Offensiveness in feminist discourse

Geraldine — wasn’t it your intention to make some sort of profound point? That’s certainly the proposition Medium is making on your behalf, and the basis upon which it inserted your post on my home page.

Unless your point is that your frustration has rendered you inarticulate, then your offensiveness hasn’t helped you. As Edward Latimore observes in The Power of The Authentic Life:

being offensive for the sake of it is also repulsive. People can feel when something is an act or a defense mechanism.

If that is your point, then it isn’t very profound.

Blaise Pascal said: “Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue parceque je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte” (“I did this ([letter] longer because I did not have the time to make it shorter”). It’s modern equivalent appears to be: “I offended, because I lacked a point”.

You need to have a point. You are writing in a new age of feminism, one in which its core propositions are becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile with observable reality — particularly by a younger generation who, like the little boy in the children’s story about the King’s clothes, haven’t heard about the magic suit and what they are supposed to see.

So you can’t rely on gratuitous offensiveness to make your points for you. You have to tell us why, for example, you find trying to exist exhausting. For those who note that you are a member of a cohort that will live years longer than men, is 60-80% less likely to commit suicide than men, is unlikely to end up in a job like men which will kill you or leave you with some permanent occupational illness or disability, and is predicted to own more than 60% of all weath by the end of this decade, this is an extraordinary claim. Show us that your exhaustion is about more than a bad book reading experience, and that its cause is comparable to the things that exhaust your readers.

Otherwise, you share the fate of the King:

Now Saturday came and the streets were just lined with thousands, and thousands, and thousands of people, and they all were cheering as the artillery came by, the infantry marched by, the cavalry galloped by. And everybody was cheering like mad, except one little boy. You see, he hadn’t heard about the magic suit and didn’t know what he was supposed to see. Well, as the King came by the little boy looked and, horrified, said:

“Look at the King! Look at the the King! Look at the King, the King, the King!
The King is in the all together
But all together the all together
He’s all together as naked as the day that he was born.
The King is in the all together
But all together the all together
It’s all together the very least the King has ever worn.”

— “The King’s new clothes” (Burl Ives)

Good luck, and keep writing.