What Women Want: Running the Clock Back

It is pretty obvious that well-born women are batting on a bit of a sticky wicket these days. The #MeToo and #BelieveAllWomen hashtags, not to mention the "Campus Rape" issue demonstrate that, at least for well-born women of good families that go to private schools and select colleges and end up in the professions, all is not well.

In part this is, as Georg Simmel wrote over a century ago, that the public square was constructed by men for men centuries ago. But what about women?

Let us merely consider the British Common Law that has developed all kinds of precedents about every kind of legal situation, including the question of rape. If an accusation is made in the legal system, what are the rules? In fact there is a forest of rules about everything, all of which may be found to have originated in some legal dispute decades or centuries ago. But those rules were developed by men over legal disputes in which the judge and the contesting attorneys were all men.

What if there had been women in that process all those years ago? Would the precedents have been different? Of course they would. You can see this merely by thinking about my notion of the male Culture of Insult versus the female Culture of Complaint. Clearly, I would say, the legal system is a regularization and civilizing of the male Culture of Insult which used to decide disputes by single combat and lex talionis. Suppose the legal system had been instead a regularization and softening of the female Culture of Complaint. It is said, for instance, that when women complain to their husbands about something they don't want him to actually do something about the complaint; they just want to register the complaint.

Is this true about the complainant against Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh? Is this a female complaint, as per the Culture of Complaint? Does she just want her pain and her rage at her humiliation decades ago to be registered and acknowledged by society? And if we adjust our justice system to accommodate the female Culture of Complaint what then? Would it still work?

We have, in fact, implemented the female Culture of Complaint in response the to campus "Rape Crisis," by removing the presumption of innocence and the right of the accused to confront the accuser. Many people say that the result has been monstrous injustice. But if the standard for the public square is to accommodate the female Culture of Complaint then the open outcry of accusation and defense, which seem to belong to the male Culture of Insult, would need to be modified.

But wait. We could say that the female Culture of Complaint is an artifact of the patriarchy where women had no formal power and were forced to get their way by subterfuge and manipulation. If women are to come into the public square maybe there is no option other than to act as a responsible actor and accept the give and take of the public square and the male-developed and male-modified Culture of Insult.

And yet, if we accept the settled science that women score higher in "agreeableness" while men score higher in "aggressiveness" then clearly women are at a disadvantage in a public institution when a sexual advance is made or a need for aggressive action is warranted. Does this mean that a woman should never be alone with a man in a public institution to protect her from sexual aggression? Should she always have an advocate in salary negotiations to provide an aggression assist?

My own view is that the sexual revolution plus feminism has tied women in knots. After all, if there is the Pill and abortion, then why not Do It? Well, the answer is "women's pain." Women just do not approach sex as men do. According to the settled science, women experience emotional pain and anxiety more than men do. They experience severe emotional pain at any sexual breakup, whether an alcohol-fueled one-night stand or a "relationship" that is terminated by a man "not yet ready for marriage" or the end of a 20-year marriage. In the old days these realities were accommodated by prohibitions against pre-marital sex, especially by naive girls, the protection of girls from exposure to sexual situations, the difficulty of avoiding conception, the danger of abortion, and the barriers against divorce.

Complicating this is the quick-and-dirty way that liberals have implemented their sexual agenda using the US Supreme Court, with Roe v. Wade on abortion and Obergefell v. Hodges on gay marriage. As I understand, the Court was surprised that its Roe v. Wade decision provoked such backlash.

Yeah. Did anyone ever ask non-well-born women what they thought about abortion? Or the sexual revolution in general? How about minority women? What do they think about all this?

The fact is that morals and ethics and politics and the like are all games that ruling-class people play with each other. They typically call on the lower orders as their foot-soldiers in their ruling-class power games but really don't spend too much time figuring out the needs and desires of their political foot-soldiers. After who really cares about what the lower orders think?

My feeling is that we have only just begun to deal with the emergence of women into the public square, and that nobody, least of all women, have a clue "what women want."

It is also true that we have only just begun to deal with the fact of the end of the agricultural age, and the related mega-migration to the cities.

And it is a mere 10,000 years since the dawn of agriculture, and we humans, according to the psychologists, are still basically programmed as hunter-gatherers.

But then, if we had everything figured out, what would be the point of life, the universe and everything?