New Blog Feature: The Female Side

evolutiontheorist open thread

In response to the suicide of Kathleen Forth, I’ve created a new blog feature, The Female Side. It’s really just an open thread for female readers.

Life can be isolating, especially if you have an unusual personality or are pretty introverted. This end of the internet doesn’t have that many women in it, which can make it doubly isolating.

Of course my intention is not to make a sad and lonely place, but a place where women can have a pleasant time together. (Work in progress.)

My fine male readers, you are welcome to use the About post as an open thread (people already do) and really, everyone is welcome to post off-topic comments on any thread. It’s fine.

Off-topic, but does anyone know how to get in touch with Peter Frost? Asking for a friend.

13 thoughts on “New Blog Feature: The Female Side”

  2. I don’t think I’d heard of her before (but I’m starting to realize that my memory isn’t as great as I like to think) but that was an interesting and intense read.

    Regarding the new feature, is there some special setting? I don’t see any comments of a place to make comments when I go to that page.

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    • Oh you’re right. Shit. The “about” page gets comments all the time, so when I added another page, I just assumed people could post comments there, too (this is a blog, after all! You post comments on it!)

      I’ll have to fix that. Thank for pointing it out.

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      • Cool, glad I wasn’t going crazy. I even registered a new wordpress account to see if maybe I needed to actually be logged in or something, but that wasn’t it. (so now I have two wordpress accounts, neither of which I use…)

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    • I don’t think I’d ever heard of her before people were discussing her death. For that matter, I’m barely ware of “rationalists” or “Effective altruists” as a *community* and not just, I don’t know, some guys who publish a report once a year about what the most efficient charities are. But it occurred to me while reading that for women who like female-dominated things, it’s easy to find other women to hang out with and be friends with, but for women whose interests fall into more male-dominated fields have a much harder time finding women like themselves to be friends with. Even some of my readers (even I!) have expressed more or less this sentiment. Thus, this new space.

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      • I think another issue is that once you aren’t quite mainstream in one way or another, you run into the high school clique situation where all the non-conformists non-conform the same way… (I’ve often felt like that person in the crowd in Life of Brian when everyone else is saying “We are all individuals!” and shouting “I’m not!”…)

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  4. At the risk of being scourged for being an unfeeling Male evil bastard I think she over reacted. When I first started reading I assumed she had some story of some sort of horrendous rape but she was touched and kissed when unwanted??? I’ve had girls touch me unwanted before and while it was annoying I would hardly kill myself over it. Girls believe they can touch Men anytime they want. I also think that she really has the wrong idea by hanging this all on Males. The real problem is assholes. Assholes are everywhere. I’ve been attacked assholes. I’ve even once been attacked by a Women once. I really hated that because she used her Female pass to attack me while I couldn’t really hit her back. Many Women are assholes but don’t usually attack you because they are weaker. Women frequently touch other Women in assholy ways just like Men and also fight each other.

    This Women was way too sensitive. If the massive amounts of Men that kill themselves gave their reasons and they were of this level no one would care. No one cares.

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    • Suicide is almost always an over-reaction to life’s problems, which is why people try to prevent other people from committing suicide. (I suspect, though, that there are details in her personal life that did not get put in the suicide note. For example, she talked about reporting rape to the police and getting turned away. I don’t think she tried to report someone touching her thigh.)

      That said, there are two things to her complaint that I do find significant and more widely relevant:

      The first is just the difficulty of being a minority within a minority–the kinds of folks who join rationalist groups are already rare, and among them, women are even rarer–which led to many social difficulties and social isolation. I believe that people are generally happier when they are around people like themselves, whatever “like themselves” happens to be, and the lack of women she could hang out with was a problem.

      I also hear this same lament from other women around this side of the internet. It’s not that they dislike men or feel suicidal, but just that sometimes it’s nice to have other women around, just as I’m sure men sometimes enjoy hanging out with other men, and that’s hard when most of the people around are men.

      Now this, I said to myself, this is a problem I can help with.

      Second, I think much of what she was feeling/experiencing, such as the desire to be protected by a strong male, was entirely normal, but no one told her that! I mean, women going after firefighters or soldiers is as old as time. “Strong and protective” are two of the most important traits in a romance novel’s hero. She wanted a husband to protect her and put a stop to all of the other men expressing sexual interest in her, and the morons around her apparently reacted with “Huh. That’s weird. I’ve never heard of that concept.”

      Not every marriage is happy, and I don’t know what other mental illnesses she might have had or other factors that might have driven her to suicide, but I think it’s safe to say that if she’d been married, she might have been happy and healthy and alive today.

      The left encourages women to delay marriage, delay childbearing, and generally to see people as detached from any evolved, animalistic social or gender roles. But of course we are evolved creatures, and we want things like love and companionship.

      Yes, women are sensitive. They also want to be treated differently in life than men do. That’s part of what makes men and women different from each other, and we deny it to our own folly.

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