On Unisexuality
In recent comments in this space, we were discussing the difference between masculine and feminine with a reader who, having been raised on the politically correct dogma of unisexualism, had never before encountered the idea that men and women are different, except in trivial or arbitrary ways, and certainly had never encountered the idea that these differences are highly desirable, whether arbitrary or not.
The doctrine of unisexuality is a by-product of the doctrine that all human interactions, particularly between the sexes, is a war between oppressor and oppressed, exploiter and victim, a condition of mutual recrimination and hatred, with no possible conciliation. Those who promote this doctrine to its logical extreme are forced to conclude that all differences between the sexes are a conspiracy of men to exploit and oppress women, and that the only path to liberation is to abolish insofar as possible all differences and marks of difference. For the radical feminist, any sign of femininity is akin to the yellow star worn by ghetto Jews, a brand of surrender to oppression.
As with all doctrines issuing from the cultural Marxism called PC, this one goes by a deceptive name.
It is called Feminism, as if it aided rather than demeaned and denatured and harmed females.
It calls its opposition Sexism, as if to admire the complimentary differences of the sexes were race-hatred applied to the opposite sex rather than applied to a race.
The true name for the doctrine is unisexuality: the theory that men should be feminine and women should be masculine in order that both be equal and therefore at both sexes be at peace.
In other words, the theory is that any difference between the sexes creates conflict and exploitation.
The true name of its opposition is Romance: the theory that men should be masculine so that life is charged with wonder and heroism and drama for women, and that women should be feminine, so that life should be filled with beauty and love and drama for men, in order that both have lust and infatuation and romance and friendship and ecstasy and divinity, and both be happy, and therefore at both sexes be at peace.
In other words, the theory is that treating women like short and weak dickless men with boobs leads to contempt and conflict and exploitation.
The two theories rest on opposite ideas of the cause of any conflict between the sexes.
The reader seems to be someone bewildered by this doctrine of unisexuality, isolated from mainstream thought, but not a feminist himself, since he actually discusses the topic and does not adopt the tone of grinding stupidity and self-satisfied self-deception which characterizes the demeanor of PC-niks.
As a visual aid to the discussion, allow me to introduce exhibit A, a scene from the 1990’s Disney film A GOOFY MOVIE. The is a fan dub of the voices, but for the purpose of our exhibition, it will serve.
Now, the question for any interested students of romance is this. Which one of these characters is masculine and which feminine?
Theoretically, since these are not only animated characters, they are anthropomorphs or humanized animals with doggy noses, it should be impossible to tell their sex, since they posses no real sexual characteristics. We do not see either one of them giving birth nor nursing, for example. I am using these as an example precisely because they posses gender without possessing a sex; that is, they possess social or ceremonial or symbolic sexual signs without possessing physical, mental or spiritual reality under those signs.
Second, was there any doubt in any mind, even for a split second, which character was which?
Is there even the slightly question in any mind that the animators intend Roxanne to be the female anthropomorph in the scene?
Ergo all the clues your mind picked up where in the voice, demeanor, or costuming. One had long hair, a higher pitched voice, with long eyelashes adorning large eyes.
More to the point, despite the fact that Roxanne is the one making the introductory move, an aggressive role usually reserved to the male, at no point is she masculine or unfeminine.
Indeed, this is cutie pie femininity at its most saccharine. Even I, ardent pro-Romantic that I am, find this lovestruck teen puppy love scene of, well, puppies in love almost too sweet for my taste. But fear not! There is even a MORE sickly sweet form of purely sugary femininity at large in the world. The Japanese have made a special science of cutie pie girlishness, and have a special word for it: Kawaii.
Here is a sample. Brace yourselves.
Now, please note again, that none of these girls are nursing or giving birth. The clues that they are feminine (or, rather, hyper-feminine) are deliberately exaggerated by several factors. They are too young to wed (except in Alabama with parent’s consent); they are dressed in bright yet soft colors with flowers in their hair, in costumes that might as well be “cosplay” costumes. Note how they hold their hands and make their gestures, again, with exaggerated delicacy and youthfulness, clapping and smiling, singing, dimpling their cheeks with their fingers, bubbling with enthusiasm.
There is no trace of sober, solemn gravity in these girls. They are not standing on their virginal dignity and freezing the hearts of men with the cold purity of their unsmiling glances. They are not acting like warlords or crowned kings or Supreme Court Justices.
Now, at this point, a unisexualist might say, “But wait! None of these behaviors or gestures are natural and spontaneous! All are artificial! Therefore all are a cruel attempt to exploit, enslave, humiliate women! It proves all men are rapists who hate women!”
Unfortunately, the leap of logic between saying “this is artifice” and saying “this is an enemy attack prompted by hatred” is wider than the grand canyon.
Contemplate the exaggeration of infantile characteristics: this girls are absurdly girlish. The unisexualist, analyzing everything in terms of a remorseless Darwinian struggle to extermination, would assume the evil rapist-patriarch-oppressor wishes his victims small and weak so that he might more easily conquer and ravish them. The romantic, analyzing things in terms of reality, recognizes that healthy men have a nature desire to protect women and children whose lives he innately recognizes as more vulnerable and therefore more precious than his own. The romance of being a superman who rescues a Lois Lane that otherwise would not notice you is also not far from the core of masculine thought.
Unisexualists want men to be weak and women to be strong for the same reason they want Nazis to be weak and Jews to be strong: only an equality of strength can suspend the Darwinian war of mutual extermination between male and female. The mere fact that there is no such war and never has been is something that cannot occur to the unisexualist.
The Romantic man wants men to be strong because it is heroic, and romantic women want men to be strong because it is sexy. No girl wants to swoon into the arm of a man who will drop her, or be carried off by a prince on a white stallion too physically unfit to pick her up and carry her off.
Let us introduce exhibit three, which include not only girls dressed in “kawaii” outfits with giant hearts on their bosoms, but also girls dressed a greasers from the 50’s, an era in America which was particularly romantic after the horror of world war were passed, and popular culture attempted to exaggerate masculine and feminine characteristics:
Sorry, no English subtitles here. However, I am pretty confident that it is a love song of some sort.
Note that the fight scenes still take place in the masculine role: the girl dressed like a greaser is still fighting for the girl dressed like a bobbysoxer. (Girl-on-guy violence is portrayed as cheek-pulling, not known to cause death on the battlefield.)
Note here that the girls when dressed as guy still look very girlish, as if dressing up as guy merely emphasizes that they are not guys. They are still cute, that is, cute enough attractive to the opposite sex, or, considering their young age, cute enough to bring out fatherly feeling of protectiveness and admiration in men.
But guys in drag look comical, i.e. not sexually attractive to women.
Unisexualists might simply deny this fact, since their whole philosophy and mindset rest on denying facts for their appeal. But supposing it were admitted, the unisexualist might say that girls-as-guys are judged differently from guys-as-girls because and only because of a cruel, foolish, and evil and arbitrary social value judgment intent on humiliating and exterminating gays and sissies, and therefore while the fact of the difference exists, the difference must be abolished in the name of social justice.
What the unisexualist cannot admit, lest the entire philosophy collapse, it is that females look for different sexual characteristics than males in selecting a mate.
Females are less shallow than men, and tend to think in the longer term: they want permanence. Whether there are evolutionary reasons for this based on the fact that men father children but women bear and nurse them, I leave for others to discuss: if it is evolutionary, it is an example of evolution following and reinforcing common sense.
Men are shallow. I use the term not in a derogatory way, but merely to point out that they tend to be sexually stimulated visually. They are looking for surface features. Common sense would tend to argue that seeking a mate able to bear children, and seeking to rear one’s own child rather than fall victim to a Cuckoo, a father should seek youth and health and energy and zest in a woman, because child-rearing is exhausting, and a young woman is more likely to be a virgin, and a virgin cannot, absent supernatural intervention, bear another man’s child as a changeling for your own.
Likewise, common sense would urge the woman to seek an older male with high rank and status, a good provider and protector, someone able to clothe and feed and shelter Mom and junior, as well as drive off wolves and predators, both (in ancient times) literal wolves, and (in modern) figurative. Hence, she should look for confidence, courage, aggressiveness, competence. She wants a winner.
The unisexualist might at this point shriek and whine and scream in outrage (they cannot discuss things in a normal tone of voice) but why, oh, why should the standards of what the two sexes find romantic be different! Now that dishwashers have been invented, and microwave ovens, women do not need to nurse, and in a welfare state, Uncle Sam will provide both paycheck and protection to the young mother! There is no need for men to be manly! In fact, manliness and aggression, causing wars and arguments, creates unhappiness and should be abolished!
Well, the only proper response to this argument is that it is false. Even a cursory examination of single-parent Moms raising multiple bastards sired of multiple live in boyfriends on public welfare shows the children have absurdly high chances of ending up in one self destructive behavior or another, from drug abuse to juvenile delinquency, the act of committing vandalism not for gain or for any rational reason, but only for the pleasure of destruction. The childmurder rate has climbed, since the number one cause of child murder is at the hands of a live-in boyfriend not the child’s father.
A man does not need an aggressive show-offish macho woman to mother his children, only a fiercely loyal one. The characteristics being discussed here, cuteness and sweetness are signifiers of that loyalty. But a woman needs an aggressive macho man to drive away wolves, both the masher kind and the bill collector kind.
A girl dressed as a guy does not seem less cute and sweet to a guy; but a guy dressed as a girl does seem less macho to a girl.
Now to the main point: the unisexualist, forever terrified that the war where men try to enslave women in preparation to exterminating them will break out again, forever terrified of a completely imaginary therefore completely manageable danger (that is, a danger with none of the inconveniences of a real danger) are terrified that girls acting artificially girlish will trigger the apocalypse and a return of the Dark Age, that is, circa AD 1950, when women where bought and sold in public markets like cattle, and forced to fight each other to death in the gladiatorial arena with whips while dressed like catwoman in a skintight leather catsuit and nosebleed high heels.
Unisexualists do not want to see the return of the dystopia portrayed in A HANDMAID’S TALE by Margaret Atwood. That such a society never existed is fact that does not concern them: they are not concerned with fact, but with emotions, particularly hysterical emotions.
So that would argue that girls acting artificially girlish is a dangerous thing, and may trigger a sudden epidemic of rape and wifebeating. In order to avoid this danger, it is important to raise boys to think that girls are just as strong and aggressive as boys, to take girls off the pedestal and encourage boys to beat them as equals. The utter illogic of this is invisible to the unisexuals: they are a unconcerned with logic as they are with facts.
But the root problem is the role of artifice in human affairs. Here, unfortunately, the argument is so weak as not to exist. The Kawaii Japanese schoolgirls in these videos do not act like warlords or Supreme Court Justices or crowned kings, that is, with dignity and gravity.
But dignity and gravity is as artificial as girlish gaiety. Justices wear black robes; they do not show up naked in court. Kings wear crowns and sit on thrones and surround themselves with ceremony intended to impress subjects and enemies alike with his regal dignity and power. They also do not appear naked in public. The artifice is meant to exaggerate the natural characteristic.
Likewise with feminine modes of dress and speech and behavior. Indeed, the cleverness of using clothing to exaggerate sexual characteristics is that corsets and bras draw attention to the bosom of women, and high heels and skirts draw attention to their hips, because these are characteristics men lack. Women attempt to minimize drawing attention to their facial hair and armpit hair and leg hair, because they are less hairy than men naturally, and so will shave or pluck to emphasize or exaggerate that difference.
The unhidden secret of this all is that when, on her wedding night, the bridal veil is torn and her gown shucked off, and she presents herself in all her naked beauty to her bridegroom, those very parts she covered up, by the mere act of covering them up, made them more alluring than they would be in a world of nudists. The male likewise but to a lesser degree, since the female is less concerned with his physical looks than with his confidence and demeanor and strength.
Far from being a condemnation, that fact that these artifices are artificial proves that they are regarded (by everyone except for unisexuals) as necessary and proper to the pursuit of love.
Of course they are artificial. So are all tools. The reason why we use tools is because we are human. And it is that, our humanity, which at the root of all things is the enemy of the unisexuals and all their cousins.
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.
