Female Privilege: It's Not About The Crazy, Not The Babies

I have read the following sentiment once too often:

the reality is that female privilege is the incessant undercurrent of culture, derived from the fundamental premise that governs all social organization and policy: women are more reproductively valuable than are men.

I’m not sure if Heartiste is saying only that, right or wrong, American society has that fundamental premise, or, that societies are rightly governed by that fundamental premise. So I will give two answers.

First, if American social organisation and policy is driven by “mo’ babies”, the USA is screwed. As screwed as any country importing warm bodies with no skills because population decline.

Second, here’s why. Reproduction is not the valuable activity: reproduction just gives you babies. Babies are raw material, not the finished product. The valuable finished product is a contributing, co-operative and considerate adult member of the society and the economy. Any idiot can produce babies, and most do, but it takes real skill, and both parents, to raise a decent young adult, especially in post-industrial societies where long periods of education are needed for the children to even begin to have the skills needed to be productive. Only warriors can train warriors, only hunters can train hunters, only fishermen can train fishermen. The last thing a small society needs is a large bunch of growing boy children without enough men to train them to be men. Fertility is like a lot of things: it’s only a good thing if it’s kept between limits. Unrestricted baby-making is a liability. Valuing women as baby-makers isn’t privileging them, it’s sensible resource-husbandry, along with keeping the cows watered.

Female privilege is a thing. However, it has nothing to do with babies. It has to do with there being a critical mass of psychiatrically damaged women and women who decide to act crazy to get their way. One feminist harridan in a lecture theatre can be stared down: five can wreck the whole proceeding. And once it becomes clear that crazy gets its way, deliberate displays of insincere crazy becomes one more weapon in the armoury.

I live in England, and while there’s a healthy tradition of, um, bawdy behaviour amongst English women that makes Saturday nights worth avoiding, not so many of them are actually crazy. Britain has its dysfunctionals, oestrogen-dominants, adventuresses, bitter girls, shrews, princesses, psychopaths and other misfits, who behave badly a lot of the time. There are so few of them that they can be dismissed as “weirdos and head-cases”, kept out of organisations where important work is done by sane people, and the average clueless man will have a low probability of meeting one.

Heartiste is in America.

America, land of obesity and medicalised psychiatry, has a proportion of hormone-imbalanced and damaged female souls that, to go by the obesity and DSM-V stats, and even allowing for extensive co-morbidity, may be as high as one in three. Crazies are going to be almost everywhere in employment, and almost everyone is going to have to deal with one at least once a day. The natural instinct to back off and placate the crazy woman is going to be kicking in on a daily basis. In fact, it may never kick out. In which case, American men are going to be tolerating all sorts of bad behaviour all the time. Crazies use feminism and liberal ideology because it suits their need to bully, confuse and browbeat. America is what happens when a society has a large number of crazy people with the vote. Someone is going to pander to them, and they will in return vote en bloc for anyone who gives them money and feeds their troubled souls. It looks like privilege, but it’s really just one giant freak show.

What Heartiste and many others call “female privilege” is a mixture of three things: a) a bunch of legal privileges in employment law, and some presumptions in Family Law which are designed to stop un-supported mothers and excess babies being a burden on the taxpayer; b) the instinct to back off and placate the crazy woman; c) men tolerating calculated crazy in their personal lives. Female privilege is mostly men putting up with behaviour from women that they would never accept from another man, and women exploiting that to the hilt and half-way up the handle as well.

Nothing to do with babies.