Legendary industrialist Henry Ford was reputed to have once told a customer asking what color his Model-T cars came in and was told that:
Of course, they stopped making Model T’s almost a hundred years ago and since then, capitalism has grown orders of magnitude more consumer-friendly. Walk into the grocery store to buy cooking oil and you will see dozens and dozens of choices. Want to buy a new TV? Amazon alone has more than 1,000 different types of all sizes, qualities, and costs. Want to have someone do some temporary online work for you? Websites like GURU and Fiverr give you potential options from all over the world. As someone who lives at the beach and tends to get hot at night, I wanted thin blankets with fish designs for my house. So, I bought hand-woven Kantha quilts on Etsy that were delivered to me from India. People complain about it a lot, but capitalism certainly has its benefits.
Consumers in the modern world have more options than any other civilization in history. There are 82 million different songs on Spotify. Barnes and Noble carries more than 5 million books. Netflix has almost 4,000 movies, many of which cost tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to make. There are a practically unlimited number of things to do, jobs to take, and types of people to congregate with online. We also live in what may arguably be the most permissive culture in human history. If you could let them see the modern world, there would probably even be people from Sodom and Gomorrah who’d look at America today and go, “I know we had a bad reputation, but even we didn’t go this far.”
Given that Americans are practically drowning in choice (I have a column coming up on that in the future), you would think that would make everyone see the obvious flaws of a big, one-size-fits-all, centralized government. Unfortunately, the Left still loves big government because they see it as a way to enforce their increasingly bizarre, schizophrenic, and unreasonable demands on the rest of the country.
Setting that oddity aside, there is another strange area where the Left feels like they should still have unlimited choice and that’s gender. Whether you want to say God created the differences between the sexes (I believe that), it’s natural selection, or just the way of the world, the reality is that men and women are not interchangeable. We are very different. We have different physical abilities, mental tendencies, priorities, strengths, and weaknesses. This is not a controversial thing to say when you’re talking to normal human beings who’ve watched men and women play sports, interact with their own gender, with the opposite gender, and naturally gravitate towards things that interest them. It’s just obvious for almost everyone who isn’t on the Left.
Contrary to what liberals want to believe, as I’ve noted before, gender is not a social construct:
The sleight of hand that liberals use to promote this obviously foolish idea is to point out that different cultures have different definitions of what constitutes manliness. To many Americans, enduring boot camp and becoming a soldier is a great way to prove your masculinity. To become a man in the Sateré-Mawé tribe, a boy must stick his hand in a glove full of venomous ants with incredibly painful bites and hold it there. On the Greek island of Kalymnos, manhood is proven via deep diving without equipment. Those men consider using diving equipment for safety to be effeminate.
You could be the epitome of manhood in America without ever allowing yourself to be bitten by venomous ants or a man’s man in the Sateré-Mawé tribe without ever deep diving; so, doesn’t that mean gender is a social construct?
No, stupid.
As Jack Donovan has noted, “Strength, Courage, Mastery, and Honor are the alpha virtues of men all over the world. “A hard-assed American drill sergeant might think it’s dumb as dirt to stick your hand in a glove full of Bullet Ants, but I can guaran-damn-tee you he would have a certain level of manly respect for a guy who’s tough enough to do it.
Moreover, there are no cultures anywhere where let’s say someone like Justin Bieber would be considered manly while someone like John Wayne would be considered feminine. Similarly, there are no cultures like the fictitious Amazon where women do the fighting while the men hang back. In the early 1900s, explorer Ernest Shackleton needed volunteers for a South Pole expedition. He placed an advertisement that read like so in the London Times: “Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful; honor and recognition in case of success.” The following day, over 5,000 men showed up to volunteer.
Note that 5,000 MEN showed up to volunteer. In no culture in the world would women ever be the majority of people showing up for something like that. Not today, not last year, not at any point in history. Yet, if gender really were merely a social construct, we’d expect to see women making up the majority of warriors, hunters, and the people doing backbreaking, dangerous jobs SOMEWHERE. Along the same lines, there’s no culture where men do the majority of the child-rearing. If gender is really just a random, illogical series of habits that civilizations pick up, then we SHOULD see a lot more overlap, but we don’t – and we never will.
When someone insists that a man can choose to turn into a woman or a woman can choose to turn into a man, they are trying to rewrite the natural order of the universe to create a choice where there is none. A man can try to make himself look like a woman (usually without great success), but he can’t grow a uterus, have a period or get pregnant. “Birthing people” don’t have babies, women do. This is all really no different than saying an otter can choose to become a falcon or a cow can choose to become a whale. It’s not reality. Maybe you can put some toy wings and a little plastic beak on the otter, but he’s still an otter. You can build a little whale costume for the cow to wear, but it doesn’t actually turn him into a whale.
Similarly, Third Wave feminists may believe that a woman can do anything as good as a man can, but that’s not true. Sure, there are limited exceptions to the rule, but that’s what they are – exceptions. Just to name an example of what I mean by that, I’ve had three dogs now. The first two were male and I named them after great generals.
Patton after George S. Patton….
…and Jackson, after Andrew Jackson.
They were both great dogs. My newest dog is the first female dog I’ve gotten and so, I decided to continue the tradition of naming her after a great general… which turned out to be a problem because historically, there are very few great female generals or even warriors of note. Given my sparse choices, I settled on Boudicca, the queen of a Celtic tribe who waged war on Rome and did a lot of damage… before she lost.
Most people are a mixture of male and female traits, but it’s 100% true to say that men as a group are going to be much more competitive, aggressive, leading, tough, achievement-oriented, and logical just as it is to say women are generally going to be more cooperative, passive, supportive, tender, appearance-oriented, and emotional. It’s in the wiring and sure, you can socialize and train people to adopt many of the traits more common to the other sex, but more often than not, “success” is just going to mean that you create men and women that are pale copies of the other sex. The vast majority of feminine men and masculine women are not people worth emulating.
This also plays out with abortions. Yes, the woman has to (gets to) bring a new life into the world. You may like that or not like that, but it’s how human beings have been designed. Many people in our culture have embraced an elaborate web of obvious lies about this because they don’t think it’s fair that the woman should have this “burden” put on her by biology. Contrary to what you hear on the Left, very rarely are abortions about a “woman’s health.” Since the baby is the one dying at the hands of its own mother, it would be much more honest to say it’s an issue of a “child’s health.” It’s also not just an issue for women. An abortion impacts three people: the woman, the man, and the child. A man shouldn’t have a say in an abortion? Actually, he should have just as much say as the woman since neither could have made the baby without the other.
Unfortunately, life is not a video game that allows you to customize your character and restart at the save points when you mess up. There are some things that are thrust upon us by life that we don’t get to choose. Things like what sex you are, which sex carries the baby, and the natural differences between women and men are among them. The more we try to rewrite reality to suit our cultural inclinations of the moment, the more off-track our whole society becomes. It’s just as Robert Ringer once said:
“The degree of complications and unhappiness in a person’s life corresponds to the degree to which he dwells on the way he thinks the world ought to be rather than the way it really is.”
Now John, there you go, about to get yourself hated on again for speaking fact and common sense. As you point out, the Left hates truth and facts, especially God created Truth. It's undeniable that only women have their "super power," the ability to give birth to human babies. Yet it's equally true that they need men to do it. I started to write a comment about abortion, but that's a side issue of this movement away from truth into false philosophy, which Christ warned us against. Yet this ghastly joke that the sexes are interchangeable is also a sterile cult that destroys life and lives. Thanks.
Totally agree! This is just language games for leftists. They actually think just changing the word used to describe something actually changes it. So if I change my pronouns to he/him I literally become a man. This is incredibly juvenile & ridiculous!
Actually I think ‘gender’ is nothing more than personality. Once we can accept that gender is personality we should be able to forget about all this nonsense. Because once you recognize its personality there’s nothing to transition to because as we all know changing your sex is impossible.
Im actually working on an article about this right now!