"For every problem there is a solution that is simple, clean and wrong” – H.L. Mencken Most women’s, but not all, greatest fear is to be deserted by a man. There is its corollary: to not get married. To not have husband, home and children.
I once had a hostile, bitter spinster scream at me: “You’re no gentlemen! You’re not married!” She was right that I am no gentleman (I was once described as a “gentleman and a barbarian,” which is pretty accurate). The accusation about marriage was her greatest fear projected on me. No man is going to yell at a woman, “You’re not lady! You’re not married!”
I saw another woman yell at a man in a bar, “You’re not married!” What do they do, check a man’s finger for a ring? If that case he was making a fool of her in a conversation, since she had no idea what she was talking about, and she was reduced to pointing out he wasn’t married. Did his not being married invalidate his argument? Of course not.
In the past a man couldn’t desert his wife since the divorce laws were much stricter. Today we have no-fault divorce unlike in the past where one spouse had to truly be at fault. (This would also prevent women from deserting his husbands, since these days most divorces are initiated by women).
One of my favorite writers is Neal Stephenson. In his novel Cryptonomicon he writes of a woman who deserts her fiancé but has enough time to convince their friends she didn’t do the deserting – that her fiancé, Randy, deserted her. Still, Randy, realizes, “He embodies…just about the worst nightmare, for many women, of what might happen in their lives.”
I’ve met women who think they’ve been deserted (they always blame their problems on men and never realize to what extent they are the problem). I’ve seen some of them end up as hostile, bitter spinsters without home, husband and children, living alone in an apartment with one or more cats.
A lot of the mores, customs and morals that constitute society were not created by reason. They evolved, and they just can’t simply be overthrown and replaced by what people misdefine as “rationality.” Liberals and leftist-libertarians are particularly egregious examples of this belief that society can be planned and improved by their simple-minded ideologies.
Those who have lost their way tend to become fanatics. I’ll quote Stephenson again: “Weirdly, the ones who adopted the sternest and most terrible Old Testament moral tone were the Modern Language types who believed everything was relative and that, for example, polygamy was as valid as monogamy.” (Anyone who is a leftist-libertarian would have to admit they believe polygamy is as good as monogamy. That’s one of their many delusions, along with supporting open borders or worshipping State-created corporate monstrosities such as Wal-Mart.)
Randy muses on what he has discovered: “…the most-modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz. society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep things running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical vigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm.”
He realizes something else: “Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX systems administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing some guidance when things got out of whack.”
Things have gotten out of whack in our society – and have been for quite a while – because so many people have thrown the old documentation out the window and are trying (in the case of libertarians) to replace it with ideologies they have obtained by imitating the opinions of other people, e.g. Murray Rothard, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises.
This out-of-whackness has permeated throughout society and now affected the relationships between men and women, which it has for about the last 40 years. One of the reasons is because of the influence of lost and deluded leftists such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. People have been imitating their ideas.
The evidence is in that these crackpots didn’t know what they were talking about and in fact have been immensely destructive. Many people have seen through these nutcases but not enough. Give it some time, though.
The result of people imitating the ideas of fools has been in increase not in security but in insecurity, fear and anxiety. Women’s greatest fear of being deserted hasn’t been reduced – it’s been increased. And for that, we can thank bad ideas. And the poor people who fell for them are the ones who suffered.
