During last week’s Red Pill Monthly discussion I was presented with the question as to whether I agreed with women’s mandatory military conscription and my take on women serving in combat roles in the military. You can listen to my take on the livecast, but since I’d already had this post in the works I’ll detail it a bit more here.
Commenter Red light dropped this comment recently
The “Warrior Princess” myth
In making the 300: Rise of an Empire they realized they had a problem, the 300 were all men.
So now in the next movie we have Eva Green as a killing machine admiral of the Persian fleet. Wait, that’s not enough! Let’s end the movie with Lena Headey being a killing machine too. Just to make the warrior princess quota.
I happened to be listening to a feature interview on NPR on a long drive home about a week ago. The interview was of a semi-famous actress-turned-writer-turned-director who’s known for her feminist slant on storytelling and forwarding the narrative of the Feminine Imperative equalism.
So as not to focus too much on the individual and more on the messaging, I’ll just fast forward to a part of the conversation I thought was most salient:
“There was a part of the film (she’s producing/directing) where (SIW®, Warrior Princess cliché) gets into a fight with the ‘bad guy’ and the guys on the set thought that her reactions were unrealistic and no woman would do what she was for the reasons she was doing it. But the women on the set were like ‘Oh totally, I’d do that, hell I’d do worse if I was in that situation’.”
“I told the guys on set that if they really want to see gender equality they needed to embrace all sides of women. They needed to let go of all these preconceptions that women are nurturing or empathetic, and accept that we can be just as violent or hostile as men when we’re pushed this hard.”
I got to thinking about this part of the interview and I got an insight into the belief system of a woman ego-invested in the egalitarian / equalist narrative that had been taught to her since her formative years.
For women so saturated in equalism there’s a kind of convenient duplicity that expects a safe environment in which they can comfortably, and without risk of injury, play out the fantasy of not just being ‘as tough’, but tougher than men.
Nowhere is this safe fantasy more repeated than in the stories that the men and women of the equalist mindset construct for themselves with the expectation of loving mass consumption. I covered this from one angle in Storytelling and I focused primarily on the unbelievability of that narrative, but I didn’t really get into why that narrative is so appealing to that set.
As I mention there, in the world of ideas and possibilities, where all conditions and events are in the control of the storyteller, and all outcomes are scripted by the individual, what comes out in playing God is a revealing of the mindset (and the zeitgeist that created it) of the one in control of telling that story.
Fempowerment
When I wrote The Medium is the Message I primarily focused on observing women’s behaviors as the primary motivator of what their true ‘headspace’ is. However, it’s also important to consider this principle on a macro scale of societal influence. The influence women wish to exert on our collective social order is evidenced in the behavior of their storytelling and the storytelling of their proxies (i.e. men who willingly foment their message and fantasies).
White Knights and sympathetic Betas attuned by a lifetime of Blue Pill conditioning are easy foils in selling out their masculine interests if it means their identifying with the superiority fantasies of women is in someway intrinsically rewarding to them (i.e. potential sexual access with women).
But what are the fantasies women imagine themselves living out in their own storytelling? Since the rise of women’s Hypergamy as the societal priority this has been the convenience of female empowerment and the fantasy that it can be balanced with women intrinsic needs and drives as a human female.
The problem with equalism (as opposed to evolved intergender complementarity) is that it reliably creates piss poor men and women. Taken to its extreme, the ideal state of equalism is androgyny – and that’s a best case scenario. At worst, the concept that gender is a relative mental/social construct creates individuals who arbitrarily define their gender identity based on the opinions of others, or languish in a gender identity purgatory of confusion.
The greatest danger the ideology of an all-are-the-same egalitarianism poses to an individual is the belief that men and women can be fully self-contained and self-fulfilled entities mutually exclusive of each other. From the Warrior Princess perspective this equalist ideal of a ‘perfected’ woman is one in which the best aspects of the masculine and the feminine are represented in one female person.
Ignoring all realities to the contrary, this super woman, this Strong Independent Woman® archetype, is not a ‘woman’ at all. She’s an amorphous being that combines the strength and independence of conventional masculinity with the ‘womanness’ that makes those traits acceptable in a society that would otherwise ridicule a man for displaying them as emblematic of maleness.
In a male embodiment, this autonomous self-sufficient being is a laughable parody; an exaggerated cliché of all the ego insecurities we popularly believe men are predisposed to. But make this strong, independent being female and all the ridiculousness transforms into pride and inspiration. In such a pretext even women’s weaknesses and insecurities (the very traits that would make a man less of a man) become a source of that idealized strength – as a woman.
The truth of course is that this egalitarian ideal is unrealistic and at odds with the reality that women and men have both strengths and weaknesses for which the other is (should be) the complement to. No man is an island, but the Strong Independent Woman® is an entity apart.
False Pride, Real Danger
Now I say that this equalist ideal is a danger to women on whole, but collectively that ideal is a greater danger on a societal level. The reason being is that women have expectations from men while simultaneously believing they are functional equals in all ways to men. In the fantasy of storytelling, and the ubiquitous control it allows the creator, danger, outcome and conditions become mitigated for the sake of the story. The real danger comes when those stories become the template on which women (and men) will expect reality to follow.
Dalrock summed this up perfectly for me in a comment I’ve returned to for years:
These women don’t just want to build a better beta, they want to tame the alpha. In fact, I think the former is just another way they are trying to approach the latter. They want to take an inherently unsafe activity and make it safe. They want to submit to a man without having to submit; they want a man who can tame their feral self. They want him to trip their danger signals. Even better if he is a stranger from a strange land.
They wan’t this all to happen without giving up their freedom; they want to play this out in the context of serial monogamy, so they can feel loved while also claiming their promiscuity is moral. They want to lose control to a string of strangers who have all of the hallmarks of very dangerous men, and they want a promise that this will always end well.
They want to know that this will be safe, without it losing the excitement of it feeling unsafe. They are telling men to build a sort of serial monogamy amusement park where they can ride the roller coaster and experience the fear of falling or crashing, while knowing that just behind the scenes grown ups are actually in charge and are responsible for them safely feeling unsafe.
One more thing. As I mentioned above they don’t want to be hemmed in. So instead of building an actual amusement park, they want roller coasters to spring up randomly in the same exact circumstances where the real danger they mimic would appear. They want to be driving their car on the freeway one instant, and the next experience the fear of careening out of control the next. They want to impulsively jump off the edge of the Grand Canyon and have a parachute appear and deploy at the last minute. And all they ask is your guarantee that all of this will be safe.
Even within the social parameters of what passes for egalitarianism today, there is still a want and expectation on the part of men to make the stories and fantasies of women’s male-equal strengths safe for them in a real context. A prime illustration of this can be found in the language of the women in the video I linked in The War Brides of Europe post.
Whether the show was contrived or not, there’s a fraying of ends going on in these women psyches. The inherently unsafe fantasies of women’s self-perceptions of male-equal strength are being contested by the reality of their situation. The men who were supposed to make the world safe for women’s indulgences of male strength fantasies are proving to be unreliable in affording them that security.
The roller coaster is suddenly real and the prospect of injury and death are real as well. On some level of consciousness they understand that their equalist’s notions of male-equal strength are in no way sufficient for survival in a real test. They are understandably nervous, but nervous in a way that belies the disillusionment of ego-investments they’ve based their lives around.
Women have relied so much on the behind-the-scenes security of men making the world safe for them that they begin to believe they are men’s functional equals. And not only functional equals, but more perfected, autonomously independent, beings that should be a match for the harsh realities their storytellers told them they ought to be.
In fact so dependent on this imagining are women that they expect the simulations of battle to accommodate their lack of capacity to handle the reality that they’ll lobby to alter the qualification necessary to engage with that reality. Thus, the physical requirements for combat suitability are reduced to a degree where women can feel like a success and maintain the storyteller’s archetype of themselves, thus sustaining their ego’s investment in it.
The problem then becomes one where men not only become responsible for women’s security as well as their own security, but also the maintenance of their feminine-primary self-image as a strong, independent, individual capable of achieving an equal measure among men while the real-world requirements mean life or death for them both.
The fantasy of female empowerment is not just the social expectation of men, but it is also the life-threatening liability of men who don’t (or can’t) perform it for them. Men literally risk their lives to maintain women’s equalist fantasy of independent strength apart from, and above that of men.