"What's touted as femininity today, or as what men had best take from women (e.g. "empathy") is more of a recent disease of spiritual decay that women have caught first than it is any innate feature of women historically." This was a tweet. I'd like to take Nietzsche's line and say I relay the views from peaks of my thinking without often relaying the path by which I arrived at them, or that I try to generate and express conclusions (often aphorisms) that carry their own weight, for reasons of efficiency. It might instead be said that I simply hunt for thoughts plausible enough to not immediately invite ridicule but implausible enough to convey novelty. That is enough for Twitter. Now that I have been asked to turn a tweet into a blog post, the logical thing to do is to provide some arguments for it so that I can get more people to believe it, or more likely, so that I can provide people who already believe or wish to believe it with means of convincing others of it, or more importantly, convincing others that there is nothing wrong with them for believing it. The actual truth of the tweet is a bit irrelevant. I am more concerned, and I think you should be too, with what can be got from it, and with how it can be argued for among people to whom truth is similarly secondary to political consequence, although still relevant. My political project, to which I consider the tweet an asset, is to see more productive competition and a wider distribution of power and defensive capabilities among the potential economic and political actors of the United States, a group which now irreversibly includes both men and women. Even if that is not your political project, you may still find value in my exposition if your own project is similarly opposed to the project of eliminating competition and violence entirely -- you may in that case share my intuition that projects which portend to eliminate competition and violence tend instead to create a monopoly on violence which finds all but a small inner circle woefully poor and repressed (see the creation of Socialist Man, the history of actually existing socialism, etc.) -- this, Socialism, is a project that benefits greatly from calling its requisite human virtues (unrestricted empathy and love, deference, impotence) feminine. I want to note now, mainly to not lose readers by seeming myopically anti-socialist, but also to sketch the rhetorical force of the tweet, that what has been called Patriarchy benefits equally from this formulation of the feminine but uses the formulation differently to meet its own ends: you see, women being naturally deferential, meek, and physically impotent, naturally depend on men for protection and guidance. Further, their strength being in their infinite instinctual love and care, they are most efficiently placed, like home appliances, in the vicinity of children. One can say of this that Patriarchal discourse succeeded in convincing half of the population in recent times that there is nothing wrong with defaulting to a state of meekness, impotence, and blind love -- that their weaknesses (and these are all strictly weaknesses) are natural, and furthermore, virtuous. This is a hell of a deal -- just let yourself be weak and leave everything up to other people. It's such a lovely -seeming deal, despite all of its real perniciousness, that men, too, are liable to take it. But it is harder to convince them that they can do so without shame, the kind of shame surrounding drug overdose or suicide -- so much in the natural world they are presented with cries out in favor of the belief that men, or even just people, or even just entities, put themselves at considerable risk by relinquishing their power to perpetuate and defend themselves. Yet Socialism has, in turn after Patriarchy, sought to do this convincing, mostly by routing around the fundamental metaphysical problem by means of simple peer pressure and attacks against "toxic masculinity." If you inhabit the internet (or, increasingly, the Western world simpliciter), I needn't remind you of the fervor with which many men today publicly disavow their masculinity or attack it in others as archaic or apelike while elevating the feminine as supremely wise, a model everyone should follow: we see Lady Liberty stand steadfast amid riots and gunshots as all of God's children are welcomed into the American kitchen for snacks. It's working to an extent: many men can be seen luxuriating in one among a recently invented assortment of forms of "non-toxic masculinity" that often seem suspiciously teenage; to disavow competition is apparently an invitation to mediocrity, to disavow physical power is apparently an invitation to languish, and to attempt a less selective love is apparently an invitation to treat romance like a hobby or drug. These men are perfectly happy putting anyone but themselves into positions of power -- deferring in this way to the people who deserve more representation is wise and brave -- and welcome policies that would take away the rights they aren't exercising, whose exercise is toxic and archaic, anyway. They aren't, like, gay, but sometimes they just wish their identities as men could be wholly erased in an all-consuming intrusion of warm, blinding light, all of their evil gone along with their ability to see it in anyone -- anyone else feel this way? While there is a real "toxic masculinity" out there (ISIS, Atomwaffen, corporate buccaneers, pedophile politicians, a man calling a woman passing him on the street a cunt) it is now and has been always a degenerate form that is perhaps by definition not going to be eliminated by mounting public invitation to just chill out -- it is more characteristically criminal than masculine. The men who would disavow their "masculinity" for unselfish reasons had better instead do the hard work of holding onto it, for they are precisely the people who should be wielding it, it being an important weapon against the criminal -- "When it's the law to disarm, only criminals will have guns," "The world needs bad men, Marty. We keep the monsters from the door," Centrism, etcetera. So much for the traditional screed against weakness in men. Where there is novelty in my tweet is in the implication that strength, self-sufficiency, and selectivity are not inherently masculine, given that meekness, deference, and blind love are not inherently feminine. The story goes, the Patriarchal move saw these virtues reduced artificially in women, who are naturally rather more strong, self-sufficient, and selective in their love. Doesn't that sound nice? I hope it's true, but I caution again that I have no interest in whether it is true, only in whether crowds can be made receptive to it. The idea is simply a tool of my political project, which involves getting everyone who is a serious economic or political actor in the United States, a group which now irreversibly includes women, to be more self-sufficient, resilient, competitive and so on and so on. To that end, crowds love stories, and there are many stories of strong women. When told today, they usually emphasize the strength in the meekness, deference, and unconditional love inherent in the heroines-- Joan of Arc is a prime example. I would advise my allies to tell more stories of women who were simply pragmatic or even barbaric in their strength. I believe these sorts of stories are more numerous throughout history although less available in the Western canon, for the Christian theological sift, to take one example, had its own reasons to select for instances of "strength in love" among women; perhaps the best examples are to be found in pagan theology and germanic culture, in which the Norns weave the fates of men and the Western tradition of bilateral voluntary marriage in one's 20s originated. There, in that not uncoincidentally un-Christian realm of history, are some nice little images to be found of women and men walking together in    armor, with swords, associating voluntarily, negotiating by leverage, laying the true, ruthlessly Capitalistic foundation stones of the world we are now stuck in together forever and ever. On that tangent, the physical strength differential between men and women at the crux of their historical stratification is contracted by the introduction of technologies of violence into the equation, so perhaps women should be carrying weapons again (pistols this time) if they really want to become equal to men. But that's a new tweet. The point to be made now is that women can be more like men. Whether we must all march meekly into the slaughterhouse before learning that is entirely up to you and your ability to share my tweet with your friends.