My only critique is that I reckon your sections on love, sex and gender in Self and Unself, and your fiction, get closer to the mystery of gender. But this is great stuff too obviously. Just putting it out there.
Also, I know it's becoming trendy to pull apart feminism these days, especially by trolly right wing types, and I might be preaching to the choir here, but this is one of the best and simplest critiques of feminism I've read, by a left wing woman Aileen Moreton Robertson (who's also a state lover, for what it's worth), found in an article by the Guardian of all places.
Yes, there are plenty of women offering good critiques of feminism. I‘m reminded of Bob Black’s comment, which some of the writers in that article echo, ‘The only mathematically certain way to equalize, gender-wise, government and work is to get rid of both of them.’
"One of the first elements of this "love" which must come under critical attack is the constantly reoccurring cycle of "unfathomable" happiness and desperation, each of whose stages is blindly lived out and accepted as inevitable: as in many forms of commodified activity, each period of intense activity is followed by a dissolution of that arrangement, which is often unexpected or inexplicable. Unhappiness engenders a new search with the inevitable outcome. Through this pattern society terroristically imposes its sordid notion of social relations, using the threat of isolation whenever the comfort of the privatized relation proves insufficient to neutralize the dissatisfaction of individuals."
"It’s simple. It’s his fault. Ultimately, it’s all his fault."
How do you, as a man, come to terms with the fact that it's all your fault?
It seems like a severe burden. Not only is man (me,you) to blame now, for the state of the world as well as in personal life, but the blame is forever on man, regardless of what happens in particular. Because man has initiative, he is the active principle, of course the blame is on him.
Again this feels somewhat true, but I am not sure what to do with this.
In contrast, in Making Love Barry Long suggests that woman is the personification of love. This seems off.
How can the personification of love have such security issues? Or any of the other, less glamorous parts of women's femininity, for that matter. Love is the antithesis of insecurity.
It seems to me, despite your largely correct analysis about women being more 'whole' than men and generally more in touch with the ineffable, that the unselfish union of man and women itself is one of the many personifications of love, not either one of them. That both need to transcend their respective egoic, emotional traits to bask in the eternal light of love.
It can be true, in fact it is true, that a) both man and woman are equally responsible and b) man is more responsible than woman. Likewise it is true that a) man and woman can and must help each other to overcome themselves and b) man has more power to unfuck up woman than vice versa.
And so on.
She has security issues because she has not realised she is the personification of love. She allows men into her life who do not love her enough to enable this to happen, because she loves her emotions more than she does her life.
I’m not talking about ‘blame’ though. A red herring if ever there was one.
If I want baseless and resentful speculation on the essential differences between men and women, I can just go read Nietzsche. For real insight into the problems of men and women, as general types and in relation, you’re going to need to go beyond conventional “wisdom.” Sure, there’s often wisdom in convention, but it’s inarticulate and pervaded with coincidence. You’ve failed to separate the wheat from the chaff
They’re almost all baseless. Or, at best, based on anecdote from vague past experience and a reading of old literature. It’s a bit like the Greek poets, just a bunch of assertions heaped up, but in prose. The resentment is evident from the fact that those highly-tenuous assertions form harsh judgments of classes of people who are not you, claiming limits to the range of possibilities that are available to them. You seem to know better than to believe statements really capture reality, so I wonder at your project?
Although sin came through Adam he was responsible for her.
One can be not guilty of a dependent's sin but be responsible for it and make right. Husbands and fathers used to be punished for crimes by his wife and children.
Men are more responsible than women for feminism and men exploit it the most but fortunately good men are starting to rescue women.
"Husbands and fathers used to be punished for crimes by his wife and children." This sounds similar to what Ivan Illich speaks of in his book Gender, he refers to it as Rough Music. The husband will be punished by the community if he was caught beating his wife (rightly and obviously) but will also be punished if his wife was found to beat him!
Haha--still--given your wonderful footnotes, in the interest of rigour you might have considered footnoting that assertion with exactly this comment and let readers decide for themselves. BTW I've just become a paying subscriber and am about to order your book Apoclypedia. It'll take me a while to work through your body of work but you're a true original and the quality of your thinking is outstanding.
On the question of toxic femininity not being recognised, the poet Robert Graves had an interesting conjecture, which is that western culture since Christianity has had no symbolic representation of the shadow feminine. The Virgin Mary is the positive Mother archetype, although I believe that she was not encouraged by the Church itself but arose as a grassroots movement (the cult of the Virgin).
We haven't really had any mainstream archetypes for other aspects of the feminine especially the shadow forms eg. the Devouring Mother, the Crone etc., although these do exist in popular stories such as fairy tales. Contrast this with other cultures such as the Indian goddess Kali.
I’m not sure that’s either true (harpy, gorgon, dragon, witch, siren) or particularly important (toxic femininity is not recognised because powerful women are the accusers, not because we don’t have an archetypical term for it). Having said that, following Barry Long, I use the word ‘fiendess’ which does seem to fill a gap in our culture, so you might have a point.
I think it goes beyond the political. A tyrannical father is very easy to recognise, a devouring mother is not. Her fiendishness is cloaked under the pretense of "safety" and "care", very common buzzword in modern politics. The tyrannical king just has you arrested/murdered. The devouring queen has you poisoned with what looks like a nice juicy apple.
Yes, it goes beyond the political, I didn’t say otherwise, but the problem isn’t being without the right kind of archetypes. Unless you’re Jordan Peterson.
Well I'm glad to have read this. I'm thankful this isn't about current social wars but more about the current inter-sexual strife of the modern world. You give off a sense of perspective that is bigger than those petty conflicts. I feel that there is truth in your words.
Thanks for putting this out there sans pay wall. I would not have encountered it otherwise. Yes, it will have some clutching their pearls; so be it. We are currently in an era where women have ascended to a dominant position -- women as breadwinners, women as thought leaders, women essentially taking on the role of fathers in every respect. It is an ill fit and extremely unbalanced. As I type this, I am frittering away time from my necessary tasks to maintain my role as primary breadwinner. It should not be this way -- I should be able to keep my modest, humble home without having to earn money too, considering I am 24 years deep into a heterosexual marriage with a husband who works full time. This paradigm of the working woman is a pendulum swing from the 1980s and before it when men were dominant, even in matters of the home, and it is equally imbalanced. My formula as a woman is to express my "dominance" in the house, where I create nourishment on the etheric plane. My husband, who is not as good at etheric duties like cooking, cleaning, decorating, and 1001 tiny things that make a pleasant home, should not be expected to do those things and in our relationship, he does not do them. Much of the rancor from women arises because like me, they have to do everything: cooking, cleaning, breadwinning. Women did this to themselves because they bought the Superwoman fable. Remember the Enjoli perfume commercial? "I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, but I'll never let you forget you're a man." Lies.
Men and women both have a great deal of psychological trouble that is the direct or indirect result of belief in a single, one-shot lifetime, which is the legacy of a couple thousand years of monotheism. Those of us who believe in the human process being part of a long series of incarnations (and mental plane skill building) via many temporary male and female bodies are not as tormented about a single lifetime as a man or a woman. For instance, I am a songwriter in this lifetime. But I was also a songwriter in past lives. I believe one of my songs, written when I was a 12 year old girl in Eastern Europe, is still with us today. So a girl can have astral influence that lasts many centuries. It's just rare. In my case, I could be wrong, but I have memories of being a man many times in my past lives. The lessons of being a man are just as harsh as the ones presented for woman, but they are different lessons.
So you both go out and work, and then you come back home but only you do the housework? Is that right? What does your husband do while you’re cooking, cleaning, decorating, etc?
To be fair, he does do the dishes sometimes. To say he builds things would be a massive understatement. When we moved into the place about 9 years ago, it wasn’t livable. It was the only house we could qualify for in our financial state: cheap, tiny, decrepit, in a lower middle class neighborhood. He fixed EVERYTHING. Structural, plumbing, walls, windows, painting, electrical, doors/locks. And that’s additional to what he has done in the yard, which was a wreck of waist high grass. He would be an incredible general contractor if he was willing to do it for someone besides me.
Kimberly, I really like what you’ve written here. It’s not so much the tasks themselves it’s the inner pull to want to perform them. Men and women have different’pulls’. In my case raised by single mum I have internalised BOTH and do everything in my marriage. However my wife thinks about our sons more than I and brings unbelievable softness through conversations and interests etc that leave me for dead. I honestly feel that in the absence of crushing debt a lot of this would just sort itself out.
I am an 80 year old woman and have lived a difficult life, not helped by growing up with an abusive mother. However, as the stoics say "No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity", so I am not complaining... BUT the insight this article provides would have been invaluable - actually, it is invaluable even at 80! The last paragraph sums it up perfectly...
Thanks Svana. I know what you mean by ‘civilisation’, the best of us — but I won’t be mourning the coming collapse of the monstrosity that normally goes by that name.
It’s a fair question, and I could give some answers that come to mind but, if you’ll excuse the evasiveness, to me this question is a bit like ‘what is your purpose in dancing?’ The only answer that makes any sense is that the music is just so damn groovy.
Thank you! As someone who teaches gender and sexuality, and am so very concerned about how a faction of people has completely hijacked sanity of any kind in the quest for "injury politics," this is very reassuring.
This really resonates and I can see how this would have many men and women up in arms in denial.
I disagree on a small point you made about toxic feminism not existing. I have written a little about toxic feminism and how it manifests as female aggression/bullying among assimilated, educated women looking to occupy higher positions in a social hierarchy. Assimilated being the key point as the emulate masculine characteristics to gain status and dominance within a female-dominant context.
Hi Darren and other readers.
My only critique is that I reckon your sections on love, sex and gender in Self and Unself, and your fiction, get closer to the mystery of gender. But this is great stuff too obviously. Just putting it out there.
Also, I know it's becoming trendy to pull apart feminism these days, especially by trolly right wing types, and I might be preaching to the choir here, but this is one of the best and simplest critiques of feminism I've read, by a left wing woman Aileen Moreton Robertson (who's also a state lover, for what it's worth), found in an article by the Guardian of all places.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/nov/11/broadside-2019-how-a-feminist-festival-took-on-feminism-and-forced-us-to-think-harder
Just putting it out there.
Thanks Gerard.
Yes, there are plenty of women offering good critiques of feminism. I‘m reminded of Bob Black’s comment, which some of the writers in that article echo, ‘The only mathematically certain way to equalize, gender-wise, government and work is to get rid of both of them.’
From the spirit of the eighties:
https://libcom.org/article/jealousy-isaac-cronin
"Jealousy" Isaac Cronin
"The Heart Has Reasons
Reason Must Understand"
"One of the first elements of this "love" which must come under critical attack is the constantly reoccurring cycle of "unfathomable" happiness and desperation, each of whose stages is blindly lived out and accepted as inevitable: as in many forms of commodified activity, each period of intense activity is followed by a dissolution of that arrangement, which is often unexpected or inexplicable. Unhappiness engenders a new search with the inevitable outcome. Through this pattern society terroristically imposes its sordid notion of social relations, using the threat of isolation whenever the comfort of the privatized relation proves insufficient to neutralize the dissatisfaction of individuals."
Very true, I think. But,
"It’s simple. It’s his fault. Ultimately, it’s all his fault."
How do you, as a man, come to terms with the fact that it's all your fault?
It seems like a severe burden. Not only is man (me,you) to blame now, for the state of the world as well as in personal life, but the blame is forever on man, regardless of what happens in particular. Because man has initiative, he is the active principle, of course the blame is on him.
Again this feels somewhat true, but I am not sure what to do with this.
In contrast, in Making Love Barry Long suggests that woman is the personification of love. This seems off.
How can the personification of love have such security issues? Or any of the other, less glamorous parts of women's femininity, for that matter. Love is the antithesis of insecurity.
It seems to me, despite your largely correct analysis about women being more 'whole' than men and generally more in touch with the ineffable, that the unselfish union of man and women itself is one of the many personifications of love, not either one of them. That both need to transcend their respective egoic, emotional traits to bask in the eternal light of love.
It can be true, in fact it is true, that a) both man and woman are equally responsible and b) man is more responsible than woman. Likewise it is true that a) man and woman can and must help each other to overcome themselves and b) man has more power to unfuck up woman than vice versa.
And so on.
She has security issues because she has not realised she is the personification of love. She allows men into her life who do not love her enough to enable this to happen, because she loves her emotions more than she does her life.
I’m not talking about ‘blame’ though. A red herring if ever there was one.
If I want baseless and resentful speculation on the essential differences between men and women, I can just go read Nietzsche. For real insight into the problems of men and women, as general types and in relation, you’re going to need to go beyond conventional “wisdom.” Sure, there’s often wisdom in convention, but it’s inarticulate and pervaded with coincidence. You’ve failed to separate the wheat from the chaff
These are just insults. Could you be specific? Which observation is baseless? Which resentful? Which inarticulate? Which undiscriminating?
They’re almost all baseless. Or, at best, based on anecdote from vague past experience and a reading of old literature. It’s a bit like the Greek poets, just a bunch of assertions heaped up, but in prose. The resentment is evident from the fact that those highly-tenuous assertions form harsh judgments of classes of people who are not you, claiming limits to the range of possibilities that are available to them. You seem to know better than to believe statements really capture reality, so I wonder at your project?
BTW “Community Note”: Eve fell first, not Adam.
Although sin came through Adam he was responsible for her.
One can be not guilty of a dependent's sin but be responsible for it and make right. Husbands and fathers used to be punished for crimes by his wife and children.
Men are more responsible than women for feminism and men exploit it the most but fortunately good men are starting to rescue women.
"Husbands and fathers used to be punished for crimes by his wife and children." This sounds similar to what Ivan Illich speaks of in his book Gender, he refers to it as Rough Music. The husband will be punished by the community if he was caught beating his wife (rightly and obviously) but will also be punished if his wife was found to beat him!
The orthodox Eden myth was written by a deeply misogynist culture. Not too trustworthy.
Haha--still--given your wonderful footnotes, in the interest of rigour you might have considered footnoting that assertion with exactly this comment and let readers decide for themselves. BTW I've just become a paying subscriber and am about to order your book Apoclypedia. It'll take me a while to work through your body of work but you're a true original and the quality of your thinking is outstanding.
Thank you Chris.
"you're a true original and the quality of your thinking is outstanding."
I agree with Chris.
Just this article you wrote has given me hope. I really like how you think. Thank you for being strong.
I’m looking forward to the intellectual adventure!
On the question of toxic femininity not being recognised, the poet Robert Graves had an interesting conjecture, which is that western culture since Christianity has had no symbolic representation of the shadow feminine. The Virgin Mary is the positive Mother archetype, although I believe that she was not encouraged by the Church itself but arose as a grassroots movement (the cult of the Virgin).
We haven't really had any mainstream archetypes for other aspects of the feminine especially the shadow forms eg. the Devouring Mother, the Crone etc., although these do exist in popular stories such as fairy tales. Contrast this with other cultures such as the Indian goddess Kali.
I’m not sure that’s either true (harpy, gorgon, dragon, witch, siren) or particularly important (toxic femininity is not recognised because powerful women are the accusers, not because we don’t have an archetypical term for it). Having said that, following Barry Long, I use the word ‘fiendess’ which does seem to fill a gap in our culture, so you might have a point.
I think it goes beyond the political. A tyrannical father is very easy to recognise, a devouring mother is not. Her fiendishness is cloaked under the pretense of "safety" and "care", very common buzzword in modern politics. The tyrannical king just has you arrested/murdered. The devouring queen has you poisoned with what looks like a nice juicy apple.
Yes, it goes beyond the political, I didn’t say otherwise, but the problem isn’t being without the right kind of archetypes. Unless you’re Jordan Peterson.
Hard to deliver worthy praise to such worthy piece. My hope was finding Ivan Illich, and I found much more. Excellent, excellent.
Oh my. This is lovely. I need to reread it a few times to fully engage with it but my initial impression is really lovely. Thank you.
Well I'm glad to have read this. I'm thankful this isn't about current social wars but more about the current inter-sexual strife of the modern world. You give off a sense of perspective that is bigger than those petty conflicts. I feel that there is truth in your words.
Thanks for putting this out there sans pay wall. I would not have encountered it otherwise. Yes, it will have some clutching their pearls; so be it. We are currently in an era where women have ascended to a dominant position -- women as breadwinners, women as thought leaders, women essentially taking on the role of fathers in every respect. It is an ill fit and extremely unbalanced. As I type this, I am frittering away time from my necessary tasks to maintain my role as primary breadwinner. It should not be this way -- I should be able to keep my modest, humble home without having to earn money too, considering I am 24 years deep into a heterosexual marriage with a husband who works full time. This paradigm of the working woman is a pendulum swing from the 1980s and before it when men were dominant, even in matters of the home, and it is equally imbalanced. My formula as a woman is to express my "dominance" in the house, where I create nourishment on the etheric plane. My husband, who is not as good at etheric duties like cooking, cleaning, decorating, and 1001 tiny things that make a pleasant home, should not be expected to do those things and in our relationship, he does not do them. Much of the rancor from women arises because like me, they have to do everything: cooking, cleaning, breadwinning. Women did this to themselves because they bought the Superwoman fable. Remember the Enjoli perfume commercial? "I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, but I'll never let you forget you're a man." Lies.
Men and women both have a great deal of psychological trouble that is the direct or indirect result of belief in a single, one-shot lifetime, which is the legacy of a couple thousand years of monotheism. Those of us who believe in the human process being part of a long series of incarnations (and mental plane skill building) via many temporary male and female bodies are not as tormented about a single lifetime as a man or a woman. For instance, I am a songwriter in this lifetime. But I was also a songwriter in past lives. I believe one of my songs, written when I was a 12 year old girl in Eastern Europe, is still with us today. So a girl can have astral influence that lasts many centuries. It's just rare. In my case, I could be wrong, but I have memories of being a man many times in my past lives. The lessons of being a man are just as harsh as the ones presented for woman, but they are different lessons.
So you both go out and work, and then you come back home but only you do the housework? Is that right? What does your husband do while you’re cooking, cleaning, decorating, etc?
To be fair, he does do the dishes sometimes. To say he builds things would be a massive understatement. When we moved into the place about 9 years ago, it wasn’t livable. It was the only house we could qualify for in our financial state: cheap, tiny, decrepit, in a lower middle class neighborhood. He fixed EVERYTHING. Structural, plumbing, walls, windows, painting, electrical, doors/locks. And that’s additional to what he has done in the yard, which was a wreck of waist high grass. He would be an incredible general contractor if he was willing to do it for someone besides me.
Kimberly, I really like what you’ve written here. It’s not so much the tasks themselves it’s the inner pull to want to perform them. Men and women have different’pulls’. In my case raised by single mum I have internalised BOTH and do everything in my marriage. However my wife thinks about our sons more than I and brings unbelievable softness through conversations and interests etc that leave me for dead. I honestly feel that in the absence of crushing debt a lot of this would just sort itself out.
By the way, what an amazing article A Partial Explanation of Zoomer Girl Derangement - https://substack.com/redirect/7f19ad0e-4b2c-4b7c-8cc2-842292a276e4?j=eyJ1IjoiMWh0eDlpIn0.n_0XW4rwYewUu6zlfKugMRgOI1TtPuxujcb2OyM10J0
I am an 80 year old woman and have lived a difficult life, not helped by growing up with an abusive mother. However, as the stoics say "No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity", so I am not complaining... BUT the insight this article provides would have been invaluable - actually, it is invaluable even at 80! The last paragraph sums it up perfectly...
Yes, it’s great isn’t it? I like her restraint as well, drops one superb essay and then silence for a year.
Your insight will save our civilisation. I am so very grateful!
Thanks Svana. I know what you mean by ‘civilisation’, the best of us — but I won’t be mourning the coming collapse of the monstrosity that normally goes by that name.
What then is your purpose in your analysis of societal issues?
It’s a fair question, and I could give some answers that come to mind but, if you’ll excuse the evasiveness, to me this question is a bit like ‘what is your purpose in dancing?’ The only answer that makes any sense is that the music is just so damn groovy.
You mean analysing in itself feels so good? If so, I can relate to that but I think you have other reasons.
Yes, I have other reasons, but they are secondary to the experience.
What precedes why.
Thank you! As someone who teaches gender and sexuality, and am so very concerned about how a faction of people has completely hijacked sanity of any kind in the quest for "injury politics," this is very reassuring.
What a great essay.
What an interesting read! Much appreciated, thank you.
This really resonates and I can see how this would have many men and women up in arms in denial.
I disagree on a small point you made about toxic feminism not existing. I have written a little about toxic feminism and how it manifests as female aggression/bullying among assimilated, educated women looking to occupy higher positions in a social hierarchy. Assimilated being the key point as the emulate masculine characteristics to gain status and dominance within a female-dominant context.
Thank you for your work on this topic.
Thanks Nathalie. I meant that ‘toxic femininity’ is not recognised; it certainly exists.
Thank you for clarifying my misinterpretation of your statement.