Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth

by John C. Wright

  Those who oppose this darkness and seek to preserve the sinking wreck of civilization, or even, by heaven’s aid, to float it again, the men of logic and reason, we are their enemies, and they hate us with an extravagant, absurd hatred and contempt. Meanwhile they are busily drilling holes in the deck in hopes of letting the water drain out.

  And I suddenly realized why the soulless ones never stop drilling holes in the Titanic, no matter how clear it is that the ice-choked water means death for us all. They have nothing else.

  I will not impose upon the patience of the reader by listing everything that fell into place once this key thought unlocked the pattern to me. I will mention but the three discussions that provoked the thought in me.

  First Discussion: Why are we still discussing this?

  The first conversation concerned that never-ending favorite topic among modern writers, how to write strong female characters.

  Anyone unwise enough to be reading my essays is weary and over-weary of my opinions on this boring topic, which I have flogged to death. I will repeat them one more time here, just out of a sheer sense of impish perversity: I think female characters should be realistic and interesting if you are writing a realistic story, should be unrealistic and interesting if you are writing an unrealistic story, but in both cases should be interesting, because no one wants an uninteresting story.

  By ‘realistic’ I mean feminine female characters; by ‘unrealistic’ I mean superheroine characters.

  The conversation in this case was even more boring, because, as it turns out, the solution of making women characters willing and able to drink beer, kick ass, and blow up the Death Star as gallantly as a male character has fallen into disfavor as a type of tokenism.

  The Progressives have been given strong female characters in every genre from detective novels to horror movies to space opera, but, to no one’s surprise but their own, this is not satisfactory. Now they want realistic superheroines, who are feminine but not feminine; the superheroines must be equal to men but not different from men and at the same time different from men, ever keeping in mind that all differences are signs of inequality.

  So the female character, to satisfy the demands of modern politics, cannot be a realistic heroine as Antigone, Penelope, Deborah, Vasilisa the Wise, Juliet Capulet, or Natasha Rostova; nor be an unrealistic superheroine as Buffy or Ripley or Supergirl.

  The conversation then suggested that real feminist icons should be characters like Oracle, aka Batgirl, after she is paralyzed and consigned to a wheelchair. Or Buffy’s Mom who dies of a heart attack.

  So a cripple and a dead single mom are the new icons of true womanhood. This, from persons who alleged themselves to be supporters of womankind.

  The conversation about how to put strong female characters in stories is boring because it is a conversation, beneath its mask, about how to use stories not to serve virtue, truth, and beauty, or even how to serve a well-crafted entertainment to a paying customer, but how to disguise propaganda to advance Progressive causes, that is, to advance the abolition of man.

  The complaint was that making heroines too masculine suppressed the femininity of the heroines, and that THIS was now, suddenly, a sign of patriarchal oppression; whereas last season, making the heroines feminine was a sign of patriarchal oppression.

  But the conversation turned an interesting corner, and asked why it was that the conversation on this topic is never-ending. I mentioned only that the conversation was never-ending because what was being asked of writers was logically absurd, due to the natural tendency of women toward femininity and the natural tendency of men toward masculinity, not to mention the natural tendency of the readers to admire and love manly men and womanly women as characters.

  At this point, I was corrected, not as if I had offered an alternate opinion, but as if I had uttered an inexplicable and inexcusable mistake of certain and uncontested scientific fact, as socially awkward as believing the earth was flat. With a note of honest surprise, I was informed in a peremptory fashion that masculinity is cultural.

  I do not think I laughed aloud, but I did call it nonsense.

  Also, as if a flashbulb had ignited in my brain, I suddenly saw the source of the bitterness and discontent of the modern world.

  The conversation on how to portray women can never come to an end as long as the modern idea of womanhood is unnatural. The feminists can never get what they want, because what they want is as impossible as a circular triangle.

  By ‘feminine’ I mean all the characteristics of female genius feminists hate, namely, temperance, justice, prudence, fortitude, but also compassion, insight, loyalty, maidenly modesty and matronly dignity. Femininity means taking an indirect rather than a direct approach, being neither a braggart nor a whiner, being a support and sustenance, a healing and an inspiration. The female approach is to get you not only to do your chores but to want to do your chores; it is more concerned with motives than results. Femininity is a genius that turns children into adults and savage and shaggy bachelors into civilized and domesticated men. Femininity is delicate and fine. It means being damned sexy, which means being nubile, fertile, and fecund; and it means being romantic.

  Feminists, at least as represented by their spokesmonsters, prefer women be aggressive, manly, boastful, foul-mouthed, ruthless, crude, cruel, whorish, shameless, sterile, selfish, and alone.

  Feminists want women not only to be childless, but to kill their own helpless children in the womb with a bloodthirsty infanticidal mania difficult to understand and impossible to overestimate. Feminists feel about the unborn the way Nazis felt about Jews. They blame the unborn for everything and promise that the Final Solution of Planned Non-Parenthood will solve everything. It seems more like a brain disease than a sober philosophical or political posture.

  To those who object that feminism is nothing more than the proposal that women should be equal to men, I reply that since the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 and the Nineteenth Amendment of 1915, women have been equal in the eyes of the law to men. Few or none number the feminists who speak against the misogynistic inequality of Islam, or speak against the adultery of Bill Clinton, because so-called feminists these days are merely apparatchiks of the Democrat Party. When women’s rights clash with Progressive strategic or tactical goals, the modern feminist lifts no hand in defense of women’s rights, utters no word.

  Whatever it may have been at one time, feminism is no longer the proposal that women should be equal to men. It is now the proposal that men are evil and women are helpless victims locked in a remorseless death-struggle for supremacy, and the only hope for women to prevail is totalitarianism in government, socialism in economics, political correctness in speech and thought, and the abolition of man.

  But, of course, the abolition of man means the abolition of woman as well.

  There are the same four steps involved. First is the Worldly philosophy, where the attempt of the suffragette begins as the perfectly reasonable and perfectly just demand that they be granted the vote.

  Second, the Worldly feminist becomes an Ideologue. Feminism becomes a paranoid neurosis once the idea takes root that any source of difference between men and women is a lurking threat to equality, or a potential excuse to rob women of their rights. All differences are abolished and unisex is the order of the day.

  Third, a retreat into Mystical feminism, from paranoia to extreme gullibility, where women are told that full expressions of their womanhood include sexual liberation, including sex with strangers; and at the same time, all gallantry is sexual harassment, all men are rapists.

  Finally, the paranoid neurosis and gullible neurosis falls into full blown screaming psychosis once the self-contradiction involved becomes clear, (namely, the self-contradiction of making women homogenous with men while preserving their unique feminine differences which make them women).

  The only thing left to do, once women are told BOTH to act like women and never to act like women, is to revise the vie
w of women into pure victims: hence the turn of the conversation toward cripples and victims and dead mothers. And this final stage is Nihilism, where the only thing to admire about women is nothing.

  When I was told by someone who, again, I admire and to whom I mean no disrespect, that masculinity and femininity OF COURSE! were nothing but cultural artifacts, not based in nature, the first of three tumblers clicked into place in my mind.

  Of course they do not believe in nature. Of course they think man is infinitely malleable, can be turned from anything into anything else. If man cannot be trained to be unisex, and if women cannot be trained to be happy, then man by his own efforts cannot break the curse of human nature, nor can women be free of their unfortunate, (unfortunate from the point of view of the Nihilist), desire to serve and suffer for the men in their lives, to be loving and giving, to submit to the leadership of their bridegroom.

  Once one accepts the premise that all differences are inequalities, there is no such thing as two complementary sexes. If either differs from the other, then one is superior, (ergo a sadistic oppressor bent on exploitation and destruction on the second), and one is inferior, (ergo a victim whose only hope of freedom is the destruction of the first). Therefore if all differences cannot be removed by social engineering, by changing laws and customs, by peaceful education or forced injections of hormones, why, then, no peace between the sexes is possible, and all dreams of women’s freedom from the horrific bondage of being a woman are dashed, and the ecstatic vision of unisex utopia fades like a mirage. Horrors!

  If they did not think mankind endlessly open to endless improvements, then the endless improvements needed to cure all the ills and sorrows of the human condition are out of reach forever.

  Of course they think human nature is a cultural artifact, which we can change at will. To believe anything else, if you live in an empty and godless world, is flat despair.

  You have to believe that. You have nothing else.

  Click. So much for the first tumbler.

  I said before that the insight was based on three discussions I recently encountered, but, to be precise, one non-discussion must be added. This is one of the sets of facts that fitted itself suddenly into place with a click like a tumbler falling.

  The one non-discussion must serve in the place of an endless number of non-discussions. A non-discussion is that particular act of craven intellectual treachery whereby a man flees from confronting any honest inquiry into his arguments by decreeing imperiously that no discussion is profitable or possible: the matter was settled long ago, and to dissent is a sign of mental incapacity and moral depravity and treason and blasphemy and worse.

  The Sound Of Silence

  I will use the example of the non-discussion on the sensitive matter of women’s role in a post-gendered, post-Christian and post-rational society. If the gentle reader recalls from our last chapter above, your gentle but innocent host was taken unawares, elbows and knees jerking in angular yet antic surprise, eyebrows aloft, to discover a respectable lady of the science fiction persuasion expressing discontent with the way strong female characters are portrayed in genre writing.

  Now, to be clear, she was not saying that she was tired, because she had seen it too often, of seeing sweater girls in tight leather skirts carrying naked swords on the covers of Urban Fantasies and Buffy Ripoffs. Nor was she saying that she was tired, because she had seen it too often, of the gritty realism where a female character must be raped in order to give her a tragic back story or a motive for revenge. Any fashion becomes wearisome after a while.

  What she was saying ,(if I understood correctly), was that portraying women as sword-wielding Amazons was tokenism, and was condescending, and was not true to life for most women’s lives, and therefore was insulting to women, and an enemy to female equality.

  What she was saying, (if I understood correctly), was that women are portrayed as rape-victims in order to portray them as weak and inferior to men, to make sure women are not uppity, are kept in their place, and kept weak. This portrayal was also an enemy to female equality.

  What bemused me not a little was that both these conceptions of how to portray women in stories have their origin in the Left and only in the Left.

  It was not any author loyal to conservative ideals of decency in speech and writing, decorum and honor and the defense of female honor who was clamoring for the portrayal of more grim and gritty and dark undersewer realism in genre fiction, who wanted, for example, to portray a sweet and innocent Mary Marvelesque superheroine as a rape victim in the pages of Miracleman; it was Alan Moore. Likewise for the portrayal of the Phantom Lady style superheroine Sally Jupiter in Watchmen. It was not Gene Wolfe or Tim Powers who larded an urban fantasy with chapter-long digressions on the evils of raping children, and had both major female characters in the drama be victims of child sex abuse in the pages of The Onion Girl, it was Charles de Lint.

  Let no one misunderstand my point in marking these examples. I mean no disrespect to these authors, whose fame and genius need no additional lauds from me. Both Alan Moore and Charles de Lint are seminal writers, and stand as colossi in our field, alongside the very few who can claim to have founded an entire subgenre of work: Urban Fantasy in the case of de Lint and Anti-superhero comics in the case of Moore.

  I do however mean disrespect to the literati Left who rejoice shallowly in the perpetual degradation of our culture, who in my generation applauded these sickening desecrations of women as ‘brave’ and ‘edgy’ portrayals, and in the current generation now do an about-face and condemn that same desecration, not because the rape scenes or warrior babes are insulting to the image of women, (which they are), but because they are insulting to the image of equality, (which they are not).

  The question again arises as to why the Left cannot take ‘Yes’ for an answer. Having succeeded beyond their wildest dreams on the issue of women’s equality, why are they gnawing on their own entrails in orgasms of spite and rage and mewling hatred, and making more demands?

  It is not a question of moving the goal posts, as when our grandmothers wanted the vote, our mothers wanted to enter the work force, our daughters want to kill our granddaughters in the womb. It is a question of why the goal posts move. Why, in the West, the only place on the globe and the only point in history when women are legally equal to men, is equality not enough to make women equal?

  It is not a question of moving the goal posts. There are no goal posts. There is only envy and discontent. The divorce rate is way up, nine out of ten of which are initiated by wives, and the suicide rate among women is way up, and the rate of venereal disease among women is way, way up. I take these rates as signals of discontent on the grounds that the normal, sane, and prudent way of life, the way of life which displays self-control in sexual matters is for a virgin girl to marry a virgin bridegroom and cleave to him and forsake all others until death. That is a contented life. Suicide, divorce, and promiscuity are not signs of contentment and happiness and joy. They are erratic distractions or vain and desperate lunges toward false pleasures; they are signs of discontent, unhappiness, self-hatred.

  The women have equality in every real sense of the word, and it is still bitter in their mouths. Vanity of vanities, they have found equality is vanity.

  Why are they unhappy?

  Is it because, as they claim, masculinity is a cultural artifact? Because if masculinity is cultural, then changing our laws and customs can change masculine nature, tame it, break it. Once unsocial masculine behavior and masculine ‘gender roles’ are happily abolished, womankind will be free to define each happy maiden her own role in life, and be truly free. Such is the promise.

  The promise is false.

  The unhappiness of women is a feminine version of the unhappiness of men, and both are versions of the unhappiness of the Fall of Man. We are unhappy with life because life does not give us—and can never give us—what we truly desire. It is human nature to be dissatisfied with life, and it is the natur
e of the proud, (that is, it is the nature of those with high self esteem), never to blame themselves for their own failures. It is the nature of the proud to hate any superiors, real or imaginary. It is the nature of the proud to blame superiors, real or imaginary, and to see each disappointment and imperfection in life, real or imaginary, as an oppression and as an injustice, only some of which actually are injustices.

  Ladies, you cannot change our nature. The best that anyone has ever done to tame the masculine spirit, and make it useful rather than antisocial, is to impose the norms, values, laws, and customs associated with chastity and charity into the male psychology. The Church once persuaded or pressured or commanded men to marry, and to love their wives, and to fight with chivalry rather than with pragmatic ruthlessness, and to treat the weak, the humble and the fallen with honor, and to let women and children get to the lifeboats first.

  This society no longer teaches that. This society teaches the opposite. This society teaches self-esteem. A man with high self-esteem shoves granny aside while running for the lifeboat, and a woman with high self-esteem divorces a man and has the courts of law punish him the moment she fears he will one day bore her. Marriage is no longer a mechanism useful for domesticating the male warrior-animal. You’ve broken it.

  You’ve broken it in pursuit of the promise that abolishing laws and customs will change human nature for the better, because human nature is cultural. Suckers.

  The promise is false because masculinity is natural, not cultural.

  If masculinity were cultural, then there should be many, or at least some, or at least one, culture where men did not fill the masculine roles.

  This is not to say that the specific form of masculine fashion does not change from culture to culture or year to year. In some years, it is fashionable to shave your whiskers, and in others, to grow your whiskers, but a bearded lady is always a freak, never a fashion.