The moral architecture of Hic Mulier

In 1620 a pamphlet appeared in England called Hic Mulier. Its purpose was to condemn women who dressed like men. What is of interest to me is the moral framework used. On what grounds did the pamphleteer oppose cross-dressing? 

Hic Mulier, title page illustration

I have previously written about a similar, companion pamphlet called Haec Vir. In this text, there are three potential reasons for supporting distinctions between men and women:

...by the Laws of Nature, by the rules of Religion, and the Customs of all civil Nations, it is necessary there be a distinct and special difference between Man and Woman

There is considerable discussion in Haec Vir about the role of custom and the rules of religion. The focus of Hic Mulier, though, is an appeal to nature. The author considers it unnatural for women to dress as men.

Appeals to nature often blend together two differing claims. The first is to suggest that a particular behaviour is wholly outside the given nature of the person carrying it out and is in this sense unnatural (like it would be unnatural for a dog to miaow like a cat). A modern example might be opposing women in frontline combat roles because the nature of a woman's body is designed around her maternal role rather than being a warrior, and that this has been generally observed in sex roles over the course of human history. 

This type of argument is not well accepted in liberal modernity. Modern philosophy has mostly rejected the idea of formal and final causes, where something is defined by its essence and its ultimate purpose. And modern philosophy often emphasises the idea that humans should be autonomously self-creating individuals, not defined by the givens of their being.

In Hic Mulier we see this kind of appeal to nature when the author argues that women who wear men's clothes are not being true to their own nature but are mimicking men, or putting on a mask or disguise - that it is merely imitation rather than a true representation of who they are and that in doing so they are being "monstrous" in the sense of becoming a deformed or hybrid creature not found in nature. 

Examples from the text include the author condemning the "folly of imitation"; claiming that the cross-dressing women were substituting for modesty "all Mimic and apish incivility"; labelling them as "mermonsters" rather than mermaids; and describing cross-dressing as "barbarous, in that it is exorbitant (wayward) from Nature and an Antithesis to kind". 

We see the language of disguise in the following:

What can be more barbarous than with the gloss of mumming Art to disguise the beauty of their creations? To mould their bodies to every deformed fashion, their tongues to vile and horrible profanations, and their hands to ruffianly and uncivil actions? To have their gestures as piebald and as motleyvarious as their disguises...

Oh yes, a world...so foully branded with this infamy of disguise. 

The author goes on to suggest that some of the mannish women might have been imitating popular stories of the time in which a woman pretended to be, or was mistaken for, a man. He later returns to the idea that cross-dressing is disguising the women's real natures in the following excerpt (note, a vizard was a strange looking oval mask worn by upper class women when outside to protect their complexions):

The fairest face covered with a foul vizard begets nothing but affright or scorn, and the noblest person in an ignoble disguise attains to nothing but reproach and scandal. Away then with these disguises and foul vizards.

So the first approach is the one that sees the act itself as being outside of nature and therefore, in the eyes of the pamphlet writer, an abomination.

It's difficult to use this first approach widely. After all, there are things that exist within our own nature, rather than outside of it, that are not morally good. So it's not as straightforward as claiming that something that is natural is therefore to be praised.

This is made clear in the pamphlet. The author recognises, and describes in detail, the differences between the higher nature of women and the lower.

So a second supplementary approach is needed. This takes the form, in Hic Mulier, of the claim that a woman is more truly herself, more truly in her nature when she acts according to the virtues of her sex. When she falls into her lower nature, into the vices characteristic of her sex, this is a deformity of her nature. It is not how she was truly made to be. 

How do we know what these virtues and vices are? In part, through the use of reason. If used well, our reason directs us to our nobler qualities, whereas a foolish person would be led to what is base. 

There is an emphasis in Hic Mulier on the virtue of temperance. A virtuous person will exercise restraint, particularly over appetites and desires. This ability to exercise a degree of rational control over oneself is a true freedom that makes us fit for civility; an absence of temperance, in which we are carried along wildly by our impulses, is both licentious and barbarous. 

And so there is a moral architecture that includes an appeal to nature, to virtue, to reason, to nobility, to wisdom, to restraint and to civility.*

Does the moral architecture of Hic Mulier make sense? I think so. In a Christian society, in which our original form is thought to be the image of God, it does make sense to believe that our higher, virtuous nature is the truer one that is natural to us (well-formed) and that the baser, vicious nature is the one that is fallen or de-formed. It fits too perhaps with the Platonic philosophy inherited from the classical world in which the closer you get to the original form, the more perfect a thing is. There might also be an influence here from the concept of the great chain of being in which there is a scale of nature from the lowest to the highest. Humans possess not only an animal like nature (such as physical appetites) but also a spiritual one (including a rational faculty). Therefore, to be fully within our nature would mean exercising rational control over our appetites - without this we would be reduced to the merely animal aspect of existence.

The moral terminology used in Hic Mulier is fitted to the overall architecture. Women are praised and criticised for a variety of reasons, but there is some emphasis, as you might expect, on the contrast between women who exercise restraint and those who do not. Virtuous women are described as modest, chaste, bashful, comely, shamefast and sober (shamefast meant being restrained in a positive sense by a sense of shame or propriety; to be sober meant having self-control, dignity and temperance). Vicious women, however, are termed wanton, loose, lascivious, shameless, skittish (inconstant, fickle), indiscreet (reckless, rash) and lustful (having excessive desires, not just sexual, as when we speak of "lust for power"). 

This is not the moral framework we commonly use today. This is to be expected as the moral architecture of our times runs almost directly counter to that defended in Hic Mulier. The current view is that we are empowered when, as autonomous individuals, we are free to choose in any direction. The logic of this position is that there should be minimal restraints on what people choose to do. 

The more traditional emphasis on qualities of self-restraint will seem alien or archaic to those brought up within the modern moral architecture. This is a pity as there is a kind of freedom and dignity in cultivating the virtue of temperance. This virtue helps us to retain our moral integrity, or, more profoundly, it permits us to continue in life as an integrated self. Everything in reality is subject to entropy. If we make no effort to uphold beneficial order either in ourselves or in society, then there will be a falling away toward collapse and disorder. If we exercise no rational control over our passions, desires and appetites, then we inevitably fall into demoralising vices that we are increasingly subject to and which are a source of disempowerment (and will likely leave us jaded and less able to enjoyably experience the passionate side of life).

Temperance is, of course, not the only virtue. The entire moral architecture should not be built on this foundation alone. But I do think we can learn something from the way that temperance was once connected to man's higher nature and to highly esteemed traits of character.

*One positive aspect of this moral architecture is that it avoids the deadlock that occurred in the middle of the twentieth century. Freud had suggested that people did need to exercise restraint in the interests of civilisation, but that in doing so they would be unhappy. They would repress their instinctive drives (sexual and aggressive) which would cause distress or even neurosis. A counterculture led by figures like Wilhelm Reich agreed with Freud that repression would lead to neuroses but concluded that people should be uninhibited in expressing their instinctive drives ("let it all hang out"). Reich took a negative view of civilisation, connecting it to a violent authoritarian opposition to human freedom. The two options here are both unattractive: you get to be either a neurotic and unhappy member of civilised society, or else a spaced out hippy with no moral self-control. The model put forward in the 1620s is more positive. The person who is "got together" in the sense of being able to moderate their own actions is thought to be more themselves, to have more freedom of self, and to be more fit to participate in a civilised society. These things (nature, freedom, civilised society) are not set against each other as they were in the twentieth century.

Rethroning nature

Germaine Greer was interviewed on British TV recently. She was putting the feminist argument against transsexualism. In doing so, though, she expressed with great clarity a fault line within Western thought. 

This is Greer's attitude to gender:

Now gender can be anything you like. It's entirely cultural. But, unfortunately, sex is not entirely cultural. It's something you're born with whether you like it or not. And most of us who grow up to be women, who have our first period, 12, 13, 14, whatever, traumatising otherwise, a body we thought we knew becomes smelly and dirty and different. And then the boys come along. They've been watching pornography and say that we're not groomed, we have to remove our body hair and so on. We've got to spend our lives removing body hair. That's femininity, which is the fake version of femaleness. Female is real, and it's sex, and femininity is unreal and it's gender, and it's a role you play. And for that to become the given identity of women is a profoundly disabling notion.

Look, I wrote a book a long time ago about how you get made into a woman. In those days we called it conditioning. And you could see it, it happens from birth...And it goes right through our entire lifespan where we're learning femininity. And it's a masquerade, it's not who we really are. There is nothing feminine about being pregnant. It's almost the antithesis of that. There's nothing feminine about giving birth...There's nothing feminine about breastfeeding. That masquerade is what is now being presented to us back as the real deal, with the hair extensions and the false eyelashes, and I think, why do you think that's real?

I'd like to acknowledge that Germaine Greer puts the modernist position on gender with admirable clarity here - it's particularly impressive for an 80-year-old. And it does seem to be modernist. She was influenced as a young woman by the libertarian philosophy of John Anderson, and he developed his mature philosophy in the 1930s.

What is a tell that we're dealing with modernist philosophy? First and foremost, the erasure of nature. Most people would think that "gender" (i.e., the characteristics we most associate with men and women) is created by a combination of nature and nurture. But note that Greer insists that gender is entirely nurture, it is wholly a product of conditioning. She spends no time at all on the nature/nurture debate, as she simply assumes that nature has no role in the formation of gender.

She is therefore left with the human body alone (the denatured human body that is simply biological and nothing more). And so Greer thinks that the only other possibility for forming gender would be via the biological fact of a sexed body. But she rejects this possibility. She insists that pregnancy and breastfeeding are not feminine. And that leaves the superficial ornamentation of the body, such as fake eyelashes or hair extensions or hair removal. But she also thinks that this is not an authentic source of the feminine.

And so there is no real source of the feminine, which means that "gender can be anything you like".

These ideas are common amongst TERF feminists. It is usually assumed that the feminine is a negative and artificial quality and that it refers only to stereotypes of female body presentation like fake nails.

None of this is at all reasonable. It is unreasonable to think that humans, as dimorphic as we are, and having developed from the beginning of our long history with very different roles for men and women, would not have distinctly sexed natures. In other words, it is strange to think that we could be so biologically distinct but that this would not be expressed in differing ways of experiencing the world.

And this is what any observant person would discern. We are not the same. This is what makes heterosexuality what it is (an attraction to a person different to us) as well as challenging (difficulties in communicating with someone with a different mind to ourselves). The workings of women can seem mysterious to men, both in very positive but sometimes also in frustrating ways. And parents who have children of both sexes will observe deeply set differences from an early age, to a degree that does not seem to be entirely a product of social conditioning.

For most people, too, our "gender" is important to our identity. It is not thought of as merely something we perform. It is an inseparable part of who we are, and of what we were made to be. And so it runs against our own lived experience for Germaine Greer to claim that the only thing real is our sexed body and that even this is a largely negative aspect of our existence. Greer leaves very little for women to go on. She empties the category of womanhood, to make it almost meaningless. There is nothing authentically or positively feminine in life that Greer attaches to womanhood. And even the fact of having a female body is denigrated by Greer. So what is left? Just a cynical attitude that womanhood might be used as a political category to get certain privileges or to identify as a political class in opposition to men. It is merely strategic, part of a game, and it is a game that can easily be lost to others with a greater claim or with more political influence.

So where did all this come from? How did it come to be that Greer can so confidently assert that "gender can be anything you like"? Why is it not seriously considered that men and women have given natures that might be relevant considerations in thinking about the masculine and the feminine?

Here I'd like to turn to Pierre Manent, a French professor of political science. He wrote a book in 1995 titled An Intellectual History of Liberalism. Manent argues that it was the Rousseau who decisively ended any appeal to nature with Western philosophy:

Rousseau's thought incarnates that paradoxical moment in political thought when man's nature is most vehemently appealed to in the political debate, and when it ceases in fact to serve as its regulator and criterion. 

The reason Manent gives is that Rousseau thought that modern society was unnatural. And so to discover what man's nature truly is you had to remove every social convention applied to man, so that you arrived at the original, solitary individual. But if natural man is pre-social, then, as Manent puts it, "Not just our society, but every society, even the best, is contrary to man's nature". This means that there is no longer much purpose in trying to conform society to man's nature. 

Pierre Manent

And so there is a breaking point between the traditional and the modern. Most traditionalists would appeal to some sort of natural law in considering how a human community should function. We would say that because it is part of the eternal, created nature of man to "x" therefore we should consider this in how we frame a human community if we want that community to flourish.

But if we follow Rousseau, then there can no longer be an appeal to nature in terms of how we might organise society.

There is a further move. Rousseau thought that man was only naturally a unity in his solitary pre-social condition. To restore this unity whilst living within a society meant forcing man to follow the general will. This required changing man's nature. For Rousseau, this was possible because man was not his nature but liberty - the power by which man gives orders to his own nature or is a law unto himself. In Manent's words "man's nature is not to have a nature, but to be free....With Rousseau, freedom....is a feeling...of autonomy....If man is liberty, autonomy, if he is the being who makes his own laws, he cannot derive his motives from nature without demeaning himself". (p.77)

And at this point we can perhaps find one of the intellectual threads leading on to Germaine Greer. Greer thinks it demeaning that a woman might derive some of her qualities or character from her given nature. If not for social conditioning, she would not be subject to any of the qualities of the feminine at all. 

This position, inasmuch as it derives from Rousseau, rests upon a false premise, namely that man is not by nature social, but is a unity only as a solitary, pre-social individual. And so it is up to us to correct this misstep within the Western philosophical tradition. We need to rethrone nature. 

Manent set himself this task in a recent essay, in which he expands upon the role of the social contract theorists in undermining the idea of natural law. I'll take a look at this essay in my next post.

The dilemma of female independence

I saw the following comment from a single woman in her 50s:

I'm independent and capable but would actually like someone to look after me, make me feel like I'm a priority.

She is caught between two things. The first is the social programming that women experience, which tells them to be, above all, independent of men. I was reminded of the force of this programming recently when talking to a female colleague. She told me that her mother's core message to her was to be independent, and that she herself had doubled down on this in raising her own daughters. She not only told them to be independent but that they didn't need a man in their lives.

However, there is also another kind of programming that we have, one embedded into our created natures. It is part of this nature for us to need, for the good of our own souls, a loving relationship with someone of the opposite sex. 

And so there is a conflict in the psyche of modern women. This conflict is not superficial because it touches on issues of formation. There is a pivotal moment in a woman's life in which she must choose between trusting a man, allowing her to release into her own feminine, receptive nature, or else relying on herself but then having to self-assert and control her environment. 

It is never an easy thing for a woman to trust, as it requires something of a leap of faith. But in modern life it is assumed anyway that the woman will aspire to become the self-assertive "boss babe" who is focused on career and autonomy and independence.

Both of the possible "pivots" that a woman can make come with potential problems. When women decide to be independent, the worst outcome is that she does not self-assert in the cool, calm manner expected of men, but that her style is a blustering one that comes across as pushy or bossy, and in which self-assertion becomes a desperate need to micro-manage and micro-control. A man who accepts a relationship with a woman like this will need vast amounts of patience to deal with it - most men will be put off. 

I don't think that this character type in women is entirely new. It is perhaps revealing that men in centuries past thought that it was most attractive for women to be demure, in the sense of being calm and settled, with composure and restraint, rather than being loud and attention-seeking. Maybe these men had seen the boss babe type in their own time and preferred something very different.

However, there are also potential negatives to women who pivot toward their feminine, receptive nature. In trusting to a man, and in being receptive, these women might develop an overly external locus of control. In other words, they will see the man as being wholly responsible for their own well-being and for their life outcomes.

This becomes especially damaging if a woman has unrealistic expectations; if she is constitutionally unhappy in life; if she is not oriented toward gratitude; or if she is not sufficiently capable in areas of life that require her own competence. 

Rejecting the mantra of independence is not supposed to mean that a woman becomes helpless or incapable, or that she does not have a moral mission that requires her to cultivate virtues and strengths of character. It is more that she feels able to lean into her husband, particularly for protection and provision, but also to provide some of the emotional stability, prudence and structure that she might not always be able to provide for herself, at least not consistently. He, for his part, will be drawn to her emotional warmth, her caring nature and the maternal qualities that she brings to the lives of his children.

It is a mistake for a woman to take independence as a goal in life. In doing so, she is less able to release into her feminine nature. She is less able to put her walls down, and to have the trust in a man that love requires. 

But a return to a vision of interdependence rather than independence won't be easy. It will mean challenging the liberal insistence on autonomy as the overriding good in life; it will mean rejecting a culture of casual relationships, which erodes trust between men and women even before a marriage has taken place; and it will mean rethinking the idea of the individual being supported within an impersonal, technocratic, universal welfare state, rather than through personal, familial relationships.

Can we bring form to marriage?

 I saw the following comment on social media this week:

To me this is importantly true, but in a particular way. It is a kind of higher truth, an aspect of Logos, or the divine order, the one that is available to our higher intelligence and that expresses a kind of ideal harmonising or fitting together of things.

It is not true in the sense that it is always present in the way people act in real life. To be present, there needs to be a polarity between the sexes. Men need to have a sense of what is required from them for women to relax into a feminine role. It helps if men project something like a masculine aura, and this is more likely to happen if men have a knowledge of their own role in creating the structures - including the religious and cultural structures - within which a woman might "feel" the masculine and respond to it. Men need to project their own masculine strengths and competencies for women to be receptive to and to allow their femininity to come into play.

Feminism, of course, rejects all this, seeking instead the aim of autonomous freedom in which we develop solo, through the efforts of our own independent will alone. Feminism has been around since the mid-nineteenth century. Even so, it's interesting to observe when the outward forms changed, i.e., when men stopped presenting masculine form and women feminine form. There was some change in the 1920s with the flappers - women who wore their hair short and who wore straight lined dresses which de-emphasised the contours of their bodies.

But I think men changed even more in the 1960s and 70s. Here, for instance, is a picture of street life in Perth in 1946:

The men are dressed to project a certain kind of masculine presence. In the 1970s there were still businessmen who wore suits, but nonetheless clothing for men had generally become more informal, i.e., lacking masculine form:

Notice as well that the woman in this photo is dressed much like the men. Again, you can still find examples of women dressing distinctly, but androgyny was becoming more common - there was a decline in outward polarity.

And women? I suspect that girls reach an age, sometime in their teens, when they have to choose whether to retain a feminine persona, or whether to pivot instead to a more masculine approach to life. Do they allow themselves to be enveloped by, and protected within, the masculine, while they themselves bring emotional warmth and care to those around them? Or do they become psychologically harder and self-protective and seek to control their environment?

Most women in modern life reject the feminine. Sometimes it's for personal reasons. Perhaps they had a poor relationship with their own father and so do not trust men. Sometimes it's for political reasons. They have been raised to be feminist and therefore an independent modern girl who does not need a man. Sometimes, it's spiritual. It is a non-serviam - I will not serve - response to God. 

It can lead to an impasse in relationships. It is common now to hear women say that they can do everything themselves and so if a man is to have any chance with them he somehow has to figure out a way to "add value" otherwise "what is the point?". 

Men, for their part, have started to ask women "What do you bring to the table?". The question itself betrays the underlying problem. If both men and women are the masculine part of the equation, then neither brings something that the other party does not already possess. What men would really like a woman to answer to their question is the answer to the polarity problem. They would like a woman to bring her "softness, emotion and warmth" to the table and to appreciate the masculine strengths that he provides.

It is unfortunate that today it is sometimes the least competent or even mentally unwell women who present to men as needing masculine support. It means that the masculine instincts in men can lead to a poor choice in a spouse. It would help if higher quality women could find a way to signal to men an openness to polarity, through some expression of the feminine. 

This is an issue that will always need tending to, no matter the era. It is one of those human condition problems. It needs to be addressed both at the individual, personal level and more generally at the level of the wider culture. It is part of the need to create workable structures, a frame that can uphold human communities.

Pleasantly surprised

 A woman on social media asked the following question:

I was not expecting much illumination in the replies. In our times, masculinity is often described as toxic or else it is redefined as being something much more akin to the feminine. So I was pleasantly surprised when one woman proffered the following list:

It's not a bad list. It could be added to, but it does capture aspects of the masculine personality. What's especially surprising is that this woman is not anything like a traditionalist. Though married, she is generally critical of men, and she has a materialistic, transactional view of relationships (her husband is supposed to enable the luxurious lifestyle she desires). Her life aim is to always get what she wants, and though she wants children she denigrates the motherhood role as being beneath her:

Some of the women in the discussion then challenged her to come up with a list of feminine traits. Again, she immediately produced a set of qualities that does seem to capture aspects of the feminine personality:

I would query the idea of magnanimity as being a more feminine quality, but apart from that it seems like a reasonable effort to me.

Just a couple of further points. First, if you read the social media timeline of this woman, she is at the most disagreeable end of the female personality spectrum. This makes her come across badly, but it has the benefit of allowing her to speak her mind freely, which perhaps explains why she did not just resort to the usual liberal platitudes when this topic was raised.

Second, a few thoughts occur to me regarding female sensitivity. This is a quality that can have both negative and positive expressions. On the negative side of the ledger, women can sometimes be overly sensitive to criticism. It can be a tough job for a husband to criticise his wife. No matter how diplomatically he frames the criticism, the response can be something along the lines of "This is a day that will live in infamy...." Similarly, women can be overly sensitive to tone, and can overdo the "tone policing" at times.

Nonetheless, sensitivity is part of the making of a woman. Women can be sensitive to the moods and emotions of others, which then supports their ability to nurture. There is a connection too, I think, between a sensitivity of feeling and a delicacy of manners and mores in women. You notice this sometimes in women who are more brashly insensitive - there is not the refinement that you normally expect in a feminine personality. Finally, men respond to women who are at least a little more emotionally sensitive than themselves. This is part of the quality of expressiveness listed above. It might lead a woman to react more emotionally, for instance, to a sad scene in a film or to express compassion for a person or animal in distress. When done well, it balances men's greater level of emotional reserve.

Parallel lives, different worlds?

 I saw the following brief exchange on social media this morning:

The idea being put forward here is that we fail to truly comprehend the opposite sex because we do not adequately comprehend how different the minds of men and women are.

I'd like to try to contribute something to addressing this issue. Before I do I need to point out that anything said on this topic is likely to be a generalisation lacking nuance, and that this type of discussion is mostly observational and therefore more tentative than, for instance, a discussion about the logical outcomes of political principles.

Men and women both clearly experience thoughts, feelings, impulses and appetites. What I would propose is that men are more likely to have a self-awareness that leads them vertically toward "logos" - the ordering principle to be found within reality. A man's sense of self, therefore, is not centred in what he is thinking or feeling at any given time. It lies at a layer immediately above this, allowing men to disassociate to a degree from what is happening at the level of emotion and thought. A man might watch his thoughts and emotions rather than inhabiting them as his "self". 

What this means is that it is possible to disagree with a man's thoughts or opinions without it much affecting his sense of self. It is very rare for a man to talk about not being "validated" or "seen" by someone who fails to agree with him. Men are more likely to fear the consequences of a lack of self-mastery, as reflected in a lack of real world competency. 

Men too are more likely to consider things from a wider ordering principle than are women. Feminists, for instance, have never really moved beyond considering the sectional interests of women. They have shown little interest in coming up with a vision of society which considers how all the different parts might be arranged to serve a larger good.

The success or failure of the male mind runs largely along a vertical axis. When working best, the male mind is receptive enough to comprehend the higher things above the self, including logos (when in the state of the "porous self"). But it is also able to look down on thoughts, feelings, impulses and appetites and order them, so that the lower serves the higher. To be actively engaged in this task should lead to self-knowledge, and a sense of how the order of the larger world (the macrocosm) is reflected in that of the self (the microcosm). 

Again, when this is operating at its best, the sense of the self serving a higher good, and being ordered to it, is linked to the heroic virtues in men - of harnessing one's strengths and powers to defend something greater than oneself. When the masculine self is working well it tends toward a selflessness of purpose.

But the vertical axis can be broken. Western men are not as good as they once were at perceiving a higher level of existence - there has been a flattening of horizons. When there is nothing above the self, there can still be oversight of thoughts and feelings, and attempts at self-mastery, but toward lower ends and with a stunted growth toward wisdom.

Similarly, men can fail at using their self-awareness to order their thoughts, feelings and appetites, to the point that they lose "right mind". In older phraseology, they become slaves to their passions. Their awareness is trapped at their own thoughts and appetites, unable to move upward along the axis. 

Women's sense of self is located more at the level of their thoughts and feelings. That is perhaps why women have such a strong need to have their thoughts and feelings validated. If your sense of self is closely tied to what you are thinking and feeling, then a failure of another to validate these things will feel destabilising or perhaps even be perceived as demonstrating a lack of love or care for who you are. 

When a woman's mind is working well the movement is more along a horizontal axis than a vertical one. Because her sense of self is centred on her thoughts and feelings, she will be sensitively attuned to the thoughts and feelings of others. At its best, the female mind might be perceptive about the thoughts and feelings of others, and gradually come to a type of self-knowledge and wisdom via this faculty. This is a type of close in, sideways movement of the mind - from one's own thoughts and feelings to someone else's. 

However, things can go very wrong. If the horizontal axis is broken, a woman can be trapped within her own emotions and thoughts. Not only does she lose her ability to sense the thoughts and feelings of others, she can become solipsistic, and see others only in terms of what she herself is thinking and feeling. She might "merge" the other person with these thoughts and feelings and not recognise them as having a mind of their own. She might mistakenly view them as experiencing whatever she is experiencing. (I wonder, too, if this helps to explain why a woman might sometimes believe that a husband should be able to read her mind - because of a failure on her part to recognise him as fully differentiated). 

Which brings me to the main point I'd like to raise, namely the issue of how we guide our behaviour. If what I have said is true, at least as a broad generalisation, then men can potentially step outside of their own thoughts and feelings along a vertical axis to engage with logos, and the higher ordering principles. This means that there are guiding principles that are not outside of, or alien to, the workings of the male mind.

If women's sense of self is centred more on what they are feeling and thinking, and the movement is sideways toward what others are thinking and feeling, then women do not have the same engagement with logos. Left to themselves, they can be guided instead by what heightens their sense of feeling (e.g. a film that triggers their sense of pity or empathy or indignation) or (when her mind is working well) by a sensitivity to what others might feel by a word or an action. But there is not the same sense of what ultimately orders a person or a society to a longer term good. 

And so women are, in at least some respects, in need of guidance. Where might this come from? In modern society, mostly from two sources. First, therapists. This is not a very effective source of guidance. Therapists are not really supposed to advise clients on what to do. Women often use therapists instead as an expensive form of validation. The use of therapy has the advantage for women that it is "validation with a qualification" - the therapist is supposed to be a trained expert, so even if the therapist is a young woman with little life experience, her validation has a stamp of authority which gives it a special standing (I am not rejecting therapy here in all circumstances - it might well be helpful for those in real need. I just don't think it is adequate in terms of moral guidance or to supply prudential reasoning.)

The second source of guidance in modern society comes from other women, for instance, via social media. Modern technology has created "bubbles" in which women can network and socialise with each other without much input from anyone or anything else. Again, this is often a poor source of guidance, as women often understand what other women primarily need to be validation.

In traditional societies there were various sources of guidance women could have recourse to. Social norms were important and also effective in guiding women's behaviour, due to the conscientiousness of women and also women's sensitivity to their standing within social groups (the "inclusion/exclusion" axis). There were also the wiser sort of older women with life experience who were willing to dispense genuine advice rather than validation. But most of all there were men that a woman might trust and lean on for guidance: priests, brothers, husbands and fathers.

I find it interesting that the wiser sort of women on social media are often the ones who accept this masculine role in their lives. It supplies something for them, that then allows them to develop further than other women. It does not constrain them but allows them to push further forward in their self-development.

I think women are aware of what I am trying to describe here. That is why the issue looms so large for women. A woman can find a man she trusts and cooperate with his efforts to order life toward a higher good, or she can reject this masculine element of life and rely on the workings of her own mind alone. Women are increasingly going for the second option. How this works out varies, because the quality of the female mind varies, but there is a trend toward a more chaotic experience of life, manifested in high rates of anxiety and depression in younger women and instability in relationships and family life. 

One final point. I have argued that the male and female minds work differently, along a different kind of axis, and that men can usefully provide a masculine element when it comes to the pursuit of the good. Some men who agree with me on this take the argument too far, and believe that it means that only men are accountable for what happens in society. I disagree. People have different resources for making moral choices for all sorts of reasons (their level of life experience, their upbringing, their intelligence, their personality traits). Nonetheless, we still have free will and a conscience, and we are therefore still ultimately accountable for the choices we make and for what we make of ourselves. If anything we need to return to the idea of women having their own significant moral mission in life.

Postscript

I'm not the first to suggest the importance of the masculine in accessing the vertical axis. Lawrence Auster, coming at the issue from a different angle, once wrote:

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.

And the Danish historian Henrik Ibsen also made these connections in his book The Fatherless Society:

The masculine — which Henrik calls the “father” — is not simply about men as individuals but is an essential aspect of culture.

He sees it as the vertical dimension, which includes everything that human beings have looked up to, from God on high to ideals and excellence as well as the father’s traditional moral authority.

That vertical dimension is the source of our higher aspirations. This upward reach needs a strong foundation of healthy human relationship — which the more horizontally inclusive world of mothering traditionally has provided. As Henrik said to me, there needs to be a balance between the two.

I thought it interesting as well that the following interview dropped on social media this morning (with actresses promoting the film Wicked). It is an unusually intense expression of the female mind, and sweet in its own way, but almost completely devoid of masculine influence. There is self, emotion, sensitivity, vulnerability and validation. A culture cannot run on this alone, not without the more bracing influence of the masculine:

The anti-wifely woman

There is a potential in women to develop either wifely or anti-wifely attributes.

When you observe a wifely woman, you are likely to notice an air of feminine receptivity and a higher degree of sexual modesty. She is, in marriage, more likely to focus on an ideal of "making a life together", which includes the grounded, daily, practical tasks associated with family life. Her husband is "personalised", in that he is not just there "for purpose" or as an abstracted figure of infatuation. She genuinely wants to form a family and so is less likely to hold out for an impossible list of requirements in a husband. She will often meet her future husband at a relatively young age and have children in her 20s.

The anti-wifely woman is more combative, seeing life as a struggle between men and women for power and status. She is more overtly sexual, in part, because she rejects the idea of serving a spouse in marriage and so, in the absence of daily gifts of service in marriage, relationships are based more squarely on the expression of sexuality. She is also more likely to cultivate a masculine energy in herself as she is too set apart from men to think of a husband providing this energy within a spousal union. And so she cultivates ambition, pursues masculine hobbies and interests, and creates within her own self an uneasy balance between masculine and feminine attributes.

What creates the anti-wifely woman? There are reasons to do with political ideology, such as the emphasis on individual autonomy within liberalism. But it goes beyond this to an ongoing potential within female nature to react against hierarchical forms of authority, particularly masculine authority. Anti-wifely women are often in a proud rebellion against the patriarchy, traditional Christianity and to serving (i.e. doing things for) a husband. It is a rebellion against the father and is triggered by fathers who were either absent or who did not model a loving form of paternal authority. 

In the 1800s, when Western culture was more heavily saturated with Christianity, these anti-wifely women sometimes identified with the prideful rebellion of Satan against God. Per Flaxneld has written a lengthy book on this theme, titled Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture. When you read the examples he gives, you are struck by the similarity to the anti-wifely women of today, in the sense that you have the same hostility to traditional Christianity, the same overt sexuality, and the same focus on forms of masculine and/or paternal authority in society.

Why bother to note any of this? First, I think it's important to understand that a layer of women in the modern West are not really fit for marriage and that it is misleading to suggest that there is some formula by which men might successfully partner with them. Second, there is a confirmation here of the important role that fathers play within the family. If a father is absent, or too lacking in authority, or if his authority is wielded unlovingly, this has serious repercussions down the line. Fathers do matter.

Four types of female love

First a disclaimer. I'm always a bit hesitant in publishing these kinds of posts, because they are based on my own, necessarily limited, experiences and observations. I put them forward more as ideas for others to work with, rather than as cast iron, unassailable expressions of truth. 

It seems to me that there are at least four types of female love. The reason for trying to understand each type is that female love for men is not always as stable as that of men for women. Men's love has the advantage that it tends to trigger the male protector/provider instinct, and so men will feel that they are fulfilling a basic aspect of manhood in directing their strengths toward supporting their family. It is an anchor point. Men also seem better able than women to find a transcendent aspect in their love. The male mind is able to combine a love for an individual and flawed woman with an experience of what is transcendent in feminine beauty and goodness. And men experience this love for a woman as a higher expression of their own nature. All this can be powerful enough to motivate men to remain attached to the same woman throughout the course of a life. Yes, there are other factors that push the other way. Men do have an instinct for sexual variety. Nor are men wholly immune to becoming too emotionally damaged for stable attachments. Nonetheless, it is generally easier for a man to attach in a stable way to a woman than for a woman to a man.

So what are the four types of female love? 

1. Libidinal love

This is love that is based on sexual attraction. When women have this feeling, they often describe it in terms of a physical response, rather than an emotional one ("I had butterflies in my stomach"). It is a strongly visceral response in women, one that has little to do with higher, transcendent aspects of mind. 

What triggers this kind of love? Unsurprisingly, primal, visceral instinct. For this reason, it can seem baffling to high minded men. Women might, for instance, respond to men who trigger a sexual thrill, perhaps by being bold, or looking menacing, or breaking the rules, or having a certain arrogance. Libidinal love favours bad boy qualities.

You get a sense of this by reading female "romance" novels. These novels are designed to trigger this libidinal love feeling in women. They are extraordinarily primal. They evoke ancient "bride capture" customs: the hero will often simply force himself in some way onto the reluctant heroine. The hero himself is untamed and outside of polite society (but, in a nod to the next type of love, also someone who has inherited tremendous wealth and status).

Female libidinal love is problematic for society. Libidinal love often doesn't last. It leads women to engage in either one night stands or serial monogamy in their party years. Its impact on men is mixed at best. At its worst it encourages a player type culture amongst men, or perhaps even a "gangsta" one - or an imitation of it. It is not a basis for successful, lifelong marriage.

2. Opportunistic love

Women, more than men, have a capacity to love opportunistically. A woman might reach a certain age, want a wedding, a house, children and financial support, and set out to find a man on this basis. If she finds a man who can provide these things, she might then be willing to embark on a relationship, even if there is little genuine sexual attraction (libidinal love).

There have no doubt been countless marriages based on opportunistic love. But there are three problems with these marriages. First, the lack of sexual attraction is likely to be a cause of frustration on both sides, perhaps even eventually leading to the collapse of the marriage. Second, if the woman secures the things she wanted - the wedding, the house, the children, the financial support - the basis for her love diminishes and she may opt out of the marriage. Third, these marriages often have an unhealthy beta dynamic in which the husband must always qualify himself to his wife.

In the days before easy divorce, opportunistic love would not have broken up marriages, but it would have undermined the happiness of the relationship.

3. Altruistic love

This was the type of love most characteristic of my mother's generation of women (those who married in the early 1960s). It was described well by Marie Robinson in 1958:

Related to this feeling in her, to her sense of security, seeming almost to spring from it, indeed, is a profound delight in giving to those she loves. Psychiatrists, who consider this characteristic the hallmark, the sine qua non, of the truly feminine character, have a name for it: they call it “essential feminine altruism.” The finest flower of this altruism blossoms in her joy in giving the very best of herself to her husband and to her children. She never resents this need in herself to give; she never interprets its manifestations as a burden to her, an imposition on her. It pervades her nature as the color green pervades the countryside in the spring, and she is proud of it and delights in it. It is this altruism, this givingness, that motivates her to keep her equilibrium, to hold onto her joie de vivre despite whatever may befall. It stands her in marvelous stead for all the demands that life is going to make on her—and they will be considerable. When a woman does not have this instinctually based altruism available to her, or when she denies that it is a desirable trait, life's continuous small misfortunes leave her in a glowering rage, helpless and beside herself with self-pity.

I think this is exactly right. This distinctly feminine type of altruistic love was, for most of the women in my mother's social circle, able to hold at bay the resentment and self-pity that women can be prone to, and carry with it a warmth and joy of feminine personality well into old age. 

The damage done by the absence of this kind of love can be seen in an excerpt from a biography of Alice James, the sister of novelist Henry James. Alice, a spinster who lived alone, was visited by her two brothers in 1889:

As the three of them sat and talked, as they exchanged memories and opinions, the afternoon became for Alice a soul-quickening experience wherein the family itself seemed to come richly back into being, a revived and reintegrated presence. Her isolation was overcome for the moment by the sense of being once again a surrounded and nourished member of that family.

When her brothers left she was plunged again into solitude:

she confessed with bleak clarity that she could never allow it to be "anything else than a cruel and unnatural fate for a woman to live alone, to have no one to care and 'do for' daily is not only a sorrow but a sterilizing process."

This aspect of womanhood is not so evident today, perhaps because it stood in the way of the liberal aim of creating a society based on individual autonomy. But it remains a potential within female nature, one that provides a stronger basis for lifelong marriage.

(There does exist a masculine version of this, in which men act for others - but it has a different quality to the feminine version. It is more a case of men using their masculine strengths to create a protected and secure space for their family, and to provide for the material needs/wants of their family.)

4. Caritas love

This is a love (that both sexes can experience) that is more likely to be found among those with serious religious commitments. It could be described like this: my love of God, and my willingness to serve Him, leads me to love and to will the good of my spouse and my children. This is a love, therefore, that is settled in the will. As a matter of deep conscience, I will remain faithful to my spouse, as to God, and I will serve Him through service to my family. I do not need my spouse to be perfect to retain my commitments, and I will seek to overcome my own weaknesses and temptations that might undermine the promises that I have made. I might see marriage as a sacred commitment, a sacrament that it is not mine to break. I might see family as a sacred community, one in which I am charged with the deep mission of the spiritual welfare of my spouse and children. I will actively orient myself to the love of my spouse.

This is the most profound basis for marital commitments, but realistically it won't ever be universally held within a society. It has declined as a serious orientation to Christianity has diminished. It works best, of course, if both the husband and wife hold to it; a marriage can still fail if only one spouse is motivated by caritas. 

It was the type of love that the poet Sir Thomas Overbury advocated as a true basis for marriage in his poem of 1613 titled "The Wife". Although he did want a passionate love, he recognised that this was no guarantee of a wife's loyalty. He thought, therefore, that even though beauty was an important quality, it was most important to look for "good" in a wife. He wrote:

Gods image in her soule, O let me place
My love upon! not Adams in her face.

Good, is a fairer attribute then white,
’Tis the minds beauty keeps the other sweete;

 And what did he mean by "good"? He explains:

By good I would have holy understood,
So God she cannot love, but also me,

He is recognising that the firmest ground for marital commitments is the one founded upon the caritas type of love.

Conclusion

You might think that the aim of a society should be to reject the first two types of female love, the libidinal and the opportunistic, and work instead with altruistic and caritas forms of love. That, though, would be a mistake. The first two are fundamental aspects of female nature that cannot be glossed over. 

For instance, it is much better if a man is sexually attractive to his wife. We know that if a man is too agreeable, or too nice, that he won't trigger this attraction. We don't want the attraction to be triggered by a race to see which man can cover himself with the most tattoos, or best imitate a bikie. But there are other ways a society can help men to be more sexually attractive to women.

How can a decent man trigger sexual attraction in a woman without going gangsta? Well, he can be physically fit and muscular. He can be self-confident. He can have ambition. He can be rough around the edges. He can show competence in things that women consider masculine (e.g. fixing things, building things, outdoorsy things). He can avoid fawning and simping, and have a sense of his own masculine attractiveness. He can be dedicated to a mission in life outside of marriage and family. He can lead adeptly.

As politically incorrect as it is to say it, men can aim to demonstrate forms of masculine power and dominance and competence. And a society can help this along. For instance, it is normal and natural for mothers to instil in their infant sons some "caring and sharing" values. This is an important part of the socialisation of boys. But after about the age of seven it should be mostly complete, and it then becomes more important that boys are socialised in a masculine way within male spaces. A society should take care to give fathers time to spend with their sons in active masculine pursuits. And between the ages of about seven to sixteen, it is helpful for boys to be educated at boys' schools with a largely male staff. These male environments can be challenging for the more gently natured boys, and some might even come out worse for the experience (by never successfully adapting), but for most boys it will have the positive effect of instilling a more spirited and competitive masculine mindset (e.g. by learning to stand up for yourself, to learn better how to keep boundaries, to hold frame when under duress etc.).

As for opportunistic love, this too needs to be understood as a matter of policy making. Society once did this in a blunt way. Marriage allowed a young woman to leave her parents' house and form one of her own, i.e. to be independent. It gave her children and material security. If she divorced she had only a limited claim to these things. Our society has, with equal bluntness, gone the opposite way by associating independence with being single, and by rewarding women with the children, house and money on divorce. A society needs to get the balance of this right if it wants marital stability.

And how do we restore "essential female altruism"? That requires a rolling back of a number of things. Because liberalism wants to make our sex not matter (as being a predetermined quality), liberals aim at a gender role convergence in which men and women play the same role within the family. This undermines a woman's sense that she might give to her family in a unique way as a woman. Similarly, the liberal emphasis on autonomy means that women are raised to believe that an independent career is what matters and that work done for family is therefore to be thought of negatively as an oppressive limitation, a burden that must be shared equally between men and women or else outsourced.

Marie Robinson thought this to be the case, even back in 1958. She described one of her clients, who was cut off from this feminine altruistic love, as follows:

The whole emphasis in her early upbringing had been on achievement in the male world, and in the male sense of the word. She had been taught to be competitive with men, to look upon them as basically inimical to women. Women were portrayed as an exploited and badly put upon minority class. Marriage, childbearing, and love were traps that placed one in the hands of the enemy, man, whose chief desire was to enslave woman. Her mother had profoundly inculcated in her the belief that women were to work in the market place at all cost, to be aggressive, to take love (a la Russe) where they found it, and to be tied down by nothing, no one; no more, as her mother put it, than a man is. Such a definition of the normal had, of course, made her fearful of a real or deep or enduring relationship with a man.

Finally, there is the issue of caritas. In a secular society, with a materialistic world view, this understanding of love will not prosper. What I would urge men to understand, even those men without religious belief, is that this is not without negative consequences. The churches did once help to create a more secure setting for family life.

The heroine's journey

Saw this on Twitter:

It hammers the anticulture very well. I would only add to it that the heroine's journey does not end with the birth of her child. She must also conquer those aspects of her own nature which damage the marital relationship, and she must resist the impulse to undermine her husband's efforts to socialise her son(s).

Prager's troubling thought

Dennis Prager is an American classical liberal. He decided recently that he would read Betty Friedan's influential feminist work, The Feminine Mystique (1963).

In this book Friedan claimed that American women were unhappy with their lives as mothers and housewives. As you might expect of a classical liberal, Prager is sympathetic to Friedan's message. Most liberals base their politics around the idea of autonomy, in which individuals are supposed to be "liberated" from predetermined qualities and roles, like those relating to our sex. And so Prager likes the way that most women now put their primary focus on a "self-determining" career role rather than "predetermined" roles relating to motherhood and family.

So far, so predictable. However, I have to give some credit to Prager for what happens next. Prager notes that things have moved exactly the way that Friedan wanted them to:

But a big and troubling thought hit me while reading the book. In the 56 years since "The Feminine Mystique" was published, every complaint Friedan made regarding the situation of the American woman has been addressed.

So women should be happy now, right? Prager is honest enough to admit that they are not happy. Far from it:

Yet, if you were to listen to many American women today, you would think nothing has improved. Every women's group and millions of individual women say women are "oppressed" despite the fact that virtually nothing remains of the "feminine mystique" described by Friedan.

Prager is aware of the anxiety and depression epidemic among women:

In fact, women today, including young women, who lead lives the very opposite of those described in "The Feminine Mystique," are about twice as likely to be depressed as men. And that statistic is true for women across all economic, racial and ethnic groups.

So if society is progressing along liberal lines, but there is no improvement in happiness, what is a liberal to do? Again, I have to give Prager some credit for his response. Prager does something unusual for a liberal. He abandons blank slatism and wonders if there is not something within female nature that might cause women to be malcontent regardless of their social situation. If this is true, then women need to overcome an aspect of their own nature in order to develop into successful adulthood.

Here is how Prager defends his idea that women might more easily than men, as a part of their nature, fall into being malcontent:

This is no more an attack on women than describing men's nature as aggressive is an attack on men. Each sex has built-in issues that an individual has to overcome in order to develop into a mature and good person. Men have to deal with aggression and the sexual predatory aspect of male nature in order to develop into mature and good men. Women have to overcome the power of their emotions and their chronic malcontentedness in order to mature into good women. But in our disordered society — a society that has rejected wisdom — in raising their children, two generations of Americans have told only their sons, not their daughters, that they had to fight their nature. The feminization of society has brought with it the destructive notion that only males have to suppress their nature. Feminists really believe females are superior, so why would women have to fight any aspect of their inherently beautiful nature?

I disagree with Prager on most things, but this is exceptionally well put. The only thing he leaves out is the reason why generations of women have been told that they don't need to regulate aspects of their nature. It's not just that female nature has been held to be superior to male nature. It's also a consequence of liberalism itself. If what matters is that I am autonomous, then I should be free to self-determine who I am and what I do, which means that I should not be limited by any ideas about an inborn nature, and which also means that I should be free to act on my own desires, no matter what they are, unless this interferes directly with others doing the same. That has been the logic of Western culture for some time.

It's great that Prager, as a liberal, has stepped back from this. In a sense, Prager is now setting objective standards, standards that represent an ordered personhood, standards that demonstrate both goodness and maturity. A community needs to do this, and to get as close as possible to the truth of this, if it wants to flourish.

The next step for Prager would be to consider not only the flaws within female nature to be overcome, but also the positive aspects of female nature that connect a woman to a higher, meaningful good that she can embody in her life and that she might therefore seek to cultivate.

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 tale of two women

This is a story of two young attractive women. Their lives have gone in very different directions because they have adopted such different life philosophies.

The first woman is Chidera Eggerue. She is of Nigerian descent and lives in the UK. Here is one of her recent tweets:

As you can see, Chidera has bought into a left liberal world view. She believes that the reason we don't have freedom and equality is that there is a power structure ("patriarchy") which only exists because one group of people, men, wanted to exploit another group, women.

This left-liberal belief goes back a long way. The power structure identified as being responsible for the world's ills changes over time. It was once thought to be the aristocratic order, then the bourgeois one, and is now a combination of whiteness and maleness. I've written about its earlier forms here.

What I'd briefly like to point out is one of the consequences of believing in "patriarchy theory". If you are a woman and you believe that throughout human history men have organised to exploit you, then what will you think about men, marriage and relationships? Inevitably, at least some of the women holding these ideas are going to lose a sense of warm, positive regard for men.

Chidera Eggerue

It's therefore not surprising that Chidera has become an advocate for the single life. She has written a book titled What A Time To Be Alone which has the following blurb:

In What A Time To Be Alone, The Slumflower [Chidera] will be your life guru, confidante and best friend. She’ll show you that being alone is not just okay: it’s just about the best freaking thing that’s ever happened to you.

Unsurprisingly the book also has the basic liberal message that what matters is our autonomy - our freedom to be self-determining individuals. A review of the book describes it as having:

a message of self-determination outlining that any woman can be who she wants to be

The second woman, Caitlin Huber, lives in the American Midwest. Her life philosophy is very different to Chidera's. She is a Christian with a more traditional outlook of cultivating feminine character.

Caitlin Huber

In her description of how she tries to live her faith she includes this:

4. Guarding My Mind & Spirit

I actively try to guard my mind and spirit from negative influences: this may sound a little "woo-woo" but hear me out. Scripture calls us to think about things that are "lovely and noble."

And in a post on cultivating feminine character:

A strong and beautiful character does not happen overnight however; it must be nurtured over a lifetime. As we nurture our character, we can lean into our naturally feminine traits and instincts to further cultivate femininity.

...We instinctively have the ability to nurture as women, but that does not mean a strong character will not help us nurture BETTER. In fact, a character rich in the virtues of discipline, kindness, faithfulness, and loyalty will allow us to nurture more effectively than one lacking in character altogether.

...The character is what we can fall back on when times are tough. Character helps us get through tough situations and moral conundrums. Good character built upon solid morals helps us make life-giving decisions so that we can live a stable, and positive life, fit and ready to nurture those around us and ourselves.

Character is different than your "Heart"

I see a ton of Women's ministries focused on our "hearts." We try to nurture our hearts, listen to our hearts, follow our hearts, and speak from the heart.

This advice has good intentions, but part of the problem is that hearts are wishy-washy. They are prone to emotional ups and downs, frivolous desires, constant confusion, and weakness. The heart should be relied upon sometimes in life, but I think that if you are going to put a ton of energy into nurturing anything in your life, let it be your character.

...Character can be created, nurtured, and forged through adversity, pain, and discipline. Through choosing the right way, the moral way, and the strong way, we will be able to forge strong character, and in turn, live effective, successful, and beautiful lives.

What can we say about this philosophy? First, it is not premised on a sense of being wronged by men. Therefore it is not surprising that Caitlin is married and looking forward to having children. Her tweets often describe the simple satisfactions of a happy domestic life:

Second, Caitlin's philosophy is a good example of what we might return to if we could only discard the influence of liberalism on our culture. Not being ruled by a liberal philosophy, Caitlin can freely accept that she has a distinct nature as a woman, one that has important virtues attached to it, that a woman will rightly seek to cultivate. She is also free to live by the standards that were once so much a part of the Western tradition, including orienting herself to the more noble aspects of character, as well as to what is lovely within womanhood.

Chidera's liberalism is a civilisational dead-end. It leads logically to solo development, rather than to family formation. It drives a wedge between men and women. It does not recognise the goods of personal character as this would limit choice - it emphasises instead that we be non-judgemental, even toward ourselves ("self-acceptance"). It preaches empowerment, but this only really means getting to follow any impulse or desire, no matter what it is.

Liberalism is unfortunately very deeply embedded in the minds of many Western men. It's not an easy thing to purge from our society. I would appeal, though, to any young men reading this to consider what is at stake, not just for the West, but for their own personal lives. If we were to jettison liberalism, and encourage women to cultivate feminine character, would we not have a better chance at living fulfilling personal lives, as husbands and fathers within a family?

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 trad women

The trad women phenomenon on Twitter continues to grow. A small sample:

This is a return to a cultivation of virtue for women. It seems to follow a certain process:

1. An aim of being a good wife and mother.

2. A recognition that there are aspects of female nature that need to be overcome to secure this aim.

3. A commitment to actively practise more positive behaviours.

This is one necessary part of the way a society solves its problems, is it not?

When Wonder Woman goes SJW

The image below is from a recent Wonder Woman (issue 30) comic book (you might have to click on it twice to make it legible):

One part of our culture is still tumbling leftward. The "bad guy" in the comic is standing up for an ideal of women as feminine and sweet and he also opposes the disempowerment of men. The rainbow coalition opposing him complain that this is "mansplaining" and one of the women punishes him for this by punching him in the face.

I was curious as to who might have written something like this. The writer credited with the story is Shea Fontana. She has a Twitter account which gives you some idea of her personality:

Clearly, Shea is nothing like a tough Amazonian warrior. From reading her Twitter feed she seems to be very much oriented to a feminine world of children, pets, home, fashion, and things which appeal to her as being cute.

And yet she wrote a comic book story in which the man who defends this aspect of womanhood gets beaten up as a "mansplainer".

So there is a disjuncture here between the person she really is and the views that she promotes in her work. It seems that you can be a feminine woman in your personal life, but publicly you must defend the "wonder woman" ethos of tough, independent warrior woman.

I will simply point out that this is another fail within liberal culture. The one thing that liberalism promises is that you can "be who you want to be" but the reality is that there are things you are supposed to be in a liberal culture that individuals are under significant pressure to assent to. And in such a culture you are not supposed to be a feminine woman or a masculine man (as you are not supposed to follow predetermined sex roles).

It seems to me to be a low act to promote to young girls a view of womanhood that you yourself do not, and would not, choose to follow in your own private life.

When women reject a higher nature, what takes over?

In my last post I drew a distinction between elevated and base aspects of womanhood. The elevated aspect is inspiring to men and is associated with feminine virtue:

Men who only see women spiritually as elevated creatures are at risk of becoming "white knights" who hold men alone as responsible for problems within the family. They aren't likely to understand the civilisational effort that is needed to keep women from falling down toward their baser nature.

I mentioned in my last post some of the characteristics that can make female behaviour petty, unstable and destructive. First, women's emotions can slide easily along several horizontal axes, one of which has "fun" at one end and "bored" at the other; another with "love" at one end and "hate" at the other. Women tend more than men to have an external locus of control, believing that what happens to them is the result of cosmic forces that have to be divined.

By chance, soon after writing this post I came across the columns of Karley Sciortino, who writes for Vogue. She is someone who has given herself over to these baser qualities of womanhood to an unusual degree, so she illustrates where the "liberated woman" (i.e. a woman "liberated" from traditionally feminine virtues) will finally arrive.

The purpose of writing this is twofold: first, to encourage women to cultivate virtue and, second, to persuade men that it can't just be left to chance that women will be formed successfully for marriage and motherhood - that this requires the culture to push in whatever way it can toward the virtues.

At first, it seems as if Karley does not prove my point about women externalising. In my first post I asserted:

...women tend to externalise. In their experience, they are acted upon by external forces, so that they don't "own" their personal emotional states. These states happen to them, in ways difficult to understand, perhaps brought about by cosmic forces they cannot control.

...most modern women still give some credence to various forms of fortune telling such as tarot cards. Even highly educated, professional women will use spells or magic to try to ward off "negative energies" that exert a baleful influence over them. Some women still go to fortune tellers to help them make major life decisions, such are those relating to marriage or divorce.

If you read Karley Sciortino's columns they are analytical and self-reflective and therefore disprove my point - until, that is, you read Karley's descriptions of her own female peers:

...even in notoriously skeptical New York, it’s increasingly difficult to find someone who doesn’t believe that some magical cosmic force is dictating everything from subway timing to whether or not they’re getting laid.

And I note too that she is not above dabbling in such matters herself: one of her columns is titled "Can a shaman cure my fear of normalcy?"

What really stands out in Karley Sciortino's writing is her fear of sliding along that axis from fun to boredom. It has been her ruin:

Last weekend, I found myself sitting in front of a shaman in a mansion in Berkeley, talking about my commitment problems. You know, cliché white people stuff. “I have this fear,” I told the shaman, “that I’m going to wake up one day with a husband, two kids, a house in the suburbs, and wonder how I got there, as if it’s my destiny. So to avoid it, I continually destroy my relationships at the first sign they’re headed in that direction.”

...In the past, once a relationship began to feel routine, I cheated...Basically, as soon as something feels stable, I sabotage it. I’ve often thought this impulse stems from my super-white-bread, middle-class upbringing: I grew up in a small town with married parents who loved each other. It felt safe but not interesting, and I’ve spent my life fighting that fate.

She is worried that she will be bored by marital love, motherhood and security and so sabotages her relationships. She also finds virtue in men boring. She explains that she goes for men who are sexually uninhibited because:

the goal is certainly to live a life full of intense and new experiences. And if you prioritize thrill and excitement over security, then a hedonist is the right choice.

And that,

Every time a relationship with a different sex maniac comes to a fiery end, I have the same thought: “This time I’m going to date someone nice, who’s never even once been accused of sexual harassment.” Every time I say it to myself in this really self-congratulatory way, like I’ve just discovered the cure for cancer. But then, without fail, when I start dating one of these nice, in-control people, within two weeks I want to kill myself. It’s hard to get off on virtue alone.

And what about pettiness? This is how Karley Sciortino filters men:

Essentially, we are far more discriminating in our 30s than we were in our 20s, which is both a blessing and a curse. We know more about what we want and what we won’t tolerate—but to a point where almost no one is good enough. I find myself having thoughts like, “I could never date him, he wears V-necks.” Or, “He was nice, but he sleeps in a mezzanine bed.” And this perpetual dissatisfaction is especially true in New York, where inflated egos are paired with incredibly high standards and the illusion of infinite choice. That cliché of thinking “someone better might be just around the corner” is real.

Karley also fits everything that the red pill sites say about the modern girl lifestyle. She rode the carousel during her 20s, but now that she is in her early 30s is worried that she has hit the wall. She has written a whole column explaining her change of heart, which includes this:

...it’s not just that being single suddenly feels alienating in your 30s. It’s also that dating itself becomes more difficult. For one, the stakes are higher. You don’t want to waste your time on someone who doesn’t feel like they could be “the one.” But simultaneously, thinking “would he make a good dad?” after knowing someone for the duration of a martini makes you feel like an insane, rom-com cliché of a woman. Not ideal.

...The catch is, as we become increasingly picky, the pool of soul mates keeps getting smaller. Here’s another 30s development: Now, when I meet a cute guy, he’s often already married...

But after so long with so many men she is, by her own admission, very jaded. She writes that she has given up on meeting a hotter circle of men and is finally thinking of settling. She writes:

Now, being jaded doesn’t simply mean that you’re “over it.” It’s more that you’ve become sick and tired after overindulging in something. And I’m pretty sure that my current state is the result of binge-eating on sex and relationships for the past 15 years. Some of the telltale signs include: Being around cheery, optimistic people makes me nauseous...I often swipe through Tinder in front of my friends, sighing unnecessarily loudly and saying things like, “See, this is what I have to choose from!”...When I see engagement notifications on Facebook, I think, She must have settled. (Or, if I’m in a particularly bad mood: She just ruined her life.)

It’s gotten to the point where I’ve pretty much convinced myself that my options are either to be single forever or eventually be like, “Eh, you’ll do.”...But even if you know you’re jaded, that doesn’t mean you have the power to control it.

Would you really want your son to be the man who ends up marrying this woman? Is this woman likely to successfully pair bond? Is it not likely that she will see her future husband as a beta male she settled for and who will therefore always be on the back foot trying to please her? Is it not likely she will want to go back to the thrill of the low-virtue, uninhibited men she spent her formative years with?

It is true, no doubt, that Karley Sciortino has pushed the "liberated" girl lifestyle further than others, but her mindset illustrates what is possible, negatively, within the nature of women. Does anyone believe that you can form stable marriages from this kind of lifestyle? Or maintain a civilisation?

It is wrong to disregard the choices women make, or to think that it is only masculine virtue that counts. Women have to be drawn to a standard of virtue - this is something basic to family formation, to the possibility of marital love, to a society successfully reproducing itself, and to men being inspired to defend their own tradition.