What is Damseling? Chat GPT provides the following answer:
“Damseling” is a term used to describe a behavior in which someone, typically a woman, portrays themselves as helpless or in need of rescue in order to elicit sympathy or assistance from others. The term is derived from the word “damsel,” which is a term used to describe a young unmarried woman. In some cases, individuals may engage in damseling as a manipulative tactic to gain attention or to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. Damseling can take many forms, such as exaggerating or fabricating problems, over-relying on others for help, or using a victim mentality to manipulate others into meeting their needs.
Women’s weakness and vulnerability is a great source of power. This uniquely feminine power has no male equivalent, because men are generally expected to be able to defend themselves from harm.
Female victimhood has the potential to raise a woman’s social status by making people sympathise with her and want to help her. A man’s weakness, on the other hand, tends to lower his status in the eyes of others.
‘Chivalry’ by Frank Dicksee (1885)
Janice Fiamengo writes:
“Well over a century ago, our ancestors debated women’s demand for voting and other privileges. Traditionalists argued that women faced a choice: they could either have special treatment on the basis of their alleged vulnerability as a group, or they could have political equality, but they couldn’t have both. Lo and behold, women got both, with peculiar results for our political culture.
In our time, the performance of powerlessness has become a dominant strategy of power, nowhere more evident than in politics. “I’ve been traumatized” is now a more galvanizing cry than “I can handle that”—and trembling weakness often eclipses demonstration of strength and competence.”
Everyone pays attention to a distressed woman. Everyone wants to help her and keep her safe. It’s an essential biological instinct to protect the weaker sex, without which our species would’ve gone extinct a long time ago. On the other hand, a man in distress is usually blamed for the situation he’s in; he’s told to try harder and do better.
A woman in distress is not expected to defend herself, because she’s assumed to be weak, vulnerable and in need of male protection. The damsel in distress archetype is the epitome of female victimhood and the resulting power. It doesn’t matter if the distress is real, imagined, acted or exaggerated: there’s always someone around to rescue the damsel and cater to her every need. The saviour may be a man, the government or the media (as in the case of Amber Heard).
Women and Children First
All human beings are innately driven to protect children – an instinct essential for survival. Adult women are able to harness the same empathy people have for children due to a biological phenomenon called neoteny.
Neoteny refers to the retention of juvenile features in adults. In humans, this is a physical characteristic in women that signals innocence and vulnerability. It therefore elicits caring and nurturing responses from other people.
Examples of neotenous or baby-like features that are important for women’s facial attractiveness are large, widely spaced eyes and a small nose and chin. Cross-cultural studies have shown that these features are considered attractive by men all over the world.
Contrast these traditionally feminine features with typical masculine traits resulting from high testosterone levels, such as a pronounced jaw, chin, cheekbones, and brow ridges. In women, the hormone estrogen contributes to the maintenance of neotenous features. During puberty, testosterone levels in boys increase dramatically, which causes them to develop the masculine characteristics that clearly differentiate them from girls.
When we see a tiny baby or puppy, we instinctively want to keep them safe. This is the same instinct women can exploit well into adulthood, while men lose this opportunity after hitting puberty.
An eye-opening social experiment has shown that people are more likely to want to protect girls than they are to care about boys, even before the effects of puberty begin to manifest. In the experiment, people rescued the little girl first, followed by the dog and then the cat. The little boy was the last to receive help from passers-by. Another study has found that both men and women are more likely to sacrifice a man than a woman when it comes to both saving the lives of others and pursuing self-interests. This is heartbreakingly representative of our society, which incessantly exaggerates the discomfort of women, while downplaying the suffering of men.
The price of women’s power has always been male sacrifice. This was as true a hundred thousand years ago and a thousand years ago as it is today.
Feminists misrepresent men’s efforts to protect and serve women as patriarchal oppression. But the truth is that all cultures glorify male suffering and self-sacrifice, while putting girls on a pedestal for their beauty and innocence.
Traditionally, women had fewer rights because they had virtually no responsibilities, and they certainly weren’t required to sacrifice themselves for their community. In the West today, women have the same rights as men, while still enjoying special treatment.
The Temptation of Damselling
Some women exploit the power of the damsel in distress more than others, but I believe we all use it from time to time. I think we are all aware of this power at an instinctual level.
There are, of course, horrible instances of actual violence against women. But women making false allegations and playing the damsel don’t make life any easier for real survivors. In fact, they’re making it much more difficult for actual survivors to get help and justice. They’re also doing a lot of harm by calling into question women’s competence and ability to rule over their own lives.
*For more articles by Greta Aurora visit her Substack Feminine Power
Casualties of the family court, AKA fathers and children, are so great in number I wouldn’t be surprised if they outnumbered the collective casualties of all wars over the last century. Each of them were made casualties by a family court culture that sides with mothers bent on establishing ownership of children, a goal achieved via character assassination of fathers, and a performance of damseling.
If women are reduced to proverbial chattel within the English law system, which of course they never were, we can only conclude that children have always been the chattel of the chattel. Ernest B. Bax elaborates this point in the following comment penned in the year 1896:
CUSTODY OF CHILDREN
It has always in England been laid down as a fundamental law based on public policy, that the custody of children and their education is a duty incumbent on the father. It is said to be so fundamental that he is not permitted to waive his exercise of the right by pre-nuptial contract. (See the Agar v. Ellis Case.)
This rule of the Common Law of England is of course in harmony with the policy of all Europe and Christendom, as well as with the historic conditions of the European social organisation, if not with the primal instincts of the race.
Nevertheless, fundamental and necessary as the rule may be, the pro-feminist magistrates and judges of England are bent apparently on ignoring it with a light heart. They have not merely retained the old rule that the custody of infants of tender years remains with the mother until the child attains the age of seven. But they go much further than that. As a matter of course, and without considering in the least the interests of the child, or of society at large, they hand over the custody and education of all the children to the litigant wife, whenever she establishes –an easy thing to do– a flimsy and often farcical case of technical “cruelty.”
The victim husband has the privilege of maintaining the children as well as herself out of his property or earnings, and has the added consolation of knowing that they will brought up to detest him.
Even in the extreme case where a deserting wife takes with her the children of the marriage, there is practically no redress for the husband if in narrow circumstances. The police courts will not interfere. The divorce court, as already stated, is expensive to the point of prohibition. In any case the husband has to face a tribunal already prejudiced in favour of the female, and the attendant scandal of a process will probably have no other result than to injure his children and their future prospects in life.
– Ernest B. Bax, The Legal Subjection of Men (1896 p.16)
Most people reading this will know the story described by Bax all too well. The situation remains unchanged to this very day. What is slightly less well known is the impact on grandparents, especially paternal grandparents who tend to become collateral damage along with the alienated father. Mothers instinctively know that grandparents will side with their son in the face of such brutality, so they make the callous and cynical decision to alienate the paternal grandparents and thereby obliterate all potential for opposition.
Callous is hardly a strong enough word for it, but whatever the appropriate adjectives, here we remain thanks to a gynocentric feminism that has eaten away at family cohesion over the last two centuries.
The chances of this happening to grandparents are extremely high, except on the basis that they demonstrate a sycophantic compliance with, and longsuffering utilitarianism towards the mother and her inflated wants – babysitting on demand, transport to and from school, regularly complimenting the mother on her great single parent skills, and the often clear expectation to ‘pay up’ financially by buying items for the grandchildren or offering large money gifts for Christmas & birthdays – which of course the mother will decide the best use of.
This is the level of extortion that so many alienating mothers resort to – a kind of pay-to-play that grandparents are subjected to. For any self-respecting grandparent the juice may not be worth the squeeze, especially if faced with continued disapproval and grifting.
When it comes to mothers displaying pronounced control issues within the intact young family, it raises the serious question of whether grandparents should form a relationship with grandchildren at the outset, and if so, how deep (or superficial) and how frequent. Such control issues are usually bankable indications that everything will eventually turn to shit, and grand parents need to wise up and decide how best they will deal with the broken relationships issue in advance.
Like the MGTOW response toward an excess in women’s relational and legal power, I wouldn’t be surprised to see an equivalent boycott trend among grandparents emerge – in this case jettisoning a portion of the increasingly vulnerable grandparent role. Grandparents Going Their Own Way (GGTOW). That is not to say that such grandparents would be disowning their son or his progeny – on the contrary – the aim would be to protect both he and his children from a greater heartache in the case of deeply attached bonds being destroyed by the mother.
The cultivation of some distance serves the goal of mitigating the likely heartache were it to happen. The less abiding and less intense the grandparent-grandchild relationship, the less drama there will be with the inevitable fallout. There would be some clear heads prevailing among the casualties, which may be all the better to help pick up the pieces for the ones you love.
Keeping a greater distance, but continuing to demonstrate a believable measure of love and support may be the most practical way for grandparents to maintain stability in the extended family, especially in the event of its collapse.
Transmaxxing is a relatively new term referring to men who transition gender (MtF) in order to obtain personal, social and legal benefits associated with being female. Said differently, the transmaxxer transitions to female status, and not to recognizing a sense of female selfhood as is the case with transwomen.
The phenomenon appeared many years before the term was coined, and while it has recently gained some interest in the incel community, its application is far broader than that. It involves a decision to identify as a female regardless of this being contrary to one’s usual sense-of-self.
The Urban Dictionary defines transmaxxing simply as, “Transitioning from male to female for personal gain.”
Based on this broad Urban Dictionary definition we will conclude the following: 1. that transmaxxing cannot be reduced to an incel activity, nor to a proclivity of gay men as some have proposed, nor to any other single demographic. 2. It never or rarely applies to cases of female-to-male transition which are considered to involve minimal gain. 3. Transmaxxing isn’t based on the clichéd explanation that the individual is “a female trapped inside a man’s body,” nor that he “has always felt like a woman.” 4. The only premise of transmaxxing is the undergoing of a MtF transition for the sake of securing a range of benefits associated with female identification.
So lets look at some of those benefits.
Some recent online discussions have cited the following benefits belonging exclusively to the female sex, and also by legal extension to transmaxxers:
Free or subsidized accommodation for the low income women
Female only scholarships
Female employment quotas
Affirmative action hires
Being able to sue for sexism
Lighter prison sentences
More leisure time, less work
Receive greater empathy and sympathy
Greater social support
More narcissistic gratification for achievements
To be believed regardless of lack of evidence
Use public transport & parking spaces reserved for women
Receive higher pass marks for the same school work
LIVING EXAMPLES
Equador
René Salinas Ramos is an Equadorian “transmaxxer-woman.” Ramos, who works as a journalist, was born male. Ramos experienced discrimination against men in the Ecuadorian family court system and legally changed her gender to female in late 2022. Ramos hopes now that the courts will treat her more fairly and that she can gain custody of her children.[1]
Switzerland
In Switzerland a man has exploited an administrative loophole and formally transmaxxed his gender to female in order to retire a year earlier. Swiss rules enable any Swiss resident with the “intimate conviction” that they do not belong to the sex they are registered as in the civil status register can apply to change their gender, in addition to their first name, for just 75 Swiss francs (€72). The unnamed man from Lucerne successfully applied to transmax his gender so that he could receive his state pension at the Swiss retirement age for women of 64, a year earlier than men.[2][3]
Germany
In Germany a self-identified transmaxxer named Tina has undergone medical transition to reap various sexual and social advantages over her former existence as an ‘incel,’ and claims to be treated better as a female under the social systems in which she lives. Such advantages included being successfully admitted to attend a female-only university class, with Tina adding that “there’s a government quota that needs to be met in Germany regarding women’s employment, and obviously I count as a woman legally, so I will have a easier time finding a job.”[4]
In Norway, 2023, a male student changed gender to gain admission to the esteemed NTNU program which prioritized female applicants. The student took advantage of the nation’s lenient gender self-identification laws to gain admission to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), and said that changing his gender for the purposes of gaining extra admission points was “about as easy as switching mobile plans.” According to Finansavisen,[5] the unnamed male student took advantage of the policy after failing to meet merit-based standards. Seeking to gain extra admission points, the student changed his gender marker, allowing him to collect just enough points to be admitted into the Industrial Economics and Technology Management (Indøk) program. The program had a bonus two “gender points” for “female” applicants.[6][7][8]
PRAXIS
Transmaxxers don’t need to use hormone replacement therapy, wear lipstick, put on a dress or engage in other performative gestures we might typically associate with transwomen (although some may choose to take these extra steps). Further, transmaxxer identification doesnt even require a renunciation of traits referred to as masculine. At minimum, all it requires is a technical change of gender either on a legal paper, or in some countries by verbal statement, and numerous aspects of female privilege become available for the transmaxxer’s enjoyment.
While the change of gender may appear cynical or inauthentic, we can say that transmaxxers may genuinely identify with an internal sense of privilege, esteem, status, deservingness, dignity, worth, purity, beauty and social value that we euphemistically call “feminine.” The degree to which a transmaxxer genuinely identifies with these “feminine” things, such femininity is integral to his sense of self.
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Addendum: The primary difference between a transwoman and transmaxxer needs to be differentiated, as there seems to be some confusion on this point. Transwomen organically feel & desire female identification, with negligeable desire to identify as male. Whereas MtF transmaxxers tend to identify as male or gender dysphoric, without an organic desire to identify as a woman. This can be summarized as follows:
Transwoman is an autonomous desire and identification of the self as female
Transmaxxing is a decision, rather than an autonomous desire, to identify as female gender contrary to one’s usual sense-of-self. The transmaxxer can be said to legitimately “transition” to female status, rather than female selfhood.
While it may seem like a modern topic, the burning question of whether men should marry or more to the point not marry, is centuries old. That men are rejecting marriage in increasing numbers is well documented, however cynicism about the virtues of marriage is nothing new.
Numerous scholarly books such as Howard Chudacoff’s Age Of The Bachelor, or J. McCurdy’s Citizen Bachelors have traced the historical rise of bachelor movements, which tend to occur when a given society sufficiently devalues men while saddling them with unreasonable demands of service to wives and the State. When societies treat males more favourably, then bachelor movements organically decline.
I recently chanced upon another book outlining the deeper history of ‘marriage avoidance’ under the heading the querelle du mariage (quarrel about marriage). The following excerpt provides some interesting detail:
The early manifestations of the quarrel often focus on marriage, one of the pressing problems of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period: An uxor sit ducenda (Should One Take a Wife) was a question much discussed by Italian men, and in Germany it could appear as Ob einem manne sey zu nemen ein eelichs weyb oder nit (Should a Man Take a Wife or Not? – Albrecht von Eyb, 1472). In answer to this question, male misogamy (hatred of marriage) is expressed as misogyny (hatred of women) and philogyny (love of women) is expressed as philogamy (love of marriage).
Christine de Pizan’s praise of women was directed against the misogamists and misogynists of her time, the anonymous text Les quinze joies de mariage (The Fifteen Joys of Marriage) deplored the loss of male liberty in marriage, and a century later Erasmus of Rotterdam presented the misogamist virgin in his Virgo misogamos (The Misogamist Virgin – 1523), who desperately wants to enter a convent but inspired by love she thinks better of it at the last moment. Philogynous texts questioned why women were punished more strictly for adultery than men or why a husband had to be brought (by a dowry); misogamists and misogynists, eg. In England, answered the question by stating that women tend to squeeze money out of their husbands.
In Germany this aspect of the querelle has been largely ignored (interest has focused on voices which argued in favor of women’s intelligence and reason), although the querelle du mariage played an important role here: the wide-ranging marriage debate during the Reformation, in particular in its sensational and scandalous early phases – public betrothals of monks and nuns, closures of monasteries and convents, an epidemic of marriages in Germany to which even French reformers travelled who wished to marry – must be read as an integral part of the European querelle des sexes and the same goes for the marriage debates of the Counter-Reformation. Martin Luther’s Von chelichen Leben (The Estate of Married Life – 1522) speaks quite in the manner of a querelle text by turning against the traditional misogamist attitude:
“What we would speak most of is the fact that the estate of marriage has universally fallen into such awful disrepute. There are many pagan books which treat of nothing but the depravity of womankind and the unhappiness of the estate of marriage […]. So they [young men listening to the advice of a Roman official] concluded that woman is a necessary evil, and that no household can be without such an evil. […] For this reason young men should be on their guard when they read pagan books and hear the common complaints about marriage, lest they inhale poison . For the estate of marriage does not sell well with the devil, because it is God’s good will and work. This is why the devil has contrived to have so much shouted and written in the world against the institution of marriage […]. The world says of marriage, ‘Brief is the joy, lasting the bitterness.”2
__________________________
I’ve long wondered what form male activism might have taken in response to the excesses of traditional European and Anglosphere gynocentrism. From the above description, and from the many anti-marriage texts abounding through old Europe, it’s clear that a historical form of men’s rights advocacy concerned itself with the dangers of entrapment within marriage, and avoidance of same by choosing bachelorhood.
Below is a brief comment on Don A. Monson’s study Why is la Belle Dame sans Merci? Evolutionary Psychology and the Troubadours. Monson is a Professor of French and Francophone Studies Emeritus, B.A., University of Utah; M.A. and Ph.D., University of Chicago, with a special interest in Evolutionary Psychology.
* * *
In Don Monson’s paper we read:
While I reject Monson’s presumption that psycho-sexual power of women was given natural expression in courtly-love language (actually the complete reverse is the case), he nevertheless outlines features of a psychological trope that still guides sexual relations in many countries today, as embedded in the European-derived tradition of chivalry and romantic love.
Monson’s belief arises from a blue-pill habit among evolutionary psychologists that places exaggerated emphasis on the Males Compete/Female Choose (MCFC) model of evolution. Steve Stewart-Williams’ challenged that Evopsych fixation and introduced the more human concept of Mutual Mate Choice (MMC) – a concept that supports my contention that the courtly love trope was responsible for exaggerating women’s sexual status.
Its almost as if Monson is asking us to amend C.S. Lewis’ famous characterization ‘The feudalisation of love’ to a reductionist evolutionary formula of ‘A love of feudalisation’ – ie. a formula assuming that males are simply designed to compete for women’s ultimate sexual choices. I reject this narrow explanation and hope that Monson doesn’t repeating it in his forthcoming book Eros and Noesis: A Cognitive Approach to the Courtly Love Literature of Medieval France.
Footnote – [Feb 2024]: Having just now read Don A. Monson’s new book Eros and Noesis: A Cognitive Approach to the Courtly Love Literature of Medieval France, a brief comment is in order. As predicted, he claims that the invention of courtly/romantic love during the Middle Ages is fallacious conjecture made by scholars who believe in a “blank slate” of the human brain (a completely false, hyperbolic and unsupported assertion), and that he, as an advocate of evolutionary psychology, can show that romantic love is a cultural universal of long-term pair bonding that is endemic to the human species. His primary bombshell evidence? – the completely debunked Jankowiak & Fischer paper (1992) which claimed to find evidence of romantic in 146 out of the 166 cultures. That said I would still recommend a read of his book, if you can partition-out this error, as it has other valuable insights that go some way to redeeming the volume.
The following elaborates on a common misrepresentation of what romantic love is. – PW
* * *
It’s amazing to observe how many academics have adopted a flawed idea of what romantic love is – all because Jankowiak & Fischer1 claimed to both define, and then find evidence of romantic love in 147 out of 166 cultures. However their definition does not match the romantic love construct from Europe which rested squarely on a feudal template of men serving elevated ladies – a template that is missing from Jankowiak & Fischer’s definition. As the most popular kind of love in the world today, this is no small oversight.
Romantic love is, in fact, different from the more generic form of love they describe.
Even the great Steve Stewart-Williams uncritically accepts Jankowiak & Fischer’s romantic love construct which omits the feudal template (ie. man as vassal, woman as lord), an omission that results in their construct not being romantic love at all because it is lacking its most definitive element.
Jankowiak & Fischer defined romantic love as based on intimacy, passion, commitment, idealization, limerence, and so on, and omitted the central relevance of the feudal template. But no feudal metaphor = no romantic love. Academics relying on such misinformation overlook the novelty of romantic love as does Stewart-Williams in his otherwise wonderful book on evolutionary psychology titled ‘The Ape Who Understood The Universe.‘ There he writes:
The question all these findings raise is a straightforward one: If romantic love is an invention of Western culture, why is it found in every geographical region, historical period, and ethnic group? The simplest and most plausible answer is that romantic love is not an invention of Western culture. Instead, the idea that romantic love is an invention of Western culture is itself an invention of Western culture, and a rather implausible one at that. Human beings were falling in and out of love for hundreds of thousands of years before we ever had Hollywood blockbusters or knights in shining armor. We’re just that kind of animal – the kind that falls in love from time to time.
Its clear that some academics are attempting to universalize a medieval phenomenon that is not, in fact, universal. And many subsequent academics are simply quoting, without checking, the robustness of the earlier study by Jankowiak & Fischer. Have they never read pre-medieval European literature, or perhaps Chinese history for alternative descriptions of love?
For example, the following quote is from the book Love and Women in Early Chinese Fiction By Daniel Hsieh (2009),2 which describes an absence of the European template in China:
The idea of a purely romantic hero, a man as both an amorous and exemplar figure, is almost unknown. Most modern readers would react to the Chinese romances with sentiments akin to E. D. Edwards who declared, “Of all characteristics of Chinese fiction which are foreign to European ideas none is more striking than the inadequacy of the hero of love stories. The nominal hero is generally a quite unheroic person….”. Given the norms of the culture this was inevitable. Romance ordinarily had little place in the life of a wenren, and any attempt to raise its position is problematic. A “real” man was not a lover. Earlier we saw an example from the Shishou xinyu where an individual was laughed at for his excessive devotion to his wife. In “Diao Wei Wudi wen”, Lu Ji (261–303) writes, “As for entangling one’s emotions on extraneous objects or setting one’s thoughts on women (gui fang), these are things that a wise and outstanding man had best avoid.” In a Confucian world, feelings for the opposite sex were sublimated. It is not that women were necessarily seen as “evil.” Rather, having little place in moral and philosophical realms, they threatened to hinder a person from higher pursuits. One’s “passion” should be for ruler and state, and very early there evolved the model of the wenren official assuming the role of lover with the ruler being the object of his devotion. Some of the most passionate poetry in the tradition – Qu Yuan’s verse in Chu ci – is based on this idea. As Arthur Waley noted when discussing the “Li sao” (Encountering Sorrow), “In this poem, sex and politics are curiously interwoven, as we need not doubt they were in Chu Yuan’s own mind. He affords a striking example of the way in which abnormal mentality imposes itself.” In the West there occurred an interesting reversal of this notion. The rise of courtly love involved a kind of “feudalisation of love” in which man devoted himself to a lady in the way a vassal devoted himself to his lord.
It’s revealing to contrast the Chinese position that, quote “a real man was not a lover” with the opposite convention coming out of 12th century Europe where, “Here the truest lovers are now the best knights.”3
This error of claiming romantic love as universal is akin to saying all four-legged animals are horses because horses have four legs. This kind of logic is relevant to hippophiles, but it isn’t science……. even if horses do, in fact, have four legs. Same with romantic love – it needs to be differentiated from more generic love constructs and not blurred together.
C.S. Lewis rightly defined courtly & romantic love as “a feudalisation of love.” Again, if there’s no feudal template (eg. is absent in many other cultures’ version of love), there’s no romantic love. So-called research that omits this point is an attempt to universalise a novel social construct. The feudal factor permeates the phenomenon of romantic love, and must be included as a guiding factor in any attempts at a cross-cultural study on romantic love. However, because this factor was omitted by Jankowiak & Fischer it renders their study misleading if we consider that the Europe-derived model has become the dominant format in many cultures today; if we are going to use the exact phrase romantic love it deserves a more detailed description.
The kind of love that Jankowiak & Fischer do end up describing and then sampling in 166 cultures is more accurately phrased as pairbonding love, which does indeed exist in all cultures. To (mis)use the European phrase romantic love leads to confusion; so I would recommend they, and all researchers who have followed them, consider making this terminology change.
The feudal metaphor is symbolised in this image of a man going down on one knee in a pledge of lifelong service to a woman considered elevated. This is a continuation of the commendation ceremony of the Middle Ages.
Addendum: Since writing the above commentary, I have communicated with both Jankowiak and Fischer who inform me that the above terminology problem has been recognized and addressed by them some time ago, leading to the dropping of the phrase romantic love and replacing it with the more suitable designation passionate love in subsequent publications.
The following excerpt from William Reddy’s The Making of Romantic Love, elaborates on the conflation of romantic love with more universal forms of love. – PW
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The English word love can mean so many different things that, by convention, one adds the word “romantic” to distinguish those types of love that include a sexual component from all other types of love. This is the sense of “romantic love” deployed by William Jankowiak and Edward Fischer in a widely cited study published in 1992.1 The authors presented evidence that romantic love was present in 147 out of 166 cultures, or 88.5 percent. Their definition of romantic love was very broad. Evidence of any one of five criteria was regarded as sufficient: (1) accounts of personal anguish and longing, (2) love songs or folklore “that highlight the motivations behind romantic involvement,” (3) elopements due to mutual affection, (4) native accounts of passionate love, and (5) ethnographers’ affirmations. The authors believed their findings disproved a view expressed by a number of scholars that romantic love was found only in modern individualistic societies. The evidence, they concluded, strongly supported the universal occurrence of romantic love. Jankowiak subsequently edited an anthology of essays by ethnographers presenting evidence for the existence of romantic love in a variety of cultural settings from West Africa to Polynesia.2
In a 1998 essay, Charles Lindholm rejected Jankowiak and Fischer’s conclusion, however, on the grounds that their definition of romantic love lacked sociological and cultural specificity.3 […] Lindholm’s observations strongly indicate the need for a more nuanced vocabulary. After all, his objection to Jankowiak and Fischer’s conclusions may be the result of a terminological confusion. Jankowiak and Fischer cast the widest possible net that the term “romantic love” permits.
In this study, the term “longing for association” will be used to refer to that wide net that Jankowiak and Fischer cast, and the term “romantic love” will be reserved to refer to those forms of the longing for association that have emerged in Western and Western-influenced cultural settings where one or another of the historical versions of desire-as-appetite is accepted as common sense.
To illustrate the importance of this distinction, consider a case mentioned by Leonard Plotinicov in the 1995 anthology edited by William Jankowiak. Plotinicov reports on a Nigerian informant who became fascinated, even obsessed with his third wife the moment he saw her. Although he already had two wives, he said, “I told her I wanted to marry her. She said she had nothing to say about that, and directed me to her parents.” He immediately went to negotiate with the parents and soon married her.4 Whatever this man’s emotion was, to equate it with “romantic love” as practiced in certain Western settings is to ignore the centrality of reciprocal feeling and of exclusivity in Western norms for love partnerships.
References:
[1]. William R. Jankowiak and Edward F. Fischer, “A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Romantic Love,” Ethnology 31 (1992): 149–55. [2]. William R. Jankowiak, ed., Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). [3]. Charles Lindholm, “Love and Structure,” Theory, Culture & Society 15 (1998): 243–63. [4]. Leonard Plotinicov, “Love, Lust and Found in Nigeria,” in Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? ed. William Jankowiak (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 128–40, quote from p. 134.
There are countless definitions of what ‘feminism’ is, with feminists themselves pointing to glib dictionary definitions, and antifeminists preferring to define it as a female supremacy movement. A hundred other definitions could easily be offered, but the more important question is what (if anything) do all these different definitions hold in common?
Below, Adam Kostakis answers this question in the affirmative with an elegant definition that most would agree with. – PW
_____________________
Even essentially contested concepts, as W. B. Gallie referred to them, must have meanings which are greater than normative, else communication about them would be rendered impossible. That is – there must be some amount of general consensus over what feminism is, between feminists and anti-feminists, or we would not be able to argue about it! Even despite the differences between a feminist’s view of feminism and of our own, some shared content must exist at some level, or we would be talking about entirely different things. They might be talking about the feminist movement, while I am talking about horse-rearing, although we both refer to our respective subjects as ‘feminism’ – but we wouldn’t have much to say to each other, would we, if this were the case?
So, I shall posit the following as a universally applicable definition of feminism; that is to say, it must fit everyone’s criteria for what feminism is, in spite of the different perspectives that different people hold on its nature. It is a suitably limited definition, since it can encompass only those parts of feminism which all definitions hold in common. So, here it is: feminism is the project for increasing the power of women.
That, then, is what everybody who discusses feminism holds in common regarding the concept, whether they are supportive, skeptical, or nihilistically indifferent. No feminist, I think, would deny that this is, at the very least, the ‘bare bones’ of feminism, even if she would prefer to flesh it out in a lot more detail. But that will not do, for beyond this narrow inference, we disagree with each other. To be as objective as possible, then, we must take only that which everybody agrees upon, and that is our universally applicable definition.
Note that there is no mention of equality. This is because there are a number of feminists who explicitly did not pursue equality, but supremacy. So, equality cannot fit into the universal definition of feminism, since certain feminists themselves – who were very famously, unequivocally feminist – disavowed it. To say that feminism is ‘about equality’, then, would be to place oneself in diametrical opposition to several extremely influential feminists! And why, that would be … misogynistic!
Nor can feminism be said to be the project for increasing the power of women relative to men, since, in this counter-feminist’s view, feminists are often quite content to increase the power of women in an absolute sense. That is, they endeavor to grab all they can for women, without reference to the status of men. The phrase ‘relative to men,’ then, only serves to imply that women are power-less relative to men at present, thus casting feminism in an unfairly favorable light. In reality, once women do achieve power which is at an equal or equivalent level to that of men, the demands of feminists do not stop. What we find is that female power becomes entrenched, and extended, and when it surpasses male power, this is simply referred to as ‘parity’ and ignored by feminists – at least, when they are not gloating over men’s newfound powerlessness.
Nor are we able to list, in our universal definition, the specific areas of life, or spheres, in which the feminist project applies. This is because feminism is inherently universalizing; it seeks to colonize and dominate every single facet of life where men and women meet. It aims for domination in every sphere of life, actual and potential.
You may disagree with some of the points above, particularly if you are supportive of feminism. But this does nothing to change our universal definition, because all we can say about those points is that they are contentious. That is, feminists and non-feminists, who are educated about feminism, disagree about these aspects of feminism, and it would simply be biased to take one or the other view for granted. That would be like consulting only Jacobins on the historical accomplishments of the Jacobin Club, or like canvassing only conservatives to explain modern liberalism. It would be a good example of poor methodology, and would help us very little in our search for truth. Right? So then, our universally applicable definition cannot be expanded beyond that which we stated before: feminism is the project for increasing the power of women.
Source: The above excerpt is from Adam Kostakis’ essay Pig Latin.
