The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Because Boys and Girls Are Different

Posted on | January 28, 2016 | 28 Comments

Just a quick rant here, to fill the void while I’m working on something else: Why do feminists, on the one hand, claim that there are no natural differences between male and female and yet, on the other hand, constantly criticize men for typical masculine behavior? The answer seems obvious to me, after months of reading radical feminist gender theory — and scrolling through the endless madness of Feminist Tumblr — and what bothers me is that the fundamental problem is seldom stated directly, either by feminists or their critics.

Begin with the status quo, the existing social order. Whether the year is 1966 or 1986 or 2016, society at any given time has certain standards, customs, expectations and incentives that influence how men and women behave. The vast majority of people accept the status quo as the way things are, and do their best to fit into the existing social system, to succeed and be happy in life. This requires a process of maturation on the part of young people who, in order to become responsible and productive adults, must find their place within the existing system and psychologically adjust to their adult roles. The unrealistic dreams of childhood must be set aside, and the unruly passions of adolescence must be reined in, in order to attain responsible adulthood.

Thirty years ago, there was a lot of talk among psychologists about the problem of Peter Pan Syndrome, describing the attitudes and behaviors of young men who were unwilling to commit to (or emotionally unable to sustain) romantic relationships because commitment logically led to marriage and fatherhood. Being a husband and father required becoming a grown-up, and Peter Pan didn’t want to be a grown-up.

Yet this problem of perpetual adolescence (which Diana West analyzed as a cultural phenomenon in her 2007 book The Death of the Grown-Up) was not limited to childish males. Contemporary feminism is, to a great extent, an elaborate rationalization of female emotional immaturity. There is a symbiotic relationship between the irresponsible behavior of young men and the limitless rage of young women in response.

Let us ask: Is the social status quo, in terms of male-female relations, better or worse in 2016 than it was in 1966?

Your answer to that question will vary, according to what you expect adult life to be. If a girl was a high-school senior in 1966 and her ambition was to become a corporate executive, a politician, or a college professor, the status quo was decidedly disadvantageous to her. However, in terms of her romantic life, the average girl in 1966 had better opportunities than the girl in 2016. Fifty years ago, the median age at first marriage for American women was about 21, so that the high-school senior who graduated in 1966 could expect to be taken seriously — as a prospective wife in the near future — by any young fellow who showed a romantic interest in her. Insofar as marriage and motherhood are among a young woman’s ambitions, the teenage girl in 2016 has very dismal prospects in comparison to her grandmother who came of age in the 1960s.

Is it not obvious that five decades of feminism, in attempting to solve the problems of career-minded young women of the 1960s, has in many ways created a new problem for the romantic-minded young woman of the 21st century? The force of law, in terms of legislation and policy forbidding workplace discrimination against women, now guarantees that the teenage girl in 2016 has far greater opportunities to pursue professional employment than did her grandmother. However, legislation and policy can do nothing to improve her romantic life. There is no law that can force her boyfriend to take her seriously, to treat her the way a man treats the woman he hopes to marry.

Furthermore, feminism has encouraged divorce and unwed motherhood, and thus to a great extent destroyed marriage and family life in America. The young man in 2016 is far more likely to have grown up in an environment where his parents were divorced (or never married) and thus has little direct knowledge of what a stable, happy marriage looks like. He may have been shuttled back and forth between his parents’ separate homes — here for a while with his mother and her boyfriend, then there for a while with his father and stepmother, and perhaps for a while staying with one of his grandmothers — and what sort of attitudes is he likely to have developed as a result?

Of course, the destruction of traditional family life has also had an adverse impact on the childhood homes in which young women are raised, and yet no feminist will ever admit this. Feminism celebrates as “progress” anything — divorce, unwed motherhood, abortion, homosexuality — that is destructive to the family and hostile to traditional morality. Because of this, the unhappy young woman can never expect feminists to offer her an honest explanation for the causes of her unhappiness. When she is confronted by the rude and selfish behavior of teenage boys, no feminist will encourage her to ask what sort of home environment the young man was raised in. Were his parents married? Was he dumped off in a daycare center as an infant? Why didn’t his parents teach him courtesy and kindness?

Even worse, however, feminism teaches young women never to critically examine their own behavior and attitudes, nor to consider whether they are responsible for their own problems. Everything that is wrong with her life, according to feminism, is to be blamed on her oppression by the patriarchy. Because this explanation is feminism’s only answer to every question, the young feminist is constantly on the lookout for bad behavior by men, and is obliged never to say a word in praise of any man’s good deeds. The feminist’s pervasively negative portrayal of male behavior prevents her from ever having to admit that (a) there are good men in the world, but (b) none of these good men desire her romantic companionship, and (c) feminism can’t solve this problem.

We return, then, to the problem of the status quo and the standards, customs, expectations and incentives that influence how men and women behave. All feminists agree that the status quo in 1966 was entirely wrong. Yet at no point since 1966 has the feminist movement found the status quo acceptable, because if feminists ever were to announce that their movement had succeeded — our society had reached “equality,” however that might be defined — then there would be no more need for their perpetual agitation. Therefore, to justify their ongoing grievance-mongering, either “equality” must be constantly redefined, so that the ideal status quo can never be achieved, or else feminists must admit “equality” was never really what their movement was about.

Feminism is simply a political rationalization of the complaints of unhappy women. If all their demands were granted today, feminists would return tomorrow with a new list of demands.

Pointing out the obvious contradictions of feminism’s ideology and rhetoric — their claim that men and women are exactly alike, except that all men are oppressors — does nothing to persuade the feminist to re-examine the premises of her argument. Feminism is a cult, organized around the grievances of unhappy women, and once she has fully internalized the movement’s worldview, the feminist can never explain any problem except in terms of the evils of male supremacy. The failure of the movement to actually improve women’s lives guarantees its continued “success,” because the more women are unhappy, the more support for the feminist movement will increase.

Feminism is to women’s happiness what the Democrat Party is to responsible government. We look at municipal disasters like Detroit or Baltimore — Democrat-controlled fiefdoms — and see nothing but corruption, poverty and crime, yet the people who live there keep electing Democrats by landslide majorities and blaming all their problems on scapegoats. The campaign rhetoric of the Democrat Party is usually just the elaborate demonization of scapegoats like white racism or “corporate greed,” and guess what? It works.

The three keys to Democrat Party electoral success are:

1. Ignorance;
2. Hate;
and
3. Fear.

With a few minor adjustments, feminism succeeds by the same formula. And after beginning this as a “quick rant,” I’ve written 1,400 words, concluding where I began: Boys and girls are different.

All grown-ups know this. Feminists are women who refuse to grow up.




 

Category: Feminism, Sex Trouble

Comments

28 Responses to “Because Boys and Girls Are Different”

  1. RS
    January 28th, 2016 @ 6:43 pm

    Furthermore, feminism has encouraged divorce and unwed motherhood, and thus to a great extent destroyed marriage and family life in America.

    Obviously true, but moreso within the lower socioeconomic classes. The well-off, well-educated class still pursues marriage and family. Feminism ostensibly is the voice of the educated woman, but its effects are borne by the single mom trying to support several children, all of whom have different fathers.

  2. RS
    January 28th, 2016 @ 6:47 pm

    Feminism is simply a political rationalization of the complaints of unhappy women. If all their demands were granted today, feminists would return tomorrow with a new list of demands.

    Feminists gave the game away when, while harping about equality, choice and opportunity, criticized women who desired a life of marriage and motherhood as “inauthentic.” That is, for feminists, happiness is impossible in any system which is not Feminism. If a woman purports to be happy, such a mindset is the result of “false consciousness.”

  3. robertstacymccain
    January 28th, 2016 @ 7:06 pm

    Marriage serves the necessary social purpose of securing male support for women and children. Since the 1960s, liberals have tried to make government a substitute for husbands and fathers. This is what “liberation” and “equality” mean: Responsible working people are taxed to support (a) women they never met and (b) children who were sired by (c) men who don’t work or pay taxes. The Welfare System destroys family, and subsidizes bad parents who raise bad children.

  4. CrustyB
    January 28th, 2016 @ 9:21 pm

    Liberals say “If you’re white and male, you are an inherently bad person because you negatively judge people according to their race and gender.” In my vocabulary, the words “liberal” and “hypocrite” are identical.

  5. mole
    January 28th, 2016 @ 9:27 pm

    Ive been dipping in and out of the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and it strikes me most of the bitterly unhappy feminist types could use a few lessons in being a stoic.

    “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
    …
    That cuts straight to the chase, they are unhappy because the CHOOSE to interpret the world as victimising them.

    “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”

    ? Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

    https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/17212.Marcus_Aurelius

    I do recommend the book, its a good grounding for day to day life.

  6. Fail Burton
    January 28th, 2016 @ 10:56 pm

    Feminists are liars. They say they only want to be included but do that in the introduction to an all-female literary anthology while insisting there never be an all-male anthology. However that is exactly the next stop, as Milo’s white male privilege college stipend is proof of. Call men dogs long enough and they’ll bark. Either join the party or knock it off, but stop telling me you get a girl’s night out but I never get a boy’s night out.

  7. Finrod Felagund
    January 28th, 2016 @ 11:19 pm

    Much like Muslims. In countries where Muslims are the minority, they’re all about minority rights. In countries where Muslims are the majority, there are no such things as minority rights.

  8. RS
    January 29th, 2016 @ 7:10 am

    Meditations is one of those books I periodically pick up and turn to a random page. And your pull-quotes are spot on. There is one difference between the problem Aurelius cites and modern Feminism. It’s one thing to have one’s view of reality jaded by actual experience. It’s another to create a reality from whole cloth without any actual experience of “oppression” whatsoever. RSM has highlighted this phenomenon in the ranks Feminism given that a disproportionate number of feminists seem to come from the ranks of the moneyed, privileged elite.

  9. Fail Burton
    January 29th, 2016 @ 7:23 am

    Good point. I think that’s a saver as a quote.

    Also, much like Islam, the closer one gets to the core beliefs of modern feminism, the more one realizes they are deeply antagonistic to free speech, equal protection and due process. Is this why women got the right to vote? To complain about once not having had that right and herd themselves into a supremacist movement?

  10. Fail Burton
    January 29th, 2016 @ 7:27 am

    And we are seeing the same pattern everywhere: increasing self-segregation when it suits them together with an insistence of being half of the pie elsewhere. There are more all-female literary anthologies than ever before, all them based on past grievances. Blacks have followed suit, insisting on BET awards with an increased presence at the Oscars based on the idea where there’s a lot of whites there’s a lot of racism.

  11. robertstacymccain
    January 29th, 2016 @ 8:15 am

    Philosophy is a tool of heteronormative patriarchy!

  12. Dana
    January 29th, 2016 @ 8:47 am

    One point which must never be forgotten is that the feminist elite are not the working-class women who need a husband to escape a paycheck-to-paycheck economic existence, but the ones who have money, have come from (their father’s) money, and who have, or are seeking, the type of professional career in which they can reasonably support themselves at a middle-class level while remaining single.

    The greatest single factor in economic success is marriage, the pooling of the financial and other resources of two adults into a single family unit. Some people can earn enough by themselves to not need marriage financially, and they are precisely the same people who tell us that marriage — at least by two people of the opposite sex! — is wholly unnecessary.

    The Womyn’s and Gender Studies Associate Professor who can support herself well on her university salary never even notices the single mother struggling to make ends meet when she buys her morning latte at Starbucks or 7/11. They are like the good German civilians of 1938 who never saw the destitute people wearing the yellow Stars of David getting beaten up on the streets.

  13. Bob Belvedere
    January 29th, 2016 @ 9:01 am

    And Marcus Aurelius was a tool!!!!!!

  14. Bob Belvedere
    January 29th, 2016 @ 9:03 am

    One of your best, Breeze.

  15. Art Deco
    January 29th, 2016 @ 9:10 am

    Why do feminists, on the one hand, claim that there are no natural
    differences between male and female and yet, on the other hand,
    constantly criticize men for typical masculine behavior?

    Because ‘feminism’ is not a set of principles and precepts. It is a set of attitudes and improvisations and games which have given public discussion the flavor of a stupid domestic argument. That’s as true of Goodman-Quindlen feminism as it is of the academic lesbian variety.

  16. Ilion
    January 29th, 2016 @ 10:20 am

    And you always get more of what you reward … and if what you insist upon rewarding is perverse with respect to human flourishing, it will eventually kill you.

  17. Ilion
    January 29th, 2016 @ 10:22 am

    He was also “gay” … >social justice wankers’ heads explode<

    edit: I was thinking of Hadrian

  18. physicsnut
    January 29th, 2016 @ 10:28 am

    why ? to keep people distracted while they do something else we don’t know about yet. Or have we connected the dots ?

    you might as well ask why commies lie !
    Possibly so they can fine you 250,000 bucks for ‘misgendering’.
    where THEY get to define the terminology .
    see
    Red Diapers – Growing Up in the COmmunist Left, Ed Judy Kaplan & Linn Shapiro, University of Illinois press, 1998
    // they think they are the Vanguard of the Revolution
    // and that the Boy Scouts are the Hitler Youth

  19. Art Deco
    January 29th, 2016 @ 10:38 am

    Yes there’s fraud. The thing is, esteem is a positional good. If occupational achievement is more admired, being a housewife is less so. When my mother was married and starting a family two generations ago, the assumption was that professional women were celibates. Doris Lessing’s short story “The Witness” has a spinster accountant among its characters: “I”ve kept myself for 27 years this March. I’ve never had anything. How many women have the qualifications I have? I should have had a pretty face’. And then she burst into tears.”. “The Witness” was set in South Africa and first published in Britain in 1957. Her’s wasn’t a personal history or an anguish local to American society.

  20. Finrod Felagund
    January 29th, 2016 @ 11:47 am

    I cannot claim originality on it; I’m paraphrasing a line I’ve seen elsewhere.

  21. physicsnut
    January 29th, 2016 @ 12:55 pm

    i wonder
    saw this video – copy before it disappears
    Some words from Prissy to Zucker
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-07ShrYB64

  22. Stellapuppy
    January 30th, 2016 @ 7:06 am

    We to f’in bad for them. I extremely happy, my wife is also extremely happy. I look and laugh at these sjw. It actually adds to my happiness to read some of the nonsense and wonder are they for real and when are they going to grow up and snap out of it. Life takes work. They just want free stuff live all the other losers.

  23. Daniel Freeman
    January 30th, 2016 @ 8:12 pm

    Be encouraged! What can’t go on forever won’t, so it’s just a matter of time until the workhorses either die of exhaustion in the yoke, or turn into lions and revolt.

  24. Daniel Freeman
    January 30th, 2016 @ 8:14 pm

    Third law: SJWs always project.

  25. Daniel Freeman
    January 30th, 2016 @ 8:19 pm

    Tens of millions of Americans killed in murder-for-hire schemes, and all that blood is on the hands of the fools that gave women the right to vote. Women’s suffrage is one of our nation’s worst sins, up there with slavery and the Indian genocide.

    I don’t care if you think I’m radical. I tire of holding my tongue.

  26. From Around the Blogroll – The First Street Journal.
    January 31st, 2016 @ 9:10 am

    […] Stacey Stacy McCain on The Other McCain: Because Boys and Girls Are Different You wouldn’t think that the esteemed Mr McCain would need to point that out, but somehow the […]

  27. Ilion
    January 31st, 2016 @ 10:12 am

    That’s true enough: but either way, it’s a bloody mess.

    It wasn’t the Germanic barbarians who destroyed the Roman Empire, it was the policies over several generations of the emperors, which had the effect of turning their subjects into slaves. A great swathe of the society just gave up — they stopped living for the future; they stopped having children.

  28. News of the Week (January 31st, 2016) | The Political Hat
    January 31st, 2016 @ 8:49 pm

    […] Because Boys and Girls Are Different Just a quick rant here, to fill the void while I’m working on something else: Why do feminists, on the one hand, claim that there are no natural differences between male and female and yet, on the other hand, constantly criticize men for typical masculine behavior? The answer seems obvious to me, after months of reading radical feminist gender theory — and scrolling through the endless madness of Feminist Tumblr — and what bothers me is that the fundamental problem is seldom stated directly, either by feminists or their critics. […]