This post is part of the ongoing Alphabet Series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀

Although I’ve touched on this subject in other posts, I thought this would make a nice companion piece to E is for Emasculation. Emasculation is testosterone-fuelled hyperbole where men pretend that having their rapey privileges taken away or even just questioned is akin to the removal of their biological weapons of mass destruction: their cocks and balls. All men see their privilege to harm women and girls as a god or nature given right, and to even question that is a crime against manity. It’s puzzling and frankly, pathetic – if you lose your entire identity when it’s even suggested that you’re not allowed to do violence, what does that say about you and your class of creatures?

In my post, The Female Equivalent of Emasculation, I discuss whether women experience anything like what men do. My conclusion is ‘no’. In order to feel a stripping away of privilege or power, you actually have to have privilege and power, and even more importantly, you have to have them AND feel like you deserve them. Females don’t have privilege and they certainly don’t have any power, and most women don’t even feel like they deserve them, thanks to a lifetime of patriarchal brainwashing. So no, women can’t and don’t feel this unjustified and irrational rage that men often do. But they do experience something that absolutely ensures that they never will gain rights and power, let alone privilege or the feeling that they deserve anything but the suffering that is doled out in the name of male love.

So today, I is for Infantilization.

To infantilize is to constantly, and even systematically, treat women as if they are children or as less intelligent and capable than they are. It involves a whole host of language and behaviour patterns, is carried out by both men and women, and is often helped along by other patriarchal tools such as gaslighting. I’ve suggested before that infantilization is closely related to feminization, the enforcement of unnatural, gendered stereotypes that place females firmly under the male boot, ready to serve unthinkingly.

So let’s talk purpose and methods.

One could easily devote an entire book and even an entire research career to this topic. It is an international problem for over half the population, and generally seen as acceptable, if it’s noticed at all. Many men and women, including women claiming to be feminists, even consider infantilization to be sweet or sexy. But, infantilization is all about 1) transcending and erasing the boundaries of women and girls, 2) denying them power, intelligence, agency and recognition, and 3) breaking down their confidence. It starts in childhood when girls are more susceptible and vulnerable to harmful messaging. It is possible to infantilize a child by treating her as younger or less capable or less intelligent than she actually is. Boys are given free reign in all areas and bestowed with the idea that they are smarter and more talented than they truly are, while girls are protected and punished and denied the most basic freedoms and acknowledgement. By the time girls reach adulthood, they are well used to being treated like naive and even stupid children and often don’t notice that not much changes despite moving into a new phase of their lives. They are primed for heterosexual relationships and for mistreatment in the workplace.

More on the methods.

1) Transcending Boundaries

Girls are taught early on that their bodies are not their own. They are for public consumption. They see it on television, in advertisements, in the places where their clothes are bought. The entire world comments on their physical manifestation. But it comes from parents, too. The girl is over-protected and punished for things that boys can do freely. She is taught how to make her body small, to lower her voice, and silence her wants and needs. She is dressed to be consumed, not to consume or just exist. Mother presents her daughter to friends, family and relative strangers, and the girl is expected to accept being touched, held and fussed over. She is not allowed to say no as it’s rude or defiant. Denying her agency and body-privacy, mother infantilizes and thereby grooms her daughter for her future role as a compliant heterosexual fuckhole. By the time she reaches her teens and early adulthood, the average girl has little confidence, doesn’t know how to look at herself through her own eyes, and seldom holds or presents herself in a natural way in public. Out in the world, boys and men talk too much and take up more than their share of space, and she accommodates their privilege by silencing her voice and making her body smaller. Males touch her in ways they themselves would never accept, and she sees the attention as tender and loving instead of infantilizing, invasive or degrading. Males grip, and lead and force, and she goes limp, and follows, and accepts.

2) Denying Power and Capability

There are a million and one ways in which females are denied power and any acknowledgement of their achievements. I’ll discuss a few of them here.

The number one way to infantalize a woman is to focus on the physical. It might sound strange at first, as sex and sexuality are supposed to be mature or adult subjects, but in actuality, focusing on female appearance and women’s dichotomous status as either a mother or a child-free non-human, serves to infantilize women and completely ignore their achievements and actual contributions to society. Beauty is decidedly not an achievement. It is subjective and has no relevance, meaning or true value. If it had real, objective value, then men would have taken it over and made it the focus of their own lives. So it serves as a distraction and even obsession for so many girls and women, completely infantilizing them, depleting their limited finances, and turning their brains to mush. As manipulatable as children. A focus on the physical also blurs the lines between adult maturity and childhood in a sexual way, giving outlets for male pedophelia. Girls are pushed to become sexual beings and adult women regress under pressure to become more childlike and youthful in appearance. Women who eschew all things beauty and fashion-related are demonized, ostracized, and banished to a circle of hell that even Dante couldn’t conceive of.

All societies also focus on mother-worship, another non-achievement-based focus on the physical, yet considered the pinnacle of female success. The rewards women reap for getting knocked up are legion. You probably do better financially and socially if you become a mother and wife than if you go to university, and I’m not kidding. But I mean, let’s get real. How is motherhood the number one human female achievement if even cockroaches, giraffes, and mice can do it? This is infantilization – essentially, the childlike having children. And all the while, mediocre males have their career paths preserved, working mothers get maternity leave and baby showers in the workplace, and child-free women are ignored, held back, and denied opportunities and respect.

Women are also infantilized through language, either by being denied existence or by having their female status called out deliberately. The use of man, mankind or manpower is still in wide use and women are supposed to accept being adjunct, but unacknowledged, members of that group. If the tables were turned and we used ‘woman’ to describe all humans, males would start World War T (testosterone) and whine about emasculation and the pussification of society. We also refer to female doctors, but not male doctors, and on American television, female law enforcement is most often called ‘bitch cop’, which is not only infantilizing, but dehumanizing. My modern British ESL teaching materials still include words like ‘mailman’ instead of postal worker or letter carrier. And in North America, we still call female parking enforcement officers ‘meter maids’. In addition, women are regulary denied their titles that denote achievement, such as Dr. even going so far as to refer to esteemed women by their first names only. Instead, we become irrationally focused on titles denoting physical ownership status, namely Miss and Mrs., and frequently bestow diminutives, such as hon, sweetheart, beautiful, and my dear, on adult women, even in professional settings. The British even refer to elderly women, patronizingly, as ‘old dear’, while there is no infantilizing equivalent for old men.

When women demand that they be called Dr., there is often angry backlash, especially from other women. I find this puzzling as female achievement makes it easier for girls to develop professional goals and dreams and to actually have a chance at success. Higher education is a positively gruelling process, rife with misogyny and degradation, and women who have not gone through the process seem to think that educated women breathe refined air. I can tell you, as one of those educated women, that academia was in many ways, more misogynistic than other work settings I’ve experienced. I’d even go so far as to suggest that formal higher education is not necessarily the best option for women these days, unless there is a clear requirement for a specific degree. And I further suggest keeping one’s mouth shut if you are completely ignorant on a topic, especially when what is coming out of your mouth is shit directed at another woman. Anyhow, regarding language, there is no reason in the world where we need to be either linguistically sexing jobs or erasing the female sex entirely from our vocabulary. Language problems are soooo easily remedied, which makes it clear that there is a different motive for keeping things as they are. Yes, infantilization and disempowerment.

Men also constantly use their big mouths to infantilize women in another way, and this is mansplaining. I wrote a short post on this phenomenon a while back, so I’ll keep it brief here. Basically, men feel the need to talk at women. Teach them. Show them. Explain to them. But the problem is that most of the time, the woman or girl being talked at already knows. The female can be educated, skilled, intelligent, and experienced, and the male can be uneducated, unskilled, stupid, and inexperienced. And he knows all of this. But he still explains – or mansplains. It is the ultimate act of infantilization. Every single female on the planet has experienced this, usually thousands and thousands of times in her life. I’ve even had boy children do this to me. I’ve had Chinese male students try to mansplain my own language to me – even more significant as it is a very disrespectful thing to do to your teacher in Chinese culture, so there was an element of racism in there along with the infantilizing misogyny. I’ve also had a Korean man try to explain to me what arithmetic is despite the fact that I have a masters in statistics. These are only a few examples, but there are literally thousands of incidents in my life. And the more educated and skilled you are, the worse it is. Some women just accept it à la ‘we have to coddle the fragile male ego’. But I don’t. You have to be really careful though. Males are used to being able to say and do what they want to you, so reacting rationally and not in a childlike way – meaning that you challenge them – can lead to violence, and as I’ve experienced, you can lose your job and career opportunities if you dare to correct the situation.

3) Breaking Down Confidence

Research has shown again and again that females constantly underestimate their skills, abilities and intelligence, while males vastly overestimate what they can do. This is known, proveable, and we see it all the time. It is likely the number one determining factor in career success, or possibly number two, after connections (as in nepotism and Old Boys’ Clubs). We know that education and experience aren’t nearly as important as people tell us. But how well you can sell yourself, even if it’s all a lie, is. And while confidence is not always appreciated in women in the same way it is in men, an employer will still usually choose a confident woman over a hesitant or unsure one. Our world prefers shiny lies over quiet truths, so it is no wonder that men get the jobs and promotions and opportunities and recognition, and higher salaries.

It is also unsurprising that women will not only underestimate themselves, but the capabilities of other females. A woman will usually throw her support behind a demonstrably mediocre male as a potential, promising leader, than a proven, superior female. And not only is there no confidence in the women in question, but capable females will often be criticized and torn down by both men and women. You even see this in so-called ‘feminist’ communities where women discount a female voice because she is confident, outspoken, educated or appears to have a better-paying job. This is an attempt to infantilize a woman who so clearly breaks the rules about female success and confidence.

My general rule of thumb when evaluating male and female claims is this: take anything a male says about his abilities and cut it in half, and take anything a female says about herself and double it. It amazes me how many stellar, intelligent, capable, multi-talented, and over-educated women I’ve met who are barely getting by financially or who are working jobs that vastly under-utilize and under-value their skill sets. But this impacts single women and lesbians much more than married women because the latter have a husband’s income that keeps them from poverty. They don’t notice the problem unless the heterosexual contract doesn’t end up working out for them.

I can say the exact opposite of males – so many of them land well-paying jobs with opportunities for advancement and recognition despite average intelligence, laziness, lack of experience or education, and a lack of skills and capability. I believe a good part of this is due to the building up of confidence in males and the breaking down of confidence that a lifetime of infantilization inflicts on females. There are other factors that work in tandem, of course. Patriarchy is a multi-front assault on the female psyche.

What’s It All Mean?

As mentioned above, infantilization is a mechanism that serves to prevent women and girls from having power and rights and even believing that power and full human rights are possible for them. To give a female agency, confidence, and a complete sense of power over her body and life throws a wrench in the male privilege machine. Even liberal males want to maintain the illusion that some kind of equal exchange is going on, even when they know on some level that there is a power imbalance. Feel free to test this out by watching the rage flare up when you suggest to a liberal male that the so-called sex that he is having is actually consensual rape since unequal people cannot truly give consent. Men need women to depend on them for guidance, approval, and protection – the very things children require from parents. I argue that heterosexuality depends on the infantilization of women and girls, and I think it’s high time to stop dreaming about screwing your dad or grandpa. It’s time to grow up.

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