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

In 2022, a 13-year-old boy I was tutoring told me in very plain English: “You are not a normal person.” My response was: “You’re right. I’m not.” On the surface, the comment didn’t seem to be meant to be an insult – trust me, I’ve been insulted all my life with regard to my non-conformity, and I’ve been called worse than ‘not normal’ – but kids tend to be blunt and honest, unless they’ve been abused or punished enough to have learned to keep their mouths shut, or unless they’ve just simply been trained to develop social skills and a filter. Boys tend to have a lot more freedom of speech, of course, and can pretty much say what they want without consequences. In this case, I found the comment to be a bit suspicious as I’d discovered in past classes, that at even at 13, this boy had already started tapping into his natural latent misogyny, and had developed a basic arsenal of male logic fails to use against females talking about fact-based male violence. So, I figured I’d turn this new and potentially misogynistic male brain fart into a multi-purpose ESL lesson. We’d indirectly discuss how not to put women into patriarchal boxes through an analytical and support-your-argument exercise, so I asked for more information about his dudely deduction. There was nothing unexpected in the conversation that followed. Basically, it boiled down to the observable mismatch between my age, thinking, and behaviour and the typical thinking and behaviour expected of a woman my age. The point I wanted to hit home was that not being normal didn’t equate to something bad. The male skull is thick, however, and the neurons so few and far between, so I doubt the exercise made much of a dent.

What I didn’t discuss with the boy, however, was that in some ways, I am completely normal.

Most kids can deal with talking to someone who isn’t normal. Most haven’t fully absorbed the incorrect belief that abnormal is dangerous. The average ‘normal’ adult is very threatened by people who think critically, who ask questions, who challenge commonly held practices and beliefs, and who poke at protected groups and systems. Fragile systems can crumble if you mess with them too much, and patriarchy is just such a fragile system. Both right-wing religious systems and left-wing ‘democracies’ depend on and protect patriarchy and do their utmost to keep women following the path of normalcy as they define it.

Whereas some kids actually really enjoy talking to someone like me, I find that I make most normal adults uncomfortable simply because I am not normal, and adults tend to be set in their rigid ways after years of being rewarded for conforming. When they meet me, they don’t know what male-defined lady-category to put me in. This can be scary to both men and women. Most women generally don’t trust other women as per patriarchal programming, and as a woman who so clearly doesn’t follow the rules? Well, let’s just say I’ve been on the receiving end of some nasty, petty and mind-boggling reactions – usually passive aggression, insults, infantilizing and outright shunning. Handmaiden psychology and behaviour are a major source of sadness for me. Some men will show intrigue at my ‘weirdness’ until they realize I am not into playing their fucking mind games based on antagonizing me – the game where men always win in the end and women submit and accept defeat.

I got interested in conformity and categorization and manipulation in childhood. When I was about 13 or 14, I wanted to be a psychologist. It was in my blood, but it was also a suitable discipline for both my personality and the way my mind works. I was already attending the occasional university psych class, and I was a question-asker, truth-teller, and analyst, by nature. One evening, at dinner, I asked my psychologist-father: “What does ‘normal’ mean?” My asshole-mother, a woman who devoted her entire existence to sabotaging my education and destroying any chance I had at developing self-confidence, visibly rolled her eyes at me, her clearly not-normal daughter, and my father preened at the chance to expound on his area of expertise. Despite my issues with my father, I did get a thorough answer – 10 different ways to understand what ‘normal’ means, although none having anything to do with feminism, specifically. So rather than listing these 10 definitions, I’ll talk about women and normalcy, and why it ends up being so important to patriarchy.

A Basic Definition

Just to put us all on the same page, we’ll define ‘normal’ very basically as deliberately conforming to or unintentionally meeting a standard, and thus, acting, thinking and looking like the majority. There are value-laden words associated with ‘normal’, so rather than just thinking that normal is just another word for ‘average’, it is also associated with lacking problems, being successful, and being free of disease or weakness or deficiency, etc. I’ll discuss an aspect of this a bit in the section on morality. We could also talk about statistical normalcy as well as cultural norms, but I don’t want to get into all of that in this article. Culture is going to be a separate post, and who knows, I may return to my roots and talk about statistics some time in the future. For now, I have a few points I want to get into below.

Pathologizing Women – Males are the Default, Dammit!

No matter where you find yourself in the world or in time, one thing is apparent. Males are the default – well, at least according to males. Instead of logically separating males and females and allowing them to exist on their own spectrums, males define a single spectrum where males are normal and females are not. When placed on this default ‘human’ (male) spectrum, women and girls are aberrations, pathological, incomplete men, lesser versions of ‘normal’, and you can express this lack of humanity in so many ways. It all comes down to women being a problem. This viewpoint is essential to patriarchal rule. It keeps women off-balance, second-guessing and hating themselves, competing with other women over crumbs of approval, and wasting their very limited money, energy and time on unimportant and distracting tasks instead of achieving anything that would make their lives and health better. For males, this tactic of abnormalizing females serves to keep them in power without having to work very hard or meet any kind of standards themselves, and to have a constant supply of insecure and approval-seeking slaves boosting their egos, keeping them clean and fed, and providing ideas and output to steal.

The idea that males are the default and females are abnormal and problematic infects all areas of life. Tools and machines are designed for male bodies. Health research is done primarily on males and then incorrectly and often dangerously applied to females. Things that female bodies and minds experience are turned into diseases and then either brutalized through medical ‘treatment’ or written off as imaginary lady-bullshit or crazy-talk. Psychological theories are developed to explain why female thinking and behaviour are pathological and inferior. Language is one of the most important ways to establish male standards and defaults to the exclusion and harm of females, to normalize hate-speech against women, or just to erase females altogether. Jobs and skill domains dominated by males are superior and well-compensated, but become devalued if women are allowed to participate and end up outshining males, which they always do.

It may come as no surprise that it is probably more accurate to see females as the more complete human given that the X chromosome is more robust and information-rich than the Y and all fetuses start out female. And I’m going to amend that last part after some online discussion on this topic that all fetuses start out ‘unweaponized’, and then male fetuses become weaponized as a sort of biological compensation for being genetically deficient or incomplete. Other biology-oriented feminists have written more extensively on what goes on in the womb, so I won’t go into the details of female completeness and of males as possible genetic mutations early in human evolution. Suffice it to say that there is a simple and clear purpose in painting females as abnormal and deficient despite the ridiculousness of the idea and evidence to the contrary. Males design and control things to deliberately put females at a disadvantage, and then use any resulting and expected female failure or non-presence in the male-dominated world as proof positive of female inferiority and abnormality. Perfect examples of confirmation bias: one of many male cognitive biases or logical fallacies used to maintain dominance. And this further serves to cover up and paint male inadequacies as perfectly normal.

Normal, Natural, Moral and Their Conflation

Many people conflate the terms normal, natural and moral. They can occur at the same time, but they are not actually related nor do they necessarily belong together. Here is what they mean, and where we run into problems. Remember here, we are talking about human thoughts and behaviours.

Normal means typical or something done by the majority of people. If you, your thoughts and behaviours are normal, you are likely fitting in and not standing out in any way. The best way to be normal is to follow rules, avoid analyzing or questioning things, joining acceptable groups, and keeping your head down.

Natural, on the other hand, is poorly understood, but can be summed up as something that occurs without effort, doesn’t need to be forced, and needs little effort to maintain. Think about what having a natural talent for something means. You seem to be good at it right off the bat, you need little training to become an expert, and you don’t need to work that hard to maintain your skills. You also don’t need an overseer to punish you and correct you every time you make a mistake because you’re generally getting it right on your own. Unnatural is the opposite. If something is not natural for you, first of all, you probably won’t gravitate towards it, and if your participation is considered important, people are going to put a lot of effort into forcing you to do it, and to do it correctly, and not to quit.

I believe heterosexuality in women is a prime example of the unnatural. Heterosexuality is harmful to females, but it is the foundation of male dominance, so it is crucial that all girls and women participate. Because it is unnatural, it needs to be enforced. Males and their handmaidens put an enormous amount of effort into grooming girls from birth for lives of accepted penetrative sex (rape) and subservient relationships with males, and females who don’t comply are punished in a variety of ways that can be extremely dangerous and isolating. Given this, it makes sense that homosexual males vastly outnumber lesbians publicly. Lesbians pose a much bigger threat to the system of male dominance than gay men do. So, for females, heterosexuality is normal because most women comply with their programming and following the rules, but it’s highly unnatural. If it were natural, males wouldn’t need their system of patriarchy, coercing, controlling, threatening, and hurting females in all possible ways. I’ve written more on this topic here. Unfortunately, most people call something unnatural natural and vice versa, and when biased systems of morality or ethics are applied, things can go horribly wrong.

Males, as a class, are violent predators. It is both normal and natural, in this case. They are born weaponized with violent tendencies that are highly noticeable early in childhood and it is generally accepted as how things are, à la ‘boys will be boys’ – male violence is considered normal and no big deal. Further, nobody is forcing them to try to dominate or behave in dehumanizing and sadistic ways – this is natural for males. It’s easy for them, and they are very good at it. Trying to force them through education NOT to rape and torture and kill females, animals and nature is unnatural and doesn’t work. Interestingly, people privately or subconsciously accept that both of these are true, but publicly and if questioned, many will try to pass off atrocious male behaviour as one-offs (aka not normal) or fixable (aka not natural, but socialized). In this way, we never have to deal with male violence as a pandemic requiring a real solution.

Sadly, mostly in the normalization process, which I’ll discuss next, and in getting females to accept unnatural conditions and treatment, the male dominance system relies upon the application of moral judgments or ethical arguments. Very basically, normal is good. Abnormal is bad. Shaming, guilting, and instilling fear as well as handing out intermittent reward crumbs can go a long way to breaking down a woman or girl’s sense of self and certainty and logical ability. As a result, we see a lot of hate- and fear-driven reactions to natural, but abnormalized, female tendencies, such as lesbianism and female separatism, and those reactions are likely as violent as they are because of the false morality that has been a major part of the heteronormalization process.

The Normalization-Acceptance Process

Normalization, or the process of making something accepted as normal, is done through repeated exposure, for the most part. The more you see and hear something, the more familiar and ‘comfortable’ (I use that term loosely) it becomes. It is a psychological process. And you can normalize just about anything, even truly horrible acts. Think about things you have learned when exposed to other cultures, for example, and if you’ve had the chance to live there for an extended time, the things that may have shocked you at first, start to become part of your daily experience and thus become normal to you over time. We also see this across generations as behaviours once thought to be scandalous or abnormal are accepted, every-day behaviour today. It is not necessarily a bad thing when norms change over time. Sometimes, this is called ‘progress’. But it can also be called ‘desensitization’ when repeated exposure to harmful practices becomes business as usual for society over time.

And this is what patriarchy depends on to maintain itself, and how it deals out backlash when women start making tiny forays into becoming human. For example, normalization is what we’ve been seeing in pornography since its inception. Of course, men have been sexually exploiting women throughout history, but with the advancement of technology, they have been pushing sadistic limits. It has been a gradual process, so most males probably don’t even notice that they need more and more visual violence against women to get off these days. One upon a time, a static photo of a naked woman was enough to inspire a boner and its nasty aftermath. But these days, many men need to see a female child beaten and raped by a group of men on video to get the job done. Normalization. And in this case, there should be moral/ethical arguments attached to this, as men have gone so far as to legally have this called an art form, fantasy, and freedom of speech. Not crime or human rights abuses. And contrary to what males say, these ‘fantasies’ that they have superhumanly managed to compartmentalize have translated not into more fantasy, but actual, increasingly violent sex with live female partners (see the British article to consensual violent sex in my sidebar). Porn does not cause violence against women and girls, like socialization essentialists erroneously believe. MALES cause violence and were committing violence before porn existed. But porn absolutely does normalize violence against women and girls, and serves as both a reward (orgasm) and permission to act out their rape fantasies on girls and women and to enjoy and feel entitled to the harm they cause, while pretending it isn’t harm at all.

The “New Normal”

This is an increasingly and annoyingly popular phrase that’s used in a range of situations to describe a new standard, and often, what your life is going to be like after some kind of nasty event. Interestingly, it is NEVER used when talking about rape and how women and girls are supposed to deal with that. I think there are a few reasons for this.

1) Rape is something almost all women and girls experience in one form or another (date rape, forcible rape, coercive rape, consensual rape, etc) at least once in their lives. It is part of our experience as females across time and place under patriarchy. It is quite possibly the quintessential female experience. And I guess if you haven’t had a dick put in you yet in your life, you are both lucky and abnormal – and I know how weird that sounds. So given that rape is a normal experience given that most women experience it, and we never consider normal to be traumatic nor something we have to recover from or suffer with, then we can understand why rape is treated as a joke or no big deal.

2) Rape is something only females experience, therefore, it is trivial because males have deemed females to be trivial. It really helps the system of male domination if an experience is sex-specific and thus can be written off as lies or crazy lady bullshit. But if that doesn’t work – and sometimes it doesn’t – males will do their best to undermine what is going on and to steal the experience and make it their own. Men have done this with rape in Western countries when women demanded attention to its prevalence. The whole ‘men can be raped, tooooo!!!’ movement, helped along by lib-fems and even some radical feminists, is serious mind-fuckery, and I’ve talked about this in other posts. Rape can no longer be treated as a hate crime thanks to men, and the women who cry for them.

3) Rape is both narrowly and nebulously defined by men at the same time. It is something that happens in dark alleys and in other exceptional circumstances. So it is a rare event, supposedly, and men tell us that women lie about being raped all the time. So we don’t talk about it except to fearmonger in order to keep girls and women in line. As a result, we don’t prepare girls for what they will likely experience at some point. It just happens to ‘someone else’, usually bad girls who deserve it. And these days, we even tell select groups of women that they both lie about rape and are privileged anyway, therefore rape doesn’t really happen to them. And if they do report rape, they are probably taking the spotlight away from other women whose rapes are worse and constant… Yet, despite (or maybe because of) all the male-controlled messaging, all women are afraid of rape. And ding, ding ding, hence the success of the forced heterosexuality campaign. The rapist class offers its protection services from all the other members of the rapist class to the rapee class. And this is in exchange for consensual rape. It’s flawed logic that most women buy into. It’s kind of like letting bank robbers guard the bank vault in exchange for skimming a little off the top, consensually speaking… The bottom line is that when you are eventually raped, you usually don’t understand that you’ve been violated even if you know something is definitely wrong. It’s ‘normal’ womanhood, after all, and you’ve been groomed for the experience your entire life. If normal means typical, then yes, being a rape victim is absolutely normal. You don’t talk about it, and therefore you aren’t offered a ‘new normal’, but are expected to function as normal-normal, which implies that nothing is wrong.

Conclusion

I’ve said this many times in past posts: female people have normal and natural designations forced upon them because that is what patriarchy is built on and depends on to keep chugging along. We have no idea what a natural woman looks like. The ‘normal’ woman is not natural – violence and threats are not needed when something is natural. Woman has always been a male construction, and as a girl, she was guided and punished into her role most directly by her mother, and then through school and various other public institutions via a moralistic and systematic process of punishments and rewards and lots and lots of repetition. You may ask, well we know what is normal for women, so what is natural? Honestly, we don’t know, although it certainly is fun to speculate.

The take-home is this: if you’re not normal, for whatever reason, enjoy it. It’s a wild ride, and it probably gives you your very best chance of discovering your true natural self, whatever that may be.

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