Unintended Safetyism

How should women vote?

I can’t sleep.

I feel fragmented.

Please bear with me as my writing reflects my state of mind.

I should be in bed dreaming, but instead I’m perched on a recliner with my head all in a tizzy over safetyism. It really is everywhere. I’m starting to react to it like a child extending her hand ever closer toward a stove she’s been warned is too hot to touch. I want to test for myself just where boundary between a warning worth heeding and scorching pain really is. The more the sensibility of the warning gives way to excessive faultfinding with my every move, the more I get a mind to press my hand into the coils just so that a month after the I-told-you-sos come I can say, “And I told you everything would be fine, and so it is now.”

For some reason, I’m thinking of a random conversation I had with a friend whose son was scolded by a lifeguard for trying to do a backflip off of a diving board at a public pool last summer. My friend inquired as to the reason for the reprimand and found out that someone else’s kid had recently flubbed his own trick off the board and ended up needing several stitches. Now the pool was facing some backlash and asking patrons to please refrain from flipping off the boards. Patrons were allowed to cannonball, do regular streamline dives, and jump in feet first. But flips of any kind were now too dangerous for little boys and girls to attempt.

I just checked this pool’s website to see if this policy made it into the official rulebook. It's ambiguous. The official rules do not appear to have been updated since 2022, a year prior to my friend’s son being yelled at for attempting a flip, but under “Diving Board Rules,” I found a related guideline which says divers must “dive straight off the board.” I’m confident that this wording simply means not to dive off center to the board by any common sense interpretation; but I’m also confident that the ambiguity of this wording can be exploited to mean that there was already a policy regarding the form dives should take in order that the city may defend itself against angry parents whose kid got hurt trying to, God forbid, take a risk in the name of summertime fun and glory.

Another rule in this section got my attention, too: “Divers who change their mind about diving will be assisted by waterpark staff.”

In (weak) defense of this policy, I suppose we don’t want to take the chance that any kids hit the water face first if they begin experiencing symptoms of shakiness or lightheadedness that we were once able to attribute almost exclusively to the growing pains associated with facing one’s fears. Kids are much more vulnerable to sudden heart attacks and stroke than they used to be, after all. Thanks, dangerous shawt climate change.

But srsly. I miss the days when if a kid got too scared to jump, their dad would climb the stairs after them and push them off as they screamed. Most kids would resurface doing an endearing sort of laugh-cry - the sound of relief at having found out very quickly that the fall was further in their heads than it was in real life. Or perhaps that it was just as far as they’d feared, but that they could conquer it nonetheless! Most went on to jump off the board many times all by themselves through this practice. No one shamed the dad who carried out the task of developing his son or daughter, either.

And now it’s too dangerous to let kids attempt flips off of diving boards while the city adjusts to the backlash from parents who are too cowardly even to take responsibility for the outcomes of their own teachings and the subsequent choices their kids make.¹ It’s not enough that there’s a whole rulebook for every nook and cranny of the waterpark plastered all over the walls of the facility and the internet. Fate dared to take a hand in spite of all the rules, and that must mean there must be...more rules. And more - and more! - until fate itself has been utterly circumvented, so they say.

And it’s really too dangerous to let dads intervene at their discretion…we definitely need rules against that. Anything short of this would be too dangerous.

More like too fun - the stuff all mother hens are allergic to.

It’s easy to take shots like that, like pointing fingers at mother hens who seem so blind to the dire consequences of their own unchecked nature and presumably good intentions. But isn’t it amazing how few of these shots land - really land? I’m running low on sympathy - I don’t give a toot about your intentions when you’re ruining summer! - and I as much as I want to believe all mother hens are not evil spoilsports, I really don’t see how the distinction is important. They turn even the beautiful, glistening city oasis into a stinky henhouse whether they mean to or not.

Most of the longhouse hens are just misguided men and women (mostly women) who have been given too much authority. Next summer, I could bring my outrage to the hens behind the new rule at the city pools and I’d be spoken down to like a child and ultimately ignored. I could say it nicely, meanly, once, a thousand times and a whole bunch of nothing would most likely happen as a result. Nothing would most likely happen because the one Earthly thing that can reliably defend us all from both absurdity and atrocity alike has been carelessly pecked to near death.

Too many hens, not enough roosters.

I’d worry about contributing to that problem by having my little soapbox here, but the simple truth is that I’d be giving myself way too much credit spending much time concerned about that. The second I suspected that something I’d written was fundamentally deviating too much from my husband’s location on the map, I’d stop writing it and go have a discussion with him. I think monitoring for how aligned I am in principle with the man I respect most in this world is a decent gauge for putting my two cents out there for anyone so inclined to read.

But does this not make me yet another well-intentioned woman? Is the fact that I strive to be in fundamental alignment with my husband on all things I write really enough to skirt around my female nature - a natural force that compels me to prize safety? Does this same force manifest safetyism through me despite my awareness of it? Is the force a servant to the woman, or the woman a servant to the force?

Many women on the internet laud the quiet work that women can do while the men are out interacting with society in a manner which is, hopefully, attuned to their higher-order masculine traits.

The irony of this practice is not lost on me. It’s not quiet at all to post opinions online.

It’s a little…funny, no? Almost preachy in a top-down fashion. It’s got an undertone ringing with the phrase “rules for thee, not for me.” It’s like saying, “I am special. I have figured out a way to make money talking as a woman who advises that women should be quiet.”

Or maybe…

“I have secured a place where I can safely do the thing I tell others not to do.”

Meanwhile, who safeguards this place of ours if not the men that are in our lives ready to defend us when something goes awry? Or the men we don’t know who permit us to be in this space by not competing with us as mercilessly as they could?

Frankly, this is why I believe the soft misogyny of low expectations is a friend to any woman who wants to use some of the modern tools at her disposal to pursue a deeper education and organize her thoughts in writing. I’d go so far as to say that it is not always “soft-misogyny” at all, but often gallantry - courtliness toward the gentle sex that, under ideal conditions, aims to make itself a clear-headed consultant to men.

But at a larger scale, the feminine force is currently working through women totally out of balance with the masculine force. Safetyism grows under this condition like the field sandbur weed in nutrient-deficient soil, and the less safe from its prick everyone becomes as a result.

In a world where women hold the trump card socially, is it reasonable to hold everything that even the most well-intentioned of us say under suspicion? Are women gonna women until proven otherwise? Can “otherwise” be accomplished? Is the desire to “have a voice” really the righteous thing many women claim it is when this voice is merely another means by which the force of feminine nature exerts itself through us?

We care very much about our reputations. The louder we are, the more we can advance them. This may be a good thing given that many of us strive to be on the side of Goodness and Freedom. And I admit that when I write, it rarely feels like this is what I’m doing.

But isn’t it?

Of course men do this too, but the difference in their case is that the force at work behind their own need for reputation advancement only holds hands with safetyism when they have totally lost their way as men, or when they only advance the rhetoric of safetyism in the interest of power grabbing. In our case, reputations are most important for improving the odds of our own personal safety through our style of soft competition. They’re important to us for securing committed resource provisioners, not for the provisioning itself as it goes for men.

It may seem like all that needs to be done is for a woman to calibrate her natural strengths toward seeking Truth and she’ll be able to transcend the pull of her nature and participate in all things political with the same outcomes that could be achieved by any man using his own natural strengths for the same purpose. But I’m increasingly, and cautiously, curious about the degree to which this is possible for women who have not only their affinity for safety to contend with, but also their affinity for egalitarianism to contend with - to say nothing of their subtle style of aggression, difficulty working on teams without falling hopelessly into groupthink, menstrual cycles, and fertility windows. Why cautiously? Because as much as I think the question of whether women can supersede their delicate natures in order to analyze political candidates and vote strategically against tyranny and not inadvertently in favor of it has its merits, I also certainly don’t want to rush into the arms of any reactionary practices born of pure frustration with the status quo. Nor do I want to confine myself or my kids to the pigeonholes of self-fulfilling prophecy by choosing to believe I am totally helpless in the face of the force of my nature.

There’s definitely room for culture jamming, and I do have a sense of humor. So when the hammer falls on the virtue signaling college girl or the academic woman brimming with arrogant self-importance, it’s satisfying in the same way it is to see Biden gaffe compilations set to the Benny Hill theme. Women who give women a bad name by being totally unaware of themselves are open for jabs like the one from the quotable

Rurik Skywalker

, who trolled, “[…] saying the same things that a man said elsewhere … but she’s a woman!!! Woah!!! BETTER PUT A RING ON HER QUICK, AMIRITE BOYS!?”

Or, as Sam Hyde put it…

But I think the mockery here should serve as a cautionary warning to all young women who think they don’t need good husbands to help temper the force of safetyism that does its bidding through all of us if left unconstrained by a sacred union in which the woman chooses her champion. Why? Because there are essentially only two terrible alternatives. Either we end up indirectly competing with viragos whose own unconstrained vision for the world functions to reappropriate resources from those that can scarcely hope to challenge them in open confrontation; or we wind up under the boot of men we don’t respect who don’t respect us and treat us like cattle in the name of their God, or in the name of attempting to make gods out of unconstrained men.

No thanks. I will answer to direct inquiries, charges, and orders from husband, my Captain, only. Not some fucking Ferengi…

I can’t say that I feel trapped by my biology, personally. It just is what it is and I do my best to leverage it to make sure I’m not evil just as I expect from everyone else. Cool, cool. But sometimes I wonder if no matter how carefully I try to align my motivations with Truth and Freedom, I’ll always filter and respond to information in accordance with the force of femininity at play within me. That doesn’t have to be a weakness, or a bad thing. On the contrary, I think women help keep men aware of much that would otherwise evade them in the details. And this is why tight marriages built on a foundation of mutual respect are so important to a functional and prosperous society.

Oopsyism - the fate of well-intentioned women who aspire to influence politics directly?

While not everyone is familiar with the precise components of the feminine force driving the outcomes of our actions, I think any intuitive person can sense that there are more powerful political implications for this force that easily go beyond the mind-numbingly basic recognition that there are differences between both sexes and so we should organize accordingly.

Is there an adage I’m not familiar with that would sum up the implications of women being involved with politics into a few words?

Something similar to…

The Truth will set you free…

Honesty is the best policy…

Or…

There’s always another typo…²

What about…

Women always tempt safetyism…?

I’d like to think that I might be able to help battle safetyism by sharing what occurs to me through experience - you never know what arrangement of words will strike a nerve with someone. And I think the fight for Freedom can probably use however many foot soldiers it can get.

“I like to think I’m helping, but I don’t know.”³

But I wonder if Ayn Rand also thought she was helping. I thought of her as I was reading this section from The China Convergence…

5. Hedonistic Materialism: The belief that complete human happiness and well-being fundamentally consists of and is achievable through the fulfillment of a sufficient number of material needs and psychological desires. The presence of any unfulfilled desire or discomfort indicates the systemic inefficiency of an un-provided good that can and should be met in order to move the human being closer to a perfected state. Scientific management can and should therefore to the greatest extent possible maximize the fulfillment of desires. For the individual, consumption that alleviates desire is a moral act. In contrast, repression (including self-repression) of desires and their fulfillment stands in the way of human progress, and is immoral, signaling a need for managerial liberation.

Unless I’m missing something, this seems very aligned with Rand’s views on happiness as the moral center of a person’s life. Is Ayn Rand the most ironic mother hen who ever lived? Did she henpeck people into thinking they were immoral if they didn’t relentlessly pursue self-gratification above all else? All her clucking about selfishness seemed like it was advancing individual sovereignty, but it wound up contributing to the theoretical basis for the hedonistic materialism so tightly woven into the fabric of the managerial regime today.

To be fair, I don’t see Rand referenced very much lately. I sort of pulled this comparison out of my hat because one thing just happened to remind me of another. But I think Rand is guilty of strategic oversight, and I wonder if this sort of thing is more characteristic of women than it is of men. Rand sounded reasonable when she said the government shouldn’t prevent people from living their best lives, but by giving a high moral standing to the act of pursuing one’s desires, she inadvertently helped establish the rationale behind the even higher victim status now enjoyed by anyone whose material hedonism is sensibly questioned or rejected; and, by extension of this, the rationale the State needed to intervene on the behalf of the supposed victims - the very thing Rand was so against.

Men may blunder sometimes and wind up advancing safetyism, too. But are women always prone to this?

Are even the women most tolerant of the uncertainty inherent to true Freedom susceptible to inevitably converging on the point of authoritarianism they’d hoped to avoid?

Does our nature as women always slant the direction of the outcomes of our involvement with stately matters towards making the state more powerful instead of less even if these effects are not immediately observable?

Do women always instigate rational justifications for safetyism whether they mean to or not?

How can marriages safeguard against this come voting time?

The oopsyism of political and cultural pandering

There’s nothing easier to do right now as a woman than to pander to the lost men of the political right. The content creator Pearl Davis knows all about this. She says many things men wish they could say as loudly as she does. She’s made an entire career out of being a counterrevolutionary novelty by advocating that women should be submissive to men - an irony that’s not totally lost on the masses who observe that she is an unmarried woman whose success is made possible by her nontraditional business endeavors.

The more Pearl tries to make money by pandering to weary men who are eager to latch on to anything that will give them a renewed sense of control by telling them, for example, how disrespectful it is that their girlfriends and wives are overweight⁴, the less focussed any men who give her the time of day are on the bigger problems of our time - election reform, censorship, war, etc..

One of the lines Pearl loves to regurgitate is that “men tamed the world so that women could enter it.”

A romantic thought, but I think it’s grade-A poppycock.

Men and women worked together to tame the world in their own interest and with the interest of their children in mind. Many of the cultural and political problems we are faced with today have only been allowed to exist because there is a present trend whereby men and women who are not woking together obtain unnaturally high status on the social and political hierarchies.

I’ve heard Pearl and her ilk discuss how men love us so much they would have eventually liberated us through the right to vote without so much insistence on the part of female political activists. She makes other points, claiming that only 5% of women wanted the right to vote in the first place, and it looks like she thinks women should not be allowed to vote full stop.

Would she vote for that if given the option?

…

Goodness. What a pickle.

I’ve taken this slight detour to mention Pearl in order to make the point that discussions about voting practices should be had without throwing women under the bus completely by mocking them in front of men who are just waiting for some excuse to reach for power.

How can we do more than just bolster our own status by pandering to frustrated men with redundant and shallow proclamations about how all women have done since 1920 to return the favor of being generously allowed to cast their vote in favor of the handsomest politician is menstruate all over politics and turn the entire Western world into a henhouse?

Even if that’s arguable, what can be done about it through the tools available to us now? How do we make a path out of the obstacle?

Should women vote?

I think the question should women vote might be the wrong way to approach the problem of the female vote that goes such a long way toward propping up power intoxicated administrations like the one we’re currently privileged to live under.

At least for now, women can vote. And because I doubt that will change anytime soon, I’m not as interested in discussing whether that should be allowed as I am in discussing how women should vote if they hope to counterbalance the vote of the misguided, single, liberal, boss girls currently lubricating this democratic anal fisting we're all being forced to endure.

Putting aside the arguments against voting at all - that is to say not participating in a system you believe is illegitimate, or the accelerationist argument of not interrupting your enemy when he is making a mistake - there is a good chance that our best chance at decentralizing power before it engulfs the world in flame is to vote for candidates that vow to vote for deregulation and then hold them accountable to that promise through the proper legal channels. In order to maximize the impact of the dissident vote, we need to match the voting enthusiasm of our political enemies. Can we leverage our understanding of our feminine nature and familial interest to meet or even exceed this enthusiasm?

I think one possibility is to make an appeal to any married women, especially those with kids, who we think will vote for more centralized power instead of at least trying to vote for less of it. To this end, we could use the vote of women who are in the pocket between being family oriented but also politically left-leaning unlike their husbands. Maybe I’m more alone in this than I realize, but I know a lot of couples like that - couples where the wife is more left-leaning than the husband. If you are friends or kin to women like this, talk to them about the violent nature of government.

Mothers, with rare exception, have something important to the task of decentralizing power in common: We may value safety as women are wont to do, but, as mothers, we are inclined by nature to do anything for our kids if we believe it will spare them from harm. The irony, of course, is that the policies some mothers think will keep their kids safe wind up making them much less safe. For proof, I submit the stories of the mothers of trans children they allowed to be surgically altered because they feared their child would commit suicide if they did not. However deranged, it goes to show that mothers can be talked into a great deal if they accept that their child’s safety is at stake. For this reason, it is imperative that mothers understand the relationship between government and violence.

I’ve argued before that mothers need to understand the rhetorically obfuscated violent nature of the Longhouse in order to oppose it, and I think that holds up in the present context. All of government comes out of the barrel of a gun. And so left-leaning mothers need their trusted husbands and contrarian friends and relatives to help them rein in the urge to vote for more regulation instead of deregulation before it backfires and we wind up making our kids far less safe in the long-run.

While I understand that many married women do not wish for their voting agency to be lumped in with their husband’s, I suspect that this perspective functions as a sort of gateway that increases the odds of a woman failing to account for her own nature as she considers who she should vote for and why. The right to vote differently than our husbands appeals to our desire to stand out, to be heard, to be validated. It appeals a little too much. And no longer do we thrive on the validation of knowing that our husbands have taken our private discussions concerning our preferences and hopes for the future into account in preparation for heading to the voting booth to represent our household. No. Now we get this validation from the State, and somehow that’s supposed to be better. Now we don't get status by boasting about how our families function as a first-rate indivisible unit, we accrue status by boasting about how we are functionally divided from the people we are supposed to be closest to. In varying degrees of awareness, women enter into politics against their husbands if they believe it will raise their reputation as an “independent thinker” or as a woman who “doesn’t need a man.” Society applauds us for this, stroking our egos. We eventually get a little too excited by every opportunity to disagree. We chant the hymns of Beyonce and Megan Thee Stallion, bragging about how savage we are for our high-ranking positions within the Longhouse as we march to vote with only a thought for ourselves at the behest of the Cathedral. With cries about sexism and gender betrayal, we scorn all those who would question whether this is truly making us happy or whether the fulfillment of such material and psychological desires is the meaning of life at all.

Material hedonism indeed.

It don't always be exactly like that, though. I’m sure many women merely want to shoulder the burden of decision making traditionally left to the man, especially if he were to miscalculate and feel a terrible heaviness for it. While endearing, this also amounts to more well-intentioned fluff. We want to mother everything. We should comfort our dear husbands as we would have them comfort us in times of strife, but we should really only mother our kids.

Governments only “give” “power” when it suits their interests. This has big implications for married couples who participate in voting. Globohomo, too, is a force - one that always benefits from disharmony between men and women generally, but married couples especially. This only adds to my questions about women being encouraged to vote at odds with their husbands in the name of “thinking for themselves” as opposed to “thinking as a team.” Smart women who wish to vote must understand how Globohomo advertises to them in an attempt to manipulate them into voting for more regulation. They must understand how this disempowers women. This practice is an insult to our intelligence and it cannot be sanctioned.

But I want to reduce all of this talk about Forces, government’s direct relationship to violence, and seeking validation from the state down even further into a heuristic that might at least help married couples who are struggling to get on the same sheet of music politically.

I think it more or less boils down to this: If you cannot even come to an agreement with the person with whom you share a home and children, on what basis do you claim you should affect policy? On what basis do you claim you are qualified to choose leaders for anyone else?

Married couples should strive to establish and maintain a unified vision of the world they want their kids to inherit. This means talking about politics together regularly. This means understanding how dangerous to Freedom a disharmonious household can be - and it means understanding how dangerous a harmonious household can be to the State. Women especially must understand their tendency to unintentionally provoke the very things they hope to keep their kids safe from and, when in doubt, not feel ashamed for following their husband’s more risk-tolerant lead. After all, presumably he shares an interest in the future of his heirs, and that's gotta mean he’s got infinitely more incentive than the State to keep them out of harm's way, too. Perhaps this acknowledgment will inspire a little more faith in him if by some misfortune you've grown accustomed to denying him the benefit of the doubt.

Women need not, and should not, give their husband’s total power over them. They should pursue an education outside of corrupt institutions and be a worthy partner in discourse with their husbands. Men should afford dignity and respect to the views of the women who love them. Married couples should debate. And then they should vote in agreement with one another, not against.

Goodnight

Like I said before, I dunno if I’m helping. I put this out there in good faith. I’m far from the only woman trying to understand the world a little better through reading and writing, and I think all of us endeavoring to do this hope our words contain something that will help unlock part of the secret of what can be done to make the world a better place for all. Perhaps here I've given my fellow Breeders something to consider about how they approach voting next year.

::Yawn:: Is it really so late? I really do have a hard time shutting off the thought faucet sometimes. Like my very nature itself, sometimes that’s a bug, sometimes it's a feature.

Thanks for rucking with me. Please enjoy the music as you exit.

1. I wasn’t there to see what happened to the kid who got hurt and sometimes it’s good to sue the state, obviously. But everyone’s fun needn’t always suffer as a result of such things.

2. Pardon me, I pulled that one straight out of my arse

3. From Batman staring Robert Pattinson, highly recommend

4. Pearl is overweight, according to Pearl, BTW. So are many of the men she pitches this sort of thing to.