Starting World War G: the gender wars

Larry Kummer, Editor

8 years ago

Summary: Previous posts in this series explained how the counter-revolution to modern feminism has begun, and how it might undermine the new social order. Before I predict how the gender wars will end, let’s see how we got here and what we have lost.

Taylor Swift sings about modern romance in “Blank Space.” She is the voice of women millennials, strong and independent, liberated from all rules.

It’ll leave you breathless
Or with a nasty scar
Got a long list of ex-lovers
They’ll tell you I’m insane
But I’ve got a blank space, baby
And I’ll write your name …

Screaming, crying, perfect storms
I can make all the tables turn
Rose garden filled with thorns
Keep you second guessing like
“Oh my God, who is she?”
I get drunk on jealousy
But you’ll come back each time you leave …

Boys only want love if it’s torture
Don’t say I didn’t say, I didn’t warn ya …

Swift is an extreme example of today’s young women. They ride the alpha carousel, surrounded by beta orbiters (their followers on social media and those they have friend zoned). They assume the betas like the abuse, since they are so eager for more. This is the end of the process begun with women’s liberation from the patriarchy. See an early version: “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” written in 1979, made famous by Cyndi Lauper in 1983 – a break from the traditional pattern of young women dating with the expectation of marriage by their early 20’s.

From this came the Girl’s Game successfully employed by so many women of Generation X (1964-1983): romance, party-of-her-life, marriage, kids, divorce, community property, child support, independence (for those of a literary turn, here’s how James Joyce would describe it (scroll to the second half). The key to women’s success at Girl’s Game was marriage when 26 – 32, plus romantically promising to marry “until death do us part” while ready to divorce as appropriate. Combined with a good career, many upper class gen X women have lived as close as possible to “having it all.”

Now the women of Generation Y (millennials) try their hand at Girl’s Game. The oldest are 34, and most have been successful at it. Marriage rates are falling, but slowly. Before saying what comes next we must understand how we got here. Oddly, little of the massive literature about women’s liberation discusses this. Comments to my posts show that many young men do not know this history. Logically, since it is ancient history for them.

What we were: patriarchy was a reward for marriage

Patriarchy was the reward for men joining the rat race. In exchange women got security, family, and children. The average guy and gal could make it work, since the roles were clear and feasible – and exit was difficult and disreputable. Spouses were partners. Sex was available, but not expected to be earth-shaking. Marriage was like most western institutions, built on low but solid ground.

The system was more attractive to women than men. Women were biologically enlisted by their fertility (before effective easy contraceptives). Young men, especially the stronger ones, often had to be pushed into the machinery. Societies across time and space had procedures to do so, including coming of age rituals, high status for husbands and fathers, and economic incentives. Men being naturally recalcitrant, women often had to entice men into their destined roles. Much of western literature describes this process. Here are a few of the countless examples of this in classic films.

This was also standard plot trope in books for men, both adults and young adults. For example, see Robert Heinlein’s science fiction, such as Beyond This Horizon (1942) and Have Space Suit, Will Travel (1958).

The revolution in marriage

Technological change (e.g., contraceptives, shift to service-based jobs) made possible the next phase in the evolution of western individualism. In Closing of the American Mind Allan Bloom describes the revolution. He describes the irresistible economic and moral changes that have made feminism a dominant ideology in America (like Christianity in traditional western society, it is the acknowledged truth – but not always followed).

“The old love relationship involved differentiated sexual roles — roles now interpreted as bondage and domination. …Now all of this has simply disintegrated. It does not exist, nor is it considered good that it should. …The goals and wills of men and women have become like parallel lines, and it requires a Lobachevskyan imagination to hope they may meet.…

“The souls of men — their ambitious, warlike, protective, possessive character — must be dismantled in order to liberate women from their domination. Machismo — the polemical description of maleness or spiritedness, which was the central natural passion in men’s souls in the psychology of the ancients, the passion of attachment and loyalty — was the villain, the source of the difference between the sexes. …With machismo discredited, the positive task is to make men caring, sensitive, even nurturing, to fit the restructured family. …

“It is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them ‘care’ is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail. It must fail because in an age of individualism, persons of either sex cannot be forced to be public-spirited, particularly by those who are becoming less so. …The old moral order, however imperfect it may have been, at least moved toward the virtues by way of the passions. If men were self-concerned, that order tried to expand the scope of self-concern to include others, rather than commanding men to cease being concerned with themselves. …

“A true political or social order requires the soul to be like a Gothic cathedral, with selfish stresses and strains helping to hold it up. {Modern ideology} condemns certain keystones, removes them, and then blames both the nature of the stones and the structure when it collapses. The failure of agriculture in socialist collective farming is the best political example of this.”

The revolution, now in its final stages, by radical feminists has created a social regime with the logic of socialist collective farming. It looks great on paper. I predict it too will collapse utterly.

The collapse has already begun, running in the usual “S” curve shape. We are in the first phase, the gentle slope during which the great and wise deny that anything is happening. Just adjustments to the new order. We see this in the many articles by women asking how to get their men to commit to marriage, and complaining that he is Peter Pan and won’t commit. We see who is adjusting, because there are few equivalent articles about women unwilling to commit to marriage.

The development of guy’s Game, Red Pill thinking, and men going their own way (MGTOW) are small phenomena — as discussed in previous posts. But they discredit the new regime and lay the foundation for the rapid spread of the insurgency in the next decade: men refusing to marry. All other aspects are minor compared to this, since marriage is a core process making our society function.