I'm imagining the first Urartian pot merchant who showed his pottery wheel to some visiting horse-nomads. "kʷelh₁! kʷekʷel!" "What's he saying?" "he say turn round. Round and round!" "Yes, they do that." "kʷékʷlos! H₁éḱwos kʷékʷlos kʷe tekmi dʰéǵʰōm!" "How do you even pronounce that? What's he saying?" "He say...buy him horse now. Probably you last chance."
Btw, incredible how influenced by Rosseau and Marx her thinking is. "If only there were no oppressive forces around, we could be all gallant and nice and insert here whatever."
Others have made the observation that when it comes to how American middle-class culture relates to masculinity, the Return of the Repressed becomes obvious. (Shocker: Freud really was right.) Young men take steroids they do not need and hit themselves with hammers in the belief this will make them "look manly"; women read romance books where the male heroes are dominant, aggressive stalkers; frustrated female desire is distorted into things like "Morning Glory Milking Farm". (I miss the 90s, when Robert Bly tried to teach men to beat drums and write poetry to get in touch with their deep feelings. Such an innocent time...)
"...women read romance books where the male heroes are dominant, aggressive stalkers; frustrated female desire is distorted into things like 'Morning Glory Milking Farm...'"
Seriously, I've been thinking a lot about the weird twists of women who want to enjoy stories of male dominance, but want it to be ideologically appropriate, and so we get monster sex so you get to enjoy stories of a powerful, manly... minotaur (or werewolf, or whatever).
Something else that I've been thinking about for a while is the way that women shape culture by serving as enforcers of norms, as shaming men, calling the men of the community to punish antisocial men, calling for male violence when necessary, etc. And I feel like, idk, that balance has increasingly come off-kilter in the last half century and change because women and men alike are failing to acknowledge it and its usefulness.
Weirdly, the equilibrium often works well in theologically conservative churches that *aren't* being self-consciously Manly (e.g. your Mark Driscoll types or adult converts to Orthodoxy), but are also not being aggressively feminist. But the trick is that you can't think about it too hard ("Our faith tradition says that men rule everything, so why is every leadership role below that of pastor held by the congregation's women...?") because once that happens, it's like the athelete who chokes on the free throw because he's now consciously thinking about it.
Oh yeah, long-time reader, first-time commenter. And man, I'm flying close to the sun with the razor-thin anonymity of my Substack handle.
It has struck me, too, how many strong-willed women there are among American conservatives. I think it's a genuinely American cultural thing: the frontierswoman who can pick up and use a rifle if she has to. (Women in Western movies are notably strong-willed.) This is why "trad women" seemed so fake.
So I've got to say I would not read such a book more than the review even though as a feminist I suppose I'm supposed to be the audience. I don't think, however, it is an actual feminist leaning book. Feminism isn't about demonizing any particular man for being man, let alone simply for being tall and bearded and working with one's hands. Some of the things the author of the book said seemed designed too make her reader roll their eye at feminism--as indeed most journalistic statements on feminism are meant to.
But equally I take issue with Ms. PSmith's take here. I roll my eyes at the idea she's expressed, multiple times that men are endowed by their gender to be a cross between Ayn Rand's Hero and Rudyard Kipling's now you are a man son. It's rather like setting gender based on the character of the Virgin Mary or and saying here proof that gender differences are real.
To make the argument that women are only acceptable when they do things that are traditionally male is a sound argument but to suggest that we should train ONLY girls in that, or we don't value the traditional female, I mean seriously? Also, Martha Stewart would like to have a word--and since I happen to know at least one of the people who taught her her skills, she was an outlier not in feminine skills but in marketing. Or one could point to her predecessor Julia Child, who mastered feminine skills and worked for the OSS.
It's this idea I find most stifling, as a mother, as a feminist as an old farm girl and thus observer of nature and as a human being, the idea that being a mother (and overall nurturer) is a cordoned off identity, that it necessarily requires one to not ambitious, or a fighter or a physically active doer, etc. That is observably untrue.
It is, as much of a sexist idea, a classist one, and a wildly middle class one at that. The idea of lady (and its counterpart gentlemen, which was a thing men could be) is of course a bit of a class conceit, a way too think one-selves above the people who did the real work. Maids, who not only women but also spent far more of their lives making a home beautiful and nurturing did not get to be ladies, not even their offshoot as nurses/nannies ,nor did slave-women.
But at least at one time the term lady came with a real sense of power, and its full expression of it. Lady's we required to have honor, and stoicism, and that careless humor in the face of disaster that men have now claimed for themselves. They were supposed to gather the people of the castle to defend it and if all hope was lost, and only rape and murder possible--throw themselves off its parapets.
Now, with the middle class moralists working on it, the term has devolved so that only those with whose zest for life is in their beige twinsets and ability to keep their sex life as decorous as possible and not the kind, the courageous and rarely the nurturing. It's not feminism's fault the word got shelved.
Nor is it feminism's fault that Heathcliffian behavior is generally considered less acceptable than gentlemanly kinds. (It was a shocking book when it was written as well.) Though really, putting out this kind of book when Heathcliffe is President of the United states seems willfully blind.
I find much more interesting the idea I read, also in a review of a book I would have read but had small children then, that because of our social ideas we don't see traits we code as one sexes as the other. We don't see women's interest in marriage and children as risk taking even though it clearly is. We don't see coaching and the like as nurturing even though it is. Heck, this author talks about men sharing factoids and doesn't see women sharing recipes etc. in the same light. We don't actually only talk about emotion and the biggest gossips I know are men-but we don't put those behaviors in that basket and so find "proof" of gender stereotypes.
But the proof that gender stereotypes are untrue is that in fact, whole certain behaviors gather more people of one sex or another, they don't do it universally i.e. Individuals differ on which behaviors they exhibit in keeping with their gender and which they don't.
And finally, if you are going to quote the study that shows primate have a greater interest in wheeled things, you have to also note that they had an equal interest in the doll and other nurturing toys. Something that is seen in field observation on them in the young.
I don't recall Catherine McKinnon demonizing individual men. Her claim to fame as a feminist is her legal work on sexual harassment. A quick check on wikipedia elucidates she talks of patriarchy on a system wide level, equating it with a marxist analysis. If you are going to say that sexual harassment law goes after men for being men, well I'm going to have to take issue with your internalized misandry.
Shulasmith Firestone, also saw it with a marxist analysis, taking the problem down to biologic distinction and finding extreme solutions. While I've been trained to think, oh yeah, he got me with that one, on the other hand, it would be wildly wrong to say her focus was on blaming individual men (though maybe the men in her family). She saw the problem as a matter of controlling the means of production and thus human beings had to find a different means off reproduction or they would never be free. To categorize that theory as against individual men seems to be missing her point by a mile.
While she was prominent, how could someone like that not be, and her ideas influenced early second wave and radical feminism, they are hardly mainstream. Then too her later work is influenced by the fact that she was developing schizophrenia which would later take over her life, and I think a certain lack of clarity is bound to leak through. Or she just thought outside the box. I'm not a trans-humanist, and admire Marx only for his keen analysis, so I'm not a fair judge there.
In discussing this, I think one would be remiss in not discussing the trend of people, but especially men, in saying feminists "hate men". I've had this said of me many times in online comments and in person. The husband of a friend of whom we get along very well says this. For a long time I assumed he, at least, was just roughly teasing but I also noticed how often in reddit help questions, men would refer to women doing something as disrespectful, often to his manhood--when it wasn't disrespectful to anything, let alone his manhood, it was just not something they liked or perhaps wanted in a relationship (which is fine, you get to have preferences and say them, so does the other person, hopefully a compromise can be made).
And it clicked. A lot of men tend to equate women looking up to them, to looking for answers, to seeing them as leaders to masculinity itself. The idea of men and women being equals feels like an attack on manhood itself. I've had a lot of frustrating conversations lately with people who insist on male headship and say men and women have complimentary roles but women WITH THE MOST IMPORTANT ROLE (according to them) are under men. They don't get to make the decisions. That's not what complimentary means. You could say that women make decisions in one realm and men in the other. That would be complimentary, but one under the other is not complimentary. That's not the definition. Complimentary colors are on the same layer of the color wheel, pairs directly opposite each other, not one under the other.
And so we come to feminists hating men and masculinity. Well, if one person believes in equality and the other is the the kind of person who equates masculinity with being in charge and specifically in charge of women, well, of course the latter think feminists hate men. That person can't conceive of men any other way.
But in point of fact, most men are not in charge, they never were. They live their lives having to bow and scrape and please and flatter. It is true in patriarchal wonderlands now. It expect it will be true in communist utopias. So please, stop pushing it as a gender linked trait. It just isn't.
On the topic of male emotional availability: In "Boys and Sex" Orenstein does interview several boys who wish they could go deeper with their male friends. I think there may be an unmet need there, and maybe that's why boys/men have a stronger need for girlfriends than women/girls seem to need boyfriends. (That said, Orenstein's methods are suspect. The fact that she found half a dozen boys who said this doesn't mean that more than half a dozen boys feel it. If you're looking for another book about boys to hate, I highly recommend it.)
When I saw this was going to be a book about boys, I thought "oh boy, I can't wait." I am an avid reader of parenting books and I've read quite a few books about boys. Very very few are any good, especially the ones written by women. I love women, some of my best friends... actually all of them are women (except the husband), but women who are obsessed with the male psyche and then write books about it can lean a bit off. I think, in general, we are living through a moment when women feel a right to have strong opinions about what men are and should be, and this off-gasses as some rather bad parenting ideas.
btw, if you *are* interested in a good book about boys, the only one still on my shelf is "Raising Boys" by Steve Biddulph. My review:
This is a great book on boys and how to raise them. It is modern, it doesn't look backwards, it doesn't praise dubious behaviors, and it doesn't blame. On the other hand, it isn't guided by social ideology and it doesn't try to stuff boys into a pre-shaped box. Rather, it provides a series of positive ideas for raising successful, kind, thoughtful, and responsible men given the constraints of the society we live in.
This book is what The Wonder of Boys could have been, with less pseudoscience and working backwards from the conclusions. The author cites that book once, suggesting that he may have been guided by its flaws. If I had to recommend a child-rearing book to the parents of sons (and yes, this book is definitely for fathers as well) it would be this one.
There are times when I felt a little lost in the organization of the book and I thought he was a tad overprotective in his advice, but on the whole this was a solid piece of work.
I’ll check it out, thanks. I enjoyed Anthony Esolen’s book about boys but it was much more nostalgia for boyhood from a man than explaining boyhood for a mom.
This was a very satisfying review to read about a certain type of person I meet too often.
BTW: In Norse mythology, shape changing was a very common ability. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIrHkfvD0ag) I'm not sure if that supposed to imply that gods are 'not really man or woman but forces of nature' or that Odin doesn't give a shit because he's a cranky old man.
You should check out the book! His big scholarly thing is echoes of shamanism in Norse religion, and he talks a lot about shape-changing in Viking conceptions of identity.
Wow! Just came across this essay in my email inbox this morning. I don't know how it arrived, but I'm glad the headline caught my eye. I'm stoked! I've found someone new whose essays I want to read. (Not that I should be happy -- I'm reading too much already.) This is good writing! Really good writing! And by that I mean it is well-reasoned, persuasively articulated, and brimming with interesting associations that make me want to read more. Also, I love the way Mrs. Psmith uses endnotes! (I'm going to incorporate them into my own essays and blog posts.)
A review of a disliked book. I love it. So first I think I already recommended "T: The Story of Testosterone" By Carole Hooven, but if not.... And second I've come to recognize how important culture is. The recent IQ studies (Should find link to the ACX post*.) show that it's ~1/2 genes and 1/2 nurture. But another name for nurture is culture. What we value in our society. And we really need to pay more attention to culture, or to a good culture. I recently finished "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" by Thomas Sowell. Where Sowell argues that ghetto culture is an out growth of redneck culture and it really is not something we should be celebrating, but trying to change.
I'm imagining the first Urartian pot merchant who showed his pottery wheel to some visiting horse-nomads. "kʷelh₁! kʷekʷel!" "What's he saying?" "he say turn round. Round and round!" "Yes, they do that." "kʷékʷlos! H₁éḱwos kʷékʷlos kʷe tekmi dʰéǵʰōm!" "How do you even pronounce that? What's he saying?" "He say...buy him horse now. Probably you last chance."
Btw, incredible how influenced by Rosseau and Marx her thinking is. "If only there were no oppressive forces around, we could be all gallant and nice and insert here whatever."
Others have made the observation that when it comes to how American middle-class culture relates to masculinity, the Return of the Repressed becomes obvious. (Shocker: Freud really was right.) Young men take steroids they do not need and hit themselves with hammers in the belief this will make them "look manly"; women read romance books where the male heroes are dominant, aggressive stalkers; frustrated female desire is distorted into things like "Morning Glory Milking Farm". (I miss the 90s, when Robert Bly tried to teach men to beat drums and write poetry to get in touch with their deep feelings. Such an innocent time...)
"...women read romance books where the male heroes are dominant, aggressive stalkers; frustrated female desire is distorted into things like 'Morning Glory Milking Farm...'"
Seriously, I've been thinking a lot about the weird twists of women who want to enjoy stories of male dominance, but want it to be ideologically appropriate, and so we get monster sex so you get to enjoy stories of a powerful, manly... minotaur (or werewolf, or whatever).
Something else that I've been thinking about for a while is the way that women shape culture by serving as enforcers of norms, as shaming men, calling the men of the community to punish antisocial men, calling for male violence when necessary, etc. And I feel like, idk, that balance has increasingly come off-kilter in the last half century and change because women and men alike are failing to acknowledge it and its usefulness.
Weirdly, the equilibrium often works well in theologically conservative churches that *aren't* being self-consciously Manly (e.g. your Mark Driscoll types or adult converts to Orthodoxy), but are also not being aggressively feminist. But the trick is that you can't think about it too hard ("Our faith tradition says that men rule everything, so why is every leadership role below that of pastor held by the congregation's women...?") because once that happens, it's like the athelete who chokes on the free throw because he's now consciously thinking about it.
Oh yeah, long-time reader, first-time commenter. And man, I'm flying close to the sun with the razor-thin anonymity of my Substack handle.
It has struck me, too, how many strong-willed women there are among American conservatives. I think it's a genuinely American cultural thing: the frontierswoman who can pick up and use a rifle if she has to. (Women in Western movies are notably strong-willed.) This is why "trad women" seemed so fake.
So I've got to say I would not read such a book more than the review even though as a feminist I suppose I'm supposed to be the audience. I don't think, however, it is an actual feminist leaning book. Feminism isn't about demonizing any particular man for being man, let alone simply for being tall and bearded and working with one's hands. Some of the things the author of the book said seemed designed too make her reader roll their eye at feminism--as indeed most journalistic statements on feminism are meant to.
But equally I take issue with Ms. PSmith's take here. I roll my eyes at the idea she's expressed, multiple times that men are endowed by their gender to be a cross between Ayn Rand's Hero and Rudyard Kipling's now you are a man son. It's rather like setting gender based on the character of the Virgin Mary or and saying here proof that gender differences are real.
To make the argument that women are only acceptable when they do things that are traditionally male is a sound argument but to suggest that we should train ONLY girls in that, or we don't value the traditional female, I mean seriously? Also, Martha Stewart would like to have a word--and since I happen to know at least one of the people who taught her her skills, she was an outlier not in feminine skills but in marketing. Or one could point to her predecessor Julia Child, who mastered feminine skills and worked for the OSS.
It's this idea I find most stifling, as a mother, as a feminist as an old farm girl and thus observer of nature and as a human being, the idea that being a mother (and overall nurturer) is a cordoned off identity, that it necessarily requires one to not ambitious, or a fighter or a physically active doer, etc. That is observably untrue.
It is, as much of a sexist idea, a classist one, and a wildly middle class one at that. The idea of lady (and its counterpart gentlemen, which was a thing men could be) is of course a bit of a class conceit, a way too think one-selves above the people who did the real work. Maids, who not only women but also spent far more of their lives making a home beautiful and nurturing did not get to be ladies, not even their offshoot as nurses/nannies ,nor did slave-women.
But at least at one time the term lady came with a real sense of power, and its full expression of it. Lady's we required to have honor, and stoicism, and that careless humor in the face of disaster that men have now claimed for themselves. They were supposed to gather the people of the castle to defend it and if all hope was lost, and only rape and murder possible--throw themselves off its parapets.
Now, with the middle class moralists working on it, the term has devolved so that only those with whose zest for life is in their beige twinsets and ability to keep their sex life as decorous as possible and not the kind, the courageous and rarely the nurturing. It's not feminism's fault the word got shelved.
Nor is it feminism's fault that Heathcliffian behavior is generally considered less acceptable than gentlemanly kinds. (It was a shocking book when it was written as well.) Though really, putting out this kind of book when Heathcliffe is President of the United states seems willfully blind.
I find much more interesting the idea I read, also in a review of a book I would have read but had small children then, that because of our social ideas we don't see traits we code as one sexes as the other. We don't see women's interest in marriage and children as risk taking even though it clearly is. We don't see coaching and the like as nurturing even though it is. Heck, this author talks about men sharing factoids and doesn't see women sharing recipes etc. in the same light. We don't actually only talk about emotion and the biggest gossips I know are men-but we don't put those behaviors in that basket and so find "proof" of gender stereotypes.
But the proof that gender stereotypes are untrue is that in fact, whole certain behaviors gather more people of one sex or another, they don't do it universally i.e. Individuals differ on which behaviors they exhibit in keeping with their gender and which they don't.
And finally, if you are going to quote the study that shows primate have a greater interest in wheeled things, you have to also note that they had an equal interest in the doll and other nurturing toys. Something that is seen in field observation on them in the young.
“Feminism isn't about demonizing any particular man for being man, let alone simply for being tall and bearded and working with one's hands.”
There’s a real motte-and-bailey claim for you. Or are Catherine McKinnon, Shulamith Firestone, etc. not feminists?
I don't recall Catherine McKinnon demonizing individual men. Her claim to fame as a feminist is her legal work on sexual harassment. A quick check on wikipedia elucidates she talks of patriarchy on a system wide level, equating it with a marxist analysis. If you are going to say that sexual harassment law goes after men for being men, well I'm going to have to take issue with your internalized misandry.
Shulasmith Firestone, also saw it with a marxist analysis, taking the problem down to biologic distinction and finding extreme solutions. While I've been trained to think, oh yeah, he got me with that one, on the other hand, it would be wildly wrong to say her focus was on blaming individual men (though maybe the men in her family). She saw the problem as a matter of controlling the means of production and thus human beings had to find a different means off reproduction or they would never be free. To categorize that theory as against individual men seems to be missing her point by a mile.
While she was prominent, how could someone like that not be, and her ideas influenced early second wave and radical feminism, they are hardly mainstream. Then too her later work is influenced by the fact that she was developing schizophrenia which would later take over her life, and I think a certain lack of clarity is bound to leak through. Or she just thought outside the box. I'm not a trans-humanist, and admire Marx only for his keen analysis, so I'm not a fair judge there.
In discussing this, I think one would be remiss in not discussing the trend of people, but especially men, in saying feminists "hate men". I've had this said of me many times in online comments and in person. The husband of a friend of whom we get along very well says this. For a long time I assumed he, at least, was just roughly teasing but I also noticed how often in reddit help questions, men would refer to women doing something as disrespectful, often to his manhood--when it wasn't disrespectful to anything, let alone his manhood, it was just not something they liked or perhaps wanted in a relationship (which is fine, you get to have preferences and say them, so does the other person, hopefully a compromise can be made).
And it clicked. A lot of men tend to equate women looking up to them, to looking for answers, to seeing them as leaders to masculinity itself. The idea of men and women being equals feels like an attack on manhood itself. I've had a lot of frustrating conversations lately with people who insist on male headship and say men and women have complimentary roles but women WITH THE MOST IMPORTANT ROLE (according to them) are under men. They don't get to make the decisions. That's not what complimentary means. You could say that women make decisions in one realm and men in the other. That would be complimentary, but one under the other is not complimentary. That's not the definition. Complimentary colors are on the same layer of the color wheel, pairs directly opposite each other, not one under the other.
And so we come to feminists hating men and masculinity. Well, if one person believes in equality and the other is the the kind of person who equates masculinity with being in charge and specifically in charge of women, well, of course the latter think feminists hate men. That person can't conceive of men any other way.
But in point of fact, most men are not in charge, they never were. They live their lives having to bow and scrape and please and flatter. It is true in patriarchal wonderlands now. It expect it will be true in communist utopias. So please, stop pushing it as a gender linked trait. It just isn't.
Ah, so demonizing all men is part of feminism, just not the part you want to admit to.
> the unladylike possibility of bonding over how weather conditions affected various WW2 aircraft
Lies and libel—it’s Cold War aircraft now
pfft
some of us never moved on from WWI y’know
I can't imagine what it would be like to be her husband. I doubt it would be pleasant.
Sweet. Bastet's. Tail.
Thank you for reading that so we don't have to.
On the topic of male emotional availability: In "Boys and Sex" Orenstein does interview several boys who wish they could go deeper with their male friends. I think there may be an unmet need there, and maybe that's why boys/men have a stronger need for girlfriends than women/girls seem to need boyfriends. (That said, Orenstein's methods are suspect. The fact that she found half a dozen boys who said this doesn't mean that more than half a dozen boys feel it. If you're looking for another book about boys to hate, I highly recommend it.)
When I saw this was going to be a book about boys, I thought "oh boy, I can't wait." I am an avid reader of parenting books and I've read quite a few books about boys. Very very few are any good, especially the ones written by women. I love women, some of my best friends... actually all of them are women (except the husband), but women who are obsessed with the male psyche and then write books about it can lean a bit off. I think, in general, we are living through a moment when women feel a right to have strong opinions about what men are and should be, and this off-gasses as some rather bad parenting ideas.
btw, if you *are* interested in a good book about boys, the only one still on my shelf is "Raising Boys" by Steve Biddulph. My review:
This is a great book on boys and how to raise them. It is modern, it doesn't look backwards, it doesn't praise dubious behaviors, and it doesn't blame. On the other hand, it isn't guided by social ideology and it doesn't try to stuff boys into a pre-shaped box. Rather, it provides a series of positive ideas for raising successful, kind, thoughtful, and responsible men given the constraints of the society we live in.
This book is what The Wonder of Boys could have been, with less pseudoscience and working backwards from the conclusions. The author cites that book once, suggesting that he may have been guided by its flaws. If I had to recommend a child-rearing book to the parents of sons (and yes, this book is definitely for fathers as well) it would be this one.
There are times when I felt a little lost in the organization of the book and I thought he was a tad overprotective in his advice, but on the whole this was a solid piece of work.
I’ll check it out, thanks. I enjoyed Anthony Esolen’s book about boys but it was much more nostalgia for boyhood from a man than explaining boyhood for a mom.
On less deranged note: I think male biology is as important as the female for centering our social role - it's just that ours only takes a moment.
This was a very satisfying review to read about a certain type of person I meet too often.
BTW: In Norse mythology, shape changing was a very common ability. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIrHkfvD0ag) I'm not sure if that supposed to imply that gods are 'not really man or woman but forces of nature' or that Odin doesn't give a shit because he's a cranky old man.
You should check out the book! His big scholarly thing is echoes of shamanism in Norse religion, and he talks a lot about shape-changing in Viking conceptions of identity.
Wow! Just came across this essay in my email inbox this morning. I don't know how it arrived, but I'm glad the headline caught my eye. I'm stoked! I've found someone new whose essays I want to read. (Not that I should be happy -- I'm reading too much already.) This is good writing! Really good writing! And by that I mean it is well-reasoned, persuasively articulated, and brimming with interesting associations that make me want to read more. Also, I love the way Mrs. Psmith uses endnotes! (I'm going to incorporate them into my own essays and blog posts.)
A review of a disliked book. I love it. So first I think I already recommended "T: The Story of Testosterone" By Carole Hooven, but if not.... And second I've come to recognize how important culture is. The recent IQ studies (Should find link to the ACX post*.) show that it's ~1/2 genes and 1/2 nurture. But another name for nurture is culture. What we value in our society. And we really need to pay more attention to culture, or to a good culture. I recently finished "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" by Thomas Sowell. Where Sowell argues that ghetto culture is an out growth of redneck culture and it really is not something we should be celebrating, but trying to change.
*https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-good-news-is-that-one-side-has