One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman

Friday, February 7th, 2020

Human Diversity by Charles MurrayAfter discussing proto-feminist Mary Astell (in Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class), Charles Murray discusses other early feminists. Most first-wave feminists didn’t concern themselves with innate differences, but Kate Austin did, as this quote illustrates:

“We know that at birth the feet of the little baby girl were straight and beautiful like her brothers, but a cruel and artificial custom restrained the growth. Likewise it is just as foolish to assert that woman is mentally inferior to man, when it is plain to be seen her brain in a majority of cases receives the same treatment accorded the feet of Chinese girls.”

George Bernard Shaw had this to say:

“If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot—because they have never seen one anywhere else.”

This first wave of feminism led to a second wave, with a different emphasis:

After the great legal battles of first-wave feminism had been won during the first two decades of the twentieth century, a new generation of feminists began to devote more attention to questions of nature versus nurture. The result was second-wave feminism, usually dated to the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe, a massive two-volume work published in 1949.

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“On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.” One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

Comments

  1. RLVC says:

    To enter into life is to be enslaved to the form which you were wrought.

  2. McChuck says:

    Feminism is cancer and modern feminists are, for the most part, insane lesbians.

    We can ignore them, laugh at them, or execute them, before they destroy our entire civilization.

  3. Bruce Charlton says:

    “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Which is exactly the opposite of traditional wisdom — in other words, a clever-silly stunt-inversion.

    It was always (truthfully) said that one needed to become a man: qualify, be initiated, pass a test. But a girl transformed into a woman simply by development — pure gift.

    This fits with sexual selection. All young, healthy (presumably fertile) women are socially valued, but only men of high status are socially valued.

    Low status men are not needed (the small minority of high status of men can do all the reproducing), and generally not wanted.

    Average women have nearly always been better treated by society than average men throughout history, and it is a particular evil of feminism to lie about this fact and exacerbate the inequality that naturally (biologically) favours women.

  4. Kirk says:

    The idiots that buy into this crap get everything they deserve–”Women are made, not born…”. Yeah, right.

    I can’t see how anyone who has spent time around kids of any age can say this, at all. Male and female behavior differences may be “minute” in some senses, but they’re unmistakable as the child develops. The whole thing is an attempt to deny biology, which is ludicrous in and of itself.

    What baffles me is that the women coming up with this intellectualized madness don’t seem to grasp that they’ve already got the nicer end of the stick. You hear constant waily-waily-woe about how “oppressed” women are, but you never, ever hear one damn word about the equivalent male “oppression”. Try being the guy who’s been served with a paternity suit, or who has to go down and register for the draft, then get back to me about “oppression”, why don’t you?

    Hell, the two-faced bitches that come out with this stuff are usually unabashed in their utter lack of consistency–All they see is male “privilege”, while ignoring male “obligation”. Let me know when some of these “equalists” chose not to take advantage of being a woman when it comes time to get into the lifeboats.

    The other thing that annoys the crap out of me with all this is the utter failure to comprehend that things were set up the way they were not as some “patriarchal plot” to suppress women, but because of the iron-bound laws of nature that mandated what had to be done for a successful society. You can lose a sh*t-load of young males and still exist as a society, but if you have customs and traditions that lead to equal wastage of young women, you’re gonna go extinct. That’s the facts, folks, and everything was set up in ye olde dayes in order to ensure that society kept going on, kept working. Societies that didn’t manage that feat went extinct–Which, likely, includes all those fantasy-fest matriarchies they hypothesize, because there’s little chance that such social structures would survive or could compete with the “patriarchal” ones.

    It’s all down to functionality under specific conditions. Conditions changed, and social lag has not yet caught up with them, which is why there is all this dislocation. The pendulum has swung one way for women, but the backswing is coming–Men are not going to put up with the BS, so either the women are going back to ye olde dayes, or they’re going to have to grow up and take real equality in stride.

    I guarantee you that once artificial wombs come in, many women are going to go by the wayside. Same thing with robotic sex partners–Why put up with the grief, when you can get a caring and loving companion simply by changing a few settings in the OS? As those sex toys grow more sophisticated, you’re going to see people having to either start acting better towards each other, or they’re gonna have to remain reliant on the toys.

    Could be… Interesting. I’ll laugh my ass off if the first real AI turns out to be a sexbot, by some whim of fate and accident. Watch what happens, then.

    Hell, come to think of it, that might not be all that unlikely–Especially if some cunning AI sees the sexual companion industry as the ideal path towards solidifying and legalizing their rights under law. I’ll be the first advocates for AI rights will likely be their human “lovers”, and it’d be doubly ironic if the AI in question was some specialized model meant as a surrogate for someone with severe BDSM/pedophilia issues…

    I almost want to live long enough to see that, TBH.

  5. CVLR says:

    Bruce Charlton: “Low status men are not needed (the small minority of high status of men can do all the reproducing), and generally not wanted.”

    Come The Revolution, you will no doubt be in very high demand.

  6. Graham says:

    Kirk,

    You nailed it with that scenario. It’s so perfect that it is almost inevitably how it will happen.

    A perfect storm of progressive values, that even reframes incels as the progressive lobby group/designated sexual minority they are and always were destined to be.

    Of course, if they were smart, they wouldn’t actually advocate for their AIs’ rights unless said androids were as physically weak as their humans and also had a built-in phsyical decay rate along human lines. Otherwise one is just living with a physically far stronger, functionally immortal and far more dangerous being without having command of a kill switch.

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