The slogan “The future is female” probably isn’t supposed to be embittering or chauvinistic. A pep talk in miniature, the sentiment is most often used to motivate young girls at nobody’s particular expense. All can use it in this way. The words emblazon shirts for boys as well as girls, men as well as women. They are, like ‘black lives matter’, open to amazing flexibility of meaning if challenged, which they are only rarely.
But now, with all that is happening and all that has happened, the slogan is increasingly taken as a taunt, a trumpet-blast of conquest, backed not only by dreamy aspiration, but cold, hard fact.
It is considerably better, I am quite sure, to be a woman than a man these days; certainly in the West, but perhaps even elsewhere, for the same dynamics and the same model generally apply.
I am surprised to have come to this conclusion. For much of my adolescence the dogma of female disadvantage seemed fairly watertight; women are physically weaker, after all, which we must remember is a profound handicap, and so all the claims of feminism were made correct in that light; even if women didn’t obviously seem to be a class of victims, I knew they could become one at short notice, whenever the male temper changed. But that I now recognise as a major fallacy.
It is true that men ultimately have a veto on human destiny. If tomorrow we collectively decide to reimpose a patriarchy, nothing can possibly prevent us. The ‘kick-ass woman’ able to defeat men at their own game is a corporate fancy designed to sell pink running shoes. Men are stronger, more dynamic, and so on.
Nonetheless, this says nothing about quality of life or immediate power. It is true only theoretically; true in the same way the working classes can seize the means of production. True but unlikely, then, for much stands in their way.
The working classes are physically and numerically stronger than the capitalists. It isn’t science fiction to imagine ragged-trousered hordes trashing the headquarters of Barclays or Morgan Chase. But it is profoundly unlikely that they ever will; because society, with its guns and its norms and its trained manpower, stands against them, forbiddingly, menacingly.
In much the same way, natural male advantage is trapped in the imagination of radicals; outside of such space, even the mention of it is condemned as evil and terroristic. Theoretical power cannot feed a starving man, or prevent a family of hard-working proletarians from being thrown out of their houses, and nor can it lend consolation to the immiserated men of our current era. The theoretical (as a general rule) is immediately useless.
Men are handicapped today by several key social factors – most obviously the universal bias that exists in favour of the fairer sex. You, the reader, will have this bias. Most people do. We see women as more precious, more valuable and fundamentally worthier of our tenderness, restraint and generosity than men.
Evolutionary psychology makes this easily understandable. In a pure state of nature, it requires only one male to impregnate a hundred females, and so individual men are naturally considered less important than women.
But this is the inherited logic of a state of nature that no longer strictly exists. We are not living in the same jungle as our ancestors, with the same struggle for life day by day. Our societies are no longer even coherent; all kinds exist around us, friendly and hostile, and yet the instinct will not disappear any time soon.
To make matters worse – for men at least – fewer and fewer cultural objections to the exploitation of this instinct by young women are tolerated within liberal society. If a woman plays to this advantage for the purpose of manipulating others, for money or influence or fame or power, it is considered vulgar and bigoted to object, or even to notice it is happening.
Men are everywhere staying quiet, allowing taboos to harden around the discussion of very important imbalances, which in turn tempts more and more young women to take advantage of them, just as men would in the same position.
It must be understood that the charge of ‘misogyny’ today too often functions as a neutraliser of protest or even notice-taking of the runaway development of female privilege. The increasing gap between the genders is precisely the opposite of what polite society insists. And the toll on men is mounting.
Today it is increasingly easy to succeed as an ordinary woman, and increasingly impossible for an ordinary man. While feminists like to argue that the male elite, who invariably and necessarily work harder and with greater dynamism than the female elite, crowd them out at the pinnacle of meritocracy, even a small step down from that elite reveals the majority of men trapped below the majority of women.
Men have degenerated – though no-one’s fault but our own – into a peasant gender, while women have become aristocratic. Men must justify themselves, their portion of space and oxygen, with high intellectual achievement and / or crushing manual labour, or else be counted as worthless. Women, meanwhile, are self-justifying; and more than that, entitled to the protection, gallantry and subservience of the peasants.
One might point out, as feminists are wont to do, that women are markedly underrepresented in the governments of Western nations; but this, too, is fallacious. The whole meaning of the aristocracy in the modern sense is based on a distinction from the actively ruling class. Aristocrats sometimes govern, but only if they wish to. And they usually do not. Lord Byron quite understandably preferred his opium pipe and mistresses to the drudgery of parliament. The aristocrats of the ancien regime, similarly, tended to choose apolitical luxury over needless, bloody partisanship. Government is a job like any other, performed out of a lack of something. When nothing is lacking, what is there to be gained?
The new aristocrats have no war to fight. Indeed, quite like the aristocracy of old, the only time they engage themselves politically is for the defence of aristocratic privileges. The very last thing young women desire is an outbreak of sexual Bolshevism, a rebellion of the peasants, the men.
And that is no longer out of the question. The internet-enabled conversion by young women of sexual power into social, financial and political power is creating the necessary conditions for a future breakdown in relations between the genders.
Already we see the politics of younger generations greatly effected by the processes described. It is taken almost as a given that men at the radical extremes of ideology are motivated at least in part by gender resentment. Uncountable tired-out routines by liberal comedians play upon the theme of right-wing and conservative men having sexually unsatisfying lives, or of them suffering from ‘male fragility’; angry virgins, fragile men, stupid losers. The liberal men who join such accusations, who strive to make clear their lack of anxiety regarding female ’empowerment’, are indirectly boasting of having a relatively satisfying life, as part of a male elite, differentiated from the peasant majority. This is essentially slave-caste chauvinism (field over house) dressed up as moral sentiment.
In the new gender model, men who are not part of the male elite, but who nonetheless wish to enjoy privileges (access to media, publishing, general political and social viability) must stress their good behaviour and adjust to a modern, acceptably castrated type of maleness (the ‘soyboy’ / corporatised ‘nerd’ archetypes, for example).
What is most interesting for those of us who care about political matters is how much the gender breakdown confuses both left and right tendencies. The paleo-right are increasingly divided according to priorities. Here, male interest goes up against ethno-nationalism, with the former creating a pan-racial brotherhood of male solidarity that undermines the goals of the latter. On the left, the militantly castrated ‘woke’ left are falling out with men who wish to see male complaints taken more seriously, and who ultimately shift to the right when they find they cannot have a voice on any non-conservative platform.
This last point is especially noteworthy. Even the most conformist young Zoomer wishing to make a name for himself on the left of politics (in journalism or visual media, say) will likely find himself frustrated purely on gender grounds. Media work is an easy, desirable, aristocratic form of labour, eagerly sought out by women. A peasant may find very few opportunities left after his young female competitors have had their fill.
The liberal Zoomer mentioned may find openings only on the right, and his sympathies, nurtured by resentment, will travel with him.
This really cannot be stressed enough. The de-platforming of men by liberal media and society will drive more and more of them to the right, and when aristocrats begin to take over even those publications, to the far-right.
De-platforming authentic representatives of male interest is an incredibly stupid move. It will accelerate social breakdown and bring the prospect of gender conflict ever closer.
I will close by making clear I do not put the blame for this development on women, especially not on women from older generations, to whom the points made may seem absurd given their own life experiences. This is something effecting mostly younger people. And even in these generations, women are only taking advantage of a situation we have all allowed to come into being.
David
Defend the Modern World 