Chivalry and Other Forms of Female Oppression

An eye exam is not an intelligence test, for the most perfect vision can coexist in the most perfect idiot. And vice versa: the person with a high IQ can obviously have poor vision -- and not just the physical kind. Rather, he cannot see various nonlocal relationships that illuminate and extend the past, present, and future, within both the interior and exterior, or upper and lower vertical.

Example. Okay, I don't want to get sidetracked, but what's really going on with this epidemic of sexual predation and perversion in various bastions of the left, e.g., Hollywood and the Swamp Media (and surely academia cannot be far behind)?

Now, there are plenty of idiots on the left, but there are also some intelligent people. However, the vision of the smartest among them is so limited that they can scarcely see what is under their noses. They seem to think it is a problem of men, or of a culture insufficiently steeped in the ideology of feminism. That is what they see because that is all their vision will allow them to see. "Ideological blinders" is such a cliché, but I don't want to waste my time thinking up a better term.

Some conservatives have speculated that the left is the ideal shelter for these sexual predators, such that their political affiliation is just a calculated pose. I don't think that is the case, at least with the majority. There may be some pure sociopaths, but even sociopaths have principles. Hitler could murder human beings all day but would never harm a dog. Likewise, Charlie Rose might stalk women all day, but wouldn't be caught dead at a Tea Party rally, or reading Thomas Sowell. There are limits to his depravity!

So, what's really going on? Well, if ideas have consequences, metaphysics has... big ones. In other words, if your metaphysic is wrong, then everything else will follow. For ultimately, a metaphysic is your "map of the cosmos," and don't try to pretend you don't have one. If you don't have an explicit metaphysic, then it only means you have an implicit, unexamined, and undoubtedly stupid one.

Feminism is an idiotic ideology rooted in an even more idiotic metaphysic. To believe it is to believe what is false, right down to the ground of being. What could go wrong?

Now we're really in danger of a major side trip, because this touches on the central theme of a book I'm currently reading, Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty. I'm holding off on a recommendation, because it is very dense, difficult, and expensive, plus I'm only about a third of the way through. But you can get my drift from the title: the feminist ideal of liberty is indeed diabolical (literally), for it is a freedom from reality, which is (obviously) no freedom at all.

What is it then? In other words, if feminism doesn't entail freedom, then what does it entail? Er, slavery? That's a good start, for it implies that the person is bound more to the ideology than to the reality which the ideology is supposed to symbolize.

But leftism does not symbolize reality, except in a hollow and self-referential way. In this way it has the identical structure as p0rn: a completely empty symbol of what it is representing. If you conflate the two, then you are dragged down to the level of the empty symbol, and the entire cosmos vertically collapses in on itself.

In this light, what is scientism but scientific p0rn? You have to understand what I am saying literally. Science is not reality, obviously. Rather, it is a symbolic system that represents reality, but always in an open, dynamic, and incomplete way. It always points beyond itself to the reality it symbolizes.

But consider, for example, global warming enthusiasts: they aren't even troubled that their models do not conform to the reality they are supposed to represent! As such, they are just like feminists for whom feminism is infinitely more important than what it is supposed to map, i.e., reality.

Back to our main peripheral point, what is going on in the Swamp. Let's put it this way: how do you stop rape, or any other bad human behavior, for that matter? With violence, or at least the threat of it. Can feminism stop this violence? For example, can a feminized president bring peace to the Middle East, or stop Korea from acquiring nukes, just by being extra-womanly? How did that work out? Didn't it just provoke the malefactors?

Here's a little paradoxical secret for feminists: men devalue women, and that is a big reason why they value them. Sounds paradoxical, but it is thoroughly orthopardoxical, and the basis of chivalry.

Let's just consider the plain, unadorned reality: everyone who has not been poisoned by ideology knows women are weaker than men. Thus, they need to be protected by men -- or better, by maleness. For related reasons, men don't want to do what a woman can do. Rather, they want to do what a woman can't do. If a woman can do anything a man can do, then to hell with manhood.

But what does feminism teach? That a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. That there are no essential differences between male and female. This is a deeply untrue doctrine, but the depth of its falsehood is even deeper than you might think. It is ultimately false because reality does not consist of atoms in the void -- not at any level, from the subatomic to the human and beyond, all the way up and into God.

Rather, ultimate reality is relationship, and there is not a thing you can rightly understand unless you first understand this principle. Thus, for example, to say a woman "needs" a man (and vice versa) is not nearly adequate to the case. Rather, woman refers to man, and vice versa. Man and Woman are symbolic realities that point beyond themselves to the Other that completes them on that level.

Another and even more primordial relationship is Man and God. Man refers to God, as God refers to Man, the latter going to the doctrine of incarnation. To understand that man is created in the image and likeness of God is one way to "see" this reality.

I think we can agree with feminists that a lot of catastrophes in the world are caused by men, indeed, probably the vast majority. Who commits all the violent crime? Who starts all the wars? Who's in charge of ESPN? Not women.

Perhaps the central purpose of culture is to shepherd merely biological males into psycho-spiritual manhood. Men commit rape and other abuses, obviously. But such crimes are unthinkable for the mature man. Now, the critical question is, how does one create such a man? Can feminism do it?

Ha! Remember what was said above about men having a kind of in-built devaluation of the feminine sphere. If it's only Mom telling me "No," then that amounts to a green light to go ahead and do it. Feminism is like a parchment barrier: "Peace (between the sexes) in our time!"

But if Dad says No? That's a different story, isn't it? I read somewhere that Brad Pitt confronted Dirty Harvey at a party and warned him in no uncertain terms that if he tried anything again with his girlfriend, then violence would be visited upon his fat, disgusting person.

Imagine an alternate reality, in which a Pajama Boy or Girl warns him that if his behavior continues, then he may well have to attend sensitivity training and learn how his maleness is really a disease that can only be cured by a psychic castration. I wonder if this is what he's learning in "rehab?"

The bottom line is that Manhood is the only solution to the problems unleashed by men; there is no "downward" solution, a la feminism, but only an upward one into the telos of proper psycho-spiritual manhood. But again, that cosmos -- the real one -- does not exist for the left.

I'm confident my son will never abuse women. He will, however, open doors and give up his seat for them, so I guess that makes him a hopeless oppressor. Again, chivalry is a function of seeing the underlying differences between the sexes.

Well, our little sidetrack hijacked the post. We'll just leave off with a few timelessly timely gags courtesy of the Aphorist:

Modern man inverts problems' ranks. When it comes to sex education, for example, everyone pontificates, but who worries about the education of the sentiments?

Ideologies are fictitious nautical charts, but on them, in the end, depends against which reef one is shipwrecked. If interests move us, stupidities guide us.

In society just as in the soul, when hierarchies abdicate, the appetites rule.

A modern man is a man who forgets what man knows about man.