Girl Powerlessness

So, women are now an oppressed minority. And they vote like an oppressed minority-- for the political party that pretends it will take care of them. 

They have bought the ideology and are flocking to the party of Bill Clinton, sexual harasser and rapist, of Joe Biden, hair sniffer extraordinaire, and of Hillary Clinton, the nation’s chief enabler of sexual harassment.

They happily put on pussy hats and march on Washington behind a bunch of anti-Semites. And they insist on being respected for their minds.

And yet, when a woman who is one of the nation’s greatest legal minds is nominated to the Supreme Court they are horrified. A real woman's accomplishments mean nothing when balanced against ideological conformity.

On this blog I have remarked that the Republican Party has become the Boy Party while the Democratic Party has become the Girl Party. Eric Levitz points out in a New York Magazine article that the gender gap between male and female voters has now become a chasm.

He offers some cogent explanations, though they seem to boil down to the notion that, what with the overthrow of the patriarchy, women are becoming non-traditional. This also means that women are sacrificing their lives in order to advance a leftist, and even Marxist ideology. The building blocks of contemporary feminism come from Friedrich Engels, through his book, The Origin of the Family. I am not using the term Marxist loosely.

Perhaps more intriguing is the fact that more and more women are swearing off men. Some 30% are now identifying as non-binary, whether lesbian or bisexual or transgendered. The number is astronomical, and certainly represents a cultural symptom. 

On the one hand, as Rod Dreher points out, this will have a direct influence on reproduction, and the future of America. Of course, to be fair, America will happily import new people in order to make up the shortfall. And some groups will produce more children than others. What might happen is that the politically woke segment of the female population will have fewer offspring and will bring them up in differently structured family organizations. 

That the traditional family, whether nuclear or generational, has been proven over time to be functional seems not to have crossed anyone’s mind. The ideological zealots who are moving the culture have adopted the Engels’ formula, namely that the structure of the family merely affirms the power of patriarchy over women. As Engels said, it made women into men’s private property.

So, women have ceased to be men’s private property, but have martyred themselves, even to the point of mutilating themselves, to advance a discredited and defeated political cause.

Please don’t expect that people will now respect them for their minds.

Levitz made an effort to explain the current gender chasm last October:

As CNN’s Harry Enten observed earlier this month, Biden’s average lead among women in recent interview polls is about 25 points; no nominee of either party has ever led by that much among women in a final preelection survey, not even in the landslide years of 1964 and 1984. And yet, in those same surveys, Trump leads among men by three points. In 2016, the gender gap in voting preference was 20 points; if current polls hold steady, it will be 28.

Happily for Levitz, he does not blame it on Trump. If he had, we would immediately dismiss him as a deranged partisan. As it happens the gender chasm pertains in all advanced democracies.

And yet, it would be a mistake to attribute this year’s gender gap entirely to Trump’s personal attributes. After all, women have been trending left, as men trend right, for decades now. And this development is not unique to the United States — rather, it is present across nearly all advanced democracies. Viewed in this context, Trump looks as much like a product of the gender gap as he does like a cause: It’s quite plausible that Trump would not have won the 2016 GOP nomination if the Republican coalition hadn’t already grown heavily male (in multiple state primaries, Trump performed significantly better among men than women).’

According to my formulas, the Girl Party is the party of care, compassion and empathy. The Boy party is the party of competition and enterprise. You might say that we are becoming more decadent-- we surely are-- but we must also say that Western democracies are giving up on competing against Asian economies.

The emergence of a gender gap in voting preferences throughout the postindustrial world suggests that the forces pulling men and women into opposite political camps long predated Trump’s political career — and will be shaping our politics long after he’s gone.

In the U.S., women have been voting to the left of men for four decades now. As a result, many contemporary political observers consider the female population’s relative liberalism to be a law of the political universe: Of course, women would, in the aggregate, favor the party of reproductive autonomy and social welfare, given their inherent interest in the former and their relatively greater propensity for empathy and cooperation.

Nowadays women depend less on men for financial security. Ergo, they vote for the political party that is willing to take care of them. If not hubby, the state will protect them-- through welfare and by criminalizing certain types of male behavior.

Obviously, the flaw in this reasoning does not make it to the Levitz brain:

When a larger percentage of women in Western Europe and the U.S. depended on husbands for financial security, they arguably had a material interest in some aspects of social conservatism, such as its emphasis on familial obligation and the stigmatization of (male) infidelity. As remunerative employment became more available to all genders, however, more women came to understand such conservatism less as a safeguard against deprivation than an affront to their autonomy.

And then there is this, the fact that more and more women are identifying as gay, bisexual or trnsgendered. There, that will teach those men:

As Rebecca Traister has incisively argued, the growing prevalence of singledom among America’s rising generation of women is one of the most potent forces in contemporary politics. In 2009, for the first time in history, there were more unmarried women in the United States than married ones. And today, young women in the U.S. aren’t just unprecedentedly single; they also appear to be unprecedentedly uninterested in heterosexuality: According to private polling shared with Intelligencer by Democratic data scientist David Shor, roughly 30 percent of American women under 25 identify as LGBT; for women over 60, that figure is less than 5 percent.

Of course, it makes a certain amount of sense. If men are toxic chauvinist pigs, why would any self-respecting woman want to enter into a romantic relationship with one of them? Besides, as is well known, women as well as most men do find females to be at least somewhat attractive. Only gay men do not find females attractive.

Besides, women loving women do not need contraception. They do not for the most part need to worry about STDs. And they quickly discover that other women are more interested in committed relationships than are men. And of course women know better than men how to give women pleasure.

All told, it does not seem like such a bad deal. 

And yet, there must be more to it. Blaming it all on men is a serious waste of little gray cells. Consider this: we now live in an age where hooking up is far more commonplace than it ever was. Many young women and girls have their first experience of male sexuality on their knees fellating a drunk boy they have just met. If you want to sanitize it a bit, let's say that they are learning the art of the hand job.

Fair enough, that is slightly caricatured, but sex without commitment, sex without dating and courtship, sex where a woman is supposed to service a boy and receive nothing in return-- these have become far more common. Compare that to girl-girl sex, and we can understand why women are increasingly renouncing men. 

I paint this disagreeable picture in order to emphasize that some part-- even if only a small part-- involves the way women have chosen to interact with men-- sexually speaking. It was not the dread patriarchy that told women to hook up. It was feminists who declared that women should be liberated from patriarchal constraints on their sexuality. It was feminists who told women to have sex like men-- promiscuously. 

Yet, women are still more likely than men to want to receive a telephone call the next day. When they do not receive one they feel used and degraded. That they contributed to their own self-degradation does not mitigate their sense that they have compromised themselves morally and now need to repair the damage they have caused to their self-respect.

Better to blame men and to renounce them. If presented with the choice between being labeled a slut-- the old walk of shame-- and renouncing men, the instruments of their degradation, more and more women are choosing the latter. 

Apparently, it has never crossed the addled minds of today’s young women that they might try dating and courtship before engaging in sexual transactions.

That women would get hurt behaving the way feminists told them to behave has not crossed the minds of those who are happy to win elections with women’s votes.