The Matriarchy

 

A Chinese student of mine has, for homework, written an essay advocating classes segregated by sex. He rightly points out that the research is overwhelming—both boys and girls learn faster when segregated. 

However, he illogically assumes we never knew this until recently, and that previous sexual segregation in the schools was based on discrimination against women.

Feminist dogma now apparently dominates the world—even China. And it is impossible to disprove, because it is presupposed a priori regardless of evidence.

In earliest times, my student begins, women were given no formal education, because of their low social status.

However, the European ruling classes were also, traditionally, given no formal education. Often they could not read or write. The same was true in India or China. I believe the present King Charles was actually the first member of the British Royal Family to attend university.

This was a job for clerks. An aristocrat, not needing to work for a living, was above such tedious labours.

So the fact that women were traditionally given no formal education might as well be cited as evidence of higher social status. They did not have to work, but could expect to be provided for.

My student then asserts that women were later educated separately from men because they were being discriminated against. This sounded plausible in the early days of feminism because of the US Supreme Court’s rejection of school segregation on racial grounds. “Separate but equal.” But does it apply in the case of the sexes?

It overlooks two other possible explanations. 

Firstly, the moral argument, that having boys and girls mix casually and daily past puberty and before marriage might lead to teenage pregnancy, sexual harassment, emotional upsets, sexual favours, sexual blackmail, and the entire #metoo morass that we currently have to deal with.

Secondly, the obvious one emerging again from current research, that both men and women learn faster when taught apart. The feminist case must assume that our ancestors were profoundly stupid. That is itself a form of prejudice. 

All traditional Chinese philosophy, back to the Classics, endorsed and was based on the idea of the bagua, the harmonious balance of yin and yang forces, being the key to the universe. And yang represented masculine, and yin feminine—they were meant to be in perfect balance.

He’d forgotten all about that. Feminism puts blinders on. It forces historical amnesia.

The same concept is familiar in ancient Indian thought. Perhaps not in Western thought, but I would challenge anyone to find in the Bible any clear assertion that men are superior to women.

The fact that God is portrayed as masculine? But that also implies that the human soul is feminine—as it is in Greek thought.

And if men have indeed dominated women, always and everywhere until modern times, how did they possibly pull it off?

Amusingly, the original argument, back in the early Sixties, were that men were better at cooperating in groups. This is why there was a drive to end "old boys' clubs," to desegregate all-male organizations.

Ironically, feminism now asserts the opposite, that men are naturally competitive, and women naturally cooperative. Yet they do not see that this undermines their entire argument.

It has, perhaps, been replaced by a more crassly materialist idea, than men have been able to control women because men are naturally more physically powerful—at least when it does not come to performing on the job or in a sport. Or in the movies.

But this does not work either. Yes, men are more physically powerful. But women have everywhere and always been in charge of preparing food. Poisoning is easy enough. A man must trust his wife implicitly.

Feminism is obviously false; and yet it rules the world.

Because men are too accustomed to deferring to women, whatever they want.

Father Knows Best

 

A reading in a current textbook laments that fewer Britons than forty years ago want to become secondary school teachers. By a lot: college grads entertaining the thought of teaching has dropped from over 60% to 17%. I keep seeing ads in my feed urging qualified Canadian teachers to come teach in London or in Scotland. 

\The piece goes on to say that one common reason given is the impossibility of maintaining discipline in classes, compared to forty years ago. And I hear this same lament from my friends in the US. And in China.

So the next question has to be, what has changed, and changed in all these countries? Why are students more rebellious, less disciplined, than in the past? Or, how have these systems of education changed so that they can no longer effectively discipline?

My Chinese student, not bound by North American shibboleths, has an immediate insight: one reason is that so many teachers are now women.

“In the old days,” he explains, “students saw the teacher as a second father.”

And then I got it. There is an obvious and immediate difference in tone between calling someone a “second father” and a “second mother.” Seeing a teacher as a “second mother” is not going to help with discipline.

We must accept what we have been perversely denying for generations: the role of father and mother is different. The mother sees to your physical needs, that you are scrubbed and fed. The father sees to your spiritual needs, to your education, especially your education in values. To discipline.

This is not a role arbitrarily assigned by society. It is built in to the male and female soul, just as we plainly see females are physically designed to nurture the young. As little Maryanne once remarked, “Men are not mammals. They can’t feed their young with milk.”

Why would it not be? How could it not be? Maternal instinct is real. So is paternal instinct. And so are filial instincts.

Here’s an interesting example of the difference between the male and female mind: men are far better at reading maps and giving directions. This is the paternal and the teacherly role: reading the map and giving directions. Women, left to their own devices, get lost. They must ask directions of others.

I used to do this experiment with my classes; and the result was the same whatever culture or country I was in, or wherever the students came from. I would first ask all of the women in class to point north. They invariably had no idea. It was random. Then I would ask the men. Most of them could. 

QED. It is the same in spiritual matters. Men have a better sense of direction, and so are better guides.

So we are abandoning our children, denying them an education, if we give them female teachers in high school. We are letting them down with female teachers in grade school, for that matter. It stands to reason that, not getting any guidance at school, they become disenchanted with the enterprise. It also stands to reason that, not having any natural talent for the task, schools dominated by women go off the rails.

Come to think of it, this is a more serious problem than the schools. We have denied the value of fathers in the family as well, undercut their authority, encouraged family breakups, and left children rudderless. We have denied the value of men in society generally, and tried to dismantle “the patriarchy.” Not going to end well. We have, in recent decades, put women in leadership roles in all parts of society. Note the recent congressional hearing, in which the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and UPenn all spoke. And they were all women. And they had all so lost their way that they did not consider a call for genocide of a student’s entire race a case of bullying.

If women lack, at least in comparison to men, an internal compass and sense of direction and proportion, this is a sure prescription for causing all structures to begin to swerve unpredictably and wander off in odd directions.

And is that not what we have been seeing?

It is the wisdom of the ages. In the New Testament, Jesus’s ancestry is traced back through many generations to David. But this ancestry is traced back on both sides, through Mary and Joseph; even though Joseph is not Jesus’s biological father.

This is because the true inheritance on the father’s side is spiritual, not physical. The important line on the male side is the teachings and the values handed down from David; compare the apostolic succession.

Have you ever noticed, as I have, that when there is a mixed marriage, the children identify primarily with the father’s faith, and the father’s ethnicity? This is the actual distinction, in Canada, between Indian and Metis, and was enshrined in the Indian Act: father Indian, mother European, child Indian. Father European, mother Indian, child European. Or, only on the Prairies, because the father is ethnically and religiously distinct from the European majority, Metis. Metis culture is simply French-Canadian culture.

In mixed marriages when the father defers to the mother’s religion or ethnicity in the education of the children, as is often required in Catholic-Protestant marriages—the children simply grow up without a sound grounding in values or sense of their identity. 

We have been ignoring these male-female differences at our peril—or rather, to the peril of our children.

Taylor Swift's "The Man"

 

The great advantage of art is that it is the one place one is permitted to speak truth. The disadvantage is that most people either misunderstand or misrepresent what you say; usually to mean the opposite. The classic example is the parables of Jesus.

But another example that has come to my attention recently is Taylor Swift’s music video “The Man,” which one of my grad students has been asked to comment on. Everyone reads it as a criticism of male gender roles and a complaint about the oppression of women by the patriarchy.

“It's a thinly-veiled attack on the disparity between how men and women in the same roles are viewed by society,” explains the BBC. The Washington Post calls it a "symbolism-packed takedown of the patriarchy."

I don’t discount the possibility that Taylor Swift herself believes so. That is not relevant, for it is the intentional fallacy. Artists are not necessarily aware of or in agreement with what they are saying. They are inspired; they are speaking, ideally, for a higher being. As Cohen writes in “Going Home”:

But he [Cohen; God is speaking] does say what I tell him

Even though it isn’t welcome

He just doesn't have the freedom

To refuse

The video indeed seems to be doing this. Superficially, Taylor Swift’s video is a feminist lament about the advantages of being a man. Examples of traditional complaints include “manspreading”; the sexual double standard that men are permitted to be promiscuous, while women are criticized for it; that men are the bosses in the work force; that men are more free to express anger, while women must always be “nice”; that old men get to marry younger women. Even that men get to pee standing up. Each familiar claim is portrayed in a brief tableau.

But the whole thing seems subverted at the end of the video by the big reveal: that the man being portrayed is not a man at all, but Taylor Swift in masquerade.

What is the point of this, if not to suggest that the image of the male life being portrayed is not real, but a woman’s fantasy of what it might be like? As if demanding of us that we question its accuracy. The more so since the final scene knocks down the fourth wall and demonstrates this was all a video as well, all “made up.”

Also subverting the superficial interpretation are hints throughout the video that woman are actually in control “behind the scenes.” Most obviously, at the end, Taylor Swift is revealed as the director, giving orders to the man and criticizing his performance, while he humbly defers and promises to do better. When the credits run, everything was done, they say, by Taylor Swift, and “no men were harmed in the making of this video.” Suggesting a status for men equivalent to that of a trained animal, or a pet.

In an earlier scene, of a man competing in a tennis match, on the rear wall we see the legend “Womens’ Charity.” That id, all the effort being put out by the man is for the benefit of women. A shot on a subway displays, on the rear wall, a fake movie poster titled “Man versus Master.” Which surely implies that the man is not the master. Another scene features a poster that reads ““Missing. If found, return to Taylor Swift.” 

In light of these background references, we have a right to assume irony. Now go back and look at the visual examples of male privilege. Are they not actually mocking these claims? Beginning with their chilche’d nature. The man manspreading on the subway has his legs spread absurdly wide. He is wearing a business suit and smoking a cigar—not the sort of person you would see in a subway, and not something you could get away with in the real world. Images of men throwing bills in the air; stepping over women lounging in bikinis on a private yacht. 

More irony: the imaginary man is seen throwing a tantrum on the tennis court, on the ground and banging his fists. Is this meant to illustrate a male right to express anger? But it seems most obviously to refer to a recent such outburst by Serena Williams. A female line judge rolls her eyes in a brief reaction shot: men are not allowed to get away with such behavior.

A gentleman of obviously advanced years is shown marrying a younger woman. If this is meant to suggest male privilege, her big smile as she flashes a huge diamond ring to the camera is not the best way to do so. It implies instead that she is getting just what she wants here.

A woman has to work twice as hard as a man to get ahead? The video shows the very opposite: immediately after criticizing her male lead, Taylor Swift as director heaps praise on a female actor for doing no more than rolling her eyes at the camera. The scene is too obvious to be without meaning.

The reality Taylor Swift is portraying is that feminism is all wrong. Men do not get the better end of the social bargain, and never did. Women are always in control; for the simple reason that men do everything they do in hopes of pleasing women in the mating dance. A pretty young women gets whatever she wants, whenever she wants it. She simply says, “try to be sexier—try to be more likeable”; as Swift does to her male alter ego at the end of the movie; and any man will react like a cowed but devoted dog. 

Men are whatever they are because that is what women tell them to be.