Women's Marches, Cathy Newman, and the Culture of Complaint

This morning my sister sent me a photo of a woman in a woman's march wearing a t-shirt and tights covered with glam shots of Hillary Clinton.

You know what I think? I think that women's marches are all about: what clothes do we wear? Pink pussy hats? Oh no, that is so last year.

And then we get Cathy Newman, the BBC Channel 4 slasher presenter who got all frightened when on-line trolls started reacting to her "So you say that women are less intelligent than men" journalism. Which is to say that even for the pugnacious Cathy Newman, Women Need Protection. They just are not programmed to be reckless about their physical safety.

My gal Sarah Hoyt has a piece out on women's marches, answering the question of why? Why are all these women out marching when we really don't even know what they want? Sarah says that's just the way women are.

You see, just like testosterone boosts your self confidence and your ability to feel good about yourself, female hormones boost your ability to bond, your desire for group cohesion, and your not-perfectly-rational wish to belong.

So you get a group of women, and it’s easy to get them all to march out for no particular reason and with no end in sight.

You’re invited by friends, because “we’re all doing it.”  And you go, because your children or your mom or stuff.  Because your friend told you “we have to do it so the children don’t have to” or because “isn’t your mom homeless.”

And unless you’re rock bottom stupid (some people, male and female, are) you know it doesn’t make a wit of sense.  But your friend is so sure.  And if you ask questions or point out it makes no sense, they’re not going to talk to you again.  There’s going to be a rift, and who are your kids going to play with?

OK, now let's blend this in with my notion that men have a Culture of Insult, and women have a Culture of Complaint.

The male Culture of Insult is a sham fight that is communicating the possibility of something much worse, a real fight, in which the men involved will not be throwing insults but actual blows against each other. This is why, for instance, legislatures have rules that forbid the members to insult each other on the floor of the House. In the House of Commons they have to refer to the "member from Barsetshire" and in the House of Representatives they have to refer to the "gentleman" or "gentle lady." Members are not allowed to refer to each other by name and they are not allowed to insult each other. It is understood that insults can easily become fighting words and that the whole point of legislatures is to conduct civil war by other means, jaw-jaw intstead of war-war, in Churchill's felicitous phrase.

The female Culture of Complaint is a sham fight of a different kind. The threat in a woman's complaint is that down the road there lies the withdrawal of affection or the expulsion from the mean-girls clique. I like to say that the typical complaint is the complaint made to a woman in a one-on-one chat about a third woman not present: "I can't believe she said that."

The problem comes, I believe when we advance the two cultures from the bar-room brawl or the kaffee-klatsch to politics. To men politics is the Culture of Insult writ large; to women politics is the Culture of Complaint writ large.

But there is a problem. Politics is the division of the people in a community into two sides for a sham fight that always threatens to escalate into real civil war. That's because government is force; every Act of a legislature is an act to force some people to pay money to other people, and the people of the receiving end of government force don't like it. Politics is in fact an instantiation of the male Culture of Insult.

But now we have women voters and women live in the Culture of Complaint. When a woman complains about something she expects her best friend or her husband to do something about it. And woe betide the person that pushes back against the complaint. As Sarah Hoyt says:

And if you ask questions or point out it makes no sense, they’re not going to talk to you again.  There’s going to be a rift, and who are your kids going to play with?

But hey girls, government is not the same as your husband that responding to your complaint because he wants a quiet life, and government is not the same as you and your neighborhood friends that accommodate each other to keep the neighborhood content. Government is force; government is men with guns.

Now scientists have noted that the big expansion of government in our era commenced, pretty well, upon women getting the vote. And indeed, beyond government pensions, which certainly issue from the time when government was exclusively a man's thing, the great sweep of modern government is providing things that women want, most notably health care, welfare, and education.

But you see, I think it is one thing for a woman to complain to her husband that he needs to get another job so she and the kids can go to the doctor. It is another thing to force everyone to fund government-run health care.

And in my view most women don't get this. Perhaps this is because of the eternal situation of women. It doesn't matter whether you have a patriarchy or the final glorious destination of the arc of history fully bended towards justice. Women Need Protection. Yes, even mad-dog presenter Cathy Newman. And as soon as a woman has a baby on the ground she needs help. This means that women are eternally subject to whoever provides protection. Despite all the talk about the patriarchy, women expect men to protect them, and that makes women subordinate to men -- or to the government of men with guns.

And what do women do when they want something? They complain. Women don't earn as much as men? Complain. Women aren't getting all the cool tech jobs? Complain.

Now I believe that we should limit the use of government force to situations where force is the only option. I do not think that government should Do Something in response to peoples' complaints.

But how do we get out of the present situation where the ruling class is glad to have women complaining and identity politics victims complaining and poor helpless crony capitalists complaining,  all so that government can force the rest of us to pay up and hope that the complainer just shut up for a month or two?

As the song "The Panic is On" goes,

How could he?
What is the reason?
I don't know.

Yes, it's a very sad situation about a woman whose lover has left her. And a really great song.

I don't know how we solve the problem of women's marches, Cathy Newman's need for protection from internet trolls, and most of all the escalation of the women's Culture of Complaint into ruling class ideology.

The only thing to do is to believe in Jung's "collective unconscious" and hope that One Fine Day a political ground-swell of deplorables will arise out of the bowels of the Earth and solve all our problems.