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A week ago sunny weather arrived in time for Mărţişor. Time to walk
hatless and scarfless along Calea Victoriei in the spring
sunshine.
Romanians consider that spring starts on March 1 (Mărţişor) and men here
celebrate it by offering mărţişoare to women. A mărţişor is a trinket,
usually by peasants who come to Bucharest to sell them,
though some fortunate ladies receive expensive versions of mărţişoare
encrusted with gems.
If you failed to invite a lady for dinner on Mărţişor today you have a
second chance, because March 8th is International Women's Day. It is a day which, if it is noticed at all in the West, is marked by left-wingers and feminists. In Romania it is a very big thing but, after more than forty years of left-wing ideas and political correctness, it is simply about giving women presents and inviting them to dinner.
A very pleasant custom but, still, I dislike IWD because it is Marxist.
I had never heard of it till I came to Romania and it used to be pretty much unknown in the West, but now it gives rise each year to tiresome articles in the leftish papers in England about sexual inequality.
One of my English women friends (30 and just became a mother, in case you imagine she is older) pointed out in exasperation on Facebook on IWD a couple of years ago, "They always talk about 'exceptional' women who are so because they're doing something traditionally considered 'male'. How about women being exceptional, for heavens sake, for being mothers, wives, home makers?"
The BBC's classical music station Radio 3 devoted IWD to women composers yet, as Melanie McDonagh pointed out in 'The Daily Telegraph', a year would not be enough for male composers. The comparative lack of female painters is equally striking and the comparative lack of female mathematicians.
Does this point to oppression of women? No. Girls from the upper classes, after all, were taught to paint and draw for centuries.
Nor does it mean women are in any way inferior to men. It points to men and women being very different - and, if one believes in a loving creator, very different by Divine purpose.
I am aware that a lot of women are achieving success in painting these
days and am pleased about it. I do not think women are for some reason
unable to be painters or composers, but am sure there are reasons why so few have been until recently and it is not because of lack of opportunity.
Harvard University President Lawrence Summers lost his job because he thought there might be innate differences in mathematical ability between the sexes - and perfectly sensible, highly intelligent Englishwomen I know think it was right that he was pushed out. The late Christopher Hitchens, despite being an atheist, Communist (Trotskyite variety) and feminist also got into big trouble for saying that women are less funny than men.
This is because of a false analogy between racial equality and sexual equality, which are not on all fours.
I have absolutely no wish to denigrate women, whom I regard as the
superior sex. Most of the closest friends I have had in my life have
been women. I find them more interesting than men.
I do not, of course, want all women to be wives or mothers, by the
way, and I esteem women who do not marry, just like men who do not
marry. People have different vocations.
But nothing is more dangerous or silly than the idea that sex is a
social construct. It's much worse even than the idea that nations and
peoples do not really exist.
Feminists can be religious believers, and vice versa, but modern
post-1960 feminism is one of the consequences of the decline in
religious belief in rich countries, because it assumes the differences
in the sexes are arbitrary and not created by an all-loving God. In
Romania this idea has not caught on but it probably will do so one
day.
Feminism is, I think, misogynistic. Vladimir Putin's pet political
philosopher Alexander Dugin is not a thinker I admire (and is a pagan,
by the way) but he makes a good point when he says that liberalism is
the most ‘male affirming’ theory. Liberals ultimately conceive of
emancipated woman as just another man, he says. I think this is right.
My last thought on the subject of International Women's Day is the answer that the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis gave, when asked what was the greatest achievement for women. 'The Annunciation'.
A very pleasant custom but, still, I dislike IWD because it is Marxist.
I had never heard of it till I came to Romania and it used to be pretty much unknown in the West, but now it gives rise each year to tiresome articles in the leftish papers in England about sexual inequality.
One of my English women friends (30 and just became a mother, in case you imagine she is older) pointed out in exasperation on Facebook on IWD a couple of years ago, "They always talk about 'exceptional' women who are so because they're doing something traditionally considered 'male'. How about women being exceptional, for heavens sake, for being mothers, wives, home makers?"
The BBC's classical music station Radio 3 devoted IWD to women composers yet, as Melanie McDonagh pointed out in 'The Daily Telegraph', a year would not be enough for male composers. The comparative lack of female painters is equally striking and the comparative lack of female mathematicians.
Does this point to oppression of women? No. Girls from the upper classes, after all, were taught to paint and draw for centuries.
Nor does it mean women are in any way inferior to men. It points to men and women being very different - and, if one believes in a loving creator, very different by Divine purpose.
I am aware that a lot of women are achieving success in painting these
days and am pleased about it. I do not think women are for some reason
unable to be painters or composers, but am sure there are reasons why so few have been until recently and it is not because of lack of opportunity.
Harvard University President Lawrence Summers lost his job because he thought there might be innate differences in mathematical ability between the sexes - and perfectly sensible, highly intelligent Englishwomen I know think it was right that he was pushed out. The late Christopher Hitchens, despite being an atheist, Communist (Trotskyite variety) and feminist also got into big trouble for saying that women are less funny than men.
This is because of a false analogy between racial equality and sexual equality, which are not on all fours.
I have absolutely no wish to denigrate women, whom I regard as the
superior sex. Most of the closest friends I have had in my life have
been women. I find them more interesting than men.
I do not, of course, want all women to be wives or mothers, by the
way, and I esteem women who do not marry, just like men who do not
marry. People have different vocations.
But nothing is more dangerous or silly than the idea that sex is a
social construct. It's much worse even than the idea that nations and
peoples do not really exist.
Feminists can be religious believers, and vice versa, but modern
post-1960 feminism is one of the consequences of the decline in
religious belief in rich countries, because it assumes the differences
in the sexes are arbitrary and not created by an all-loving God. In
Romania this idea has not caught on but it probably will do so one
day.
Feminism is, I think, misogynistic. Vladimir Putin's pet political
philosopher Alexander Dugin is not a thinker I admire (and is a pagan,
by the way) but he makes a good point when he says that liberalism is
the most ‘male affirming’ theory. Liberals ultimately conceive of
emancipated woman as just another man, he says. I think this is right.
My last thought on the subject of International Women's Day is the answer that the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis gave, when asked what was the greatest achievement for women. 'The Annunciation'.
So interesting that the old communist guard never caught on the militant potential of 'women's' day. Growing up, March 8th was simply 'Mother's day' for us in Romania, a day to celebrate Mom. It still is, as most cards talk about Mom. In general, starting with the beginning of the 20th century, women were participating in the labor market, not out of this weird empowerment notion(with the exception of the bourgeois suffragettes maybe), but out of very practical reasons. After the great war, it was a given that a woman should have a career in case the husband dies. I remember my grandma telling me about her father grooming her for a career in the 1910's, and the main reason was the practical benefit of a career. My grandma's grandmother was running several shops in the 1890's as she had lost her husband. I was astonished to see this un-natural excitement and arrogance of 'career' women here in the US. I would ask them, so what's the big deal, and get rolled eyes and scoffs as an answer. And I was wondering, how come these women feel so persecuted, since the West has been in large part, populated by pioneer women, incredibly strong women who have my absolute admiration. It took me a while to understand why.
ReplyDeleteYes, the '60s was a terrible intellectual regression in the conscience of the west, the ideology of a cuddled and spoiled generation. I am surely glad I missed it. It is so reckless in it's ideas that indeed, now feminism has become misogynistic, with the bar being raised to have women in combat competing for the same muscular mass as men. Not that it cannot be done, but to what purpose?
Feminism is, I think, misogynistic.
ReplyDeleteVery much so. The essence of feminism is that being female is worthless and contemptible, and therefore women must try to turn themselves into men. Feminism is nothing but hateful bigotry.
Alexander Dugin is not a "Pagan". He is an Orthodox Christian Old Believer. Please understand that unless you have read Dugin yourself, almost everything you have been told about him is wrong.
ReplyDeleteHa, ha, ha. Sorry about that but is just a good reason to have a party. I would celebrate even the Mamaliga Day...
ReplyDeleteSunny C
Yes, you are right.
DeleteIn pre-feminist days I would surely have been forced into a marriage (and motherhood) I do not want. Very glad feminism gave me the room to travel and be independent. -- A woman
ReplyDelete