If a guy is always asking a girl, what she would like, he is lost. Yep, women like to take a back seat in a relationship

Really? {raised eyebrows}

An awful lot of modern feminist commentary is about women becoming active in their own lives and within the mythos of society. Women realise that they are cast as audience for male behaviour and are now openly questioning the centrality of the male view as the essential dominant ideology. It may not impact your generation, but the next couple of generations of women ain't gonna take that shit no more

keep to the Fen Causeway

recently I realized that hierarchy interactions, instincts and emotions have to be taken seriously.

My take on feminism is described by analogy to a half-born baby. The head's out, but the hardest part is till to come. The most perilous part is where we are now. In the first world women have fought for and insisted on more emancipation and have achieved rights hitherto denied them for centuries by patriarchal systems intent on preventing it. However much of the world remains heavily patriarchal and watches our evolution with horror, pushing back with ever-growing intensity fearing these ideas will spread to their lands.

Millennia of human evolution determined separation of roles and responsibilities between men and women. By muscular superiority mens' skills were deployed away from the hearth, in the hunt and at war, while the women tended the home and learned the skills that do not depend so much on muscle mass as horizontal thinking, multi-tasking and nurture of the young, so vulnerable amongst the rest of the animal kingdom, so slow to form autonomy.

In a perfect world men would never have profited from superior strength to force women to obey them, or womens' wits would have found ways to preclude this enforced subservience, and the better examples of this are still visible in today's vastly morphed gender landscape.

The baby's not going back into the womb. Women who have tasted more freedom to be authentic and less dominated by patriarchy have not had an easy time reclaiming their rights and they are loath to re-yield them, justly. Few women choose to return to the old ways, with some notable exceptions in communities like the Amish for example. In 'primitive' societies the women themselves willingly enable patriarchy by teaching their sons to respect men more, by genitally mutilating their daughters, or in history binding their feet and condemning them to a life bereft of clitoral pleasure or chronic pain and inability to walk in a normal manner.

Because the bulk of feminism is still unborn, the major work ahead for feminism is to detoxify the Stockholm syndrome that encourages women to perpetuate patriarchy, the learned helplessness that is the hallmark of women fatalistically accepting their lot will always be subservience by biological dint of their slighter builds.

On one hand we have the will and prayers of billions of women still victims of gender discrimination all calling for the yoke of patriarchy to be lifted, all trying to midwife the child of true equality and mutual respect between the sexes, and the forces of privilege, the males who have been able to bully their women into indulging them, pampering their egos and permitting them the myth of their superiority, in return for the muscular protection of being possessions, baby-farms, chattel not far above cattle in social status.

On the other hand Feminism as such has only been around little more than a century. That's the head. The resistance endangering the complete birth comes from the billions of men whose self esteem is falsely rooted in their roles as deciders, leaders of the family, tribe or state. This 'arrangement' has been thousands of years in the making. That's the body, still stuck.

Only the most confident of women will choose autonomy and the ensuing vulnerability in today's world. These few women seek men whose feminine sides are developed, with whom they can have relationships that transcend gender differences, meeting on a plane of human respect and enjoyment, a very different kettle of fish than traditional fear-based protection agendas. Only the most confident of men will nurture their own femininity, braving the gauntlet from their fellow men for 'betraying the brotherhood', jumping ship, going 'wet' or earning epithets like 'wimps' or 'pussies' by relinquishing the male-dominant hierarchy and finding what's beyond.

The richest emotional experiences are closely related to achieving a high status, apparently.

'They' spend billions wanting us to believe that, with great effect.

How much would you like to push against?

Rome wasn't built in a day, change of the profundity this diary discusses may take a millennium. I am still glad the journey to gender justice is well on its way, remaining in the dark ages is to remain victims to the worst patriarchy offers. What we do now will help future generations of our children and theirs beyond to have better lives, what else are we here for? Full human rights increase our potential to be more wholly actualised as a species, that's a destination worth struggling towards.

Once the shoulders are out the rest will come easier. Hierarchy may well be as irrelevant as the placenta come that time.


'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

Yep, women like to take a back seat in a relationship

From the towering height of a half-century of ill-digested social relations, I'll try to amend this :

Yep, most women generally like choose, or are obliged, to take a back seat in a relationship

It's interesting to indicate where one is coming from in this sort of discussion; there are no absolute truths, and the certainties we have reached from personal experience are necessarily partial.

I have recently buried my mother. She was a front-line feminist, strongly engaged in empowering helpless women. A near-contemporary of Betty Freidan and Simone de Beauvoir, she had to work it out for herself to a great extent. But what struck me, in reflecting on her life, is the extent to which her thinking was structured in consequence of her rather complicated reproductive destiny.

For me, the only fundamental distinction between men and women is that of reproduction [and before anyone interjects, I acknowledge that this is false, like all great truths about men and women : the questions of gender identity blur and complicate this simple distinction nicely!] That is to say, the question of dominance/submission as the primary motor of male/female relations harks back to a biological archetype. The behaviours expressed by modern men and women undoubtedly have an instinctive element; however, they are conditioned by the cultural framework we live in.

Clearly, we all have some innate propensions as to sexual preferences (notably, but not only, with respect to the gender of partners). We all are influenced by the role models of the men and women we grow up with (including, of course, our parents). Some (most) cultures allow little or no choice to men and women as to the range of behaviours they are permitted to express. Many societies try actively to suppress the range of natural human sexual propensities. This often leaves parents ill-equipped to guide their children in this respect :

This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin : The Poetry Foundation

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
 They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
 And add some extra, just for you.

 But they were fucked up in their turn
 By fools in old-style hats and coats,
 Who half the time were soppy-stern
 And half at one another's throats.

 Man hands on misery to man.
 It deepens like a coastal shelf.
 Get out as early as you can,
 And don't have any kids yourself.

[Disclaimer : I do not endorse the sentiments expressed in the final verse.]

My parents were equal co-deciders in all aspects of their lives (and ours). Because of their respective personalityes, my father (who had a high-status job, but preferred a quiet life) was generally perceived as being dominated by his wife.  This, in my analysis, allowed us to grow up with a larger degree of freedom with respect to the sexual roles we could assume (or alternatively, fucked us up: see above).

Bottom line : the dominant/submissive thing has a biological origin, but is largely a self-fulfilling prophecy, and has absolutely no reason to be actively perpetuated in modern culture. Everyone has a place on the dominant/submissive continuum, and no doubt a the cursor is somewhat to the right for a majority of men, and to the left for a majority of women. People do themselves violence if they try to force themselves into a role which is expected of them and which does not correspond to their true nature (and, of course, they do violence to their partner). The secret is that it's a wide world, and there are a huge number of men and women out there... one or more of them will fit you like a glove.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

So, a question, to my fellow male nerds:

What the fuck is wrong with us?

...

We are not the lovable nerdy protagonist who's lovable because he's the protagonist. We're not guaranteed to get laid by the hot chick of our dreams as long as we work hard enough at it. There isn't a team of writers or a studio audience pulling for us to triumph by "getting the girl" in the end. And when our clever ruses and schemes to "get girls" fail, it's not because the girls are too stupid or too bitchy or too shallow to play by those unwritten rules we've absorbed.

Although I have an amused tolerance for books like The Total Woman, I am not entirely incapable of good, old-fashioned feminist rage. The notion that even educated middle-class American women had to put out in order to get a damn refrigerator--even that they might "yearn" for one--just steams me. However, I would not advise against using sex for more subtle marital adjustments, of a type described in The Sex-Starved Marriage. Davis reminds women that one of the more effective ways to get a husband to be more considerate and helpful is to seduce him. She counsels a group of female clients who complain of angry, critical husbands to "pay more attention to their physical relationships with their husbands," to "be sexier, more affectionate, attentive, responsive, and passionate." Darned if the old bag of tricks doesn't work like a charm--the ladies arrive at the next therapy session giggling and thrilled with their new powers. To many contemporary women, however, the notion that sex might have any function other than personal fulfillment (and the occasional bit of carefully scheduled baby making) is a violation of the very tenets of the sexual revolution that so deeply shaped their attitudes on such matters. Under these conditions, pity the poor married man hoping to get a bit of comfort from the wife at day's end. He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual maneuver, and still doing a slow burn over his failure to wipe down the countertops and fold the dish towel after cooking the kids' dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his e-mail, catch a few minutes of SportsCenter, and call it a night.

She was trying to cook and I was trying to help her. You see in my grandparents' (I was raised by them - a lower working class family) my grandmother would prepare the meal and serve everyone (as a side, she also had a full-time job as a cleaner, making MORE than my grandfather). She would eat (she still does) after everyone else.

It was a fight, a big fight. Now it struck me, you see nobody was forcing her to behave like this. Indeed my grandfather is a bit macho, but she had (has) more money, was/is financially independent and in an environment (surrounded by urban elites) where social support would be on her side.

But she was actively the biggest enforcer of the status-quo. For me (a materialist-rationalist troskyist at that time), this was a massive revelation. Suddenly male-oppression narratives were giving way to voluntary servitude ones.

Ten years later another idea struck my mind: I was making my grandmother distressed and unhappy with all my attempts of shared cooking. A nice old lady that deserves some peace.

Monday I will be lunching with them. My grandmother will be making the food, cleaning the dishes. I will be eating everything and smiling. They will be happy and I will be extremely happy because they are happy. I will be able to bear this for a couple of days at most - but they will be profoundly happy and that has to count for more than my liberal bigotry, right?

Of course there are consequences: probably my biggest shame (really) is that I do not cook. And being lazy makes me not act on this. I am profoundly embarrassed by this...

Now, lets change gears and fast-forward to the hyper-liberal, hyper-progressive (and if you do not believe this, just see the voting records in areas where students/faculty live - start with Cambridge and Oxford), hyper-rationalist environment of British universities (which deserve to be considered some of the best in the world). I have been to plenty of them for considerable time. Suffice to say that I tend to compare Academia to North Korea. It is a highly hierarchical environment (and getting worse through reasons that I will not discuss here). This is supposedly in the place where rationalism is bred.

The painful conclusion that I have taken in my life is that we are just a garden variety of primates with a strong sense of hierarchy and very little reason.

If you believe in the fairy-tale of the nice, rational, pure human which society spoils, then you are in for constant disappointment. It is the base material that is not up to your standards.

But, on the other hand, if you see a species with primal instincts (like any other) which is endowed with (a little bit) of reason than there is cause to be both pessimist and optimist. Pessimist because that tiny bit of reason can make ugliest part worse. But optimism because reason can make the sharper edges a little bit less sharp (though I would not say, soft).

What we would need is an educational programme devoted to the idea of softening the edges. This is a completely different perspective from the enlightenment view that human material has in-born all the qualities that just need to be nurtured. This is also a completely different perspective from the conservative view which seems to want to sharpen the edges.

The Wikipedia page reveals the inequality slant and spoilers soon. Or if you have time between football for a "WTF did I just watch?" experience, here are Part 1 and Part 2 on Youtube. Or here is a Hollywoodish trailer:

It is remarkable that this movie was made early in Perestroika (if not just earlier), as the parody of Soviet pecking orders (with pretty arbitrary status promotions and rituals), bureaucracy manners, rude service is pretty visible. Also, the film is made by a Georgian director - and now familiar Russian domination theme might be discerned as well.

But the "surface" critique of Western inequalities holds water as well, especially now, with all that false or random meritocracy. The wild 90s in the Russia are no less fitting the film theme than the Soviet stagnation. There is something timeless about the inequality subject.