Woman is the luckier sex for two reasons. Without shame we can indulge in a good cry and we have the babies.
Tears do help, no matter what the cynics say. The resilience and longer life of women probably are due to our ability to clear supercharged emotional atmosphere with occasional violent storms.
The symptoms follow a pattern. For days you feel low. You mope, and worry over nothing. Then some little upset comes and you hit bottom. Waves of misery wash over you. They flatten you out.
Then grief grips your soul and sobs rack your body. When ended it’s as if you were born again. The good old “I’m alive” feeling floods your being. You wash your face, and powder your nose and for the next six months the family can expect reasonable behavior from you. Such outbursts are better than a bottle of drug store tonic for feminine nerves.
Men, poor things, can’t have such a release for fear of becoming softies. Instead, they indulge in profanity, which is a poor substitute for tears.
They mention their great achievements with pride, but not one ever emerged from months of discomfort and pain, clasping a live baby.
Life’s high moments are rare and brief. And God saved the best for us.
“Nonsense,” I can hear the realists say. “Babies are a commonplace biological fact.” Which proves that they talk nonsense, for every woman knows that her baby is a miracle made of Heaven-spun dreams.
Mrs. Walter Ferguson, “Reserved for women”, The Pittsburgh Press, 1946-09-17.
December 18, 2025
QotD: Reserved for women
December 14, 2025
Andrea Dworkin – feminism’s anti-sex evangelist
On her Substack, Janice Fiamengo examines the life and work of Andrea Dworkin, whose influence on modern feminism is still quite strong, twenty years after her death:
A friend wrote a couple of days ago to say that he had seen shiny new copies of works by feminist author Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) in Munro’s Books, one of Canada’s premier independent bookstores. One of the books was positioned on a shelf with the cover facing out to indicate that it was being showcased.
It is both shocking and unsurprising that Picador Books decided to reprint three of Dworkin’s texts in the past year, calling her a “prescient and visionary writer” who was “ahead of her time”. Anti-male paranoia is a sanctioned, cultivated taste more popular now, perhaps, than ever before, and Andrea Dworkin is its most notorious propagandist.
Known for her physical bulk, impassioned rhetoric, unkempt hair, and lesbian-identified overalls, Dworkin was a feminist icon in the 1980s and 90s, loved and hated in equal measure. No one did more to outline and consolidate the modern feminist understanding of sex than she, writing on the subject obsessively and with unparalleled fervor in books with titles such as Woman Hating (1974) and Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981). The MeToo movement is almost unimaginable without the influence of Dworkin’s pronouncements.
Like other radical feminists, Dworkin wrote about rape, pornography, and prostitution, but her special focus was the degradation for women of sex itself: regular sex, the commonly accepted, normalized indignity that men allegedly inflict on women every day. Tempering her words in the white-heat of her revulsion, Dworkin became feminism’s anti-sex evangelist.
Sex, Dworkin believed, embodied nothing less than men’s hatred of everything female: “Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women” (p. 175). This is the thesis of her most representative book, Intercourse, which was first published in 1987 when Dworkin was 41 years old. Dworkin’s characterization of heterosexual sex as the ultimate enactment of misogyny has had an enduring impact on North American culture.
Intercourse set out to illuminate, through select readings of literary texts, what Dworkin believed to be a constant of male culture: the “hatred of women, unexplained, undiagnosed, mostly unacknowledged, that pervades sexual practice and sexual passion” (pp. 175-76). The phrase she most often used in the book to refer to intercourse was “the fuck”, which was meant to signify the raw dehumanization that supposedly characterized it.
Dworkin nominated herself the expert on male contempt for women because she had been its victim. “Specifically, am I saying that I know more than men about fucking?” she asked defiantly in the book’s preface, and answered, “Yes, I am […] the way anyone used knows the user” (p. xxxi).
While she also claimed in the preface that the book “does not say that all men are rapists or that all intercourse is rape” (p. xxxii), she does essentially say that, if not in quite those words. As she asserted only a page after the denial, “Intercourse conveys […] what it means that men — and now boys — feel entitled to come into the privacy of a woman’s body in a context of inequality” (p. xxxiv).
In another segment, she clarified that most, even the vast majority, of men were sexually abusive. She charged that men object to feminist criticism of pornography and prostitution because “So many men use these ignoble routes of access and domination to get laid,” that “without them the number of fucks would so significantly decrease that men might nearly be chaste” (p. 61). The implication was that men who objected to her arguments about the omnipresence of sexual exploitation were themselves sexual abusers who didn’t like the thought of their exploitation being curtailed.
This was the Dworkin who made feminists swoon with admiration: bombastic, hyperbolic, and incandescent with accusatory rage.
A Fire Upon The Deep and the Identity Gradient
Feral Historian
Published 8 Aug 2025Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep would take a two-hour video to completely dissect. This is not that video. Instead, I’m looking just at the recurring ideas of collective identity and distributed consciousness. And all without a single mention of Skroderiders.
This one has been sitting around for about a year, due to lack of b-roll to cover the numerous jumpcuts due to my rambling and the rather persistent flies on that particular day. It’s a little rough, but let’s just roll with it.
(more…)
December 11, 2025
Your words are violence to an astounding 91% of US college students surveyed
J.D. Tuccille presents some depressing poll results from American college students who have massively bought into the illogical position that words can be the same as actual violence:
Of all the stupid ideas that have emerged in recent years, there may be none worse than the insistence that unwelcome words are the same as violence. This false perception equates physical acts that can injure or kill people with disagreements and insults that might cause hurt feelings and potentially justifies responding to the latter with the former. After all, if words are violence, why not rebut a verbal sparring partner with an actual punch? Unfortunately, the idea is embedded on college campuses where a majority of undergraduate students agree that words and violence can be the same thing.
Most Believe Words Can Be Violence
“Ninety one percent of undergraduate students believe that words can be violence, according to a new poll by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression [FIRE] and College Pulse”, FIRE announced last week. “The survey’s findings are especially startling coming in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination — an extreme and tragic example of the sharp difference between words and violence.”
The survey posed questions about speech and political violence to undergraduate students at Utah Valley University, where Kirk was murdered, and at colleges elsewhere — 2,028 students overall. FIRE and College Pulse compared the student responses to those of members of the general public who were separately polled.
Specifically, one question asked how much “words can be violence” described respondents’ thoughts. Twenty-two percent of college undergraduates answered that the sentiment “describes my thoughts completely”, 25 percent said it “mostly” described their thoughts, 28 percent put it at “somewhat”, and 15 percent answered “slightly”. Only 9 percent answered that the “words can be violence” sentiment “does not describe my thoughts at all”.
It’s difficult to get too worked up about those who “slightly” believe words can be violence, but that still leaves us at 75 percent of the student population. And almost half of students “completely” or “mostly” see words and violence as essentially the same thing. That’s a lot of young people who struggle to distinguish between an unwelcome expression and a punch to the nose.
Depressingly, 34 percent of the general public “completely” or “mostly” agree. Fifty-nine percent at least “somewhat” believe words can be violence.
In 2017, when the conflation of words and violence was relatively new, Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychology professor, worried that the false equivalence fed into the simmering mental health crisis among young people. He and FIRE President Greg Lukianoff wrote in The Atlantic that “growing numbers of college students have become less able to cope with the challenges of campus life, including offensive ideas, insensitive professors, and rude or even racist and sexist peers” and that the rise in mental health issues “is better understood as a crisis of resilience”.
Conflating Words and Violence Encourages Violence
Telling young people who haven’t been raised to be resilient and to deal with the certainty of encountering debate, disagreement, and rude or hateful expressions in an intellectually and ideologically diverse world plays into problems with anxiety and depression. It teaches that the world is more dangerous than it actually is rather than a place that requires a certain degree of toughness. Worse, if words are violence it implies that responding “in kind” is justified.
“At a time of rapidly rising political polarization in America, it helps a small subset of that generation justify political violence,” Haidt and Lukianoff added.
QotD: Being a bore
My problem is that I have two modes of socializing: to be silent or boring. I cannot make small talk, for when I try to do so my words turn to dust in my mouth, as it were, before I have even uttered them. I can talk only on matters of impersonal interest.
My problem is that I am a serial monomaniac, with one subject occupying the foreground of my mind for up to a few months. In the midst of my enthusiasm, I cannot imagine that other people are not as fascinated by the subject as I. The subject of my monomanias are various: Haitian history; the disappearance of the cuckoo from the English countryside; the life of Caradoc Evans, the Welsh writer of the early part of the 20th century; etc. I never stick with anything long enough to be a scholar of it.
When my wife kicks me under the table, it is usually in mid-anecdote. I cannot stop straightaway, abruptly, for that would look peculiar, as if I were having a fit or a stroke. But I have to bring it to a quicker end than I had anticipated, omitting details that to me had seemed choice and amusing. Often, I have to admit, my wife has heard them before.
Of course, I don’t agree that I am being, or have ever been, boring. Bores don’t know that they are boring, just as people with halitosis don’t know that their breath smells. I look at the people around the dinner table and think they are glued to what I am saying. The fact that I don’t really give them any alternative doesn’t occur to me. How, in any case, could anyone be uninterested in the story of le Roi Christophe who built, or had built, one of the wonders of the world, La Citadelle, near Cap-Haitien, or of how people threw bricks through Caradoc Evans’ windows, so disgusted were they by his literary portrayal of his countrymen? In those days, literature was important.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Full Bore”, Taki’s Magazine, 2020-05-29.
December 7, 2025
The great military leaders of the past have been … quirky
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @InfantryDort considers the clear evidence that most of the greatest generals of history were, at the very least, eccentric:
Most real post I’ve seen all month.
Yes, the process weeds them out.
Until all that remains is some corporatized astroturfed version of … whatever.
Military commanders in the modern era MUST lack personal audacity to some degree. Almost without exception.
Because audacity is “dangerous”. It can be unpredictable. And this is a bad thing in a world obsessed with safety and predictability.
But a military without it, is just one on anti-depressants. You never feel the highest highs or the lowest lows.
You just … exist, in inspirational purgatory.
So you will never see a Napoleon, Patton, Allen, or Sherman ever again.
Their modern equivalents mostly got out as captains because the experience they were promised from history, is now covered in bubble wrap. Wearing a bib and a football helmet.
The modern military is devoid of both victory and defeat. A victory you aren’t allowed to win. A defeat you can explain away. Much of it is due to the American people themselves, and their disdain for violence. At least violence against what sane people classify as enemies.
We have a chance to take it back. A chance to return to glorious and sometimes unhinged leadership. But the rot is thick. And the Empire Strikes Back daily.
My infinite gratitude, and the gratitude of a fawning nation, will rest with those who display the force of will to make it happen.
And crush the corporatization of military leadership once and for all.
The world awaits. And one wonders if our country has the appetite for it all, short of an existential crisis in a war of national survival.
Update, 8 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
December 5, 2025
“I can stop [buying books] anytime. It’s not an addiction!”
In The Freeman, Nichole James resists the notion that her bookbuying habit is an addiction (because she could stop anytime she wants, unlike addicts who clearly can’t ever stop):
A small portion of my own book hoard. These shelves at least have a bit of commonality to them, unlike a lot of other shelves I could share.
There are people who collect sensible things, like pensions or matching dining chairs. Then there are people like me, who collect books and then build new shelves to hold the books, then buy more books to fill the shelves, then realize the house is now 70% paper.
I have always loved books. The magical lands they open up, the lives you try on for a few hundred pages. Places you cannot reach with a passport and an airline ticket. Narnia, Hogwarts, Mordor, and the parts of Sydney where even Google Maps looks nervous. The whole lot. Some people fall in love with the smell. Others with the weight of someone’s thoughts in their hands. I fall in love with all of that and then apparently forget that my house has finite wall space.
Which is why, as I call the carpenter for “just one more bookshelf”, a tiny voice in my head wonders if this is still charming or if I now qualify for some kind of diagnosis.
As it turns out, I might. The diagnosis even has a very fancy Greek name: bibliomania.
Back in the 19th century, an English cleric called Thomas Frognall Dibdin wrote a whole book called Bibliomania, or, Book Madness. He gleefully catalogued the symptoms of the afflicted: obsession with first editions, uncut pages, vellum, rare bindings, and the sort of Moroccan leather that smells faintly of money and self-satisfaction. It was a time when collectors bid like lunatics at auctions, paid “fancy prices”, and were generally regarded as slightly cracked.
That was then. Now, we call it a “TBR pile” — To-Be-Read.
Today, psychologists define bibliomania as a type of compulsive buying disorder. The warning signs are sobering. You buy more books than you can possibly read. You feel out of control. You get into financial trouble. You feel guilty. Your loved ones begin sentences with “Do you really need …?” and gesture helplessly at the tottering stack of paperbacks by the bed.
I recognize a few of these symptoms. I have definitely skipped a meal to afford a hardback. I have walked into a bookshop to “just browse” and come out clutching a small tower and a freshly re-mortgaged soul. There are hardbacks I have moved house with three times that I haven’t yet opened. They look at me accusingly whenever I walk past, like neglected gym memberships in dust jackets.
But here is where I part ways with the diagnosticians and join the Church of Umberto Eco.
Eco, the Italian novelist and semiotician with the beard of a wizard and the library of a dragon, reportedly owned around 50,000 books. He did not consider this a problem. He considered it a system. He said it was foolish to think you have to read every book you buy, just as it would be foolish to insist you must use every screwdriver before you are allowed to own another one.
Books, in his view, are like medicine. You keep a lot in the cabinet. Most of the time they sit there harmlessly. Then one day, in some dark night of the soul or slow Wednesday in July, you need the exact one that will fix you. So you reach into your “medicine cupboard” and pull out the right book for that moment. Which, he argued, is exactly why you should always have more than you need.
This is the philosophy I am choosing to live by, rather than the one that suggests I should be monitored by a spending app and gently reintroduced to the public library.
December 4, 2025
“… the biggest problem facing disabled people is that they aren’t eager enough to call themselves disabled”
On his Substack, Freddie deBoer decries the New York Times viewpoint that “there is no such thing as a person, only beings that exist to function as sets of interlocking identities”:
(you would find this horribly condescending too)
Image from Freddie deBoer
I’m not joking! Paula Span has produced this particular bit of scolding for The Official Publication of Liberals Who Occasionally Look Up From Their Crosswords to Disapprove of Everyone and Everything. Span writes
Identifying as a person with a disability provides other benefits, advocates say. It can mean avoiding isolation and “being part of a community of people who are good problem-solvers, who figure things out and work in partnership to do things better”
Of course, you can enjoy those benefits without identifying as disabled, without allowing one unfortunate aspect of your life become an entire identity. But that doesn’t fly in the world of the brownstone liberals who fund and run the New York Times, who seem to believe that there is no such thing as a person, only beings that exist to function as sets of interlocking identities.
Here’s the maddening thing about this piece: it quietly smuggles in a worldview that has metastasized across the discourse, a worldview in which the biggest problem facing disabled people is that they aren’t eager enough to call themselves disabled. Not, you know, being blind or paralyzed or suffering from dementia or constantly wracked with chronic pain, no, all of that is subservient to the only question anybody seems to care about anymore, the all-devouring question of identity. The whole thing hums along with the cheery institutional conviction that the answer to every human frailty is more identitarian self-labeling. If only the elderly would embrace the capital-D Disability identity, we’re told, everything would be better — their health care would run smoother, their interactions with institutions would be less demeaning, their sense of community would blossom. Maybe they’d even be happier! The Times treats this as self-corroborating common sense, like, well, everything else argued in the New York Times.
What this kind of thinking actually represents is the natural endpoint of a cultural project that has turned medical pathology into a personality type. It’s the codification of a worldview where suffering is not something to address, treat, alleviate, or recover from, but a new kind of boutique identity, complete with community membership, branded discourse, and moral status. It turns vulnerability into a form of social currency, rewarding performance over authenticity and turning genuine suffering into a spectacle for peer validation. In doing so, it erodes the very possibility of meaningful treatment, because the focus is no longer on recovery or well-being, but on cultivating a carefully curated self-image that fixates on impairment. And what I think, as I read this person tut-tutting senior citizens for not embracing that new ethos, is “Maybe they just feel like they’re too fucking old to take part in such nonsense?”
The piece insists, without evidence or even really argument, that treating disability as an identity will improve access to accommodation. Disability accommodations matter; of course they do. But what this article is concerned with is patently not getting older adults the practical support they need. The piece is instead fixated on the idea that the real issue here is that people don’t want to be disabled in the metaphysical, self-defining sense, as though the reluctance of an 84-year-old to call herself Disabled-with-a-capital-D is some retrograde psychological failure rather than a perfectly sane human impulse born of a lifetime of struggle. Span frames this as a story about insufficiently enlightened seniors who need to be ushered into the disability “community”. But maybe the reluctance they’re describing is the whisper of something older and much wiser: the understanding that disability is not a polity you join, not a club whose membership conveys special epistemic authority, but a condition of life that you endure and attempt to mitigate. These older people don’t identify as disabled because they remember, stubbornly enough, the distinction between having a problem and being the problem. They treat disability as a practical reality, not an existential category. And they’re right to do so.
Update, 5 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
December 2, 2025
QotD: Brutalism “is to architects what propaganda was to communist leaders: It serves to make them feel powerful”
I have long suspected, but cannot prove with an indisputable argument, that this architecture has played its part in the brutalization of daily life and social behavior in the country. Certainly, it has dehumanized the appearance of many towns and cities; its harsh surfaces and willfully austere and jagged designs leave the mere human being feeling that he is about as welcome as an ant on a kitchen counter — which, indeed, he now much resembles.
This architecture is to architects what propaganda was to communist leaders: It serves to make them feel powerful, not despite the fact that so many people detest it, but because so many people detest it. They are like the doctors of old, who, if they could not cure their patients, could at least make them take the most repellent and noxious medicine, on the grounds that a little bit of what revolts you does you good.
The projected museum is in a former school in the north of London, designed in 1968. Here is fairly typical commentary on the building:
Despite decades of wear and some unfortunate interventions, the raw concrete structure has remained a cherished example of socially driven modernist design.
It is to be noticed that the cherishing done here is independent of anyone who cherishes; as for “socially driven modernist design”, we might read “totalitarian”. Indeed, the building exudes totalitarianism, as raw reinforced concrete exudes ghastly stains after a short time.
Le Corbusier, one of the founders of this kind of architecture, was indeed a fascist in the most literal sense, though he had no real objection to communist totalitarianism, either. What he most hated was what he called the street, that is to say the place where people behave spontaneously and without direction from above, and where they are not corralled into functions imposed on them by all-wise socially driven architects. It was for this reason that he and his acolytes preferred to build urban wildernesses of the kind that have now been built the world over, but especially in Britain.
The architects who have been given the task of renewing the school building where the museum dedicated to architectural brutalism is to be housed have “noted its distinct geometry, as well as its symbolic presence reflecting the ideals of the school’s broader 1960s Brutalist architecture conceived in an era of social progress”.
Apologists for such architecture write a pure Soviet langue de bois — or perhaps I should say langue de béton, since concrete rather than wood is their favorite material:
Consultation with the school, families and local stakeholders has underpinned the project from the outset, ensuring that the building’s next chapter remains tied to its founding ethos centered on architecture as a tool for collective learning and expression.
Does anyone, after the death of the late, not much lamented, Leonid Brezhnev, have thoughts that correspond to, or are couched in, words such as these? By their language shall ye know them.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Architects of Our Own Destruction”, New English Review, 2025-08-08.
November 30, 2025
The plight of most young western men
At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter explores the dangerous psychological rift in western thought that casts young men into a literal no-win situation and yet blames them for not succeeding:
La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Frank Bernard Dicksee, 1901
A great deal of Discourse revolves around the desultory state of the broken modern young man. We wring our hands about porn brained incels, and about the incel’s mirror image in the sociopathic gym bro fuckboy. We talk about how men need to man up, put down the console controller, get out of the basement, talk to real girls, and wife them up. At the same time, we do everything we can to make this as difficult and unappealing as possible. Male sexuality is relentlessly demonized, and this is at the root of great deal of social dysfunction.
Our society has established new social norms that make talking to girls in the wild, or even looking at them, tantamount to a sex crime. Buying a girl a drink at the bar is an imposition, an implicit expectation that she will at the very least say thank you, and this is essentially sexual harassment. As a result of this men do not buy girls drinks anymore. Glance at a girl’s cameltoe as she places her yoga pants between you and the mirror to do hip thrusts while you’re trying to focus on your deadlift, and get put on blast on TikTok as a perv. As a result men carefully avoid looking at girls, and girls wonder why they don’t get attention. Office romances are right out: ask Betty from accounting if she’d like to get a coffee, and you’re rolling the dice between getting lucky and getting a talking to from HR (if you’re lucky). Friend-group romances are discouraged: they bring too much drama.
The only romantic avenue still permitted is the dating apps. The de facto proscription of every other venue was so abrupt and thorough that I can’t help but wonder if MeToo was engineered by Match Group, in order to do to dating what Uber did to taxis. Just like Uber took an occupation that was able to provide a reasonable living standard for working class guys and turned it into piece-work for an imported third-world precariat, so Tinder wiped away thousands of years of accumulated social technologies optimized for the purpose of bringing young men and women together into stable, loving, and fecund matrimony, and replaced it with a winner-take-all meat market in which a small minority of the best-looking men swipe their way through a digital harem of emotionally crippled cum-dumpsters, while women retaliate by using their matches to get free meals and ghosting as soon as the cheque comes without so much as a thanks for the company. Commoditizing romance left everyone more lonesome and miserable than ever, but would you look at that market cap.
The decay set in long before Tinder, however.
Feminists have gotten a great deal of mileage out of Freud’s Madonna-whore complex. This is the idea of a Manichean division of femininity: the chaste purity of the innocent nurturing mother, contrasted with the wanton looseness of the degraded prostitute. The Madonna is embodied by the Virgin Mary, whose only begotten child was conceived immaculately, which is to say without actually having sex. Both archetypes are caricatures that fail to capture the full range of feminine sexuality, but a traditional, god-fearing society effectively forced women to choose between one or the other. Either she represses her instincts and lives a passionless life of quiet misery, or she becomes a fallen woman.
Unlike much of Freud’s oeuvre, which largely consisted of the author’s barely concealed fetishes, the Madonna-whore complex has held up fairly well in the era of evolutionary psychology. Freud’s explanation for the phenomenon – that it is rooted in the Oedipal desire to rut with your own mother – is of course nonsense (except possibly insofar as it may have applied to him). Its origin is more plausibly in the predicament of paternal uncertainty which has bedevilled men since before the dawn of mankind, and which leads to a trade-off between short- and long-term mating strategies with easy women on the one hand (with whom paternity is always in question, and in whom investment should therefore be kept to a minimum, but since they’re easy you can sow your seed in lots of them), and chaste women on the other (with whom paternity can be more reliably determined, and in whom greater investment is therefore warranted). It doesn’t matter that we have paternity tests now: evolved instincts don’t care about your technology.
In the aftermath of the sexual revolution female sexuality was freed from these ancient constraints. Women are permitted to dress as they please, date who they want, have sex with as many partners as they desire. Any attempt to dissuade women from such behaviour is attacked as slut shaming, a ploy by the patriarchy to control their bodies.
Promiscuous premarital sex was once a one-way street to single motherhood. The pill and legal abortion reduced that risk considerably, which provided the justification for eliminating sexual restraint in the first place. Male sexual psychology presents its own problems, however. Revealing attire invites male attention, and often not from the males whose attention a woman wants to attract. Women enjoy male attention, and so dress to attract it. Sexually excited men are liable to behave badly. Badly behaving men result in women getting hurt. Obviously, if a man behaves badly, society will punish him … but the wise course is to avoid putting temptation in his way in the first place. Those ancient restrictions on female sexuality weren’t there to oppress women: they were there to protect women from themselves.
Women may have chafed under the chastity belt of the Madonna-whore complex, but it caused problems for men too. Men don’t generally want either a frigid Victorian schoolmarm or a drunken slattern for a wife: he wants the happy medium between the two, purity in the streets but a prostie in the sheets, a girl who enjoys sex and is good at it, but only has it with him. The Madonna-whore complex is a schizoid separation of these two conflicting desires, which then leads to the romantic frustration of both sexes: men have to choose between two equally unappealing options, and women are required to deny one or the other aspect of their own sexuality.
Just like men, women tend to want two, somewhat contradictory things from the opposite sex. First, they want men to protect and provide for them: to build what needs building, fix what needs fixing, pay for dinner, buy them pretty jewellery. In other words, they want men to sacrifice their time and energy of their behalf. At the same time they want men who are dominant, strong, confident, and at least potentially dangerous, for the obvious reason that men must compete with other men, and men who do not possess these traits make terrible protectors and providers in comparison with men who do. The necessary tension is that dominant, aggressive men are generally much less interested in protecting and providing: a man who won’t submit easily to other men, won’t submit to women either; a man who can force other men to submit to his will, can also force a woman to do the same. This mirrors the tension in male desires: a girl who’s a good lay might not be the most impeccably virginal of innocent maidens.
We can’t call women whores anymore in order to enforce virginal purity, but bad romantic decisions still carry bad consequences, and women also need to be protected from those consequences (and can’t ever be held responsible for them). The emphasis has therefore shifted from policing female sexuality to policing male sexuality. The result of this is the emergence of the simp-rapist complex.
The only way to create a safe environment for women whose behaviour is entirely unrestricted is to ruthlessly suppress precisely those masculine traits of dominance and aggression that women find attractive in the first place. All of these traits get included into the broad category of “rape culture”. Even looking at a woman without her expressly stated positive consent becomes a problematic act. Men who violate these norms become, according to this standard, “rapists”.
Update, 1 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
November 29, 2025
Eliminating fathers – a long-term goal of early Feminists
Janice Fiamengo laments a recent British change to family law that “family courts will no longer work on the presumption that having contact with both parents is in the best interests of a child”. This is merely the latest move in a long-running legal and political struggle to alienate fathers from their children:
“Even today most people will refuse to believe that one of feminism’s main aims is, and always was, to give women the power to rid their families of men.” — William Collins, The Empathy Gap (2019)
“‘The person who is least likely to abuse a child is a married father,’ notes Canadian Senator Anne Cools. ‘The person who is most likely is a single, unmarried mother.'” — quoted in Stephen Baskerville, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage and the Family (2007)
[…]
It is a truism that feminists seek to destroy the father-led family and have long worked to do so through anti-father propaganda, legal chicanery, and evidence-free allegations of abuse.
Those who have not read feminists’ own words on this subject may have difficulty appreciating the depth of their desire to deny fathers any legally- or socially-recognized familial role.
Elizabeth Gould Davis’s The First Sex (1971) provides a compelling example. Written at the height of the Second Wave of feminism, and published three years before the author’s death by suicide, it was a popular female-supremacist treatise. In it, Davis rhapsodized about goddess worship and female power in the ancient world, detailing a time when societies allegedly recognized and revered women as the superior sex.
In these societies, according to mythographer Robert Graves, “Men feared, adored, and obeyed the matriarch” (quoted p. 121). In thrall to women, men were peripheral, their roles as fathers non-existent: “[The woman] took lovers, but for her pleasure,” writes Davis, “not to provide her children with a father, a commodity early woman saw no need for” (p. 121). In this matriarchal sexual utopia, “Sexual morals were a matter of personal conscience, not of law” (p. 116), and the sole familial bond was between the mother and her offspring.
A chapter on “Mother-Right” made the case for a return to such a system, explaining that fathers contribute nothing good to their children’s lives. “The father is not at all necessary for a child’s happiness and development” (p. 117). Even children allegedly know this to be so: “In nearly every child’s experience, it is the mother, not the father, who loves all the children equally, stands by them without regard to their worth or lack of it, and forgives without reservation” (p. 118).
The father’s irrelevance is rooted, Davis explained, in men’s inability to love. “Maternal love was not only the first kind of love. For many millennia it was the only kind” (p. 119). Man has merely “learned to appreciate and be grateful for woman’s love, even though he was not emotionally equipped to return it in kind” (p. 119). She quoted Freudian psychoanalyst Theodor Reik to support her view that when men speak of love, they are actually speaking of a mere ‘scrotal frenzy'” (p. 119).
This rhapsody to female power and assertion of male uselessness continues for hundreds of pages in Davis’s ludicrous yet impressively-detailed book. Many feminists at this period made similar claims, attacking fatherhood and calling for the destruction of the patriarchal family. Author and activist Kate Millett, for example, argued in Sexual Politics (1970) that women’s oppression could not be ended without a transformation of “patriarchy’s chief institution […] the family” (p. 33).
In the same year, feminist radical Shulamith Firestone excoriated the patriarchal nuclear family as the “most rigid class/caste system in existence” (The Dialectic of Sex, p. 15). Two years earlier, would-be killer Valerie Solanas had expressed the sentiment crudely in her SCUM Manifesto: “The effect of fathers, in sum, has been to corrode the world with maleness. The male has a negative Midas touch — everything he touches turn to shit” (p. 45).
These were not simply sad cranks penning screeds in cat-piss-scented rooms (though many of them were mentally ill). They were acknowledged leaders of a movement that would, within a few decades, shape and control the core institutions of western civilization.
November 27, 2025
We’re not quite at the point that we get trigger warnings for trigger warnings, but …
On her blog, Sarah Hoyt discusses the continued expansion of trigger warnings in fan fiction, but not because the readers demand it:
Image from According to Hoyt
… I’ve noticed a creep up of trigger warnings in fanfic. Some of these would be incomprehensible to non-Jane-Austen fans and are actually not so much trigger warnings as sub-genre warnings. There are subgenres some fans (sometimes I’m some fans) hate, like “Lizzy is not a Bennet” or “Bingley is evil” or … whatever. That’s fine. It saves me the trouble of reading a fanfic that’s going to annoy me. Unless I’m in the mood to be annoyed, in which case I will read it so I can grit my teeth and mentally yell at the writer. (Bingley is evil is a problem because it usually turns into a revenge-fest on EVERYONE. Everyone is evil. Etc. I don’t think there’s ever a time I want to read that. You find yourself wanting to take a shower for the soul. With a wire scrub brush.)
We make fun of trigger warnings, often, but it’s a real measure of how stupid things have gotten. When I’m having to read a trigger warning for say “kissing without consent.” or “violence against children” (Okay, you’ll think that last makes perfect sense, until you find out it’s because a kid gets slapped once in the novel) or “verbal violence” or –
And you start wondering, on the serious, if the ideal novel for these people has no plot at all, just people sitting around having a nice meal and talking.
This is disturbing, because the whole point of a novel is to make you feel emotions and experience things you either can’t in your real life, or which wouldn’t be safe to experience in your real life, followed by resolution and catharsis. That’s what a novel offers you. The opportunity to be the someone else far away experiencing “Adventure” (which as we all know is really a series of unpleasant events.)
Anyway, I’ve slowly come to the conclusion all this demand for warnings and screeching about offense isn’t by real readers.
No, seriously. Real readers know that no one can insulate them against all surprises in a book (or blog) and that in fact the point of reading is to get out of your head and experience different things, different events, different emotions and different points of view. You might disagree vehemently with them (I actually do with most of the really old science fiction. Really, scientists in charge? Who thinks that’s even safe? Oh, yeah, the Soviet Union. But even they didn’t DO IT. They just paid lip service. They might have killed a lot more people if they’d done it, at that.) but that forces you to think about why you disagree and how you’d do it differently. If you’re of a certain frame of mind, you [might] end up becoming a novelist and writing your response to what you disagree with. Though if you are worth spit, even then, your “response” will be less of a response and more of this whole new thing it became, with the response buried somewhere inside it. And if you’re not of that frame of mind, you’ll still end up a more considered and self-reflective thinker than you were before. For one, while you might think that the other POV is stupid, if you read a whole novel with it, you’ll be aware that thought went into it, and might even have to confront that the worst stupid takes a lot of thought and self deception.
Anyway, the point is, I don’t think the offense-monsters read. Because the whole point of their screeching is to shut down the thinking and prevent ANYONE ELSE from being exposed to the material, and maybe thinking.
That’s not what they say, of course. They say “I’m offended”. And “I’m hurt”. And “You’re mean because you offended me”.
But what they really mean is “this you cannot think” “This you cannot see” and “this you cannot read” and “this you cannot write”. And “this you cannot say”.
They have, you see, completely surrendered their very core to the herd. They have given up their right to think and feel and be, in favor of belonging completely to the herd. (They used to have a term for this and said it as though it were praiseworthy: “mind-kill”.) So being exposed to contrary things hurts, and they have no defense, because they have taught themselves not to think and/or reason through things.
The pain they feel at the slightest hint of disagreement is true. It is also a symptom of what they have done to themselves, and has nothing to do with being mentally or emotionally healthy.
Just like the pain of withdrawal of a chronic alcoholic denied alcohol is real, and continued and too fast withdrawal might kill him, however continuing to feed his drinking habit will also kill him, faster.
To give them trigger warnings, apologize for any offense and handle them with kid gloves is not only bad for them but bad for society in general.
November 19, 2025
Julia: A Feminist Retelling of 1984?
Feral Historian
Published 11 Jul 2025Julia, a 2023 novel by Sandra Newman, does more than just retell Orwell’s 1984 through Julia’s eyes. That perspective switch presents an Oceania that is both more mundane and more familiar. It’s certainly a companion piece more than a stand-alone work, but it does have something to offer both in how it examines Orwell and a few times, how it contradicts him.
00:00 Intro
02:18 a Different Perspective
09:30 Caught in a Trap
12:45 Backstory
15:40 Departures
20:18 Endings and Beginnings
(more…)
November 15, 2025
There’s not much room for men and boys in the “Female Future”
Janice Fiamengo responds to a recent discussion between former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and happiness coach Chris Williamson which was intended to be about men’s lives but “quickly becomes a conversation about what women want”:
Chris Williamson: “It’s very hard to try and put forward something that doesn’t sound like putting the brakes on women. And I don’t think that’s what either of us …”
Here is the problem in a nutshell. We must never say No to a woman, no matter the social atrophy and misery she and her sisters are causing. Carlson, in turn, gives the only permissible response: “Are women happier than they were?”
A conversation about men’s lives quickly becomes a conversation about what women want.
**
Men’s issues have long been the purview of a tiny group of outliers who gained traction in the early days of the internet and were popularized in Cassie Jaye’s The Red Pill.
Following in the footsteps of iconoclasts like Ernest Belfort Bax (The Legal Subjection of Men, 1896), Esther Vilar (The Manipulated Man, 1971), and Warren Farrell (The Myth of Male Power, 1993), they questioned standard feminist wisdom, focusing on male disposability (see also here) and the empathy gap. For years, they were voices crying in the wilderness.
Now, decades into our Female Future, it’s becoming harder to ignore the suffering and plummeting fortunes of men and boys — and their knock-on social effects. But what happens when the red pill begins to go mainstream?
As the recent discussion between former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and happiness coach Chris Williamson makes clear, most hard truths get leached away, and we’re left with half-hearted calls for a compassion that the influencers themselves seem unable to maintain.
Spoiler Alert: “Chris Williamson’s Guide to Being Happy, and Debunking the Feminist Lies Sabotaging You” doesn’t debunk any feminist lies. Even the MeToo movement, which harmed or destroyed thousands of men’s lives through unproven accusations (some of them almost inconceivably ridiculous and trivial), is accepted as an attempt to “sanitize the toxic elements of male behavior”. Accusers’ falsehoods, ‘Poor-me-I’m-so-desirable’ showboating, manipulations, and blithe indifference to evidence are all passed over in feminist-compliant silence.
Sadly, the discussion is full of feminist lies.
**
Near the beginning of the discussion, Williamson expresses frustration that in order to acknowledge any of the troubles of men and boys in the modern world, it has become obligatory first to rehearse women and girls’ (always at least equal, if not greater) suffering. Unfortunately, Williamson is a prime example of such gynocentric genuflecting, visibly uncomfortable every time the conversation seems to be moving into non-feminist territory.
In order to talk about the drastic decline in men’s higher education attainment, for example, Williamson seems to think it necessary to point out that women were at some point in the past discouraged from getting university degrees. Both Williamson and Carlson refer to men’s diminishing earning power, but pivot immediately to stressing how hard this is on professional women looking for marriageable men.
The sexual revolution is alleged to have mainly benefited men who can now, with impunity, “use and abuse women”; nothing is said about women’s rampant OnlyFans activity or their exploitation of men in divorce.
It goes on and on like this: for every male suicide, divorce-raped father, falsely accused or incarcerated man, there must be at least one woman somewhere who felt at some point that she wasn’t encouraged to do something.
There is a small amount of criticism directed at women, but only when women act badly towards other women, as is the case, according to Carlson, with female bosses. But about female cruelty to men or children (over half of child maltreatment, for example, is female-perpetrated), we do not hear anything.
There is a good deal said about women as a civilizing force, how much women bring to family life, how women are better with social cues, how they are “unbullshittable.” Carlson even gushes about how kind women are to their hubbies: “They wash your underwear. They listen to you snore,” he rhapsodizes. For the considerable number of men who have rarely had a kind word from any woman or who have gone through a hellish marriage and/or divorce with a vindictive shrew, the adulation seems quite unhelpful.
November 10, 2025
QotD: “Is it a boy or a girl?”
People are intrinsically fascinated by psychological sex differences — the average differences between men and women in personality, behavior, and preferences. Psychologists have studied this topic systematically for decades, beginning with landmark works like The Psychology of Sex Differences (1974) by Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin. That book helped spark a wave of research that continues to this day. Since then, increasingly sophisticated methods have enabled researchers to detect subtle but consistent differences in how men and women think, feel, and act.
Men and women use language and think about the world in broadly similar ways. They experience the same basic emotions. Both seek kind, intelligent, and attractive romantic partners, enjoy sex, get jealous, make sacrifices for their children, compete for status, and sometimes resort to aggression in pursuit of their interests. In the end, women and men are more alike than different. But they are not identical.
To be sure, sociocultural influences play a role in creating those differences. But environmental factors don’t act on blank slates. To understand young men and young women, we must consider not only cultural context but also evolved sex differences. We are, after all, biological creatures. Like other mammals, we share similar physiology and emotional systems, so it’s not surprising that meaningful differences exist between human males and females.
To understand why psychological and behavioral sex differences evolved, the key concept is parental investment theory, developed by evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers in 1972. The basic idea is straightforward: the sex that invests more in offspring tends to be more selective when choosing a mate. This selectivity follows basic evolutionary logic: those with more to lose are more cautious and risk-averse. To put the stakes in perspective: raising a child from birth to independence in a traditional, preindustrial society requires an estimated 10 million to 13 million calories — the equivalent of about 20,000 Big Macs. For women, reproduction is enormously expensive.
Men also incur reproductive costs, though of a different kind. On average, they have about 20 percent more active metabolic tissue — such as muscle — that fuels their efforts in competition, courtship, and provisioning. While pregnancy requires a large, immediate investment from women, men’s reproductive effort is more gradual, spread out over a lifetime. In evolutionary terms, both sexes pay a price for reproduction, but in different currencies — women through gestation and caregiving, men through physical competition and resource acquisition.
Yet while nature can inform our understanding of human behavior, it does not dictate how we ought to live. A clearer grasp of sex differences can help guide our decisions. It cannot define our values.
Rob Henderson, “Sex Differences Don’t Go Away Just Because You Want Them To”, Rob Henderson’s Newsletter, 2025-08-03.
