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Is feminist and homosexualist PC the biggest problem we face?
Mark E. writes:
The below is an article about yet another instance of a black actor getting in trouble for violating political correctness against so-called “gays.”
Also, a black basketball player was recently raked over the coals for stating frankly that he would not want a homosexual teammate to be in the locker room with him. I believe that he continues to be unrepentant for this statement.
It seems that black men are the only ones who are willing to say such things aloud.
What is also sick is that if this black actor had committed some crime, he would not be subjected to all this. No, punishment and ostracism and “counseling” are reserved for mere statements.
Notice how “gays”—i.e., mostly middle- and upper-class whites—have become the ultimate “minority” group for liberals today. The fury turned upon black men who speak ill of “gays” is no less than if they were whites who spoke ill of blacks.
I wish you would comment about this. More than that, I wish you would accommodate to your views the fact that it is whites in America who are the most destructive racial group in America.
Most blacks I meet are “normal” people (I live in the “inner city”) with normal views about things; but the white middle- and upper-middle class suburban educated types are really whacked, especially the women.
White women are the most destructive force in America. The feminizing of America, not what you miscall “liberalism,” is the root of all rot.
Blacks are increasingly the victims of white liberal fanaticism.
I don’t know how you ignore this massive white female elephant in the room of your race-based theorizing.
Here is the article:
Washington Pulls Himself Out of Emmys
Grey’s Anatomy star Isaiah Washington has pulled himself out of the Emmy Awards race following the controversy surrounding a homophobic remark he made about cast mate T.R. Knight. The actor outed Knight last year during an on-set row with cast mate Patrick Dempsey. The controversy rumbled into 2007 when Washington uttered a derogatory gay term again backstage at the Golden Globe Awards, claiming he never used the word in the first place. He has since accepted he was wrong on both occasions, apologized to gay community leaders and undergone counseling. But Washington obviously doesn’t think he’ll find a lot of favor among Emmy voters and so he’s the only Grey’s Anatomy cast member not to submit himself for consideration, according to trade paper Daily Variety. http://www.imdb.com/news/wenn/2007-04-20/#2
LA replies:
“I wish you would comment about this. More than that, I wish you would accommodate to your views the fact that it is whites in America who are the most destructive racial group in America.”
What do you think “the path to national suicide” is all about?
Mark E. replies:
Thanks for reply. In a subsequent email I have made clear my recognition of this, and have added further explanation. The last sentence of my email sounded more pointed that was intended.
I think what I am getting at is that the entire mentality of our times is being driven, household-by-household, by the steady drip drip drip of the domination of female mentality in all social spheres. On your site, you and various commentators will speak of “fighting back” against immigration and so on. To me, it is not about policies but of speaking truth to power, the “power” being the white females who dominate society.
You also speak of identifying with one’s “own.”
Now, consider these incidents of black men being excoriated for speaking unfavorably about “gays”.
I, as a white man, identify much more strongly with a lot of black men, than I identify with a lot of these white bourgeois women. I feel a lot more endangered by the threat of what white women could do to me for saying the wrong thing, than I feel endangered physically by all the black guys walking past me on the sidewalk. So, in all these gender-based conflicts, who is “my side?” White women, because they are white? Or black men, because they are men?
LA replies:
This gets complicated.
It seems to me we have to approach it in two stages.
The first stage is:
We have to confront the sickness and evil within the white West, such as the feminist rule you speak of.
But that is not enough. That leads to a neocon/Mark Steyn type argument which goes like this: “Our problem is that we Westerners don’t believe in ourselves; we need to believe in ourselves again.” To which I reply: “Fine. But once we believe in ourselves again, what do we DO?” And the neocons never have a reply to that. They don’t actually want the West to defend itself. They just want to beat their chests and throw darts at the left and let the neocon audience imagine that beating one’s chest and throwing darts at the left is enough to stave off the external threats to the West.
Similarly, “speaking truth to the feminist power,” as you urge, still doesn’t get us to the point of what we must do, once truth has been spoken to the feminist power. You dismiss policies. But laying out actual policies for Western survival is essential in the forming of a pro-West body of opinion prepared to act in defense of the West. An argument that consists of saying, “We must reject the left, we must reject feminism,” does not create such a body of opinion.
So the second stage is:
We must call on the white-majority West to do the things it must do to survive.
Obviously we are in a hell of a situation, since there is no unified West that has the identity and will to act in its own behalf, and obviously, the people who have the concerns I’ve stated here are at present a small and powerless minority. But those Westerners who do have such identity and will must seek to speak for and to lead the West, while simultaneously confronting those elements within the West that are set on destroying it. We do not have the power to defeat those elements directly. But, given the accelerating suicidal course of liberal society, as liberal society continues to crash, more and more people will wake up to its nature and be ready to turn to something else.
Again, we have no power at all at present. What we can do is seek to set up, both within ourselves and externally, an intellectual and spiritual critique of and alternative to the liberal order, in the hope that this community or body of opinion will over time draw more and more people to it and gain the social and political substance to resist liberalism and save the West.
Finally, you write:
I, as a white man, identify much more strongly with a lot of black men, than I identify with a lot of these white bourgeois women. I feel a lot more endangered by the threat of what white women could do to me for saying the wrong thing, than I feel endangered physically by all the black guys walking past me on the sidewalk. So, in all these gender-based conflicts, who is “my side?” White women, because they are white? Or black men, because they are men?
I may not feel this problem as you do, since I do not have to deal much with feminist PC. However, I do think you’re overstating it. To the extent that I do encounter feminist PC, I look at it in the face and tell it to bug off. And, in general terms, I think we can only do this successfully by criticizing the feminism as such, by showing that it’s wrong, not simply by “disobeying” it. Of course it may be that in certain employment and other situations, that is simply not possible. But that is true of the rule of liberalism generally. (And by the way I disagree with your idea that feminism is the ultimate problem, not liberalism. Feminism is one dimension of liberalism.)
There is no simple solution to the dilemma you’re describing. We have to deal with all the issues that we have to deal with. However, I would suggest not creating a paralyzing dichotomy between opposing feminism where it is needed, and opposing black violence and black racialism (and the liberal orthodoxy that justifies both) where it is needed. All these things are part of the same thing: the leftist/liberal campaign (in alliance with many non-whites and non-Westerners) to destroy the American nation, Western civilization, Christianity, and the white race.
LA continues:
I want to add that if you are implying that blacks in general will be our ally against the left in saving the west, I think that is folly. The small number of blacks who are Western patriots—that is, blacks who love the West and who, as part of that love of the West, at least implicitly accept the West’s historic white majority character—will join us spontaneously out of their own love of America and the West, without our having to make some special appeal to them of the type that “conservatives” are always making to “conservative” blacks and “conservative” Hispanics, making that appeal to nonwhites the cornerstone of their politics.
Mark E. writes:
The last sentence of my email perhaps sounds sharper towards you personally than the mere expression of urgency that was intended.
I know of course that you do comment upon feminization—the general application of female thinking and valuation as the metaphysical and societal norm. Indeed, you seem somewhat to recognize this impliedly in your discussion about what is liberalism.
My disagreement with you is that you give such primacy to racial matters and upon the wrongdoings of various racial minority or immigrant group members, when the widespread conceptual and psychic destruction is all being driven and brought about by whites, and particularly white bourgeois females.
This is shown by such things, the IMDB article for example, as the denunciations of black men who are honest about their dislike of homosexuality. The bourgeois white females identify with and pride themselves on their PC views of “gays,” who are (1) females or feminine men, (2) hip artsy trendy with-it and into clothes and home decoration, (3) white bourgeois like themselves, (4) not men who want to push their yucky thingy on women.
(I believe that women have a natural aversion to and resentment of sex. Just observe a female cat in heat being pursued and mated by males. Does she sound or act like she is enjoying it? At best, women simply do not care about it, because it has no independent value to them. Sex to women is only a means to something else (money, gifts, power-by-proxy, marriage, kids, acceptance, attention). Men regard sex as a good-in-itself, and are sexually driven even if they don’t want to be. Much of our societal confusion arises from the refusal to acknowledge frankly women’s sex aversion, and women’s resentment of men for wanting sex.)
The race/immigration problems that you discuss are not a result of any cultural/intellectual force from within those various non-white races, neither those in America nor in their home countries.
Some illegal alien committing a murder is a terrible thing. But it is one action, and does not set social standards.
Social standards are really set at home, at parties, in the office, by what is expressly or impliedly held unacceptable, etc. Gossip and social selection—inclusion/exclusion—the powers wielded by women—are the main engines of social attitudes.
It is the white women yapping yapping yapping, dominating their husbands, indulging their kids, spending spending spending, sounding off ignorantly and stridently about their political “beliefs,” deluding themselves that if they did not have kids they would be president of General Electric by now, imposing on society a level of risk-tolerance appropriate for a nursing home—it is they who are destroying the American soul.
LA replies:
I feel you misunderstand me. I don’t think I have ever said that the race/immigration problems that I discuss are the result of any “cultural/intellectual force from within those various non-white races.” I have never blamed nonwhite and non-Western groups for anything or focused on the “wrongdoing” of immigrant groups. Not even Muslims. Indeed, I’ve said that Muslim jihadists are not bad people, but good Muslims, doing what Muslims are commanded to do by their god, which is to kill non-Muslims. I’ve said that self-aggrandizement is the natural way of mankind, and that if we turn our country into a cultural vacuum, others will come and fill up that vacuum, as the Mexicans are doing. I don’t blame the Mexicans for their imperialist invasion of the U.S, which I wrote about at FP last year. I blame us for allowing that invasion.
All my blame and criticism has been directed at white America and the white West for allowing in a mass influx of non-Westerners who, not because of any fault of their own, but simply because who they are, are incompatible with and dangerous to our civilization.
At the same time, once these people are here in sufficient numbers to feel their oats, they ARE going to start to assert themselves and change society. At that point it is no longer enough to criticize the whites for letting them in. We have to deal with the immigrant groups themselves.
It’s the same with the Mexicans. The issue doesn’t stop with “blaming us” for letting them in. We also have to take action to stop the invasion. We have to confront the Mexicans themselves, for example, telling the Mexican state, you drop your aggressive behavior toward us, or we are going to make you feel it.
I think your focus on bossy women is off-base. Everyone has his pet angle on what’s wrong with America, and yours is bossy women. Let’s say that American men asserted themselves again and restored a more healthy and traditional relationship with women. Would that solve all our other problems? No. We’d still have to decide what to do about the Muslims, the Mexicans, and a hundred other issues. So I feel you are reducing our civilizational crisis to this one issue that particularly gets your goat. And I think that’s a mistake.
LA writes to Jim Kalb:
A reader wrote to me:
White women are the most destructive force in America. The feminizing of America, not what you miscall “liberalism,” is the root of all rot.
This is a view I hear from time to time. What do you think of it?
Jim Kalb replies:
Women respond to the setting in which they find themselves. It seems to me feminism etc. exist as they do because the basic concepts that order public life are overly technological. Everything becomes an interchangeable resource for satisfaction. Thought is dissociated from feeling and feeling becomes the ultimate standard of the good and thus sacred. With regard to women that has several consequences:
1. Standard feminism. Since the point of life in general is getting one’s way, the point of women’s lives is also getting one’s way. Since the social structure is a matter of rationally organizing the whole world to maximize equal satisfaction of preferences through global markets and neutral rational bureaucracies, and since identity and dignity come through participation in the social structure, women’s identity and dignity must be a matter of career and moneymaking.
2. Oprah-ized slush. Since reason is purely a matter of technological structures, values become wholly irrational and simply a matter of personal feeling. In the absence of any objective summum bonum, all feelings are equally important and equally sacred. Since feeling as such is sacred, and we know our own feelings most intimately, self-involvement supplements political correctness as the basis of moral life.
3. Relations between the sexes. Since sex is freely transferable, and there’s widespread demand and lots of suppliers, it becomes a commodity. Since it’s so closely connected to the person, especially in the case of women, women also become commodities. Women accept that because it offers certain immediate advantages and because it’s the way things are, and they reject it because it’s dehumanizing and disadvantageous generally. The result is a lack of wholeheartedness—suspicion, resentment, deceit, manipulation, abuse, etc. etc. etc.
4. It should be noted that all of the foregoing suit the interests of the large impersonal rationalized organizations that now mostly run things. Why should they want life to be carried on through small local informal nonmarket nonbureaucratic arrangements like the family?
LA replies:
Without going into the details of your analysis for the moment, your answer is that you disagree with my reader’s idea that “the feminizing of America, not liberalism, is the root of all rot.” You see feminism as a symptom of the general conditions of the modern, technocratic organization of life. However, your analysis leaves out the specific aspects of feminism that this reader and others have brought up: the feminizing of America and the rule of women.
If the technocratic conditions of modern life are affecting everyone including women, why has this resulted in women increasingly running things, with men intimidated by them, and so on?
Rachael S. writes:
Mark E. writes:
I believe that women have a natural aversion to and resentment of sex. Just observe a female cat in heat being pursued and mated by males. Does she sound or act like she is enjoying it? At best, women simply do not care about it, because it has no independent value to them. Sex to women is only a means to something else (money, gifts, power-by-proxy, marriage, kids, acceptance, attention). Men regard sex as a good-in-itself, and are sexually driven even if they don’t want to be. Much of our societal confusion arises from the refusal to acknowledge frankly women’s sex aversion, and women’s resentment of men for wanting sex.
That is baloney and here is why: Liberals, not women as a group, resent the heterosexual sex act. Not comprehensively, of course, because it can be an expression of the desire of two consenting adults who just happen to have compatible body parts… but at a deeper level. Men are naturally dominant, women passive. I think that this relationship is what a liberal woman would dislike. Healthy heterosexuality embraces the traditional understanding we have of women and men. A woman who accepts the natural roles of women and men would not have an aversion to sex. Mark E. is wrong with extra cheese :), especially where he says that men desire sex as a good in itself, and women have all these other reasons for wanting sex. He seems to be distilling a man’s motivation to just one thing… a good in itself (the pleasure?) and a woman’s reasons as being mainly materialistic.
Surely such a resentful view of the female relationship to sex is unhealthy in the larger struggle we are facing with the decline of our culture. Sex in its proper place (within marriage) is part of what keeps our culture working… mutual affection, children, Eros, the poetry and art and literature that has and will continue to be inspired by the mystery of love… I would say that my relationship to my husband is a good in itself, and I desire him for himself. That seems to be the most basic “good in itself” that I can think of. I think that men who tend towards being bitter about the state of our culture can also tend not to appreciate that there are many conservative women who adore and idealize men.
(Also, there is an unfortunate physical reason why female cats seem upset during mating. That doesn’t happen with humans! A well considered traditional argument does not use animal analogies when trying to describe the human condition. Sorry Darwin, it doesn’t work.)
LA replies:
Thanks for this. I was pretty shocked by Mark E.’s negative and reductive comments on the sexual attitudes of women.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 20, 2007 02:32 PM | Send
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