Some years back I came across this bumper sticker (“MEN ARE NOT PIGS! Pigs are intelligent, sensitive, sweet and caring beings.“)This was not long after I saw in a shop window a rubber stamp that read ABORTION IS HARMFUL TO WOMEN / LEGALIZE CASTRATION. I went inside and inquired of the shopkeeper about the stamp, which I found also displayed on a shelf. “Some people find it funny,” she said. I wrote a letter of protest to the store owner (a woman), quoting another joke I’d heard (“Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher.“) and asking if she found it “funny.” Curiously, I received no reply. Last I looked, the rubber stamp was still on sale.
I don’t think this kind of thing will ever end. It has become clear that even in the most intelligent, kind, gentle, even enlightened woman there is an underlying stratum of resentment against men that is never penetrated by reason. I have yet to encounter a woman whose first, involuntary reaction to this kind of “humour” is not amusement — perhaps quickly suppressed, but it’s always there.
I don’t really get angry about it any more. What’s the point? It’s like being upset about the weather, or other Acts of Nature. Women are as they are; it’s a fool’s errand to expect them to be like men, to understand that “equal treatment” really means something besides a way to wheedle everything they can get out of men. When a woman appeals to principle, it’s only a device, to get a man to do what she wants; the idea that a principle is something that applies to all equally, that might limit her activity as well as a man’s, is completely foreign to her mind. She knows instinctively that her innate power, derived from the power of Nature Herself, absolutely trumps anything a man can come up with. After all, she created him, did she not?
What she doesn’t understand, what never occurs to her without male assistance, is that the ultimate result of the use of her power will be her own suffering. This is why the Buddha, and every other great teacher of liberation from suffering, was a man. Woman on her own can’t get out of the prison of suffering life.
The bottom line is: there is no such thing as “equality” between the sexes. It is a chimera, a mythical beast, a political tool used by women — on average much more clever than men, as Harry Belafonte (“Dat’s right! De woman is uh! smatah!“), among many others, noted — and fundamentally lacking the innate sense of scruple that even the most corrupted man possesses — to fool and manipulate men by appealing to our sense of “reasonableness.”
Lead, or follow. There cannot be two drivers at the wheel, two hands on the tiller. Either our activity is guided by Reason, or it is propelled by Passion. And the life ruled by Passion is the life of suffering, no matter how attractive it may seem in the (very) short term.
Women in our culture are completely out of control. They have taken over the lead, but they really don’t know where they are going. They are no longer restrained and guided by men, and self-restraint is unknown to the female mind. The other day I saw an overweight teenage girl wearing a sleeveless tee-shirt that said “It’s all about ME. Deal with it.” Which I thought summed up feminism neatly and for all time.
“If you allow them [women] to pull away restraints and put themselves on an equality with their husbands, do you imagine that you will be able to tolerate them? From the moment that they become your fellows, they will become your masters.” Marcus Porcius Cato (the Elder, aka the Censor), 234-149 BCE
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The antifragility of the system
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