We come to a third edition of the topic of women and power. Both Donal and Chad have responded with criticisms, so I’ll respond.
Donal’s response is, as he admits, somewhat unordered and incoherent, but essentially he denies that men act as a class and states that modern weaponry has lowered the power differentials between men and women.
Chad’s response is wrapped in parable. I’ve never been too good with allegory and as of my writing this I don’t think he’s done yet, but from my understanding he’s likening men to land and women to water. The land shapes the environment and guides and controls the water, but the water flows where it flows within the framework the land has shaped and has the power to either destroy the land or make it bountiful.
From these, I don’t think we disagree as much as my critics think we do.
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First, on the nature of power:
The female, and indirect method, is to make the world desire to change and help it do so.
I think many of my critics are missing or misunderstanding a critical piece:
any power [women] may display is simply proxy power given them by men.
They can not, as a class, have power in the public sphere that is not given them by men.
So maybe I should restate a little: women as a class do not have any inherent public/political power.
Women do have political/public power but only that given them or supported by men. Indirect power, the power the make the world desire to change and to help change is only effective when men give them men’s power to effect that change.
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Second, we will go more into the nature of the public and private realms:
Oh, and another thing: the personal is the political, at least in the sense that political power is heavily influence by personal and private spheres of power. As anyone who has worked in the political field knows, politics is largely about managing personal connections and networks of like-minded people.
Donal seems to be misunderstanding what I meant, which is understandable as I didn’t explicitly state or link to some background assumptions:
In the public realm, where personal relationships are superseded by hierarchical and organizational ones, physical violence is power and power is physical violence,
The Way of Men has more on this, but men exist in a world of function-based, hierarchical organizations, ie. public organizations, while women exist in a world of one-on-one personal relationships. The former does not eliminate personal connections or friendships, but rather changes the nature of them: the personal relationships and networks exist in a framework where function, shared virtue, and ability towards a shared goal are the measures of judgment rather than emotional closeness, non-judgmentalism, and acceptance.
To explain what I mean, think of the playground. Boys generally self-organize into large group activities, such as soccer, where most other boys are allowed to join as they will (except maybe the occasional incompetent or nerd). Girls generally break up into pairs. This doesn’t mean the boys playing soccer don’t have personal relationships, but that the relationships exist in a public, hierarchical, function-based environment, the soccer team, and are superseded by a higher value, winning the game. Politics is playground soccer on a grand scale. The management of personal relationships and networks in such a public system is different than that in a private system, such as the family.
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Finally, on women and men as a class.
Speaking of unified displays of male strength, I think that it should be noted that men rarely act together as a “class.” It isn’t how we are wired. There isn’t really a Team Man counterpart to Team Woman. So any argument founded on a notion that men can overcome women “as a class” fails as a foundational matter.
This misses the entire point of my argument. There is no ‘overcoming women’. There is no war between men and women, to think there is a class war based on sex is to fully adopt the neo-marxist foundations of feminism. To think there is a power conflict between men and women is to lose the ideological war entirely before it even begins. If we accept a sexual class struggle exists, we might as well give up now and enjoy the decline because we’ve already accepted the enemy’s frame and joined him.
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Here we get to the main point I’m trying to make:
Men and women are not enemies and are not in competition, they are naturally made to complement each other. Women are naturally creatures of the private sphere, men are naturally creatures of the public sphere and the social arrangement of men and women, often referred to as patriarchy, of each tending to own their sphere works fantastically well for both men and women. Women have no inherent public political power because their inherent power rests in the private sphere, the sphere in which they are comfortable.
We do not have a competition between male power and female power, because the nature of their power is different. Rather we have a competition between one group of civilization-hating men and other groups of men, particularly white conservative males, in which women are but one group being used as weapons. Women are involved because the former group, using their control of cultural institutions, have managed to take the concerns of a small group of hurting, betrayed, broken, self-destructive, and/or high-testosterone women and elevate them to a class struggle in which most of the class does not share the small groups concerns and does not want to fight and most of those that do want to are primarily doing so because they have been lied to and the struggle is just the accepted environment in which they live.
The war is against that group of civilization-hating men. Feminists are the symptom of entropy not the disease. If we want to start winning we have to avoid mistaking the leaves for the roots.
I hope you don’t mind if I take my time again to respond to this post FN. I want this next post to be a bit more coherent.
Women are involved because the former group, using their control of cultural institutions, have managed to take the concerns of a small group of hurting, betrayed, broken, self-destructive, and/or high-testosterone women and elevate them to a class struggle in which most of the class does not share the small groups concerns and does not want to fight and most of those that do want to are primarily doing so because they have been lied to and the struggle is just the accepted environment in which they live.
The problem with this is that nearly half of women are willing to fight such a war. Of course, they can never win, because men prefer to withdraw rather than fight with women. That does not mean that women are not fighting, and for all that their power is borrowed, they are putting it to devastating use.
The Shadowed Knight
You’re correct in that I’m not done yet. I had a surgery on Tuesday and simply can’t focus enough while on pain meds to get it done. Hoping to knock it out tomorrow.
This post has certainly given me some to think on. I think we still disagree, but not as much as I originally believed. We’ll see
A woman only has the power you concede to her. Unfortunately you guys want to give her an insane amount of power
FN,
I think you’ve started something important with this discourse.
The only thing I would add a point of emphasis that gets lost even though you have dealt with it often. Western Christianity was the first world movement fundamentally built on the idea of one man and one woman as a family unit. From that unit, modern societies were built.
This was significant because up until then humans had congregated more like animals with one alpha male breeding with multiple females (see Genghis Khan). Throw in the female Original Sin nature to want to challenge male dominance, and you have the recipe for what we deal with now.
Men who want to enjoy the fruits of having many, many women are in favor of feminism because it ultimately gets them their harem of women. Women are too blind to see this is the goal because of their nature. They are too focused on the selfish opportunities feminism might get them, and they will not see what they lose in the process.
To give a perfect example of how feminism helps powerful men who want the moral shackles of Christianity removed, read this section of an interview with this extremely frightening, but logical feminist. (I say logical because she admits that getting rid of most men is the logical result of feminism.) She wishes to reduce the male population so that the world is 90% female and 10% male. Here is her explanation:
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VICE: I assume The Ratio refers to your belief the male population should be reduced to between by 90 percent.
The Femitheist: I believe that conventional equality, with a 50/50 female-to-male ratio, is an inferior system. Essentially my ideas lead to men being made a special class—a far more valued class—having choice of a myriad of women due to the difference in sex ratio. That is my intention. Men would be made more valuable, and their quality of life would be dramatically improved. They would have a subsidised existence if you will, akin to going on an all-expenses paid vacation that lasts from birth to death.
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Even while expressing her wish to eradicate most males from the face of the earth, this feminist wants there to be a special class of men who are to breed with the women, etc. This explains why feminists love Bill Clinton types. Many women would in theory prefer a system with fewer men, but more dominant men.
This shows that the real issue for women, something that has never changed since Genesis, is that women don’t like the idea of submitting to any man they might find inferior to them. This is their nature. (Of course, women will ultimately find any man inferior to them, but they always believe there is a richer more powerful man out there. It is their nature not to be satisfied.)
Of course, there are many things in human nature (murder, rape, etc) that Christian morality tries to control for good reason. A society founded on strong Christian marriages and families should work against the female nature. Feminism is just another way of destroying Christian societal foundations. So is gay marriage, easy divorce, etc.
As you point out, this isn’t a fight between men and women. It is a fight between Christian men and men who wish Christianity to go away since it interferes with their worldly desires. Women are pawns as are many men including White Knights, PUAs, and the men that follow either movement.
As you point out, men are hierarchical. We create systems and rules. We can either create and support systems and rules that help men thereby helping the family unit, or we can create systems that reward a few powerful men.
As you pointed out, Progressives are absolutely open about their goals. They believe in the rule of the elite over the masses. All of the philosophies that lead to progressivism (Marxism, feminism, etc) are merely Trojan Horses for this goal. They are also always anti-Christian.
This means it is the age-old fight between those who worship God and those who worship this world.
PS thanks for linking to your piece “MGTOW, MRA, and the Long March”. It is excellent.
Why should she build a house when she get her hair done, put on some makeup and a nice dress, and move into yours?
The greater the civilization in terms of infrastructure (architecture, roads, water systems) the greater a society’s beta conditioning. Look at the history of sub-Sahara Africa or North American Indians before European interference. Grass and wood huts, deer skin teepees, no stone, concrete or metal infrastructures to maintain. This isn’t because they were idiots. As the old Indian Chief said to a white man in a bar, “Our men used to spend their whole days hunting and fishing. The women did all the cooking, cleaning and sewing. Sex was always available. We had no jobs, didn’t pay taxes or answer to anyone. Things were perfect until the white man came along.”
By your own article on Patriarchy: Restraining Males, the human male is this planet’s apex predator. His energy can be directed towards creation, destruction or hedonism, depending upon the incentives provided. A beta strong society provides incentive towards creation, to build and expand. Our planet today has about met its capacity to absorb expansion. We have roads, harbours, airports everywhere. There’s comfort in all time zones, at just about all latitudes. The PTB are now removing those incentives to build, shifting us globally towards destruction and hedonism. They’ve pressed the reset button for our entire species. A few hundred years from now our global population will be half. This is all by design.
We’re the apex predator. This is long range planning most would not consider possible nor even conceivable. Which is why the species has been so successful in the past.
I think of it in terms of “hard” and “structural” power, which is the province of men; and “soft” and “behind the scenes” power, which women exercise.
Also, women have “soft” power in that they control sexual access. Period, full stop. Women control almost completely when, where, with whom and under what circumstances sex happens.
Women have “behind the scenes” power through their intimate personal relationships, which they use to influence what happens in public spheres.
Men traditionally exercise power within male-created structures, through decisionmaking – earning and spending money, working. They determined the overall direction of social and corporate units – families, churches, businesses, political entities, etc. They determined laws and rules, the rewards for compliance, and the consequences for noncompliance. That’s the “hard” power I was talking about.
Power, or who, whom?
“Deti”
Think about it this way. Women, as a group, don’t have the power to change anything. That’s what F.N. is saying.
With regards to Chad’s analogy, does the Grand Canyon fall under this too? It may have taken a few million years, but the Colorado River was able to cut down a mountain range– the effects of which are lasting and observable.