Liberation?

One of the mottos of INGSOC (The Party, in George Orwell's 1984) is: "Slavery is Freedom"

It occurred to me today as I was fixing the Magazine section of the Barnes and Noble that I work at, that women’s liberation never, in fact, happened. Women are slaves, well, at least some of them.

Primarily the ones that think they are liberated.

How is this the case?

What constitutes a 'liberated' woman? Well, it would seem a liberated woman is one who is taking her cloths off on the cover of a magazine. She is 'liberated' because she can do anything with her sexuality that she wants. Men no longer define who she is as a woman, she defines it, and she can do with her body what she pleases.

But wait....

Men always wanted women to do just exactly that. More sexually aggressive women is what most 'men' want. It makes sex easier to get. Women with no sexual inhibitions are what men desire. So who are they liberated from?

Ahh, from the old fashoned women who think that dressing nicely and being feminine are good. Because, naturally, since women dressed in a classy way in decades past, that makes dressing that way a bad thing, it makes you a slave. Never mind that such a mode of dress was designed to uphold a womans dignity, it was a marker of her status as a woman. No, we must destroy that! Women are equal to men!

But wait...

What does equality mean? We treat you the same as we treat ourselves? So we should treat you as jocular, crass, insensitive, sexually aggressive jerks? We should treat you like men? Aren't you women?

And then that was when I realized what actually happened. Men won.

Men won the war for women’s liberation. They changed the idea (or got women to change their own idea) of what freedom was. Slavery is Freedom, says The Party. Those women who would tell you that you ought to exercise self restraint are capitulators, traitors, thought-criminals. They want you to go back to being enslaved now that the revolution has been won. They are the Enemy.

What enemy? There never was any enemy!. Even if men were guilty of oppressing women, they were only doing what came naturally to them. There wasn't an organized effort to keep women out of 'men’s places' it was simply the social order of the time.

But a functional social order, such as we used to have, became perverted, and was abused. And a revolution did, in fact, happen. But it was a revolution in the Bolshevik sense. It inducted a reign of terror. Anyone who refused to accept the position that men and women are different, have different roles, and are good at different things, was a counter-revolutionary, and they were dragged into the streets and ideologically shot. The goal of our current society is to destroy the idea of gender. Everyone will be equal, we will have the world of "Harrison Bergeron", where we all wear masks of varying ugliness so that nobody is outwardly more attractive than the most hideous burn victim, we will all wear chains of varying weight so that no-one is stronger than the most barley functional invalid.

Except that it will happen in reverse, or perhaps in inverse. Everyone will be physically capable of different things, but it will be illegal to point that out. The truth will exist, and people will know it because there is no way to destroy it, but it will be illegal to speak of it.


Here is a solution.

Men, act like Men.

Women, act like Women.

All of you: be content with what you are, strive to better yourself and do not concerned yourself with what others have been gifted with that you lack.

Egalitarianism is the first step on a road to Hell paved in good intentions