Men Without Chests and Women Without Breasts

This morning, after greeting me “in the usual way,” Petey observed that, “the really hideous thing about the left is that it is composed of men without chests and women without breasts.”

But also as usual, he left it to me to elaborate and to try to explain what it has to do with yesterday’s post on the nature of human destiny.

Well, let’s see. Even--or especially--if you are a moonbat who hates the classical liberalism embodied in the conservative movement, you will no doubt agree that it espouses scary masculine virtues such as competition, maintaining the rule of law, standards over compassion (i.e., not changing the rules for members of designated liberal victim groups), delayed gratification, and respect for the ways of the father--that is, conserving what has been handed down by previous generations of fathers, and not just assuming in our adolescent hubris that we know better than they.

Contemporary left-liberalism, on the other hand, has come to represent the realm of maternal nurturance--compassion over standards (i.e., racial quotas), idealization of the impulses (just as a mother is delighted in the instinctual play of her child), mercy over judgment (reduced prison sentences, criminal rights, etc.), cradle-to-grave welfare, a belief that we can seduce our enemies in a feminine way and not have to defeat them with manly violence, and the notion that meaning, truth and values are all arbitrary and subject to change (which is true of the fluid world of emotions in general).

Now, I am not one of those modern space age a go-go people who imagine that gender is irrelevant to our destiny. But nor do I think that our destiny can be reduced to gender. Rather, our destiny is influenced by several archetypal factors that go into our “blueprint” and inform who we are: sex (for each sex emphasizes different divine qualities), age (i.e., season of life), intellect (not its content, but its height, depth and breadth), temperament (e.g., Jung’s useful system), caste (e.g., priest, warrior, menial/intellectual laborer, merchant, etc.), and even zodiacal type (in the archetypal sense, not the debased “predictive” variety found in newspapers and most books on the topic).

Now the feminist movement of the 1960’s and 70’s had very little to do with comprehending, much less honoring, divine femininity, but generally degraded and devalued it. In the long run, it represented nothing more or less than the flight from a temporary or at best “pseudo problem” in exchange for a real and abiding one. It largely became a vehicle for the expression of female envy, giving existentially angry and maladjusted women license to imitate the men they envied. After all, few women are less feminine than the typical NOW activist.

Nor are they masculine, however. A woman cannot actually become a man, but can only become a monstrous blending of male and female. They become “women without breasts,” except perhaps for plastic ones. (If you ever want to hear the archetypal voice of a woman without breasts, try listening for a few moments to Randi Rhodes on Air America. If you have ears to hear, you will know in an instant what Petey is talking about. Woe to her luckless child and, one assumes, luckily ex husband. Only a man with no chest at all could have survived in such a shrill atmosphere.)

(Importantly, this is not to even remotely suggest that a woman cannot develop her masculine side or a man his feminine side. What we are talking about is a complete nullification of sexual polarity, a kind of magical, self-imposed blindness, so that these critical differences are effaced.)

Because they have disassociated their own devalued femininity, these women without breasts will try to locate them elsewhere. In the deepest layers of the unconscious explored by psychoanalysis, the breast is associated with the source of life and of being itself. How could it not be? The infantile mind does not separate breast, milk, love, life, being, or mother into separate existential categories. Rather, these categories will only gradually emerge from the harmoniously mixed-up intersubjective diad of mother-baby. But not always. The primordial edenic memories of the perfect breast-paradise remain.

For some, these dreams of a non-friction life with unlimited abundance are transferred onto an inanimate object called the government, which becomes the great existential teat for all of us. It will heal us when we are sick, rescue us from hurricanes, take care of us when we’re old, educate us, and generally shield us from the vicissitudes of fate.

That giant suckling sound you hear off in the distance is the sound of Democrats on the morning of November 8th. However, Petey informs me that there are still several alternative futures implicated in the present moment, so our fate is by no means sealed. He says “watch Rove work. I regard him as a quasi-mage who can read the Signs of the Times and respond accordingly.”

I hope this is not too esoteric, but the brave new world offered to us by the left represents a reversion from our uniquely human trimorphism of mother-father-baby, to the primordial biological diad of mouth-nipple through which mammals first enter the world. These nipple-dragging leftists keep us fixated on the most primitive object of our desires, which ultimately prevents the critical evolution from static twoness to dynamic threeness.

I know, I know, but look again at what happened to the black family as a result of all the liberal meddling. Government replaced the category of fatherhood, which eventually resulted in 70% of black children being born without benefit of marriage. And for these boys without fathers to emulate and show them how to be men, another aspect of government fulfills that role: prison. For prison is none other than a belated (and now greatly exaggerated) can of whoop-ass from the missing father. The percentage of fatherless murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals is just staggering.

Or look at socialist Europe, which is populated by Men Without Chests and Women Without Breasts. No wonder they can’t reproduce.

It was C.S. Lewis who coined the phrase "men without chests." In an article entitled Wimps and Barbarians, Terrence Moore notes that while "barbarians suffer from a misdirected manliness, wimps suffer from a want of manly spirit altogether. They lack what the ancient Greeks called thumos, the part of the soul that contains the assertive passions: pugnacity, enterprise, ambition, anger. Thumos compels a man to defend proximate goods: himself, his honor, his lady, his country; as well as universal goods: truth, beauty, goodness, justice. Without thumotic men to combat the cruel, the malevolent, and the unjust, goodness and honor hardly have a chance in our precarious world."

Naturally, "Wimps make worthless watchdogs. But their failure as watchdogs or guardians has nothing to do with size or physique.... Many of today's young men seem to have no fight in them at all. Not for them to rescue damsels in distress from the barbarians. Furthermore, wimps vote. As Aristotle pointed out, to the cowardly, bravery will seem more like rashness and foolhardiness than what it really is. Hence political and social issues that require bravery for their solution elicit only hand-wringing and half-measures from the wimps. Wimps are always looking for the easy way out."

Moore ties the phenomenon of wimps and barbarians directly to the culture of divorce and the absence of male role models in boys' lives. "Half of American boys growing up do not live with their natural fathers. The sons of single mothers lack strong men to usher them into the world of responsible, adult manhood. Divorce, whether in reality or in the acrimonious rhetoric of the mother [probably without breasts--ed.], impresses upon the boy an image of the father, and therefore of all men, as being irresponsible, deceitful, immature, and often hateful or abusive towards women. For sons, the divided loyalties occasioned by divorce actually create profound doubts about their own masculinity. As the boy approaches manhood, he is plagued by subconscious questions which have no immediate resolution: 'Will I be like Dad?' 'Do I want to be like Dad?' 'What is a man supposed to do?'”

The answers for the leftist Man Without a Chest are no, no, and “act like a woman.”

Oh really? You think that bombastic Bob and polemical Pete are engaging in hyperbole?

Here’s a recent idiotorial from the Chronically San Franciscan by Professor Robert Jensen, Men Being Men is a Bad deal: Guys Should Evolve Beyond Masculinity:

“Maybe this masculinity thing is a bad deal, not just for women, but for us. We need to get rid of the whole idea of masculinity. It's time to abandon the claim that there are certain psychological or social traits that inherently come with being biologically male. If we can get past that, we have a chance to create a better world for men and women.”

Amazingly, in Jenson’s bizarro world, our worst social problems are not caused by an absence of real men, but by their very presence: “masculinity is dangerous for women. It leads men to seek to control ‘their’ women and define their own pleasure in that control, which leads to epidemic levels of rape and battery.”

Flatland leftist that he is, Jensen conflates the horizontal category of mere biological maleness with the vertical psycho-spiritual achievement of true manhood. And naturally, “if we are going to jettison masculinity, we have to scrap femininity along with it." We “have to stop assuming” that masculinity and femininity even matter anymore.

So there you have it. A man with no chest has climbed out of the sissypool of the left to speak out on behalf of his sisters without breasts. Let’s hand over the country to these lowbrid humans on November 7th!