Mental Illness and Cultural Change.

Inmates running the asylum...

If you've been reading me you know the subject of mental illness is a recent topic here.  Specifically, are gay people nuts?  Just pushing your buttons - it's really about the former diagnosis of homosexuality as a mental illness and how that is so not the same as bipolar.  The discussion drives people nuts - but I'm sure there is a medication for that.  What?  I don't take it seriously.

That said, I mentioned an article someone sent me about a feminist who was diagnosed schizophrenic and also wrote on gender issues - and I kinda sorta implied she lacked credibility because of the diagnosis - not to mention the irony of writing about gender ideology.  Unfortunately, I had not read the entire article and it turns out it was a sort of obituary on Feminism's Rotting Corpse, by Kathy Shaidle.  The article is from Taki's - a magazine I normally don't read.

Anyway - to add more background to where I was coming from, I will reprint a couple of out takes from that article.  It's quite interesting because it helps us understand the origins of gender ideology.

Shulamith Firestone

"[T]he end goal of feminist revolution must be…not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally."

After learning of the death last week of Shulamith Firestone, author of 1970’s The Dialectic of Sex, I roused myself to search for the book ...

Her first and most important work is still required college reading, but unlike those of her second-wave feminist peers—Greer, Friedman, and Gloria Steinem—Firestone’s is not a familiar face. She never turned up on The Phil Donahue Show or in the gossip pages or on Henry Kissinger’s arm. 

And yet in the photo accompanying her New York Times obituary, Firestone looks exactly like you’d expect. That “look”—the frizzy hair, the Lennon spectacles, the lipstick-free, unsmiling mouth—transcends eras. Firestone eerily resembles one of my old Reagan-era anarcho-peacenik comrades—also crazy, also brilliant—who helped me block consensus when some other chick in our women’s caucus proposed dropping the word “caucus”because “it has the word ‘cock’ in it.”

Firestone published her radical manifesto calling for the liberation of women from childbirth’s unfair burden—and from gender itself—at only 25. That’s around the age when schizophrenia tends to claim its victims, of which she was one. - Read more here.

I suppose the premise of the article may be summed up in this quote: “Yesterday’s mental illness is today’s social policy.”  The irony of which lies in the fact that was pretty much what the bipolar lady I criticized was saying.

I give up.

St. Benedict Joseph, pray for us.