Sunday, August 30, 2009

On women



In his chapter “On Women” of the very brilliant collection published in English as Essays and Aphorisms, Schopenhauer wrote the most insightful thoughts about women I have ever read, of which I’ll quote some sentences (no ellipsis added between excerpts):

1

Women are suited to being the nurses and teachers of our earliest childhood precisely because they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted, in a word big children, their whole lives long: a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the man, who is the actual human being, “man”.

In the girl nature has had in view what could in theatrical terms be called a stage-effect: it has provided her with superabundant beauty and charm for a few years at the expense of the whole remainder of her life, so that during these years she may so capture the imagination of a man that he is carried away into undertaking to support her honorably in some form or another for the rest of his life, a step he would seem hardly likely to take for purely rational considerations. Thus nature has equipped women, as it has all its creatures, with the tools and weapons she needs for securing her existence, and at just the time she needs them; in doing which nature has acted with its usual economy.

2

The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and more slowly does it mature. The man attains the maturity of his reasoning powers and spiritual faculties hardly before his twenty-eight year; the woman with her eighteenth. And even then it is only reasoning power of a sort: a very limited sort. Thus women never see anything but what is closest to them. To consult women when you are in difficulties, as the ancient Teutons did, is by no means a bad idea: for their way of looking at things is quite different from ours, especially in their propensity for keeping in view the shortest road to a desired goal and in general what lies closest to hand, which we usually overlook precisely because it is right in front of our noses.

It is for this reason too that women display more pity, and consequently more philanthropy and sympathy with the unfortunate, than men do. Thus, while they possess the first and chief virtue [compassion], they are deficient in the secondary one which is often necessary for achieving the first.

3

Fundamentally, women exist solely for the propagation of the race. Men are by nature indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies. Because in our case a hundred different considerations are involved, while in theirs only one is decisive, namely which man they have succeeded in attracting. Another reason may be that, because they are all in the same profession, they all stand much closer to one another than men do.

Man strives for a direct domination over things, either by comprehending or by subduing them. But women is everywhere and always relegated to a merely indirect domination, which is achieved by means of man, who is consequently the only thing she has to dominate directly. Thus it lies in the nature of women to regard everything simply as a means of capturing a man, and their interest in anything else is only simulated, is no more than a detour, i.e., amounts to coquetry and mimicry.

Nor can one expect anything else from women if one considers that the most eminent heads of the entire sex have provided incapable of a single truly great, genuine and original achievement in art, or indeed of creating anything at all of lasting value. What there ought to be is housewives and girls who hope to become housewives and who are therefore educated, not in arrogant haughtiness, but in domesticity and submissiveness.

- end of “On Women” excerpts -


Schopenhauer’s chapter boggled my mind when I read it back in 1992. Here we had a 19th century philosopher that, unlike the coward men of my world, told the naked truth about the fair sex; and I would like to expand his crude, albeit realistic views to its ultimate consequences, especially from my present viewpoint of this most darkest hour for what I treasure the most: Nordish women.

The first weapon of mass destruction against our civilization has been the ideology of anti-white racism. Along with it comes feminism: the other fatal weapon for the West and the inexorable dwarfing of the white people.

Let me indulge in a little fantasy for a minute, “If I ran the zoo...”

If I were dictator of the West, I thought in my daily peripatetic walk in my town, I’d reverse feminism back to Victorian and pre-Victorian ages (yes: I’m a fan of Jane Austen). The reversal would be brutal and swift: but the psychological plan in my racial dictatorship would be to gradually “liberate” women not beyond the values of, say, America in the 1940s and 50s. All of this would be pure Machiavellianism of course: to convey angry women the misleading message that the “liberal” wing in my dictatorship overcame an idealized Austen-like world when, in fact, the ultimate goal would have been from the beginning to fix forever Western society’s sex roles in about the 1940s and 50s.

Arthur C. Clarke wrote The City and the Stars in 1956. The Machiavellian psychologists and social engineers who created the mega-city Diaspar discussed the Utopia blueprints for centuries before elaborating a closed society (yes: Popper was wrong!) albeit a rather stable culture for whites, which in the novel lasts a billion years.

Although Arthur Clarke was an incorregible liberal who took feminism for granted, it’s a highly recommended novel along with its almost identical precursor, Clarke’s 1953 Against the Fall of Night. But if the westerners finally make it after the race wars it will be obvious that Clarke was wrong: technology was not the ultimately axis of cultural transformation but psychogenic development with the corresponding reversal of the suicidal “women’s rights” movement. Feminism may not be the subject-matter of Michael O’Meara’s Toward the White Republic, just released this week. But its first chapters are worth reading to grasp how psychogenic emergency about one’s own ethnic group could be the transforming factor in the forthcoming future, a future that I still envision like some of Clarke’s best novels.


Postscript of 20 September 2010




Stags sometimes sustain smashed antlers or broken legs, or are blinded in one eye in their lust to win the female; fatal injuries are not unknown.





The target-audience for this entry are obviously the males. However, in order to understand women, the subject-matter of this post, we must first understand the biological basis of our lust to win the favor of one of these beautiful specimens. Just as Schopenhauer spoke out the naked truth about women, so naked that no woman will ever accept it, in this postscript I will quote zoologist John Sparks, the producer of the 1996 TV series Battle of the Sexes in the Animal World.

Sparks’ brutal honesty shocked me. It turns out that we males are, quite literally, driven by our gonads (cf. “the sperm and its slave” way below). Thanks to the attraction toward young nymphs, what I have called the crown of evolution, our unattainable goal is to fill the world with duplicates of us. In the introduction to his book, Sparks wrote:

* * *


Every living creature has an overwhelming urge to breed. This is not simply a trivial expression of bestial lust, but a fundamental characteristic of life, the fulfilment of which determines whether an animal is a success or a failure. The nature of sex is widely misunderstood, a matter which this book [Battle of the Sexes, BBC Worldwide, 1999] will attempt to rectify.

Animals of every kind strive to ensure the survival of as many of their genes as possible. Sex specifically demands very public behaviour among many species. With an almost unlimited supply of sperm at their disposal, [the males’] best reproductive strategy is to mate with as many females as possible; each of which will provide them with offspring. From the male’s perspective, there are never enough females to go around [My note: this strategy doesn’t work with humans. See, e.g., my entry on Abraham & Casanova]. Competition between the lusty males is therefore intense. However, in species in which males have opted for dedicated monogamy the females are usually the larger sex; in some cases, the males are miniaturized. Charles Darwin was aware of degenerate males.

Suicidal sex

For most kinds of animals, no matter what tactics the males employ to further their sexual aspirations, it is the females which determine the winners. This is because—as we shall see in the next chapter—it is they which do the choosing.

Remarkable strategies have evolved which illustrate the extremes to which males will go to give their own sperm the best chance of reaching the eggs first. In Australia, male red-tailed phascogales—small, squirrel-like carnivores—burn themselves out in an all-or-nothing quest for fatherhood. These endearing little marsupials [are] so intent on finding as many targets as possible for their precious sperm that they have no time to feed during their week of frenzied sexual activity. While the freshly impregnated females retire to their nests, the knackered males rapidly succumb to a combination of infections, failed livers, gut ulcers, extensive hemorrhages and extreme weight loss. Not one adult male survives. But 50 per cent of the females’ babies will be males and by the following spring they will be mature enough to enter the same lethal sexual arena.

One battle over, another looms

The egg is now fertilized—in a split second, a new life has been initiated. This has been achieved against astronomical odds. Both the sperm and its slave, the male body which produced it [my emphasis] and propelled it into the female’s tract, have had to be supreme players in the most rigorous and demanding contest on earth—survival. The male has relied on countless brawling ancestors, themselves winners endowed with the skills needed to overcome both physical dangers and cut-throat competition from rivals. His sperm has passed the female’s demanding tests for quality control. Of the billions that started the race, many were deformed, most simply got lost or died of exhaustion. Of the few that lashed their way to the egg, only one was victorious.

Although it takes place on a microscopic scale, this is the key event over which the sexes have been striving to exert control.

* * *


My comment:

From the zoological viewpoint it is worth noting that, unlike the birds, in our species a male can force a female to copulate. In fact, among the primates rapes are pretty common, especially among orang-utans and chimpanzees.

On the other hand, while it is true that from the fruit fly to the elephants the females choose the male or the males, at least in my case I declined marriage proposals from several Mexican ladies throughout my life. They were honourable ladies, yes: but not “beautiful nymphs.”

What a predicament it is not to live in a little whiter nation...

9 comments:

Chechar said...

To believe in the West is to believe in the defeat of feminism. We must not say, “There’s no support for your little Gedankenexperiment, Chechar, don’t masturbate with daydreams like this.”

No. We make a point by fantasizing about the possible cure. By pointing to draconian measures we persuade people of the gravity of the problem. A thought experiment might persuade them to understand the liberal weapon of mass destruction called “feminism.” After the forthcoming collapse of civilization, only such measures will make Western survival possible.

Jane said...

Not that I care what cranky old Schopenhauer thought, but he also said this:

"I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man."

Of course a woman (or man) does not have to rise above the mass to contribute something of value. In my US working class family some women are homemakers and some work outside the home. There is no conflict between the two.

I don't think that Alice Miller, a woman I share your great admiration for, would agree that (non-manhating) equity feminism must be defeated. Just out of curiosity, how do you reconcile your esteem for her with the fact that she was a Jew? She'd probably have an interesting analysis of your hostility to women.

The misogyny of men like Schopenhauer was itself a catalyst for feminism. I don't think you're going to have much luck in luring women back up on that rickety pedestal, at least not in the US. There's a reason they call it an equalizer.

In any event, while I am proudly Eurocentric, I have no interest in returning to the 19th century. People like you and Lawrence Auster are simply too extreme and reactionary. You'd be more successful, as Tom Sunic suggested, in drawing educated white women to your cause by appealing to their disgust at third worlders' misogyny and the fact that western women's rights have been shunted aside in favor of appeasing Muslims.

Then again, perhaps that's not a priority. Dream on, then.

Jane said...

Correction: It was Alex Kurtagic, not Tom Sunic, that I was thinking of.

Chechar said...

Just out of curiosity, how do you reconcile your esteem for her with the fact that she was a Jew?

Recently, in the most scholarly and intelligent anti-Semitic blog in the English blogosphere, I wrote that the people who helped me the most to understand and debunk psychiatry and psychoanalysis were some Jewish critics, including Miller (in another blog I recently defended another Jew that I admire, Stefan Zweig). There’s no contradiction at all between what I say in this blog about the Jew-White conflict of interests and my continuing admiration for Miller.

She'd probably have an interesting analysis of your hostility to women...

I corresponded with her and this is an unfounded conjecture. The remorse I feel toward my mother—toward both of my parents actually—has been exploded elsewhere not against “women in general”: but in autobiographical confessions. I mean, a 270,000-word book about my life (if you know Spanish, half of it can be read for free here).

People like you and Lawrence Auster are simply too extreme and reactionary.

My article “On women” was designed to be read by men, not by women. Anyway: there’s something that you (obviously) missed. This article was an extended response to various nasty articles on “Game” in the blogsites Occidental Dissent and Mangan’s. I’ll not bother to look for the links though (I’m leaving for the airport). But here’s the context:

At Mangan’s I wrote that “women should be treated like princesses”. Of course: I had in mind the images you can see in Pride & Prejudice, especially how Mr. Darcy refrains from kissing Elizabeth in bucolic England (see my YouTube clip here). I.e., treating Liza with real respect. The Mangan’s guys made fun of my remark because they hadn’t seen the P&P context. Then I felt compelled to quote Schopenhauer to settle the accounts with “gamers”; modified this entry, and invited them to read this post “on women” for what I really meant with my “princesses” metaphor.

At any event, HBD teaches us that not all women are as smart as Jane Austen and (presumably) you. Many women are indeed childish and shortsighted throughout their lives, as Schopenhauer observed and as much more recent IQ tests have thoroughly documented.

Incidentally, in my mind this post was meant to be balanced with my other posts on women, where I don’t quote Schopen, nor do I say anything derogatory about the fair sex.

Jane said...

I apologize for the remark about Miller. It's just that A.S. can get my back up.

Aside from the mathematics gap, I don't know of a huge difference in male and female IQ scores. I certainly am not aware of the ability of IQ tests to measure childishness or shortsightedness, much less greed or sociopathy. If that were so, perhaps our current economic collapse and the results of the "invade the world/invite the world" doctrine could have been averted. The failure of gamers and HBD folks to consider this in their obsession with IQ and "feminization" is unfortunate. There is plenty of blame to go around for the sorry state of our civilization.

I do think we'd be much better off if more white feminists followed the brave example set by Orianna Fallaci and Phyllis Chesler. Unfortunately, we've been told for 40 years that white men invented conquest and slavery 500 years ago. We need to remember that feminism is a product of the West and go back to classical feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft: “I do not wish them to have power over men, but over themselves”.

I will look into your other posts some time.

Sincerely,
Jane

Chechar said...

@ “I certainly am not aware of the ability of IQ tests to measure childishness or shortsightedness”

Of course not. I was BS you when I wrote that phrase :)

I like Oriana and read her three books about Islam. BTW, I copied-and-pasted a brief, Austerite comment about Oriana for this blog (here).

@ “white men invented conquest...”

Conquest was so good. And I’m not BS you now, I’m dead serious. I was born in Mexico and wrote a politically-incorrect book about the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, most of it available for this blog (cf. some sample chapters here). In fact, I believe that after the coming Crash white males will start behaving again like males and conquer inferior cultures, like the Arab world (cf. the article in this blog “Let’s nuke Mecca”).

@ “feminism is a product of the West and go back to...”

William Blake started to advance suicidal feminist ideas within Mary Wollstonecraft’s lifespan. See Blake’s magnificent painting about woman “slavery” (marriage) at the top of still another entry.

I mean what I wrote about reversing feminism. Either males start behaving again like males—and among other things this means reclaiming their women back (traditional or “slavery” marriage if you want to call it)—, or the white race will go extinct and Islam, after re-conquering the world, will treat billions of surviving women like shit.

Anonymous said...

Jane, the crux of the IQ matter with regard to men and women is not average IQ, which is the same, as you point out. The crux is that men srongly dominate once one gets two standard deviations from the mean or more; ie there are many more male geniuses than female. Google "La Griffe du Lion" and read his entries on gender and IQ if you want a detailed, authoritative account on this.
BTW, don't be put off if, like me, you lack the maths to fully follow what he writes; La Griffe's main points are easily understood without his equations, although I do find it valuable to follow them to the extent that I am able.

Interestingly, not only are there many more geniuses, there are many more male idiots too. Men are simply more exceptional than women, exceptionally better and exceptionally worse. In mathematical terms, the distribution width of the male bell curve is greater, both to the right ('desirable') and the left (not).

My own feeling is that this can be extended to just about any normalized ('Bell curvable') trait, not just IQ; men are more exceptional in their attitudes to authority, to fair play (both likely biological correlates of poltical liberty), in their criminality, creativity and many other traits I'm sure.

When one considers that THREE standard deviations from the mean on traits like IQ, and probably all these others as well, men utterly outnumber women by a huge factor, one finds the biological underpinning for the vast majority of the great figures of history being male.

Nor should any of this surprise us. The female is the stable bauplan on which the male is built. It is the Y chromosome that is the add-on, not the X. All of us males start as essentially female zygotes, and begin our masculinization in the womb.

Males are unstable creatures, adventurous departures from the female norm, prone to great achievement and great despair. Properly, women are our anchors of stability in this sea of male biological exceptionalism. We can be a great team.

Lastly, note how Schopenhauer anticipates these modern concepts with insights such as the one about women being much more alike than men. They are!

It is unfortunate that he seems to make here so little allowance for ANY great female achievement, but those were the times! Bottom line is that, for the great majority of women, their quest for achievement should not be a struggle against nature, but a search for achievement within the mutiple female advantages: steadfastness, security, home-building, child-raising. When one things about it, what could be more important in all human life than this last?

Jane said...

As I said before, anonymous, it was high IQ guys who created the corporatocracy and the military industrial complex, both of which exist only to enrich an ever-smaller number of criminals. Why then should I care to judge people mainly by the results of an IQ test? Considering the mess the oligarchs have made of the world, perhaps some consideration of the limitations of IQ testing would be in order. The smart white guys running the world have no loyalty to the general welfare. I have no loyalty toward the sociopathic.

I'm afraid I can't get excited about pushing out cannon fodder for Chechar's dreams of further conquest. Surely a high-IQ guy like him could come up with something more sophisticated than more smash-and-grab, which only results in blowback and mass immigration. It's bizarre that a fan of Alice Miller would entertain these violent fantasies. I also consider Christianity to be one product of the West worth saving. Unlike Lawrence Auster, I believe it is more than just a flag to rally around.

Since so many right wing men favor a quasi-Sharia existence for women, why should I care if it is white guys rather than ragheads calling the shots? It is a false dilemma that you posit anyhow.

It's great that Shakespeare and Beethoven were white guys, but it's been a while since we've seen one of them. Modern so-called traditionalists don't give me much reason to feel loyalty toward the white race. I see a distinct lack in the areas of creativity and self-critique from them.

I have yet to encounter a single white nationalist online I'd want to spend five minutes with in real life. As much as I hate mass immigration and the excesses of identity politics, I am sincerely glad that you lot are not running things.

Chechar said...

@ “Surely a high-IQ guy like him could come up with something more sophisticated than more smash-and-grab, which only results in blowback and mass immigration. It's bizarre that a fan of Alice Miller would entertain these violent fantasies.”

Not bizarre at all. It’s the logical consequence of pursuing child interests, as any rational reader of The Return of Quetzalcoatl would conclude. A section from that book was linked above, Jane, in my response to you. I guess you didn’t even read that. (And by the way, if an ethno-state is ever created it will never allow mass migration.)

@ “Since so many right wing men favor a quasi-Sharia existence for women, why should I care if it is white guys rather than ragheads calling the shots?”

My native language is Spanish, Jane, but can you read English? I wrote above: “The ultimate goal would have been from the beginning to fix forever Western society’s sex roles in about the 1940s and 50s”. Does this strike you as “quasi-Sharia”? Have you ever been in Iran, Sudan or Saudi Arabia?

@ “Modern so-called traditionalists don't give me much reason to feel loyalty toward the white race.”

Now you are behaving naughty, Jane. One of the reasons that moves me toward white nationalism is the perpetuation of the phenotype (i.e., the genes) of Caucasian women, which is an endangered species now. And you are saying that you don’t feel loyalty toward your own race?? Unless you are non-white, I would consider this statement downright treason.

@ “I have yet to encounter a single white nationalist online I'd want to spend five minutes with in real life.”

You are making wrong assumptions here. In public life racially-conscious males almost never get as blunt as the tone of my posts here. Instead, we usually use “homeopathic” rhetoric to gauge up to what point it’d be reasonable to expose our views. Have you ever watched Jarred Taylor speaking? Or you wouldn’t like to spend even five minutes in real life with someone like him?