Feminist Tumblr Syndrome
9th January 2016
The Other McCain just can’t look away; it’s like a horrible traffic accident.
It is perhaps necessary, for readers not familiar with Third Wave feminist jargon, for me to explain that “dfab” means designated female at birth — biologically, she’s female — and “demigirl” is “a gender identity describing someone who partially, but not wholly, identifies as” female. Whenever I encounter bizarre jargon terms like this (which are very common in Feminist Tumblr) my first impulse is alway to wonder, “Has she consulted an endocrinologist?”
This is not merely sarcasm. Because I intend to include a chapter on Feminist Tumblr in the second edition of Sex Trouble, I’ve plowed through enough of these blog profiles that various patterns and clusters of symptoms have become apparent to me. “Feminist Tumblr Syndrome” typically involves a combination of mental illness and abnormal sexuality. There may be feminists who are both (a) sane and (b) heterosexual, but none of those women are running Tumblr blogs.
These women are a non-random set — there is a pattern, as I say — and in many cases, the Feminist Tumblr blogger will describe herself in ways that seem symptomatic of endocrine disorders. I find myself wondering, “Has your doctor checked your thyroid function? Do you have any problems with your metabolism? What about your hormone levels? Is there some kind of underlying gynecological problem? An undetected cyst somewhere? Could you maybe ask the doctor to run an MRI?”
It is difficult to believe that an entirely healthy 20-year-old would be spending all her time on Tumblr, describing herself as a bisexual “dfab white demigirl,” claiming she is the victim of a “hostile environment” and ranting about Star Wars characters.