You are not fucked up.

Perpetual footnote 1: You are not fucked up. You are having a perfectly normal reaction to a fucked up situation. (Slightly paraphrased from "Pump Up The Volume".)

...

(This just keeps coming up, so it needs to have its own spot here. Feel free to link to it whenever appropriate. I'd be interested to know when it happens, so commenting after you do so would be neat (but not at all required).)

I wasn't *planning* to make an impression...

I think a recent, brief rant of mine had been stewing inside me for years, waiting for an opportunity to burst out. On Thursday, I was in a training seminar with about twenty other people. The subject of mental illness came up. A young woman said that it seemed like women had more mental health problems than men: So many more women had anxiety, for example.

I got, um, a little more passionate than is usually seen there. I said, "About ten years ago, I read a study that found that women suffered more anxiety than men. They said, 'Gee, we wonder whether this is something intrinsic to women, or something situational.' When I read this, I thought, Jews in 1932 Germany suffered more anxiety than Christians. Gee, I wonder whether that's something intrinsic to Jews! When we FIX sexism in America, THEN we can talk about anxiety as a..." I didn't get to finish the sentence because of the roaring cheers. (I was probably one of three men in the room.) ^[1]

I've just made a hell of an impression on a lot of my new coworkers. As the overstimulation subsided, I thought, I probably just got more goodwill than I really earned. It's just words of support from a male ally. ^[2] I then reconsidered, No, that was also working to counter societal gaslighting, which tells women that they're crazy for being upset with how badly they're treated. Whatever; I'll take the approbation, and I'll live up to it.

1. Perpetual footnote 1.

2. A male feminist walks into a bar, because it was set so low.