Women

Our Israeli correspondent MC takes a hard look at the “gender” front of the current Culture Wars that plague the Western World.

Women
by MC

I suppose the most abhorrent thing about Islam is it treatment of women, and in particular, the obsession with so-called ‘modesty’ which places the woman in a black trash bag to hide her from sight.

Being male, I find women attractive, but my social conditioning demands that I approach women within a fairly strict, culturally-based code of conduct. I come from a family of boys, four of them, and my first contact with girls was at the gentle age of 5 when I went to school and discovered that girls were confusing, but the (female) teachers even more so.

Boys played football and girls played netball. Boys did ‘craft’ and girls did knitting. At that point girls were just creatures who wore different clothes, skipped, and did not like swearing, and there was another big secret: apparently their bottoms were ‘different’.

It was also drummed into me that men were always civil and well-mannered to women and girls, and that they were also responsible for the safety of any of the girls in their immediate vicinity.

The 1950’s were a genteel era to grow up in.

I suppose the first thing I learned about Islam was the idea that women always walked behind their husbands/fathers/brothers. This struck me as a bit pathetic.

One thing I had learned in school was that, on average, there were more clever girls than boys, but that the boys were at the extremes. The girls on the whole could do everything that we boys did, and often, did it better — the girls could run faster and jump higher.

That mothers were women made them a vital part of a boy’s life, and respect for Mum meant that one also had an innate respect for all mums. How could a man demean a woman? It was just not logical.

Of course, as I grew up some of the mysteries were revealed, and new ones became apparent. I had my first crush, which I did not really understand; I found the girl attractive, but she found my older brother more attractive and used me as a conduit to him.

Like Popeye the sailor, I was confused…

My mother had wanted a daughter and got four boys instead. Her mother was one of those people who see boys as princes and girls as house-elves. So Mum overcompensated, an easy thing to do as a parent: she put females on a pedestal, a state not at all conducive to future relationships. My mother had also used the emotional blackmail against us that we were responsible for Dad’s next promotion, and that if we misbehaved, the Navy would get to hear about it and dad would be passed over.

At the time we were in Singapore. It was the “Indonesian confrontation” and Dad was one of the few techies who could make the antiquated gunnery radars work. Dad was gazetted for Lieutenant Commander and went for the mandatory medical — he failed; cancer; he had been exposed to too much radiation. I was 14; I was doing well at school, and had friends for the first time in my life. That life evaporated, Dad hung on for nine months; then I was fatherless.

I think bereaved children get a sort of PTSD, a shock and a fear for the future. because Dad was an officer it was assumed that Mum was educated upper middle class, and that family would ‘support’ her (and us). Wrong — she was a Catholic girl from the council estate, one of a family of twelve children.

So we became ‘poor middle class’, neither one thing nor the other.

Into this mix came the feminist revolution. For me, the first sign had been the 1966 Advanced Party report, which changed ‘Boy Scouts’ from an organization for boys to ‘Scouts’, an organization for budding socialist sissies. Slowly we were feminized, no more the wild almost unsupervised adventures, more and more the idea of fully risk-assessed ‘expeditions’. My treasured ‘Sailing Charge’ was revoked, I had to get an external (government recognized) re-qualification which I could not afford — I was de-qualified at the stroke of a bureaucratic pen. I had been sailing and messing about in boats since I was 10. I could swim well; I could row, sail, navigate and read a chart, but suddenly it all counted for naught.

These were the opening shots of the feminista coup, but we did not recognize that at the time.

The feminista did nothing for the girls. The Girl Guides were not reformed and continued to be ‘protected’; they were impossible to work with, they were regulated to such an extent that even the colour of their knickers was specified. There was no ‘liberation’ there.

This was the way things went. Rather than create ‘equality’ by enhancing the lives and opportunities of the girls, the feminists were only interested in attacking the boys and reducing them to wimps.

To me, it is significant that the first point of attack was the Boy Scouts, at a time when a huge percentage of young males came under its influence. It was an autonomous organization with para-military overtones, and a beginner pool for intake of young officers and NCOs into the military. All three armed services sponsored various activities and donated specialist equipment and in return, filled their ranks with the product.

Thus it was a prime target for leftist feminists, and they succeeded: the boys that would have been boys became boys that would be girls. And the girls who would be boys had a field day out. They may have become Scouts, but they never became boys, they just became a burden. No more going behind a friendly tree, loo stops had to be planned in advance. If one puts girls and boys together, they will get up to mischief. Responsible male adult supervision and leadership became fraught with difficulties, and the men left the room.

The attack adumbrated the subsequent de-legitimization of British society, the move to external sovereignty, the dilution with alien cultures; all familiar tactics.

Don’t get me wrong — there is nothing wrong with girls joining in with boyish behaviours, but it would have been better to allow occasional combined activities rather than to feminize the boys’ world. To consolidate their feminist equality claims, ‘Scouts’ were forced to open their doors to girls, which basically totally obliterated the ‘boy’ culture.

Meanwhile the feminista did nothing for the ‘girl’ culture, that was never their intention.

When I was at University in the early 70’s there were two ‘feminist’ movements, one, which was called the Women’s Liberation Workshop, promoted equality before the law and the emancipation of women from traditionally sexist behavior — an admirable cause. Then there were the bra-burners, the ones who were aggressively pushing female superiority by delegitimizing the male, but at the same time aping male behaviour.

I have not heard of the Women’s Lib Workshop since, but the aggressive feminists stole the stage from their somewhat more rational sisters. These particular Feminists should really be called the masculinists, their policy being in the main to reverse the sexual makeup of the establishment, but only for women like themselves: college educated upper middle class female bullies. Real women, and especially married mothers, were of no interest to them.

There are many glass ceilings in this world, but the feminists chose one particular one which just happened to be relevant to upper middleclass college educated women. Strange, that. Women still are underrepresented in executive positions in business, but then so are those without college degrees, including the men.

It is ‘old money’ which is well represented, and one doubts that ‘old money’ females really want to be bothered with boards. Feminists, whilst claiming to represent women, achieved nothing but self-aggrandizement, and did absolutely nothing for those women who really needed help: the single mothers struggling to bring up children, the young girls forced into mutilation of their private parts, the young teenagers kidnapped and forced into unwanted marriages with men old enough to be their fathers or grandfathers. The lonely young girls, abandoned to be groomed and prostituted by rape gangs, the girls murdered because they had a date with a boy not of their parent’s choosing.

The feminists are strangely quiet about the real issues facing females, especially those that might be called girls.

And then there is the contraceptive pill. The pill constitutes an abuse of the female body because it messes around with the natural cycles. We still do not know what the long-term physical effects of the pill will be, but the falling birth rates alone may be terminal to our civilization. The pill puts a girl in charge of her sexuality, but at what age is this appropriate? At what age is a child ready to take responsibility for the risks presented by sexual activity even though the risk of unwanted pregnancy is removed? Are pre-teens emotionally mature enough to say ‘No’? That is, what eleven-year-old on the pill cannot be groomed? The pill is not a maintenance-free install-and-forget option. Behind the hormones is a vulnerable child who needs the protection (and supervision) of a loving family and a society that actually hears her cries for help.

To put a woman in charge of her sexuality is also to remove responsibility from the male, so when the accidents happen, whose fault is it? Who picks up the (very expensive) bill? Or do we pressure the mother to just murder the foetus and live with the guilt for the rest of her life?

In all things there is a physical dimension and a spiritual dimension. Women feel the spiritual more than most males, and it can come out as feelings of guilt.

Women, it seems, can be a girl’s best friend worst enemy. I have always found that women are very hard, even cruel, to each other, with high expectations of other females that they do not necessarily hold for the male equivalents. This is of course a sweeping generalization, but then we are in an age where the sweeping generalization has become fashionable. It is not men who have undermined motherhood. It is not men who have demanded to know why my wife, mother of my four children, has not got a job. It is not men who have debased motherhood.

From the days when I commanded an age in single digits, I remember a particular episode of “I Love Lucy” (or it may have been “I Married Joan”) where the wife in question managed to get a whole new kitchen on the strength of a problem with a broken cupboard doorknob.

That, of course was in the olden days when food was actually prepared in the kitchen. What stayed with me was the idea of a marriage ‘battle’ instead of a marriage consensus. Marriage should be teamwork between congruent and compatible people; it is not her kitchen, but their kitchen. Is motherhood a form of slavery? If it is, then so is Fatherhood — that is, being a wage slave. But In Islam, marriage is always a condemnation to slavery. This is not unique to Islam; other religions and traditions do the same, but never to my knowledge in such a barbarous way. In Islam the husband owns his wife; in Christianity he is responsible for her and must love her as Christ loves the church*. These doctrines are many miles apart

There is no equality for Muslim women, but there is no congruency either. Men and women can never be ‘equal’ before the law, since they are different. However they can be congruent (where the angles are the same but the size is different). Our societies desperately need women to have babies, but at the same time we penalize motherhood heavily. The financial penalties of motherhood are enormous, and few families can now survive on a single income, plus the loss of tax thresholds, child tax allowances etc. Let alone the psychological trauma of childbirth itself and the ensuing loneliness of mothers stuck at home with no support. Gone are the days of societies geared to the non-working mum.

Modern life for real women is chaotic, and for the working mother it is living hell. Even the loos and the locker rooms are becoming un-private and unsafe. We live in a society where boys will be girls and girls might try to be boys, but it does not really work. We desperately need girls to become mothers, but the average girl child must look at her mother and think, “That is not for me.” It is not an attractive picture.

We need to stop the persecution of mothers by coercing them into the workplace. If we do not, then the Islamic model of subhuman brood mares womanhood will eventually win!

* Ephesians 5 v. 25

MC lives in the southern Israeli city of Sderot. For his previous essays, see the MC Archives.

26 thoughts on “Women

  1. I think bereaved children get a sort of PTSD

    Not a ‘sort of’ PTSD’ at all. It is THE most devastating thing that can happen to a child, especially for a boy to lose his dad, a girl her mum. They’re both hard, but as usual it divides along those lines. Get your ACEs score, MC (ACEs being Adverse Childhood Experiences), right here:

    https://acestoohigh.com/got-your-ace-score/

    Importantly, they also mention resilience in children and how to promote it.

    I was on the pill for two years many many years ago. I happened to move and change docs; the second one took me off the pill immediately. He said smoking and the pills were a lethal combo. I finally beat the cigarettes many years later but I think the pill was a partial cause of my eventual breast cancer some years later. No one in my family has cancer: we all have vascular problems.

    That collaboration on ACEs between Permanente and the CDC is the largest undertaking of its kind.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Permanente
    http://www.cdc.gov/

    I’ve been advocating for people to understand the genesis of adult health problems in the stresses of childhood ever since I began studying the research by a Dutch pediatric psychiatrist who specialized in the physical changes that could be observed in traumatized children.

    Now the other two groups have banded together to study a much wider population of adults and work their way back from heart disease, diabetes, auto-immune disorders all the way to childhood crises. They’ve put out a five minute video:

    https://acestoohigh.com/2016/04/05/five-minute-video-primer-about-adverse-childhood-experiences-study/

    I know my fibromyalgia is an over-arching diagnosis that takes in the other limits I face. It’s no longer considered “psychosomatic” or “empty nest syndrome” but a real brain disorder that affects the neurohormones that control our perception of pain.

    Fibro is mostly a “woman’s disease”. Only 25% of patients are men. An endocrinologist in California whose practice is devoted solely to FM thinks that when they find its genesis it will be on one of the X chromosomes. One fellow I knew that developed it some years ago had it so badly that he could no longer lift the weapon that was part of his job. And a basketball coach had to give up his work: couldn’t run up and down the court – but fought it until they carried him off the floor.

    My favorite story about boys and girls: the future Baron was homeschooled in his early years. We’d made friends with another family who homeschooled and I took the fB over there to visit with the kids while I was at work. When we showed up, it was a day off school for local kids and a few new girls had come over to play. The fB was excited to meet some new people…but when I picked him up in the afternoon he got into the car very glum -unusual for him. I asked him how the day went and he explained that the girls had organized a play and assigned roles to each person. “So how did it go?” I asked. To which he replied, most memorably, “girls in groups are scum!” This from a normally cheerful kid.

    I told him that in my limited experience he was right: one-on-one, girls are fun. Get them in a group and it’s hell, whether you’re a boy or a girl…imho. It may be the same for boys; I never had much experience there…

    Feminists are creepy. They had a wonderful opportunity to help poor women get more equitable treatment in the workplace. But they blew their opportunity by trying to imitate ambitious men instead, and then complained…and complained…and complained. Most of the divorces in the 70s were initiated by women and it destroyed a lot of children’s lives. Those lies about “divorce is better for children if parents fight” was so much froth. Children are better off with two parents.

    See Christina Hoff Sommers’ excellent work. From the wiki:

    Sommers’ positions and writing have been characterized by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as equity feminism, a classical-liberal or libertarian feminist perspective which suggests that the main political role of feminism is to ensure the right against coercive interference is not infringed.[4] Sommers has herself contrasted equity feminism with victim feminism[5] and gender feminism,[5][6] arguing that modern feminist thought often contains an “irrational hostility to men” and possesses an “inability to take seriously the possibility that the sexes are equal but different”.[5]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Hoff_Sommers

    Israel seems to have done a good job on integrating male/female work assignments. I hope you’ll address that.

    • My favorite story about boys and girls: the future Baron was homeschooled in his early years. We’d made friends with another family The fB was so, so right, “girls in groups are scum!” I hated them in my youth and hate them now – bunch of narrow minded, opinionated, bossy brats actually.

      Furthermore the problem with girls is that there are only two types, those that like you and those that hate you. Boys are so much easier, and nicer – believe me as a female I know.

  2. according to our neurologist, fibromyalgia may be related to an endocrine or oestrogen hormone deficiency. makes sense, the nerves that control the muscles no longer respond properly and the muscles contract around the muscle cells causing a feedback loop of pain. been studying in our home lab for going on three years.

      • I have been conducting some rather amateurish case studies while being ‘mentored’ by my two sisters-in-law, one is an RN and the other a health consultant. My initial conclusions would indicate an accumulation of toxins that the body as it ages no longer has the ability to flush out as it did when it was younger. Endocrine imbalance, along with high blood pressure runs in the family. Couple that with repetitive motion syndrome (RMS, you heard it here first, maybe) as the result of being a teacher for 30+ years, and you have a near textbook case for the ills she is working to recover from.
        In the same vein of tobacco use (divinely healed after 15+years), alcohol use (likewise but not willingly) the additives put into processed food, sodium, and the pesticides that find their way into vegetables, make a rather good case for organic diets and substance-free living so as to avoid the vicissitudes common to those of us who are over 60, or even 50. Though you may be hard put to resist the peer pressure, as with any other investment, the payoff later in life that would include little, if any, medical expenses would be quite worthwhile.
        Just a thought as I ask the Lord to heal you as He has been doing for my wife’s maladies.

      • Over 40 yrs. ago, after I gave birth to a Down Syndrome baby,
        with no glaring genetic reason amongst my ancestors; it was
        presented by some researchers at the time that the ways that
        “medical science” was meddling & messing about with our
        hormones (via birth control pills, etc.) we were now getting
        some misfires that resembled older forms of retardation in
        our gene pool.

        Of course, that theory fell down the old memory hole in
        favor of just aborting the “offending” blob of “tissue” via
        the “modern miracle” of abortion.

    • When I first got to Israel I was suprised to see little girls walking to school unsupervised, this was something that had been absent from UK for at least 20 years.

      I do not like the way that some girls are dressed in black skirts, and there are some ‘modesty’ hangups, but some of the young things are very very obviously feminine.

      In law females have equality, and also equality of opportunity, and it is enforced, what we do not have is micro aggression stupidity and mixed gender facilities; there is no talk that I know of more than two genders.

      Yes there are tensions, some of them religious, we tend not to have the same tolerance of LBGT ‘victim culture’. Maybe that is why we violate so many imaginary human rights……

      There are many ‘Paypals’ in the world with double standards; the hypocrisy that patronizes Islamic barbarism whilst being offended by North Carolina’s democracy is just gross.

  3. You are so, so right about Israel’s good job on integrating male and female work assignments. I once heard someone say that at Orthodox events the speakers are all men, those honored tend to be men, etc., etc. BUT everyone knows it was women who planned the entire event, made all the arrangements and decisions, etc., etc. That goes for just about everything in the Jewish world – the women really are the power behind the throne. It seems fair to me – who needs to be praised and honored when you have the honor, and it seems the opportunity, to make all the decisions and arrangements.

  4. Birth does not have to be traumatic at all. I’ve had mine two months ago, did hypnobirthing, and despite the NHS doing their damnedest to make it an unpleasant experience (really going for a home birth next time round…), it was short and sweet and (almost) painless

    Little one shot out like a fish.

    Do hypnobirthing.

  5. Well, I believe that women tend to talk differently and they use different tactics like gossip and lies and emotional blackmail every so often – that if you get a boy under the influence of “crazy mother” – she will destroy his confidence and his masculinity with it. Don’t take me wrong, I do not want to attack women – but I have seen it so often that I came to believe that there really is a thing called “man’s word” – that is – yes is yes, and no is no… I don’t know why, but it is very hard to find a girl or a woman that would talk clearly and truthfully – like a stereotypical “real man” from old books.

    Now there is the same problem with men – no doubt about it. But women – maybe because they are physically “weaker” – tend to play the emotional/irrational card more often then men. And that is one thing which, if not adressed clearly before the young boys, creates a lot of confusion.

    And so it happens that emotional arguments are the tune of the day today – and real rational arguments, like the use of real force – are downplayed. It would be ok were the world a good place to live – but the world is savage. And feminized western society is still waiting for a disaster. When the [excrement impacts the circulation device] – only real masculine force will count – be it from girls or boys…

    And that is,, IMHO, the true tragedy of feminism: Trying to say that women are as well equipped for combat as men – is an outright lie, and Angelina Jolie or Demi Moore or any other super-heroine won’t change a thing about it! It is a dangerous lie. And it gives muslim men the upper hand.

    • Yes, while men are more prone to physical aggression, women are more prone to social aggression. And the social aggression is usually not sufficient to constitute a crime, so it tends to get employed much more often. (An example of criminal level social aggression would be filing a false police report such as a false rape accusation or similar. So yes, social aggression can rise to the level of criminality. Unfortunately I don’t know how seriously this type of crime gets prosecuted so it probably happens more often than it should. Prosecution will be more difficult because it is difficult to untangle a bunch of lies for a jury.)

      This is something that needs much more study and awareness but it doesn’t get much study, probably due to the zero-sum gender warfare mentality that pervades academia.

      • A corollary to all this is a disparate willingness to order deadly force when given the opportunity. Many years ago there was a study that put different subjects in a “war room” simulation, and gave them tactical scenarios that tested their war-related thinking. One of the options allowed them was to use “the button”, an escalation to nuclear weapons, in order to get out of a tactical bind.

        It was found that women were much more likely to push the button than men. Men have generally had more experience with physical conflict (and possess more instinctive responses evolved to handle it), so they are subliminally aware of the long-term dangers of escalating an encounter to a higher level. Their general tendency is to use as much force as required to prevail, but not more, and to be cautious about over-responding. Women, on the other hand, when presented with an apocalyptically effective option to overcome their weaker status, are more likely to take that opportunity without fully assessing the possible consequences.

        This is something we should all bear in mind starting January 2017, during the Rodham presidency.

        • I guess Frank Herbert wasn’t being too unrealistic with some of his writing:

          “The Honored Matres rule through sexual enslavement, sheer physical power, and the terror inspired by their draconian methods. They are completely without mercy and quick to anger, often resorting to extreme measures of violence in the face of the slightest provocations.”
          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honored_Matres

          Note that the Honored Matres didn’t appear in his writing until after the 70s. The more tame but still Machiavellian order of weird nuns, the Bene Geserit, he came up with in the 60s.

          And to think I read all this stuff in middle school.

          • I was a bit older, Nimrod, but maybe it’s time for a revisit (though I recall Herbert as being a bit pompous). The arab/muslim attitudes on the desert planet “Dune” ring a bell.

          • Well, I may have read it in middle school but I can’t say I really understood it back then. I should probably read the books again.

        • A friend who was a police officer in New Orleans told me of a study he participated in collating data for a study of the relative frequency of the use of firearms in felony-level arrests by male vs female police officers, adjusted to compare officers with equal time on the force.

          Felony-level arrests were then generally described as those where the arrestee was suspected by the officer of having committed a felony crime, where a warrant for felony had been issued, or where the arrestee had attacked the arresting officer.

          The study found that female officers were approx. 40% more likely to draw or fire their sidearm during the course of such arrests than were their male counterparts.

          This experience was from New Orleans in the mid-1980s, but there should be more recent studies / observations, unless suppressed, as this study was, to avoid negative reflections on the female officers on the force at that time.

          My friend attributed it to the female officers being smaller than some of the large to very large people they were required to arrest, and when faced with the loss of the confrontation, and the physical consequences for the officer, necessitated for them the use of deadly force.

          New Orleans at that time was an exceptionally violent city, though, as now, much of the violence was in the poor and or minority areas, and mostly associated with the drugs trade.

          John in Indy

    • “… if you get a boy under the influence of “crazy mother” – she will destroy his confidence and his masculinity with it.”

      I’ve seen it. In high school I volunteered at a preschool in order to put in some community service for Scouts. I generally like little kids and it’s neat how they quickly become their own little people. One little boy had an overbearing, fawning mother who was doing him no good growing from boy to man. I clearly remember one afternoon at the time that parents were arriving to pick up their kids and this little boy was running and he fell and got a little scrape. He was in the process of getting up and dusting himself off like it was nothing and he looked up and his mom was standing there – and then the water works started. I keep thinking back to Joanne Woodward’s line in Sybil, “What did that monster do to you?”

  6. Can you imagine the terrible Darwinian survival disadvantages of Islam–if it, hypothetically, had been the belief system–in our pre-historic savanna-living ancestors?

    Then, during these distant pasts, we had to cherish and protect the women fiercely, as her child needed years to mature into self-sufficiency, she probably couldn’t hunt herself efficiently, and she was barely anatomically capable of non-lethal childbirth because of h.sapiens head/pelvis size. There was, therefore, either love and protection of women or extinction of the species. Take your pick. Islam would have been cancelled by low survival rates after a few generations. This tells us that it is fundamentally wrong to hold such dysfunctional Muslim tenets….or we would not exist.

    Even now, I wonder about their survival. I bet their peri-natal death rates and infant death rates are very high and theit obstetrical mortality must be astronomical. High fertility rates are always associated with these childhood mortality statistics, so their overall fertility rates keep up, way above 2.0. [Mothers want lots of kids if each has such a poor chance of growing up. See India.]

    • Not to mention that raping 9 year old girls is likely to cause reproductive system damage and sterility. Even Stone Age “savages” can figure out that this is a bad idea for survival, yet for some reason Allah and Mohammad couldn’t seem to do so.

    • Islam’s programming to overcome the challenges you identify includes polygamy and over breeding.

  7. As a professional swindler of the young–oops, high school social studies teacher–I have discovered that while even as a gimpy old man with a bad back I can still get two burly males to de-escalate and back away from a physical fight, it’s best to call security immediately when two skinny girls go at each other.

    • In junior high we had a shop teacher, an old guy, and if someone was getting out of line he would throw a tennis ball at them. Nailed them on the head every time. Then he would make the one who was misbehaving bring him back his ball. Of course, back in the 70′ not too many girls in shop class.

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