Men and Women

I've been reading a collection that I bought on Kindle for super cheap called Swords Against Cthulhu that purports to be  "old-fashioned" sword & sorcery fiction, but newly written by new writers, that focuses on Lovecraftian horrors in particular.  I actually got a compilation of three volumes of it for the discount price of $3.99, I think. As such, so far (59% into the first volume) I think I might still have been ripped off. Some of this stuff is among the worst fiction I've read in decades. I actually think when I was young, stupid, and the internet itself was young and stupid that I routinely read better fanfic of stuff in the 90s on Usenet and in other collections.

That may not be entirely fair. Not all of the stories are terrible. But I've yet to read one that I would recommend bothering with too, and some of them are extremely bad. The one I read most recently was called "Sword of Lomar". It wasn't the worst of the bunch by far, but it does indulge one of the worst trends of modern fiction; treating women as if they're interchangeable widgets with men, and casting them as superheroic action-grrls. Action-grrls, and their close ideological cousins, smug grrlbosses, rate among the absolute worst tropes of recent years. Not only is almost every single one of them insufferable, unlikeable, and off-putting, but it's also starting to become a bit of a joke how woke writers are inserting them everywhere where it makes no sense for them to exist. The superheroic action grrlboss character in "Swords of Lomar" seemed to  have been deliberately written and described to fit the imagery of the flame princess, from the B/X clone Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Although for all I know, that might be a coincidence; lots of nerdy guys have a major hard-on for redheads. I don't pretend to know much about that game other than a few second-hand reports I've had of it that it's actually mechanically not very different from B/X, but that its claim to fame is a kind of "grindhouse" gratuitously grimdark tone. And that its mascot is a superheroic pale-skinned red-headed action grrl.

In any case, in "Sword of Lomar" the fact that the main character was a woman was inconsequential, because at no point was her sex important; it just was because. She was written exactly like a man, and a Mary Sue man at that. So, it was kind of a silly affectation, but didn't really make the story any worse or better in a significant way.  The story was pretty mid.  It was just an excuse to write action scenes, but there was little if anything beyond that that was consequential.

However, the other night I also watched Disney's 1959 animated classic Sleeping Beauty. In addition to its artistic value (the tapestry-esque backgrounds are really, truly stunning works of visual art, and the adapted Tchaikovsky score is a brilliant example of Romantic era classical music) there are other reasons to praise this movie as well. Curiously, it was very expensive for the time, and didn't make back its budget in its initial release; although decades of re-releases have turned a tidy profit for Disney on the project, and it has really come to be appreciated for its artistic merit. One of the reasons I love it is that the titular character, Princess Aurora (also known by her "witness protection" alias of Briar Rose) is so incredibly charming and feminine. It's simply impossible not to like this girl. My wife, who briefly walked by while I was watching it on her way out to meet with one of her girlfriends for an "eat dinner and talk for hours" dates made a sarcastic remark about the improbability of falling in love at first sight because that's the scene I was on as she briefly walked by, but the reality is that Princess Aurora effortlessly makes the audience fall in love with her in moments. It's not unbelievable that Prince Phillip would do so as well after just watching her sing and dance for a few minutes. Maybe I'm just letting myself go because it's a Disney fairytale adaptation, so my inner romantic is coming out. I don't expect it to have deep, realistic relationships between characters.

Phillip himself is a charming fellow, as far as Disney princes go. Most of them are just passive cameos; the princess's reward for being so virtuous and feminine, but Phillip, as my daughter is fond of saying, actually goes out and earns his place at the princess’s side. Something Cinderella and Snow White's princes notably did not do. Then again, they were already princes. They brought plenty to the table without doing a darn thing in terms of marriageable collateral. But again; yet another reason to prefer this movie to any other classic Disney fairy tale princess movie. (Tangled has a totally different vibe, but is another one that is at least pretty recommendable. Again, in part because of the charming main characters and their chemistry together.)

In any case, Aurora’s femininity and virtue is in stark contrast with modern characters' feminism which is off-putting, unlikeable, smug, arrogant, and more importantly, unrealistic in every way. She is absolutely not anything like a Rey or a Captain Marvel, or any of the other forgettable (at best) and unappealing characters that have vandalized our current crop of pop culture. Reading the one story and watching the other within a short 12-hour or less window really put in context for me the contrast between the two tropes. And for some data from another interesting angle; the popularity of the Barbie movie, in spite of its toxic feminism, is based on the fact that it gives women something that they want, which all of the "strong female characters", i.e. women pretending to be third rate men, don't do. It gives them a movie which at least treats them like women. And then it tells them to be demanding, obnoxious, smug, self-absorbed, narcissistic, bratty little princesses. But at least its not coming from an angle of telling them that they need to be Fake Men.

There's a lesson here for writers, especially those in Hollywood, if they could get off their entitled butts, stop striking, and start working again: stop trying to pretend that men and women are the same. Stop trying to pretend that women are only "good" if they’re acting like petty, demanding, third rate fake men and men are only good if they act like simpy betas and third rate fake women. The sooner you stop trying to rewrite reality, the sooner you'll be able to actually produce something that people will want to consume again.

In a related note, Vox Day recently made a post about the nature of women and men and the relationships between them. He quoted extensively from Florence Nightingale, and made the point that too many men are foolish romantics who expect something from their women that most of them won't get: unconditional love. Nightingale's quote, while accurate, is also pessimistic and focuses on the worst.

In reality, nobody—men or women—are likely to give very much unconditional love. Relationships are like contracts in a way; both parties expect to get something that they need out of the affair. I've been married for almost thirty years now (next summer) and it is abundantly clear to me that our relationship was strongest and best when we made substantial efforts to give each other what the other person needed. It was weakest and shakiest when we didn't care or know what the other person needed, and tried to do what we wanted, and then expected appreciation for things that the other person didn't want or need. I expect to continue in our marriage for another thirty years and beyond, but that's because we've learned that endless self-sacrifice without "compensation", for lack of a better word, of what we need as well, is a recipe for failure. So it's not exactly fair to single women out for wanting something out of a marriage or relationship, and being dissatisfied if they don't get it. I'm confident that that's a two-way street. And it's not that Vox said otherwise, either, but what he left unsaid can beg questions by those unwilling or unable to put together the rest of the puzzle. I have no doubt that false binary folks are having a conniption over that post on his social media platform.

Also, women—just like men—can and often do try to be better people. Just because many angles of our society give women the message that they should indulge their most selfish desires doesn't mean that all of them do, or that they don't strive to be better.

The real challenge, as I've told my sons, is that as generations go, young women of today are among the worst. Certainly the worst in Western Civilization's long history. Isaiah 3:16 and 2 Timothy 3 describe today's conditions, and women are at the heart of it, sadly. Finding those who rise above the expectations of today's society is challenging, but they exist, and they're not that rare if you look in the right places. (Hint: the bar scene and the careerist women single scene is not the right place for the most part. Church is.)

There's a reason why "don't be judgy" is today's secular commandment of most import. The people who preach that the most are those who know deep down that men with good judgement will pass them over, so they try and shame them into exercising poor judgement and picking poorly. Don't fall victim to that temptation. It's a virtue-signaling philosophy of men, not one of God. Even in the famous chapter when Jesus himself said to judge not, he then—just half a dozen verses later—gave us specific instructions on how to judge correctly, so clearly our records are missing something there. Indeed, I think making righteous, but not hasty or overly harsh judgements is one of the most important things as Christians that we need to do. Our judgement should most often encourage us to help and support rather than condemn and throw stones, but at the same time, we can't do either effectively if we are unwilling to even correctly judge what the situation is in the first place.

Anyway, enough ranting about women and men. It's a favorite although sometimes bitter topic of mine to discuss, in large part because I believe our culture has given generations worth of false messages about the nature of men and women, and people have bad expectations, which leads them to failure in their relationships all too often. Too much of what I've learned I've had to learn through trial and error rather than because someone really taught it to me properly. And I also discovered as I got older that my mother and my sister are very unusual for women in terms of many aspects of their personality, so they didn't even give me a model to follow that was all that useful. But, through trial and error, I've arrived at a place where I think things work pretty well, and I'm trying to do a better job of distilling what I've learned to my kids so they don't have to stumble and struggle in the ways that I did when I was young. They'll stumble and struggle in other ways that I don't anticipate, no doubt, just as I did in ways that my parents probably didn't anticipate, but that's life and not to be feared or avoided.

UPDATE: Although I didn't see it right away, all around good guy Shad posted a video saying some of these same things, and plenty of other things that I didn't say too. Good stuff!