Courtesy of Free Northerner, I came across a post at the Orthosphere which tried to resolve the apparent differences the manosphere and traditionalists hold about the nature of women. I was intrigued by the post because a number of the points were quite similar to some I’ve argued in the post. One example includes this snippet:
I observe that women are generally conformists. They donât want to rock the boat. They donât want to make waves. They just want to get on with living as pleasant a life as possible, and this requires having good relations with other people and not feeling like a fish out of water when they listen to our leaders. Most women just want to agree with what the authorities are teaching and get on with having a comfortable existence.
And this need not be a bad thing. When the times are properly ordered, it is good for a woman not to waste her precious psychic resources tilting against windmills when there is important practical work to be done raising the next generation. The ability and desire to raise children well is the unique gift of the woman, and the world is generally better off when most women leave the idealism to the men.
Remember, generalizations are generalizations. Readers of the Orthosphere are different. If youâre reading these words then youâre probably not a conformist. But most of your sisters are.
Many men are conformists too. But manliness is antithetical to conformity. Men, on average are different.
This advances the same idea I raised in my post The Herd and Women-Good/Men-Bad:
When society at large encourages moral behavior and discourages immoral behavior, more women than men will behave morally, but when society at large discourages moral behavior and encourages immoral behavior, more men than women will behave morally.
Its always nice to know that I’m ahead of the curve. One thing that deserves to be commented on is this:
Through most of human history, when the authorities taught the ideals of pre-marital chastity and post-marital fidelity, most women, being conformists, felt allegiance to this ideal. Being human, they occasionally failed to reach it. And those who fail to reach an ideal are tempted to deny it. But most women, most of the time, endorsed the ideal.
I have two problems with this. The first, which is addressed in the comments, is that teaching is not what made the system what it was. Teaching chastity and fidelity are the small and easy steps. What matters, and what “traditional” societies did until recently, was to enforce what they taught. Tied to this is whether most women really “endorsed” the ideal. I don’t think that they did, any more than men did. Endorse is too strong of a word, it indicates far more support than I think most had. Rather, women accepted the requirements the ideal imposed on them. Some certainly accepted, or even endorsed, the ideal. But they would be the minority. The majority accepted it because the they wanted to avoid the consequences of deviancy.
Now, I did have some disagreements and observations about other parts of the post. For example, I definitely disagree with this statement:
So why is the modern woman different? Because sheâs a conformist, and so she conforms to the new ideal of selfishness.
While I do agree that woman are conforming to that ideal, that is not the only reason why modern women are different. In fact, I would argue that conforming to selfishness has only a small part to do with it. But that is a subject for my next major post.
Next, I wanted to point out a flaw with this part:
Traditionalism of the Orthosphere variety doesnât just order men to âman up and marry the womanâ (to paraphrase a popular Manosphere saying.)
That isn’t a paraphrase of the manosphere saying, it is an alteration of it. And by alteration I mean change so significant as to be almost disingenuous. A more accurate paraphrase would be “Man Up and Marry That Harlot.” The difference between those two versions of the saying is profound, and thus a correction is necessary.
Also, I think that this bit:
if men abdicate their responsibility en masse then the human race will founder
has pretty much been definitely proven by now. Our present “civilization” is a living example of what happens when men abdicate responsibility en masse. I suspect that there is little we can do about it now besides try out best to preserve and pass on that wisdom to the next few generations, in the hopes of not repeating that error again anytime soon.
