Sweden 2017 - peak feminism?

Feminism is off the charts in Sweden. The following stories are from the front page of just one newspaper on just one day.

The details:

Environment Minister Carolina Forest (MP) want to see fewer cars in Sweden's cities. This is because men drive more than women, and thus are "stealing space from women," she says to Göteborgs-Posten.

A magazine has named Swedish pop singer Zara Larsson "Woman of the Year" despite the fact that she is open and proud about hating men:

The runner up for Woman of the Year wasn't much better:

From the article:

Radical Feminist Ebba Witt-Brattström, 62, ended up in second place in Expressen's appointment Woman of the Year in 2017. She says that all male TV personalities should be removed and replaced by feminist women.

The next newspaper item is about a photography museum which decided to raise the entry price for men and to donate the extra money to an organisation which campaigns for gender quotas:

Some Swedish men are encouraging all this. The directors of a building union apologised for being flawed white males:

These are the same men who wore vagina hats in solidarity with feminism:

Their grovelling statement gives away some of their motivation for acting this way:

"Today on International's Women's Day we want to pay attention to all you women in the construction industry and tell you how much you're needed and the respect we have for you because you dare to break gender roles," they wrote in an opinion piece published by public broadcaster SVT.

"We know we're going to have to endure some jibes, mainly from other men, because we are standing here in our pink, home-knitted hats. But to us it is an act of solidarity."

"God knows we're not perfect. We ARE a bunch of white middle-aged men. Sometimes we put our foot in our mouth. Often we hear it ourselves and apologize. Sometimes we don't notice it ourselves; please tell us and give us a red card. So that we learn for next time."

"We ARE a bunch of white, middle-aged men. But at least we're wearing pink hats."

Note that women get respect from these liberal men because "you dare to break gender roles". Why should that be such a good thing? It's ideological. If you believe that our predetermined sex is a prison that we have to be liberated from, then those who break gender roles will be thought of as blazing a trail of moral progress.

But that's a big ideological assumption. Most societies, in most epochs, have thought of our manhood and womanhood not as prisons, but as core aspects of our own self. In fact, if you take away the Cartesian mind body dualism, then you are likely to think of our sexed bodies as being inseparable from our minds and souls. So to bring our own self to fruition means developing ourselves toward what is best in our manhood and womanhood, physically, emotionally and spiritually.

How can these union leaders be oriented toward an integrated development of themselves as men, if they believe that their predetermined sex is something they have to be liberated from, or if they believe that it is the breaking of gender roles that represents moral progress, or if they believe that sex distinctions exist because they, as white males, created them to oppress women.

Little wonder that these middle-aged men do not have that masculine "steeled" look that you would hope men would develop over a lifetime of struggle and achievement (and they have entirely abandoned the virtues of gravitas and dignitas that were so important to the ancients).

(I'd like to give some publicity to the Swedish paper I drew these stories from, namely Fria Tider. I've only read a few articles, but it seems to be a good source of Swedish news and commentary.)

From Alain de Benoist

Below is a great quote from Alain de Benoist (hat tip: Wrath of Gnon):

Some thoughts on women

Women are so enigmatic. One way that men respond to a physically beautiful woman is to "read" virtue into her body - in other words, a man sees the beauty and then has a sense of the "virtuous feminine" which might include purity or grace or tenderness. But, of course, the individual woman might not embody these qualities very well at all, might not even be self-conscious that they are qualities that a woman might try to cultivate. It can leave men with the feeling that they are privy to an appreciation of the feminine that has been denied to women themselves - that women are, in some ways, strangers to their own virtues.

Women are more complex too in the sense that it is generally a good thing for a man to be as masculine as possible, as this brings him closer to the fruition of what he was created to be, but the same is not necessarily true of women - it is not simply the case that the more feminine a woman, the more she upholds an ideal of what a woman should be.

It is a good thing, for instance, for a woman to be more sensitive than a man. Most men will find it attractive if a woman tears up and sniffles at the sad parts of movies, or if she is more fearful of potential danger, or if she is a little more connected to the emotions of children. But too much sensitivity is not a good thing. It can lead to a woman never forgiving small slights she has experienced, or holding onto petty hurts that her husband may not even be aware of. An overly sensitive woman will make for a poor wife. There is some sort of sweet spot for a woman to have when it comes to this quality.

It is similar when it comes to passivity. If a woman is passive in the sense that she doesn't emasculate her husband and allows him to lead in a masculine way; or if she is passive in the sense that she keeps herself lovingly receptive to her husband, that is obviously a good thing. But I've noticed that there are women who interpret passivity as meaning that their role is to merely look on and critically judge the performance of their husband; or that their husband should take over the work of the household, so that he becomes something of a drone in her eyes; or even that the husband is responsible for her happiness - she externalises a responsibility onto him that can only really be carried by herself.

Torrisian poems

Sydney Trads have been publishing some poetry of late. Some of it is by me (here, here, here, here). There are also some little political poems by Luke Torrisi which I thought clever and enjoyable. He has a go at Dutch liberals here, and his take on French right-wing politics is here.

The left is doubling down on its hostility to whites and males

After the election of Donald Trump I wondered if the left would rethink blaming whites and males for the ills of the world. But they are still at it - if anything they have intensified their efforts.

A case in point is a student group at St John's College in Santa Fe. An email was sent to all students and staff at this college advertising the new student group (see below). The email runs:

This is a group where those who most often exhibit racist and sexist behaviour - white males - can begin to be self-critical of the very dangerous, brutal and depraved hierarchical pathologies of superiority, supremacy, and inferiority handed down to us by white Euro-American institutions.

The main topic for discussion will be an ongoing one. How do we deal with the depravity of whiteness and the brutality of masculinity? How can we get to the root of this problem?

Once the email came to light, the college announced that it had erred in not suggesting edits to tone down the "inflammatory" language. But the point remains that it is now considered a leftist position that whiteness and masculinity are to be looked on negatively as pathologies. The obvious thing for whites and males to do in response is to decouple from the left.

Left finds normal things toxic

You might have heard of "toxic" masculinity. Now it seems that whiteness is also toxic, so much so that you can pay feminists $100 to be purged of it:

What will come next? Toxic heterosexuality? Toxic fatherhood? Toxic motherhood? Toxic beauty? Toxic goodness?

You can determine your own sex now?

This is something that seems crazy but is actually a logical application of liberal first principles.

Here are some excerpts from an interview (video below) between Tucker Carlson and a senior adviser to the Democrats, Zac Petkanas.

It begins with Carlson raising his concerns about the liberal attitude to how we identify as male or female:

Carlson: There’s no biological anchor to sex anymore. It’s all determined by the individual. So my obvious question for you is, how do I know if a person’s male or female? Is there some absolute standard people have to meet to be male or female, other than what they say?

Petkanas: One’s gender identity is enough to show what gender they are.

Carlson: Is there a scientific standard?

Petkanas: Your gender identity determines your gender. Period.

Carlson: As an apparent man, if I say I'm a woman is that enough, do I meet the standard, as a woman to play in a woman's sports team?

Petkanas: Yes. The answer is absolutely yes.

Carlson: I want you to name a single scientist, just one, who says you can determine your own sex just by saying so.

Petkanas: You clearly have some issues around this.

So the Democrats are committing to the idea that I can be considered a woman as long as I say that I identify as a woman even if I am biologically a man. If I say that I am a woman, then I can play on a woman's sports team, even if I am tall, muscular, broad-shouldered, bearded and biologically male.

It was predictable that this would happen. After all, liberals believe that the primary good in life is a freedom to self-define or self-determine. Therefore, the idea that something as important as my sex is predetermined by biology is a radical limitation on my individual freedom. Better, from the liberal point of view, if there are many sexes and if my sex identity is fluid and self-determined.

So you have to go one of two ways. If you want to stick with the liberal first principle, then you have to accept a future in which the idea of many sexes and self-determined sexes will be pushed on society. Alternatively, you can reject the consequences of liberal thinking about the sexes, which means challenging the assumptions on which liberal thinking is based.

If you take this second option, then you cannot view a freedom to self-define as always and everywhere the overriding good. You must, instead, be able to discern goods that are already there - that are given to us - as part of the created nature that we inhabit.

Liberalism, honour, witchcraft and the no harm principle

American singer Lana del Rey has joined a movement of witches who are placing spells on Donald Trump. On reading this story I discovered that the key moral principle of witches is the Wiccan Rede, this being "An it harm none, do what ye will" - or in modern English, "Do what you want, as long it doesn't harm anyone".

This is striking, as it is also a key moral principle of liberal modernity. The idea itself goes back a long way. Rabelais, a French writer of the Renaissance, wrote (in the 1500s) of an ideal community based on the principle:

Do What Thou Wilt, because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour.

The idea here is that gentlemen, at least, can be free to choose in any direction because they will by nature choose what is honourable.

John Stuart Mill, the English liberal, had much the same idea in the mid-1800s, although he added to it by suggesting that all social classes could be educated to the level of being gentlemen. He also emphasised the "no harm" principle that had been clearly stated by the French revolutionaries in their Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789:

Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.

History has made clear that John Stuart Mill was wrong. We have had high levels of education in the West for many decades, but the level of gentlemanly honour has dramatically fallen rather than risen. One of the reasons for this is that people are generally much more attentive to the idea of "do what you want" rather than the condition "as long as it doesn't harm anyone".

Why doesn't the "no harm" clause work in practice? One problem is that people are able to rationalise away the harm that their decisions create. A woman might choose, for instance, to divorce her husband, thereby dissolving her family. Clearly it has a considerable effect on those around her. But she might say to herself "the children will be better off if I'm happy". Or "we will still be a family, all of us, I'll just be living with another man." Angelina Jolie took this line recently about her decision to divorce Brad Pitt:

'I don’t want to say very much about that, except to say it was a very difficult time and we are a family, and we will always be a family,' she said, visibly emotional.

'My focus is my children, our children,' she explained to the BBC.

'We are and forever will be a family and so that is how I am coping. I am coping with finding a way through to make sure that this somehow makes us stronger and closer,' she said.

In her mind, she can choose to divorce but not dissolve her family, in fact the divorce will make her family stronger and closer.

But even when there is no rationalisation, even when the harm is admitted, the no harm principle is pushed aside. Dalrock recently had a post about an American woman who decided to divorce her husband and who justified her decision using the following lines from her favourite author, Cheryl Strayed:

Go, even though you love him.

Go, even though he is kind and faithful and dear to you.

Go, even though he’s your best friend and you’re his.

Go, even though you can’t imagine your life without him.

Go, even though he adores you and your leaving will devastate him.

Go, even though your friends will be disappointed or surprised or pissed off or all three.

Go, even though you once said you would stay.

Go, even though you’re afraid of being alone.

Go, even though you’re sure no one will ever love you as well as he does.

Go, even though there is nowhere to go.

Go, even though you don’t know exactly why you can’t stay.

Go, because you want to.

Because wanting to leave is enough.

This is so interesting, because the last line clearly states that "do what thou wilt" is enough of a justification, that you don't need to meet the moral condition of "do no harm."

Obviously, the instinct to honour is not strong enough in many people to hold them to virtue or to moral duty. They follow instead an individualistic impulse to follow "their own good" even if this harms others.

And here's the thing. Rabelais defined honour quite well: "an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice." But why not then encourage people to act virtuously? If you tell people that the moral thing is "to do whatever you want" it suggests that standards of virtue don't exist and that one act or choice is as good as another.

In other words, the "do what thou wilt" slogan is "de-moralising" - it places people in a moral vacuum, an empty moral landscape. Little wonder then that people lose some of the moral strength to do the right thing by others.

Sydney Trads publish my poem

Sydney Trads asked me if I had ever dabbled in poetry. Dabbling is all I've done (wrote two poems last year). Still, they were kind enough to agree to publish a few of them. The first one is here.

Amerika interviews Mark Moncrieff

I was pleased to see Mark Moncrieff getting some much deserved exposure at the Amerika website. He is interviewed there about his traditionalist politics - he acquits himself very well. Worth reading.

(Mark Moncrieff runs the Upon Hope website and is a Co-Convenor of the Melbourne Traditionalists.)

Marine vs Merkel

Marine Le Pen went to the EU Parliament and tore into Angela Merkel. An eloquent takedown:

The old conservative watchers

This is well said:

Being a smug conservative is much like being a smug Carthaginian. Both are able to watch all there once was being ground into dust, while smiling at their own virtue.

The author, Porter, goes on to observe,

The left wants the West in ruin and its daughters in infantry tents. The mainstream right wants a comfortable seat to watch the show. Thus it’s not difficult to understand why both factions feel intense enmity for those few manning the ramparts.

I myself used to despair of the right-wing intellectual types who had no fight in them, but just wanted a space to prove their own cultural and intellectual superiority over the leftist vulgarians. It was a kind of smugly self-satisfied armchair politics, unserious really.

So it's been a joy to watch the emergence of a livelier and more combative right-wing movement, one that has even notched up a few victories.

There were even fewer on the ramparts 10 years ago, far fewer. The momentum is with the defenders now, rather than the watchers.

Open borders costs UK 30 billion pounds a year

Open borders is economically very expensive for the UK. An economic analyst, Bob Lyddon, has authored a report which shows that the 3 million EU migrants in the UK cost the government £10,500 per head, at a total cost of £31.5 billion per year. Of these migrants, 1 million aren't in work and the other 2 million are mostly in low paid jobs and contribute on average only £500 each in taxes, which adds up to a revenue of only £1 billion per year. The UK Government is losing more than £30 billion a year through the immigration programme.

So who benefits? The multinationals do:

[Lyddon] argues that the EU freedom of establishment rule combined with freedom of movement means “tax efficient” multinationals can flood the UK with cheap foreign labour but avoid paying money to the Treasury such as corporation tax.

In a damning indictment he says that the UK taxpayer is subsidising low paid jobs for foreign workers.

UKIP responded to the report as follows:

Ukip pointed out that the report comes just days after Brexit Secretary David Davis said mass EU immigration could continue for many years after the UK leaves the EU.

The party’s immigration spokesman John Bickley said: “Bob Lyddon's damning report blows apart the myth perpetuated by the established Parties that EU migration benefits the UK economy.

“Uncontrolled cheap labour from the EU benefits big business at the expense of landing ordinary taxpayers with a whopping and unsustainable pensions bill.”

What are the feminine virtues?

Mark Moncrieff alerted me to an interesting post by Dalrock. It's about a Lutheran pastor, Hans Fiene, who thinks that Millennials are having less sex because young men are too invested in porn and social media to pursue relationships with women. According to Pastor Fiene,

As men pursue women, however, they come to develop a more robust appreciation of what women have to offer them beyond physical beauty and sexual gratification. They become more exposed to the various feminine virtues—things like kindness, compassion, selflessness, loyalty, tenderness. And the more decent men encounter “the imperishable beauty of a quiet and gentle spirit,” as St Peter calls it, the more they come to value this inner beauty over raw sexuality.

This jumped out at me, because I am of a generation of men that would not identify women with qualities like kindness, compassion, selflessness, loyalty and tenderness - certainly not when it comes to their personal relationships with men.

But all of this raises the question of how we define masculine and feminine virtues. And it seems to me that to qualify as one of these two conditions need to be met.

The first is that the quality should be characteristic of that particular sex. So if we say that courage is a masculine virtue, then we should expect that many men will have that particular quality, particularly relative to women.

The second is that the quality should be part of how we define what it is to be a man or a woman. The quality, in other words, should make up part of what we perceive to be the essence of the masculine or the feminine. We would therefore want men or women to deliberately cultivate these qualities so that they are able to play their necessary masculine or feminine role in society; so that they can reach fruition as men and women, successfully embodying their own created nature; and so that they can stand fully inside their own spiritual nature as a man or a woman and have that completing sense of genuinely feeling "this is what I am meant to be".

To give an example of how this works, there was a scene from Australian reality TV in which a group of people were sent to live in the African jungle. The women arrived first at the isolated jungle camp and saw that the open air beds were arranged in two circles, the inner one closer to the fire and the outer one bordering the jungle itself. The women immediately expressed fear about sleeping close to the jungle with its wild animals and hoped that the men would agree to sleep protectively in the outer circle.

This did not make the women seem to be lacking in feminine virtue, because we do not instinctively believe that courage defines a woman the way it does a man. We would not respect the women less, as women, for wanting to be physically protected this way. But if a group of men had been fearful and had urged the women to sleep on the outer, then we would have taken this to diminish their manhood.

So, to get back to Pastor Fiene, we have to ask whether his list of feminine virtues meets both criteria I outlined above. The answer, in my opinion, is that some of them do, but only with conditions applied.

It's easier to begin with the qualities that don't meet the criteria. The most obvious one is loyalty. There is no doubt that men would like women to be loyal and to cultivate this quality in themselves. But it just does not seem to me to be characteristic of women - it is a quality that is far stronger in men. So it fails to meet the first criterion.

In what ways do women fail to show loyalty? If you have ever worked in a female environment, you will know that there are women who seek in-group conformity by turning on some hapless member of the group and making them persona non grata. It can be demoralising as a man to watch this play out precisely because of the breach of loyalty on display. In personal relationships, too, many women appear by nature to be serial monogamists who find it difficult to retain attraction for one man over the course of a lifetime.

To say that loyalty is a feminine virtue is likely to blind men to the difficulty of maintaining a system of monogamous pair bonding. It seems more truthful to recognise that civilisations arise when men are strong enough to keep women within a system of marriage and family. The Roman historian Tacitus, witnessing the decline of the family in his culture, praised the Germanic tribes in this regard:

Much better still are those tribes in which only virgins marry and where marriage is performed only once for a wife with a hope and a vow. Thus they take only one husband, in this way both being of one body and life, lest there be second thoughts or belated desires, so that the women love not so much their husbands as their married state.

Tacitus here recognises the difficulty of women remaining loyal to their husbands in a personal sense, but thinks that if women are not given the opportunity of "second thoughts or belated desires" that they will at least stay committed to their married state (hat tip: David Grant at Social Matter for the translation).

And what of kindness, compassion and tenderness? The problem here is that women show more of these qualities than men in some aspects of life, but less in others. For instance, the best women do show these qualities when it comes to the care of their children, of the elderly and of the sick. But they do not show them when it comes to their husbands. It has been noted at the red pill websites, correctly in my experience, that it is a considerable error on the part of husbands to seek support from their wives for troubles they are experiencing, as their wives are likely to lose attraction for them, sometimes disastrously so.

It's important to make this distinction, because men should know, realistically, that it is not in women's nature to love their husbands compassionately. However, I do agree with Pastor Fiene that kindness, compassion and tenderness for children, the elderly and the sick are feminine virtues, both because many women do have these qualities and because it is a defining aspect of the feminine (i.e. if a woman did not show these qualities we would think that she was not meeting an aspect of her own feminine essence).

So, despite my initial scepticism, I do believe that Pastor Fiene has correctly identified some of the feminine virtues.

You can follow me on Twitter here.

A rad trad criticism of liberalism

Some readers might find this interesting. It's a description of the outlook of radical traditionalists within the Catholic Church. There is clearly an overlap with the criticism of liberalism I have made at this site:

The “radical” school rejects the view that Catholicism and liberal democracy are fundamentally compatible. Rather, liberalism cannot be understood to be merely neutral and ultimately tolerant toward (and even potentially benefitting from) Catholicism. Rather, liberalism is premised on a contrary view of human nature (and even a competing theology) to Catholicism. Liberalism holds that human beings are essentially separate, sovereign selves who will cooperate based upon grounds of utility. According to this view, liberalism is not a “shell” philosophy that allows a thousand flowers to bloom. Rather, liberalism is constituted by a substantive set of philosophical commitments that are deeply contrary to the basic beliefs of Catholicism, among which (Catholics hold) are the belief that we are by nature relational, social and political creatures; that social units like the family, community and Church are “natural,” not merely the result of individuals contracting temporary arrangements; that liberty is not a condition in which we experience the absence of constraint, but the exercise of self-limitation; and that both the “social” realm and the economic realm must be governed by a thick set of moral norms, above all, self-limitation and virtue.

Because of these positions, the “radical” position—while similarly committed to the pro-life, pro-marriage teachings of the Church—is deeply critical of contemporary arrangements of market capitalism, is deeply suspicious of America’s imperial ambitions, and wary of the basic premises of liberal government. It is comfortable with neither party, and holds that the basic political division in America merely represents two iterations of liberalism—the pursuit of individual autonomy in either the social/personal sphere (liberalism) or the economic realm (“conservatism”—better designated as market liberalism).

This is a principled criticism of liberalism, one that reaches down to first principles. I was especially interested in the final observation - that the mainstream parties are usually just "two iterations of liberalism," with the left wing party oriented to "the pursuit of individual autonomy in either the social/personal sphere" and the right wing party being oriented to the pursuit of individual autonomy in the economic realm.

Regular readers will know that I agree with this understanding of mainstream politics (though the emergence of an anti-globalist right is starting to modify the political landscape).