Antifatherhood
Upon a time a few year’s back, I saw a skit or commercial where the female characters from the television show MAD MEN, secretaries and office girls from the 1960’s, were confronted by the time traveling ambassador from their future, our present, portrayed by Ellen Degeneres. She is an untalented celebrity of some sort but known to me only because of her widely publicized sexual degeneracy.
In the little skit, Miss Degeneres exclaims to the benighted damsels of the allegedly remote past that women in the future have full equal rights. She includes “the right to get married” as the crown in the list of such civil rights enjoyed by the future women.
The writers of the skit intended this to be a triumphant rather than a ridiculous statement, and intended it to mean that women of the future have the civil right to get married to each other, that is, to have an unnatural lesbian liaison with one of their own sex called marriage, and treated with solemnity and legal recognition.
As I watched in awe at the perfection of tonedeafness parochialism involved in retrofitting modern Lefty echo-chamber sentiments to the generations of our mothers and grandmothers, I could not help but wonder: by what means have we come to this?
Whether the time traveling ambassador of female emancipation also mentioned the woman’s right to alter their bodies with carcinogenic chemicals to produce temporary sterility, or to kill their own beloved offspring in the womb, and to compel the public coffers to pay for both abominations, that I do not happen to recall, and I am unwilling, due to my delicacy of digestion, to move my finger the half-inch it would require to lookup the matter on the worldwide computer system we enjoy here in the future.
I felt a moment of vertigo as I contemplated the immensity of the gulf that stretched between (1) the rational creatures of the universe and (2) the creatures that had, in all seriousness, conceived and wrote and produced this skit and aired it to the public.
So the character is oppressed by being feminine but the actress is liberated? How does that work again?
The writers were not writing a parody, and there was a certain charming innocence and fecklessness about the ham-handed approach.
As best I can tell, the writers actually expected the characters from the 1960’s to regard their lives as intolerable thralldom akin to the slaves of the antebellum south toiling under the lash, or the Hebrew under the taskmasters in Egypt, and moreover to regard the indulgence in a sexual perversion so disgusting that it could not be mentioned in public during the era in question as the culmination of the Lincolnesque or Mosaic manumission the Year 2000 promised.
The writers expected the ladies of our mothers’ generation to greet the advent of sexual promiscuity, culminating in infanticide and abomination, by an ovation of incredulous joy, as if that was what all feminists and suffragettes and lovers of liberty had indeed been yearning and dreaming and sacrificing and struggling forever to achieve.
The lack of proportion is disorienting, like meeting a man who soberly intones that the whole of World War Two was fought to save one private soldier.
Furthermore, the writers apparently expected the modern audience bovinely to accept the idea that the women of that era would indeed regard these matters in this light, to frame their opinions in this frame.
By “this frame” I mean specifically the philosophical axiom (or rhetorical conceit) that the male-female dynamic, the institution of marriage, the role of women in society, should be analyzed in Marxist terms of an oppressive possessing class and an oppressed laboring class; and that the male-female question was the same as the race question and was nothing but that.
Lest any think I exaggerate, allow me in this context to quote from Shulamith Firestone in her landmark 1970 book, The Dialectic of Sex (http://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/firestone-shulamith/dialectic-sex.htm).
“So that just as to assure elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and, in a temporary dictatorship, their seizure of the means of production, so to assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduction: not only the full restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies, but also their (temporary) seizure of control of human fertility – the new population biology as well as all the social institutions of child-bearing and child-rearing.
“And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. (A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality Freud’s ‘polymorphous perversity’ – would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.) The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would born to both sexes equally, or independently of. either, however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally. The division of labour would be ended by the elimination of labour altogether (through cybernetics). The tyranny of the biological family would be broken. “
If you are like me, a safety valve in your brain is preventing you from noticing the true depth of depravity and insanity this passage embraces.
Reread it. Savor it. In this passage, Miss Firestone (I assume she is a “miss”, for none would marry such a termagant) explicitly says she is expanding the analysis of Marxism to declare war both on the cultural institutions of the family and on biological reality of sex.
She proposes to liberate women from womanhood, to achieve freedom for her sex by eliminating sex.
To call this barking-mad moonbat lunacy would be a mild understatement.
When King Canute waved his sword at the sea to drive back the tide, he did it to silence the flattery of his courtiers by reminding them of the limitations of royal power. No man’s sword can turn the tide.
Nor more can any social revolution, even one armed with the considerable power to denude humans of the adjuncts of their human nature, eliminate humanness without eliminating the humans.
Far more foolish than this ancient king is the dame who waves her sword in daintier hand in earnest at the sea of sexual reality which rages larger and is pulled by deeper tides.
Reading this passage by Miss Firestone is like overhearing the raving apocalyptic visions of flat-earthers who declare war on the dome of the sky, and who then, with a battlecry and brave flourish of lance and saber, charge boldly for the spot on their horizon where their theory says the sky-dome surely touches the ground.
And, again, I cannot help but wonder: by what means have we come to this?
The argument is too large and long to fit into one essay, or even a series of essays. Here, I hope only to cover the basic points, not to make the argument, but merely to lay out where the argument should go.
Allow me to submit that there is a certain logic to thought, to the relation of concept to concept, which operates in a man or in a society much the same way precedent operates for courts of law.
Namely, if a concept relates to an analogous concept where that man or that society has made an unambiguous judgment, he must either follow that judgment, or must distinguish the cases. The fewer points in common or weaker the analogy between the two concepts, the easier the distinction is to make convincingly; the closer the analogy, the harder.
When we have a situation where one concept influences and sets the precedent for a whole host of subsidiary concepts, we can call it a principle or call it a crucial or fundamental or governing concept.
Human nature being what it is, it frequently happens that the crucial concepts governing a man or a society is unquestioned, unknown, or known without being articulate. When it is articulate, we can speak of a man’s or a society’s fundamental philosophy or virtues; when inarticulate, we call it a vision or a worldview or a sense of life or a set of values.
Discovering which concepts are crucial is a delicate and uncertain process. In no small part this is because, human nature being what it is, many a man and indeed more than one society is reluctant (at times, hysterically so) to admit what really governs and guide them, and will not put a name to what they idolize.
Unfortunately, human nature also being what it is, the most popular sport of the modern day is to attribute secret motives or fundamental concepts to one’s ideological foes, selecting only the most despicable motives and concepts, those which any man, truly or not, would deny move him. So the discovery of fundamental motives is itself untrustworthy.
Despite that, a certain confidence is permitted a detective seeking the crucial philosophical foundations of his society, if and when the crucial concept is indeed found at the crux of many lines of inquiry. If one idea, over and over, crops up as a core idea, the pattern of repetition lends some credibility to the assertion that this idea, this concept, is crucial.
The pattern I have seen governing our modern thought is a simple one. Call it antifatherhood.
You have heard of the war on women. This is a “war” where the Roman Catholic Church, because God Almighty has so ordered and command, is unwilling to abet gross moral evils which mock the two millennia old teachings of the Church, and fund with our money the wickedness of women of loose morals, who wish to float in a cesspool of consequence-free sexual encounters, send us the tab for their contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortions.
The rhetoric under which all this is concealed, is a concern for woman’s “health” — as if a baby were a disease, or as if chastity were a plague. It is like saying the victim of the hold-up man is “making war” on the robber by refusing to pay for his bullets.
As with all most things promoted by the mainstream media and pontificated by self appointed intellectuals, it is the mere opposite of truth.
The truth is that the modern age is the age of the war on fathers.
What is a father?
A father is naturally the source not just of strength but of authority, not just of masculinity, but also of fertility. A father is one who fathers his children; who has the moral right to command whether he has the strength to compel obedience or not; he is the king and lord of his family and establishes their laws; his role is more combative than the maternal role , and he is naturally suited for toil and war, and so his role also includes elements of breadwinner and protector.
In that role he fears no shock of war, either literal or figurative battle against the hardships of life called earning a wage; and lacking weakness, he shuns dishonorable victory; and to shun dishonor is to shun dishonesty. A woman might adorn the truth as she adorns herself to make the gentle side of nature foremost; or a mother shield her child from a hurtful reality with a fairy tale or a diplomatic word; a manly word is straight as an arrow and meant to hit the heart of the mark.
To his wife, the father is both Romeo and Galahad and Adonis, at once her master and her retainer her worshiper. The father is also a slave, bound by the unbreakable chain of his marriage oath forever, unwilling and unable to forsake wife or child, if he be true, and vowing to forsake all others and cleave to her whom God has made one flesh with him.
If you recoil in confusion or disgust, dear reader, to hear the matter put so bluntly; or if a nagging sense flutters like a cloud of bats about your skull that this description gives too little worship to equality; or too little praise to womanhood and motherhood, or dishonors children by refusing them their dignity and equality; or displays homophobia by not rushing to qualify the statements with a reassurance that either “gender” can play the masculine role; or if you are taken off balance like a man who steps on a missing stair as you wait for me to assure you that all these concepts are odd anachronisms having no place in the utopia of tomorrow-land in which we live; or to assure you that only our culture, one among many, upholds these arbitrary “values”; or to assure you that I speak mine opinion only, and yours if it differs is as good as mine; or that I am using the words master and authority and masculinity in some abstract or bloodless way; or if the very concept of authority sounds jarring in your ear like a clamor of brass vessels; why, then, dear reader, whether you admit it or not, you have supped the food of the elves which nourishes no man but bewitches them, and bibbed the wine of the modern world, for one of your crucial concepts that influences or governs you is antifatherhood.
In sum, the concept of fatherhood includes and controls the concept of strength, of courage, of honor, of authority and obedience, of equality, of individuality, of maternity, of femininity, chastity, of childhood, of true liberty, of life itself and of all true faith. Let us turn to these concepts one by one and see their relation to the crucial concept.
If this is a father, what is the antifather?
It is the opposite of any of these things, or even of all these things.
Antifatherhood is weakness, either the physical weakness of a sexual pervert who cannot control his flesh, or the mental and moral weakness of a tyrant and a bully. This includes the more pathetic mental and moral weakness of that gossip and backbiter who minds everybody’s business but his own, whose tongue is quick to venom, and whose heart is so small it can hold only the burning ember of condemnation, punier than an atom. A busybody is merely a tyrant without a scepter.
Antifatherhood is effeminate waffling and fear, or childish intemperance, or an inability either to obey without rebellion or to lead without tyrannizing. It is the cowardice that attacks imaginary or symbolic enemies, while leaving real enemies untouched, or, worse, it is the folly that aids and lauds real enemies with no forethought for the children under one’s care.
Antifatherhood is the pusillanimity disguised as cynical realism which says that dishonest means and dishonorable means to win an argument or win an election or win a war are forgivable means.
The father teaches his children that sports are to teach sportsmanship, and that a fallen foe treated with honor today may be an friend tomorrow.
The antifather teaches that the ends justify the means.
A childless man never has to contemplate how he must explain himself when innocent and adoring eyes are turned up to him so trustingly, to imitate the lessons of his life.
Authority is the one concept that the concept of Antifatherhood has successfully destroyed in modern life, so much so that even to talk about it is to speak a language as dead as Latin. The antifather sees only earthly power, the power to compel, the power to inflict. The antifather defines all power as tyranny, as unauthorized or illegitimate power.
Hence the antifather cannot obey and follow, since the follower lacks power and is hence automatically the oppressed victim. Hence the antifather cannot lead without tyranny, doing only those acts his authority authorizes, since, to him, to lead is to have total and totalitarian control over all life.
Imagine a king on his deathbed, with barely the strength to speak or raise his hand. What makes his knights still bow the knee to him, or elevate his infant son to be their liege, is authority.
Imagine a president in a wheelchair, crippled by polio, and imagine that you are his last soldier after all his armies have been wiped out by a treacherous rebellion or turned their coats. If he commands you to stand in the door of the Oval Office and shoot rebels until they overwhelm you, that command has presidential authority, even if he himself has no power to punish you should you disobey. You did not obey him in the first place only because of fear of punishment. Only the antifather speaks of obedience in such terms as this.
The perversion of the concept of equality that demands all success be punished and heroism be dragged to the lowest gutter level of the dullest philistine is the opposite of the concept of a father, for a father does not make himself a child to raise his child. A true father serves the true concept of equality, the one that raises up sons to be fathers in turn, the knight who leads the hesitant squire to knighthood.
The perversion of the concept of individualism that preaches an utter atomism of all social and civil relations, as if each man were an independent sovereign, making no bonds with his fellows aside from alliances of convenience or mercantile mutual advantage is likewise opposite the concept of a father. No man is a father without a wife who is a mother.
The one man in fiction who tried to be a virgin father was Dr. Frankenstein, whose name has since been rightly made a synonym for the unbalanced hubris of the intellect. No man is a father who lacks children dependent upon him for provender and protection and leadership, especially moral leadership.
Fatherhood implies motherhood as yin implies yang. The concept that all things masculine or feminine are all hateful or oppressive or arbitrary or optional likewise is antithetical to fatherhood, for the concept of a father is the concept of a true man, and true man seeks and adores a true woman, without which he is as nothing. Fathers are masculine because mothers are feminine.
As fatherhood implies motherhood, so motherhood implies femininity, which, upon reflection, we can see to be either those qualities which make for good mothers, or signs and symbols adopted by a culture to advertise those qualities. Like all advertisements, they might be true or false.
Antifatherhood equates femininity with weakness, and weakness is the despicable state of the oppressed, the victim, the downtrodden.
Antifatherhood equates femininity with the silliness of peroxide blondes pretending to be stupid so as not to scare off men mistrustful of brains in women.
The antifather wants strong women for the same reason as he wants weak men, because he is shallow, and he mistakes physical or political strength for spiritual strength, an art of which he knows nothing.
A truly feminine woman has the strength to drive a lover to suicide, a betrothed to the altar, a husband to fatherhood, a boy to manhood, a man to heroism. This is not a power to be despised, but it is a deep and profound power, and the shallow mind which dwells forever on simple and material things cannot see it.
The antifather thinks the mating dance is an arm-wrestling match and nothing more. If a man has more upper body strength than a woman, the antifather calls this an injustice.
The central point at which fatherhood and antifatherhood clash is that very point in the human soul where the reason clashes with the base and animal appetites, that crucial point of sex.
Fatherhood is a sexual role, indeed, it is one of the three essential roles of sex. The other two roles are motherhood and childhood. A father is not the father of a bastard. The reason why we make a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children is because we make a distinction between chastity and fornication, that is, between sex within marriage and sex without marriage.
This is the main point of the modern attack on fatherhood. The reason why it has been so successful is that it has an ally and secret agent in the base appetites of man, and it unleashes the most powerful of human drives, the sexual appetite.
I will not bother to repeat or refuse the bogus arguments used to promote the sexual revolution; any reader blind to the social pathologies that comes of adopting the Playboy Magazine philosophy cannot be made to open his eyes if I point to the various landmarks on the long downward slope of corruption, or point to the cyclopean and monstrous abomination of desolation looming in the holy place so that the sun hides it face.
On the other hand, any reader whose daughter complains that her husband would rather watch pornography than consummate their marriage and deliver him a grandson will feel the cold wind of that desolation without my touching on it.
Any reader who has given herself to a live-in lover, coupling with him in the hopes that the boy will somehow grow into a man and come to love and cherish her, but overhears him joking with his other girlfriends about not needing to buy the cow when the milk is free, she also feels the deadly breath of the desolation, and needs no word from me.
Any mother not a widow who is raising her child without a man, and sees her boy allured to gang membership, to drugs, to suicide, or sees her girl allured to men as worthless as the absent father, also feels the desolation.
Any father robbed of his family by an ungrateful and unfaithful wife, horsecollared with alimony and child-support, and yet a man who did no wrong, and perhaps does not even know why his wife left him, he not only feels but lives the desolation.
The attack on fatherhood has been so successful than many a man these days cannot even imagine a society where fatherhood exists, and assumes all ages must have been like ours, and all leaders adulterers, and all women harlots, except when they make the voluntary (yet inexplicable) choice not to be. The idea of chastity strikes the modern mind as unnatural.
Likewise, the idea of children strikes the modern ear with the sound like that of a plague of locusts being carried in on the east wind, a noise of menace, an alarm that the bounty of earth is threatened.
Here is part of the logic of concepts which earlier I mentioned: a man, or a society, can feel reverence and respect for sexual perversion, such as incest or sodomy, because it values personal autonomy as sacred; or that man or that society can feel reverence and respect for chastity and marriage, because he holds virginity and motherhood as mystical and sacred; but he cannot hold chastity and sexual perversion as sacred without making a distinction so artificial between the two concepts as to persuade no one.
Likewise here: if it is a crucial concept to you or to your society that sex is merely recreation, such that even the sex of one’s sexual partner is of no nevermind, then the use of sex for procreation cannot also be sacred; children cannot be sacred; virginity cannot be sacred.
Even the word “virgin” will sound awkward and anachronistic when you hear it, and you will giggle or perhaps sneer. Whereas screaming the word “vagina” will sound like a warlord’s trumpet in your ear, and you will ride to battle, banners bravely waving.
How did a crudity become your battlecry, O ye generation of vipers?
How did we come to the situation where you cannot tell the difference between “all men are created equal” and “women can marry each other”?
It is because all the concepts related to fatherhood are inverted when the concept of fatherhood is inverted. You hold it a sacred duty to desecrate what is decent, because to you any sign of decency is a sign of oppression.
You have simply equated, or your teachers have equated for you, the concept of self command in sexual matters and the concept of political oppression or psychological repression. Someone has convinced you that nature is unnatural and that the unnatural is the most natural thing in the world.
It is because your crucial concept, whether you know it or not, is that sterility is better than fecundity, that children are bad and contraception is good, that marriage is oppression but whoredom is freedom, that authority is oppression, the femininity is weakness, that masculinity is tyranny, that sex itself is unfair because the two sexes are not one (and you reject marriage, the one way whereby the two sexes can in truth become one), and that everything is opposed to your independence and self-expression and self-esteem, and you want to whore around and play the whore, because you wish you lived in a world where you could get away with every sin without ever paying any price.
The secret never spoken but always hanging huge as stormclouds in the background, covering the mental landscape of the modern age from horizon to horizon, is that you are not just in rebellion against political and social institutions who labeled instruments of oppression. You are not lovers of liberty as you claim, for true liberty consists in the perfection of the nature of man, not in the abolition of man.
You are an odd combination of anarchists and tyrants: anarchic in any matter where self-command is called for, or honor, or honesty, or truth to one’s word, and tyrants in any matter where some girlish fear smothers you, either fear of overpopulation, or global warming, or global cooling, or both at once; fear of ozone depletion and fear of cellphones and fear of lightbulbs and fear of flush toilets; and fear of being in want and fear of being unloved and fear of being hated and fear of being mobbed and killed by throngs and hordes of insane Episcopalians or mass-murdering Baptists; but most of all, you fear to lose your cheaply-won and meaningless self-anointment of moral superiority, where you go through the motions (without understanding them) of Christian concern for the dignity of women and children and Christian compassion for the poor and downtrodden; and you classify as downtrodden the Mohammedan Jihadist whose dearest dream for which he is willing to die and kill is to impose Sharia law on you and yours; but you fear the loss of your cheap illusion of moral superiority more than you fear the sword of Jihad, and so in the name of whatever the fashionable buzzword might be this season to excuse your sins and crimes, you act like tyrants when you have the power, and you act like gossips and backbiters when you lack the power, to aid your enemies and wound your protectors.
The reason, once seen, is simple. Your protectors are men who remind you of fatherhood. Soldiers and lawmakers and police are man of authority, who must be physically brave, and act as honor demands, and serve and obey and command.
Your enemies do not remind you of fatherhood. If anything, they remind you uncomfortably of your own life of comfort and ease which your father fought and toiled to bestow on your ungrateful and wasteful and empty souls, and you see them as charity cases, even though they say that want nothing from you, and do not see them as enemies, even though they never cease to proclaim in loudest words and louder actions that they are.
The crux or overlap between the concepts of sexual sterility and aiding an enemy is the concept of life and death. The modern world with its empty soul speaks in terms of enjoying the endless party of life while it speaks in actions of lurching glassy-eyed toward the crumbling brink overlooking an abyss. The modern world is a death cult.
Why? Why does the modern world celebrate choice, the act of choosing, with such cheers and paeans of praise and ringing tambourines, and then choose cowardice, dishonor, perversion, sterility, childlessness, self-destruction and death?
If life is such a rollicking party, why depart by suicidal acts of drug addiction or opening borders or supporting jihadists? Why support euthanasia?
If you are having such fun, why are you trying to die?
Because you are not just anarchists rebelling against men. You are addicts of unreason rebelling against reality. You are slaves of hell rebelling against God.
He is the source of all life, and in rejecting Him, whether you know it or not, you reject life. His is the authority behind all moral principles, the mind behind all logic and reason, the inspiration behind all true and wholesome art, and He is love, the source and summit of which all earthly loves are reflections and shadows and foreshadowing of greater loves to come.
The modern world has no choice. In the name of individuality and liberty and equality and fraternity (or whatever other meaningless word-fetishes the witch doctors of modernity invoke, merely for the sonorous sound of the words) the modern world rebels against fatherhood.
But, due to the logic of concepts aforementioned, it is sad and telling truth that no one can rebel against the concept of fatherhood without rebelling against God Almighty.
The witch doctors of modernity either demote Him to some emasculated hermaphrodite, or making a doting grandfather in his dotage who freely grants gifts but never delivers judgment; or they join fully with the pride of Lucifer, scorning the Lord as a tyrant, or mocking the Lord as a myth or figment or fairytale lie.
That, simply put, is why we have come to the house of madness in the land of make believe in the world of the looking glass where everything is backward.
God has put the choice before us, to chose life and be blessed, or to chose death and perish – and the modern generations have thought it would be chic and stylish to chose death, because the other choice offended their self esteem.
Women, now that a world without fathers, without husbands, without families, without homes, has been brought into being now are free of the restriction of being feminine or female or women at all.
They soon will be merely sexless persons in a powerless void, where their only provider will be faceless bureaucrats as remorseless and inhuman as the Mandarins of China. With all other institutions destroyed, family and clan and church and community, they will be naked before that power.
Women and men, young and old, are approaching the perfect freedom the postmodern world promises, the perfect freedom of as an astronaut whose umbilical cable is severed and spaceship is lost, and nothing for infinite lightyears reaches to any side of him as he falls.
Congratulations. All you had to do to win the freedom to sin was give away your soul.
You did not even bargain for it, or get anything in return. Faust would be ashamed.
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.
