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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2684 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 23, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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...that's a curious case of misogyny.

If the causal model is not "doctor is mustache-twirling villain" but rather "misogyny--> vague institutional belief that since PPD/ PPP happens to moms, it isn't important/isn't real/ isn't sympathetic/ doesn't merit help--> minimal PPD training for clinicians, inadequate funding for programs--> PPP sufferer seeking help encounters only undertrained clinicians and rejections from overburdened programs," then I don't think the gender of the clinician enters much into it.

For a parallel case, in the feminism-in-publishing debate I similarly highlighted a whole bunch of male authors and male publishing execs, but it was rightly pointed out that ideology can exert structural influence at the level of funding, training, hiring, project prioritization, etc., even if you don't see direct malicious action by individuals.

Isn't misoginy actual no-shit hatred of women rather than vague institutional bias? Isn't lived experience suppose to enter the equation here somewhere, and even if they had "poor training", given the amount of TikToks with moms mock-strangling their children, wouldn't one of these women go "oh yeah, I totally went through that" on chance alone? Or are they all childless?

For a parallel case, in the feminism-in-publishing debate I similarly highlighted a whole bunch of male authors and male publishing execs, but it was rightly pointed out that ideology can exert structural influence at the level of funding, training, hiring, project prioritization, etc., even if you don't see direct malicious action by individuals.

And what did you think of that argument?

And what did you think of that argument?

I... thought it was a reasonable-enough counter to "but but but male authors"? (Although I still believe the wider claim fails for various unrelated reasons, most obviously the fact that girls' reading has declined in exact parallel with boys'.) And I was surprised and impressed to see that level of nuanced critical thinking around this issue, and I believe I said so at the time.

Isn't lived experience suppose to enter the equation here somewhere, and even if they had "poor training", given the amount of TikToks with moms mock-strangling their children, wouldn't one of these women go "oh yeah, I totally went through that" on chance alone? Or are they all childless?

I'm not 100% following, but I don't think there's any claim that clinicians didn't recognize she had PPD, just that the risk assessments were perfunctory/ wrong, the level of clinical interest tepid, the treatments actively harmful, and the support that could have saved her children (like the inpatient or day programs she sought) too under-resourced to be available to her.

All of which imho feeds into a steel-mannable (though certainly not airtight) case that overall dismissive attitudes toward a female-only condition, leading to institutional under-resourcing and deprioritization of research/ training, were contributing factors in this case: a case about second- and third-order consequences, not first-order. A case that, once again, I am not necessarily endorsing, just steelmanning because that was the explicit request that opened this conversation.

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