The Problem with Women

By Olivia Pierson

One of my bug-bears is how much feminism has messed with the heads of modern females - to the point where they have shot themselves in the foot so severely that it’s created an ugly limp in what ought to be a woman’s confident stride.  What makes this limp a travesty is that I am talking about women who have been thoroughly ‘emancipated’.

Emancipated from what, one may ask?  From yesteryear’s feminine models of being nothing more than appearing pleasing to men; that is, not practiced in the qualities of reason, virtue and knowledge, but instead affecting coquetry, resorting to cunning and always displaying overt softness -  in other words, wearing their sex’s “weaknesses” on their sleeve.

But surely the independent-minded 21st Century woman is way beyond those antiquated notions of womanhood. Today’s woman can be a doctor, a construction worker, a lawyer, a professor, an astronaut and everything in between - so what is the limp?

The limp is an entitled and misguided sense that a man should love her no matter what she is, does or says.  It is the absolute societal-reinforced conviction that pleasing a man has no relevance whatsoever to a woman’s happiness, when somewhere deep inside she feels that it might - thus she is knocked off balance by a gut impression (and desire) which contradicts everything she has been taught by feminist mothers, sisters, teachers and professors.

During the 20th Century, women demanded equality without giving enough consideration to what the word equal actually means.  Did they mean equal in will and mental accomplishments? Did they mean equal in earning power or equal division of household chores?  Perhaps they just meant equal in the efficacy of their civil vote or potentiality to stand for public office.  I’m not sure that even women today know what ‘they’ meant, but I do know that the result has been that today’s women will brook no opposition by their men - over anything. Too many women behave like petty tyrants whose polemic often doesn’t rise much higher than the weak remonstrance: “because I feel it.”

When I think of what 18th Century writer Mary Wollstonecraft meant by equal in her book, “The Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” she particularly highlighted the area of education.  She took great pains to push the idea that a woman’s mind was just as deserving of an education as a man’s, since without one, women remained in a state of ornamental uselessness barring them from even reaching the status of being adequate companions for their menfolk who governed the world.  She also considered that because women were the primary influence over the developing minds of the young, educated mothers would bring about a better generation of human beings than uneducated mothers ever could.  On this she was profoundly correct - and in the fullness of time, her ideal came to pass in European culture, only it seems to have overshot its mark considerably.

Here are Wollstonecraft’s words:

“Consequently the perfection of our nature and capability of happiness, must be estimated by the degree of reason, virtue and knowledge that distinguish the individual, and direct the laws which bind society: and that from the exercise of reason, knowledge and virtue naturally flow, is equally undeniable, if mankind be viewed collectively.”

Wollstonecraft freely admitted that men and women were not physically equal; on this score nature endowed stronger and superior qualities upon men which made them the natural protectors of women.  But she thought that men had taken this too far by not requiring their women to practise reason, virtue and knowledge (experience) which she considered the very essence of being an independent, happy human being.

Today, the norm of womanhood is immense independence, at least, most women are fully independent before they secure a relationship which brings forth children.  Even after the children are born it is exceedingly common now for women to return to the workforce within six months to a year after having a baby in order to help pay for the family finances.  Has this made women happier, or has it subjugated their stride into a limp?

In Wollstonecraft’s time, one of her contentions was that the middle-class woman was so “infantine” - is how she put it, so overly concerned with maintaining her beauty and “softness”, that her man ended up living a life of chronic infidelity when his wife either lost her looks or proved herself to be too boring and insipid for sex with her to be worth much.

In our modern time, if a woman oversees the running of a home as well as holding down full time employment, how much care do you think she will devote to the pleasure of her man?  I venture none.  She will expect their domestic life to be all about him pleasing her - and her expectation will be that of a tyrant, perhaps justifiably so because she is extending herself way beyond the call of duty and they both know it.

The problem is that a man does not like making love to an entitled tyrant, nothing could kill his feelings of desire more, so before long, he starts to have trouble getting his big-boy up (in the 20 minutes or so a fortnight that she has allocated in her diary for sexual connection).  She can’t understand this, for her needs are not the same, and it hurts her, resulting in her feeling undesirable to her companion. She also slams her mind shut to the idea that the extra 20 kilos she’s still carrying after a pregnancy doesn’t help things much in his big-boy department because he is always meant to faithfully love her “as she is.” He is far too polite - and grateful to mention any of these things, especially when he can see she works so hard for the family and the finances, like he does, so they never have the honest conversation about what a man finds sexually attractive - he can’t bear to be seen as “that bastard” who would say such things.  By the time baby number three comes along, and after little Johnny has been diagnosed with ADHD because he hasn’t quite received the attention and calm home life he needed to develop self-esteem and self-discipline, they are well ensconced in living a life that is disconnected from any natural order and nobody wants to mention that nobody is truly happy because aside from paying off their mortgage a bit quicker, nobody is really getting what they deeply need for a happy relationship and good family rhythm to thrive - and this is considered normal life to many.

Before you know it, he’s visiting the harlot across town, or at least doing porn every second day and we end up in a similar state to husbands and wives of Mary Wollstonecraft’s era, not because the woman is too insipid to shag, but because she’s too macho and harried… to say nothing of tubby.

Behold the emancipated woman with a limp.

By Wollstonecraft’s standards she has let herself and her marriage down, not by being uneducated in a field of chosen career, but by being uneducated in holding the long term sexual attention and amorous affections of her man because she lives in a time when that is considered silly, old fashioned and irrelevant.  If she applied the attribute of knowledge (or experience), she might open herself to the notion that men are highly sexual creatures who are visually stimulated by physical beauty in a woman and that after having a baby, perhaps one of the best things she could do for her marriage is not to help pay the mortgage, but to get herself back into good shape.  If he be a man in any meaningful sense of the word, let him pay the mortgage on his own while she runs herself and the household with excellent, long-range judgement.

If she applied the attribute of virtue, she might open herself to the idea that children need a caring, relaxed mother overseeing their growth and development every day and that well brought up children add great joy to a home - whereas frenetic living routines tend to complicate that joy and make for parental guilt becoming a permanent parental motivation influencing all things from discipline (or its lack) to too much unearned pocket money (spoiling).

If she applied the attribute of reason she might open herself to the idea that a harried woman who overworks herself on all fronts quickly loses her sense of humour and easy sense of joy, which were possibly the very things her man loved most about her when they first met.  A quality, happy home is one of the finest things anyone could create and it takes a lot of sound judgement, humour and optimism to make it so.  The greatest springboard into life any two people could give to their children is the experience of watching a real and fulfilling marriage at work, that they get to proudly call “their parents.”

I’m not saying that I think mothers shouldn’t work - they should if they want to and if they can run their homes well simultaneously, but most women cannot do this without feeling incredibly torn in an inordinately negative way until the children are at least of school age - even then it’s a great challenge.

If Wollstonecraft could take a peek at today’s emancipated women: emancipated in ways that she could not have even imagined, I think she would be a little shocked at how unhappy many middle class women are.  Not because they lack an education; they don’t.  But because they have put to bed so firmly any notions of men-pleasing that they fail to see that part of their happiness as heterosexual, monogamous women does in fact include helping to maintain the sexual, emotional and domestic happiness of their menfolk, if the goal is to have a loving relationship and family life.

Most men today couldn’t care less what their women do with their independence, so long as they come home to a happy, well-run domicile and a wife who does actually give a care about how he feels and what he may want or need. It is my experience that when men are afforded this decency from women they tend to bend over backwards to help make their women happy  - and the women put themselves in the advantageous position of holding their men’s attention, love and affection, perhaps even forever.  This has a huge effect on the personal happiness of women.

But when women buy into the lies told by feminists that to please a man is weak, insipid or a cop-out because men’s demands over women are the world’s number one social problem, they seek to mould the relationship into one where he has to be a woman pleaser in every respect, thus turning him into a lapdog.  I have never yet met a woman who admires a lapdog type of man - she may like him, she may even prefer him that way on many levels because she always gets what she wants, but the wellspring of her deepest respect for him as a man will be as dry as a desert along with their sex life.

Decent men love a strong woman who is independent and who pursues interests outside of himself and the relationship, but they don’t love it when their own wants and needs are consistently placed at the very bottom of the heap.  If a woman refuses to educate herself about how to keep her man happy over the long years ahead, she should not be surprised when not only his eye wanders but also his sexual affections.  Genuinely happy, longterm monogamy is the achievement of giants and many modern women need to be re-educated about how to help create and maintain it.

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​