"Are we all brides to be
Are we all designed to be confined
Buy ourselves chastity belts and lock them"
Metric - Patriarch on a Vespa
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"[Dee] Graham repeats the long-discredited fable about the 9 million victims of the European witch-hunts over a three-hundred-year period, further noting that as some scholars say witches were persecuted for six hundred years, the real number of martyred women may actually be twice that high. By contrast, Robin Briggs, in his recent meticulously documented Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft, tells us that the best-informed recent estimates of the total number of executions for witchcraft in Europe are between forty thousand and fifty thousand, of whom about 25 percent were men."
Daphne Patai - Heterophobia (1998)
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Mild spoilers for We Happy Few's second storyline.
(Also potential spoilers about human nature, if you've never thought about that stort of thing.)
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I decided to polish off the rest of We Happy Few, whose problems still mostly stem from its production unfortunately split between open-world survival and story missions, compounded by forcing the player to start the campaign over for each character gathering berries and bottles. Pity, because it really did boast a highly memorable setting both visually and aurally ("take! your! joy!") good writing and professional-quality voice acting. But even in terms of storytelling Compulsion Games cut the branch out from under themselves several times.
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| posters of the "C"-grade and crashland |
Superimposed on that you've got the superficial Sally of casual gameplay, spouting nonstop one-liners about rape. She's in good with the supernatural and her last couple of quests reframe all conflict against men. Methinks I smell a rewrite.
Granted, all three protagonists, in keeping with the game's central theme of willful ignorance, center on self-delusion. But where Arthur and Ollie's stories drive them toward admitting their own guilt, Sally's flips to feminist flat-Earthism at some point, to that mystical land of Femtasia where all a woman's problems can be blamed on males. Even her last line doubles as a parting shot against men. All this within an overarching plot hinging on EVERYBODY's complicity in the town's self-destructiveness, with Sally herself objectively more entangled than the others.
But nope!
Men are useless pigs, women gotta stick together and our heroine finds her inner strength and floats gloriously into the sunset instead of facing her inner demons.
Who needs nuance when you've got conceit?
Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.
Then again, we've grown so accustomed to those sorts of digressions, haven't we? If you're a fan of The Order of the Stick you probably remember one particularly nonsensical page. During a fight against giants, one giantess' banter suddenly turns into a random feminist rant against men taking credit for her work... with a heroine voicing uncritical solidarity. Ummm, you go girl(s) ... I guess? Preferably you go back to the actual story about fireball-slinging frost giants on an airship?
Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.
You can pick most any book/movie/game/comic these days and only flip a few pages/minutes/quests before running into such gratuitously interjected posturing. Of course, observing the sheer pervasiveness in modern fiction of our need to reframe any male/female interaction as a call to charge to women's defense on a white horse, you should expect it to have deeper roots. And it does. We've been doing it (albeit more gradually and subtly) in fictionalizing history, for centuries now.
Remember that stirring plot hook in Braveheart about prima noctis, the supposed law giving lords the right to fuck the bride on her wedding night? Turns out nobody can actually find such a law. It's certainly possible that some lords in the dark ages did stop by to rape random housewives (simply because they had swords and the peasants didn't) but even too much of that would rapidly earn you a housecall from a gaggle of pitchforks and torches. But hey, Braveheart needed a politically correct motivation, so there. Fuck history. Prima noctis it, even.
Or remember when Disney's Mulan risked execution for dressing like a man? Yeah, turns out that part's about as likely as her running around with a pet dragon. (The original folk tale, if memory serves, just had her donning her father's gear when he falls, in the general vein of a son taking up his father's sword; plus that whole filial piety angle sells great in China.) But hey, Mulan needed a politically correct motivation, and nothing would serve but pitting her against oppressive, stupid men - oppression and stupidity made to order for a Disney audience.
Or how about chastity belts. We've all heard how those evil, sadistic crusading knights used to put their womens' privates under lock and key while they went on cheerful adventures overseas. (i.e. bleeding to death in the mud in hopes of bringing back some loot for said wife but that part's not important) Well, turns out those didn't exist either, at least not until centuries after the crusades, when a spare handful show up... as the same sexual fetish they are now. 'Cause we're a bunch'a kinky monkeys.
Or hey, the rule of thumb. Everybody loves that one. Remember when British/American men were legally empowered to beat their wives with a stick no thicker than one's thumb? No? Actually, nobody does, because that too was conflated and inflated by feminists to justify their demonization of men. Laws explicitly forbidding wife-beating were, on the other hand, commonly enacted, even if enforcement was lax in this as it was for infanticide or selling fake merchandise or really, most any crimes before modern criminology.
Or take the idea of women being persecuted as witches (so uncritically accepted that even saner social critics like Sam Harris may be heard referencing it as being put to death "simply for being a woman") sensationalized to the point you'd wonder how Europe had any women left after torching them by the millions. Except of course it didn't. The current estimate hovers around 50,000-100,000 executed/accused victims over a period of three centuries and spare. For reference, during that same period, the Thirty Years' War alone (itself superficially justified by Christian schisms) claimed (conservatively!) at least five million lives. A hundred times the carnage concentrated into a tenth the timespan, but fuck that historic noise, crimes against women are so much... sexier, aren't they?
Except even witch hunts were not specifically aimed at women. About a quarter of the victims were men (yup, even odds one of the weird sisters would've been a weird brother) and the specific attention to women seems to have been concentrated in north-western Europe (do I detect a trace of Norse seidr?) with other regions like France breaking even and still others like Finland/Russia/Estonia in fact hunting male witches predominantly. If you have trouble visualizing such demographics, the University of Edinburgh put together a loverly little map of Scotland's ~3100 witchcraft trials over 200 years, complete with male/female color coding. (As in Salem, at first glance the big unspoken issue seems to have been class warfare, with middle class families particularly targeted.)
Even that doesn't place witch trials into proper context, forming a very small part of religiously motivated violence in which the far more general accusation would've been not witchcraft or lycanthropy or necromancy or demonic possession, but HERESY. Some hapless villagers keep their fingers at slightly the wrong angle while praying to Jesus? CRUSH THEM IN THE NAME OF JESUS!!! Orthodox and Protestant churches certainly didn't shy from oppressing nominal heretics, but the Catholics especially outdid themselves, seemingly intent on declaring all of Europe's population heretical at some point or another. And when it comes to religious warfare (as to danger in general) it would've been men up against the wall first and foremost, a fact we simply take for granted as our instinct dictates.
We want to hear about women as victims because, instinctively, it feels good to jump to their defense.
Much of this obsession with past centuries' crimes against women in fact predates modern feminism. Heavy cultural damage was inflicted in the 19th century. Victorian Western Europe was already in many
ways a consumer economy, with all the sensationalist entertainment that
entailed but none of today's fact-checking. The hoopskirt brigades
always got a thrill out of hearing how they would've been mastered and
ravished by those oh-so-domineering (and therefore much sexier) brutish
males of the past. (Seriously, why do you think your girlfriend wets
herself at the sight of Jack Sparrow? It ain't just Depp's pout. They
want the pirates.) Some of the issues now cited as patriarchal oppression are in fact products of that same female consumer market.
Take virginal white wedding dresses, occasionally bemoaned by feminists as imposed by The Patriarchy on poor helpless brides. For most of space and time, women wore richly colored dresses to their weddings, not as any statement about their hymens but because dyes
were expensive and weddings were supposed to emphasize the new couple's
prosperity. Translation: rich bitches wanted to show off. Then in 1840 the richest bitch decided to wear white, which later acquired the connotations of Victorian puritanical mores. Gradually, some of the aristocracy (and America's placeholder aristocracy, Hollywood) fell into step, and a century later after WW2 the trend was normalized by the middle class. Meaning the virginal white wedding dress had damn near nothing to do with patriarchal oppression or even religious oppression, and everything to do with women's own pissing contests over class and respectability, envy and posturing and pretending you're a queen - which makes perfect sense when you remember the average guy could not possibly give less of a shit about the color of wedding dresses!
(While we're at it, Braveheart did not invent prima noctis, popularized back in the late 1800s by The Marriage of Figaro)
Feminists like to pretend their movement exists to right practical concerns, and back in the 1950s when the arguments were about bank accounts and driving licenses, they had at least half a point. But the push to recenter every single argument on women's perceived plight cannot stand on factual grounds. Talking points like "rape culture" or the supposed wage gap or one-sided domestic abuse or a lack of social services compared to men have been repeatedly demonstrated to be either overinflated, abused as pretexts long after they have been addressed, or outright fabricated.
No, attacks on men as evil oppressors instead gain acceptance from a constant, all-pervasive perception of male guilt supported in part by historical revisionism, partly feminist and partly merely sensationalist. Back in '98 Patai referenced the myth of millions of women burned at the stake as embarrasingly outdated and debunked, but if you asked around now most people probably still believe it. The truth is we want to believe all these little rewrites about plucky damsels in distress, all the little misquotes and urban legends, all the myriad little lies adding up to one big one:
Man bad. Woman good.
We grow up in it, every day of our lives, from Disney to Paramount Pictures to video games to comics to every news article, tweet and wiki stub insisting that if it sounds so right, it must be. A million little slips of the tongue every year drum the anti-male dogma into us, and declare anyone daring to question it a heretic.
So let's get heretical.
Let's address the biggest revisionist half-truth of all, the idea that women had less freedom than men. Yeah, true. So? What do you think that meant in a monarchist world? Do you imagine your ancestors were arguing over who gets to drive the galleon or give speeches before the Royal Society? It's no accident that when early feminists like Mary Astell published their demands for more freedom, they so often focused on upper class concerns like the Duchess of Mazarin, who had resources to enjoy liberally. Except most people were not dukes and duchesses! The division between the sexes, going back to prehistory, established a status quo for the majority of the population (with the increasingly stratified nobility's mores growing out of such immemorial universality) and for that human majority life consisted of hitting dirt with a stick day-in and day-out hoping the dirt will turn into food.
What freedom did men have? What was the average person's life in all those woefully misogynistic centuries now lamented by feminists furiously thumbing rape paranoia tweets from neon-lit Women's Studies departments? What would've been the average man's life, whose freedom the women of the past supposedly so envied?
You lived and died in the same river valley as your ancestors. You worked at your father's craft if he was lucky enough to have one, and no, interpretive dance was not an option. You knelt in the mud and bowed to the cardinal or dowager countess rolling by in their carriages. You married the only unwed girl in a five-village radius who wasn't a first cousin, even if she preferred spending her time with the village priest, was missing her front teeth, had a habit of tossing pots at your head and smelled like boiled cabbage on a good day. You never learned to read any more than she did. You built her a house so she could hide inside it while throwing you to the wolves. (Literally. There were literal wolves!) Your greatest entertainment was trotting back and forth at spring and harvest festivals, accompanied by some lute-jangling itinerant buskers who might also juggle sticks. And you spent every day stockpiling supplies for winter or patching holes in your roof. Ownership of the land you lived on might get traded among the nobility (with you as an extension of the property) and you'd get notified you'd be bowing to some new nobles now... but you sure as hell wouldn't be voting for them. If you were really lucky you'd get invaded and gutted like livestock, your home and whole brief lifetime's accumulated effort torched while your wife and children cowered inside the church along with the priest. They'd lose everything except their lives. You'd lose everything.
There's your fuckin' freedom. Choke on it.
Freedom was a meaningless concept for an overwhelming majority of the population. Working outside the home was not a privilege or adventure. It was a desperate necessity. Virtually nobody had what we now call choices, or a career or aspirations. Women surrendered an abstract, academic concept in return for some tangible, minimal, much-needed protection from the very real hardships permeating every facet of existence, and very often traded their husbands' lives while lamenting their misfortune at losing the resources a man would've brought in. The few educated, capable upper-class women surrendered their professional lives not to men, but to the far greater majority of women who relied on the fiction that only men could do - because doing killed. The division of the sexes lasted throughout history because it materially benefited women and children first, preserved bloodlines. The bloodlines which did not adopt such measures largely died out. We've inherited that instinctive protectiveness which now makes us so susceptible to fables about damsels' distress. Then more recently, when after centuries of scientific progress industrialization, street lights and forensics had eliminated most of the wolves, when they found it safe enough to go outside, women turned around and weaponized the advantage their mothers and grandmothers had extracted from men... as a grievance against men.
That's the feminist historical grievance: a chastity belt, a kinky little pretense of confinement to which women themselves always held the key.
Happy Valentine's Day, lovers.
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