1,680 words
Most worthwhile pursuits are more difficult than they appear to the casual observer. Only those with a bit of natural talent and a determination to persevere and overcome all obstacles ever achieve the success which appears effortless to outsiders. That appearance of effortlessness is, indeed, part of what distinguishes the true master. As a Roman author said: ars est celare artem. “The real art is to conceal one’s artfulness.” The master does not usually invite the public into his workshop, preferring to offer them only his finished product.
I am going to break this rule today. I am a writer, and I work hard at my craft. As anyone who has ever done serious writing knows, it is unlike casual speech. One does not simply “talk on paper.” Much labor and thought goes into a piece that reads superficially like a spontaneous outpouring of thoughts and opinions. Today I am going to take the reader into my confidence and explain how I create an article—or, more exactly, how I created one particular article.
I do a lot of writing about men, women, and sexual mores. I devote attention to this because we live in a world extremely confused about these subjects, and the confusion results in unnecessary suffering. If I can succeed in explaining things to people, some of that confusion may be dissipated and there will be a bit less unnecessary suffering in the world.
Confusion about sex is so great today that to someone with a more traditional understanding of the subject matter, the world often appears to have gone mad. The abnormal gets treated as normal, while the normal gradually recedes from view and disappears.
When it comes to men, women, and sex, few things qualify as more normal than marriage. In most societies throughout most of history, the great majority of men and women got married and raised children together. In ancient Athens, men did not even have the right not to get married. All freeborn Athenian girls were entitled by law to a husband. If a girl had difficulty securing one, she could complain to the city authorities; they would look about for some bachelor, grab him by the collar, and compel him to marry the girl in question. The Christian endorsement of celibacy as a valid choice for certain individuals was thus a liberalization of sexual customs. But even within Christendom, of course, marriage continued to be the rule. Most people do not like to be alone.
One day not long ago I was thinking about some of the leading trends in contemporary society: the decline of marriage and the rise in childlessness, divorce, singlehood, sexual deviancy, suspicion and hostility between men and women, and general unhappiness. I wanted to bring these ideas home to the reader, along with a sense of just how abnormal and topsy-turvy things now are as compared with the past. How could I do this most effectively?
Then I got what seemed to me a really clever inspiration: Let’s start with a boy-meets-girl story, a prototypical and utterly normal one—almost hyper-normal, so to speak. And let’s set this story in a world not so different from the one we are now living in, but from which the very idea of marriage is absent. No one has ever heard of two young people getting married. Then let’s sit back, grab some popcorn, and watch the absurdities begin to pile up.
This was an idea for a satire. It would begin with a description of a young man whose head has just been turned by a pretty face. He feels an overwhelming and irrational urge to love and protect the girl he has fallen for.
Why does she need protection? Is she living in some especially dangerous neighborhood? Not necessarily. But for thousands of years, men and women lived in hunter-gatherer bands; their lives were nasty, brutish, and short. Dangers were more common and subsistence more precarious than today. Our minds and personalities were formed by that environment, adapted to it over many, many generations through the process of natural selection. So men still have an instinct to protect women even under conditions where little protection is called for. Women have a complementary instinct. Many married women, for example, discover that if their husband is away for a week on business, they find themselves haunted by a vague sense of insecurity, even though they may be living in a perfectly safe home in a good neighborhood. This is the voice of our ancient ancestors within us.
And that is why the young man who has just fallen in love feels such a strong urge to protect the girl he loves—even in the absence of visible threats.
I shall begin, then, by describing such a man. I will say less about the young woman, but make clear she is not averse to the man, as well as extremely fond of children: her one dream in life is to become a mother.
It should be obvious to readers, I figured, that the normal thing for the man and woman to do in such a situation would be to get married. The man can do as his instincts dictate by loving and protecting the woman, who can then have the child she desires.
But suppose they are living in a world where people are so confused about the nature and importance of marriage that the entire concept has quite simply disappeared. They will not know what do to, and neither will anyone else! It seemed to me the very pinnacle of absurdity, and the more I thought about it, the funnier it got.
So I sat down and started writing with tears of mirth streaming down my face. I started by having the young man seek out the advice of an avuncular old fart who had written a world-shaking contemporary classic entitled Sexual Utopia in Power. This character then pulls a copy of Krafft-Ebbing down from his shelf.
You can buy F. Roger Devlin’s Sexual Utopia in Power here.
That might require a bit of explanation. Richard von Krafft-Ebbing (1840-1902) was a psychiatrist in Imperial Germany who in 1886 published a foundational work entitled Psychopathia Sexualis (“Sexual Psychopathy,” or “Sexual Mental Illness”). This famous—or perhaps infamous—volume features clinical yet still occasionally hair-raising descriptions of every sexual perversion you can imagine and a few you cannot. It’s the sort of reference work that might be useful to a prison psychiatrist forced to deal with real sickos.
Our avuncular old fart thumbs through Krafft-Ebbing’s account of foot fetishes, necrophilia, and bestiality, but cannot seem to find anything that will fit the strange new case he finds himself confronted with: namely, a young man in love with a young woman who would like to become a mother. Damn, this is a real head-scratcher! He is simply out of ideas.
Next our young man might proceed to that fount of all wisdom, the modern university. It’s a dangerous place, in more ways than one. According to gallant, old-fashioned male conservatives in whom the instinct to protect women is strong, the young fellows on campus today represent a grave danger to the women, what with their wicked sex drives entirely out of control (quite unlike the honorable and decent men they used to be in their distant youth). These well-meaning but sanctimonious and ill-informed male conservatives of the older generation are constantly describing younger men as predators. (If you have ever read Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, you will be familiar with what I am talking about.)
In fact, good men are women’s natural protectors from the much smaller number of bad ones: rapists and love-them-and-leave-them psychopaths. If you imagine all the young men have turned into predators in the years since you were young, you end up attempting to protect women from their natural protectors, leaving them less secure rather than more. You also get a lot of lonely people, both men and women. And you do all this while imagining yourself a champion of marriage and families. The way you get families, of course, is to assign each young woman a nice young “predator” who can then go on to protect her from any other predators who happen to crop up—not to mention serving as a father to her children.
So our confused young man in love arrives on campus and proceeds to the Gender Studies Department, seemingly the natural home for experts on men, women, and sex. He wants to find out what he and his young lady friend should do. But the normal has given way completely to the abnormal, and instead of finding someone capable of explaining to him the nature and purpose of marriage, he encounters an absurd, man-hating dyke who publishes lesbian pornography under color of scholarship.
Here (I thought to myself) I shall work in a little material about recent feminist discoveries in the moral realm, including women’s absolute right to complete bodily autonomy—something not altogether easy to square with the traditional conception of marriage, where the husband’s and wife’s bodies are in some sense entrusted to one another.
So the Professor of Gender Studies is unable to help, even though she expresses a vivid desire to get to know the young man’s lady-friend—perhaps with the altruistic idea of becoming a sort of mentor to her. Why else would so many lesbians want jobs that grant them access to young women?
What seems to be needed here is “some sort of reliable, mutually beneficial arrangement” between the young man and the young woman, something like what used to be called marriage—that’s “marriage” beginning with the letter “M”—but no one has any idea how such a thing would work.
And that, ladies and gentleman, was my idea for what I considered a clever satire. I hope you have enjoyed this little visit to my writer’s workshop.
By the way, in case anybody has not looked at it already, please check out “A Puzzling Situation,” a piece I published here at Counter-Currents on February 28.
6 comments
Thanks for this excursion. It amused me, write again some literary experiment or fiction. It’s a nice refresher on Counter-currents.
“Today I am going to take the reader into my confidence and explain how I create an article—or, more exactly, how I created one particular article.” The first half of that sentence had me excited, since Devlin is a skilled writer. The second half was a disappointment, since I knew no writing tutorial would follow. Alas, the secrets of the craft are still locked away… But I still enjoyed the article!
I think Devlin’s work is, in its sociobiological realism, a huge improvement over those old moral conservatives writing in the post-Sexual Revolution Era, but doing so with sensibilities decidedly formed in morally and socially healthier pre-Revolutionary times.
That said, I cannot agree with this characterization:
These well-meaning but sanctimonious and ill-informed male conservatives of the older generation are constantly describing younger men as predators. (If you have ever read Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, you will be familiar with what I am talking about.)
As a nearly four decade subscriber to Chronicles, and a more than two decade subscriber to First Things, I think these well-intentioned but evolutionarily ill-informed “theocons” are much more common in the pages of the latter publication, than the former.
Frankly, I think Dr. Devlin is describing his own slightly dated sensibility here, a sensibility formed decades ago (1970s? 80s?) when he first realized that those older moral conservatives, in focusing their ire on ‘cads’ and ‘playboys’, were letting females off the hook from receiving their own well-deserved moral censure. Coming of age myself in the late 70s and 80s, I, too, never liked that type of mostly Christian moral conservative discourse which, in tandem with feminists, constantly imputed the ethico-sexual derangements (according to conservatives) or dissatisfactions (in the eyes of feminists) of the modern world to male behavior alone, while casting females as perpetual victims, whether of male violence (the feminists), or male lechery (the conservatives).
Perhaps because I grew up in the aftermath of the Sexual Revolution, I never thought women, especially of my own generation, were special or morally superior. It was about four decades ago when I enraged a graduate school seminar by casually asserting that “women aren’t better than men, just weaker”, by which I meant that women could be just as vicious and evil as men, but, due to their anatomical and psychological differences, their evil would play out in very different actions.
That had been an intuition borne of personal experience. My later intellectual anti-feminism was nurtured by five books – among the only secular works I knew of in the 1980s-90s which questioned feminist dogma, at least in its moderate variety (feminism comes in many flavors, and radical feminism – dogma of the true “feminazis” – was long critiqued and mocked by the mainstream Right): [in order of my reading, not their publication] George Gilder, Men and Marriage (originally titled Sexual Suicide); Michael Levin, Freedom and Feminism; Esther Villar, The Manipulated Man; Steven Goldberg, Why Men Rule (originally better titled as The Inevitability of Patriarchy); and Thomas Fleming, The Politics of Human Nature. In terms of intellectual value (at least to me), I would rank their quality (in descending order) as follows: Fleming, Goldberg, Levin, Gilder, Villar.
Fleming, the long time editor of Chronicles, is an interesting case here because he is almost certainly one of Devlin’s “well-meaning but sanctimonious and ill-informed male conservatives of the older generation” whose views on the woman question Devlin (rightfully) considers so inadequate, and yet the book of his I refer to above is (as I recall from my early-90s reading of it) extremely well-informed wrt the scholarly literatures of feminism, anthropology and even sociobiology. Indeed, when I read The Politics of Human Nature, not long before the mid-90s breakthrough period of new race-realist books (The Bell Curve; Race, Evolution and Behavior; Dsygenics and Eugenics: A Reassessment, and later many additional books from Richard Lynn; The g Factor; Heredity and Humanity; Why Race Matters; and the Kevin MacDonald trilogy on Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy), it was the only ‘mainstream’ book I was aware of that applied sociobiological insights to political issues, and, more specifically, which drew (obvious) conservative policy conclusions from the “new Darwinism.”.
But the crowning achievement (that I’ve read, or am familiar with) in secular anti-feminist scholarship is Dr. Devlin’s own Sexual Utopia in Power, a book which might ultimately prove to be as useful to the recovery of white racial sanity and the preservation of white civilization as The Dispossessed Majority, Suicide of the West, The Camp of the Saints, On Genetic Interests, and The White Nationalist Manifesto. And it is probably more useful to young white men than any of these other works.
Thank you, Lord Shang, for your thoughtful remarks. My writing is naturally influenced by my own personal “data set” of experiences, observations, and reading. I never read First Things as assiduously as Chronicles. I have read Levin’s and Goldberg’s books and, I believe, Gilder’s, but not Vilar’s or Fleming’s. I should do so. I love Fleming’s title The Politics of Human Nature: such a politics is exactly what I have been looking for all my life. Fleming is indeed my paradigmatic example of a paleocon clueless of the true character of the sexual revolution, though he had plenty of company at Chronicles. I actually made an effort once to introduce my ideas to him, and his response was to accuse me of hating women. Having discovered the limits of his debating skills, I broke off the discussion. So I am surprised to hear his earlier book has any merit with regard to the domain of sex.
That sounds like some of my own 1990s interactions with Fleming! He is a prickly fellow who has an extraordinarily high opinion of his own oftentimes cranky views (but, to be fair, I also find him extremely intelligent and exceptionally erudite; our generation of prowhite intellectuals does not seem, on the whole, to be as impressive as that earlier era of paleocons: Bradford, Fleming, Francis, Clyde Wilson, Gottfried, Kopff, etc).
The book of his I listed above is extremely well done (I think there’s a blurb from Robert Nisbet – “thoughtful and superb” or something). He deeply researched in many separate fields, and patiently critiqued various egalitarian ideologies, including feminism extensively, not only with reference to history and political philosophy, but also, as I mentioned, anthropology (Evans-Pritchard) and sociobiology (E. O. Wilson). I recommend it highly (and might reread it in my retirement).
Utopia, Jim’s Gender Psychosis, Faye’s Sex and Deviance are the three most important books in these circles for our women that I’d recommend to pique their interest if explicit proWhite scares them off. And unlike other topics, none of these books are racial. The rotating polyandry chapter is a particularly depressing but essential one into how repulsive these criminals of the courts are. Btw, anyone noticing that the 100 commentators section has not been updating in a while?
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