Women and Politics

There is no doubt to me that men and women are different, although I realize that our liberal friends beg to differ.

In fact, you are not allowed to say that men and women are different. But that is nothing new. Usually, there are all kinds of things you are not allowed to say.

But I think that men and women are profoundly different. Apart from any genetic reasons arising out of the Y chromosome, there is this.

Down the ages men have been the chaps defending the hunter band, or defending the border. And women have been the ones "keeping the kids alive."

My point is that men and women have a different approach to conflict. With men, shall we say, it involves fisticuffs, or at least the threat thereof. With men, the concept of honor is all bound up with the reputation for courage.

With women onflict involves the community of women and Mean Girl culture. In other words, conflicts are resolved by naming and shaming, and getting the rest of women in the community to say, of a certain woman, "I can't believe she said/did that." With women, the concept of honor is all bound up with the reputation for chastity: for being what I call a Good Little Girl.

Now it is my belief that politics is a development, a de-escalation, of the natural and physical culture of males, which is to resolve conflicts with a fight. Same with law. Back in the day, conflicts were resolved by the lex talionis, otherwise known as "an eye for an eye." If you damage the property or the livestock of your neighbor you must make restitution, or your kin must make restitution, or face a fight from him and his kin. You killed a guy? Then his kin have the right to kill you.

So the point of government with the monopoly on force is to end the old system of private vengeance. What a concept! Then there is law, which provides a forum in which the normal disagreements of life and commerce can be worked out by an impartial judge. In the old days, the courts were mostly for merchants to resolve their differences. It worked so well that the kings wanted in on the reputation for impartiality that the merchants´ courts had obtained.

But women are different. The point is that women are typically stuck where they are and do not have the option that men have had, when they get in a row with the other men, to head out for the territory. They have to stick it out. And so they resolve their differences with the conversations -- or gossip -- of the community of women. Of course, nothing is equal, and so some women are skivvies; some women are whores; some women are Mean Girls, and some women are Queen Bees. The power of the community of women is the power of naming and shaming, and of course in the extreme case to ostracize. For the vast majority of women this power is enough to keep them socialized to the values of the community. Hey, they have nowhere else to go!

I recently read an interesting interview in NRO about abortion, and interview between Kathryn Jean Lopez and Frederica Matthewes-Green. Says Green:

So often, the pregnancy that seems terrifying, cataclysmic, evolves and comes to be manageable; then, when the baby is placed in her mother’s arms, a bond is forged that may well be called primeval. It is one of those moments when we realize we are enacting some eternal drama, more profound than we can grasp. Somehow we have gotten caught up in the wheels of the universe. The bond between mother and newborn is the foundation of all human love. To treat it as irrelevant or negligible is to threaten something close to the heart of the human story.

 In other words, it's all about the emotions. And, she adds, what women in difficult pregnancies need is moral support. "I needed just one person to stand by me."

Now I think that abortion should not be determined by the law. I think it should be determined by the community of women. It is up to the community of women to to determine what to think and feel and say about another woman's difficult pregnancy. And I tell you, the woman in question will accept the verdict of the Mean Girls. Because that is who women are. Now she will complain about the decision of the women for the rest of her life: "I can't believe they said that!" That is how women deal with most of the events of life; they complain about them.

And I am not being judgmental about this. Not at all! I am just saying that life for women is inseparable from the community and they will accept the decision of the community.

But in our modern age we have encouraged women to enter into the public square of politics and business, an area of human life for which they are not programmed by their genes and by the thousands of generations of women's life. So what they do is treat politics as just an extension of the community of women and its way of social control by naming and shaming. Hello corporate HR departments!

I suspect that this development is disastrous.

I believe that politics should cover the areas that used to be subject to the men's culture of force and insult. I believe that women should continue to have domination of the areas of human life that fall short of violence and force.

In fact, the overwhelming majority of human conflicts can be resolved short of force and violence. In other words, short of government and its policemen.

But in our age we have made everything subject to law and the government's monopoly on force.

I think this is a disaster, and I think that we need a return to the days when the women resolved most interpersonal conflicts with their culture of naming and shaming, and, in the extreme, ostracism.

And I think that men should keep out of the emotional world of the community of women and let the women get on which their ancient method of social control. And I include in this the whole question of welfare and education, in which women have a particular interest.

But where violence rears its ugly head: that is where we need guys, and that is where we need to crack a few heads, pour encourager les autres.