Decadence, the Corruption of Status Hierarchies, & Female Hypergamy: A Response to Rob Henderson’s Article “All the Single Ladies” – Part 2

Go to Part 1.

My Response Part Two: The Effect of Corrupt Status Hierarchies on Female Hypergamy

I could go on at much greater length denouncing the absurd, grotesque, surreal levels of corruption plaguing Western institutions of higher learning, but I bite my tongue to return to the point from which we set out, viz., Rob Henderson’s article “All the Single Ladies” and its touching portrayal of the loneliness of contemporary women who cannot find sufficiently educated men.

These sound like extraordinary ladies, and quite unlike any I ever knew or dated. Do they find men’s stock of knowledge and ideas insufficient to stimulate their own constantly buzzing intellects? Have male minds not been honed to enough razor sharpness to spot logical fallacies a mile off? Do the lady’s suitors have an insufficient appreciation of the fundamental principles upon which Western Civilization is based? Might an ability to parse Cicero help? How about solving differential equations, or explaining competing theories about why the industrial revolution occurred at the place and time it did? The poor fellows are certainly going to have to bone up before they can hope to become worthy of such exalted female minds!

Coming back down to earth, it is obvious Henderson is using the term “education” not in its proper sense—relating to the genuine practice of higher education—but with exclusive reference to contemporary institutions of “education.” And these are scandalously corrupt. The young women are “educated” only in the sense that they have demonstrated proficiency at negotiating a credentialing process that serves to protect a status hierarchy that has lost all mooring to the practice of higher education universities were originally meant to foster and promote. Those best able to rise within such a hierarchy turn out to be idle young women adept at chattering about olfactory oppression. (Competent women scholars obviously exist, but any survey of the contemporary academy would surely reveal that the remaining serious scholars are disproportionately male while the fakes are disproportionately female.)

Most of the noncollege young men these women despise—the 84 percent who are employed, in any case—do not engage in such chatter because they are too busy fixing leaks, delivering cargo on time, stringing electrical wire, repairing engines, hurrying to accident sites, putting out fires, preventing dusky barbarians from cutting our throats, bringing life-sustaining foods to market, and generally keeping the world around us running. They are operating competently toward the lower end of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, as most men have had to do throughout history. And they are the only reason Western Civilization has not already collapsed entirely. The travesties of scholarship produced within the contemporary academy, by contrast, never benefit anyone apart from the mandarins who produce them. It is simply obvious that an electrician, carpenter, or auto mechanic is more valuable to the world than an olfactory racism “scholar.”

Why are women more successful than men at climbing today’s corrupt academic status ladder? In considerable part for the same reason they are better at knitting sweaters: they have a higher tolerance for monotonous, repetitive work of a sedentary kind. To spend his peak physical years culling examples of olfactory racism from the novels of Virginia Woolf and then—worse—to compose a long, formal dissertation on the subject would amount to positive torture for many young men, something I think does our sex credit. I myself had difficulty with restlessness in graduate school, which I dealt with through long walks and other physical exercise. I kept slogging away at the academic task because I was fascinated by big, serious, consequential philosophical ideas. But I could never have done the same for the sake of most of what gets “studied” in the contemporary academy.

Dutton mentions the probability that our newly minted olfactory racism scholarette has received public funding. Again, the particular case hardly matters—the point is that most young women in the academy benefit from such funding. This means working men have had a portion of their earnings confiscated to allow her to peruse Virgina Woolf novels and grind out empty verbiage about oppression. It is a crying injustice that should not be tolerated one minute longer. Yet in return for such support, the young lady looks down her snout at the men funding her! They are simply not “educated” enough to be worthy of her consideration.

What explains such women’s limitless faith in the objective validity of academic credentials? In part, their own mediocre intelligence and the limits precisely of their education in the authentic sense. Learning and acquired mental acuity are goods difficult to appreciate except by those who already have them in significant measure themselves. It is hard to judge uphill on education because people by definition cannot know what they do not know. Dull and untrained minds cannot have a proper sense of what they are lacking. All they can judge by is externalities—such as academic credentials. Any fool can see a degree hanging on someone’s wall in a way he cannot so easily see the benefit a gifted mind has derived from, for example, extended immersion in the Latin classics. Hence we find women in the tragicomic situation Henderson describes: lonely and miserable even as they reject legions of men on the basis of meaningless credentials. And we are asked to believe they do so because they value education. I feel myself crashing into the limits of the English language’s capacity for expressing contempt.

The relation of the genuine life of the mind to today’s corrupt academy might be illuminated by comparison with the ancient Christian doctrine of the church invisible. Christians believe the church derives from God himself, yet this presents an obvious problem. God is perfect, while the church is made up entirely of imperfect, sinful men (wise theologians admit that ecclesia semper reformanda – “the church is always in need of reform”). The explanation of this apparent paradox is found in the distinction between the church visible and the church invisible. Normally when men refer to the church, they have the everyday, visible church in mind. But this human institution is less important than the true, invisible church responsible for the work of salvation, and whose composition is known to God alone. The invisible church somehow exists within the visible, but is never identical to it. Obviously, the decay of genuine learning within a corrupt academy is analogous to a near-throttling of the invisible church by the visible.

If you give an uneducated (in the proper sense) person an educational credential, he—or more to the point, she—will accept it unquestioningly as a proof of her own real accomplishment. Dutton reports that the young olfactory racism expert weathered the storm of public scorn directed at her successfully. He even quotes her as saying, “I’m fine, I’m quite pleased that I’ve upset these basement-dwelling incels.” It does not occur to her that the incels may only be incels because thousands of academic spinsters like herself are ludicrously deluded as to the value of their own attainments.

In short, the corruption of our educational institutions has produced a status-mirage that women are unable to see through, one which condemns both themselves and men to childlessness—though not necessarily depriving the women of polygynous sex with men above them in the outward status hierarchy.

In addition to the mediocrity of their minds and the modesty of their attainments, women in the academy may have difficulty seeing through the corrupt status hierarchies in which they are enmeshed simply because they are women. As I wrote in a recent essay, the sex generally consists of “impressionable conformists with a powerful need for social approval.” Status hierarchies are produced by men, as Napoleon knew (“Les femmes n’ont pas de rang”). Women rarely consider them critically; they accept them as given, and all their instincts concerning the “attractiveness” of men operate downstream from there. If a society is healthy, its status hierarchy embodies sound values, and female hypergamy functions as a spur to worthwhile male achievement. If a society is sick—we get what we see in Henderson’s article.

A Valuable Historical and Literary Parallel

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote a wonderful story reflecting how an impressionable female mind functions within a different sick society marked by an equally distorted educational status hierarchy: early Soviet Russia. It is called Nastenka, and can be found in English translation in the collection Apricot Jam (the relevant narrative begins on p. 91). The story presents numerous suggestive analogies with the decadence and corruption of the contemporary West as described in this essay. Let us have a look.

Just before the revolution, Nastenka enrolls in “a classical high school, one of the best in Moscow.” It survives unchanged well into the 1920s because at that period the Bolsheviks have more pressing matters than educational policy to worry about. The young heroine becomes fascinated with the imaginative literature of the nineteenth century. “It was an entire, enormous, organic world, more vivid than the reality that flowed around her.” At first, she simply enjoys the direct experience of reading, but gradually her teacher, a cultivated lady who received her education under the old regime, reveals to her the possibility of going deeper:

She learned to look at books in a new way—not just to live with the characters, but to live constantly with the author. How did he regard his characters? Was he the sole master of their lives, or where they independent of them? How did he organize this scene or that, and what words and phrases did he use in doing so?

Gradually Nastenka conceives the ambition of sharing her love of literature with the rising generation by becoming a teacher.

At age sixteen, one year before graduation, her family moves and she is thrust into an unfamiliar environment. At her new school “she couldn’t recognize the literature of the past in what was now being laid out before her in lectures.”

Though they did acknowledge, in passing, the musicality of Pushkin’s poetry (but never mentioned the transparent clarity of his perception of the world), they insistently pointed out that he expressed the mindset and ideology of the mid-level landowners during the incipient crisis of Russian feudalism. [The playwright] Ostrovsky reflected the decay of the feudal, serf-owning system and its displacement by developing industrial capitalism.

Nastenka pores over the new Soviet literature textbook produced by some communist ideologue named Kogan, where she learns how “all these Onegins and Bolkonskys” (characters in Pushkin and Tolstoy respectively) are our class enemies. She quietly thinks: “That may be so, yet they certainly knew how to love in those days!” But she cannot bring herself to question the overall validity of what she is being taught: “There was no way to maintain a sustained argument against Kogan. He couldn’t have constructed all these many things on utter nonsense. Surely there was a genuine historical and social basis for them? . . . Surely they weren’t built on thin air?” She begins to feel a mixture of confusion and boredom that contrasts sharply with the enthusiasm for literature that initially inspired her choice of career.

Her boredom vanishes temporarily when she meets a charismatic young man named Shurik, overflowing with ideas that he expresses with extreme confidence. As we all know, women love confident men: “How did Shurik know all these things? When had he found the time to soak it all up?” The reader quickly perceives—although Nastenka herself never does—the reason for Shurik’s self-assurance. He is a communist militant who follows the party line unswervingly. He knows exactly what he is supposed to say about everything under the sun. Nastenka drinks up his every word, and a romance begins. But soon he is pressing her to consummate the relationship, and something inside her tells her that, at the very least, it is not yet time. Concerning early Soviet manhood in general, she reflects: “None of them could understand the slow, gradual development of feelings.”

So Shurik breaks off with her and demonstratively ignores her for the rest of the time they are in class together. Soon he is called to Moscow and a no doubt successful rise within the official status hierarchy of the Soviet literary world. Nastenka is left broken-hearted. The reader understands—as she herself does not—that she has barely avoided a spiritual landmine.

Time passes and Nastenka, now addressed at Anastasia Dmitrievna, is put in charge of a class: “At long last, her dream had come true [and] she could pour into [her students’] heads all the things she had preserved from this great and good literature” (as well as “make sure these little boys become decent men, not like the ones today”).

One day she is handed a new literature textbook meant to guide her own teaching. In it a major Soviet author is quoted as stating: “It is entirely natural that workers’ and peasants’ power is crushing its enemies like lice.” She wonders, “How could you possibly present that to the children?” Yet this writer is “a Russian classic, and an authority respected across the globe, so how could your wretched little mind challenge him?”

By this time the Soviet curriculum is tightly controlled. She makes the best of things, teaching “all these production and Five-Year Plan works with the same dedication that she felt to her own sacred cause of literature.” On her own time, however, she organizes an after-school literary circle for a dozen or so of her best students where she “takes them through the best of the nineteenth century, things that weren’t included on the syllabus.” But word gets out and she is ordered to stop. “Enough harping on the classics! It distracts the students from life.”

Nastenka’s fate is the tragedy of a promising young female mind stunted due to an inability to trust its own healthy instincts and question what it receives from a corrupt authority. She senses the gulf separating the great literature she learned to love in her youth from the Marxist rubbish she is forced to impart, but never breaks through to clear insight about her situation. Perhaps most fascinatingly, she dimly perceives that this cultural decline bears some relation to the contrast between the men of her own time who insist on getting straight down to business with women and the Onegins and Bolkonskys who “certainly knew how to love in those days.”

So in general, as I said, women accept the authorities and status hierarchies that they find in place. This is probably because authority and status are essentially male concerns. Les femmes n’ont pas de rang—women are never going to tear down corrupt hierarchies for us, nor is it reasonable for men to blame them for being as nature made them. Their sexual instincts will function properly again once we have replaced rotten hierarchies with sound ones in better accord with the nature of things and a proper sense of values. When we do, we shall never again have female olfactory racism scholarettes turning up their noses at hardworking men.

What, Then, Must We Do?

Some years ago I came across an amusing article about a fire breaking out in an office building. What was amusing was the reaction of the female employees. Firemen, as everyone knows, do not enjoy the very highest status within our society, despite the dangerous and life-saving nature of their work. But every dog has its day, and even firemen come into their own when a fire breaks out. Under such circumstances, there is no time for discussion or persuasion. Everyone who knows what’s good for him must do exactly as the firemen direct, including the corporate CEO. You do not give firemen any backtalk while a fire is raging. For a brief moment, they are at the top of the status hierarchy.

Well, these corporate “career girls” were practically swooning. Once out of the building and in safety, they began marveling to one another how manly those guys were. This was virility the likes of which they had never known. It was the first time in their whole lonely, miserable lives that any man had put them in their place, and they were simply beside themselves. It was better than Love’s Sweet Fury.

It would be interesting to know whether any of these women went on the internet afterwards to seek dates with firemen. I doubt it. Most firemen are not terribly “educated,” and often earn less than the ass-sitting female paper-pushers they rescue. Perhaps if women had to spend several post-pubertal years being continually rescued from burning buildings, we could foster a baby-boom. Instead, of course, America’s fire departments are busy replacing firemen with firewomen. (When a large part of Los Angeles recently burned down, it emerged that the three persons in charge of the fire department were all lesbians.) So those rescued women probably went back to their sterile lives as soon as the building reopened. What a pity.

So what can we do? It is tempting to say we must raise the status of young men. But the solution to the problem described in Henderson’s article is surely not for policemen, farmers, and plumbers to get post-doctoral fellowships in feminist theory. If we cannot make female hypergamy function correctly once again by raising the status of men, all that remains is . . . to lower that of women. In effect, this is what briefly occurred in that burning office building. And the women just loved it.

Feminists, like broken clocks giving the right time twice a day, have described how women under “patriarchy” eroticize and derive pleasure from their own oppression, meaning their exclusion from the male status hierarchy. They are correct. The reader who wishes to observe how women might be made happier once men finally work up the gumption to deprive them of status is advised to watch my favorite Italian movie, Swept Away (1974; avoid Madonna’s 2002 remake). It was made by a woman—and could only have been made by a woman. Meanwhile, clueless male traditionalists offer nothing but laments that women are no longer being placed upon sufficiently high pedestals, unaware that their excessively elevated status is now the principal factor in their loneliness and sexual frustration. Watch the movie!

Sex is not simply something that happens in people’s bedrooms. It structures the whole of society. Societies that are badly out of order sexually, as ours is, can expect to experience sexual dysfunction and a potentially catastrophic decline in fertility. Women need men’s love, but to get it they need to respect men. (For men to respect women is also nice, but not as essential—although discussed ad nauseam.) Women have traded love for status, a properly male concern, and they are deeply unhappy. This is because they are not getting the love they need, neither from the men above them in the status hierarchy who can go from hookup to hookup nor, even more obviously, from the lower-status men their inborn instincts virtually compel them to reject. And it does not matter that these men are not actually unworthy of them. For women, all that matters is the outward status hierarchy.

Another point to consider: Henderson asks only how the ladies might find worthy men, not how men might find worthy wives. But what would the average academic spinster really have to offer a man who must go out every day and accomplish challenging tasks in the real world? She probably cannot cook, since grad students live on frozen entrees and takeout. Can she clean, decorate, grow a vegetable garden, or do anything else that might make his home a comforting and pleasant place? Assembling snippets from Virginia Woolf just doesn’t cut it.

So far I have spoken only of the 84 percent of non-college men who are employed. Henderson himself passes rapidly over this larger group to discuss the 16 percent who are stuck playing video games and watching pornography. Obviously, their long-term happiness and self-respect as well as the good of society demands that some useful work be found for them to perform. Fortunately, there is always valuable work to be done in this world; it is just a matter of suiting the tasks to the men. But this is a complex economic problem I have no special qualifications for addressing. One thing I would not recommend most of these young men do is enroll in college, where they can expect to be demeaned and resented. Leave the campuses to the purple-haired women’s studies majors who organize slut marches.

Proper employment will take care of most of the video game addiction from which these young men suffer. There remains the question of pornography. Being by temperament more analyst than moralist, I have been reluctant to address this question. Moreover, I long assumed that even a fairly mediocre woman could be counted upon to win out over lifeless images in the heart of any normal young man. I am no longer so sure.

Let us look at just a few of the advantages pornography enjoys from the point of view of Henderson’s unemployed and underemployed young men:

• Pornography cannot divorce them and clean out their bank accounts with the armed backing of the state.
• While porn cannot give them children, it also cannot take their children away from them. Pornography has never denounced any man to Child Protective Services as an abuser.
• Pornography does not despise any man for having failed to earn an academic credential in oppression studies, does not call his masculinity “toxic,” does not condemn him for the natural sexual urges he cannot help: in sum, does not indulge in the endless litany of complaints about men heard from contemporary women.
• Porn is cheap. Wives cost a lot of money, especially when they are carrying and nursing babies, whereas making porn requires only a camera and a slut. Not being a capital-intensive industry, the end user can find a nearly limitless ocean of it online for free.
• Perhaps not least important, you do not actually have to pay attention to pornography. If forced to choose between keeping either porn or a pretentious female racism “scholar” under my roof, I would unhesitatingly choose the porn since I could always stuff it in a drawer and ignore it—something that cannot be done with a woman.

I can only conclude that these young men are behaving rationally in preferring pornography to the available women. If I were God or possessed a magic wand, I would (after finding them gainful employment) provide these men with sweet, loving, grateful young wives capable of creating homes for them and bearing and rearing decent children. But I am not hiding any stash of such women from anyone. I really do not know where they are to be found. If someone were able to solve this problem, I suspect the plague of pornography would largely take care of itself. Any eventual legislation to outlaw it would provide no more than the coup de grace.

End of Part 2 of 2.