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Chicks Who Hate Freedom
Young American women supporting Hamas may be the strangest social phenomenon in history. There was some logic, however sad, in the story of John Walker Lindh (the “American Taliban”) whose conversion to Islam may have been a reaction to the disruption to his family life by his father’s homosexuality. Black men who joined the Confederate Army could justify that odd choice because of an offer of personal freedom. But what would persuade a free, privileged young woman to support a political, ideological and religious movement that would extinguish “choice” and the availability of living an alternative gender while advocating horrific violence?
One would think that the extraordinary degree of misogyny inherent in Islam (and the Hamas edition in particular) would be off-putting. Wife-beatings, denial of education, genital mutilation, child brides, honor killings and sartorial oppression are features, not bugs. Genghis Khan was probably more pro-woman than the average shariah-enforcing imam (he banned kidnapping and several other offenses against Mongol women, probably because his mom had been taken against her will by his father).
What mental gymnastics are required to believe that there is a natural alliance between LGBTQ+ and Hamas? Or that there was ever an Islamic Arab nation called Palestine? Or that men with an identity disorder are really women? Or that humanity is doomed because the climate may be two degrees warmer on average in another 50-100 years? Or that history started at the moment capitalism began to oppress everyone?
I sometimes imagine that Hugh Hefner or someone like him was secretly a kind of mad genius, the secret architect of feminism, convincing women that they really wanted to live the same hedonistic, predatory, impersonal, pointless sex life as a male lounge lizard. The pill and abortion were created to aid that lifestyle choice. Two generations of young men have since been raised to respect “choice”, i.e., her body, her problem. Sexual “liberation” was always asymmetrical and barbarous.
Are the confused co-eds in keffiyehs (almost of of which are made in China) simply running from an utterly barbarous sexual climate, from the belief that marriage is not worth the risk, and from the realization that financial security cannot really be guaranteed by being a good girl with good grades? Is there some satisfaction in feeling “empowered” by a mindless, semi-violent movement with the intellectual depth of a bumper sticker? Daddy issues? What explains this?
Before we make undergraduates read the Federalist Papers, maybe we should require Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom. Precisely because Americans don’t have to oppose kings or clergy trying to limit our freedom, we are instead more likely to be beset with isolation, anxiety and powerlessness, at liberty to succumb easily to conformity, new forms of authoritarianism and even destructiveness to escape. Instead, we need to cultivate the use of our expansive freedom to achieve, love, spontaneity and a life of reason. That so much of popular culture and universities are constructed to oppose that healthy and happy mode of living may be why we have a problem. We do not educate our young on how to make use of freedom.
Anyway, how do we pull so many young women back from the edge of an abyss?
Published in General
I remember women in the UK were going towards Islam, since it gave them structure.
Here is one way – Heb. 12:2 (“looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith”).
And women who think they’d be safer encountering a bear in the forest, than a random man.
When I was 20, I was a socialist. I believed my father, the owner of a small business, was evil because he was a capitalist. I grew out of my youthful, ignorant idealism and assumed most others did the same. That was the 60s and 70s. Now I see these protestors and just laugh at what total fools they are. But many of them are the same 20-year-olds that I was hallucinating with as a youth, only they are in their 70s…and they still can’t carry a tune. There is no logical explanation.
Sure there is. “Most people have an IQ of 100 or less, by definition.”
Maybe it’s called not growing up.
Dealing in stereotypes (which exist for a reason, but are not universal nor determinative), women (as the growers, bearers, nurturers, and protectors of the youngest and most vulnerable humans (babies)) seek protection and security over “freedom.” Structure provides an attractive version of protection and security. Freedom is scary and uncertain. Freedom is more a guy thing than a girl thing.
Reference the 2012 Obama campaign video “Life of Julia,” in which “Julia” seeks to elect a government that will perform the protector and provider functions of a husband and extended family. Which video has now been almost completely erased from the public record because of how obvious it made the point that what women want is a stable, protected, and provided for home as provided by a husband.
Hugh Hefner and company tried (tries) to convince women that the answer to all their longing for security is to have the “power” that men have, and that the way to attain that “power” is to behave like men. Not until it’s too late do the women realize that such “power” is full of uncertainty and danger. [I believe Hefner and company were pushing their position mostly as a mechanism to increase their [male] power and dominance rather than any true interest in helping women.]
Women do seem to be more susceptible to social contagion which could be a driver.
What’s interesting is that as young women increasingly embrace fringe leftist causes, young men are instead moving to the right.
Feminism is merely a branch of Marxism and has inculcated women in a worldview of class conflict where you always have an evil oppressor class and a blameless victim class (in Feminism man = oppressor and woman = victim). Any movement, no matter how violent and oppressive (like Hamas), can be seen as sympathetic so long as it is framed as the victim class. Per Marxism, the victim is never responsible for their actions, no matter how cruel and destructive, as they are merely responding to the crimes of the oppressor class. Thus, anything the victim does is actually the fault of the oppressor. In practice this means that the more brutal and barbaric is Hamas, the more Israel gets the blame.
Recently young men have turned onto the “Red Pill”, “Manosphere”, “MGTOW” and the like. These movements are effectively, or expressly a reaction against Feminism and in turn Marxism. Deprogrammed from the Marxo-Feminist propaganda boys and young men have been fed for the past half century, they unsurprisingly have bolted to the political right.
What I find most amusing in its way, and totally ignored by women, is that even feminism requires men to do it. If men decided there wasn’t going to be feminism, there wouldn’t be.
Adopting a position injurious to one’s own self interest is a way of demonstrating how “woke” you are. It’s the equivalent of self flagellation to demonstrate one’s religious conviction. Yes, allowing men in women’s sports undoes lots of what women fought for over 100 years…but it proves just how dedicated leftist females are to the cause. Yes, the Hamas reason of Islam would strip away most of women’s rights…that just shows how firmly they believe. They are also safe in the knowledge that they’ll most likely never confront the consequences of their own actions because most don’t play organized sports and won’t ever set foot in the Middle East.
But you’d think they might be a little more sympathetic to the women already in the Middle East.
The suffering of the alleged Palestinians trumps them.
The hierarchy of oppression is complex.
I guess they think the Palestinian women are doing better than other women.
It simply required that men, like women, be demoralized via a mixture of propaganda and agitprop.
It so demoralized men that they aren’t listening to the propaganda and agitprop anymore. And as a result, fewer and fewer of them are voting for the Democrats.
They’re listening to women a lot less too.
I think the fact that US champions of Hamas can act without risk of consequence is a big part of it. It’s easy and self-gratifying to cheer on the anti-establishment cause when the likelihood of such cheering redounding upon the oh-so-passionate activist is effectively nil. And if one is ignorant of practically everything (including the approximate magnitude of one’s own student loan debt) then no discomfort is engendered by the macabre irony that one is self-righteously shilling for sadists and butchers in the name of humanity.
It’s so easy, and it feels so good.
Maybe for the women, who are already more accustomed to living consequence-free; but men seem to be less susceptible.
Female Hamas supporters are certainly more incongruous than male Hamas supporters — other than gay male Hamas supporters, who are particularly absurd. But are they more numerous? Could be, and it wouldn’t particularly surprise me, but I’ve never seen nor read anything (including OB’s post) that asserts that they are.
Haven’t we seen the “demonstrations” that appear to be mostly female? And mostly white at that? The guys may be some true believers, and some who just want to bang the women.
I have a theory that if I really fleshed out would probably get me banned for misogyny.
So I’ll go with the short, pithy version, which is to ask you to consider why 50 Shades of Gray was such a huge hit with women.
As I just wrote, here:
“such a huge hit”
Har, har!
I think this is right.
Look at the New York Attorney General. She is literally in big trouble. This is a very simple legal case unlike what she did to Trump. So she threw a party to get a bunch of donations and then now the governor of New York has a $10 million fund for people getting legally attacked or whatever by the trumpet administration.
I wish there was a way to just cut these people loose to see what they would do. No GOP or constitutional pushback. They are crazy. “If this government force doesn’t work, then that one will. I will get my cut along the way as well. Force everything around for the good of mankind. Those guys think.
The Chinese and the Indians are putting up a new coal powered electricity plant every other week at a minimum. There are 2 billion destitute poor that don’t care about global warming. They just want power. Outside of building, compact nukes as fast as we can, it’s a complete waste of time to worry about global warming.
Liking for the title alone.
Much of this has to do with the West’s loss of civilizational self-confidence. See my post Sleeping With the Enemy, in which I discuss an old–but currently very relevant–book by Arthur Koestler (best known for his Darkness at Noon)
Excerpt:
A commenter at Chicago Boyz reported that a significant number of female British medical students have been converting to Islam. This writer, herself a Muslim, says that “Since 9/11, vast numbers of educated, privileged middle-class white women have converted to Islam”…she identifies these converts as including women at “investment banks, TV stations, universities and in the NHS.” Her concern is not that they are converting to Islam…something I’d presume she would applaud…but that they are converting to “the most restricted forms” of the religion. (And it is, of course, among the believers in the most absolute form of any religion or political system that one is likely to find the most obviously self-confident believers.)
The late Dr David Yeagley, the American Indian (Comanche) who blogged under the traditional name Bad Eagle, has quoted a Cheyenne saying: “A nation is never conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.” The link from the preceding paragraph suggests that in Europe, at least, there are more than a few female hearts on the ground concerning the future of Western civilization. The prevalence of women at anti-Israel, anti-American, and even pro-Hamas demonstrations is a disturbing indicator of this in the USA.
It is a phenomenally lucrative grift that China, Russia, Soros, and the rest will crawl through broken glass to fund candidates and NGOs foe.
Regarding Wednesday’s Hamasnik takeover of Columbia’s Butler LIbrary, 60 of the arrested rioters were women and 19 were men.