The New War on Women, Part II
Women have forgotten all this in a big way for a long long time. They had a run for sure. They started agitating for the vote just about the time the United States officially became the richest nation in the world. They got that right and others, but they never saw that as they thought they were getting ahead they were in fact being exploited for purposes that were of very mixed benefit to them and the culture as a whole. Because the richest, the U.S. became the first resort for bailouts when the Old World succumbed to the vices of their Old White Men and started world wars for multinational domination. The U.S. while claiming no ambition other than altruism took advantage of the opportunity to acquire as much power as they had money, but military means and men were required in volume. Which meant someone had to come from somewhere and keep the factories running and the businesses humming. Women were conscripted for the job, which acquainted them with the tools of politics, the power of the vote, and the even greater power of the public purse.
They did the job they’d been drafted into and started demanding more. More jobs, more opportunity, more power, more independence. They got all but the last one. It’s been a long time since anybody dared annoying their cultural and political leaders by taking a hard look at how much progress has been made for women and how much progress has not been made.
Time is the true measure of accomplishment or the lack of it. Since 1920, women have had 100 years to employ advanced technology and educational opportunity to level the playing field between the sexes across the board. After 5,000 years of a social consensus based on marriage, nuclear families, moral religious precepts, and a sex-based division of labor that began in the era of caves and lasted through the dawn of flight, the invention of modern medicine and modern plumbing, and the radical decrease in such eternal ills as high infant and child mortality, what has been accomplished? There is no new social consensus. There is instead merely a bloody battlefield of broken institutions and corrupt concentrations of power — in every discipline — into silos of self-perpetuating and self-celebrating mediocrity. There is chaos abroad in the land and in the world. Women are a significant component of that chaos.
As a victim ‘niche’ outnumbering men, they haven’t cut the mustard anywhere. Numbers of women graduating from professional schools have grown through set-asides to exceed the numbers for men. They don’t control the big banks, law firms, manufacturing companies, institutions of hard science, engineering organizations of every kind, the U.S. Government, the U.S. Military, or the large and small organizations that provide the hardly ever examined function of “keeping it all going.” Overwhelmingly, men are still both the managers and vital laborers who do almost all the architecture, construction, plumbing design and maintenance, the road building and maintenance, the electricity generation, electronic innovation, the fishing, the supply chain transportation, the commercial piloting, the fire and police functions, protecting the borders, and combat.
Men also still own and drive the creative and media arts, from moviemaking to journalism. Pick one and do your own research. In Hollywood, for example, men still write the most screenplays, produce and direct the most movies, and attract more box office revenue as actors than women. All but a couple of the news moguls are men, and all the TekLords are men.
Where do we see lots of women in the workforce? Teaching (especially school boards), nursing, and so-called ‘pink-collar’ positions in retail, restaurant service, social work, and home/day care for children and seniors. Female attorneys prefer to be salaried prosecutors rather than at-risk defense attorneys. Female doctors prefer to be pathologists, gynecologists, and dermatologists instead of intense life-or-death specialists and surgeons.
And, of course, there’s still no sign of a female Shakespeare, Mozart, Picasso, Dickens, Eliot, Einstein, Tesla, Pasteur, or da Vinci.
What we do have is the most spectacular increase in infant mortality in all of recorded history, a plurality of children born out of wedlock, staggering casualty figures associated with addictive drugs, and a steady loss of personal liberty in the United States that may have begun under Wilson before Women’s Suffrage but has proceeded apace ever since through the power of the women’s vote in the elections of FDR, Carter, LBJ, Clinton, Obama, and Biden. It’s not that hard to make a case for the proposition that women have disassembled the foundational work of the nation’s founders in just over a hundred years.
Nobody’s holding any of this against you personally. As I observed, nobody’s viewed the record from a long-term perspective. The chief significance of the failure of the women’s movement to justify itself has made them vulnerable to being set aside themselves. Redefine gender, remove the traditional sanctity of womanhood and motherhood, remove the appurtenances of sexual romance (invented by men in the first place to prevent that “poop” ad from ever being made), and then shove them under a very long and slow moving bus until they seem almost to disappear into the laughable fiction of 30 or 40 genders.
It’s not something that’s going to happen. It is happening, and women have been too passive and slow-witted to perceive it. Here are the icons of political leadership we’re all, men and women, being asked to regard as archetypally female:
Here are the biggest media/show biz stars best representing the post-woman age:
Top Row: Grammy-winning Rapper Lizzo and Big Whoopi from The View
Middle Row: Gay, Bi, and Trans in some order
Bottom Row: Trans, Established (Ellen/Eliot) & Up-and-Comers
Here the great superstars of sport who are supposed to empower you and your daughters for the next generation. Pause to reflect on 1) A basketball player whose career is absolutely insignificant and whose fame is now as a prisoner; 2) A soccer star whose World Cup winning team lost in a pickup game to 15-year-old boys the same year they won the cup; 3) A record-shattering star of women’s swimming who is a biological male in every sense; and 4) A genuinely GOAT female tennis player whose recent retirement was a) covered as a chance to provide info about PPD, and b) an occasion for her candid opinion that she probably wouldn’t win a set against any of the top 200 male tennis players.
Now I ask you to think, maybe for the first time, about the huge joke Hollywood has been playing on you for over 40 years (since Sigourney Weaver flashed us and killed the Alien in 1980?). The killer martial arts chick who can demolish men two or three times their size. This example is from Bruce Willis’s last Die Hard outing. There wouldn’t have been a second outing if this had been in the first one.
The time has come for the Old White Men to put you in your place, in the Octagon and everywhere else in sport.
There you are then. Reduced in stature to a prone figure on the canvas. You’ve wrongly sought out the bad boys thinking they held the secret of how to dominate in the big bad outside world. Now nobody wants you. You don’t deserve even the pretty man who kisses the mirror. According to Madison Avenue, you are grist for the mill of this kind of guy, whom you will probably trust because you have such a long record of trusting the wrongest possible guys.
Some final but crucial thoughts. I am not proposing or desiring to turn back the clock. I’m seeking to give you the reason and the motivation to fight back. I believe feminism made some extremely serious mistakes in its various waves. Fighting the patriarchy in such a tunnel-visioned way made it hard to see that much of what feminists have done is try to become men, or man-like, themselves. The tiresome bluster that anything a man can do a woman can do as well, maybe better, is delusional. It leads to misspent efforts. It leads to following male operating rules inside organizations, which the men who prosper avoid by going over, under, or around those rules in brave and ingenious ways. Don’t just claim to be better. Be better in the areas where you have talent, dedication, and aspiration beyond a title and a monetary fortune. Give up the fantasies of “having it all,” “doing the home and career thing equally well,” and thinking that pretending you can do what you genuinely can’t do is anything but a recipe for failure. (My sister once told me that brought up the way boys are, a woman could throw like a Sandy Koufax. She was wrong.) Your current plight is as ironic as it is difficult for most to detect.
The victories you’ve won in the various waves of feminism have been secured by cutting the Old White Men down to size and jumping the line ahead of black people in the affirmative action sweepstakes. You’ve done everything possible to make white men look guilty, tyrannical, predatory, emotionally dysfunctional, imperceptive, foolish, inarticulate, and even laughable. You copy their promiscuity and still blame and damn them for their own. You have labored to emasculate them and render them institutionally impotent. Your seeming success at this has become your most signal and spectacular failure. You have been a willing accomplice in the creation of the one-parent home, the increasing dependence of single mothers on state largesse and other cultural accommodations. You have participated in the degeneration of moral debate about abortion into depiction of your opposition as a shallow male assault on your personal liberty. And now the men have seen through the act and are prevailing not through their crippled manhood but their membership in the invincible power elite whose only aphrodisiac is ruling the world from an unassailable tower. Where there’s a glass ceiling on the very first floor. There are anatomically female members of this elite, but they are no longer ‘women,’ except insofar as they play the role to exploit and manipulate you and other victim-niche female identifiers. They have learned what you refused to. Divide and Conquer does not mean divide yourselves into competing conquest-mad gangs. These are a cinch to pick off one by one.
All of which leaves you precisely where? You have become the mirror image of your hated white male patriarchy, but on the bottom looking up. You are the privileged (and heretofore legally favored) matriarchy that now arrogantly calls the predictable results of inter-gender coitus disposable trash or a baby depending exclusively on the woman’s economic and social circumstances. You have lost the motherhood card. You have also lost the womanhood card as men seized the opportunity you gave them to put you back into second place, or as much lower than that as they like. It is no longer enough to be a mere ‘woman’ (vaginaed, menstruative, whatever) to demand special dispensations. You must be a hyphenated woman, attached by a dash of punctuation and a lot of propaganda to one of the other victim niches, black, brown, lesbian, bi, transgender, and/or violently misanthropic or infanticidal, and never ever politically conservative. Otherwise your natural enemies, meaning all the other victim niches, will tear you and your ambitions to pieces.
All that’s left, it seems, is getting off the canvas and fighting without the benefit of any hyphens. Fight for yourselves, not your ‘gender,’ class, or ethnic affiliations. Learn how to prosper and succeed and accomplish great things the old-fashioned way. By taking pride in what you devote your lives to, whether any Tom, Dick, or Jane in the peanut gallery approves or not. It might even be time to listen at least as much as you talk.
The truly great accomplishments are usually recorded by those who survive enormous setbacks but prevail through courage, vision, family, friendships (not alliances), incredible self-discipline, indestructible character and, primus inter paribus, faith. Callings not causes are the surest route to fulfilling lives. Here’s a closing song for you from more white guys, but they call themselves Queensryche, which should be worth something, and ‘silent lucidity’ seems like a relevant state of being about now.
FYI: Here’s The New War on Women, Part I.
P.S. Don’t know if this is consolation or validation. But it should confirm there’s more evidence for this situation than I cited above: welcome to the Barbie Fashista Line of Products.
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