A Feminist Lament

If you reject reality you will never run out of things to complain about. So here we have another feminist lament, even though author Sarah Bernstein never mentions feminism or the ideological brainwashing it has imposed on women. 

Bernstein thrills to the progress that women have made, in the worlds of work and politics, and she remarks that, alas, the more women succeed the less men want to mate with them. One might note that successful women are not very likely to be drawn to men who are less successful than they are.

To which one is tempted to reply: you broke it, you own it.  Feminists wanted women to throw off the shackles of housewifery and to find happiness in their careers. In principle, these women, no longer wanting to be anyone’s ward, no longer needing to be protected or provided for, would naturally be more attractive to men. 

It turns out that this is nothing more than a feminist fairy tale. Feminists use it to seduce the minds of young women, to set them off on a fool’s errand, wherein they end up with big careers and miserable dating lives. 

Bernstein suggests that the solution lies in this: men will dispense with their roles as breadwinners, to become equal partners, or some such. After all, to her mind, it’s all just a cultural norm.

Dare we mention that Bernstein has no sense of reality. She does not make reference to any of the work that has been done on the biological basis for cultural norms. She would be enlightened if she read Donald Symons’ masterful book, The Evolution of Human Sexuality. 

To her rather limited mind, it’s all about cultural norms. Bernstein does not say where these norms came from and why they have persisted. She prefers to think that women’s investment in feminist ideology will eventually pay off in happy egalitarian marriages. Didn’t Friedrich Engels promise it. That reality is militating against her personal ideology… never crosses her mind. 

Besides, if the breadwinner role, the role of protecting and providing for women and children, is built into the genome, then men will be confused about what their role in the new relationship dynamic is supposed to be. 

That is, they will not see themselves as having defined roles in relation to women and will be less likely to want to make a commitment to these new women, the ones who are driven by ideology.

One hates to be too obvious about it, but many women want to have children. They want to take time to care for their children. They are not necessarily willing to give up time with children because they are married to men who refuse to provide for them.

Then again, if the meaning of womanhood lies in the right to abortion, no man will ever have to face the indignity of providing for his family. The net result of the feminist redo of gender roles is the practice of hooking up. Anonymous sexual encounters outside of any defined relationship-- it’s the ultimate feminist wish fulfillment.

But then, feminists complain when hookups do not lead to relationships. In truth, a woman who hooks up is telling the male mind that she does not want him to call back. She wants to use him in exchange for his using her-- to the feminist mind it feels like a fair exchange.

Feminists broke it. Now, we are faced with the daunting task of putting it back together again,

Rather than mewling over male resentment, why not consider what James Carville once opined, that the Democratic party was filled with “preachy females.”

As many people have noticed, the women who have been advantaged by identity politics, who have been promoted and advanced beyond their abilities, tend to talk down to men, to condescend to them, to treat them like trash. They are insecure and suspect that they were hired to fulfill quotas.

And, to be extra clear, many women who have succeeded in the world outside of the home have earned their success. And yet, the price of identity politics is that one assumes that they were hired and promoted in order to fulfill quotas. The most obvious example being Kamala Harris. 

Why would men vote for a reformed courtesan who had been nominated to fulfill a quota. It is one thing to resent women’s success. It is quite another to believe that that success was not earned, but was imposed at the expense of some man. Dare we mention that young Sarah Bernstein never considers this possibility.

Feminists fail to notice that romance and dating are a woman’s domain, a domain where women have traditionally been in charge. If there is something wrong with the way people mate and date, and you are looking to assign blame, you should follow the old French expression: Cherchez la femme.

One understands that modern courtship is a variation on a medieval custom of courtly love. When medieval lords rode off on their crusades to the holy land, they left their wives in charge of their properties. Said wives created a new ritualized form of seduction, directed at the young men who remained. That would be cooks and gardeners and stable hands. 

They concocted a ritual seduction, one that presumably never led to consummation. More importantly, courtly love was directed by a powerful woman. In the love poems young men wrote for them, they called them Lord. 

Doesn’t this sound familiar. Older more powerful woman and younger less powerful man. Evidently, the game could only continue while the lords of the manor were off fighting the crusades. Once they came home, the party was over.

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