Women's suffrage

From Kat Rosenfield, whoever she is, and her substack: (And this is somewhat edited/cut by me, without annotation, so if you want the whole unfiltered thing, follow the link.)

Neil Gaiman appears to be a pretty bad guy. That's not actually what this essay is about, but I know people are going to ask — what about the man, are you defending the bad man — so let's just get it out of the way, the bad man is so extremely bad. He’s so bad that I don't even care if he broke the law, at this point; if the best defense for your behavior is "But she consented to eating her own **** and vomit!," if you find yourself saying anything even in the ballpark of that statement, you need either therapy or Jesus or both. Neil Gaiman gets a big thumbs down from me, he gets zero stars. I would certainly not have sex with him and I don't think you should, either.

I mean, unless you really want to, but ah, there it is: even if you say so, how can we know you're telling the truth?

There's a moment in the Gaiman exposé where the main accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich, sends him a text message asking him how he's doing. Gaiman says he's struggling: he's heard from people close to him that Pavlovich plans to accuse him of rape. "I thought that we were a good thing and a very consensual thing indeed," he writes.

"It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she replies.

Except: she doesn't mean it. We know this because Lila Shapiro, the author of the piece, breaks in to tell us as much. But also, we know this because she didn't mean it is sort of an ongoing theme, here. And that's what I want to talk about.

By this point in the article we've been instructed, explicitly and repeatedly, that you can't assume a relationship was consensual just because all parties involved gave consent. Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich's behavior (including the "it was wonderful" text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that's just because women do be like that sometimes.

Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I'm more interested in what happens to women when they're cast in this role of society's unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.

The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they'll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it's not just sex they can't reasonably consent to. It's medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world's adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can't have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn't mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.

So close, and yet refusing the see the very question that she begged or its obvious and inevitable conclusion! For the entirety of human history until very recently; the last couple of generations or so, literally everyone in the world knew that about women and treated them accordingly. Sure, sure; women have agency. They're ultimately responsible for their own decisions, same as everyone else. But women are fundamentally different than men, and our desire to treat women and men as interchangeable widgets in the social sphere, the work sphere, the political sphere, and elsewhere was always based on a fundamentally flawed and incorrect baseline assumption, and was therefore fundamentally doomed to failure before it even started. It only kinda sorta worked as long as it has because Western Civilization is a nice civilization, and was able to indulge some bad ideas for a time before they metastasized to a dangerous level.

https://thosewhocansee.blogspot.com/2020/06/fall-of-empire-thy-name-is-woman_30.html

Women's lib, even the very first wave of feminism and women's suffrage a hundred+ years ago now, was always the wrong idea. And men gave women what they wanted, to be treated kinda sorta like fake men, even though that's not really want they wanted and it's actually been a disaster for them. Just look at mental issues the modern working woman faces, for instance! Women coveted what they imagined men had, but women are not men, and women and men both should have been content with a very workable status quo that was actually in harmony with divine intent for the roles women and men should have in an idealized, divine society.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/the-family-a-proclamation-to-the-world/the-family-a-proclamation-to-the-world?lang=eng

The world is fallen, so human societies will inevitably give way to entropy and decay. However, rarely can we draw to clear and bright a line to that decay from a conscious decision made at a societal level to erode the roles of men and women and blend them together, treating women like fake men and treating men (sometimes) like women, and allowing women and their "natural woman" instincts be treated as if they were good instead of bad inclinations that need to be contained and bridled. Our current discourse frequently refers to toxic masculinity, and while it exists, the phrase has become a joke because all masculinity is confused for toxic masculinity, and toxic femininity is treated as a desirable rather than dystopian state of being.

Liberal women

Borrowing from another post someone else made. In fact, mostly quoting him explicitly.

I wonder if they’ve ever considered how not behaving like horrifically unpleasant control freaks ready to take offense or administer a retarded lecture at the drop of a hat might make people more willing to spend time with them? Almost certainly not. They probably haven’t considered how actively uglifying themselves with ridiculous haircuts, piercings, and venomous hair colors makes them unattractive to others either.

It’s interesting to see how the conservative women are not only more soundly based, but more socially successful.

At the risk of sounding like a pedantic sperg, just a bit, I tend to find that conservative and liberal are not as meaningful as they used to be. But they still serve as a kind of self-sorting activity, if nothing else. Plenty of liberal women can be more or less pleasant, even if they believe stupid things, and plenty of conservative women aren't pleasant even if they more or less believe sensible things about political and social issues. Political and social issues are almost certainly correlated with personality issues, but it's not a 1x1 correlation, and I personally know plenty of exceptions. But Vox Day is also certainly correct; the problem with liberal women feeling lonely is a problem almost entirely of their own making. If they'd quit being so terrible to be around, they'd likely be much less lonely. 

It's also gotta be the people that they hang around. The whole point of liberalism is that it attracts people who 1) are envious and resentful of people who are happier or more successful than they are, 2) hate normal behavior and social norms and nihilistically want to tear them down, 3) desperately want to feel morally superior to people around them, and 4) in general is attractive to people who are narcissistic, immature, and/or psychologically broken in some way. This doesn't help them feel less lonely; even if they are hanging out with other people, the other people tend to be narcissists and complainers; self-absorbed and completely lacking in empathy. It doesn't help your loneliness to hang around with people like that.

Again, it's not a complete 1x1 correlation; there are still some foolish nice people who think liberalism "sounds nice" so that's why they identify as liberals. But that's a vanishing breed, and most of those people don't call themselves liberals or self-identify by their politics anymore anyway. If they ever even did. Liberals, more and more, are shrill, unlikeable, dysfunctional people who surround themselves with other shrill, unlikeable, dysfunctional people.