The eternal plaint of men is "what do women want?" I think the answer is easy. Women want to be protected so that they can do their work of caring.
But in the last half century or so women have entertained a fantasy of something different, the notion of "the independent woman" advocated by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex. Look, everyone does stupid stuff, and imagines things that can never be. So Simone de Beauvoir was a fool. So are we all.
There is no such thing as an "independent woman." Not no how.
But women believe what they have been carefully taught, more so than men, in my sexist imaginings. An example is the BBC interview of BadThinker Jordan B. Peterson by Cathy Newman, where she castigates him for 40 minutes for not having received opinions on women and transgenders as approved by North London luvvies.
Right through the interview, I felt that Cathy Newman never deviated a millimeter from the received left-wing party line on men and women and women in the workplace and transphobia and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. I thought to myself, this woman has never read a book. Because if she had, she would deviate, somehow, somewhere, from the narrative. Her natural conceit as a Someone who reads books would lead her willy-nilly to parade that in front the eevil transphobic interviewee Jordan B. Peterson. But she did not. So I assume that she is an idiot that knows nothing: only what she picks up from the lefty mean girls clique at the BBC.
But women are troubled. Because they are Good Little Girls that learn their lessons well they get to college, or into their careers, or into the twenty-something dating scene and it doesn't compute. Or rather, it feels all wrong.
Well, yes, it would, girls. Because what we -- or rather I should say you lefties -- have cooked up is your fantasy of the "independent woman," who maybe does not get married, maybe does not have children, lives as though she were a man battling through life as a sexual and/or economic predator.
But women are not like that, or at least the vast majority of them. And so that is why poor "Grace" feels shame and distress that when she signed up for a date with comic Aziz Ansari and found out that all he wanted was sex, and that he didn't want a relationship etc. So nothing has changed since Monica Lewinsky wanted Bill Clinton to tell her that their dalliances were about something more than sex. Or since Hollywood invented the casting couch.
People-that-don't-read-books like Cathy Newman may believe that the "patriarchy" has kept women barefoot and pregnant since the dawn of time, and they may be right. But I rather prefer to learn from the haunting message of A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous about the two months in Berlin in the spring of 1945 when Berlin was occupied by Soviet troops of the Red Army and there were no German men to protect German women from the sexual aggressions of the Red Army soldiers. Or there's the message from The Year 1000 by Lacey and Danziger. Back then the Vikings would sail up the rivers of Britain every autumn, kill all the men, take all the grain and the women and children and sell the women and children at the main slave market in northwest Europe in Dublin.
Women need to be protected from sexual aggression: indeed they expect it. And a society has failed that fails to protect its women from sexual aggression. And that is why Good Little Girls like "Grace" are feeling betrayed and abandoned that nasty cruel men out there seem to regard them as booty.
Obviously the solution to the current problem is to reassemble a culture from the ruins of bourgeois culture trashed over the last century by the left. In this culture it will be accepted once more that the default answer from women is No. In this culture cads and bounders and the like will once more be marginalized and named and shamed.
But the solution is not to write more laws. The criminal law is a very blunt instrument. Of course it is, because government is force, men with guns. The whole point of humans as social animals is to resolve 99 percent of problems by cultural norms that every young person learns as a child rather than by police action.
So we have to build a new culture around sex. Unfortunately the social and cultural world is dominated right now by lefty never-read-a-book people spouting lefty talking points as though they know what they are talking about. What is needed is for a gentle, thoughtful culture of the middle to arise that gently revises the common culture of America to revive courtship and respect and banish the sexual revolution's assumption that women are just like men when it comes to sex, that there can ever be such a thing as "just sex."
Oh and we need to revise the notion that the highest and best course for a woman's life is a career. No. The center of a woman's life is her relationships, her marriage, her children, her role as the center of social life, and above all her devotion to caring for those nearest and dearest to her.
I like to remind my readers that "career" comes from the French "carrière" or racetrack. It's a perfectly sensible way to socialize men away from war and loot and plunder and into the harmless work of business. But women don't need to be run around a racetrack. They are already socialized to the work of daily life, and it is an insult to treat women as though they are aggressive, testosterone infused men.
Honestly, I don't know how we get to the sunlit uplands of the new culture. Because if there is one thing obvious to me it is that the left-wing cultural elite, the present ruling class, are the last people on Earth that should have anything to do with this project.
What I hope for is that a spontaneous movement will arise among women to move towards this sadder, wiser culture. But I do not expect it in my lifetime.
But in the last half century or so women have entertained a fantasy of something different, the notion of "the independent woman" advocated by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex. Look, everyone does stupid stuff, and imagines things that can never be. So Simone de Beauvoir was a fool. So are we all.
There is no such thing as an "independent woman." Not no how.
But women believe what they have been carefully taught, more so than men, in my sexist imaginings. An example is the BBC interview of BadThinker Jordan B. Peterson by Cathy Newman, where she castigates him for 40 minutes for not having received opinions on women and transgenders as approved by North London luvvies.
Right through the interview, I felt that Cathy Newman never deviated a millimeter from the received left-wing party line on men and women and women in the workplace and transphobia and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. I thought to myself, this woman has never read a book. Because if she had, she would deviate, somehow, somewhere, from the narrative. Her natural conceit as a Someone who reads books would lead her willy-nilly to parade that in front the eevil transphobic interviewee Jordan B. Peterson. But she did not. So I assume that she is an idiot that knows nothing: only what she picks up from the lefty mean girls clique at the BBC.
But women are troubled. Because they are Good Little Girls that learn their lessons well they get to college, or into their careers, or into the twenty-something dating scene and it doesn't compute. Or rather, it feels all wrong.
Well, yes, it would, girls. Because what we -- or rather I should say you lefties -- have cooked up is your fantasy of the "independent woman," who maybe does not get married, maybe does not have children, lives as though she were a man battling through life as a sexual and/or economic predator.
But women are not like that, or at least the vast majority of them. And so that is why poor "Grace" feels shame and distress that when she signed up for a date with comic Aziz Ansari and found out that all he wanted was sex, and that he didn't want a relationship etc. So nothing has changed since Monica Lewinsky wanted Bill Clinton to tell her that their dalliances were about something more than sex. Or since Hollywood invented the casting couch.
People-that-don't-read-books like Cathy Newman may believe that the "patriarchy" has kept women barefoot and pregnant since the dawn of time, and they may be right. But I rather prefer to learn from the haunting message of A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous about the two months in Berlin in the spring of 1945 when Berlin was occupied by Soviet troops of the Red Army and there were no German men to protect German women from the sexual aggressions of the Red Army soldiers. Or there's the message from The Year 1000 by Lacey and Danziger. Back then the Vikings would sail up the rivers of Britain every autumn, kill all the men, take all the grain and the women and children and sell the women and children at the main slave market in northwest Europe in Dublin.
Women need to be protected from sexual aggression: indeed they expect it. And a society has failed that fails to protect its women from sexual aggression. And that is why Good Little Girls like "Grace" are feeling betrayed and abandoned that nasty cruel men out there seem to regard them as booty.
Obviously the solution to the current problem is to reassemble a culture from the ruins of bourgeois culture trashed over the last century by the left. In this culture it will be accepted once more that the default answer from women is No. In this culture cads and bounders and the like will once more be marginalized and named and shamed.
But the solution is not to write more laws. The criminal law is a very blunt instrument. Of course it is, because government is force, men with guns. The whole point of humans as social animals is to resolve 99 percent of problems by cultural norms that every young person learns as a child rather than by police action.
So we have to build a new culture around sex. Unfortunately the social and cultural world is dominated right now by lefty never-read-a-book people spouting lefty talking points as though they know what they are talking about. What is needed is for a gentle, thoughtful culture of the middle to arise that gently revises the common culture of America to revive courtship and respect and banish the sexual revolution's assumption that women are just like men when it comes to sex, that there can ever be such a thing as "just sex."
Oh and we need to revise the notion that the highest and best course for a woman's life is a career. No. The center of a woman's life is her relationships, her marriage, her children, her role as the center of social life, and above all her devotion to caring for those nearest and dearest to her.
I like to remind my readers that "career" comes from the French "carrière" or racetrack. It's a perfectly sensible way to socialize men away from war and loot and plunder and into the harmless work of business. But women don't need to be run around a racetrack. They are already socialized to the work of daily life, and it is an insult to treat women as though they are aggressive, testosterone infused men.
Honestly, I don't know how we get to the sunlit uplands of the new culture. Because if there is one thing obvious to me it is that the left-wing cultural elite, the present ruling class, are the last people on Earth that should have anything to do with this project.
What I hope for is that a spontaneous movement will arise among women to move towards this sadder, wiser culture. But I do not expect it in my lifetime.
LOL has your wife read this?
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