But one must beware of some guy who is intimidated by women unless she's in a subservient or traditional position or some who want to keep women down and out.
Spoken like one who has a true contempt for women and their role as life-bearers and mothers and believes it is somehow "empowering" for women to split themselves in two so as to handle (by half the usual measure) the responsibilities of fulltime career and fulltime mother.
Perhaps it is you who are intimidated by women who aren't "leveled" down to a male-based homogenous form of New Man with the right to be unpregnant at will and a sexual predator (when she's being degraded on prime-time HBO for entertainment purposes or gang-raped, razor-bladed or copulating with animals for some pornographer's Pink Ballet).
Further to the author's quotes about the Socratic observation of human nature which the feminists seek to destroy with their unisex toilets, boys that must drugged until they behave like girls and women who must have every accomodation in order to act like men ... ... Clearly, life-affirmation is one source of gentleness and protectiveness toward women. But woman has another claim to male reverence and self-control -- her beauty. Why? Beauty is an immediately perceptible experience of perfection, of the ideal, of the sacred, therefore of God. Beauty is God's manifestation of His Goodness and perfection in the material world – whether in a sunset or a woman's person.
As Simone Weil aptly put is, "Beauty is eternity here below." this is confirmed by one's typical response to natural beauty, including beautiful women: wonder, awe, even reverent fear akin to "fear of the Lord." Often, too, one experiences a painfully intense tenderness and protectiveness for the beautiful.
Dwelling in an imperfect, often painful world, we need reminders that God exists and that perfection is possible. Beauty is that reminder. It keeps our longing for and awareness of the divine from being worn away by the frustrations and travails of daily life. Beauty affirms that life is good and worth living [AND WORTH FIGHTING FOR]. Beauty, then, is food for the soul – just as vital as food for the body.
When the beautiful is destroyed, damaged or degraded, we are the less for it; our souls have been robbed of an object of one of their deepest needs and yearnings.
Reverence for beauty and reverence for women and indissolubly linked, the first naturally evoking the second, the second a manifestation of the first. Women are indisputably the custodians of much of the world's beauty, certainly of humanity's – and not physical beauty only but a beauty of the soul … in their capacity for love, manifested in gentleness, sweetness, devotion and empathy. Women thus manifest the perfection our souls seek, hence are precious.
It follows that reverence, gallantry and protectiveness are the appropriate response to female beauty and are the women's due.
… Woman's fecundity and beauty, then, have profound significance. In them God's creativity, perfection and goodness are manifest. In them too woman is, properly understood, a bridge to the transcendent; they prompt us to cherish her, and in cherishing her we grow in virtue; as Goethe pointed out in concluding Faust, woman ever draws us higher toward perfection.
Who honors woman, the vessel of life and beauty, honors them and the God who is their author. A life-affirming, beauty-honoring civilization – which is to say a religious one – will honor women and regard chivalry as ideal.
All too clearly, we no longer inhabit such a civilization … If life is not a miraculous divine gift, but something that just happened for no explicable reason or purpose, then it has no intrinsic value. As the bearers and nurturers of life, women are the natural targets of nihilism.
… Misogyny, then, is not merely hatred for women but hatred for that which defines them as women and entitles them to Reverence and Self-Restraint; their beauty and life-bearing … The perfect example of this is the Marquis de Sade …
Long deemed virtuous and passive, women, in the sadist's world, are the appropriate victims. And woman's physical softness, apparent vulnerability, and beauty which in a civilized world inspire protectiveness, reverence and tenderness, in a sadist's inverted world only prompt cruelty.
… Woman thus now lives in a civilization seethingly hostile to life and beauty, her central defining characteristics as woman. She lives too, as the foregoing evidence also shows, in a civilization which is rejecting restraint, including self-control, all across the board, and becoming increasingly savage.
She lives, in short, in a Sadean death culture. And repudiation of beauty, life and restraint leads inexorably to rejection of and cruelty to she who personifies the first two and thereby has a claim on the third.
Like Sade, Romanticism glorified self-will. Solipsism and self-will are epitomized in sexually victimizing woman. Cruelty, rape and other defilement are praiseworthy; they manifest the triumph of the will, the victory of the active and assertive over the passive. Atheist Ayn Rand, an enormously influential pioneer of modern libertarianism, a self-proclaimed Romantic whose motive was "the projection of an ideal man," worshipped assertive male self-will. In Randian eyes, rape is romantic and heroic; the greater her beauty or achievements, the greater his triumph. [Several paragraphs on the rape of Dominique, etc. omitted.]
… Profound woman-hatred also informed modernity's ugly, decidedly unwomanly ideal of female beauty: thin, stringy arms and legs; a hard flat abdomen; vestigial breasts. New York writer Dalma Heyn lauded "the miracle of female bodies; the reproductive significance of those curves and bulges, the sumptuous glory of it all" - and added perceptively that women accepting the starveling
boyish ideal suffer from "revulsion at looking female" and "self-loathing," and "battle our own intrinsic femaleness." If a woman's normal voluptuousness has "reproductive significance" and sumptuous glory," draw your own conclusions about how an ideal of resembling "a well-developed adolescent boy" values life and beauty.
Radical feminism is a misogynistic Sadean rebellion against metaphysically-given existence, repudiating womanhood, aiming to "liberate" women from it.
… In 1948, Richard Weaver wondered "whether modern civilization wishes to survive" (Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19481, P. 185). Half a century later, we have our answer.
Modernism's crowning suicidal lunacy
in an era full of them
is feminism's campaign to force women into combat.
Now women too can die horrible deaths chillingly like Sade's "murderous passions": tortured to death as POWs, dismembered by artillery, crushed by tanks, roasted alive with napalm. Instead of admitting that the whole modern project which began with the Enlightenment has been a lethal error and a ghastly flop, feminists and other moderns keep stripping woman of her few remaining protections, prating all the while of how they are setting her free.
Excerpted from John Attarian's Women and the Sadean Death Culture (Culture Wars 12/97, pp.14-21) |