William Faulkner, an unrepentant misogynist, considers that women are ‘merely articulated genital organs with a kind of aptitude for spending whatever money you have’, (from the novel Mosquitoes) a statement which well represents Anglo-Saxon Protestant biblical prejudices and sexual frustration. In Mudarra the Bastard, Lope de Vega reckons that women swing between two poles, ‘love and vengeance’. Balzac, on the other hand, in his Human Comedy always constructs devoted, selfless, sensitive feminine heroines who know how to suffer, whereas his men are egotistical, calculating brutes. Balzac (never cited in feminist literature out of ignorance — who reads Eugénie Grandet any more?) thinks women have better moral qualities than men. As for the author of Don Quixote, Cervantes brings before us indecisive women, constantly switching opinion, not trustworthy or true to their word.
To return to ancient authors: there is, of course, Homer, who thinks women are faithful, constant, courageous, and who plainly acknowledges feminine bisexuality — provided they have a husband; but also Menander, who equates women with ferocious beasts, like Hesiod, to whom we owe the expression femme fatale. But the poetry of Horace, like Plutarch’s Marital Advice, divinises women long before the ‘courtly love’ of the Middle Ages. Let us conclude with Tolstoy. In Anna Karenina, the Russian novelist advances the idea that every woman is a mother in her soul: the wife in regard to her husband, the mistress in regard to her lover, and every woman in regard to the man with whom she falls in love. Thus, feminine psychology reproduces everywhere — even in the domain of sex — the mother-child relation: a dominating-dominated and dominant falsely dominated.
We see that no one is really in agreement over feminine psychology. They are presented as both cruel and loving, thoughtful and thoughtless, devoted and faithless, submissive and dominant. The Roman allegory of the She-wolf,[20] or the goddesses Ma’at[21] and Diana[22] of Egyptian and Roman myth, reflect this complex and kaleidoscopic image of feminine nature. Is not this feminine nature more complex, more complete than that of masculine nature? Man is simple, one might say; women is complicated. What has given an advantage to the male may give an advantage to the female in the future.
The Unisex Utopia
The feminisation of so-called ‘male professions’ creates a number of insurmountable problems. One of the utopian imperatives of egalitarianism is applied here, namely equivalence between the sexes or, more precisely, their interchangeability. The feminisation of the army and the police[23] are a good example.
This ideology of equivalence between the sexes is the counterpart to the equivalence between races (or of their denial). Unisex ideology and feminism make a good team, but it all comes down simply to masculinising women and ridding them of their femininity. Feminists are fascinated by the male model which is implicitly taken for ‘natural’. In doing this, the woman’s body — with all it implies — is devalued. At the same time, and as a symmetrical counterpoint, the male body is feminised.
* * *
In the West, unisex first hit the fashion world in the 1960s with trouser suits for women. Let us note that this was still a matter of masculinising women; no one had any idea of launching a fashion of skirts for men. The proportion of Western women who wear dresses today is no higher than 15 percent, especially among recent generations; 50 percent of men and women dress almost interchangeably. This is a process of sartorial desexualisation, paradoxically associated with an increasing sexualisation of all images and discourse.
Observe a high school or university when classes let out; compare photos of people in the street and in cafés and restaurants today with those from before the 1960s or from the Belle Epoque. Two things are especially striking: people of both sexes are now badly dressed, without elegance (despite the impressive number of ‘off-the-rack’ outlets which have replaced tailors), and a large number of women and girls, having lost all sense of coquetry, dress in dull outfits of masculine appearance. Fear of harassment does not explain everything; a very serious decline in taste is also involved.[24]
This masculisation of feminine dress is a covert defence of androgyny, just as the ideology of miscegenation is a defence of anthropological indistinction. In both cases, differentiation is chased away: no more sexes, no more races, everything identical.
However, this situation covers up some striking paradoxes which run in the direction of both sexualising and desexualising the female body, as if a tendency towards exhibitionism were combining with a tendency to dissimulation. It was in the 1960s that all this first happened, with the simultaneous appearance of the pants suit and the miniskirt — and the bikini.
To complicate things still further, we have recently seen a return to skirts among women in some domains where pants are worn, especially politics, out of exasperation at the wry remarks of their vaguely male colleagues. Out of defiance, they show their legs: a form of sexualisation which should make certain feminists bristle.[25]
Today, this struggle between the sexualisation and desexualisation of the bodies of (young) women has become complicated, not to say confused; different discourses confront one another and become entangled in contradictions. We (increasingly) see young Muslims by birth or conversion with their bodies ensconced in sinister outfits; but at the same time, among high school girls there has appeared a fashion for wearing jeans or skirts that leave as much of their bellies exposed as possible, as well as for tight fitting trousers of leather or cotton which draw attention to the mons veneris.
At the same time, girls are choosing to dress in a masculine and ugly manner (parkas, shapeless tracksuits, and the like), not to use makeup or fix themselves up so as not to ‘provoke’ boys, especially in the suburbs, of course.[26] They turn themselves into asexual beings.
The more use advertising makes of feminine eroticism, the more feminist groups scream about the humiliating ‘objectification’ of women. Feminist ideology, in any case, has an irreconcilable quarrel with the idea of feminine beauty, which it equates with the exploitation of women by men. Feminist ideology implicitly promotes the idea of feminine ugliness instead.
The contradiction — between woman’s sexual liberation and the refusal to allow her body to be displayed or ‘instrumentalised’ — runs through all feminist ideology. Sex and puritanism mix in the most confusing way. It is as if women must be free regarding bodily enjoyment but at the same time be protected from men’s eyes. Machismo is the enemy, but so is the sexualisation of the female body (there are strong traces of lesbianism here: women’s bodies must be reserved for women). Feminism combines puritanism with machismo in its will to separate the sexes and to repress open heterosexual enjoyment.
Co-education in primary and secondary schools was also imposed beginning in the 1960s, in the name of unisex ideology. This was a very poor decision. Mixing pupils of both sexes has given rise to significant disturbances, especially among boys. Thinking they were promoting maturity through mixing, immaturity and psychological confusion were the result. As always with its naïve presuppositions, egalitarian ideology thought that the education of girls proceeded in the exact same way as that of boys. Egalitarians imagine — or rather force themselves to believe, in accordance with the catastrophic doctrines of ‘educationists’ — that children of different nationalities, of distant origins, and of different levels of academic ability (rejecting ability grouping) can be mixed in the same classrooms. Their other-worldly and dogmatic ideology (which has destroyed the French school system) had, by 1960, invented mandatory coeducation starting in first grade, making it universal within ten years. Psychologists advised against it. The assumption was that there is no difference between boys and girls, and above all that girls and boys must not develop any ‘femininity’ or ‘masculinity’, contrary to unisex dogma.
The effects were perverse and unforeseen by the imbecilic Marxist ideologues: contrary to their assumptions, co-education favours machismo in boys over the long term, inclu
ding disrespect for girls and their vulgarisation as a defence mechanism. Forcing young boys and girls together harms the psychological development of both sexes. But dogma is incorrigible: all individuals are interchangeable, all have the same brain, sex and origin be damned....
Co-education is, in my opinion, one reason — obviously not the only one — for the lower average achievement (especially among boys) in primary and secondary schools.[27]
Combined with extra-European immigration, co-education has created inextricable problems: boys and girls of every race and origin are forced into the same educational mold, faced with obsolete, often mediocre teachers whose heads are stuffed with ideology. This can only end in total failure: in ethnic and sexual chaos. Such is the illusion of ‘republican integration’, of the egalitarian illusion that each human being, boy or girl, whatever his nature, is a mere cipher. After all this, we should not be surprised that the illiteracy rate among the younger generation is constantly rising.
The most comical aspect of what is happening is that progressives do not see any problem in Muslim immigrants rising up against the unisex model (be it schools, swimming pools, or whatever) with obsessive excess. At bottom, this is their anti-racist complex at work. One does not criticise Islam; it is untouchable. If Catholic fundamentalists rejected co-education (or anything else), progressives and feminists would be wild with indignation. But Muslims have the moral right to demand anything, even contrary to the dominant ideology, which is paralysed with fear of them.
The Dialectics of Double Domination
A man’s love or desire for a woman can switch to hatred or indifference the moment she becomes a stepmother. The woman, the companion, turns into a substitute mother, castrating, ruling, authoritarian, and disciplinarian. She loses all her charm, all her mystery.
Feminine authority kills male sexual desire; masculine authority, on the other hand, does not necessarily kill female sexual desire. Female violence toward men generally pushes them toward indifference and abandonment, toward lassitude; male violence to women, on the other hand, pushes them toward submission.
Generally speaking, women despise submissive men that they are able to command, and hope they will revolt. Dominant women are waiting to be dominated by a man even stronger or more brutal than themselves, even if they never find him. The most authoritarian, feminist, autonomous, ‘liberated’ women still have a rather limited capacity of resistance when faced with a sufficiently enterprising man. Their ability to say ‘no’ is weak. A woman’s resistance is not limited by her own will but by her exhaustion in the face of masculine insistence. This leaves aside the terrible litany of women beaten, raped, or killed at home, which I shall discuss later, who just happen to be found especially in neighbourhoods with a high proportion of Muslim immigrants.
The submission of women to men remains a majority phenomenon even in the West, despite legal equality. Regardless of feminist demands and ‘parity’ laws, it is not possible to cancel with the stroke of a pen hundreds of centuries of phylogenetic evolution.
* * *
Dominant women start off hating men who do not obey them and refuse to submit to their whims; but they often end by admiring such men for resisting them, and decide to submit to them, fascinated by their strength. They also despise men who submit to them and obey their commands, enjoying their own position with a hint of sadism. Dominant women are only impressed by men who ignore them and, at the same time, are able to tame them and stand up to them.
Whether a woman is dominant or dominated, she is always looking for a father figure (with the inherent contradiction that he can also be like a son who must be taken care of at home). A woman’s love for a man is always based, even if unconsciously, on a striking mixture of submissiveness and maternal protectiveness: taming the wild male while also feeling reassured and defended by him and assuring him a home. The recent economic independence of women does not change anything about these hereditary dispositions. But at the same time, quite paradoxically some women look for submissive men in order to protect and correct them like mothers with little boys, which permits them a certain revenge.
The most ‘liberated’ women are always looking for the most dominant men, while also trying to dominate men. Feminine psychology does not look for tenderness in the male, but a sort of presence, a reassuring presence. Dominant women only admire — and only sleep with — men who resist them, and only fall in love with men who are indifferent to them.
* * *
Women are, in general, rather fragile in the face of an assiduous effort at seduction, even if at the beginning they reject the man who insists upon courting them. The reasons for this are probably genetic. In spite of all egalitarian and feminist discourse, many apparently domineering and determined women end up submitting to insistent, domineering men. I have seen striking cases in which fine women have ended up giving way, by a sort of atavism, to the incessant courtship of mediocre men unworthy of them. This can be explained by two traits of feminine character: maternal pity (‘poor fellow, he has wanted me for so long; I don’t want to make him unhappy’) and submissiveness to men (‘I have to obey; I don’t want to make an enemy’, or ‘He has influence; that can always be useful to me’). Many women are unable to resist a man’s insistent harassment. The man who doesn’t give up, even if he is ugly and stupid, has got a chance. He is counting on the fact that, statistically speaking, women generally end up giving in.
The gullibility of some women prevents them from detecting the more subtle techniques of sexual harassment, based on the ‘promise’ technique. The seducer passes himself off as powerful — exaggerating or even inventing his social and professional position — and the desired woman ends up giving in, imagining that he will help her or that his prestige will reflect on her. These are all illusions, of course.
Women are more easily impressed than men by signs of masculine prestige and power (but many men are also attracted to women of prestige and power), something from which many high-flying politicians benefit.
* * *
Many couples fall apart because the woman reveals herself as authoritarian, intolerant of the man whom she dominates and amusedly despises for his weakness. The man is responsible for this situation, as is the ideology of the egalitarianism and the feminisation of men. A woman, atavistically, cannot respect a man who does not resist her, does not stand up to her, does not dominate her, who shows himself weak, undecided, a coward. The women who scream denunciations of machismo are the first (despite all their ideas, which are only words and do not translate into behaviour) to need a man of authority and who need, albeit subtly, to be dominated. A man who does not know how or is unwilling to dominate finds himself cruelly dominated, for he has stepped out of his natural, ancestral role.
Being overly considerate, too ‘feminine’, too nice, too obliging confuses a woman, often turning her into an irritable and aggressive harpy. Women, usually without admitting it to themselves, expect a certain dignity, a certain authority from men, a recurring harshness, an indifference, a distance, which they interpret as protective strength. The overly friendly man is rarely loved and never respected. Women only respect strong men, those who browbeat them occasionally, who impose their will, who are somewhat stingy with tenderness. This is, however, easy to understand; the woman expects a man to be virile, and one aspect of virility is to impose one’s will without discussion or negotiation, and to know how to say no.
Moreover, when you study the strategy of seducers such as Casanova or Don Juan, you see that they measure out attention sparingly, alternating with much studied indifference, which excites the target. Never does a seducer say ‘I love you’ to the woman he desires or who satisfies him. These magic words, as the songs call them, can only be pronounced by women. The worst romantic turn-off is the male ‘do you love me?’
Such considerations, even if shocking to the spirit of the times, rest upon
the unchanging natural order of the male and female constitution, forever safe from ideological pronouncements. The most stable couples are those in which the man exercises his authority (which has nothing to do with being domineering, brutal, or disrespectful) and makes decisions — in certain matters but not all. The most ephemeral couples are those in which the woman assumes the male role and ‘wears the trousers.’ As for the mixed model of the perfectly egalitarian couple, it is one of those contemporary utopias, one of those models which will never be realised.
Moreover, we notice that women who exercise authority (in a couple, in society, business, politics, and so forth) do so in a rigid manner. She has more bossiness about her than authority, precisely because authority is not natural to her. To dominate she has need of a certain violence, for she does not know how to exercise power.
Sex and Deviance Page 14