From the Pen of Devon Eriksen
Odd to have two columns in a row which merely point to another man’s words, but the personal issues (and disorganization) has kept from from attending properly to my blog of late. Nonetheless, as a courtesy to my readers, I thought this column from Twitter work of genius, and well worth passing along.
From the pen of Devon Eriksen, author of THEFT OF FIRE.
The words below are his:
Obesity and Feminism
The immediate cause of the obesity epidemic is feminism.
It’s unimportant whether this was a deliberate effort to stick a fork in the voting population, or whether food companies that sold poison simply saw feminism as an opportunity.
The effect is the same, per Grey’s First Law:
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
And Grey’s Second Law:
Any sufficiently disguised malice is indistinguishable from incompetence.
The first step in this was convincing an entire generation of women that feeding their families is a degrading task which is beneath them.
So you do a massive media campaign, on every level, to shame housewives out of the kitchen and into the corporate office. This required effort, because the corporate cubicle is the veal calf fattening pen of the soul, while the kitchen at home is actually a pretty nice place to be.
That statement may seem strange today, especially to young women.
But bear in mind that there have been decades and decades of propaganda, stretching from back before you were born, designed to convince you that housewives had to be (metaphorically) chained to stoves, that they were little more than house slaves, barefoot, pregnant, and ignorant.
They had to work hard to convince you that the mid-20th century housewife was not the happiest and most privileged creature in the history of the known universe.
You see, happiness comes from two places.
First, it comes from a feeling of accomplishment.
Second, it comes from a feeling of connection to other people.
Cooking, in the home, for friends or family, is one of the few human activities that automatically provides both. As many a man who has moved into the kitchen in our somewhat limited spare time can tell you.
No, the Rolling Stones can sing sneering little songs all they want about “mother’s little helper”, trying to convince you that all those 1960s housewives were hopped up on valium and martinis to deal with the terrible pain of caring for children that they loved, but remember that Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were debauched rock stars addicted to cigarettes, heroin, and cocaine themselves, and their perception of housewives, with whom they had extremely limited contact, may not have been the clearest.
I contend that being a housewife in the mid-20th century was a luxurious and enviable position, and I am old enough to have personally witnessed the last of these lucky creatures, so I know.
No, in order to talk women out of their kitchens and into cubicles, a unique combination of forces and tools was required.
First, you needed a bunch of disgenic ugly mutants and neurotic lesbians in academia, who resented the family unit and wanted to destroy it.
Their job was to generate the rhetoric.
Second, you needed dominant communications technology like TV, radio, and national print magazines, which had a one-to-many nature built into them, allowing a few wealthy and powerful individuals to dictate what was heard, seen, and read by many.
Their job was to spread the rhetoric.
Third, you needed major organizations, governments, and corporations who stood to profit from the whole agenda.
And their job was to pay for all of it.
Worked like this.
The third element, the paymasters, wanted women out of the home, the kitchen, and the nursery, so that they could take on these roles for money and power.
A food industry wanted to sell plastic-wrapped, ready-to-eat poison, made in factories.
Politicians wanted children to be raised by government schools, so the politically acceptable beliefs could shape the values of the next generation of voters.
Industrialists and large-scale employers wanted to double the size of the work force, creating competition that would lower wages and salaries and reduce their payroll.
And when they noticed the first element, the extremist freaks in academia, with their bizarre, convoluted rhetoric, and their specific and explicit desire to characterize the nuclear family as a bastion of tyranny, and to destroy it, then the opportunity was obvious.
All that was necessary was to supply the money and influence to connect them with the second element… one-to-many communications media.
Women would never turn on their fathers, husbands, and sons merely because a bunch of weird academics told them to. Nor would they so easily be persuaded to abandon their own homes for a tiny corporate cubicle. Nor would they consent to stop cooking food and eat frozen slop heated to lukewarm in a microwave.
No.
You cannot simply talk women (or men) out of their basic instincts. If you wish to turn them against themselves, you must leverage another instinct.
In this case, the feminine desire to conform to the opinions of the tribe.
The purpose of all the television shows and magazine articles wasn’t simply to feed feminist rhetoric to women.
Yes, they could tell all the lies. They could say that women had been treated as slaves throughout history. They could say that men thought women were inferior creatures who couldn’t do anything. They could say that marriage was a trap, that the family was a cage, that heterosexual sex was inherently rape, and so on.
But the critical part, the part that sold all the lies, was the deliberate and carefully crafted impression that other women already believed this.
Women have a powerful instinct to defer to the opinions of the tribe, because they are descended from many generations of women who depended on the goodwill of the tribe for survival.
To most women, widespread public disapproval, especially that of other women, can be as painful as torture, and as compelling as physical force.
The media-manufactured illusion of consensus was the great lie with which feminism was sold.
The fact is, most women of the time did not agree with the basic principles of the feminist intellectuals. And, in fact, they still do not, today.
But still, they will pay lip service to, and vote according to, the beliefs derived from those principles, not only because they believe they will be ostracized if they don’t, but because they have been sold a false notion of history through the illusion of consensus, as well.
Most women do not agree that:
“No woman should be authorized to stay home to raise her children. Women should not have that choice, because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”
They think feminism is about empowerment, and having choices, and that the men of the past wanted to take their choices away.
But those are the words of Simone de Beauvoir, high priestess of feminism (and groomer of underage girls for Jean-Paul Sartre), who very much did not want women to have certain choices, and not of the men of the early 20th century, who were simply adapting their expectations to the choices women were typically inclined to make.
Examples like this, of fake history sold with fake consensus, abound.
But pictures from the past don’t lie.
These people, in this picture, aren’t fitness enthusiasts. They weren’t carefully selected for beauty before taking a staged photograph.
This is simply how young people looked in the late 70s. I may have been a child at the time, but I remember.
Look at their faces. Look at how they are dressed. These aren’t professional photos. These aren’t models. These are ordinary people.
This is what you would have looked like.
The reason you don’t look like this isn’t because you have the special gene that turns air into marshmallows when you breathe it.
Nor is it because you are specially lazy and gluttonous.
People did not suddenly start getting “fat genetics” in massive numbers around 1989. Nor did they suddenly become gluttons and layabouts.
You were poisoned.
You were tricked into eating toxic food that made you sick. And being fat is one of the symptoms of that sickness.
Some of you reading this have never been healthy in your adult lives.
This is what they stole from you, this unholy alliance between Wall Street and hateful intellectuals. For the sake of money and pride, they undertook to destroy the family whose function was to feed you and keep you healthy.
A woman’s place is in the kitchen, after all.
Because the kitchen was never a place of underachievement, slavery, and shame. That was the lie they sold you.
It was a place of love, health, community, appreciation, honor, and joy.
Your foremothers were not slaves. And they were far healthier and happier than you are.
Learn to cook
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
