The He Man Woman Haters Club

"A proper wife should be as obedient as a slave . . . The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities . . . a natural defectiveness."

- Aristotle

Back when they taught classical literature in the public schools, I was introduced to Lysistrata, a play by Aristophanes. You may be familiar with the plotline of this ancient comedy. Athens is mired in the Peloponnesian War, which seems to have no end in sight. The women of Athens decide they've had enough, and the title character leads them, and soon the wives of all the warring sides, to withhold sex until the men stop fighting. Hilarity ensues, and peace finally returns to Greece, heralded onstage by a Spartan messenger sporting an exaggerated erection.

Funny stuff. Now all things old have become new, with the 4B movement making its way from South Korea to the U.S. in response to the results of 5 November. These ladies have pledged themselves to four "no's": no dating, no sex, no marriage, and no children, at least so long as any of those four things involve a man.

That this movement came from South Korea returned to the headlines yesterday after an abortive coup attempt by the autogolpe President there. It didn't last long--their legislative body acted unanimously and appropriately to stop the coup in its tracks (something I fear ours would fail to do should DJT try the same trick). What's interesting here, however, is that the party behind the coup ran a deliberate political campaign directed at the poor incels (involuntary celibates) who are left waxing their own dolphins as a result of the 4B thing. My favorite blog explains all this:

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/12/incel-nationalism

Peg regularly reminds me that I have absolutely no concept of the level of misogyny out there, and I reckon she has a point. It's hard to know it if you haven't lived it, and I'll be the first to admit I haven't, can't really.

But this is, more than any other motive, what animates the right. It's not race, obviously: men of all races swung heavily for DJT, picking themselves up off their parents' couches to go to the polls and strike a blow for, well, I doubt they even know. It's not about religion--the churches are emptying by the day, and these efforts by state and local governments to force-feed evangelical Protestant Christianity to the agnostic masses feel like a last gasp of a weakening group of fanatics.

No, it's about the fact that women outnumber men in post-secondary education, from undergrad to law school. It's about men having to compete with these women, and a lot of these fellows simply eschewing the competition in favor of going home to play video games. This emerging world of equal opportunity is bad news for whoever benefited from the old system. Hence the revanchist tone of the incoming administration.

This is what Dobbs was about, as much as anything. My knucklehead neighbors can go dewy eyed about embryonic blobs and lines from the Hebrew Bible stitched out of context, as usual, into some sort of command that women carry a fetus to term no matter what. But the reality is that the state taking control over their bodies, over the consequences of sex, seems the real driver here. If you can't control them in the boardroom or the bedroom, there's always the legislature.

This is a rant with no proposed solution, unfortunately. It's a battle that was already ancient when Aristophanes wrote his play. To some degree, this stated goal over the last half-century of some semblance of gender equality was always an outlier, a blip on the arc of history. We'll see if we have the courage to see it through, although things aren't looking so hot today.

I had more to say, but need to get some tax classwork done and bill a little on this truncated workday.