Men, Women, Politics, and the Public Square

According to one of the exit polls last night, the voters that moved most towards the Republicans from Democrats was white women.

Which means, I suppose, that while women don't like mean tweets, they really don't like men in the women's bathroom.

I suppose that this is the reason why, they say, the most important thing in a political candidate is "likability." Kennedy was likable, Nixon was not.

Guess what kind of voter thinks that likability is important.

Or let's get back to my pal Nazi Carl Schmitt who says that politics about the friend / enemy distinction. But I prefer Curtis Yarvin who makes it real simple and says: "There is no politics without an enemy."

See, in my belief system women don't have "enemies;" they only have women that they don't talk to, of whom they have said "I can't believe she said that."

Put it another way: in the Carl Schmitt friend / enemy distinction the point about the enemy is the possibility of "conflict," or violence, or killing. In the "conflicts" that women have the most extreme result is really no more than "never talking to her again." Obviously, in the male case, fisticuffs, or worse, is always a possibility. Anyway, in the US, male murder offenders outnumbered female offenders by about 7 to 1.  And if you factor in that blacks are 55 percent of murder offenders, then how many white women murderers does that leave you?

What I mean is that, if politics is about the enemy, and for white women the enemy is almost certainly no more than that woman down the street that she is not talking to, then politics is really a guy thing. Because the enemy is almost certainly male, and only the guys are going to put it to a fight.

That's why women hate the mean tweets.

Mean tweets are a part of the male Culture of Insult, which we may consider a polite form of dueling, or a civilized form of conflict. We modern men trade insults instead of fists. It's a guy thing. But for women mean tweets don't make sense: "I can't believe he would tweet that."

When women don't like something they complain; when men don't like something they trade insults: thus the women's Culture of Complaint and the men's Culture of Insult.

But when prices are spiraling into the stratosphere and grocery-store shelves are empty, and little Susie is getting attacked in the school bathroom, that's different, because all of a sudden the protected world in which a woman can go about her vital day-to-day business is no longer protected.

I say that "women expect to be protected" and when they discover that the current protector isn't protecting them, then they go get another protector. So if the gubmint isn't providing a safe neighborhood and a functioning economy, and safe schools for little Susie, then women start talking to the neighbor women and pretty soon they all come to the conclusion that they are all going to vote for the other guy.

But it's worse than that.

I say there is no need for politics, because there really isn't an "enemy" any more, some Viking band that will sail up the river and kill all the men and take all the grain -- and the silver from the church -- and sell the women into slavery at the main European slave market in Dublin. If you, the Russkies, loot the factories in eastern Germany and take all the machines back to Russia what good does it do you? The Soviet Union still collapses 45 years later.

What? No enemies? No need for politics? Tell me it ain't so!

That's why our liberal friends, who believe in politics like a religion, have to conjure up fake enemies, like the "armed insurrectionists" of January 6, and the violent extremists that are upsetting education bureaucrats at school-board meetings, and the white oppressors that are systematically oppressing oppressed peoples despite the best efforts of the allies. And that is to say nothing of "climate deniers," the foul enemy that is preventing noble ecological heroes from tackling climate change.

But here's the problem. We men, we few, we band of brothers, are programmed to be ready at a moment's notice to jump up and fight the foe. But if there isn't any foe, then what do we do?

The answer is simple. We have to fake it. If you are a liberal you conjure up fake political enemies and mount on your charger and set your wokey lance and charge the enemy oppressor. For everybody else you become a road warrior and battle the other road warriors for market share. Road warriors are guys that create products and services; liberal social justice warriors just divide everyone into battling tribes.

For women? They go to college and decide they want to get into "activism." So they get a job in HR and start forcing CRT on the employees and the kiddies.

This is not that hard.

The Question of Men, Women, Stress, Hierarchy, Complaint and Conformity

Responding to my piece on "Yes, Young Liberal Women Have Mental Health Issues, But..." regular reader Sara reminds my that my notion of the women's Culture of Complaint was corrected a while back by a woman red.hibiscus who wrote:

I don’t agree that woman have a Culture of Complaint. That is what men perceive, not what women experience... The actual culture is a Culture of Conformity. Negative tools are shame, guilt, threat of expulsion. The civilized version is rule of community ties and on-the-ground social ties, eg family.

Perfectly correct. Actually I would say that, in a perfect world, men have a Culture of Courage. After a couple of drinks it descends into a Culture of Insult. In a perfect world, women have a Culture of Conformity. After a couple of disagreements, it descends into a Culture of Complaint. Ying and Yang, and all that.

The piece on Liberal Women got into the question of "stress" which I think is a Girl Thing. I also think that "mental health issues" has a lot to do with women experiencing conflict in the man-designed public square. Conflict is part of the game for men, but intolerable for women.

In view of all this, Sara writes, we need to remember

1) The idea that open confrontation (instead of gossip) is anti-female culture 

2) The idea that stress AKA conflict is intolerable to women and they won't stand for it. 

Men live in a dominance hierarchy, Sara writes, and "see their survival in the world around them as a fight to be on top of the pyramid." But

Women however, because of the nature of their female bodies, necessarily see their own survival in the world around them as a fight to be left alone and survive in an EXISTING CONTEXT set by men.

Actually, I would refine this to say that most men most of the time know their place in the dominance hierarchy, and only occasionally attempt to change it in a fight, a point made by Jordan B. Peterson in his lobster hierarchy argument.

I suppose the same applies to women, wanting to be left alone to run their households and raise children in the context created by marriage, and only occasionally being challenged by the gossip of the women's Culture of Complaint -- which is, no doubt, concerned about the woman in question appearing to violate the Culture of Conformity.

To get all Hegelian we would say that the male Culture of Courage has its negation in the Culture of Insult, while the female Culture of Conformity has its negation in the Culture of Complaint.

I would say that, despite the male hierarchy, there is among men a curious counter-current of equality. When men greet each other with an insult they are expressing that notion: "hey, pal, you are no better than I am." And, for instance, when I had my interview with billionaire Steve Ballmer I was careful to treat him as an equal, and behave as though I expected to be treated as an equal.

And I think that in the women's Culture of Conformity that asserts an equality among women there is a hidden hierarchy that every woman knows but nobody talks about. The Culture of Complaint is all about adjusting that hidden hierarchy.

Also, another woman corrected me on the Culture of Complaint saying that the ideal among women is Kindness. (This explains the last line on the virtue-signaling #WeBelieve yard sign that insists "Kindness is Everything").

I suspect that the Culture of Conformity and the Culture of Kindness are different aspects of the same thing.

Don't ask me how all this aligns with the left's insistence that everything is a social construction, except when it isn't.

Why the Good Guys Always Lose: It's Not Their Fault

One of the perennial complaints of guys like me is that our conservative and Republican leaders are wusses, that they always roll over for the Dems.

Like with the current stolen election. Like with cheap foreign labor for Big Tech. Like with climate change. Like with systemic racism. Like with the eternal entitlement programs.

I'm here to say It's Not Their Fault. Let me count the ways.

Ruling Class Argument -- There is a ruling class in America and elsewhere in the world and it's a kinda club. You wanna be a member? Well you better wear the right clothes, express the right opinions, support the right programs, or you can't advance to higher "degrees." Just like in the Masons. Right now the ruling class is the "educated class" that has been to all the right selective colleges. 

So, if you didn't go to the right college and express the wrong opinions you just aren't going to get ahead in the ruling class.

Cathedral Argument -- Curtis Yarvin argues that reality in the western world is defined by a Cathedral, a quasi-religious cultural establishment that defines what you think and feel.

Its inner circle, the Brain and the Voice, includes all professors, journalists, serious artists, published authors, etc. Its outer ring, the Conversation, is the whole upper social class. Its funding division, the Foundation, is the whole upper economic class. Its teaching division, the School, gets to indoctrinate almost everyone for over a decade. And its doctrine, the Dream, defines good and evil for all decent people.

And now, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, Google's YouTube is establishing an Index of proscribed videos. You are not allowed to post videos suggesting that the election was stolen.

Truth is, all societies make it very difficult for visions of good and evil that compete with its Cathedral orthodoxy. Usually such visions are considered heresy.

There Must Be An Enemy Argument -- Since whenever, human communities have had to defend themselves from the Enemy. Now, you may think that, in this day and age, we are past all this, because chimps, for chimps survive by defending their food-growing territory in which the females and young can eat and grow, as argued by Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn. True, because now you can buy food, not grow it. But you think that the defense instinct, that goes all the way back to chimps and beyond, is going to wither away in the two centuries since possession of food-growing land hasn't mattered?

Actually, when the rulers don't have a foreign enemy to rally their people, they invent a domestic one. That's what our rulers' "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative is all about.

The whole point of this argument is to rally the males, because all males are instinctively defenders of the border. It goes with the male Culture of Courage/Insult.

Yes, right now, the enemies of the state are people like you.

All Good People Agree Argument -- If you are a good person everybody likes you; if you are a bad person then everybody hates you. If you are a good person you will go to Heaven; if you are a bad person you will go to Hell. If you are a good person you may be a saint; if you are a bad person you may be a witch.

And if you get on the wrong side of the good people you may find that you have become one of the bad people.

The whole point of this argument is to get all the women conforming to the ruling class narrative, for women must, for good reasons going all the way back to our chimp ancestors, get along as they live with each other every day preparing food and caring for the children. Women have a Culture of Conformity, which is enforced by the women's Culture of Complaint.

Yes, right now all the bad people are people like you.

Failed Revolution Argument -- All religious and cultural and political movements eventually face a "failure of prophecy" moment. Because they are all confidently predicting a glorious future that almost certainly will not show up. The more cunning religious movements prophesy that Heaven and Paradise are the reward for a virtuous life after death. Our modern socialist and culture war religious doctrines prophesy Heaven on Earth.

What do lefty movements do when the promised Heaven on Earth doesn't arrive? They usually amp it up, to keep the sect together. In politics, the ideologists amp it up with a Reign or Terror or a Great Purge, or a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Eventually the amp-up collapses, because, as Crane Brinton says in The Anatomy of Revolution, humans cannot live forever in a state of ideological fervor. Eventually we have to get back to wiving and thriving.

Yes, right now our Wokies are amping it up. Nobody knows when normal programming will resume.

Creative People Gotta Create Argument -- In my reductive Three Peoples theory I suggest that, for Responsibles, God made the Heaven and Earth and the job of humans is to responsibly wive and thrive on the Earth that God created. But I argue that Creatives are called to be gods, to create the world anew.

This means that for Creatives, if they are not creating, doing something new, bending the arc of history towards justice, advocating for traditionally marginalized people, imagining a new and better world, they are nobody.

Yes, right now if you are not creatively advocating for a better world, you are a nobody.

Stupid Ruling Class Argument -- A good ruling class knows that it must refresh its membership with talented people from the lower classes. A good ruling class creates a "political formula" that values all the people in the realm. A good ruling class keeps a weather eye on the passions and the obsessions of the "masses." A good ruling class knows that it is a minority, and that if the people ever got serious they could kick the rulers out in a New York minute.

A stupid ruling class knows that it knows best and it makes sure the plebs keep quiet. A stupid ruling class thinks that only members of the ruling class are smart, and that the lower classes are stupid. A stupid ruling class lives and entertains itself in the Capitol and doesn't get out much. A stupid ruling thinks that the ordinary people are too stupid ever to form a head of rebellion against their wise rule.

Yes, right now we probably have a fairly stupid ruling class.

Why to the Good Guys always lose? I would say that over the last 50 years we have had several political moments where our rulers could have altered their rule to accommodate various populist moments: The Silent Majority in the Nixon years, the Reagan Democrats in the Reagan years, the Ross Perot moment in 1992, the Republican Congress in 1994, the Tea Party in 2010, the Trump election in 2016. But they didn't.

The point is that, of course the Good Guys are going to lose, short of an actual rebellion and civil war, if the ruling class refuses to accommodate to their grievances. The rulers have the upper hand; that's why we call them rulers. And It's Not Their Fault if the rulers outmaneuver the suckers every time, using all the bolded arguments I have listed up above.

And so it goes. Until the day that it doesn't.

No, Women Have a Culture of Comformity

 There I was happily commenting on a piece at Quillette on women and the Mourner's Veto, in other words the right for emotion and tears to overrule calm and spirited discussion. So I commented with usual wit and brio thus:

The Mourner’s Veto is a Girl Thing. No man would ever tearfully say at a microphone that he is “literally shaking.”

This all began to come together for me when I read the German sociologist Georg Simmel, who wrote over a century ago that the public square had been created by men for men, and that as women came into the public square they would change it to “suit a more feminine sensibility.”

What did that mean, I wondered?

The answer, I realized, eventually, as the world got into full-on Snowfake and Micro-aggression territory, is that women don’t relate to the public square. Not at all, and they are presently in the process of destroying it. Women’s transactions are one-on-one where the two women present complain about other women, as in “I can’t believe she said that.” A variant is “Much as I hate to say it…”

Men have a Culture of Insult. Its civilized version is the public square.

Women have a Culture of Complaint. There is no civilized version.

But an intelligent woman, red.hybiscus, responded thusly.

I feel like I’m caught in a giant Mean Girls cafeteria, wherein a tiny group of very nasty rich girls hold everyone else in thrall and terror. If a dysfunctional male hierarchy involves physical violence and brutality, a dysfunctional female hierarchy involves vicious nasty rumor and unctuous tribal affiliation. My own hypothesis is that social media - a tool that makes social shaming, expulsion, groupthink enforcement etc vastly easier - intersects with women rising in economic and social power. So we have more powerful women conjoined with a tool that allows a handful to do their Mean Girl thing.

I don’t agree that woman have a Culture of Complaint. That is what men perceive, not what women experience. Men perceive it’s ‘complaint’ because they still think of women as dependent on them, so to them women’s form of power is whining and complaining to them. The actual culture is a Culture of Conformity. Negative tools are shame, guilt, threat of expulsion. The civilized version is rule of community ties and on-the-ground social ties, eg family.

She's right, you know. The whole point of women's complaining to each other about a third woman not present is to establish and enforce an agreed narrative to which every woman in the community must conform, or else. Or else she is a witch.

Of course, it's not just women that do this. It's true in religion, where you'd better toe the line on the orthodoxy, or you are a heretic and they are building the auto da fé right now. It's true in politics where you better toe the conventional wisdom line or you are a traitor and a rebel, and we are getting ready to shut you up for hate speech right now. It's true in science, where you better toe the line until the old guys retire or you won't get grants, as Thomas Kuhn wrote many moons ago in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

But back to red.hybiscus's Culture of Conformity.

The actual culture is a Culture of Conformity. Negative tools are shame, guilt, threat of expulsion. The civilized version is rule of community ties and on-the-ground social ties, eg family.

I think that the key with the women's Culture of Conformity is that resort to law-enforcement should be excluded. In other words, the whole point of the women's culture is that women sort it out among themselves. This woman is a good woman, that woman is a whore. Etc. But no whining to the police, like the two women university administrators in Britland that, doubtless, were "literally shaking" about the man that said, in a private conversation, that Jews are smart and Germans are good engineers. So they fired him.

Er, no, ladies. You get to talk to all your Mean Girls in the university administration and say to each other "I can't believe he said that," and "I'm so angry I am literally shaking." But not a firing offense. Get it?

I think in the male Culture of Insult and its civilized version, the public square, this is called "being a good sport."

Insurrection in Seattle

Well, well, well. The AntiFas and wokies have taken over a six block area of wokey Capitol Hill in Seattle, the place where all the 20-somethings in artistical black live.

And the first thing that happens is they erect barricades. Otherwise known as a border wall. Imagine if Trump...

And the first thing their police force does is rough up a guy doing an unapproved "tag." Imagine if the Seattle Police Department...

Well. 

I called my Seattle city councilman this morning, axing what his 5-point Plan was to end the insurrection. I suggested to his voice mail, as an example of tough action, the Clinton-era attack on the Branch Davidian compound that, I believe, resulted in the whole compound of the religious cult being burned to the ground and several Branch Davidians and federales being killed. It all started when the Bureau of Tobacco and firearms came to get the guns of the cultists.

So. They came for their guns and the followers of David Koresh said, out of my cold dead hands. Thank goodness there wasn't a Republican president at the time or everyone would have thrown themselves on the ground wailing and gnashing their teeth at the end of "our democracy."

Since I'm a mere 5 miles from the center of insurrection, you might think I am concerned, and I am, of course, because you never know.

But maybe we need this, because, as Edmund Burke said, "Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other." Borders. No kidding. Police doing a bit of the rough stuff. No kidding.

This is the sort of thing that President Trump is rather good at addressing, and I dare say he will when he addresses the Republican National Convention and gets on the road again with his Trump rallies.

The point is that the educated left in this country are ignorant idiots. They, in the words of Ben Rhodes, literally know nothing.

Here they are returning the nation back to vigilante justice, justice by vengeance rather than bureaucratic law and order and police restrained by actual laws and rules.

Here they are returning to naming and shaming and shunning, as practiced down the ages by the women, and latterly in church communities and their "dis-fellowshipping." Oh and by the Kidz in Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Here they are, proposing to "defund the police" and spend the money on social programs. Oh please. Don't you idiots realize that the social programs are the problem?

The problem, dear liberals, is that you are trying to combine your religion, the religion of woke equality and justice, with the prosaic system of law and order, which tries not to take a position on the question of "the meaning of life" but merely to remove some of the primitive cultural practices like outgroup hate and vengeance with police and law courts.

The point about police and law is not that they are morally superior, but that they remove the older practices that we colloquially refer to as "the Hatfields and the McCoys."

The point about the separation of church and state is the idea to separate the search for meaning from the prosaic question of keeping the peace in the city.

And there's another question, that appears in black and white to me, as a profound sexist. A lot of the naming and shaming and canceling is being done by women. I believe this is because naming and shaming is part of the women's instinctive community culture, the way that women have interacted since the dawn of women living close to their mother-in-laws.

I am here to say that I don't think this women's cancel culture works in the so-called "public square" of the modern world.

Put it this way. Just as men have had to modify their instinctive male honor code from vengeance and the duel to merely insulting each other in public forums -- limited in places like the House of Commons and Congress by rules against insult -- so women need to civilize their culture of name and shame, of "I can't believe she said that" and getting the other women on your side against the neighborhood woman that offended you.

Right now our wokie women and the nice liberal ladies have No Idea that their Culture of Complaint is a problem. No Idea.

And I don't know how we are going to educate them and the SJW kidz educated in our lefty seminaries, except by the Burkean concept of the School of Example.

The whole purpose of knowledge, of course, is to limit, at least in part, the brutal lessons of the School of Example.

Meanwhile Long Live the Revolution of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone!

The De-domestication of Woman

If men have been progressively domesticated over the millennia and the recent centuries, whatabout women?

Good question. If we believe the feminists, women have been domestically oppressed since the dawn of time. Until yesterday when women came forth into the public square and demanded their rights. Women had been forcibly domesticated by men except for occasional liberations like the Amazons of myth and legend.

Only, if we believe social scientist Georg Simmel, the emergence of women into the public square has more to do with the reduction in work at home to keep food on the table and babies in the crib than a reduction in oppression.

Or, if we believe Martin van Creveld, the emancipation of women occurred because men felt sorry for them. As in, whatever the little woman wants. You realize what that means, ladies? It means that the dreaded era of white male supremacy has been replaced with a new era of white male patronage. Eeuw!

Also, the domestication of men has resulted in a less dangerous public square. Used to be that unescorted women were fair game. Not in the capitalist city, where the coin of the realm is trust. Hey, maybe part of being a trustworthy man is to be trustworthy around women.

But as Georg Simmel wrote, the emergence of women into the public square would result in a change to the public square as women transformed it to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

But now, as I have written, I realize that women are not interested in a public square, because the public square is a domesticated version of the male one-one-one duel and the medieval tournament, that are predicated on the male cultures of courage and insult. Did you know that there are lines on the floor of the British House of Commons that the members are not allowed do cross? The distance between the two lines has to do with the length of swords back in the day. Modern politics is a domesticated version of civil war -- civil war by other means. It is where men can strut and fret in parliament without actually coming to blows, mano a mano. Women don't do duels, or open outcry in parliament, or dueling op-eds. Because women have a culture of complaint.

So I interpret the emergence of women into the public square as women just complaining again. It looks really cool to get out of the house, especially as a way for well-born educated Gentry women to differentiate themselves from low-born Commoners. But when you actually get out of the house and find out how the public square works, well, I can't believe it's like that.

But of course it is. Men have a culture of courage when they are being good boys, and a Culture of Insult when they are being bad boys. So the public square they built is a domesticated form of the old culture of combat and insult. Bloody brilliant, if you ask me, because the whole point of social animals is the reduction in violence, because violence is expensive, and the more you can reduce violence to a dull roar, the more social the animals and the more they can survive and prosper and wive and thrive.

So the interesting question, for me, is to figure out how women will retreat back into domesticity, since the open outcry of the public square is just not their kind of thing. Let's just try to imagine how this will work.

Actually it's not that hard to imagine, because all we have to do is look around us as women have demanded an end to micro-aggressions -- i.e., trivial insults that any man would take in stride -- and safe spaces from uncomfortable ideas. Women really are not into face to face combat, and not into direct insult. Their Culture of Complaint is indirect rather than direct, with Woman A complaining to Woman B about Woman C.

Perhaps schools will become girls and women only. Schools used to be places where little boys were roundly spanked and disciplined until they got with the program. But since girls and women have emerged into education they have utterly transformed it into a Kaffee Klatsch that is profoundly unfriendly to boys and men. But actually, with on-line learning and the internet and home-schooling I expect that men will create a new education system better suited to the male sensibility. One thing that might help would be to reinstitute apprenticeships.

Perhaps men will develop a new public square, parallel to the present one, where men can be men and do not get named and shamed and canceled for hurting someone's feelings, leaving women in charge of the old public square that nobody pays any attention to.

Perhaps men will develop a new -- domesticated -- culture of courage and insult based on the online video games that young men are presently addicted to. I have a feeling that a good way to understand video games are as a rehearsal for the real world of the public square, a place where young men can hone their courage, develop their tactical skills and, for the talented tenth, their strategic sense.

Perhaps girls and women will come to dominate the safe sectors of education and work in established administrative structures where the culture can be adapted to the feminine sensibility of one-on-one conversation and the disciplinary culture of naming, blaming, shaming, and canceling, leaving men to dominate the new domesticated wild west of the new public square.

The point is that women have always been domesticated, just like chimpanzee females. Their job, and it is the only job that matters, is to birth and raise the next generation. Everything else is just fluff and conceit and the need for high-status humans to differentiate themselves from the common herd.

And my judgement of the feminist movement of the de-domestication of woman is that it is a cruel trick upon lower-status women that do not feel the need to differentiate themselves as special and clearly way above the common herd.

The Sacrificial Hero Ancient and Modern

Recently I've been writing a long piece, that I submitted to the edgy conservative site American Mind, entitled "A Vision of the Good Life Better Than Leftism." Don't know if they'll publish it, but I've been thinking about what I wrote.

Because what I wrote about is trying to answer the question: what should educated scions of the educated Gentry aspire to? What should be the vision of the good life for an educated person?

My point is that the old culture of responsibility, of obeying the law, going to work, following the rules of God's divine law no longer resonates with the educated class.

The problem is that the highest and noblest vision of the good life for educated people, ever since Marx, has been to be an activist, nobly bending the arc of history towards justice for the oppressed and the marginalized. And I believe this is a monumental error.

Of course, I have developed a comprehensive and mandatory critique of the left, in my Great Reaction concept that experiences the left as a gigantic lurch back to the primitive. This has become understandable to me since I took a serious look at Jung through his adepts like Jordan B. Peterson. The point of Jung's "collective unconscious" and "archetypes" is to advance the notion that a lot of what we think and do and believe is imprinted in us through eons of evolution as "instincts" or "emotions," etc.

I use quotes because I am suggesting that we really don't have a clue what the so-called "collective unconscious" is. Nor yet an "archetype." Or "instincts" and "emotions." Obviously we have something that influences our actions, and that something is something other than our conscious mind. For instance, as I walked briskly up the hill on N 60th St this morning my breathing "automatically" became deeper and deeper as I struggled up the hill. I wasn't consciously doing that; but something was triggering it. Yes, Sherlock, just what was it?

So, when the educated elite decides that God is Dead, they embark upon a long and perilous journey, as Nietzsche argues, through decadence, nihilism, and the endless hell of the eternal recurrence. Until they find a new god to worship in the revaluation of all values. And that god is themselves.

But, obviously, there will be many mistakes and false turns and disasters on the Journey to a new faith and a new god. And I think that "activism" is one such false start.

My brilliant vision of the good life better than leftism is that the goal for an educated sprout should not be to become an activist, because activists are "Ego Heros." Activism is not really about saving the oppressed. It is about the educated activist feeling good about himself, massaging his Ego, making himself into a kind of Homeric god that orders the world around, not from Mr. Olympus but from Activist Central.

And I developed the notion that this notion of activism is an echo of the knight-errants of medieval romance. I first set this up a while back and now I am reading The Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga which deals with the whole question of the cult of the knight and the knight's love for his chosen loved-one whose scarf he carried on his knightly quest. Bologna and balderdash: that is what Huizinga says. The real knights of the Middle Ages were thugs, and life back then was nasty, brutish and short. There was no time for courtly love and damsels in distress, just the brutal game of political and military power. The medieval romances were fantasy, escape-from-reality. Nothing wrong with that: we all like our fantasy literature for breakfast.

But I am saying that the Activism Culture is a fantasy culture, and it probably does more harm than good, because the way to get on in the modern world is to become a responsible citizen that takes responsibility for looking after him and his, and does not expect some medieval lord or activist to do the heavy lifting.

As an example, today Christopher DeGroot this morning writes appreciatively about James Q. Wilson's 1990s proposal that "we" should put single black mothers in group homes if they get welfare, to get them out of the poisonous culture of the ghetto, in at attempt to deal with the poison of children growing up in a world where they "never see a married man working for a living at a legitimate job and supporting his family."

Yes, but. The problem begins with the fact that today we have abandoned the old rule that a woman needs a husband if she is going to be a mother and expect to raise her child to adulthood. The whole paraphernalia of chastity, of not having sex with a man unless he commits to raising his child, of marriage, of middle-class morality, of bourgeois respectability, of stigmatizing a woman having a child outside marriage as in Les Miserables, and so on is that if a woman does not ensure that her child has a father, and if society -- i.e., the neighborhood women -- turns a blind eye towards single parenthood, then you got trouble with a capital T. And group homes ain't gonna solve it.

But it sure feels good being an activist protesting against middle-class morality.

So what I came up with is the notion of the Sacrificial Hero. Yes, I know! Talk about reinventing the wheel, especially since the whole of Christianity amounts to a cult of Jesus Christ, the Sacrificial Hero!

But that is the point. The great truths are timeless, but they need to be reimagined in every age and for every culture, and for every level in the culture.

The question for our time is how the Sacrificial Hero can be experienced in our time and especially by the Gentry class of educated people that very often live and work in cloistered monasteries, like government bureaucracies, university faculties, and corporate headquarters.

This kind of person thinks themself a couple of cuts above an ordinary middle-class Commoner. You can tell this because of the genius of the political idiot Hillary Clinton who coined the notion of the "basket of deplorables" to signify ordinary middle-class Americans that aren't quite into the creative culture of the educated Übermenschen.

The point is that it in my lordly and reductive Three Peoples philosophy, it is perfectly understandable that ordinary middle-class people are not really into creative treatments of race, sex, and gender. People like that just follow the rules, without questioning them. And guess what: it is probably a good thing, because if everyone was determined to "question everything" well... Actually, our liberal friends are clear about that. They get to question everything, but not ordinary "deplorables." No siree.

So, if you follow my notion, you judge people that aspire to creativehood by whether they aspire to be an Ego Hero or submit to being a Sacrificial Hero.

Of course, the ancient form of the Sacrificial Hero that the gods sacrificed as a result of their power games on Mt. Olympus. That is how Sacrificial Hero works for the People of the Subordinate Self. But with Axial Age religions, God provides the Sacrificial Hero in the person of the Son of God, and all humans have to do is venerate God's example and try to live like Jesus.

But for the People of the Creative Self it is each one of them that must try out for the Sacrificial Hero. And so, for those that choose it, the Sacrificial Hero's Journey is incredibly hard and challenging. No wonder most of them choose the easy way out, as Ego Heroes.

I think that the two most obvious Sacrificial Heroes out there right now are Donald Trump and LTG Michael Flynn. The Deep State is throwing everything it can against these two men, and they are baring their chests and taking the incoming rounds. And for what?

Yeah, I know. To a great extent they had no choice. Not for them the convenient leak in the media, the helpful unmasking, the special prosecutor to cover their tracks. They must travel their own via dolorosa and try to keep faith that it will all come right in the end.

And if it doesn't come right in the end, at least they died honorably.

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous: Donald Trump the blowhard publicity hound becoming a Sacrificial Hero. Who woulda thunk it? But the truth is that Donald Trump has accepted his destiny with unimaginable courage and seems to get up every day determined to do the best he can.

And if Donald Trump wins the November election he is still not out of the woods, because he will be dealing with the aftermath of the shutdown with its gigantic increase in federal debt, and then the inflation that will follow the monetization of a lot of the debt, and the recession that will come as a result of having to fight inflation.

I doubt if Donald Trump will leave office as a glorious hero. I expect that he will leave as the scapegoat for all our troubles, a sacrifice to our national dignity.

Or some sort of Sacrificial Hero.

The Two Cultures -- Table of Contents

The Two Cultures: Male and Female

1. Women and Sex and Love and Marriage
   So rules about sex are a good idea after all?
   
   
2. Chelsea Clinton Proves My Two Cultures Theory
   She complained about Steve Bannon's tweets
   
   
3. Are Women the Big Problem?
   Because some things are better left to men
   
   
4. All Politics is Identity Politics
   
   
5. Basic Training for Women in the Workplace
   If women are to be able to deal with aggressive men, they need training
   
   
6. Politics is Not About Issues, But Status
   
   
7. Women's Marches, Cathy Newman, and the Culture of Complaint
   
   
8. On Failing to Rewrite My "Three Peoples" in the Light of Lefty "Privilege" Notions
   
   
9. On Darwin and Escape Hatches and the Will to Power
   
   
10. The Wages of Women in Leadership
    Women just don't belong in a hierarchical system
    
    
11. Yes, But What Message are People Receiving?
    
    
12. And, of Course, Tribes are Sexist
    
    
13. Our Big Woman Problem. Again.
    
    
14. What Women Want: Running the Clock Back
    
    
15. A Test of My Culture of Complaint Theory
    Did Christine Blasey Ford just want to "tell her story?"
    
    
16. A Public Square with a More "Feminine Sensibility"
    Without the male culture of insult? Hmm.
    
    
17. Melinda Gates Validates My Theory of the Sexes
    Melinda Gates hated that the men argued so much. So she "civilized" Microsoft
    
    
18. What Do You Think Parades are For, Lefties?
    It's all about "we got the power" to show that nobody can't mess with us
    
    
19. What is the Point of Religion and Morality?
    In 50 years things will be different from now
    
    
20. Was Trump's "Go Back" Tweet a Blunder?
    
    
21. Women and Politics
    Women's culture is naming and shaming, men's is insult and force
    
    
22. The Question of Women in the Public Square
    
    
23. Let's Check Out the Woman Question
    Maybe women will end up returning to wiving and thriving
    
    
24. Jane Austen and the Resumption of Manners
    Because the culture of manners is how women dominate the domestic space
    
    
25. Women Stressed. What Does It Mean?
    It's really hard being superheroes when all you want is to Learn and Care and Instruct
    
    
26. Pejorative Politics: Nothing New Under the Sun
    The way to deal with pejoratives is to embrace them
    
    
27. Which is Worse? Trump's Insults or the Racist Canard
    If \women don't like Trump's insults, then whatabout accusations of racism?
    
    
28. What's Next in the Battle of the Sexes?
    One fine day all the women's gossip network will end today's feminism
    
    
29. Time to Kill the Racism Virus
    It's time to stop cringing in fear whenever someone calls us a racist
    
    
30. Looking at the Good Side of My Culture-of-Insult/Culture of Complaint Notion
    Cos there's also the Culture of Courage and the Culture of Praise
    
    
31. Just Because I Made a Little Joke
    My letter to the Managing Editor of Right Wing Watch
    
    
32. The Sacrificial Hero Ancient and Modern
    How do we "save" the Gentry hero from egoism?
    
    
33. The De-domestication of Woman
    
    
34. Insurrection in Seattle
    
    
35. No, Women Have a Culture of Comformity
    
    
36. Why the Good Guys Always Lose: It's Not Their Fault
    
    
37. The Question of Men, Women, Stress, Hierarchy, Complaint and Conformity
    
    
38. Men, Women, Politics, and the Public Square
    

Two Cultures in Brief

Men and women live in two different cultures. This arises out of the different culture of honor experienced by each sex. I first began dimly to understand this when I read James Bowman's 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.

Honor for men is courage, the courage to stand with his brothers-in-arms under fire. Honor for women is to be good, with nary a blemish on her pinafore or her reputation.

Of course a woman's honor is not just about her sexual chastity; it is more a question of her being a Good Little Girl that has done everything Mother or Teacher has demanded.

I call this the Two Cultures. In fact, there are four cultures, two each for men and for women.

Taking the negative first, men have a Culture of Insult. This is what the ancient principle of the bar fight is all about. Some drunkard at the saloon has dared to question my courage, and so I am obliged to teach him a lesson and defend my honor. A more upscale version of the bar fight is the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Hamilton accepted the challenge because he felt, as a General in the United States army that might be called upon to lead his nation on the battlefield, he needed to defend his reputation for courage.

The women's version is the Culture of Complaint. This is because the culture of women is that you do not directly challenge another woman. What you do is complain about a third woman in a one-on-one with another woman in the community, using the time-honored complaint of "I can't believe she said/did that."

Of course, when a woman complains to a man, that is different. She is telling him, indirectly, to step up to the mark, to be a man and protect her. Alternatively, as George Eliot suggests in Adam Bede, she complains because she wants to be "soothed."

Enough of the dark side, let's look on the bright side.

When men are just behaving like good courageous warriors, standing beside their brothers, we have a Culture of Courage, and they are using their courage to do good things, whether it's defending the border, or being a good husband and father and going down the mine to earn wages to provide a home for his family.

Equally, when women are behaving like loving wives and mothers we have the Culture of Kindness. The kindest woman that ever lived was of course George Eliot's Dinah Morris in Adam Bede. But later Eliot evidently thought that Dinah was a bit over the top, and so she revised and expanded the concept and so created three heroines in Middlemarch: Dorothea Brooke that wanted to do good; Rosamund Vincy that is convinced that she is good; and Mary Garth who actually lives doing good. Mary is the daughter of a land-agent just like George Eliot was.

The precipitate of the male Culture of Courage is the male hierarchy, that Nature has invented to reduce violence among males. To raise your position in the hierarchy you need to demonstrate courage under fire, and so men engage in all kinds of activities -- from business to politics to climbing Mt. Everest -- to demonstrate their courage and hopefully raise their position in the hierarchy. And that is where the Culture of Insult comes in.

The consequence of the female Culture of Kindness is the formal equality of the neighborhood community of women. In that community no woman is better than any other, or the Culture of Complaint will go to work. Obviously, if you are chaste and pure -- and who dares tell a woman she is not -- then no other women in the community, be she ever so beautiful and rich, is better than any other women in the community. Thus Lizzie Bennet in Pride and Prejudice can tell Lady Catherine de Bourgh where to put it.

You see the Two Cultures at work any time you go out for a walk in the neighborhood. The men you will encounter call boys and dogs "Buddy" and expect them to come to heel. The women you observe will seek to persuade boys and dogs rather than order them.

Just Because I Made a Little Joke

A while back in American Thinker I penned a piece about "Women, the Public Square, and Cancel Culture." In it I made the point that I had spent years pondering that women don't like the public square, and if we give them too much opportunity they will abolish it. See the "cancel" culture and microaggressions and safe spaces. Oh, and I made a little joke:

In other words, women don’t confront someone that has insulted them [in the public square]. No. They complain about it to a third person, as in “I can’t believe President Trump tweeted that.” And the complaint ripples through the “hive mind” of the community of women, and sooner or later the culprit is named, shamed, and shunned. Or, as we now say, “impeached.”

A couple of days ago I was searching Google for my use of "Culture of Insult" and I found that back on December 10 that AT piece had been featured over at Right Wing Watch in a piece by Kristen Doerer: "Women in the Public Square Are to Blame for Impeachment, Right-Wing Blog Says."

As Foghorn Leghorn said, so many years ago, "That's a joke, boy." I think I am going to send Kirsten Doerer an email:

Attn: Kristen Doerer, Managing Editor

A couple of days ago I came across your report on my thoughtful article at American Thinker on women in the public square.

Do you know? I think that the headline of your piece "Women... are to blame for impeachment" was what we postmodern thinkers call "overdetermined."

As Foghorn Leghorn said, so many years ago. "That's a joke, boy."

Of course, I realize that, racist-sexist-homophobe as I am, that I would not be as sensitive to modern readers like you as I might have been.

But jokes and pejoratives aside, I was trying to think through a serious question. What if women are different than men? What if women cannot stand the free-for-all of the public square? What then? What happens to the free exchange of ideas? What happens to politics? What happens to the culture?

What do you think? What speech is acceptable, what what speech is to be named, shamed, and shunned? You tell me.

Of course, my larger point, encapsulated in one of my maxims -- at https://americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com/2019/01/assorted-opinions-and-maxims.html -- is that progressive activism and the left in general represents a Great Reaction, an attempt to re-politicize the world in an age that can probably do with a lot less politics. Here is my short version: 

"Great Reaction: Socialism is a return to slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is neo-vengeance; activism a return to revolution, rioting for the ruling class, part medieval knight-errantry, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a school play for their parents; helpless victims are a return to sacrifice, social justice is good old loot and plunder."

My point is that all the progressive instincts are a lunge back into the past. If we think in Jungian terms we would say that the left is mining the collective unconscious for ancient archetypes, and using them in a project of power.

But I want to talk to you directly about activism. As Managing Editor of Right Wing Watch I imagine your experience yourself as a progressive activist, fighting for justice against the forces of bigotry and superstition that abound on the right.

But I think that "activism" is similar to medieval knight-errantry. I was re-reading some of the medieval romances and I realized that the romances are an absurd effort by minstrels toadying to the feudal barons to make them into noble disciples of Christ saving damsels in distress in between epic feasts. But in fact they were thugs.

I'm here to say that your average revolutionary, whether Robespierre, Lenin, Trotsky, Hitler, Franco, Castro, or Pinochet is a thug. So in my view anyone with a misty idea of being an activist and fighting injustice is probably kidding themselves. Because politics is a game for thugs. Actually, I have a maxim for that:

There is no such thing as justice. Only injustice.

My point is that it is all very well to be an activist for human rights and justice and fight against injustice. But I am here to tell you that many people on the receiving end of your fight for justice are going to experience it as injustice.

In that case, would you be right or would they be right?

Hey! If you are ever in Seattle, get in touch and let's have coffee!

sincerely,

Christopher Chantrill

Hey whaddya think readers? Ain't I a stinker! As Bugs Bunny would say.

Looking at the Good Side of My Culture-of-Insult/Culture-of-Complaint Notion

Here was I, cruising along unconcernedly as a seagull with my notion of the male Culture of Insult and the female Culture of Complaint when suddenly I realized I had got it all wrong. Or at least only half right.

Because the male Culture of Insult and the female Culture of Complaint are only half of the story.

And I shoulda known it. What a fool! Fortunately my unconscious mind got me sorted -- as the Brits say -- about 4:00 am a couple days ago. Really, what would we do without our unconscious minds pointing out the "glitch" in the Matix?

What I realized was that, with the notion that honor in men is courage, according to James Bowman in Honor: A History, that there are two sides to the coin. Let's reproduce the key quote again.

[I]n spite of the discrediting that honor has undergone, the basic honor of the savage -- courage for men, chastity for women -- is still recognizable beneath the surface of popular culture that has done so much to efface it.(p.5)

(But as late as the movie On the Beach in 1959, with Gregory Peck as the captain of a nuclear submarine in the aftermath of nuclear Armageddon, the male characters are all constructed around the courage archetype and the female characters around the chastity archetype.)

Obviously, I now realize that male honor -- courage and the reputation for courage -- comes in two cultures. There is the positive side and the negative side. There is the Culture of Courage in the Hero and there is the Culture of Insult in the Adversary. I get that from Jordan B. Peterson in his Maps of Meaning.

So, when men are hurling insults at each other, they are not as good as they could be. Because the Man of Courage, the Hero, is above all that.

Hmm. And here I have been encouraging men to throw the insult of racism right back in the face of the pathetic liberal pejorator (perjorator is one who hurls pejoratives: I just coined it). Obviously, in the Culture of Courage, our Hero would not throw the insult right back. On the other hand he would not cringe either, and whine that he was not a racist, no, because some of his best friends are black. Still, to throw an insult at a vile liberal pejorator requires a significant degree of courage, particularly if the liberal pejorator gets in touch with HR and gets you fired.

But what would the pure Hero, sans peure et sans reproche, do? I'll have to think about that.

Now let's get to the female side of the equation, where honor is chastity and the reputation for chastity. Here, obviously, we have a Culture of ChastityPraise and a.Culture of Complaint. But whatabout the archetypes? I don't know where this will end up, but I think we have to start with Good Girl and Mean Girl. The practitioner of the Culture of Praise is the Good Girl, the Virgin, that is pure and innocent and sees nothing but good around her. The practitioner of the Culture of Complaint is the Mean Girl, of high school memory, who is always poking holes in the chaste pretentions of the other women in her community of women. That, after all, is what the iconic "I can't believe she..." remark is all about. Don't imagine that the the girl next door is a sweet innocent, 'cos I got the goods on her.

The point about the Hero and the Culture of Courage is, to return with Bowman to the savage, the defense of the border which can be psychologized into the border between Order and Chaos. The point about the Good Girl and the Culture of Praise, with Bowman, is the management of the hearth and home. If we go back to our chimpanzee friends, the males are defending the band's territory so that the females can bear and feed and rear the baby chimps. That's according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn. The Good Girl is doing all the things that need to be done about the hearth -- Latin: vesta, as in Vestal Virgins -- or, as we say, keep the home fires burning.

The point is that in the Culture of Praise the Good Girl is getting on with the things that need to be done with good cheer, while in the Culture of Complaint the Mean Girl is busy critiquing all the other women because they aren't doing the things that need to be done, according to the judgement of the Mean Girl. The Mean Girl is perfect, of course.

So, in this analysis, the Culture of Insult and the Culture of Complaint are both perversions. The Insulter is faking the courage of the Hero, and the Complainer is faking the innocence of the Good Girl.

Notice that Insults and Complaints are easy peasy; anyone can do them. But what does the courageous Hero do? What does the chaste Good Girl do? Good question.

See, living the life of Courage or of Praise is hard. That's why the Hero has to go on a Hero's Journey to find out what it really means to be a hero. And the chaste Good Girl? Despite the pretensions of the Heroine's Journey and all those unbelievable superheroines around these days, the life of a woman is lived moment to moment; she doesn't get to go off into the underworld for a spell. That is why women are eternally agonizing about the right thing to do. There's a word women use for this, but I have forgotten it.

Well, obviously this is just the start. Who knows where it will lead?

Time to Kill The Racism Virus

By now everybody knows that the MSM has jumped on board the Xi train and accused President Trump and others of "racism" for calling the COVID-19 virus the China virus.

Oh yeah! You should always go with the experts at the WHO. And the propagandists in the totalitarian regimes.

Never mind that the US media -- hello New York Times -- has been carrying water for the Commies since the 1950s, what with NYT reporter Herbert Matthews hailing Cuba's murderous dictator Fidel Castro. Not to mention the 1930s when NYT reporter Walter Duranty wrote of the Ukrainian famine: What famine?

And never mind that the Chi-Coms are batting on a bit of a sticky wicket now that facts on the ground are telling us that we need to be a lot less dependent on the global supply chain. I mean, the Chic-Coms, that apparently produce 95 percent of our antibiotics, have been threatening us with a cutoff. If we don't stop the racism! See, they are looking at a real economic depression if the US and Europe decide to lower their dependence on manufacturing in totalitarian countries. So of course they are trying to intimidate us and change the subject.

You would think that any journalist worth her byline would be extremely skeptical of government memes out of China right now. Even if she was emotionally consumed with writing her next article about her hair.

But hey! If you are a mindless liberal journalist "racism"-in-the-air is like blood-in-the-water for sharks. You can't help yourself.

Now if I were the editor, or the publisher, or the owner of The New York Times I would have put the race-baiting journalists on Social Distancing without pay for 30 days or until the arc of the China Virus epidemic curve started to bend towards justice. That's what I would do. But I dare say that NYT owner Carlos Slim rather enjoys watching the gringos in a cat-fight.

I say, never mind about them. Whatabout us?

And I say that it is 30 years past the time when there was any moral warrant to name, shame, and shun "racists." Because hey, racial discrimination is illegal. And the only real racists are loser white crackers parading around with tiki-torches. If there is still racial discrimination in America then pull the FBIs off Michael Flynn and put them to work on investigating acts of racial discrimination and sending the results to the local Soros-funded prosecutor.

I mean. There is a difference, dontcha think, between some guy making a racist tweet and some innocent POC being denied a job or a place in university because of racial discrimination. One of the two is not like the other. One of them is an act of racial discrimination, and the other is just some jerk mouthing off.

So I say that this China Virus racist flap is the ideal moment to declare that we deplorables are not going to cringe in fear any time someone call us racists. Not any more. It is time to stop apologising.

Indeed it is time to hit back, using the eternal male Culture of Insult that is connected back into the male culture of honor, which is courage. We males are expendable, anyway, as the millions of men that died in the armies of the rulers of the world down the ages have proved.

Here are a few insults for you to try out when next you are accused of being a racist.

"Wait a minute! I thought you cupcakes said that race didn't exist!

"That's an insult to all the African-Americans that died under slavery down the ages!"

"So's your father, buttercup!"

"It takes one to know one!" 

"Know what racists and anti-racists have in common? A vile obession with race."

"Yeah, call me racist-sexist-homophobe, snowflake. I don't care!" 

"Know what really gets me? The hate that educated whites have poured on poor white trash down the centuries." 

"Wow! You really are a hater. I had no idea!"

Notice that you should add the patronizing "cupcake" "buttercup" or "snowflake" according to taste and opportunity.

Now, if you are lunching with a liberal woman friend the rules are different. Because with women we cannot use the male Culture of Insult. Instead we are acting out the female Culture of Complaint and are always talking about a third person who has said or done something that should be named, shamed, and shunned.

So when some third person is branded a racist, as in "I can't believe she would say something so racist," you say:

"But, like, Susie in my book club who is, like, a Gender Studies professor says that race doesn't exist." 

"So, like, I always worry about which are the worse haters, the racists or the activists." 

"I worry that making that a racism thing makes it, like, harder to deal with real racism."

I leave the "like"s and "I can't believe"s and "uptalk" to you. You know best how to emotionally manipulate your women friends.

We can't finish this without reminding ourselves of the words of the noble Democratic sage, Rahm Emanuel, who said:

"You never let a serious crisis go to waste."

And two can play at that game. Cupcake.

What Next in the Battle of the Sexes?

Oh for the good old days, when eevil right-wingers were all sexist aggressors and progressives were all noble allies of women!

To think that Harvey Weinstein, producer of progressive movies, was a sexual predator! And remember NBC News host Matt Lauer? I can't believe what he did!

And now Chris Matthews, "retiring" from his Hardball show! Apparently he was in the habit of making aggressively sexual comments to female guests while they were both in make-up. And, of course, Chris went off the reservation this weekend, politically speaking.

Oh. And Michael Bloomberg, he of the "kill it" to a pregnant female staffer at Bloomberg.

To tell the truth, all this has been a little surprising to me. The Weinstein thing exposed the utterly crude modus operandi of the corporate sexual predator. It was revolting to me on this level: why would you want to relate to a young woman on those terms: a quick champagne and caviar at a restaurant followed by a visit to the office and... stuff? And Matt Lauer and the remote door lock if he was in his office with a babe and didn't want to be disturbed. And so on.

I guess I'm a patsy, because for me, I want that soft look in a woman's eye before proceeding to the other stuff. Otherwise, for me, what's the point?

OK. I get that if you are an aggressive, ambitious man, then life is all about driving your enemy before you and hearing the lamentation of their women, then the more lamentation the better.

And I get that, for non-powerful people, you hold your grudge for years, and then when there is blood in the water, you strike! Otherwise, the blood in the water is yours.

But, of course, with my conceit that I have a strategic mind, I am thinking of the bigger picture.

Because, as I read the feminist movement, the original idea was that women had been held in purdah for centuries and only needed the right to vote and the right to work in order to "hear me roar" and all that rubbish.

And the idea of the sexual revolution and "choice" was to free women into a sexual life that was much more like men. They could have a sexual life without being stigmatized as whores. Etc.

How's that working out, girls?

I'd say that things are getting pretty clear, right about now.

First of all, women don't like the open-outcry life of the corporate career. Why?

Well, I like to explain that by saying that men have a Culture of Insult, which is attached to the male concept of honor, which is courage in battle. Thus, men are forever testing themselves and other men on the question of courage and got-what-it-takes.

And women have a Culture of Complaint, which is attached to the female concept of honor, which is chastity. Thus women are forever judging another women in their "Well I never" and their "I can't believe she..." remarks. They are rehearsing her chastity -- or lack of -- by which I mean the large sense of always being a Good Little Girl.

So, most women are just not going to want to dominate a meeting full of aggressive a--holes. And bid for a higher hiring salary. And women do not want to develop the toughness of telling a Harvey Weinstein or a Matt Lauer to "put that thing away if you don't want to eat bratwurst for lunch."

(Actually, men really love a woman with the ability to exchange one-liners. They love the challenge of it.)

And then the sexual revolution. Come on, girls. When are you going to admit to each other that it has been a disaster for women? Maybe there are a few women that love to mix it up with the guys. But I haven't met one. What women want is to be loved, and then when, in the fulness of time, she announces a future event she wants that man to melt in gratitude.

(I was watching the second half of Spartacus in memory of Kirk Douglas last night, and Kirk -- Spartacus -- did exactly the right thing for 1955 women when his slave wife made the announcement. Who knew that Roman slaves were good at this?)

But the sexual revolution makes it very hard for women to say no, and gets them very angry when they get dumped -- hello Mattress Girl -- and wounded forever when told to "get rid of it."

Hey! How about Emma Sulkowltz today: libertarian, reader of Jordan B. Peterson!

Thing is, I don't know what it is going to take to move the question of women in the public square to a mode that actually is comfortablle for women other than crazy feminist activists. That's because women don't do politics by open outcry, as per the Culture of Insult.

You can see why when you look at presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren. People hate the aggressive woman trying to act like a man, trading insult for insult with the guys.

So, women trying to change the rules from female superheroes and a-career-for-every-woman and let-it-all-hang-out sexuality aren't going to do it with conferences and activism and funding from billionaires. Because that's not the way that the overwhelming majority of women interact with the world.

No. What will happen is lots of women networking together and talking to each other and agreeing with each other and "well I never-ing" the women that think otherwise and one fine day we will wake up and find that the culture has changed and nobody will know why.

Here's an example of how this works. Black women vote not just at the general election but in primaries almost in unison. How do they do this? Because black churches? Or because of the women's gossip network? You tell me.

Or maybe they will will make the change with one canceled progressive media a--hole at a time.

Which Is Worse: Trump's Insults or The Racist Canard?

We all know that all educated suburban women are disgusted with -- cannot believe! -- the crudities of President Trump, the Twitter Insult Dog.

But I have a question for you educated suburban women. What do you think about the lefties in our land that think nothing of calling anyone with an opinion they don't like of being a "racist?"

Which is worse? A presidential insult? Or the admission that when you are a billionaire, women will let you pet them in the crotch?

Or being accused of being a "racist" the Summum Bonum of the Pejorative Culture?

Now, I would think that there is no contest. A few insults on Twitter, about Slow Joe Biden or Pencil Head Schiff, are just joshing among the guys, the kind of thing that is normal and natural on, say, the locker room and the golf course.

But I realize that among women such insults are experienced in a conversation at the coffee shops as "I can't believe he said that." An abomination!

Whatabout the accusation of "racism?" Isn't that much, much worse? Particularly if it means that your husband loses his tech industry job because some woke HR woman had it in for him?

OK, ladies, I'm waiting for your answer.

I was thinking about this, as one does when you have had an idea for a blog and haven't yet written it.

And then I thought, OMG. Yes, even I say OMG from time to time.

Because I realized that the question of honor among men, and honor among women, as developed by James Bowman in Honor: A History applies here. And how!

Bowman's simple dictum is that honor among men is the reputation for courage; among women honor is the reputation for chastity. Or, to quote Bowman directly:

[T]he basic honor of the savage -- bravery for men, chastity for women -- is still recognizable beneath the surfaces of the popular culture that has done so much to efface it. If you doubt it, try calling a man a wimp or a woman a slut.

Now, Bowman develops the idea that the institutionalization of society leads to a situation where the honor culture of bravery among men gets diluted by the presence of women and the substituting of police and courts for the revenge culture of the tribesman or the gang member.

In fact, following Nietzsche, we could say that Christianity and "the priests" have switched entirely the bravery culture among men for the good vs. evil culture among women. And what, says Nietzsche, would happen if good finally triumphed over evil, so there was no evil in the world, but only good? What then?

So here is what I think. I think that, indeed, it has been necessary and appropriate to diminish the honor-as-bravery culture among men and dilute it with the chastity culture among women, so that men become good little boys in the peaceful market economy.

But whatabout women? And here I return to the prophecy of Georg Simmel from a century ago, who understood that things were going to change, what with women emerging out of the home.

Obviously, Simmel wrote, the public sphere, the world outside the home, in the short term would still be defined by men for men, but in the long term women would transform the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility." 

But do you know, I am coming to think that the opposite is true, and that women in the public aquare will have to adapt to a more masculine sensibility. In other words, following Nietzsche, they will have to acquire something of the culture of the Übermensch, the "free spirit:"

Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this? The most moderate; those who do not require any extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede, but love a fair amount of accidents and nonsense… human beings who are sure of their power and represent the attained strength of humanity with conscious pride. 

I don't think you can thrive in the public square unless you are a person "sure of their power" and someone that can not just endure but "love a fair degree of accidents and nonsense."

Now, it seems to me that the women's culture of chastity demands absolute purity. You are not allowed to make mistakes; you are not allowed to push against the community of women that define what "good" is in your community. In this sort of culture it makes perfect sense to name, shame, and shun people who are not perfectly chaste in all their actions. That's all very well in the private women-only culture of the tribe, where men live in a different world of war and hunting.

But the modern public square cannot be a perfect moment of chastity maintained to eternity. It is a roiling mess of accidents and nonsense, and that's just on a normal day. Why is this? Because the public square is the old world of tribal warfare and defending the border that has been civilized into the market economy and democratic politics.

So I say to educated suburban women: if you don't like the male honor culture of Trump, and insist of enforcing the name and shame and shun culture of "she's a racist-sexist-homophobe" then you had better retreat from the public square and live in a male-provided safe space.

And one thing is for sure. You are not a liberated woman.

Pejorative Politics: Nothing New Under the Sun

Are you a racist? Are you a sexist? A homophobe? Etc? It's the thing of the moment, what every fashionable and Woke American does: using pejoratives to shut people up -- or even get them fired from their jobs.

The truth is: everybody does it. It's just that, according to my Law of the Incoming Rounds, we only notice when the mortar rounds are descending upon us and ours.

For instance, the nicknames for the political parties in Britain, Whigs and Tories, were both originally pejoratives. "Tory" was a name for dispossessed Irish peasants and became the name for supporters of the Catholic King James II of England. "Whig" is probably a shortening of the word "whiggamore," the nickname of 17th century Scottish rebels.

When we deplorables talk about "lefties" and "commies" we are using pejoratives; we are using the words as insults.

And here is the real genius. Our liberal friends have to change their name every generation or so, because their normal name turns into a pejorative. Thus the Progressives of the turn of the 20th century reinvented themselves as "liberals" in the New Deal. And then, about 15 years ago they reinvented themselves as "progressives." Because in the hands of chaps like Ronald Reagan the word "liberal" had become radioactive, an insult.

But hey, politics is a game of insults, whatever Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says about "people don't insult people." Yes they do, Nancy. All the time. Now, as I observe, in my notion of the male Culture of Insult, the insult direct is a male thing. I encountered probably the base experience of this in Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage. The whole thing is about a young soldier wondering if he will have the necessary courage to get going when the going gets tough, and about the bravado and insults uttered by the soldiers as they are hanging around in camp in-between marches and battles.

What Our Nance is talking about is that women do not use the insult direct. In women's culture, insults are made indirectly, when two women have a conversation about a third woman not present: "I can't believe she said/did that." In the women's Culture of Complaint hey complain about her. But the intention and the intended effect is just the same as the insult direct. Isn't it, Nance?

The purpose of an insult direct or an insult indirect is to take out someone. In men's culture you do that directly, basically challenging an opponent to put up or shut up. In women's culture it is done indirectly, by the community of women, in a series of one-on-one convsersations, coming to a collective decision that some targeted woman is to be named and shamed and shunned. Anthony Trollope does a beautiful number on a step-mother naming and shaming and shunning her step-daughter in An American Senator. Of course, her vile actions didn't work because her step-daughter was the heroine of the story!

Ain't I a sexist? As Bugs Bunny might have said.

Back to the use of "deplorable" as a pejorative. The insult was coined by the matchless Hillary Clinton when she said to an LGBT audience during the 2016 presidential campaign:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?

 [Laughter/applause]

The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric.

Well yeah. Of course I would say that you ain't seen haters until you've been around LGBT activists. And that is why Hillary Clinton talked about deplorables in her speech at the LGBT fundraiser. Because that's what the gays and the lesbians wanted to hear. That's why they laughed. That's why they cheered. Because Hillary Clinton was telling them that they were the good guys and the Other was the bad guys.

But here's the thing. We deplorables loved it! We marched right out and owned that "deplorable" pejorative. So that now, it really isn't a pejorative any more, it's a badge of honor. The next day some wag had culturally appropriated Les Mis and designed a poster of Les Déplorables and the song "Do You Hear the People Sing."

Same thing with Whigs and Tories. Back in the day, the parties in the British Parliament were referred to by all and sundry as Whigs and Tories, and Conservative Party voters are to this day called Tories.

So I say that the only way to detoxify the dread accusation of racist-sexist-homophobe is to own it.

Yes, I'm a racist. What's it to you?

And, of course, if I was dealing with a real sophisticate, I would say that, according to Hegel, the thing and its opposite are really the same. So the racist and the anti-racist are united by their obsession with race. You might even say they deserve each other.

Whaddya think about that, pardner?

Women Stressed: What Does It Mean

I saw one of the usual pieces about women and stress yesterday.

The study, conducted by the Meredith Corporation and The Harris Poll, found that women across generations feel more stressed, tired, overwhelmed, anxious and burned out across every aspect of their lives than in the past — and significantly more so than their male counterparts.

Hmm. I always wonder about this. Because I think that the culture is teaching women to feel stress. When two women meet for Kaffee Klatsch they will probably try to outdo each other on the stress front.

In a way this is baloney, because, come on, girls. Could you be more stressed than the average woman of years gone by that lost half of her babies in the first year of life? Or that endured the "stress" of famine in a dry year?

But there is amother side to this. Talking about stress is a girl thing. No man should ever admit to stress. "Suck it in, baby." That's the guy approach to stress. Because the whole point of being a man is boldly to "outdare the dangers of the time." Of course, most men do not measure up to that, but we wish we did, and we honor the man that does. In other words, men honor the Sacrificial Hero.

But what about women?

I dug around in my Jung stuff, looking for the Great Mother. Not to mention the Terrible Mother. And I thought: this is all guy stuff. This is women as experienced by men. So, if women don't like stress, which is to say, danger, then What Do Women Want? Or Expect?

I realized that I really did not have a good handle on this. So, I went off on a bookstore run, in a bad frame of mind, looking for a Tolkien biography -- after watching the movie Tolkien on the plane -- and some Herman Wouk stuff.-- because of reading The Caine Mutiny. There, if you like, is an example of the guy thing. Never mind if the captain of your ship is a coward and a monster. You don't get to mutiny in order to save your miserable lives, guys.

Anyway, guess what happened. I stumbled into a 1984 book Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education by Nel Noddings. I didn't buy it; I couldn't bear to. But it goes into great detail about the moral situation of the carer and the cared-for. Etc. Nel Noddings, 90, had 10 children, and became a math teacher before getting a PhD in Education. Yeah, that was back in the day, when girls went to college and majored in Math. Only later did they discover that they really wanted to become teachers.

The point is clear. OK, for guys, it's all about the descent into the unconscious to slay the monster therein and become a Sacrificial Hero.

But for women, it's about becoming a Carer and a Teacher. Period. This is so obvious that it is ridiculous. Watch a mother out in public with her children and what is she doing? She is caring for them, making sure they don't get into danger, and she is instructing them. Dear God how she is instructing them.

Another thing about women. They love to go to school and learn. Any excuse, and they are off to the local university to take a course.

Now the point is that Learning and Caring and Teaching is what comes naturally to women. And I suggest the reason that modern women are all dying of stress is that the feminists have insisted that women should be like men, and bravely outdare the dangers of the time and do anything men can do, such as become superheroes and fighter pilots.

But all the superhero and fighter pilot and CEO stuff is keeping women away from Learning and Caring and Teaching. So they feel miserable and stressed.

Back to guys. Being a Sacrificial Hero does not come naturally to men. We have to be carefully taught. Well, actually, we have to decide to slay the monster within, the rapey, piratical monster within, in order to rise to the occasion, which is to die heroically on the border between Order and Chaos so that others -- principally I imagine women and children -- may live. And need I say, we men really don't want to have to rise to the occasion. It's too hard. We don't like to go to school; that's why we have Shakespeare's schoolboy "creeping like a snail unwillingly to school." In order to make soldiers out of us they send us to boot camp, which is an exercise in humiliation.

But women are good little girls; they will dutifully Learn and Care and Instruct without being forced to because it is right there in their genes and in human culture from the dawn of time. And you are not allowed to humiliate them.

Feminists want women to be just like men only better. So women find themselves having to be superheroes and fighter pilots as well as Learners, Carers, and Teachers. And it is driving them mad. Or "stressed" as we say.

We can see women pushing back against this. In the "microaggression" thing; in "safe spaces." And of course in the whole sexual harassment thing. Women want to be safe. They expect to be safe and the reason is obvious. Women need to be safe in order to be Learners and Carers and Teachers.

Any questions?

Jane Austen and the Resumption of Manners

Last week the Wall Street Journal did a piece on Jane Austen and manners, "Jane Austen Knows That Manners Make the Man." Author Paula Marantz Cohen notes that, when Jane Austen became respectable, in the 20th century, the question of "manners" and "civility" was depreciated by critics. They preferred her "moral depth and astute satire."

And of course, by the mid 20th century manners went right out of fashion, and things have only got worse in the decades since.

But Cohen wants us to understand that in Jane Austen, civility and manners are a guide to morality, and that manners "need to be strengthened by practice." Maybe so, but I would say that the current moment shows a revival of interest in manners. The whole #MeToo movement is not so much a movement against sexual harassment as an attempt to revive the importance of manners.

So when the feminists bring out accusations against Brett Kavanaugh, they are really complaining about the lack of manners. A girl can't go to a party and expect the men to behave themselves any more. A girl can't work in an office without some man making her uncomfortable.

I think this raises an interesting question. Back in the day, when rough tough feminists were telling us that women could do anything a man could do, they were really telling us that the old rules, where women expected to be protected, were over. Women could take it, and they could give it right back. We are still in the aftertow of this, with female superheroes and rough, tough female helicopter pilots in Avatar.

I think we are seeing that those days are over. Women have now instinctively returned to the old culture, in which women expect to be protected. That is what special snowflakes, microaggressions, and safe spaces are about. It is women, now dominating the culture of the university, demanding a return to a protected space.

Of course, because it is lefty women leading the charge, it will be a complete mess, because lefty women "literally know nothing," in the famous phrase.

Now I believe that the culture of manners is the way that women dominate the domestic space. Among themselves, men do not have a culture of manners. Indeed, as I say, men have a Culture of Insult. This is related to the nature of honor among men, which is the reputation for courage, for in the casual insult between men, the guys are raising the question of courage. They are wondering if the other guy would really rise to the occasion when the chips were down. They are also testing the current state of the male hierarchy.

But women have a culture of manners among themselves and for mixed company, and they are pretty good at naming and shaming and even ostracizing people with bad manners. My notion of women having a culture of complaint, and of complaining about other women with "I can't believe she said that" is my way of understanding the women's culture of manners. By the way, the women's culture of complaint ties into the nature of honor among women, which is a reputation for chastity. I don't just mean sexual chastity, but being an all-around good little girl. Being a good little girl is the price she pays for protection and the right to complain about other people.

The dirty little secret about the sexual revolution -- and women's liberation -- is that it did not liberate women. By dismantling the culture of manners, women dismantled the major way in which women dominate the face-to-face culture of daily life. The point is that when there is a culture of manners in place then women dominate. That is the point of Jane Austen. The men in Jane Austen are mostly ciphers. The women run everything. And some of the women -- well you wouldn't want to get anywhere near their force field. I am thinking of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park.

Oh sure. The women don't own the mansions and the income. They don't have to. They command the domestic space, and that is nearly everything. Indeed, you might say that the overriding issue in Jane Austen is how a young woman crosses the bridge from vulnerable singlehood to a secure domination in her own married household. It is made perfectly clear at the end of each novel that the heroine, newly married, is to become mistress of all she surveys.

Think of the sexual revolution as the sexual equivalent of going off the Gold Standard. This usually happened because of war, back in the day. Getting back on the Gold Standard was called "resumption," and it usually included a tough time of deflation and social disruption, as after the Napoleonic wars, the US Civil War, and World War I. And the truth was that the losses suffered in the wartime inflation could never be made up, not without hurting innocents.

So I would advise that the resumption of manners is not going to be pretty. And the reason is that the educated women who will likely be in charge of the resumption are, like most men and nearly all women, completely blinded by conventional wisdom. These are the women that in North Seattle are putting #WeBelieve and "We're Glad You're Our Neighbor" and "Hate Has No Home Here" yardsigns in their front yards and thinking that they are demonstrating their superior morality and wisdom.

So, in many ways, it's going to get worse before it gets better. But nobody said that life was a bowl of cherries.