Reading About an Alien Species

I will say, I thought you were better than this. The grandma in me adds: you should be ashamed of yourself. But I doubt you are.

—Daisy Deadhead

And in her last sentence (only), she’s right.  I’m NOT ashamed in the slightest.  I call it like I see it.  I don’t necessarily like what I see, but so long as I find it to be the truth, I’m gonna say it.  To use another quote:

If I’m wrong, then I’ll pay for it
If I’m right, yeah you’re gonna hear about it

                      –Michael Anthony/Sammy Hagar/Alex Van Halen/Edward Van Halen, “Don’t Tell Me (What Love Can Do)”

Daisy’s left a lot of comments of late (just go through any of my recent posts and you’ll find at least one), but what really got her goat is my assertion that women need to be trained.  Frankly, they do need training, not unlike Navy Corpsmen, horses, acrobats, and plumbers.

She writes that I said that “women are no good unless they are trained, like dogs?”  I concede that dogs are of little use without training.  On the other hand, untrained women do have their uses, but that’s not what I want our little girls to grow up to be.  Yes, really.  I mean that.

Nevertheless, a few months back when I was focusing primarily on politics, Daisy also left her fair share of comments and demonstrated to me that her heart is in the right place (again, I mean it).  I disagreed with her frequently (examples include here and here), but she remained respectful at all times, so I responded in kind.

I know that I won’t change Daisy’s mind, for one has the same chance of persuading a staunch opponent through just writing as an aspiring young French actress has of landing a starring role if she refuses nudity.  I’m sure it can be done, but don’t count on it.

But she is sincere, and she made another comment which demonstrates an important point:

I don’t know who these women are that you write about… but they have no resemblance to me, my mother or my daughter. Its like I am reading about an alien species…

And I’m sure she means it.

Is Queen Hamster at work?  Undoubtedly.  But sometimes the Hamster has actual facts to work with.

I won’t focus on her mother or daughter (all I know about either is that her daughter is married to a guy with a mom who’s active in the TEA Party), but I think it’s important to show that when Daisy says she has no idea what I’m talking about, she means it.

Daisy is a baby boomer, I suspect from the middle wave.  She probably grew up in either the fifties or sixties, before the Sexual Revolution began to completely transform our society.

I don’t know what her family structure was like, but I bet what when she was a girl that the men in her life were masculine and the women were feminine.  There were undoubtedly thousands of little things that showed her how men and women act that probably didn’t even register in her conscious mind.

But, like I described in The Red Pendulum, many in her generation falsely assumed that the Chesterton’s fences of traditional gender roles were restrictive and outdated without realizing how they benefited from them.  They wanted to overturn the oppressive system without recognizing that revolutions often lead to nothing more than a hefty dose of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”, or sometimes, “meet the new boss, worse than the old boss.”  Like Rousseau, we dislike having to have any fences at all, but there are always fences of one kind or another.

But the type of fence changes gradually.  In the documentary Berkeley in the Sixties, women complained how in the early days of the peace movement the men took charge and had the women stick to making coffee and copies.  Even the Revolutionary Progressives stuck with tradition at first.

And this hybrid of tradition and innovation at the beginning of a decline accelerates it.  To paraphrase something Mark Steyn said at some point, one of the best times to be alive is when a decline starts.  You’ve still got the structures that enable you to live in luxury, but you don’t need any of the discipline required to create them.  Your parents and grandparents had to toil and wake up every morning at four thirty to build it, but you just get to enjoy it.  The more your forebears busted their collective asses, the longer it takes for you to tear down what they’ve built.

Unless you’re mature, you don’t recognize how hard it was to build those building until they’re gone.

At first, to everyone except the morally conscious, the Sexual Revolution must have been a fucking blast.  For guys, imagine a time in which women retained their feminine traits (purple shirt appearing at 2:43, two thumbs up:  way up), but you didn’t have to marry them to have sex with them.  It was probably harder to score a one-night stand, yet you didn’t have to go all out and buy the metaphoric cow to have a blast.  They weren’t yet “50 Shades obsessed sluts” and not only provided you with “an abundance of value besides the hole between her legs”, you also got the hole between her legs.  Alphas got more, but Betas got some, too.  How likely you were to become a decent husband and father still mattered to a twenty year old; spending the next decade “finding herself” was still out of the question.

Women had the chance to experiment a bit, but in the back of their minds the old rules remained.  They might put out, but they would never want to be a slut (much less be proud of it).  She had the option to pursue a career, but until the 1970’s there was still no shame in an MRS degree.  They didn’t feel as pressured into having sex before they were ready, but if they wanted to, they could without severe consequences.  To butcher my favorite Joseph Heller phrase, her hypergamy was let into the room, but she still had to act like a lady.

So imagine how difficult it must be for the women in Roosh’s video to admit how anything could possibly be wrong with the fun they were having.  They threw off the oppression of the 1950’s and had more fun than any generation probably ever has.  How the hell could anybody ever want to go back to the days of Ward and June Cleaver?

Unacknowledged is the devastation wrought by feminism on the black family, and black men and boys in particular.  They don’t see any connection between teen pregnancy and the sexual liberation of women (or do they just not see any problem with it).  Increased access to abortion was supposed to lead to fewer unwanted pregnancies.  How’d that work out?

Do they not see the lonely thirty-five year-old women trolling the bars hoping desperately to catch the attention of the men they so casually dismissed ten years earlier?  What about the men who are inundated with sex every minute of every day yet can’t get any themselves?  Are modern divorce rates a problem?  The “supermom” phenomenon?

There’s also the Abilene Factor for sure; nobody wants to admit that something of which they were so certain and into which they put so much effort could possibly have been destructive, especially when it was so damn much fun.

So it makes perfect sense how a baby boomer who got to benefit from the old order while tearing it down would see the experience of most modern men and women as utterly “alien”.  They’ll never have to experience a youth in which so much of what they wanted actually happened.

Is it possible for women of a certain age to understand How Women Turn Men into Pickup Artists?  I doubt it, for feminism has changed our society so much that I can’t see how anyone who grew up in a world without it could possibly understand how so much of what was great about their childhoods simply doesn’t exist today.  The dating scenes, courtship rituals, and security provided to both men and women from knowing what was expected of them is dead.

Why do I link to stuff like this?  Because it works.  Do I want it to work?  No.  Do I think it should work?  No.  But dammit, no matter how alien it might seem to you, today, in the post-feminist world those pretty babes in the Roosh video created,  it works.  Like.  A.  Fucking.  Charm.

But in the world of Daisy’s youth, it probably didn’t.  I just want to go back to a world in which both men and women could be healthy with each other and not feel like they’re going to war all the damn time.

So Daisy, “I will refrain from using the” phrase go to hell, “but rest assured, I am thinking it.”