Liberal Munchausen Syndrome

Originally published via Armageddon Prose:

I have coined what I believe to be an original term — forgive me if someone somewhere out there in the info-sphere has already come up with it — based on a recent soap opera-esque essay of defeat and despair among liberal women following the vanquishing of the Karamel-uh entity, she who was anointed to be the First Historic Whatever in the White House.

That term is: Liberal Munchausen Syndrome.

Via Cleveland Clinic (emphasis added):

“Munchausen syndrome (also known as factitious disorder imposed on self) is a mental health disorder where you falsify, exaggerate, or induce physical, emotional or cognitive disorders.
People with factitious disorders act this way because of an inner need to be seen as ill or injured...
If you have Munchausen syndrome, you may undergo painful or risky medical tests and operations in order to get the sympathy and special attention given to people who are truly ill. You may secretly injure yourself to cause signs of illness. You may add blood to your urine, or use a rubber band to cut off circulation to a limb. Some people will cut or burn themselves, poison themselves, reopen wounds, rub feces or dirt into a wound to cause infection, or eat food contaminated with bacteria…
The online community has groups for people with physical and mental/emotional health issues. They’re meant to be a safe place where people who have a disorder can come together and discuss their difficulties, share tips and provide support. Examples of support groups include those for leukemia patients, cancer patients and cystic fibrosis patients.”

This teenage twit, who clearly attends — based on context clues such as the unisex bathroom facilities she mentions — a highly affluent liberal private school, opens her extremely emotionally vulnerable essay with outrage that her male classmates weren’t nervous wrecks biting their fingernails and crying into each other’s shoulders the day after the election.

Via The New York Times (emphasis added):

“On the morning after the election, I walked up the staircase of my school. A preteen was crying into the shoulders of her braces-clad peer. Her friend was rubbing circles on her back.
I continued up the stairs to the lounge, where upperclassmen linger before classes. There I saw two tables: One was filled with my girlfriends, many of them with hollows under their eyes. There was a blanket of despair over the young women in the room. I looked over to the other table of teenage boys and saw Minecraft on their computers. While we were gasping for a breath, it seemed they were breathing freely.
We girls woke up to a country that would rather elect a man found liable for sexual abuse than a woman. Where the kind of man my mother instructs me to cross the street to avoid will be addressed as Mr. President. Where the body I haven’t fully grown into may no longer be under my control. The boys, it seemed to me, just woke up on a Wednesday.”

Of all the misogynistic hatecrimes, imagine the banal evil of playing Minecraft the day after the brave and stunning first-historic-whatever corporate robot-whore has literal violence committed against her by Deplorable voters!

Continuing:

“I am scared that the Trump administration will take away or restrict birth control and Plan B — the same way it did abortion. I am scared that the boys I know will see in a triumphant, boastful Mr. Trump the epitome of a manly man and model themselves after him. I was 8 years old the first time he was elected. Now I am 16. I am still unable to vote, but I am so much more aware of what I have to lose…
Eight years ago, I was too young to feel the full force of Hillary Clinton’s loss. Now at 16, I’ve had the wind knocked out of me. On Wednesday, I was flush with anger — but it was diluted by an even stronger feeling: defeat. I saw it in the eyes of women in my subway car that morning. I saw it in the barista at the coffee shop on the corner, the female security guard at my school and in the face of my history teacher.
In a terrible way, I’ve never felt more part of a sisterhood or more certain that pain is shared within that family. I wish the consequences of this moment for young women punctured the apparent indifference of so many men and boys I saw that day. I wish they could breathe in what the women and girls I know have been inhaling since Nov. 5.”

Looking back at the 1950s, would it be possible to have imagined a teenage girl getting paid by The Newspaper of Record to have an emotional meltdown disguised as a thought-provoking essay after, say, Dwight Eisenhower won the election?

Is this the bounty of feminism we were all promised?

Surely we can find some middle ground here.

Do I, or most Americans, believe that women should be allowed to open bank accounts and go to school and otherwise participate in society without male chaperones?

Yeah, sure; the ideal isn’t Taliban rule with women de-personed, never to be seen or heard in public — women who, by the way, have real problems that extend beyond insurance companies covering their Plan B abortions after a night of boozing and wanton sex.

Via The Guardian (emphasis added):

“New Taliban laws that prohibit women from speaking or showing their faces outside their homes have been condemned by the UN and met with horror by human rights groups.
The Taliban published a host of new “vice and virtue” laws last week, approved by their supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, which state that women must completely veil their bodies – including their faces – in thick clothing at all times in public to avoid leading men into temptation and vice.
Women’s voices are also deemed to be potential instruments of vice and so will not be allowed to be heard in public under the new restrictions. Women must also not be heard singing or reading aloud, even from inside their houses…
From now on, Afghan women are also not allowed to look directly at men they are not related to by blood or marriage, and taxi drivers will be punished if they agree to drive a woman who is without a suitable male escort.”

Perhaps this future New York Times columnist could bring herself to write a teary essay about Islamic fundamentalism’s stance on women’s rights sometime.

But naw, that would be Islamophobic and there’s no social cache to be had that way; let’s cry more about the social imperative for drive-thru abortion clinics on every American corner for Equity™.

Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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