Radical Feminism - Rendering Women Invisible

Poor, invisible, oppressed women.

We all know how the spiel of “nice feminists” goes - women were oppressed for millenia by patriarchy, and we needed feminism to put a stop to it. Nice, “reasonable” feminists often point out that patriarchy also hurts men, and by challenging patriarchy, feminism also benefits men. They might sometimes even acknowledge that perhaps feminism has gone a bit far and that some kind of “correction” is called for… but, by and large, in the grander scheme of things, they will continue to parrot that feminism is a cause for good.

All well and good, except for one small problem - feminism never ever had a legitimate claim. There never was any such thing as a unilateral, one-way oppression of women by men, and to buy into such an absurd thesis is to fundamentally fail to understand how cultures and people’s minds work. By blaming some mythological unilateral patriarchal oppression that never was, they render invisible the matriarchal oppression that defines the things that matter. In their obsession with the purported invisibility of women, they render women invisible.

There is an alternative paradigm, however, one that establishes that every living organism takes its cues for behavior from its ecosystem… and for humans, that ecosystem is culture. Experience wires the brain (Doidge 2008), and for humans that experience is cultural.

Matriarchy’s primary nurturer

It is almost paradoxical that in obsessing about the invisibility of women, feminists have served to make women even more invisible by discounting (or aborting) the area in which women’s influence is most potent - our role as primary nurturer. It is in our role as primary nurturer that we first impress upon our children the things that matter. This applies irrespective of which culture we are discussing.

From Christians, Muslims and Hindus, to Buddhists, Pacific Islanders and Kalahari bush men, those with first dibs at defining the things that matter in the minds of their children are the culture’s primary nurturers, who generally tend to be women. Women’s expectations and priorities are generally impressed upon their offspring from infancy through to early childhood, and these first impressions wire the brain most profoundly.

It is only in subsequent years, from later childhood and on their transition into manhood, that boys are encouraged to break from their maternal comforts, apron-strings and security and “patriarchal” influences begin to dominate. Before reaching this stage, the foundations for neural wiring have pretty much been laid, and the young man is most likely to have his mother to thank for his initiation into “the things that matter.” The things that matter… these are the assumptions – the “given” that we take for granted – that most every person takes with them from infancy and childhood into adulthood and old age. This interpretation is at odds with the mainstream, genocentric paradigm that presumes our core assumptions about the world to be objective “facts” that have their origins in the DNA.

When children first learn about the things that matter, they learn about power differentials, about getting attention and getting along, and whether they behave with kindness and civility or selfishness and hostility. These dynamics are first impressed in children while their brains are as absorbent as sponges for experience.

The relationship between single-mother households and criminality is well established (Facts on Fatherless Kids n.d.). It is also well established that women are the primary abusers of children (Administration for Children and Families n.d.). Single motherhood (excluding widows) and child abuse are two of the ways in which toxic mothers define the things that matter. Children first learn violence from their primary nurturer.

The bottom line is this, and it is a most important point. Oppression within cultures, vs. between cultures, is never unilateral, never one party to blame (as it is impossible to give the full breadth of this subject the justice it deserves, we necessarily default to the idealized, simplifying assumption of a steady-state culture in which all parties within it have “assimilated” and accepted its terms). Culture is a whole, a complex system where everyone is somehow complicit. And in trotting out the patriarchy shibboleth, feminists manage to deflect attention away from the reality of women’s very real contributions to crime and violence.

Defining the things that matter

What do I mean by “defining the things that matter”? What I am getting at is a principle from philosophy defined as pragmatism (Wikipedia – Pragmatism n.d.), and quite beyond the scope of this post. The essential point must, however, be made. It is the primary nurturer that first establishes the cultural/social transactions and its terms that have the greatest bearing on the wiring up of the brain of the infant/child under their care. When we factor in the relevance of neural plasticity and how the brain develops, it is clear that stimulation from the environment is essential to healthy brain development (Shatz 1992).

The infant enters into the world with approximately 2,500 synapses per neuron, by age three that number grows to 15,000 synapses and by adulthood the number of synapses per neuron is culled to about half that number (Cherry n.d.). Life experiences are crucial to how the brain wires itself. There are critical periods for the developing child wherein if certain skills have not been acquired by a certain age, it is unlikely that the individual will ever acquire that skill - language, for example.

The primary nurturer is primary caretaker, primary guardian and primary teacher during the most crucial, formative years of a child’s life – when the brain’s development is at its most dynamic. And it is in these formative years that the primary nurturer’s role in defining the things that matter is so important. Child abuse and its transactions matter, and stand a high probability of being translated into anti-social conduct in the mature adult.

Stefan Molyneux recognizes the urgent implications of child abuse with respect to adult health and social problems (Molyneux 2009). In his discussion of the biology of violence, for example, Moyneux observes that:

During the first 4 years of life, 90% of a child’s brain develops through the experiences of that child.

During the first 4 years of life, it is reasonable to conclude that the primary nurturer will have the greatest impact on defining the things that matter, and this will impact profoundly on how the child’s brain is wired. This will ultimately have the most potent influence on the adult that that child becomes. In traditional two-parent households, the father’s role is to intervene and provide a corrective to motherly influences. In single-mother households, by contrast, the mother’s world-view proceeds unrestrained, its reflexive, solipsistic impulsiveness (as the defining characteristic of the famous rationalization hamster) is allowed free reign without being tested, and this sets the stage for unrestrained, impulsive delinquency in the child.

The schizophrenogenic mother

Before feminism came onto the scene, the notion of the schizophrenogenic mother was widely accepted as playing an important part in the genesis of schizophrenia in patients. In view of the intimate relationship that the mother has with her child during that period of its life when brain development is at its most dynamic, this should not be surprising. If it is the mother that first defines the things that matter for the child, then it is not unreasonable to factor in the relationship between the role of the mother and the schizophrenia that might develop in her child later on. The typical profile of a schizophrenogenic mother suggests that she is cold and authoritarian, inclined to withhold love, or maybe provide love on conditional terms in which guilt plays a central role.

In her analysis of patterns of behavior profiled by criminologists of perpetrators who imprison and sexually abuse their victims (with particular reference to Josef Fritzl, Viktor Mokhov, Aleksandr Komin and Wolfgang Priklopil), Galina Sapozhnikova, (Sapozhnikova 2008) observes that the perpetrators all had authoritarian mothers:

Surprisingly, Fritzl, Mokhov, Priklopil and Komin are similar in both history and profession. They were all crazy about their mothers, grew up without fathers and were beaten in childhood. All their mothers were strong women. Fritzl’s mother kicked her husband out and Mokhov’s mother controlled who Mokhov brought home in the evenings even when he was 53. Priklopil was also close to his mother.

Among the worst of these profiles, that of Josef Fritzl, references to his abusive mother are well documented. Writing for the Guardian, Kate Connolly(Connolly 2009), reports on what the forensic psychiatrist assigned to Fritzl had to say:

… Kastner said his behaviour had its roots in his troubled childhood, describing a mother who did not love him, who left him to cry when he was in pain, and who regularly beat him and left him on his own for hours at a time.

In view of the incarceration by the authorities of the aforementioned perpetrators, it would seem that they may not have quite qualified as schizophrenic… the parallels are clearly evident, though, and the differences are probably academic.

More specific to the topic of schizophrenia, Scott Peck writes, “I frequently found the mothers of schizophrenics to be extraordinarily narcissistic individuals.” (Peck 1978).

Theodore Lidz (Wikipedia – Theodore Lidz 2012), was an American psychiatrist who was famous for his books and articles on the causes of schizophrenia. From Wikipedia:

Lidz noted that schizophrenogenic mothers manage to be impervious to the needs and wishes of other family members. “As her psychotic or very strange concepts remain unchallenged by the husband, they create reality within the family”. Dr. Lidz calls this phenomenon folie à deux, a shared delusion between two parents. And if the delusional ideas of the dominant parent are shared by all family members, the result is a folie en famille.

Of course in these politically correct times, what suggestion that women might in any way be held accountable for their actions should not be accompanied by a disclaimer? Accordingly, Wikipedia continues:

Lidz criticized a culture of blame against schizophrenogenic mothers, however, writing:

I also find it very distressing that because the parents’ attitudes and interactions are important determinants of schizophrenic disorders, some therapists and family caseworkers treat parents as villains who have ruined the lives of their patients.

Anne Harrington’s article, however, is more in keeping with the spirit of our time (Harrington 2012):

The psychiatric profession is appalled by the burden and pain that was once inflicted by telling families, and especially mothers, that they had literally driven their children crazy.

Is it sexist to suggest that mothers are more likely to have a crucial part to play in the genesis of schizophrenia? Is it wrong to “pick on” mothers for bad mothering practices? If it is, then why is it just dandy to continue with the myth that all men are inherently violent and need to be “educated” to not rape? Bad mothering, in all its permutations is, after all, the flip-side of violent or criminal or dysfunctional behavior. Of course nothing of this is to exempt men from responsibility for their own behavior, but equally importantly, you cannot consider violence – or schizophrenia – in the absence of the role of the primary nurturer. And general consensus has it that thus far throughout most of human history, that role has been ascribed to the female of the species.

The exciting bad-boys of women’s choosing

In order to understand the choices that women make, we need to understand that men’s and women’s brains are wired very differently. Of course this is mostly off topic, but it would shed some light on the matter if we realized that men have more grey matter (neurons) and women have more white matter (glia), and that these have a direct bearing on men’s and women’s conceptualizations of the world.

It was found in intelligence tests (Haier, et al. 2005) that on average, men used 6.5 times as much grey matter as women, and that women used 9 times as much white matter as men. It’s almost as if men and women were different organisms, quite literally. If we factor in neural plasticity and the idea that the brain wires itself with experience, then it is logical to infer that the reason for these differentials is that the provider sex and the provided-for sex make very different choices from their culture. Men’s deliberative style of decision-making impacts more heavily on the wiring up of neurons, while women’s more reflexive, impulsive style of making choices impacts more heavily on the wiring up of glia (white matter).

The outcome is as ridiculously simple as it is obvious - if you baby a provided-for person, male or female, throughout their lives, then they will never get to grow up. In the contemporary climate of feminism where women are not required to take responsibility for their choices, culture sanctions the babying of women, and the end result is diaper-clad toddlers in women’s bodies.

Now in having concluded that men and women think very differently, it should also occur to us that men’s and women’s sexualities express themselves differently. These are the dynamics of desire and being desired, the pursuer and the pursued. It is beyond the scope of this post to go into this in detail, so we will need to take it on face value for the time being that there is a logical relationship between female sexuality and the contexts that they find arousing. More specifically, there would appear to be something about violence, or criminality, that women often find arousing. For example, Otto Weininger famously observed the relationship between criminality and prostitution (Weininger 1906), and it would not be too much of a stretch to interpret prostitution within the context of the unprecedented levels of promiscuity in our zeitgeist’s women and our slut culture.

Paradoxically, feminists provide proof of their own failed agenda. Why do feminist women only notice violent, abusive or dominating men? Why are they of the belief that only violent, abusive or dominating men count? Why are other kinds of men invisible to them? Are they stupid? Is this proof that they are less intelligent than the rest of us? The correct answer is that a major component of feminist women’s obsession with these types of men is projection. We should not underestimate the importance of this. If we ignore projection, then we miss a vital clue as to what motivates feminist women.

Roissy periodically draws our attention to the reality that “chicks dig jerks.” His most recent interpretation is substantiated in the work of Kayt Sukel, who references a study where single women had their brains MRI-scanned as they looked at photos of men whose faces had been altered to appear more or less masculine. It was found that the subjects were most attracted to the masculinized faces – and that the regions of the brain that were activated indicated that these were the men that the subjects found most threatening (Sukel 2012). This further substantiates our observation that dangerous men resonate at a visceral level with women’s sexuality. Feminist women notice violent men over non-violent men because it gets their juices flowing - it’s that subconscious stuff operating at a primal level that ties in with women’s fantasies and lights up the threat centers of women’s brains like a Christmas tree. As Roissy observes, “I’m fond of saying the boner doesn’t lie. The same could be said of lit-up neurons; hard to fake that funk.”

From among all the different kinds of men that exist - moral men, kind men, brave men, courageous men, thoughtful men, spiritual men, creative men, feminist women first and foremost notice violent, abusive or dominating men, with their demands that all men have a duty to stop rape. Talk about epic fail. To be fair, they also occasionally notice the utility of a safe, obedient provider or the opportunities to be had in befriending a feminist sycophant, but it’s not quite the same thing - these more supplicating versions of men don’t inspire arousal in quite the same way that an exciting thug or mumbling defective can. For women more generally, the tingles associated with the thrill of the forbidden are experienced from a perspective quite alien to the world as experienced by men.

CONCLUSION

Women need to be held accountable for:

1) How they raise their children;

2) The choices they make in men.

Of course men should continue to take responsibility for their own behavior. But the idea that men alone are to be held responsible for violence is a lie of the most outlandish kind and says something very disturbing about how divorced western culture has become from understanding our true natures.

With respect to violence in culture and the purported invisibility of women, we conclude with the following that should by now be self-evident:

1) Children first learn violence from their primary nurturer;

2) Men learn what women like in men from the types of men that women choose.

The bottom line is, quite simply, that there is no such thing as patriarchy acting in a vacuum. There is a patriarchal-matriarchal duality, and women are equally responsible with men for all that is good and bad in culture.