What is the Good Life Better than the Left -- for Women?

I've established to my own satisfaction that the meaning of "life, the universe and everything" for educated male Gentry or People of the Creative Self is symbolized by the notion of the Sacrificial Hero that comes through the Nietzschean/Jungian tradition, and through adepts like Joseph Campbell and Jordan B. Peterson.

But whatabout women?

Truth is, women are not into heroes. You can see that in the whole "safety culture" that powers the "cancel culture." If you make me feel unsafe, well, your words are hurtful and you should be canceled. We have seen this in the resignation of Bari Weiss at The New York Times.

This safety thing, to me, is a girl thing. Being safe, intellectually and emotionally, is not something that occurs to a guy. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." That's the guy approach to wordplay.

And this takes us back to Georg Simmel's prediction a century ago, that with women coming into the public square, they would transform it to suit "a more feminine sensibility." I have been thinking about this for a few years and have come to the conclusion that women don't relate to the public square; they aren't comfortable at all with a frank and fair exchange of views; they don't believe in "debates." That's because women that have a disagreement don't have it out woman to woman. They complain to their friends about the woman they have a problem with, and the whole thing gets massaged by the neighborhood community of women and spat out, eventually in some collective decision of naming and shaming and shunning.

The proof of this is the "safety culture" that is emerging in universities and in the prestige media as women take over. Most of your university students these days are women; most of your university administrators these days are women. And it certainly seems that most of your young journalists are women. That is why you see the rise of the "safety culture." Women expect to be "safe;" they insist on being safe. Being a hero doesn't make sense. Not to a woman.

(Yes I know. There are exceptions. I know a few of them, personally).

So what is "best in life" for a woman?

The answer, I believe, issues out of the basic concept of honor among women. As James Bowman writes in Honor: A History, 

[In] spite of the discrediting that honor has undergone, the basic honor of the savage -- bravery for men, chastity for women -- is still recognizable beneath the surfaces of popular culture what has done so much to efface it. If you doubt it, try calling a man a wimp or a woman a slut. (p.5)

I think the woman's notion of honor comes out in the #WeBelieve yard-sign which usually closes with "Kindness is Everything."

Then, of course, we turn to My Girl George Eliot, Mary-Ann Evans that was. In Adam Bede, the heroine Dinah Morris is the kindest and most thoughtful person in the world. She is always thinking about other people and how she can help them. Her antagonist, Hetty Sorrel, is the most selfish person in the world who thinks of nothing but her beauty, her self-adornment and herself. You can see the question of chastity in women blazing across the sky: goodness, thoughtfulness, kindness.

In Middlemarch we have a rainbow of young women exemplars, from Dorothea Brooke, who really wants to do good in the world, to Rosamond Vincy, who is completely selfish and cannot see out of her needs and her truth of her eternal innocence, to Mary Garth, the Mary-Ann Evans name-alike, who is not to be dislodged from her determination that Fred Vincy has to deserve her before she will accept him as her affianced husband. Dorothea is the kindest, noblest, most thoughtful young woman in the world, and yet, as her uncle Mr. Brooke might say, she has a tendency to "go too far." Rosamond is a peerless beauty, yet frozen in place, determined never to do anything wrong, yet unable to see the wrongness of her mindless selfishness and sense of entitlement. Mary Garth is the balance between the two: kind but firm; thoughtful but not yielding; good, but no pushover.

So, after the alpha and omega of womanhood in Adam Bede George Eliot in Middlemarch gives us a spectrum of women and the opportunity to reflect on the question of woman's honor in more depth and breadth.

Now let us think about how this works out in the context of the modern educated woman in the educated Gentry or the People of the Creative Self.

Clearly, for such women, the need is for something original, something that steps out of the Commoner context of being good and kind and thoughtful by following the rules, going to work, obeying the law. We are trying here to think outside the box of goodness, thoughtfulness, and kindness, all the while avoiding falling into the trap of becoming a Lady Bountiful.

So, obviously, our Dorothea/Dinah/Mary would not be doing conventional things such as nice liberal women do, just aping the current liberal line and doing good, being kind and thoughtful and Lady Bountiful around the usual liberal victims.

In other words, the role of the creative good/kind/thoughtful woman is hard, as the role of the male Sacrificial Hero is hard.

OK. We have solved the whole problem and the future of womankind is set for the next millennium.

But what shall we call this paragon of femininity, the name, the feminine ideal corresponding to the male Sacrificial Hero.

Frankly, I don't have a clue. So I will just lay the question aside and leave it to my Jungian unconscious to rummage around in its archetypes to come up with the right answer.