Grrl power is based on wanting girls to be courageous. But the writers who do the scripts for grrl power movies seem to have have a fundamental misunderstanding of courage. Courage does not mean not being afraid of anything. I was watching the live-action reboot of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and I really got tired of the heroine, who kept saying “I’m not afraid” over and over, even in situations where she really ought to be afraid. That’s not courage, that’s foolhardiness. Like that stupid “fearless girl” sculpture they put in front of the charging bull on Wall Street. Within about 5 seconds, the girl is going to be dying from massive internal injuries caused by horns and hooves. No, courage means being able to put aside your fear so that you can do whatever duty is required of you. “Fearless girl” isn’t really doing anything, she’s just striking a pose. That doesn’t mean girls can’t be brave. They certainly can be. You know who I think is a good example of grrl power? Dorothy Gale. You know, the character played by Judy Garland in the classic Wizard of Oz film. I don’t know about the character in the book, but in the film version, Dorothy spent most of the journey through Oz scared to death. But do you know what? She slapped a dangerous lion in the snout. She threw water on a witch. And she called out a wizard with god-like powers for being a lying sh*tweasel. She was not any less afraid, but but she did what was needed to be done at the time she needed to act. That’s courage. That’s grrl power. And she didn’t just stand there striking a pose.
OregonMuse, “The Morning Rant”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2019-03-16.
July 10, 2022
QotD: The difference between courage and fearlessness
July 8, 2022
The Early Emperors – Part 7: The Imperial Women
seangabb
Published 11 Jan 2022The Roman Empire was the last and the greatest of the ancient empires. It is the origin from which springs the history of Western Europe and those nations that descend from Western Europe. It is the political entity within which the Christian Faith was born, and the growth of the Church within the Empire, and its eventual establishment as the sole faith of the Empire, have left an indelible impression on all modern denominations. Its history, together with that of the ancient Greeks and the Jews, is our history. To understand how the Empire emerged from a great though finally dysfunctional republic, and how it was consolidated by its early rulers, is partly how we understand ourselves.
Here is a series of lectures given by Sean Gabb in late 2021, in which he discusses and tries to explain the achievement of the early Emperors. For reasons of politeness and data protection, all student contributions have been removed.
More by Sean Gabb on the Ancient World: https://www.classicstuition.co.uk/
Learn Latin or Greek or both with him: https://www.udemy.com/user/sean-gabb/
His historical novels (under the pen name “Richard Blake”): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Richard-Blak…
June 29, 2022
It’s not your imagination: young women are becoming more liberal
Daniel Cox looks at the noted shift in political opinions among young women (aged 18-29) compared to their male counterparts, and not just on the current hot-button topic of abortion rights:
… In fact, young women have become significantly more liberal over the past decade whereas the political identity of young men has remained largely unchanged over time.
Rise of Unmarried Women
There are a few reasons for the increasingly liberal politics of young women. One explanation may lie in their marital status. Compared to previous generations of young women, far more women under the age of 30 today are unmarried. Only 15 percent of young women today are married compared to more than one-third of young women two decades ago.
Why does this matter? Research has shown that unmarried women feel more connected than their married counterparts to other women — a phenomenon known as “linked fate” — and it can lead them to support more liberal policies. In their fascinating 2017 study, Christopher T. Stout, Kelsy Kretschmer, and Leah Ruppanner argue that “women consistently earn less money and hold less power, which fosters women’s economic dependency on men. Thus, it is within married women’s interests to support policies and politicians who protect their husbands and improve their status.” This phenomenon of “linked fate” was not found to be evident among men, so even though young men are also less likely to be married compared to older generations, their marital status may have less of an impact on their politics than for women.
The Growing Education Divide
Over the past several decades, women’s educational attainment has far outpaced that of men’s; “Women in the United States have earned more bachelor’s degrees than men every year since the mid-1980s”, writes Derek Thompson in the Atlantic.
American colleges and universities now enroll roughly six women for every four men. This is the largest female-male gender gap in the history of higher education, and it’s getting wider.
The education divide between men and women has become more politically relevant because of the stronger connection between educational attainment and political behavior. In recent elections, college graduates have become a much more loyal Democratic constituency. And on a range of issues, college-educated Americans are more liberal than those without a Bachelor’s degree.
June 22, 2022
Puberty, “white guilt”, and social contagion helps drive huge numbers of teen girls to think they are transgender
Until a few years ago — a blink of the eye in social terms — most individuals who wanted to transition to the other gender were born male. That is no longer the situation in North America, as vast numbers of young teens have been hammered with accusations of “privilege” for being white, while already undergoing the stresses and social disruption of puberty, seem to be deciding in groups that they must have been “assigned the wrong gender” at birth. In City Journal, Leor Sapir tells some of their stories:
Patricia (a pseudonym) is the mother of a teenage girl who in recent years has come to identify as transgender. She lives in California, considers herself progressive, votes Democrat, and leads a group for parents of children with rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) — that is, youth who suddenly experience distress with their bodies and believe that undergoing medical “transition” will make them whole again. When I spoke to her recently, she recounted how her daughter’s at-first-lesbian and then trans identity emerged in response to feelings of shame about being white.
I have since spoken to more than a dozen ROGD parents and parent-group leaders who tell a similar story. Their schools compulsively tell their children how awful it is to be white, how white people enjoy unearned “privilege”, how they benefit from “systems” put in place by and for white people for the sole purpose of oppressing “people of color”. Plagued by guilt, the children — almost all of them girls — rush to the sanctuary of “LGBTQ+” identity. Once there, they are catapulted into hero status. According to Patricia, some teachers at her daughter’s school are more forgiving toward “queer” and “trans” kids who hand in their homework late.
The students, especially the girls, absorb this messaging. They are acutely sensitive to how identity affects their social status and academic fortunes. They want the warmth that comes with queer/trans identity, but above all they don’t want to be thought of as vicious oppressors. Lacking maturity and self-confidence, they fail to put “anti-racist” indoctrination in its proper context. They do not appreciate its ahistorical, anti-intellectual, and anti-humanist foundations, nor are they aware of the incentives leading teachers and administrators to foist it on them. Being white is not something these teenagers can escape, but they can mitigate its social costs by declaring themselves part of an oppressed group.
The wages of whiteness for teenagers are, however, only half of the story. Decades of gay rights activism have taught us that being gay or lesbian is not something one chooses. The mainstream narrative of transgenderism — promoted aggressively in the context of civil rights policymaking — holds that even being transgender is something people have little control over. Gender identity, experts have argued in Title IX lawsuits, is innate, immutable, and “primarily dictated by messages from the brain”. Thus, membership in the “LGBTQ+ community” would seem to be nonvoluntary. One is either “born that way” or not.
[…]
Several of the parents I spoke to told me that their daughters’ friends all identify as non-heterosexual, despite none having ever kissed another teenager or been in a romantic relationship. LGBT identity is, for them, not related to sexual attraction or behavior. As Kate Julian has written in The Atlantic, America is going through a “sex recession”. Whereas in 1991, most teenagers would have had at least one sexual encounter by the time they graduated high school, by 2017 most had had none. The vacuum left by the hollowing out of courting and relationships has been filled, so it would seem, by a new, inward form of “sexuality” in which the sexual side of our nature is purely a private experience. The 1960s sexual-liberation movement has somehow bred asexual atomism.
June 16, 2022
Among GenZ adults, LGBT identification tracks far higher than LGBT behaviour
In conversation on social media the other day, I speculated that in years gone by, some possibly significant proportion of self-identified lesbians would probably identify as asexuals today. Coming of age long before more relaxed modern attitudes toward non-heterosexual relationships, women who were not attracted to men would probably assume that this lack of attraction meant they must be lesbians. Similarly, Eric Kaufmann discusses a recent survey that shows some interesting divergence among GenZ adults between their declared sexual orientation and their actual behaviour:
A granular look at survey data on same-sex behaviour and LGBT identity shows that identification is increasingly diverging from behaviour. More importantly, those who adopt an LGBT identity but display conventionally heterosexual behaviour are a growing and distinct group, who lean strongly to the left politically and experience considerably greater mental health problems than the rest of the population.
By contrast, those who engage in same-sex behaviour are more politically moderate and psychologically stable. These facts sit awkwardly with the progressive view that the rise in LGBT identity, like left-handedness, is explained by people increasingly feeling that they can come out of the closet because society is more liberal. My analysis of these data raise another interesting question: Has some of the increase in anxiety and depression among young people, like the LGBT identity surge, arisen from a culture that values divergence and boundary-transgression over conformity to traditional norms and roles?
[…]
But has the LGBT share of young people really tripled in a decade? It has not. First, a growing share of LGBT identifiers engage in purely heterosexual behaviour. Figure 1, drawn from the General Social Survey (GSS), shows that, in 2008, about five percent of Americans under the age of 30 identified as LGBT and a similar number had a same-sex partnership in that year. By 2021, the proportion identifying as LGBT had increased 11 points to 16.3 percent but the share reporting same-sex relations had only risen four points, to 8.6 percent. LGBT identity had become twice as prevalent as LGBT behaviour. We must also bear in mind that 20 percent of young people now report no sex in the previous year, which means the four-point rise in same-sex partnering since 2008 is actually closer to a three-point rise: not nothing, but hardly a sexual revolution.
The trend towards greater LGBT identification has been particularly pronounced for young women, among whom there are three bisexuals for every lesbian in the 2018–21 period. Among young men, on the other hand, gays outnumber bisexuals and the LGBT total is only half as large as it is for women. Other large major surveys conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and by Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) find a similar pattern.
Furthermore, the GSS data show that bisexual women are the fastest-growing category, accounting for a disproportionate share of the post-2010 rise. A closer look at trends among female bisexuals in figure 2 shows that an increasing share of them display conventional sexual behaviour. In 2008–10, just 13 percent of female bisexuals said they only had male partners during the past five years. By 2018 this was up to 53 percent, rising to 57 percent in 2021. Most young female bisexuals today are arguably LGBT in name only.
June 14, 2022
Gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia
Once upon a time, in the dark recesses of ancient history (say, 2015 or so), most of the people expressing dissatisfaction with their birth gender were male. Shortly after that, the numbers inverted significantly and today it’s predominantly females demanding “gender affirming” treatment:
Girls who reject femininity or self identify as male or “non-binary” actually have a form of body dysmorphia. Rejecting their feminine body parts, for instance by flattening their chests, shows repulsion toward the areas they feel are not fit for acceptance. The trend of “binding” to produce a flat, androgynous body is dangerous, cutting off the air supply and possibly causing permanent damage, but it is encouraged as a precursor to transitioning from female to male.
In fact, transgendered people who were born women tend to suffer from eating disorders in an “extremely high proportion”, according to the Duke University Health System.
Make no mistake, a young woman who is dieting obsessively does not wish to look feminine or capable of having children. Many women who achieve their desired weight by extreme dieting cease to have periods and even grow downy hair on the face which resembles the incoming beard of a pre-pubescent man.
So is gender dysphoria essentially interchangeable with body dysmorphia? The woke people working at the NHS and gender reassignment clinics would never admit it, and would deny any correlation despite the statistics. But they are seeing more gender dysphoric young women than ever.
According to this article, entitled “Why Are So Many Females Coming out as Trans/Non-Binary?” in recent years the proportion of young women coming out as trans as opposed to men has increased dramatically. This shows a reversal from the previous trend years ago of more men wishing to become the opposite sex. But the incidence of actual transitions carried out does not show a corresponding rise for women, and that should prove many young women eventually grow out of identifying as trans, or “desist” from the desire to become male. “Desistance” refers to the situation where a young person who experiences gender dysphoria eventually “grows out of it” and decides not to go through with a sex change.
The occurrence of desistance among youngsters supports the position that they should not be allowed to undergo irreversible operations such as mastectomy or be pumped full of hormones (including puberty blocking “treatments”) which they are likely later to regret. Sadly, many medical “experts” don’t believe the figures cited for desistance among young people and discount them as flawed due to the looser criteria for diagnosing gender dysphoria used in the past. In other words, young boys who liked to wear dresses and would have been diagnosed as transgendered in previous years would not so qualify today, but young girls who hate their bodies and want to mutilate their breasts would be eligible for such “treatments”. The reasoning goes on that a whole raft subsisted of boys who were merely “gay boys who may have been experimenting with different ways of expressing gender but who were never really transgender in the first place”.
Such conclusions defy common sense or any logic or human decency. This article cites the findings of one Thomas Steensma, a clinician and researcher at the Centre of Expertise on Gender Dysphoria at the VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam. He conveniently found in a study that desistance rates were lower in older, female children than in young boys.
H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.
June 13, 2022
QotD: Helot women in Sparta
And I want to stress the importance of this question, because there are more helot women in Sparta than there are free humans in Sparta (as from last time, around 15% of Sparta is free – men and women both included – but 42.5% of Sparta consists of enslaved helot women). If we want to say absolutely anything about the condition of life in Sparta, we simply cannot ignore such a large group of human beings living in Sparta.
And our sources here let us down catastrophically. There are, to my knowledge, no passages anywhere in the corpus of ancient literature which are actually about helot women, and every passage that mentions them could be included on a single typed page with space to spare. But that is no excuse to pretend they do not exist, and we are going to talk about them.
As far as we can tell, family structure and labor roles among the helots approximated what we see in the rest of Greece. Once freed, the Messenian helots establish a fairly normal polis in Messenia, so it hardly seems like they had some radically different social makeup. That gives us the beginnings of sketching out what life might have been like for a helot woman: we can then take the handful of things we know that are peculiar about their circumstances and combine them with what we know about the normal structure of life for ancient Greek peasant families.
The primary economic occupation of helot women was probably in food preparation and textile production. And if I know my students, I know that the moment I start talking about the economic role of women in ancient households, a very specific half of the class dozes off. Wake Up. There is an awful tendency to see this “women’s work” as somehow lesser or optional. These tasks I just listed are not economically marginal, they are not unimportant. Yes, our ancient sources devalue them, but we should not.
First: let’s be clear – women in ancient households (or early modern households, or modern households) were not idle. They had important jobs every bit as important as the farming, which had to get done for the family to survive. I’ve estimated elsewhere that it probably takes a minimum of something like 2,220 hours per year to produce the minimum necessary textile goods for a household of five (that’s 42 hours a week spinning and weaving, every week). Most of that time is spent spinning raw fibers (either plant fibers from flax to make linen, or animal fibers from sheep to make wool). The next step after that is weaving those threads into fabric. Both weaving and spinning are slow, careful and painstaking exercises.
Food preparation is similarly essential, as you might imagine. As late as 1900, food preparation and cleanup consumed some 44 hours per week on average in American households, plus another 14 hours dedicated to laundry and cleaning (Lebergott, Pursuing Happiness (1993)). So even without child rearing – and ask any parent, there is a TON of work in that – a small peasant household (again, five members) is going to require something like 100 hours per week of “woman’s work” merely to sustain itself.
Now, in a normal peasant household, that work will get split up between the women of the house at all ages. Girls will typically learn to spin and weave at very young ages, at first helping out with the simpler tasks before becoming fully proficient (but of course, now add “training time” as a job requirement for their mothers). But at the same time (see Erdkamp, The Grain Market in the Roman Empire (2005) on this) women often also had to engage in agricultural labor during peak demand – sowing, harvesting, etc. That’s a lot of work to go around. Remember, we’re positing a roughly five-individual household, so those 100 hours may well be split between only two people (one of whom may be either quite old or quite young and thus not as productive).
In short: these tasks, when combined with all of the other demands, is very much a full time job and then some. It’s also a job that someone very much needs to do if the family is to survive.
We can assume that these demands, along with marriage, the bearing and raising children, and religious rituals and festivals, likely shaped the contours of the lives of helot women, much as they would have for many poor women in the Greek (or Roman) countryside. But the Spartan system also shapes these contours and it does so in almost entirely negative ways.
Let’s start [with] textiles. Spartiate women do not engage in textile manufacture (Xen. Lac. 1.4) as noted previously, nor do they seem (though the evidence here is weaker) to engage in food preparation. In the syssitia, at least, the meals are cooked and catered by helot slaves (Plut. Lyc. 12.5, 12.7). In the former case, we are told explicitly by Xenophon that it is slave labor (he uses the word doule, “female slave”, which clearly here must mean helot women) which does this. So helot women now have an additional demand on their time and energy: not only the 2,200 hours for clothing their own household, but even more clothing the spartiate household they are forced to serve. If we want to throw numbers at this, we might idly suppose something like five helot households serving one spartiate household, suggesting something like a 20% increase in the amount of textile work. We are not told, but it seems a safe bet that they were also forced to serve as “domestics” in spartiate households. That’s actually a fairly heavy and onerous imposition of additional labor on these helot women who already have their hands full.
We also know […] that helot households were forced to turn over a significant portion of their produce, perhaps as high as half. I won’t drag you all through the details now – I love agricultural modeling precisely because it lets us peek into the lives of folks who don’t make it into our sources – but I know of no model of ancient agriculture which can tolerate that kind of extraction without bad consequences. And I hear the retort already coming: well, of course it couldn’t have been that bad, because there were still helots, right? Not quite, because that’s not how poor farming populations work. It can be very bad and still leave you with a stable – but miserable – population.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part III: Spartan Women”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.
June 12, 2022
The “w-word” is no longer allowed, please update your Newspeak Dictionary, citizens
Brendan O’Neill on how the dreaded “w-word” is being actively erased from woke vocabulary [Note — to avoid being prosecuted under some progressive British law, I’m protecting the innocent eyes of my readers by substituting [the “w-word”] in this article to avoid offence]:
Two people at EuroPride 2019 in Vienna holding an LGBTQ+ pride rainbow flag featuring a design by Daniel Quasar; this variation of the rainbow flag was initially promoted as “Progress” a PRIDE Flag Reboot.
Photo by Bojan Cvetanović via Wikimedia Commons.
Over the past week we have witnessed two biological males – or men, as we used to call them – winning first and second place in a [the “w-word”]‘s cycling race. We’ve watched as the Crown Prosecution Service has hired a diversity consultant who is trans and who has previously suggested that [the “w-word”] could be replaced with “womxn”. We’ve heard that civil servants have received equality training telling them that the phrase “adult human female” – which is the dictionary definition of [the “w-word”] – is a transphobic dogwhistle. We’ve seen the publication of a new study by King’s College London which suggests that one way around sex / gender controversies might be to change the wording of questions in official documents like the census. For example, you could ask respondents “Do you menstruate?” rather than “Are you a [the “w-word”]?”.
Anyone who doubts that the word [the “w-word”], and the entire idea of [the “w-word”]hood, is being erased, sacrificed at the altar of the ideology of transgenderism, will surely have had a rude awakening these past few days. When men can claim [the “w-word”]‘s sporting prizes, it is clear that [the “w-word”]‘s sport risks becoming a thing of the past. When powerful institutions like the CPS and the civil service flirt with the idea that it is sinful to utter the words “adult human female”, it is obvious that even talking about [the “w-word”] has become a risky business. When even someone as globally influential as Michelle Obama uses the unpronounceable word “womxn”, as she did in a story shared to her Instagram page, you know that it’s not just time-rich, purple-haired campus crazies who have tumbled down the rabbit hole of genderfluidity. No, from the sporting world to the political world, from the justice system to the state bureaucracy, the idea that sex can be changed, and that language must be changed to avoid offending the trans minority, is orthodox now.
Strikingly, Mrs Obama’s use of the word “womxn” was related to the Roe v Wade controversy. She shared on Instagram a series of slides created by the nonprofit campaign group When We All Vote. One of them said: “State lawmakers will have the power to strip womxn of the right to make decisions about their bodies and their healthcare.” There is a dark irony to this comment, and one that exposes just how messed up the war on [the “w-word”]hood has become. That Obama-endorsed IG slide frets about [the “w-word”] being stripped of the right to control their bodies and yet it implicitly strips [the “w-word”] of the right to use certain words when they talk about themselves and what they need. “Womxn” is a reprimanding word, used to remind the female masses that their kind includes men now too. As Dictionary.com said of “womxn” when it added it in 2019, it is designed to be “inclusive of trans and non-binary” people. That is, blokes. In stripping out the old, supposedly problematic word “[the “w-word”]“, even as it wrings its hands over [the “w-word”] – sorry, womxn – being stripped of their bodily autonomy, When We All Vote unwittingly highlights the profound confusions and deep illiberalism behind today’s erasure of [the “w-word”]hood.
Barely a day passes without fresh reports about the linguistic war on [the “w-word”]kind. So the recent civil-service story involves a group called A:gender, which supports trans and intersex people who work in government departments. The Times got hold of some training videos A:gender has produced, which are shown to thousands of civil servants every year, one of which claims that it is impossible to define [the “w-word”] and that saying “adult human female” can be “transphobic”. Beware, these woke educators warn the civil service, of “transphobia [that] is increasingly presented as feminism”. To reiterate, this is civil servants we’re talking about, the people responsible for the smooth functioning of the nation. And they’re being told that if you say out loud what the dictionary says [the “w-word”] is, then you are a bigot. They’re being told that the likes of JK Rowling, whose great thoughtcrime is to understand biology, promote hatred dressed up as feminism.
QotD: Zima
There was, however, something perversely enticing about a drink that seemed to come from a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which color did not exist. There was an ingrained assumption that Zima must be expressly targeted at somebody, but nobody knew who that was … Zima was ridiculous … but did that actually mean it was brilliant? The only viable conclusion was “sort of”.
It’s true at first blush, but so douchey that you want it to be wrong just to spite whoever wrote it. I’ve never wanted a Zima more in my life than I did after reading that passage. But at second glance, it’s laughably false. Ask anyone who was in college in the 1990s; they’ll tell you exactly who Zima was “expressly targeted at”: Frat bros who were expecting female company. Because it was clear — no, really, it was beer(-ish) that looked like club soda — it somehow seemed like “diet beer”. Which meant your female party guests were almost guaranteed to have three or four more than they should.
In other words: Zima was the midrange panty dropper. Not as classy as white zinfandel, not as trashy as Boone’s Farm, there was no other possible reason to have it in your dorm fridge, but it somehow had plausible deniability when you offered it to her as a light refreshment. If Klosterman ever had sex at any time between January 1, 1990 and December 31, 1999, he knows this. There’s no way he doesn’t.
Severian, “A Meta-Review”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.
June 10, 2022
The common male delusion that they “age like fine wine”, unlike women who “hit the wall”
Ed West considers the brutal truth that while beauty may indeed be fleeting, ugliness is life-long:
George Clooney at the White House, 12 September, 2016.
Official White House photo by Pete Souza via Wikimedia Commons.
The male psyche is filled with delusions, forming a sort of psychological protection against real life. Just as men tend to overestimate how competent they are at any given task, they are programmed to wildly overestimate their value in the mating market. The brutal truth of dating apps has shown that around 80% of men are basically unattractive and, in many societies, a significant chunk would fail to find a mate at all, forced to set out on a longship in the hope of winning glory and a girlfriend. We don’t contemplate this, because reality would be just too much to take for most of us.
Among the many delusions males have is the idea that, unlike women, they don’t become less attractive with age; in the minds of many men, female attractiveness peaks early and, while most men don’t improve with age, looks are less important for us so female preference doesn’t really change.
That explains the popularity of a certain genre of feature piece, usually in the Daily Mail, in which women in their 30s lament that there aren’t any available men left, and they can’t get a date despite being beautiful and wealthy and having their own career. Many quite embittered men take pleasure in these pieces, gleeful that the shoe is now on the other foot, and that the women who spurned them have hit “The Wall”.
The Wall is the name given to the drop in female attractiveness that comes with age, the decline beginning quite early, around 20 or 21, as judged by searches on dating sites and the number of approaches a woman receives. There are even cruder measurements, such as the average hourly earnings of strippers, lap dancers or prostitutes, and which again show a decline from the early 20s which becomes steep after 30. If you think that’s a depressing measurement, there are even bleaker ones highlighted by Louise Perry in her new book, on rape victims, which show a very similar pattern.
These are all quite horrible measurements, but then science is an empty moral void and the data only has deeper meaning if you choose to give it any. It doesn’t measure attractiveness as most of us feel it; people become more interesting as they get older, and as men mature their interests change, too. What’s strange about our species is that men’s prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain concerned with judgement — doesn’t fully mature until around 25. As women enter their peak for male attention, their male contemporaries have not even finished maturing yet, and are at the pinnacle of stupid behaviour (as measured by things like car accidents).
Some men take pleasure in female contemporaries hitting the Wall, because while those contemporaries became very desirable in their late teens, they struggled to find a date, and so convinced themselves that they were playing a long game. But it just isn’t true — men hit the Wall, too, and it’s not even that much later.
Many men seem blissfully unaware that, while the dating game may seem brutal and unfair in adolescence, it’s going to remain brutal and unfair later, just in different ways. They’re not going to mature into a debonair George Clooney-type who has the women gushing over his overgrown ear hair. They’re just going to become increasingly repulsive as they age.
June 1, 2022
QotD: Spartiate Women
Sparta has obtained a reputation in the popular culture – derived from the sources – for affording a greater degree of freedom and importance to its women than any other Greek polis (I should stress this is a very low bar) and, so long as we are talking about spartiate women there is some truth to this.
Spartiate girls went through a similar “rearing” to spartiate boys, although they were not removed from the home as their brothers were. Spartiate girls ran races and were encouraged to be physically active (Plut. Lyk. 14.3; Mor. 227; Xen. Lac. 1.4). The evidence is thin, but points fairly strongly to the suggestion that spartiate women were generally literate, in quite the contrast (again, as the evidence permits) to the rest of Greece. Now our sources make clear that this is in part a product of the leisure that spartiate women had, since the primary domestic tasks of Greek women – textile manufacture and food preparation – were done entirely by slave labor forced upon helot women (Xen. Lac. 1.3; Plato, Laws. VII; Plut. Mor. 241d).
Whereas the sources paint a portrait of elite citizen Athenian women as practically cloistered, spartiate women had significantly more freedom of movement, in part because they appear to have been the primary managers of their households. Male spartiates didn’t live at home until thirty and were likely frequently away even after that (Plut. Lyc. 14.1; Mor. 228b). Spartiate women could also inherit and hold property in their own name to a greater degree than in Athens or elsewhere in Greece (note for instance Plut. Agis 7.3-4). The strong impression one gets from the sources is that this gave spartiate women quite a bit more sway; our largely male sources, especially Aristotle, disapprove, but we don’t need to (and shouldn’t!) share their misogyny. The sources are also very clear that spartiate women and girls felt much freer to speak their minds in public than Greek women in most poleis, although they were still completely and universally excluded from formal politics.
But – and you knew there would be a but (surprise! there are two) – but the role of women in Spartan society as we can observe it remains fundamentally instrumental: in the Spartan social order, spartiate women existed to produce spartiate boys. The exercise that spartiate girls undertook was justified under the assumption that it produced fitter (male) children (Plut. Lyc. 14.2; Xen. Lac. 1.4). Plutarch implies that the age of marriage for spartiate women was set in law, though generally older than in the rest of Greece (Plut. Lyc. 15.3; Mor. 228a).
Spartiate women appear to have had no more say in who they married than other Greek women, which is to say effectively none. Marriages seem to have been arranged and the marriage ceremony itself as it it related to us was a ritualized abduction (Plut. Lyc. 15.3-5; Hdt. 6.65) without even a fig-leaf of (largely illusory) consent present in some other ancient marriage rituals. Husbands apparently also “lent out” their wives to other spartiate men (Plut. Lyc 15.7; Xen. Lac. 1.7-8); descriptions of this passage stress the consent of the men involved, but completely omit the woman’s consent, although Xenophon implies that the woman involved will “want to take charge of two households” and thus presumably be in favor; I have my doubts.
Everything we have about the Spartans (honestly, just read Plutarch’s Sayings of Spartan Women, but also Xen. Lac. 1.4, 7-8, Plut. Lyc. 15, etc.) reinforces the impression that spartiate women were viewed primarily as a means towards producing spartiate boys. Gorgo’s retort that spartiate women “are the only women that are mothers of men” (Plut. Mor. 240e), her husband’s command that she in turn (when he died), “Marry a good man and bear good children” (Plut. Mor. 240e), the anonymous spartiate woman who shames an Ionian woman for being good at weaving because raising children “should be the employments of the good and honorable woman” (Plut Mor. 241d) and on and on. Most of the sayings that don’t involve the bearing of children, either involve spartiate women being happy that their sons died bravely, or disowning them for not doing so.
Now, there is a necessary and very important caveat here: this is the role of spartiate women as viewed by men. It is striking that the one of the largest things we can be reasonable sure that spartiate women did do – they seem to have had the full management of the household most of the time – doesn’t figure into these sayings or our sources hardly at all (save, to a degree, to Aristotle’s polemic in Book 2 of the Politics). We should not be surprised that our – elite, aristocratic and exclusively male sources pick out the roles that seem most important to them. The average spartiate woman may well have felt differently – for my part, I can hardly imagine many spartiate mothers were overjoyed to hear their sons had fallen in battle, whatever brave face they put on in polite society. And I have to imagine that many spartiate women were likely shrewd managers of their households, and probably took some pride in that skill.
All of that said, I think it is fair to say that, on the whole, spartiate women seem to have had a relatively better condition than free citizen women in other poleis in Greece. Where they were sharply constrained – and to be clear, by modern standards, spartiate women were still very sharply constrained – they were constrained in ways that were mostly typical in Greek society. Quite frankly, ancient Greek poleis did quite poorly by their women, even by the low, low standards of other pre-modern societies. But given that low bar, the life of spartiate women does seem quite a bit better and our sources reflect this fairly openly.
But – and this is the other “but” I alluded to above – a huge part of this is that spartiate women were freed from the demand to do hours and hours of difficult labor preparing and serving food and producing textiles. And here we circle back to last week’s problem: spartiate women probably represented around 6% of Spartan (including the helots) women. If we want to talk about the condition of women in Sparta, we need to talk about helot women.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part III: Spartan Women”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.
May 14, 2022
The Crusades: Part 5 – The Role of Women
seangabb
Published 19 Feb 2021The Crusades are the defining event of the Middle Ages. They brought the very different civilisations of Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam into an extended period of both conflict and peaceful co-existence. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this long encounter with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
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May 6, 2022
QotD: “… the Spartiates were quite possibly the least productive people to ever exist”
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part II: Spartan Equality”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-23.
April 25, 2022
Miscellaneous Myths: Pygmalion and Galatea
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 7 Jul 2016Hey, any of you ever wanted a girlfriend? Statistically speaking, more than half of you just thought “yes”, and a non-trivial percentage probably even went so far as to think “HECK yes.” Well, this is the story of one brave pioneer who, rather than waiting for Miss Right to find him, decided to speed up the process by MAKING her! Don’t go getting any ideas, though — I’m afraid our boy didn’t quite think this through in advance.
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April 24, 2022
QotD: Love in an age of Instagram
I really like the girl I’m dating, except for one thing. On every date, she asks me to take photos of her for Instagram. Afterward, she consults me repeatedly on which will “get the most likes.” I’m starting to get really annoyed, and I find it cuts into my enjoyment of our time together. She even did this on my birthday! — Irritated
Psychologist Erich Fromm wrote, “Mature love says: ‘I need you because I love you.'” He died in 1980, 30-some years before Instagram-infused love: “I need you, love, because my telescoping selfie stick won’t fit in my cute purse.”
This girl’s far from alone in turning every occasion short of stints on the toilet into a photo op. Social media (and Instagram especially) transformed fishing for compliments into a business model. #admirationvampires
Some young women — especially 20-somethings with a still-murky sense of identity — might feel they don’t exist in any meaningful way if they don’t post pix and videos of themselves to score likes and gain followers. #KeepingUpWithTheInstadashians
There’s also the lure of easy money for those who can rack up an audience: potentially making big “influencer” bucks just by showing up to events in some pop-up shop’s dress and striking a bunch of poses they copied off Beyonce.
Amy Alkon, “The Camera Sutra”, Advice Goddess, 2021-12-25.
