Women, a warning from Instagram: “You really need to be a bitch or you’re going to develop an autoimmune disease. It’s that simple.” Versions of this scientifically dubious statement have caught the imagination of a corner of the internet, getting algorithmically nudged my way multiple times (a TikTok to this effect has 40,000 likes; a Threads post 26,000). Sometimes, it’s set to music; sometimes, it’s the basis for earnest discussion of cortisol and inflammation. Sometimes, it’s evangelical. One woman claims that, “Being a bitch healed my autoimmune disease,” adding: “Being the ‘love and light’ spiritual girlie is probably the reason why you feel depressed and you have IBS.” A Substack evokes the need to break the “good girl contract”, talking about those for whom “setting boundaries, getting ferocious about protecting their own bodies, minds, souls … sometimes allowed the nervous system to settle enough that the body’s natural self-healing mechanisms could kick in and heal”.
As a woman with an autoimmune condition (alopecia), this resonates on a woo-woo level: my hair fell out when I was trying and failing to reconcile incompatible demands; to make everyone happy. It’s also, I recognise, deeply silly. For a start, “women” – yes, all of us – needing to do something, or be a certain way, is a wild generalisation. It’s also definitively not “that simple”, and I would hate to upset a whole community of intellectually rigorous immunologists. I imagine them rhythmically banging their heads against their keyboards, muttering about there being no peer-reviewed cohort studies interrogating the relationship between “being the love and light spiritual girlie”, or putting too many exclamation markers and conciliatory qualifiers in emails, and autoimmune disease.
What is true is that women have far higher rates of autoimmune conditions than men. In the US, “four of every five people diagnosed with an autoimmune disease are female”, so women are disproportionately concerned by the how and why of chronic disease. It’s also true that bodies probably keep the score; stress and autoimmune disease seem to be correlated. “A clinical diagnosis of stress-related disorders was significantly associated with an increased risk of autoimmune disease,” one study found in 2018. Another study, in 2020, found PTSD sufferers are 58% more likely to have some autoimmune conditions.
Mostly, though, I think it’s interesting that the idea that women are making themselves sick by being too nice is resonating. Women have probably been pissed off at playing nice since Eve, and certainly since the earliest articulations of feminism. But it feels as if a new wave of fed-upness started to build a decade ago, starting with pussy hat marches and #MeToo, and intensifying as inequities deepened during the pandemic. I wonder if it’s cresting? Think of the fascination with the Korean 4B movement, rejecting motherhood, marriage and straight sex. Or with economist Corinne Low crunching the data, looking at the decline in women’s happiness over the past 20 years, and deciding to date only women – joking that she’s not physically repulsed by men, just “socially and politically repulsed”. There’s deep disgust at the Epstein files and the manosphere monetising dangerous contempt for women; weariness about women still bearing the domestic and emotional load; and anger at medical misogyny, meaning our pain gets dismissed. We’re also experiencing “epidemic” levels of violence against women and girls. I don’t think it’s melodramatic to suggest that being nice, saying yes and smoothing over jagged edges has been – and still is – not just social conditioning, but a strategy for women to stay safe. It’s also not that fanciful to imagine it comes at a cost.
As we watch terrible men in power (yes, there are many more good men – they’re probably getting autoimmune conditions, too) start wars, I bet I’m not the only woman whose mind occasionally wanders to a 2018 viral tweet from journalist Erin Keane. “Every woman I know has been storing anger for years in her body,” Keane wrote, “and it’s starting to feel like bees are going to pour out of all of our mouths at the same time.” The bees still haven’t swarmed – and, thinking about it, a body full of bees seems like a thing that could make you sick – but they’re trickling out. This daft meme is a factually dubious, solitary self-care bee, not a deadly stinger. But it’s definitely a bee.
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