Perhaps the most famous quotation ever attributed to Sigmund Freud is “What do women want?” For the record, the complete quotation is “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’” Also for the record, the quote is from a letter he wrote to Marie Bonaparte, a descendant of Napoleon, who consulted Freud for frigidity beginning in 1925.
Freud lived till 1939, so he was around long enough to see the triumph of the suffragettes, though not the routine appointment or election of women to high office and other positions of authority. His thoughts on that development surely would have been interesting. Suggestion for Psych 101 term paper topic: “Is the Girl-Boss Phenomenon a Manifestation of Penis Envy?” Penis envy, of course, is another Freudian theory not beloved by feminists. Famously, Woody Allen once said he believed in the theory but didn’t think it should be restricted to women.
Now that women in positions of authority are commonplace, we can start to make some observations about patterns of female behavior when they wield power. At the outset, let’s trot out the obligatory NAWALT disclaimer. Even so, if your prejudices accompany you into the voting booth and you look askance at female candidates, your instincts will rarely lead you astray.
Another famous quote comes from former (1977-1987) Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, a veteran of classic Irish ward-heeling politics in Boston. He once observed, “All politics is local.” It appears he did not coin this phrase but he is still associated with it even though he died 30 years ago.
There’s no telling how many talking heads have parsed this simple four-word phrase over the years, but it’s not particularly hard to understand. It means that a voter bases his decision on how candidates’ positions will affect him, his family, his neighborhood, his city, etc. with diminishing importance as one goes up the ladder. In other words, voters cast their ballots according to self-interest. What a revelation!
The concept of local is elastic to some degree. In a small or sparsely populated state, a local issue might be a matter of regional if not statewide importance. Typically, big-picture, geopolitical issues will gain little traction. When the flatscreen pundits turn to the pros and cons of regime change in Uzbekistan, local viewers/voters reach for the remote.
So keeping the two aforementioned quotes in mind, let’s assert this axiom for the woman politician and the woman voter: What women want politically is personal, i.e., local. No surprise there because women take everything personally. In fact, they admit it. One of the most popular second-wave feminist slogans was “the personal is political.” I wouldn’t go so far as to say women are incapable of objectivity, but I think their instinctive stance on any issue will be subjective rather than objective. The latter just doesn’t come naturally to them.
Chances are if there is some sort of charity regularly begging you for money, women are behind it. More often than not, there is some element of the personal in the charities they select. The ravages of (fill in name of birth defect) are rarely addressed by a woman unless she has given birth to a child with same. At that point, she is more likely to get involved in organizing a charity to fight said birth defect. Of course, while she does have a vested interest in alleviating the suffering of her child, the money will also alleviate the suffering of other people’s children and possibly fund a cure. So self-interest often leads to more than just selfish ends.
Nevertheless, you can’t come out and admit that your advocacy involves even a modicum of self-interest. The appeal must always be to the common good. Every candidate has a self-interest but woe betide anyone running for public office who admits it. The voter, of course, casts his ballot in secret, so no one can stop him from casting a ballot in his own best interest. Nevertheless, political pecksniffs still wag their fingers and admonish him to vote his conscience!
Actually, some people do vote conscience over self-interest. There is a word for such people: Suckers! By definition, only you can vote in your self-interest. If you don’t do it, no one else can. In truth, such a practice is democracy in action. If everyone votes for his own self-interest, the people with the most self-interested votes win! Never had a poly sci course in my life, but even I figured that out.
So what happens when female self-interest goes beyond charity to public policy? An object lesson is an elementary school teacher named Jeanne Manford. In 1972 she learned that her son had been beaten up while distributing pro-homosexual flyers at a political gathering. So she wrote a letter to the New York Post announcing, “I have a homosexual son and I love him.” One thing led to another, and she eventually founded Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, later known as PFLAG. Now the Lesbians and Gays have become LGBTQ, et al, and we have Pride Month, same-sex marriage, and a Technicolor panorama of flags.
Would this have happened without mothers like Jeanne Manford serving as a sort of ladies’ auxiliary? Would mother Manford have had an epiphany if her son had not been beaten up? Or if he had been a heterosexual beaten up for some other reason? Or if some other woman’s homosexual son had been beaten up? Doubtful.
Another issue that women take personally – to put it mildly – is abortion. Of course, millions of women have had a personal experience with this procedure. Some have regretted it ever since. One such woman of my acquaintance has a birthday party on the due date of the child she aborted decades ago. Like a religious convert, she is more zealously anti-abortion than rank-and-file pro-life women who have never had and would never consider an abortion.
More numerous are those who have had abortions and admit to them – and sometimes boast of them – asserting that whatever success they have enjoyed in life would not have been possible if they had been hamstrung by children. Call them pro-choice or pro-abortion, they tend to be quite vocal about their beliefs. Curiously, some of the loudest are post-menopausal women whose self-interest would not seem to be served one way or another by whatever laws a state enacts pertaining to abortion. How to account for that?
In many cases, it is because such women have daughters and want to ensure that they will be able to abort their babies if they want to. One of the selling points for abortion is that there’s a woman in every family who’s had one, though you might have to include the extended family. You wouldn’t vote against what’s best for your stepmother or your sister-in-law or your second cousin, would you?
Paradoxically, taking things personally dovetails with the female herd instinct. Any threat to legalized abortion is perceived as an attack by the individual woman, and also as an attack against all women. Criticism of women in general is taken personally by the individual woman; criticism of an individual woman is an affront to all women. It is a rare woman indeed who does not play the sexist card when she becomes the subject of opprobrium.
Consequently, a nuanced, rational debate about abortion is all but impossible. As far as women are concerned, it is all about their bodies and their rights. More’s the pity because the issue raises philosophical (when does life begin?), moral (if abortion involves the taking of life, can it ever be justified?), and religious (what would a higher power think about the deliberate eradication of inchoate human beings?) issues.
And what about the effects on society at large? Given the birth dearth, where will the future taxpayers come from to fund the welfare state that women are so fond of? On the other hand, a conservative argument in favor of abortion is that it is the most effective way ever devised to keep the underclass in check! Not that a pro-choice advocate will ever offer that up in an attempt to win hearts and minds. Feminists will be freezing their eggs in hell before they take to the streets bearing signs to that effect!
And what about the fathers of the fetuses? Don’t they have a say in the matter? You already know the answer to that. Sit down and shut up, Mr. Man!
Thanks to the herd instinct, if a woman in Texas can’t get an abortion, women in New York and California are outraged! They may even make a pilgrimage to Texas to raise hell about it. Of course, women can’t get abortions in Afghanistan but even the most ardent feminist isn’t crazy enough to travel there to lead workshops or protests against the Taliban. The hand of Allah writes, and having written moves on.
Given the tendency of women’s menstrual periods to synchronize when they live in close proximity to one another, one can’t help but wonder if the same is true of their political views. How many parents have been bewildered by seeing that vivacious young woman they sent off to college return to them a few months later as a social justice sourpuss, much too young to be a perpetually frowning frump, yet there she stews. A semester or two in the college hive will age a young woman but it won’t help her grow up.
Whatever you do, don’t engage such a young woman in debate. She will be passionate about a number of issues, and rational about none of them. If you don’t see eye to eye with her and say so, it will be more than a disagreement; it will be a personal attack on her as well as her sex. If you’re not down with abortion, then the question becomes: why do you hate women? The pro-abortion female is never asked why she hates fetuses.
Of course, this attitude is often present in regard to other issues. If you’re not in favor of the beatification of St. George Floyd, why do you hate black people? If you criticize Hezbollah, why do you hate Palestinians? If you don’t support Israel, why do you hate Jews? Is it possible that this attitude can be attributed to the increasing involvement of women (and testosterone-deficient men) in politics? Can we blame at least part of the Playskool politics of today on the increasing involvement of women?
After reading accounts of the 1787 constitutional convention, the Federalist Papers, and the writings of the founding fathers, one is tempted to say that public discourse in America has been on a downward trajectory for 250 years. Could that be because back then there was no input from women (no, Abigail Adams’s letters to her husband John do not count) – and no need to appeal to the women’s vote? If women were as politically involved then as they are now, we might still be British subjects, a more disturbing thought today than it would have been in 1776.
Of course, when the Declaration of Independence was drafted, all politicians were white males and women couldn’t vote. No need to seek out a candidate who looked like you because every candidate looked like you! Candidates had to take a stand on the issues, and voters had to ponder the issues and figure out which party or candidate was preferable. Whew! Thanks to identity politics, we don’t have to resort to that anymore!
In the early days of the republic, animosity was hardly unknown among male voters and office-seekers. But that was just part and parcel of being a man. If you were attacked, personally or politically, you counter-attacked; if someone zinged you, you zinged him back. A man who receives a tongue-lashing from a female foe doesn’t have the luxury of playing the sexism card. Actually, it probably wouldn’t occur to him to do so because the male herd instinct is not a thing.
When a man is verbally attacked by another man, a strong rejoinder is a must because if he fails to respond in some form or fashion, he will be adjudged a sissy – and that only makes things worse. There’s something fundamentally defective about a guy who won’t stand up for himself. Even a woman will look down on such a man – unless it’s her son. A man’s thought processes are more like, OK, he got me today, I’ll get him later. Maybe it’ll be face to face, maybe I’ll drygulch him, but I will get him. More importantly, although you may not like the other guy, you don’t hate him for what he said. He’s just doing his job. It’s nothing personal! If he out-insults or out-zings you, the onus is on you, not him.
Consider Playing the Dozens, an insult game played by black males. In short, it is a duel of oneupsmanship in insults. To say that the banter is insensitive would be an understatement. All’s fair in love, war, and Playing the Dozens. While insulting one’s mother would usually be taboo, in this contest it is common. You can say the worst thing imaginable about your opponent’s mother, and he will respond in kind. The only taboo regarding your mother is running home to her so she can dry your tears.
Another good example is a Friars Club roast, in which comedians get together to “honor” one of their own. If you’re good at dishing it out, you’d better be good at taking it. And if you’re not…well, they probably wouldn’t be roasting you in the first place.
Sports teams have always had bench jockeys and trash talkers. The abuse is milder than in days of old and there are more taboos, chiefly but not exclusively ethnic. It may be hard to believe, but there was a time when Yankee greats Joe DiMaggio and Phil Rizzuto took no offense at being dubbed Big Dago and Little Dago.
Today public address announcers will routinely warn fans not to engage in “racist or sexist” taunting. Of course, Joe and Phil wouldn’t have known what sexist behavior was. In fact, I don’t think the word “racism” was coined till after their heyday.
We are told that women seek consensus. More to the point, when they are in positions of authority, they impose it, creating a distinctly female form of totalitarianism. Being more hierarchical, men do not need consensus to function. The boss doesn’t care what you think about his policies, he just wants you to do your job.
When we hear that many people are breaking up friendships these days due to political differences, I suspect that those people are mostly female, biological or wannabe. With men of normal testosterone levels have a political disagreement and the matter cannot be resolved, it is perfectly acceptable to agree to disagree. Of course, there are men who go along to get along. This is not the same thing as following orders. We’re talking about trucklers who suck up to people in positions of authority. The yes man is universally despised. Is there such a thing as a yes woman? To be sure, but the phrase is redundant.
Ah, you say, haven’t you heard the catty remarks women make about each other? I remember years ago when the Miss America pageant was a big deal. In those days the contestants had to be attractive: No dogs, no trans women, no land whales, no purple hair. During the annual televised panorama of pulchritude, I would hear my mother, aunt, grandmother, or some other adult female in the living room criticize just about every contestant…with a schnoz like that she must be related to Jimmy Durante…her legs are like matchsticks…looks like a bottle blonde to me…her butt is too big – or too small. As I horny teenager, I just didn’t get it. They all aroused me. When does the swimsuit competition start?
An important difference in the jibes of men and women is that women’s negative comments are never said to another woman’s face. In fact, just the opposite. If a woman shows up with the most unflattering hairdo conceivable, the response is always, “Oh, I love what you’ve done with your hair!” If a poll was taken and her best friends unanimously thought she looked goofy, not one would break the news to her.
So it should be no surprise that the sacred cow status of freedom of speech is slowly eroding. The excuse is that it might – might, mind you – inspire some sort of anti-social behavior. Crack a joke about (fill in name of ethnic group) and you’re a bigot! Crack a joke about a homosexual and you’re a homophobe! Crack a joke about women and you’re a misogynist! And if somewhere in our fair land some ethnic, some homosexual, or some woman is harmed, it’s because of men like you! As a man, you believe in accountability but there are limits.
Before signing off, let’s bring back Freud for an encore. Another of his famous sayings is “The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” So there you go! If not for insensitive remarks, we wouldn’t be here today!
So why do you hate women, Dr. Freud?
