Well, this is odd.
For the best part of this last decade, the very word feminism was enough to cause my teeth to grind and the veins in my eyes twitch. I’ve outlined my reasons previously.
Yet here I find myself thoroughly reconciled with it. It’s strange, but there it is.
I haven’t changed my opinion of feminists, mind you. Western feminists that is. People like Anita Sarkeesian, Laurie Penny, Amanda Marcotte et al still strike me as thoroughly loathesome and pointless. They are “those that never ripened and rotted on the branch”, and I can hope for the strong wind that blasts them from the tree. No, I’m still consistent on that.
What has changed is that I have understood the difference between the system and the substance.
Simply put, as awful as people like Marcotte are, they would be far worse under just about any other system. I have previously floated the idea that had they been born under different stars, they’d have been like Sigrid Hunke and Isle Koch. Or like Imelda Marcos.
If you want to see my, imagine someone like Sarkeesian as the spoiled and narcissistic wife or mistress of some caudillo. Or, for the neoreactionaries, imagine her as Anne Boleyn. Just try to imagine the kind of chaos and suffering such types would cause in that circumstance. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Contrast that with today – by and large the narcissists that are western feminists are a bloody nuisance, but they are not getting innocents lynched, whipping up race hatred, or inflaming wars. That is what such types would have done at most any time in history.
Read the Iliad. Achilles and Helen are both described as “god like”. That isn’t complimentary; what it means is that they are willing and able to follow their whims without any concern for other human beings, and do not care who suffers or dies because of them. Narcissists, in other words. Of course, men and women are different, and so awful men are awful in a different way from awful women. Achilles is a monster who lives only for war and slaughter, and has no joy beyond it. Helen quite enjoys that she is so beautiful that she can tear the known world apart, and leave Troy a burning ruin.
The world today… is really kinda great
I don’t think you can ever get to a state where some proportion of humanity isn’t just irredeemably dreadful. What you have to plan for is a system where the damage such people can do is minimized. And here we really need to be grateful to feminism, in its full, historic sense.
Manospherites and Neoreactionaries are motivated by a disgust of bullying, venomous narcissists. They are fooling themselves, however, if they think that under some system that subordinated women they would have been better off. In those systems, women still exercised power – through men.
And not small amounts of power, either. The thing about the Helen legend is how you can find ones like it all over human history. Think of Cleopatra, playing off Caesar and the Mark Anthony. Think of Diaochan inciting Luu Bu and Dong Xhu against each other. Think of Aisha, who helped lay the basis of the Sunni/Shia schism that is still killing people today.
There is a great moment in the webcomic SomethingPositive where the main character Davan confronts an anarchist:
You want anarchy?! This is anarchy! Where the stronger rule the weak, and guess where your place is, Pugsley? Anarchy is your sixth grade gym class for all eternity!
Something like this applies to the world that neoreactionaries and many manosphereites fantasize about. It would not be the stress free utopia of their fantasy, it is one where a tiny minority of ruthless men hogged all the women and you had to grovel to the whims of all of them. The nobles, their wives and concubines. All of them.
I’ve said before that there is no difference between Western feminists mocking shy nerds and a cheerleader getting the jock she’s fucking to beat them up. Now scale that up by fifty orders of magnitude, and that is what you would really have in a reactionary society.
The effect of feminism, of women’s emancipation, has does something great – it has eliminated, or at least strongly minimized, such types. One of the many great things about women’s emancipation is that women no longer need to cultivate that power. Far fewer find themselves shoved into loveless marriages with no way to escape, and turning to spite as their only salve. More importantly, women do not need to band reflexively behind someone who has a scrap of power.
Only a minority of women in the West now identify with the label of feminism, and far fewer with what Western feminism actually is like – because they have the option of simply getting on with their lives. They see the poisonous, senseless lives that prominent feminists live – and decide they want no part of it. This is a wonderful thing for all concerned, men and women both.
This is a great thing.
So – yeah. Three cheers for feminism!
Clogging up the works
There is, however, one way in which the rabble that are Western feminists are really bad. They are poisoning and sabotaging a good movement at a time when we desperately need a serious movement dedicated to women’s emancipation.
Fortunately, with the rise of the Rest, there is a new breed of tougher, better men and women willing to shoulder this burden. Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Nonie Darwish. Sabatina James. Wafa Sultan. And so on.
Western feminists can’t help what they are – it is in their nature. The only thing we can ask is for them to get the hell out of our way.
Someone should write a song about that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg9_Lx2AWaE
