A Theory of Feminine Immorality

“Women, for their part, are always complaining that we raise them only to be vain and coquettish, that we keep them amused with trifles so that we may more easily remain their masters; they blame us for the faults we attribute to them. What stupidity! And since when is it men who concern themselves with the education of girls? Who is preventing the mothers from raising them as they please? There are no schools for girls—what a tragedy! Would God, there were none for boys! They would be raised more sensibly and more straightforwardly. Is anyone forcing your daughters to waster their time on foolish trifles? Are they forced against their will to spend half their lives on their appearance, following your example? Is it our fault if they please us when they are beautiful, if their airs and graces seduce us, if the art they learn from you attracts and flatters us, if we like to see them tastefully attired, if we let them display at leisure the weapons with which they subjugate us? Well then, decide to raise them like men; the men will gladly agree; the more women want to resemble them, the less women will govern them, and then men will truly be the masters.” —Jean-Jaques Rousseau

     I haven’t written on the fascinating subject of the evolution of the female human animal lately, so what the hell. This one could also have a title like, “A Theory on Why So Many Modern Western Women Are Confused, Messed-Up Basket Cases”; but that is too long, and not very philosophical-sounding. Nevertheless, modern western (and eastern but westernized) women are more unhappy and confused, to say the least, than were their grandmothers fifty years ago, as studies by modern women themselves indicate. So the situation now is worse than what would normally be expected from females, who naturally appear to be more emotionally complicated and insecure than brutish, insensitive men anyway. Women may appear somewhat psychotic to men even if they’re completely healthy and normal; but I have a theory as to why they have become even more that way since, say, 2nd-wave feminism went mainstream back in the 1970s.

     Possibly the most widely-accepted theory on the subject is the idea that “liberated” women have been taught that they would be happy if they lived with the same freedoms and responsibilities as men; yet they have found that having a career and being independent hasn’t turned out as well as they expected. Women were told that now they could have it all, with no reasons why they shouldn’t be happy and successful, and it turns out that nobody can really have it all—career and family life, for example, are to some degree mutually exclusive. As the second-wave feminist Camille Paglia has observed:

Women have rarely worked side by side with men in the way they now do in the modern workplace, whose competitive operational systems were devised by men for maximum productivity. Despite their general affluence, professional women of the Western world have been chronically unhappy for decades, and I conjecture that it is partly because they have been led to expect happiness from a mechanical work environment that doesn't make men happy either.

     The rejection of millennia-old gender roles for the sake of imitating men no doubt is a major contributor to the situation of unhappy feminists, and the theory just mentioned is certainly significant, yet I suspect that those millennia-old gender roles have been around more than long enough to have left genetic, instinctual traces in the human female. By rejecting or downplaying the primordial roles of mother and wife, a normal woman has torn herself away from her own innate human nature to some extent, which almost certainly will have a destabilizing effect on one’s psychic equilibrium—regardless of feminists in Gender Studies departments insisting that human nature is a total lie and a tool of patriarchal oppression. But the particular theory I want to discuss goes farther than this.

     Women, since human beings have existed and up until very recently, have lived very different lifestyles from men. For one thing they have been less adventurous, as the men have primordially been the ones to go out to hunt or wage war, while the women tended to stay closer to home to care for children and forage for less dangerous food—picking berries, catching frogs, etc. As civilization advanced, women’s lifestyles changed, but not radically, and to this day women tend to be less adventurous and more risk-averse, as well as more people-oriented and less violent, than men. The very fact that men’s bodies are larger and more muscular, and male hormones more conducive to aggressive behavior, is good evidence that this division of functions in society between men and women is to some degree built into our species, physically as well as psychologically.

     One difference in social behavior that has existed since the Stone Age is that women have been required, more than men have, to be modest and virtuous, especially with regard to sexual matters. Men have also been more inclined to follow polygamous urges, whereas women have been more oriented toward a monogamous relationship with one man. This also no doubt has some biological basis, as from a biological point of view it makes perfect sense. For example, one man can potentially father hundreds of children if he has enough mates; whereas one woman can bear only a fraction of that number of children, regardless of how many mates she has. Also, a woman can be fairly sure if a baby is her own, while a man sometimes cannot, especially if the baby doesn’t resemble him. And it makes perfect biological sense for a man to prefer raising his own offspring and not the offspring of the bastard who cuckolded him—promulgating one’s own DNA sequences and not one’s rival’s is the name of the game in the Darwinian, evolutionary game of life. Thus greater chastity for females has deep biological roots.

     Even the different types of sexual jealousy that men and women tend to experience bears this out. A woman, generally speaking, would prefer, if she had to choose, her mate to be physically unfaithful so long as he continues to love her best; on the other hand a man, likewise generally speaking, would rather his woman be emotionally attached to another man so long as she didn’t actually go to bed with him. A woman, especially in the Stone Age but still up until very recently, had to have a man who was emotionally attached to her sufficiently that he would continue to protect and care for her after she had begun bearing children. A solitary, unprotected woman, especially if she were pregnant or with small children, would be in a terrible predicament in a very dangerous world. And so, women have tended to attach themselves to a man who loves them and is able to provide for them and their children. To some degree it’s built right into instinctive human nature. A certain amount of modesty and faithfulness and virtue has had real survival value for women, and greatly increased their capacity to reproduce those vital DNA sequences—with some of those sequences coding for traits affecting modesty and faithfulness and virtue.

     So here’s where my theory starts: Despite academic dogmas emanating from the political left (and to some degree from the Christian right also), instinctive human nature does exist; and since human males and females have evolved under different pressures, adapting to different roles, they have evolved different adaptations to life in general, both physical and mental/emotional. Women are evolved not only to be less aggressive, adventurous, and violent than men, but also are evolved to be more sexually restrained and demure. CONSEQUENTLY (and here’s the theory), women have not required, evolutionarily, as robust a moral conscience as men have. Allowing new-fangled cultural mores to encourage them to behave more like men causes them to cause much more damage to their inherent moral sense than is the case with men. A woman who commits murder, or who sleeps with a different man every weekend, is more likely to be emotionally traumatized by that, or at least to be troubled by it at a subliminal level.

     “Women’s liberation” has “empowered” women with the right to be just as immoral as men are, despite their lower tolerance to certain forms of immorality (other forms, such as lying, may actually be easier for women than for men). One of the first rights second-wave feminists of the 1960s demanded was the right to be as sexually promiscuous as they pleased without any social stigma. After several decades of this right establishing itself, now it is positively flaunted; sex to the new left is now considered to have practically nothing to do with morality, and probably the most modest women are the ones most likely to be shamed and reviled by their slutty peers. (As a totally gratuitous aside, I remember as a young boy that the models in the more explicit pornographic magazines tended to look pretty raunchy, essentially like the whores that they were, whereas by the 1980s they were looking as perfectly gorgeous as mainstream movie stars. And now hardcore pornography is so mainstream that a porn actress like Stormy Daniels can be a national celebrity and receive an honorary award from the same city council that openly rebuked the President of the United States.)

     As mentioned at the beginning of this little essay, women have no doubt alway seemed to men to be a bit silly and messed up. Also, unnaturally strict virtue enforced in some cultures (like Victorian England or Burmese villages today) has resulted in problems of its own, such as hysterical symptoms—fainting fits, dizzy spells, and even more serious mental illnesses. But the fact is that women in modern society are less happy than were their grandmothers, despite the lack of a corresponding decrease in emotional well-being in men. And as Jordan Peterson has observed, apparently based on actual research, women in the most feminized societies experience the highest levels of chronic anxiety and fear—more so than their more conservative, repressed sisters in other parts of the world.

     An obvious solution, especially now that the dreaded “paradigm shift” is slowly but surely moving western civilization in a rightwards, more conservative direction, would be a return to some semblance of modesty and virtue in women, and a re-redefinition of morals away from the decadence of cultural Marxism and Social Justice. There may even be a major, long-lasting return to traditional religion if this whole paradigm shift business isn’t just an ephemeral flash in the pan. Who knows: instead of an equality of depravity between the two sexes (ignoring all the new ones), in future, with more emphasis on traditional values, maybe there could even be an equality of virtue? But we men are evolved to be particularly immoral, and we have evolved more robust consciences to help us bear the consequences.

     

     

In short, #MeToo from a historical perspective is a cri de coeur from women who are realizing that the sexual revolution that many of us had once ecstatically embraced has in key ways devalued women, confused their private relationships, and complicated their smooth functioning in the workplace. It’s time for a new map of the gender world. —Camille again

The whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned into woman from the start, just as it is prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light, air, salt, carbohydrates etc. —Carl Jung