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androgeny, battle of the sexes, break up, break ups, dating, divorce, equality, feminine, feminism, gender, gender roles, marriage, masculine, red pill
There is a concept in Chinese culture that has no real equivalent that I know of in the West, but it is a concept well worth pondering — yin and yang.
Yin and yang is difficult to really define because it can mean many things but in short it is like two parts making a whole, the up and the down, the left and the right, the night and day, the power of opposites attracting. Neither is better or worse, good or bad, right or wrong. They are separate but equal. And not only that, they need each other to be complete, balanced, whole.
In Western culture there is a more dualistic thought process, more like either/or. Something is either good or bad, either right or wrong, either up or down, either yes or no. There is no yin AND yang, it’s yin OR yang.
Dualistic thinking has its place, no doubt. However, as anything it also has its limitations. I believe a lot of the nonsense we have going on surrounding gender these days is related to the inability in our culture to see the strength, even necessity, of the yin and the yang.
Feminism, for example, seeks to bring gender to the middle, to encourage women to act more masculine and to encourage men to act more feminine. The obliteration of gender seems to be the ideal, the definition of equal. But is it?
Feminism also teaches that gender is a social construct, or in other words we are not born male or female, we are taught to be male or female. This implies that male and female are learned roles, not naturally inborn ones.
Well anyone who played peek a boo in preschool quickly learned that there are indeed differences between males and females. Feminists might say these differences are only physical. But are they?
An even deeper question is: are these differences bad? Good? Do they have to be either bad or good? Could they be both? Is minimizing or eliminating them the answer? Or is celebrating them?
Personally, I think it is a mistake to try and bring gender to the middle, to seek equality in the elimination of the yin yang element to gender. Androgyny? Blech.
I think women NEED men. I think men NEED women. I think men and women are attracted to each other because they are two parts of one whole.
Of course in today’s highly charged social, legal, and political climate, embracing the yin and yang concept of gender can be quite dangerous, costly, and damaging. The stakes are incredibly high. And they are currently tilted in (surprise!) the female interest. That’s why so many men are opting out, going their own way (mtgow.) And why so many women are wondering, where have all the good men gone? The good men understand full well the current sexual marketplace (smp) and marriage marketplace (mmp) and are just not willing to take the risk or have been burned badly already and are not willing to take the risk again. If I were a man, I can’t say I would not feel the same.
I vote we bring back women being women and men being men. The yin and yang version. Two halves of one whole, neither inferior or superior, different, but both equally necessary, each with their own strengths and weaknesses that just so happen to perfectly complement the strengths and weaknesses of the other. Imagine that!?! Viva la differance!
Let those who have ears hear.
Wow
Wow to all the typos (which I have hopefully now fixed, lol) or wow to the idea? Thanks for commenting 🙂
That was a highly complimentary wow. Didn’t even notice the typos. 🙂
Oh good, bc there were lots! Lol. Men are highly underrated in my book. Thanks nickdee! imho, women should appreciate men a lot more than they currently do. I fell for all that feminist malarky myself, and have paid a high price personally for adopting that untested and highly experimental worldview. So that’s why I started this blog, to try to help other women see the flaws in that life path. I am trying to do my own little part in floating the idea that men are actually pretty darn fantastic just as they are back into the collective consciousness. ommmmm.
the idea of both good and bad is called dualism. It is very present in Western culture, especially Star Wars movies.
I find it a little problematic because it implies equality, and as a Christian I believe good will always overcome evil, there is no equal.
Feminism believes in equality, also men’s rights believe in the idea of equality.
“Two halves of one whole, neither inferior or superior, different, but both equally necessary, each with their own strengths and weaknesses that just so happen to complement the others strengths and weaknesses.” This statement would imply that you are leaning towards the idea of equality also, but perhaps more on the men’s rights side?
I do not believe in equality, but in an order. Men are the leaders of women and with that responsibility comes certain responsibilities. I believe order is present in other areas of life also.
Boss leads employee, this does not imply superior/inferior, just that one is in the position to lead and the other follow.
Parent leads child, again neither one is superior, but the order creates harmony.
Great post! Very thought worthy.
I’m not sure what the belief of androgony would be, maybe a refusal to believe in absolutes? There is no absolute truth, therefore; whatever truth I make up is truth?
Hi Jenny, thanks for commenting! I can see how it might seem from this post I am advocating duality but I do indeed believe for example, there are absolutes such as right or wrong. I also believe in a captain/co-captain model of relationships, and I also believe men are born to and should be the headship in a family, and that his doing so in no way takes away from the woman or is better than her role as a helpmate, nor do I believe her being a helpmate/co-captain is inferior to being the lead. These things just ARE, imho. And they work. They are supposed to be this. I will likely do another post on just that topic, as there is a lot I could say about it.
In short, it was only after I had my first child that I realized why women aren’t the lead — they cannot be. Raising children is incredibly time and energy intensive, and women who are pregnant or who have children are incredibly vulnerable and really *need* a man to take the lead. Him leading is a GOOD thing. I did not realize this when I was young, but learned the hard way there is wisdom to the old ways. I will work up a post on this…may be a good Father’s Day post!
If you live in the West and are feeling a bit dualistic, you can blame it on Aristotle. Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle proclaimed, loudly, that exactly one member of any contracition is true and one is false: they cannot both be true, and they cannot both be false. Likely he was not a fan of yin and yang. The philosophers Liebniz and rather recently Russell affirmed this in formal logic as the “Law of the Excluded Middle”.
By 1988 I had a math professor who math logic who found this assertion problematic. So did I, but at the time I had not heard of Lotfi Zadeh and his work dating back to 1965. Then in 1993, Bart Kosko popularized Zadeh’s work in math logic with a book called “Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic.” According to Zadeh and Kosko, you could open up the field of logic if you got rid of that pesky excluded middle law. Needless to say the yin/yang believing East embraced it wholeheartedly and began making stuff with embedded fuzzy logic control systems. The West, however, was not ready to include this new middle ground in it’s formal logic. We still believed in half full and half empty glasses, but never the twain shall meet. It’s no surprise that we also resisted the Kinsey Scale, and believed that only men were men, women were women, and straight was never gay.
The West is finally being led, kicking and screaming, into non-duality. According to fuzzy logic, the proverbial glass is a 50% member of the set of empty glasses and a 50% member of the set of full glasses. The optimist and the pessimist truly are equivalent, they just have difference in attitude. Transgendered and bisexual individuals expanded our concepts of sexual identity and sexual preference. What should have been all along treated as a spectrum anchored by endpoints is once again being treated as a spectrum of nature or of choice.
So let’s say we have our manly masculine men and our womanly feminine women as endpoints in the spectrum of gender identity. The nature of feminism, at least in theory, has been an attempt to shift women towards the center of the spectrum in terms of masculine power, while giving them the option of choosing where they wanted to stay on the spectrum in terms of social protocol and privilege (and preserve feminine power). The unintended consequences of the movement was to diminish the magnitude of masculine power while shifting men’s social protocol towards the feminine end of the spectrum. I can just see yin and yang nodding its dual head in vehement disagreement.
I’ll let folks discuss before this gets TL;DR.
In addition yin and yang does not mean there is no right or wrong, I don’t believe it is about ethics or morals or what not but about how everything can have two sides, like two sides to a coin. Personality traits, for example. My oldest daughter is shy and sensitive and artistic. These are all both good, and bad, personality traits. I love that she is shy/sensitive/artistic, and yet I worry about her too, wonder if she could or would stand up for herself if need be? So I am always trying to draw out that side of things in her, to help create balance while also celebrating the upside of her natural personality bc she’s fantastic! My youngest is in many ways the opposite, boisterous, fearless, a go getter. Also all great personality traits, and she is equally fantastic as her sister just as she is, but also these same traits can be a problem in some settings. So while I am always encouraging the oldest to take it up a notch, I am at the same time encouraging the youngest to take it down a notch! Lol. And in many ways they are a perfect pair, yin and yang, also encouraging this in each other — the youngest pushes the oldest into setting boundaries and the oldest pushes the youngest in the direction of mellowing a bit. If that makes sense?
Thanks for adding that Eccentric.
Personally I feel all this current bi sexual, homosexual, and now transsexual as other gender options is somewhat the fad du jour in many ways, rather than what you describe. Yes, there have always been a small subset of people with such orientations, and in the past people likely just didn’t stop to ponder whether say the two ladies (or men) who lived together for years as adults might be a couple and not just roommates. I don’t know that I would say they are just part of a spectrum though, as you suggest. And for example, with all of the emphasis on bi/homo/trans these days one might be led to believe they make up say 1/3 of the population when really the numbers are pretty low, maybe 6%? Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating retribution or hate or whatever, but at the same time I think there really are male and female and that male and female is “the norm.” Ying/yang. Not yin/yang/yung/yun/yan/etc. 😉
There is no absolute truth, therefore; whatever truth I make up is truth?
Very common this view today it is.
Realize how silly it is they do not.
And eccentric if I misread or misunderstood what you were saying my apologies!
Put another way, if male and female were traits on a bell curve for example, this would mean being “male” or “female” would be outliers and that there would be far more who were somewhere in the middle. In real life, that does not seem to be how it plays out. maybe more like homosexual male and homosexual female are the end points of the curve? But I am not sure that is quite right either, I don’t know that it is a spectrum. I will ponder it. I am an English major (as evidenced by the many typos, lol!), not a math major so perhaps someone else might be able to do the stats better.
Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle proclaimed, loudly, that exactly one member of any contracition is true and one is false: they cannot both be true, and they cannot both be false.
A dead white man be is.
Young women taught to consider such men not.
Pity this is.
Greek philosphers an odd lot they were..
Socrates died of an overdose of wedlock he did.
Bloom, I hadn’t got to the part about distribution along the spectrum.
The Law Of Excluded Middle worked so well for so long because it dealt with those domains whose members populated the endpoints. Men were men, women were women, and the two were attracted to each other as polar opposites. Inconvenient truths like hermaphrodites were surgically altered to fit the paradigm, and transexuality wasn’t an option. In logic, these are known as “crisp sets”. The problem is, most of the world is probably fuzzy. Is it hot today, or cool? A little of both, always.
The other distributions we are most familiar with, at least in biology, are uniform, bell curve, and reverse bell curve. Oxygen and nitrogen are pretty uniformly distributed in the atmosphere. Height, and correspondingly shoe size, follows the bell curve. More than likely the gender preferences are strongly inverse bell curve, with true bisexuals being pretty rare. I’m not sure if we’re noticing the shape of the curve more on the Kinsey scale or if in the process of violating social conditioning, people are choosing more options on the scale (coming out of the closet, for example).
Eccentric I do have to admit this is an area where I am completely out of water. I have always felt 100% female, I have always 100% been attracted (sexually) to males. I like women too, as friends, but I have never felt any urge to explore my sexuality with women. So I really have no point of reference in these matters. What others do or feel, I cannot say.
Fuzzy logic? Fuzzy thought? Bears did not invent these thigs. For us, reality is concrete.
I was thinking about the sculptor Rodin. Did he use a bear for a model?
Redpillgirlnotes,
I don’t think it’s so much a matter of duality as much a matter of who is driving the bus. Laws have been changed to the point where women are protcted to the point of being able to demand dominacnce in the relationship. The only recourse a man has is that he hopes that she doesn’t use it.
While you mentioned the Far East, I have heard that among Orthodox Christians, they see their spouses as their “Half”.
Yhanks to Spawny for his help, I now have an image!
It suits you well, Fuzzie Bear! Nice to “see” you!
I’m over the moon over this! While it may be a little silly, it’s fun!
Back to what we ere talking about. Roosh posted this today on RoK. I should warn your female readers that they need to be prepared for more cynicism with the marketplace than they can handle. It’s deep.
http://www.returnofkings.com/65305/women-in-their-prime-prefer-sex-with-damaged-men#!
Redpillgirlnotes,
To be honest. I don’t know what Roosh’s problem is. From his videos, I think that I have seen the real Roosh and there is nothing wrong with him. There was an old blogger who went by “NiceGuy” who ran into the same thing. When he became “EvilGuy”, his dates would even buy the pizza. He left the US, went to Japan, and got married there.
Something very weird is going on.
@ fuzzie, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Roosh is a “bad guy.” I have read his blog on and off for two years now. He’d been at his quest for several years by then, so I can’t speak to the early days but when I started reading I felt like I was reading lamatations — it didn’t seem like he was enjoying his supposed poosy paradise lifestyle, but was tired of it. Perhaps disgusted by being on the front line? I never did the club scene much because it all seemed so shallow, I can only imagine that night after night, especially for someone like Roosh who seems fairly introverted, intelligent, and introspective. Then he went through a really bitter period where it seemed like he hated it, but at the same time wasn’t sure what to do next. Lately he seems to be finding new direction and I am glad to see it. I think he truly is motivated to improve the plight of men, and perhaps with age he has moved beyond thinking that centers around scoring with women and is bigger and deeper than poon. Some of his field reports are downright depressing, he admits to bedding women he isn’t even interested in or attracted to. That has to do something to one’s soul. When I visited the Imperial Palace in Bejing, they told the story of one emperor who had so many concubines that he had to visit a new one every day and could not get through them all in a year. Paradise, right? Apparently not. He also lamented the sheer nameless, faceless volume of poon he was expected to slay daily whether he wanted to or not. I suppose too much of anything can eventually be too much. I wish Roosh well. He has much potential. I think he’s going to take things to a different level and I hope he finds joy in new directions.
I knew a nurse a few years back who was really great at her job. She was smart, and very knowledgeable, and calm in a crisis, and had a very pleasant disposition and good bedside manner with the patients.
She also looked to be in her mid-fifties or so and I thought she must have been a nurse for a long, long while. One day I asked her and she told me her story. She’d only been a nurse for five years. Before that, she was a CEO at an accounting firm and made about ten times the salary she made as a nurse. She explained one night she had a dream/nightmare that it was her funeral and someone was reading a list of her life accomplishments. The only thing they could say about the sum total of her life is that she helped a lot of rich people get richer. She woke up in a cold sweat and decided to change her life around. She immediately turned her life around and resigned from her job and enrolled in a nursing program, and she was extremely happy with her decision and found a lot of personal fulfillment in it (she never got married or had children).
Maybe Roosh is having his own epiphany as he approaches middle age.
Hi Liz, my insomnia buddy! Yay! 🙂 that’s a good story. I am glad she listened to her heart.
Hi Bloom. 🙂
Yeah, her story actually made quite an impression on me at the time. I’m glad she listened to her heart, too. She was one of the best nurses I’ve ever seen. She’s had a positive impact on a lot of lives.
I am sorry for you insomniacs.
The point that I was trying to make about Rossh, is that he shouldn’t have to put on an act. He says, that when he is overseas, he has to do less of it and relationships last longer, until the language barrier and not being a local come in to play. Something is wrong and that Rossh has to do so much adaptation tells me it isn’t him.
I don’t know enough about Roosh (pretty much nothing at all about Roosh, with the exception of what Rollo has mentioned recently about him changing) to answer knowledgeably, Fuzzie. I’ve lived overseas (Europe and Asia) though and there’s always pretty significant culture shock at first. People are different elsewhere and social conventions are different…living there comfortably (and to be accepted socially) often requires one to change. Some of the changes are obvious (social faux pas, for instance) others kind of come about organically.
Are you a good sleeper Fuzzie? Do you hibernate like a bear? 🙂
Just to add (re “people different”) basically everything is different. Body language, social courtesies and nuances, what’s polite to talk about, what they wear, personal space, ect.
Yes well, we Moehau Mans of the rugged Coromandel have not needed notions of yin and yang or that bloke Aristotle or any of that foreign palaver. Don’t ask me how, how but we seem to get by without them. “Crisp sets” to us are pointy brassieres sometimes worn by Moehau Mans when we impersonate our womenfolk for their amusement. None of us fool each other at all.
We have no truck with notions such as “Fuzzy Thinking”. Our society is what you foreign jokers would call “highly advanced”. We have our codpieces and chunks of oblong rock. We’re ahead of Dolphins, I would suggest.
Mrs Moehau Man (my urbane old mum) has just called out, “Do convey my congratulates to Fuzzy on his fine ursine avatar. ‘Tis no small matter to submit one’s face to the tyranny of binary detail.”
Moehau Man,
Thank you for conveying your mother’s complients. All credit belongs to Spawny. He found this excellent bear photo.
Liz,
What was remarkable about Foosh being overseas was that he could be more human and act less. It was as if foreign women were more accepting of his humanity.
He said something elsewhere that has bothered me a great deal since reading it. That when he is “gaming” a woman, the whole thime, she is putting up a wall of hostilitiy. This is while he is trying to be his charming best. Tha would strain any man’s patience.
Moe man I do envy the way you folk of the Coromandel figured out what worked long ago and have stuck with it. That’s wisdom there, for sure! Good to see you here too! Tell your mum hi from me! 🙂
@ fuzzie with all respect to Roosh, maybe he’s fishing in tainted waters? Gals in nightclubs who will go home w him that night? Ummm, yeah (akward pause)
Again Fuzzie, women in a bar setting, bitch shields are up out of self protection…
Redpillirlnotes,
I don’t know. Aaron Clarey did a video for yutube called “Death of the Nightclub”. I tend to believe him and am now wondering what is viable as a meeting place for single men and women. Nothing comes to mind.
@ fuzzie, not sure if there is one in your area but used bookstores can be a good location, or libraries, or parks. If I am in a bar, I know my guards are way up, versus say at a community education night class, or a poetry reading, or (insert place low key thinker types might be and there’s an easy conversation bridge based on common interest…) I know it’s much different for girls but maybe trying with that “abundance mentality” as if you are just kicking tires, not over thinking it that saying hi has to lead to… 😉
Redpillgirlnotes,
I don’t know. Maybe the whole point I was trying to bring up with Roosh is that with all his tools and experience, he is dissatisfied.
From another source, I have heard that younger women are approached about sixteen times a day. That’s once an hour for every hour they are awake. I think that if I go out there, bitch shields will be everywhere.
@ fuzzie even at my height I did not get 16 approaches a day. Maybe the top tier do but that’s not the average, I guarantee it.
Whatever you believe will be your reality. If Henry Ford believed his engineers a V8 was “impossible” think of all the muscle car action lost… You can’t focus on the odds! There are always exceptions to the rule. But not if they don’t believe it could be them…
@ fuzzie more on ford and his V8, when the engineers told him it could not be done, his response was to tell them to go back to the drawing board and figure it out. Eventually, sure enough they did!
“@ fuzzie even at my height I did not get 16 approaches a day. Maybe the top tier do but that’s not the average, I guarantee it.”
I don’t think ‘top tier’ would, either. Men are afraid to approach them. He must be thinking of prostitutes.
They DO get a lot of looks and indirect IOI though. Maybe that’s what the guy meant.
It’s always interesting to me when women who dress as prostitutes, but aren’t, have huge b*tch shields up. Like, “Don’t you DARE look at my breasts that I clearly have on display!!”
@ Liz re looks and IOIs yes this is true. I remember adefinetebeta guy saying on j4g how guys automatically scan a room and size up all the women all the time, and myself and other gals said that women don’t. We tend not to notice a guy until he notices us. That’s why I agree w the pua mantra approach, approach, approach. It gets a guy noticed. She may not always be attracted, but wo the approach one will never know.
@ fuzzie also Roosh is purposely NOT seeking attachment, so his lack of a sweetie is not because he’s not trying. He was dating a gal he calls Anna for a bit. Apparently she was everything he had ever wanted. But he got restless after a few months, wanted something “new” so he left her. He regretted it later, after not finding another anything close to her. He went back and tried to make it work but decided again he couldn’t commit. It’s on his blog, interesting reading. I feel for him, he’s perhaps unable to attach. Sad.
@ fuzzie: there are 5 parts, plus an epilogue, plus an update a year later… It’s not because no woman wants to commit to him: http://www.rooshv.com/anna
Also for those who have never read Roosh, especially the female readers, brace yourself. It’s pretty raw stuff. But he does bare all… One man’s world.
RPG…”@ Liz re looks and IOIs yes this is true. I remember adefinetebeta guy saying on j4g how guys automatically scan a room and size up all the women all the time, and myself and other gals said that women don’t. We tend not to notice a guy until he notices us.”
Would be different, I imagine, in a scenario where the guys are *doing* something rather than just standing there…say, playing ball or putting on a theater production.
Right or wrong?
@ David, yes. I wouldn’t say I have *never* noticed a guy who didn’t notice me first but in general I don’t think women notice EVERY guy and size them up in the way described by a commenter on this other blog. As he put it he literally sizes up EVERY woman he sees, the gal at the bank, the ladies in line at the store, the gal on the bus, etc. And as he sees them they are ranked, “5” or “2” or “9+” etc. I don’t think women do this same thing, maybe some do but I mostly don’t make eye contact with or look at men in passing or certainly don’t size them up. Also this guy, he wasn’t being “a pig” or anything, he said for him it just naturally happens…it’s part of how his brain works. I should do a post on this…I would be interested to hear what others think!
“Would be different, I imagine, in a scenario where the guys are *doing* something rather than just standing there…say, playing ball or putting on a theater production.
Right or wrong?”
Definitely right!
Especially if they are in some sort of uniform (like a soldier of fire fighter). Then they could probably just stand there. 🙂
@ David yes to your question also, women notice men in positions of leadership and/or power – whether that means they are killing it on the sports field or leading a theater production or are in a uniform. A man displaying his particular talents and honing them to his highest potential would I suppose be a form of game, would make him stand out to the women who value that particular category of guy. This is good because then she likes him for who he IS not who he is pretending to be if he employs more “parlor tricks” style game, not that it doesn’t work too a la Mystery etc.. And actually I think for Mystery, that IS who he is, the “fuzzy hat, look at me!” type of guy! That’s all about getting NOTICED. What gal could NOT notice a tall skinny guy in a ridiculous fuzzy hat? It just begs her to “come give me a hard time about my ridiculous hat!” And so she does, because women love s#it testing guys who stand out. I certainly would have to neg the tall skinny guy in a fuzzy hat, and not even because I was necessarily physically attracted to him, it’s more of an emotional attraction…a dare. And the ice is broken…it’s like he is luring them in!
I think women and men often complement each other nicely, but I’d say it’s natural for men to have certain qualities that are feminine as well as women having some qualities that are more masculine. I have a few dude-like interests and I find it refreshing when guys can feel comfortable doing things that are seen as feminine. I pretty much vote for all people embracing all the different things they find that suits themselves.
The closest Western concept is also a fairly newish one, though it borrows from older traditions. There’s the Divine Feminine coupled with the Divine Masculine, which is echoed in the cycle of life. For women, this typically takes the form of Maiden-Mother-Crone. Men have a lesser known but equal corresponding cycle of Youth-Father-Sage. Both showcase the importance of each aspect of one’s destiny: From the incredible energy and promise of a child, to the wisdom and reflection of a esteemed elder, and the life lived in between.