Angry Young Women

I am not sure what they are drinking in the Netherlands, but that supposedly enlightened nation just allowed a healthy 22 year old woman, by name of Zoraya ter Beek, to kill herself. It’s called assisted suicide, and it has its proponents. 

One must note that this same country is responsible for some of the appalling research into gender dysphoria, and thus, has supported child mutilation. 

I have already opined on this appalling practice, here, and, will repeat myself, to the effect that it is grossly irresponsible and even malpractice for a psychiatrist to trigger the wish for assisted suicide by declaring that a case is hopeless. 

The psychiatrist who told ter Beek that he had tried everything and that she would never feel better, should be deprived of his license. Removing all hope, dashing any chance that future treatment might do better, is professionally unacceptable.

You have to wonder about a healing profession where a serious professional does not seem to be aware of the simple fact that telling people that there is no hope, no recourse, no chance for improvement-- produces negative psychological effects.

Scarily, the conditions that ter Beek was suffering, anxiety, depression and borderline personality disorder did not prevent her from having a boyfriend and a home. And yet, how often have we heard mental health professionals tout the great work that they have been doing on these conditions. Surely, they are treatable. 

We are not talking about terminal cancer in a nonagenarian. We are talking about an otherwise healthy young woman who has been persuaded by her doctors that she might just as well die. One might respond that she would have done as well to be angry at her inept psychiatrist and learn to express her rage.

This tells us something about the state of mental health care in the Netherlands. Apparently, the failures have not been limited to that nation.

Nowadays more than a handful of sufferers have chosen to indulge in something like rage therapy. They go out into the woods with sticks and beat the ground until it cries out. 

There is nothing new about it. The practitioners of this pseudo-therapy are following principles that have been around for quite some time. Whether it is primal scream therapy, proposed by Arthur Janov, or cushion beating therapy offered by Alexander Lowen, the notion that you need but express your negative feelings, thereby purging them, has been around for decades. 

Unfortunately, it has not worked for decades. So young healers have been selling it to a new group of gullible females, in the guise of witchcraft.

Olivia Reingold reports on it for The Free Press:

A couple dozen women, plus one purple-haired man, are screaming at the top of their lungs over Zoom. Some are in their bedrooms, whacking Swiffers and broomsticks onto their mattresses. One blonde woman is outside in the tall grass, heaving in a child’s pose. 

“Let all your pain out,” their leader, Mia Banducci, a 36-year-old self-described “ambassador for the ancient magikal way,” yells while gasping for breath. “Let everything you’ve held back out.” 

This is a rage ritual, an event that Banducci bills as an opportunity to “release emotions that have been shamed or suppressed within you for years, even generations.” 

“A lot of women didn’t grow up with men who care about them. They grew up with men who abuse them and talk down to them, spoke unkindly to them, and they’ve never had an opportunity to stand up for themselves,” she told Fox’s Jesse Watters. Going on one of her retreats “gives them a really safe space to individually and collectively release some of the anger that they’ve perhaps been burdened by for their entire life.”

It’s the old story of expressing your repressed emotions. There is nothing very original about this form of witchcraft, but women who have failed at therapy seem apt to try it on, for size.

One notes that the exercise itself solves nothing. Even if you are enraged about the planet, about the environment, about men or about the patriarchy, getting in touch with these feelings will not in any way help you to learn how to do something about it. Or better, to live a more constructive life.

We would get a step closer to the truth if we qualified the rage in question. We should call it impotent rage, the rage of people who may or may not have reason to be enraged, but who are not doing anything about the situation that might or might not have caused it.

Impotent is the opposite of empowered. It is not the least irony that these young women, their minds supersaturated with feminist ideology, should feel incapable of taking consequential steps to improve their lives. 

Their feminist godmothers taught them to complain, to whine and to grieve. They taught them a bevy of dysfunctional attitudes, the kind that make them less likely to have good marriages and even less likely to have solid careers. 

And so they are angry, even incensed, that reality does not fulfill their beliefs and expectations, and that life has not turned out the way feminists promised.

It’s the new femininity, in touch with the goddess but perfectly incapable of doing anything constructive in the world. Is this what feminism has come to?

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