Women in the Public Square: Pelosi and AOC

One of my ideas is that women do not understand and do not want to live in the public square. It comes from years of pondering Georg Simmel's dictum about the emergence of women into the public square.

Simmel understood that in the short term the public sphere for women would be defined by the rules “created by men and for men” but that eventually women would transform the public square to suit “a more feminine sensibility.”

But how do you square this with micro-aggressions and "safety culture?" You can't, unless you make the shameful jump to the notion that women do not get the public square that men have created, and do not like life in the public square.

The point about the public square is that it is a place where men can fight each other: not with swords but with words. And a beautiful thing it is: to transform the age-old culture of the fight to the verbal fight of the public square.

But women don't do this. When a woman has a beef with another woman she stops talking to her, probably forever. Women can do this because the vast majority of women are the absolute monarchs of their households. Anthony Trollope understands this in John Caldigate where he has all the women in complicated relations of not-talking-to-each-other.

I think this is the way to understand House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her animadversion to Donald Trump. She is just not willing to have any conversation with Donald Trump. Because? Probably because he insulted her a ways back. Insults: that's what men do to each other as they sort out their hierarchy. But women do not. 

So I regard the impeachments of Donald Trump as a kind of high school Mean Girls campaign. Except, of course, that the Mean Girls never think of themselves as mean, but as the most attractive and chaste and pure girls in school.

And AOC is a naive young woman that believes what she has been carefully taught, as I believe, almost all women do.

What neither of these women understand and what few women understand is what every man in the public square understands: It's All Bullshit!

Men can accept this because of a maxim of mine:

Women expect to be protected; men know they are expendable.

But, you see, if women are to expect to be protected they must go with the program, and that starts with believing and enacting society's main narrative.

So I believe that eventually women will depart the public square; they will realize they have much more power by acting from behind the scenes. The Duke of Wellington, you know, was frequently entertained by in the 1820s by Mrs. Arbuthnot.

How will it happen? Probably it will happen as upper-class women come to decide that careers are not what they are cracked up to be. And so it will come to be accepted, and then insisted, that women who really contribute to society do so as mothers to their children and advisors to their husbands. Oh, and they will be opposed to divorce. Did you know that the divorce rate for college-educated women is 25 percent?

And then middle-class women will copy the upper-class women, and the world will change.