The woman's fault

Motto: This won't be pretty.

There's a century old theoryⁱ about the causative agent of schizophrenia (a typically male disease) pinning down the mother. We won't go into a discussion of that (other than to say that the current DSM crowd doesn't credit itⁱⁱ) chiefly because we don't believe you're in a position to follow. Instead, let's stick to the more readily accessible outcroppings on the tall rockface of truth and try to find an easier path.

Ordinary Peopleⁱⁱⁱ is the exact story of this problem, as it was encountered throughout the 80s.^iv The parties are :

• a young man, at that age when he should be fucking twice a day, five different cunts^v each week. He is deeply perturbed, specifically by the fact that he is NOT fucking twice a day, five different cunts a week - and by nothing else^vi. All sorts of people aim to "help" him, for just as long as "helping" mistranslates with "helping him delude himself that he should try and cope with this patently insane situation, rather than buldgeon everything in sight until either a) the environment is reduced to a fine dust, b) he dies, or c) the requisite cunts are produced".
• the young man's father, a smart fellow who has bought hook line and sinker into the theory that satisfying the desires of women is more important than satisfying the needs of men. This used to be called the "chivalric ideal", back when it lived in Europe, and it was a joke. Always played for laughs, part of the large arsenal of tropes of what you don't recognize anymore as comedia [del arte] (even though you're swimming in it), this nonsense was taken literally by the "grandtouring", humourless, culture-deprived Brits. Such is the fate of all barbarians visiting the center of the world - they go to Byzantium and end up with the strange idea that the Hebrew word for young woman literally translates as the Greek word for virgin (she was a maiden, ok ?). Literalism is always and everywhere the fate of children and children-alikes.
• the young man's mother, an unremarkable urchin which has imported from her stupid mother^vii a whole set of behaviours, between the merely bizarre and the outright psychotic, intended to cope with the insane situation where she's to be in control of things that she has no business ever touching the control rods of.

The dialogue flows as you'd expect :

Calvin? What's the matter?

This will sound strange. What I'm going to say will sound strange.

What happened? Come inside.^viii

Could we talk about Buck's funeral?^ix

What?

It'll seem trivial. But it's on my mind. I'd like to talk about it. When I was getting dressed for Buck's funeral...

What could getting dressed for Buck's funeral have to do with anything?^x

I was wearing a blue shirt. You said. "Wear a white shirt and other shoes." It was nothing. But it seemed to stay with me. What difference did it make what I wore to Buck's funeral?^xi

Hear me out. Beth!

No one would listen to that.^xii

I just want to talk about it.

Why do you want to remind me?

Because I've wondered what it mattered what I wore. I was crazy that day. We were going to our son's funeral. You were worried about what I wore on my feet. It sticks with me... and I wanted to tell you about it.^xiii

It's all right.

The closing is telling ("we would've been all right if there hadn't been any mess"), which is of course how delusion always goes - the dotcom bubble would also have been alright, and the deindustrialisation of the United States in favour of a "service economy" would also have been alright. All idiocy ever "would have been alright". If only...

In the end : it's not a woman's fault that she can't love anything but men ; it's not her fault if men decide to instead be boys, and pretend like their inescapable duty to select the offspring (which yes, means killing some children) may be abstracted away under layers of verbiage. It is however her fault if she admits to live in such insane arrangements, and it is doubly her fault if she procreates therein.

The woman's fault is having children with the sort of imbecile her stupid mother would approve of - which is to say any man that is not her master. The woman's fault is raising those unfortunate children to resemble their insane father - which is to say any man who doesn't keep the women^xiv as slaves^xv. The woman's fault is, basically, deviating from that ancient role.

Yet in a world that has succumbed almost completely to neoteny, the woman's fault is rapidly approaching "even existing at all".

Which is all for the better, I suppose - the 80s ended, and the problems therein depicted and here discussed exist no longer. In their old stead we find today the problems of little girls, unlikely by any measure to ever mature into women.

None of this can have a practical resolution, which is both sufficient and necessary to show the western world must end. But that's ok - not like there's a DSM for it! We can go to hell in a handbasket agreeing with each other that it'd have been okay, if only!

If only the barbarians didn't come, if only the army didn't get routed, if only law and order were maintained, if only, if only.

If only.

1. I don't mean The schizogenic mother, NUFFIELD EJ 1954, that a typically USian "hai c-am furat un negativ"* aka restatement with pretension to ownership of things overheard but not understood, partly because not speaking any languages, partly because not part of any cultures.
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   * See also the discussion of Smith, the Mormon prophet. [↩]
2. They equally don't like its later equivalent, blaming the woman for autism. Somehow the recurrence however doesn't give anyone pause - the proponents think themselves original, the opponents imagine they are fighting the good fight opposing - all marionettes forever happy without considering the inconceivable coil or spring. Would there be any need to ? [↩]
3. 1980, by Robert Redford, with Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore and Elizabeth McGovern. [↩]
4. The Graduate is the exact equivalent, covering the 70s. Notable differences are that "the woman" here, the wife of a friend of the kid's parents, takes it upon her to expiate the (plainly obvious to her) fault of womanhood, through the normal avenue - sexual submission ; that the thusly purified young man "mistreats" the woman's daughter, in the sense of treating her exactly adequately, if with the somewhat bumbling hand of the young male. The girl herself however perceives said treatment as improper, for no reason in particular other than the fundamental reason, namely that this is what it means to be a woman : everything seems indesirable until you try it the first time. Which is why the correct cure to female virginity is rape, not coddling, and so on and so forth - but let's not get carried away. [↩]
5. No, I don't mean "women". Nobody cares, get over yourself, the attachment is happenstance of no further consequence. [↩]
6. The film tries to sell the ridiculous theory that the actual problem would be the honorable death of his brother, fallen in the line of duty fighting the elements. This is exactly the ridiculous sort of claptrap a capon would be crowing all day long. [↩]
7. The term of art for this would be stramula. It comes from a seminal Romanian-language piece on the topic (in which language mula is yet another derogatory term for a stupid woman, not that there's any shortage of these ; whereas stra- is a prefix indicating primacy on the decendency line, sort of like grand in grandfather). [↩]
8. Why is the woman producing imperative statements towards the man ? [↩]
9. Why is the man asking for permission ? [↩]
10. Why is the woman pretending like she's setting the agenda for this, or any other, meeting ? [↩]
11. The answer, obvious but nevertheless not provided, is that the woman is trying to provide for the future through tightly controlling the present.

    But why is she trying to provide for the future ?

    Because she lives in a bizarro world where the desires of women (ie, quite specifically, that their offspring will survive irrespective of quality) stand above the needs of men (ie, quite specifically again, that woman's offspring only survives if it meets a minimum bar of humanity).

    It's not a matter of whether this is an acceptable trade-off, or whether it costs too much or any of that. No system predicated on this nonsense can ever stand no matter what happens. Even if every single man agrees to be Calvin, and be told by some urchin what to wear to his son's funeral, the system still can not stand, for it is rank nonsense through and through. [↩]

12. And of course socialism shows up, the ready ally of women determined to stay stupid. [↩]
13. This is the important part. He... wanted to tell her about it.

    Not do anything about it. [↩]

14. Do note the plural. [↩]
15. Which specifically, and necessarily means - without a say in measuring the world. [↩]