Since the 1960s no aspect of our lives has become more political than the discussion of femininity and masculinity. There has been an intellectual war of words as to what the definition and limitations are of these two concepts. When a child is born now people consider it not simply acceptable, but actually polite conversation to discuss the politics of what toys the child will like to play with, or more frighteningly deciding what toys the child should like to play with. The idea being that it is ethical to sculpt and mold a child by force into the kind of person the parent wants them to be. The issue of femininity and the definition of true “womanhood” has been disproportionately taken up and manipulated by social engineers. In this essay I will be discussing social engineering as it relates to an organised and planned top down redefinition of “femininity” used to meet political and economic interests. Essentially a process that reduces women into the status of raw materials that can be processed to function as units of production and as political agents for policing society. Much of what I write about is equally applicable to men, however, the sheer volume of effort and publicity used to redefine femininity to suit commercial or political purposes is truly staggering.
Social Engineering and Gender Roles
A social engineer is a person who believes people are malleable and it is ethical to manipulate dishonestly an entire population to think and act in a certain way for “the greater good” whatever that actually means. Social engineers come in many shapes and forms: religious fanatics, cult leaders, politicians driven by an ideological agenda, political lobbyists and ambitious academics who want to change how people think. Typically social engineers are not up front about their intentions to change people, just as most people you regret dating were not up front at the start of the relationship they really considered you a block of clay they could fashion into the person they actually wanted to date but were too lazy to go out and find.
The primary social engineers pushing for redefining the definition of femininity are university academics, politicians, the mainstream media and big commercial interests. They all have their different motivations for doing this, all of them will argue it is for the greater good and that if people would just submit and follow their instructions then everything would work out better for everyone. I feel it is important to point out that anyone who believes they know somebody else’s interests better than they do is being conceited, and anyone who believes they know better than millions of total strangers how to run their lives, families, households and communities is suffering from delusions of grandeur. The best person to decide your personal interests is yourself.
The concept of social engineering is based on the erroneous idea that a person is their self-concept. While this is true in a very specific sense, there are limitations: a person can only be who they are within the realm of possibility, they can not be who they wish they were outside realistic limits. Social engineering means flattering people by telling them they should not focus on accepting who they really are, but focus on the person they wish they were, however unlikely it is that they could actually be that person. This promotes what many people call “egotism”, what I prefer to call “narcissism” and is essentially the idea that if you are not the person whom you wish you were, or that other people expect you to be, then you are a failure or defective as a human being.
Healthy self-esteem is about not caring more about the expectations of other people over your own personal interests. The social engineers who created this new definition of femininity in the belief that it would inspire women to be better than they had ever been historically, however, made the same mistakes every single social engineer has made before them:
1. Human beings are not malleable creatures that can simply be programmed to do a task like a computer. As a human being you function best as an autonomous self-correcting agent. There are real barriers preventing you from being all things to all people without body modification or insanity. A human being cannot drink concentrated hydrochloric acid and live, nor can they believe two contradictory things at the same time and still make sense. Social engineers always require people to serve two or more masters equally and to believe two or more contradictory things at once. (for example, telling women they should not compare themselves to others when looking for an identity or self-worth, but then constantly using “girl-power” to compare them to boys and men).
2. Self-esteem has nothing to do with peer pressure, in fact peer pressure is toxic to self-esteem. Self-esteem comes from within, not from the praise and attention given by other people. If you rely on other people to provide your life with a sense of meaning, then you do not have self-esteem. When people turn to a predefined gender role to give them a sense of worth, they do so only because they have poor self-esteem and are relying on other people to tell them who they should be and how they should live their lives.
The Map is Always Wrong
How can we be certain that social engineers are wrong with their definitions of gender roles? This is actually an easy question to answer, it simply requires logic. If we were walking through the forest using a map and we came across a river that the map said was not there, then which is correct? The map or the landscape? Since the map is an abstract concept and the river is a physical reality, the map must always be wrong. To put it another way: ignoring the map will not hurt you but ignoring the river could be fatal. The same logic applies to gender roles: if a woman is found who does not match the prescribed definition of femininity, is the woman “wrong” or is the definition of femininity wrong? People can not be wrong in this sense, only social engineers who think they can define abstract ideas like “femininity” and “masculinity” and then use them to measure how masculine and feminine a person is. Gender does not exist in the same way as sex exists. A person is either male, female or neither, this can be determined by their physical characteristics and can not be changed without body-modification. Gender, however, can change from person to person, from mood to mood and from moment to moment. It is a ridiculously fluffy concept that only exists so long as people believe ideas are more important than people.
An Example of Social Engineering: Girl-Power
Girl-power is one example of a cultural movement to “toughen” girls up by redefining girlhood in a powerfully aggressive and even masculine way. Girl-power means all the children’s story books need to be rewritten with “strong” (aggressive) female characters. In modern story books, cartoons, toys, music, TV and movies most now girls act like boys, think like geniuses, fight like warriors, are adventurous like rangers, solve problems like master detectives, are pure as angels, wise as monks, sexually active like bulls, run like athletes and multi-task like a hex-core CPU. Everywhere in the culture women are supreme and omnipotent. More importantly, women do not fail, they do not make mistakes, they can not be criticised and they seldom show weakness. Even in cartoons as seemingly innocuous as Peppa Pig we see the female characters blessed with disproportionately superior character traits to the male characters. However, this litany of traits that defines the new femininity has not turned into an inspiration for women to aspire to, but a long list of expectations for women to live up to.
When little girls buy into this, because they are still too young to have their own filters for detecting insincere flattery, they choose to feed their egos on the delusions of grandeur while starving their spirits of the things that mean the most to little girls: relationships, babies, giving and supporting other people. Women do not know how to be women anymore and they are too embarrassed to cry out for help or to stand up and object to the inhumane treatment of being manipulated by mass media brain washing to re-engineer their identities into something they would never choose to be if they had ever been given a choice.
Girl-power propaganda demanding that people redefine their expectations of femininity and womanhood are so pervasive it is difficult to escape them. Consider that such propaganda is produced by the government and spread through publicly funded schools and universities. TV, radio and movie companies tap into this lucrative market of flattering women with insincere and unrealistic notions of how real people actually behave and function. This helps manufacturing companies, eager to exploit this by apportioning a large amount of their marketing budget to advertisements that continuously flatter and objectify women. Once one gets accustomed to detecting the propaganda it becomes almost impossible to find a TV program that does not cater to the egotism of women, often at the expence of men. In such an environment a human being is no longer in a state of freedom, but one of constant intellectual oppression.
So what happens to a mind that is effectively forced to adopt this world view without exposure to alternatives? Flattery works with women, because women are naturally more attuned to other people socially than men are. Men will often insult each other and act rudely, this behaviour is fine around other men, but unacceptable in women’s social circles. Women seek positive attention from other people, this is important because for a woman if people stop treating her with attention and respect she knows when to leave and find new company, this is also why abused girls often get stuck in abusive relationships as they “normalise” abusive behaviour. So when a woman hears flattery, it sounds like heaven to her. However, while young girls generally learn quickly that boys who flatter them are bad news, how many parents sit down with their daughters and warn them about the flattery on TV, in the the movies, at school, in their books etc? This flattery is used to sell goods, services and political agendas to her later on, but more importantly, this flattery is used to destroy her self-esteem by getting her addicted to constant affirmation from other people and the media while ignoring her own desires and interests.
This is perhaps the most pernicious effect of flattery is the phenomenon of “praise addiction” where a person grows so used to being praised that they can not function properly without constant praise and attention from other people. This dependency on other people to prop up a person’s emotional stability leads to feeling that no matter how hard one tries, one is just not good enough. This in turns leads self-destructive relationships that revolve around abusing and being abused by others.
This is why you should protect your children by teaching them to understand how flattery is harmful to them. Taking away the TV and hiding the books with these themes will not be enough as she will not be independent enough to protect herself in the outside world as an adult would. She needs to have the intellectual armour needed to protect herself from this. This is found in the Trivium, which is the core of every mature adult’s “filter” for erroneous information being hurled at them. Frighteningly enough, the Trivium is seldom, if ever, taught in a publicly funded school.
Acceptance is the Best Approach
Acceptance means appreciating that every child is their own self with their own personality and special strengths and weaknesses. The problem with girl power and gender roles is not that they are forcing the wrong conditioning onto girls and boys, but that they are using force. They are dictating to little girls how they ought to be by pathologising how they naturally are. Kids are not defective, so it is not up the government, academics, or anyone else to decide the “official” definition of femininity or masculinity. The traditional approach might work well for the majority of children, but applying it forcefully is no better than girl power. Instead, observe your child and reflect back to your child his or her true nature. If he or she is sensitive, accept that he or she is sensitive, if he or she is rough and tumble accept that he or she is rough and tumble. Do not push try to push your expectations onto your child or try to change you child to suit your interests. Instead help your child discover their own femininity or masculinity for themselves without trying to be controlling by defining it for them.
Four Birds Education 