I Am Not Going To Roar

3,557 words

Women today are defined though the agencies of one non-desirable camp or the other. Frankly, the liberal and the oppressed camps are equally repellent. Either women “are” hairy-armpit-proud man-hating leftist-agenda queers who welcome diversity, godless paganism (if you’ve ever been to a goddess circle you understand what I mean by godless) espousing only womyn-power focused gender politics — OR women “are” soft-headed Republican sweet cheeks who get their nails done, support our troops, knit hats for premature babies, eat too much chocolate once a month, and have no brains for real politics, genetics, or anything that isn’t preached from an oak paneled pulpit once a week (at least). No other option is currently available.

Ladies, we have been robbed of a huge slice of who we are.

What do I mean by this? Let me illustrate with a pointed parable that may make it to somebody’s Tumblr feed.

Let’s take a good old American female icon: the pioneer woman. Everyone can picture her, from her calico sun bonnet down to her gingham apron strings. She is a strong image, a mother, a cook, a healer, a settler, a farmer’s wife, and a farmhand in her own right. She also was usually the only other adult besides her husband to be found in the immediate vicinity of her world. That means a lot of shared duties. It takes a lot of work to build a new life in the wilderness (I know). Hard work and shared work is her lot. Sometimes she does man’s work. (Note that I did not put scare quotes around the term man’s work.) Take, for example, the image of the pioneer mother grabbing a rifle from her husband’s stash and shooting alongside him to protect their family and home because two grown-up white people are better than just one when it comes to protecting the kids and the cabin from the Apaches. Women know what it means to have to take up arms and lean out of a window and shoot when you’d rather be hugging your children protectively and praying your husband can protect you all . . .

. . . but, instead of giving this scenario the right interpretation: that we women are protectively capable of doing what needs doing when punch comes to hit, we get sold the image of a sharp shooting Maisy who doesn’t need some gun toting man around the ol’ farm anyway. Maisy, as a matter of fact, hit more ‘bad guys’ (they were white invaders in this version) than he did, having superior aim and better upper body strength. Maisy wouldn’t shoot Apache Peoples. She’s not a racist violent oppressor. Heck, Maisy would find some nice squaw to raise some soy boys with in the ways of zer people [if zhey only could]. Maisy knew the truth about how a woman’s life ought to be lived, she was proto feminist before she was a pioneer, before that she was a cowperson and a mountainperson and fought in the Union Army. But she didn’t kill anyone. She helped slaves escape.

If you aren’t thinking you particularly like Maisy, if you don’t see Maisy the way the matriarchy expects you to, if you question the historical reality of anyone like Maisy, you are less than a woman.

And you are a racist (obviously . . . you would have shot those First Americans).

And you are a man.

This is the message that the world ceaselessly campaigns for women to ingest with their morning decaf-double-almond-milk-latte, along with their daily doses of Xanax and birth control pills, too.

If you ladies don’t want to be a racist, and a man, you must think that my little feminist twist on pioneer gender roles is perfectly natural . . . and wonderful. You are a racist and a man if you don’t think pioneer women were the same as pioneer men. No, scratch that. Not the same. Better.

But.

If I know I’m a racist because everyone is (think about it, Tumblr rebloggers). I guess I must be a man then?

I am not a man.

But I must be, if only because I am not a feminist womyn, and there is no other option except the God and cookie-party double X version of womanhood where non feminist women clump in hen-like fashion to gossip, look at each other’s Pinterest boards and—according to what we all saw on TV growing up—sometimes unashamedly lounge around, laughing and pillow fighting, in lacey but demure bras and panties, because non-feminist women don’t have to worry about, you know, that, like men and lesbians do. Non-feminist woman is woman happily unsexed and unrespected as non-man, with her spray-on tan and a little gold cross around her swan-like neck.

I am not that.

What am I, then, in society’s estimation, if I don’t believe that I am a man and yet I don’t act within the established parameters of not-man womanness? If I don’t believe that I am a not-man womyn or a not-man grrrrl? If I don’t regard myself even as a not-man because I don’t define myself by what I am not?

It’s maddening.

If I don’t agree to conform to anything other than these repulsive things that are offered to me: being manlike or non-manlike, I am left with no contemporary role models, no common gender community, no positive reflections, no place in the greater picture of life that is constantly shown to me via the internet, movies, books, magazines and other people. I become something that is, by dint of not finding acceptable alternatives, socially unacceptable.

Socially unacceptable.

In this modern era of greater broader grander Women’s Emancipation, Gender Equality, Woman’s Rights, blah blah blah . . . there is a whole gamut of actual feminine experience, of viable femalehood, of traditional woman ways which is not socially acceptable. Unless a woman embraces one of the two extremes that are the only contemporary versions of woman allowed or given any attention to, she is, to all extant and purposes, nonexistent. Not mentioned. Not alluded to. There are no well-balanced versions of women in today’s consciousness.

Not on the Left and not on the Right.

The rigid concept of woman, of female, is as narrowly defined by Right writers as it is by Lefty writers. Women are either too strong and challenge men (on the Right this is portrayed as a negative, for the Left a positive), or they are not even strong enough to be trusted to vote in a “man’s world” (on the Right this is portrayed as a positive, on the Left a negative).

I can get chocolates but I can’t get Esoteric Hitlerism. I cannot have tattoos and homeschool my children. I can respect Savitri Devi but not Jack Donovan. I can homebirth but I can’t Home Rule.

Really now. That’s all I get?

Ha. Ha. Ha.

That’s all any of us get if we go along with it.

Forget it brothers and cisters, we’ll go it alone.

Let us keep the defining of authentic womanhood to authentic women. Feminist-womyn are not the only thinking radicals with XX chromosomes on the face of the earth, just as men are not the only thinking traditionalist rational humans around here either. And if you don’t like it, I suggest you lump it.

Actually, I more than suggest it. You can lump it.

I am tired of this nonsense. I am tired of the inexact definitions. I am tired of ignoring this two-image perception of women when I come across it in essays or articles because it is beneath me to quibble over whether challenging it is “too strong” or not challenging it is “too submissive.” You know what, grrls and boys, it’s neither, I’m neither and I think that anyone — man or woman or self-proclaimed trans-queer who shoves the concept of womanhood to one end or the other of the human spectrum is . . .  for lack of a nicer way to put it . . . a pain in my ass. And I hate pain in my ass people, pardon my unladylike language. Pain in my ass people mean that I have to take the time to deal with them, which will establish them as worth dealing with, which is not what I think of them at all. See . . . pains in my ass.

But sometimes you have to deal with them.

So I am going to.

Bear with the gloves-off quality of the next section of this essay, please. Sometimes . . . a lady has to do with a lady has to do. Silence breeds consent, after all.

What is the place of women in a white homeland? I can answer that question, because I’m smack dab in the middle of building one. As for the hard heavy labor and protection . . . I leave that to my menfolk. And they can concentrate on working and protecting because I am organizing and making the place worth protecting. I cook a mean streak. And clean up efficiently. And mend. And knit. And garden. And raise kids. And write essays. And I’m liable to stop and look at cute things like puppies and kittens and chicks while I’m out hanging laundry by hand, washing dishes outdoors in the cold by hand, realigning the supply tent that the wind keeps knocking, and watching the sky for the ever present North West rain.

I don’t like the idea of having to shoot an invader or a deer or kill one of my hens for food . . . but I can. It is important to know that I can, even though I don’t have to. And I don’t have to. We have a balanced life here, and I don’t have to do the manly and husbandry side of things . . . but I can if I no longer had a husband to do them.

 

^[2]As regards surviving and flourishing in this experience we call life, my strengths and resources are equal to but not the same as what men’s are. Not as strong in muscle, but better at endurance. Not as fast at running, but better at picking things up. Not fueled by testosterone, fueled by estrogen. I presume you get the picture. That’s real strength, knowing what your own strengths and suitabilities are. That’s also traditional womanhood as partnered with traditional manhood. Which is how it is supposed to be.

I am tired of every snot-nosed septum-pierced vagina-positive pro-abortion quasi-marxist (Marx wasn’t a womyn after all) piece of feminist-spite telling the world that she writes for me, speaks for me, opines for me. That lesbians and Bruce Jenner are commendable examples of womanliness. That if I so much as look at a dotted Swiss vintage apron I may as well throw myself in the back of a cave and let some cro mag abuser pull me around by my hair. Which is not blond, because blond hair is evil.

I like dotted Swiss vintage aprons, I like old cookbooks, I like washing my own American-made antique dishes and my Edwardian-era silver plate table ware. I like tablecloths. And forget-me-nots. I adore knitting. I love babies. I want as many grandchildren as I can get, and I plan on making plates of cookies and passing platters of home cured ham until I die. I chose to be a mother. Note that I did not use the obnoxious term “stay at home mother”—because the term mother should automatically mean that I stay at home and raise my children. If I didn’t raise them, then I’d just be a person who has kids and a job. No thanks, womyn, I’m not taking that poison.

And when I do these things, and when I like these things, and most importantly when I publically state that I do and like these things, I am standing my ground in a fight that takes so much strength of character that it makes the so called women’s revolution look like nothing more than the go with the flow peer pressured popular mass culture that it is. A feminist is a woman who is too weak to oppose feminism.

I was once asked to help out with my sons’ Boy Scout troop. They were putting in raised flower beds at a senior citizen center –it was an Eagle project. Scout moms showed up in “gear” (costumed like drag king lumberjacks) with shovels and hammers in hand, to “help.” I brought a bunch of cookies and some lemonade that I made for the event (I make very good lemonade). The moms looked at me like I was an evil beast, an evil crazy housewife beast intent on wrecking their equality, when I put that box of cookies and that lemonade on a table and proceeded not to pick up a board of wood and start hammering like a man.

They hated me for two reasons. The first is that they felt a bit cheated. There I was not banging my thumb, not ruining my shoes, not running around in unbecoming work clothes because I didn’t want to be an ersatz man parent. The second reason is that I ruined their self-images, which is fine with me. I never asked to be in charge of how they view themselves when they compare themselves to a woman who doesn’t want to be an ersatz man. Making these unthinking women have to stop and wonder what exactly constitutes their true power/worth/value is a feather in my “I am woman but I am not going to roar” bonnet. (I don’t actually wear a bonnet; that is part of your extremist brainwashing. Just because I am not a man and do not want to be doesn’t mean that I wear bonnets. C’mon.)

Really, I don’t care if anyone out there doesn’t like that I’m not advocating for either extreme of womanhood, that I say that women are not men and are not dolls, that I say I am good at things that men are not good at and that men are good at things I am not. That I don’t care about the power structure, per se, of man versus woman . . . and that when some idiotic manosphereian rubs his hands together and outlines how much more rapeable women are, it doesn’t faze me. We are well aware of that (is anyone not aware of that?). But that doesn’t mean we are little pink mice that anyone can pick up and have his way with just because men have more body strength; it means that we are more vulnerable. Okay. We’ve been vulnerable like this since the beginning of time. We have managed to assess our situations and our environments and our companions since the beginning of time, too. Without the help of the frenzied every-man-is-a-rapist rape-whistling feministic army by the way. Somehow enough of us got through all those horrible patriarchal years to land here in woman-power-time safe and sound. Golly.

I mourn the loss of gentlemanly men and ladylike women, but they’re gone as our culture of European civility fades, what we (when I say we, I am speaking of we who are reading this on an Alt right, New Right, or Folkish Heathen site, not someone who is not we, someone who is reading this as a reprint that some leftist reblogged somewhere) anyway, what we have now is a bunch of mostly harmless folks who don’t quite realize what is happening, and some real pigs.

“Pigs” is a non-gender broad-based term, by the way—I get mean emails from empowered womyn pigs and their grrlfriends attempting to put me down by inserting the terms “racist” and “nazi” as soon as they can wrangle them into their tirades about gender-flexible multicultural family units and why I am not as enlightened as those who advocate these. And I get condescending emails from women-hating men pigs who attempt to put me “in my place” by calling me “honey” and also “idiot feminist” right off the bat.

Ah, not letting either extreme define my sense of self really gets both ends of the old social spectrum piggery going.

Oh well. It’s not like either side is right.

Women need to stop picking up what the establishment is putting down. We need to recognize that every image, every notion, every social cue regarding womanhood and ladylikeness and femininity we receive from the greater One World Bank backed social landscape (whether far liberal left or far conservative right) is a manipulation.

Tasha Tudor is a manipulation. Barbie is a manipulation. Frigga is a manipulation. Freya is a manipulation. (Before you start hate mailing me again, remember who recorded the sagas and myths . . . it wasn’t the heathen Norse . . .) Mary, mother of Jesus is a manipulation. Mary Magdalene is a manipulation. Hillary Clinton is a manipulation. Rosa Parks is a manipulation. That stupid girl with the dreadlocks and glasses in that meme is a manipulation. Every female character in ABC’s Once Upon A Time series is a manipulation. The Vagina Monologues is a manipulation. 19 Kids and Counting is a manipulation. Miley Cyrus is a manipulation. Taylor Swift is a manipulation. Eva Braun as “lover” and not as “fiancée who became wife” is a manipulation. Bruce Jenner is a manipulation. The whole woman of the year concept is a manipulation. Miss America is a manipulation.

These are manipulations of what it is to be female, of what it is to be a mother, of what it is to be attractive, of what it is to be natural, of what it is to be powerful, of what it is to be weak, of what it is to be good, of what it is to be a failure, of what it is to be smart, of what it is to be fully and balancedly engaged in this plane we call human existence. The manipulations are done for a reason. The reason is to keep us off balance, off kilter, not right within ourselves. So long as we agree to accept their terms, we are letting them dictate how we see ourselves, and how we live with ourselves. We live according to how others than ourselves want us to live.

Sure, it’s been forced upon us. As has racial equality, gender equality, (heck, gender fluidity), GMOs, non-white immigration, the evils of white privilege, vaccinations, credit scores, holocaust controversy, going to college, and fluoride in our water.

It’s rather like the “astro turf” method used by big politicos to fake grass-roots support and make people think that “everybody” is doing something. You are a crank or a quack if you distrust vaccines. You are a freak and a conspiracy nut if you wonder about chemtrails. You are a nonthinkingsheeplebreeder if you don’t embrace feminism. You are a slutbitchwhorewhowantstobeaman if you do.

We don’t have to take this. We have to deal with it, sure, but we don’t have to take it. Dealing with something is different than taking it. We can deal with it by not taking it.

We are not any more or less than what we are. We are women. Authentically. Really. Actually. We have always been us. But so many of the things that make us us, that make us women, have been distorted and denigrated for so long that too many women consider this fun house mirror reflection of ourselves as the truth of ourselves. Don’t look at those mirrors. Look elsewhere.

Where?

Plenty of places. Let’s start with ourselves.

I do not consider what I do unisex, I consider everything I do “female.” I am female. A female human. Sort of but not the same as a male human. We all eat, we all breathe, if we are threatened we will defend ourselves, we grasp astronomy, higher mathematics, ancient languages, we can curry a horse or a sauce, we dream in technicolor, we can shoot, kill and gut a deer, and we can plunge our hands into freezing water . . . we are quite capable of many things. Both men and women are. But we are not the same.

I don’t want to be the same. I also don’t want to be strictly limited to one or the other of the prevalent extremes in which I may express my womanhood. And so I reject those extremes. I reclaim the total, the whole, the entire length and breadth of who I am as a woman. Neither anti man or pro feminist. Neither screeching harpy or special flower. A person. A woman person. A woman.

If you winced when I ended that last paragraph with the word “woman” because it just doesn’t sit right with you and you’d rather that I closed with the word “person” . . . do some deep thinking, do some self-reflection, ask yourself why ending with the word “woman” seems to evoke both a challenge and an admission of defeat.

Then email me regarding traditional European recipes, astronomy, milk paint, knitting, iambic poetry, cottage gardening, signed copies of my books . . . and how to start a white homeland. Do not address me as Ms. But as Mrs. Howard-Hobson* I will be happy to answer, as fast and as thoroughly as womanly possible.

Note

* I have been asked why I use a hyphen in my surname, if I am not a roaring feminist. I am not a roaring or even an unroaring feminist. My name contains the hyphen of an obsolete class system, not of an overactive social agenda. Now you know.