I suppose most women are not attracted to writings that view modern feminism as an aberration and not the progressive philosophy the contemporary world insists it is. But the criticisms of feminism here amount to the fact that it is fundamentally anti-woman, seeking to remake her as an imitation male instead of something good and true in her own right. This is close to the traditional view of men and women but tradition seen in a pure and original form without any decadent accretions in which one sex seeks to dominate the other. Equality between the sexes is rejected because the sexes are not the same and the attempt to make them so has resulted in modern woman losing touch with her inner femininity to a large degree which is damaging her, the family and humanity as a whole. Spiritually speaking, feminism is a false friend to women but it is attractive to the worldly self because it seems to offer more power and autonomy.
Well, there it is. People will point to the good feminism may have done, which it has in certain areas, but this is not so very different to saying Mussolini got the trains to run on time. It's the overall effect of something that matters not its benefits taken in isolation. It is also its spiritual effect that is important and this is not obvious to those who do not see the world in spiritual terms and who therefore don't see the damage an ideology might do to individuals on a level above the immediately obvious material.
Women are more empathetic than men and incline more to the love aspect of spirituality than the truth aspect. In a world orientated to truth this can have a very salutary softening effect. In a world such as ours that has turned away from truth, it can be disastrous because what it does, or potentially does, is give truth and falsehood equal recognition. This is also why women are more comfortable following the distortions of the left these days. They see it as more compassionate than the right and miss its real foundation in adversarial destructiveness. I dare say that men are generally more able to see this even though, of course, it is men who have created these monsters in the first place.
Women are more conformist than men. This goes along with them being less risk-taking. They are more likely to toe the consensus line and less likely to look behind communally accepted things to deep reality. So a blog like this, which essentially exposes the modern world as a nightmare from which we need to wake up, is not going to appeal to women so much as the more adventurous male who is more likely to want to dig down into the whys and wherefores of things, and not accept what is told him just because authority says it. None of this means there aren't many women who do this and many men who don't. That's an individual thing and there is no reason why anyone should be the slave of their sex. But, in general terms, this is how men and women are. Like it or not, men are, usually, better philosophers just as women are, usually, more interested in people and therefore more likely to respond to the human angle.
The writers here are all male but so are most writers pointing out the insanity and nihilism of the modern world, and the spiritual vacuity where any attempt at spirituality exists. Women are more likely to take to a doctrinally amorphous sort of spirituality which is more about pleasing or comforting the feelings than one which seeks to engage with reality. Again, not all women by any means but go to any New Age type gathering and women will be much more in evidence.
So much for some general points. But I'd like to make another observation on why there might be a greater number of men than women who see through the deviant state of the modern world and are therefore attracted to positions such as those represented by a blog like this. Over the last few decades men have lost power and women have gained it. When you have lost power, you want to find out why and look for some kind of compensation. When you have gained it, you may well be happy with how things are and not open to being told that your new power derives from a world that has gone wrong. This is just human nature.
I have this phrase in my mind which I think I read somewhere but I can't remember where so forgive the plagiarisation, if plagiarisation it be. Men expand the horizons while women maintain the status quo. Men are more likely to innovate and women to imitate. This may not be a popular thing to say nowadays but it really just echoes something I have written before about how, in cosmic terms, the masculine is the expanding force while the feminine is the contracting one. Alternatively you could say that the former relates to the transcendent and the latter to the immanent. Obviously we need both and, though one might be seen as primary (for instance, you have to expand before you can contract), they are still two sides of one whole. The modern world has lost the sense of transcendence and I would suggest that it is men who are more likely to want to restore that, and perhaps better able to do so as well.
It's hard to write about a a question like this because the topic is so sensitive and who can be sure that subjectivity is not interfering with his or her vision? But I think that humanity will only start to make real advances when men and women start playing for the same team and in their correct positions. That, and when they both see that the contemporary world, with its denial of God, is on the path to self-destruction. This may mean a healthy dose of humility for both sexes but that's never a bad thing.
An afterthought: The thought has crossed my mind that maybe the demons behind so many of the modern transgressions have specifically attacked women through attempting to corrupt womanhood because they know that when woman is true to her inner self she correctly orientates man to God. When she deserts her post, as it were, he does not have her guidance to put him on the right path. She softens and civilises him but only when she fulfils the trust laid in her femininity. In Christian terms you might say that Christ could not have been born if Mary had not been pure of soul.
26 comments:
"Women are more conformist than men. This goes along with them being less risk-taking. They are more likely to toe the consensus line and less likely to look behind communally accepted things to deep reality."
This is basically the only point that matters.
The others are all false because they ignore how women actually see the world. In an evolutionary biological sense, primates all belong to a social order which is typified by the female remaining in the social group of her birth her entire life (unless something goes drastically wrong) while many or most of the males are driven out of their birth group when they reach sexual maturity and have to explore and come to terms with their relationships alone, then within a juvenile gang, then eventually taking over (or parasitically exploiting) another social group. This is of course a simplification, but the salient point is not altered by expansion.
Women adapt to and accept the dominant social paradigm in which they find themselves, they do not seek to challenge or escape it...even when they feel the failure or even destruction of their society is imminent to a degree that results in epigenetic changes to their off-spring.
It has always been a relatively common practice to abduct women and force them to serve as low-class concubines. It is exceptional for the women themselves to put up any meaningful resistance to this, for every woman that makes an active effort to escape even the most heinous abusive situation, there are a hundred who come to accept it as inevitable and a dozen that come to defend it actively (until they are forcibly removed without any display of respect for their 'consent'). The practice continues today, despite international norms and laws that attempt to abolish it.
The reason is simply that it works much better with women than with men. A man will challenge the moral and ethical standards of a social group even if he was born into it, a woman will not as long as the group still has power over her life circumstances.
Feminism didn't increase the power of women in any way. It only increased the ability of rapists and scoundrels to get away with their crimes by blaming them on the men who had traditionally been their enemies, committed fathers (and men seeking to become such). This has clearly been at the expense of women by every measure that takes women's actual life satisfaction into account. But most women have gone along with it for the same reason that most women in Islam go along with that.
Because they are women, and it is the dominant social paradigm in their experience.
You've elucidated some points for me there which is what I was hoping someone might do. However I still think your explanation is only partial and leaves out something important. Namely that we are not just material creatures obeying biological impulses and programming but spiritual beings who should be attempting to manifest our spiritual archetype or true pattern. The true woman or true man is not just an expression of unconscious material forces but conscious spiritual ones too. Thus Mary was the perfect woman because she embodied the spiritual perfection of her type not the biological expression carried forward to something higher, though she may well have done that too.
If man, as in mankind, is part angel and part animal, it is the spiritual part that must be determining so although we certainly are biological creatures, as you say, we also have this higher, more conscious, spiritual aspect to our natures, and that is what we should be attempting to respond to.
Both men and women should be able to see the truth of God and Christ because that is part of our spiritual DNA.
And though I take your point about feminism, it surely has increased women's power in many material senses though it has also decreased it in other, probably more important ones.
I feel therefore I am.:-)
Yet in reality one sex does seek to to dominate the other. What woman would wish to place her fate entirely in the hands of a man, especially a thoroughly corrupted, materialist modern one? Men are unable to view women truthfully because they want so much from them, as mother or lover. Their want distorts their perception. I believe woman's best role is the traditional one, but it ought to be chosen freely with plenty of safeguards to prevent abuse of a dependent status - because, to be honest,dependency is what such a role entails. Women are attracted to critiques of feminism and atheistic leftism and do read blogs such as this. However, so many of those critiques have a bitterly misogynistic tone that is likely to drive women readers away. Misogyny, unfortunately, is not just a feminist buzzword.
I agree with you. The female revolt against the male wouldn't have happened if the male hadn't abused his authority. But I also think that each sex tries to dominate the other in one way or another. That is no doubt the consequence of the Fall and is the fault and responsibility of both sexes.
I suppose I would say that because things get abused and misused that is no reason to reject the thing in itself, as feminism does. But I completely understand the wish to avoid dependence on someone who is untrustworthy and unreliable. The current situation is not the fault of one sex but both, and surely arises ultimately from the rejection of God.
And yes, many anti-feminist types often are misogynistic in that they identify women just with their negative traits so they have the same but opposite fault of the radical feminists. But that is usually because they do not come from a spiritual position but are completely worldly in approach.
I see men and women as complementary. Each needs the other as you would expect unless God has made a blunder in creating them! But that doesn't mean they are equal. In some aspects one might be superior, in others it would be the other though even here that is not say there is a complete numerically equivalent balance.
I agree with most of what you say, but I don't think women wish to dominate men in the same way men want to dominate women. In fact, dominating a man is usually unappealing to a woman at a visceral level. The woman simply wants, like a man, to exercise her will, which may bump up against the man's. In other words, she wants what she wants and will use the means at her disposal to get it. That is naturally self-serving, human, a trait she has in common with the male of the species. Of course, someone has to have the last word. I believe C.S. Lewis has addressed this point.
Yes, I would go along with that.
The idea of making opposites equal is an absurd notion and doomed to failure. In a ludicrous effort achieve equality between the sexes one has to deny and distort their true nature or else subtract or deny the essential components of said nature. No two individuals are equal no two individuals are the same unless they be reduced to nothingness, which is perhaps the final destination of the drive for equality. An identical homogenous, androgynous mass of nothingness. A steril environment devoid of culture, and true diversity. This is,of course, impossible to achieve unless everyone has nothing and is nothing. The 100 000 000 of so who died at the hands of communism are proof of this. The modern obsession with equalizing the vast array of diversity of people’s and individuals relies on the premace of denial and consequent destruction of the whole.
We need to understand that men and women are fundamentally different yet equal. Perhaps the word equality itself is to blame for much of the confusion in this issue.
For me the divine feminine and masculine are two opposing forces which when functioning in harmony create a a oneness, a whole. Rather like the positive and negative forces at work in the atom.
To achieveperfect balance between the masculine and feminine forces within oneself is a goal worth striving for and hard enough for an individual. How this could be achieved in the world of men and women is difficult to imagine.
If harmony is achieved through the constituent parts of the whole singing in unison then disharmony is achieved when one or more parts seeks dominion over the other. Shouts too load sings out of tune. This has perhaps been the case and man is as you say partly to blame.
Yet it can be observed that there are forces in the world that have waged war upon the integrity of the divine masculine and feminine, through subversion inversion and perversion of said forces. And they are working overtime twenty four seven, bombarding us withbtheir destructive propaganda. Nature is denied and divine nature scoffed at. It seems that evil has strategically targeted the true nature of man and woman in order to divide and conquer them.
At the same time I do wonder if perhaps we are not witnessing a seismic shift in polarity. A chaotic swing as the feminine breaks free of its shackles in order to restore equilibrium. Although it is hard to imagine much rising from the rubble if this chaos is allowed to reign much longer and there are as we speak some powerful oppressive forces arriving to fill the hole of lost western masculine influence. Sean fowler
Count me as one of your faithful but silent female blog readers! Maybe there's many of us but we just don't comment.
I think I found you via Steve Sailor, who referenced Bruce Charlton, who cited you. Though I agree with much of the altright criticism of leftist culture it left me feeling angry and in despair due to the hopelessness of changing our culture and I had to let go of reading those sites. That's where your voice is so helpful and valuable. You offer uncompromising Christian truth but with such compassion and patience. I often retread some of your postings about how to let go our our false self and unite our individual, true self with God.
You offer truly valuable insights and I'm so thankful I found your blog.
To whitestone,yes I think you are right in what you say and it's very much worth saying. What I am trying to understand in this post though is why are women seemingly less likely to perceive the distortions of the modern world than men. And I think it is because men, often but by no means always, have a stronger intellectual polarisation towards truth just as women tend to do towards love.
To Anon, thank you very much for reading and commenting. I was hoping a female blog reader or two might give her view and provide just the balance we always talk about when this subject is discussed.
Another anonymous female reader here. You are likely correct in saying that love has primacy for women. We are obviously physically designed to bring forth new life, to nurture and care for it, deny that reality as we may. Love IS women's truth, without which we are nothing as St. Paul said, but for men it is a thing apart. Forgive my platitudes, please. But I think women are able to understand Edith Stein's maxim,
"Do not accept anything as love which lacks truth."
If that's a platitude it's also a great truth. Thank you for your comment.
Yes I did go off into a slight tangent. Perhaps the true feminine shines through despite all attacks. It’s up to the men to slay the dragons, fight the wars and keep the wolf from the door. And yes I think you are right truth logic rationality and action are generally the male domaine. While ladies would seem to lean more towards the world of feelings empathy nuture. Love? I’ve always loved the women in my life much more than they loved me:-)
As for being involved in this blog. I would guess that females generally choose a large percentage of literature penned by women and men by men.
But why in a world where women are much more active in the work place and politics would they be less inclined to” combat the distortions of the modern world”. Apart from the obvious differences in temperament? Could it be like this? Because to the pathological PC feminine that seeks status, power and material gain above loving and caring, the distortions of the modern world are the distortions that facilitate her dominion. PC is the weapon that the active post modern pathological feminine wields. These distortions are her lifeblood. PC is the fuel that drives the engine. Why would it be in her interests to combat these distortions? Quite the opposite.
Modern history tells us that we live in the dawning Sophianic Age and writers such as Rudolf Steiner and Valentin Tomberg have pointed to profound connections between the Divine Feminine and the 2nd Coming of Christ.
Steiner prophetically dated the "sunrise" of Christ's return as 1933 - the same date as Hitler came to power. It took a World War (and all that followed) to blind humanity to these momentous and ongoing spiritual happenings. Great good attracts great evil.
The Divine Feminine now is under severe attack - distorted and atavistic Sibylline forces have arisen from the depths and now hold sway. Not Wisdom but base stupidity. Not Love but barely concealed hate.
Thanks whitestone and moonsphere, you both make valuable and interesting points. It may well be that it is the coming back into outer focus of the Divine Feminine that has attracted such attacks on and attempted corruption of it, unfortunately largely successful so far I would say. It's expression has been perverted. But maybe something has to come out onto the surface before it can be cleansed. Let us pray to God that it may be so.
I think that most women actually feel keenly that 'feminism' is a mistake that only exists to empower and defend rapists and scoundrels while thwarting men who seek to protect women and children from such.
But the problem is in thinking that women, as a class, will or even can do anything about it.
If we're going to seriously fight back against the rapists and scoundrels who have hijacked modern civilization and essentially taken whole generations of women and children hostage, we're going to have to do it by relying on men to do the fighting rather than asking the women and children to rise up against their abusers.
It's a nice, romantic, lovely vision to imagine strong women and precocious children rising up and fighting against their wicked captors. In the one in a hundred or thousand case that it actually happens, we justly are moved to cheer and rejoice.
But men have got to stop thinking that those exceptional events are going to become commonplace and overturn the current situation. When you are seeing your women and children raped and abused and deceived and sit by waiting for them to be the ones to take the initiative in saving themselves before you do anything yourself...you can't call yourself a man anymore.
Or at least you shouldn't.
This isn't a fight women and children should have to face at all, let alone bearing the brunt of the effort. Men need to take the lead, and they need to do it with the understanding that they aren't going to get a lot of help from women and children, and that isn't because there is anything wrong with women and children.
Anymore than men not bearing and nursing children means there is something wrong with men.
"most women actually feel keenly that 'feminism' is a mistake that only exists to empower and defend rapists and scoundrels ". I wish that were true (that most women felt that). It's not my experience at all though that experience mostly comes from the media and middle class London professionals who, practically to a woman, absorb feminism hook, line and sinker and think that women are just the same as men except in those areas where they are superior. I see them as deeply conditioned into accepting something that appears to be to their advantage but is not at all in reality.
From a spiritual perspective, I think men and women are being tested based on different things. Rather they are being prepared for different approaches to eternity.
So I think women are subject to men in this life because it's one of the best ways to ascertain what a man will do when he has such a power. For women, the power temptation has more to do with how she relates to her children (including what man she allows to father them and how she encourages them to relate to him).
Because I think this life really is a chance for us to experience in a limited way what it will be like to have God-like power, and so I think we get clues from the structure of Nature of how that plays out differently for men and women.
I believe that ultimately people will have the chance to reject what it means to become fully man (eternal father) and fully woman (eternal mother), and that this is why we have some feeling of provisionality about our sex. But it seems clear to me that men and women simply have different things to learn from this life.
I'm sure that men and women do have different lessons to learn (in one respect, in another all human beings have to learn the same lessons). Which only goes to show how misguided the whole feminist ideology is.
I think our fundamental outlook has to change first because we seem to have it backwards. We see ourselves as enclosed "individuals" looking "out" at the world. As if we were ready-made products, and the world was a giant shopping mall with endless shelves of "free choice". It's more sensible too see ourselves as a continuum within the human organism, instead of competing "things". I don't like when feminism hijacks the word "woman" and makes it a boxed in group category. We are not "men" or "women" more than we are individuals with masculine or feminine poles. The error is reasoing from abstract, categorical groups that absorb the individual entirely. If you derive your self-worth primarily from the group, it means you have an actual shortage of self-worth, because you do not love God. You're trying to hide in the middle of the crowd because you're afraid to face your own soul. I don't think a woman with high self-esteem and feminine integrity cares about how many female scientists there are or not. Why is it even relevant? Creation comes first, not our personal little "quests" for self-importance.
Feminism has become a spoiled and self-righteous ideology. It's easy to run around in the city and crusade against the patriarchy - as if civilization is some ready made "thing". Women might get mistreated, but it's not like it's easy to be a man either. It is for sure not some sort of privilege, more than a responsibility. Men are actually more fragile than women in many ways, but at the same time we hate exposing our weaknesses - so the suffering and spiritual suffocation of young males (especially non-conformists) often goes unnoticed, while the ideologues keep whining. But I guess that's part of being a man, and a hero for that matter. You know that you must get the job done while everyone keeps talking - knowing that you'll never get any credit from the herd, besides being called bad things.
I am a Christian feminist which means I hold the feminine spirit, embodied in Mary, in the highest regard. Women are individuals, not subjects of men, or of some other group - which is exatcly why I'm opposed to modern feminism. I just want people to embrace their nature and have normal families, but apparently that means "right wing extremism" today.
End note: There are no "bad" groups to fight, but only fallen individuals - men and women - and perhaps this is what the individualist really fears, by hiding from God in the crowd. Like Adam and Eve, many of us live much of our lives in hiding. We hide behind the bushes, our public image.
Yes, there are only fallen individuals. In the past we knew that but now we don't and therefore justify all sorts of attitudes that spring from and sustain the fallen self, feminism being one of these among many. Both men and women have to see themselves as primarily children of God and put themselves right with their Creator. Then these stupid rivalries would cease and the natural way of being would automatically present itself with men and women both fulfilling their true roles.
@Chiu,
"In an evolutionary biological sense, primates all belong to a social order which is typified by the female remaining in the social group of her birth her entire life (unless something goes drastically wrong) while many or most of the males are driven out of their birth group when they reach sexual maturity and have to explore and come to terms with their relationships alone, then within a juvenile gang, then eventually taking over (or parasitically exploiting) another social group. This is of course a simplification, but the salient point is not altered by expansion."
Why drag in speculative evolutionary reasoning? Among great apes (probably the more relevant group), consider the large number of social differences between chimps, bonobos, and orangutans. This sort of evolutionary reasoning is liable to error, and your salient point becomes questionable when looking with more specificity at groups that would seem to be more closely related to humans.
Why not just say that female humans have higher average levels of agreeableness (in the big five personality traits), which is much easier to demonstrate? No speculative evolutionary reasoning required.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
If we fail to understand why the sexes differ in personality and disposition, then we easily fall into the profound error of thinking that one sex is "right" and the other "wrong" on every point of notable difference.
This error underlies most of the tragedy we are presently discussing.
Men and women are not "just different", they are different for profound reasons that are tied to their differing functions within the extended procreative influence parents have on their children. Children need both mothers and fathers, and the mothers are women and the fathers are men. This is not merely a matter of natural conception, nor even of bearing to birth, but of raising children to become fully human.
@Chiu,
It sounds to me like what you're saying is that men and women are designed as complementary. That also has been believed much more strongly for almost all of human history, without the specific evolutionary theory that you have suggested. If someone adheres to some sort of general evolutionary framework, they will probably want to say we evolved average personality differences between men and women for evolutionary reasons, and some of these reasons might be more obvious, well-evidenced, easier to test, and so on, than others. One can certainly speculate on what those specific reasons might be, but one should at least be aware that the history of evolutionary psychology is littered with theories like this that have now been discarded. Basing one's reasoning on this on a speculative, specific theory like the one you outlined above is, in my opinion, a bad idea. IMHO and FWIW.
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