Yes, Young Liberal Women Have Mental Health Issues. But...

All of us racist sexist homophobes are having a grand old time with the latest news -- reported by Instapundit -- that "Over 50% Of Liberal, White Women Under 30 Have A Mental Health Issue." Akshully the article's text puts it slightly differently, and in the interests of truth, justice, and the American Way, the result comes from people answering a poll, whose question was:

"Has a doctor or other health care provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?"

So, 56.3% of liberal white women aged 18-29 answered "yes" and 33.6% of liberal white men answered "yes." For white conservatives the numbers are 27.3% and 16.3%. The numbers go down as whites get older.

But do you see a rather important point? It is not "woman have mental health issues" but women reporting that a doctor told them they had a problem.

I think that we should take all this with a grain of salt. First of all, mental health treatment is what we might call a "cure of the soul," a job that was performed in the old days by priests and ministers. You would expect that secular people like liberals would seek "cure of the soul" from a mental health professional rather than a minister. Second is that no doctor or other heath professional would tell someone that they have a mental health problem unless their patient "signaled" to them that they would accept such a recommendation. I find, on the rare cases that I interact with the health care system, that the medical practitioner in question is keenly interested in knowing what you want to hear.

The other thing is the "women in the public square" issue that I keep an eye on. It comes from German sociologist Georg Simmel who wrote, over a century ago, that women were coming into the public square, due to various trends, and that we could expect that they would change the public square "to suit a more feminine sensibility."

I say that women do not like the male-created public square, which is a domesticated version of male fisticuffs. Women don't confront each other; they just don't.

Women also, you may have noticed, find "stress" to be a problem. For men, the whole point of "stress" is whether you are man enough to deal with it.

So I would say that educated women today have embarked on a life that is not well adapted to "a feminine sensibility." And I mean everything from consecutive "sexual relationships" to living together before marriage to abortion to combining career and family to divorce to managing finances. In my view, all of these aspects of a modern woman's life are experienced as "stressful" and an unjust imposition.

As I say, "women expect to be protected." What does that mean? It means that no woman can successfully run a household and raise kids and keep everyone healthy -- in other words create the next generation -- unless she is protected from the physical vicissitudes of life. And I say this not in a patronizing way, but as a definition of reality.

And when Simmel talks about adapting the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility" I interpret that as everything that women are trying to do in the public square from "safetyism" to "microaggressions" to sanctioning students in college that raise controversial questions.

This, in my view, goes right back to hunter-gatherers. If a male hunter-gatherer gets into a row with his band-mates, do you know what he does? He quits the band and joins another.

What! And you thought that tribes were tribes and ne'er the twain shall meet! Wrong! Tribes were invented later.

But here is what I read into that. If you are a woman in a hunter-gatherer band and you don't get on with the other women, then you will literally descend into hell. The other women will shun you and name and shame you and your life will be a perfect hell. And leaving the band for another was not an option, I suspect.

The whole culture of women not confronting each other, but complaining about each other behind their backs in conversations about "I can't believe she said that" is  all about the situation of women since time immemorial: that they have to make their life within the community that they were born into or were married into. It means that women have to get along with the other women.

To expect women to suddenly adapt to a more male culture of open outcry and verbal fisticuffs is essentially demanding that they drop the culture that human females have practiced since time immemorial.

And most women will find the "stress" of that to be intolerable. And blame the patriarchy. And encourage their doctor to recommend that they seek care from a mental health professional.