On complementarity

From Twitter:

There is, of course, a corresponding instinct in men to want to protect and provide for a woman so that she can, as Rachel puts it, fall into her femininity. This is the instinct that is physically embodied in relationships when a man draws a woman toward him, inviting her to lean into him and feel supported. Or when at night in bed a man puts his arm around a woman and draws her into him, enveloping her.

It is one aspect of the relationship between men and women that can be genuinely complementary (not all aspects of relationships are). And it is a significant part of how men and women interact, as without it part of the bonding instinct is lost. It should, therefore, be defended within a culture, rather than taken for granted.

It seems to me that part of the dysfunction in modern relationships is because of interference with the provider/protector instinct in men. There is, first, the insistence in liberal societies that women be autonomous, and therefore independent, powerful and self-standing. Young men will grow up watching women kickboxing their way across TV and cinema screens. The softer qualities of women will be downplayed. Men will begin to feel that women are no longer a "complement" to their protector instincts.

Second, when a man sets out to protect and provide, there is always a risk that a woman will abuse his efforts. If a woman follows her lower nature, she might see an opportunity to exploit his willingness to work on her behalf. A lower natured woman might string him along and then at a certain time in the marriage reveal the deception. A man in this situation will lose his wife, his children, his house, and a considerable portion of his material assets and future income. Worse, he will be zeroed out existentially, as his efforts in life will have been revealed to have been chimerical. Some men never recover.

So defending complementarity between men and women, and the depth of connection that goes along with it, requires support within the culture. First, women need to balance being generally capable in life with a willingness to show their softer side to men. The image fed to men should not be the "tough warrior woman" but something more genuinely feminine. Nor is it really wise for a society to aim at women out earning men, particularly not via artificial means of quotas and so on - as this too undermines men's provider instincts.

As for the risk of exploitation, we need a better balance within family law that protects men from "divorce rape". Even more than this, it's important that men do not make it their entire life mission to protect and provide for a family. As much as a man might feel the truth of the complementary nature of his protector instinct and a woman's desire for a strong man to create a protected space for her, it is better for this to be the domestic side of a man's larger mission in life (rather than being the larger mission itself).

Women themselves don't really want a man to sacrifice his entire life for her. Women don't see relationships this way: they recognise their own sacrifices on behalf of family, but find it difficult to conceive of a man doing the same. They are attracted to men who go out and make their own way in the world rather than men who sacrifice their interests for women - to the point that it is difficult for them to register that a man might do this.

And if a man has a mission outside of his marriage, it leaves him far less exposed to deception by a lower natured woman (one who sees relationships in transactional terms and who cannot genuinely reciprocate a commitment to build a loving relationship within a marriage). If he still has his core mission, then as deep a blow as the deception might be, he will not have lost the existential ground to life as much as a man who puts everything into his role as a husband.

I'm not writing any of this to discourage men from being masculine enough to "allow a woman to fall into her femininity". It's to try to establish an understanding of how men might be encouraged to do this, rather than feeling demoralised and stepping back from this part of their nature.

Molly on love

I recently wrote a post on duality between men and women, pointing out a basic way that the instincts of men and women fit together in a complementary union. However, I was careful as well to note that relationships between the sexes aren't always simple to navigate. Take, as an example, the following tweets from an American woman named Molly. She begins with this:

She elaborates with the following:

Her base impulse was to associate love with an intensity of feeling, and this intensity of feeling was brought on by the thrill of uncertainty, of being left on the edge of her seat not knowing if the person would stay or go, of not knowing securely what the other person felt, of chaos and pain and so on.

This attitude has been recognised in the manosphere for some time, with young men being advised not to give away commitment too easily but to make a woman work for it; to remain something of a mystery; to keep excitement in the relationship and so on.

Even so, it's not an attitude that fits well with marriage. In marriage a man makes a firm and clear commitment to a woman - she is not meant to feel uncertain whether he will stay or not. Similarly, in marriage a man vows to protect and provide - he is not meant to make her experience chaos and pain.

So what's the solution? Well, at least part of the strategy is the one that Molly herself suggests, which is to try to overcome base impulse with something more elevated, namely a love that is settled in the will, that wills the good of the other person, that is willing to self-sacrifice for the larger good of the marriage and the family, and that aims to cultivate, as best we can, the finer qualities of our masculinity and femininity (as Molly puts it both for ourselves and for our spouse).

But this more elevated concept of love doesn't come to all people readily. It helps if it is part of the culture, of the ground within which people grow and form character. It cannot be taken for granted, but needs to be deliberately fostered generation by generation.

Stacey's feminism

I saw the following tweet this morning:

It was followed by this exchange:

Stacey seems to be pushing the idea that women should pursue their collective self-interests whilst men should also pursue women's collective self-interests. I replied:

And that's where feminism is at. There is an assumption, a remarkable assumption, that men in the past pursued their collective self-interests at the expense of women. So that it can now be justified as "equality" if the reverse is true and we have a society in which both sexes pursue the material self-interests of women.

This ideology helps to explain why there is so little gratitude for the sacrifices of men, past and present, within a feminist culture. How can there be gratitude when feminists assume that men did not make sacrifices, but instead acted out of a collective self-interest?

I think Stacey and other feminists are in for a shock. If feminists were to succeed in convincing people that the point of life is to pursue our self-interests, then relationships between men and women would degrade very quickly. Stacey is trying to circumvent this by requiring men to follow women's self-interests, rather than their own. But that just sets up an ideological tension. She is, in effect arguing:

1. The point in life is a pursuit of one's own material self-interests.
2. Men should pursue women's self-interests.

The second part of the argument contradicts the first. Therefore, it's not likely to hold in the longer term.

Stacey is wrong about Western culture. I've been reading Our Borders, Ourselves by the late Lawrence Auster. In the chapter "What is the West" Auster observes that "one of the characteristic features of Western culture is the drive toward self-transcendence". He elaborates by describing this as "the idea that man attains the true order of his being only by being united with a truth outside his own being." Auster complains that this aspect of Western culture has been undermined:

On the Left, the reduction of the human being to the power-seeking and resentful self not only denies the spirit but by doing so denies the balance of earthly and spiritual that is the essence of the West.

Young Western men have been drawn historically to family life for many reasons. Obviously the sex instinct played a part, as did a desire to have children and to fulfil masculine aspects of self related to being a father and husband. In the past, too, there was a social function to marriage, as sex roles were more differentiated than they are today. Men who wanted to preserve their own family and national traditions would also have sought out marriage.

But added to all this was the drive that Lawrence Auster describes. A man's love for a woman can, at its best, focus a man on a good outside of his own self that (hopefully) balances both the earthly (a flesh and blood woman/carnal desire) and the spiritual (the good of love/a transcendent sense of the feminine/mystery in the unity and drawing together and attraction of the masculine & feminine). This then can powerfully inspire a man toward sacrificial love and toward deeper loyalties and commitments.

But it only works if a man keeps the balance right (e.g. does not idolise & remains aware of human infirmities & works within the limits of human nature) and if women inspire this kind of love by embodying feminine virtue sufficiently.

And here's the thing. Whereas Western women were once raised toward habits of feminine virtue, they are now encouraged to rebel against it. Lawrence Auster writes about this in his book, in a section titled "The Rebellion against the Father":

In all its forms, the phenomenon we've been discussing represents the loss of authority in a father image. Symbolically, the father is the structuring source of our existence, whether we are speaking of male authority, of the law, of right and wrong, of our nation, of our heritage, of our civilization, of our biological nature, of our God. All these structuring principles of human life, in their different ways, are symbolically the father. The rebellion we've discussed is...a rebellion against the father. The belief that the universe is structured, intelligible, and fundamentally good, and that one can participate in this universe - this is the experience of having a father, which is the opposite of the experience of alienation that drives contemporary culture. (p.12)

We live in a culture shaped by intellectuals who have rebelled against the "structuring sources of our existence" and who prefer to stand, instead, within their own individual orbit, as beings defiantly organised by their own will and desires and choices alone.

There is an element of this mindset, it seems to me, in the aggressive way that some women promote abortion, or refigure their bodies with tattoos, or speak gracelessly or dress immodestly. The same kind of women will often hate male authority figures (commonly identified these days as old white men), but will believe at the same time in a diffuse, universal ethic of care. The latter is the go to version of morality because it is not a structuring principle of reality - it doesn't judge right or wrong and nor does it direct our loves and loyalties in any given direction (hence the apparent contradiction of leftist women hating conservative men with a passion whilst at the same time claiming universal benevolence).

Lawrence Auster wrote about the effect of feminism on men and women that,

All that's left to attract them to each other is their bodies, their bare utility, or their power, with the further result that...the love, sympathy, and friendship that used to prevail between men and women is reduced to jungle combat. (p.134)

You can see this in Stacey's feminism. Men exist for utility (serving women's purposes). What matters is a contest for power and material self-interest.

It's not difficult to predict that women will get far less out of men this way than under the old culture, in which men thought of marital love as one aspect of attaining "the true order of their being".

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

A change of heart?

Six years ago Chrissy Stockton (writing as Amy Glass) wrote a piece titled "I look down on young women with husbands and kids and I'm not sorry".

The argument is one that crops up every now and then in feminist circles. The problem to be addressed is this:

1. Liberalism wants maximum individual autonomy. This means that each individual is to be free to choose as they wish without restraint, unless it limits the choice of others.

2. This presents a conundrum if a woman chooses to be a stay at home mother. On the one hand this choice does not maximise her autonomy as she is choosing to be interdependent within a family rather than an independent individual focusing on solo development. This fails the liberal principle. On the other hand, if she cannot choose to be a stay at home mother the liberal principle is also denied.

Chrissy Stockton argues in her piece that the stay at home option is the one that fails the test:

Every time I hear someone say that feminism is about validating every choice a woman makes I have to fight back vomit.

Do people really think that a stay at home mom is really on equal footing with a woman who works and takes care of herself?

Here she is clearly advancing the argument that what matters is independence. She goes on to draw out the argument that motherhood, being something common to women, is not a uniquely self-determined achievement - it is not "exceptional":

Having kids and getting married are considered life milestones. We have baby showers and wedding parties as if it’s a huge accomplishment and cause for celebration to be able to get knocked up or find someone to walk down the aisle with. These aren’t accomplishments, they are actually super easy tasks, literally anyone can do them. They are the most common thing, ever, in the history of the world.

...I want to have a shower for a woman when she backpacks on her own through Asia, gets a promotion, or lands a dream job not when she stays inside the box and does the house and kids thing...

...You will never have the time, energy, freedom or mobility to be exceptional if you have a husband and kids.

So in this worldview showing your independence by backpacking alone in a foreign country is a greater achievement than getting married and having children. (Which may help explain those articles encouraging women to journey solo to those parts of the world most dangerous to women - this being the realm of liberal female accomplishment.)

Chrissy Stockton wrote another piece at around the same time titled "Successful women do not fall in love". Again, this is one of those opinions that appears in feminist thought from time to time. The argument is that if what matters is a uniquely self-determined accomplishment, and if this accomplishment is our career, that love distracts us from our career goals and should be suppressed. Alexandra Kollontai, writing in the early twentieth century, put it this way:

this motive was a leading force in my life ... to shape my personal, intimate life as a woman according to my own will ... Above all, I never let my feelings, the joy or pain of love take the first place in my life ...

I still belong to the generation of women who grew up at a turning point in history. Love ... still played a very great role in my life. An all-too-great role! It was an expenditure of precious time and energy ... utterly worthless ... We, the women of the past generation, did not yet understand how to be free. The whole thing was an absolutely incredible squandering of our mental energy, a diminution of our labour power.

A century later Chrissy Stockton followed suit by arguing that it is important for a woman to guard against the impulse toward self-sacrificing love:

We’re kind of brainwashed to take care of other people, and make them happy and for me, being single is kind of an armor guarding against whatever cultural or biological intuitions are telling me, as a woman, to be self-sacrificial.

...I am in love with myself, in love with building my work, which will outlive me, and in love with proving people wrong, the ones who told me what I couldn’t do– be happy and secure and the center of my own world.

There were criticisms of Chrissy Stockton's attitude toward mothers. She defended herself by writing:

If we were convinced that motherhood and being a wife was a freely made goal that did not in any way encumber women, my post wouldn’t have over 200k social shares, I wouldn’t have received hundreds of emails in the span of a few days...

That's a revealing comment. It shows how much Chrissy Stockton based her ideas on a liberal worldview. Note that being a wife and mother are put in question because they are not "freely made goals" (i.e. not self-determined) and because they "encumber women". The dictionary definition of encumber is "restrict or impede (someone or something) in such a way that free action or movement is difficult." Liberals often use the term "encumbered self" in a disparaging way.

This is highly significant for what comes next. To this point in time, Chrissy Stockton's ideal is a world in which we are not restricted, in which our free action or movement is not impeded. It is also a world in which self-sacrificing love is a barrier to achievement and in which relationships are too ordinary to matter. And it is a world in which we are to develop solo, in denial of the longstanding belief that we are fundamentally social creatures.

Fast forward to the present day. Has Chrissy Stockton proved her critics wrong and become "happy and secure and the center of my own world"? Well, no. She does have an interesting job as an editor of an online magazine. She admits, though, that she has an anxiety disorder and that she is frustrated in love. She has also come around to the view that love is a fundamental human need. Most interestingly, she acknowledges that an unrestrained dating culture undermines her own ability to form loving relationships - an illustration of why restraint can work toward the human good (and should not always be sacrificed to the liberal aim of maximising individual autonomy).

Here she is, for instance, describing how a hook up culture can leave people jaded and less able to pair bond:

I don’t have an infinite reservoir inside me of love and affection and self-confidence. When a guy ghosts me...it has a cost. I have to spend months getting over this.

Instead of viewing marriage and motherhood as being "super easy" to achieve, she now worries that they won't happen for her:

Men and women seem so different. There are so many ways we don’t speak the same language and yet there’s this overwhelming sense that I should one day find complete partnership with a dude. It seems like such an unlikely thing that we understand each other’s needs and are free enough from baggage and emotional dis-ease that this will become a reality.

It feels very disorienting to be asking for someone to at least be polite when they decide they don’t want to see you anymore. I don’t think these guys would behave rudely to a stranger they met off the street, but they are rude to me and it is sad and confusing.

Men lose interest when they’ve slept with you. It’s not the beginning of anything for them, it’s the end.

I just want to be full-time adored.

It’s scary that it’s [getting married] supposed to be so important but also that it’s so hard

It’s scary to be worn down. There are many things that get better with aging but you have to work purposefully at not getting bitter and the more tired I get the harder it is to frame my dating life as something other than failing. What is going to happen if I fail for another 10 years? I think it would be just fine to be single for 10 years or the rest of my life but I’m not sure I can take the pressure of knowing that I failed at something that is so fundamental to our humanity.

She is now complaining not of being encumbered by marriage but of men's fear of commitment. She writes to one such man as follows:

Maybe you’re afraid of commitment. The way someone runs from a scary monster or a man with an axe. But I’m a girl with a cozy bed and a full heart and a hand to hold. I want to love you...

Maybe you’re just busy. Though we all know “busy” means something like “I have a lot I’d rather do” and like I told you when we were in bed with our whole bodies touching: I just don’t know what else there is, besides this.

From previously having diminished the importance of relationships with men, she now utters the line "I just don't know what else there is, besides this."

She wrote this about another man who would not commit:

I spent a lot of nights that spring touching his skin and playing him music and telling him how great he was. In retrospect every feeling I was trying to hold in was completely called for, natural, and appropriate for the situation.

Nothing about the act of caring for someone makes you crazy. It’s human to care. It’s human to have a relationship with the people who touch us and play music for us and tell us how great we are. But we were in a silent competition to care less than the other person, to keep it more casual, to act more indifferent. Which is a pretty gross way to go through life.

She had once commended the suppression of love as a way of staying free to focus on career. Now an indifference to love is described as "a pretty gross way to go through life".

Here is a poem she wrote idealising love for a man:

We sit under cedar rafters
Cross legged and
Palms pressed
Together
I say that I will make you the best person you can be
And
You will make me
Too
And
I trust you completely
And
Everything in our lives together will be good and beautiful
And
With my eyes big like
Saucers
In the Cancerian full moon
(Imagine that light on your skin in your bedroom at night)
I confess
(Light a candle with a wooden match)
Each
(Wrap each arm around your body and
Compress
And
Soften)
And
(Exhale deeply)
Every
(Soften)
Way that I love him.
(Soften).

Her strident views on solo development and achievement also seem to have mellowed:

I don’t think I’m a particularly strong woman...And here’s the thing: I shouldn’t have to be strong. Why should I have to possess every single positive quality?...

...Here’s another thing: we need each other. We need each other to be different.

It’s so easy to see this with parenting. It’s not very controversial to say it seems ideal for kids to be raised by two parents. We acknowledge that mothers and fathers generally bring something different (and valuable) to the table

...The gift of community is that we don’t have to be uniform. We don’t have to do everything on our own, our gifts serve the collective and our weaknesses are balanced by it.

I don’t want to have to be strong when I think the ways I am weak are a price I pay for the other valuable assets I bring to my community. I am good at making people feel loved. I don’t care if it makes me too vulnerable sometimes. I’m okay with that. When people tell me all women are strong, there is a way I hear “it’s not okay for you not to be strong.” There is a way that this devalues characteristics that have long been associated with women.

Instead of promoting solo achievement along tough masculine lines, she is now defending what is brought by the feminine to a community.

Chrissy Stockton's story illustrates some of the weaknesses in the liberal worldview that is currently our state ideology. Her younger self was wrong to believe that it is only a uniquely self-determined achievement that brings meaning. There are experiences "fundamental to our humanity" that we do not uniquely self-determine but that still bring fulfilment, including loving relationships with the opposite sex. Nor are all women suited by nature to a lone wolf life of personal ambition or rugged individualism; Chrissy Stockton acknowledges that her own gifts as a woman are more relational.

The liberal belief that we should liberate people from restraints has also failed women like Chrissy Stockton. Some of the restraints on behaviour in traditional societies were aimed at fostering family formation and preserving the ability of people to pair bond. Without them men and women increasingly lose trust in and admiration for the opposite sex. In theory Chrissy Stockton has been sexually liberated, but it has left her working "purposefully at not getting bitter".

Chrissy Stockton does seem to have had something of a change of heart over the past six years. Perhaps others will do likewise and there will be a better chance to open up a conversation about the place of liberalism within Western culture.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Mary's moral dilemma

Mary has a moral dilemma. She wants to be a good liberal but she is concerned about the real world effects of liberal morality:

The first part of the moral dilemma is easy to explain. Liberalism says that the highest moral good is a freedom to act on our will unimpeded (as long as we don't impede others). Therefore, women should be "free to express themselves sexually" and in order to extend this freedom (to remove negative consequences) there should be easy access to abortion, contraceptives and an absence of judgement from others, hence no slut shaming.

The liberal approach to nature deepens this account of morality. Traditionally, humans were thought to stand within nature and therefore we attempted to discern our higher nature and to work within a natural order of being. But liberal modernity has tended to see nature instead as something that we stand outside of and have mastery over, so that we may then use nature to fulfil whatever our wants may be.

Therefore, it is often pointless to say to a liberal things like "open relationships will lead to jealousy" or "men will tend to have a stronger commitment to raising their own biological children". The instinctive liberal response will be that nature shouldn't get in the way of whatever people desire and that it is simply wrong to let jealousy or paternal instincts place limits on schemes to maximise individual choice. Some liberals will assume that objections do not really express aspects of nature, but are simply one group of people attempting to put their own wants ahead of others, i.e. that it is an attempt to assert power over others.

Mary wants to accept the liberal approach to morality. But she has noticed a problem. Women have been told that they should express themselves sexually without restraint. The real world effects of this message are considerable. It has led many women to treat their teens and twenties as party girl years in which they compete for relationships with a relatively small number of sexually attractive men. These men then have a wealth of options and can play the field. In the meantime, the family man culture takes a hit - many of the men left behind begin to take a more dismal view of relationships.

So how is Mary's moral dilemma resolved? I know a lot of men would like to resolve it by suggesting that women be free to express themselves sexually - with their husbands. But this too is inadequate. Our sexuality isn't meant to be freely expressed. It has its own proper ends, even within marriage. It can be a significant force for good, more deeply uniting a husband and wife in love, or it can make our relationships and our own being more base - it can disorder relationships and aspects of self.

Here's another complication in resolving the dilemma. Culture has a major effect in shaping how people behave. It is therefore difficult to resolve the issue at an individual level. For instance, the higher forms of relationships are not easily achieved. They require that both the husband and wife were raised as children within a stable, loving family setting so that they both grow up capable of secure attachments. They require that both the husband and wife grow up in a high trust culture, so that each is willing to make themselves vulnerable to the other (otherwise they will aim, in self-protection, at independence). They require that both are raised in a culture that encourages a sense of loyalty and mutuality between the sexes, rather than one that promotes the idea of men and women as competing sex classes. They require that both are raised in a culture that places love and spiritual goods above hedonistic or materialistic ones. They require that both are raised in a culture that promotes moral prudence - a capacity to discern higher moral goods and to act virtuously to attain them.

What this means is that leaving the issue to people to determine as individuals will rule out, for most people, the opportunity to experience the higher expressions of sexuality. It requires a community to deliberately create and uphold a culture for these higher expressions of sexuality to become widely available.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

A woman asks: how did we go wrong?

You might have seen an article by Anna Hitchings, a 32-year-old Sydney Catholic woman, bemoaning the lack of her marital prospects.

Her article was limited in scope, being mostly a "where are all the good men?" treatment of the issue. However, there was a comment at Anna's website from a woman called Cynthia which was unusual in that it focused on women's contribution to modern day dating problems. Here it is in full:

Anna, as a fellow Catholic woman who’s been watching the social decay for decades now, I thought I would offer my thoughts on what you’ve written.

One of the reasons you’ve elicited such a strong negative response from a certain segment of the Internet (specifically, the manosphere), is that there appears to be a hole in your analysis of the current situation. 

The current state of things is not a mystery. It is the inevitable conclusion of feminism. It is, in reality, a state that women have brought on themselves. The failure of women to confront this is something that even the Christian end of the manosphere doesn’t typically like. They call our inability to see our own failings, mistakes, sins, and hubris the “rationalization hamster”. I see less of that in your post than a man might, but I do understand how hard it is to face.

Now that is not to say that you, not I, or any other individual woman, is solely responsible for the dire state of the sexual marketplace in the West. I do believe that we have all, as individuals, made decisions that have contributed to our own problems. Honest mistakes, perhaps, uninformed mistakes, sometime, but mistakes are still the result of decisions.

This isn’t intended to be a lecture. I’m 33 and only got married this year, so I know what you’re going through. I consider myself extremely lucky to have found a fellow Catholic man who was single, who wants children and who attends church regularly. It is extremely hard to find these guys. But you have to have some awareness of why the dating waters have gotten so choppy if you want to have a hope of navigating them.

Again, this is a female problem. Putting careers and bosses ahead of finding a husband and starting a family. Rampant porn consumption (by this I mean literary erotica) in the female sphere that leads to warped expectations and unrealistic ideas about relationships. Widespread contraceptive use and promiscuity. Continual degradation of men, male spaces, masculinity, and so on. Not every woman has done/participated in all of these things, of course, but no one woman has to do all. It’s bigger than any one of us. It is something women as a group have done collectively.

The effect of the culture on most men in our generation has been profound. They’ve dropped out of dating, out of church, out of civic society. They’re demoralized, and many have concluded it no longer matters. What reason have we given them to stay interested in us?

It’s on us to call out what other women are doing. It’s time to start shaming unacceptable behavior. It’s time to set higher standards for ourselves. It’s time to teach girls that not being serious about marriage and family at 22 will leave you alone in your 30s.

But that’s the culture, and this is deeply personal. Reality hurts. You’re living it. I’ve lived it. It took me eight years to find my husband, and that wasn’t for lack of trying. I don’t know your story, but I do know mine and I know I made choices that contributed to where I am. I suspect you’re the same. But let me just say, nothing gets better until you take an honest accounting of yourself and make the changes that need to be made.

For me, that was getting out of the military and working hard on finding, developing, and keeping a relationship. I sacrificed a lot. It came at the cost of better paying jobs, of using my degree, of having all those cute things that the magazines want to sell us. I might not be able to have kids at my age. But I have the chance now, and that’s worth everything.

It might not be your fault, nor mine, but we’ve been saddled with the consequences nonetheless. We can’t control the culture, but we can stop being shocked by it. Other women have ruined the system that sustained our sex for thousands of years. Any one of us who wants a traditional life has to work extra hard. But how can you do it if you don’t realize you need to?

That’s the criticism you’re getting.

I thought a later comment from Cynthia was also of interest:

I don’t think most women would care much for what I have to say. The problem we seem to have is that we lack imagination in failure – we can’t conceive of it when we have a chance of correcting course, and then we can’t admit it later on when it’s too late. It hurts too much. The manosphere is successful because it offers men a path to fixing their problems. Does it help everyone? Lord no. But there is possibility there. There is no equivalent for women because it’s much harder for us to fix things for ourselves. Facing it can often bring nothing but the realization that you can’t undo your mistakes.

Zeitgeist girl

Young women today are encouraged to be "sexually empowered," meaning free to follow their own impulses and desires when it comes to relationships.

The older cultural norms and social standards which once helped to govern the relationships between men and women are dismissed as being oppressive limitations on the self, imposed by an exploitative patriarchy (a mindset captured luridly in the TV series The Handmaid's Tale).

And so there is no encouragement for young women to follow rational self-restraint; reason gives way to the more impulsive, instinctual "animal" side of human nature.

I wrote a post earlier this year on how this message of sexual empowerment played out in the music of Cardi B, noting the primitivism of a music video featuring a dozen near naked women twerking together.

But Cardi B does not capture the Zeitgeist as well as another contemporary pop star, Taylor Swift. It's difficult to imagine Taylor Swift producing a twerking music video like Cardi B's. She is too "classy" for that.

Even so, if you read the lyrics of her songs you get a good sense of where the liberal principle is leading us when it comes to relationships (I'm indebted to a post by Fabius Maximus for alerting me to this.)

For instance, Taylor Swift has only just released a new song, titled Me. The video begins with an image of a snake making its way along a brightly coloured street (a nod perhaps to what is diabolical underneath the colourful surface of what we are to see). We then see Swift and a boyfriend arguing. Swift is being unreasonably dramatic. At one point she points to their "daughters" (a pair of cats - a nod to the fur baby phenomenon).

The lyrics then go:

I know that I'm a handful, baby, uh
I know I never think before I jump
And you're the kind of guy the ladies want
(And there's a lot of cool chicks out there)
I know that I went psycho on the phone
I never leave well enough alone
And trouble's gonna follow where I go
(And there's a lot of cool chicks out there)

I know I tend to make it about me
I know you never get just what you see
But I will never bore you, baby
(And there's a lot of lame guys out there)

She is no longer guided by reason (her own or that of society as a collective). Therefore she is impulsive, trouble and her emotions get out of hand ("psycho"). She is also self-centered ("I know I tend to make it about me").

So why then would a man fall in love with her and want to be with her? She offers just two reasons. First, she is not boring. Second, because of her individuality:

Me-e-e, ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh
I'm the only one of me
Baby, that's the fun of me
Eeh-eeh-eeh, ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh
You're the only one of you

Neither of these is convincing. As much as men don't want someone who is boring, they also fear "psycho" women with uncontrolled emotions. And the fact that she is "the only one of me" is neither here nor there - is it a "one of me" that a man might love and trust enough to marry?

You have to remember that our liberal culture tells women that they are empowered when they freely follow impulse and feeling. They are not supposed to be prudent or reasonable - that is considered an exploitative imposition. What a woman wants as an impulse is what matters and it is not supposed to be constrained - not even by reason.

Taylor Swift's song expresses liberal culture. She is just being "her" in the moment. She is impulsive and emotionally out of control. She is centered on what she wants and feels. She is embodying an expressive individualism - and this is what a man is supposed to respect and like.

It's interesting also that Taylor Swift's song so openly acknowledges female hypergamy. In her mind, she is one of the many cool chicks competing for one of the few men out there who is not "lame" - for one of the few men that "the ladies want".

If it were up to Cardi B, women would compete for these few, desirable men through overt displays of female sexuality. Taylor Swift doesn't go down this path, but doesn't offer much of an alternative. She seems to think that a man with options would be attracted to a woman who demonstrates individuality via high maintenance, self-centered emotionalism.

If you're thinking that Taylor Swift is deluded, it should be said in her defence that for most of her life she has not been looking for stable, enduring relationships. One thing that happens when women are "liberated" to act on primitive desire, is that they tend to spend their formative years seeking sexual highs with player type men. They may not seek predictability or security in relationships. In her song "The Way I Loved You", Taylor Swift contrasts a relationship with a boring nice guy with a more dramatically intense relationship with a player. She sings of the nice guy:

He is sensible and so incredible
And all my single friends are jealous
He says everything I need to hear and it’s like
I couldn’t ask for anything better
He opens up my door and I get into his car
And he says you look beautiful tonight
And I feel perfectly fine

It's not what she wants. She prefers the "rush" that comes with "insane":

But I miss screaming and fighting and kissing in the rain
And it’s 2am and I’m cursing your name
You’re so in love that you act insane
And that’s the way I loved you
Breakin’ down and coming undone
It’s a roller coaster kinda rush
And I never knew I could feel that much
And that’s the way I loved you

She doesn't want comfort with the nice guy, she wants "wild and crazy":

He respects my space
And never makes me wait
And he calls exactly when he says he will
He’s close to my mother
Talks business with my father
He’s charming and endearing
And I’m comfortable
He can’t see the smile I’m faking
And my heart’s not breaking
Cause I’m not feeling anything at all
And you were wild and crazy
Just so frustrating intoxicating
Complicated, got away by some mistake and now
And that’s the way I loved you oh, oh
Never knew I could feel that much
And that’s the way I loved you

Taylor Swift is now twenty-nine. It's possible that she will decide at some point that she wants something more solid (there are rumours that she might be engaged to her current boyfriend).

But I hope that her song lyrics give fair warning to men that you can't expect a stable culture of marriage to develop in a liberal society. In particular, you can't expect a family guy ethos to survive in a culture in which women are "sexually empowered". In such a culture, young women in their sexual prime are not likely to select for reliable, "got together" men.

There was a reason why traditional societies once insisted on certain standards from young men and women. The standards did not exist to limit people for no reason or to exploit women. They existed to uphold a higher good - that of enduring marriage and timely family formation.

We should not underestimate what a difficult cultural achievement it is to arrive at this higher good. It requires a self-disciplining of the instincts of both men and women, but particularly of women.

It was achieved in the past and can be again, but not when the cultural institutions are sending the opposite message to what is needed.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

We are playing by girl's rules

If you were to believe feminists we live in an oppressive patriarchy in which women lack equal rights.

And yet when it comes to relationships we are clearly playing not by men's rules, or even equal rules, but by women's rules.

Western culture once viewed individuals as having, like other creatures, an animal nature, but unlike other creatures, the faculty of reason. The idea was to use reason to guide our nature to higher ends or purposes. Human freedom was associated with self-restraint of baser impulses and desires, and with the cultivation of virtue and character.

But the formula has changed. To be liberated now means having an autonomous individual will, so that we are free to act on our desires or impulses, no matter what they might be (we are no longer even meant to judge these desires, we are supposed to be "non-judgemental").

And so a young woman will be told that she is being "empowered" by acting according to her desires or impulses, no matter what they are. It is her "right" to do so, a part of her autonomy. The culture of rational self-restraint has been overthrown (as described in my How Free is Cardi B? post).

There are three noticeable aspects of this experiment in liberating female impulse from a culture of prudential reason:

1. When women's primal nature is exercised unrestrained, there are observable patterns in their relationship choices at different stages of life.

2. Society is organised to enable these female choices.

3. Liberating and enabling these impulses has negative effects.

I'm going to make a foray into territory I usually avoid, by attempting to observe how women process relationships. I'll be drawing on the work of Rollo Tomassi in doing this. I can't endorse everything he has written (if for no other reason than I haven't read all that he has written). However, his way of describing the patterns in female behaviour fits closely with what I have experienced and observed. I therefore believe it to be useful knowledge that should be widely known (there is a useful graph illustrating his ideas embedded in this post.)

The underlying observation, on which the rest depends, is that there is a dual nature to women's sexual strategy. The kind of men that women are attracted to sexually are often different to the kind of men that women rely on for support in establishing a family. Rightly or wrongly, the first kind of men are usually termed "alpha" and the second "beta".

If a young woman is "liberated" to do so (i.e. liberated to follow her impulses, no matter what they are), she will often choose to spend her younger years attempting to attract the alpha males who she responds to sexually. Rollo suggests that this "party years" phase is at its peak from roughly ages 20 to 26 (I have heard women of my own age refer to it as their "wild years").

Who are these alpha men? It varies a bit, but it will include men who are edgy in their looks and behaviour, who are self-confident in dealing with women, who have a reputation as "players", who are muscular, who have a visible level of drive and ambition, who have some kind of social status (e.g. play in a band) and who don't play by the rules.

Women don't necessarily expect that relationships with these "exciting" men will be more than sexual. In this phase, women are using the sexual power they find themselves with to compete to be chosen by such men. As long as the women still think of themselves as young and attractive enough to vie for the attention of such alpha males they may well prefer a "sex in the city" lifestyle in which they aren't tied down to any one man. They like the experience of exercising their sexual power; some don't want it to end.

And does our society support women acting on these impulses? Rollo would say that we live in a "feminine primary social order", i.e. one that enables women's sexual strategies rather than men's. And he appears to be right. What is it, after all, that feminists call for at this stage of life? Younger feminists call for free abortion on demand, free and affordable contraception and for an acceptance of female promiscuity (e.g. the "slutwalk" movement). These are clearly aimed at enabling the party years phase of a woman's life.

Feminists are not really advocating for equality here. What they are doing is supporting women to act freely on their impulses, whatever they are. They are being "liberationists" in the sense that they are liberating women from prudential reason, from the self-limitation of desire. They are supported by the liberal state in doing so, in part, because they are able to argue for this as an expression of a woman's individual autonomy ("my body, my choice"). It is likely, as well, that the liberal state is supportive of women's traditional commitments being dissolved via sexual revolution, as this brings women more completely under the rule of a liberal, technocratic ordering of society.

Traditional societies never permitted the party girl phase to be so unrestrained. They were correct in this as:

1. It delays family formation, so that women's most fertile years are wasted, contributing to below replacement fertility levels.

2. Women spend their formative years engaging promiscuously in sex, damaging their ability later on to successfully pair bond, hence a higher rate of divorce.

3. Family oriented men are likely to be rejected for an extended period of time, leading to resentments or demoralisation, with less incentive to commit to careers.

The party girl phase ends when women start pushing up to their later 20s and can no longer compete as easily with younger women. They go through what Tomassi calls an "epiphany" phase, in which they are ready to stop competing sexually and instead focus on forming a family. In this phase, they might start considering men they had previously rejected, men who are conscientious, loyal, hard working and family oriented - so-called beta males.

It's common for women in this situation to start to ask where "all the good men are". They might surprise themselves by giving a chance to a man "they wouldn't normally go for." They might find themselves telling such a man that he is "not like all those other men" and that "all she ever wanted was to get married and have children". Her previous experience with men will be downplayed as she adopts a different persona.

The men in this age bracket (say 30s) will in the meantime be told they have to start "manning up" and take on traditional family responsibilities. If they are men who have been previously overlooked, they might be surprised at their newfound popularity. They might even have the experience of fielding interest from several women, something very different from when they were younger. They are suddenly and unexpectedly in demand.

Things might go well for a period of time. A woman might genuinely in this phase of her life be looking forward to marriage and motherhood and so hold her beta male fiancee in high regard.

For some years the marriage might go reasonably well. Husband and wife will buy a house together and raise their young children. If there is a difficulty it might be in the wife's lack of genuine sexual interest in her husband. She might not say this openly, not when she is looking to secure things with him, but it will emerge in an unwillingness or an inability to either have sex or to connect with her husband in sex. This is part of that difficulty of women having a "dual nature" in finding some men sexually attractive, but others attractive for family formation.

The next phase Rollo calls alpha reinterest. He sees it as happening typically in a woman's late 30s, though in my observation it reaches a critical point when a woman's youngest child is semi-independent (e.g. old enough for school). For some women, this phase is very powerful. She might, despite being middle-aged with children, want to return to her clubbing days. She might become a devotee of the 50 Shades kind of literature. Importantly, she might not just want her husband to act a little differently, she might want him to be a completely different kind of man. What she wanted in a man a decade previously is not what she wants now. It is possible too that she doesn't want someone else to marry, she just doesn't want to be married - she wants to go back to the intoxicating party years phase.

Some of these women will start to prepare to divorce. They won't tell their husbands of any discontent, because they don't want to save their marriages. They want their husband to be someone else and they want to be single again (some women will choose to stay married, though, perhaps because they fear the loss of comfort or security, or they are worried about how family and friends will react, or they might be concerned about their children).

Once again, the "feminine primary social order" steps in and enables these women to divorce with as little fallout as possible. It will usually be women who retain the family home, who have most of the custody of the children, and who receive income transfers from their former spouse. Many divorced men find themselves shunted out of their families, but still expected to fulfil the provider role for their ex-wives. They are financially propping up the new lifestyle of their ex-wife, as she seeks out an "alpha" relationship dynamic, the one she is familiar with from her formative years.

Efforts to reform family law have often been vociferously opposed by feminists. There are feminists who strongly support equal parenting during the marital life phase, but who are strongly opposed to it in the divorce phase.

Is it good for society to allow a woman's alpha reinterest to lead to divorce? I would have thought the answer to be clearly no. The childhood of the children involved will be disrupted; some of them will lose contact with their fathers. Some will be exposed to temporary boyfriends of their mother who will be a risk to their well-being. Some ex-husbands don't recover from the sudden impact of so many stressors: loss of spouse, children, home, assets and income. The women themselves will often need to be supported financially by the state as single mothers. Nor do these women always think clearly about their real prospects in the dating world after divorce.

My intention in writing this is not to discourage anyone from marrying - a good marriage is still a blessing in life. It's more to help spread the message that liberation from rational self-restraint is not compatible with a stable culture of marriage, in part, because it liberates women to pursue certain predictable impulses, as Rollo has described them.

The best response would be to return to the social standards, the cultural norms, the economic policies, and the family laws which once reinforced "prudential reason" as against "immediate impulse/instinct". Until this happens it seems to me that men who want to marry might be advised to do the following:

1. Try to combine at least some "alpha" traits, at least those compatible with family life, along with the family guy "beta" ones. There's no reason, for instance, why a family man can't demonstrate masculine energy in being driven to reach life goals and to have ambitions (not necessarily career ones). Similarly, there is no reason why a family guy can't aim for muscularity and physical health.

2. Avoid choosing a woman who has neurotic personality traits. Women who rank high in neuroticism are "prone to having irrational ideas, being less able to control their impulses, and as coping more poorly than others with stress". These women will be least able to successfully regulate their baser impulses during the course of life. The problem for men is that it's not always easy to identify these women; in happy times, they may exhibit a lot of attractive traits. Some of the "gives" are that they will be more irritable than most people, as they do not handle even low levels of stress well and often overreact to low level setbacks; and they might have a poor history of maintaining all sorts of relationships (work, friendships, romantic) because they are prone to irrational thinking. Long engagements are wise with these kind of women: even if they are able to mask neurotic thoughts from their partner, over time these thoughts will sabotage the relationship. Two, or perhaps even three, year engagements are advisable.

3. Women who exhibit self-control and conscientiousness are more likely to succeed in relationships. In other words, what matters more than a woman's feelings in the moment toward you are her settled personality traits. People with conscientious personality traits are more likely to "take obligations to others seriously".

4. Women who come from warm, intact, loving families and who have good relationships with their fathers do seem, in my observation, to be more likely to want a committed relationship with a man at an earlier age. These women often pair bond more readily, and at an earlier age, so a man might need to be ready at an early age to succeed with one of these women.

5. Men should not be too taken in by the sudden interest they might receive when women reach the epiphany phase. Much sober-minded screening needs to take place.

6. It's not wise for a man to invest everything in family. As important as it is, for himself and for society, a man's sacrifices are no guarantee of a lasting marital bond. Have other areas of life that also give a sense of purpose, achievement and identity.

7. It's not healthy for men to devote everything to winning female desire. If men were only to compete to prove their desirability to women, then masculine character would not fully develop. Women are not sexually attracted by character and virtue in men. The heroes in female romantic fiction are generally darkly natured cads, who have inherited high status and who act on impulse to take what they want. Masculine character develops when men work together in public life for the public good (polis life). That's when men have the opportunity to measure each other through criteria of loyalty, honour, probity, courage or service.

One final point: men have to exercise their higher rational and moral natures without overly suppressing their primal, biological, instinctual natures. Men might find that their love of a wife is based in their higher nature, but for her to sexually desire him requires that he has retained something of his primal masculine nature.

Do women love the same way?

This is a tweet from a young woman hoping to guide other women toward more successful relationships:

The criteria she is suggesting for selecting a man to commit to is based on how he makes her feel. It is not based on a love for something intrinsic to him as a man.

Men don't approach relationships the same way. A man needs to think that there is something good or beautiful in the woman he loves. He might even have the sense that he is able to perceive in her feminine beauty or goodness something transcendent and meaningful that inspires love.

This is a powerfully masculine response to women that has inspired a great deal of art over the centuries. And it leads men to have a sense that their love for women is a finer quality in themselves. Little wonder then that a man will often focus on the better qualities of the woman he is with, suppressing and forgetting her flaws or the injuries he has received from her. In other words, men will often err toward idealising women in general and their wives in particular.

And so men experience love as being coloured with loyalty, particularly as it often triggers the masculine instinct to provide for and to protect a woman.

Men have a hope, or an assumption, that women experience love in the same way. That she will find something in him, and in his masculine virtues, that will inspire a stable love that mirrors his own. And so the more romantic minded men might well assume that liberating love as a force in life  - the "big love" - is likely to increase the good in life.

But, as the tweet above suggests, women process love and relationships differently. A woman's love is not grounded in the man himself, but in how the relationship makes her feel. And her thoughts and assessments are likely to follow on after her feelings, rather than guiding them.

As an example, when a woman is in the early infatuated stage of a relationship it is often the case that the man can do no wrong. Her feelings about being in the relationship are so positive that even if a man behaves very poorly she will find some mental excuse for it. But the opposite is true as well. If she is not feeling good in the relationship, then her mind will set her husband at fault, even for acts of God.

And the way a woman feels about the same kind of man can change at various stages of her life. At 20, she might ignore the family type man because of the way the "hot" boys make her feel. At 28, when she reaches her epiphany phase and her feelings change toward wanting marriage, children and home, the family man will be told that "he is not like all those other men" and that "all I ever wanted was to get married". At 40, when the alpha reinvestment phase hits, she will feel that the marriage, and her husband, are holding her back from pursuing someone hot, and the thoughts will change to "we were never happy together" and whatever loving bonds might once have existed quickly fall away.

The point of writing all this is to try to explain to men that whereas the "great love" might push us to hold steadily onto our love for a woman, because it holds us to a better part of ourselves, and because it focuses us on the feminine goodness and beauty to be found in women, the same does not hold true in the way that women love men.

What does this mean for relationships? It means that for men to have a stable loving relationship with a woman over the course of a lifetime, it makes sense to dial things down from a vision of a great romantic love. Men are more likely to experience this good of a lifelong relationship in a culture which does not encourage women to let loose with their emotions or their sexuality. The men who encouraged sexual liberation were not really doing themselves, or their sons, any favours. Traditional societies held up modesty as a prime virtue for women for a reason, as it was a self-constraint (a self-regulation of emotion and feeling) that made possible more stable relationships between men and women. Similarly, in more traditional cultures there was value placed on a "quiet, gentle" spirit in women, which may strike modern minds as overly subdued, but which ought to be seen as women ordering their own personalities toward the good.

It means too that the principle of stability cannot be found in the nature of a woman's love, but has to come from elsewhere. One possible source is a genuine and sincere religious outlook, in which a woman acts for the benefit of her family, in obedience to, and out of love for, God. If this reaches the point that feeling is not thought to be sanctified by God, but instead is disciplined toward a principle of love and service to others, then it might help to form a culture of marriage.

There do exist some statistics on the relationship between religious belief and marital stability. The statistics show that nominal membership of a church does not help marital stability much at all. However, active membership, whilst not preventing divorce, does significantly reduce its prevalence (by about 30%). One study found that active Catholics were 31% less likely to divorce than the non-religious and active conservative Protestants were 35% less likely to divorce (nominal Protestants were actually 20% more likely to divorce).

Women can be helped, too, by the culture they inhabit to think prudently about their actions. Our culture has spectacularly failed to help women do this. A generation of women grew up thinking they could defer marriage and family until the last dying gasps of their fertility; the same generation grew up thinking that they could divorce their husbands in their 40s as mothers of quite young children and still expect to find another man equally committed to her and equally willing to be her companion in older age.

Men have to lead in the sense of upholding a vision of the good that provides a stable framework of life for both men and women. Men need to clearly understand that a "liberated" female nature (i.e. one that recognises no good higher than itself and which therefore acts without restraint) is incompatible with a stable culture of family life. The female "mode of being" that is compatible with lifelong marriage will not be based on grand romantic feelings, as much as men might wish it to be so, because this is not how a woman comes to commit in a stable way to the good of her family.

Digging a deeper hole

A reader of the left-wing Guardian sent the following problem to the paper's agony aunt, Mariella Frostrup:

Like me, most of my friends are in their 30s, some turning 40...

We’ve tried all of the dating things, found no one and biological clocks are ticking. One friend said her life is not worth living because she hasn’t got a partner or a child.

...life isn’t going how we thought it would. We’re being left behind and without the financial ability (or housing) to freeze eggs or go it alone, or adopt.

I get harassed by some friends, almost bullying me into going on dating apps...But I hated it – men were rude, unkind and I felt physically threatened. I found myself despising all men.

The idea that single people in their 30s are all having fun is a lie. We are the have-nots and we are sad. What now?

Mariella's advice? She wants the reader to focus her energies on bringing about more feminist social revolution. The problem, according to Mariella, is that women still aren't equal enough, so more feminism is needed to fix the condition of "sad singleton" women:

What a fascinating dilemma...in the 22 years since Bridget Jones was published, life hasn’t changed much for women in their 30s. I’m not convinced that even millennials will have a radically altered experience of women’s still untenable position.

While Helen Fielding’s book was dismissed as “women’s writing” at the time, it was a zeitgeist novel that summed up the state of the world for sad “singletons”. Women were told they had equality in a still wholly unequal world. Now here you are, over two decades later, experiencing the same old story. Truly society has not yet shape-shifted enough to fully integrate us.

Your letter confirms what I’ve long suspected – that the seismic changes needed to make the world more bearable for our sex aren’t happening fast enough or with enough focus. Women are still penalised for pregnancy, bear the main burden of domestic life (so often now combined with full-time work) and, despite increasing lifespans, have the same short window in which society deems them to be fully contributing members.

...There will, I firmly believe, come a time when women’s lives truly are equal and breakthroughs in medical science will be welcomed instead of fuelling hysterical headlines about pensioners giving birth....I’m convinced that if you and your friends focus further on shaping the world you want and worry less about what the fates will bring, your chances of fulfilment and happiness will soar...

There's nothing of substance in this advice. Just an abstract call to more equality and a hint that science might solve the problem by allowing women to give birth later in life. It is, at heart, a refusal to even consider that feminism might share some of the blame for disrupting family formation.

So what might help women form families in a more timely way? You could write a book on this, but here are a few suggestions on my part.

First, it would help if women weren't encouraged, from girlhood onwards, to believe in a radical form of autonomy. As an example, here is a quote that I noticed in a girl's magazine my young daughter was reading:

"Women are empowered and strong, and don't have to be saved by some male hero, but can take care of themselves using their intelligence and power."

I agree that women don't need to be "saved" by men. Where, though, in this quote is the recognition that it is natural for women to live as part of a family? What is the point in telling a girl, at age 10, that she can "take care of herself" as an empowered woman, and then consoling her at age 35 when she is in grief at being single and childless?

Second, it doesn't help that feminists see the world as a contest between men and women as hostile social classes. How can this not disrupt family formation, especially among the more highly educated, left-wing women who take these ideologies seriously? I know myself how frustrating it is to hear my work colleagues frequently blaming "white men" for social problems. There is no way I could develop romantic feelings for women with this mindset, i.e. for women who saw me politically and socially as the enemy.

Third, there has to be a recognition that the sexual revolution has had negative consequences. Mariella Frostrup is all for this revolution: on her social media accounts she pushes the idea that there is no such thing as a woman being too "slutty". But if women (and men) do not self-limit when it comes to sexuality, much else follows, including a decline in the ability of women to successfully pair bond, and a rise in the rate of divorce that follows (leading to a decline in trust between the sexes and cynicism about marriage).

The Guardian reader disliked dating apps because she found the men rude and unkind, but if feminist women press the idea that there is to be no self-limitation when it comes to sexuality, then it is likely that standards will be coarsened.

Fourth, reform to family law would help to revive marriage. Currently, a man who marries is heavily exposed to abuse from a divorcing wife. He can lose children, house and future income. There are perverse incentives at the moment for a woman to marry a man without seeing this seriously as a life commitment. If divorce really does have to exist, then there should be an expectation of shared custody, with the wife supporting herself rather than expecting a now ex-husband to continue his former role of provider.

Fifth, the feminist push for "equality" runs hard up against female hypergamy in relationships. Women want to marry men they can look up to and who they perceive to be worthy in terms of social status, resources and so on. But the pool of high status, high resource men is in decline. The greater the success of feminists in pushing women into higher education and high status professions, the greater the problem these women face in finding men of equal or higher status to marry.

It is a similar story with "empowerment". If women are hypergamous, and are drawn to men who they perceive to be powerful relative to themselves, then the more that women are empowered the more difficult it is for these women to find men who will impress them.

Sixth, feminism has encouraged the collapse into merely economic values. We live in a market economy and the values derived from this way of organising society, such as career and consumer lifestyles, have become too dominant. Feminists very clearly believe that it is a higher thing for a woman to work in an office as an employee than to be a mother within a family. There is little acknowledgement of how important family roles are in terms of our identities as men or women, or in fulfilling a deeper instinct to reproduce and carry on our traditions, or in the natural drive to experience parenthood and maternal or paternal love, or in our basic human relational needs of having the love and close support of those we are closely related to.

Finally, it is difficult to secure family formation in a culture that has rejected virtue. The question of what qualities should be cultivated so that a man might be a good husband and father, or a woman a good wife or mother, are rarely asked and, in the case of women, would probably be considered regressive. But it cannot be merely assumed that individuals will develop in a way that allows them to be good candidates for marriage. A woman, for instance, needs to develop qualities related to emotional regulation, loyalty and patience, a self-sacrificing love, prudence, gratitude, and appreciation of the worth in everyday things - and none of these can simply be assumed, they need rather to be fostered both within the culture and within the individual soul.

It is part of the nature of genuinely masculine men (men with the warrior instinct) that they wish to defend the good not only in themselves but within their own people. There is an order that can be won from the flux and chaos of the world, that represents things being set right. Ultimately, a people lives or dies by the presence or absence of such genuinely masculine men (men with chests, as C.S. Lewis put it).

Family formation is part of what has to be set right for a people to flourish. It is where we need those genuinely masculine men to re-form and to take charge of the culture. The grieving single women won't find any solutions in the Guardian, let alone from Mariella Frostrup, and nor from Western men who have collapsed into a view that either sets economic values as paramount, or who believe only in a discordant reality, so that there are only individuals and their own autonomous choices, with no choice having any more significance or value than another.

We have to retrieve something within the culture that is not entirely lost, but that has been put away for some time.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

She didn't get the memo?

Hayley Hendrix

Hayley Hendrix is a Perth woman who, being single in her early 40s, used a sperm donor she found on Facebook to conceive a child.

She's not alone in doing this, but she is right in line with modern ideology in how she frames her life choices.

Why did she wait until 42 to become a mother? She very honestly describes how she spent her prime years of youthful fertility:

I'm really ready at 42 to be a mother. I was too career focused, too 'me-oriented' to have done this a decade ago. I was living in Los Angeles – it was a hectic lifestyle and there is a real Peter Pan syndrome going on there.

'You almost never grow up and I suppose this is how I missed the memo for motherhood,' Ms Hendrix said.

'I was thinking of where to travel next, what bar was the coolest place to be seen at, who was the coolest person to hang out with.

'Life now is a world apart, filled with unwashed hair and dirty nappies. And I couldn’t be happier. I am more fulfilled now than I ever have been.'

Ms Hendrix explained that living in LA, she felt a void that is gone now. These days, she feels deeply rewarded by the simple things in life.

'Remy’s smile has filled my heart,' she proudly told Femail.

'I am really present with him – he is getting all of me so it is the best of both worlds for the two of us. Not only did I have a miracle child, I really found my purpose.'

It's not that there were no potential fathers to be had, but that she followed the liberal script and spent her younger years in pursuit of an "expressive individualism" in which we focus on those things we can choose as autonomous individuals, such as career, travel and food - as well as casual, uncommitted relationships.

Hayley Hendrix admits that this realm of choice was not genuinely fulfilling or purposeful, and that she has found herself in motherhood, but she just can't let go of her ideological commitments. This is how she justifies single motherhood:

Ms Hendrix wants women to know that they are the authors of their own story, and that regardless of their relationship status, they too can become a mother just like her.

She added that while she acknowledges that there are strangers out there who may disagree with her choice, she wants to share her story publicly to show women that there is no 'right' way to have children.

'It's about breaking down stigma and purely traditional ways of thinking.'

So she's learnt nothing. Instead of admitting "I should not have wasted my prime fertile years doing insubstantial things" she is instead claiming to be a liberal heroine who is the author of her own story (autonomous) and who is breaking down traditional ways of thinking (i.e. breaking down limits on individual choice).

It was this focus on maximising autonomous choice that got her into trouble in the first place, yet she is doubling down on it and encouraging other women to do the same thing.

And it's a lie. She claims that there is no right way to have children. Yet her child will grow up without having a father in his life. And she herself, as a mother, will lose the depth of love and support that would have come from a relationship with the father of her child. She is pushing toward a kind of spiritual barrenness or sterility in denying our more profound relational needs in favour of an "I can choose any which way" mentality.

We are "creatures" in the sense of having a given, created nature and therefore there are necessarily limits on what we can rightly choose if we wish to genuinely flourish as individuals within a community.

There are even leftists now who are using the word "slave" to express how they feel within a modern, liberal society. They are expressing a deeper intuition here, that freedom is not really being able to choose insubstantial things as an autonomous individual. We do not really experience this as a state of control or agency, but as powerlessness over ourselves and our society. In the classical tradition, freedom was more usually understood as an acquired ability to govern ourselves, through habits of virtue, which would then give rise to communities oriented the same way, i.e. in which men were able to apply self-limitations not only to preserve political freedoms, but to live within a community that was able to orient itself toward the good.

Hayley Hendrix changed her surname after having her Facebook baby:

Ms Hendrix, formerly Hayley Chapman, changed her surname as a result of her experience with social media sperm donation to represent the new chapter she had forged for herself and baby Remy.

'I did it to show that Remy and I are a family in our own right.

'I am my own person on my own mission –I don’t need to wait for someone else.'

I'm not sure what exactly to make of this. I suspect, though, that it is another assertion of individual autonomy, in the form of rejecting a connection both to the past and future. Usually our surname marks a particular family lineage that connects us to generations past, present and future. When you select your own surname, to mark yourself as "a family in our own right", then it is just you and the baby as a one generational unit and identity.

It's noteworthy that Hayley Hendrix is a very good looking woman. In most eras, she would have had no trouble finding a high quality man to form a family with. Yet, having embraced the liberal anticulture, she found herself in her later 30s "desperately seeking" motherhood. All she aspired to by this time was to be impregnated by an anonymous man.

It doesn't have to be this way. Last week I visited a family I've known for a couple of years now. I walked in at a good time - they were all on the couch, laughing together - father, mother, three children and another on the way. You could sense the familial love, of the kind that most people aspire to.

The parents have achieved this at a relatively early age, early 30s at the most. How? In their case, they have a serious commitment to an independent church, and therefore to marriage, family and parenthood.

Now, a lot of churches have collapsed into liberal modernity, and many more will not resist liberalism when it comes to issues of nation and identity. But this family nonetheless illustrates the point, that if there is an active community of people, with serious and explicit non-liberal commitments, that a culture different to the liberal mainstream, with different social outcomes, can be generated.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

More feminist regret

Dr Taylor Burrowes is angry at the influence feminism has had on her life. She has a successful career as a family counselor and as something of a media personality (she anchors a news show and has done a Ted talk). However, she believes that feminism influenced her negatively when it came to relationships with men.

She posted the following as a Twitter thread, but I'm condensing it for readability:

A Dear Joan Letter to Feminism:

I’m mad that you took away my right to choose what I wanted as a woman...you took things too far when you pushed me out of my natural nurturing role & into a man’s world. The expectation to strive & succeed amongst men killed my femininity, thank you FEMINISM!

Why did you have to go & steal my hopes & dreams from me? You’re selfish & never cared enough about what I really wanted to even ask me first. Maybe I didn’t want to spend 18 years in post-grad school when I would’ve rather been prioritizing prospects for finding a good partner.

I would’ve never let you swindle me out of my prime years in the name of progress. I would’ve rather used my god-given gifts on what is truly important to me. My PhD can’t defend me in an attack or keep me safe from harm. It doesn’t even guarantee that I’ll be financially robust.

Sure, it’s impressive to other women in the game of competition, but what the hell are we competing for? Men don’t care that I have a PhD, in fact, it limits my options in the dating pool. It’s like height, I’m tall & average height men are mainly out of the market for me.

I can’t pair with a man beneath me, literally and figuratively. You forgot to discuss this temper tantrum you had decades ago with your older sister HYPERGAMY. If you had, she would have put you in your place a long time ago. But you had to go rogue and try to prove your point.

I just can’t believe I let you manipulate me into neglecting my feminine ideals & self-sabotaging to the point that I may have set myself up for being alone without any family of my own while I help other people find & keep their happy lives with their families.

I know somewhere along the way you thought you were right for doing what you did, but I need you to stop and reconsider things now. I can’t go back and redo my 20s or even go back to puberty and start my socialization over so that I understand male/female dynamics realistically.

My life may be irreversible now, and I’ll have to make peace with the consequences of what you did. But I know you’re still out there doing this to other people. I’m just asking you to stop for the sake of love and family values. Let women be women again.

And for goodness sake let men be men! If there’s anything I can say to appeal to your senses, this is it: thank you for showing me I am powerful & smart when I need to be. I will take that with me. It’s just not the whole story. I need to respect, honor & admire a partner.

This is what I needed to learn:

1. Men are awesome creatures when they are at their best & I need one in my life to love & keep me safe and ensure a healthy & happy home & life.

2. Find a man that inspires your whole being so that even when you disagree, you defer to his leadership.

3. There is no need to rebel against his leadership if I choose wisely. And when I do, know that “the ship has sailed” and we are on course for a lifetime of adventure together. We can strategize our teamwork to plan according to all the challenges at sea, but we must not waver.

4. Being feminine is everything. Denying our beauty is a sin on humanity. Embrace & celebrate your inner & outer sensual essence by being graceful, selective, kind, joyful, warm, loving & intuitive. You can do so without being weak or meek or insignificant.

5. I was put on this earth to love and to heal and to help and support someone, my someone! There is no progress without leadership, there is no leadership without followership, there is no home without a healthy system to guide & protect it and there is no love without a home.

Enough FEMINISM, you have done enough damage...You’ve proven your twisted point. If you carry on any further you are going to destroy life & love as we (used to) know it. Women will rule the world with subservient masses of weak men. Then what? Will you stop then?

Will you be happy when you look around at the mess you’ve created and smile? I don’t think so! I think you’ll wail like you’ve never felt sadness and despair before once you understand what you’ve “created.” The destruction will be catastrophic...it’s already begun.

But it’s not too late for our future even if it’s too late for some. So, I beg you FEMINISM: Enough! You’ve had your run, let go of the death grip and listen to your inner voice. I know you still have it. You don’t have to fight anymore. I’m sorry if you're hurt by my leaving.

But I’m done.

All the best,

The generations of women from who you squandered youth and the Divine Feminine for too long.

There is a genre of this kind of writing - of middle-aged women without families feeling dudded by feminism (which I hereby dub "feminist regret"). One of the earliest examples that I recall was written by an Australian journalist, Virginia Haussegger, back in 2002 - see here.

Dr Taylor Burrowes' letter is better than many I've read. I like the following aspects:

1. She recognises that men aren't very attracted to a woman's professional qualifications.

2. She recognises the reality of female hypergamy: that women feel attracted to men who they can look up to in some way. Therefore, both her height and her PhD limited the pool of men she might have successfully bonded with. She writes "I can’t pair with a man beneath me, literally and figuratively." This has implications for how society is organised - care has to be taken to ensure that men have the standing in society to attract their female peers.

3. She doesn't do the "men can't handle smart/strong women" shtick. She acknowledges that the problem was internal to her and that it would have helped if she had been brought up to better understand the male/female dynamic.

4. She does a good job in identifying the qualities that women might cultivate in themselves. She suggests that women aim to be "graceful, selective, kind, joyful, warm, loving & intuitive".

5. She is open and honest about needing a man to lead in the relationship. She associates a man leading and protecting with the creation of a loving home (leadership includes teamwork between man and woman).

Finally, I hope that the men reading this don't respond with a "white knight" instinct, because it is not what women like Dr Taylor Burrowes are looking for. She is not looking for a servant to uphold the feminine imperative, i.e. to do her bidding. She wants a masculine man who can more than hold his own in a relationship. Who she feels confident in deferring to for leadership. It is not a case of "rescue" but of being a man who can be relied on to make good decisions and to steer things in the right direction.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.