A brief lesson on analyzing toxic female behavior using two real-life personal anecdotes.
Part One: “The Beautiful Budding Gymnast”
When I was about ten years old I liked gymnastics, but I wasn’t good at it. I was briefly amazed by a neighbor girl who was really good at it. She was a bit older, but one time she let me come over to her house to practice. Not only was she really good at gymnastics, she was also exceptionally beautiful—quite tall for her age, with shining, straight, long black hair and perfect alabaster skin. She reminded me of a real-life princess and I felt almost troll-like standing next to her.
Her mom was there, an attractive divorcé who remarried shortly after that day, the two of them moved and I never saw her again. That was no big deal though, because I wasn’t friends with the girl, I just admired her beauty and talent.
What has stuck with me my entire life about that day was something her mother said, because I would discover this again and again throughout my life in my dealings with certain toxic people, especially women: Their stated perception about reality trumps reality itself.
Nowadays they call it ‘pathological narcissism’ or any other number of psychological terms, and Gaslighting has become the clever term for their favorite tool of perception control.
The girl wanted her mom to ‘judge a competition’ between her and I on our gymnastic skills. Of course, we all knew who would win that competition. Apparently though, the mother had decided, unbeknownst to us, to give me a few bonus points in advance. Perhaps due to my younger age, or my more novice standing, or just because she wanted to teach her daughter (or me) a lesson?
I watched the girl’s clearly superior cartwheel with simple, honest envy. How I’d love to cartwheel that perfectly, I thought! She would probably go to the Olympics I suspected, with a cartwheel like that.
I was sure if I practiced enough I could be that good, but back then I had trouble keeping my legs stiff in the air and landing in a straight line. Her mother, however, claimed my cartwheel was definitely better, to the jaw-dropping astonishment of us both.
How she lies! I was baffled. The girl objected, naturally. I objected, confused as all hell. The mother insisted. And for decades I’ve analyzed this lie, turned it over in my head, compared it to what I’ve heard and observed with others, and to what I see happening in the society at large.
I do believe by now I’ve got a pretty good handle on this particular brand of heavy duty gaslighting. What makes it so harmful is that it’s so insidious, so easily masked, with layers of plausible deniability—it’s a real life example of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The evil step-mother type is easy to discern, so not nearly as confusing, therefore not nearly as dangerous.
At first I thought, like is natural to do, to give the mother the benefit of the doubt. But no, it’s not really about encouraging humility in the achiever, because we both knew she was lying, and she knew that we knew. False humility is manipulative and to force her daughter to pretend to be ‘less than’ she actually was would be a mean trick, seems to me.
It was also not about assuaging the real loser’s feelings, though she would surely insist her intentions were both of these efforts toward virtue. But, if she had really been concerned about my feelings in that situation, she should’ve pointed out my flaws directly and asked her daughter if she’d be so kind as to spend some time to help me with them, because that’s what I really wanted. I already knew plenty of places by that tender age where I could go to get lied to.
So really, it was about assigning herself the loftiest role in the room, that of the High Priestess, aka, Perception Manager. And in doing so, she takes it on herself to gaslight everyone else in the vicinity. It’s not virtuous, it’s self-serving. It’s not about creating harmony, it’s about stifling dissent. It’s not about fostering relatedness, it’s about establishing hierarchical control. Though she would admit nothing of the sort, I’m sure.
Not only will she readily lie to others, she will then lie to herself about what her lies mean. These are not ‘little white lies’ to avoid being unnecessarily hurtful.
Conflict avoidance is also not a virtue, it’s a tactic.
These are the relentless Political Correctness promoters. Anything not coated in marzipan, according to the Toxic Feminine, is considered hate speech and outside the purview of polite discourse, (unless they do it, which is always ‘out of fear’ they say, but actually it’s just avoiding minor discomfort and loss of total control of the given situation). Bring up voting at the dinner table and you’ll get a heel to the shin. Try to discuss your cousin’s drug abuse and you’ll get an eye roll. Mention your pending divorce and she’ll change the subject, most likely to her own pending divorce.
An excellent mind-f**k movie of this popular leitmotif, from the French, because they do it best: La Moustache
She’ll even police your language and behavior at the bar after three martinis from a distance, this is the level of professionalism we’re dealing with here, like she learned directly from the Fabian Society experts themselves!
We see the negative impact of this brand of perception control to the microscopic level everywhere we look today. Everyone gets to choose any reality based on their personal preferences—boys can be girls, girls can be boys; whites can call themselves blacks ‘on the inside’; beauty at every size, even morbidly obese; sunny weather claimed even when the sky is murky with filth; adults behaving like children and children posing as adults; abuse labeled as quirky fun; poisons labeled as food; violence sold as entertainment; indoctrination called education, and on and on. Give the devil a finger, as the adage goes.
Where are the ADULTS?
She’ll happily blame every social ill on “The Patriarchy,” right after she cashes her welfare check and swings by WIC for more free baby formula. And it’s getting worse exponentially now.
To be an unwed mother with three babies from three fathers is not even considered an undesirable familial or social situation anymore. I wish I were exaggerating!
This wolf-in-sheep’s clothing toxic deception harms every level of social life, from the relations between the genders, to the family unit, to the political sphere.
If the gaslighting gets pushed any heavier in this country the demand for wool is going to skyrocket!
Or maybe, all is not yet lost in space. Some critical thinking is being applied in some small circles.
Here’s a hopeful and educational interview with Justin Deschamp and Adam Riva on Dauntless Dialogue: Social Engineering of the Male-Female Dynamic, that’s well worth some deep consideration. What’s been created, expressly, is a culture of acceptable gaslighting—socially-engineered through propaganda for reasons of control—promoting a culture of confusion, distraction, and distorted value systems that force individual, inter-relational, social and political imbalance. So the oligarchical controllers are then appeased to, eternally, by their hapless subjects to create order out of their physical, intellectual and emotional chaos.
That’s the lesson of the beautiful budding gymnast.
(Coming soon Part 2)
