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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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After reading Shelley it occurred to me that sometimes women have male souls by accident. It used to be 5%, and even grew to 10% around the turn of the last century because of how vigorous Victorian and Edwardian society was. The weird post-puritanism of the English upper classes (prior to mass education and the lumpenproletarianization of England into a universal chav state) sublimated all sexual energies into neurotic hyperproductivity, similar to how the Greeks saw unrestrained sexuality as bestial and subhuman to such an extent that they would rather fuck each other and slave catamites than their own wives half the time, because they could only regard other oiled-up hyperproductive demigods as equals and full human beings and thus as "partners." In England, and in Protestant Germany for similar reasons, living a sensuous existence was only conceivable for the anonymous lower classes who presumably needed to scurry between their tenements and their servant jobs each day, in the margins and behind the scenes of the meaningful lives of the upper classes. There was thus only one "gender" in high bourgeois society, something like male-adult-citizen-fully human-bourgeois-educated-restrained to the point of uncomfortably tense. Anything else was just "other," "presumably in the background," incidental background character tier. Women were assumed to fall into this latter category because they are generally weak, childish, selfish and wasteful in a benign way, essentially incapable of restraining themselves to the degree necessary for manhood, citizenship, and personhood. Because this was simply the nature of things, high bourgeois society gave a high bourgeois education indifferently to anyone who wanted one. It assumed women who wanted them were inconsequential anomalies, like Aspasia, it reflexively treated viragoes as curiosities and novelties.

This created a very efficient procedure for turning women with male souls into honorary men. How it worked was, if you had a female soul in a female body, you were left to ferment in the common slime with the other women and lower classes as normal. But if you showed up at the door of malehood and requested to transcend the slime, the doorman wouldn't even look up at you, he would simply hand you all the accoutrements of masculinity, as he would for anybody, and tell you to knock yourself out. This was the only brief window in history in which feminism might have worked, because a lot of women actually did go off and knock themselves out, becoming men and returning. There were signs that the Aspasia virago freakshow "ha ha my wife is actually quite the author in her own right and not just my ancilla isn't that just so modern what a brave new world" category was bending and beginning to break and some Edwardians were really starting to think self-consciously wow women can be humans not just as exceptions but as a rule, crazy.

There were signs that this phenomenon could have advanced even more, maybe even proving the feminists right that women can become "equal to men" over time, basically the creation of a third, transitional, intermediate gender between masculine (active) and feminine (passive), with the ultimate aim of relegating traditional femininity (woman=anonymous sensuous frivolous child, Periclean Funeral Oration type, putting flowers in her hair and ideally spinning wool) to the merely potential or formless material pole of female self-actualization, so that what today we call simply feminine in general would be only the disgraceful, child-like state against which a woman must differentiate herself, analogous to a man being a coomer who plays video games all day and still lives with his mom. But just as this possibility appeared on the horizon, the high bourgeois modernism that created it imploded into mass demotic 20th century modernism, and where you once had male-woman occultists translating Bergson and forming bicycle clubs you now had Bloomsbury skanks and puellile jazz floozies sucking every drop of puerile male attention from parading themselves as "liberated" thots (synonymous with gyrating to jazz and having a reputation for being loose). As with everything else in merely demotic modernity, the high bourgeois excellence that created and sustained it was dissolved into a factory produced gruel supposed to be consumed by everybody at birth, now it wasn't that women were able to become men because excellence is available to everyone, it was that everybody is excellent, now it wasn't that one could free oneself from contingency including the contingency of gender itself by genderless promethean acts of self-liberation, it was that everyone was "liberated" because society was "liberal."

This was like a bomb exploding in female consciousness, it dispersed all the energies that had so improbably been built up over centuries. Now a woman who would have inexorably become a neurotic citizen-scholar just as queerly sexless and hypertense as her Victorian male counterpart was inundated from childhood with suggestions that the proper path to her independence as a woman was to show her holes in the jazz club and whine to "the government" for "more equal" "working conditions" for average women, meaning undifferentiated anonymous women, as opposed to more possibilities for excellence for select women. Not only did this new demotic-dionysian worldview disperse all those improbable apollonian conditions of female masculinization, it was doubly dangerous because it gave a new impetus to traditionally ur-feminine instincts that had been gradually suppressed.

The puritan chastity that had slowly formed the conditions of possibility for a secular equal opportunity masculinity was ruptured by a volcanic eruption of primeval femininity: near psychotic competition for male attention destroying all possibility of friendship with both men and other women, bacchic desire for total irresponsibility and frivolity, longing for a paradoxically infinitely powerful but infinitely indulgent father ("The Government," "the Patriarchy," "the West"=women's schizophrenically repressive-yet-permissive surrogate daddy figure who is to be shit-tested and endlessly dialectically probed for BOTH concessions and reactionary episodes of paternal discipline, primeval womanhood's version of Russian roulette).

From the Edwardian 10%, by the time of women's lib it was 0.1% of women who could escape the YAAAAS LIBERATE ME JAZZ, HEAR ME ROAR egregore. Among millennial women it was 0.01%. Among zoomers it has reached 0.0%, lower even than the Middle Ages and ancient Greece, certainly far lower than in ancient Rome and probably various oriental cultures. It's simply impossible to be a masculine woman anymore, because every possible escape trajectory from child-womanhood has been blocked off by traps that mimic real escape trajectories. Tomboy? There's a mimicry trap for that. Unease about being a mere sex object? Mimicry trap. Against all odds, manage to notice that men are falsely praising you with ulterior sexual motives FOR rejecting false male praise with ulterior sexual motives, and that a qualitative leap of total repudiation of male attention is necessary in order to be a truly free woman, and you may have to pull the Get Insanely Fat Like Dworkin But At Least It's Better Than The Male Gaze option lever? Not so fast, there's even a mimicry trap for Dworkins. There is no escape. Transplant Dworkin to 2023 and she will become a pseudo-Dworkin with an Instagram crypto-addicted to meta-meta-meta-sublimated male attention for being a Dworkin. Even if you ascend through ten standard deviations worth of mimicry traps that would have gotten all the women below you on the bell curve, there are infinitely more, and if there aren't, your act of transcendence will only allow your path to transcendence to be modeled and turned into a new trap by the system for any future You. The last women who achieved true no-handicap Victorian-tier personhood by dint of being sheer statistical anomalies were born in the '40s and miraculously pulled off needle-threading 10-point landings out of the great hippie jazz thot trap redux of women's lib. Now they are all dead or dying. Do not try to find an Edwardian man-woman any longer. The most you can do at this juncture is to marry a high IQ but individually dunderheaded and brainwashed woman who contingently has acceptable morals and hope that your great, great, great, great, great granddaughter will be part of another generation of women that has a slim chance at being spiritually male.

Do not try to find an Edwardian man-woman any longer

They are rare but they're quite obvious when you come across them and get them talking. If you find a woman who bitches about useless co-workers in a male-coded way- this is true for both female-dominant and male-dominant positions- you've likely found who you're looking for. Bonus points if they're wearing a firearm at the time. I know a few people that qualify, but I also live in the red part of a blue "state" and have red hobbies, so y'know. It's trickier to cultivate this kind of personality these days because the days of meteoric rise to power by manipulating reality are in the past but the seeds are there if you look hard enough. And for reproductive purposes that is probably enough.

Finding one that's not taken, and actively looking at the same time, and interested in you... well, that's a lot more difficult (and I think I already missed out on one).

It's also shit like this that makes me consider I'm "gay" specifically because I think this is exactly right about what gender fundamentally is (actually, thinking harder about it, I seem to be related to a higher-than-normal proportion of man[lier-than-normal]-women so that probably has a non-trivial effect on my sexuality; guess that explains my preference for androgyny over sex and a level of concern over perceived sexual identity that's a lot lower than normal to the point I have to purposefully emulate it).

The woke are more correct than the mainstream in that sex and gender are indeed different things, and they're correct in that they're bestowed by reality (for sex) and the community (for gender), but becoming an ugly eunuch and forcing acknowledgement of being the opposite gender at gunpoint do not a real transition make.