Female social control & the struggle for sovereignty
What's actually required to liberate ourselves?
I share this as background for my obsession with forms of female control. I welcome your reasoned discussion in the comments. I’ve got a subscriber chat as a dedicated space to discuss such phenomena.
I was six, and we had just moved into our first house. There was a new maroon carpet and 90s wallpaper with a busy floral pattern. I spilled water. My mother flew into a rage and beat me, like she often did in the years following, until I was too tall to overpower. Even then, though, I remember not running away and just standing there, taking it, as though there was no point in trying to escape. I told myself on some level that it must have been deserved.
A couple of times, I was taken to a psychologist because my general practitioner saw my misery. But I was never taken back because my mother knew I would complain about her abuse, and I distinctly remember being told that I can’t say anything or the state’d take me away, and that would be the ultimate shame on the family.
I clung to logic and reason as a talisman against all the chaos around me. My father never protected me; he just exposed the absence of logos in the household. I became its defender in an environment of unrestrained pathos. I couldn’t count on a man to protect me or a woman to nurture me, and so I tried to do everything for myself. Ironically, my strongest emotions are always triggered by irrational behavior or ideas imposed on me. The absence of logic has often driven me into rage. I've caused trouble in female society by thinking for myself my whole life.
Becoming a feminist: liberation theology
My mother ran away to the US to escape literal patriarchy and live a free life, which she did while oppressing me under patriarchal feminine sexual and behavioral norms. My clothes, friends, communication, and behavior were constantly policed. She even invaded my privacy at the most basic level by reading my diary. That is all aside from the constant threat of physical violence that hung over my head until I graduated from high school. That I'm writing these words at all is miraculous, because I've had chronic depression and anxiety since I can remember. It’s under control after a Herculean effort.
My mother, who seized her own independence, once told me that my own independence scared her.
My first strong identity was not Indian, liberal, or democrat, but feminist. I saw it as a liberating framework that could give me the language and confidence to demand my right to self-determination. My culture of origin was oppressively standing in the path of my independence. What I thought feminism was about:
Liberation from men and cultures that control women's sexuality
The freedom to self-determine
Thinking for oneself
Exercising agency in one's life
Developing resilience in the face of adversity
Feminism was a kind of liberation theology for me. I barely had friends because they found my mother scary and because I was poorer than they all; I couldn't afford expensive labels or many clothes, which is one primary vector of status games among girls.
Girls inflicted the most significant level of emotional cruelty on me throughout life, all the way to women in the present day. And like my mother, these girls and women were adept at presenting a moral face to the world. In a heterodox women’s group just last week, a woman said that my patterns in life probably mean I’m the asshole. I often wonder if I’m crazy because most people don’t see what I see. Maybe I am.
My relationship with women is bound up in my relationship with feminism. Most women I’ve befriended and encountered socially consider themselves feminists, or at least believe women should reach for self-empowerment. It’s a default ideological lens for women under forty-five.
My mother never called herself a feminist, but her story of escaping compelled marriage and poverty is undoubtedly a beacon of feminist ideas in action: that a woman could autonomously chase a better life than she had under overt patriarchy (Indian culture encourages preference for sons, but it is women who often uphold this preference, as I saw in my family). It was my grandmother who compelled my mother to marry to get rid of her.
The Enlightenment values on which first-wave feminism was founded gave my mother the chance at a better life with legal equality and a fresh start away from a natal family that shunned her for getting divorced. But make no mistake: the women in the extended family excluded my mother with the most zeal. Women carry culture in our bodies and police the bounds of acceptable social action.
I studied hard, though my GPA would indicate someone bored by school (it was a 3.8, which for an Indian kid is a C-) without the focus to improve. The abuse left me without a sense of safety in my own home, and I was anxious since I can remember. My emotional self-regulation was non-existent, and I learned to navigate the world alone.
Today, my relationship with my parents remains fraught. My returns to Gainesville are excruciating because my childhood keeps cropping up everywhere, like my twelve-year-old self is a ghost in the house.
Perhaps due to these experiences, I’m addicted to achievement (of any kind) and can’t find my self worth in simply being without production. My dopamine circuit is fucked. I’m no longer anxious all day by default, but I am medicated, and the balance is maintained through discipline regarding exercise, diet, and electronics. I hold myself and others to what they might call excessively high standards of behavior. I heard this last week, but don’t know how else to be. Excellence in every area of life is a north star for my psyche; if I could be that, I would be lovable.
Women both punish and constantly demand excellence. As a child, I used excellence as a shield and a coping mechanism. If I did well enough in school and went to college, I’d escape my house and make my parents proud (which I still perversely wanted to do even after it all). And they are. But that change also taught me that love is conditional.
Vignettes: female social control and expulsion
Feminism promised psychological and material liberation. After adolescence, I ceded my autonomy to grievance, self-pity, and social control, outsourcing my self-worth to social media. I share these because they were formative, not because they still hurt me.
At nine, my best friend abandoned me without an explanation. We were both from Brahmin parentage, but she was an heiress. Our being from the same religious community was irrelevant. I’ve been heavily conscious of how class colors experience since then.1
Three girls I considered friends in middle school mocked me relentlessly about everything, but they at least allowed me to claim to have friends.
In high school, one of the three ‘good’ middle school friends didn’t invite me to her birthday party as a freshman, but I found out at school, hearing everyone else talk about it. For almost the remainder of high school, I ate lunch under various trees or in the biology teacher’s classroom. I was so acutely aware of being a loser because I was invisible. I always wandered alone during trips to theme parks for band and chorus. If I’m not a loser anymore, make no mistake, it’s because I became impressive.
I liked a boy at fifteen. He liked me back but never said anything at the time. I found out about three years ago in a random Facebook message. I at least have the satisfaction of knowing that at least one boy saw me, too. But at the time, the female-driven exclusion dampened signals of anyone valuing me. Girls were taught platitudes that we are worthy, but the actions of the girls around me and my mother taught me I was not, and this experience isn’t unique. I internalized this to my own detriment; I didn’t have strong internal scaffolding then.
In college, I was mocked by women for being liked by men they saw as unfuckable losers. After getting my first boyfriend at nineteen, I was ostracized from a ‘friend’ circle of about fifteen people because the guy’s ex hated me for daring to date someone she broke up with. She and I weren’t friends, just in the same circle. Not one other woman ever told me they considered the behavior fucked up. We judged each other based on who was still a virgin (seriously), and my stoner self wasn’t well-regarded among them.
In the past ten years, I’ve lost many friends and three communities because I changed my mind given new information2 and couldn’t be controlled. Those social contexts cultivated the woke outlook and victim mindset that graduate school had seeded with postmodernism, feminism, and postcolonial theories.
But I’ve also gained many high-agency female friends who embrace accountability. They happen to be rare. The culture certainly discourages us from taking responsibility for our own actions, outcomes, and impact on others, despite the social justice types screaming about intention over impact. When I was mired in social justice, accountability was for everyone but me.
The sad thing is that if I claimed depression as an identity, called myself neurodivergent, queer, or gender nonconforming, Indian American, brown, etc., I would have more social standing among the people I constantly call out. I know because this was once true.
I was at a botanical garden on a trip with my women-only online community in 2018. I refused to stand during the national anthem at the amphitheater. The white women around me moved in front of me in a protective stance. At another meetup for a separate but overlapping group (the outgrowth of the first stolen from me by a woman) in 2017, Nashville, the white people were eager to perform their allyship every five minutes. They were the safe ones.
Elite women’s beliefs trickle down to the lower strata, such that Rob Henderson’s ‘luxury beliefs’ concept is better described as ‘luxury feminism’. I have always found it odd that all these commentators writing from a detached vantage about elite beliefs never seem to take the critique all the way, because the tendencies and beliefs they note are primarily held and pushed by women; they set the cultural direction for campuses and the workplace. Performative allyship was abundant for me, just not actual friendship.
I will suffer a million social deaths before I succumb to feminine social authority again. In the post-industrial age, women have no excuses for subordinating truth to social harmony. That is precisely how the Overton window has narrowed: everyone is too scared to challenge the most fragile person in the room, who dictates truth. Is that how we want to live?
Control by women at work
From 2011 to 2019, I worked in female-dominated professions: teaching, recruiting, and marketing. Success standards were often arbitrary, tied more to social status and likability than measurable outcomes. There was no shortage of gaslighting from both men and women, but the most damaging career setbacks came from women.
A few high-agency women did elevate me, lest you assume this is about all those who cut me down. I’ve realized that the sisterhood is a mirage unless both women are secure in their skin.
Even recently, I saw how a female manager had quietly held me back. Maybe it wasn’t personal. Maybe it wasn’t intentional. But to someone who didn’t come from money, it was harmful all the same. Once she was laid off, suddenly people saw me, and I could seize the opportunity without worrying about upstaging the women around me. I often do, and they notice, but they can’t sabotage me because I have support laterally and vertically from men. Men are usually more willing to recognize my talent to its fullest than women generally have been.
True sovereignty through discernment and self-knowledge
Feminism promised that women would reach their potential. But in practice, I’ve seen the opposite. The scarcity mindset among women isn’t inevitable—it’s chosen. And it’s that mindset, not male oppression, that has suppressed more of my potential than anything else.
I emphasize the role of feminism because it virtue washes anti-social behaviors women have evolved to display rather than correcting them, despite all the crowing about patriarchy. It provides excuses for not rising above our biology.3
I don’t cite biological and psychological4 research for determinism, but rather to show that the behaviors I’m imploring women to transcend are deeply rooted and require casting off to reach our higher selves. I’m asking women to strive for something more than status games and attachment to our youth and beauty.
Instead, we must seek the path of discernment through philosophy, which means cultivating a love of knowledge to achieve self-actualization. It cannot be an accident that the difference between my life five years ago and today has correlated with a change in my inner orientation and a casting off female-enforced ideological control.
We constantly tell each other not to care what people think, but we're not taking concrete steps to break out of the panopticon of female control. Breaking out of prison requires risking social capital. Thus, casting off the desire to seek status requires embracing knowledge and discernment. Women, however, are often hostile to this sort of inquiry because of how we reinforce know-nothingism among each other. As I imbibed from Classical Indian and Greco-Roman philosophy, integrating logic with emotion, living in balance, and acting for the greater good are pillars of a good life.
The highest compliment I can receive is sharing this with others.
In case you’re wondering, American Hindus (whom we call “South Asian Americans”) are majority high caste, with Brahmins (the white people of India, in that Brahmins have another moniker in Sanskrit that translates to “golden”) disproportionately represented.
See Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, among others.
For more, consult Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes by Joyce Benenson.
Campbell A. The evolutionary psychology of women's aggression. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2013 Oct 28;368(1631):20130078. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2013.0078. PMID: 24167308; PMCID: PMC3826207.
I believe that Ursula K. LeGuin pointed out that, if all roads lead to Rome, even if you walk away from Rome, you're still on the Roman road.
Letting yourself be defined in terms of your enemies and their ideology means you can never be free.
Thanks for the post. One of the suppressed truths is that many working women that were surveyed preferred to work under a male boss, than a female boss.