The Persephone Complex

Freud thought of himself as a budding Oedipus, and many of us still suffer his influence. Feminists were having none of it. To their minds, a woman was a budding Persephone, daughter of the goddess Demeter, abducted and raped by Hades, the king of the underworld, rescued in part by the power of her mother. Worse yet, she was forced to marry him.

As you recall, Demeter was so aggrieved at what had happened to her daughter that she caused the crops to die. Zeus relented and allowed Persephone to leave the underworld and to spend part of the year with her mother. Yet, he could not return her to her mother full time, because, while she was in the underworld, she had eaten a pomegranate. Don’t expect me to explain that one to you.

Anyway feminists consider women to be suffering a Persephone complex. They fill the airways with stories of the perfidious abuse that men have visited on women and then they insist that being the victim of male violence is the truth about being a woman.

Not only that, but all writers have now been instructed to place trigger warnings on any story regarding sexual abuse, the better to protect women from having to recall their trauma. Again, to the feminist mind, being abducted and raped is, in a nutshell, the female experience.

Jill Filipovic offers a mea culpa for participating in this madness, in the Atlantic:

In 2008, when I was a writer for the blog Feministe, commenters began requesting warnings at the top of posts discussing distressing topics, most commonly sexual assault. Violence is, unfortunately and inevitably, central to feminist writing. Rape, domestic violence, racist violence, misogyny—these events indelibly shape women’s lives, whether we experience them directly or adjust our behavior in fear of them.

Note what she says. Sexual violence is endemic to feminist writing. That is not quite the same thing as saying that sexual violence is endemic to women’s experience.

Now, feminists have taken on the role of Demeter. They are going to rescue young women from the predations of predatory males. Most especially, they are going to shut down any discussion of any topic that might recall their rape and abduction:

… students also saw themselves as fragile, and seemed to believe that coming into contact with offensive or challenging information was psychologically detrimental. In asking for more robust warnings about potentially upsetting classroom material, the students seemed to be saying: This could hurt us, and this institution owes us protection from distress.

Now, Filipovic suggests that all of this protection has made girls even more vulnerable. Since they have been shielded from certain realities, they have been rendered incapable of dealing with reality. They have been coddled and swaddled, to the point where they can barely breathe.

But as the mental health of adolescent girls and college students crumbles, and as activist organizations, including feminist ones, find themselves repeatedly embroiled in internecine debates over power and language, a question nags: In giving greater weight to claims of individual hurt and victimization, have we inadvertently raised a generation that has fewer tools to manage hardship and transform adversity into agency?

I do not think that trigger warnings, per se, are the culprit here. A feminist ideology that defines all relations between men and women in terms of violent abuse certainly contributes. Anyway, the more the country is bathed in feminist ideology, the worse things become for women.

… from 2007 to 2019, the suicide rate for children ages 10 to 14 tripled; for girls in that age group, it nearly quadrupled. A 2021 CDC report found that 57 percent of female high-school students reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” up from 36 percent in 2011. Though the pandemic undoubtedly contributed to a crash in adolescent mental health, the downturn began well before COVID hit.

For the record, the time period in question seems to correlate rather well with the Obama presidency, with a presidency that extolled feminist values. Hmmm.

Filipovic also places the blame on the lack of social connections, the lack of time girls spent with other girls. One might say that feminists made being a girl such a bad thing that most young women withdrew into themselves, and barely interacted with other young women. Women who want to join the vanguard of the revolution are likely to distrust other women. Are they friends or foes of the revolution?

So what has changed for the worse for teenage girls since roughly 2010? The forces behind their deteriorating mental health are opaque and complex, but one big shift has been a decline in the time teenagers spend with their friends in person, dipping by 11 hours a week—a decline that began before the pandemic, but was badly exacerbated by it.

Filipovic correctly points out that people are more resilient in dealing with trauma when they are more closely connected to friends. But, they are also more resilient when they do not pretend that sexual violence is the truth of relations between the sexes. 

If we want to replace our culture of trauma with a culture of resilience, we’ll have to relearn how to support one another—something we’ve lost as our society has moved toward viewing “wellness” as an individual pursuit, a state of mind accessed via self-work. Retreating inward, and tying our identities to all of the ways in which we’ve been hurt, may actually make our inner worlds harder places to inhabit.

How do you rescue women from their Persephone complex. Filipovic has one constructive idea.

In my interviews with women who have experienced sexual violence, I try not to put the traumatic event at the center of our conversations. My aim instead is to learn as much as I can about them as people—their families, their work, their interests, what makes them happy, and where they feel the most themselves. And I always end our conversations by asking them to reflect on how far they’ve come, and what they are proudest of.

Whereas certain politicians believe that the cure for despair and depression lies in hope, Filipovic has a better idea. The cure for despair and depression is pride.

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