Have you ever noticed there is a PC taboo (sometimes explicitly stated, sometimes more explicit) over the phrase ‘strong woman?’
Let’s begin with a satirical parody of pompous highbrow professor-speak, just for the fun of it. Unlike our elders and better in the Olympian academy, I will actually take the liberty of translating the following sentence into common sense, plain English terms.
This joyless, puritanical, censorious spirit is rooted in the postmodern fetish for ‘immanence,’ i.e. the desire to remain trapped in one’s own uncultivated, everyday immediacy.
Excuse the parody of pompous Parisian intellectualism!
What I really mean, in plain English (something to which pretentious Social Justice Warriors are deeply averse), is that any attempt to improve and better oneself is somehow an ‘abusive’ response to the ‘emotional blackmail’ of the sinister, conspiratorial power structures of this world.
Thus it is that any cultivation, any growth and maturity, or more pompously, any kind of ‘transcendence’ of one’s less perfect self, is frowned upon, and characterized, in all cases, without exception or regard for context, as a form of abuse.
I call this toxic immanence. You can see it in the Neurodiversity fetish (an almost ‘literal’ pun). The Neurodiversity ideology teaches those with certain disabilities or mental illnesses that we are perfect, pristine, cutesy little special snowflakes just as we are.hat’s all fine, until you find out that you are doomed to starvation, as your lack of basic social skills has finally made you unemployable.
Postmodernism kills. This is not a metaphor.
And you can see it also in the idea that to value strong women is to devalue others.
In other words, to commend someone who has perdured and struggled on through the utter barbarism of what men often are often inclined to cruelly inflict upon women, is to rob women who are deemed, by some, to have been less successful.
This is the kind of dog-in-the-manger attitude of ‘ressentiment,’ typical both to humanitarian idealism and its mutant postmodernist bastardization, whereby pulling down is superior to raising up.
Everybody knows the scorecard here.
Dr King was a ‘mere petit-bourgeois conformist,’ Mill was a hypocrite, Wollstonecraft an elitist.
On the other hand, the new heroes of this ‘Revaluation of Liberal Values’ are Lenin, or Malcolm X, or the No-Platformers, or Faux-Left Antisemites.
Why rise up, or help others rise, when you can pull down instead?
As Max Scheler justly notes in his book ‘Ressentiment,’ the problem is not what one does, but who one is. The hatred is existential or ‘ontological.’
Or again, in plain English, the hatred pertains to you as an entity, a person; and not your actions, not to anything you’ve done.
Those who hate ‘strong women’ do not hate the actions of strong women. They hate them for who they are, independently of what they do.
The excuse that they are criticizing sexism or even misogyny will not fool those who are wary.
It is true that men idealize women, and that this is a subtle trap. A woman with dignity and pride will feel great distress at the ‘passive aggressive’ violence of the man who places her above her, only to place her infinitely below her.
But it does not follow from this that the counterfeit egalitarianism of shaming ‘strong women’ is right either.
Slavoj Zizek once appealed to an interesting folk tale. I do not remember exactly what he said, or even the precise context. But endeavoring to roughly characterize it, I will say this:
It seems that some would rather have one less cow and their neighbour have two less, than to have one cow more themselves and their neighbour have two more.
This is the kind of postmodern ressentiment, the kind of illiberal social justice spirit, underlying the hatred of strong women.
And it is a truly toxic phenomenon.
Shaming strong women is not a sign of strength.
If women are to be equal to men, then they must be able to compete as equals; and not reduced to a formless blob of nondescript Womanhood-in-General.
True gender equality discriminates and discerns.
There is no equality between women and men, without inequality between women.
I’ll leave you with that unsettling thought.
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Image attribution:
By Photography by F. Hartmann in Basel – https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/04/10/0b/04100baec90c105729b47f33c371476b.jpg, Public Domain, Link
