Very often, men’s perception of female incorrigibility is entirely mistaken. On one hand, there’s women being incorrigible because feminism is a blight on mind, body, and soul that leads to fanatical selfishness and entitlement. And yes, some women really are so toxic that you just can’t deal with them. By all means, avoid those women to your utmost ability. But on the other hand, there’s women seeming incorrigible to men simply because they’re not men. Oftentimes, we don’t adequately distinguish between these two possibilities. The effective result is expecting women to briefly become godly men on their way to becoming godly women.
You may know that men and women are different, but the fact remains that everyone under 40 was indoctrinated to believe otherwise, and we will always struggle under that psychological baggage. Knowing better now doesn’t mean knowing how to navigate the differences. By way of analogy, one can know that Macs and PC’s are different but still be unable to print a document from a mac. And so, we still expect women to generally be convinced to change the same way we generally expect men to be—by things like rational argument and moral obligation.
And before anyone gets all triggered, I’m not saying that women can’t be convinced by intellectual arguments, don’t care about reason, or are too emotional to think rationally. If you consider stereotypes like that as absolute statements, they naturally aren’t accurate. I suspect most people personally know exceptions, and I myself am aware of having–primarily by reason–changed several women’s minds on controversial subjects relating to feminism. In other words, NAWALT–no surprise there. After all, stereotypes aren’t meant to be absolute statements–they’re generalizations. But to take it a step further, those stereotypes aren’t really accurate as generalizations either. To be sure, there is a reason those stereotypes exist, (and it’s not misogyny, as too many people reflexively contend) but they are nevertheless imprecise at the very least.
Humans (men and women alike) are rational creatures, but we’re not only rational creatures. There is, by design, a lot more to our consciousness than logical analysis. And this is a good thing. We absolutely need reason to both know truth and to survive, but at the same time, we shouldn’t be aiming to emulate computers or Vulcans. Reason should never be discarded, but neither can it function in a vacuum.
While some claim that reason is the only way we have of knowing, that claim is self-referentially incoherent. If reason is the only way you can know that reason is the only way you can know things, then you necessarily fall into circular reasoning—it’s unreasonable to believe this. In contrast, it’s quite reasonable to accept certain axioms, certain natural laws, certain intuitions, certain empirical data, and so forth. We feed our reason with such things to make it work, and it is entirely proper to do so as long as those things remain coherent with one-another.
Because humans are more complicated than computers, every one of us has times, moods, and mindsets in which we’re highly resistant to argument. When somebody argues for what isn’t in your interest, what’s counter-intuitive, and, yes, what triggers certain powerful emotions, you’re going to be much more skeptical at best and downright obstinate at worst. Likewise, there are other circumstances in which we’re much more open to reason. So we’re all rational on a sliding scale or sorts—and I do believe the core of that inconsistency is by God’s design (e.g consider the nature of disgust), even if the inconsistency has become terribly destructive since the Fall. (But hey, what hasn’t?)
All of this is true of both men and women alike because God made us both human. But the similarities do end eventually because God also made humans either male or female. Accordingly, there is a very real difference in precisely which times, moods, mindsets,etc tend to render women resistant to reason as compared to men. You could argue whether or not those circumstances are broader for women than for men (I think they are), but the key reality here is simply that they’re different. That’s why men and women alike both think of each other as complete ninnies from time to time. Men are absolutely terrible at being women, and women are just the worst at being men.
But these different tendencies are not actually a bad thing so long as you don’t think men and women are supposed to be equal (as we’ve all been indoctrinated to think.) Never have I been so convicted of this before I actually found myself trying to reason with toddlers. If women are designed and adapted to be more adept than men at rearing children in their youngest years, it makes sense that rationality has a somewhat different place in their consciousnesses in relation to things like intuition and social instincts.
The upshot of all this is that a whole lot of women aren’t truly incorrigible. It’s just that most modern men have become very unskilled at doing so because our forefathers—like parents giving in to a tantrum—took the easy way out. Instead of approving of women as women we began to blindly approve of them as men to try and soothe feminists’ insatiable envy of masculinity. The problem is that if you insist on equality and judge women by masculine standards, they invariably fall short. Then you’re left with only two options: Constant disappointment (MGTOW) or a weird pretense that women are actually more “masculine” than men (soy boys, gamma males, and white knights.) Ironically, it’s often a combination of the two.
And so, several generations later, we’ve lost a lot of the know-how on to deal with women as women. To be clear, I absolutely include myself in the “unskilled” category here. That is why I’m not providing a complete pre-packaged Third Way with a list of tips and an explicit how-to guide anywhere in this series (sorry to anyone who was expecting that by the end.) What I’m trying to provide here is hope—because what I can tell you is that it’s not voodoo.
Having worked in IT for as long as I have, I’ve encountered any number of people who sabotage their own ability to use technology because they treat computers as magical contrapulators which defy all laws of common sense and whose workings cannot be discerned by the uninitiated. They fail to learn to use technology precisely because they believe they cannot.
That experience is only reinforced by the rest of my life. At various times in the past, I’ve believed myself to be a terrible writer, incapable of being handy, and unable to speak publicly. I’ve overcome each of those precisely when I stopped sabotaging myself by believing such skills to be voodoo. Now, I’ve designed and built small bridges, built playgrounds, repaired electronics and vehicles, delivered sermons, given lectures, and occasionally, people even pay me to write. I’m by no means great at every one of these things, but I can get by far more than I could before.
A lot of men sabotage themselves in the same way when it comes to dealing with women. I know I have. We believe it’s impossible without being some kind of psychic or alpha male. But it doesn’t have to remain that way.
To be continued…
