social conservatism and small government

I’m obviously a social conservative but since I’m an agnostic I can’t base my social conservatism on religion. That would be hypocritical. I base my social conservatism on pure pragmatism.

What intrigues me is that mainstream conservatives seem to be blissfully unaware of the political consequences of social liberalism.

In the past half century or so we’ve seen a fascinating social experiment take place in the West – an attempt to create a society without sexual morality and without traditional sex roles. I think it’s pretty clear that the attempt has failed. Predictably it has led to social chaos, human misery and a collapse in birth rates. What we now have is a dying society – a society that cannot reproduce itself is pretty obviously a dying society. It’s become more and more a society of atomised individuals without purpose and without hope.

All this should be obvious but the exasperating thing is that mainstream conservatives just cannot see it. They continue to believe that a society is nothing more than economics. All we need to do is increase GDP and people will be happy. But GDP increases and people don’t get happier. All we need are more tax cuts and everything will be great. But taxes get cut and things don’t get better.

Human beings are social animals, not economic animals. People need more than money and consumer goods to make them happy. People need social connections and they need a purpose (other than greed). Feminism and sexual freedom destroy families. Without families people find that their lives are empty and meaningless.

But there’s another consequence that is usually overlooked. If the family is destroyed then the state must step in to take over its functions. This obviously results in a bigger stronger state. More big government.

Of course for most mainstream conservatives this is a feature, not a bug. Mainstream conservatives want what big business wants, and big business wants big government. So really they’re evil rather than stupid.

But what about the conservatives who claim that they are small government conservatives? They have shown no interest in promoting social conservatism so they have in effect contributed to the growth of big government. The logical conclusion would be that they’re stupid rather than evil. Or possibly they’re merely cowardly.

The libertarians are even more deluded. To the extent that libertarianism might be a workable proposition (which is I think extremely dubious) it could only ever work in a very socially conservative society with fairly rigid adherence to traditional sex roles.

The bottom line is that you can’t have small government without social conservatism. So-called conservatives who think they can be “fiscally conservative but socially liberal” are living in a dream world. So-called conservatives who think they can be in favour of small government without also being in favour of social conservatism are living in the same world of delusions.

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propping up feminism

A commenter on a recent post at Oz Conservative made what seems to me to be a very good point.

“If the laws promoting feminism were to be simply repealed, it would disappear of its own accord in no more than a decade.”

I think that’s almost certainly true. Feminism is an ideology that is so deluded and wrong-headed that it can only be propped up by active and aggressive government action.

Governments can pressure universities to achieve “equality” in science faculties. We then end up with a huge number of scientifically incompetent women occupying places in academia and, more worryingly, in industry and government. But this cannot change the fact that women’s contribution to science and technology has been practically nil. And continues to be practically nil. Women are just not good at science. Most women “scientists” are in fact administrators and other parasites. They’re not real scientists doing important cutting-edge work.

Governments can pressure corporations to appoint female CEOs. This usually has disastrous consequences for the corporations in question because women make poor CEOs. The biggest corporations don’t care. They’re too big to fail and it’s actually an advantage to them if their smaller competitors are weakened by being forced to put women into senior management positions.

Women can be pushed into political careers. They are rarely successful. They usually end up being incompetent but vicious control freaks like Theresa May, Hillary Clinton, Julia Gillard, Angela Merkel, etc etc etc. The women who want to go into politics do so because they love the idea of telling other people what to do but governing a country requires other skills that they conspicuously lack.

Governments can force the police and other emergency services to employ women in roles for which they are clearly not suited. The usual result is that innocent people die because the women are not up to the job.

Governments can force the military to put women in combat roles but when the shooting starts the women will almost all suddenly discover they’re pregnant and they won’t have to fight. Women don’t want to be soldiers; they want to play at being soldiers.

Governments can appoint more and more women to the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy will just become even more inefficient as the women hold endless meetings to discuss the importance of holding meetings.

Governments can encourage women to try to live like men and to conduct their personal lives lie men. The result is crazy miserable women.

Feminism can only survive as long as it is enforced as official government policy.

This might be acceptable if it actually made women happier. But it doesn’t. Pressuring women into taking on roles for which they are biologically and emotionally unsuited just makes women angry, miserable and crazy.

Of course most of the liberal agenda could never survive in the real world without government coercion to make us all pretend that it works. Feminism is merely the most spectacular example.

sex, feminism and liberalism, part two

Part one can be found here.

Female sexuality is an absolute nightmare for feminism. It all but tore feminism apart during the feminist sex wars. The feminists who started spouting their slogans about all men being rapists, all sex being rape, about pornography being exploitation of women, about the wickedness of awful things like BDSM (bondage dominance and sado-masochism) that the patriarchy imposes on women. They naturally expected their pronouncements to be met by a chorus of praise from women.

Much to their horror many women, even fully paid up members of the feminist sisterhood, violently disagreed with them. These women objected that they actually liked having sex with men, many of them had no real issue with pornography (some of them enjoyed pornography). Even worse, it transpired that there were women who were happily engaging in consensual BDSM sex (even more embarrassing was the revelation that BDSM was incredibly popular among lesbians).

The stage was set for the bitter long drawn out war between the anti-sex feminists and the sex-positive feminists. It ended with a virtually complete victory for the sex-positive feminists.

This might sound like a happy ending. The anti-sex feminists like Andrea Dworkin were a crazy miserable lot and totally out of touch with the reality of female sexuality. Unfortunately we’re talking about feminists here so it goes without saying that there was and is lots of craziness on both sides. The sex-positive feminists can be pretty loony as well, and they’re the ones who’ve been supportive of much of the trans madness.

And being feminists even the sex-positive feminists tend to be control freaks. It’s not enough for them to be tolerant of outright perversions – they have to force everybody else to celebrate those perversions.

The problem of female sexuality remains unresolved for feminism. One problem is that for most women sex means sex with a man. The danger in that is that the man might enjoy it. Feminism can just about deal (with certain very stringent limitations) with the idea of a woman enjoying sex, but a man enjoying sex is definitely problematical.

Much more problematical is the feminine desire for dominant men. The reality is that lots of women actually enjoy feeling dominated, at least to a limited degree, in the bedroom. And some women take that desire to its logical conclusion and enjoy sexual practices that feminist theory simply cannot cope with. Feminist theory tells feminists that all that nasty stuff used to be forced on unwilling women by the patriarchy. There’s no room in feminist theory for women who think that the beastliness and aggressiveness of male sexuality is incredibly exciting and they want it. And feminists cannot abandon their theories – that would be terrifying.

Pornography was the main battlefield of the feminist sex wars. The total victory of the sex-positive feminists has to a large extent ended the debate on pornography. There are still Christians who are opposed to pornography but no-one listens to them.

One other thing that needs to be remembered is that male sexuality as it exists could not have survived the process of evolution unless it had a great deal of appeal to women. Sexual selection is a very potent evolutionary force. And female sexuality as it exists could not have survived unless it had a great deal of appeal to men.

An essential tenet of both feminism and liberalism is that men and women are basically interchangeable. Sex presents them with an enormous problem. No matter what they do they can’t eradicate the profound differences between male and female sexuality, and no matter what they do neither male nor female sexuality will conform to good liberal principles. Women will continue to want strong masculine men and men will continue to want pretty feminine women.

sex, feminism and liberalism, part one

There’s an extremely good post over at Oz Conservative, Accepting our monstrosity?

Canadian writer Stephen Marche, clearly a whiny male feminist, is aghast at the reality of male sexuality. Nothing unusual about that. Anything pertaining to reality always surprises liberals. But rather than merely mocking and laughing Mark carefully unpicks Marche’s babblings and in the process makes some very good points. And he demonstrates that Marche, in his own way, has uncovered some unpleasant truths. Being a liberal Marche naturally cannot deal with these truths or accept any of the conclusions they might lead to.

Marche is very upset over the brutality of male sexuality. Being a good male feminist he is ashamed of being male. Men are so beastly!

Mark quite rightly makes the point that

“there is an element in sex of men as the active and aggressive part and women as the responsive and receptive part.”

This is true, and of course it’s obvious to anyone with experience of the real world.

But the thing that really really upsets liberals, the thing they really will not face, is that on the whole women want sex to be this way. They like it. The big problem for liberals is female sexuality. Female sexuality just doesn’t work the way liberals want it to work. Amazingly enough most women are nauseated by the idea of having sex with whiny male feminists. They want to have sex with virile masculine men. No matter how virulently and enthusiastically they espouse feminist principles, no matter how bitter and angry they might be towards men, when it comes to the nitty gritty it is to a very large extent those beastly brutal masculine men who get women sexually aroused.

Women might like nice guys, but that doesn’t mean they want to sleep with those nice guys. Women might in an intellectual sense strongly disapprove of bad boys but they still get sexually excited by them and they still sleep with them.

None of this is surprising. Our survival as a species depended on having effective mating strategies. Women being attracted to the strongest most aggressive members of the tribe was a very effective mating strategy. Those were the men who could, if necessary, defend them. Men being attracted to the prettiest and most feminine females was an equally effective mating strategy. They were the females most likely to be fertile and most likely to be capable of successfully raising offspring.

The unpleasant truths (unpleasant for liberals and feminists) are that it’s perfectly normal and perfectly healthy for men to be masculine, that masculinity does indeed contain an element of aggressiveness, and that the aggressive element in masculinity is part of male sexuality. The other unpleasant truth is that it’s perfectly normal and perfectly healthy for women to respond sexually to this.

Liberals and feminists have now created a world in which the expression of masculinity has been all but outlawed. What this means in practice is that normal healthy masculinity has been repressed, so women in search of masculinity go looking for any kind of masculinity they can find. They usually find it in the sort of men who are obviously men they should have nothing to do with but the women can’t help themselves. Fundamental biological urges cannot be denied.

part two will follow

making traditionalism fun

A major problem facing traditionalists today is that we naturally tend to regard the past fairly favourably, but liberals and the cultural left have had a century or more in which to paint the kind of  distorted picture of the past that suits their agenda. The Narrative applies as much to the past as it does to the present. And a negative view of the past has now been well and truly ingrained in the minds of most people.

That negative view has been propagated through schools and the news media and through books but most of all through movies and TV programs. It is important to remember that most people do not distinguish between fiction and non-fiction. If they watch a movie they might understand that the actual story itself is fiction but they assume that the background to the story is basically factual. If the movie is set in the 1930s then they assume that it’s giving them an accurate and faithful picture of life in that decade. Of course nothing could be further from the truth but the average person has a touching belief in the basic honesty of people who make movies and TV shows.

This makes it incredibly difficult to persuade people that perhaps the past wasn’t so bad, that perhaps the beliefs and values of the past were as valid as the beliefs and values of today, and most of all it makes it near-impossible to persuade people that life in the past may actually have been pretty good, and even fun.

If you suggest to anyone under the age of 40 that maybe life was a lot more pleasant in the 1950s they’ll look at you as if you’re mad. They know that in the 50s in the American South blacks were being lynched by the hundreds every year, they know that homosexuals were brutally persecuted, they know that women were not allowed to leave the kitchen, they know that liberals were thrown into prison just for being liberals, they know that teenagers were forbidden to have fun, they know that life was grim and miserable and oppressive. They know all these things because their teachers have told them that’s how it was and they’ve seen modern movies set in the 50s and those movies have confirmed everything their teachers tell them. The fact that none of these things are true makes no difference. The cultural left controls the megaphone and their view of the past prevails.

If you try to suggest that perhaps the Victorian age wasn’t so bad and that the Victorians weren’t all  vicious capitalist robber barons, that not all eight-year-olds were sent to work in coal mines  or that the Victorians were not hopelessly sexually repressed you just are not going to be listened to.

If you’re unwise enough to put forward the notion that the Middle Ages might not have been a constant nightmare of filth, squalor and violence then again you’re not going to be believed. People today know how brutal that era was, they’ve seen it in movies. They know for example all about the droit de seigneur, the right of the local lord to have sex with any young unmarried girl under his dominion. The fact that this right didn’t exist doesn’t matter – their teachers will have assured them that it was true.

If we are to have any success in promoting the idea that traditional values, traditional lifestyles, traditional sex roles, are worth emulating we have to be able to sell those ideas. We have to make such ideas sound not just reasonable but desirable and attractive. We have to convince people that traditionalism isn’t just good for society but that it promotes individual happiness. We need to sell the idea that traditionalists have more fun. That’s very difficult to do when the megaphone is in the hands of those who are determined to convince people that the past was a horrible nightmare and that today we live in the happiest most enlightened period in all of human history.

We also need to distinguish traditionalism from puritanism. Puritanism was a destructive religious heresy and, in a mutated secular form, it is very much with us today. It still exists to some extent as a religious heresy. Puritanism has always been unhealthy. The Cultural Left never misses an opportunity to paint traditionalists, and especially Christian traditionalists, as grim humourless puritans.

In fact puritanism has been a major strain in many destructive leftist ideologies, especially feminism. And the mindset of the modern SJW is to a large extent a puritan mindset, obsessed with sin.

Given that traditionalists are not likely to be granted any access to the megaphone I really don’t know how we’re going to promote the idea of traditionalism as the secret to happiness. But I do know that our biggest problem is that it has been so easy for our enemies to portray us as miserable oppressive killjoys.

a woman’s world

A recent post at Oz Conservative, Why can’t male sacrifice be acknowledged? included a quote from a post, Appreciation, at The Rational Male.

Even the most enlightened, appreciative woman you know still operates in a feminine-centric reality. 

For me this opens up an interesting line of thought. The observation is obviously correct. In fact it has always been true that women operate in a feminine-centric reality. Why wasn’t this a problem in the past and why is it a problem now? The answer is that the problem has been caused by the collapse of traditional sex roles.

Men and women are profoundly different. And to a large extent women should live in a feminine-centric reality. That’s the way they’re wired. They don’t view the world the way men do, they don’t want the same things out of life that men want, they don’t think or feel the same way men do, they don’t approach sex the way men do. They should not have to do any of these things. They are being forced into living their lives as if they were men. It doesn’t work.

The fact that women operate differently compared to men is not a flaw but an asset. Women operate psychologically, emotionally and sexually in a way that is ideally suited for their intended roles as wives and mothers. In a sane society based on traditional sex roles women would be allowed to live their lives in a manner to which they are biologically suited, and living their lives in that way would bring them happiness and fulfilment.

Women encounter problems because they cannot change the way they are wired but they insist on (or in many cases are pressured into) living as pretend men. They try to have high-powered careers and they end up being stressed and unfulfilled. They then try to combine their unfulfilling careers with marriage and motherhood and of course their marriages fail and their kids turn out badly because the woman is wasting her energies on her career. They then end up being bitter, angry and miserable.

They generally only succeed in their high-powered careers because they get favoured treatment. They are not equipped to be politicians or CEOs. They don’t have the cool analytical intelligence, they don’t have the mental toughness. They’re not supposed to have those qualities. Women make decisions based on emotion. That’s what they are supposed to do. It makes them good wives and mothers.

The idea of strong empowered women is a myth. Women are strong and empowered only to the extent that they have the apparatus of the state to back them up, with force if necessary. Which means that their strength and empowerment is in fact provided by men. When their feelings get hurt they stamp their feet and cry and expect a policeman to come along and arrest the bad man who made them cry. In actual fact women are supposed to get upset when their feelings are hurt. They’re supposed to be emotionally sensitive. There’s nothing wrong with a woman crying if her feelings are hurt. In a sane with traditional sex roles women are protected from situations that are likely to upset them. The problem today is that women put themselves in situations where it’s practically guaranteed that their feelings will get hurt.

Women are natural control freaks. This is a good thing. If you’re going to be a mother being a control freak will keep your kids from harm. In business or politics it’s a disaster. Women try to run corporations, and run the country, they way they’d run the nursery. Theresa May being a fine example.

The post at The Rational Male also states

I think what most men uniquely deceive themselves of is that they will ultimately be appreciated by women for their sacrifices. Learn this now, you won’t. 

This is true, but again it comes down to the abandonment of traditional sex roles. There are things that women should expect men to do without making a song and dance of it. There are certainly things a wife should expect her husband to do automatically. He should protect her, not just from physical harm but from emotional harm. He should support her financially. She should expect him to be faithful and she should not expect him to abandon her when she’s no longer young and hot. The reason for the problems today is that women have been taught that they have no reciprocal obligations whatsoever. In the saner world of the past women understand that there were certain things that a husband was entitled to expect from a wife. She should provide emotional support, she should provide sex, she should not denigrate him publicly and she should keep house for him. Neither sex considered these things to be unreasonable. Perhaps they were sacrifices in some cases but since they were reciprocal both parties ended up winning. Both parties derived a great deal of emotional satisfaction from the arrangement.

Women not only did not expect men to do housework, they would have been horrified by the idea. It meant you were a failure as a wife, and a man who agreed to do so was considered (quite rightly) to be an emasculated weakling.

As long as men and women stuck to their traditional roles there was mutual respect as well as love and affection. The mutual respect is gone. The result can only be disaster.

why feminism is fundamentally wrong

In the light of the discussion that my previous post, the myth of moderate feminism, kicked off I feel I should clarify my views on feminism.

Feminism is not like political ideologies such as communism or fascism or even liberalism, all of which are based on ideas that have some merit. Those ideologies do not work in practice but they are not inherently unreasonable. It is possible to engage with such ideologies on rational grounds. Feminism is not like that.

Feminism is based on ideas that are entirely false, mistaken and inherently unworkable and unreasonable. Thinking that it’s possible to engage with feminism in a rational manner is like thinking that it’s possible to engage in a rational manner with Flat Earthers.

Feminism is based on a belief that the differences between men and women are so insignificant that they can, and should, be made to disappear. This is entirely false. The differences between men and women are fundamental and profound. Men and women do not see the world the same way. Male intelligence and female intelligence are different. The emotional differences between the sexes are profound. Women are ruled by their emotions to a much greater degree than men. These are not weaknesses. If men and women stick to their traditional sex roles these differences are assets, not liabilities. 

Men and women differ in their experience of sex and their approach to sex. Men can to a large degree separate sex from emotion. Women in general cannot. For a man a one night stand is about sex. For a woman it is not purely about sex. 

The demands that feminists originally made sounded reasonable, but they were not reasonable because they were based on a complete misunderstanding of both men and women. The demand for equal pay was absurd. Women do not do the same work as men. This is partly because there are jobs that are suitable for men and other jobs that are suitable for women, and women have no desire to do many of the highly paid jobs that men do. Many of these jobs are highly paid because they are dangerous and unpleasant. Women do not want to do jobs that are dangerous and unpleasant.

Women should not receive the same pay as men because it is the duty of men to provide for their wives and children. A man needs to be paid enough to enable him to support a family. This is not the role of women.

Feminist wanted women to have equal access to higher education. Higher education is very expensive and it is not efficient to spend a fortune educating a woman for a profession that she will most probably practise on a part-time basis and with lengthy gaps for child-rearing. Women in general do not require expensive higher education.

A woman’s role is mainly to be a wife and mother. Feminists have managed to devalue these roles, which has been tragic for women.

The feminist demand for an end to the sexual “double standard” was equally wrong-headed. The double standard was there to protect women. Women face more serious consequences from living a promiscuous lifestyle. The idea that those consequences cannot be evaded by means of contraception and abortion is false – the contraceptive pill has severe health consequences and abortion has serious emotional consequences. Promiscuity is harmful for both men and women, but it is more harmful to women. The sexual double standard was simply a recognition of reality.

Feminism is also based on a deep hostility to femaleness. Feminists worship masculinity. They believe that women are worthless unless they turn themselves into pretend men.

Traditional sex roles existed because everyone used to understand that men and women were different. The things that make men happy are not the things that make women happy.

Feminism is an ideology that is based entirely on false premises. There is nothing reasonable about it. It’s wrong all the way through. It’s wrong for women. It has made women angry, dissatisfied and miserable. It needs to be rejected in its entirety.