It is only through ignorance
or suppression of the truth that anyone can believe in the leftist worldview, a
kind of bad morality play that would be merely amusing were it not so
influential.
Of this feminism is a representative example.
Motivated by status
envy, which is a reflection of human
nature’s difficult need for esteem, feminists have a perverse
conception of history. It never seems to occur to them that men no more chose
their greater physical strength and, yes, greater ability to engage in abstract
thought at the highest level than women chose to be mothers, with all the
grueling burdens that accompany that fate.
“The large institutions [of the world] have
almost all been created by men,” the psychologists Roy Baumeister and Kathleen
Vohs have written.
The notion that women were deliberately
oppressed by being excluded from these institutions requires an artful,
selective, and motivated way of looking at them. Even today, the women’s
movement has been a story of women demanding places and preferential treatment
in the organizational and institutional structures that men create, rather than
women creating organizations and institutions themselves.
For reasons that are beyond
anyone’s control, and in regard to which resentment and blame are incoherent,
it fell to men to create the marvelous achievement that is civilization. Yet
men’s greater power outside the domestic sphere, we must understand, is
symbiotic with women’s greater power therein: Nature’s balance this is, which
we alter at our peril.
What is more, while civilization and culture at
their highest are the work of a minority of men,
still even these accomplishments correspond to biological needs and desires
that, for the most part, have been in the service of women and children. And
indeed, serving women and children, providing for and protecting them, has been
the primary purpose of most men in history.
“Like men, women are not fair-minded, and there
are sensible reasons for that.”
As if they wanted to confirm the
truth of female hysteria, feminists reduce human life to a silly
binary: man, bad; woman, good. Or, man, oppressor; woman, oppressed. What gives
the lie to this is women’s relations with other women. In recent months we have
seen spectacles of
group shaming and vicious gossip whereby women have sought to ruin men’s lives.
What many people don’t know is that such phenomena stem from the very nature of
women, and nobody knows this better than women themselves.
In a
study published last month in the Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology,
Tania Reynolds, Roy Baumeister, and Jon Maner found that women, in their fierce
intrasexual competition, use gossip and manipulation to “undermine the romantic
and social appeal of same-sex romantic rivals who are perceived to be
threatening.” That women would do so is supported by a 2009 study in
the same journal, which found that women are more attracted to men who are taken.
Just as many women are quite willing to falsely accuse men of sexual harassment
and of sexual assault, so women employ their preternatural skill at deception
against their fellow women. Like men, women are not fair-minded, and there are
sensible reasons for that.
To be sure, Reynolds et al. are not on new
ground. Writers have been representing the unscrupulous craftiness of women for
centuries. In his essay ”On
Women” (1851), Arthur Schopenhauer wrote:
As lions are furnished with claws and teeth,
elephants with tusks, boars with fangs, bulls with horns, and the cuttlefish
with its dark, inky fluid, so Nature has provided woman for her protection and
defence with the faculty of dissimulation, and all the power which Nature has
given to man in the form of bodily strength and reason has been conferred on
woman in this form. Hence, dissimulation is innate in woman and almost as
characteristic of the very stupid as of the clever. Accordingly, it is as
natural for women to dissemble at every opportunity as it is for those animals
to turn to their weapons when they are attacked.
Physically weaker than men,
and bearing within themselves the future of the species, women rarely find it
in their best interests to be overtly aggressive. It’s far more effective,
indeed, to be a fox than a lion.
But it’s precisely because
they cannot afford to be straightforward like men that women are more resentful
and vindictive than men. Passive where a man is active, a woman simmers and
simmers, and when she does exact revenge, it is by subterranean means. This is
another truth that poets and novelists have long depicted.
The psychologist Leonard Berkowitz has argued that
pain and “aversive” stimuli generally beget feelings of anger and blame. They
are followed by a desire to punish. Well before Berkowitz, Nietzsche
argued that the will to punish is the very essence of morality,
a complex drive that produces a creative inversion of natural instincts. Women
are not less inclined to the will to punish than men; again, they are simply
more covert.
The greater subtlety of women
is lost on most men—but not, of course, on women themselves. They know it only
too well, and therefore will readily grasp the truth of Schopenhauer’s
observation:
It is natural for a feeling of mere
indifference to exist between men, but between women it is actual enmity. This
is due perhaps to the fact that odium figulinum [trade
jealousy] in the case of men, is limited to their everyday affairs, but with
women embraces the whole sex; since they have only one kind of business. Even
when they meet in the street, they look at each other like Guelphs and
Ghibellines. And it is quite evident when two women first make each other’s
acquaintance that they exhibit more constraint and dissimulation than two men
placed in similar circumstances.
This underlying antagonism of women naturally
turns up in the workplace. Thus, Allison Gabriel, assistant professor of
management and organizations at the University of Arizona’s Eller College of
Management, in her
recent studies of men and women in the workplace, “found
consistent evidence that women reported higher levels of incivility from other
women than their male counterparts…. [Women] are ruder to each other than they
are to men, or than men are to women.” And the more assertive the women were,
the more rudeness they received from other women. Hence, while feminists are
forever urging women to be “strong and independent,” women’s biggest obstacle
in doing so is likely to be other women.
Gabriel’s work concerns perceived aggression. Yet such is
the nature of women that, where a man will act on his anger or resentment, a
woman often will do nothing at all. She may even disappear from one’s life. Or,
as people now say, “ghost.” A year ago, in her article for Time magazine “Why Friends
Ghost On Even Their Closest Pals,” Deborah Tannen described the considerable
pain this causes women. Tannen tells us that she herself has been ghosted on.
And yet, her article is superficial and would have been more insightful if she
had compared the ways of women to male directness and to the distinctly male
notion of duty. I will add that the moral evil of ghosting reflects the general
decline of manners and morality in our time. Indeed, I am old enough to
remember when people took it for granted that we owe each other an explanation
and a sense of where we stand in regard to each other. Common courtesy, in
other words.
In Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, her 2001 book,
Phyllis Chesler gives example after example of women mistreating fellow women.
Some of the cruelest examples concern women mistreating their daughters-in-law,
and here, as so often is the case with women and moral issues, there is a
palpable element of women’s maternal character, mothers going to extreme
lengths to try to ensure that wives are worthy of their sons, even if that
should entail doing horrible things.
Although marred by the standard cant about the
“patriarchy,” Chesler’s book is a useful corrective to the silly binary
mentioned above. And certainly Chesler herself merits respect for outgrowing
her former belief that, in a moral sense, women are better than men. Neither
sex is better than the other, is her more mature and reasonable opinion.
(Chesler should also be commended for her principled
opposition to the treatment of women in the Islamic world.)
The moral differences of men and women are
fascinating. It is evident that
women, with their maternal endowment, are more altruistic and given to pity
than men. And as the greater female support for open borders suggests, women
are also more universal in their moral conceptions. It seems, though, that with
respect to moral phenomena on a person-to-person basis, women on the whole are
less fair-minded than men. Why shouldn’t this be so? Moral thought systems,
with all their abstract rigor and sense of duty, are male creations, and
indeed, just as women’s greater cunning and dissimulation have a probable
evolutionary basis, so perhaps women’s lesser sense of fairness on an
individual level serves the same purpose. After all, it is the instinct of
women to be deeply partial, most of all to their children; whereas, outside the
realm of local affection, getting at a sense of the objective good requires the
most exacting impartiality, a trait in which there is nothing maternal.
A lesser sense of fairness in individual
relations is also consistent with female hypergamy. For it is natural for women
to be ruthless in their efforts to obtain powerful and highly fit (with respect
to survival) men. In this regard, Ernest Hemingway’s great
short story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936),
which might aptly be titled “What Women Really Want,” is very illuminating. As
his facetious name implies, Francis Macomber, like most Western men today, is a
weak fellow, easily manipulated and controlled by his wife, Margaret, who is
much stronger in mind and will than him. While on vacation in Africa, the
couple goes on a safari with an alpha male indeed—a literal lion hunter—whose
courage among the lions and other beasts stands in humiliating contrast to the
cowardly Francis, who has no such chops and panics when a wounded lion charges
at him. Margaret, acting on her determining hypergamy,
is smitten and soon sleeps with the heroic Robert Wilson, whose masculine
superiority she had earlier rewarded with a kiss.
Now Francis feels even worse,
betrayed and impotent. At length, however, he overcomes his weakness as the two
men continue to hunt, and feeling manly at last, he decides to leave Margaret.
Whereupon she in her wicked guile decides that Francis must “accidentally” die.
And so he does, his wife shooting him. The hunter Wilson, though not an abettor
of the deed, cynically pretends to believe her subsequent false account. Nor is
he troubled, believing the brutal turn of events is all in the nature of
things.
The superbly ironic title refers to the brief
moments when Francis is a real man (finally having self-mastery and refusing to
let Margaret dominate him)—that is, just before his wife kills him, since she
has resolved to punish him for his newfound freedom. If only, like Robert
Wilson, he had been a real man all along, rather than a chump whom Margaret
profoundly resented, then Francis would have fared better—that, perhaps, is the lesson of
this dark tale.
It is in eros, anyway, that
we can most clearly see this truth: that “equality” is the last thing women
want.
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