This a just a personal observation which may or may not hold true across the board. I've encountered several blatant "virtue signalling" episodes at work lately and they have each followed a pattern.

Each time the initiating group has been the handful of young childless women I work with. They will suddenly raise an issue like Trump or Sonia Kruger and immediately step into group enforcement mode. What I mean by this is that if a man were to raise a political issue he might say something like "Hey, how about that Donald Trump guy?" According to his politics he may expect the others to say something negative or positive about Trump, he may even make it clear that he expects something negative or positive. But it begins with a relatively open-ended topic-raising comment.

But with the young childless women the intention from the beginning is very clearly to shut off any kind of discussion. It will be something along the lines of "Hey, what about all those dumbass Americans who support Trump. They're all stupid hicks. I've never met anyone stupid enough to support Trump. Everyone I know has basic morals." Then one of the other young childless women will pipe in enthusiastically in support and say something similar. Then another one.

The level of interest in thinking about the issue is zero. The level of interest in relating the issue to real world events is zero. The interest is, first, in signalling one's own virtue by holding to the "right" political views. But, secondly, I think it might also reflect young women enforcing social boundaries within the group and doing so in a way that I don't think would happen in an all male workplace (i.e. it is an expression of a certain kind of young female instinct to ostracise or "group patrol").

Anyway, after the young childless women have set the scene, a few of the younger apolitical men will join in, albeit more half-heartedly. So it is a case of the youngest, least invested, least experienced women leading men.

One of the difficulties in countering all this is that men like myself are more used to there being an opportunity to "make an argument" - but this is precluded by what happens at the very beginning. The expected entry point for argument never happens. What I have found works instead is not to directly oppose the virtue signalling but to simply raise for discussion something that undermines it. If the virtue signalling was "Sonia Kruger is bad/mad for raising concerns about Muslim immigration" I'll throw in something like "Hey, did you hear what happened yesterday in ......" It immediately switches the conversation to a real world event, which then begins to allow discussion, which then allows others (usually the older staff members) to voice their ideas.

What I am doing, I suppose, is to create an entry point for discussion that the virtue signallers are doing their best to avoid.

The women with children are generally (not always) more genuinely concerned with the real world effects of politics than the childless women. I don't know if this is because they identify more with the political concerns of their husbands or because they are concerned about the future safety of their children, but the distinction does seem to be there.
Posted by Mark Richardson at 11:41 pm 25 comments: Melbourne Traditionalists meeting

Mark Moncrieff has called a meeting of the Melbourne Traditionalists for August 1st. It's an excellent chance to meet up with likeminded people and to have face to face discussions. It contributes, as well, to taking a local movement to the next level, so I'd encourage interested and sympathetic readers to come along. For further details read here.
Posted by Mark Richardson at 10:47 pm 3 comments: Sonia Kruger takes a stand

Sonia Kruger is a popular media personality here in Australia. She was invited to debate the issue of whether Muslim immigration increases the risk of terror attacks. She courageously answered yes. The following video doesn't take long to watch and Sonia Kruger defends her position ably:

Update: Ben Fordham has spoken out in support of Sonia Kruger:

This afternoon, television and radio presenter Ben Fordham spoke out in support of his colleague, saying he would "rather be honest than popular".

"I think Sonia Kruger should be congratulated first and foremost for speaking her mind and not worrying about what everyone is going to say about her for speaking her mind," he said on his 2GB Drive program.

"And I think she’d be surprised if she knew how many people in Australia agree with her.

"While an outright ban on Muslim immigration might sound extreme, that's where we'll be headed if we have more terror attacks because of radical Islam."

Posted by Mark Richardson at 10:28 pm 4 comments: Drew Barrymore 2

So Drew Barrymore files for divorce from husband Will Kopelman. They then issue a media release announcing "Sadly our family is separating legally, although we do not feel this takes away from us being a family."

I asked my readers what could lie behind the seemingly odd view that divorce "does not take away from us being a family". I received several excellent replies, but I'd like to focus on the first one, which argued that it was a classic case of women pursuing a strategy of alpha sex and "betabux".

These are red pill concepts, and I think there's something to it, though I'd modify the argument. The idea is that it is in the nature of women to want sex with alpha men but then to want provisioning and security from beta men, i.e. alpha sex and beta money. At red pill sites it is often argued that women will purse alpha sex until they are near to "hitting the wall" at which point they will settle and seek to marry a beta man for his money.

The connection to Drew Barrymore is the suggestion that she is trying to have it both ways: that she wants to do the family thing with beta man Will Kopelman, whilst still being free to pursue sex with alpha males.

What is true in this, from what I can tell anyway, is that women are strongly conflicted between their sexual drives and their desire for family and security. Their sexual drives flow most freely with men who are perceived to be untamed, undomesticated, fun (or perhaps dangerous) types who are there just for sex. The men they want for family duty are the stable, loving, trustworthy, reliable types, but with these men sex is for leverage (it is transactional) and sometimes women will not have sexual feelings towards these men (or worse yet they may feel repulsion). And yet women do want these men, at a particular point in their lives, for establishing a family.

It's a pity, I think, that the red pill sites use the terms alpha and beta the way they do. It assumes that the player type men, the ones women identify as being there just for sex, are the superior men. But that's not always so. A woman might see a psychologically muddled no-hoper as being a man she would never consider as a beta provisioner, but if he can thug it up a bit (even in looks), or appear a little cool, or even come across as risky and dramatic, she might see put him in the "there for sex" category. On the other hand, the man who is emotionally open to a loving relationship, able to hold down a good job, good father material, and loyal might objectively be superior in character but the very fact that he presents himself for the domestic role can flick a "beta switch" in women from which there is no coming back.

I have no idea of what Will Kopelman is like as a person, but if you look at photos he is tall and handsome and fashionably dressed, and he has a high status job (art consultant), is wealthy and comes from a high social class. And yet in red pill terms he is "beta". I suspect that once he is divorced he will suddenly look very alpha to a lot of women.

At red pill sites there is a term "alpha widow". It refers to a woman who has bedded many men (the alpha men) and who then settles for a beta provisioner (betabux) but can't form a loyal attachment to him because she still pines for one of her past alpha lovers. The thing is, though, that I have known women whom you might term "beta widows" - they divorce a husband and after a relatively short period of time try to replace him with a replica of what they once had. They were not attracted to him for the reason that they were married to him not because he lacked attractive qualities as a man.

Marriage, it seems, puts men at a great disadvantage when it comes to holding the attraction of women. It means that men have given away all the commitment they have to offer; that they cannot appear attractively aloof when they have so much to lose in the event of the wife leaving; that they will appear unattractively domesticated; that they will have to offer comfort and security rather than danger, fun and risk; and that just by virtue of being the loyal provisioner they will be cast in the beta role in their wife's mind.

A society that values marriage is going to have to bolster the position of married men. It is going to have to give married men a boost to their power and status compared to the unmarried guy in the band. It is going to have to grant to married men resources that a woman cannot get anywhere else except by being married (or perhaps through her own hard, lifelong labour).

I'm not sure, but it is possible that marriage can only survive in a patriarchal culture, by which I mean a culture in which fathers are the spiritual, moral and legal heads of the family, and in which this paternal leadership and authority is felt within the daily life and culture of the family. If not, women will tend to identify married men with a powerlessness that they can live with platonically happily enough, and will sometimes endure for the sake of the children, but that will have them looking elsewhere for sexual fulfilment.
Posted by Mark Richardson at 10:06 pm 9 comments: "We do not feel this takes away from us being a family"

The American actress Drew Barrymore has filed for divorce from her husband Will Kopelman with whom she has two young daughters. Announcing the divorce, the couple wrote in a press release that:

I have heard this before - the claim that after divorce you are all still a family just like before, that nothing significant changes. And I really don't understand the mentality behind it - maybe readers can suggest to me what is going through a person's mind who says something like this.

After all, a divorce dissolves a family. It means that a father and mother no longer live together; they are likely to go off and find other partners and form households with them; it means that the unique little community that a family once was no longer exists.

I can only think that some people are beginning to separate in their minds, as two different things, the raising of children platonically with the children's father/mother and the pursuit of romantic and sexual fulfilment with someone else. In other words, family is something you do separately to the pursuit of romantic and sexual fulfilment. If you are comfortable with this idea, then perhaps you might well think of 'separate household families' as being part of a normal family life.

I don't really know if this is what is happening, I'm just speculating. But when I read the quote "Sadly our family is separating legally, although we do not feel this takes away from us being a family" I am still struck by it. Divorce does not take away from you being a family? Then does marriage have nothing to do with family? Does growing up together in a family unit have nothing to do with being a family?
Posted by Mark Richardson at 7:44 pm 8 comments: Why feminism is evil 2 Sunday, July 10, 2016

You know the haka, but the Icelandic Viking Clap?

Most people will have heard of the Maori haka but I had never before seen the Icelandic Viking Clap. After their team lost in the quarter finals of the 2016 Euro tournament, a mass gathering of Icelandic fans performed the Viking Clap - it must have been stirring to have taken part:

Posted by Mark Richardson at 8:24 pm 3 comments: A richer sense of belonging

I'm not sure what to make of this. Ian Tuttle is a young National Review writer, who, as you might expect, is generally an "establicon" in his politics (aka a right-liberal). His column on Brexit, though, is surprisingly good:

The inability of our political leaders to envision political futures other than the one to which they are wedded has facilitated the polarization, and the unresponsiveness, of our politics. That people are now looking for alternatives is, in fact, entirely reasonable.

This is not what you'd generally expect from a right-liberal. Right-liberals want a liberal society to be regulated by the market rather than by bureaucracy. Tuttle is making a criticism of both options in his post, as leaving out too much.

Perhaps there are some on the establishment right who see that the world order being created is a heavily bureaucratic, stifling one and so prefer the national option to be preserved and who can see that "market participation" is not a sufficient argument for preserving national existence (markets, after all, can easily be transnational).

Tuttle therefore makes an argument for local (i.e. national) loyalties and government. Tuttle is a right-liberal so I do not believe he supports ethnonationalism, but his argument for local loyalties does at least overlap with an argument for ties of ethnicity ("loyalties rooted in close-knit interactions among people who share a particular space and a particular history"..."a richer sense of belonging than interaction in a common market").
Posted by Mark Richardson at 2:37 pm 8 comments: So now Christians can't mingle?

A court in California has approved a settlement of a discrimination case brought by two homosexual men against a Christian dating site. The owner of the dating site, Christian Mingle, has agreed that the site will no longer ask users to click either "man seeking woman" or "woman seeking man". The website will now only ask users to click on whether they are male or female, not which sex they are seeking.

The case demonstrates clearly how liberal claims to tolerance and neutrality simply don't work in practice. Christians and homosexuals aren't left each to their own under the terms of liberalism - Christians are being required to cease being orthodox Christians.

You can see as well what a liberal society is going to require from its citizens. The future liberal citizen, in order to function in the public square, will have to hold to no substantive identity or moral code, but be committed to neutral attitudes and functions, such as market activity and consumption. There is a process by which individuals are squeezed toward this outcome, because that is what is required of them by the rules of the society they live in.

A future "Christian" for instance, to avoid social marginalisation, is going to have to believe that all forms of sexual expression are equally worthy/valid, which then becomes a positive belief that sexuality is contentless in the moral sense, merely whatever the individual makes of it. Christians are going to have to move toward the "empty world" assumptions that liberalism is based on.

And it won't stop with sexuality. Surely it will only take a transsexual to complain about people being given the options of "male" and "female" at a dating site and this too will be considered discriminatory.

Christians should stop trying to fit in with liberalism, and recognise how incompatible liberalism is with a belief in anything substantive.

P.S. I've just read another news item on this story. It includes a statement from the homosexual men's lawyers which illustrates the kind of mentality that fits within a liberal society:

“I am gratified that we were able to work with Spark to help ensure that people can fully participate in all the diverse market places that make our country so special, regardless of their sexual orientation,” Vineet Dubey, one of the plaintiff’s attorneys, said in a statement to the Journal.

Liberal America is special because people "can fully participate in all the diverse market places"? I don't think so, but it might be true that participating in diverse market places is one of the few things that fits in well with the liberal framework of society, i.e. that is sufficiently contentless.
Posted by Mark Richardson at 12:24 pm 6 comments: Labels: liberalism and neutrality, liberalism and tolerance

Monday, July 04, 2016

The power of sexual surrender 2

This is the second part of my review of Marie Robinson's The Power of Sexual Surrender (part 1 here).

Chapter 4 begins with the observation that sexual frigidity in women is often connected to what Marie Robinson calls "personality distortions" in which there is a misunderstanding of reality and in which blame for one's own failures is externalised.

Robinson then goes on to explain different types of frigidity. She includes women who are able to orgasm normally, but who are psychologically unable to build relationships with men and who therefore usually live promiscuously.

Chapter 5 is an attempt to explain why frigidity should have become such an issue. Part of Marie Robinson's argument is an historical one. She argues that prior to industrialisation most men and women worked together as part of a cooperative effort based in the family home. Industrialisation sent the men off to work elsewhere, the children off to school; and outsourced much of the productive work traditionally undertaken by women, meaning that the family home was no longer the centre of all life as it had once been, meaning that a wife was no longer at the centre of all life as she had once been, no longer as profoundly needed in her social role:

As a woman she was profoundly needed, and as a woman reared to respond to this need she had no single occasion to question her worth or her abilities. And then one by one, slowly but surely, her responsibilities and her duties were removed from her; her close and equal working relationship with her husband was destroyed; her importance to her children was diminished sadly.

It's a reasonable argument. It is certainly true that feminism took off as a mass movement after the Industrial Revolution, though it seems to have been accepted most quickly in frontier/homestead states in Australia and the U.S. where women's work at home was still crucially important. An alternative argument is that it was only when the Industrial Revolution had created a significant economic surplus that some women turned more confidently against men, who formerly played a more critical and necessary role as their providers.

How did women react to their new situation? Not well, according to Marie Robinson:

Very slowly, too, but everywhere, women woke as if from a centuries-old dream of peace and happiness to ﬁnd themselves dispossessed. Gone was their central place in the family home, gone their economic importance, gone their close working partnership with their mate, their functions of teacher and moral guide to the children. The child himself was gone, to school, as the husband had gone to the mill or factory.

Yes, she was dispossessed, dispossessed of all those things that for centuries had deﬁned her womanhood for her, that had supported her ego, given her the certain knowledge that being a woman, however hard, was a wonderous and most desirable thing. She felt her womanhood itself devalued, the things it represented unwanted.

And then she reacted. She reacted violently and with rage at this depreciation of her feminine attributes, of her skills, of her functions. Unhappily this reaction was precisely the wrong one, the one from which no solution of a happy kind for her could be attained.

Here’s what she did. Looking about, she thought she spied a villain in the piece. Who was it? None other than her partner through the centuries, man. It was he who had deserted her, who was responsible for her loss of self-respect as a woman, a mother, an equal socially and mentally and morally. He despised women. Very well, she would show him. She would simply stop being a woman. She would enter the lists and compete with him on his own level. To hell with being a women. She would be a man.

In response Marie Robinson writes:

...in so far as the feminist movement pitted itself against the male, and at the same time advised woman to masculinize herself or divest herself of her feminine nature, it was dreadfully neurotic, and we have been reaping the whirlwind this movement started ever since.

Marie Robinson next argues that one reaction of Victorian era women to their loss of traditional role was, in a kind of revenge move, to deny their sexuality. This then meant that twentieth century women inherited a toxic culture from their nineteenth century foremothers:

This, then, is the heritage of woman today: On the one hand, from Victorian woman, a profound belief that she is and should be non-sexual, frigid, by natural law. On the other hand, from the feminists, that man is Woman’s natural enemy, that she should drop her femininity altogether, oppose man, supersede him, become him.

The feminist view became the dominant one after WWI:

The ﬂapper of the 1920’s represented the unintended ﬂower of the feminist philosophy of life, its deﬁnition of what constituted womanhood. As we know, the ﬂapper was a caricature of woman, a cheap and shoddy imitation of the opposite sex, a second-class man. Happily, she did not survive as a conscious national ideal, but the philosophy that created her did survive. The depreciation of the goals of femininity, biological and psychological, became part and parcel of the education of millions of American girls. Homemaking, childbearing and rearing, cooking, the virtues of patience, lovingness, givingness in marriage have been systematically devalued. The life of male achievement has been substituted for the life of female achievement. The feminist-Victorian antagonism toward men has survived too. It has been handed down from mother to daughter in an unbroken line for so many years now that, to millions of women, hostility toward the opposite sex seems almost a natural law. Though many a modern woman may pay lip service to the ideal of a passionate and productive marriage to a man, underneath she deeply resents her role, conceives of the male as fundamentally hostile to her, as an exploiter of her. She wishes in her deepest heart, and often without the slightest awareness of the fact, to supplant him, to exchange roles with him. She learned this attitude at her mother’s knee or imbibed it with her formula. Little that she learns elsewhere counteracts it with any great effectiveness.

Clearly, then, if this is the historical direction women have taken, the individual woman who wishes to become a real woman must change this direction. This she can do only by taking thought, long thought. For among the women around her she will not necessarily ﬁnd too much support for her wish to be entirely feminine.

For one hundred and ﬁfty years now women have blamed their problems on the outside world. They have used the very real diﬂiculties created by revolutionary social changes to avoid the task of looking within for the real problem and the real solution. They have indulged in an orgy of ﬁnger-pointing and self-pity. If the results had been different, if this attitude had brought them happiness and fulﬁllment, if feminism and Victorianism had made them good mothers and joyful wives, or even pleased them with their new place in industry, the game might have been worth the candle. But it hasn't been. The game has brought frigidity and restlessness and a soaring divorce rate, neurosis, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency—-all that results when the woman in any society deserts her true function.

Would you have expected this to have been written in 1958? It is a reminder of the influence of the long first-wave of feminism in the West. Even in 1958, Marie Robinson believed that many women had been brought up to see men as a hostile enemy and to resent a feminine role in society. Little wonder that second-wave feminism loomed on the horizon.
Posted by Mark Richardson at 11:51 pm 7 comments: Crossing the bridge to womanhood

I have just finished reading an impressive book. It was published in 1958 and written by a female psychiatrist, Marie Robinson (Nyswander).

Called The Power of Sexual Surrender it is a book that sets out to explain frigidity in women and in doing so discusses the specific ways that some women fail to arrive at a mature womanhood.

It is not the perfect book. It is overly "scientistic" at times; its Freudian framework is questionable; and a few of its claims now seem either dated or wrong.

Its great strength, though, is that it deals unflinchingly with the specific ways that psychological and emotional immaturity in women is expressed in relationships with men. It comes across as extraordinarily "red pill" for 1958. It is one of the most quotable books that I have ever read.

I don't think I'm going to be able to review the book adequately in a single post, so I'll set the scene with this post and leave the meatiest part of the book for next time.

I'll begin by quoting this:

women today have, beyond the shadow of any doubt, achieved complete equality with men.

In 1958 not only did Marie Robinson not feel oppressed, she felt that she was living in a society where she was completely equal with men. Not how 1958 is usually portrayed.

She then notes that the Victorian era view that women were asexual had been overcome, but that something like 40% of women were unable to benefit from this in terms of enjoying marital love because of some degree of frigidity.

Marie Robinson does not use the term frigidity as we usually do. For her, the frigid woman has "learned to fear physical love." She writes:

The reasons for her fear are hidden from her, are locked in her unconscious mind. Consciously she may wish, above all things, to achieve real closeness with her husband, to give and receive the greatest of all mutual joys between man and woman, sexual gratiﬁcation. But she has not the capacity to receive this joy.

There is a lesson here for men. It is possible for a woman to consciously strive to be open to physical love, to read books about how to achieve it, to go and see someone like Marie Robinson to discuss her problem, whilst the real, underlying reasons for her problem don't come to the surface.

According to Marie Robinson, frigidity in a woman is the result of something going wrong in a girl's development, which then leaves her immature:

When all goes well in the development of the young girl, both her personality and her sexual passions will ﬂower, she will achieve a beautiful and integrated maturity. But if, as so often happens, thwarting or blighting experiences take place, the development of her personality and her sexuality will be frozen at their sources, and maturity will remain a never-never land whose very existence she will come to doubt.

If she wishes to resume her growth she must...insist, deep within herself, on achieving that true and passional relatedness with her man for which there is neither simulacrum nor substitute in woman’s journey through life.

In chapter 3 of her book, Marie Robinson begins to challenge her readers. Even in 1958, she had female clients who had been raised to have a negative view of both men and womanhood. She tells the story of a successful female lawyer who came to see her:

Her father had died when she was an infant and her mother had been a militant leader of the movement for women’s “rights.” The whole emphasis in her early upbringing had been on achievement in the male world, and in the male sense of the word. She had been taught to be competitive with men, to look upon them as basically inimical to women. Women were portrayed as an exploited and badly put upon minority class. Marriage, childbearing, and love were traps that placed one in the hands of the enemy, man, whose chief desire was to enslave woman. Her mother had profoundly inculcated in her the belief that women were to work in the market place at all cost, to be aggressive, to take love (a la Russe) where they found it, and to be tied down by nothing, no one; no more, as her mother put it, than a man is. Such a deﬁnition of the normal had, of course, made her fearful of a real or deep or enduring relationship with a man. For years she sedulously avoided men entirely. Gradually, through her grown-up experiences, she learned of other values, but by the time the right man came along it was too late to have children.

Marie Robinson felt that she had to oppose the "defensive and self-destructive" feminist view with a portrait of what a more normally developed woman is like:

Deep inside herself she feels profoundly secure, safe, both with herself and with her husband. She is very, very glad to be a woman, with all the duties, responsibilities, and joys it entails. She can’t imagine what it would be like to be a man and has no interest in imagining it as a possible role for herself. She feels that the very existence of her husband makes the world safe for her. This sense of reality almost invariably leads her to select a husband who is good for her...Of course marrying a good husband adds to her sense of “at-homeness” in the world. Related to this feeling in her, to her sense of security, seeming almost to spring from it, indeed, is a profound delight in giving to those she loves. Psychiatrists, who consider this characteristic the hallmark, the sine qua non, of the truly feminine character, have a name for it: they call it “essential feminine altruism.” The ﬁnest ﬂower of this altruism blossoms in her joy in giving the very best of herself to her husband and to her children. She never resents this need in herself to give; she never interprets its manifestations as a burden to her, an imposition on her. It pervades her nature as the color green pervades the countryside in the spring, and she is proud of it and delights in it. It is this altruism, this givingness, that motivates her to keep her equilibrum, to hold onto her joie de vivre despite whatever may befall. It stands her in marvelous stead for all the demands that life is going to make on her—and they will be considerable. When a woman does not have this instinctually based altruism available to her, or when she denies that it is a desirable trait, life's continuous small misfortunes leave her in a glowering rage, helpless and beside herself with self-pity.

I will only say of this that I have known women who had this quality of giving themselves to others who, just as Marie Robinson describes it, were also more secure in themselves than other women, more active and more resilient.

Marie Robinson's fully natured woman is also definitely a sexual person who enjoys the sexual relationship with her husband but who is not attracted to infidelity:

One woman put it this way to me: “I like other men; if they’re attractive,” she said. “Their attractiveness does honor to the sex my husband belongs to.”

She has a lot more to say about her ideal of womanhood, but I'll leave it there for now. The best parts of the book are yet to come. If you'd like to read it yourself, there is a free pdf here.
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