John C. Wright's Journal

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.

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A reader asks: “As an amateur who’s trying to simply get in the habit of writing something coherent on a somewhat regular basis, I’d love to hear your take on the problem of "Writer’s Block." I’d also appreciate any general tips or disciplines you might be willing to share.”

Certainly. Let me, before I answer, announce my disqualifications to answer: There are two major disqualifications to answering not merely this question, but any question on the topic of writing.

First, writing is mysterious. Each writer approaches his craft in a different way, and advice from one writer to another is useful if and only if you happen to be a writer of the same method and temperament as the first.

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An article from FIRST THINGS which I found fascinating. I reprint the whole thing here without comment. http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2009/12/03/the-fountainhead-of-bedford-falls/

The Fountainhead of Bedford Falls
Thursday, December 3, 2009, 9:00 AM
Joe Carter

Frank Capra and Ayn Rand aren’t often mentioned together. Yet the cheery director of Capra-corn and the dour novelist who created Objectivism have much in common. Both were immigrants who made their names in Hollywood. Both were screenwriters and employees of the film studio RKO. And during the last half of the 1940s, both created works of enduring cult appeal, Capra with It’s a Wonderful Life and Rand with The Fountainhead.

Capra and Rand were also both masters of sentimentality, a literary form that is foreign to those of us weaned on irony. The inability to appreciate sentimentality leads some critics to dismiss Rand and Capra as amusing but minor talents rather than as gifted storytellers. Yet each produced work that will outshine their more critically acclaimed peers. People will still be reading Rand’s novels long after the works of Sinclair Lewis and Norman Mailer have been forgotten. And Wonderful Life has already earned its place on the short list of great American films.

My purpose, however, is not to defend the genius of these creators but to compare two of their protagonists, The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark and Wonderful Life’s George Bailey.

To anyone familiar with both works it would seem at first glance that the two characters could not be more different. A closer look, however, reveals that they are not only similar but a variation on a common archetype.

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The latest Wright’s writing corner is up at Arhyelon

http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/93406.html

Read and enjoy.

Well, I normally do not talk about my work progress in my journal, but I am pleased that after a long dry spell (not writer’s block — I have personal reasons for believing such a thing does not exist, which I will reveal if anyone asks — but the press and tumult of travel, day job, and other affairs) I have written up version number 800. Sacrifice a chicken to Urania, the muse of SFF!

Now, this is not 800 complete drafts. I make a copy each time I sit down to a writing session, and save each in a separate file, just in case I want to return to an earlier version. But the timestamp on the earliest version (back when it was called ‘Concubine Vector’ and was about a revolt on a multigeneration slave ship) is 5/25/2005.

I think I have changed every element of the plot, character, and theme since then. I also collided it with notes I had been gathering for a spacewar saga on the epic magnitude of an E.E. Doc Smith book, and strange new particles of ideas fled outward from the collision path, making odd shapes in the cloud chamber of my mind.

If anyone asks where science fiction writers get their wild ideas, the answer should be: my ideas come from radical high-energy brain experimentation outlawed in all civilized nations. (The answer is not true, of course, but then again we writers are people who make up stories for a living.)

Fourteen pages of copy since about 7.30 this evening. Not great, but not bad.

If you are curious, here is a scene I decided, for reasons of timing and character development, to delete.

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A short post by Mr. Goldberg at National Review Online. I notice the word ‘stigmata’ seems to have a different meaning for Catholics. In any case, this followed some of my own thinking along these lines. Even in a totally libertarian commonwealth (such as I imagined in THE GOLDEN AGE) I propose there would have to be a formal or informal agency of imposing stigma on activities that were legal but unacceptable in polite society (such as I imagined with the College of Horators in that book).

Here is Goldberg’s comment, which I reprint in full:

WHAT’S STIGMATA WITH YOU?

In the wake of the NY Times story the other day on food stamps, there’s been lots of discussion about stigma in the Corner and elsewhere (See here, here and here. Bonus post by Mickey Kaus here). Charles Murray had a really excellent post on the value of such stigma the other day. He writes (emphasis mine):

Stigma is the only way that a free society can be generous, whether through private help or government programs. The dilemma is as old as charity: how to give help without creating a cycle in which more people need help. Stigma is the way out. Stigma does three things.

First, stigma leads people to socialize their children in ways that minimize the chance that they’ll need help as they grow up. When children are taught that accepting charity is a disgrace, they also tend to be taught the kinds of things they should and shouldn’t do to avoid that disgrace.

Second, stigma encourages the right kind of self-selection. People in need are not usually in a binary yes-no situation. Instead, they are usually somewhere on a continuum from “I’m desperate” to “Gee, a little help would be kind of nice.” Stigma makes people ask whether the help is really that essential. That’s good—for the affordability of giving help, and for the resourcefulness of the potential recipients.

Third, stigma discourages dependence—it induces people to do everything they can to get out of the situation that put them in need of help.

All of these benefits of stigma reflect tendencies. Of course there are lots of exceptions. But large-scale assistance is shaped by tendencies. The European model says that people should look upon assistance as a right. Once you say that, the tendencies you create commit you to a cradle-to-grave system of government-decided support systems and corresponding limits on the ability of people to make choices for themselves.

The role of stigma in a free society is one of the least appreciated topics in modern discourse, I think.
Stigma is what keeps a society free without descending into the bad sort of anarchy (and such anarchy breeds a natural desire for a unhealthily powerful state to impose order).
I know lots of smart folks who want decriminalize drugs (including at this magazine). I know far fewer (which is not to say none) who want to destigmatize drug use. This is the bargain free societies make when they legalize bad things. Take prostitution. You can make a strong case that it should be legalized. You cannot make a strong case it should be respected as just another career choice. This is one of the areas where many cultural libertarians, of the left and the right, really fall down. They too often conflate the case for legalization with the case for acceptance.
Murray’s point is really important and profound. Just because the state can or should be blind to something bad, doesn’t mean everyone else should be. The legalization of gambling doesn’t require us to refrain from judging chronic gamblers. If, God forbid, heroin is legalized in the United States I hope it wouldn’t mean that everyone must view being a junky (on Food Stamps!) as just another lifestyle. I’m against legalized prostitution, but if it is legalized one hopes that local communities would still be reluctant to elect a hooker to the PTA.
I’m increasingly libertarian on lots of issues, but I’m also for the sort of cultural conservatism that makes libertarianism something more than a cultural suicide pact. If you take the stigma out of all sorts of things, including the dole, you foster a client-master relationship between the individual and the state, where the healthy correctives of culture and community are delegitimized.
In short, when you stigmatize stigma you empower the state.