Which "fundamental tenets if feminism" would those be? Do you have a problem with women being equal in society? Are there any avenues of opportunity you think women shouldn't have simply because they are women, not men?
Thanks for the discerning take and a lucid account of an irony-drenched, labyrinthine cultural moment. So, how long before the gravitational pull of biological reality actually gains ground on the current madness? Or has it peaked? Social media seems to have reached a kind of zenith moment that it couldn’t sustain, at least in some quarters. As a retirement-aged cis white guy, my first reaction to the budding trans craze a few years back was ‘what’s wrong w/being gay?’, a response that didn’t seem to register. Glad to know after all this time that I wasn’t alone after all.
"History doesn't repeat; but it rhymes." Our "civilisation" has "collapsed" before at the end of the Bronze Age and at the "Fall" of Rome and I'm seeing a whole lot of rhyming going on. The two previous had drastic climate change and boatloads of woo going on and all.
We have to be aware not that the sky is falling; but that the sky CAN fall if we are not conscious of a dreadful synergy that'll drive us into a screaming positive feedback to blow the amplifier of civilisation if we are not careful.
Hi, Lorenzo. An interesting and challenging essay, as ever. I'd like to check if I have missed something somewhere. You take "feminism's attacks on male freedom of association" as a given, which is unlike you. It's an allegation I've seen before, of course, but the examples given have always been very sketchy and trivial (golf clubs, etc). Where is your evidence for the assertion to be found? Have you covered it in a previous essay that I missed?
Actually, the golf clubs etc. examples are not trivial. Having male social spaces can have cathartic and norm-building effects and the attacks thereon generate significant resentment. But I have not gone into detail on this anywhere. Forced association is a more pervasive pattern.
I've spent most of the day thrashing this out in my head, and come to the conclusion that, to do it justice, I would need to write a Substack or two! My response is therefore going to be insufficient other than as a mind-clearing exercise.
First of all, Lorenzo and Josh, you were quite correct to call me out for using the word "trivial". Even the example I gave is important, as I will go into shortly. However, I think the importance comes not from the restriction on men's freedom of association, but from the effect it had on loosening restrictions on women.
Men's domination of sports - and I'm not talking about elite level at the moment - had a disproportionate effect on women. In keeping "men's freedom of association", women were very restricted from indulging in those activities. Since I used golf in my example, I'll expand on that, but you could equally use football, rugby, snooker, cricket or a dozen other sports to illustrate the point. Back to golf (of which I have learned more today than I ever thought!) The "men only" nature of golf meant that women did not have (at least the) same access to courses, equipment, training or competition (in the event they got to play at all). There was no practical way for this access to be gained other than by breaking down the men's "freedom of association", since there was no alternative route. Whilst, in theory, women could have set up their own clubs, that would have required creating their own courses - land intensive, needing expert (male) input, very expensive - since access to greens was strictly controlled by men who had no intention of letting their "freedom of association" be tainted by women. Women needed to break that down, and the means almost forced on them was to insist on membership on the same basis that men had. (Note that there were clearly some big exceptions to this, since the first known ladies golf club dates back to 1867 <https://faculty.elmira.edu/dmaluso/sports/timeline/golf.html>) I cannot deny that some male golfers of a certain age still grumble about women being allowed in the clubhouse and on the greens, Lorenzo, and that there seems to be real resentment amongst some of them, but I'm not sure it is justified.
Helen, you give examples that I'd need to do more reading on, but, as I understand just one of them, Girl Guides lost members once Boy Scouts allowed/were forced to let girls in because of GG's outdated ideas about what girls should be doing. Where I grew up, the Venture Scouts were very popular pre-inclusionary Boy Scouts, because they did accept both boys and girls on an equal basis.
Steven - yes, the "women stay in the snug" attitude was still around well into my adulthood in the working class area I grew up in. I think for the older generation (my grandparents, for example) it served a purpose - men talked pigeons, horses, football, whilst women talked about whatever (I was never allowed to join in that side!), but still felt a sort of togetherness with their other halves.
As I said at the beginning, I know this isn't even half-baked, and it's too long for a comment anyway. I'm not convinced that breaking down male freedom of association was a bad thing *at that time*, but I'm on the fence about whether the assumption it is a bad thing needs to be re-evaluated.
As I was discussing with my partner the other night (in response to some good questions about where feminism went off the rails), breaking down male freedom of association and pretending pregnancy was the only real difference between men and women had instrumental value if not intellectual value.
The latter, of course, was adopted to prise labour-markets open to women, and it worked.
However, both strategies have now started to evidence my pupil-master's quip: "the only law always in force is the law of unintended consequences".
It would have been much better all round if everyone had been truthful rather than merely strategic, but that ship has sailed long ago.
I completely agree about Murphy being ever-present and a avoidable, but I'm a bit baffled by your comment about strategy v truth. Where was the truth avoided?
2. Scouts and Guides, historically, were sex-segregated. After a long and bitter campaign, Scouts admitted girls. At the same time, Guides began to wither. However, it continued to provide an important refuge for Muslim and Jewish girls who were not permitted in co-ed environments. That has now come to an end as transwomen have forced entry into the older age-groups, while others have become leaders.
The same story repeated with respect to Boys' Brigade/Girls Brigade, Antioch, Plast, and other youth associations. Often the fights involved were nasty.
3. Concerted campaigns against City firms to get more women on corporate boards, and then, imposition of the Public Sector Equality Duty pursuant to the Equality Act 2010.
A good history of this from the UK perspective has not been written. I could probably write it, but I'm not sure I'm interested enough in it as a topic to do so. There have been attempts to write the equivalent in the US, with varying degrees of success (of course, the US story is complicated immensely because forced association there turned on both sex AND race): https://www.amazon.com/Age-Entitlement-America-Since-Sixties/dp/1501106899
Do you think this sort of maddening belief system was inevitable given the level of decadence and comfort in our culture? Basically, if this ideological insurrection at the university hadn’t happened, do you think crazy ideology would have shown up anyway?
I think something would have shown up. But without the particular, pre-existing, pathologies of the universities this particular madness would not have arisen. This is gnosticism on a scale never seen before.
Eirēnaios would beg to differ... not that he realised it is impossible to distinguish 2nd - 4th Century "gnosticism" from 2nd - 4th century "Xtianity". We are still in a pre-Constantine moment; never mind Theodosian levels of stupid.
In both those cases I note the East held. Assyria pretty much escaped the Bronze Age Collapse; and Byzantium endured. Oh, look: this tripe doesn't go down at all in Warsaw and Buda-Pest. I'll not be surprised if there isn't a Miracle on the Vistula and Danube. Shame about the Babylons on the Hudson and Potomac though.
Depending on how bad things get, you are likely to be better off away from the cities. That is, somewhere with sufficient local food sources and more local social coherence.
The more general advice is to cultivate connections with the likeminded and useful.
Although Paul Harell's videos are fascinating from a technical point of view, I find that I have been watching them more and more from an anthropological perspective. Paul Harell is an excellent example of the unreconstructed masculine type. Intelligence without arrogance and strength without brutality. A living fossil of perhaps an almost extinct American frontier psyche. I expect our civilization will be rebuilt by men such as him when they emerge from their homesteads in the wasteland.
Xtian heresy? From the perspective of Augustino-Theodosian "orthodoxy"/bullshit maybe. Early doors Xtianity was a very heterodox thing that could encompass JC saying: "Don't worry, Pete bro'; I'll make Mary a man." and Paul being "All things to all men". Judaeo-Christiano-Islam has ever been a chameleon shape-shifting bollocks seeking to takes us in with verbal nonsense with knobs on from the opening verses of Genesis trying to pass as the science of the day with liberal doses of Platonic woo that would carry right on into the Apocalypse of John. Rome was to do the same with Galileo and claiming they too were only doing "science". Please, can we just kill this cancer once and for all? The hole is hole-shaped and "God" has nought to do with it except to have been carefully crafted in all instantiations to fit in the hole like an opiode latching onto and usurping a neuro-receptor. If 'Woke' is a "heresy"; so are the various flavours of Protestant Xtianity. It is like Marxism and Protestantism: a Re-formation of the same material. Just as Chihauhas and Greyhounds remain Wolves.
Which "fundamental tenets if feminism" would those be? Do you have a problem with women being equal in society? Are there any avenues of opportunity you think women shouldn't have simply because they are women, not men?
Thanks for the discerning take and a lucid account of an irony-drenched, labyrinthine cultural moment. So, how long before the gravitational pull of biological reality actually gains ground on the current madness? Or has it peaked? Social media seems to have reached a kind of zenith moment that it couldn’t sustain, at least in some quarters. As a retirement-aged cis white guy, my first reaction to the budding trans craze a few years back was ‘what’s wrong w/being gay?’, a response that didn’t seem to register. Glad to know after all this time that I wasn’t alone after all.
" my first reaction to the budding trans craze a few years back was ‘what’s wrong w/being gay?’, a response that didn’t seem to register. "
Sexual preference isn't the only thing that determines gender, there's also whether or not you like matchbox cars.
LOLOL
"History doesn't repeat; but it rhymes." Our "civilisation" has "collapsed" before at the end of the Bronze Age and at the "Fall" of Rome and I'm seeing a whole lot of rhyming going on. The two previous had drastic climate change and boatloads of woo going on and all.
We have to be aware not that the sky is falling; but that the sky CAN fall if we are not conscious of a dreadful synergy that'll drive us into a screaming positive feedback to blow the amplifier of civilisation if we are not careful.
Hi, Lorenzo. An interesting and challenging essay, as ever. I'd like to check if I have missed something somewhere. You take "feminism's attacks on male freedom of association" as a given, which is unlike you. It's an allegation I've seen before, of course, but the examples given have always been very sketchy and trivial (golf clubs, etc). Where is your evidence for the assertion to be found? Have you covered it in a previous essay that I missed?
Actually, the golf clubs etc. examples are not trivial. Having male social spaces can have cathartic and norm-building effects and the attacks thereon generate significant resentment. But I have not gone into detail on this anywhere. Forced association is a more pervasive pattern.
Thanks, Lorenzo, Helen, Josh and everyone else replying. I'll draft a response for a little bit later.
I've spent most of the day thrashing this out in my head, and come to the conclusion that, to do it justice, I would need to write a Substack or two! My response is therefore going to be insufficient other than as a mind-clearing exercise.
First of all, Lorenzo and Josh, you were quite correct to call me out for using the word "trivial". Even the example I gave is important, as I will go into shortly. However, I think the importance comes not from the restriction on men's freedom of association, but from the effect it had on loosening restrictions on women.
Men's domination of sports - and I'm not talking about elite level at the moment - had a disproportionate effect on women. In keeping "men's freedom of association", women were very restricted from indulging in those activities. Since I used golf in my example, I'll expand on that, but you could equally use football, rugby, snooker, cricket or a dozen other sports to illustrate the point. Back to golf (of which I have learned more today than I ever thought!) The "men only" nature of golf meant that women did not have (at least the) same access to courses, equipment, training or competition (in the event they got to play at all). There was no practical way for this access to be gained other than by breaking down the men's "freedom of association", since there was no alternative route. Whilst, in theory, women could have set up their own clubs, that would have required creating their own courses - land intensive, needing expert (male) input, very expensive - since access to greens was strictly controlled by men who had no intention of letting their "freedom of association" be tainted by women. Women needed to break that down, and the means almost forced on them was to insist on membership on the same basis that men had. (Note that there were clearly some big exceptions to this, since the first known ladies golf club dates back to 1867 <https://faculty.elmira.edu/dmaluso/sports/timeline/golf.html>) I cannot deny that some male golfers of a certain age still grumble about women being allowed in the clubhouse and on the greens, Lorenzo, and that there seems to be real resentment amongst some of them, but I'm not sure it is justified.
Helen, you give examples that I'd need to do more reading on, but, as I understand just one of them, Girl Guides lost members once Boy Scouts allowed/were forced to let girls in because of GG's outdated ideas about what girls should be doing. Where I grew up, the Venture Scouts were very popular pre-inclusionary Boy Scouts, because they did accept both boys and girls on an equal basis.
Steven - yes, the "women stay in the snug" attitude was still around well into my adulthood in the working class area I grew up in. I think for the older generation (my grandparents, for example) it served a purpose - men talked pigeons, horses, football, whilst women talked about whatever (I was never allowed to join in that side!), but still felt a sort of togetherness with their other halves.
As I said at the beginning, I know this isn't even half-baked, and it's too long for a comment anyway. I'm not convinced that breaking down male freedom of association was a bad thing *at that time*, but I'm on the fence about whether the assumption it is a bad thing needs to be re-evaluated.
As I was discussing with my partner the other night (in response to some good questions about where feminism went off the rails), breaking down male freedom of association and pretending pregnancy was the only real difference between men and women had instrumental value if not intellectual value.
The latter, of course, was adopted to prise labour-markets open to women, and it worked.
However, both strategies have now started to evidence my pupil-master's quip: "the only law always in force is the law of unintended consequences".
It would have been much better all round if everyone had been truthful rather than merely strategic, but that ship has sailed long ago.
I completely agree about Murphy being ever-present and a avoidable, but I'm a bit baffled by your comment about strategy v truth. Where was the truth avoided?
This is part of British history that isn't as well known as it should be, and took various forms.
1. Male clubs: golf clubs, other sporting associations, and private members' clubs. A very small number of these fights are still ongoing - see Cherie Blair's campaign against London's Garrick Club: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/aug/16/cherie-blair-backs-campaign-for-garrick-club-to-admit-women
2. Scouts and Guides, historically, were sex-segregated. After a long and bitter campaign, Scouts admitted girls. At the same time, Guides began to wither. However, it continued to provide an important refuge for Muslim and Jewish girls who were not permitted in co-ed environments. That has now come to an end as transwomen have forced entry into the older age-groups, while others have become leaders.
The same story repeated with respect to Boys' Brigade/Girls Brigade, Antioch, Plast, and other youth associations. Often the fights involved were nasty.
3. Concerted campaigns against City firms to get more women on corporate boards, and then, imposition of the Public Sector Equality Duty pursuant to the Equality Act 2010.
A good history of this from the UK perspective has not been written. I could probably write it, but I'm not sure I'm interested enough in it as a topic to do so. There have been attempts to write the equivalent in the US, with varying degrees of success (of course, the US story is complicated immensely because forced association there turned on both sex AND race): https://www.amazon.com/Age-Entitlement-America-Since-Sixties/dp/1501106899
"Coronation Street" early doors: the only women in the "snug" of the Rovers were tellingly the elders Ena Sharples and her sidekick.
Why are those examples 'trivial'?
Do you think this sort of maddening belief system was inevitable given the level of decadence and comfort in our culture? Basically, if this ideological insurrection at the university hadn’t happened, do you think crazy ideology would have shown up anyway?
I think something would have shown up. But without the particular, pre-existing, pathologies of the universities this particular madness would not have arisen. This is gnosticism on a scale never seen before.
Eirēnaios would beg to differ... not that he realised it is impossible to distinguish 2nd - 4th Century "gnosticism" from 2nd - 4th century "Xtianity". We are still in a pre-Constantine moment; never mind Theodosian levels of stupid.
Please more examples of what not to notice.
I will keep this request in mind.😉
Do you have any advice for surviving the collapse of a civilization/ society?
In both those cases I note the East held. Assyria pretty much escaped the Bronze Age Collapse; and Byzantium endured. Oh, look: this tripe doesn't go down at all in Warsaw and Buda-Pest. I'll not be surprised if there isn't a Miracle on the Vistula and Danube. Shame about the Babylons on the Hudson and Potomac though.
Depending on how bad things get, you are likely to be better off away from the cities. That is, somewhere with sufficient local food sources and more local social coherence.
The more general advice is to cultivate connections with the likeminded and useful.
Have both a pistol and carbine in the same caliber.
I'm only being slightly sarcastic when I say that and recommend videos such as this,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVLZYBCs73E
Although Paul Harell's videos are fascinating from a technical point of view, I find that I have been watching them more and more from an anthropological perspective. Paul Harell is an excellent example of the unreconstructed masculine type. Intelligence without arrogance and strength without brutality. A living fossil of perhaps an almost extinct American frontier psyche. I expect our civilization will be rebuilt by men such as him when they emerge from their homesteads in the wasteland.
Xtian heresy? From the perspective of Augustino-Theodosian "orthodoxy"/bullshit maybe. Early doors Xtianity was a very heterodox thing that could encompass JC saying: "Don't worry, Pete bro'; I'll make Mary a man." and Paul being "All things to all men". Judaeo-Christiano-Islam has ever been a chameleon shape-shifting bollocks seeking to takes us in with verbal nonsense with knobs on from the opening verses of Genesis trying to pass as the science of the day with liberal doses of Platonic woo that would carry right on into the Apocalypse of John. Rome was to do the same with Galileo and claiming they too were only doing "science". Please, can we just kill this cancer once and for all? The hole is hole-shaped and "God" has nought to do with it except to have been carefully crafted in all instantiations to fit in the hole like an opiode latching onto and usurping a neuro-receptor. If 'Woke' is a "heresy"; so are the various flavours of Protestant Xtianity. It is like Marxism and Protestantism: a Re-formation of the same material. Just as Chihauhas and Greyhounds remain Wolves.
Posturing, virtue-signalling bullies. No wonder politicians love them.