On the Misery of Modern Women
Not that I have much trust in scientific research–we all know that 7.5 out of 12 statistics are entirely false, including this one–but a recent study made the headlines in the NY Post: Compared to 35 years ago, today’s modern woman is, in fact, more miserable than ever.
Why are women miserable now, as opposed to before the Sexual Revolution? That question seems to answer itself in the asking.
I once read a science fiction book (DARKNESS ON DIAMONDIA by A.E. van Vogt) which proposed that in the far futuristic year of 2000 A.D., women, in order to avoid exploitation by men (Van Vogt did not, in the pre-Clinton years, use the term ‘sexual predator’ but that was his meaning) would form a union like a labor union, and safeguard each other’s interests. Basically, the Women’s Union had the legal power to intimidate mashers and keep cads away. It was not until quite later that I wondered why, even in this science fiction background, the women’s menfolk did not do that work.
Van Vogt, if you look at his books like EARTH FACTOR X and THE VIOLENT MALE and RENAISSANCE and MAN WITH A MILLION NAMES, portrays the man-woman dynamic in a most unsympathetic and unromantic light. Basically, it is the ruthless male tricks or entraps the helpless female into a neurotic affection for him, a dependency. The helpless neurotic women would always rally loyally to the man abusing her.
But even he, for all his cynicism (or realism, take your pick) failed to anticipate a future world as strange and neurotic as the one we now inhabit.
Basically, the ‘women unions’ of our world, NOW and other organized political groups meant to promote feminism, have sold women on the idea that equality with men means equal promiscuity as men. Even Van Vogt never wrote about the women’s unions betraying womanhood.
Example: When President Clinton, the very model and archetype of a ruthless, hypocritically smiling, power-hungry and masculine skirt-chaser was caught in the act of exploiting some White House intern young enough to be his daughter (while using the powers of his office to intimidate old lovers and victims), the National Organization of Women leaped to his defense, putting out the astonishing statement that two people seeking the comfort of a mutual relationship was no one’s business but their own. The NOW abandoned the interests of Hillary Clinton rapidly enough, perhaps because they wanted to cling to their powerful male icon, the man who would keep abortions safe, legal and frequent.
This was an astonishing doctrine to come from the lips of alleged feminists: that having an affair with a married man, and being used as an ashtray for his semen while kneeling before him, was ennobling to women, or (a word typical of the 90’s) "empowering".
But, of course, if feminism teaches that marriage is meaningless, or, better yet, a trap meant only to enslave the fairer sex, then any virtue which logically follows from the necessities and realities of marriage can be abandoned: such as chastity, fidelity, modesty or even simple prudence.
This revolt against reason has older and deeper roots than the feminist movement: you can find early versions of it in Marx, Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant and other dismal German metaphysicians, and the intellectual roots go back to the French Revolution. But the revolt against reason in matters of sex has won a tremendous victory–for men. Not for chaste, thoughtful, loving Christian men, oh, no. For those same boors and cads and mashers the women’s unions of Van Vogt’s SF book were meant to protect against.
Feminism is the daydream of a sexual predator come true. Men are no longer expected to be the breadwinners for the family, no longer expected to be in a family at all. Women who want to have children have them on their own, with sperm donors. Women now frequent the workplace, which raises the opportunities for fraternization and infidelity, and serve aboard Naval vessels in our armed forces, getting pregnant with such frequency that one wag labeled out modern ships "Love Boats."
Contraception robs women of the mystery and danger of creating life. Previously, in order to find a willing partner, a man either had to marry, or to find a demimondaine and risk his health and reputation in the meanwhile. Feminists regard this situation as mere exploitation by men. Perhaps it is, but if so, the solution should not have been the one the sexual revolution brought about: bringing all women (with a few exceptions) into the world of the demimonde. In a contraceptive society, copulation is seen as entertainment, merely one requiring a partner of the opposite sex, like mixed doubles tennis. This means femininity, as a concept, is dismissed, and replaced with the uglier and cruder concept of sexuality. A voluntarily sterile woman can be treated a sex object with no real-world consequences. And, thanks to feminism, she now bears all the risk of pregnancy: it is no longer a norm in our society that a man is expected to do the right thing when he fathers a child on his lover.
I cannot understand it. I thought feminists called we real men, "male chauvinist pigs." But, ladies, if you KNOW we are pigs, why have your dismantled the social tissue of values, virtues, customs and expectations that prevented you from being merely prey for us?
If you know we are pigs, O women, why did you throw your pearls before us, knowing we would turn and trample you?
We now live in a culture so inundated with porn that when one researcher wanted to do a study on the effects of pornography on boys from ages 10 to 20, he could not find any boys who had not been exposed to pornography to act as the control group. And yet I seem to recall, at least when I was young, that feminists objected to pornography. Didn’t Gloria Steinem serve as a Playboy Bunny for a time, and write articles denouncing the dehumanizing reduction of womanhood to mere sex-doll status? In short, I do not understand why the feminists do not make an alliance with the Puritans, who seem to have a correct regard for female interests, but instead ally with the Pornographers, who clearly want to treat women like so many sacks of savory meat?
The study shows that women are less happy than their mothers and grandmothers. The study allegedly controls for age, marital, labor market or fertility status of the group analyzed. A little later on in the article, one woman suggests (with Stoicism worthy perhaps of a Spartan wife) the women merely give up on happiness and the idea of happiness altogether.
Feminism, in its modern form, has little or nothing to do with Suffragettes, or those who sought legal equality between the sexes. It has everything to do with Marxism as it applies to sex. Marx analyzes all human relationships as power struggles between collectives, which always are assumed to enjoy a perfect unity of interests. Modern feminism analyzes the male-female dynamic much as Van Vogt does, as an inhuman and cynical power struggle, where to fall in love with a man is a sign of weakness, but to play the harlot a sign of strength: the modern ideal is meretriciousness. Modern empowered women are supposed to act like unpaid whores, to throw off the antiquated notions of love and romance and marriage and children (as these are obviously part of a sinister conspiracy of men to weaken womankind, and hold them in bondage), and to flit from partner to partner, and seek true satisfaction in a career as a plumber, lumberjack, cowgirl, businesswoman, or political leader.
The keystone of modern feminism is abortion, which makes every woman into Medea. Once you have convinced a mother to kill her own helpless babe in the womb, turning what should be the gentlest and most loving of all human relationships into a murderous relationship, turning what should be the most joyful and blessed of all events into a sick medical horror-show, at that point, if only to retain her sanity, the ex-mother/murderess must adhere to the party line, and tell herself that the way of death if the way of freedom. If she ever admitted the truth to herself, if her eyes ever saw the true horror of infanticide, her only options are pagan suicide, like a Roman matron, or Christian forgiveness, like a Roman saint. The ferocity and the loyalty of the gang is cemented by their mutual guilt.
If you deny that the act implies guilt, imagine explaining to your six year old daughter how you killed her brothers and sisters in the womb before she was born, because they were inconvenient to you. Explain that you have the power of an oriental potentate over his slaves, the power of life and death, and then imagine the look in the little girl’s eyes next time she sees a pregnant woman. "Mommy? Is that mommy going to kill her baby?" "Hush, stupid child! It is not a baby! It is merely a mass of tissue!" "Oh….. But Mommy? Can I touch her tummy? I want to feel the mass of tissue kick!"
The modern feminist regard abortion not only as a right, but as an obligation. Your tax money will and must go to pay for the wee little murders. Charities and hospitals refusing to play along will be shut down. Indeed, Benedictine monks living in an abbey are to be required by law to pay for abortions, sterilization, or contraception, their non-negotiable doctrinal religious objections notwithstanding, for their civilian employees, on the grounds that refusing to pay for abortions discriminates against women.
The legal theory is that since only women have abortions, to refuse to fund them on the grounds that killing babies is forbidden by your 2000 year old doctrine, is merely sex discrimination, like hiring a man over a more-qualified woman. No, I am not making this up. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2369140/posts.
Men who do not want to father children can pressure the woman into having an abortion, which is an institution almost solely for the convenience of live-in boyfriends, who pressure the mothers into killing their children. The abortion mill is hardly the correct symbol for the freedom and equality of the fairer sex. If I may use a Marxist metaphor, the abortion is part of the system of exploitation.
No, it seems to me that the only conspiracy here has been at the hands of frustrated intellectuals who wanted to convince women to become ladies of easy virtue, so that they did not have to grow up to be men of hard virtue. Men these days are overgrown boys, still reading comic books and playing video games, and the only voice heard in the land preaches total disregard for prudence, justice, moderation, temperance and fortitude: the voice of nihilism. The voice of nothing. Women are cheap and easy these days, because it is against feminist principles to expect chastity, fidelity, romance, love, marriage, babies.
Look at what women have lost. Dignity. Respect. Honor. Worship. Support. And yet the anger of feminists is not directed at the ones who robbed these things from them: it is directed at the ones who want to restore them. It is directed at the Christians almost exclusively. If I were a mystic instead of skeptic, I would see something satanic in that. Oh, wait, I am a mystic (albeit a very skeptical one). If there is anything more pleasing to Hell than getting a mother to kill her children in the spirit of selfishness but in the name of freedom, liberty and equality, I cannot imagine it. I do not believe mere natural perversity and wickedness could generate so supernaturally unnatural and bloody a crime.
You will not be able to mount a crusade to restore any of the lost dignity or femininity or fertility to women. Folks would regard that as sinister, or contemptible. But if you want to mount a crusade to promote equality for sex workers, and to encourage the international slave trade, you will soon find an entire gaggle of solemn intellectuals willing to denounce the cruelty of stigmatizing adultery and fornication for pay.
Don’t bother saying anything in favor of sacred matrimony or sacred virginity. Marriage is a conspiracy to offend the gays. Virginity is merely a social construct, having no biological reality. In Marxism, everything is a social construct, and everything is a conspiracy.
But only real conspiracy (as I said above) is the conspiracy of men without virtue and without prudence to lower women to the status of whores without pay, available, providing their own contraception, paying their own way, making no demands on men as men. That seems to have been successful beyond anyone’s expectations. The men do not even need to conspire any more. Your sisters are doing it now under their own power. The helpless neurotic women have rallied loyally to the men abusing them, just as in the most cynical of Van Vogt novels.
COMMENT ADDED 12/16: One of the quoted statistic turns out to be wrong. It is one-half of teenage girls who will contract a venereal infection once they being sexual activity. So, your chance of getting the clap, or some sort of itch or mold in your privates, dear young girls, once you start playing hide-the-sausage in the current unsanitary sexual environment of the modern age, is a coin toss. 50/50.
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.
