Find all blog entries at A Commoner Manifesto Substack.
How to Show You ar Special
I think that everyone with half a brain knows instinctively that the whole LGBTQ+ alphabet soup is cultish rubbish.
Yes, humans love to bury themselves in cults. Usually, it doesn’t end well.
So when I read a piece in The American Spectator — “Hypocrisy and Harm: The Dark Binary of the ‘Non-Binary’ Identity” by Sarah Kendis — I got it.
Sarah Kendis is a feminist. So when it comes to transgender and non-binary she becomes George Eliot’s Mr. Brooke, muttering about “going too far.” Well, maybe she’s a bit spicier than Mr. Brooke.
As a loud and proud feminist, and not the fake pandering kind, I am well aware of the fact that the female sex is chronically subjugated across the world and through time, and that our movement is not some undefinable charade dressed up in glitter and marketable slogans to seek nebulous equality, but real, definable action which seeks to liberate women from such discrimination and oppression based on our sex.
Actually, the problem that women have is not subjugation, but the curious human adaptation that, unlike most other animals, male humans are turned onto women 24-7. Your average male ape is only interested in sex when a female is in estrus. Even then, most male ape species are restricted in their sexual activity by male hierarchy. Only the tippy-top males get to tap the females. However, I believe that Bonobo monkeys are different.
So while male apes are kept in check by male hierarchy, something different is needed for humans, especially after humans developed the culture of monogamous marriage.
If we think about human sexual culture “before the dawn” of feminism, it was characterized by rigorous rules:
Lifetime marriage.
Shaming of pre-nuptial sex.
Shaming of infidelity.
Chaperones to protect single girls at balls.
No marriage unless there was enough money.
And so on.
We like to sneer at the good old days, but I suggest that the rules of courtship were about nothing much more than keeping women safe. Life was precarious, back in the day, and a poor family could not afford to have its daughters taking lovers and getting pregnant.
Fact also is that every woman knows that she is vulnerable to “unwanted attention.” That’s why feminism makes such a point of male bad behavior. That’s why, when I take my morning walk in liberal North Seattle I very rarely see a woman walking alone. She may be walking the dog; she may be running; she may be walking with a friend. But not alone, just walking.
And women — almost all women — really have a problem with men in the women’s bathroom. It’s in the jeans.
I suspect that the relaxation of sexual mores has more to do with the explosion of wealth in the wake of the Industrial Revolution than with any notion of “liberation” from the patriarchy.
It also has to do with the development of technology to control reproduction, from the Pill to abortion.
And of course, there is the development of the welfare state, so that young single mothers do not drag their lower-class parents into hunger and poverty, or starve on the streets of the city. Not any more.
Fact is, our modern prosperity allows us to to stupid things. Women may want to be liberated and independent, but experts say that single women tend to have “mental health” problems. Women may want to have a career, but career comes from the French carrière, meaning race-track. In my view sports and work in the market economy and careers are a modern dialing down of the border war of the hunter-gatherer males into non-violent competition.
Again, our modern prosperity gives us the space and the time to experiment with life and sexuality. In the old days you learned to do things “the way we do” them. Because if you didn’t, you died of starvation.
So I think that the whole modern culture of sex and gender from feminism to dating to sex before marriage to divorce to gays and lesbians as a Thing — and all the rest of the gender rainbow — arises because the question of having children and raising them to adulthood and a competence is no longer a life and death affair.
We moderns can afford to go off into the weeds of sex and gender. And a lot of people do.
But my prediction is that the wild and crazy stuff is going to peter out.
Years ago I read someone — probably Wilkinson in The Spirit Level — who said that a century ago the rich were fat and the poor were thin. And now it’s the other way around. Same thing with work. Used to be that the poor worked and the rich had servants. Now the rich work and the poor are on welfare. I wrote about it in 2013.
The point about being rich is that you are different from the average person. And you make sure to discreetly advertise it.
Today, when every silly woman with a useless degree is running around with blue hair, the best people distinguish themselves by being ordinary.
| Tue, 14 Jul 2026 23:16:58 GMT |
Switch to Substack for more blog posts
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.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
When you have dominated the oppressors, what do you get? Oppression or domination?
Justice is the absence of force.
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: Communism: An Analysis
