The future was female

Was.

Editor’s request: it’s been brought to my attention (by myself) that this article, if not taken in entirety, or even in combination with my other works, can be totally misconstrued. As such, if you want to know how important I think women are, please refer to my essay The Meaning of Life, in which women play an almost-central role in it. If you want to know how intelligent I think women are, please refer to my essay Are Women Basically Children?, in which I hold women to high standards of what we know as street smarts, and thus to its corollary, responsibility. If you want to know how divine I think women can be, please refer to my essay A Prophet or a Menace, in which I ask whether a woman can be the direct expression of God Himself.

This essay isn’t about the average woman except in two areas: 1) how women themselves prefer to live, and 2) the physical and spiritual effects of testosterone. The third thing, and probably the most insulting to most women, has almost nothing to do with either men or women at all. And that is whether there are an equal number of Leonardo DaVinci-calibre geniuses between the sexes.

As such, my advice is to read the whole thing before flipping out. If you don’t have time to read the footnotes, bookmark this essay for later. If you’re too lazy to read the footnotes, go read Curious George or The Babylon Bee.

Yours,

-J

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Dear S,

The big problem with music today is the same problem with modern church; and that is, both of them are made for women and children.

I’m not saying today’s music is all bad; it just lacks the originality and genius the genres had when almost everything was run and made by men. To my knowledge no woman has ever invented a new sound entirely, even. The idea of Jazz, or Rock and Roll, or Metal, or New Wave, or Soul, or Hip Hop or Punk being pioneered by a woman is almost comical: from Grunge to Alternative to Prog Rock to Country, across the board we see one common thread — and that thread, at the beginning, is testosterone. (I wish I could say the same for church, but “genius” and “church” are almost totally exclusive categories. When a genius gets control of a church it ends up becoming a sect at best, and most usually ends up being a cult).

We were told the future would be female, but not that it would be sterile — like the women who lead it. Every industry and calling where women have totally replaced men is one overrun with rote schooling and rubber stamping: places where physical strength and pioneering aren’t too necessary, and where systems can be gamed with quotas — not usually places where Nature Herself weeds out the unfit. According to the US Department of Labor, women are most prevalent as teachers of children and the handicapped, executive secretaries and assistants, nurses, speech pathologists, dental assistants, dietitians and nutritionists, and other such jobs which obviously require intelligence and skill, but not necessarily war spirit, brute strength, leadership skills, a cutting-edge intellect, or even too much innovation.

Please don't take this as an insult: each and every one of these jobs is essential to the health and efficiency of our society, and, when done properly, to maintaining our general quality of life. I just mean you go to school for them, and you usually have to make it through an HR rep — unlike founding Led Zeppelin or SpaceX, which can't be taught or gatekept by anybody.

It's worth mentioning here that I had to look each of these jobs up because I wasn't really sure what women were up to, aside from teaching and nursing. The things men do — and almost exclusively men — are so obvious that only a male feminist could miss them. I’m talking about the people who started companies with a little funding and an old garage and turned them into Goliaths we half love and half fear. In this category we have the founders of Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Tinder, Google, Netflix, Uber, Facebook, and Twitter — a slew of (mostly) household names responsible for changing not just our quality of life, but for upsetting norms and politics and even the gender roles themselves.

I’ve only noted modern tech companies here, excluding the older giants, because we’ve been living in an age of pantsuits for decades now, where women do better than men in school and are generally better off career-wise; and I listed them to show that raw innovation and leadership are still (apparently) a man’s field. Not because of a “social construct” like patriarchy. I’m saying that, even in a social construct like feminism, it's because of nature. They've been keeping us down in schools, but without government interference and social pressure, they can’t keep us out of the board-rooms. At least not when the founding generations are still active.

Aside from this we have the blue-collar trades, which are still well-paid and almost totally male-dominated. These careers, which almost no women even pretend to want, encompass the physical building and maintaining of society, from roadways to cars, to homes and electricity, to water and sewage, policing and firefighting. Then there's mining and oiling. Engineering and shipping. Landscaping and general contracting. Not a glass ceiling to overcome here, but a physical and spiritual repellent: places where women don’t feel safe, or comfortable, or even needed. The doors have been open for them to sign up for a while now, and the takers are practically zero.

But perhaps equal in importance to this is something I mentioned above and probably insulted my readers with: the thing known as intellect.

I don’t mean to say here that men are smart and women are stupid. I mean that when the internet gave everybody a chance to listen to what other people had to say, the intellectuals everybody wanted to listen to most were usually men. Note that almost zero women (since Oprah) have ever taken the spotlight for the discussion of American issues. Once the TV barriers were broken, and the talking heads didn’t have to be greenlighted by a horde of Jewish leftists and DEI officials and other gatekeepers of mediocracy, the shift towards men as arbiters of the public discussion happened so quickly and so freely that no women even have a chance to stand close. The age of Ellen and The View is over.

Women have the reputation for talking; it is men who made a show and a real art form of it. We have all the best comedians. When covering a wide variety of social and political and health issues, we have most of the popular talk-show hosts. The hits on Spotify and YouTube and Instagram prove that random men don’t just dominate women in public discourse — we beat the intellectuals which the schools, and book publishers, and magazines told us to listen to. We introduced the world to a whole slew of intellectuals the media even told us not to listen to. The average Joe Rogan podcast runs somewhere around three hours — the most popular talk show in the US by miles. Further down the list we have Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, Jordan B Peterson, Russell Brand, Dan Bongino, Theo Von and Steven Crowder. Candace Owens is the only woman I know of who can keep up with the boys; and in the Democrats’ camp, a camp dedicated to seeing women dominate men (if they can’t make them equal), are The Young Turks, Bill Maher, The Breakfast Club, and Trevor Noah: not a single leading woman in sight. The Young Turks had Ana Kasparian, but she realized they were crazy and left.

What I’m saying is the future was never female. Women were put on this planet by God to share it with us, and to balance us, and to make this planet worth living on. And the second the internet freed people up to compete, we found women needed and wanted us after all — in the categories they couldn’t keep up with us. Like we want and need them in the categories we can’t keep up with them.

So why do we end up fighting about these things? I suppose, in the end, it’s because the misbreeds on one team — the sexless, the frustrated, the people who get self-esteem from their category instead of their character — said the other team wasn’t important: a poor attempt to shore up their meager self-worth. And I suppose in the long run the arguing doesn’t really matter anyway.

Why? Because the feminists went about importance all wrong***. It takes one woman and one man to make anybody at all — even the geniuses; and the whole reason we build this world up and fight about it, in the first place, is because we get to make somebody — together. So you can argue about who has the most popes, or whatever, but every single king came from spread legs and grunting and pelvic thrusts****. And it would be better to live in the Stone Age with a good woman than to live in a self-sustaining spaceship with Ben Franklin.

What I’m saying is simple. There are things that are bigger than the war between the sexes, and one of them is sex. There are things that are more important than Thomas Edison and Elon Musk, and those things are mothers and daughters. What we are — and especially the majority of time at home — is more important (most of the time) than what genius things we do**. As Paul said, where there are prophecies, they will cease. Where there are tongues they will be stilled. Where there is knowledge, it will pass away. But love? Love never fails.

So feel free to argue about jobs all day. But I would advise you to remember why we think callings are important in the first place. That reason, for men, is women. And that reason, for women, is men.

Yours,

-J

P.S. My editor (God bless him) rejected this essay on the grounds that it wasn’t “airtight.” He argued, first of all, that many women are listened to in the public forum; and second, that maybe I just haven’t listened to them.

I would argue that his counterargument isn't airtight either. Why, for instance, didn’t he have a household name ready to throw back at me? I'm fine with somebody calling attention to my ignorance. But instead he confirmed that in this category we’re both ignorant. My whole point was that the greatest talk-show hosts we all know are the boys. It was household recognition I was arguing for: not total knowledge of the talk-show landscape.

But this brings us to the next question. Are any women great at being intellectuals?

I guess that would depend on your definition of "intellectual." In my view, an intellectual is someone with original ideas and takes who goes head-to-head with big thinkers, in public, over a wide variety of issues — not a self-help guru like Brene Brown or Mel Robbins who, while interesting, hosts people she mainly agrees with. Thus to my knowledge, other than Ayn Rand women don’t really have intellectuals on the top-tier — and a quick look at their “big names” on Ranker and Super Scholar, a list of their leading intellectuals both current and historical, proves my point. In fact after looking at the names I think the lists are kind of an insult.

But this doesn’t mean I ignore what women have to say. I put some women next to Nietzsche and Montaigne on my bookshelf anyway: Joan Didion for pure style, and Nora Ephron for pure fun. When a woman makes my shelf it’s usually for the same reason I find my way to her at a party, or sit next to her in the break room: because she's a really good time.

To the notion that I haven’t given women a chance, I’ll list thinkers across the spectrum such as Jane Jacobs, Barbara Tuchman, Isabel Wilkerson, Camille Paglia, Robin DiAngelo, Stephanie Kelton, Anne Applebaum, Virginia Woolf, Ann Coulter, Rebecca Solnit, Jennifer Eberhardt, Rebecca West, Bell Hooks and a whole slew of critically-acclaimed thinkers and gurus I can’t even remember.

Of these there’s a lot of style, and grace, and even some great points. Some of them are insightful and others are even occasionally profound. But not a single one of them comes close to the blurbs of Rochefoucauld or E.B. White or Eric Hoffer*. And women certainly can’t keep up with the YouTube videos of Jordan B Peterson, or Alan Watts, or the wide range of topics covered and leaders interviewed by Joe Rogan. In terms of the density, the delivery, and the sheer diversity of ideas, women have yet to catch up with our best.

I’m not saying that women in general aren’t as smart as men in general. In my experience most women are adequately intelligent. What I’m saying is that in that rare category of men — the geniuses, I mean — we might produce a higher quality than they do. If any woman takes offense at this, cheer up: probably none of the men you know will ever reach this category either. In that respect the sexes really are equal. We should be happy to catch glimpses into better minds than ours; but the truly inferior man doesn't appreciate a hand-up. He grumbles about things he never had a chance to be anyway.

****Regarding sex, we pretend to have dignity up until the moment we get what the posturing was for. As Alexander the Great put it, he knew he was only a man when it was time to either grab some teats, or hit the sheets (Will Smith translation). The rest of us, starting from a much humbler position, are downgraded from Joe Plumber to Rin Tin Tin.

*Camille Paglia has a memorable passage in Sexual Personae that shows not only insight and originality, but style,

Everything is melting in nature. We think we see objects, but our eyes are slow and partial. Nature is blooming and withering in long puffy respirations, rising and falling in oceanic wave-motion. A mind that opened itself fully to nature without sentimental preconception would be glutted by nature’s coarse materialism, its relentless superfluity. An apple tree laden with fruit: how peaceful, how picturesque. But remove the rosy filter of humanism from our gaze and look again. See nature spuming and frothing, its mad spermatic bubbles endlessly spilling out and smashing in that inhuman round of waste, rot, and carnage. From the jammed glassy cells of sea roe to the feathery spores poured into the air from bursting green pods, nature is a festering hornet’s nest of aggression and overkill. This is the chthonian black magic with which we are infected as sexual beings; this is the daemonic identity that Christianity so inadequately defines as original sin and thinks it can cleanse us of.

If she’d keep this up I’d put her on my shelf next to Ayn Rand — but we see here only a blip of genius: not a full career. Camille is brave, and true, and a fun brawler in the war of ideas. But she never made a whole book of passages like this.

G.K. Chesterton did. And he writes, on sex, in his biography of St Francis of Assisi,

The effect of treating sex as only one innocent natural thing was that every other innocent natural thing became soaked and sodden with sex. For sex cannot be admitted to a mere equality among elementary emotions or experiences like eating and sleeping. The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant. There is something dangerous and disproportionate in its place in human nature, for whatever reason; and it does really need a special purification and dedication. The modern talk about sex being free like any other sense, about the body being beautiful like any tree or flower, is either a description of the Garden of Eden or a piece of thoroughly bad psychology.

**The fact that men outclass women in the public sphere doesn’t mean women aren’t as smart. Being an intellectual is a calling — a job, most times; and, just as it is in the world of business, most extremely competent women are smart enough to get their priorities straight. That means, when it comes to picking between 1) working all day for a boss who doesn’t really care about you, and 2) travelling around the world arguing with idiots, most of their best decide to 3) make a human being who’s enamored with them, and 4) spend their life giving him or her the best shot they can possibly afford.

In short, they pick love instead of money and glory; and if the poets and the gurus are to be trusted, I think this is the real proof of women’s intelligence. That is, knowing you can’t fill an empty heart with a full wallet and a big ego. It tops off when a toddler throws his arms at you and says, “up!”

Mother Nature is an engineer, and she decided people run on love like cars need to be run on gas. She has also dictated that all genius expresses itself in obsession. No man ever proved he was a genius but in that field (or those fields) he was personally enamored with. You can have the highest IQ in the world, but if you’re not interested in physics you will never be nominated for a Nobel Prize in nuclear physics. If your obsession is in making widgets, you might end up inventing the IPhone. If you’re a mid-range IQ but you’re obsessed with theology, you will outpace a genius spiritually who’s only interested in technology. As the Spanish proverb goes, a fool knows more in his own house than a wise man does in others’. And we all know that home is where the heart is.

I would thus argue that when a woman has a child her whole sphere of influence becomes totally narrowed due to obsession. She sees that baby for the first time, and hears his cry, and her whole being, chemically and spiritually, is poured into his existence. There is nothing like a mother’s love. Thus there is nothing like a mother’s mind. Thus many women of high intelligence, maybe even of genius, would never go too far into business, or science, or politics. There was no point (and no fun) in their doing it. They were given a more important task, and their reputation as thinkers took the brunt of it.

***Although women really do value a good face and a 6’4” frame with big muscles, when they’re picking a life partner, they have generally valued men for what they can do and where they rank more than what they physically are. And conversely, because we need women to make and raise a baby, men have always valued women more for what they physically are than what they can do in the business field.

Thus there comes a point where women, imagining what men feel, but drawing from their own lopsided perspective, project their attitude about worth onto us — a false claim, at bottom, that causes mass paranoia, and a lack of insight that translates into a lack of self-esteem. They look at us and think we don’t value them because they can’t keep up on talk radio, or engineering, or warfare. And let me be frank with any ladies reading this right now: whether you can run a Fortune 500 company or not, if you’re hot and/or fun, we couldn’t give less of a shit.