It was as if I heard trumpets blare, and a voice call out: And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?

And for the tender mother
   Who dandled him to rest,
And for the wife who nurses
   His baby at her breast,
And for the holy maidens
   Who feed the eternal flame,
To save them from false Sextus
   That wrought the deed of shame?

Getting mentored is a privilege. Being born with a special gift is just part of who you are. In the former case, you have someone else to thank for your advantage. In the latter, you have only God to thank. Even being adequately parented is a privilege. You don’t earn that, and not everyone is given it.

Everyone who becomes heroic gets tested, though. Life itself is the test. Me, I like Dickens because his heroes are forced to earn their happy endings, and they do.

I could get behind some of that. I know a few women whose input I still want heard, even if I don’t necessarily agree with their entire mental framework or sensibilities, and so I’m happy to welcome all their sistren just to keep them. There’s a price for everything. Besides, plenty of men I want off the rolls sooner and for solid reasons. (And they me, doubtless.) So a sex-based solution isn’t really plausible or desirable to me. And certainly never going to happen.

I used to toy with age limits, ideally 25, 21 for the sake of tradition and generosity. I didn’t get a chance to vote in a Canadian election until I was just short of 23, and I don’t see what the big deal was. I certainly don’t think I should have been able to vote at 16, and neither should anyone else. Even kids inclined more to my side of the line are still too dumb at that age, and so was I and everyone I knew. Even the book-smartest and most precocious among us, if not indeed especially them, are too dumb to be trusted with the tiniest share of power.

Mileage varies on this one- I don’t buy the idea that being old enough to serve in the military ought to mean old enough to vote, though I am sympathetic. Plenty of societies thought you should do the service first in order to qualify for the vote, and I could even see the case that the maturity that ought to be required for the vote is actually greater, whether one serves or not. Other past societies have taken the view that active duty military shouldn’t vote on civil-military grounds. I think Heinlein actually shared that view at one point, even when advocating only veterans should vote. In the end, I would let that one slide. If the age is 21 or 25, honourable service before that gets the vote.

I don’t see the need for the age of franchise to match the drinking age, either. I don’t want to raise the latter but I would to solve that particular equivalency. On the whole, I’d say that making that equivalency actually suggests one is putting a low value on the franchise.

All that is just woolgathering. Ultimately, your self-supporting criterion is probably not too bad. I’d give voting rights to pensioners, though. Life’s honourable service has its perks.

Or there’s Neville Shute’s 7 vote system from one of his lesser tales. He included a university degree getting one of the extra votes, so we’d even have ideological diversity….

“Adolescents, through no fault of their own, have no idea what they’re doing… but somebody’s got to do it. I can love a YA protagonist who is doing his level best to learn on the job.”

I’ll buy that. Of the movie series I mentioned above, I most credit The Hunger Games with taking the origins, life experience, mental state, and character development of its heroine seriously. I think it was the best done of all those series, and the best acted, with the best story ideas, and the scenario that most encouraged me to identify with the same characters and cause as the rest of the audience. A big part of that was making the character of Katniss and her development at least believable, wildly more so than is common in modern genre movies.

In a similar vein, I remember the Fisherman’s Hope series of novels by David Feintuch in the 90s. Think, early 22nd century (?) space navy of a unified Earth with one extrasolar colony, lightly imagined such that this Earth has the social, political and religious norms of Georgian England under other colours, and with a technological mcguffin to make sure that naval officer cadets have to go to space very young like midshipmen of old. So he could tell Hornblower-like stories in space.

His protagonist was a neurotic mess operating in a very demanding setting with duties and mental challenges that nearly broke him numerous times, and relied a lot on luck, but he wasn’t a teen superhero everybody worshipped out of the gate. Quite the opposite.

(I also liked those stories for the way they handled the society’s religion and its AIs. Passages in which AIs are strongly motivated to recite out loud the Lord’s Prayer or the 23rd Psalm struck me as oddly moving at the time.)

Now Harry Potter was somewhat a reluctant hero and he had his learning moments, but he was from the start The Boy Who Lived and carried an aura of fate around him at all times. I am reminded of the old Calvin and Hobbes comics, in one of which Calvin started calling himself Calvin, Boy of Destiny. Maybe every little boy should have a little of that, but it needs to be tamed a bit by the time of adolescence.

I suppose it is interesting on some level that so much of this ‘destined for glory from day one’ magical hero modern stuff, even when the character is male like Potter, is written by women. I have no precise idea what that means, but there’s something about the traditional male expectations of being mentored, trained, tested and selected in life that they are not getting. Or want rid of. Maybe because if ever boy hero is a hero because special from birth, its OK for every girl to be a heroine from birth too.

On the other hand, I did single out Hunger Games for some praise in this area, and that was a female character written by a woman, so there’s that. And, too, we now have an established tradition of male creators unhealthily obsessed with superpowered magical beings as saviours in lieu of human self-protection, as well as, more recently, male creators fixated on the idea of the world being saved by magical powered young women. For reasons perhaps best left under-explored.

It started out with the 19th Century near-deification of “motherhood”, and has ended in what we have today, a soft-power coup conducted by the female side of the sexual divide. The destructive nature of what they’ve wrought is all around us, and it’s only going to get worse. I don’t think that a civilization has ever undergone anything quite like this, and I don’t think it will end well for either sex. The women have identified and exploited a gap in the armor of culture, and with their essential hormone-driven insanity coming to the fore in politics and daily life, we’re pretty much screwed.

Everywhere you look, since we gave the silly bints the right to vote, politics has gone nuts. The whole thing has come to turn on making them happy, no matter what–If you look at the 19th Century, the Congress used to take its responsibilities seriously, and was parsimonious as hell. Women got the right to vote, and instead of people being elected to office on what they did there, and how the performed, all of a sudden it was what they looked like, and what they promised.

Kennedy would have never been elected during any 19th Century election. But, because he was suave and photogenic, he got the presidency.

If you disbelieve me on this, go out and query your female relatives and acquaintances: Why do they vote for who they vote for?

Shockingly, when I’ve done that, it’s boiled down mostly to “I don’t like the way he looks…”, or “I don’t like the way he sounds…”. Never mind the merits of the man’s platform or policies, it’s all appearance-based choice, nothing else. If Satan himself showed up, they’d vote for him if he just looked good…

The fiscal side of things is also indicative of the female mindset: There’s no attention paid to eventual consequence, it’s all what the psychotic b****hes want, immediate gratification of trivialities and emotions. Not all women think or vote like that, but enough do to really skew the whole political reality we live under.

I think that there’s a definite case to be made that we need to restrict voting rights again, to gainfully employed people only. Live at the expense of others? Fine; you’re legally a minor for voting purposes, and while you can influence your household head all you like, actually voting without having paid into the tax rolls means you don’t get one of your own.

The whole thing is insane, with what we’ve stumbled into, culturally and politically. I think there’s a lot to be laid at the door of how we’ve “empowered” women, as if they were ever without true power in the first place. Instead of equalizing things, what we’ve done is given them more power than they ever had before, and even less responsibility to go along with it–Which is a recipe for disaster.

What the world needs is heroes who think things through and then do what needs to be done.

Adolescents, through no fault of their own, have no idea what they’re doing… but somebody’s got to do it. I can love a YA protagonist who is doing his level best to learn on the job.

Even older, already pre-qualified archetypes of literary culture like the precocious young male, not quite ready to be a hero but aiming to be one; or the weary older male, once a hero or never yet called and wise enough to know the costs; or the even older male who acts only to spare his sons or tries to counsel them away from heroic dreams [think Jimmy Stewart in Shenandoah]; or the intellectual hero whose heroism is disdained by the gung ho version [since Odysseus, at least] are all passe now. Not deconstructed enough for late/post modernity.

Or they can be female. In which case some of the older archetypes can be reactivated only for them.

On the issue of precocious children, in this post Harry Potter-Hunger Games-Maze Runner-Divergent culture, it seems like adolescence is the last valid time for heroism. In theory, people who produce this think children need to identify with child heroes. Now, there was always this sort of thing. CS Lewis could tell us about it, and so could plenty of others. But one struggles to remember a time when boys and girls also consumed fiction, even fiction written for them, that encouraged them to aspire to grow up and be adult heroes and heroines.

I was 6 when Star Wars came out. I and all the boys I knew identified more with Han Solo than Luke Skywalker. Part of it was that antihero thing all boys seem to like, but also he was older and already knew what the hell he was doing. Didn’t every boy used to aspire to be that, and not Harry Potter?