Feminism – Maverick Philosopher

Universal Suffrage

I wrote, on 4 March,

The war is over the soul of America. The question concerns whether we should (i) preserve what remains of America as she was founded to be, and (ii) restore those good elements of the system bequeathed to us by the Founders, while (iii) preserving the legitimate progress that has been made (e.g. universal suffrage), OR whether we should replace the political system of the Founders with an incompatible system which can be described as culturally Marxist.

As I was writing clause (iii) I realized that some to my Right, people I consider friends, whose intellect and judgment I respect, and with whom I agree on many fundamentals, would take issue with my endorsement of universal suffrage. They are against it. Two points in response.

The first is that the 19th Amendment, ratified 18 August 1920, will never be overturned. The Amendment states, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." And so the question whether female citizens should have the right to vote, while of historical and theoretical interest, has no practical importance whatsoever.

The second point is that, even if it could be overturned, it ought not be. Now I concede to my friends on the Right that women as as a group are not as politically astute as men as a group. Their political judgment is inferior to that of men. This is a fact, and a fact is a fact whether you like it or not. We conservatives stand on the terra firma of a reality antecedent to human wishes and dreams.

What I have just asserted is enough to bring down the wrath of many feminists upon my head. They will hurl the 'sexist' epithet at me. And I will reply: It can't be sexist if it is true, and it is true. This is a special case of a general principle: It cannot be X-ist if it is true. Candidate substituends for the variable include 'age,' 'race,' 'species,' 'able,' and others. Particularly knuckleheaded is the accusation of 'ableism.'

I have said enough to establish my conservative bona fides.

Why shouldn't the 19th Amendment be overturned?

Yesterday, on C-SPAN, I watched Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) rake Christopher Wray, FBI Director, over the coals. She did a superb job, a job as good as any man could do. So I put the question to my friends on the Right: Do you think that Stefanik should not have the right to vote and participate in the political life of the country?

To nail down my point, here is a list, off the top of my head, in no particular order, of just a few females who are lot better politically than a lot of men I could mention:

Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo, K. T. McFarland, Tulsi Gabbard, Riley Gaines, Candace Owens, Mollie Hemingway, Tammy Bruce, Faulkner Harris, Diane West, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Heather MacDonald.

Will the friends to my Right dismiss these women as wholly unrepresentative outliers? Do they have arguments? What might they be?

The Eclipse of Sex by the Rise of Gender

Ponder this

“One Man’s Datum is Another Man’s Theory”

Why do I use 'man'? To exclude women? No, to exclude leftists, both men and women. I believe in equality when it comes to the exclusion of the destructive.

In the '70s, when it first really got going, gender-inclusive language seemed to many a very good thing indeed. It showed a welcoming attitude to the distaff contingent, a salutary openness, a gracious concession to those females who felt excluded by (what in fact are) gender-neutral uses of 'man' and 'he,' not to mention a praiseworthy recognition of the excellence of many women in many hitherto male-dominated fields. Gentlemen are considerate of the feelings of others even when said feelings are unsupported by reason. And surely it is true that some women are superior to some men in almost every field. And surely people should be evaluated as individuals on their merits.

It all started out with good intentions, and many conservatives went along with it, oblivious to the unforeseen consequences. But now, a half-century later, we see where it has led.

And so if I use the sex-neutral 'man' and 'he' and cognates, it is not because I am a knuckle-dragger, one who hails from the valley of Neander, but because I am a man of intelligence, discernment, and high culture, a member of the Coalition of the Reasonable, who is doing his tiny bit to resist and if possible reverse the subversion of our glorious alma mater, our fostering mother, the English language. I am resisting politicization, tribalism, and the weaponization of language. Can I ramp up my charge to the allegation that the Left is committing matricide against our dear mother? I'll essay this later.

For I say unto you my brothers and sisters, the subversion of language is propadeutic to the subversion of thought. The latter, I fear, is what our enemies intend, the thoughtless being the easier to rule and control.

A Note on Feminism and My Conservatism

Although I am a conservative, I am not a 'throne and altar' conservative. Nor am I the sort of conservative who thinks that everything traditional trumps everything newfangled. (The conservative's presumption in favor of the traditional is defeasible.) And of course it is silly to think that conservatives oppose change; it is just that we don't confuse change with change for the better.

Traditionally, women were wives and mothers whose place was said to be the home. (Either that, or they lived with their parents or entered a nunnery.) Now the traditional wife and mother role is a noble one, and difficult to fill properly, and I have nothing but contempt for the feminazis who denigrate it and denigrate those who instantiate it. May a crapload of obloquy be dumped upon their shrill and febrile pates. But surely women have a right to actualize and employ their talents to the full in whichever fields they are suited to enter, however male-dominated those fields have been hitherto. They must, however, be suited to enter those fields: no differential standards, no gender-norming, no reverse discrimination.

Simone Weil, Edith Stein, and Elizabeth Anscombe are wonderfully good philosophers, and much better than most male philosophers. I know their works well and consider them to be my superiors both intellectually and morally. (And I don't think anyone would accuse me of a lack of self-esteem.) It would have been a loss to all of us had these admirable lights been prevented from developing their talents and publishing their thoughts.

This makes me something of a liberal in an old and defensible sense. But I don't use 'liberal' to describe my views. 'Liberal' has suffered linguistic hijacking and now is, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable in sense from 'leftist.' Anyone who reads this site soon learns that one of my self-appointed tasks is to debunk the pernicious buncombe of the Left. As someone who maintains a balanced and reasonable position — does that sound a tad self-serving? — I am open to attack from the PC-whipped leftists and from the reactionary, ueber-traditionalist, 'throne and altar' conservatives. To my amusement, I have been attacked from the latter side as a 'raving liberal.' (I respond in the appropriately appellated Am I a Raving Liberal?)

So much for a brief indication of where I stand with respect to feminism.

Addendum

Having stuck up for the distaff contingent I must now express a certain distaste for their tendency toward tribalism, group-think, and identity-fetishization. Herewith, a congressional depiction thereof. I cannot recall whether this was SOTU 2020 or 2019:

Mary Midgley (1919 – 2018)

The Guardian reports,

Mary Midgley, who has died aged 99, was an important writer on ethics, the relations of humans and animals, our tendency to misconstrue science, and the role of myth and poetry.

Read it all.

The Telegraph obituary, behind a paywall, begins:

Mary Midgley, who has died aged 99, was one of Britain’s leading moral philosophers, though she was more effective in wielding philosophical objections to other people’s beliefs than promoting a coherent philosophical viewpoint of her own.

That's a bad sentence. Do you see why? Strike 'coherent' and it is just fine.

There are women in philosophy such as Midgley who are much better than many men. Why then female 'under-representation' in our discipline?

Here are excerpts from a longer piece which is sure to elicit the impotent rage of leftists:

Why are women 'under-represented' in philosophy? Because women as a group are not as good at it as men as a group, because women as a group are not as interested in it as men as a group, and because the feminine nature is conciliatory and averse to what they perceive as the aggressive, combative, and hostile aspects of philosophical dialectic. This is surely a large part, if not the whole, of the explanation, especially given the Affirmative Action advantage women have enjoyed over the past half a century.

The hostility often felt by women reflects something about the nature of philosophy, namely, that its very lifeblood is dialectic and argument. Argument can be conducted civilly, often is, and of course ought to be. But it still looks to the female nature as a sort of 'fighting,' a sublimated form of the physical combat that men are wont to engage in, even when dialectic at its best is no such thing. So there is something in the nature of philosophy and something about females that explains their 'under-representation.' Those are sneer quotes, by the way. Anyone with an ounce of philosophical intelligence can see that the word I am sneering at conflates the factual and the normative. Therefore it shouldn't be used without sneer quotes.

[. . .]

Anecdote. I once roomed with an analytic philosopher at a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute. I recall a remark he made about philosophical discussion: "If you are not willing to become a bit of an asshole about it, you are not taking it seriously." The guy was obnoxious, but he was right. In a serious discussion, things can get a little tense. The feminine nature shies away from contention and dispute.

If you deny that, then you have no knowledge of human nature and no experience of life. Ever wonder why women are 'over-represented' among realtors? It is because they excel men when it comes to conciliation and mediation. I don't mean this as a snarky put-down of the distaff contingent. I mean it as praise. And if females do not take it as praise are they not assuming the superiority of male virtues?

It is a non sequitur to think that if the Xs are 'under-represented' among the Ys, then the Xs must have been the victims of some unjust discrimination. Men are 'under-represented' among massage therapists, but the explanation is obvious and harmless: men like to have their naked bodies rubbed by women in dark rooms, but women feel uncomfortable having their naked bodies rubbed by men in dark rooms. It is not as if there is some sort of sexism, 'institutional' or individual, that keeps men out of massage therapy.

Blacks are 'over-represented' in the NFL and the NBA. Is that because of some racism 'institutional' or individual, that keeps whitey out? Of course not. Blacks are better than whites at football and basketball. Jews are just terrible. Chess is their athletics. Jews dominate in the chess world. Is that because the goyim have been suppressed? Is a Jewish conspiracy at work?

Does my talk of blacks and Jews make me a racist and an anti-Semite ? To a liberal-left dumb-ass, yes. For they are incapable of distinguishing between a statement whose content is race and a racist statement.

Madeleine Albright, Chief of the Tribal Females

"There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other." Thus Madeleine Albright, urging women to vote for Hillary because she's a woman.

Now there is a reason that stands up to sober scrutiny. That's on a level with someone's refusing to vote for Hillary because of her pant-suited thunder thighs.

Albright is the gas bag who also darkly hints at Trump's being a fascist. But she lacks the estrogen to come out and say it. Does she know the meaning of that word or is she just using it as a verbal cudgel in the typical way of the leftist?

Tribalism is on the rise among the distaff contingent and it is not a pretty sight. The tribally female Dems are "un-freaking-hinged" to borrow a creative adjective from Rod Dreher whose Progressive Tribalism Beats the War Drums I invite you to read.

Niall Ferguson on Christine Blasey Ford and #MeToo

Well worth reading. Especially this:

The #MeToo movement is revolutionary feminism. Like all revolutionary movements, it favors summary justice. Since April 2017, more than 200 men have been publicly accused of some form of sexual offense, ranging from rape to inappropriate language. A few of these men seem likely to have committed crimes and are being prosecuted accordingly — notably the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. But #MeToo seems to have created a single catch-all crime, in which rape, assault, clumsy passes, and banter are elided into one.

With a few exceptions, reputations have been destroyed and careers ended without due process. "I believe her" are the fateful words that, if uttered by enough people, perform the roles of judge and jury.

Sexual harassment is bad, no question. And yet a much bigger threat to women's rights is largely ignored by Western feminists. As my wife likes to point out, verse 2:282 of the Koran states that a woman's testimony is worth only half of a man's testimony in court. (Some people want the opposite to apply in Ford v. Kavanaugh.) Wherever sharia law is imposed — from the armed camps of Boko Haram or ISIS to the sharia courts found in most Muslim-majority countries — it is women who lose out. Do Senate Democrats care? No. When my wife testified on this subject last year, they literally ignored her.

Read it all. I mean it. It gets even better! If you've seen Ferguson in action on C-Span or on Fox you know he is tops — assuming you have my level of good judgment.

The Left eats its own: pink pussyhats are now ‘racist’

But of course! First, not all 'women' sport pussies. Second, not all female genitalia are pink.

The second point presupposes that race and skin color are the same, which is demonstrably not the case; that, however, is a serious point upon which I shall expatiate in a rather more serious offering. Here I am engaged in the Alinskyite task of mocking the willful stupidity of leftists.

There is also the irony of protesting an alleged presidential pussy-grabber by parading around like an idiot in a hat that ramps up the vulgarity a couple of orders of magnitude. I'm thinking of you, Madonna. This is the Women's Movement brought to fruition?

Welcome to the Decline of the West brought to you by the Left.

One good thing about leftists, though, is that they eat their own. They seem bent on their own destruction as they drift ever farther leftward. Contemporary Dems are an example. It wasn't so long ago that they took a reasonable line on illegal immigration. (Whether Clinton, Obama, and their ilk actually believed what they preached is a further question.) Now the Dems support open borders. We of the Coalition of the Sane, trusting in the basic sanity of most Americans, hope they become as unelectable as Libertarians, the perennial losertarians of American politics.

Story here.

Related: Camille Paglia on Pussy Hats

Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained

The 'pro-choice' movement, to use the polite euphemism, is fueled by concupiscence. Not entirely, of course. To what extent, then?

One naturally wants the pleasures of sexual intercourse without any consequences. One seeks cost-free indulgence in the most intense sensuous pleasure known to man. Unrestricted abortion on demand is a convenient remedy to an inconvenient pregnancy should other birth-control methods fail. Combine the following: a fallen being, a powerful drive, advanced birth-control and abortion technology, the ever-increasing irrelevance of religion and its moral strictures, 24-7 sex-saturation via omni-invasive popular media – combine them, and the arguments against the morality of abortion come too late. As good as they are in themselves, they are impotent against the onslaught of the factors mentioned.

It's always been that reason is reliably suborned by passion; it's just that now the subornation is quicker and easier.

And then there is the feminist angle. Having come into their own in other arenas, which is good, women are eager to throw off the remaining shackles of family and pregnancy. They insist on their rights, including reproductive rights. And isn't the right to an abortion just another reproductive right? Well, no it isn't; but the sexual itch in synergy with emancipatory zeal is sure to blind people to any arguments to the contrary. (That there are some reproductive rights I take for granted.)

And now for a little paradox. Sexual emancipation 'empowers' women. But in a sex- and power-obsessed society this 'empowerment' also empowers men by increasing the cost-free availability of women to male sexual exploitation. Enter the 'hook-up,' the name of which is a perfect phrase, hydraulic in its resonance, for the substitution of impersonal fluid-exchange for the embodiment of personal love.

It is no surprise that men with money and power who operate in enclaves of like-minded worldings take full advantage of the quarry on offer. But lust like other vices is hard to control once it is given free rein. And so the depradations of Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer and a hundred others is the natural upshot.

Women rightly push back but too many veer to the extreme of #metoo.

The result is a strange blend of sexual licentiousness-cum-sanctimony.

A lefty will say that I preaching, posturing, moralizing. But for a lefty all moral judgment is moralizing, except when they do it not knowing what they do; and all preaching is hypocritical, except when they do it.

But don't ever expect to get through to benighted people whose will to power has so suppressed their will to truth that they cannot look into the mirror and see themselves.

Related:

The Role of Concupiscence

Ohne Fleiß Kein Preis

The Role of Concupiscence in the Politics of the Day

Shakespeare on Lust

Was Hefner a Condition of the Possibility of Post-’60s Feminism?

Damon Linker:

By mainstreaming pornography in Playboy magazine, and valorizing the pursuit of (male, heterosexual) hedonistic pleasure with his highly publicized playboy lifestyle, Hefner made a singularly important contribution to the overthrow of received norms of sexual morals that made modern (post-1960s) feminism possible. But he also accomplished this overthrow by exploiting women, reducing them to sex objects for use (and sometimes abuse) in the satisfaction of the insatiable (and now unconstrained) male libido.

If Linker's claim is that no sort of post-1960s feminism could have arisen without Hef's mainstreaming of pornography, valorization of male hedonism, and overthrow of received sexual norms, then I doubt it. A sort of equity feminism could have arisen without the Hefnerian excesses and without women aping the basest elements in men. I'd be interested in hearing what Christina Hoff Sommers would have to say about this.

That Playboy was a necessary condition of the possibilility of Playgirl is a more credible claim than that the Playboy lifestyle was a necessary condition of the possibility of the rise of any sort of worthwhile post-1960s feminism.

The High Price of Feminization

By Andrew Cadmon, from a British perspective. Good insights sure to enrage 'liberals.' (HT: Bill Keezer)

Plain Talk About Transgenderism

Sometimes the cure for P. C. is C.P. , Camille Paglia, that is:

It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women's studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. Thus very few current gender studies professors and theorists, here and abroad, are intellectually or scientifically prepared to teach their subjects.

The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one's birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.

And a fortiori for transracialism.

Are Gender Studies Garbage?

If they are, they have not been proven to be by the Conceptual Penis as Social Construct 'Son of Sokal' Hoax. If you care to 'bone up' on this, this Reason article has the links for you.

Camille Paglia on Pussy Hats

She approved — of all things — of the Women’s March. “I think it’s important that women rediscover solidarity with themselves,” she said. “It really wasn’t about feminism. It’s really not about Trump. It’s not about any of that. It was all of a sudden, Oh, wow, to be with all the women.”

Still, the pussy hats: She buried her face in her hands as she discussed them. “I was horrified, horrified by the pink pussy hats,” she said; the pink pussy hats were “a major embarrassment to contemporary feminism.”

“I want dignity and authority for women,” she said. “My code is Amazonism. I want weapons.”