On Jessica Valenti

Hat tip for this story to The Politically Incorrect Australian. Jessica Valenti is a prominent American feminist. She has written a memoir called Sex Object which has been memorably reviewed by Robert Stacy McCain. It's worth reading the whole review (it is blunt in its language).

Let me give the briefest of summaries of Valenti's life to date. She followed the modern girl path of spending her teens and twenties as a party girl seeking sex with the most alpha men she could get (she preferred tall, blue-eyed, fair-haired men) and taking drugs. She was snorting coke during the period she founded the feminist website Feministing. When she hit her 30s she did the done thing and got married. She has, apparently, been somewhat ruined for marriage though:

Andrew and I have been going to couple’s therapy, both for my anxiety and because Andrew is so mad at the space the anxiety takes up in our relationship. Our default mood is low-level annoyance toward each other with a propensity to turn into full-blown rage at the smallest thing.

I feel like I might hate him and I suspect he feels the same.

It reminds me again that we do not choose the best people to run our culture. Our young women are supposed to look up to and emulate someone with mental health issues and a history of drug and alcohol abuse.

If it were me, I would not be putting myself forward as a role model, at least not until I had got myself sorted out.

The other reminder is that we now have to deal with a culture in which there exist women who want to be players but who also want to keep the option of becoming wives and mothers. It's an odd game that modern feminists are playing: they want a player culture of their own, whilst stridently opposing one for men. Robert Stacy McCain touches on this in his review - he identifies the double standard by which it is "progressive" for women to act like players but "sexist" for men to do the same. To put this another way, the ideal for a feminist is to allow free rein to her own sexuality whilst keeping a lid on the expression of male sexuality (the traditionalist preference is for both to be directed toward higher ends).

A validation gap?

A number of Clinton supporters have directed their anger at white women for supporting Trump. One of these Clintonistas is an American writer and feminist by the name of Lindy West. I found her thoughts on the issue particularly interesting, as she spelled out the underlying, psychological reasons for her passionate support for Hillary. In claiming that white women had "pawned their humanity" in voting for Trump she wrote:

I got up on Election Day and burst into tears — not a genteel twin trickle but a great heaving burst, zero to firehose. Tears spattered the inside of my glasses, dripped from my lips, and left mascara-tinged rosettes blooming black in my cereal milk.

“Honey,” my husband crooned to me. “Honey, it’s going to be O.K. The numbers are still good. It’s O.K.”

But it wasn’t the numbers. I wasn’t sobbing because I was afraid Hillary Clinton was going to lose. That would come later. I was sobbing Tuesday morning because, as I poured my coffee, I’d caught a glimpse of a cable news interview with Mrs. Clinton just after she voted for herself in Chappaqua, N.Y. She seemed breathless, exhilarated, a little overwhelmed. Over her shoulder, Bill Clinton stared at his wife and beamed.

My husband stares at me like that sometimes. It’s not just love — we expect husbands to love their wives — but something less traditional, more conditional and gendered. It’s professional respect. It’s pride.

We’re accustomed to that pride flowing the other direction, from wife to husband, because men in our culture get to be more than just bodies, do more than just nurture. Men get to act and excel and climb and aspire and thrive and win and rule and be the audacious, hungry fulcrum of public life. It is normal for men to have ambition. It is normal for women to stand aside.

...I cried because I want my daughters to feel that blazing pride, that affirmation of their boundless capacity — not from their husbands, but from their world, from the atmosphere, from inviolable wells of certainty inside themselves. I cried because it’s not fair, and I’m so tired, and every woman I know is so tired. I cried because I don’t even know what it feels like to be taken seriously — not fully, not in that whole, unequivocal, confident way that’s native to handshakes between men. I cried because it does things to you to always come second.

Whatever your personal opinion of the Clintons, as politicians or as human beings, that dynamic is real. We, as a culture, do not take women seriously on a profound level. We do not believe women. We do not trust women. We do not like women.

I understand that many men cannot see it, and plenty more do not care. I know that many men will read this and laugh, or become defensive, or call me hysterical, or worse, and that’s fine. I am used to it. It doesn’t make me wrong.

But maybe this election was the beginning of something new, I thought. Not the death of sexism, but the birth of a world in which women’s inferiority isn’t a given.

After I had read this it occurred to me that what she was really seeking in having Hillary elected was psychological validation. She has a hunger for validation. She wants her daughters to feel "that affirmation of their boundless capacity...from their world, from the atmosphere, from inviolable wells of certainty inside themselves". She is crying out "World please validate me and save me from feelings of inferiority". She believes that having a female president might deliver this.

Her quest for validation has led her to reject the feminine in favour of the masculine. She sees men shaking hands firmly, having self-confidence and energy and she is envious. She thinks that men are being given something by society, that they have been placed on a track by society that gives them this sense of inner validation. She wants it for herself. And so she wants to cast off the feminine and adopt the masculine.

In one sense, she's right. Men probably do have, on average, a more securely anchored sense of themselves and so do not seek external validation as much as women do. But I think Lindy West is wrong to assume that this is because society has empowered men to have ambition and denied this to women.

After all, we have had many female world leaders now; we have had women rising through the professions; we have had generations of girls raised to be ambitious at work. Lindy West herself has a relatively powerful and prestigious career as a journalist. If Lindy West were right, then women should now be amassing a treasure trove of validation, but instead Lindy West finds herself crying into her morning cereal.

And what of men? If Lindy West's theory were right, then ambitious, powerful men should feel validated, other men not. But it often doesn't work out this way. There are plenty of men working very humble jobs, who nonetheless have the self-confident, knockabout qualities that Lindy West seems so envious of.

So the question is this. How does an individual come to have a confident and secure sense of themselves as having worth as an individual?

There's no single thing, is there? If a son receives a good dose of mother love as a child, this helps. The same if a daughter grows up lovingly protected by her father. Genetics contributes something.

From here there is a gap between traditionalists and liberal moderns. Traditionalists can find worth for the individual in things that transcend individual life. For instance, if the masculine virtues have an inherent worth, and I as a man can embody some of these virtues, that then gives worth to who I am as an individual. Similarly, if there is a beauty in nature that has inherent value and I can perceive this and feel connected to it, then that too will add to my sense of worth as an individual.

For secular liberals, things are more difficult, as there is only the individual and his choices - there is no connection to things that have objective, transcendent value. So how do I prove my worth if I am a liberal? It has to be through things that mark out a purely personal, individual achievement, such as social popularity, sexual success, sporting achievements and, most of all, careers.

I can't be sure, but I suspect there is a major split between the kind of women who support Trump and those who support Clinton. The Clinton women are more likely to think that individual worth comes the liberal way (sexual conquests, social status, career advancement) and so are sensitive to the fear that they are being held back in achieving this because they are women. Lindy West is a case in point in how this is failing women. Despite women being given the green light to do whatever they want to, she still feels invalidated in her life. She hasn't gained a sense of worth from these pursuits alone and in seeking worth through these things she has turned on her own feminine identity.

The Trump women, I suspect, still look to more traditional sources of worth for themselves as individuals. Perhaps, they see a transcendent value in family and their own role in family life as wives and mothers. Perhaps they see a transcendent value in the larger communal traditional they belong to (i.e. in their identity as Americans) and don't wish to see this dissolved within a tide of globalisation and open borders. Perhaps they see a transcendent value in womanhood itself, and are uncomfortable with its declining status in the modern world or with the attempt to dissolve sex distinctions between men and women.

One final point. Liberal women see no reason to be loyal to the men of their own community. If all you are doing is pursuing sexual conquests; amassing likes on social media; and pursuing a career then why do you need to stand in solidarity with the men of your community? There's no logical reason to do so, especially if you believe these men are your competition.

Once you see yourself, though, as part of a family, a community, a culture and a civilisation, then you do have a reason for loyalty. And it is a good thing for men and women to be connected to each other in this way. It is an ugly part of modern life that men and women have been so set apart.

The reaction to Trump's victory

Some on the left clearly aren't used to losing. Despite controlling the media, the universities, the schools and the churches - in fact, nearly all of the institution of society - they did not get to win the Oval Office.

One response was to be "triggered" to the point of needing therapy:

Dozens of students at Cornell University gathered on a major campus thoroughfare for a “cry-in” to mourn the results of the 2016 presidential election Wednesday, with school staff providing tissues and hot chocolate.

At Tufts University, arts and crafts were on offer. And the University of Kansas reminded students via social media of the therapy dogs available for comfort every other Wednesday.

Another response was to riot:

The Portland, Oregon PD has fired live bullets after declaring the city's anti-Donald-Trump protest a riot Thursday night afters cars were smashed, buildings and cars vandalized and fires started.

'Due to extensive criminal and dangerous behavior, protest is now considered a riot. Crowd has been advised,' Portland police tweeted at 8:30pm local time.

They then tweeted: 'After several orders to disperse, police have used less lethal munitions to effect arrests and move the crowd. (Officers) still taking projectiles.'

Earlier footage showed protesters fighting and vandalizing buildings.

This left likes to lecture the rest of us about tolerance but is once again not looking the part.

And then there are the predictable attacks on white people. In New Orleans protesters daubed the words "Die Whites Die" on a monument:

And then there are the celebrity reactions. If you jump to 8:40 of the video below you see a tearful Chelsea Handler trying to convince herself not to move to Spain. (Why Spain? I have no idea.) Again, the left has had its ways in nearly all things for decades now and still controls the institutions of society. And yet this one defeat has pushed Chelsea Handler to despair:



I'd like to see all this ramped up a notch. I'd like to see us continuing to make inroads amongst the intelligentsia; to carve out more independent media influence; and to build up our influence in the institutions of society. I don't want us to return to a situation where we are isolated, powerless individuals, with the left having to search around for someone to oppose. Hopefully the left will just have to get used to things not always going their way.

The election 1

It's a bit late here in Melbourne so I'll leave some more considered thoughts about the Trump election win until later. However, I thought some of the exit poll data was interesting and will briefly comment below.

First, the left-wingers on my social media feeds are apoplectic about the following table:

What the left finds depressing about this data is that it was not just white men who voted Trump, but white women as well. The usual taunts and jeers directed at white men won't work here. To me, it is a tantalising glimpse of what life could be like, when men and women are not set apart the way they have been for so long.

Here's another interesting one. Educated whites voted for Trump. He won amongst college graduates. This could be an important shift amongst the educated away from liberal group think.

The group that is still majority liberal are college educated white women, but even here the gap is not that large (45% voted Trump).

The following table is also significant. Trump won the majority of younger white voters. It's interesting too that his strongest support was amongst those aged 45 to 64 rather than the oldest group.

This too is striking. Despite religious leaders often being liberal, the religious rank and file went majority Trump. Those with no religion are, for the time being, still mostly liberal (I think there's a chance this will change, as the next generation of secular intellectuals are starting to break with liberalism).

What was the most important issue for Trump supporters? Immigration. Those who do not support open borders and globalisation went for Trump.

Finally, it is noteworthy that Trump's supporters identify as conservative but want change. This might seem contradictory, but it makes sense. If you live in a society with a liberal establishment, then a conservative doesn't want to conserve the current direction of society, he wants to change it. Hence the following tables:

So Trump supporters believe that Trump should be more conservative than Obama. But they also believe that the country is on the wrong track:

They also believe that life for the next generation of Americans is likely to get worse:

Therefore, they voted for a candidate who they hope can bring change:

P.S. I've simplified this commentary by treating Clinton supporters as liberal and Trump supporters as conservative. In truth, voting Republican is not a reliable indicator that someone is not a liberal - some Republicans are what I would call right-liberals. However, the debate this time around was so unusually polarised along liberal/conservative fault lines that I've cut myself a little slack in my use of terminology.

Feminist professor on white men

This is from Sara Ahmed, currently Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London:

I call upon white men not to keep reproducing white men; not to accept history as a good enough reason for your own reproduction.

It takes conscious willed and willful effort not to reproduce an inheritance.

She wants us to do the opposite of what we should be doing. Reproducing the best of your own inheritance is what responsible members of any nation or people seek to do.

She seems to see us as a kind of institutional bloc, standing in the way of her own progress, and therefore worthy to be torn down.

These are the fruits of a liberal society in the year 2016.

Lena Dunham and her father celebrate extinction of white men

Lena Dunham, American feminist and prominent Hillary Clinton supporter, has posted a video on her twitter site which openly celebrates the extinction of white men.

In the video, Lena Dunham asks her father "How are you feeling about the extinction of white men?" Her father answers "Well, straight white men are a big problem, that's for sure. I actually feel pretty good about it. Straight white guys have been screwing things up for long enough." Dunham titled the tweet "It's not the end of men, it's the evolution of men into better men" which suggests that she thinks men will improve if there are no white men.

Here's the video:

It's not the end of men, it's the evolution of men into better men. (beautiful animation by Sophie Koko Gate!) pic.twitter.com/Qtf0xyT5Ad

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) November 2, 2016

I listen to this and am reminded of how moderns have to find what Zippy Catholic terms an "oppressor-untermensch," i.e. a category of persons who can be blamed for the failure of modernity to usher in humanity's (supposed) final phase of equal freedom. Once moderns tag you as the oppressor-untermensch you are in trouble, as any means will be employed to get you out of the way.

It's all based on a series of assumptions. First, that the aim of existence, and the end point of human history, is an equal freedom to be autonomous, self-determining individuals. Second, that the reason this doesn't exist is because one group of people (the oppressor-untermensch) has decided to divert human progress by attempting to oppress and exploit others to their own benefit.
The point for us is not to argue within the framework of this kind of politics, but to decisively reject the framework outright.

P.S. Life is strange. I just did an internet search on Lena Dunham's father. Turns out he's an artist. I don't know how to put this, but his paintings are focused on female orifices. Words fail me. He is a gone-bad-in-the-spirit WASP American.

Two Brisbane men set off SJWs

Australian SJWs are not happy people today. They are feeling a bit shaky. Why? Two intrepid Brisbane men have set up a men's working space!

Some background to all this. Recently in Australia some women's working spaces have been created. My understanding is that these spaces exist to help women with business start ups: they provide working space, advice, networking and so on. They have been warmly welcomed and have large memberships.

The two Brisbane men thought that a similar working space for men was also warranted. Calling themselves Nomadic Thinkers they have set up a place which aims to "address male related social issues," to "help men be men" and to "launch men in business and life".

Some of the thinking behind the men's working space is quite good. Here is a sample:

Men are physical and practical creatures. We require camaraderie and social time with other men (without female chaperones). We need to provide for ourselves, then our families and then our communities (in that order as we mature further), this give us purpose.

Despite having no experience in any other time period, I would say that we live in the most challenging time and culture to be a man.

Historically (and unarguably.. though some will try) men's primary role has been to protect and provide for their families and communities.

Due to the fact that we are an incredibly intelligent species, we have created a world where those tasks now look incredibly different. In fact, very few of us need to protect our families from any real threats...

Furthermore, not only have we lost our roles but it is becoming common place for men to be persecuted for expressing their masculinity.

...Alas, as is so common in human nature, feminism has gone past its desired point and is polarizing to the extreme other end. We have become a culture that praises androgyny, glorifies gender role removal and tolerates all beliefs and choices... except from traditional (conservative I guess) views...

With the media pushing images of passive men, the clumsy dad, the goofy and dim-witted boyfriend, the incompetent boss, men are being seduced into a placated and listless expression of themselves. Is this so bad? Yes, absolutely! This is the reason we have an unprecedented rate of marriage breakdowns...show me a woman who respects a guy that gets walked all over?

While MGTOW [Men Going Their Own Way] community advocate checking out on marriage and women the reality is that will lead to quality men not reproducing and not raising the next generation. Simply put think of it as a numbers game. If you have kids and you are raising them well. This have a multiplier effect. Your ideas and worldview can be bestowed upon them meaning your vote at elections increases, your wealth production increases and your general well-being can increase.

That being said the risk of finding a quality mate is high. With increasing divorce rates and laws such as no-fault divorce and Disney's absolute destruction of what Love and real relationships are with an obsession with infatuation. But they are out there and even in the West.

It's generally good stuff. I'd encourage any Brisbane readers to think about supporting the venture (the website is here). It's a good example of an innovative way of creating alternative spaces. The pity is that they are pioneers and so have to bear the brunt of SJW anguish alone - ideally these ventures would be springing up all over the place.

Coming to a school near you

Nicholas Matte lectures at the University of Toronto. In the video below he asserts that "It is not correct that there is such a thing as biological sex". He then announces his intention to break down a "cisnormative culture" which he defines as the idea that "there is such a thing as male and female, that they connect to being a girl or a boy or a man or a woman..."



Crazy, right? But don't write him off. His views fit in with the state ideology, so they'll find their way onto your local school curriculum regardless of how outlandish they seem.

Remember, the ultimate aim of liberalism is for individuals to be self-defining. We don't get to define our biological sex, so a liberal will therefore be committed to making the fact of being a man or a woman not matter. They can do this either by aiming for sex neutral outcomes or, more radically, by denying the existence of biological sex. Liberals will be tempted to take the view that being male or female is merely a social construct designed to privilege some people and oppress others. They will want us to overcome the "gender binary".

Marxist academic describes liberal campus culture as insane, gets purged

I've been thinking for some time that liberalism has pushed the modernist project to a degree that Marxism never attempted, i.e. that liberalism is now to the "left" of Marxism.

For instance, I am not aware that Marx or Lenin or Trotsky or Stalin ever pushed the idea that whether we are male or female has little to do with our biological sex but depends instead on what we as individuals identify as. I doubt that parents in the USSR ever had state officials threatening to confiscate their children if the parents did not consent to them undergoing sex change procedures (as now happens in the UK). I suspect that Stalin would have choked on his cornflakes at the idea of this.

And to help confirm my belief that Marxism is now less radically modernist than liberalism comes the news that a Marxist academic at NYU, Michael Rectenwald, has been stood down for objecting to the liberal campus culture with its "safe spaces" and its "trigger warnings" and its attacks on people for being "cisgendered white males". Rectenwald wrote:

"Identity politics on campus have made an infirmary of the whole, damn campus. Let’s face it: every room is like a hospital ward. What are we supposed to do? I can’t deal with it—it’s insane.” And later still: “the crazier and crazier that this left gets, this version of the left, the more the alt-right is going to be laughing their asses off

Rectenwald also, understandably, felt alienated by the intersectional politics on campus which removes moral status/standing from white heterosexual men:

A cis, white, straight male like myself is guilty of something. I don’t know what. But I’m f... sure I’m guilty of it. And I am very f.... low on the ethical totem pole, you know.

For uttering these thought crimes Rectenwald found himself being condemned not by "The Workers' Collective Against the Running Lap Dogs of Imperialism" but by a similar sort of committee calling itself the "Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group".

This group claimed to fully support Professor Rectenwald's right to speak his mind but then declared him to be "guilty of illogic" and he was subsequently stood down.

We live in an ideological society. If you had been born in East Germany in 1950, then as a 25-year-old in 1975 an Eastern bloc style communism would have been all that you had ever experienced. It would have seemed normal to a degree. This is even truer of the Western liberal societies as liberalism has proceeded along more gradually and has chosen to mostly hide its ideological nature (instead making appeals to ideologically neutral sounding phrases like freedom or equality or social justice). But we are just the same as those East Germans. We live in an ideological society we have grown used to.

The answer is not to revert to a now less radical form of the same modernist project, such as Marxism, but to think outside of the whole project to something different. If we drop the modernist ideology altogether then what opens up to us? Can't we then begin to think again in terms of the virtues? Of deeper forms of communal identity? Of the spiritual aspect to our existence? Of the stability of family relationships? Can't we then begin to address the complex ordering of society that is needed to draw together the different aspects of the human experience (the natural, the social, the spiritual) - rather than trying to impose a cruder technological ordering based on the needs of the market or state bureaucracies?

Anyway, it seems as if liberals are going to crush the Marxists to their right. More room for us traditionalists to fill the void.

Ultimately empty

I picked up a copy of The Australian at my parents' house today. I don't usually read it, so was interested in how recognisably right-liberal many of the stories were.

A good example was a piece by Caroline Overington ("What's a nice kid doing in a pop-cultural caricature like that?) The gist of it was that what the world really needs is not Donald Trump but a nice guy right-liberal.

What is the right-liberal ideal for Caroline Overington? It's someone who isn't self-hating and who believes positively in the individual in the market. In her own words:

In the U.S. they are thirsting for a Reagan-style leader who believes in the individual and in the superiority of Western culture...Somebody who believes that capitalism - bold, enriching capitalism - is the best way to drag millions and then billions of people out of poverty; who is tired of being told that wealth must be redistributed to those who didn't earn it; who believes in merit and reward for sacrifice; who can't bear the stultifying political correctness of daily life any longer.

Who thinks that the pale-white, middle-class men behind revolutions such as the Apple computer company and the Microsoft operating system and the Google search network haven't done such a bad job, actually, of improving the world, just as it was largely American companies such as Ford and General Electric, led by white, middle-class men, who helped improve the previous century.

Who thinks our culture, our way of doing business, is not too shabby, so what is with the self-loathing? Because actually I want to feel good about myself and my country.

I can understand the superficial appeal of this kind of politics. If the only two options are a left-liberalism, which holds that inequality exists because of evil white males and the oppressive racist and patriarchal institutions of the evil West, and a right-liberalism, which holds that the liberal West is to be looked on positively for its progressive achievements and that what matters is people achieving things in the market - then the right-liberal option can seem like the more attractive one.

But if you look at it closely, then its emptiness becomes more apparent. Right-liberalism reduces a society to the market. What matters for right-liberals is a freedom of the individual to be self-made in the market. This then becomes a poor foundation for resisting the inroads of the left. Why, for instance, should a right liberal care if the left pushes for open borders? After all, an economic migrant is someone seeking their individual advantage in the market - which is a virtue in the right-liberal outlook. And if the market is the great force for progressive change, then why not have the kind of global free trade arrangements which have helped to deindustrialise parts of the US?

There is nothing in right-liberalism which runs counter to the abstracted and atomised view of the individual that is also part of the operating framework of the left. An individual in the market is not someone who is marked by a sense of belonging to a particular ethnocultural tradition; nor is this individual a moral being, distinguished by integrity or honour or conscience; nor is this individual marked by biological sex - by manhood and womanhood - and the identity and social offices deriving from this. An individual in the market is stripped down to a technological role of producer or consumer or profit seeker.

How then can we look to a right-liberal politics for our defence? Returning the Republican Party to this kind of politics is not the solution Caroline Overington imagines it to be.

Musings on women and resilience

At school we sometimes have to do risk assessments for student activities. I was discussing one with a female colleague and I was surprised at how differently we assessed risk factors.

For instance, one activity involved a museum guide talking to a small group of students with three teachers present. I assessed this as low risk, my female colleague as high risk. I asked her what could possibly go wrong. She answered that the museum guide might say something that offended the students and hurt their feelings. She said that if it were my child I would not want this to happen.

This led to a discussion in which I tried to explain how important it has been in my life that I was expected at school to be resilient. The strengths I learned back then have served me well. But my female colleague wasn't at all impressed by this and said that I was the exception and that it was essential that nobody ever had their feelings hurt.

This led me to the thought that there are women who don't really understand the strengths that men need to cultivate to do well in the world. But why wouldn't they understand this?

The political answer might be that women have been raised, first, to think in gender neutral terms and so might assume that the lives of men and women are the same. They have also been raised to think that men are a privileged oppressor class, who, presumably, are thought to have it easier than women and so are less in need of resilience.

But I'm not sure that the political answer is really the decisive one. The thought occurred to me that a woman can grow up with the expectation that she will be looked after and cared for in her adult life. Not all women might take this option, but it is there. If needs be, she might find a man who will seek to protect her and keep her from excessive difficulties and hardships in life.

Adult men don't have this option and so don't even think about it. It is not usually on a man's horizon. For us, it is a competition to prove ourselves. So perhaps that goes some way to explaining why a woman might not be focused on developing resilience in boys - she might assume that men have the same support options as women do. (Or maybe it just has something to do with the maternal instinct being different from the paternal one.)

Anyway, this led on to some other thoughts. First, the disparity has grown more rather than less under feminism. Yes, there are some women who are independent careerists and who don't look to men for support. But at the same time women no longer nurture men domestically as they once did. No more coming home to a cooked dinner and a clean house and a smile - men are now expected to do the domestic things for themselves. So in a way it has become more one-sided now, with men often still expected to protect and take care of their wives, but not to expect to receive domestic support or comfort in return.

I should say at this point that most younger men probably prefer women to show at least a little vulnerability and need. I think that when I was 25 I would have been left cold by a woman who was totally independent and without any need of masculine support. But at the same time it's possible for a woman to take being looked after too far. I have known women who translated any difficulty or hardship in their life as "the man has failed to support me" - even if the difficulty was something outside of the man's control. There is a balance here in which a woman is ideally willing to accept a man's support but also sees herself as capable of doing her part to work through life's inevitable difficulties.

Miss Peregrine's Home: a short review

I went to see the latest Tim Burton film, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. I found it mildly enjoyable - I think young teenagers would relate to it better than I did.

It did, however, have one feature I thought worth mentioning. The portrayal of the female characters was better than you usually find in the cinema or on TV. The two younger female characters were undeniably feminine: physically graceful, dressed prettily and a little emotionally vulnerable. It was credible that they would attract romantic interest from the younger male characters.

And then there was Miss Peregrine herself. I am someone who believes that the human body gives us a clue as to our telos - the qualities that we are supposed to cultivate and develop toward. You can see glimpses, at times, in the female body of a certain kind of nobility. Miss Peregrine's "peculiarity" in the film is the care of the young, and her dedication to this gave a depth to her character which, along with her bearing, did at times suggest a kind of feminine nobility.

Miss Peregrine is, in some ways, still following the older understanding of caritas - of a particular, concrete love that is settled in the will. She is not, in other words, just following her heart wherever it leads, no matter what the damage to others. She has a duty, founded on the love of the children in her care, to which she is willing to make sacrifices.

So, despite its quirkiness, and despite some features that are likely to irritate traditionalists, it did not strike me as being, at its core, a liberal film.

A conversion story

A blogger has written a post titled "Dear Progressives: My Path From Left To Right". It's worth reading the whole thing, but I'll pick out some choice bits here. He begins by noting that once upon a time,

I was a liberal; a latte-sipping, NPR-listening, Salon-reading, organic food-eating, SWPL. I worked for the Clinton and Kerry campaigns. I gave to Greenpeace and the ACLU.

So how did he end up leaving the left? First, leftist beliefs went against normal heterosexual perceptions:

I always disagreed with radical feminist beliefs, and was frustrated by their insistence that men and women be psychologically identical, or that sexual attraction was learned, or that beauty standards were entirely conventional.

Second, as liberals pushed their theories into ever more radical territory, he found it difficult to keep believing:

When the left went from saying you should not harm homosexuals to attacking “heteronormativity,” that was a straw. It was just insane to me to claim that heterosexuality wasn’t the biological norm. When racism went from the belief that you should not treat someone badly because of their race, to an impersonal, omnipresent, invisible, malevolent force against which you must guard every stray thought lest you be lead astray–when it became witchcraft–that was a straw. When the Sierra Club sold out the environment over immigration, that was a straw. The way leftists obviously expanded the definition of emotionally charged words like “rape” or “racism” for political gain was a straw. The slogan “diversity is our strength” was a big straw. I think I first heard this phrase during the Clinton administration. I laughed because it was so obviously not true

He explains why he still found it difficult to break away from the left as follows:

It is so difficult to break from being a leftist because it is the entirety of your identity. White leftists believe themselves to be entirely self-created individuals and have no ethnic, racial, or religious identity. It is an amazing coincidence how these purely self-created individuals all happen to end up with the same tastes, styles, opinions, and political views. This is beginning to change as white liberals have come under attack and are starting to dimly perceive that they are a type, and live in homogenous enclaves like any other. Even then it really angered me that despite all being white, having all their friends be white, living in white neighborhoods, listening to music made by white people, having the organic, fair-trade, localist values that only whites have, they had the smug clear conscience that they weren’t racist because they had learned the right things to say in the right situations to throw off suspicion.

That's a good insight. He is observing, first, that if as a liberal you believe yourself to be entirely self-created, that your political identity then forms a greater part of who you are, as you have rejected predetermined communal identities. Shedding this political identity is then a very significant upheaval.

Second, he notes, as many of us have done, that despite believing themselves to be self-created individuals, leftists are actually quite good at forming homogeneous enclaves of their own.

Finally, he came to see that liberalism could not sustain the tradition that he valued:

This was the final straw, to see that all of the things that a kind must do in order to continue to persist are exactly what liberalism condemns. That if you have two groups, one of which refuses to do what it must in order to persist through time, and another group which does, the latter will inherit the Earth. In fact, the Earth will always be inherited by those groups who take the effort to persist...I wrestled with these implications for a long time, for over a year actually. But in the end I could not get over the conclusion that, whatever moral or political theory you prefer, it can’t, like the Shakers, lead to the extinction of those who practice it. Values have survival value. On the other hand, liberal values are “Deathwish Values,” they lead to the extinction of those who live by them, and can not endure through time. If you adopt liberalism, you go extinct. This is what is currently happening to all the ancient peoples of Europe due to their adoption of liberalism. The world will always be inherited by those who live by values that ensure the survival of their kind.

That was it for me. Seeing that liberalism ultimately destroys whomever practices it was the end. My goal really became the preservation of my kind and the defeat of the liberalism which rots and destroys. When I finally broke with the left it was quite a liberating feeling.

Protect yourselves, said Rousseau...

Another good one from Conservative Thoughts:

Protect yourselves, said Rousseau, from the cosmopolitans, who pretend to love humanity in order to desert the duty of concrete solidarity. (Bernard Willms)

Swedish feminists demonstrate in support of men?

There is a feminist political party in Sweden called Feminist Initiative. On its Facebook page there is an entry from the party's sex policy representative. She writes in support of a proposed new law by which a rape could be proved when there is no resistance. Predictably, she also wants an education campaign that targets masculinity:

Feminist Initiative wants the government to allocate resources for an education initiative about how power structures are supported by ideas of masculinity in which the right to exercise control is an important part. Such training should also include questions about sexuality, gender perspective, lgbtq plus issues and knowledge of men's violence against women. Such skills should be a mandatory part of the training in the police, health service and the judiciary.

But what happens if an alleged rapist is not an ethnic Swede but an immigrant? Does all this still apply? Apparently, the answer is no. A disabled Swedish woman has alleged that she was raped by a group of asylum seekers in Gotland. The reaction of Feminist Initiative? To organise a demonstration in support of the accused men:

We want to show that we do not accept the simplistic description of the need to protect Swedish women from external threats, says Lisa Tune Farm, Feminist Initiative, Gotland.

It's difficult to see this ending well. Feminist Initiative thinks that it is supporting Swedish women by:

a) using the issue of rape to introduce education campaigns intended to emasculate Swedish men

and

b) denying that there is a need to protect Swedish women from external threats

Note too that once again the "intersectional" politics of the left puts race above sex, so that even a feminist party believes that male asylum seekers should get more priority as a group than Swedish women.

Finally, in an age old story, some very masculine men (of the kind that Swedish feminists want to deconstruct) are the ones actually protecting women in the Middle-East (see here).