“ My teenage self could only find truth smuggled away in the dark recesses of obscure online communities; usually couched in layers of ironic (and sincere) bigotry. And while I did not enjoy the bigotry (at the time), I found value in engaging with the transgressive material I came across because I felt that it expressed truths otherwise unavailable to me.”
Chateau Heartiste, by any chance?
Excellent essay. I have daughters who are young adults. I tried to be helpful, and I hope that it was of some use, but they are definitely influenced by the culture around them.
The model of a family consisting of a man and a woman committed to each other, having children together, and being responsible for those children and each other, provides a framework for all of these urges and needs and biological pressures. It evolved over thousands of years. Throwing it out in two generations and hoping something better would spontaneously emerge was unwise, to say the least.
I sometimes speculate that we will have a century running from about 1960, the appearance of the oral contraceptive pill, to some unknowable but major cultural change in 2060, and put all this madness behind us. Future historians will describe this century as a very puzzling and destructive time.
I will be long gone by then! But the world goes on.
Glad you enjoyed the essay! At the end of the day, the social landscape right now is completely alien to everyone, no one knows how to navigate it successfully, the most you can do as a parent is offer the insight you can.
Yes, the red pill Internet had all kinds of pathological elements. It started out a lot better than it ended up. At first it was people trying to make sense of the craziness going on around them, but it attracted people with a really malignant mindset overtime. Seems to be a typical phenomenon, another example of Gresham’s Law.
Thank you, Zinnia. Was the transgressive site you mention Château Heartiste? That was a blog which was extremely influential, but it was so completely antithetical to what was acceptable that no one would admit that they were reading it. But you would see quotes from it or references to show up all over the Internet..
Heartiste started out as brilliantly insightful and hilarious, and also seemed to contain practical and actionable relationship advice, and it’s cynicism was tempered with a certain amount of benign worldly wisdom. But it decayed overtime into a sick and bitter and weirdly anti-Semitic focus which bore little resemblance to its initial purpose. Very strange and regrettable. My guess is that the original anonymous blogger or bloggers dropped off and new people came in who didn’t have the same character or intelligence.
This is true about other revolutions too. I talk to young socialists who want a revolution! Because society sucks! I say ‘I bought a building site and built a 134 suite rental building. Start to finish it took me 11 years before I took a dime out of it. One simple little rental building which everyone agreed was needed took 2.5 years to get approvals! You think you can tear down society in October and by March everything will be looking goood. You tear down society and you will have 75 years, three generations, before it might start looking okay. Might.’ Too many of these movements are fueled by the desire to tear something down far more than the desire to build something beautiful.
I very much appreciated this piece. I am eager to hear more from you. At 50 my focus is mostly on what young men need now. But I can not truly understand them without knowing what women and girls are going through in this pathological Era. So thank you. And, subscribed.
really glad I was able to offer you a different perspective, at the end of the day, men and women need each other, so it's nice for us to understand what the other is going through
Also, I grew a lot of zinnias last year, just casting around the contents of seed packets. A prolific plant. Good choice for your name. Here's to similar abundance for your substack.
A fascinating piece Zinnia. I would like to add to it this, my own 'different perspective': "Something that gets very little attention in journalism about romantic and sexual pair bonding is the huge difference between the fortunes of what one might term the More and the Less Desired of each sex. Most sex-relations journalism is always framed in terms of a generic species called ‘Women’ and a generic species called ‘Men’; as if the perceived asymmetries under discussion are entirely ones BETWEEN the sexes...... The huge intra-sexual differences between the experiences of pretty women and ‘plain’ ones; and between confident ‘alpha’ males and ‘betas’ – this never gets considered."https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired
I was yapping about the inconsistencies of modern progressive, feminist ideology.... inconsistencies which have been a huge factor in the mental health/ identity/ relationship crisis suffered by western women over the last 50 years.
And that's a postmodern, Neoliberal Death Cult lie (one of many these days) that has created multiple social, economic and political disasters. As the resources that supported that lie tap out, and the unintended consequences peak, recognition of human interdependence will make a comeback. Hopefully, for the species' sake. But until then, enjoy your Daily Dystopia.
Your dystopia is my utopia. Hopefully soon we will transcend the homo sapiens and become transhuman and engineer new resources as we move towards infinite progress and space colonization.
Very few of either can survive well without the other. I think you should expound on your statement so those reading it can better understand your meaning.
The Western world has rising rates of anxiety and depression never seen before in human history, or in other societies. We also have declining rates of marriage and childbirth, and formation of relationships and socialising generally.
It's possible these two things are unrelated, but it's also possible that one is causing the other, or that they both have the same root cause.
What characterises humans as distinct from other species is a lengthy infancy. Thus, over thousands of generations we have selected for traits where people tend to form families and tribes - if we didn't, those infants wouldn't have survived. Those traits include things like romantic love, fidelity, loyalty and so on.
This may be a contributor. However, as Erik Hoel notes, rates of adolesccent anxiety and depression increased at the time of introduction of smartphones.
We can see too that the most materially prosperous countries in the world quite often report the worst mentall wellbeing. One of the correlates was age of first smartphone use.
No doubt there are many contributors. There's a human tendency to try to reduce everything to just one problem, since if that were correct, all we'd have to do is sort that thing out and we'd be good. This is why people concerned about climate change tend to deny that fossil fuels are finite, and peak oilers are usually climate change denialists, and radical feminists think it's all about patriarchy, and critical race theorists think it's all about white supremacy - and you think it's all Big Pharma.
Unfortunately, our world has a multitude of problems. Prudently we should focus on measures which contribute to solving two or more problems at once.
Very good article. As a man, I obviously haven't experienced the bulk of this personally, but it rings true with what I've seen. I've been saying for a while, for example, that most FTM's seem to have a desperate desire to be desexualized, while most MTF's seem to have a desperate desire to be sexualized (and more deeply, to be valued and desired). Obviously both are signs that something in how society treats both men and women since "sexual liberation" has gone horribly wrong.
One thing that could bear mentioning is that while Belle Delphine and those like her get flaunted in the media, most who go that path DON'T get rich. The most common OF payment per month is $0. The second most common is a few hundred. Survivorship bias creates delusions.
Another thing that this article doesn't address is aging. This may be because you're fairly young yourself, in which case congrats for figuring so much out so quickly, but the heavy attention women get from men takes place within a limited window. That window can be a different size depending on the woman and how well she takes care of herself, but very few manage to keep it open through their 40's. That's when women get to experience something more similar to men's existence, where they're judged by what they do or have done rather than what they are. So most of the women who have been riding this OF/e-girl/whatever-you-want-to-call-it wave haven't really experienced the brunt of the consequences of their life choices yet. When they do, that's when things are REALLY going to get interesting, as there's definitely going to be a major social shift, one way or another.
We've all seen it before, the attention-seeking young 24-year old hottie.
Even if you find her cute now, her act will be getting mighty old by the time she's 34. And it will have really worn thin when she's 44, especially as the old tricks no longer get her the same results that they once did.
That is only because lots of women would create an OF account out of curiosity, but never actually put anything on it (just like how people would create an email account for one-time use and then immediately forget about it).
If we only look at active OF accounts, i.e. accounts that are consciously being run like a business, it is very profitable in terms of the time and effort required.
Because when men invented the machines which liberated themselves from the plough, the spade and the horse and cart, women made sure men redirected their efforts towards making life safer and more comfortable for women (he for she).
But when men invented some more machines which liberated women from spinning, knitting, washing clothes and beating carpets, those men did NOT demand women redirect THEIR efforts towards making life fairer and more pleasant for men (she for he).... or for children (she for them).
Instead men said "You're free to do whatever you want now - we've got everything covered".
As a consequence, in the post industrial age - and freshly liberated from crucial tasks around the home -women lost their sense of purpose, social responsibility and identity as women, and embarked on the hedonistic pursuits of 'liberation' and 'personal empowerment' (vanity, self service and narcissism) - abandoning the needs of their own children, and even usurping the roles of their husbands and sons along the way.... until society collapsed under the weight of all this 'female empowerment', which all began to feel increasingly hollow and sickening.... which is roughly where we are today :)
If men had made more demands on women - rather than letting women become bored housewives and then resentful, self-centred feminists - we would not have had the mental health / identity/ relationship crisis that we've witnessed over the last 50+ years.
As awful as we treat men, those constant demands gives them a sense duty, social responsibility and an external purpose (he for she) which stops men disappearing up their own backsides.
But men's innate tendency to put women on a pedestal even if they contribute absolutely nothing to society is why so many modern women are deranged ..... as they take photos of their bum holes, sell their bathwater, abandon their children all day in order to do (what amounts to) housework in some pointless office job - before coming home to put pretend food in the microwave and serve it up as 'food' to their own family.
By demanding nothing of women - other than to just 'be' women - modern men have stripped women of their identity. Female biological hard wiring on its own (vanity, neuroticism, anxiety, narcissism) is not a good basis for an identity. To prevent derangement, you need to be serving a cause which is greater than, and external to, yourself (and your perfectly bleached and polished bum hole). LOL
Men can't make demands of women because men have higher sex drive and will always desire women more than the reverse. Nothing will change unless biology changes.
I've always said, if we had to go back to the 1800's (i.e., horse, plow, open stone hearth and washboard) there'd be much less time for women and men to try and decide who or what they are. The daily requirements of survival would answer those questions. Fulfilment and satisfaction would be as simple as not freezing because you built the walls and roof that shelter you, or having a reasonable full stomach because you grew, preserved and prepared the food you just fed yourself and your family.
There is just no way those polished bum holes could even come close, to those basic and critical levels of self worth and satisfaction.
I was talking 'cause and effect'. Framing the issue in terms of 'fault' and 'blame' attributed to one sex or the other is part of the mindset of feminism.
Modern women are very much a product of men's achievements over the last few centuries. Without men's labour, to create modern post industrial society, there could be no such thing as 'the modern woman'.... no such thing as feminism... no such thing as 'patriarchy theory'.
To have modern women complain about 'the male gaze' (or whatever) rather than 'having to survive the winter without starving to death' is one of the finest achievements of men.
The problem faced by modern women is that men have erased women's identity/ value, by inventing a bunch of mod cons that have liberated women from the home. Feminism is mostly a movement complaining about being bored and having no sense of female self worth as a result of being liberated by technology.
Often lottery winners also go off the rails and become miserable after winning the lottery and quitting their day job. Feminist women are experiencing something similar.
The whole thing is far too complex to be about blaming men, or blaming women.
Not exactly your point, which is a very interesting one, but I have long said ‘Men create Women, and Women create Men’. Men ‘pay’ for beauty, so women who can, beauty themselves, and use it to get what they want. Women ‘pay’ (ie give sex) for power, success, and wealth. So men work their tails off to be successful to sleep with the most beautiful women.
I'm just divorced for a second time at seventy, and I had become firmly ensconced in the Red Pill philosophy. There really are two sides to everything, aren't there? Thank you for pulling me back from the abyss.
glad you enjoyed it and I was able to give you another perspective! Sorry to hear about your divorce, that's tough, the abyss is tough and that really sucks; not much else I can say other than offer you my sincere best wishes.
My first wife called me three Christmases ago - just out of the blue - and made small talk for a long time, leaving me wondering just exactly what was going through her mind. Clearly she wasn't saying it.
Finally, as we prepared to hang up, she took a deep breath and said, "Look, I just wanted to apologize for not being a better wife to you."
People say they are speechless; I was literally, actually, completely, gobsmacked .... speechless.
We had been divorced twenty years. Twenty. I had always blamed her for the marriage's failure (I had filed for the divorce - part of the 20% filed by men), but it seemed like I should say something nice, so I stammered out something that I apologized too, for the same reason.
But I didn't mean it; I was just being nice. Now I think I need to call her back.
**********
I obviously don't know your status, but somehow you have to get this point of view over to whomever you marry - and I have to tell you: good luck; the pickin's are pretty thin. All best to you. You made my day, my week, and a lot more.
I don't think so. She was always very analytical, living inside her own head - and still is, which explains the phone call - but unfortunately as a teenager in the early 'seventies had absorbed the just-developing tenets of Toxic Feminism and took the attitude that any demands for her to do HER part of the marital job was "oppression." I was so green that I was hesitant to ASK her to take up any slack, and to keep the peace would simply take everything on myself. Eventually, when we had kids, that didn't work, so we drifted more and more apart. I drifted into a world without her; she without me. I had a high-paying job and hired out most of child-rearing to others.
re: "If I only knew then what I know now." If we were both 24 again, with the knowledge of decades of experience behind us, we could make it work, but not now. She knows that; I know that. Not everything turns out well. That's just how it goes.
Don't be an idiot bro. Call her, she wants to hook back up with you. Just let her talk and tell her you hope she's doing well, then listen to her and let her make a move if she wants it.
You don't need to put yourself out there, just stay in contact with her. If she wants you then she will bring it up.
It doesn't matter if she wants me. I don't want her. We talk when an issue with our two adult sons comes up, and without exception after hanging up the phone I say to myself, "God, every time we interact it all comes flooding back." No, I'm good.
I divorced my first wife for cruelty. Twelve years after being divorced she pulled me aside when I was picking the kids up to being them home (I had custody) she said she wanted to talk to me privately. I thought ‘yup, she wants money’. She said she wanted to apologize. She said ‘all these years I thought you were the bad guy. I finally saw it correctly. You were the good guy! I was the bad one. I destroyed the marriage.’ It was very moving for me. If you had asked me how I would respond to that I would have said ‘Meh. I couldn’t care less what she thinks.’ But it was important to hear it for me.
I admit I started skimming half-way through your essay because you do not discuss the most significant factor contributing to the modern pathological relation between the sexes: secularization of human experience!
Instead of Masculine and Feminine, we now refer to men and women as "Male and Female", and instead of focusing on Character (and by extension, moral VIRTUE), we use scientific models to explain behavior as the result of 'brain chemicals' and hormones. Personally, the reductive "hormonalization" of female/woman nature has contaminated all discussion of ethics. Thanks to several dangerously-convincing explanations, women can basically blame hormones for everything. If she is a bitch, must be PMS. If she's fat, must be her thyroid or 'genetics' or some 'hormonal fluctuation'. Angry? Sad? Happy? Crazy?--she MUST be BPD or suffer from PTSD because "you know, her boyfriend cheated on her, she must be sooooo traumatized now."
Women are encouraged to evade all accountability through "official science". See how dangerous it is when pathological behavior has been legitimized by a materialistic paradigm?
In ancient metaphysics, there was an archetypal and mythic model for moral behavior. It wasn't enough for men to be piles of muscle, they also had to be virtuous and noble in their speech, gestures, and demeanor. Women likewise had some divine model upon which to build an entire "personality" that was both noble and well-rounded.
At least Jungian psychology, with its Archetypes and Animus/Anima dynamic, contained traced of an original Tradition.
This stands as my best attempt to explain why almost all women born between the years 1992 - 2000 are neurotic, crazy, and worse: blame everything and everyone but themselves for their inexcusable behavior!!!
I hope you keep writing. You're off to a promising start. I would like to see you explore the "esoterica" side of your newsletter name. What esoteric ideas are you particularly inspired by?
I discovered my spiritual side quite recently and haven't spent any time thinking and reading about those things; I picked e-girl esoterica, partially because I liked the alliteration, but I also have wide ranging interests like mathematics, art, beauty, history, philosophy, and I like to dabble in these things. So I don't have any specific ideas that I can point to; but the main thing that drives is me is a search for truth and beauty.
Beauty will lead you towards an intuitive understanding of truth. That is one way the ancients understood, philosophy is another. Looking forward to your next essay
If you're after more esoterica and myth, you may find some of the writings of John Michael Greer interesting. He's most well-known for his "collapse now and avoid the rush" kind of writing, but he does a lot of occult writing, talks about the importance of myth (even among people who say they don't believe in myths, like the followers of Progress!).
I'm not into the occult and myth side as much as he is, but it may interest you. Sit with a coffee and a box of tissues, this is his most recent post - on the death of his wife.
We have essentially two female archetypes. Madonna, and the Whore. (Although in Madonna these two blended!). So, Marilyn Monroe, sleepy eyed sexpot, and Mother Mary. Other cultures had Medea, Kali, Durga, the ‘Shrew’ or Scold. And so on. It was accepted a scorned woman (Medea) was a dangerous person who would kill her own sons to hurt her ex lover. It was accepteds t the ‘Shrew’ needed to be tamed. Kali and Durga are the most dangerous Gods in the Hindu pantheon. We don’t accept women as easily being these dark feminine types. It can’t be just dark energy, it has to be something done to Marilyn/Mary for her to be that way. A lot of women really take advantage of men, using their bodies and emotion to take financially from their ‘lovers’. We barely acknowledge this. And if we do everyone pretends either he deserved it, or ‘I am not like that. I would never choose a man for money.’ Right. She might sleep with someone not for money, but marry? No. It is ubiquitous in our society. Ask young women what they want in a man and his salary will be the first or second item mentioned. I was sitting in a coffee shop with my wife and a few of her friends. Another female friend came up and chatted for a minute and then walked away. One of the women said conspiratorially ‘she scored’. The other women oohed and aahed. It turned out she had just married a top realtor in a very wealthy suburb of Vancouver. He probably made a Million or so a year. I was disgusted.
Good point. Masculine and feminine are active qualities that at least imply certain attributes. Male and female Conveys nothing. Or very little at any rate.
I have a file titled "Gems". I just put this article there. This piece is just another illustration that in these crazy times everyone is "educated" to ignore the obvious, the simple; truths that every society has known until 5 minutes ago.
Yes. That, as the author pointed out, pretty breasts are pretty whether they belong to a grown woman or a young girl. Therefore, it is not sexualizing a young girl to insist that she not put them on display. On the contrary, it is protecting her sexuality, as her parents, to insist she not dress in ways that provoke scenarios she is unequipped to handle.
It's nice to get a missive from the other half of the growing-up-zoomer hellscape; the outlook is so grim on the boys' side as to become all-consuming nightmare, which in turn makes it difficult for us to keep in mind the equally hellish plight that the fairer sex is facing. Hearing from the other side helps us keep in mind that we're not the only ones stuck in the pit
we're all in this together tbh; the large gulf between zoomer boys and zoomer girls is important to close if things are to be improved, we need each other
I think this is what I most appreciated about this piece—you did not pit men against women or women against men. We need each other, so very much. We must learn to love each other again. I look forward to hearing more from you.
Good article, gave me quite a bit to think about especially regarding where we went wrong. As a writer of fiction, I think some of the blame lies with fiction being warped and used to put stupid ideas into women's heads.
For example; Eowyn is a fine female archetypal character, yet somehow her choice to become a mother and wife is frowned upon in modern society, when that's the highest calling.
Yet what is more is that she is celebrated while characters such as Luthien remain mostly unknown, when Luthien is arguably the most important character of the Legendarium, and is the most feminine of them all yet somehow more beautiful and archetypal than any other.
You have Zenobia in Howard's fiction who manages to with a few words and a single confession of love tame Conan, and calm his fury so that he devotes the rest of his life to her. This is somehow scorned by many, when the choice Conan made is natural for him to do as a man, and is a testament to the purity and goodness of Zenobia. This purity and kindness on her part, should be encouraged in girls rather than telling them they can be Conan when they clearly cannot become him.
Sure, female warrior characters can exist, but the archetype should not be used willy nilly, but with practiced aim, and there must be other female leads. Or so I tend to think, maybe I'm just stuck in my ways and in my own particular style of writing them as a fantasy-writer.
I have always been drawn to female characters who are realistically strong, not bad ass warriors, but sly, cunning, clever women or women who are brave and loyal till the end; that kind of character speaks more to me than Ms. Marvel ever did
Zinnia, I don't know how you feel about Victorian novels, but the Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels contain exactly the sort of female character you like in the personages of Lady Glencora Palliser and Madam Max Goesler. The former in particular I seriously consider to be among the best developed characters in all literature. Anyway, I just couldn't help myself recommending those to you. They're so terrific but sadly almost unknown in the United States (where I am; I don't know where you live) except among really weird literary types.
Oh I see, funny thing is I've one bad ass warrior but she's also shy, and icy, but trying to improve in one story. She's not strong as Ms Marvel but rather a spear-woman who will be struggling alongside her love interest and his two friends. She's more like Eowyn than anything though slightly less perceptive but she gets there.
And I've two shy and clever, if brave and loyal girls in another story, one of them is primarily loyal to her surrogate older brother, and to her younger brother.
Kudos for the Howard reference. Although, to be fair, in that story Conan found himself in a desperate situation because he was unmarried, without an heir, and therefore not part of a dynasty that his followers could rally around. So there may have been a bit of calculation going on. On his part, I mean.
Zenobia, as you say, demonstrated both purity and goodness. But she was not a modern "girl-boss" (how I despise that term). She wasn't a warrior, and did not go around beating up a dozen men, each twice her size, as modern feminists would have it. She did supply Conan a poignard, though, when he was weaponless, which ended up saving his life.
Both excellent points, I really like Howard's work and have written on it in my substack, but I do think that Howard was looking at things from a certain chivalric literary perspective due to how he was trying to sell the book to an English & European audience at the time. Zenobia seems to have been inspired by the love of his life, and so I think it was a decision of sentimentality and calculation on Conan's part.
I enjoyed your essay’s directness and openness. I have also wondered whether the rush to identify as trans happens frequently in divorced households where a girl suddenly finds a strange man (ie stepfather or boyfriend) living in the same household. In the trans (fTm) whom I know, there is a common pattern of rapid onset gender dysphoria once a stepfather entered the picture. Do you find the same phenomenon? I think it’s also the case that pretty girls are not told they’re pretty because their peers are jealous and the adults think it’s politically incorrect to mention it. Hence, I see a number of very beautiful zoomer girls intentionally making themselves less beautiful through septum piercing or weird haircut. They either are acting out or “reading the room” to notice the hatred for anything beautiful in our society.
I cannot comment on the step-daughter phenomenon but it seems plausible to me, desexing yourself is almost always a protective mechanism. Pretty girls are usually not told they are pretty, and I do agree with your analysis there. Glad you liked the article!
To be loved and found beautiful. Seems like a straightforward request. It’s so funny how such an innocent desire sounds so foreign to our media-conditioned ears. It reminds me of hearing a zoomer girl say once how she’d like to be a stay at home wife and avoid college somehow. It was refreshing to hear this goal. Why do we have to follow these scolds/haters who want women to waste their youth and beauty on a corporate rat race to nowhere?
Ideally society should have room for the great natural variation within both sexes. Women should be able to be anything from trad cath to Amazon warriors; men should have similar latitude.
An ideal society from a genetic point of view would be more like that of wolves, with the best and the brightest reproducing abundantly, continuing and improving the species; and the plain, the dysgenic, the unsuccessful, being given honorable and worthwhile roles other than reproduction which contribute to the overall welfare of the species, the People.
"Women should be able to be anything from trad cath to Amazon warriors; men should have similar latitude."
This sounds amazing but completely unrealistic. Women can 'be anything' because society does not actually depend on women to keep the infrastructure, supply chain, power stations running. And men heavily subsidise women's lifestyles (whether married or single). The net flow of resources goes from men to women (men EARN more than women, and women SPEND more than men).
If you want men to have the same freedom as women to 'be anything they want to be' then you will have to invent a third sex to pay the majority of taxes and to take men's place working on oil rigs, trucks, power stations, repairing power lines, laying cables on the ocean floor, mining coal, fighting fires, milling steel etc... because 99.9% of women do not want to do those jobs or give up their status as a heavily subsidised class.
Women should be subsidized: as the original author has capably described, women bear immense burdens, aside from the huge risks and burdens of childbirth and raising. A well-ordered society should be centered on women and children, without which the species ends.
Just as there are trad cath type women, for whom the time-honored roles of mother and home-maker are ideal and natural, there are many men for whom the time-honored roles of father and provider are ideal and natural.
There are also many men and women for whom these roles are oppressive, confining, stultifying etc. A well-ordered society will make use of their abilities and accept their inclinations, while perhaps discouraging them from reproducing, except when their abilities are remarkable and thus genetically valuable.
Fine. Then we must acknowledge that patriarchy is good and not evil. Patriarchy (aka traditional gender roles) is when men's role is to provide resources and protection to women (women and children first).
We either subsidise women or we have 'equality'. The reason why society is short circuiting is that feminism demands BOTH subsidy (he for she) AND equality (women don't need no man).
We have to decide one or the other and make peace with it otherwise we cannot ever end this stupid battle of the sexes.
"aside from the huge risks and burdens of childbirth and raising."
Child birth is a fraction of the risk it used to be. And far more men die in construction jobs (or similar) than women die in child birth. And you forget that most women do not raise children. They hand them over to ideologically deranged strangers all day long from the age of 4 (daycare/ school).
If we are going to value motherhood as a role and an identity, then we have to re-introduce motherhood! Abandoning your children every day is not motherhood. It is not parenting. It is the opposite of that.
If a man abandons his job every day at the local power station or airport control tower we do not say he is doing his job properly. We say he's a failure. And a danger to society!
"There are also many men and women for whom these roles are oppressive, confining, stultifying etc."
Then don't have children. Simples. If you can't face walking a dog at least 3 times a day then don't get a dog. Why should having children be any different?
"A well-ordered society..... "
No idea what this means. Sounds like a euphemism for some terrible Orwellian nightmare.
I recall some academic feminist yapping on about how White Male Medicine (whatever that means) doesn't understand a woman's body.
My response was: "Bull."
100 or so years ago, women in western countries had lower life expectancies than men. Today they have considerably higher life expectancies, not because of goddess spirituality or feminist praxis or whatever happy horseshit they teach in Women's Studies, but because medical science has largely eliminated child-birth related mortality.
Huge risks of childbirth? As opposed to the low risks of being a faller for example? I know of no women hurt in childbirth. I knew five fallers who died.
As a man, I have no particular insight into the struggle of girls. In my youth I was rather more in awe of their sexual power than anything else. It is eye-opening to read your essay and to see the problems girls experience as they mature.
For all their faults, earlier generations provided a template to shape one's masculine or feminine roles. Today, for girls, the choices seem to be Only Fans or retreat into shapeless, de-sexualized androgyny. Or worse, down the rabbit hole of "gender identities", which in the worst case lead to mutilation, lifelong medical problems, and sterility (in all senses of the word).
Today's society has made it tough for both men and women. Consider that the biological urge to mate with the opposite sex is among our strongest instincts. What does it say that today, more and more young people are not just single, but reluctant to even try to establish a relationship?
The only likely result seems to be that we will be replaced, by an ethnicity which is not so "modern".
As a former high school teacher and grandmother with granddaughters that I worry about, this was an insightful and sad article. So much as changed with the advent of the smartphone and social media. I saw the a significant transformation in girls starting around 2010. I truly feel for young girls as they navigate this current culture. Now 42 years into a marriage that is truly a partnership of equals, I wish this for my granddaughters and other young girls longing for safe relationships where they are seen as beautiful and the freedom to be themselves. It is possible, just so much harder to discover in our society today.
I have often stated that men and women need to be more generous and forgiving of each other because we are what Nature, evolution, made us. Women have the eggs, biologically our most precious and essential possessions, and are themselves the gateway, the means of reproduction. Just as sperm race chemotactically to the egg, with just one winner among millions, men are drawn chemotactically to women (think of how often smell in mentioned in connection with love and lust). Men are designed to seek indications of youth, health, genetic and reproductive fitness: we call this 'beauty'. And women are designed to seek strength, wealth, protection. They check out different bulges than men do, but we all check bulges.
Little or none of these things are 'social constructs' as scientifically illiterate NPCs drone about: they are obviously the result of our evolution. What questions Nature was asking, what problems she was solving by doing so are of interest, and perhaps evolutionary biology and sociobiology might have some answers or at least ideas.
As a single father raising two sons and a daughter, I could intuit the effect the internet age was having the boys and attempt to steer them clear but remained clueless about what is was doing to my little girl or how to help her. It was easy to jump on a political bandwagon and point fingers at the preceived villains. But politics never healed a broken heart nor saved a mortal soul. Your essay gave me great insight into a troubled paradigm of youth that I preceived but could not define. I wish you the best on your Substack launch.
You touched on some things my wife revealed to me only after she reached menopause and the chance of pregnancy was gone. If I were more anonymous I would share them. We have eleven children together and never practiced any form of birth control. Don't get the wrong idea, my wife loves being a mother and now, a grandmother. But pregnancy is a hard ordeal on women, and the natural outcome of being desirable to men. Birth control allows young women to act like post menopausal women without any of the wisdom, experience, and structure that comes with age. Maybe something you could explore in future pieces. I look forward to reading your sure-to-be-insightful future pieces.
“ My teenage self could only find truth smuggled away in the dark recesses of obscure online communities; usually couched in layers of ironic (and sincere) bigotry. And while I did not enjoy the bigotry (at the time), I found value in engaging with the transgressive material I came across because I felt that it expressed truths otherwise unavailable to me.”
Chateau Heartiste, by any chance?
Excellent essay. I have daughters who are young adults. I tried to be helpful, and I hope that it was of some use, but they are definitely influenced by the culture around them.
The model of a family consisting of a man and a woman committed to each other, having children together, and being responsible for those children and each other, provides a framework for all of these urges and needs and biological pressures. It evolved over thousands of years. Throwing it out in two generations and hoping something better would spontaneously emerge was unwise, to say the least.
I sometimes speculate that we will have a century running from about 1960, the appearance of the oral contraceptive pill, to some unknowable but major cultural change in 2060, and put all this madness behind us. Future historians will describe this century as a very puzzling and destructive time.
I will be long gone by then! But the world goes on.
Glad you enjoyed the essay! At the end of the day, the social landscape right now is completely alien to everyone, no one knows how to navigate it successfully, the most you can do as a parent is offer the insight you can.
i spent time scouring redpill forums as a teenager, didn't buy into all of it, but that framework was helpful
Yes, the red pill Internet had all kinds of pathological elements. It started out a lot better than it ended up. At first it was people trying to make sense of the craziness going on around them, but it attracted people with a really malignant mindset overtime. Seems to be a typical phenomenon, another example of Gresham’s Law.
I thought what you said sounded familiar. Great article by the way 👍 👌.
Thank you, Zinnia. Was the transgressive site you mention Château Heartiste? That was a blog which was extremely influential, but it was so completely antithetical to what was acceptable that no one would admit that they were reading it. But you would see quotes from it or references to show up all over the Internet..
I wasn't familiar with Heartiste at the time, mostly was just on reddit, but all of that was derivative from the older bloggers
Heartiste started out as brilliantly insightful and hilarious, and also seemed to contain practical and actionable relationship advice, and it’s cynicism was tempered with a certain amount of benign worldly wisdom. But it decayed overtime into a sick and bitter and weirdly anti-Semitic focus which bore little resemblance to its initial purpose. Very strange and regrettable. My guess is that the original anonymous blogger or bloggers dropped off and new people came in who didn’t have the same character or intelligence.
I hope this gets posted there. Modern reddit is an absolute crash for enforcing modern insanity.
This is true about other revolutions too. I talk to young socialists who want a revolution! Because society sucks! I say ‘I bought a building site and built a 134 suite rental building. Start to finish it took me 11 years before I took a dime out of it. One simple little rental building which everyone agreed was needed took 2.5 years to get approvals! You think you can tear down society in October and by March everything will be looking goood. You tear down society and you will have 75 years, three generations, before it might start looking okay. Might.’ Too many of these movements are fueled by the desire to tear something down far more than the desire to build something beautiful.
That "major cultural change" is 8-10 years away, not 40.
Then I may live to see it!
I very much appreciated this piece. I am eager to hear more from you. At 50 my focus is mostly on what young men need now. But I can not truly understand them without knowing what women and girls are going through in this pathological Era. So thank you. And, subscribed.
really glad I was able to offer you a different perspective, at the end of the day, men and women need each other, so it's nice for us to understand what the other is going through
Indeed.
Also, I grew a lot of zinnias last year, just casting around the contents of seed packets. A prolific plant. Good choice for your name. Here's to similar abundance for your substack.
A fascinating piece Zinnia. I would like to add to it this, my own 'different perspective': "Something that gets very little attention in journalism about romantic and sexual pair bonding is the huge difference between the fortunes of what one might term the More and the Less Desired of each sex. Most sex-relations journalism is always framed in terms of a generic species called ‘Women’ and a generic species called ‘Men’; as if the perceived asymmetries under discussion are entirely ones BETWEEN the sexes...... The huge intra-sexual differences between the experiences of pretty women and ‘plain’ ones; and between confident ‘alpha’ males and ‘betas’ – this never gets considered."https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired
"at the end of the day, men and women need each other"
They do not. I guess you will maybe find this out in a hard way.
THIS: Men are a burden on women, which is why women are better off without men.
BUT ALSO THIS: Men who abandon their wives are bastards.
THIS: Marriage is the enslavement of women by men.
BUT ALSO THIS: Single mothers are at a disadvantage and deserve our pity and help because they lack the support and resources of a husband.
All of the above statements come from modern, progressive, feminist ideology.... and they can't all be true simultaneously.
tf are you yapping about
I was yapping about the inconsistencies of modern progressive, feminist ideology.... inconsistencies which have been a huge factor in the mental health/ identity/ relationship crisis suffered by western women over the last 50 years.
Spoken like someone who hasn’t met or spent time with many unmarried middle aged men. They don’t do well alone, I’m afraid.
Feminism is nonsense imo, but nothing you stated is actually inconsistent (even though its foolish).
And that's a postmodern, Neoliberal Death Cult lie (one of many these days) that has created multiple social, economic and political disasters. As the resources that supported that lie tap out, and the unintended consequences peak, recognition of human interdependence will make a comeback. Hopefully, for the species' sake. But until then, enjoy your Daily Dystopia.
Your dystopia is my utopia. Hopefully soon we will transcend the homo sapiens and become transhuman and engineer new resources as we move towards infinite progress and space colonization.
Good luck wid dat.
For your stupidity, we will punish you by sending you to a prison labor camp on Mars. Enjoy the desert, you transhuman peasant
Yep, you are a regressive, confirmed.
Bahahaha
Man...talk about yappin. Nitwits abound, I suppose.
Very few of either can survive well without the other. I think you should expound on your statement so those reading it can better understand your meaning.
They do…in general. Although any one individual can opt out if they so choose.
The Western world has rising rates of anxiety and depression never seen before in human history, or in other societies. We also have declining rates of marriage and childbirth, and formation of relationships and socialising generally.
It's possible these two things are unrelated, but it's also possible that one is causing the other, or that they both have the same root cause.
What characterises humans as distinct from other species is a lengthy infancy. Thus, over thousands of generations we have selected for traits where people tend to form families and tribes - if we didn't, those infants wouldn't have survived. Those traits include things like romantic love, fidelity, loyalty and so on.
The rising rates of anxiety and depression are CAUSED by pharma. Massive drugging if children going on.
This may be a contributor. However, as Erik Hoel notes, rates of adolesccent anxiety and depression increased at the time of introduction of smartphones.
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/what-the-heck-happened-in-2012
We can see too that the most materially prosperous countries in the world quite often report the worst mentall wellbeing. One of the correlates was age of first smartphone use.
https://sapienlabs.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/4th-Annual-Mental-State-of-the-World-Report.pdf
No doubt there are many contributors. There's a human tendency to try to reduce everything to just one problem, since if that were correct, all we'd have to do is sort that thing out and we'd be good. This is why people concerned about climate change tend to deny that fossil fuels are finite, and peak oilers are usually climate change denialists, and radical feminists think it's all about patriarchy, and critical race theorists think it's all about white supremacy - and you think it's all Big Pharma.
Unfortunately, our world has a multitude of problems. Prudently we should focus on measures which contribute to solving two or more problems at once.
You are hilariously wrong.
Very good article. As a man, I obviously haven't experienced the bulk of this personally, but it rings true with what I've seen. I've been saying for a while, for example, that most FTM's seem to have a desperate desire to be desexualized, while most MTF's seem to have a desperate desire to be sexualized (and more deeply, to be valued and desired). Obviously both are signs that something in how society treats both men and women since "sexual liberation" has gone horribly wrong.
One thing that could bear mentioning is that while Belle Delphine and those like her get flaunted in the media, most who go that path DON'T get rich. The most common OF payment per month is $0. The second most common is a few hundred. Survivorship bias creates delusions.
Another thing that this article doesn't address is aging. This may be because you're fairly young yourself, in which case congrats for figuring so much out so quickly, but the heavy attention women get from men takes place within a limited window. That window can be a different size depending on the woman and how well she takes care of herself, but very few manage to keep it open through their 40's. That's when women get to experience something more similar to men's existence, where they're judged by what they do or have done rather than what they are. So most of the women who have been riding this OF/e-girl/whatever-you-want-to-call-it wave haven't really experienced the brunt of the consequences of their life choices yet. When they do, that's when things are REALLY going to get interesting, as there's definitely going to be a major social shift, one way or another.
We've all seen it before, the attention-seeking young 24-year old hottie.
Even if you find her cute now, her act will be getting mighty old by the time she's 34. And it will have really worn thin when she's 44, especially as the old tricks no longer get her the same results that they once did.
"The most common OF payment per month is $0."
That is only because lots of women would create an OF account out of curiosity, but never actually put anything on it (just like how people would create an email account for one-time use and then immediately forget about it).
If we only look at active OF accounts, i.e. accounts that are consciously being run like a business, it is very profitable in terms of the time and effort required.
Even taking that as given, the law of diminishing returns would indicate that the average payout would decline as more women joined OF.
"Why are young women today so deranged?"
Because when men invented the machines which liberated themselves from the plough, the spade and the horse and cart, women made sure men redirected their efforts towards making life safer and more comfortable for women (he for she).
But when men invented some more machines which liberated women from spinning, knitting, washing clothes and beating carpets, those men did NOT demand women redirect THEIR efforts towards making life fairer and more pleasant for men (she for he).... or for children (she for them).
Instead men said "You're free to do whatever you want now - we've got everything covered".
As a consequence, in the post industrial age - and freshly liberated from crucial tasks around the home -women lost their sense of purpose, social responsibility and identity as women, and embarked on the hedonistic pursuits of 'liberation' and 'personal empowerment' (vanity, self service and narcissism) - abandoning the needs of their own children, and even usurping the roles of their husbands and sons along the way.... until society collapsed under the weight of all this 'female empowerment', which all began to feel increasingly hollow and sickening.... which is roughly where we are today :)
If men had made more demands on women - rather than letting women become bored housewives and then resentful, self-centred feminists - we would not have had the mental health / identity/ relationship crisis that we've witnessed over the last 50+ years.
As awful as we treat men, those constant demands gives them a sense duty, social responsibility and an external purpose (he for she) which stops men disappearing up their own backsides.
But men's innate tendency to put women on a pedestal even if they contribute absolutely nothing to society is why so many modern women are deranged ..... as they take photos of their bum holes, sell their bathwater, abandon their children all day in order to do (what amounts to) housework in some pointless office job - before coming home to put pretend food in the microwave and serve it up as 'food' to their own family.
By demanding nothing of women - other than to just 'be' women - modern men have stripped women of their identity. Female biological hard wiring on its own (vanity, neuroticism, anxiety, narcissism) is not a good basis for an identity. To prevent derangement, you need to be serving a cause which is greater than, and external to, yourself (and your perfectly bleached and polished bum hole). LOL
You left out hypergamy.
Men can't make demands of women because men have higher sex drive and will always desire women more than the reverse. Nothing will change unless biology changes.
Precisely why those demands are necessary.
Very well and intelligently stated.
I've always said, if we had to go back to the 1800's (i.e., horse, plow, open stone hearth and washboard) there'd be much less time for women and men to try and decide who or what they are. The daily requirements of survival would answer those questions. Fulfilment and satisfaction would be as simple as not freezing because you built the walls and roof that shelter you, or having a reasonable full stomach because you grew, preserved and prepared the food you just fed yourself and your family.
There is just no way those polished bum holes could even come close, to those basic and critical levels of self worth and satisfaction.
So women's inherent failings are also the fault of men. Accountability dodged yet again.
I was talking 'cause and effect'. Framing the issue in terms of 'fault' and 'blame' attributed to one sex or the other is part of the mindset of feminism.
Modern women are very much a product of men's achievements over the last few centuries. Without men's labour, to create modern post industrial society, there could be no such thing as 'the modern woman'.... no such thing as feminism... no such thing as 'patriarchy theory'.
To have modern women complain about 'the male gaze' (or whatever) rather than 'having to survive the winter without starving to death' is one of the finest achievements of men.
The problem faced by modern women is that men have erased women's identity/ value, by inventing a bunch of mod cons that have liberated women from the home. Feminism is mostly a movement complaining about being bored and having no sense of female self worth as a result of being liberated by technology.
Often lottery winners also go off the rails and become miserable after winning the lottery and quitting their day job. Feminist women are experiencing something similar.
The whole thing is far too complex to be about blaming men, or blaming women.
Not exactly your point, which is a very interesting one, but I have long said ‘Men create Women, and Women create Men’. Men ‘pay’ for beauty, so women who can, beauty themselves, and use it to get what they want. Women ‘pay’ (ie give sex) for power, success, and wealth. So men work their tails off to be successful to sleep with the most beautiful women.
I'm just divorced for a second time at seventy, and I had become firmly ensconced in the Red Pill philosophy. There really are two sides to everything, aren't there? Thank you for pulling me back from the abyss.
glad you enjoyed it and I was able to give you another perspective! Sorry to hear about your divorce, that's tough, the abyss is tough and that really sucks; not much else I can say other than offer you my sincere best wishes.
My first wife called me three Christmases ago - just out of the blue - and made small talk for a long time, leaving me wondering just exactly what was going through her mind. Clearly she wasn't saying it.
Finally, as we prepared to hang up, she took a deep breath and said, "Look, I just wanted to apologize for not being a better wife to you."
People say they are speechless; I was literally, actually, completely, gobsmacked .... speechless.
We had been divorced twenty years. Twenty. I had always blamed her for the marriage's failure (I had filed for the divorce - part of the 20% filed by men), but it seemed like I should say something nice, so I stammered out something that I apologized too, for the same reason.
But I didn't mean it; I was just being nice. Now I think I need to call her back.
**********
I obviously don't know your status, but somehow you have to get this point of view over to whomever you marry - and I have to tell you: good luck; the pickin's are pretty thin. All best to you. You made my day, my week, and a lot more.
Hey bro if your ex-wife is calling you and apologizing to you, then she's trying to hook back up with you.
I don't think so. She was always very analytical, living inside her own head - and still is, which explains the phone call - but unfortunately as a teenager in the early 'seventies had absorbed the just-developing tenets of Toxic Feminism and took the attitude that any demands for her to do HER part of the marital job was "oppression." I was so green that I was hesitant to ASK her to take up any slack, and to keep the peace would simply take everything on myself. Eventually, when we had kids, that didn't work, so we drifted more and more apart. I drifted into a world without her; she without me. I had a high-paying job and hired out most of child-rearing to others.
re: "If I only knew then what I know now." If we were both 24 again, with the knowledge of decades of experience behind us, we could make it work, but not now. She knows that; I know that. Not everything turns out well. That's just how it goes.
Don't be an idiot bro. Call her, she wants to hook back up with you. Just let her talk and tell her you hope she's doing well, then listen to her and let her make a move if she wants it.
You don't need to put yourself out there, just stay in contact with her. If she wants you then she will bring it up.
It doesn't matter if she wants me. I don't want her. We talk when an issue with our two adult sons comes up, and without exception after hanging up the phone I say to myself, "God, every time we interact it all comes flooding back." No, I'm good.
You’re a shallow idiot lol
I divorced my first wife for cruelty. Twelve years after being divorced she pulled me aside when I was picking the kids up to being them home (I had custody) she said she wanted to talk to me privately. I thought ‘yup, she wants money’. She said she wanted to apologize. She said ‘all these years I thought you were the bad guy. I finally saw it correctly. You were the good guy! I was the bad one. I destroyed the marriage.’ It was very moving for me. If you had asked me how I would respond to that I would have said ‘Meh. I couldn’t care less what she thinks.’ But it was important to hear it for me.
I admit I started skimming half-way through your essay because you do not discuss the most significant factor contributing to the modern pathological relation between the sexes: secularization of human experience!
Instead of Masculine and Feminine, we now refer to men and women as "Male and Female", and instead of focusing on Character (and by extension, moral VIRTUE), we use scientific models to explain behavior as the result of 'brain chemicals' and hormones. Personally, the reductive "hormonalization" of female/woman nature has contaminated all discussion of ethics. Thanks to several dangerously-convincing explanations, women can basically blame hormones for everything. If she is a bitch, must be PMS. If she's fat, must be her thyroid or 'genetics' or some 'hormonal fluctuation'. Angry? Sad? Happy? Crazy?--she MUST be BPD or suffer from PTSD because "you know, her boyfriend cheated on her, she must be sooooo traumatized now."
Women are encouraged to evade all accountability through "official science". See how dangerous it is when pathological behavior has been legitimized by a materialistic paradigm?
In ancient metaphysics, there was an archetypal and mythic model for moral behavior. It wasn't enough for men to be piles of muscle, they also had to be virtuous and noble in their speech, gestures, and demeanor. Women likewise had some divine model upon which to build an entire "personality" that was both noble and well-rounded.
At least Jungian psychology, with its Archetypes and Animus/Anima dynamic, contained traced of an original Tradition.
This stands as my best attempt to explain why almost all women born between the years 1992 - 2000 are neurotic, crazy, and worse: blame everything and everyone but themselves for their inexcusable behavior!!!
you make a good point; I did not consider how the loss of myth and lack of a cohesive meta-narrative underlies the problem; thank you for engaging
I hope you keep writing. You're off to a promising start. I would like to see you explore the "esoterica" side of your newsletter name. What esoteric ideas are you particularly inspired by?
I discovered my spiritual side quite recently and haven't spent any time thinking and reading about those things; I picked e-girl esoterica, partially because I liked the alliteration, but I also have wide ranging interests like mathematics, art, beauty, history, philosophy, and I like to dabble in these things. So I don't have any specific ideas that I can point to; but the main thing that drives is me is a search for truth and beauty.
Beauty will lead you towards an intuitive understanding of truth. That is one way the ancients understood, philosophy is another. Looking forward to your next essay
If you're after more esoterica and myth, you may find some of the writings of John Michael Greer interesting. He's most well-known for his "collapse now and avoid the rush" kind of writing, but he does a lot of occult writing, talks about the importance of myth (even among people who say they don't believe in myths, like the followers of Progress!).
I'm not into the occult and myth side as much as he is, but it may interest you. Sit with a coffee and a box of tissues, this is his most recent post - on the death of his wife.
https://www.ecosophia.net/a-life-remembered/
We have essentially two female archetypes. Madonna, and the Whore. (Although in Madonna these two blended!). So, Marilyn Monroe, sleepy eyed sexpot, and Mother Mary. Other cultures had Medea, Kali, Durga, the ‘Shrew’ or Scold. And so on. It was accepted a scorned woman (Medea) was a dangerous person who would kill her own sons to hurt her ex lover. It was accepteds t the ‘Shrew’ needed to be tamed. Kali and Durga are the most dangerous Gods in the Hindu pantheon. We don’t accept women as easily being these dark feminine types. It can’t be just dark energy, it has to be something done to Marilyn/Mary for her to be that way. A lot of women really take advantage of men, using their bodies and emotion to take financially from their ‘lovers’. We barely acknowledge this. And if we do everyone pretends either he deserved it, or ‘I am not like that. I would never choose a man for money.’ Right. She might sleep with someone not for money, but marry? No. It is ubiquitous in our society. Ask young women what they want in a man and his salary will be the first or second item mentioned. I was sitting in a coffee shop with my wife and a few of her friends. Another female friend came up and chatted for a minute and then walked away. One of the women said conspiratorially ‘she scored’. The other women oohed and aahed. It turned out she had just married a top realtor in a very wealthy suburb of Vancouver. He probably made a Million or so a year. I was disgusted.
Good point. Masculine and feminine are active qualities that at least imply certain attributes. Male and female Conveys nothing. Or very little at any rate.
I have a file titled "Gems". I just put this article there. This piece is just another illustration that in these crazy times everyone is "educated" to ignore the obvious, the simple; truths that every society has known until 5 minutes ago.
Yes. That, as the author pointed out, pretty breasts are pretty whether they belong to a grown woman or a young girl. Therefore, it is not sexualizing a young girl to insist that she not put them on display. On the contrary, it is protecting her sexuality, as her parents, to insist she not dress in ways that provoke scenarios she is unequipped to handle.
At the end of the day, I believe we'll come to a new wisdom and it will look shockingly similar to the old wisdom.
Great opening essay, I like.
It's nice to get a missive from the other half of the growing-up-zoomer hellscape; the outlook is so grim on the boys' side as to become all-consuming nightmare, which in turn makes it difficult for us to keep in mind the equally hellish plight that the fairer sex is facing. Hearing from the other side helps us keep in mind that we're not the only ones stuck in the pit
we're all in this together tbh; the large gulf between zoomer boys and zoomer girls is important to close if things are to be improved, we need each other
I think this is what I most appreciated about this piece—you did not pit men against women or women against men. We need each other, so very much. We must learn to love each other again. I look forward to hearing more from you.
There is nothing hellish plight about the "fairer" sex lol
Good article, gave me quite a bit to think about especially regarding where we went wrong. As a writer of fiction, I think some of the blame lies with fiction being warped and used to put stupid ideas into women's heads.
For example; Eowyn is a fine female archetypal character, yet somehow her choice to become a mother and wife is frowned upon in modern society, when that's the highest calling.
Yet what is more is that she is celebrated while characters such as Luthien remain mostly unknown, when Luthien is arguably the most important character of the Legendarium, and is the most feminine of them all yet somehow more beautiful and archetypal than any other.
You have Zenobia in Howard's fiction who manages to with a few words and a single confession of love tame Conan, and calm his fury so that he devotes the rest of his life to her. This is somehow scorned by many, when the choice Conan made is natural for him to do as a man, and is a testament to the purity and goodness of Zenobia. This purity and kindness on her part, should be encouraged in girls rather than telling them they can be Conan when they clearly cannot become him.
Sure, female warrior characters can exist, but the archetype should not be used willy nilly, but with practiced aim, and there must be other female leads. Or so I tend to think, maybe I'm just stuck in my ways and in my own particular style of writing them as a fantasy-writer.
I have always been drawn to female characters who are realistically strong, not bad ass warriors, but sly, cunning, clever women or women who are brave and loyal till the end; that kind of character speaks more to me than Ms. Marvel ever did
Zinnia, I don't know how you feel about Victorian novels, but the Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels contain exactly the sort of female character you like in the personages of Lady Glencora Palliser and Madam Max Goesler. The former in particular I seriously consider to be among the best developed characters in all literature. Anyway, I just couldn't help myself recommending those to you. They're so terrific but sadly almost unknown in the United States (where I am; I don't know where you live) except among really weird literary types.
There is a well done BBC series from the 70s called The Pallisers I recommend as well. Glencora is great.
Oh I see, funny thing is I've one bad ass warrior but she's also shy, and icy, but trying to improve in one story. She's not strong as Ms Marvel but rather a spear-woman who will be struggling alongside her love interest and his two friends. She's more like Eowyn than anything though slightly less perceptive but she gets there.
And I've two shy and clever, if brave and loyal girls in another story, one of them is primarily loyal to her surrogate older brother, and to her younger brother.
I think you've taste that is similar to my own.
If you’ve never seen Alias Grace, I recommend it then.
Kudos for the Howard reference. Although, to be fair, in that story Conan found himself in a desperate situation because he was unmarried, without an heir, and therefore not part of a dynasty that his followers could rally around. So there may have been a bit of calculation going on. On his part, I mean.
Zenobia, as you say, demonstrated both purity and goodness. But she was not a modern "girl-boss" (how I despise that term). She wasn't a warrior, and did not go around beating up a dozen men, each twice her size, as modern feminists would have it. She did supply Conan a poignard, though, when he was weaponless, which ended up saving his life.
Both excellent points, I really like Howard's work and have written on it in my substack, but I do think that Howard was looking at things from a certain chivalric literary perspective due to how he was trying to sell the book to an English & European audience at the time. Zenobia seems to have been inspired by the love of his life, and so I think it was a decision of sentimentality and calculation on Conan's part.
Same! And love your username, working on a podcast of the Silm and Beren & Luthien in particular
I enjoyed your essay’s directness and openness. I have also wondered whether the rush to identify as trans happens frequently in divorced households where a girl suddenly finds a strange man (ie stepfather or boyfriend) living in the same household. In the trans (fTm) whom I know, there is a common pattern of rapid onset gender dysphoria once a stepfather entered the picture. Do you find the same phenomenon? I think it’s also the case that pretty girls are not told they’re pretty because their peers are jealous and the adults think it’s politically incorrect to mention it. Hence, I see a number of very beautiful zoomer girls intentionally making themselves less beautiful through septum piercing or weird haircut. They either are acting out or “reading the room” to notice the hatred for anything beautiful in our society.
I cannot comment on the step-daughter phenomenon but it seems plausible to me, desexing yourself is almost always a protective mechanism. Pretty girls are usually not told they are pretty, and I do agree with your analysis there. Glad you liked the article!
To be loved and found beautiful. Seems like a straightforward request. It’s so funny how such an innocent desire sounds so foreign to our media-conditioned ears. It reminds me of hearing a zoomer girl say once how she’d like to be a stay at home wife and avoid college somehow. It was refreshing to hear this goal. Why do we have to follow these scolds/haters who want women to waste their youth and beauty on a corporate rat race to nowhere?
Ideally society should have room for the great natural variation within both sexes. Women should be able to be anything from trad cath to Amazon warriors; men should have similar latitude.
An ideal society from a genetic point of view would be more like that of wolves, with the best and the brightest reproducing abundantly, continuing and improving the species; and the plain, the dysgenic, the unsuccessful, being given honorable and worthwhile roles other than reproduction which contribute to the overall welfare of the species, the People.
"Women should be able to be anything from trad cath to Amazon warriors; men should have similar latitude."
This sounds amazing but completely unrealistic. Women can 'be anything' because society does not actually depend on women to keep the infrastructure, supply chain, power stations running. And men heavily subsidise women's lifestyles (whether married or single). The net flow of resources goes from men to women (men EARN more than women, and women SPEND more than men).
If you want men to have the same freedom as women to 'be anything they want to be' then you will have to invent a third sex to pay the majority of taxes and to take men's place working on oil rigs, trucks, power stations, repairing power lines, laying cables on the ocean floor, mining coal, fighting fires, milling steel etc... because 99.9% of women do not want to do those jobs or give up their status as a heavily subsidised class.
Women should be subsidized: as the original author has capably described, women bear immense burdens, aside from the huge risks and burdens of childbirth and raising. A well-ordered society should be centered on women and children, without which the species ends.
Just as there are trad cath type women, for whom the time-honored roles of mother and home-maker are ideal and natural, there are many men for whom the time-honored roles of father and provider are ideal and natural.
There are also many men and women for whom these roles are oppressive, confining, stultifying etc. A well-ordered society will make use of their abilities and accept their inclinations, while perhaps discouraging them from reproducing, except when their abilities are remarkable and thus genetically valuable.
"Women should be subsidized"
Fine. Then we must acknowledge that patriarchy is good and not evil. Patriarchy (aka traditional gender roles) is when men's role is to provide resources and protection to women (women and children first).
We either subsidise women or we have 'equality'. The reason why society is short circuiting is that feminism demands BOTH subsidy (he for she) AND equality (women don't need no man).
We have to decide one or the other and make peace with it otherwise we cannot ever end this stupid battle of the sexes.
"aside from the huge risks and burdens of childbirth and raising."
Child birth is a fraction of the risk it used to be. And far more men die in construction jobs (or similar) than women die in child birth. And you forget that most women do not raise children. They hand them over to ideologically deranged strangers all day long from the age of 4 (daycare/ school).
If we are going to value motherhood as a role and an identity, then we have to re-introduce motherhood! Abandoning your children every day is not motherhood. It is not parenting. It is the opposite of that.
If a man abandons his job every day at the local power station or airport control tower we do not say he is doing his job properly. We say he's a failure. And a danger to society!
"There are also many men and women for whom these roles are oppressive, confining, stultifying etc."
Then don't have children. Simples. If you can't face walking a dog at least 3 times a day then don't get a dog. Why should having children be any different?
"A well-ordered society..... "
No idea what this means. Sounds like a euphemism for some terrible Orwellian nightmare.
I recall some academic feminist yapping on about how White Male Medicine (whatever that means) doesn't understand a woman's body.
My response was: "Bull."
100 or so years ago, women in western countries had lower life expectancies than men. Today they have considerably higher life expectancies, not because of goddess spirituality or feminist praxis or whatever happy horseshit they teach in Women's Studies, but because medical science has largely eliminated child-birth related mortality.
Huge risks of childbirth? As opposed to the low risks of being a faller for example? I know of no women hurt in childbirth. I knew five fallers who died.
Wonderful essay. Please keep writing.
As a man, I have no particular insight into the struggle of girls. In my youth I was rather more in awe of their sexual power than anything else. It is eye-opening to read your essay and to see the problems girls experience as they mature.
For all their faults, earlier generations provided a template to shape one's masculine or feminine roles. Today, for girls, the choices seem to be Only Fans or retreat into shapeless, de-sexualized androgyny. Or worse, down the rabbit hole of "gender identities", which in the worst case lead to mutilation, lifelong medical problems, and sterility (in all senses of the word).
Today's society has made it tough for both men and women. Consider that the biological urge to mate with the opposite sex is among our strongest instincts. What does it say that today, more and more young people are not just single, but reluctant to even try to establish a relationship?
The only likely result seems to be that we will be replaced, by an ethnicity which is not so "modern".
As a former high school teacher and grandmother with granddaughters that I worry about, this was an insightful and sad article. So much as changed with the advent of the smartphone and social media. I saw the a significant transformation in girls starting around 2010. I truly feel for young girls as they navigate this current culture. Now 42 years into a marriage that is truly a partnership of equals, I wish this for my granddaughters and other young girls longing for safe relationships where they are seen as beautiful and the freedom to be themselves. It is possible, just so much harder to discover in our society today.
I have often stated that men and women need to be more generous and forgiving of each other because we are what Nature, evolution, made us. Women have the eggs, biologically our most precious and essential possessions, and are themselves the gateway, the means of reproduction. Just as sperm race chemotactically to the egg, with just one winner among millions, men are drawn chemotactically to women (think of how often smell in mentioned in connection with love and lust). Men are designed to seek indications of youth, health, genetic and reproductive fitness: we call this 'beauty'. And women are designed to seek strength, wealth, protection. They check out different bulges than men do, but we all check bulges.
Little or none of these things are 'social constructs' as scientifically illiterate NPCs drone about: they are obviously the result of our evolution. What questions Nature was asking, what problems she was solving by doing so are of interest, and perhaps evolutionary biology and sociobiology might have some answers or at least ideas.
As a single father raising two sons and a daughter, I could intuit the effect the internet age was having the boys and attempt to steer them clear but remained clueless about what is was doing to my little girl or how to help her. It was easy to jump on a political bandwagon and point fingers at the preceived villains. But politics never healed a broken heart nor saved a mortal soul. Your essay gave me great insight into a troubled paradigm of youth that I preceived but could not define. I wish you the best on your Substack launch.
Very powerful opening piece.
You touched on some things my wife revealed to me only after she reached menopause and the chance of pregnancy was gone. If I were more anonymous I would share them. We have eleven children together and never practiced any form of birth control. Don't get the wrong idea, my wife loves being a mother and now, a grandmother. But pregnancy is a hard ordeal on women, and the natural outcome of being desirable to men. Birth control allows young women to act like post menopausal women without any of the wisdom, experience, and structure that comes with age. Maybe something you could explore in future pieces. I look forward to reading your sure-to-be-insightful future pieces.