What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 2. Care, lack of care, and an existential lack of focus.
Basically- Save the tomboys, let little boys paint their nails, don’t be a jerk to your kid because there are bad people/groomers in the world- protect your child and teach them they’re great the way they are and doing those things doesn’t mean they’re a different gender
Luka "Bunny" Hein.
In that, I also noticed the operation of synchronicity. And here I find it at work again.
Among the various bills pending in front of the state's legislature are two regarding the horrific abuse of minors in the name of "gender affirming care". Chemical and surgical attacks on gender and surgery to "reassign", or at least partially remove, a person's gender characteristics is "care" in the same way that the Holocaust was a "solution". It isn't, it demonstrates extreme moral depravity, and it's an absolutely insane rejection of nature.
Some of this topic, and that one, started off with various items I'd read or heard, which was then followed, by what I just noted here:
Well, I was in the bookstore for three days running, but that's another story.
And just before the trip to the bookstore, I became aware that somebody who I've known their entire life now identifies as transgendered, but there's something else, I suspect, going on there that I'll not deal with here.
I noted in that I'd post another one on this particular topic.
And then the very brave Luka "Bunny" Hein testified in front of the legislature, saying a lot of this stuff more bravely than I could have.
I so thoroughly killed off my younger self to become what I was, what I am, that I truly feel as though trying to find any part of her left in me would just feel like resurrecting someone else’s corpseI suppose that metaphor is appropriate with how Frankenstein-like I feel now
Luka Hein.
Hein isn't alone. She's joined by Chloe Cole, whose name has been given to one of the proposed statutes, "Chloe's Law". Cole, like Hein, is an activist against this horror, but she's gone further and is crusading generally against what we might call the perversion of youth. If you want to know why there's so much furor over a certain book that keeps getting mentioned in regard to school libraries, look at her Twitter feed. She put the pages of the book up, complete with the male on male dick sucking images, which are the reason people are complaining about the book.1
I've known little boys who played with dolls who grew up to be men's men, and I've known plenty of girls who took up what had been formerly regarded as very male activities, or male habits. Indeed, ironically in our day and age, younger women who have retained highly traditional ideas, or perhaps I should say highly feminine behavior, have been ridiculed and belittled, while women as a whole have been pushed into entire roles that are not only traditionally male, but in some (limited) instances, such as combat soldiers are likely genetically so. Up until just recently, however, it wasn't the case that the conclusion was made on some societal level that this must mean those boys want to be girls, or those girls want to be boys.
Now that's being shoved down upon them.2
What's really going on here?
We discussed some of that just the other day, but there are a number of things going on, the first of which is the complete rejection by the WASP class of the concept of nature and standards, which we touched on in our earlier essay. That's left them a ship adrift, and subject to the winds of forces which very much have an agenda.
As we've already gone into it in some depth, we won't here. But basically to sum it up, up until after the Second World War the dominant American culture, the WASP culture, was rooted in a Protestant sense of Christianity, which means that it was rooted in a Christian world view. Even people who were not Protestant Christians picked up large portions of this world view, given us the oddity of Protestantized Catholics and Protestantized Jew, as well as Protestantized Agnostics and even Protestantized Atheists. Humorist Garrison Keiller has a joke in one of his monologues about claimed non believing bachelor farmers going to Lutheran Easter services and noting that "it was a Lutheran God they didn't believe in", but there's something to that.
As part of that, or related to it, American society, and European society wasn't all that far removed from nature in a way up into the early 1960s. You certainly can find examples of people who lived an urban life for generations by the 60s, but more often than not you'd tend to find some recent rural connection. People's parents, or grandparents, had been farmers quite often. And certainly in North America, as Gene Shepherd noted in one of his essays, even urban people retained outdoor activities to some degree if they had no farm connection.3
Why does this matter? Well, for a couple of reasons. Starting in the 60s, this really started to breakdown. The Spirit of 1968 essentially rejected all conventions, existential or otherwise, and started society on a path of radical self defined, "if you feel good, do it" type of thinking, inroads into which were already being advanced by the Playboy culture that started attacking the family, in essence, in 1953. Things were well advanced in this direction by the time Tom Wolfe redefined the Boomers as "The Me Generation" in 1976, by which time the Greed Is Good ethos was also taking root. By the late 1970s the WASP culture was so diluted it was already about individual self definition, as long as that also included monetary success. Ties to the land were being lost, in spite of efforts to revive it in an unrealistic idealized sense, so lessons that are plain in nature, were gone.4
With the guardrails removed, it's no wonder where things ended up, but it didn't happen, of course, overnight. Indeed, it really took until the Boomers children raised in the larger WASP culture started having their own, and passed on only a very diluted sense of anything whatsoever, with that mostly being "be yourself" and "be successful". Nobody was a loser, everyone (up until you needed to make money) a winner, and whatever you wanted to do was okay.
Well, nature is nature, sometimes cruel, and that's not the way things work.
And hence we see the fork of a dilemma here, which is impacting the modern age, and the rise of transgenderism in confused, mostly female, adolescents, and confused males in their early 20s.
And that means the root is likely not the same.
The Confused Girls
Luka Hein describes this, having lived through it, about well as anyone can. By and large, what we see with these girls, and that's what they are, is this. They're mostly distressed female teenagers with ADHD, some of whom are Tomboys, who are pushed in this direction or find temporary refuge in the identifier. Totally lacking a community, with parents who are about as firm as milk toast and who have no existential concept of anything, they head that way and then are pushed that way.5
In a society grounded in nature, let alone the existential, they'd get real support from their families, which would like be sports, the outdoors, and a community with external standards. Instead, they get "support" which amounts to pushing them into mutilation.
The big root in this is the lack of a community, combined with an exposure to the perverse early on. Girls this age don't want to be pushed into sex, let alone pushed into sex, which up until very recently was regarded as extremely weird. Now they are. They're pushing back and away. Getting away is the real desire. Given enough time, and support, to realize that they don't have to yield to whatever weird conduct Reddit is boosting at the moment, or appearing on the cover of "teen" magazines, and they'd be okay. Moreover, being somebody like Hein, whose Twitter photo is a baby rabbit sitting on a large caliber handgun, doesn't mean you have interest which mean you have to be a closet male.
Polish mountain climber Wanda Rutkiewicz, Tomboy extraordinaire, difficult personality, married woman, and a real woman. Polish Olympian Maria Magdalena Andrejczyk provides another, very contemporary, example.
The Confused Young Men
Some of what we noted above applies to men as well, but I suspect that we have more often is a cry for attention, or the Laying Flat culture, or both, at work.
While it's not popular in any fashion to say it (although it is being said), it's always been hard to be a man. This is not to say that it's been easy to be a woman, but frankly the burdens of life have traditionally fallen on men and women quite differently. The historical burden on women is indeed tied to their biology, bearing children is dangerous, or at least was up into the 20th Century, and hard on the body. And up until the Government stepped in to be the husband of women who cared not to marry the father's of their children, having even one child tied a man to the father if she kept the child permanently as there was no other economic option for the most part. People have tended to therefore look back and be wistful on the "patrimony".
Truth be known, however, male roles in societies have been blisteringly simple traditionally, if not always easy. Men were expected to take a societally defense role, with their first obligations being to protect their families first, protect women and children in general secondly, and protect their nation last. On that last one, you can put in tribe if you are thinking of a more aboriginal society.
Men were also expected to "provide" for their families. When I was young, it was still the case that people would excuse some other real or imagined failure of a man by stating "he's a good provider". This had all sorts of meanings in context. In one hand, a man might have some real moral failings, perhaps he hit the bars a lot, or perhaps he dallied with other women, but if he made a good income and brought it principally home to his family, that was regarded as excusing a lot of other conduct.
Conversely, it was also used in the instances in which a man might otherwise be regarded as boring, plain looking, or not an otherwise romantically attractive person. "He's a good provider" would be regarded as excusing those failings on one hand, or be used as a basis for suggesting to an unmarried woman why somebody should be regarded as a prospect for marriage.6
This goes back to the dawn of the species and reflects the original genetic dimorphism, physically and psychologically, that our species exhibits. In modern industrial times it reflected itself in a number of interesting ways that directly made, if you will, men's life "hard".
Men working themselves to death wasn't really regarded as abnormal and in certain societies with thin resources, such as Finland, men died much earlier than women did. Men in general still generally die younger than women for that matter. And dangerous work was a male role, including not only industrial work, but the most dangerous work of all, war. Indeed, in spite of feminism and a general societal effort to suppress this, this is still largely true.
Much less true, however, is how society reflected this.
Men were expected to respect women in a much more formal manner than they do now, where this is very much no longer the case. They were expected to defend them, even in a situation in which they really didn't know them. They were expected at some point to plan to make a living which "would support a family", or if they didn't feel up to that, and not all did by any means, to drop out of the family raising role for some other societally acceptable one. They were expected to support families if they had one, including marrying a woman if they got her pregnant and were not married. And they were expected to bare arms if need be.
A good example of this in the early 20th Century is interestingly the Titanic. A monument in Washington D.C. introduces to us the reason why on its front and back inscriptions:
TO THE BRAVE MEN WHO PERISHED IN THE TITANIC
APRIL 15 1912
THEY GAVE THEIR
LIVES THAT WOMEN
AND CHILDREN
MIGHT BE SAVED
ERECTED BY THE
WOMEN OF AMERICA
Back:
TO THE YOUNG AND THE OLD
THE RICH AND THE POOR
THE IGNORANT AND THE LEARNED
ALL
WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES NOBLY
TO SAVE WOMEN AND CHILDREN
The men on the Titanic, rich and poor, stepped aside so that women and children would live. This was the traditional expectation, and they fully fulfilled it, stupid modern movies notwithstanding.
The reward, so to speak, for the role was in part simply genetic. Husky's, the dog, are happy pulling sleds, which coyotes would not be. Much of this just worked the same way. Additionally, however, male life tended to result in male societies, formally and informally, going all the way back to tribal society. Membership in them was part of being male, and amazingly universal.7 Indeed, it started off in childhood, with the first "band of brothers" usually being a "band of boys", and later some formal organization, like the Cub Scouts.
Now all of this is shattered. A society that confused equality of the sexes, which existed much more than imagined prior to feminism, but which has been confused by the failure to understand how technology impacted that, with samism, has created a societal requirement that, save for professional sports, the physical differences between women and men are not to be mentioned. Men have become shy about defending women the way they once did, least they receive a rebuke. Well-intentioned government subsidies combined with the society wide adoption of the "Playboy Ethic" has blinded society to the physical and psychological impacts of sex so that not only are men not really expected to take care of any children they cause, or the women who bare them, but they're actually expected to put out irrespective of the consequences. This is so much the case that in a fairly recent notorious event in which somebody was unjustly killed, the press was full of his being a "good father", which in real terms simply meant that he'd fathered a lot of children, and not all by the same woman. Not that he was acting as a parent.
Added to that, the traditional role of "defense" has seen female intrusion as something that must be accepted, although in reality it hasn't gone that far at the armati homines level.
Male societies now are completely verboten. You can't do that. The Boy Scouts must admit girls, and is the Scouts. Men, basically, have no larger societal refuge from their male lives.
And the point of those lives is now warped. The "get a good job" pressure is still there, but point is missing. Getting a good job is supposed to occur, so you can buy toys. In the WASP end of things, many of the upper middle class WASPs avoid children entirely. Ultimately procreation, a reality of earlier years, is just regarded as recreation, and therefore the object of it on the giving and receiving end easily disposed of.
That gets to this.
If young teenage women, on the cusp of becoming young women, have been freighted by the Reddit/Internet portrayal of their expectation that they serve as harem concubines for men in general, and have opted out through transgenderism, young men, a little past their early teen years, and perhaps fully past them but still in their very young 20s, have looked at this in some instances and looked for the door out.
In the past, as noted, there was an outdoor, even before much of this became so perverse. In rural societies, bachelor farmers, who often weren't terribly good farmers, were a pretty common and accepted thing. Farming, and ranching, was good honorable work, and not getting married as part of that was more common than a person might suppose.
The unmarried industrial worker was also surprisingly common. A sort of portrayal of this, combined with one man's desire to get married, is shown in the movie Marty. Enlisted men in the Army, with the exception of senior NCO's, sometimes, tended to be unmarried. Indeed, junior officers were usually unmarried, and in some militaries, such as the British Army and, while a bad example, the Imperial Russian Army, marriage was highly frowned upon. Moreover, certain male occupations tended to fall towards unmarried men by default, and some, such as the Catholic priesthood, required it. Just as male society tended to accept the mentally off a bit into it's ranks in the larger group, it accepted unmarried men into it as well.9
With the rise of the societal acceptance of homosexuality as ostensibly normal, this dynamic completely changed. While there have always been people with same sex attraction, unmarried men were not assumed to be "gay", they were assumed to be unmarried. Homosexual men did fall into the categories mentioned, as the wealth in society started to rise mid 20th Century and certain low paying occupations became increasingly societally unacceptable to obviously intelligent men, this increased. But the postwar economic boom, the Playboy culture onset, the Sexual Revolution, and Feminism completely destroyed what had been.
At some point, by the late 1980s, society would no longer let men who wanted to basically drop out of things, for whatever reason, do it. A couple of decades prior society accepted that a guy could take an industrial job, for instance, and work it his entire life as a single man, with a single dwelling, and not be homosexual. By the late 80s, no longer. And no longer was such a person really even allowed to peaceably dwell in that condition, but an absolute need for sex of some sort was presumed. Such people were presumed to be homosexual and if they were younger, relationships they might not really want were forced on them. The Friends and Big Bang Culture had arrived.
At the same time, the rise of the Me Generation meant that money for individual hedonistic purposes was now the point of being. You needed a "career" so you could live well, even if living well really meant that everything was for entertainment, including other people.
How do you get out of that?
Well, "transitioning" will work.
Based at least on some observation, young men just getting ignored in their plight, with parents who aren't going to provide any guide rails, is a big factor in this. They aren't really seeking to change genders, they're trying, ironically enough, to get back to the 1950s.
How does this end?
I'm usually pretty cautions about quoting Rod Dreher. I like some of his stuff, and not so much others. Be that as it may, he's spot on here:
There will be no justice until every damn doctor, hospital, and medical association responsible for this atrocity has been sued into the ground, and some of them imprisoned. Forgiveness? Yes, in time (though that's easy for me to say, as I have not suffered what this father has suffered) -- but only after full lustration, only after Nuremberg-like tribunals, only after the trials, only after utter and complete shame shattering all the luminaries and the institutions -- including the Democratic Party, the TV networks, the major newspapers -- which brought this evil onto the lives of American children and their families.Those who did this to young women like her -- people like Dr. Gallagher above, who revels on social media in her success in slicing the healthy breasts off of women -- God willing, they will pay within the limits of the law for what they have done. As evil as the Tuskegee Experiment was, this is even more damaging, because it has created, and is creating daily, thousands of more victims.
He's exactly right.
Indeed, it's already happening. Chloe Cole has filed suit. My prediction is that if she doesn't win, somebody soon after her will. And like the Opioid lawsuits that are now so common, they'll drive this out of the societal field by litigation force and judgements. In the meantime, the same society that was just lately pushing pills will be "oh my, oh my, how could this terrible of thing have happened.
But that won't solve the larger problem.
Their end is destruction. Their God is their stomach; their glory is in their “shame.” Their minds are occupied with earthly things.
Philippians; 3:19.
This pretty much defines where we are, even though's worshiping their stomachs and glorifying in their shame don't recognize it. That has to change, and changing that is a tall order.
Because in order to do that, the lens, in society has to be turned back to me, towards the whole, and the existential.
Footnotes:
1. I really haven't tracked the library debate much and have discounted it, but Cole's posting makes it plain how far things are gone. The book clearly illustrates the author's descent into homosexual conduct and is frankly pornographic. It shouldn't be in a school library, and it does amount, intentionally or not, to transgender propaganda.
At no point prior to our current era would there even been a debate on whether a book which graphically depicts sexual acts, let alone homosexual acts, should be available to be checked out of a public school library. The fact that there is such debate now is a sign of how far gone things really are, and additionally how entrenched certain interests are that not only want to defend their contra natural lifestyle, but actually promote it.
2. To state this bluntly, what people feared about the Obergefel decision has not only come to pass, but it's surpassed those fears.
This should not have surprised anyone. Many years ago the homosexual book After the Ball, according to those who have read it, and I have not, not only argued for the normalization of homosexuality, but apparently for the dismantling of marriage and the traditional and long-established incidents of male/female relationships. Presently, not only are those campaigning for the normalization of transgenderism, but campaigning for it, which is accompanied by foisting medial "treatments" upon the very young, and the accompanying large-scale transfers of cash that entails.
This has happened before with other industries. Think, for example, this:
3. Shepherd noted in one of his books how the men in the Indiana city in which he grew up all subscribed to Field & Stream, even though they largely were not outdoorsmen. It was a retained desire.
4. One of the odder examples of this, very widespread, is the change in our relationship with animals.
Our species is one of those which has a symbiotic relationship with other ones. We like to think that this is unique to us, but it isn't. Many other examples of exist of birds, mammals and even fish that live in very close relationships with other species. When this occurred with us, we do not know, but we do know that its ancient. Dogs and modern wolves both evolved from a preexisting wolf species starting some 25,000 to 40,000 years ago, according to the best evidence we currently have. That likely means it was longer ago than that.
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Cats, in contrast, self domesticated some 7,000 or so years ago, according to our best estimates.
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Cat eating a shellfish, depiction from an Egyptian tomb.
We have a proclivity for both domesticating animals, and accepting self domestication of animals, the truth being that such events are likely part and parcel of each other. Dogs descend from some opportunistic wolves that started hanging around us as we killed things they liked to eat. Cats from wildcats that came on as we're dirty. Both evolved thereafter in ways we like, becoming companions as well as servants. But not just them, horses, pigs, sheep, cattle. . .the list is long.
As we've moved from the natural to the unnatural, we've forgotten that all domestic animals, no matter how cute and cuddly they are, are animals and were originally our servants. And as real children have become less common in WASP culture, the natural instinct to have an infant to take care of, or even adore, has transferred itself upon these unwilling subjects, making them "fur babies".
It's interesting in this context to watch the difference between people who really work with animals, and those who do not. Just recently, for example, our four-year-old nephew stayed the night due to the snow, and was baffled why our hunting dog, who is a type of working dog but very much a companion, stayed the night indoors. The ranch dogs do not. . . ever. The ranch cats, friendly though they are, don't either.
5. Both Hein and Cole have been reluctant to criticize their parents, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be criticized. These strong daughters honor their parents by providing the backbone that their parents completely lacked.
Having said that, this illustrates the point I noted above. These young women are roughly in their early 20s, which means they were born either in this century, or the tail end of the last one. This means that their parents were likely born in the 70s or 80s, to parents who had come up in during the 60s. So in effect they are the grandchildren of Boomers whose children were often raised with the ethos of the 60s and 70s, which combined would be there are no standards and your goal is to make money. Additionally, their parents came up during the GOP's gutting of science funding in schools. So they were born to parents whose grasp of the physical and metaphysical is weak, and whose principal world view is that it's nice to be nice to the nice.
6. While citing to fiction is always dangerous, an interesting example of this are well depicted in the fiction of Jane Austen. Not really intended for wide circulation, and limited to the concerns of her class, they nonetheless demonstrate the basic nature of male and female relationships across the ages, which is why they remain incredibly popular, particularly amongst young women who tend to see themselves in the characters.
A feature of this is the "provider" aspect. Tending to focus on families made up of women, the unmarried women are the concerns of their parents and concerned themselves. Finding a suitable match, to so speak, dominates the novels, with tension between that and romantic love. An example in Pride and Prejudice, her best novel, is found in the character of Charlotte Lucas, the protagonist close friend, who opts to marry the Episcopal Churchman, William Collins, who is the epitome of boorish and overbearing, as she's 27 and has no other prospects, and his position is secure.
7. An example of this given that at some point, it must have been in the 1950s and perhaps early 60s, my father was a member of the Knights of Columbus.
Now, my father was not a joiner by any means, but in the 50s and 60s a man would almost by default be a member of some organizations. He was the President one year of his profession's statewide professional association, which means that he had been active in it. And based on some recollections he related to me over the years, he'd been a member of the Knights when the Knights still had a downtown clubhouse. So had two of my uncles, at least. Maybe, and probably, all four of them were.
The Knights were a much different organization then, at least locally, than now. Now I know that they act as a mutual benefit society, as I am sure they did then, and I note them most frequently for having pancake breakfasts at one of the parish churches every Sunday after the early morning Mass. They may have done that then as well, but the big difference is that their clubhouse, like most men's clubs of the day, had a bar, and it could get a little rowdy. The long serving Parish Priest of the era stopped in every night at closing time to make sure that they were actually closing, and their St. Patrick's Day parties were legendary.
Be that as it may, it's almost impossible to imagine my father in that setting. Probably after he married, or at least after I was born, he chose not to be, which was in keeping with his character. Still, it's interesting that you pretty much had to be a member of some social club, probably male only, if you were a man prior to the 1970s.
I've never been a member of anything like that, really, although when I was first practicing law the county bar association was amazingly active and often met one evening, right after work, in a bar, ostensibly to present a CLE. My enduring memory of one of those meetings was getting there in time, but just in time, and having to squeeze into the back row of table seating, only to have one notoriously rude female lawyer saying something like "so you think you can get around my fat ass?"
She later was subject to a scandal when her husband turned her over to the authorities for molesting him when he was a minor.
9. This is reflected back to us by the culture of earlier eras in some odd ways.
For instance, in cartoons, an unmarried male character was really common. Gasoline Alley's central protagonist was, at first, unmarried, with this changing as female readership was low.
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