Why does feminism appear to be so important to so many people? For one thing, it’s the most lucrative possible ideology for a woman to promote. No other notion or culture can provide a woman with so much access to funds for so little effort.

There are a number of ways that women can access these funds, which may or may not be directly from the state and federal treasuries. One is by birthing bastards, and then applying for benefits. The next is by divorcing a husband who earns well. Given that both of these two strategies has suffered from depleting effectiveness in recent years, new innovations have to be drummed up to provide the duchesses and princesses their rightful due.

Every man knows that women hold the whip hand in the modern legal system. Those that think that they are exceptions due to whatever personal qualities that they might have often discover later on that their vanity was no match against the court system.

Challenging the new-found authority and status that women have in the public square will earn you righteous indignation. The older the woman, the more ferocious her opposition will be, because her entire legal standing, along with the way that she has structured her relationships, her sense of self, and her bearing are all impacted by her special privileges under the law.

This reveals something essential about humans: someone is always in charge. There is no such thing as a fully equal relationship, just as there is no equality between people as individuals. The rhetoric of feminism centers around achieving equality, but much like Communism requires enormous coercion in the hopes of bringing about a millennium, it is just the same with the new female-headed household.

In family court, there is no presumption of innocence. In general, the presumption is that the man is guilty. The penalties for failure to comply with the dictates of the court are often both civil and criminal. Women are, in general, quite happy with the idea of this arrangement, although the details of the implementation often leave a lot to be desired. It’s much easier to get a right to an income from your deposed spouse than it is to actually squeeze juice from that lemon.

In this, the educated girl at university mouthing feminist slogans is only practicing for her future profession as either a laborer, a legal plaintiff, or both. The enraged sense of entitlement only reaches full bloom in the courtroom, when it comes time for the ideas to be put into practice, for narrative to triumph over facts, logic, and truth, and to gain a fortune besides.

‘Beta’ men get a lot of flak for being doormats. They are simply creatures malformed by fear of superior power. The expectation is still there for them to behave as bourgeois men did in past times, without the legal or social standing that those bourgeois men enjoyed. In general, those men who still behave like the older style man do so upon the virtuous restraint on the part of their wives to not exercise their impressive legal powers. Most do not, because that sort of restraint is in short supply.

Serfs had a certain dignity to them, although they were considered good insomuch as they were loyal, pious, and hard-working. If they had pride, it was in their acceptance of their station, and good behavior as far as serfs go. People didn’t expect serfs to carry themselves as free men or nobles. They had lower legal status, lower status in reality, and their bearing reflected their status.

Similarly, the more civilized the man of today within a system that humbles even the greatest merchant-princes, the more deferential he is to women. The men who are not deferential are hounded out, finding themselves in the lower-status professions, or into banditry, which is to say, outside the magic circle of civilized life, bound together by law.

Sexual harassment laws and scurrilous circulation of e-mails and text messages encourage even leading men to be careful. This is because their rights are conditional upon whether or not a woman gets upset enough at them to raise a case. They can be revoked if she invents a story persuasive enough in a courtroom setting to at least result in a successful civil case. The rights of men are less absolute and more conditional upon the whims of a fully average woman of no special talent or virtue.

When the men cross that line separating the inside from the outside, the cooperative magic of the law loses its power, and there is nothing left but squabbling and fighting among rival powers. Ultimately, men are the fighters of the species. A weighty kick from a man can rupture an organ, but there’s only so much that a bite or scratch can do to the human body. It’s not a good idea to hound the strongest men in your civilization into a profound opposition.

If you say that you only want feeble men within your magic circle, don’t be too surprised if they prove incapable of maintaining it.

In popular writing, modern men (and occasionally women) are occasionally accused of being ‘commitment phobic.’

The idea of phobia derives from the thought of Freud. Although there are theories about what physically causes the symptoms observed by psychiatrists, there are no objective tests for the existence of this syndrome (collection of symptoms). Further, most of the writers accusing various people of having ‘phobias’ are not clinically qualified to do so, and even if they were, they would not be able to legally diagnose it outside of a clinical setting.

Let’s ask ourselves: are men commitment phobic? Have the wicked men of this generation driven the good, hard-working feminist women into expensive fertility treatments, due to a lack of commitment-eager partners?

To even ask the question undermines the validity of the concept of ‘phobia,’ which medicalizes an inclination that may have rational roots.

Jillian, the author of the linked article, mistakes the salesman’s rapport-generating gambit for the truth, which is why people who think that they can spot sales techniques are often most persuaded by them. The doctor is a salesman for $4,500 a dose fertility treatments and egg storage subscription fees. Take away his doctor’s costume, and he could be selling vacuum cleaners or heroin.

There is nothing to fear about getting into a commitment when entering into a modern marriage, at least from the woman’s perspective, because she is not really making any commitments. In most situations, she can just seize the marital assets after cooking up some story or another about the evils of her bum husband with the help of lawyers and psychologists and all the other modern authorities.

The man commits to an unlimited liability that can be exercised as an option at any time, and gains few if any legal rights. Even rights to paternity in the form of visitation to children are conditional, at least as far as the man is concerned. It is up to the discretion of the judge, because paternity is more a question of law than it is one of biology, although the latter still matters.

Given that the woman commits to nothing other than the contract providing direct access to the man’s property, and the creation of a common family unit that can be looted later on, there is not really much commitment at all anywhere. A woman doesn’t even need a marriage to get child support payments from the biological father of her children. Parentage without paternal rights is just a parody of indenture, mixed with a confused genetic essentialism.

The other funny thing about the author’s personal essay is that she seems not to entirely notice that she gives away much more than she could ever expect to give away to a husband — like her youthful charms — to a succession of hook-ups which she calls relationships. Psychology sanctifies this behavior as ‘rational’ and ‘good’ while also noting that stable pair bonds have better life outcomes when measured in statistics. But the psychology of 50 years ago would have called it pathological behavior, because the language of mental illness is mostly concerned with medicalized metaphors for immoral behavior.

There has been no fundamental discovery in the way that the mind works since then — only changes in societal morality.

Despite all this, the faith that the moral system is not sick is as strong as the conformity towards lifelong monogamy once was. The belief is so strong that you can sell treatments that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to these women — money that could otherwise be going to her children are going towards the gambler’s hope of having late children. You can also make phenomenal money selling eggs to the women who have delayed too long for conventional treatments.

If these women were as committed to their careers as they say, they would be re-investing that money into their boss’ business (or their own) and sterilizing themselves. And if they were as committed to having healthy, happy children as they say, they would behave differently.

The human condition is one in which everyone is buffeted around by intense drives and desires, but no one has a fully adequate means of fulfilling those desires. The achievement of civilization is like that of turning a path through a frightening forest into that of a well-lit road. Without the road, few people would be able to navigate the path.

Revealed preference shows a desperate desire to reproduce, but inadequate methods by which to make that happen in a secure and successful way. When the old roads are demolished, and replaced by an invocation to navigate by the stars, ignorant navigators will walk around in circles until they perish. This is the tragicomic situation of the modern people.

In the United States, we have a population that is no longer recognizable as American in the same way that previous generations were still arguably American. Foreigners have always seen the United States as a place with a weak innate culture, even long before the waves of European and later international immigration began impacting its character.

Probably the largest change is the decline in strong Christian belief, even among those who profess to Christianity. Many of the core teachings of the Bible, especially those around gender, have been either downplayed or are actively denigrated. The same goes for the established churches, which have tended to follow along with the Protestants in innovating religious doctrine and general practice.

Furthermore, there is wide agreement, apart from in some parts of the conservative tradition, that the American founders were evil people and that their ideas were flawed, if not actively wicked. Whether or not the founders were good or bad, right or wrong, is less relevant than the general abandonment of the personality cults that characterized the American character. The maintenance of those history cults is now decidedly a niche pursuit — a lucrative niche, but not a defining one.

From this comes the search for new ‘identities’ to use to define the inchoate masses of American citizens. They can be categorized by colors, beliefs, or affinities for different kinds of popular culture, but it is hard to speak of a single tribal category to which they all belong. They are people with citizen papers, but they are not citizens of anything resembling a coherent nation. To the extent that a minority of people engages within the political process, it’s rarely out of a sense that that political process embodies anything sacrosanct — the branches of government are political utilities, rather than inviolable structures of a legal order.

Even most plumb-line New Deal supporters, like your grandparents probably were, would not recognize the youngest generation as American in the sense that they saw the term, without even considering matters of race. Apart from a small number of fast urban women from the 1920s, or members of the bottom-lower-class, it would be hard for them to recognize the life patterns of today’s youth as anything that would be acceptable to civilized opinion at the time.

Even for the baby boomers, the generation currently enjoying political authority, understanding how greatly the heirs to their revolution differ in their own ways of life, especially in the area of hang-ups around ‘relationships,’ is tough for them, because they at least experienced the tail end of the old order, to give them something tangible to react against.

Given that there is such a sharp disconnect in life patterns between these generations, we should expect that the political form of the state should change as sharply as the personal forms of life have, as it has already done over the last few decades.

Is it possible, given a people so profoundly disconnected from one another, even at the family level, to continue to run a coherent state?