Well, this is odd.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 I’ve outlined my reasons<\/a> previously<\/a>.<\/p>\n Yet here I find myself thoroughly reconciled with it.\u00a0 It’s strange, but there it is.<\/p>\n I haven’t changed my opinion of feminists<\/em>, mind you.\u00a0 Western feminists that is.\u00a0 People like Anita Sarkeesian, Laurie Penny, Amanda Marcotte et al<\/em> still strike me as thoroughly loathesome and pointless.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 No, I’m still consistent on that.<\/p>\n What has changed is that I have understood the difference between the system<\/em> and the substance<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n Simply put, as awful as people like Marcotte are, they would be far worse under just about any other system.\u00a0 I have previously floated the idea that had they been born under different stars, they’d have been like Sigrid Hunke and Isle Koch.\u00a0 Or like Imelda Marcos.<\/p>\n If you want to see my, imagine someone like Sarkeesian as the spoiled and narcissistic wife or mistress of some caudillo.\u00a0 Or, for the neoreactionaries, imagine her as Anne Boleyn.\u00a0 Just try to imagine the kind of chaos and suffering such types would cause in that circumstance.\u00a0 It doesn’t bear thinking about.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That is what such types would have done at most any time in history.<\/p>\n Read the Iliad<\/em>.\u00a0 Achilles and Helen are both described as “god like”.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Narcissists, in other words.\u00a0 Of course, men and women are different, and so awful men are awful in a different way from awful women.\u00a0 Achilles is a monster who lives only for war and slaughter, and has\u00a0no joy beyond it.\u00a0 Helen quite enjoys that she is so beautiful that she can tear the known world apart, and leave Troy a burning ruin.<\/p>\n The world today… is really kinda great<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n I don’t think you can ever get to a state where some proportion of humanity isn’t just irredeemably dreadful.\u00a0 What you have to plan for is a system where the damage such people can do is minimized.\u00a0 And here we really need to be grateful to feminism, in its full, historic sense.<\/p>\n Manospherites and Neoreactionaries are motivated by a disgust of bullying, venomous narcissists.\u00a0 They are fooling themselves, however, if they think that under some\u00a0system that subordinated women\u00a0they would have been better off.\u00a0 In those systems, women still exercised power – through men<\/em>.<\/p>\n And not small amounts of power, either.\u00a0 The thing about the Helen legend is how you can find ones like it all over human history.\u00a0 Think of Cleopatra, playing off Caesar and the Mark Anthony.\u00a0 Think of Diaochan inciting Luu Bu and Dong Xhu\u00a0 against each other.\u00a0 Think of Aisha, who helped lay the basis of the Sunni\/Shia schism that is still <\/em>killing people today.<\/p>\n There is a great moment in the webcomic SomethingPositive<\/em> where the main character Davan confronts an anarchist:<\/p>\n 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!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Something like this applies to the world that neoreactionaries and many manosphereites fantasize about.\u00a0 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<\/a>.\u00a0 The nobles, their wives and concubines.\u00a0 All <\/em>of them.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 Now scale that up by fifty orders of magnitude, and that is what you would really have in a reactionary society.<\/p>\n The effect of feminism, of women’s emancipation, has does something great – it has eliminated, or at least strongly minimized, such types.\u00a0 One of the many great things about women’s emancipation is that women no longer need to cultivate that power.\u00a0 Far fewer find themselves shoved into loveless marriages with no way to escape, and turning to spite as their only salve.\u00a0 More importantly,\u00a0women do not need to band reflexively behind someone who has a scrap of power.<\/p>\n Only a minority of women in the West now identify with the label of feminism, and far\u00a0fewer with\u00a0what Western feminism actually<\/em> is like\u00a0– because they have the option of simply getting on with their lives.\u00a0 They see the poisonous, senseless lives that prominent feminists live – and decide they want no part of it.\u00a0 This is a wonderful thing for all concerned, men and women both.<\/p>\n This is a great thing.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n So – yeah.\u00a0 Three cheers for feminism!<\/p>\n Clogging up the works<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n There is, however, one way in which the rabble that are Western feminists are really bad.\u00a0 They are poisoning and sabotaging a good movement at a time when we desperately need a serious movement dedicated to women’s emancipation.<\/p>\n Fortunately, with the rise of the Rest, there is a new breed of tougher, better men and women willing to shoulder this burden.\u00a0 Ayaan Hirsi Ali.\u00a0 Nonie Darwish.\u00a0 Sabatina James.\u00a0 Wafa Sultan.\u00a0 And so on.<\/p>\n Western feminists can’t help what they are – it is in their nature<\/a>.\u00a0 The only thing we can ask is for them to get the\u00a0hell out of our way<\/a>.<\/p>\n Someone should write a song about that:<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=xg9_Lx2AWaE<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, this is odd. For the best part of this last decade, the very word feminism was enough to cause…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,12,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-femen","category-the-enlightenment-continues","category-womens-rights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1502\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}