Some have disagreed with my previous post, both in the comments and on their blogs. The jist of common objections are:
Women have the power of supplying willing, enthusiastic sex.
Only a Godly woman, submitted to a man with Godly masculinity, will be able to resist. His masculinity will appeal to her flesh, he will be put in authority by God, and hr will derive his direct power from God in the same way she will derive her indirect power from the same source. She will magnify everything in that household to be more as her husband and more as God, and the same in the community.
It overlooks the realm of indirect/private/influence power.
Now these are not wrong, a woman does have power in her private sphere: she has power to influence her husband, power to inculcate values in her children, and power to otherwise influence her local community and personal relationships.* I even briefly mentioned this in my original post: “Women do have a specific power: women are wonderful.” But this power is irrelevant to the discussion as women’s power lies in the realm of individual private relationships.
On the other hand, men’s power lies in the realm of hierarchical public organizations, although, they can bring their power to bear in the private sphere as well.
That is why I specified that women as a class are powerless. A class can only exist in the public realm and women’s power does not transfer into the public realm unless men allow it to and support it. (This does not mean that women’s power if meaningless or non-existent, only that it does not exist in the public realm).
In the private realm, emotions and personal relationships rule. Where harmonious relationships are paramount power can come in many forms as emotional and spiritual violence, the kinds of violence women excel at, are just as effective against individuals as physical violence and the use of physical violence is often destructive to harmonious personal relationships.
In the public realm, where personal relationships are superseded by hierarchical and organizational ones, physical violence is power and power is physical violence, however well-hidden the violence may be. Spiritual and emotional violence are useless as as they can only truly work against isolated individuals or family units, not tribes or thedes. In the public realm, even when public power may come from authority, legitimacy, expertise, tradition, at heart it still flows from physical violence or the implication thereof. Democracy is bloodless war, public policy is coercive confiscation, redistribution, and regulation, authority derives from implied violence, and legitimacy derives from being a part of a hierarchy backed by violence. In our modern society, violence is mostly implied and hidden behind many layers of bureaucracy, but the system still rests on it.**
And women, as a class, are not capable of violence. They can not, as a class, have power in the public sphere that is not given them by men.
In the public realm there is know balance of power between the patriarchy and the matriarchy, there is only a power balance between civilized men and uncivilized men, and the women belonging to either group.
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Why do you think feminists try to make the personal political?
If feminists could succeed at extending the personal realm into the public realm, to have it annex the public realm, women would be able to exert far more power over the public realm through their power in the private realm.
Of course, the personal can not be made political, you can not have individual private relationships with more than about 150 people, let alone millions. It is impossible for the private realm to conquer the public realm, but the public realm can conquer the private realm, so when trying to mix the two the public realm always comes out on top. This is why feminism always ends in bureaucracy. This is why leftism, however pro-anarchy it may be, always ends in bureaucracy.
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This separation of public and private power makes a case for extreme subsidiarity. If most political decision making is devolved to the Dunbar level, the private realm could conquer the public realm, and we could have a political structure that does not fundamentally rest on violence. This is called tribalism.
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As for sex explicitly, there is nothing women could do if men decided to take it forcefully. Thankfully, due to the Christian civilization feminists are intent on destroying, most men have been inculcated with values that are in opposition to rape. While women’s love might be a strong private force, I’m fairly sure that if civilized Christian values stopped being indoctrinated into children from a young age, most men would not be as adverse to rape as a few of the commenters think they are.
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As for female serial killers: as I said, “There is a .01% of women capable of physically matching the average man. This is not significant.” Some women are outside the norm, that doesn’t mean anything to women as a class.
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* I should mention that even here, those powers exist only because the stronger men in her life allow them to women. Men could easily take them away, making those powers dependent on men.
** This is not necessarily a moral judgment; morally legitimate violence is necessary for any polity. Also, for those wanting to get metaphysical on my use of morality here, God is good because God is powerful.
Following up my comment from last thread, and seconding Alan Perick’s comment there. Your thesis is right on the money. It cuts the Gordian knot.
I am much impressed both by this and the previous essay and indeed the comments to the previous essay.
Can it be summed up as – this is not original – ‘the only power that women have comes from men; the only people they use that power against are men’. Doctor Johnson’s observation that nature having endowed women with certain power the law was wise to deprive women of further power, seems apposite.
Women as a class are powerless because if all men did not go to work tomorrow the world would collapse in one hour – imagine no power or water – and soon, no food.
If women did not go to work tomorrow, in many ways the world would get better. The worst would probably be the lack of nurses, which would be fatal for some.
But not society.
FN,
This is a good clarification, but I hope readers don’t miss the point of your initial blog:
There are men in the public sphere using women through feminism to further their own power, not to help women.
Please continue to elaborate on this and ignore the “rabbit hole” debate over women’s power.
The real power of violence isn’t in the pain, it’s the implication it can escalate to the point of death. If you’re not willing to bring your violence to a final conclusion, it’s nothing more than a bluff, and all power is lost. The Mao quote in your last post mentioned political power and the barrel of a gun… not a clenched fist or bullwhip, but a gun. Mao recognized the final conclusion of violence, because that’s the only path to control. And even then, the control is only temporary. Every despotic or violent regime in history eventually failed. A 100% success rate in failure.
You know God has an interest in this game. You know male and female are two parts of the same whole. You know neither sex will be able to (nor want to) bring submission to the other. The big horn sheep does not use it great horns against the head of the doe, to bring her to heel for his harem. He never has and never will, and she knows this. Women know this too. Love isn’t a theory. I don’t mean romantic love, I mean the unconditional love with lies within all things, that stops mankind from making a funeral pyre of the entire planet.
As a class, men won’t exercise their full power with violence. As you’ve said, women as a class are not capable. Which is fair, because the end goal was never about checkmate.
Working on a long, in depth response.
However, the brief one is that you are arguing that, because the nature of direct power in relation to indirect power allows direct power to override the indirect; indirect power is actually nonexistent.
This is false.
Just because direct power can force indirect power to change its course does not mean the power vanishes, simply that it works within different constraints and situations.
Your definition of power is to force change upon the world. Which is a very male definition.
The female, and indirect method, is to make the world desire to change and help it do so.
The complete definition is thus:
To have powet is to have the ability to be involved in changing the world with any method available to you.
Chad is onto something here.
The key flaw in this whole discussion is that “power” is being defined in terms of what men think power is, and what men consider victory.
But victory is harder to define when you don’t consider the motivations of your adversary.
When a wife goads her husband into an argument, but he ends up prevailing, but is angry and frustrated, that may have been the wife’s goal all along – destabilize his mood.
You can’t know ultimately define power until you can define a desired outcome, and there is where it gets tricky. Even if men banded together one and all to completely bring females under control, the wiliness of the female sex would find some way to take advantage of the situation.
It is so easy to think that women behave irrationally, until you bring yourself to the point of saying “what if, based on her perceptions, he actions are wholly rational?”
Women make this same fundamental error when they look at a MGTOW and decide that he is a “failure”, or decide that a man who quits a high-stress job to become a surf bum is a failure or a loser. Yeah, but if every day he wakes up happy, and does exactly what he wants, how is that failure?
There is NO POINT to power unless you can identify a goal toward which that power is focused.
So you have to more clearly understand what an individual’s motives and goals are before you can decide what kind of power they have.
If you want to define power in terms of physical power, then yes, male capacity for violence puts men at the top of the power ladder in the physical domain. But is that really all there is?
Jack, I would say you’re inserting a goal as a qualifying trait is still too narrow. For that brings into question whether one must be wise to have power, which I would say is no. A thug with a gun has power and uses it thoughtlessly. A thug with a gun and wisdom can further use power by controlling a gang, but that doesnt mean the first thug has no power.
Changing the world is the only definition of power in this world.
And then there is God, and his eternal love, which can, will, and does exert iteself on this world and will ultimately conquer it and the next.
Compared to that, we all are using indirect power, as all our strength comes from God.
And these are the mere surface of His mysteries
There is probably a natural limit protecting women from the violence of men; one constraint might be their value to their husband and his family. A history of Rome reveals an early practice of the wife being purchased from her father by the husband, her status no higher than her children, and her inheritance or wealth belonging to her husband. As Rome prospered, the status of women became closer to that of men. The power of men to inflict violence is used more to protect women than harm them. Fathers, brothers and uncles are (were in some places) the first line of defense for daughters, sisters and nieces. Today, there has been an attack on this defensive system, probably by men who never learned to effectively use this power to protect themselves or their women.
A wife’s nagging is the power to kill.
Peter Blood-
Ooo, that’s good. Female disapproval is power stuff for most men.
“Peter Blood”
A lot of men are marrying later, not at all, or even un-marrying (divorcing). What of that? Are you implying that men are, therefore, losing more of their power?
A lot of White Knights appearing… Probably they are here to troll, though. No matter, the kind of theorising that “Free Northerner” does is only really useful when men start co-operating for higher goals (such Ethno-Nationalism). Women aren’t useful in strategic politics as either politicians or the goal. Women’s power is making babies and controlling betas. Controlling betas could be a goal of politics, though, so the way to do this to get the alphas to create a winning society which happens to be attractive to women who then control the betas who make up the bulk of the society.
A lot of White Knights appearing…
projection.txt
Probably they are here to troll…
concerntroll.txt
The gaggle of giggling geese…
“Women have the power of supplying willing, enthusiastic sex.’
This works on men controlled by willing, enthusiastic sex – the typical Western male – whichever Greek letter he calls himself.
However, in times of war, great hardship, or whenever a man has a higher goal than female approval – then men take this power back.
If they are non-violent, they ignore silly women, and not suck up to them.
If they are violent, they capture, rape and kill the stubborn ones to keep the rest in line.