Toxic Femininity
Mar. 14th, 2023 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kimberlysteele
Here are some terms that were not in place when I grew up in the 70s/80s: woke, equity, social justice. Political correctness of the type that is currently de rigueur was laughed at. Nobody would have dreamed of putting a biological male on a women's swim team, let alone a women's prison. Racism of various stripes was allowed to slide when it was not baldly displayed out in the open. In my teens, I had a relative who used the word "gook" to refer to Asians. It was not uncommon to hear white people using the N word to refer to black people, and not in a friendly, trying-to-be-cool way. In the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany's, Mickey Rooney did a turn as the ostensibly-Japanese Mr. Yunioshi, a buck-toothed, thick-bespectacled idiot landlord. In elementary school, we swung our bodies on the jungle gym to this refrain:
Chicky chicky China sitting on a fence
Tried to make a dollar out of sixty-five cents
She missed, she missed, she missed like this
Have you ever seen a China girl who missed like this
The acceptance of everyday racism and sexism made every interaction with non-white people awkward. I felt this especially as a child, being the worst of both worlds: half-yellow and half-white. Half-breeds everywhere know the pain of not being colored enough for the color of one half and not being white enough for white people. As a girl, guys did not wait for my boobs to come in order unsnap my fledgling bra and to grab my butt in the halls of junior high. This kind of walk-by molestation was called a "goose" because that is what they yelled as they did it. To this day, I think it is a miracle I did not murder anyone in junior high or high school. Back then, if you were a girl or a woman, you just took it. For thirty years of my life, I was thought not to think much of it if a guy cat-called me.
As weird and icky as it used to be, I would gladly take yesteryear's racism and sexism over the current reign of Generation Cuck and the Thought Police who get their binders in a twist when they spot a minor transphobic infraction to report to their ghoulish social media followings. At least the goosers, the racist movie directors, and extended family members had a sense of humor. The politically correct scolds of the modern era are as joyless as a skiing accident.
Consider the toxic masculine pyramid of the 1980s: at the top were Gordon Gecko types and electric guitarist/singers of hair bands who wore as much and more makeup than their 2020s drag queen equivalent, yet did so while calling themselves straight. The pendulum took a dramatic swing, passing right through a moderate period during which it wasn't OK to call Asians gooks at the dinner table but it also was not OK to lump all white/straight people into an evilly evil blob slated for Stalinist persecution. By the 2000s, toxic masculinity was on its way out, taking its refuge in game culture. By the 2010s, the last of toxic masculinity hid in the chans and attempted to assert itself through the MGTOW movement. Toxic femininity exploited the vacuum left in the wake of toxic masculinity.
Shame
It is a human thing to project the shadow. Anytime a human does not want to deal with something she is doing, said human props up an enemy that resembles herself and then pretends the enemy is the only person doing the wrong thing. Toxic feminists seek to shame because they carry a great deal of unprocessed shame. This is their Achille's heel. If you want to destroy a toxic feminist from the inside out, tell them they ought to be ashamed of themselves and that you and they already know why, even if you are completely talking out of your ass.
Look underneath the hood. Toxic feminists try to pretend they are shameless, but they hate the bodies they pretend to be so "body positive" about. They know they are hypocrites and their troll act is just that... an act. They despair over the empty, vacuous lives they try so hard to paint as interesting on TikTok and Instagram. Deep down they are horrified about just how deep they have dug, but they cannot yet look in the mirror and admit it. Consequently, they wag fingers and scream EVIL instead of being honest and throwing down the shovel.
Chasing the Unlimits
At its core, toxic masculinity is a refusal to accept the limits of masculinity and a placement of excessive limits on femininity. Toxic femininity, on the other hand, attempts to remove any and all limits, including the hard limits of natural law. Toxic femininity at its core is a refusal to discriminate about anything: gender, beauty, law, getting up in the morning and going to work.
When I saw the Broadway production of Wicked in the 1990s, I remember making a mental note about how many of the songs were about the removal of limits. Many years later, I made the same mental note about the film musical The Greatest Showman, which features the song A Million Dreams (because a mere thousand or hundred dreams would never do) and Never Enough:
Towers of gold are still too little
These hands could hold the world but it will
Never be enough, it will never be enough
In the decade of the Millennium turn, McMansions got larger just as hard limits were slamming down everywhere else. For many, many years, the salary class and the politicians who make its existence possible have done whatever they possibly could to continue kicking the can down the road. In the 1980s, what was left of American manufacturing was sent overseas to China and its satellites, gutting the American lower-middle class and propping up the salary class with obscene wealth. In the 2000s, inflating property values and tech bubbles to frothy highs did the job until that had to be bailed out in 2008. After 2008, toxic femininity began its ascent because there was nothing else to do, nowhere else to go, and no resources left to cannibalize.
Toxic femininity is a kind of cannibalism. It cuts through the gills in order to scrape the last bits out of the tube. By removing the limits of human decency, it enables sexual access to children. By lumping in morbid obesity and freak show amputation/disfigurement into an amorphous standard of beauty, it opens the floodgates for medical profiteers to cash in on mental illness and dysmorphia. By making it acceptable to shame white and/or straight people for the appearance of their skin or their natural sexual urge to cohabit with the opposite sex, it provides endless avenues for vice disguised as virtue.
Communism
The gay luxury communist utopia where nobody works and everybody eats bugs (ahem delivered by drone) represents a toxic feminine ideal of detached, isolated, self-hobbled bliss. Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates are the ultimate figureheads of the lifestyle and they both have the man-teats to prove it. Toxic feminists love communism because they love violence: they advertise their love of it all the time by trying to equate free speech with violence. Communism itself is a symptom of the ongoing decay of monotheism: it creates demiurges like Pol Pot and Stalin who create mini-Apocalypses in their urge to re-create the world in their own images. Communism is feminine. It wants to conquer by infection in equal proportion to dominating via military might. The irony of communism is its domination by male leaders, and this is also the irony of modern toxic femininity. It is dominated by males, whether it is transitioning males on the playing field or XY chromosome holders with Her/She bars in hand.
Covid: Attack of the Killer Couch Potatoes
The lockdowns and vaccine hysteria of the 2020s were quite successful (but ultimately failed) attempt at installing toxic feminine communism worldwide. Without placing males at the heads of its nearly-unlimited hydra, toxic femininity cannot force its will at the end of a gunpoint because it does not know how to handle firearms without men at the helm. That is why for every Theresa Tam there are three or more male equivalents calling the shots. Toxic femininity is a cult of people who want to stay home and continue being poisoned, brainwashed, and spoon-fed. Toxic femininity is soft, pliant, and wants to take in and consume everything it touches.
In its current incarnation, toxic femininity is the juggernaut of the salary class. The toxic feminine takeover of masks, vaccines, and lockdowns was the most psycho in salary class strongholds. Neurotic, sclerotic rich people in cozy enclaves fought as hard as such types can fight for keeping Versailles peasant-proof.
Lockdowns are like McMansions in the way they are designed from the inside out. In the McMansion, there are enormous rooms the size of small houses that are bundled together in what from outside looks like a packed-together village. On the inside, there is always a cavernous foyer, a dining room, a living room, a finished basement with another huge living room/wet bar, a master bath, ostensible kid's and guest bedrooms, and at least seven large bathrooms. What the outside looks like hardly matters as long as all of these standard features are present.
Similarly, the toxic feminine salary class did not care about practical concerns such as a functioning economy and the state international shipping as long as it got its wishlist. The wishlist was mostly a removal of limits on the salary class. They were sick of commuting, so the primary goal became to give themselves couch time (Netflix and chill and GrubHub) while dictating orders to lower classes from a virtuous perch.
The handover of wealth from small businesses to mega corporations was fairly obvious when people were allowed to shop at Target or pick up Burger King at the drive thru but the tiny gift shop and café on the corner were forced to close. Of course the rules were childish: they were endorsed and followed by stunted adults who bought the luxury communist ideal hook, line, and sinker when they were not pressured into accepting its worst parts via shame and threats.
Subtle signs of yet another pendulum swing are lurking about. Shirts that read Nobody Cares, Work Harder are suddenly all the rage. The mainstream TV news media has to try extra hard to drum up interest in the latest failed effort to indict Donald Trump. Experts are coming out of the woodwork condemning Covid vaccines and all hope of censoring their dissenting voices has been dashed. I only hope that as the pendulum swings, it finds a few more stops in the middle this time.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-18 07:26 pm (UTC)The internet itself feels like quite a toxic feminine force generally, in the sense of uniting everyone in a nominal equality, but with all sorts of unspoken rules and cliques and social shunning punishments doled out for minor infractions.
Anon poster and Kimberly - have either of you read Rintrah Radagast's blog as well?
He's a Dutch psychedelic user, who has the occasional spectacular insight and used to post a lot on Covid. This post from late 2021 is the one I think of regarding toxic femininity:
https://www.rintrah.nl/myth-exists-outside-of-time/
He mentions the "Rotting goddess", who turns up in various religions.
It makes me think of fungi, the organisms who rot everything, and the parallels between a fungal network and the internet.
Mr Crow
no subject
Date: 2023-03-18 11:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-19 01:44 am (UTC)I just re-read the essay and it's actually in the comments that someone mentions her as the rotting godddess - Rintrah referred to her by the South American name of Pachamama. As an aside, in 2019, there was a very weird Roman Catholic mass which the pope did that was devoted to Pachamama. I've seen some clips/pictures and got some very creepy vibes from it.
Also, a fun fact for you - before fungi evolved, dead trees just piled up everywhere and the soil slowly became depleted. This went on for millions of years and is the only reason coal exists, but it will never be renewed now that fungi exist. The surge of nutrients opened up a whole host of new niches for exciting new species to evolve. As annoying as it is that my shed is slowly rotting to pieces, the fungi certainly have their purposes.
Mr. Crow
no subject
Date: 2023-03-19 03:48 am (UTC)Yeah, I saw photos of the Pope deferring to Pachamama. My thoughts were fairly basic... the Pope is an idiot.
What I find funny about Christians and monotheists in general is they never once consider that they could be punished for their blasphemies against various gods and goddesses. Much of the rotting goddess could be construed as a bit of heady revenge for the incredible hubris of monotheists. The male gods in ancient Mesoamerica seemed just as bloodthirsty if not more bloodthirsty than the female ones.
From Rintrah: "The Dionysian element returns to life and the matriarchal Goddess cult of human sacrifice is revived. It essentially took them a few weeks of heavy use of psychedelics, to revive the core of Aztec mythology."
The trouble with psychedelics and tripping your way to expanded consciousness is that you do get to the destination, but you built no strength or resilience along the journey. It's as if I was gifted with being able to play piano at the concert level (something I cannot currently do) and I didn't put in the multiple lifetimes it takes to become super good at it. Rintrah thinks he revived the core of Aztec mythology but he seems more like a golfer who hit a lucky hole in one while on massive steroids and now thinks he is young Tiger Woods.
Human and other animal sacrifice is (in my humble opinion) a vestigial behavior from the Iron Age that has heavy ties to maleness and dominance over herd animals. There's a guy who is like a broken clock -- he is right twice a day but in many ways is an arrogant crackpot -- his name is Dr. Will Tuttle. He wrote a book called The World Peace Diet that (in a biased and arrogant douchebag way) explains the ties between herding, animal sacrifice, and the rise of capitalism fairly well. The way I see it, people have always eaten animals (including other humans, which is always the primary reason to sacrifice them, free meat) because the amount of fat and calories you can get from eating meat is better than you can get from any other source. It doesn't mean that meat is healthy or unhealthy per se -- mostly meat isn't great for humans as we are mostly-herbivorous apes. Human males have seminal vesicles, and that is an herbivore thing; no carnivore has them. Nevertheless, if you were a nomad busting through 4000 calories in half a day running around in the long grass, it was eat meat or die, including the arms, legs, rumps, etc. of the human enemies you just raided and killed. Religious excuses were made in order to turn it into a sacrament, but something about it always seemed wrong, especially when it came to killing other humans for their flesh. I think the monotheist herding gods Allah, Yahweh, and Jesus are all pro-meat, pro-sacrifice gods. I believe they are male gods, and that isn't a statement meant to define good or evil. It's just what I believe to be facts. They are male and they like meat as an offering. They seem to like their followers to eat dead herd animals and display flesh as a ritual sacrifice and symbol of male dominance on the table for Sunday dinner. Of course I could be wrong; I'm not a god. I don't pretend to speak for gods and the above statement is pure speculation.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-20 05:59 pm (UTC)Your idea that the monotheistic gods are the gods of nomadic herding cultures makes a ton of sense and seems like a painfully obvious truth that has been hiding in plain sight all along. The ancient Egyptians associated their storm god Set with the desert and desert nomads. Originally he represented the parts of the natural environment that are hostile to sedentary human habitation, whereas his twin brother Osiris is the god of fecund/fertile lands very suitable for human civilization. The myth of Set dismembering and killing Osiris is quite fascinating. Isis (his wife) resurrects Osiris and their son Horus avenges his death by battling Set. Symbolically, the victory of Horus and Osiris is the yearly flooding of the Nile (and the restoration of fertility and life) and subsequently the harsh desert being pushed back to the margins of the Nile valley. Later on, after Egypt had been repeatedly invaded by foreigners from the desert, Set was demonized. Such demonization of an archetypal part of nature (not to mention deities themselves) seems to always result in some sort of blowback. Looks like Set got his sweet revenge and now we're left with a different type of archetypal imbalance that will correct itself sooner or later. I believe that early Christianity adopted a bastardized form of the Osiris/Isis/Horus/Set myth and the end result ended up as an unwieldly mythological chimera (something Set would love in his role as the adversary), whereby an amalgamation of Osiris and his son Horus is Jesus, and Set (Yahweh) is his father, and of course Isis is the holy mother who eventually becomes symbolized via the Virgin Mary in Catholicism/Orthodoxy. Weird stuff going on here, LOL.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-21 03:36 am (UTC)"The ancient Egyptians associated their storm god Set with the desert and desert nomads. Originally he represented the parts of the natural environment that are hostile to sedentary human habitation, whereas his twin brother Osiris is the god of fecund/fertile lands very suitable for human civilization."
Thank you for that -- it is easy for me to forget basic details when meditating, and Set as the desert god versus Osiris as farm/agriculture god is a rich topic. Supposedly the Egyptian Book of the Dead is very similar to the Bible, but I don't own a translation and have not studied it. How do you think Set got his revenge?
no subject
Date: 2023-03-21 03:06 pm (UTC)I agree that the black window archetype is a real thing when it comes to negative female behaviors. I skimmed so fast through Rintrah's essay; does he equate this with the Rotting Goddess concept? BTW I do find that concept quite fascinating, but I'm loathe to associate it with human behavioral archetypes or any kind of moralistic framing. Using the CosDoc scheme, I would posit that one of the "Lord of Form" (Lady in this case) is the spiritual force presiding over the process of decay and perhaps the intelligence that guided the evolution of fungi. This is a very beneficial mechanism here on Earth, in that it clears away bulky dead husks to make way for new life. If we're to stick to a pagan worldview, we'd know that the forces and processes of Nature can't really be looked at from the perspective of simplistic human morality. Now the idea that eating psychedelic mushrooms gets one in tune with this force is interesting and perhaps destructive when done in an unguided or excessive manner.
On the topic of the Hebrew Bible and Egyptian religion, that is a fascinating topic I can drone on about for quite a long stretch. I will say this though, the way I see it is that Ten Commandments were clearly ganked from the "42 negative confessions of Maat" which is found in the Book of the Dead. Of course the former was taken way out of its original context after the Bible authors appropriated these precepts and retconned them (way after the fact) as being "Laws of Moses." The original Egyptian confessions were not presented as concrete laws of human conduct beamed down from the sky on one day by some deity, but rather a checklist of "don'ts" for when the soul enters the afterlife and has its karma judged; if any of the checklist items aren't fulfilled then the soul is denied entry into the realm of immortality. The implication here is that coming up short means reincarnation; more and more rebirths until these karmic issues are finally balanced out. Other parts of the Bible, like the so-called Proverbs of Solomon, are clearly derived from much older Egyptian Wisdom literature. Overall the Hebrew Bible came about as an exercise in borrowing copiously from Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Greek traditions, and rewriting those source materials to fit their own narrative.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-21 03:55 pm (UTC)As Mr. Crow mentioned, fungi are relatively new on the evolutionary scene, where as femininity is not. I think Rintrah was certainly on to something, but like any kind of false transcendence, his came with a great deal of presumption. Actually, I think the Devouring Mother is the Ring Chaos of molly coddling. Not only are you on your own if you have a devouring mother in your life, actually you are in danger all the time. You have to become a survivor; there's no depending on anyone else except yourself. The softness and perpetual childhood created by molly-coddling creates an equal and oppositely horrible hardness/premature adulthood when exposed to the Devouring Mother. The gushy emotions of molly coddling spur on the broken glass state of the Devouring Mother and vice a versa. As always, balance and harmony is somewhere in the middle.
The black widow is also a reaction to the weakness of the male. When males evolve into a corner of delicate weakness, they are only good for one thing (sperm) and then Nature in her cruelty does away with them ASAP. Nature being what it is, this is the same if a human male is soft and feminized and the woman assumes the protective typically-male role of provider/fighter. I think this is the trend we are seeing en masse -- women either opting in or being forced into the provider/warrior role, or some melange of both. In my opinion, this is a toxic state for any civilization because men have a natural propensity to be warriors and providers and women have a natural propensity to be nurturers and etheric plane harmonizers a.k.a. homemakers. Nobody can be all these things at once and to have everyone running around doing each other's roles leads to the exact kind of dumpster fire we are in right now.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-21 05:34 pm (UTC)I also agree that nobody can be all these things at once and to have everyone running around doing each other's roles leads to the exact kind of dumpster fire we are in right now. It's one giant intractable clustercluck, and the so called gender wars are a direct result of this. I'd argue this problem actually goes back to the beginnings of the industrial revolution, but that's another topic for another time. Sadly, I think this is going to keep getting more polarized and ugly until things finally bottom out.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-20 11:59 pm (UTC)While I do think the pope is an idiot (or more accurately, a puppet), I also think somebody knew what they were doing with that ritual. Much like the weird ritualistic opening ceremony of one of the tunnels at CERN a few years back, but I won't get into that today.
Yeah, I would take anything Rintrah says with a small pile of salt. He often tends to contradict himself a few weeks later. What interested me most was the rotting goddess as an archetype, which is distinct from, but similar to, the devouring mother. They consume and absorb and unify but also remove all individuality and nuance. Like in Communism, or when trying to interact with a computer system - there are no named heroes in Communism and the machines are infallible. The Borg is a good analogy, and the Borg cubes are led by a queen.
Equity is a weird term that seems to have sprung up recently as well - wheras equality was notionally about everyone being treated the same regardless of their obvious differences, equity is explicitly saying that some people are less skilled or intelligent than others, and so have to be brought up to the same level through artificial means. I saw this explained and I just thought "But isn't that just compensating for incompetence...?"
Anyway, where the toxic masculine uses outright force and overt menace, the toxic feminine uses subtlety, shame, guilt and manipulation. Both are destructive extremes, but I feel that the pendulum may already be swinging - I don't know if the news of the "Andrew Tate" court case reached American shores, but he is a British guy who is facing trial for sex trafficking for a sleazy, but probably still just about legal ring of cam-girls he orchestrated in Eastern Europe. He rose to fame for his youtube videos (as far as I can tell - I've never watched them) where he is an unapologetic misogynist, who believes that women are inherently worse than men in every conceivable way, and treating them like trash is therefore not only justifiable, but logical. He's become extremely popular with teenage boys, who also shame their peers with the terms "simp" and "cuck" if they appear to be showing undue respect towards women.
I feel like the separation of men and women again in society is not that far off.
Interestingly, despite having made his videos and commanded his harem for several years, the police only went after Mr. Tate when he spoke out openly against the vaxes. Go figure, right?
I also pondered the other day that shame and appeals to empathy only work as a weapon against those who feel guilt or care about the feelings of others. Some people don't feel either of those things, and there's a name for people like that - psychopaths. If we assume that each imbalance sows the seeds of its own destruction, the toxic feminine in society is likely to give rise to a whole host of male psychopaths. Yay...?
Going on the Greek principle of Anacyclosis, where societies go through stages (https://anacyclosis.org/), we seem to be just leaving democracy, which I would say is an overall feminine type of government, towards ochlocracy, or demagogues and mob rule by force and threats of violence, which is very much a masculine form of government and one in which the psychopath would thrive. Related is the idea of enantiodromia, where something becomes its opposite,like you mentioned on another comment where the Left has become what the Right was.
I totally agree on the psychedelics. It's like some guy has given you the keys to an intergalactic spaceship and as he's walking out into the teleporter he says over his shoulder "You read the manual, right?". Some (actually, probably most - what child ever listens to their parents' wisdom?) truths have to be learned slowly over time.
I was doing some meditation one night on the theme of sacrifice, and it hit me that when you sacrifice an animal or person, unless they have offered themselves willingly (and an animal, by definition, cannot), what you are really offering is *yourself*. The god is effectively saying "will you take the karmic consequences of murder as a sign of your devotion?"
No offence to any South American readers, but I think some geographic regions just have more bloodthirsty gods generally. The jungle is a fertile, noisy, vibrant and dangerous place for everything that lives in it. No reason for its gods to be anything different. Our gods over here in Northern Europe? More stoic and cold, but also ruthless, rapacious and duplicitous (think Odin, and the British Empire).
And apologies to the original Anon poster, I've kind of derailed this thread! I said to myself "don't write any more 10 000 word screeds", but here we are, these ideas have just been stewing in my head all week...
Mr. Crow
no subject
Date: 2023-03-21 04:58 am (UTC)Hmm, I have heard about the CERN stuff but I have not watched it. Sounds like a substack post of yours I would read!
I heard of Andrew Tate being arrested but I honestly never knew anything about the guy. Does he have a famous brother? Is he in a Romanian prison or something?
The interesting part about toxic masculinity is the female psychopaths it breeds -- if you want to create a female monster, by all means, pigeonhole women into pre-fabricated, pre-ordained roles and expect them to be happy about it or else. Women don't have the same instinct to crow about how many they've murdered as men do, so you'll never know how many quiet female serial killers there are out there in a patriarchy. It seems that toxic femininity breeds a certain class of male vigilante. By disenfranchising large swaths of the population with forced vaxxes and woke garbage, toxic feminists have done two things: they have created lots of men with nothing left to lose (and revenge to gain) and the fun of easy targets who don't know how to physically defend themselves when laws break down.
That's an interesting thought about sacrifice. Carol J. Adams coined the term "absent referent" for the dead body on the family table. The corpse acts as a symbol of male dominance; the slain sacrifice whom all must partake in eating to complete the power structure of the pyramid. Now consider Christians worship a dead and resurrected human son of God, and that all the Abrahamic religions are named after a guy who nearly sacrificed his own son Isaac to God. (As an aside, I named one of the feral cats who pops into my yard every now and then "Abraham" because he killed his own kitten son a couple of years ago and left the poor little ginger kitty's dead body on my side porch). Also consider that Christians take communion by symbolically eating the body of their god and drinking his "blood" in the form of wine. All of the Abrahamic versions of God, for better or worse, started out as deities of blood sacrifice and that's why we have the legacy of male dominance, females as second class citizens/breeding chattel, and eating animals and their secretions as the building blocks of monotheism in the West.