May 24, 2020, 1:45 PM
by Tim Beckley
I would say that the degree of agency needed to perform well in the traditionally feminine domain is significantly lower than in the masculine, and to the extent that its development detracts a woman’s attention from the development of empathy, it’s a disadvantage.
The role of agent, or one who acts and exerts power, is already filled in a properly functioning home and society by man. At best, a woman’s assumption of that responsibility is redundant, and based on the present state of our women as you describe it, it’s probably too great a burden for most to bear.
I don’t think we fully appreciate how excessive our demand for agency in women already has been for the last 100 years, or how destructive their attempts to meet it likely have been.
Based on the biases of a vocal minority of women, the whole sex has been thrown into the field of masculine political concerns, duped into believing that voting was a right withheld rather than a liability which, for most of our history at least, we’ve had the good sense to spare them.
Even more callously and deviously, we’ve since required that they enter the dog-eat-dog world of business and soul-deadening rat-race.
That some of us are surprised that they’re miserable and seemingly incapable of doing what they evolved to do given these enormous and short-sighted impositions seems laughable.
That some don’t recognize the need to correct the problem in the next system we construct by freeing them to serve their proper function seems even worse.
Women evolved to rely on empathy as their primary virtue. They rely on it to meet the incessant and nearly insatiable demands of our children, and couldn’t do without it.
They rely on it to satisfy us, so that we can function properly, free of unnecessary distraction. And they apply it at the broadest appropriate scale in their communities, unifying them through the maintenance of individual relationships with other mothers, children, friends, neighbors, and family.
The net effect of their collective contribution is individual fulfillment and group coherence.
So I don’t think it’s coincidental that the rapid disintegration of our group and the existential threat we face as a people also accompanied these early signs of gender confusion and conflation.
My understanding is that Europeans show pronounced sexual dimorphism relative to other groups, which should imply that sexual specialization has been an advantage for us.
I think it also goes far to explain why we seem more prone to defection and other forms of dysfunction between the sexes- differentiation and specialization come at the cost of ease of communication.
To me that speaks to the importance of our arts as a compensatory means of mediation.
In the end, I think the question is if we’ve organized our society such that our women can no longer cohere the group, who will?