Fight like a Cornered Cat
In a recent discussion about, of all things, Dante’s INFERNO, video games, batgirl, and women in action films, an interesting paradox came up:
Modern women are supposed to be as violent and aggressive as men (see, for example, the popularity of Buffy, Xena, Wonder Woman, or Trinity) but are supposed to look like dewy-lipped glamour models, dressed alluringly (in either a short skirt, leather bikini, a red-white-and-blue swimsuit with high heeled boots, or skintight black leather respectively). The New Femininity portrays women with Barbie-doll looks and G.I. Joe action figure fighting skills.
By coincidence, I was reading this article over at Big Hollywood: Robert Avrech describes an encounter he has with Tuesday Weld blonde in a gunstore. She is against guns and violence, but her ex boyfriend is a stalker, and the police cannot protect her.
Here is the paradox: The modern attitude toward guns is that they are scary and dangerous and no one should use them. The modern attitude toward the fairer sex is that it is a bigotry akin to racism to suggest that women tend to be smaller and weaker than men physically, and that, psychologically, men are far more likely to be violent toward women than women toward men .To suggest that men should protect their womenfolk from other men is "sexist" (whatever that newspeak nonword is supposed to mean). And at the same time, it is modern dogma that all difference of power between men and women in society is due to rape or the threat of rape, and that all members of the phallusocracy are rapists, or whatnot. And at the same time, the modern attitude is against hanging rapists, or sending them to the electric chair. (By modern here, I mean ‘Leftist’)
Now, if I am not mistaken, each one of these dogmas is a direct or indirect contradiction of the next.
A woman who claimed equality with men, and armed herself, and served a term in the military, would be acting in a self-consistent fashion. A woman who claimed to be old-fashioned, and wanted her brothers or her husband to protect her in time of combat, who was afraid of guns and relied on the men around her to avenge insults against her, again, would be acting in a self-consistent fashion. But a women who, in the name of equality, thought it was condescending for men to protect her, but who also thought protecting herself with a firearm was too violent, scary or immoral to countenance, she is merely setting herself up to be an easy victim.
I should mention that this pattern — leftism removes both the ability of women to protect themselves, and the willingness of men to protect them — appears more than once in recent history. (If it is not designed to render large swaths of the population helpless and without any spirit of rebellion, it at least has that outcome.)
The whole sexual revolution promised the fairer sex that as a matter of equality, of equal stature with men, they should act like harlots, have sex out of marriage, approve of pornography, and kill any of their own children in the womb whose life might prove inconvenient to them. This strips away the normal protections society evolved to shield women from male sexual predation, or even unwanted attentions, it put women in situations where it was easier to rape them — getting a college girl into your dorm room, where there is no witness to say whether she actually said ‘no’ or not is much easier these days. You would be scorned as a prude, or as something more sinister, for even suggesting that nubile young women should be chaperoned, or dormitories have curfews, or colleges not be co-ed.
In the name of freedom and free speech, we are drenched with pornography, hammered with it, and no message of chastity is ever uttered anywhere a young man’s ear might lightly brush against it. At the same time, young ladies are told that true freedom, true liberation, not to mention being cool, consist of dressing like a streetwalker and having several lovers at once. I can point to a number of music videos carrying that message. So men are much more willing and able to exploit, abuse, and abandon women than ever before in history, and women, paradoxically, are meant to regard their newfound defenselessness as a type of freedom. Ushering back in old standards of reserve and chastity under the color of laws against sexual "harassment" in the workplace make, for obvious reasons, a poor substitute.
Female equality has somehow been redefined from giving women the vote and the right to own property, to urging women to be as licentious and sexually-aggressive as men, without pointing out that the cost-benefit ratio should something go wrong (such as a pregnancy) simply cannot be made the same between men and women. Don Juan as a deadbeat dad can walk away from the mothers of his bastard children with relatively little emotional scarring. A single mother cannot walk away from the child in her womb. She can commit the crime of Medea, and murder the babe, perhaps, but that carries scars of its own which Don Juan need not bear.
It is merely sad and ironic that, in an age when sex is commonplace and robbed of all romantic content, that carrying out the sexual reproductive act so that it is a success, and you actually father a child, is to be regarded as something going wrong rather than something going right. A selfish philosophy distorts the judgment, because it is schizophrenic to seek the pleasant side-effects of an act without willing the results.
Let me quote, by way of support, this anecdote from Theodore Dalrymple, the British prison doctor whose insight into the human condition grows more acute by seeing the very lowest of that condition.
She had abjured alcohol for four months before her admission, she told me, but had just returned to the bottle because of a crisis. Her boyfriend, aged 16, had just been sentenced to three years’ detention for a series of burglaries and assaults. He was what she called her "third long-term relationship"—the first two having lasted four and six weeks, respectively. But after four months of life with the young burglar, the prospect of separation from him was painful enough to drive her back to drink.
It happened that I also knew her mother, a chronic alcoholic with a taste for violent boyfriends, the latest of whom had been stabbed in the heart a few weeks before in a pub brawl. The surgeons in my hospital saved his life; and to celebrate his recovery and discharge, he had gone straight to the pub. From there, he went home, drunk, and beat up my patient’s mother.
My patient was intelligent but badly educated, as only products of the British educational system can be after 11 years of compulsory school attendance. She thought the Second World War took place in the 1970s and could give me not a single correct historical date.
I asked her whether she thought a young and violent burglar would have proved much of a companion. She admitted that he wouldn’t, but said that he was the type she liked; besides which—in slight contradiction—all boys were the same.
I warned her as graphically as I could that she was already well down the slippery slope leading to poverty and misery—that, as I knew from the experience of untold patients, she would soon have a succession of possessive, exploitative, and violent boyfriends, unless she changed her life. I told her that in the past few days, I had seen two women patients who had had their heads rammed down the lavatory, one who had had her head smashed through a window and her throat cut on the shards of glass, one who had had her arm, jaw, and skull broken, and one who had been suspended by her ankles from a tenth-floor window to the tune of, "Die, you bitch!"
"I can look after myself," said my 17-year-old.
"But men are stronger than women," I said. "When it comes to violence, they are at an advantage."
"That’s a sexist thing to say," she replied.
A girl who had absorbed nothing at school had nevertheless absorbed the shibboleths of political correctness in general and of feminism in particular.
"But it’s a plain, straightforward, and inescapable fact," I said.
"It’s sexist," she reiterated firmly.
Mr. Avrech in the article mentioned above, suggests that the ladies might want to peruse a website like Cornered Cat (http://www.corneredcat.com/) to get some commonsense advice about guns and self-defense. As a public service, if any of you ladies are better educated than the seventeen-year-old in Theodore Dalrymple’s article, I pass this link along to any female readers who are interested in real equality with men: and by equality, I mean, possessing The Equalizer.
I confess I am the mere opposite of a feminist. I think men and women are different, and viva la difference. One difference between men and women is that men seek mates by pursuing them, and women seek mates by alluring them. This means that, even if we were, or could be taught to be, the same, men and women should differentiate and exaggerate masculine and feminine characteristics, for purposes of cold Darwinian calculation, even if not for fun. (As a minor example, when women dress distinctively from men, the dress itself becomes a feminine symbol, a poetic symbol, whereas if both sexes dress uniformly, the only way to allure a mate is for a woman to show her cleavage, or some other crass way to emphasize the sexual difference. It seems a paradox, but by being less feminine, the women is placed in a false position of having to be more crudely sexual to work the same allure.) Another difference, which is as much psychological as physical, is that men are more violent and more prone to violence. A related difference is that men can rape women and women cannot rape men. This means women should be armed, and drilled in the use of arms.
There is a scene in ORLANDO FURIOSO when the maiden Isabella is kidnapped by the pagan knight Rodomonte. Before he can impose on her virtue by his violent affections, she tricks him into killing her, that she might die a virgin rather than live ravished and deflowered. There is also a scene where King Cymosco of Freisland has “a weapon strange” upon which he in most unknightly fashion relies upon to win his battles, a hollow engine packed with gunpowder, whose shot is likened to a thunderbolt. In disgust Orlando throws the devilish engine into the sea, lest it corrupt the chivalry of Christendom. Myself, as a more modern poet, had I penned the epic, I would have given the engine to Isabella, so she could have blasted Rodomonte into sulphury hell and lived happily ever after, and using the pagan knight’s skull as an ashtry. (Of course, I would have also had her ended up married to Ragnar Danneskjold from ATLAS SHRUGGED, Captain Hedrock from THE WEAPON-MAKERS OF ISHER, or maybe Colonel Baslim from CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY, so no doubt my taste in these matters is not to be trusted.)
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
