Guest post: Nurturing run amok
Originally a comment by Sastra on What reward can genderists offer?
I’m coming to the conclusion that what’s primarily fueling this mental social contagion isn’t misogyny, but the feminine attribute of nurturing run amok — and the responsible parties for the most part aren’t men, but women.
Sure, there are men identifying as women while thrusting themselves wherever they want just like men, but there have always been transvestites testing boundaries. The modern, ubiquitous warm, welcoming embrace of trans inclusion and acceptance, the generous impulse to say and mean “but OF COURSE you are a woman!” looks like it comes right out of the Woman’s Playbook on Being Agreeable and Helping Others. When our increasing sensitivity to minorities met Therapeutic Culture’s increasing sensitivity to everything, it was often mothers and primary school teachers who decided that a healthier, happier, better world started with the children becoming more sensitive to the feelings of those who are weak and unhappy. A noble impulse, certainly — but like a lot of noble impulses there’s an escalating series of increasing opportunities for being noble. Those kids grew up and kept looking further and further up.
Men certainly jumped on board with the idea that this issue is about civil liberties and freedom from constraint, but it’s the tender mercies of the women refusing to notice what’s happening to their rights while smiling and nodding and cooing and putting arms round their fellow “girls” that requires explanation. It’s tempting to think come on, they must know these men aren’t women just as it’s tempting to believe that religious believers don’t really believe there’s an invisible Man on High tenderly watching over them — but I think they’re likely all sincere. The Universe must be Nurturing and Kind and so must we. You see truth better through those lenses.
That’s a jolly good piece of insight there.
I would add just one thing: when primary school teachers exhort their pupils that they should be kind to one another, the girls, by and large, seem to interpret that as meaning that they should be kind to others, and shouldn’t do anything which might upset other people; and the boys, by and large, seem to interpret it as meaning that whatever they do, other people shouldn’t get upset but must be kind to them.
It’s much harder work instilling empathy in boys when so few parents even try; the ones we try to teach to be decent people end up being much more influenced by peer pressure, and often abandon the attempt at being generally kind (at least in the playground) out of self-preservation. I have now heard stories from five generations of male relatives of how it only takes one or two boys in a year-group, ones who are being raised to be thugs, for the whole cohort to become ‘hard’ in self-defence. I don’t have an answer to this.
Oh lord, what a good point. (Sorry, boys.)
Sastra and Tigger, both excellent points. Trust me, if a boy/young man decides they’re not going to buy into the whole ‘hard’ thing, it’s fucking miserable. I have precisely zero school mates in my life now because I was real friends with only one guy and life took us in different directions. By contrast I have a number of university friends who have been friends for life because we accepted each other as we were and didn’t play stupid dominance games.
I’ve often thought that female socialization (e.g., taking other people’s feelings into consideration) is an excellent thing. The only problem with it now is that only half of the people get one, whereas the other half are socialized to take advantage of it.
And there is always that ‘Golden Rule” attributed to one Yeshua bar Joseph, aka Jesus Christ: ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.’ That is an invitation to a sort of empathy, though it arguably has problems. For example, I might like having my head scratched, but if I went around scratching heads on whatever basis of head selection, it would not be long before I was in the eye of a storm of the bar-room brawl genre.
The arguably superior form of the Golden Rule came from Confucius (trad. 551–479 BCE.) It is the ‘negative’ formulation: ‘Do not do to others what you would not have others do to you,’ which eliminates the head-scratching problem.
It possibly got passed from China to Roman-occupied Palestine along the Great Silk Road; altered by oral transmission (Chinese whispers?) from the negative to the positive (Yeshua bar Joseph) form along the way.
Yeshua also said: (Matt. 5 Verses 39 to 40:) “But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also.” That one has been honoured far more in the breach than in the observance over the centuries of Christian history.
And re tigger’s comment @ #1:
The Samurai of Mediaeval Japan effectively had James Bond’s ‘licence to kill.’ The result was politeness and deference on a mass scale: particularly among those who did not seek to become Samurai themselves.
I think Sastra makes an excellent point, but I also think part of the problem is that we keep trying to find ‘a’ reason. Before we explain women’s acceptance of men being women, we have to explain men claiming to be women; if that didn’t happen, there would be nothing for women to ‘be kind’ about. There I think we can credit several things, all of which have been mentioned here before: AGP., narcissism, misogyny, desire to cheat, predatory behavior, desire to violate women’s boundaries, and so forth.
Next we get the tie to LGB, as though it is the same thing. LGB worked long and hard, with often fatal consequences, for acceptance, then a bunch of straight white males come along and shove their ‘T’ onto the LGB and everyone falls in line, not wanting to be like the homophobes of our childhood (and now, actually). Then they shove it onto racism, and more people fall in line, not wanting to be Nazis or KKK. They had so much success I think it’s shocked them that women are fighting back when they try to shove it onto women’s rights and feminism.
Added to that the natural antipathy of the young to those older feminists, and the branding of GC feminists as ‘second wave’ hags and obsolete crones, and you’ve got a perfect recipe for success at getting young women into your movement…and insisting other young women, those who are lesbians, should give in and have sex with these poor women who were misidentified at birth.
“..the natural antipathy of the young to those older feminists, and the branding of GC feminists as ‘second wave’ hags and obsolete crones, and you’ve got a perfect recipe for success at getting young women into your movement…and insisting other young women, those who are lesbians, should give in and have sex with these poor women who were misidentified at birth.”
Yes. Note how women with gender-critical views are usually framed as old, ugly, white, Christian, badly-dressed, ignorant, prudish, religiously fanatical, “stuck in the 1970s”, etc.
https://nitter.poast.org/mengiemeng/status/1066549025325740033#m
And of course this ties into the “woke” people’s smearing of everything that happened before the 21st century as being “toxic” and “problematic.
I’m willing to concede old, white, and badly dressed (though not when I dress up; I rarely do). The rest of it they better not come at me with; I can be quite withering when I get started, and I always get started when someone dares to call me a Christian or a religious fanatic. As for ugly, well, that’s sort of subjective, really.
Omar, while I agree that the Confucian version of the golden rule is the superior one I think it still falls to Shaw’s objection that “other people might not have the same tastes as me”. For example, being a fairly unsociable type I generally prefer it if people leave me alone and don’t try to engage in vague pleasantries yet I realise that sometimes I need to do the thing I would not have done to me, because I understand the human need for social reassurance. I was going to say that the right thing to do is just ask, but really I suspect that if you need to rely on rules, you should do the hard work of getting to a position where you don’t. And I understand that there are people who will never be able to do that but, still, as a goal I think doing the work is far superior to seeking the One Rule.
Extending the “being kind” from personal interactions to political ones is infuriating. Kindness is very important in our relations with family, friends, colleagues, the strangers that help us with our luggage, give us directions etc, life would be bleak without that sort of kindness. Kindness can take a more formal role in charity – something that women are often involved in in disproportionate numbers at the grass roots level in staffing charity shops for instance.
But kindness is often at war with truth and courage and justice– which are far more important public virtues. Those fighting for their rights, whether women seeking the suffrage, trade unions seeking better pay, blacks seeking equality with whites – none of them ask for the powerful to treat them with kindness but with justice.
It is odd that the nurturing role gone mad that the original post outlines has become so significant among the young. Women, young women, see themselves portrayed in popular culture, or at least in films and television series as kick-ass superwomen, not as nurses of the sick for instance.
I believe iknklast is 100% correct. You can see it must have developed as she says by who has what attitude. Transgender “rights” like trans women playing in men’s sports are supported more by women than men, and are supported much, much more by liberals than conservatives.
I think Sastra makes good points about empathy being a factor. The strongest support I see is from women, with a lot of “we love and support our trans sisters!” type of sentiment being expressed. In general, men, mostly liberal ones, seem to go along with it because they want to be on the right side of history. They’ll be scolds for the progressive view of transgender issues but seldom are seen expressing how happy and proud they are for someone coming out as trans, etc.
Tigger makes some interesting points as well about boys being prone to not develop empathy. The part that does not quite seem right to me is that from what I’ve seen these “hard” boys have very low acceptance of transgender “rights”. It seems unlikely they’d become trans themselves, although maybe it manifests that way in a small minority? It seems more common for, well, “soft” boys/men to become trans.