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"Empowering" Women Does the Opposite
Yesterday I was writing about how J.K. Rowling got hammered, as a young woman, by the modern culture created over the last century by our lefty friends.
It all led, we might say, to the Graham Platners of the world.
But today I read a piece in Compact about how we males have got it all wrong on the culture war front. Ashley Frawley tells us men to forget about insulting “cat ladies.” The problem is that
contemporary governance has learned that older forms of masculine authority were too naked. Power is better exerted not by direct coercion or the threat thereof, but by a kind of pseudo-benevolent maternalism, where so-called negative feelings can and must be expressed and then safely attuned to a corrected script of feminized therapeutic compliance.
It’s the globalists at work!
Institutions of global governance have sought for decades to “empower” women in the belief that they make better, less volatile subjects and leaders.
Don’t think that all women are happy with this feminization of the public square.
Woe betide the woman who does not adopt the kindly demeanor, who does not look to the rulebooks instead of her own reason to judge, for instance, whether she ought to “just be nice” to the man in the changing room, or instead kick up a fuss.
The present culture has dealt with the fundamental problem for the modern woman, of combining work and family, by abolishing family. What’s needed is “a vision of the modern world in which work, autonomy, and family hang together within a livable orbit.” And “a retreat into fantasies about tradwives,” says Frawley, ain’t gonna do it.
Meanwhile we have combined the male hierarchy of administrative government with a feminized administrative culture that “is therapeutic, protective, solicitous of feelings, and intolerant of risk.”
What is to be done?
Our problem is “a social order that is built around bureaucratic management.” And, I might say, a culture of bureaucratic management of, by, and for a ruling class that believes in the saving grace of government administration and bureaucracy.
The solution begins, I think, with detaching women from their present faith in the government as protector. Maybe it begins on the “men in women’s bathroom” front.
After all, J.K. Rowling was all in on the liberal agenda, including transgender rights. Until she realized that it meant men in the women’s bathroom.
Love her or hate her, at least Rowling had the courage to stand up and say No pasaran! And realize that that glorious progressive political and cultural offensive had gone A Bridge Too Far. For which she has paid a price.
Rowling could afford to take a stand against the LBGTQ+ Industrial Complex. The three former child actors in the Harry Potter movies could not. They know that the threat “You’ll never work in this town again” is real.
But what would a “modern world in which work, autonomy, and family hang together within a livable orbit” look like?
I think it would be a world in which government and administration and regulation were gradually and steadily reduced in size and power and reputation, and the non-governmental institutions of civil society were re-empowered to allow women the scope they had always had in the home and the community. Just go back to Victorian novels if you need a hint. In Jane Austen: Lady Catherine de Bourgh. In Dickens: Betsey Trotwood. In George Eliot: Mrs Poyser. Don’t mess with those ladies! But how were these women possible when women were the helpless slaves of the patriarchy?
And there is another thing. I believe that lower-class women have been savagely treated by the educated-class dominated welfare state. The woman trapped under a gate at a BART station symbolizes this humiliation. For educated-class women the modern state means Jobs and Influence. For the lower class it means neo-slavery and humiliation.
| Tue, 07 Jul 2026 22:07:16 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
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A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
#PleaseBelieve: Other Lives Matter / Government is War Plus Loot and Plunder / No Dog is Illegal / Love is Blind / Because Science / CO2 is Plant Food / Deplorable Rights are Human Rights / Everything is Everything
After we elected the First Black President we learned that to oppose his policies was racism. Does that mean that any opponent of the First Woman President will be sexist, and any opponent of the First Gay President will be a homophobe?
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Analysis of Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation
