The Woman Who Kills for Womankind

"Now I don’t know what to do about this problem. (The essence of a rant, in fact, is that the ranter has no idea how to fix the thing being ranted about.) What I do know is this: it would be good if more women see interesting opportunities that they might not be qualified for, opportunities which they might in fact fuck up if they try to take them on, and then try to take them on. It would be good if more women got in the habit of raising their hands and saying “I can do that. Sign me up. My work is awesome,” no matter how many people that behavior upsets." -- Clay Shirky

This attitude that Clay espouses for women is called, where I grew up, The Bogard. It doesn't work for females. Or more properly, I should say that females don't bogard.

Somewhere over the rainbow, there are people who have decided that if women want to succeed they should act more like men. So you should expect over that way there will be those who ask the provocative question that maybe men should act more like women. And so it goes into an oblivion of controversy.

Why hasn't history produced a female warrior? I say it's because women don't want to be warriors. After all, if they could be successful warriors, who would stop them?

Let's start with the presumption that some of the rainbow warrior coaches come up with a way to get women to kick men's asses. Ultimate fighting perchance. Will women watch? Is that the way women actually compete? No they don't. Women compete in other ways, and I think it is a sort of disrespect and lack of understanding for those ways that fuels the speculation about empowerment.

So that's the provocation.

In our society, the alpha female is the center of attention. She is not simply attractive, but radiant. Her power is not simply in her presentation of herself but in that she exudes a grace. It is in this grace that people find serenity, purity, truth, beauty. These are archetypically feminine virtues according to my reading of things and these are the powers of women.  I take what might be considered an 'Eastern' view of balance between men and women - one should not compete in-kind but offset, thrust and parry, find unity.

The breadth of human actualization is absolute. Surely in history there are men who have represented the yang and women the yin in full reversal. But we are not here to make fetishes of the unusual, but to recognize the underlying truth of things. 

I feel confident in the research of Tolkein to refer to his archetypal characters in the LOTR series as appropriate references. As I was putting those feminine virtues together, suddenly my mind went to Galadriel, the Lady of the Wood and she is, not surprisingly "the mightiest and fairest of all the Elves that remained in Middle-Earth". 

What Shirky recognizes is that the essence of the Bogard is risking life and limb. That is where the argument must go. Our measures of equality and inequality in the American peasantry are unbalanced because we generally observe them in fair economic peacetime or in progressive planning for utopia. Success is not something that is a steady state that can be maintained without effort, and the nature of the effort in general is not free of violent conflict. It's the size of the prize that demands such. If women will not make war, then they will not conquer and if they will not threaten war they will not dominate. The fate of humanity falls to those who will. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.