Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

There is a lot of talk about Toxic Masculinity. No one ever talks about Toxic Femininity. Though every woman who is a functional human being knows about it, as does anyone who has ever lived or worked in a predominantly female environment.

So, why does no one talk about it? Well, mostly because the left believes that “designated victims”™ are sacred and must never be called on their own bullshit, no matter how smelly. Hence also the bizarre idea of racial “privilege” that tells you holocaust survivors should be attacked for “white privilege” but the Obama girls raised as the creme de la creme, and never facing a day of privation in their lives don’t have any privilege and are victims.

But there’s also other stuff going into it. To an extent—to the extent that historically for biological reasons men dominated public life—the fact that no one talks about the bad side of female modes of being in society is the result of patriarchy.

Men are ridiculously, idiotically, insanely blinkered about women. They don’t really see women as they see other men, but through rosy glasses as much better than men. The “oh so smart” former president with the depth of a rain puddle in Colorado told us that women are so much better than men and that the world would be better under women. Which means he’s basically a bog standard male who has never given the matter a thought, and is going on what “everybody knows.” (It occurs to me this man, if he’d been born to an ultra conservative Arab family in one of the ultra conservative Muslim countries would also be telling us that women’s hair emits seductive rays. He’s a suit that speaks. Or an empty chair, if you prefer.)

Of course it is right evolutionarilly that men should feel that way about women. It keeps the species going. It is also bizarre though, and leaves men curiously defenseless now that women view themselves as an aggrieved class and are trying to take over public life and exclude men.

In fact it leaves as the only defense in society that most women—even the feminists who pretend otherwise—unless completely and extensively broken and indoctrinated know what other women are and therefore will not trust any of them. As they shouldn’t. I can’t imagine a worst hell than what Obama is proposing.

To lay my own biases on the table, in the family it was normal for both my mother and grandmother to talk about men as if they were somewhat daft children in large bodies, and yet endearing. At the same time, men would laugh at women’s notions of what was important and what was noteworthy. As a child, I saw both sides.

My feeling about it was this: there are things at which men are superior. There are things at which women are superior. Both will look like idiots to the other when outside their domain.

But in a society in which tasks were strictly divided by sex this was not a big deal. Women and men competed only against others with the same social modality. Note, I did not say this was a better way to organize things. Hell, given contraceptives and medical science it might not be possible now, absent total culture destruction.

That’s not the society we have anyway. And the disparate abilities of men and women make them naturally regard the other as an idiot. But only women, due to the Marxist social bias of ALL our cultures in the west, are allowed to complain and voice the problems with the other sex’s way of behaving.

Only women are allowed to talk about a toxic way of being and say it should be eliminated from society.

Worse, women are better at seeing the defects in men more clearly than men see the defects in women.

So, the problem is this: right now, men, due to their illusions about women are curiously defenseless against women in public spaces. As a result, and in many ways masculinity itself is being exterminated.

First, before I go into this, let us establish that like every other possible human trait, masculinity and femininity are on a continuum. There are men who act more like women than women themselves in the social sphere (and btw, through having had to work with them, they are the most toxically feminine of all. And no, I’m not calling them gay. I have gay friends who are intensely masculine, and most gay men are men. In fact the most toxically “feminine” men I know in social style are straight and act masculine. They just don’t present masculine in social style. But once I describe the primary mode of female society, you’ll probably come up with half a dozen of them from your own experience.) And there are women—particularly those not neuro typical—who act more like men in the social sphere. Which means they couldn’t take a social clue if you hit them with it and put nails in. And they grow to hate and despise the subtle hints and rumor mills of female social groups. (Why, yes, I do have a mirror. Though I’m not so far gone I can’t see normalcy from here.)

So, with that in mind, and the understanding that archetypes only exist as abstractions and that statistics don’t describe any human being who lives in the real world, let’s talk about “the female mode of making society hell.”

We don’t need to talk about the male mode of making society hell. Or perhaps we do, since little boys are no longer allowed to be little boys, and you might never have seen the natural man in his natural state.

When I first entered elementary school we had two one-room schoolhouses side by side, one for girls and one for boys.

I remember looking over the fence at the boy’s play yard and giving silent thanks I wasn’t a boy. Because while I fought when I absolutely had to, all boys did was fighting and pounding on each other and acting like lunatics. Girls don’t do that. Boys don’t do that now either. They can’t physically fight for dominance. And that, in the end creates toxic masculinity. The raw masculine creature is physically aggressive, tries to establish dominance that way, and tries to get what he wants that way.

If males never learn to control their impulses—say by not being allowed to be physical at all as children, and the curbed appropriately—they grow into toxic males, who will try to bend people to their will with their superior masculine strength.

The beginning of civilization was when the first man instead of pummeling another man into the ground with his club chose to hit him only once, establish dominance, and then make a pact of friendship. You find something like that in almost every early saga of humanity.

You never find that among women. Women don’t fight for dominance and then become best friends. Because that’s not how female dominance works.

Look, we’re weaker—again on average—smaller, and couldn’t win a fair fight with any man. Which makes us more ruthless, more merciless and not at all fair. Or really physical.

You could say in many ways the female mode of being is civilization. Because it looks that way from the outside. But it’s not. Not if you allow females to compete with males and to take over all the institutions of society from science to politics AND YOU DON’T TEACH THEM TO CURB THEIR INSTINCTS.

So, let’s look at toxic femininity. In recent life it’s mostly been on stage in, I THINK the first Democrat debate, when Kamala Harris took off after Joe Biden.

Look, I don’t care more for those two than for a bucket of warm spit. BUT if you look at that debate, when she attacked him (and briefly bolstered her repulsive self) you can see Joe Biden’s surprised shock. Here is a woman he’s been friendly with, a woman he helped, who suddenly comes after him on personal grounds. This is something no male in the same circumstances would ever do. But toxic women give no quarter, seize every opportunity, will take advantage of every weakness, and don’t care if you helped them in the past.

You see, if you go back to what women and men did in the distant past before agriculture, the past that still shapes us because evolution is very slow, you’ll find that men hunted in groups, where the hierarchy must be absolutely clear, because you have to know who is giving orders, in a group that must coordinate their actions and might all die if they don’t. Also you must be sure that the best/strongest/most agile man is in charge.

Hence males continuous testing “contests” with each other, but also the acceptance of the hierarchy thus established, once it’s established.

While women also have hierarchies (after all, the alpha female raises more kids) it’s more subtle. Females, you see, gathered. They also watched kids at the same time. Your goal is to be able to gather the most food, while losing none of your toddlers who wandered off and didn’t get watched.

Women try to have cohesive groups that from the outside appear to be smooth and loving because they are cohesive and do communal work (a lot).

Women’s work is traditionally safe, boring, social, and capable of being interrupted by kids.

This means the best of these groups is one that’s fairly homogeneous and minimizes personality conflicts.

This is usually accomplished by alpha females by enforcing a stultifying conformity and destroying the social credit (and sometimes the mind) of any woman who steps out of line or is just too weird.

In the primitive tribe this was best, because if all the women were more or less the same, they all watched every other woman’s kids, and more kids survived.

Unfortunately, as with men, there is always a contest of wills to see who will be the alpha female who keeps the other ones in line and apparent comity. And the alpha female has to be fairly ruthless at rooting out threats to her authority.

This usually boils down to “having something” on every woman in the group or making it up if she doesn’t. And being ruthless at using anything she has to pull other women back into line. When she loses that game, her reign is over and she becomes just another of the lumpen masses to be kept in line by the new alpha female.

While this form of being social works pretty well in extended families (which is all the earliest human groups were) with the matriarch keeping charge till she can’t hold it together anymore, and the other women—and often the new incoming women were kidnapped or traded from other tribes so had to learn the way of this one—being kept in line by her, it works like heck in the modern world of offices, laboratories and factories. Not to mention universities.

And because our society insists on being blind to the existence, let alone the dangerous side of female aggression, it destroys any possibility of accomplishment or excellence and in general makes the wheels come off whatever endeavor it is where women become ascendant.

Look, what I described above: any exclusively female, dominant female or female directed portion of society is a crab bucket.

Arguably, absent a toxic female lead, this is not bad for a large family group, within its very limited functions.

It sucks for a society, though.

You know when people wail that girls get discouraged from math or whatever? And feminists attribute that to patriarchy? They couldn’t be more wrong. The people who tell women that liking math or science of wanting to be one of those weirdos who are passionately interested in building things is ridiculous or funny or whatever? Females. Usually same age group females. If you want to encourage girls to excel in science take them out of schools who group by age. Older women can intellectually encourage Odd females. But the same-age groups can’t. Instinctively the different is just “Wrong” and they want conformity. (And yes, females who love math and science are very often Odd. Not because women aren’t smart enough for those subjects, but because they’re BETTER at language processing and thus tend to prefer doing that.)

The problem with not admitting that women in a group default to the crab bucket, trying above all to keep each other in conformity is that this mode is allowed to go into places it should never go: into offices where women play office politics and rumor games to keep everyone in the same median mediocrity.

The personality games can get—often get—so toxic that what they’re actually supposed to do is forgotten in the “I need to take this challenger down now.”

Look, men had to curb the male mode of dominance to function well in groups. Sure, they established it in many ways, instead of having a good punch up (though from what I understand from books written in earlier parts of the 20th century, those might happen too, out of sight) including the inevitable braggadocio about girls. But most of all they were curbed by teaching men the “gentlemanly virtues.” You know, don’t take advantage just because you can. Obey legitimate authority. Concentrate on doing your part, rather than using your power to overcome everyone else. That sort of thing.

Note these virtues are not universal. They’re almost exclusively Western. Other societies dealt with dominance in other ways, including religiously or traditionally determined hierarchies. But for the West, the “gentlemanly virtues” worked.

We’re no longer really teaching them to men. And that’s a problem.

BUT WE NEVER TAUGHT THEM TO WOMEN.

Why?

Well, because women in the public sphere were rare enough that most of them learned them by osmosis from the males around them. And when they didn’t, they were usually ineffective enough, back when there was an actual patriarchy. Even if men are blind to female aggression, it not being physical, even men can see it when it’s blatant and in your face. And then they decide this one woman is a monster and all turn against her.

Women are now in public life. Given the nature of work today, there’s no real reason they shouldn’t be.

But unless you want society to come apart in a sea of crab buckets, each pulling the other down, and for men to be run from society by feral, toxic females, we must start training women to be civilized. Teach them to be “gentlemen.” Teach them to be aware of their impulses, where they come from and what the consequences are. Teach them to work in hierarchical groups without continuously testing for dominance. Teach them to compete without undermining. Teach them not to take advantage just because they can. Teach them to value the mission. Teach them not to be tattle tales and rumor mongers.

Daddy’s little princess is all well and good when all she’s going to do is eventually be the matriarch of her family.

When she might be the leader of a country, or the scientist in charge of a project, though, she must learn to pull in harness and not to try to change directions for her own personal advantage, rather than the stated goal.

And she must never, ever, ever be told that she is naturally perfect, with no flaw or bad impulse, and that society would be perfect if only she ruled it. That’s feeding the monster of toxic masculinity. Teaching her every man is against her adds paranoia to the mix, which means males must be destroyed FIRST before she beats every other woman into submission with psychological games.

The way we’re raising women is a good way to create monsters who unmake society and end up—if surveys can be trusted (I’m agnostic)—unhappy, resentful and envious.

If you’re raising your daughter for the harem, go ahead. Tell her she’s the most wonderful thing in the world and all little girls are made of sugar and spice with no flaws.

If you’re raising your daughter to have any power in society, teach her to use her natural power wisely and in the service of building civilization.

Or we’ll all pay, and then something will arise that raises all daughters for the harem.

 

Reprinted from According to Hoyt for December 18, 2019