The strangest and least plausible idea about women’s roles or women’s culture or feminine tradition is the idea that men could somehow have invented it. It’s the least likely thing for men to have created. Have you met men? It’s not the sort of thing could have come up with, much less maintained. To be honest, they’re not that creative or versatile or that good at explaining and maintaining such things.
It’s an equally implausible idea, though I have heard it said, that male success is the result of coddling or encouragement and being given advantages and being told they can succeed. That’s not the preparation the male psyche receives in masculine culture.
Male success is the result of competition, challenge, testing, and failure. Top soliders don’t get to their position by being encouraged into it. Quite the opposite. They’re challenged and eliminated until they’re all that’s left. They’re told that they’re nothing if they can’t compete. They’re told to suck it up and toughen up. Don’t cry, don’t expect encouragement, prove yourself.
The threat of physical violence is a persistent background condition of masculine culture. Men have to learn to get along, to play the game; they have to know who they can and can’t trust, who is an asset and who is dangerous. And they test one another to see how dangerous they are and how in control of their dangerousness they are.
Deep down among men there is an innate willingness to destroy one another, and also to be destroyed in the pursuit of the goal and defense of the goal. Men are willing to die. Deep down, they’re made for it. And one of the biggest things they will die for is for women. They’ll kill for them too. So that women can be secure, men will actively surrender their own security. So the family, the home, the village, the state, the vision, can be secure. And deep down women are quite willing to let them die, for the good of the city. They don’t like it. But they will spend the coin that men offer.
If men treated women like they treat men, women would hate it. Men hold up heroic examples as an inspiration, as a challenge. Not because you can assume that you already possess that kind of competence or value, but because that’s the challenge. Become this, or be nothing. Disappear. You have no innate value. You have to prove yourself or be eliminated. Make yourself heard or be silent. Make yourself seen or disappear, because no one is going to do it for you.
That’s your job. Prove yourself to other men. Prove yourself to women. Because prejudice is stacked against you. No one takes for granted that you’re worth saving, except your mother. Whatever you can get, you have to earn. And you had better be aggressive in seeking it and asserting it and proving it. Because otherwise you’re in trouble. The strength of men is in the weakness and tenuousness of their position. They will die for something, for the sake of the future.
Watch the movie Predator and try to understand the male psyche. It’s a fantasy about being hunted, about being stalked by an implacable foe before whom you are nothing. Your life is a trophy to be collected. It’s about seeing the best and strongest of men reduced to chattering fear and being butchered like animals. Its about seeing supermen reduced to mere prey by an undefeatable, animistic foe. It’s a fantasy of the fears of our deepest, darkest memories of the primordial jungle, the jungle of life where death ruled and out of which only the ones who could survive emerged.
Dutch, the hero, survives. After losing everything. He loses all his help, his companions, his weapons, all the trappings and help of civilization; he runs, he’s buried in deep waters, he crawls in the mud, he hides, he expects to die. He looks death in the face. And he survives. In part by happy chance. But he learns. He learns the danger of the jungle. He learns how to cloak himself in its darkness and danger. He becomes the predator. He masters fire and stands out, challenging the night. He’s beaten to within an inch of his life, reduced to a child, crawling and crying out. But he survives. Barely.
What a strange and horrible fantasy! And how compelling. He slays the dragon of fear and death. But even in death, the dragon laughs at him. In the end, he stands amid the ruin, a soldier who did his duty. His general looks on him in pity, the woman he protected sees him and sheds a tear. He is burned, bleeding, dirty. But alive. And as he leaves, the music lets us know, the danger is gone for now. But not forever. It lives on in the heart of the jungle.
Buried somewhere in there is the message. The greatness of men is not viciousness, nor mere predatory aggression. It’s not even exactly strength or cleverness. It is courage, sacrifice, magnanimity, perseverance.
If you study the lives and culture of the men of the past, to die is no surprise. To die with honor is their ambition.
The loss of chivalry and of chivalric heroes isn’t a kind of escape or gain for women. It’s the end of the part of the masculine attitude that treats women differently from men. What remains is not a world they would wish to live in, nor the sort of men they would wish to meet. There is a dark side to men, the predators they could become if they don’t become heroes. They are willing to die, and that makes them powerful. They’re willing to kill, and that makes them dangerous. For better or for worse. Take away chivalry, and men won’t become women, any more than women will become men (although of the two that’s the easier), men will become bad men and worthless men. Men need their heroic fantasies, crazy as they are. In them there is the seed of something necessary, even something great. But you won’t know how necessary or how great until the day you find yourself looking around and asking the question, “Where have all the good men gone?”
The roles that women and men have both inherited were not imposed artificially in some sense from the outside. They were produced from the inside by the ones who filled them. Those cultures were then sustained and reinforced in their particular forms. Once male or female culture had taken a particular form that form was communicated and enforced within the culture. But the culture itself was produced by, generated by, the people themselves.
Women created the world that women inhabited. Because it’s what women wanted, what they needed, and what was needed from them. Because they are who they are. Same for men. We all made the world we inhabit, and we all received it as something imposed on us. History and technology changed the conditions, changed the demands. The demands of the sexes among themselves, the demands of the environment, the demands of each sex on the other. It was a continual struggle and negotiation.
Sometimes the culture had to evolve, had to change the interpretation of what was needed from the sexes and what the sexes had to offer. But fundamentally it all flows, and always has, in an emergent flowering from the underlying nature of the sexes in response to the existing environmental challenges. And those challenges are both variable and persistent, particular and universal, as the solutions existent in the sexes are also variable and persistent, particular and universal. Life is a complex game we all play, shaping and being shaped. Giving and taking, trading, negotiating, gaining, and losing. It’s a world of tradeoffs. Conceiving it as anything more simple will only lead to confusion and disappointment.
Making Nobody Happy 