What Does Feminism Give Women?

I. Seriously, What? 
Scribblerg posed the question on Rollo's blog.

I think a lot of women feel similarly disoriented in this “modern” world of the Strong Independent Woman. Reading Deida and seeing you weren’t crazy, it’s interesting to hear how disoriented a woman can be made by this whacked out society.

Why the hell are we letting this happen to the world? Who is it working for? Old battle axe feminists? Young ones? Ask yourself, how many radfems/social justice warrior types do you know who are even happy?

I thought about his question, and my thoughts required something longer than a blog comment.

Feminism adds value to the average woman's life. A woman's support for feminism is not irrational. They do wish to submit to high-value men but feminism and the liberated society increases the likelihood of meeting such a man and breaking bonds should such a man NOT meet her standards.

Most importantly, Feminism gives her Options. Second, Feminism gives her Time. Third, Feminism gives her Hedonism (or at least a rationalization for wanton pleasure).

II. The Beta Life

My arguments come from my own personal experience. Therefore, your social circle may not resemble mine. Relevant attributes of my social circle:

-Highly Educated. Minimum bachelor's, majority earn post-teritiary degrees.
-High income families.
-Largely white, some ethnic South and East Asians.
-Irreligious for the most part.

Essentially, the kind of Yuppie crowd that voted enthusiastically for Barrack Obama and now wants to #FeeltheBern.

So let's start with the two major criticisms. At least with regards to finding good men.

The major criticisms leveled at Feminism are the Beta-fication of men, along with the encouraging Strong, Independent Women.

Both of these kill any chance of finding meaningful relationships for any length of time.

From my on-the-ground perspective, both of these problems are somewhat overblown.

III. Contrary to popular belief, good guys still exist:
Most of my social circle has drifted into some sort of marriage-drifting LTR at this point or has actively been married. These men are not your typical, whining Betas. They are Vox deltas for the most part, but have enough disposable income to dress nicely, socialize, and hold interesting hobbies.

They aren't super-handy, but they can lend a hand around the house. They generally cook better than women, they hold down jobs, and you can take them home to see Mom and Dad.

Women generally like them, at least somewhat. They aren't guys who pull lots of girls, but girls do generally like them.

I actually think this is the best generation of men ever. Unless you want a niche man....say, a really religious man, or a really handy man, or a military veteran, which may have gotten harder to find....this generation of men produces, on average, the best quality any woman in history would ever get.


Why all the bemoaning about where the good men have gone?!

We'll get back to that.

IV. Contrary to popular belief, girls enjoying being Feminine, and know they like it:

 I only know two women who fit the archtype of SIW.

They both identify, proudly, as feminist.
They both write a lot, dance a lot, etc.
They are both overweight.
They are both ugly as sin.
They are both single.

Other than those two extremely ugly women, most of the women I know treat their men with care and deference. They never belittle their men in public, they generally follow the man's lead, they enjoy cooking for their men, they enjoy caring for their men, and they really dig craft projects.

Seriously, click on the link. Pinterest, a website with a 90% woman userbase, 100% validates women enjoy their femininty.

The extraordinarily toxic attitude of female leadership simply does not exist among most of the women I know. Perhaps that will develop over the years. I don't know. But even amongst those terrible women that earn more than their SOs, deference still exists and is still the norm.

 So why all the talk about women trying to one-up their men?!

We'll get back to that.

But, key to my point, in my social group, Feminism does not prevent marriages.  

Feminism actually helps these women, and that's key to my next point! But, first.....

V. What the hell is going on?  Don't men really struggle to get dates? How are they all married now? 

 
Oh, my simple man. Rollo covered this ground in more detail. 


The men have risen in Sexual Value. We've filled out. We've trained. We've learned. We're more confident. We are all dramatically better than we were just 4 or 5 years ago. Most of the men have gained weight but most of the weight is muscle, believe it or not.

The women have all fallen in Sexual Value. Not dramatically, but perceptibly. Facebook is such an amazing tool, because you can look at pictures of girls from their college years and compare to how they are now.

There is simply no better tool to prove how men rise in SMV and women fall in SMV than Facebook.

So the men have risen, the women have fallen. So men have a somewhat easier time. End of story, right?

Not quite, because women have different goals in life now.

Stealing another Rollo concept, the Late Party Years. 

What's actually happened is that women have entered a life stage where they are seeking to consolidate their handle over a man. Basically all these women now in relationships found men a few years post-college.

I've found that, post-graduation, women try their hand at continuing the college lifestyle. That makes sense at the time: more disposable income than ever, apparently more free time. Now we can really party and pursue all those hot men.

Reality sets in after 18-24 months on the new job. The constant demands of life drain women to almost nothing daily. The drinks expand waist-lines. The SMV decline manifests. The extra income actually benefits men more than women. The "dating" scene turns out to be a nightmare.

The women themselves do an immediate about-face and mellow out. They generally shit-test less, they approach less men, they party less, and become more amenable.

By the late-party years, women start to realize they do not want to party anymore or compete there anyways, almost like a mini-epiphany. They find a man who embodies at least a few arousal traits along with the attractive traits, and choose to Cash Out. 

Practically all the women I know in happy relationships now found a man in their late party years and quickly consolidated control. Remaining single women feel major fear. 


VI. Having your Cake and Eating It, Too

But why not just grab men in college when SMV is peaked out?

Because women really like to party, and really like sleeping with attractive men with almost no commitment.

So, yes, women enjoy relationships, and they can grab those with ease under feminism, believe it or not.

But feminism allows a delay in marriage. This means that women can enjoy their peak SMV years partying with essentially no commitment. They can behave as nastily as they want to weed out all unattractive men and focus only on the remaining few men.

That's feminism actually offers women, and most of these women love the deal. Obviously, they'd love for the deal to be even better! Let's extend those party years, let's make the Alpha guys buy me flowers during my party years, whatever.

But Feminism still allows women to party. So it's a huge win over what came before, which was a woman obligated to marry young and waste her peak SMV years on a man when she did not really need to.

Obviously, the most virulent feminism is destructive of feminine ends, which is why my 2 feminist friends are notoriously single. But even for them, the ideological comfort of Feminism is more valuable than marrying a SMV-peer, IE, an ugly fat dude.

VII. Ending Conclusions


So, what are we left with?

Feminism, in the end, really does not prevent women from enjoying lifelong marriages, should they choose to go that route. Women who still enjoy their femininity and know it can still find decently attractive men and live out their blissful white picket fence lives.

This is why the Upper Middle Class still gets married and still stays married.


So, returning to Scribblerg's statement and question:

I think a lot of women feel similarly disoriented in this “modern” world of the Strong Independent Woman...Who is it working for?

 It works for young women in college and peak SMV years. See, they do not WANT relationships, and they do not want marriages. They want to party. They want beta emotional sponges on the side. They want to leave relationships on a whim and monkey-branch to another guy. They want to have one night stands, with no judgements. They want to have anal sex with exchange students and cry rape when convenient.

Feminism isn't the end goal. The Feminine Imperative is the end goal. Feminism is a tool towards that goal. Feminism has been dramatically successful in increasing options for women to fulfill the Feminine Imperative.


Does Feminism always advance the Feminine Imperative?

No.

If you embrace the Strong, Independent Woman archtype, you will alienate virtually all men and will not fulfill your life's mission.

But most women understand that, at an unconscious level. When the time comes, the biological script running in the back of a woman's mind will flip off the Feminism, and embrace something else. The end goal is satisfying the Hypergamous instinct.

The end goal is not Feminism.

Education and Ideology

Uhhhhh....


Why?

We learned yesterday that Witch Hunts tied directly to the Renaissance, Reformation, and growing intellectualism of the late Middle Ages.

So why would education stop terrorism?

Education does not stop violence or terrorism. Osama Bin Laden undoubtedly attended some of the best schools in Saudi Arabia. Bashar Al-Assad, currently dropping barrel bombs on civilians for fun and gassing his own citizens, trained in the United Kingdom. Pol Pot studied engineering in Paris.

On the other hand, you have this guy, who spent probably less than a single year in any form of schooling in his entire life:

Common ideology and common cultural practices can prevent terrorism, but that is simply no guarantee. Education informs and instructs the young, yes, but can just as easily instill values contrary to Western liberalism: Communism, Nazism, Socialism, and Maoism all found homes in the schools, and all instructed generations of young people  in ill-guided philosophies.

All of these philosophies were, in turn, developed by learned men and women of certain social structure.

Mass education and mass literacy in the 19th century led to an ideologically motivated populace that led directly to the killing fields of the 20th.

That's what education ultimately wrought. True, we have learned our lesson and have avoided another Great War the last 70 years, but education has gotten us no closer to universal, disarmed utopia.

At least, not outside Western Europe, and I specify Western Europe, as Eastern Europe is now under attack from Russian expansion.

Obviously, I support education, but we must remain realistic about what education can actually accomplish, and the real risks we face when we train young, possibly dangerous minds.

Religious and Intellectual History of the West

Is this how you picture Witch Trials?

That's how I imagined the Witch trials. Superstitious Puritans, blaming marginally attached older women, for causes now known to have natural causes.  All to scapegoat.

How wrong I might have been.

To make the 30-40 minute commute more bearable, I've listened to a let of courses from the Great Lecture series. The last few weeks involved a lot of study of intellectual and religious history of the Western world, particularly the United States.

Turns out, the Witch Trials resembled something closer to this:


And the Puritans, so casually insulted in the first Simpsons clip, developed one of the first mass literate societies in human history, if not THE first mass literate society.

So, wait, smart people burned the witches?

Yes.

Witch hunts don't become emblematic of European society until the 15th century, roughly contemporaneous with the Renaissance, and peak at the same time Newton hypothesizes universal gravitation and Galileo argues the Earth revolves around the Sun. England passes a Witchraft Act in the 1540s, the same decade Nicolas Copernicus passes into the next world.

What does this tell me?  I am not certain yet, other than that religious orthodoxy and intellectual development often go hand-in-hand throughout history. The same intellectual freedom stimulates both: the freedom to develop new ides means new crazy ideas as much as it means new good ideas, which is also why Marxism arises in the 19th century, the same time as the Industrial Revolution.

What else have I learned?

1. Speaking of the 19th Century, America in the 19th Century underwent the Second Great Awakening and the Protestant Factionalization. While the Catholic Church remained unified, a religious fervor swept the American frontier: new evangelists go around to bored, isolated farmers and preach their revivalism. This leads to Methodism becoming America's major religious denomination.

2. 19th Century leads to Millennialism in the US, which is the belief that the world is about to end. 
This tradition leads to groups like the Seventh Day Adventists, IE, Ben Carson.

3. Fundamentalism is an American religious phenomenon, developed from The Fundamentals. These are a series of pamphlets issue in the early 20th century, and are a reaction to the Modernism of some religious Sects, who steadily modified their religious doctrine throughout the late 19th and early 20th century to the point that their religions were no longer recognizable (Jesus isn't really the Son of God, etc.

I am still digesting some of these ideas, and wonder what priors I should revisit. I suppose that this makes me think that American religiosity is inextricably linked to American exceptionalism, and that there is an underlying quality feeding both. To attack American religiosity means to attack American exceptionalism, which is perhaps an unwise course of action in the current world.

See: European banking crisis, Syria, Paris attacks, Chinese pollution, Russian stagnation, etc.


The most important point, of course, is to continue to actively challenge preconceptions, and always strive to learn more: there's a lot you THINK you know, that is absolutely incorrect.

Lessons from Friendsgiving 2.0

What a damn awesome night!

Entertaining gives me the greatest high. I love hockey, I love meeting a tight deadline, I love sexing up my wife, I love cleaning the gutters and mowing the lawn, and I love frying up a good omelette, but nothing, nothing, nothing on Earth makes me happier than breaking bread with good friends and family around a table.

Mrs. Beta roasted a solid 24 pound butterball turkey for a dozen people. We did not brine the bird, but let me assure you that the every morsel I tasted melted away on my tongue with the utmost ease, well drowned in cups full of home-made gravy, adorned with home-made stuffiing out of the dried out bread crumbs sitting on our island the past week.

We asked everyone else to bring a dish as well. Some were a little far out there (lasagna?!) and some set off the fire alarm (Ratatouille at 425 spews a lot of smoke from my crappy oven).

But we had a dozen happy faces, some a little less sober than others.

Obviously, this is what life is about, and this is why I kept my parents old dining room table, along with the 10-seater we purchased from Ethan Allen: we had plenty of seating for our large group of friends (and half the people we wanted to invite declined!)

Still, not everything went swimmingly. A few lessons stood out:


1. Know your portion sizes. At my Father's house, anything less than 3 servings is an insult. These hummingbirds barely packed away half a plate.

2. Keep the booze selection small. I am something of a drinker myself, so I put out several kinds of rum, mixers, whiskey, gin, vodka, and GOK what else. Almost no one had any.

3. Coffee is a bigger hit than I imagined. The crowd drained the pot I made in less than 20 minutes. I am glad I bought extra Bailey's mudslide creamer for everyone.

4. Empty your recycling bin BEFORE the damn party. Oversight on my part, and not to be repeated, I assure you.

5. Tupperware containers need cleaned and positioned before the end of the meal.

6. Not everyone wants to listen to an hour of Frank Sinatra.

7. A 24-pound bird needs multiple serving platters.

8. Where the hell is my goddam gravy boat?!


Likely, more lessons will come in the future.

I rather enjoyed having friends over. I see a great amount of drudgery in people's daily lives and a great deal of resignation to a gray, cold world. Certainly, when I grew up, my parents seemed to never invite any friends over, and rarely saw family.

I see this in my Sister and her Husband as well.

The foundation of my life is my mission, but the cornerstones are my Wife, my friends, and my family. I prefer to see friends and family at least on a weekly basis: I try to see my nieces and nephews more than that, but they are so often sick and so often traveling that even once a week is a feat!

The real danger rises when the Beta household has children of its own, which will dramatically complicate the logistics of any such venture. I sincerely hope, though, to make a greater effort to see family than my own family currently makes. It is, in fact, the whole reason I remain in the Chicago area: the vast majority of my immediate relations are in a 40 minute drive, and only one farther than a hour and a half commute.

It is with that I fashion the mortar that will become my life.