I consider myself a feminist and I’m incredibly grateful for your writing on the subject. It keeps me coming back because it is HONEST, and so much of today’s feminism speaks to ideals rather than realistic, workable solutions to societal woes. This article is yet another great example. I would add two things that I think a lot of women also forget: women working outside the home isn’t a new phenomenon. Certain classes of women have always had to and always will. Middle class housewives (the types considered “wife material today) advocated for life outside the home and drew attention to the facts that stay at home wives and moms can experience stifling unhappiness in these roles. It’s also worth noting that many of these trad wife influencers held up as ideals of meek feminine perfection are working. Their job is professional trad wife on social medial and they get money from various sources for doing it. The average working class person needs two incomes. We don’t have time to churn our own butter unless it’s making us some money. They are selling a fantasy just as much as leftist feminists.
Very well written. Despite my annoyance at feminism, most men's advocates are just as stupid. (Frequently stupider!)
Nice to know there are some that are less so. I think I read Clarey back in my dating days (Captain Capitalism right?), and have bought a few of Rian and Rollo's books. I need to read them. ;) (I will buy the hardcovers on Amazon, now that you told me buying and not reading them hurts the author!)
I think the thing is there's a certain zero-sum aspect to gender relations--not the whole thing obviously, but there's a sense in which male and female aggregate interests diverge. The guys like to sleep around, but want to know their children are theirs, which leads to the whole madonna-whore divide (and as you correctly point out there are a bunch of other subtypes). Theoretically from the evolutionary point of view you'd want a harem that's loyal to you, but since roughly equal numbers of men and women are born that means you have lots of guys fighting each other over the women. This is overall socially destructive so you get some variant of monogamy, but the old Adam persists and men try to make the wife be monogamous but try to get action on the side. Unsurprisingly the women are less than excited about this.
Conversely the woman wants to lock down the best man she can, but doesn't mind stringing along a few orbiters. She also wants to avoid approaches by lesser men, which is where you get all these rules about how it's 'creepy' to approach. You can probably outline the thinking better than me.
This is an excellent analysis, but I'd bet the "women shouldn't work" advocates—at least, the one selling the grift, if not the ones buying it—know exactly what you just said: that there are categories of women (wife, mistress, servant, etc.) to them, and they are only speaking about specific ones.
They know exactly what they're saying. We, in the center and on the left, don't. And this is why we can call them out on their apparent inconsistencies and it doesn't faze them. Their worldview is ugly, but it's not inconsistent if you're willing to accept some truly dark premises, including that male–male competition is both fundamental and good, that women play at most an assistive role in addition to being what is competed-for, and that society will be fundamentally broken unless there is a violent cataclysm that reduces the male population until the men left over are few enough that all their needs can be met.
What these men seem to want is a more primordial society in which high-status men have harems to fulfill their needs—sex, domestic support, social support—and (in order to make the numbers work) low-status men are dead—they're just assuming they'll be the high-status men. The buyers of the manosphere grift are told that "wokeness" is why they're in low positions, and that all it will take to fix this is a future cataclysm that remains formless to them but is usually expressed (when it actually happens) as a war that cuts down the male population.
These men also believe women are incapable of having purely economic relationships; to them, a woman who works outside the house is a time bomb, because at some point, she will cross the line and the economic relationship with her boss will become an intimate one. This is paranoid nonsense, of course, but it resonates with a generation of men who've been economically castrated and who are furious about being so badly positioned that their wives _have to_ work, which is a frustration most middle-of-the-road men—who agree that women should be able to work outside the house if they choose, and that women should have equal rights and equal pay—also share.
Might I take a crack at this? Please note that this meant to be descriptive and not prescriptive.
The seeming contradiction between these men is that they separate what their personal life ought to look like vs the political.
They are not seeking to pass a bill in Congress to keep women out of politics.
Instead they are trying to reshape how men look at their private lives to build a world where the only women who go to work are the highly competent or the unwanted.
Thus why these men on the one hand say that women should stay at home and raise the kids but can also employ women in their business.
I’m sure if their most competent female employee left to live the trad life they would fight tooth-and-nail to keep her.
What they want is men to be highly competent and successful and marry trad wives to breed out feminist thinking from society so that the culture takes care of the political.
It's crazy to think "Not my problem" would get you so much irritation from people who don't even know you from Adam.
The internet produces cultural sociopaths.
The very idea that people stop seeing people as people, but as exploitable entities says it all.
That aside, for black market fiction, instead of a short story what about the first chapter of something I have been working on?
For the magazine, it needs to be a complete work
I consider myself a feminist and I’m incredibly grateful for your writing on the subject. It keeps me coming back because it is HONEST, and so much of today’s feminism speaks to ideals rather than realistic, workable solutions to societal woes. This article is yet another great example. I would add two things that I think a lot of women also forget: women working outside the home isn’t a new phenomenon. Certain classes of women have always had to and always will. Middle class housewives (the types considered “wife material today) advocated for life outside the home and drew attention to the facts that stay at home wives and moms can experience stifling unhappiness in these roles. It’s also worth noting that many of these trad wife influencers held up as ideals of meek feminine perfection are working. Their job is professional trad wife on social medial and they get money from various sources for doing it. The average working class person needs two incomes. We don’t have time to churn our own butter unless it’s making us some money. They are selling a fantasy just as much as leftist feminists.
Very well written. Despite my annoyance at feminism, most men's advocates are just as stupid. (Frequently stupider!)
Nice to know there are some that are less so. I think I read Clarey back in my dating days (Captain Capitalism right?), and have bought a few of Rian and Rollo's books. I need to read them. ;) (I will buy the hardcovers on Amazon, now that you told me buying and not reading them hurts the author!)
I think the thing is there's a certain zero-sum aspect to gender relations--not the whole thing obviously, but there's a sense in which male and female aggregate interests diverge. The guys like to sleep around, but want to know their children are theirs, which leads to the whole madonna-whore divide (and as you correctly point out there are a bunch of other subtypes). Theoretically from the evolutionary point of view you'd want a harem that's loyal to you, but since roughly equal numbers of men and women are born that means you have lots of guys fighting each other over the women. This is overall socially destructive so you get some variant of monogamy, but the old Adam persists and men try to make the wife be monogamous but try to get action on the side. Unsurprisingly the women are less than excited about this.
Conversely the woman wants to lock down the best man she can, but doesn't mind stringing along a few orbiters. She also wants to avoid approaches by lesser men, which is where you get all these rules about how it's 'creepy' to approach. You can probably outline the thinking better than me.
Men's wishlist as societal panacea is tiresome. On par with *one weird trick to fix the world!*
There are solutions. They all start with eliminating active retardery.
This is an excellent analysis, but I'd bet the "women shouldn't work" advocates—at least, the one selling the grift, if not the ones buying it—know exactly what you just said: that there are categories of women (wife, mistress, servant, etc.) to them, and they are only speaking about specific ones.
They know exactly what they're saying. We, in the center and on the left, don't. And this is why we can call them out on their apparent inconsistencies and it doesn't faze them. Their worldview is ugly, but it's not inconsistent if you're willing to accept some truly dark premises, including that male–male competition is both fundamental and good, that women play at most an assistive role in addition to being what is competed-for, and that society will be fundamentally broken unless there is a violent cataclysm that reduces the male population until the men left over are few enough that all their needs can be met.
What these men seem to want is a more primordial society in which high-status men have harems to fulfill their needs—sex, domestic support, social support—and (in order to make the numbers work) low-status men are dead—they're just assuming they'll be the high-status men. The buyers of the manosphere grift are told that "wokeness" is why they're in low positions, and that all it will take to fix this is a future cataclysm that remains formless to them but is usually expressed (when it actually happens) as a war that cuts down the male population.
These men also believe women are incapable of having purely economic relationships; to them, a woman who works outside the house is a time bomb, because at some point, she will cross the line and the economic relationship with her boss will become an intimate one. This is paranoid nonsense, of course, but it resonates with a generation of men who've been economically castrated and who are furious about being so badly positioned that their wives _have to_ work, which is a frustration most middle-of-the-road men—who agree that women should be able to work outside the house if they choose, and that women should have equal rights and equal pay—also share.
Might I take a crack at this? Please note that this meant to be descriptive and not prescriptive.
The seeming contradiction between these men is that they separate what their personal life ought to look like vs the political.
They are not seeking to pass a bill in Congress to keep women out of politics.
Instead they are trying to reshape how men look at their private lives to build a world where the only women who go to work are the highly competent or the unwanted.
Thus why these men on the one hand say that women should stay at home and raise the kids but can also employ women in their business.
I’m sure if their most competent female employee left to live the trad life they would fight tooth-and-nail to keep her.
What they want is men to be highly competent and successful and marry trad wives to breed out feminist thinking from society so that the culture takes care of the political.