When another age dawns, and the heroes of the present age have been tossed to bottomless perdition, there to dwell in adamantine chains and all that, to be reviled forever as fiends and monsters, the bill of indictment about how the left betrayed women will look something like this:
They led women into the wilderness of victim feminism instead of sensibly adapting the male-created public square to suit a more feminine sensibility.
Were women the helpless victims of the patriarchy in times gone by? My guess is: probably not. But women certainly occupied a separate world from men, and women relied on men to keep them safe. In hunter-gatherer and horticultural society it seems that the men did nothing except hunt and fight and herd the livestock, and the women did everything else. In agricultural society the men did the plowing and the herding, and the womrn did mostly everything else. In industrial society the men go to work and do Honey Dos and the women do pretty well everything else. Maybe there is something more than patriarchal oppression going on here. But what? You tell me.
In today's world one of the salient facts is that well-born women have a yen to live in the public square, to establish status by working outside the home in bureaucracies and rising to supervisory positions. And since work these days tends to include a lot of jobs much less physical than plowing and fighting and mining and well-drilling, and blacksmithing, and fabricating, women see the opportunity to sally forth from the domestic sphere to partake in the public square. Why should men have all the fun?
This has created a culture clash, because the public square, created by men for men, has a male culture that expects its participants to be creators, fighters, and destroyers. Women, on the other hand, are learners, carers, and teachers, so as they come into the public square they want to adapt it to their culture. Men deal with defaulters differently, either with death or with exile. Women deal with defaulters using naming, shaming, and ostracism. How do we adapt a public square to the needs of both men and women?
The left sees everything as a political question, a civil war by other means, and so feminist activists of a lefty persuasion have liked to characterize the movement of women into the public square as a fight of helpless women victims of the patriarchy finally coming out into the light after millennia in the dark imprisonment of patriarchal oppression.
But why should work for wages be such a glorious goal for women? For men, it is a yoke we have to bear: to put bread on the table, to attract a mate, to compete for the glittering prizes. Maybe it is just as well that men have to work, because idle men seem to resort to wine, women, and gambling, as the idle upper-class young men do in Trollope.
If you ask me, people down the ages, men and women, only worked when they had to, and almost invariably, except for the richest kind, they had to. Women worked dawn to dusk on cleaning, food preparation, weaving and sewing, child care, and on a whole rainbow of social interactions with the community of women in the village or other community. What about men? In the old days they did nothing except hunt and fight. In the enslavement of the agricultural age they began to plow and to manage farms. In the city they went out to work for wages.
But, of course, there is more to life than working to put bread on the table. That other side of life is the fight for status, and both men and women play this game: only they do it differently. For men it used to be the actual fight for advancement in the male hierarchy. But now it is the fight for the selective college, the prestige job, the glittering career, the top dog as CEO or president. But what about for women? How do they play the hierarchy game?
Yes, how do women play the hierarchy game? I have my ideas, but I admit that I really know almost nothing about it. Whatabout the mother in Trollope's Lady Anna? She's a middle-class girl that marries an earl, but the earl pretty soon tells her that he's already married. So she spends the rest of her life trying to prove that she really is the Countess Lovel and get her daughter, Lady Anna, to make a suitable marriage. That, I suspect, gives us a real insight into the way that women play the status game. Today, upscale women are bribing college officials to get their kids into fancy colleges. So nothing has changed. Why do modern women want corporate careers? Because it gives them status; because you are nobody in the educated class unless you have a status job.
So the left has told women to liberate themselves and get out into the labor force and earn as much as men. Wait! It is unjust that women as a whole learn less than men! It is monstrous that women earn less than men because they are less inclined to bid for for money! Well, of course. Politics is division, and so anyone in politics is looking for a way to divide Us and Them.
And don't get me started on sex. Oh yeah. Women are supposed to be free to be themselves, to enter into sex without the traditional stigma of an "easy" woman. And women should have control over their own bodies. And women should be able to dissolve abusive marriages. Just between you and me -- and don't tell anyone I said that -- I think that all this -- the sexual revolution -- has been a disaster for women and that the whole #MeToo culture and microagressions and safe spaces is an inchoate rebellion by women against the modern liberated sex revolution.
And the left is who has put women in this box. The personal is the political: that's what they say. But I say that reducing human life to the political is a Great Reaction against the modern discovery that we probably need less force -- less government -- and less division -- less politics -- and overall less meddling in other peoples' affairs to make the modern world go round. The problem is that women getting themselves out of the box the left has put them in is going to be a process of trial and error, as is everything in this world. The undoing of a mistake is much harder than getting into it.
But when women have emerged from the hell of lefty idiocy, they must face the future as Scarlett O'Hara had to: "Where shall I go? What shall I do?" It is, frankly, a challenge. Freedom is like that. And the truth is that most of us don't really want that. We want to be told what to do and them complain about it.
They led women into the wilderness of victim feminism instead of sensibly adapting the male-created public square to suit a more feminine sensibility.
Were women the helpless victims of the patriarchy in times gone by? My guess is: probably not. But women certainly occupied a separate world from men, and women relied on men to keep them safe. In hunter-gatherer and horticultural society it seems that the men did nothing except hunt and fight and herd the livestock, and the women did everything else. In agricultural society the men did the plowing and the herding, and the womrn did mostly everything else. In industrial society the men go to work and do Honey Dos and the women do pretty well everything else. Maybe there is something more than patriarchal oppression going on here. But what? You tell me.
In today's world one of the salient facts is that well-born women have a yen to live in the public square, to establish status by working outside the home in bureaucracies and rising to supervisory positions. And since work these days tends to include a lot of jobs much less physical than plowing and fighting and mining and well-drilling, and blacksmithing, and fabricating, women see the opportunity to sally forth from the domestic sphere to partake in the public square. Why should men have all the fun?
This has created a culture clash, because the public square, created by men for men, has a male culture that expects its participants to be creators, fighters, and destroyers. Women, on the other hand, are learners, carers, and teachers, so as they come into the public square they want to adapt it to their culture. Men deal with defaulters differently, either with death or with exile. Women deal with defaulters using naming, shaming, and ostracism. How do we adapt a public square to the needs of both men and women?
The left sees everything as a political question, a civil war by other means, and so feminist activists of a lefty persuasion have liked to characterize the movement of women into the public square as a fight of helpless women victims of the patriarchy finally coming out into the light after millennia in the dark imprisonment of patriarchal oppression.
But why should work for wages be such a glorious goal for women? For men, it is a yoke we have to bear: to put bread on the table, to attract a mate, to compete for the glittering prizes. Maybe it is just as well that men have to work, because idle men seem to resort to wine, women, and gambling, as the idle upper-class young men do in Trollope.
If you ask me, people down the ages, men and women, only worked when they had to, and almost invariably, except for the richest kind, they had to. Women worked dawn to dusk on cleaning, food preparation, weaving and sewing, child care, and on a whole rainbow of social interactions with the community of women in the village or other community. What about men? In the old days they did nothing except hunt and fight. In the enslavement of the agricultural age they began to plow and to manage farms. In the city they went out to work for wages.
But, of course, there is more to life than working to put bread on the table. That other side of life is the fight for status, and both men and women play this game: only they do it differently. For men it used to be the actual fight for advancement in the male hierarchy. But now it is the fight for the selective college, the prestige job, the glittering career, the top dog as CEO or president. But what about for women? How do they play the hierarchy game?
Yes, how do women play the hierarchy game? I have my ideas, but I admit that I really know almost nothing about it. Whatabout the mother in Trollope's Lady Anna? She's a middle-class girl that marries an earl, but the earl pretty soon tells her that he's already married. So she spends the rest of her life trying to prove that she really is the Countess Lovel and get her daughter, Lady Anna, to make a suitable marriage. That, I suspect, gives us a real insight into the way that women play the status game. Today, upscale women are bribing college officials to get their kids into fancy colleges. So nothing has changed. Why do modern women want corporate careers? Because it gives them status; because you are nobody in the educated class unless you have a status job.
So the left has told women to liberate themselves and get out into the labor force and earn as much as men. Wait! It is unjust that women as a whole learn less than men! It is monstrous that women earn less than men because they are less inclined to bid for for money! Well, of course. Politics is division, and so anyone in politics is looking for a way to divide Us and Them.
And don't get me started on sex. Oh yeah. Women are supposed to be free to be themselves, to enter into sex without the traditional stigma of an "easy" woman. And women should have control over their own bodies. And women should be able to dissolve abusive marriages. Just between you and me -- and don't tell anyone I said that -- I think that all this -- the sexual revolution -- has been a disaster for women and that the whole #MeToo culture and microagressions and safe spaces is an inchoate rebellion by women against the modern liberated sex revolution.
And the left is who has put women in this box. The personal is the political: that's what they say. But I say that reducing human life to the political is a Great Reaction against the modern discovery that we probably need less force -- less government -- and less division -- less politics -- and overall less meddling in other peoples' affairs to make the modern world go round. The problem is that women getting themselves out of the box the left has put them in is going to be a process of trial and error, as is everything in this world. The undoing of a mistake is much harder than getting into it.
But when women have emerged from the hell of lefty idiocy, they must face the future as Scarlett O'Hara had to: "Where shall I go? What shall I do?" It is, frankly, a challenge. Freedom is like that. And the truth is that most of us don't really want that. We want to be told what to do and them complain about it.
Does Marjorie actually read your columns? Sheesh!
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