In my parents' and grandparents' eras in rural Ireland, it was customary for employed bachelors over say age 35 to be named and shamed by the local priest at Sunday mass. Their names would be read out in an “unmarried roll call of shame”, their single male status would be denigrated, and they would be attacked for their "selfishness" and general uselessness. Proper order, too – it must have been great fun for everybody else, watching the named guys squirm lol.
Years later, going to a rural N Irish school on buses in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was unremarkable for lads to be groped in public by a minority of very confident girls on the bus. Putting your schoolbag up on the luggage rack, you’d be vulnerable to have your ass fondled or your bits squeezed by an opportunistic girl, and this would be highly embarrassing of course, but primarily it was taken as a crude compliment, and blokes who remained un-groped were secretly jealous. It seems obvious that modern rich urban feminists have never behaved like that, and moreover seem unaware that any women do behave like that.
There is of course a large and ignored difference between rural women and educated urban women, in that rich white urban American women, who comprise the most influential section of the feminist commentariat, tend to have more middle-class hang-ups and less sexual agency than rural / farming-background women. The rich urban feminists, convinced of their own superiority and sense that they speak for all women lol, are generally unaware of how far ahead of them country women are.
I felt sad reading this article: sad for the London career women, worried that they may never marry or have children (and perhaps wondering whether to freeze their eggs); sad for young Greek women, trapped by the Greek economy into marital relationships where men have the power (and often abuse it); sad for the woman in the anecdote with her failed marriage, now living with her partner. Neither milieu seems to have a happy outcome. And as Graham Cunningham points out in his comment, there are plenty of lonely men in the western world who would love to marry but who are not seen as marriageable by alpha women. Perhaps the West should do as in India and other eastern countries, and adopt a properly regulated arranged marriage system? So that young men and women of roughly equal social status and intelligence and from stable backgrounds are helped to meet each other? The Hollywood idea of romance and falling in love do not come into it - or slowly develop later on. I know it is very old-fashioned to say so, but free sex messes up relationships, romance and long-term reliability. There are good emotional and psychological reasons why chastity before marriage - for both sexes, not just the girls - is a better building block for an enduring relationship than the modern no-strings, bed-hopping, free for all we see practised everywhere.
I am in the minority but I am so tired of plucking women out of context--family, community, culture--and then affixing a solution to their problems in the world.
The world has problems. They cannot be solved on a macro level.
We don't need feminists we need men and women who can recognize truth and distinguish it from lies.
The world likes to lie to us--those that trust and listen to those lies find out soon enough.
I lived in Greece for a year back in the mid-2000s, with my aunt. It was a great adventure and I am grateful for the opportunity of a lifetime. I did see up close the problems though. Unemployment and low wages affected both young men and women and the lack of opportunity was hard on both, but in different ways. Most people my age (I was 26) or younger had a goal to leave the country.
I quickly made up my mind that I was not going to live permanently in Greece or marry someone there (when I arrived I had an open mind to all possibilities.) I did not want to raise kids there, especially not boys. Certainly I saw examples of sexism and bad behaviour from men, but I think the problem goes deeper to not having a way to become masculine in a positive sense. Lack of jobs and meaningful challenges seemed to leave a lot of men at loose ends trying to get attention from women as the only way to prove themselves.
I’m very grateful for this article as it tallies with my experiences in a rural Nepalese village. In particular with an experience I had with a woman in that village who had suffered for decades from a fourth-degree uterine prolapse resulting from a combination of a traumatic birthing experience and years of heavy labor, whose husband was beating her for not working hard enough to fuel his alcohol addiction, and who had little financial or social recourses to get out of her situation. I’m glad we can acknowledge the both/and experiences of women in these contexts (rich West and other parts of the world) and that you open space for no single solution.
This was very interesting. Thank you for writing it. I have never lived in Thessaloniki, but I have lived for years in another southern European coastal city, Naples, which shares the problems you cite—about 40% youth unemployment—and, from your account, many of the same cultural characteristics, including older women (and men) hounding young women to get married and produce grandchildren; and young people spending most or all of their meager income on clothes and grooming. In Naples, this emphasis on appearance was true of men and women, and it resulted in rampant superficiality and consumerism, which in turn wearies and erodes a culture and its people. I have a Neapolitan grandmother and I married into a traditional Neapolitan family. I was amazed to watch my Neapolitan sisters-in-law replicate their mother’s life down to the most minute detail: little education, early teenage pregnancy resulting in marriage, followed by an endless cycle of domestic drudge and family obligations. (The educated class in Naples is not caught in the same loop.) As you write, family is touted as the most important thing in Thessaloniki and Naples, which is laudable, but when the family simply folds in on itself, generation after generation, in a repeating rhythm of limitation, it appeared to this observer that it didn’t nourish the dignity of anyone. There was no concept of betterment or expansion for subsequent generations, only replication of the existing pattern. I posit that something more than a particular kind of feminism is needed here because, while women bear the brunt of so much of the poor behavior of men in these cultures, nobody is experiencing anything one might call thriving.
Our society doesn’t offer either sex what they really want: dignity, responsibility and belonging. Personally, unless you are getting abused or cheated on, you probably need to work with the person you are married to. Anyone who divorces the person they are married to because they are just “not that head over heels” (aka I think I can do better) is destined for eternal misery, always gazing at the other grass. If we stopped viewing marriage as the culmination of a Rom Com, but instead as an agreement for the good times as well as bad, we would be a lot further towards maturity. But alas, we are lied to and told we will be young forever, and thus we are always chasing the never returning youth.
Is there a more depressing word in the English language than "looksmaxing"? Taking the most superficial elements of our extremely superficial society, and focusing all your social (and financial) capital on exclusively that.
Not a criticism of these women; they're just following the incentives. But what miserable incentives society has pushed them towards.
1) The theme of the first part of your essay is well made. That in "Greece and many other countries around the world [women] are still struggling with" ANY kind of feminist liberation. But then the corollary - that a better and nobler kind of #MeToo movement would have prioritised its firepower on behalf of those millions of women living In The Shadows of #MeToo in these oppressive cultures - is fought shy of. The reality of course was that the real #MeToo was so Anglo-metropolitan self-absorbed that it aimed its firepower at the easy target of the most liberal-feminised parts of the West. It was willfully myopic and shallow in other words. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/life-in-the-shadows-of-metoo
2) The second theme of your essay would (if read by some notional being from outer space) create the impression that - on Planet Earth - finding sex and romance is a piece of cake for all 'Men' whereas for all 'Women' it is problemmatic. The reader would never know that, in the liberal West, there are many more lonely men unable to find romance (and no I don't mean 'incels') than there are women in this bind. They would not get any sense of the reality which is that sex and romance options for The Less Desired of both sexes is quite a different reality from the mental universe of successful metropolitan alphas and pretty things. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired
I’m a middle class American who took the “stop looking for Prince Charming; just marry a Good Man with a decent job and settle down” advice deeply to heart and did exactly this in 2009, with the determination to learn to love.
It was utterly awful. I tried for ten years, but I was the only one trying. I eventually left him and pursued a divorce.
I had been in such despair that I was on multiple antidepressants but still suicidal — after my divorce I was able to come off of all my meds and still be — more or less, in the usual imperfect way — something that could be described as actually happy.
This evidence of probably having made the right decision still does nothing to stanch the wellspring of maternal guilt I feel over what the divorce did to our son.
I guess my point is: Lord, save us. There isn’t any sort of ideology that is ever going to be a perfect solution. I still think, generally, that the principles based on which I decided to marry were, generally, good ones. I still think, generally, that duty is the superior virtue to autonomy, and that marriages based on infatuation are likely to be based on sand.
But I no longer think that good principles alone can save me, or anyone, from falling into disaster. They help, but they’re far from infallible, and…I guess I think the most important virtue of all here, especially if we’re going to be giving out life advice, is plain humility.
tl;dr this was a fantastic piece which I really appreciated. Thank you for writing it.
Particularism is a good start. One of the hazards of Indo-European languages is their abstraction. It tends to cause those who use them without real care to assume that the actual world of things and emotions is as atemporal and aspacial as the language we use. The language we use should reflect the context in which we are speaking, in which we are being heard.
I often wonder if women are actually capable of honest self-examination, if despite their lived reality, they continue to doggedly hold to feminist beliefs that have made them so desperately lonely and unhappy. As to finding a partner in the university sphere, good luck! That space has been pretty much taken over by radical feminists who raise the "harassment" alarm if a man so much as asks a woman on a date. Statistics show men abandoning universities at an accelerating rate, with more than 60% of enrollment women now. Male suicides outnumber women's 4 to 1 and are at historically unprecedented rates, though no one much seems to care. Young men in the West are raised to believe that simply by being male, they are part of "toxic masculinity." Combine that with climate dysphoria and no wonder so many young men are rootless, lack ambition and view starting a family with horror, since they feel they have no future in our society. Yet all we ever hear in the media is women's, women's, women's perspective on these issues.
Is "feminism" really the most useful, compelling, accurate, needful (etc.) way of referring to radical, absolutely categorical resistance to "all-male panel[s] of broadcasters...call[ing] women slurs," men "comment[ing] on the body type of female politicians," mens' refusal to repent of, and cease, the kinds of conduct exposed by the "MeToo" movement, and a social order in which, when a woman's manager "slaps [her] ass" he easily gets away with it, whereas if the woman in question exposes him as a vicious degenerate, she is "fired for making a scene"?
Can we think of a better, more comprehensive term for such resistance?
In my parents' and grandparents' eras in rural Ireland, it was customary for employed bachelors over say age 35 to be named and shamed by the local priest at Sunday mass. Their names would be read out in an “unmarried roll call of shame”, their single male status would be denigrated, and they would be attacked for their "selfishness" and general uselessness. Proper order, too – it must have been great fun for everybody else, watching the named guys squirm lol.
Years later, going to a rural N Irish school on buses in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was unremarkable for lads to be groped in public by a minority of very confident girls on the bus. Putting your schoolbag up on the luggage rack, you’d be vulnerable to have your ass fondled or your bits squeezed by an opportunistic girl, and this would be highly embarrassing of course, but primarily it was taken as a crude compliment, and blokes who remained un-groped were secretly jealous. It seems obvious that modern rich urban feminists have never behaved like that, and moreover seem unaware that any women do behave like that.
There is of course a large and ignored difference between rural women and educated urban women, in that rich white urban American women, who comprise the most influential section of the feminist commentariat, tend to have more middle-class hang-ups and less sexual agency than rural / farming-background women. The rich urban feminists, convinced of their own superiority and sense that they speak for all women lol, are generally unaware of how far ahead of them country women are.
I felt sad reading this article: sad for the London career women, worried that they may never marry or have children (and perhaps wondering whether to freeze their eggs); sad for young Greek women, trapped by the Greek economy into marital relationships where men have the power (and often abuse it); sad for the woman in the anecdote with her failed marriage, now living with her partner. Neither milieu seems to have a happy outcome. And as Graham Cunningham points out in his comment, there are plenty of lonely men in the western world who would love to marry but who are not seen as marriageable by alpha women. Perhaps the West should do as in India and other eastern countries, and adopt a properly regulated arranged marriage system? So that young men and women of roughly equal social status and intelligence and from stable backgrounds are helped to meet each other? The Hollywood idea of romance and falling in love do not come into it - or slowly develop later on. I know it is very old-fashioned to say so, but free sex messes up relationships, romance and long-term reliability. There are good emotional and psychological reasons why chastity before marriage - for both sexes, not just the girls - is a better building block for an enduring relationship than the modern no-strings, bed-hopping, free for all we see practised everywhere.
I am in the minority but I am so tired of plucking women out of context--family, community, culture--and then affixing a solution to their problems in the world.
The world has problems. They cannot be solved on a macro level.
We don't need feminists we need men and women who can recognize truth and distinguish it from lies.
The world likes to lie to us--those that trust and listen to those lies find out soon enough.
TL:DR life is a series of tradeoffs.
I lived in Greece for a year back in the mid-2000s, with my aunt. It was a great adventure and I am grateful for the opportunity of a lifetime. I did see up close the problems though. Unemployment and low wages affected both young men and women and the lack of opportunity was hard on both, but in different ways. Most people my age (I was 26) or younger had a goal to leave the country.
I quickly made up my mind that I was not going to live permanently in Greece or marry someone there (when I arrived I had an open mind to all possibilities.) I did not want to raise kids there, especially not boys. Certainly I saw examples of sexism and bad behaviour from men, but I think the problem goes deeper to not having a way to become masculine in a positive sense. Lack of jobs and meaningful challenges seemed to leave a lot of men at loose ends trying to get attention from women as the only way to prove themselves.
I’m very grateful for this article as it tallies with my experiences in a rural Nepalese village. In particular with an experience I had with a woman in that village who had suffered for decades from a fourth-degree uterine prolapse resulting from a combination of a traumatic birthing experience and years of heavy labor, whose husband was beating her for not working hard enough to fuel his alcohol addiction, and who had little financial or social recourses to get out of her situation. I’m glad we can acknowledge the both/and experiences of women in these contexts (rich West and other parts of the world) and that you open space for no single solution.
This was very interesting. Thank you for writing it. I have never lived in Thessaloniki, but I have lived for years in another southern European coastal city, Naples, which shares the problems you cite—about 40% youth unemployment—and, from your account, many of the same cultural characteristics, including older women (and men) hounding young women to get married and produce grandchildren; and young people spending most or all of their meager income on clothes and grooming. In Naples, this emphasis on appearance was true of men and women, and it resulted in rampant superficiality and consumerism, which in turn wearies and erodes a culture and its people. I have a Neapolitan grandmother and I married into a traditional Neapolitan family. I was amazed to watch my Neapolitan sisters-in-law replicate their mother’s life down to the most minute detail: little education, early teenage pregnancy resulting in marriage, followed by an endless cycle of domestic drudge and family obligations. (The educated class in Naples is not caught in the same loop.) As you write, family is touted as the most important thing in Thessaloniki and Naples, which is laudable, but when the family simply folds in on itself, generation after generation, in a repeating rhythm of limitation, it appeared to this observer that it didn’t nourish the dignity of anyone. There was no concept of betterment or expansion for subsequent generations, only replication of the existing pattern. I posit that something more than a particular kind of feminism is needed here because, while women bear the brunt of so much of the poor behavior of men in these cultures, nobody is experiencing anything one might call thriving.
Our society doesn’t offer either sex what they really want: dignity, responsibility and belonging. Personally, unless you are getting abused or cheated on, you probably need to work with the person you are married to. Anyone who divorces the person they are married to because they are just “not that head over heels” (aka I think I can do better) is destined for eternal misery, always gazing at the other grass. If we stopped viewing marriage as the culmination of a Rom Com, but instead as an agreement for the good times as well as bad, we would be a lot further towards maturity. But alas, we are lied to and told we will be young forever, and thus we are always chasing the never returning youth.
Is there a more depressing word in the English language than "looksmaxing"? Taking the most superficial elements of our extremely superficial society, and focusing all your social (and financial) capital on exclusively that.
Not a criticism of these women; they're just following the incentives. But what miserable incentives society has pushed them towards.
1) The theme of the first part of your essay is well made. That in "Greece and many other countries around the world [women] are still struggling with" ANY kind of feminist liberation. But then the corollary - that a better and nobler kind of #MeToo movement would have prioritised its firepower on behalf of those millions of women living In The Shadows of #MeToo in these oppressive cultures - is fought shy of. The reality of course was that the real #MeToo was so Anglo-metropolitan self-absorbed that it aimed its firepower at the easy target of the most liberal-feminised parts of the West. It was willfully myopic and shallow in other words. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/life-in-the-shadows-of-metoo
2) The second theme of your essay would (if read by some notional being from outer space) create the impression that - on Planet Earth - finding sex and romance is a piece of cake for all 'Men' whereas for all 'Women' it is problemmatic. The reader would never know that, in the liberal West, there are many more lonely men unable to find romance (and no I don't mean 'incels') than there are women in this bind. They would not get any sense of the reality which is that sex and romance options for The Less Desired of both sexes is quite a different reality from the mental universe of successful metropolitan alphas and pretty things. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired
I’m a middle class American who took the “stop looking for Prince Charming; just marry a Good Man with a decent job and settle down” advice deeply to heart and did exactly this in 2009, with the determination to learn to love.
It was utterly awful. I tried for ten years, but I was the only one trying. I eventually left him and pursued a divorce.
I had been in such despair that I was on multiple antidepressants but still suicidal — after my divorce I was able to come off of all my meds and still be — more or less, in the usual imperfect way — something that could be described as actually happy.
This evidence of probably having made the right decision still does nothing to stanch the wellspring of maternal guilt I feel over what the divorce did to our son.
I guess my point is: Lord, save us. There isn’t any sort of ideology that is ever going to be a perfect solution. I still think, generally, that the principles based on which I decided to marry were, generally, good ones. I still think, generally, that duty is the superior virtue to autonomy, and that marriages based on infatuation are likely to be based on sand.
But I no longer think that good principles alone can save me, or anyone, from falling into disaster. They help, but they’re far from infallible, and…I guess I think the most important virtue of all here, especially if we’re going to be giving out life advice, is plain humility.
tl;dr this was a fantastic piece which I really appreciated. Thank you for writing it.
Particularism is a good start. One of the hazards of Indo-European languages is their abstraction. It tends to cause those who use them without real care to assume that the actual world of things and emotions is as atemporal and aspacial as the language we use. The language we use should reflect the context in which we are speaking, in which we are being heard.
Great reading this from Hungary - a fresh perspective.
Thank you, much needed perspective. "No magic bullet"
I often wonder if women are actually capable of honest self-examination, if despite their lived reality, they continue to doggedly hold to feminist beliefs that have made them so desperately lonely and unhappy. As to finding a partner in the university sphere, good luck! That space has been pretty much taken over by radical feminists who raise the "harassment" alarm if a man so much as asks a woman on a date. Statistics show men abandoning universities at an accelerating rate, with more than 60% of enrollment women now. Male suicides outnumber women's 4 to 1 and are at historically unprecedented rates, though no one much seems to care. Young men in the West are raised to believe that simply by being male, they are part of "toxic masculinity." Combine that with climate dysphoria and no wonder so many young men are rootless, lack ambition and view starting a family with horror, since they feel they have no future in our society. Yet all we ever hear in the media is women's, women's, women's perspective on these issues.
Is "feminism" really the most useful, compelling, accurate, needful (etc.) way of referring to radical, absolutely categorical resistance to "all-male panel[s] of broadcasters...call[ing] women slurs," men "comment[ing] on the body type of female politicians," mens' refusal to repent of, and cease, the kinds of conduct exposed by the "MeToo" movement, and a social order in which, when a woman's manager "slaps [her] ass" he easily gets away with it, whereas if the woman in question exposes him as a vicious degenerate, she is "fired for making a scene"?
Can we think of a better, more comprehensive term for such resistance?