While I think that makes sense, I also think it doesn't seem that much to me like "a sense of superiority over other women". Like... She's kinda right, no? Darcy is kind of disdainful of people who want his approval, because they must be after his money or something. See also, Wickham, who is not a woman, IIRC.

Lizzie kinda hates his guts at this point no? So she can't possibly be after his money, which means that... He can trust her opinions to have something other than greed behind them. Most of Lizzie's experiences re:"people who want Darcy's approval" is women, the shit with Wickham happened off-screen in the backstory, so that's kind of the whole sample she's working with.

Also, sidenote, I get that a lot of people have the "not like other girls" thing going on as a function of blindness to the depth and personhood of the women around them. And that is indeed bad. However, I find it frustrating that the vilification of internalized misogyny and the dehumanization of gender-conforming women seems to be coming at the expense of acknowledging like... the legit isolation that GNC women, gifted women, and women who are otherwise standing apart from the norm tend to experience.

Like, Lizzie is very different from most of the girls and women around her, she has a stronger relationship with her father than her sisters seem to, she is less interested in marriage and social maneuvering, she is out of step with her society and what it expects of her. And... When men are like that, that's kind of a good thing, no? Like, Hiccup in How To Train Your Dragon is not like the men around him, nor is Hamilton in Hamilton, nor is Captain America. It's a very standard male protagonist thing.

Shouldn't it be okay for a female character to also... just be different? And have enough observational skills and introspection to know it and remark on it?

I get that when male protagonists are different, that's a source of insecurity they must overcome, and when female protagonists are different, that's a source of pride, because of the relative standings the two cohorts have in a sexist society. But that's not going to change if we just... Decide to hold in disdain any female character who is different from other people along some notable axis and is aware of it.

Now that you mention self-description, I have realised that I speak about myself very rarely in Spanish. I wonder if my weird phrasing and generally strange way of speaking has less to do with me being autistic and more to do with me subconsciously avoiding self-description.

A wonderful habit to have!

I'm wondering if you can do this on purpose. My French is very unemotional and theoretical, as I basically have to reverse-engineer sentences in it a lot of the time.

But if I read only Enlightenment works in French and never anything else, could I trick myself into making an "enlightenment thought" switch, like having a virtual machine inside another one?

I'm also learning Latin. If I read a lot of ancient Latin literature, will I get an "ancient Rome" switch inside my brain? Will it change my instincts in Latin vs French vs English vs Spanish? I know for a fact that I have found some books or short stories vastly more compelling in one language than the other (e.g. La Casa De Asterión is a masterpiece in Spanish. It's interesting and okay in English. Mistborn is a lot of fun in English. It is unbearable in Spanish).

I think the capacity to turn different moral intuitions on and off could prove astonishingly useful, and yet I rarely hear anyone discuss doing this on purpose.

Yeah! And also how much of it is purely about what we think is normal. My default "normal" things in Spanish and English are different. And therefore what a "sanctity" or "this is unnatural" reaction looks like in both languages will change. The whole thing runs on availability bias.

A lot of moral philosophy I have read is super reliant on reverse-engineering moral ideas from a combo of moral intuition and phrasing. And yet almost none of it is linguistically comparative. I have never read a philosophy paper that discusses language differences at length that is not about philosophy of language.

There are a few papers I read recently that seemed kind of incoherent to me, where I think if the author was forced to translate their own work into another language, they would realize the narrowness of their perspective.

I find that I feel a lot more gender dysphoria in English than Spanish, and I wonder if it has to do with the role of gender in the language.

When tables are gendered female, it kind of takes the edge off. It feels arbitrary. Compare in English, every instance of people gendering me feels like they're deliberately making some sort of point.

I am Spanish/English speaker (live in English-speaking country with Spanish-speaking family. Speak Spanish daily). I swear, I am legit more socially conservative in Spanish.

I can't tell if it's the environment I grew up in or the language, or what, but it is much easier for me to understand conservative thought if I translate it to Spanish in my head.

On the other hand, I am much more economically progressive in Spanish too. It's like my English brain is a socially progressive quasi-libertarian sometimes, and my Spanish brain is a brocialist that doesn't like to consider social aspects.

My "actual" political beliefs are broadly progressive on both axes, but my instincts lean more one way or another and I have to fight my instincts and rely on principled convictions more in some aspects in one language and in other aspects in the other language.

I also speak some French (very little though) and in French, my brain seems to lean more removed, all principle, no intuitions. Probably because I haven't spent long enough in a French-speaking place to associate a political philosophy outlook with the language.