A few months ago I left a couple of comments at Chateau Heartise that I want to present to you here. I think the ideas in them are very important and I was lucky that I mentioned a movie in one of them so it was fairly easy to find again. I have edited them a bit for content and to combine the two comments into one post. My comments respond to the idea that the balance of men and women will someday shift back to our more natural roles:
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Even when the balance does begin to come back around women will still feel like we are missing out on *something*. Inherently we understand that, not only are we weaker, we are not as intelligent or often times, as interesting. We see the men congregate, the bonds that you form, the things you create and we know, deep down, that most of us will never have that. We can be a part of it by supporting our husbands, sons, brothers and fathers who are doing these things. If we are intelligent enough and can learn to keep our mouths shut we may even be allowed into the group to at least listen and even comment. However, we will never be a part of what it is to be MAN.
As a (maybe silly) example, a few months ago I was watching 13 Assassins and a band of 13 samurai strangers band together to kill a man. Within days these men were bonded in a way that women are incapable of. Some of us do see that and crave that. However, we also understand that if these men were to ever allow a woman into this bond, the entire thing would be finished, merely by her presence. Her mere presence would weaken and destroy the very thing she wants to be a part of. The best we can hope for is to be outliers and supporters of this bond.. It is a noble place to be and it is necessary. But, deep down, we know it is never the same and this can be a very difficult thing to come to terms with.
Women who have the courage to realize that our true strength and grit comes from backing up, supporting, and giving ourselves to our men will very often earn true and deep respect from the men around her (especially these days). However, I think it is important for men to be aware of this envy woman will feel at men’s overt strength and power. Men receive the validation that women so crave and that is not easily achieved by our own covert power. I believe that this may be at the root of the beginning of feminism. To compensate and validate, women were put on a pedestal and admired for our beauty and what many believed was some inherent goodness. While I don’t think it wrong for men to admire women’s beauty (even if I did, this will never stop. This is inherent) I do think it wrong for men to use the pedestal as some kind of reward for women who choose their natural roles. That we can be put back there when we realize and fully submit to what our strengths as women are.
From my perspective women do not want to be put on a pedestal even if our men think we deserve it. We will rebel against it. It don’t know why, but it is not a place women like to or want to be. I do, however, offer this. Put the tasks that you admire us doing on that pedestal. The cooking, cleaning, raising the children, and all the little things in between on that pedestal. We will understand that better and be happier with our place if we see that Men find our tasks important and noble. It can be hard for us to see that our daily tasks are important when they so often involve the tedious (let’s face it, cleaning the bathroom is no fun). And the feedback from raising good children often comes much later and is rarely immediate. It can be very difficult to maintain focus without our men standing behind us and truly appreciating what we are doing. But when we see the smile of true appreciation, everything we are doing makes sense and it is all worth while. Put all that on the pedestal. We need it to help us remember that what we do, while not challenging or world altering, is important and without it, the work of Men would suffer.
On the Rock 
An eye opener, thanks.
For some women, feminist feelings start when close men around them devalue them and make female work look like everything they themselves wouldn’t be bothered to do. The best way to make someone resistant to cleaning up is telling them your work is too important to do it yourself. Ever read that Tom Sawyer story about the fence? 😉
But yes, without backup, achieving great things (or simply good things) would be tougher, having a backup person is extremely valuable.
I’m glad you got something from it. Thank you for saying so.
The original comment was here:
http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/comment-of-the-week-the-natural-state-of-woman-is-submission/#comment-279607
Again, you don’t get this woman’s-eye view anywhere else on the net or in the culture, for that matter. You have a unique product here, Stingray.
I wonder how much of the penis envy is part of our feminist culture and how much is intrinsic to female nature. After all, Lady Macbeth was expressing envy centuries ago:
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief!
It must be intrinsic to female nature — because envy is intrinsic to each of us, male and female. The grass is always greener. But it is uniquely exacerbated for women in a feminist age: the female arts are denigrated as undignified and low, so it is more difficult to find satisfaction privately while you are being publicly mocked.
If it’s any consolation, I (and most men) envy female beauty far more than you “crave” brotherhood. I covet beauty, I desire irrationally to collect it. I want to possess it, to envelop it, to be enveloped by it.
It is through my infinite desire to collect female beauty like butterflies on pins that I became acquainted with the power of envy as a sin. I always thought I was pretty good on the ninth and tenth commandments: I’m satisfied with what I have, I don’t begrudge someone else enjoying his own possessions and relationships. There’s plenty for me.
But then I realized how much I underestimated the green-eyed demon’s power, and how insidious it could be. There’s a reason it’s one of the seven deadly sins. We are born coveting what we don’t have, and we primarily covet control of all things. When my will is thwarted or fortune doesn’t go my way, I become irrationally apoplectic.
That’s the same way I am regarding women. I want you all. All for me. And therefore I am at war with every other man out there, and I hate that you aren’t under my command. The only non-impossible solution to this is an adjustment of expectation, to realize the desire per se is the sin, and to retrain yourself to manage the upwelling of desire, like the Buddha. Without constant adjustment, envy will grow like bacteria in a trench boot.
So we want what we don’t have and can’t have. You should know that whatever you “see… and crave” corresponds to equally impossible desires in men. Be thankful that your envies don’t drive you to the often suicidal absurdities-on-stilts that men act out in frustration. A woman’s greater ability for quiet acceptance is something to be envied.
Again, your observation is important and unique. I can’t think of an antecedent. I never would have realized that women crave something so natural among men that it ceases to be considered valuable among men. The implications are fascinating to contemplate. I wonder how we can correct for this gap, to strengthen the male-female bond. I have no clue.
Matt
When I get the privilege of observing men amongst men, it is quite enjoyable, and I do like joining in, but I also take pleasure in just holding back and letting them do their thing. I don’t think I envy their interactions as long as I have my own thing to do or if I’m gossiping with the girls.
This is most likely the root of the after dinner tradition we all refer to so much. Ideally, a life is comprised of many different interactions with men and women to varying degrees. Our current culture requires us to lock ourselves down so much into being a couple, friendships with others and time spent with others are seen as a threat instead of a necessary component of a full life.
The reason I believe so many relationships fail is that they become TOO concentrated. Like a television show that cuts out all its supporting characters. We all need time apart to remember we want to be together. So, dinner together, segregation afterwards for a bit, and then everyone together again. So simple.
I wonder how much of the penis envy is part of our feminist culture and how much is intrinsic to female nature
I do believe it is intrinsic to female nature, but as you more accurately stated, human nature. However, male and females present differently in their envy. For example, look at how envy presents most prominently in women today. Many women covet traditionally male jobs/careers. Not so much because women truly have a passion for these careers but more out of a sense of the validation they will receive. “If a man can accomplish that so can I!! Think of the attention I will get then! You go girl.” Sure, there are women out there who can accomplish these difficult tasks, but it’s not as if they are climbing Everest because it is there. They are climbing Everest (with the aid of quotas and lowered physical standards) for the attention and accolades they will receive.
I can’t think of an antecedent.
Adam and Eve. I think a great deal of this is part of the Fall, though I lack the knowledge to back up that claim.
The implications are fascinating to contemplate. I wonder how we can correct for this gap, to strengthen the male-female bond. I have no clue.
While women can never really be a part of this bond, if there are women you know out there who can partake in some of the activities that men do, let them in. When you go to the shooting range (obviously this is just one example of many) with your friends and a women can handle it as well, occasionally take her with you. Make it understood that she is usually most welcome but at times the men need to go alone. I think this is important because, as you say, “bros before hos”. If she gets *it*, she will encourage this time with your brothers. But more importantly, men need to let the women in their lives know how extremely important their work is to them and let them know why. While women don’t want to be respected first and foremost by men, when we are truly respected it boosts us more than any female herd ever could. I am talking genuine respect here. Not the fake insisted respect that women expect today as that’s not even really respect. It’s fakery and we know it. Genuine respect from a man is . . . like . . . I don’t know. I don’t have the words to describe it. But it can get us through almost anything and provides untold strength and a true bond to the men who give it.
When I get the privilege of observing men amongst men, it is quite enjoyable, and I do like joining in, but I also take pleasure in just holding back and letting them do their thing
Don’t get me wrong. I do as well. But it’s not just the interactions I am talking about here. It is the bond that men can form between them. Two strange men can form a bond as strong as brothers in a very short time. I don’t believe women can do that, not at the same level as men.
I agree with the rest of your post. Time apart let’s us unabashedly enjoy female and male differences and then be able to enjoy our time together even more.
For some women, feminist feelings start when close men around them devalue them and make female work look like everything they themselves wouldn’t be bothered to do.
I realize that. I think most everyone does. However, this is far more hidden and less understood and makes otherwise happy women start to question the roles they have chosen. It will also drive these envious women to follow the far more unhappy and bitter women drawn to feminism from what you have described here.
“Two strange men can form a bond as strong as brothers in a very short time. I don’t believe women can do that, not at the same level as men.”
Hmmm. I guess evolutionarily speaking men were more often in siutations where their very lives depended on their ability to work together. So, maybe women don’t have it to that extent, but watching how children form instant friendships, I think its just something that may get lost as we age. I find I’m still able to do it. You are too. How else would we have become friends, even if just the virtual sort 🙂
I have been giving friendships a lot of thought lately. What constitutes one and how necessary they are. I’ve come to the conclusion that while some people you do want around forever, there are so many people out there, that I don’t find it necessary to collect friendships as anybody I meet can be a friend for the time/circumstance that I know them.
My very sage daughter was asking whether or not we would see friends we made last week at the beach today. I said, its unlikely we’ll see those exact people again. I mentioned there might be other people to play with and she said, “I’ll just make new friends.”
OT: Hope everybody is feeling better!
The solution is the re-legalization of men’s clubs. They never went away, they just dispersed and went underground, into places like Roissy’s.
But isn’t that just it? A men’s club like Roissy’s still has room for women like you — who have the consciousness about the importance of man time.
I think I will make that a goal of mine, to found the first 21st century exclusive club for men to reopen its doors, kind of like having the first beer after prohibition. It may have to be a speakeasy for the first decade or so.
Matt
Sounds like a great idea! I’m sure it would be wildly popular.
It would be huge. I like it.
Oh, I agree that women can form friendships and lasting ones. I think you and I would make fast friends. I just don’t think the bond women form is to the same extent as what men are capable of. Men will throw themselves on grenades to save their brothers and to ensure the goal is met. It’s deeper, and it’s profound.
I’m still skeptical to the idea that men bond so strongly and so fast because of something innate. In a battle situation, it seems reasonable people would bond, if they need to fight together and have the same identity and the same enemy. Women are not usually in those situations. I don’t know if women would bond the same way if they were, but I never observed men bond stronger than women in peaceful times. In fact I observed the opposite – women tend to be closer.
I understand you being skeptical and, unfortunately, I cannot explain it. I have seen it myself and could still not explain it. Maybe some of the men here could. What I can tell you is that women, on the surface may appear to be bonded more closely, but it is a bond that can break over amazingly simplistic things. Whereas the bond between men may not be as readily observable as they can go years without seeing each other and yet, when they are together again, it’s like no time has past. There is also very little that will ever break that bond.
I belong to an Internet “club” for Traditional Catholic men. We have a rule I formulated, “no chicks, no clerics”. We do have a couple of women on as honorary men. But we got rid of one woman who had the temerity to try to prevent a man she didn’t like from joining.
It’s interesting that you quote Shakespeare. Currently on the bus in Chicago traveling back from a rehearsal of As You Like It. The director decided to do a gender swap of the fool character that marries a country bumpkin. I can’t decide if I’m intrigued or disgusted more by hearing very masculine speeches of love and defending her choice of a husband from the other female with no respect. Makes it so there’s not a single male in pursuit of a woman that isn’t an effeminate fool in the play.
Very realisitic to today’s culture. Very disturbing. And then it’s a comedy. Bleh. Hate working on the play more than any I have in awhile
The funniest depiction of couples has got to be The Importance of Being Earnest. You’ve got women who are basing their entire decision to marry someone on whether or not his name is Ernest, men whose most important arguments are about cucumber sandwiches (I mean, sammiches:)) the hysterical Lady Bracknell and her views on marriage, and the love affair of Miss Prism and Dr. Chasuble. Some of my favorite quotations come from that play. Here is one among an assortment of gems:
“The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to someone else, if she is plain.”
I don’t remember As You Like It much, but Shakespeare had a lot of cross-dressing female characters.
Well, I’ll take your word for it for now, but it would be interesting to see it. My experience with female friendships has been mixed… The closest ones I’ve had could turn unpleasant from small things, but we got back together. But I have heard the saying, goes something like “Women treat friendship like glass, men treat it like a football”. It’s true – women always care about each other’s feelings and are careful not to hurt them (a bit TOO careful). I’ve found friendships become more solid when you dare to be rougher with each other and more honest, but I thought roughness came from closeness, not the other way around.
Yeah Kate. But, to me at least, I think a lot of the humor an irony of the cross dressing characters is lost in today’s audiences due to the change of allowing women on stage. I love it for modern plays, but there’s something ridiculously ironic and hilarious about a man, playing a female character, that then pretends to be a man.
I wa lucky enough to see all male casting of Richard the 3rd and one of his comedies i now am blanking on the name…. Same all male cast, both shows, hilarious and astounding.
I really do think it’s a shame you don’t see more all male casts of Shakespeare. It’s simply that the plays are written for men casting to really shine. Seen much more all women than all men – somehow it’s sexist to do it as it was originally written.
Matthew, I certainly don’t envy female beauty, unless you mean want to possess it. But even so, I don’t want all women, I just wanted one. And I got one I like, and I am happy. I don’t understand that common masculine desire to have two women in bed with you, or to have a string of conquests.
I could have had more women, but I never saw the point.
You do seem to struggle with Faustian desire. Perhaps it is your youth. But I do think it is a masculine mode of thought. There is a reason why the Evil Genius trope is a masculine one. It is men that want to rule the world.
Me, I settled for ruling my smaller world. My image of the ideal life is of the man in his small castle, loyal wife beside him, with maybe some children and retainers. A few of these retainers, in my fantasy, might be females, but I would not want to populate my bed with them.
I have been accused of building an Internet harem, or having groupies. But this is only a half-truth, and I have no desire to have real-life groupies.
I always feel that if you choose wisely, one woman can be all women to you.
As for penis envy, I have written elsewhere that it is the only thing Freud got right.
I used not to believe in penis envy, but I find that my wife has some of it. Also, some of the strange ways women behave publicly when they hear of men being castrated (those women on The View) and the strange remarks of people like Nicole Fabian-Weber have made me suspect that penis envy is a real problem, with some women at least:
http://register-her.com/index.php?title=Nicole_Fabian-Weber_–_Bigot
Puts me in mind of Victor/Vicoria! A woman, pretending to be a man, pretending to be a woman. Have you seen the movie, Restoration? Its set in, you guessed it, the Restoration, and focuses on two actors as women replace men playing women’s roles.
“I belong to an Internet “club” for Traditional Catholic men.”
Knights of Columbus?
“I certainly don’t envy female beauty, unless you mean want to possess it.”
I certainly do mean “want to possess it.” Not to manifest it but to keep it as your exclusive property.
“You do seem to struggle with Faustian desire.”
I do. It’s called concupiscence according to Augustine, and it is an inescapable condition of this fallen world. I defined that “struggle” against envy as struggle against sin, and a mortal sin to boot. There are plenty of “desire[s]” that I check to prevent sinfulness.
My sexual approach to women of this age is purely tactical — it does not derive from desire. Just as there is no murder per se in war, but plenty of killing, there is no transgression in our age of sexual anomie when united to the higher purpose of the cause, which is restoring order. It requires a kind of subtlety impossible to impose on today’s men — e.g., Roissy — who have been loosed like savages to plunder the landscape.
So I look to the younger generations, as we always must. I think they can be inspired to martial discipline over their world-destroying libido, but only if we make the link between sexual license and social dysfunction so plain as to be no longer questioned, as feminism now is. The only way to do that directly that I see is to “increase the contradictions” or “immanentize the eschaton.” In other words, translate the patent dominion of man in the bedroom back to the dominion of man in societies.
I’m not looking to carve out a little separate peace as you have. My instructions are: Thy Kingdom come.
Matt
immanentize the eschaton
Big fan of Buckley, ay? 😉
In other words, translate the patent dominion of man in the bedroom back to the dominion of man in societies.
I agree, and I think (hope?) that Roissy et al. are the beginnings of this. A lot of the young men there are starting out with pick up, but many seem to be waking up to the bigger picture of masculinity for it’s own sake and not simply playing it for the sake of women. Of course, not all of them will. That is to be expected, but I see more and more of them waking up to the idea of manhood for their own selves and for no one else.
I don’t think so…. If I have, it didn’t leave an impression on me for being good or bad.
HAHAHAHA!!!!!!!! Might be because I had the title wrong: Stage Beauty is what its called. Oops 🙂
Nope. Never seen it
Haha. Definitely haven’t seen it.
Leap,
Weird. Sometimes you go into the spam bucket and sometimes you don’t. I would like to remedy this. How did you stop it at the other sites it happened at? I remember you said you emailed them, but then what?
Dunno. It still happens all over the place. I bounce around a lot from using internet at different cafe’s, posting via phone, etc.
I think wordpress just disapproves of my lifestyle habits. 😉
Stingray, I think that Roissy and all are definitely the beginning of it. With more people learning game, its more people seeing the true driving thoughts/emotions behind the psychological choices women make. They’re not bad…. they just… are.
But if men stop subscribing to them and instead learn game, we’ll hear more whining and screaming from women that dated said game aware men but weren’t worth committing to. There’s only so much whining anyone can stand listening to before even simply game aware men start having to stand up and point to the values of masculinity to defend their lifestyle choices as ones that are completely natural.
And women will have to deal with that however they see fit – though I certainly hope a realignment towards valuing families happens. I certainly wouldn’t be sad to have those Sundays I was describing every weekend.
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This has always been one of your better posts darling
Thank you, Sir.
Well said
Thank you very much.