called Pinjarra. I took three library books with me, two of which proved to be useful. I am still researching the pre-Oedipal to make sure I understand what I think I understand. The self-laudatory prognosis is that by and large I seem to have nailed it, in that intuitively and reflectively I have understood a hell of a lot and do not need to worry to much about proving that I know what I do, via footnotes, which should be easy enough to create.
Anyway.
Yeah, women are not considered to be real in certain fundamental psychological senses. That is how come we are the glue that binds together the real people in the real society to make it work. But in ourselves, we are somehow not real — not enough for general social-psychological principles to apply to us, or for us to react to pain in a way that attracts justifiable social attention. We are there to SERVE the real people — but this is not considered to be possible to the degree that we take ourselves seriously.
However…
There can be advantages in not being real. The prime one is that if others are not prepared to treat you or your experiences as real, they break the implicit social contract that says: “We are all in this together — you and I — and are bound to care for each other’s needs in a human, rather than robotic or animalistic fashion.”
So, there are those who will go out of their way to make is very clear that they are in a position to break the social contract with you. I’ve had people break the contract with me by accusing me of “whining” when they have no idea at all how restrained and stoical I actually am. Everything I say is Understated. So they break the social contract with me, and I owe them nothing.
There are others who will break the social contract by adopting and maintaining an authoritarian tone. Others do it by only partially listening to me, ignoring some of my more solid criticisms. They give me permission to only half listen to them, in a very distracted mode when the mood takes me.
So, subtly I refuse to be social glue for a system that isn’t working for me at all. Bit by bit, I withdraw my support for the systematisation of abuse and misogyny.
You’re quite right.
Not being considered real is key.
I used to think – I mean starting as a toddler – that if I could find a way to suffer enough, I might be considered real.
I realized this morning that I still have this problem.
NO you can never be considered real whatever you do. The unreal woman who dissolves into ‘hysterics’ concerning the punitive nature of life (under a patriarchal system) is considered the most unreal of all. Other women are just varying degrees of unreal.
One way to manage this is to become real in relation to yourself. It’s what Nietzsche called “self overcoming”. You draw a line in the sand concerning what sort of person you are and your current capabilities, and then you swear to exceed that. The pain and pressure of this kind of striving does give your life a very definitive kind of meaning and reality.
Gosh – in my experience those (the women in comment 1) are the ones considered the most real, who get the most rewards, and so on. I always thought it a poor idea to become one, though, because it was clear that if the reward system ever broke down, one would be a bag lady. This was the anxiety underlying these women’s behavior.
The fundamental unreality, though, is something I have only seen clearly recently and which I am still trying to wrap my mind around – it is very interesting.
Striving and so on, yes, that does work in the personal realm.
Oh, I see. Well my view is more cynical — that women are broken down by the system, and the more they are broken down the less adherents of the system feel they are worth recognising as real.
But there is a distinction between those who put on a show of hysteria, and those who are genuinely desperate and thus deemed “hysterical”. It is the latter, no doubt, who are most dismissed.
Also I didn’t just personal striving but more rather setting up oppositions within oneself, which can be overcome in part (but never totally).
Yes but for purposes of this post I’m still most interested in the fundamental unreality.
Well it is like Lacan says, “woman does not exist”.
Indeed!
Now in terms of the post you commented on, on my blog, there is a different place for women within a culture that has more of a place for the pre-Oedipal. As Kristeva’s work implies, the devaluation of the pre-Oedipal mode for the sake of ego-centred consciousness is also a devaluation of the feminine. This might explain why, in the culture I come from, the feminine was less devalued than in it is in your or my present culture: The pre-Oedipal self and the ego self were in tandem, and not with one in submission to the other. (Ego domination of the pre-Oedipal field of selfhood implies ego-inflation and a de-sensitisation to the realm of fantasy, interconnectivity and the imagination.) So with the domination of ego, a kind of narrowing of experience occurs, and the feminine is structurally excluded from that. Hence, even though it is the ground of being itself, it is heavily repressed by ego-consciousness and deemed not to exist.
And you and I, too, as representatives (in the mind of these narrow egoists) of the feminine, are deemed to have a kind of unreality about us — whether our behaviour is primarily ego-based or otherwise. The logic of excluding the pre-Oedipal realm from the realm of reality goes so far as to exclude women from it, too, it seems.
In Zimbabwe, women are economically and culturally oppressed in general, but they still represent a greater psychical reality for the societies, paradoxically, than do women in the West.
Yes.
It also strikes me that if the pre-Oedipal field is ideologically labeled as “womenly” then there the erroneous equivocation between the primary processes which relate to a generic human immaturity and the ideological sense of what it means to be adult and female can be exploited.
I think it could be tried in this way: If maleness is associable (but not consistently) with ego inflation and femaleness is associated with the ego deflation that leads us downwards towards the pre-Oedipal, then one might deflate one’s ego in order to set a trap. On the metaphysical plane (in terms of secondary thought processes), a deflated ego is “womanly” — which is to say, harmless, passive, benign. Yet we know that females are not intrinsically that way, and that primary processes themselves are far from benign.
So one might simply disappear from view — off the patriarchal radar — by deflating one’s ego.
At that point, one gets ready to attack.
This is possible.
HA! Now I have asked a couple of people about this IRL. They now say that their response to me has always been based on the assumption that anything I said about academia was just a response to a bad day – i.e. “not real.” So their advice was about emergencies only.
This I find extremely interesting in the case of those who began offering scary (and not very good) “advice” unsolicited, very early on, and generally refused to answer the questions I *did* ask. More proof for my point: they do not allow for reality, either of me or of the world.