The Root Cause of Feminism

One of the things that really stands out about Reactionaries – whether you’re talking about Wagner, Stoddard, or Mencken – is their ability to be downright prescient about the future.  Where areas most predictions are based upon of self-serving and unsubstantiated political faiths, the True Reactionary makes a Mistress out of truth.

Nowhere is this more obvious than with the anti-suffragettes.

All of the problems with feminism which we articulate in the Manosphere today were thoroughly delineated by Reactionary writers a century back:

• The foolishness of women voters (“sexy” presidents and socialism)
• Dropping birthrates
• Old Maids trying to legislate husbands (Age of Consent laws)
• The sensitivity of women in the work place
• Rising rates of divorce (including no-fault specifically)
• Female-targeted welfare as a necessity
• The bitchification of women’s character
• The pussification of mens’ character
• Oppressive anti-booze, anti-drug, and anti-fun laws
• Latch-key kids – irresponsible and criminalized youth
• The breakdown of sexual morality
• The breakdown of culture and national character

There is nothing new under the sun.  Everything – and I do mean everything – argued against by the alt-right and the manosphere was accurately predicted and thoroughly explicated by these writers (some of whom were women, for the record).  Any errors were errors of timeline – the unpopularity of prohibition would have surprised them – but the overall narrative was perfectly explored.

But feminism is merely the Proximate Cause; true, when we look at the degenerative breakdown of our society, more often than not you can point towards a feminist who caused it.  But what of the Ultimate Cause?  What caused the feminist?  During my recent conversation with The Observer Watches we talked about how both North America and Singapore are going through the exact same sorts of problems, but for different reasons.  In Singapore feminists showed up late to the party – unlike here, they don’t have access to the Internal Gears of government – and were recently told to Go Fly a Kite by the latest budget.  While they are problematic in and of themselves, they are not part of Singapore’s problem.  They have no influence.

And yet Singapore is suffering from an almost identical demographic and financial collapse; as is Japan, as is China; each for apparently different reasons.  Yet we have all arrived at the same point in history.

Feminism, multi-culturalism, anti-natalism, socialism, what have you – the problem is Modernism. (HT Ex-Army)

But if the machine age has profoundly altered the position of the working man, it has done still more with woman.  It has dispossessed her.  Her work has been taken away.  The machine does it.  It makes the clothes and brews the beer.  The roar of the vacuum cleaner has hushed the sound of the broom.  The proud proportions of the old-timecook are dwindled to the slim outline of the gas-stove expert operating on a beefsteak with the aid of a thermometer.

One of the common mistakes nowadays is to look to the 1950s for a model of gender relations, without acknowledging that the 50s were a Weird Time.  One decade of Depression – another decade of War – these are not the sorts of experiences which create well-balanced human beings, who form emotionally-stable relationships.

The 1950s were stifling; they were oppressively homogeneic.  Can you really blame the Flower Children for rebelling so far in the opposite direction?

We watch Hollywood movies from the era, and mistake the Silver Screen for reality – if we were to do that today, spending your twenties at bars and clubs ought to be fun and fulfilling, not shallow and full of heartbreak.  Gen-Xers think of their grandparents, imagining a Normative Model out of the marriages which survived, and judging the people of the era by their more-settled, calm and aged results – as if there were no vitriol or arguments between these couples in the past.  We see glamour and plenty amongst a people who were still traumatized by memories of privation and want.

The Past just ain’t what it used to be.

Furthermore, the 1950s were deep set into the sea of modernism.  Men were torn from their families and the land, going to work in factories all day, while the women were deprived of their husbands, left without meaningful work.  We are right to chide the feminist solutions to the problems as idiotic – but that doesn’t mean their complaints were groundless.

Criminalizing drunk sex is stupid; but for that matter, so is turning a blind eye to the problem of date rape (both the Rape-Rape variety, and the I-Feel-Bad variety).  Clearly something is wrong on our modern College Campuses.

So what did the complaints from fifty years ago look like?

The problem that has no name – which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities – is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease
…
Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question– ‘Is this all?

~Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

That Friedan ultimately contributed the demise of the Nuclear Family is inarguable; and certainly, her founding of the National Organization for Women helped the Cultural Marxists in their quest to destroy the fabric of America.  But to accuse her of being an anti-society degenerate is disingenuous.

She raised three children, stayed married for 22 years, was criticizing the “radical” feminists as early as the 1960s, and in regards to the rumours of Domestic Violence between her and her husband, she said: “I almost wish I hadn’t even written about it, because it’s been sensationalized out of context. My husband was not a wife-beater, and I was no passive victim of a wife-beater. We fought a lot, and he was bigger than me.”

Idyllic 1950s relationship indeed.

The leaders of the Frankfurt School were masters of manipulation – informed by Freud and Marx, they knew precisely how to manipulate language and academia to Dupe the Masses.  But in Friedan’s case – the Problem with No Name – it wasn’t about manipulation for the sake of evil.  It was about accurately identifying a problem with Modernity.

Nietzsche and Wagner warned about the Death of God.  Dickens wrote about the social erosion of the Factory.  H.P. Lovecraft trembled in terror as we fell into a meaningless cosmology, while Erich Remarque wrote about the horrors of a war waged by machines, where men became ammunition.  Orwell warned of the horrors of socialism, as did Yevgeny Zamyatin and Aldous Huxley.  Ted Kaczynski went mad as he saw humanity being mechanically separated from its very soul.

Modernity – soul-destroying, mechanicstic Modernity – is the underlying problem behind all our woes.  The logic of the machine and the institution, humans as replaceable cogs.  HBO show The Wire sums describes it thusly:

Simon has identified the organizations featured in the show—the Baltimore Police Department, City Hall, the Baltimore public school system, the Barksdale drug trafficking operation, The Baltimore Sun, and the stevedores’ union—as comparable institutions. All are dysfunctional in some way, and the characters are typically betrayed by the institutions that they accept in their lives.

Feminists are little more than collected human detritus, the broken and the ugly forming packs on the internet, and occasionally lobbying to try and turn night into day.  They are the old and ugly, the stupid, and the forgotten, but never the mover – always the moved.  Their existence is their own damnation, and arguments are largely unnecessary.

If there is to be hope for the future, you won’t find it in the 1950s – not even the 1890s – and certainly not 1776.

Deep in our history, deep in our hearts – before Rings of Gold corrupted us into Nazgul – childlike servant-kings of technology and material comfort, addicted to the heroin-drip of electronic toys and central banking.  Before the Modern age.

Look to the noble dignity of Roland, Arthur, Beowulf, and Achilles –

If there is a future, they are it.

ͼ-Ѻ-ͽ

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