"Dis, maman
Pourquoi je suis pas un garçon?"
Mylène Farmer - Sans Contrefaçon
While it's certainly possible to be called "an abortion" or "you abortion" in English, the phrase is slightly too imprecise for use as an insult. The French, in their inimitable flamboyance, have suffixed it into the pithier "avorton" with a specific focus on physical imperfection or insufficiency. An avorton is a runt - wimpy, shrimpy, dinky, spineless, gutless, etc. with ugliness an implied bonus. The term is masculine. The concept itself is masculine or rather anti-masculine, the threat of existential negation by personal insufficiency.
On a completely unrelated topic, a few days ago I was listening to an interview between famous skeptics Carol Tavris and Michael Shermer about Shermer's book on immortality in all its superstitious, psychological and Utopian interpretations. Twenty-two minutes into it, Tavris remarks with some consternation:
"all of these techno-people busily figuring out how we can live forever, either by body or by our brains, I am struck by one extraordinary thing: they are, all, men! They are, all... men! [...] It's almost enough to think of the Simone de Beauvoir observation that women don't worry about the identity of being women - they are women, but men are always insecure about masculinity. [...] it may be that the men, male scientists who are busy trying to become immortal... maybe there just aren't enough women in their professions yet to get there, and they will one day be just the same as the men"
On another completely unrelated topic, I was recently reminded of the late medieval author Christine de Pizan and her politically convenient work the City of Ladies in which she counters misogynistic comments by providing lists of 150-odd virtuous women - enough to populate a city. Half of her examples seem either mythical or mythologized, but that was just par for the course for anything written in 1400.
Today is the 8th of March, International Women's Day, and four of Wikipedia's five front page pictures promote women. It's become a ritual as reliable as church sacraments over the past few decades to flip through history books or pop culture and randomly canonize some woman or another as a trailblazing martyr for double-x damsels everywhere. We're constantly browbeaten with two prima facie dictates:
1) Women are forbidden access to Activity X by their evil patriarchal overlords
2) Here's a heroic woman who did Activity X against all odds! ... And another one! ... And another one! ... And another one...
Now, either both of those statements are true (as we've been taught all our lives) in which case the cognitive dissonance might make a few heads explode, or our culture has vastly over-stated both cases. And, given her expertise in cognitive dissonance, it's a bit sad to see Tavris fail to reconcile her own hypotheses. If women really aren't tilting at the immortality windmill, could it be due at least in part to their assurance that the insecure men-folk are on the case? After all, if a cure for mortality is discovered at some point, it's hard to imagine it could only be administered via testicular massage. Until then, it's a high-risk, low-payoff proposition. Why strain yourself?
Wanna have some more fun with cognitive dissonance? All our lives we've been indoctrinated into the moral panic over a lack of female education, a crime for which all of us patriarchal pigs surely must suffer. However, Americans aged forty or younger have also lived all their lives in a society of female-dominated universities. More recently this includes the sciences, where you can sit through class after class of female professors standing in front of majority female classes, browbeating their male students over the implicit crime against the women who outnumber them. And yes, that ratio flips when you get to graduate school, because all those female students nod along through four years of female-only scholarships, grab their diplomas then move on to lucrative, hard-working but low-pressure careers as nurses, dieticians, physical therapists and pharmacists. Meanwhile, it's the "always insecure" men who stick through six more years of low-yield doctoral work, pinning all their self-worth, all their hopes for wealth and glory, on being the next Jonas Salk. And while we bemoan all the young women who opt out of continuing their preferentially-subsidized studies, what's our response to the much higher number of men who were denied that chance four years earlier by adverse admissions, funding and disciplinary policies? Mockery? Scorn? At best.
Feminists' own obsession with dredging up every female name in history should stand as evidence against their central claim of male domination. Or at the very least that claim should never be spoken in the same breath as actual forms of oppression, most of which are defined by inter-tribal competition. However sparse the number of female painters and merchants throughout history, it still vastly outweighs the proportion of Nazi Jews or Catholic Tsars. And yet still, every single time we hear feminists produce yet another symbol of triumphant femininity in the form of an actress or poet or chicken polisher, as though from a magician's hat complete with multimedia flourishes, we feel obligated to ooohh and aaahh as though illuminated by the discovery of such beasts as the elusive ovaried aquarellist. Most of the time when shown yet another Sappho, Agrippina or Gentilleschi, we must concede that, sure, they're decent... but "decent" doesn't usually get your name in the history books - luck most often does, being in the right place at the right time, and more rarely true game-changing greatness. Still, these women did well enough for themselves. Christine de Pizan wrote not only in defense of women's honor but on matters of manners, ritual and politics. Their works and reputations were even appreciated enough to be preserved through the centuries and passed down to us. How many of their male contemporaries of equal artistic, diplomatic or intellectual level could say the same, lost in the shuffle of apprentices and collaborators?
Or here's a blasphemous thought: maybe women are less likely to sacrifice their lives in pursuit of the superlative not because they're prevented from doing so but because they don't have to. They have the option, when faced with most any problem, of simply throwing the nearest available male at it, and most are quite comfortable in that role. How many professional women's lives have read something like the good lady de Pizan's? "Husband died of the plague" and "father had died the year before" so "was left to support her mother and her children." Leaf through a few biographies of ancient men, from kings to poets and ship's navigators, and see how many of them were set on their careers because 'his mother and wife both died so he had to fend for himself' - how many men could take up footbinding to advertise their uselessness as a virtue? Based on what rational arguments do we assume that just by throwing enough money at them, we can turn a population of soap-opera fans into Mary Shelley? Why do we assume that female complacency is imposed upon them by some patriarchal authority and is not simply a continuing vision of our simian ancestors dozing on a tree branch in the afternoon sun, every bit as intrinsic as the murderous rages of male baboons?
Just as the minority of intelligent men must constantly contend with the reality that most representatives of our gender amount to grunting, obnoxious blowhards like Al Bundy, the minority of intelligent women must at some point admit their fellows are nothing more than whining, obnoxious, primped-up lumps on a couch like Peg Bundy. If three generations' worth of institutionalized favoritism have not turned
hundreds of millions of women into Marie Curie, maybe we should just
admit it won't happen. Men struggle to prove themselves to secure resources and women are only too happy to push their mates out the door... for their own benefit. Return with your shield or on your shield. Return either with the cure for mortality or with an alimony check.
Not enough women in leadership positions? Not enough women in high-profile jobs? Well how are they penalized if they're not? The carrot they can get second-hand from any man dumb enough to sign a marriage certificate, and there is no stick. An unimpressive man gets derided and ostracized as a runt, a loser, a deadbeat, a "scrub" an "avorton" unworthy even of life, a waste of womb-space. What similar penalties would modern society institute against any women who fail to measure up to the standards of an alpha female? What's more, feminists have been all too eager to feed this male fear of female disapproval, of being declared an insufficient non-person, at every opportunity. There is indeed at least one modern social movement which has adopted "abortion" as a direct interpersonal insult in the English language:
"The male is a biological accident: the y(male) gene is an incomplete
x(female) gene, that is, has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other
words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion.... To be
male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency
disease and males are emotional cripples."
Valerie Solanas - The S.C.U.M. Manifesto
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