Probably the most concise distillation I’ve written so far… of why I don’t support neo-feminist agendas; nor their forever-engendered warmongering.
The longer version? It’s an ideology that is not rooted in our collective reality and history, and this disconnect is what gives it permission to arbitrarily re-write any rules as it pleases. Modern life is very detached from our real story… So much of this biological subtext and context once went without saying, and indeed it often was unspoken and unrecorded in our historical literature; however “first world” children are now growing up in society mostly isolated from the primal struggle to survive, much less survive a world at war, and this visceral understanding of nature—of cause and effect—is no longer intuitive to them.
Even our history books only emphasize the 1% of the 1% of the 1% (of the 1%) of ‘Men’ &/or ‘Women’ who changed the course of events, whether though ingenuity, brutality, courage, cowardice, malice, lust, or all of the above… It can be very misleading if we focus solely on our passive envy for the activated 0.00001% and misconstrue the overall patterns of what life was like for the rest of humanity. You’ll also likely miss the fact that every culture writes its own history, from its own point of view, and then passes these teachings on down as it is able. This approach gives individual/”marginalized” groups free reign to reconstruct events in their image as a counterpoint to omission, filling in the blanks with their own presumptions about “The Way Things Are” (or Were), and very much with the same creative license patriarchal historians have so often made use of in building their own canon of male-centric cultural history.
You might be giving them a taste of their own medicine, but you’re also giving yourselves a strong dose of their poison… Your integrity is unconsciously being exposed to those very same corrupting pathogens and pathologies.
But that could never be You, right? Not within the confines of our basic Us vs. Them dialectic… You’re the righteous ones, nothing like the dirty profane unrighteous arrogant ignorant fools who stand in your just way.
Dominator ideologies tend to come from two things… opportunity(ism) + an empathy/apathy void which provides a supremacy mindset, generally made most effective in combination with a conspiracy of occulting forces—a logic, grammar, and rhetoric that drives our consciousness out of enlightenment and into darkness; so that our collective culture and “understanding” is easier to control by the elite few chosen ones.
Privileges are extended outward from there, to earn as much loyalty as needed on behalf of the ruling classes. When it comes to armies and resource extraction, that has always meant recruiting and conscripting as many men as possible into the agenda, and the psychological/physiological means by which that is done are legion. You can call it “patriarchy” but you’re missing the point. Men are powerful. Women are powerful. Intrinsically, inherently, innately so, no matter the social order. You can thank/blame nature for making us preternatural counter-balances of each other. Some among us will use that power to accumulate more and more and more (and more), and in so doing they’ve learned to navigate these networks and corridors of power ever-to-their-advantage.
In a sense, this is the quintessential driving force behind social engineering—whether perceived as good or bad, progressive or regressive—i.e. manipulating the unique strengths of others to work in favor of an agenda, rather than against it. Convincing your most powerful enemies to become your (often unwitting) allies, in other words.
Enter neo-Feminism, et al.
In the era of physical strength supremacy—especially before gunpowder, let alone the technopocalyse—military brawn was the only true “power” that could enforce and sway the masses to be at war with one another, whether as offenders or defenders. Few weapons were powerful enough on their own to change the tide, and strategy can only accomplish so much if all odds are against you and your people.
Moreover, if the elites couldn’t win that militant body over for themselves? Then they would face it instead as a very dangerous domestic threat of rebellion and revolution.
Ideas are powerful, so powerful they can control the mind in untold and unforeseen ways, but they also must be executed materially—a word sharing the same root as matriarchy. This is the “manifest” portion of “manifest destiny.” Without that 51% majority support and ballast to turn the tide (physically) in their favor, all empires collapse under their own weight eventually. It’s the inverse of many hands making light work. Contrariwise, however, a people who are too unified (especially familially) also have the solidarity, insight, influence, and willpower to rise up against injustice; which is where divide and conquer becomes necessary again in order for a people to remain controlled en masse.
It’s our consciousness that is ultimately conquered, not merely our bodies… A truly egalitarian society is sovereign, not subservient.
Controlling the psychology is essential to this dominion, but perhaps all the more so is controlling the brute force critical mass of strength, the material resources necessary, and in order to do that you essentially need to coerce/seduce a society (more or less willingly) to go along with a broader agenda. Thus the “work” of the common person becomes the commandeered utility of a higher imperial authority.
If you truly believe Matriarchy (or any other ruling class) won’t be privy to these same pitfalls, either you’re not paying any attention at all, or you’re simply rooting for the home team at the expense of true holistic knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. In either case, you’re not only trying to rewrite the past but also our future, which may sound good in theory…but you’re working from a deeply flawed script, one that assumes any inconvenient detail we don’t like can simply be replaced or erased from the equation.
Unfortunately, that’s not quite how variables work IRL.
Again, Men evolved to prioritize defensive combat, Women evolved to prioritize procreation and nursing as our only womb-bearers… The reason why is very simple: these roles determine who lives, and dies, which in turn determines whose genes/experiences/stories/cultures get passed on; and neither our biology at birth nor the environment we are born into is of our own choosing. Likewise, even in a military context a society loses many soldiers and resources every time it goes to war, and without those men and resources being replenished year after year, decade after decade, even a once great empire will wilt to nothing within a few generations (as its enemies eagerly watch and wait for this vulnerability to present new opportunity).
A baby takes 9 months to gestate, a soldier takes 18 years.
It’s so ironic to me, ultimately, that men have literally used what little agency they had to build a world in which women are not only given equal rights but also many legal and social privileges, so much so that younger women are actually starting to outpace the success (and wellbeing) of men within just a half century of elevated privilege and power in the industrial world.
And yet we still speak of a unilateral patriarchy like it’s 1969, going on 1869, with maybe ~1/10th as much understanding of the underlying subtext, if we’re lucky, as our people(s) had back then.
As much as we can stretch the power of metaphor…? Women did not fight a Revolutionary War for their freedom. In fact there are very few cases in history of women ever launching a successful defense against the military might of men, and that alone should tell you how we got ourselves into this evolutionary mess. By choice? Whose? Mine? No. Yours…? No? If that ever changes, it will probably be because women have inherited the military industrial complex, and all its technologies of war, to use at their disposal.
In truth, our world has always been a co-creation, not just between men and women but between each sovereign individual, each family, each culture, each village, but we also don’t create it from scratch; we don’t inherit a blank slate with which to dole out responsibilities and privileges however we wish.
The way neo-feminists talk, you’d have thought “The Patriarchy” as a whole would be grooming its women to be dumb breeding animals, kept as innocuous slaves, rather than witnessing the massive support and outreach you see for women spread out across all of modern society, and the huge investments in education, opportunity and agency for women.
In fact, it might be more accurate to say that women have never fought a revolutionary war because men have fought so many on their behalf.
No, it’s not the unfailing widespread “support” you want; because this isn’t the world any of us wanted.
“Privilege” doesn’t mean you don’t face burdens, repression, trauma, and inconvenience. It never has meant that. The word itself merely translates to “private law.”
When we abuse it, and when we don’t use it for the greater good, we lose it to time. We lose our equilibrium and abundance that provided the foundation for autonomous privilege.
That’s the royal We, and the individual “we,” but most of all it’s the collective: “We the People.”
Men, women, children, etc.
How much do you really know about our collective history, or our origins, and how much are you just flexing your pride?
I don’t have all the answers, I’m just kindly asking you to stop pretending you do… so that we can collectively start solving real problems again, at the source. Let’s move on a little more from the racy cluster-B envy-infused microaggressions tug-o-war, and get back to a deeper understanding of macro aggressions IRL.
Think about it.