Women and Men
Some of what follows is unorthodox, and may arouse ill-will, particularly if you are unfamiliar with the rest of my work, which sets it in a fuller context. Anyone who reads and reacts with instinctive antipathy might like to ask why her feelings should be those of the system; why so much of what follows is verboten in the media of the system (both mainstream and dissident), while contrary views are strenuously promoted. Given the nature of the system, the correct answer is unlikely to be ethically satisfying, which is why it is never given.
Preamble: The Fact of Sex and The Quality of Gender
The words man and woman refer to sexual facts. Men actively produce sperm and women are passively born with eggs. These primal facts have qualities, as all facts do, which is why men are always basically (or qualitatively) masculine, and women are always basically feminine.
The words masculine and feminine, however, refer not to sexual facts, but to gendered qualities which, as all primal people (and great artists) well understood, can inhere in any kind of fact, even in numbers. This is why, for example, cats feel more feminine than dogs, which feel more masculine.1
Upon the primal facts of man or woman the self comprises an infinite number of secondary facts, with their own gendered qualities. I call these ‘secondary facts’ modalities. These pertain to mind, will, body and feeling, each of which can be ‘shaded’ with more or less masculinity or femininity.
Woman then is ultimately feminine, and man is ultimately masculine, but each is made up of many, various and extremely subtle gendered modalities. A man can have a slightly feminine jaw, for example, or a feminine attitude to authority, while a woman can have a touch of masculinity in her sexuality, and so on.
Thus a balanced human is primarily either male or female, with, following from this, a massive and highly nuanced variety of secondary modalities. Together all these qualities make up the fascinating blend, in all human beings, between the essential or general man and woman, and the specific individual.
Modalities can be culturally acquired; they are shaped by environments which can also be masculine or feminine.2 Thus, balanced (primal) societies produce essentially masculine men and essentially feminine women, with, again, a variety of subtle and interesting modalities following from this.
Unbalanced societies either produce overly masculine men and feminine women (such pseudo-gendered people tend to appear in pre-modern, moralistic societies) or they produce overly feminine men and overly masculine women (such mono-gendered people tend to appear in postmodern, decadent societies).
Opposites attract, which is why a partner is most attractive when they have complementary modalities. A projective masculine mind will enjoy the company of a receptive feminine mind, a sharp, square masculine body will find a soft, round feminine form attractive, and so on and so forth.
Although it is considered a thoughtcrime today, it is possible to make general observations3 about men, those people who produce sperm, and about women, those people who are born with eggs, and about the masculine and the feminine, qualities which most — but not all — men and women essentially possess.
But generalisations are gestures. To speak of the essential difference between men and women one must, as Ivan Illich pointed out, reach for metaphor, because sex and gender refer to complementary qualities that are, rationally speaking, enigmatic. It is impossible to ‘pin down’ men and women.
The miracle of love is impossible without this complementarity. If you are basically the same as me, I may love you, understand you; but I cannot experience a mystery that unites, as metaphors do, two different qualities. Love becomes mathematical, or rationally understandable. Unmysterious. Economic.
Men and Women
Man makes History, woman is History.
Oswald Spengler
Have you ever noticed how, when a man and woman in relationship argue, if he is found to be wrong he often seems to be more wrong, than she does when she’s guilty? Even with the most atrocious, horrendous women there is often, somehow, a sense of innocence about them that male monsters do not possess?
It’s simple. It’s his fault. Ultimately, it’s all his fault. Adam fell first, and then he blamed Eve, and has been blaming her ever since. Woman is responsible, of course — in fact she takes on the evil in the world more readily than man does, and becomes far more deranged — but the source of it all, is in his stinking heart.
Every man has a devil in him. An angel too, yes, but the fiendish horror that man nurses in his self (even — sometimes especially — the nicest men) makes her evil look, if not more trivial (for she can certainly be diabolic), then, at the very least, more pitiful.4
Woman, generally speaking, is more innocent than man. She is more gullible than man, more childlike, more trusting, more spontaneous, more sensitive and more compassionate. This is because she is born whole. Man is born incomplete, with an insensitive split, and must learn to become whole, in time.5
A woman’s guess is much more accurate than a man’s certainty.
Rudyard Kipling
Man thus has aspiration, something which is basically alien to woman. She may aspire, but she doesn’t have the need to master herself in wordly activity. This is why feminine women tend to give up on the path to mastery. They become good, but they almost never become great. Anyone who says otherwise has no taste.6
A woman with personal aspiration is either unhappy or angry. Woman does not need to aspire to completeness. What she needs to do is refuse to compromise with a loveless — which is to say, incomplete — life. This is the only real rift in her existence, and the only thing she naturally ‘aspires’ to.
The loving completeness of woman might then manifest as some kind of marvellous work in the world, perhaps even something which can be described as worldly ambition, but this is unlikely. Women don’t naturally strive as such. They just do what they love and acquire skill that way.
This is unsayable in the unnatural world. The possibility that there is something that women might desire beyond wordly career or technical mastery must be taken as bigotry by a world which demands woman’s competitive participation, and which also demands she deform herself in order to competitively participate.
Men are not really interested in women who strive. Okay, so she has an ambition, fine. Lovely. Women, however, hate men who do not strive. He doesn’t have to aspire to some marvellous cultural achievement, but if there is no sense in him that he is seeking to overcome his self, she’ll unconsciously hate him.
If men knew all that women think,
they would be twenty times more audacious.
Alphonse Karr
Another aspect of aspiration is individuality. The aspiration of man to overcome his self pulls him out of the crowd, although man is naturally more individual than woman anyway — and seeks individuality more than she does — which is why women’s faces naturally resemble each other more than men’s do.7
Overcoming self means discovering some ‘part’8 of your conscious experience that transcends will, mind, body and emotion (a ‘part’ women have no need to find, because she is that). Man does this through love (for nature, for woman, for the ineffable) and through mastering his tools.
In mastering his tools — including the tool of his mind — man learns to master himself. Industrial technology and institutions are not tools, they are systems, and cannot be mastered (they master us), which is why guitarists are more desirable than managers and why women do not fawn over professional gamers.
Men who do not master themselves seek to master other selves. This explains the striking similarity between the attitude of unconscious men towards both nature and women, as external things to be studied, experimented on and used, for one’s own benefit, rather than as mysteries to be experienced, from within.
The main difference between men and women is that
men are lunatics and women are idiots.
Rebecca West
Such men are rightly considered to be, by women, simple creatures.9 This is because they do not have a very noble aspiration or are not far enough advanced in their pursuit of it. They are children, and she treats them as such. A man who knows what he is about is almost as subtle and strange as a woman. Almost.
Today we live in a world in which women are forced to aspire, to achieve, to succeed and, most unnaturally of all (for her) to win. She really doesn’t give a damn about winning, but she has to in the man-made world. All this disturbs her spirit, particularly when she is menstruating.
Menstruation is a monthly purge of all the misery and pain she has accumulated in man’s world over the past three or four weeks. During this time she finds it more difficult to participate in that world, and resents having to. She tends to take out her resentment on the nearest representative of man’s world to her.
Woman is also forced to hyper-focus in the world — another male trait. She must pick out things in the world and manipulate them. Obviously she can do this, and can even enjoy it, but the degree to which she is compelled to abstract in this way corrupts her embodied presence and wisdom, and makes her male.
Acquisitive and competitive women, increasingly, are in control of the world, but woman cannot change its male-made essence. It changes her. It infects her with an unnatural, projective, abstract and insensitive maleness, which she then defends as her nature and her right.
The most conspicuous physical manifestation of woman’s acquired maleness is her tragic lack of sensuality. Modern woman, in man’s world, has less and less sensuous presence, which makes her more and more emotional; more depressed, more anxious, more frustrated, more angry, and less feminine.
The most conspicuous social manifestation of woman’s acquired maleness is feminism. Feminism can mean a simple desire to help women, but the word as it is officially used refers to an ideological technique for forcing woman into man’s working world, where he can more easily manipulate her. Feminism serves man.
Emancipation of women has made them lose their mystery.
Grace Kelly
Although it is true that once, in the ‘bad old days’ of the pre-modern past, men wielded ruthless power over women’s lives, it is also true that women once had power over her domain, the home, which she has now lost. Now, with the exception of a few privileged women in the West, she is powerless everywhere.
If you ask young women in the West today, ‘do we need men?’ many will cry ‘no!’ Not because she can do everything he can do (such as all the gruelling physical professions dominated by men10), but because his technological system has made him (and her) obsolete. When it falls apart her answer will change.
Now man might be under her thumb at home and in the office, but this is a Pyrrhic victory if ever there was one. Not only has her power over him eroded the love between them, but the man-made system now rules over her completely, over her mind and body, everywhere, and she helped that happen.
Woman might be more innocent and loving than men, but she is just as responsible as he is for the loveless state of the world, for the simple reason that she compromises so readily, accepting lovelessness, usually through fear of being abandoned and through lack of confidence in love.
Man plays on these fears. First of all he undermines her confidence in love by conflating it with mere self-confidence which he knows she always, no matter how powerful and successful she is, possesses less of than he does. If he is particularly low he will play on her fears of being unloved and abandoned.