Women and Children First

Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters. —Camille Paglia

     Over the past few years I have been accused a few times (just a few) of being a misogynist, always by western feminists, as far as I can recall. I may really be some kind of sexist, depending upon the definition of “sexist”; many years ago a girlfriend surprised me by telling me, out of the blue, that she was glad I was a sexist. Even so, I am quite willing to admit that women are the equals of men, although they are emphatically not the same as men. The differences between male and female, including psychological differences, are not just a cultural construct. The situation is not that I despise women—the situation is that I despise feminism, and what it is turning western women into.

     I have spent more than half of my adult life, so far, in rural districts of upper Burma, so most of my mature dealings with women have been with little brown barefooted Burmese Buddhist village women, many of whom have acquired their fourth-grade education from the local Buddhist monastery. These women tend to be modest, virtuous, devoutly religious, generous, and girlish in a frank, clear-eyed, innocent sort of way; and after a few years of interacting almost exclusively with devout Burmese Buddhists I got used to women being like this. Consequently I experienced a bit of culture shock on returning to the USA in 2011 and again began living amongst my fellow barbarians of the west—western women, in comparison with the females I was used to, seemed big, loud, clumsy, and jarringly lacking in modesty or self-restraint. I realize they can’t really help being bigger than Southeast Asian women, and the enhanced grace of Burmese village women comes largely from their habit of carrying things, including full pots of water, balanced on top of their head; but the lack of modesty and self-restraint, although it has its fascinations, seemed pretty much the opposite of an improvement upon the traditional, conservative female.

     The clear, open expression and demeanor of a little old Burmese lady, indicating a clear conscience and a degree of dignity and self-respect, or in other words, of relative innocence, is lost in most modern western females by around the age of 16, maybe even 13. Despite the recent rapid modernization of Burma, the overwhelming majority of Burmese village women are still either faithful to one man their entire life or else they endure lifelong virginity. A guy practically has to marry a girl just to kiss her. In many respects old-fashioned women like this are really morally superior to the average man. This is why Burmese men freely give them the respect that they receive, despite a traditional Asian culture that officially takes female inferiority as a given. The average Burmese village woman is intermediate between the average western women, and a nun. I lived near one village for many years in which I was told that a man would receive a public flogging if he were to speak profanity in the presence of a woman—I never heard of it happening though, neither the flogging nor the profanity.

     It is in large part because women in the west used to be more like Burmese village women that western men in the not so distant past would stand up when a lady entered the room, remove their hat when they met one on the street, and always let the ladies go through the doorway first…unless there might be danger afoot. Most men had to admit that most women were morally superior to them in many or even most respects. There was certainly a moral double standard, but women were morally superior because of it.

     Men voluntarily drowned to let women use the life rafts on a sinking ship. They died in defense of women, or even of just their reputation or honor; let alone the lifetime of hard work they engaged in for the sake of providing comfort and security to the women and children of the family. Now women have abandoned many if not all of the reasons why men used to respect them. One of the primary aims of second-wave feminism back in the 1960s and 70s was for women to fling away with both hands all superiority they once had with regard to sexual morality, for the sake of being just as depraved as men naturally are. Now feminists have demonized men into being the enemy of the whole world, and seem intent on replacing them with surrogate husbands and fathers in the form of an all-controlling socialist government as the guarantor of female comforts and security. But at the same time they ironically demand even greater respect from men than they had before. As with Adolf Hitler or with leftists in general, if one makes concessions to them it only encourages them to become more aggressive and to increase their demands; give them an inch and they think they’re a ruler.

     Read some fiction of the 19th century to see how women would steer men who loved them towards greater moral rectitude; read Jane Austen or Charles Dickens or George Eliot, for example, to see the transformative effect a virtuous woman could have on the life of a vagabond male. To some degree this is still the case, as plenty of guys are irresponsible bums or party animals until they fall in love with a woman, and by the time of their wedding they have changed their ways and begun behaving themselves like respectable members of society. It still does happen, although not as much as it used to happen, largely because the young women are almost as likely to be irresponsible, amoral party animals as the men. Plus, as I have discussed elsewhere, women evidently have a more sensitive, less robust conscience than the average man, and so their newfound wantonness tends to mess them up more, and to result in greater unhappiness, which the feminists then blame on men.

     The thing is, all that respect that men once had for more modest, more morally restrained women is falling apart in the west, seemingly at the insistence of feminists and of women who reap the presumed benefits of feminism, to the point that nowadays if a ship starts sinking there will be a free-for-all at the lifeboats with women getting punched in the face, as equals. And if women want real equality with men, then they should accept the idea that half the people who drown should be female. I would like to think that children, at least, would still receive some special consideration at such a time and would be allowed to get into the lifeboats first. Seriously, why in hell should men respect the average western woman now? What moral high ground has feminism caused women to occupy? Leftist politics, maybe? Political correctness? The semi-morality of unrefined feminine sentiment? This issue of earning men’s respect is something for women to figure out, because simply demanding respect without earning it, abandoning traditional femininity in order to do a bad job of imitating men, while considering men to be the adversary the whole time, isn’t going to work out so well. Neither is allowing women (and some beta “white knights”) to redefine masculinity into the state of a culturally emasculated social eunuch with all the old duties of men being replaced by the artificial god of socialized government.

Women and children first: the Birkenhead drill