A few days ago a first time commenter left a comment on an old post of mine, A Must Read Story. There is a small part of her rather longish comment that I want to examine. The key part is in bold:
itâs very difficult to have high self-esteem when you do everything ârightâ but still have poor luck with the opposite sex, and it creates a very lonely feeling when you follow your values but end up getting victimized for it. Our society is simply set up so that selfish people appear to get aheadâthat goes for Chads sleeping with hundreds of women, and the slutty girls having âfun.â Eva is the equivalent of the beta male looking on confused, and just because you canât imagine a woman sharing that experience with you, doesnât mean it doesnât happen. In fact, most women are profoundly insecure. The ones who are open about itâlike Evaâhavenât learned the lesson that YOU perceive all women to be adept atâhiding their feelings and vulnerabilities.
Most women are profoundly insecure.
That little tidbit is the subject of today’s post. I’ve written on it before, in my post Beta Farming. I explained my reasoning at the time of why women might be insecure. Some of my reasoning:
Much of this insecurity comes from the gap in physical prowess between men and women. We men are much more capable of defending ourselves and imposing our will on our environment than women are- at least at the individual level. But whatever its source, it has a profound effect on female behavior. Women are constantly, and often at an unconscious or subconscious level, trying to alter their environment to make it feel more secure.
Having thought about it more, I can think of additional reasons for female insecurity. One of them is that women know (mostly at an unconscious level) how vulnerable pregnancy and child-raising makes them. Another is that women, again unconsciously, realize how limited their peak fertility and SMV window is. They worry about optimizing that time, and covering for when they are no longer at their peak. There is plenty of room for speculation there, and my commenters can feel free to contribute.
However, I want talk about how the insecurity should be handled. One of the problems with that insecurity is that ill-intentioned men can exploit it. Often times quite easily. And course, it usually isn’t entirely unwillingly. But exploitable it still remains.
At the same time, I think that this insecurity is something that good men can relieve or buttress. They can, in the right scenario, build up women’s confidence in a positive way. This can help women resist that lure of exploitation or build up a wall against it. Men can supplement the tissue paper or paper mache walls that women may have with walls of stone and gates of iron.
Unfortunately, our society isn’t exactly eager to see this happen. Fatherhood has been trashed, both as a social as well as a legal force. Fathers are essentially powerless to protect their daughters these days, especially when they are older. Likewise, our society does its level best to keep women away from actual good men, who though few in number still exist. Certainly it tries hard to keep women from marrying such men when they are young.
Now, what I am saying gets awfully close to white knighting. I will admit that gives me pause. All the same, I think the argument is potent indeed that strong men are needed to protect women- from themselves. But for that to happen men need actual power to go with that responsibility. Our present cadre of White Knights, especially in Churchian circles, is what you get when you take that power away from men. Men become modern caricatures of Don Quixote, assaulting windmills left and right and ignoring the real threats all around them.
I will leave with two questions I want to pose to my readers.
First, what methods can be used to protect women, assuming the necessary social structure was in place?
Second, if that structure is not in place, how can it be created, or what workarounds can be used if it cannot?
