Vincent J. Curtis
4 Feb 15
I promise this will be my last posting on Latham
Hunter. I had hoped that my previous was
my last, but in her column of 31 Jan 15, headlined “Education and Anger” she answered
a lot of questions. She ‘fessed up to
being a neurotic.
Neurosis goes far to explain her obsession with hatred. She thinks men hate and oppress women because
at one time she hated and oppressed herself, a hatred which expressed itself in
anorexia nervosa.
In her ‘fessing up article, Hunter says that “an affliction
suffered so overwhelmingly by females shouldn’t be classified with illnesses
like bipolar disorder, which is evenly divided among males and females, and
depression, which is diagnosed in two females for every male (probably because
men are less likely to seek help for depression than women.)”
She thus opposes the classification of anorexia as a kind of
mental illness.
Let’s analyze this for a bit. Anorexia is expressed as a refusal to eat,
despite there being no biological reason for such refusal. Not being biological, only mental is left as
a cause, and thus it is reasonable to say that the root cause of anorexia is
mental. Hunter’s own successful
treatment for anorexia consisted of psychological counselling, which serves as
confirmatory evidence for the classification.
Nevertheless, Hunter rejects the obvious for the spurious reason that
men and women ought to be equally subject to it.
Men and women are not equally subject to pregnancy. Hunter apparently has not thought that post-partum
depression should affect females and not males at all, and PMS and menopause
are afflictions known to affect women exclusively. Even her comment that women seek help for
depression at twice the rate that men do says that there is something different
mentally between men and women; and still she refuses to see it. Her ideological prejudice that men and women
ought to be absolutely equal in every respect forces her to think of excuses to
explain away the real world. Her anger
arises from the real world contradicting her prejudices at every turn.
How toxic is this ideological frame of reference? “Looking at the politics of things like food
and gender not only became passion, it became my career.” There is politics to food, and politics to
gender? “Wow,” is all I can say. That would not be my first association.
She says of anorexia and its sufferers, “…as if the disorder
were a personal thing with the sufferer, rather than misogyny, at its
root. And it’s the sufferer who bears
the responsibility for ‘getting better’ when in fact we should all bear the
weight of the gargantuan task….”
Got that? The cause
of anorexia is not mental in the sufferer, but misogyny; and the sufferer is
relieved of the responsibility for getting better because it is society as a
whole that ‘ought to bear the weight of the gargantuan task.’ (A little bit Freudian slip in that irony,
comparing anorexia with gargantuan and bearing weight.) Since even women are included in ‘we all
should bear the weight…’ then women also are responsible for misogyny. So if you suffer from anorexia, blame others;
and women are also responsible for misogyny, in the same sense that men are. Such is the reasoning at the root of her
claim.
It is only in this climate of victimhood that a person with
the reasoning power of Latham Hunter could get a job of professor. Luckily, that job is not in the Math
department, or Engineering, or one of the hard sciences. Her field of study is so soft that the name
of the discipline doesn’t even end in –ology.
Hunter has managed to turn her personal demons into an
ideology and a job. Good for her. Not good for her students. I suspect they are bullied if need be into
regurgitating Hunter’s prejudices if they expect to pass her improbable
courses.
Let me end this subject with a positive word for Dr.
Hunter. In a previous column she
admitted to being a mother of five. That
is a fantastic thing in my books, especially in this day and age of self-hatred
by westerners. Modern environmentalism
holds that the spread of westerners is a curse upon the earth, and here the
real humanity of Hunter overcame her political dispositions. Her children probably are all good looking and
intelligent. She has managed a career
and motherhood. When all is said and
done, the greatest thing in her life will be her children and grandchildren,
and that is the way it should be. And
politics be damned.
-30-
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