An Appeal for a Wise Female Voice
Back in the 1990s I came across an author who seemed to be in a fix comparable to mine. She’d written a huge, groundbreaking book (798 pages) that talked about big big things and the cultural powers-that-be found her inconvenient at best and dangerous at worst. Nobody really wanted to deal with what was in the book. Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia. I bought a copy and read it cover to cover. I found it fascinating, brilliant, and obviously revolutionary. She was exploring the relations between the sexes through a very deep dive into art throughout the ages. She introduced a word I’d never read or heard before, “chthonic,” which means ‘pertaining to the underworld.’ This, she believed, was the existential realm of women, the basis of an unending war between the sexes exemplified by the marriage of Hades and Proserpine. Her approach stood so starkly alone that I regarded it as being as much a work of art as a serious work of anthropology, although it was clearly both.
Paglia went on to become a highly visible socio-political critic and she was both wise and funny in her media appearances. But the big big book kind of disappeared into her fame, acknowledged as an event but permitted no real impact on women’s writings, especially feminist writings. Why? Despite her own intellectual attainments and charisma, her conceit was that, in their essential nature, women constitute the Great Unconscious of Carl Jung’s conception. This was not ever going to be a popular idea. She was tolerated as an eccentric star of the political left, a vocal Lesbian, a serious Madonna fan, and a quotable contrarian on many hot-button sexual issues, but as a game-changing cultural influencer she was shunted effectively to the side.
Why am I talking about her now? Two reasons. First, to conceal what this post is really about from the Facebook censors. And second, to explain why I’m asking someone or, preferably, some ones else to take the lead on the mission described here. Whether she’d agree with this characterization or not, an obvious inference from Paglia’s book is that women were the genii who had to be placed in a bottle before what we know as historical civilization could begin. History has been a story of patriarchy. Paglia also believes that pre-historical cultures were dominantly matriarchal and therefore ahistorical, governed more by the lunar cycle than the wheeling of the constellations through time. Every year is the same year; therefore there is no need for history or written language or philosophical and moral questioning. I think this inference may be substantially correct. I had been approaching this same perspective myself before I read Sexual Personae, from the standpoint of consciousness as I came to understand it via the equally controversial work of Julian Jaynes. Not a social scientist, whatever that is, I began playing with my own ideas on the subject by means of satire, and in the realm of politics I offered — as a gadfly voice only — the rhetorical position that the most damaging event in the last century was women’s suffrage. Which clearly could never be repealed and therefore needn’t be much discussed except as a provocative rhetorical needle pointed at a dangerously overblown balloon.
Lately, I confess, my rhetorical needle has hardened into a sheathed spear of historical conviction. What will soon put an end to the American experiment is not Marxism or Chinese games of Go played on the world stage. It is the power of the women’s vote in western democracies. It’s taken just a hundred years for women to vote us to the brink of a worldwide statist totalitarianism whose real purpose is to ensure control by ending thought forever.
Why I’m not the right voice to fight the fight I’m describing here. I’m not trying to roll back time. I’m not the nightmare figure of “A Handmaid’s Tale.” Equating sexism with racism has been a neat verbal sleight of hand pulled off by the left. They’re not the same thing at all. There are differences between the sexes apart from skin color. Beginning with skin shape and including everything beneath the skin, including the anatomical configuration of the brain and associated drives. It is entirely possible to be a sexist without being a misogynist. I don’t regard women as inferior beings, just as very different beings for the most part. Do I have resentments about the fact that so many women have been masquerading as men while men have been surrendering their masculinity to innumerable variations on a theme of Lysistrata? Yes. Sure I do. Does that in any way translate to hatred or a desire to subjugate women? No. I want them to understand some things that are very much to their advantage. That shows in what follows, which is a post about short-term political matters that women seem likely to be a deciding influence on, to the detriment of every U.S. citizen, including them.
I know it’s an important problem as I have described it because Facebook has used clandestine means of censoring it since I first posted it six weeks ago. When it got no response, I pinned it, so that it would be the first thing anyone saw on my page. But I have discovered a way to see my page as visitors see it; the pinned post is not shown at all.
Everything below is about that objective. The first part is the intro I wrote when I pinned the post after receiving no response of any kind. The second part is the original post. If all this is too long to read, I don’t care. It’s here. I’ve done what I can. The summation of my career as I view it toward its end. I have always done what I can. Just asking some particular others to do the same…
The abortion issue is poised to kill the country. It can’t be hidden from. It must be dealt with. It shouldn’t matter because it’s a lot of fuss settled with the price of a bus ticket. But Republicans are afraid to talk about it, the pro-lifers don’t know how to, and the women of the nation have been swindled by totalitarians.
This post matters. I don’t care who doesn’t like it. I’m not the one to lead the charge except for finding the WOMEN who need to lead the charge. I don’t care about the morons whose minds can’t be changed because they’ve never been used for anything. Why I made the post too long for those people to read. All I care about is saving the nation for all the people, including even the ones who are too morally undeveloped to understand the evil of a License to Kill. But the post isn’t about that. It’s about why that’s an irrelevancy and why a host of other issues are life-and death relevant, not just for a fetus, but for the last best hope of the world.
I’m going to quote a dead white male for my intro to this piece of advice from a not-quite-dead white male.
It’s time for women to step forward and play Dutch uncle (aunt?) with women who are planning to cast their presidential vote in 2024 based on their emotions about the Supreme Court’s Roe decision.
It has to be the right women of course. This is not the time for Bible beating or moral hectoring or ultrasound photos. It’s about clarifying the facts and providing a context many single issue voters lack for reasons of convenience, much as many of them make abortion decisions for reasons of convenience. (That’s me talking, a demonstration of why the argument has to be framed by women.)
The approach has to be along the lines of “Let’s cut the posturing bullshit, girls. That’s a luxury we can’t afford in the mess we’re in.”
Truth. Abortion is not going to be unavailable for women determined to get one in the United States. At most it will be a Greyhound bus ticket away, far cheaper than the procedure itself, no matter what state you live in. The overturning of Roe is also not part of some grand male conspiracy to subjugate women in a ‘barefoot and pregnant’ throwback to the past or a dystopian great leap forward to the paranoid fantasy of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
The bottom line is this. The overturning of Roe was a one-time legal decision, based on the fact that the Constitution has nothing whatever to say about abortion, although probably contains an unstated bias against it. The original Roe decision was therefore based on a fictional right read into a ‘penumbra’ of the Constitution by justices who were bowing to popular sentiments of the time.
What the decision did was return the jurisdiction of the abortion issue to the individual states to decide as they will. California and New York will obviously mirror the absolutism of Roe. Some will adopt draconian laws, but those are laws that can still be contested and opposed in court. Win or lose, the bus ticket argument stands. Which means that the decision to cast a presidential vote on this one issue is not a matter of defending hearth and home but merely making a point. A point which can be made in a state capital more easily than in Washington, DC, where the die is cast for a long time to come. To some degree this may make the process of aborting a fetus a little more difficult, but is this really a decision that should be easy?
The broader context, the broader question that should be on every woman’s mind, is this: In what direction lies the greatest danger to the liberty and autonomy of women in their homes, careers, and private lives?
For all who can raise their heads from the myopic obsession with Roe, the answer is clear, stark, and scary. It is the progressive movement that claims to represent women who are, in dozens of ways, waging war against the female sex.
Think about it. Who is sponsoring the tyranny of school boards who are seeking actively to sexualize and even regender children without parental permission? Progressives, many of whom claim to be feminists. Their underlying message is that the state owns children and parents are the enemy which must be locked out of the child-rearing process. Who is ramrodding the effort to eliminate gender differences in terms of bathroom privacy and sports participation? Who is creating a new super-cause called LGBTQ+ which assumes superiority over heterosexual women as well as heterosexual men, with the white versions of both sexes consigned to last place in cultural priority behind every flavor of sexual, ethnic, racial, and spiritual activism to overturn the status quo? Who is using mass media entertainments and advertising to caricature normal American women and replace them with an ‘improved’ version that is as foul-mouthed, promiscuous, personally obnoxious, and even hygienically odious as hormone-crazed teenage boys?
Progressives. They have been whittling away at the quality of women’s lives for a very long time. Even the abortion issue has been used to increase the dependency, poverty, and physical risk of women’s lives in the United States. Because it is also the Progressives who are as deeply misogynist as they are racist. Since the perfect storm of birth control pills, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and the Roe v. Wade decision — all presented as women-friendly cultural breakthroughs — the net effect on women has been catastrophic.
Birth control pills are a technology that makes promiscuity lower risk for both sexes. Becoming popular even as feminism encouraged women to stand up to hound dogs and divorce them (not to mention increasing the rate of their own tit-for-tat affairs), the divorce rate increased, resulting in more single-parent homes (the ‘single mom’ phenomenon epidemic now), which increases the incidence of ugly custody battles, domestic violence, and ultimately a drastic increase in the number of illegitimate births to women who are having to raise them on subsistence-level jobs. Women’s Liberation? Not hardly.
It also serves to increase the abortion rate. Mothers who abort not from choice or convenience but financial need. Which also imposes a racist penalty no one wants to quantify or count in any way. In New York City, where marriage is a round-robin and ‘baby daddies’ outnumber husbands, fully half of all black pregnancies end in abortion. In any but the Roe context this would incite a war cry of “Eugenics!” Which it is. This is a secret so zealously guarded that it leads to the murderous scandal of unregulated abortion clinics, where women are harmed, sometimes unto death, babies are suffocated after birth, and fetal bodies are sold for parts while city institutions look the other way. Elsewhere in urban environments, women are squeezed into poor choices about prostitution, drug use, and the expectation of violence to their persons and children (drive-by shootings, anyone?) by abusers who have never had live-in fathers to teach them how to be men.
Even more affluent sectors of the middle class are being manipulated and harmed by Progressive orthodoxies. Women pursue educations and careers because they are increasingly expected to, but the odds are still stacked against them. Prestigious universities are happy to take the money and hand out the fancy degrees, but career paths pursued by women are depressingly narrow and quite often impaired by the unending choice between being an engaged mother and being a financial success. Result? Women wait too long to have children, which increases their risk for female-specific cancers and stress ailments, and face the prospect of being in late middle age by the time their feminist daughters leave home for college.
You see, there are things that remain the same, regardless of utopian fantasies peddled by people pretending to be ahead of their time. Some doors will always be closed, wholly or in part. Men have more ways of making a living. They own the blue collar world, which actually makes all the stuff work we need to work in real physical life. Yes, women can learn the mechanics of being a plumber, an electrician, an automotive technician, a telephone lineman, a garbage truck/snow plow/tractor-trailer/tugboat pilot, do masonry and construction framing, logging, welding, skyscraper building, bridge painting, firefighting, policing, war-fighting, etc. But all of those things involve a requirement for physical attributes men have more of than women. Endurance in extreme temperatures and other circumstances, strength in manhandling balky equipment, sheer body strength, and instantaneous response to immediate physical threats. In these terms, men are going to remain in charge of operating and maintaining the physical world we live in.
They are prepared for this no longer respected mission by all manner of male experiences women have been taught to laugh at or deride. Dangerous sports on teams held together by peer pressure and competitive spirit. The expectation that their physical courage will be tested repeatedly early in life until they know what they are, or are not, made of. The cultural impulse to protect the female of the species with their lives if necessary, even those they don’t know personally. The deep acceptance that everything is a competition, with winners, losers, and also-rans. The equally deep realization that competitions are won by those prepared to take on the biggest risks, physical, mental, creative, and financial.
Why the infamous Old Boy Network has survived the slings and arrows of feminism virtually intact. Their advantages are not institutional, procedural, or ideological. They are male. Why, 100 years after women got the vote, they still have not turned their superior numbers of population into equal accomplishment in politics, medicine, law, business/finance, high technology, and the arts (including painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, fashion, and even box office appeal in the realm of moviemaking).
Progressives pretend to be all about correcting these disparities by means of regulations, laws, and ongoing redefinitions of the standards by which accomplishments are measured. But that’s not what they’re really after. They’re after control, wealth, fame, and sexual gratification. There is no morality in their makeup, no real inclination toward fairness or justice. These are just words they use to exploit those they work hard to make see themselves as victims rather than important participants, each in their own way.
Yes, there are women in the Progressive power structure. Females that is. Technically speaking. We hear their their loud voices shouting from the rooftops. But who are they? They’re imitation males, not even faux men, but all the worst of mankind stripped of the ameliorations provided historically by religion, law, and respect for the verities of home and family. What’s left is the competitiveness and the ruthlessness of a prizefighter lost in fury and willing to pummel the target in front of him until it stops breathing.
Look at the young ‘women’ whose pro-Palestinian convictions are unaffected by Muslim-led baby decapitations and brutal rapes and dismemberment of wives, sisters, and daughters. What could have prepared them for this? A carefully indoctrinated blindness to what physically occurs when a 6-month fetus is yanked in pieces from the uterus? IDK. The Progressive mentality has been synthesized successfully in an increasingly large percentage of females who have been taught that their greatest source of strength and power is actually an obstacle to be managed and controlled. What is that, you ask?
Motherhood. The eternal source of female power and the one indispensable factor in the survival and continuation of the species. The genetic makeup of the human female is governed by this above all other attributes. Societies have been organized around the primacy and necessary admiration of Motherhood. But if you can teach the female of the species to have contempt for motherhood as a mere cultural artifact of the patriarchy, you have eliminated them as a serious rival for power in any realm. Because no matter how mean, homicidal, brutal, and psychopathically motivated women become, men will still be more dangerous in every one of these respects, and they feel no compunction about subjugating and enslaving the pitiful copies of their own worst instincts which are all that remain of the female sex. Why Progressives suddenly have so much trouble defining what a ‘woman’ is. That’s how deep this goes.
Those who think the imposition of limits on abortion rights is the most sinister threat facing women in the United States are the biggest fools in the nation. The real danger is right in front of their faces: the determination of the state to make motherhood itself obsolete, reduced to a simplistic command and control function of the government. A clear and present danger right in your face. At the school board meeting. In the porn on the shelves of the elementary school library. In the steadily increasing number of decisions in a young female’s life from which parents are deprived of knowledge and input — birth control, sexual activity, sexual preference, gender identity, gender surgery. While the boys are being given free rein to bully their peers and if they fail as bullies to shoot the ones who hurt them the most, girls included.
All of this is what women are voting for if they think it’s brave and beautiful to vote for abortion rights over affordable food/gas/mortgages, physical safety for themselves and their children on the streets and in their homes, and the energy that runs their cars, stoves, furnaces, and water heaters. The Progressives think giving you the vote was the most accidentally brilliant move they ever made. Let the fair sex uglify and destroy itself, which leaves the elite alone with the bimbos who always do what they’re told.
*************
No man can make this argument. Women have to make it. Lawyers, judges, doctors, economists, authors, mothers, aunts, sisters, mothers, mothers, and grandmothers.
But it’s time. Time they made the argument. If the current gang of criminals remains in charge, there won’t be a next time to vote on anything.
Comments
Post a Comment