Digest #10
life-building:
How Andrew Tate smashed the patriarchy
What happens when you stop honouring men for self-restraint
… In that essay I teased out the paradox of treating Tate’s moral failure as a falling-away from liberalism, when the values he cites to justify his behaviour are really John Stuart Mill’s hyper-individualism without the harm principle. But I found Tate still on my mind having written this, for another unexamined paradox he embodies: the fact that he’s a product not of too much patriarchy, but not enough of it.
… I’ve grown steadily more convinced that the ‘patriarchy’ is better understood as what elsewhere I have called “the aggregate result of historical human efforts to balance the conflicting interests of the two sexes”. In other words, a set of complex emergent patterns with material, cultural and historical components, that arise in part due to the irreducible asymmetry of the sexes and in an attempt to navigate that asymmetry.
… Viewed thus, in other words, “patriarchal” social codes are often not codes that entrench male supremacy so much as modulate untrammelled male aggression and sexuality in the interests of women and children. No doubt there are times when such codes fail resoundingly, or are actively counter-productive, but it seems clear to me that this is at least part of what ‘patriarchy’ sets out to do, at least (as Louise Perry argues) within the Christian cultural frame.
I can recall times when I’ve chafed on the receiving end of such treatment. It can feel irksome to have someone grandly do something for you that you can do perfectly well for yourself. But as I argue in Feminism Against Progress, it’s a mistake to read this as a moral change. Rather, the list of things women can do perfectly well for ourselves is considerably longer than in premodern times largely as a consequence not of moral advancements but technology.
… From this perspective, we really don’t live in a ‘patriarchy’ any more: if we did, as Nina Power puts it, we’d see far greater honour accorded to those men ‘taking responsibility for their families and for society at large’.
As Power argues, quoting feminist scholar Juliet Flower McCannell: “what we have in the place of the patriarchy is the Regime of the Brother.” That is: an order where men and women interact as siblings, governed only by a dog-eat-dog rubric of individual competition and advantage.
… And abandoning patriarchy for fraternity has not just loosened the constraints on physical and sexual aggression, but done so within an envious, competitive fraternal regime largely shorn of the obligations that came with old-fashioned patriarchy: the duty to protect the weak, to submit to discipline and hierarchy, to act with honour, and to consider the past and future - that is, the duty owed to ancestors.
… when the patriarchy is gone, the only group whose approval matters is the fraternity.
There are two ways of seeing ‘patriarchy’ then. There’s those persistent sex differences which we can either waste our energy trying to ‘smash’ or do our best to accommodate as constructively as possible. And then there’s the various historic forms of ‘patriarchy’ that comprises pragmatic efforts, under specific cultural conditions, to accommodate those differences as constructively as possible.
We’ve done our best to smash both. Andrew Tate is all the evidence we need that we’ve succeeded. For as well as liberating women from social and cultural norms associated with the female reproductive role, this moral and technological transformation has largely liberated men - including violent, selfish, licentious, and greedy ones - from any widely-held social obligation to assume a protective role or embrace societal responsibilities. This isn’t solely the fault of feminism, but has certainly not been hindered by the frequency with which wealthier women have told men: ‘we don’t need you any more’.
… Our challenge now is to find our way out the other side of this destruction of all norms, toward a new realism about those features of our equally dignified but irreducibly sexed human nature that we need to accommodate.
(all bolded emphases mine)
Abby is trying to mother herself,
though she isn’t quite sure how to do it.
Then she pulls up on screen a series of childhood photos of herself and explains that the men she’s hooked up with in the past have often made her feel as though she’s undeserving, not only of love but also of basic respect. So she’s trying to remind herself of her worth as a person by playing the role of mother to her inner child. “Am I OK with that for her?” she asks tearfully, gesturing at her younger self in the photo. “Would I let her be a late-night, drunk second option? Would I let this happen to her?” She shakes her head, weeping. “From a third-person, caretaker point of view, I would never let any of this stuff happen to her.”
Abby is trying to mother herself, though she isn’t quite sure how to do it. And the thousands of young women in her replies are trying to do the same (“I’m sobbing”; “i rlly needed this, thank you”; “this just changed my life”). They’ve been denied the guidance of mothers, not because their actual mothers are unwilling to offer it, but because of a matricidal impulse in liberal feminism that cuts young women off from the “problematic” older generation. This means not only that they are cut off from the voices of experience, but—more importantly—they are also cut off from the person who loves them most in the world. Feminism needs to rediscover the mother, in every sense.
What the loss of inherited wisdom has cost young women:
Tammy Peterson and Louise Perry
eye-catching:
... and my dog JAKE
about half-a-block from No Hope
Set was arbiter of ‘normal’ and master of my worldview during these years, and when I glance back with the hindsight I see also parts of the eighties. The way it was a source of humor and pride for us to hear the stories of how bad they wanted our blue jeans in Soviet Russia shines out, the way the druids sticks of Holly Wood enchanted the whole world.
By 2018, when my old Portland contact hit me up about an open room out there I had been through the biblical lecture “Call to Abraham” and was primed for my next adventure.
It was on one such morning that the algorithm fed me a fork in the road (the electronic footprint might deny that it was the same day, or it may confirm). Like any good agnostic, I ended up straddling both as best as I could. It could be said that each path of the fork represented a worldview, and each was embodied by a YouTube character.
I told myself that I was staying here the first year because my ma had just lost her ma. By that Christmas, I was staring down the barrel of the decade I had just bore witness to. That was the Christmas I saw the lady in the wheelchair, down the road. In No Hope.
There are three ways one generally takes to and from Wal-Mart and the house, which with the exception of the convenience store make up the extent of my physical world interactions. One is through No Hope to Park Lane, one is up to Falcon, and another to the stoplight on Main. It’s usually through No Hope we’ve always and I continue to make the Wal-Mart return. It was there I saw her sitting in her yard in her wheelchair in the early winter sun, waving and smiling.
…
~ GrimGriz
The Paradigm Shift Explained With Cuteness
~ Chris Petkau
onramping:
The Importance of Storytelling in "This Little Corner"
Part of it was just like dude you gotta go for it like you're gonna turn 30 - so I'm gonna die soon relatively speaking right? I have this wife that supports and loves me, so I have her in my corner; I have this son who I just want him to be proud of me: I want him to to look at his father's work, and to say one day ‘Oh, I want to be like Dad - because Dad uses his work for a good.’ So you just gotta do it at some point; kicking and screaming you just gotta upload or press record or take the word doc out and just do it.
~ Joe (The Gist with Joe)
One thing about this network or this corner of the internet is that it looks very different than it did four years ago, where aside from Jonathan, and maybe The Storytellers YouTube channel there weren't a whole lot of people with this worldview coming out with video essays, critiquing film or trying to do a review for a movie. I did a little bit of that and kind of dabbled and experimented, but now there's a lot. They're doing really good video essays. Then there's also the conversation piece and back in the day it was Paul Vanderklay and Jonathan Pageau and a couple others interviewing other people. Now there's a bunch and it's great and it feels like that space is being filled.
To where I look at myself in the mirror and I'm like, of course I can post conversations, I can podcast, I can write a symbolic interpretations of film and other things; but is it the thing? What's the main thing, what are the talents that you have received, what are the the experiences that you've lived? You know a lot of these things they're not self-generated - you receive a lot of these things. So I write letters to progeny, like you mentioned being a good example, so a lot of what motivates me is future generations - my kids, but also to patrons.
I write these letters, and one of them was called know your seeds or garden your ideas: I look at it like this: some people try to approach things like a genre, like I'm gonna sit down and write a sci-fi dystopian graphic novel. I just don't work like that - so I start seeing things in the world, experiences, listen to things, as I observe they just come together, meaning comes together in an understandable way through a dystopian sci-fi graphic novel, or a trilogy for a concept record or it comes into the mystical memoir which I'll be writing this year. So these are the things: they come in seed form for me sure, so I receive these ideas and then it's like well what do I need to do to tend? I've only read like two memoirs in my life, so I how do I go about writing it? And so it informs me of what I have to learn in order to bring it forth. Just like a gardener gets squash seeds and is like well those are very different than getting carrot seeds - how you tend to it is very differently.
So when it comes to this realm it's like I started getting that conviction of there's people doing the video thing, there's people doing the conversation thing; but who's gonna write these stories? And finally it hit me, I was like oh, no one else. I finally found I've narrowed it down to those things that absolutely no one else can do, and I have to do these things and so I'm not quite sure what that's going to look like, but that's what I'm endeavouring to do.
… Why is that? Because you can take three hundred hours worth of conversation - and tell a 3 minute story.
Loving the digest. Keep it coming. Glad something I said could be of use.