The Feminine Urge to Explain Yourself
Stop playing a game you can’t win
Pop quiz. You are at a summer pool party and halfway through a lively conversation, some bespectacled geek asks you the following: “what would you say your political leanings are, if you don’t mind me asking?” He shifts his posh but affordable spectacles up the bridge of his oily nose as his mouth widens into a self-satisfied cheeser of a smile and raises his chin to await your response.
Which of the following responses is best:
A.) “I am a Democrat”
B.) “I am fundamentally an anarcho-syndicalist, but ideally I’d like to see interconnected (but not interdependent) micro-communes that share aesthetic similarities but are not guided by any unified/codified constitutional framework. Don’t get it twisted - I’m not talking about some sort of…I don’t know…Balkanization? It’s not that. That would indicate an antipathy between the communes when in reality these communes would be functionally independent other than trade relationships based on barter rather than fiat. And no - I know what you’re going to say; “fiat is shorthand used to represent barter but without the risk of spoilage.” Yes, I’ve read The Second Treatise on Government too, bro. But what Locke didn’t understand, hell what Fidel didn’t even understand, is that you can’t clean money no matter whose ink you try to wash it with. Self-subsistence is and always has been the name of the game and, to be honest, the only economic configuration that’s going to be possible when we run into several obvious ‘peak points.’ I’m not being Malthusian when I say this, I know that we eventually will be able to bio-engineer fake meat and fake leather or whatever, I’m just saying that eventually the non-renewables are exactly that - non-renewable. The problem won’t be that we don’t have enough corn, it will be that we can’t ship the corn. We can’t process the corn. We can’t store the corn. Sooner or later we are going to stop having choices we thought we had. The formation of communes is inevitable but advocating for them prior to the point of collapse is going to allow us to be proactive rather than reactive in their envisioning. So that’s what probably feels the most true for me to say - I am a ‘Proactive Collapse-Realist Neo-Rousseauian Communist.’”
C.) “I am a Republican.”
D.) “I believe that politics is just another word for spectacle. What we once understood as a ‘political process’ is now nothing more than an elaborate psychodrama produced and presented by multi-national corporations who control the actual levers of power and hence the formulation of reality as we know it. It’s a form of participatory theater. Voting is the equivalent of polling the audience or bringing one of them up on stage for a little bit of fun. My participation in it is submission, my non-participation is meaningless. Better to float free in a void than to be bound by chains in a cell.”
E.) “I would say I am part of whatever political party is responsible for those Jalapeño poppers over there. Have you tried those?”
The correct answer is obviously E. Even though it does feel a little bit like a PUA “reframe,” the underlying premise of the maneuver is strong. Heck, maybe a little alpha wolf strategy can open the door for some kino escalation with that pre-wall dime piece you’ve had your eye on. And if not, who cares? You still win because A.) if she doesn’t want your shit then she’s probably a lesbo anyway and B.) You don’t actually want to answer that question.
You don’t want to answer that question because answering that question makes several unspoken concessions that you are not interested in conceding. On the surface, the question is simple: What is your political identity?
But to answer that question also requires that you:
agree that political self-definition is important and relevant to the conversation.
agree that talking about it will somehow lead to you having a better time than you are currently having.
agree that the question itself is motivated by some general curiosity and not as a means to harvest some piece of data about you that can later be used as a conversational cudgel.
believe that knowing and sharing your political identity will lead to productive conversation or reveal higher truths.
concede that political self-definition is even possible.
I rarely agree with any of these statements, and because of this, I refuse to participate.
I also don’t feel bad about refusing to participate because - as demonstrated by the five implied concessions listed above - the question is leveled dishonestly and answering it would only serve to validate that which is fake & gay. Though slightly obfuscated, the question is a good example of the classical formulation of begging the question, with the main underlying assumption being that “political affiliation” is something I have, believe in, or support.
Perhaps this exact question is not the one being asked. Maybe I’m doing a little straw manning myself here by pretending there are armies of dweebs out there who would whiplash an easy-going poolside conversation about modern Shoegaze and its discontents into one about political allegiances. But one need only take a peek around any corner of the “ideas” internet to see that political self-identification is the coin of the realm for being taken seriously. Scroll just a little ways down on any Substack, Twitter feed, Medium article, or message board, and you’ll be certain to find self-published novels’ worth of arguments about the alt-right vs the new-right or post-left vs anti-left or whether the legacy of the Combahee River Collective is properly acknowledged in the modern DSA. Dig even a little deeper and you’ll find painstaking explications of micro-political identities that are so painful to read that most people would probably prefer a printed list of their father’s internet history.
The act of “declaring” one’s political identity is an act of utter impotence. It is the equivalent of donning a college’s hat at a “press conference” alone in your basement to declare which university you’re attending on a clarinet scholarship. No one cares. No one asked. It doesn’t matter. All of the reporters in attendance are just your stuffed animals.
What started as an innocuous sharing of your political compass results on Facebook in 2006 has now become a central symptom of the identitarian mind virus that has hijacked just about every institution in the west. It is the idea that “affiliation” with an ideology or coalition will somehow clarify your thinking and provide heuristics for which positions to take on things like unions, abortion, material conditions, fascism, Ukraine, the Clintons, or even what level of ironic distance to take on these issues themselves. It is the impotent belief entailed therein is that if everyone just knows where everyone else stands, then we can begin to organize a society that properly represents the will of all of those individuals. It is the formulation of belief that if we have x amount of anarchists and y amount of Trotskyists and z amount of libertarians, then perhaps we can use the x, y, and z variables to formulate an equation that satisfies these interests at the proportional level of their allegiances. Then we just follow Order of Operations and voilà! The mathematically correct president is Vermin Supreme.
To interpret this in the most concrete and charitable way, it is a form of “roll call” - a taking of attendance and a signaling of affiliation to…someone. Mostly to you, maybe to some other people that narrowly define themselves in the same way. But we don’t really do anything with that information outside of the two main US parties who use this info as a means of targeting advertisements and identifying battlegrounds. What it most certainly is not for is “finding strength in numbers.” Those who participate in this form of declarative micro-identification find anything but strength. I need make no argument for this; the proof is in the pudding.
Political affiliation is intended as a form of shorthand to relay one’s political ideology. Political ideology is a shorthand for one’s personal ideology. Personal ideology is a stated, partially stated, or unstated (and simply felt) self-manifesto of one’s feelings. Feelings, of course, are ideas which cannot be easily captured in words. If I am pro-life, it is not because I have written an essay in my brain that weighs all sides of the abortion argument and has come to a singular coherent conclusion. I am pro-life because when I think about abortion, certain levels of chemicals squirt from different parts of my neurologic and endocrine systems that make me feel a certain way. “I am repulsed, therefore I vote for Trent Lott.”
An adult cannot bring themselves into any topic as a blank slate. This, fundamentally, is why arguing about political issues themselves is such a fool’s errand. Politics, and by extension personal values, are based on primordial things that ooze within us. Things that exist a priori to an article you read in The Atlantic on Biden’s relationship with labor unions. The things inside of you that actually determine you position on Biden labor unions are simple and dumb and child-like. They are often based on things you cannot articulate or that even rise to your conscious awareness. They are instinct. They are a funny taste in your mouth when you hear Biden talking about “Corn Pop.” They are a draining feeling in your stomach when you think about the Triangle Shirtwaist Company.
This is not to say that one’s “mind” cannot be changed. But the changing of minds has much more to do with the aesthetic feel of a position rather than the logical trappings of that position itself. Even when those aesthetic, sensual feelings are influenced or altered by new logical data, they are still just feeling. They are a glowing mass of light somewhere in the barely accessible basement of your conscious mind.
Most people are pro-choice because at some point in their life, saying that they were “pro-choice” made parts of them feel sparkly and pure. These parts might have been formed in anticipation of approval from their like-minded parents, or of rejection from their Catholic school teacher, or a desire to get laid and not have consequences, just to name a few. Conversely, those who are pro-life have that position because of equally dumb and stupid feelings, such as surge of “cuteness overload” when they see babies, or the inverse of any of the feelings for pro-choice described above. Disagree with me at your own risk, but before you do consider how unassailable some political ideas are in our society despite the tidal wave of evidence to the contrary. Apologies to the “just trust the science!” crowd, but people don’t really give a shit.
I am not saying that people are “full of shit” or that their all opinions are just “virtue-signaling.” I am just saying that I believe our worldviews are like a big pot of stew, of which our opinion is just one ingredient. And also: we don’t really know what many of the other ingredients are. What I am saying is also my opinion stew. It’s Jungian chicanery; incantations of cryptic spells from the sub-conscious. Talk of the deep and symbolic is all soothsaying and conjecture. But it is only fair to argue that all who speak on matters mind and soul are always just conjecturing. Knowledge about the transcendent is never empirical, only speculative fiction. We choose to say it anyway with the hope that bringing it forth and pushing it into reality might cause a spark in some other soul, which will then case a spark in another, and so on and so on until enough souls are sparked to cause at last the justification for a subreddit.
I am well aware that I am saying is not novel. I am not the first person to suggest that the reason that “we are the way we are” is because of imperceptible transactions that happen inside of us for which we only later construct a reasonable narrative. This is old news. What may be a little bit of new news to the reader is my belief that sharing these political identities is not in any way worth our time. The sharing, and subsequent justification, of our political ideologies is a process that I think most of us need to retreat from. We need to stop having an opinion, at least in public. This is especially true for those of us who not support The Current Thing. And it is vitally, undeniably true for those of us who often feel we are on the automatically losing side of any argument by nature of an unalterable personal characteristic.
Here now I attempt to construct the impossible: a framework of political disentanglement. How the thinking man lusts after such a possibility! This has been my desire for most of my conscious life, to solve the impossible question of, “how can I justify not giving a shit about the world around me?” And further, “how can I walk away from it all without feeling guilty or irresponsible.” People cut from my cloth are jealous of those who so easily engage in a garden-variety compartmentalization or dissociation in order to absolve themselves of the painful task of having to pay attention. I dream of an escape pod from this culture. Not only one that is effective but one that is moral and necessary. I am not advocating a mere “detachment” from political or social discourse for our own “mental health.” I am saying that we detach for the health of our society and future. I am saying is that every time we engage in said political discourse, we are hauling water for the dominant political ideology. And that dominant ideology is feminine.
I want to make clear as I have before and will again that I am no chauvinist. Pay careful attention that I wrote “feminine” and not ‘feminists” or “feminism.” I do not wish for a masculine regime that dominates the feminine impulse. I advocate for a system of equal strength. I believe that balance and harmony between masculine and feminine forces yields the best in people and society. Human history has oft suffered under the regimes of extreme masculine energy. Our current regime suffers from an overabundance of the feminine.
This is mostly new territory, and because of that it is has been harder to name. Most of us are unaware what an over-feminized society would look like. The illnesses and excesses of over-masculinity are obvious: war, bloodshed, charismatic strongman dictators, blood oaths, duels, pirates, genocide. Over-femininity has less analogs, yet yields its equal share of social illness. This illness is not as overt as its masculine counterpart. Less blood is spilled, less land is taken. Less heads are put on pikes. The illness of a feminine-dominant regime is a feminine illness. As such, it does not command obedience through brute strength, dominance, shattering of wills, or plundering. It does not even command obedience at all, it merely requires conformity. Conformity is the way the feminine brings order. Conformity creates safety in predictability, social cohesion, and harmony. It punishes not those who defy the leader but those who defy the group. It creates order not with military uniforms but with matching outfits.
The classical conception of masculine energy is that it represents order. I disagree with this. It represents a sort of obedience, yes. A “show of force” can be a powerful ordering principle. But I do not share the common opinion that masculine energy is what brings order to society. I think the Founding Fathers were fathers because that’s the only people who were given the education, titles, and appointments to be in the room. There is no natural male proclivity for organization, and even at the risk of sounding like I’m doing some “fake feminism for pussy,” I’ll even concede that a group of Founding Mothers might have done a better job. At the very least, having both groups in the room would have been great. In fact it would have been great if all races, creeds, and genders were in the room too. It’s a shame we couldn’t have a few non-binary folx in the room, it would have been rad to have at least one “Founding Nari/Nary.” Oh well, if only everything would have been different than how it actually was. I hate facing up to reality, but hey - I’m on Team Truth.
Good thing we have grown and changed since then, and we now have a western culture free enough that people can express themselves however they want! These days, the utility of our bodies as “carrier of rocks” or “carrier of baby” aren’t constrained by social expectation. As such, the seed of personhood grows more freely, the plant sprouts and climbs in directions more suited to sensation and self — sometimes even varying by the day.
This new freedom has made some things better and others worse. Authority works best as a binary; “you are either with us or against.” Freedom allows for many branches to sprout along this horizontal line. At first these branches seem like exciting new possibilities, perhaps even the solution to the binary choice we once had. This is what I earlier intended to explain with my discussion of the many shades of political identity that now saturate the west. Even more prescient is how these branches have sprouted along the axis of gender, growing so far from the soil of that two-way-arrowed line that we forget the line from which they sprout.
I have not. It’s not that I don’t believe there are different ways to feel and express our
”gender” - whatever that now means. It’s just that I have not given up the opinion that gender rests on a spectrum between two anchored points.
Let us take pause for a moment and re-read that last small paragraph. Note the way it makes no sense. In my quest to answer the twisted political arguments of the day, I somehow find my own arguments equally twisted and vague. It is almost as if the very paper that I write my counter-arguments upon are part of argument I am countering itself. Here now you may begin to grasp the reason I am advocating a departure from the debate. Here now is why I believe it is of absolutely no use to even attempt the rebuttal. You cannot possibly write a formidable argument against an idea, when the paper you write it upon, the pen you write it with, and the table it all sits atop, are all part of the argument itself.
Let us dispense then with a roadblock that congests the road that I am attempting to travel. Words like “masculine” and “feminine” are words created by the feminine. As such, they cannot be fairly used; “You cannot use the master’s tools to disassemble the master’s house.” So another reframe is in order - one that I think actually works well. The actual difference between the masculine and feminine can be better understood as the difference between hunter and gatherer. By naming these two energies thusly, we are relieved of the troubling connotations that the words “masculine”and “feminine” hold. This is especially true in the feminine paradigm in which “the masculine” has been forcefully assigned the definition of “that which is not feminine.”
Now I do not make this distinction merely to avoid the detection of those who are conditioned to reflexively react to language such as this. I do not address the hostile people at all. Instead I use these words to address those who stand behind the gates of meaning that are policed by the regime of thought and language. I make this distinction because I truly believe these energies are present to some degree in all people. I would venture that the hunter (née masculine) energy historically appeared more often in men and the gatherer (née feminine) energy more often in women, but we no longer live in hunter/gatherer times.
The masculine hunter goes into the forest for sustenance. He goes alone or in small packs of men he would call his brothers. He does not ask for authorization, nor does he seek a structure of approval and justification. He does fill out forms to request permission. The masculine goes into the darkness not because of the higher-order principles of community, but because he is merely answering the hunger that calls within him. The masculine is fueled by instinct and need. He values order only insofar as order can be readied for the day it must confront a threat that surely waits. It does not trade on definitions and arguments. The argument is settled between man and beast by the most absolute calculation there is: he is right if he lives and he is wrong if he dies. This is the language he speaks and understands.
Talking about it doesn’t get you any dinner.
The gatherer finds her place in the village. She does not stalk into the darkness where actions are decided by instinct and “feel.” How interesting that it is the hunter that operates on his feelings alone, as this is usually thought of as the realm of the feminine: the feminine sense or a woman’s intuition. The gatherer does not strive with beasts, but instead something far more dangerous: other people.
To battle with other people, she does not use blade or club. These weapons are of no use against the threat of one’s own neighbor. Especially as the battle often happens from a bench as you watch your children playing in the field before you. “Feel” and “intuition” are not the gatherer’s friends on that bench. Calm rationality rule the day. Cunning, emotional discipline, and measured words are all “must haves” in the arsenal of the Gatherer. There is no room for “going with your gut” when your business is to manage crop yields and winter shortages and disputes over tiny plots of land. For this the Gatherer must create systems of meaning and order. They must create ways to communicate the importance of things to others who do not understand. They use words as shorthand to talk about the things in the basement of their mind that appear only as symbols: trust, love, spirituality, vulnerability, grieving. They need to depend on each other, but moreover, they need to be able to depend on the others to conform. They must reward those who do and punish those who refuse. This is the true nature of order.
The hunter and gatherer are not at odds. Even when they disagree, there still remains an essential respect of the role and value of the other. Each faction knows that they cannot do what the other does. Each one know they are different in input but equal in output. A society of all hunters cannot survive too many failed hunts. A society of all gatherers cannot make it through the winter frost without meat inside their storage. They are opposite; they push and they pull. But in the middle of that push and pull is the central balancing tension of life. This is the tight rope upon which we walk, if the rope begins to slack or slope, then mere hell is leashed upon the world.
We no longer live in the era of spears and arrows. The main crop yield of most of us in the West is Barack Obama Chia Pets. It is harder to understand the value of words like masculine and feminine. They have been relegated to self-help seminars and bonfire retreats for divorced men. They are seen as things that figure into the solution for the madness which now consumes us, other than when used as cudgels to absolve ourselves of evil and point it toward another. But whether or not we still believe, no matter how twisted and stretched these lines become, they all still emerge from the same soil. These are the forces that form the soil from which all things grow. They must be watered as often as they must be pruned. To little water and it withers, too little pruning and it proliferates like weeds across the pasture. We must cease our struggle to name each weed. The breath we waste to do so is precious gas that gives way for proliferation and overgrowth.
We must now close our mouths. We must now walk away. Back into the forest. Into the night. If you are hungry then you can join me. I will call you brother.
We do this not to prove a point.
We do not do this to win your favor.
We do this for one reason and one reason alone.
A reason I don’t have to tell you.