Such a careful essay deserves an attempt at a careful response. So here goes!
Only in certain forms of “play” might we be tempted to identify “sexuality”with “freedom”, and it’s an odd form of play that would generate a view of sex as ONLY self expression. Yet this does happen frequently enough, and when it does, it’s the kind of “play” some ancient Greeks might associate with hubris and consequent nemesis or tragedy.
Similar problems (and potential tragedies) arise from the conflation of sex with power, if “power” is the ability to control or dominate others… even if we are too slowly learning that freedom must be responsibly identified with “ability” rather than license.
Part of the human tragedy is that sexuality, though it cannot be identified with power or violence, can never be cleanly separated from them. Part of the human tragedy is that we are compelled, not only to act out our sexuality, but to explore through play (and through other means?) how sex, power, and violence interact and may be partially separated. Part of our human tragedy is that this dynamic of sexuality and violence is only a fraction of a grander, more thorny “complex”.
It’s all too tempting to see sex and violence as binary aspects of a greater compelling FORCE personified, perhaps, as a god like Eros or Dionysus (resplendent in blood and light). Obviously, as humanity, we have “been there” and “done that” (which is not to suggest we don’t persist in this type of “playful(?)” conceptualizing). There is also another aspect of power or compulsion that drives human behavior and imagination. This is nurturance.
Nurturance can be symbolized in terms of the acute, self-draining, all-consuming attention a human newborn requires from parents (usually mothers). Anyone who ever dwells on the relationships between love and sexuality is likely to be discomforted by how nurturance can morph into sexuality OR violence. Some aspects of nurturance are, after all, forms of “power over,” “control,” and “dominance” that are not always benign. A different aspect of “nurturance” is the urge “to protect,” with its obvious associations with violence. The galvanizing care and attention required by newborns is one (often ill-considered and sometimes perverse, but quite powerful) engine exploited by the anti-abortion right wing who choose to see themselves as “pro-life”. (This mode of care and attention also has many other noxious permutations.)
Nurturance can also be expressed as compassion or empathy, or even conceptualized as “love” or “grace”. One anthropological view of Christianity (an outgrowth of Second Temple Judaism and the brutality of empire) is that it was the first formal WESTERN (state sponsored and state sponsoring) “religion” to begin an attempt to give primacy to compassion as well as loving justice in how it organized society and tried to shape minds and behavior. (Buddhists may rightly smile at or object to this. Christians may rightly object to my use of the past tense.)
Abraham Heschel famously claimed at the end of his “The Prophets” that the Hebrew God should be “identified” with a loving, compassionate, merciful justice. Most of us still struggle to see how justice can be identified with compassion and empathy. Perhaps they are (like sexuality, violence, and nurturance) quite distinct, though inseparable, forces that can only be unified at a higher level of abstraction or on a plane of existence inaccessible to everyday human cognizance. Yet one way mortals CAN routinely explore how these complementary and supplementary expressions of “the life force” combine and interact (for good or ill) is through play.
Johan Huizinga, in “Homo Ludens” wrote that “play” is older than humanity and human culture, claiming that ritual, religion, language, law, and even war all have roots in formalized play. His view of “the sacred” is that it “sets aside” a realm of true creative and exploratory play with boundaries of space, time, rules, and consent.
“The arena, the card‑table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play‑grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.” — Johan Huizinga, “Homo Ludens: a study of the play element in culture”
Huizinga’s notions are also relevant to the contemporary USA when masked and anonymous “law enforcement officers” are engaged in street violence and abduction as part of a grander sweep of authoritarian repression where women are the original and perennial victims in addition to foreigners, Jews, and those found guilty or suspected of crimes because of some apparent deviance. He warned that fascism will masquerade as “games”, using jokes, symbols, pageantry, spectacle, and false myths of destiny to mask, justify, or glorify violence. (It should be noted that Huizinga was an opponent to all forms of totalitarianism who died in the Netherlands under Nazi house arrest.)
Play is always serious business, and play is also embodied in deities of every culture, not always simply in the guise of a mischievous trickster. The Greek God Dionysus (as an embodiment of masking, tragic drama, grape cultivation and wine culture) may be the prime exemplar of a majestically potent god who combines play, whimsy, justice, revenge, terror, and violence: sometimes creative and generative, other times destructive and cruel. His mythologies are linked to ideas of resurrection and the spiritual transformations resulting from the breakdown of rigid identities. His mythologies are central to Western notions of dance and ecstatic, transformative modes of music. Dionysus is also linked to a wide range of sexual expressivity that go well beyond lustful or heteronormative coupling. He is frequently portrayed as androgynous, and his liberatory festivals were viewed as being especially attractive to women in the Ancient Greek culture, which was generally patriarchal and repressive to women.
Sexuality, violence, and nurturance are all primal and prior to humanity and human culture. (So may well be “justice”.) Their disturbing tendencies to morph into one another are partially responsible for their profound abilities to invoke shame, guilt, and fear. These tendencies may be partially explained as well as be kinetically and somatically explored through “careful play,” where the word “careful” combines both seriousness of purpose as well as the caring associated with nurturant compassion and empathy. But even “careful play” can go wrong, and Huizinga tells us nothing new when he addresses issues of “false play” and cheating. We should also remember that one early (and ongoing) aspect of deadly warfare was the aim to disrupt and supplant the rituals, sacred spaces, and gods of other peoples.
The rise of fascism in the US and the current wave of authoritarian reaction across the globe requires us all to take these ideas seriously, and especially to try to conceptualize freedom not so much as license (with its limited adolescent or malignant appeal to those who seek to benefit from disruption) but as mutual enablement, activation, and development of everyone’s capacities. In the struggle against fascism we may be tempted to resort to violence or escape into privatized sensualities, but building mutual capacities in the face of treacherous power cannot be successful unless we cultivate and elevate compassion and empathy into our games, our work, and our dreams.
Thank you for this extended comment! There's a lot to think about here.
I don't identify the modern reactionary movement as strictly an enemy movement (perhaps this is obvious to most readers but I never know who is taking which morals from my stories). I do identify some strands and individuals within it as my enemies and as enemies of women's freedom more broadly. I also think it's very interesting that the movement seems aligned with extremely "clean" notions of the sacred.
I am curious if you have references related to the notion that Dionysus's "mythologies are linked to ideas of resurrection and the spiritual transformations resulting from the breakdown of rigid identities." An example that immediately comes to mind is Midas, who, when given a boon by Dionysus, asked that everything he touched turn into gold. In the version of the myth I know, Midas then regretted this wish and begged to be restored back (and his daughter restored to life after being turned to solid gold), and Dionysus told him of a place he might be able to journey to as part of his transformative reversal.
I am also curious for references on the idea that "one early (and ongoing) aspect of deadly warfare was the aim to disrupt and supplant the rituals, sacred spaces, and gods of other peoples."
For me the idea that one aspect of deadly warfare was the aim to disrupt and supplant other rituals, sacred spaces, and gods comes mainly from Robert Graves in “The White Goddess” which I read many years ago, noting at the time that he made a lot of interesting claims without providing references. The idea that this kind of symbolic warfare “continues’ is something of a conceit on my part, but… destroying the sacred spaces of rival cults is well documented in the Hebrew Bible. (Temples were also often the sites for storing treasuries in addition to precious decorations sooo…) The most famous examples are the destruction of the Jerusalem temples by the Babylonians and then the Romans (a half millennium later)
In the “White Goddess” (and other works) Graves went much further, proposing that much of Greek mythology contained resonances to indo European patriarchal Greeks and Dorians overturning and supplanting more matriarchal societies and religions with ancient sisterhoods of priestesses being raped, executed, enslaved, exiled, etc. There might be some poetic validity to Grave’s ideas and it may also well be that Indo-Europeans were more patriarchal than many of the societies they displaced, conquered, or assimilated into, but right now most anthropologists are pretty skeptical about pervasive matriarchy in any Neolithic or pre-Neolithic cultures.
As for Dionysus, he has been a fascination for me for quite some time probably because of Nietzsche , even well before I read Rene Girard’s essay “Dionysus v The Crucified.”
I’ve been interested in Greek mythology since grade school so I’m always reading stuff about it — but necessarily in a scholarly or disciplined way. I’ll put in some links, but one of the central stories is that of Zagreus, the “first” Dionysus who was (as a child) dismembered and devoured by Titan’s though Zeus was able to retrieve his heart and have it sewn into his thigh before he could find a mortal woman to bring it to term and give birth to the second Dionysus. In relevant mythology and drama Dionysus is depicted as both a newcomer to the Greek pantheon while also being one of the most primordial of the “Greek” gods. He wears masks and causes havoc.
In the real world today, we’re facing down (or being face-downed) by new iterations of fascism which must be confronted, resisted, refuted, and undermined with visions of the future that are not committed to generating enemies and criminals but to helping everyone develop their capacities which include the capacity to understand the needs and rights of others. Maybe some fascists would choose to be my enemies and doubtless some of them are criminals, but I refuse to say any human being is evil. All of us have done evil things, sometimes even things that are excruciatingly difficult to reconcile with or forgive, but the word “evil” applies to an act or a consequence, not a person.
I also feel it is possible for a traumatized human to double down so many times that they become committed to a course of transgression that may involve multiple larcenies, swindles, falsehoods, assaults and even multiple rapes and murders. I still would not call that person “evil” and I don’t support the death penalty — and believe that incarceration (when necessary) must incorporate every effort to preserve and protect human dignity (a fiction, I suppose) even in the face of an individual who rejects it.
I related to it having been sorta stuck between the left and right myself for a very long time. The limited number of political options is at least partly due to our two-party system where if you're not helping one side you are at least half helping the other. It's really unfortunate, especially when they're constantly realigning in ways that would be very comical if the stakes weren't so high (I remember when natural eating and suspicion of corporate food manipulation was something the *left* did, and when the right was for free trade and the left for free speech).
But to answer your original question, I think when you get down to it old-school patriarchy produces a lot of kids, and that gives patriarchal societies a huge advantage in terms of having more soldiers and workers. Evolution favors the model that leaves the most offspring--it doesn't have to be *pleasant* for the people involved.
No reason power couldn't have grace, though. You probably know that better than most.
Aella's got some interesting data suggesting kink is its own orientation, FWIW.
Thanks for the link, very interesting. I have an old post under my Clarisse Thorn pseudonym, discussing BDSM as a sexual orientation, and the post also discusses what I called “complications of the orientation model,” ie the way the idea of sexual orientation can be weird and problematic. The post was popular and eventually got reprinted in an Oxford anthology about sexuality, so I guess a lot of people think about this question!
Aella’s data is often very interesting. I think her samples are likely skewed, but this is the sort of question I’d expect her surveys to be better able to illuminate (vs. questions about say, what is common among normies).
I haven’t had sex in years for various reasons, and in the meantime I suspect I’ve experienced some major changes in style due to very large cognitive shifts in the meantime, but I am not sure since I haven’t done it in a while. Very curious to see what happens for me when I finally feel like I’ve connected with the right partner(s).
Edit: almost forgot to address the question of patriarchy being more fertile in sheer numbers of children! I’m not sure about that, but I also haven’t tried to figure out the answer in an organized way. I’ll think about it more… I wonder where to start trying to answer that? It feels like the sort of question where there will never be a final answer but we can probably collect clues.
The human animal is what it is, people slap words on it and sometimes they fit and sometimes they don't.
I found the article (searched my Kindle copy of your book). So...sometimes it's an orientation and sometimes it isn't...and if it isn't does that remove the value of the 'born this way' argument for allowing it? You wind up arguing that as long as it's between consenting adults it doesn't really matter if it's an orientation or not. From what I can see some reactionary feminists (Louise Perry, Mary Harrington) are starting to attack the value of consent as primary determinant of whether something is OK or not, and I think radical feminists always were suspicious of it anyway.
Sorry to hear that, though of course it's none of an anonymous dude on the Internet's business what you or don't do. Good luck either way! I'm actually thinking about going monk due to what I believe will be rising reputational and legal risks associated with kink.
There seems to be quite a bit of evidence patriarchy increases the number of children:
Given you're talking about the difference between 2 and 7 children that's hardly surprising!
It's a little trickier to see to what extent this holds in rich countries (the degree of patriarchy becomes harder to define), but the relationship supposedly reverses, with more equality increasing the birthrate--of course, that's exactly what the academics and media people want to believe, but:
A lot of the countries at the bottom of the fertility list seem to be the relatively patriarchal East Asian countries...but the famously equal Scandinavians don't do that much better.
OK, let's go to OECD (all the rich countries) and look at 2021, the last year they've got lots of data:
Again at the bottom you've got East Asia, as well as the relatively unequal (for rich countries) Southern Europeans (Spain, Italy, Portugal)...but on top (apart from Israel, which is specifically trying to make up for the Holocaust) you've got Czechia, France, Mexico, Iceland, Denmark, Ireland, Turkiye, and Australia, which don't seem to have much in common. (Only Israel is over replacement.) So...eh...maybe? I guess I'd sum it up by saying patriarchy increases fertility in poor countries, but in rich countries it's hard to tell either way and other factors are probably more important.
It feels like there are a bunch of questions all kind of jumbled together. I'll try and parse it out and answer each in turn.
1. Is it possible to be a conservative and a woman?
Of course. Millions of examples in the most recent election. Substantially the entire pro life community is female led. OP herself seems to be one.
2: Why do men seek to control women in patriarchal societies (re: the Taliban).
For the obvious reason. Slaves are convenient to own. Having target groups lets you ally with others without fear of being enslaved yourself, so those slaves will typically share an identifying trait. Gender works.
3. Why do the men and woman from 1 (American conservatives) tolerate those who aspire to be the men in 2 (American misogynists).
Politics in a zero sum game is merciless. Every enemy of the left must find a home on the right and vice versa. If the Left valorized hair length the right would have more bald people. Homophobes push gays left. Pussy hat rallies drive men right.
"One reason was that I wanted to preserve — to conserve — the world that made it possible for me to be that free-spirited woman." - beautiful.
Such a careful essay deserves an attempt at a careful response. So here goes!
Only in certain forms of “play” might we be tempted to identify “sexuality”with “freedom”, and it’s an odd form of play that would generate a view of sex as ONLY self expression. Yet this does happen frequently enough, and when it does, it’s the kind of “play” some ancient Greeks might associate with hubris and consequent nemesis or tragedy.
Similar problems (and potential tragedies) arise from the conflation of sex with power, if “power” is the ability to control or dominate others… even if we are too slowly learning that freedom must be responsibly identified with “ability” rather than license.
Part of the human tragedy is that sexuality, though it cannot be identified with power or violence, can never be cleanly separated from them. Part of the human tragedy is that we are compelled, not only to act out our sexuality, but to explore through play (and through other means?) how sex, power, and violence interact and may be partially separated. Part of our human tragedy is that this dynamic of sexuality and violence is only a fraction of a grander, more thorny “complex”.
It’s all too tempting to see sex and violence as binary aspects of a greater compelling FORCE personified, perhaps, as a god like Eros or Dionysus (resplendent in blood and light). Obviously, as humanity, we have “been there” and “done that” (which is not to suggest we don’t persist in this type of “playful(?)” conceptualizing). There is also another aspect of power or compulsion that drives human behavior and imagination. This is nurturance.
Nurturance can be symbolized in terms of the acute, self-draining, all-consuming attention a human newborn requires from parents (usually mothers). Anyone who ever dwells on the relationships between love and sexuality is likely to be discomforted by how nurturance can morph into sexuality OR violence. Some aspects of nurturance are, after all, forms of “power over,” “control,” and “dominance” that are not always benign. A different aspect of “nurturance” is the urge “to protect,” with its obvious associations with violence. The galvanizing care and attention required by newborns is one (often ill-considered and sometimes perverse, but quite powerful) engine exploited by the anti-abortion right wing who choose to see themselves as “pro-life”. (This mode of care and attention also has many other noxious permutations.)
Nurturance can also be expressed as compassion or empathy, or even conceptualized as “love” or “grace”. One anthropological view of Christianity (an outgrowth of Second Temple Judaism and the brutality of empire) is that it was the first formal WESTERN (state sponsored and state sponsoring) “religion” to begin an attempt to give primacy to compassion as well as loving justice in how it organized society and tried to shape minds and behavior. (Buddhists may rightly smile at or object to this. Christians may rightly object to my use of the past tense.)
Abraham Heschel famously claimed at the end of his “The Prophets” that the Hebrew God should be “identified” with a loving, compassionate, merciful justice. Most of us still struggle to see how justice can be identified with compassion and empathy. Perhaps they are (like sexuality, violence, and nurturance) quite distinct, though inseparable, forces that can only be unified at a higher level of abstraction or on a plane of existence inaccessible to everyday human cognizance. Yet one way mortals CAN routinely explore how these complementary and supplementary expressions of “the life force” combine and interact (for good or ill) is through play.
Johan Huizinga, in “Homo Ludens” wrote that “play” is older than humanity and human culture, claiming that ritual, religion, language, law, and even war all have roots in formalized play. His view of “the sacred” is that it “sets aside” a realm of true creative and exploratory play with boundaries of space, time, rules, and consent.
“The arena, the card‑table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play‑grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.” — Johan Huizinga, “Homo Ludens: a study of the play element in culture”
https://merton.bellarmine.edu/files/original/b0899cfad820ab8ad7033952b7a022ba1d7cab9d.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Huizinga’s notions are also relevant to the contemporary USA when masked and anonymous “law enforcement officers” are engaged in street violence and abduction as part of a grander sweep of authoritarian repression where women are the original and perennial victims in addition to foreigners, Jews, and those found guilty or suspected of crimes because of some apparent deviance. He warned that fascism will masquerade as “games”, using jokes, symbols, pageantry, spectacle, and false myths of destiny to mask, justify, or glorify violence. (It should be noted that Huizinga was an opponent to all forms of totalitarianism who died in the Netherlands under Nazi house arrest.)
Play is always serious business, and play is also embodied in deities of every culture, not always simply in the guise of a mischievous trickster. The Greek God Dionysus (as an embodiment of masking, tragic drama, grape cultivation and wine culture) may be the prime exemplar of a majestically potent god who combines play, whimsy, justice, revenge, terror, and violence: sometimes creative and generative, other times destructive and cruel. His mythologies are linked to ideas of resurrection and the spiritual transformations resulting from the breakdown of rigid identities. His mythologies are central to Western notions of dance and ecstatic, transformative modes of music. Dionysus is also linked to a wide range of sexual expressivity that go well beyond lustful or heteronormative coupling. He is frequently portrayed as androgynous, and his liberatory festivals were viewed as being especially attractive to women in the Ancient Greek culture, which was generally patriarchal and repressive to women.
Sexuality, violence, and nurturance are all primal and prior to humanity and human culture. (So may well be “justice”.) Their disturbing tendencies to morph into one another are partially responsible for their profound abilities to invoke shame, guilt, and fear. These tendencies may be partially explained as well as be kinetically and somatically explored through “careful play,” where the word “careful” combines both seriousness of purpose as well as the caring associated with nurturant compassion and empathy. But even “careful play” can go wrong, and Huizinga tells us nothing new when he addresses issues of “false play” and cheating. We should also remember that one early (and ongoing) aspect of deadly warfare was the aim to disrupt and supplant the rituals, sacred spaces, and gods of other peoples.
The rise of fascism in the US and the current wave of authoritarian reaction across the globe requires us all to take these ideas seriously, and especially to try to conceptualize freedom not so much as license (with its limited adolescent or malignant appeal to those who seek to benefit from disruption) but as mutual enablement, activation, and development of everyone’s capacities. In the struggle against fascism we may be tempted to resort to violence or escape into privatized sensualities, but building mutual capacities in the face of treacherous power cannot be successful unless we cultivate and elevate compassion and empathy into our games, our work, and our dreams.
Thank you for this extended comment! There's a lot to think about here.
I don't identify the modern reactionary movement as strictly an enemy movement (perhaps this is obvious to most readers but I never know who is taking which morals from my stories). I do identify some strands and individuals within it as my enemies and as enemies of women's freedom more broadly. I also think it's very interesting that the movement seems aligned with extremely "clean" notions of the sacred.
I am curious if you have references related to the notion that Dionysus's "mythologies are linked to ideas of resurrection and the spiritual transformations resulting from the breakdown of rigid identities." An example that immediately comes to mind is Midas, who, when given a boon by Dionysus, asked that everything he touched turn into gold. In the version of the myth I know, Midas then regretted this wish and begged to be restored back (and his daughter restored to life after being turned to solid gold), and Dionysus told him of a place he might be able to journey to as part of his transformative reversal.
I am also curious for references on the idea that "one early (and ongoing) aspect of deadly warfare was the aim to disrupt and supplant the rituals, sacred spaces, and gods of other peoples."
For me the idea that one aspect of deadly warfare was the aim to disrupt and supplant other rituals, sacred spaces, and gods comes mainly from Robert Graves in “The White Goddess” which I read many years ago, noting at the time that he made a lot of interesting claims without providing references. The idea that this kind of symbolic warfare “continues’ is something of a conceit on my part, but… destroying the sacred spaces of rival cults is well documented in the Hebrew Bible. (Temples were also often the sites for storing treasuries in addition to precious decorations sooo…) The most famous examples are the destruction of the Jerusalem temples by the Babylonians and then the Romans (a half millennium later)
In the “White Goddess” (and other works) Graves went much further, proposing that much of Greek mythology contained resonances to indo European patriarchal Greeks and Dorians overturning and supplanting more matriarchal societies and religions with ancient sisterhoods of priestesses being raped, executed, enslaved, exiled, etc. There might be some poetic validity to Grave’s ideas and it may also well be that Indo-Europeans were more patriarchal than many of the societies they displaced, conquered, or assimilated into, but right now most anthropologists are pretty skeptical about pervasive matriarchy in any Neolithic or pre-Neolithic cultures.
As for Dionysus, he has been a fascination for me for quite some time probably because of Nietzsche , even well before I read Rene Girard’s essay “Dionysus v The Crucified.”
I’ve been interested in Greek mythology since grade school so I’m always reading stuff about it — but necessarily in a scholarly or disciplined way. I’ll put in some links, but one of the central stories is that of Zagreus, the “first” Dionysus who was (as a child) dismembered and devoured by Titan’s though Zeus was able to retrieve his heart and have it sewn into his thigh before he could find a mortal woman to bring it to term and give birth to the second Dionysus. In relevant mythology and drama Dionysus is depicted as both a newcomer to the Greek pantheon while also being one of the most primordial of the “Greek” gods. He wears masks and causes havoc.
Nietzsche is the first go-to:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51356
Then Girard:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2905504?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
There’s also lots of stuff like this on the web:
https://www.electryone.gr/wp-content/uploads/4.-M.-Kosma-2021-7.2.-pp.-50-66.pdf
Or
https://lost-history.com/dionysus.php
I like this one:
https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-bacchae/themes/disguise-deception-and-identity
And Wikipedia is pretty comprehensive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagreus
In the real world today, we’re facing down (or being face-downed) by new iterations of fascism which must be confronted, resisted, refuted, and undermined with visions of the future that are not committed to generating enemies and criminals but to helping everyone develop their capacities which include the capacity to understand the needs and rights of others. Maybe some fascists would choose to be my enemies and doubtless some of them are criminals, but I refuse to say any human being is evil. All of us have done evil things, sometimes even things that are excruciatingly difficult to reconcile with or forgive, but the word “evil” applies to an act or a consequence, not a person.
I also feel it is possible for a traumatized human to double down so many times that they become committed to a course of transgression that may involve multiple larcenies, swindles, falsehoods, assaults and even multiple rapes and murders. I still would not call that person “evil” and I don’t support the death penalty — and believe that incarceration (when necessary) must incorporate every effort to preserve and protect human dignity (a fiction, I suppose) even in the face of an individual who rejects it.
Just ran into this. Very well written.
I related to it having been sorta stuck between the left and right myself for a very long time. The limited number of political options is at least partly due to our two-party system where if you're not helping one side you are at least half helping the other. It's really unfortunate, especially when they're constantly realigning in ways that would be very comical if the stakes weren't so high (I remember when natural eating and suspicion of corporate food manipulation was something the *left* did, and when the right was for free trade and the left for free speech).
But to answer your original question, I think when you get down to it old-school patriarchy produces a lot of kids, and that gives patriarchal societies a huge advantage in terms of having more soldiers and workers. Evolution favors the model that leaves the most offspring--it doesn't have to be *pleasant* for the people involved.
No reason power couldn't have grace, though. You probably know that better than most.
Aella's got some interesting data suggesting kink is its own orientation, FWIW.
https://aella.substack.com/p/the-other-sexual-orientation
Thanks for the link, very interesting. I have an old post under my Clarisse Thorn pseudonym, discussing BDSM as a sexual orientation, and the post also discusses what I called “complications of the orientation model,” ie the way the idea of sexual orientation can be weird and problematic. The post was popular and eventually got reprinted in an Oxford anthology about sexuality, so I guess a lot of people think about this question!
Aella’s data is often very interesting. I think her samples are likely skewed, but this is the sort of question I’d expect her surveys to be better able to illuminate (vs. questions about say, what is common among normies).
I haven’t had sex in years for various reasons, and in the meantime I suspect I’ve experienced some major changes in style due to very large cognitive shifts in the meantime, but I am not sure since I haven’t done it in a while. Very curious to see what happens for me when I finally feel like I’ve connected with the right partner(s).
Edit: almost forgot to address the question of patriarchy being more fertile in sheer numbers of children! I’m not sure about that, but I also haven’t tried to figure out the answer in an organized way. I’ll think about it more… I wonder where to start trying to answer that? It feels like the sort of question where there will never be a final answer but we can probably collect clues.
The human animal is what it is, people slap words on it and sometimes they fit and sometimes they don't.
I found the article (searched my Kindle copy of your book). So...sometimes it's an orientation and sometimes it isn't...and if it isn't does that remove the value of the 'born this way' argument for allowing it? You wind up arguing that as long as it's between consenting adults it doesn't really matter if it's an orientation or not. From what I can see some reactionary feminists (Louise Perry, Mary Harrington) are starting to attack the value of consent as primary determinant of whether something is OK or not, and I think radical feminists always were suspicious of it anyway.
Sorry to hear that, though of course it's none of an anonymous dude on the Internet's business what you or don't do. Good luck either way! I'm actually thinking about going monk due to what I believe will be rising reputational and legal risks associated with kink.
There seems to be quite a bit of evidence patriarchy increases the number of children:
https://www.populationmedia.org/the-latest/patriarchy-overpopulation
At the very least increasing women's educational attainment depresses fertility:
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2011/01/27/future-of-the-global-muslim-population-related-factors/
Given you're talking about the difference between 2 and 7 children that's hardly surprising!
It's a little trickier to see to what extent this holds in rich countries (the degree of patriarchy becomes harder to define), but the relationship supposedly reverses, with more equality increasing the birthrate--of course, that's exactly what the academics and media people want to believe, but:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
A lot of the countries at the bottom of the fertility list seem to be the relatively patriarchal East Asian countries...but the famously equal Scandinavians don't do that much better.
OK, let's go to OECD (all the rich countries) and look at 2021, the last year they've got lots of data:
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/fertility-rates.html?oecdcontrol-00b22b2429-var3=2021
Again at the bottom you've got East Asia, as well as the relatively unequal (for rich countries) Southern Europeans (Spain, Italy, Portugal)...but on top (apart from Israel, which is specifically trying to make up for the Holocaust) you've got Czechia, France, Mexico, Iceland, Denmark, Ireland, Turkiye, and Australia, which don't seem to have much in common. (Only Israel is over replacement.) So...eh...maybe? I guess I'd sum it up by saying patriarchy increases fertility in poor countries, but in rich countries it's hard to tell either way and other factors are probably more important.
It feels like there are a bunch of questions all kind of jumbled together. I'll try and parse it out and answer each in turn.
1. Is it possible to be a conservative and a woman?
Of course. Millions of examples in the most recent election. Substantially the entire pro life community is female led. OP herself seems to be one.
2: Why do men seek to control women in patriarchal societies (re: the Taliban).
For the obvious reason. Slaves are convenient to own. Having target groups lets you ally with others without fear of being enslaved yourself, so those slaves will typically share an identifying trait. Gender works.
3. Why do the men and woman from 1 (American conservatives) tolerate those who aspire to be the men in 2 (American misogynists).
Politics in a zero sum game is merciless. Every enemy of the left must find a home on the right and vice versa. If the Left valorized hair length the right would have more bald people. Homophobes push gays left. Pussy hat rallies drive men right.
I don’t identify as a conservative and am definitely not “pro-life” (by which I mean that I support legal, safe abortion).