66 lines
4.6 KiB
Plaintext
66 lines
4.6 KiB
Plaintext
The desexualization of the American (fe)male
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<p>There’s been quite a blogospheric flap lately about Kim DuToit’s<br />
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essay <a href='http://www.kimdutoit.com/dr/essays/essays.php?id=P2327'> The<br />
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Pussification Of The Western Male</a>. The single feature of the<br />
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conversation that surprised me most is that nobody connected it to<br />
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Steven den Beste’s equally searing essay <a href='http://denbeste.nu/essays/femaleperson.shtml'>Anglo Women are an<br />
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endangered species</a>.</p>
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<p>Steve’s point complements Kim’s and amplifies it in some useful<br />
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ways. Nobody wants to go back to the days when women were treated as<br />
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chattels or second-class citizens. Anyway, attempts to do so would be<br />
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doomed for reasons not so much moral as economic; societies that<br />
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suppress the productivity and intelligence of 50% of their members are<br />
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inevitably going to lose out to societies that don’t. But what Steve and<br />
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Kim have pointed out is that Western society often has pursued the<br />
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worthy goal of equality in a way that is hamfisted and destructive,<br />
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because it tries to remake human nature rather than acknowledging and<br />
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working with it.</p>
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<p>These essays address two specific problems we’ve been saddled with;<br />
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Kim’s with the attack on masculinity, and Steve’s with the attack on<br />
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femininity. Among white anglos (especially bicoastal<br />
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“progressive” white anglos), it is no longer respectable<br />
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for a male person to behave like a man and a female person to behave<br />
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like a woman.</p>
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<p>In fact, in today’s bien-pensant circles, one can be attacked as a<br />
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sexist for suggesting that the phrase “like a man” or<br />
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“like a woman” has any meaning at all. Many of us have<br />
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become obscurely terrified of sexual dimorphism, apparently out of<br />
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fear that acknowledging it will bring back the bad old days.</p>
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<p>This kind of attitude has done more damage than most people<br />
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realize. Read those essays. There’s something gone badly wrong when<br />
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normal boys are dosed with Ritalin for being normally loud and<br />
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aggressive, and only strippers have the privilege of hugging a man<br />
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they like while at work.</p>
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<p>I think our culture will recover from this. Beginning in the<br />
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1950s, portions of the kibbutz movement in Israel made the most<br />
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fervent try yet at erasing sex differences — they raised kids<br />
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in creches and tried to systematically stamp out sex-differentiated<br />
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behaviors. They failed; the children of the first generation, despite<br />
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intense socialization, gravitated back to traditional sex roles.</p>
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<p>We’ll all be happier when we relax enough to acknowledge that<br />
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although equality before the law is something every human deserves,<br />
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some things naturally fall in men’s country and some in women’s<br />
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country — and the fact that minorities of men and women behave<br />
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in gender-atypical ways doesn’t change that reality. There will never<br />
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be more female soldiers or policemen than male ones, and never more<br />
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male nurses and child-rearers than female ones. Men are going to<br />
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groove on power tools and women are going to coo at babies; that’s<br />
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just the way it is. down to our DNA. Behavioral dimorphism is wired<br />
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into us for good reasons that have everything to do with Darwin and<br />
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nothing to do with political correctness.</p>
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<p>The first stage of recovery is recognizing that there’s a problem<br />
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— that men and women find each others’ behavioral as well as<br />
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physical sex differences attractive, and that neither men nor women<br />
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are well served by efforts to cram us all into a unisex box. My wife<br />
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once observed, on behalf of a billion sisters, “What good is a man if<br />
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you cut off his balls?” — and she was talking everyday behavior,<br />
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not just anatomy or sexual function. There aren’t a lot of men who<br />
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will seek out the company of defeminized women if they have a choice<br />
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in the matter, either.</p>
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<p>That is where essays like Kim’s and Steve’s can help. By waking us up<br />
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and pissing us off, they remind us that our sex-linked behaviors and<br />
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our preferences for sex-linked behaviors in others actually<br />
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<em>matter</em>, that they’re every bit as much a part of our normal<br />
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human makeup as having penises or vaginas. People who want us to<br />
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forget this for ideological reasons are objectively inhumane.</p>
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