The Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan knows the kind of world he would like to live in.
He would very much like to live in a world where men have all kinds of different careers and options in life and women have one career — staying at home, evenly distributed throughout the men of the land and having babies so that those men can pass on their “genetic inheritance.” He would like women to admit that they are bad at medieval sword fighting and therefore require protection from men, and also admit that they are bad at science and should just let men have all the science careers (also all of the other careers). He would like to live in a world where Donald Trump is president again and where there is no social safety net because ladies are sufficiently protected by gentlemen (who, of course, never need a social safety net themselves).
This is a world that a lot of conservative men want, quite desperately, and like so many others before him, Klavan has chosen to create a grand unifying theory of why the world should operate the way he wants it to and women should live the way he says they should live.
It is very stupid and long and convoluted and involves some very confusing tangents about gorillas and women in movies doing things he doesn’t think women should be able to do, like science and beating up men.
Klavan starts out by subtly pointing out how stupid he thinks women are, by the mere fact that before Biden dropped out, more of us were planning to vote for him than for Donald Trump because “they just don’t like this guy!” That is true. We don’t like him. We also don’t like his policies or anything he stands for or anything else about him.
Instead of continuing on that rant, however, Klavan immediately goes off on a tangent about how the women should be distributed. Because while he would surely cringe at the idea of anyone thinking about how wealth, resources, food, healthcare, and housing should be fairly distributed in a society, he is a total commie when it comes to distributing ladies. Let’s read some:
“There is a sense in which the central purpose of every society is to figure out the distribution of women because women are valuable. They’re valuable not just for their company and for their way of looking at things and for sex, which is a lot of fun, but also because they are the only path there is to continuing your genetic inheritance. That is the way it is. When men want women on this kind of basic animalistic, just life level, to reproduce. Right? So the most obvious way to distribute women is to give all the women to the strongest man. Right? So you get — reproduce from the strongest person.”
Now, I am but a pea-brained, no-good-at-science woman, but I think this just might actually be a very bad idea from a genetic standpoint, unless you really want your great-grandkids to look like Habsburgs.
This also does not make much sense in a world where women are not, in fact, inanimate objects or the property of men and are rather allowed to make their own decisions about who they would like to be with.
“That’s the way gorillas — many gorillas, silverbacks — live. The one guy gets all the girls. And the problem with that is it sounds like a good idea, but it’s unstable because, obviously, all the other guys finally get think to themselves, oh, I know what we’ll do. We’ll get together and we’ll kill the main guy, the alpha guy, and we’ll steal the women. And that’s why those governments are unstable.”
The gorilla governments? Is he talking about gorilla governments? And did he or did he not he just describe a version of historical materialism?
The only society I can think of where a few men got all of the women (and underage girls) to themselves is the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, and Warren Jeffs wasn’t overthrown by men, he was thrown in prison thanks to the women who escaped from him and came forward and testified at his trial. Ah, but Klavan may be puzzling through some of the issues with the Habsburgs and the genes. Or maybe not!
“When you have a democracy, the best system is monogamy. Right? One per customer. Everybody gets a woman. And it sounds like that means that weak people will be allowed to breed, but it turns out it’s actually a pretty good system because it favors diversity. Because a lot of times, the smartest guy in the room and the strongest guy in the room are two entirely different people. So you want the strongest guy to reproduce, but you also want the smartest guy to reproduce, and that is how humanity advances.”
The women, of course, don’t matter at all except as a breeding vessel! It doesn’t matter if a woman is smart or strong, just so long as she’s got good birthin’ hips!
“However, it goes against the gorilla code, and the gorilla code is written into our DNA. We’re somehow related. I’m not saying we evolved from gorillas, but we’re related to them. We’re not that far away from them. The men want lots of women, so the strongest man wants all the women, and the women want the strongest man. That is the way evolution has designed us.”
Gorilla code. Written into our DNA. Yes, that is definitely how things work. We share 98 percent of our DNA with gorillas, but also there is a specific Gorilla code in there somewhere?
Klavan then starts going on about how monogamy is good but “the strong” want to destroy it so they can have all of the women for themselves? And I guess in this case “the strong” are Democrats?
“The strong want to take women back, and they have to do it through — because it’s a free system, they can’t do it by force. They might want to, but they can’t. They have to do it by lies. And there are two big lies they want to tell them. One is your husband is a no-goodnik. […] But the big lie that the government wants to tell you, that the people who want the power concentrated all in one place to get all the women, they want to tell you is that women can take care of themselves.”
THIS IS NOT ANYONE’S PLAN! Absolutely no one is doing this.
I feel like I should be more upset about the idea that women can’t take care of themselves, but we know that conservatives think that women can’t take care of ourselves or make our own decisions about our bodies or what we want to do with our lives. But the idea that a robust, functional government is just a secret plot to steal all the women? Well, that is new and also just kind of hilarious — but it does make a certain kind of sense given how often we hear Republicans whining about women finding them unfuckable!
This is where Klavan starts trying to hack together his theory that women are weak and helpless and thus must be taken care of and protected from bad scary men by their husbands or by the government. Clearly, he is on Team Husband.
“To convince women of things you need what I will call atmospherics. Women are very, very susceptible to atmospherics. Women are more social than men, and they are more emotional than men, and if the emotional atmosphere of the society around them says ‘A’ women are more likely to say ‘A’ than to be a contrarian like me and say, ‘I don’t care what society is telling me, this is the truth.’”
Klavan isn’t a contrarian. He’s a weirdo who wants to get to live in a creepy homogenous world that no one else besides him and a few other aspiring members of the Stepford Men’s Golf Association would actually enjoy living in, and he genuinely thinks that everyone should put all of their own ambitions, ideas, wants aside in order to create that world for them. He wants to believe that this wouldn’t be oppressive because women can’t think for ourselves anyway and will just go along with whatever scenario we’re placed in.
It is at this point that Klavan starts talking about how he is mad about movies in which women can beat up men or movies where they are really good scientists or are just smart in general because he feels this is not true — and this “creates an atmosphere” in which women think they can be strong or they can be smart or they can do science when he believes “it’s not true.” He is also, just so you know, very mad at the idea that women might think a woman could win a “Medieval sword fight.”
“When they pour out these movies in which the women are the tough guys, the women are the smartest people in the room, the women are the strategists, they’re the best tacticians, when they do that, it’s, it’s not true, but it creates an atmosphere.
“And if you say to a woman ‘men are stronger than you,’ ‘you can’t win a sword fight in a Medieval situation, you may win one where there are rules where there’s, you know it’s fencing, and all that stuff, but you cannot win a sword fight against another Warrior who is trying to kill you, it cannot be done.’
“When you read a science magazine — now they only interview women scientists — if you said, ‘You know what, for every woman scientist, there is a man scientist who’s going to be better at science than you.’ Women find this very offensive.”
Oh, really? I wonder why that might be!
Ironically, despite how importantly Klavan clearly feels about the idea that men are naturally better at science, he fails to offer any kind of scientific explanation for this theory. Or even another gorilla-based explanation for his theory. He also fails to acknowledge that, regardless of gender, there’s always going to be someone better than you at whatever it is you are good at, unless you are the single best person in the world at that thing. For instance, I am a woman, and yet here I am, able to construct an argument that makes sense while poor Andrew Klavan over here is rambling on and on about who would win medieval sword fights, as if this is a skill that is going to come up anywhere other than the Renaissance Faire. (Perhaps this is the kind of “atmospheric” argument he thinks we women are so easily seduced by?)
Actual studies conducted by actual scientists, however, have found that men and women are equally good at science, but that men are more likely to believe they’re better than they are. Which … tracks.
“The reason for that is because feminists have convinced them that male values are the best values. That to build a home to nurture a child, to bring a child into fruition as a human being, this is less than doing something that a man might do better, this is less than building a rocketship to the moon. I’m sorry, that’s a falsehood. It is not true.”
Oh wow! So does that mean that like, actually, the most feminist thing ever is being a tradwife? Gee, it’s so great that men can use their massive rocketship-to-the-moon-building brains to explain that to us! Otherwise we just might want to decide for our own damn selves what we want to do with our lives instead of doing the thing that men like Andrew Klavan want us to do.
“When women are convinced that they can take care of themselves, suddenly, they find that they have to turn to the government, they have to turn, you know, to Me Too, we have to be able to sue, we need government child care! Who’s going to take care of my baby. What if I can’t work because I have children?”
Here’s where we’re supposed to go, “Oh wow, I could just not work and be a stay at home mom instead! Then I’d never have to worry about child care or sexual harassment!”
Now, to be clear — that is an absolutely fine choice for those who wish to make it (and are financially able to make it). Frankly, I don’t give a flying shit what people choose to do with their lives so long as they’re happy with it and they’re not hurting anyone else.
Let’s move ahead a little bit to where he is mad about movies again!
“I’ve talked many times about the fact that before feminism, there were movies that were kind of for women, but a man could go see them. You could go and watch a Bette Davis picture, for instance, I’ve watched many of them with great pleasure. They were pictures that kind of emphasized the woman’s role, but they were about human beings, right? And the men’s pictures, maybe they had gangsters and more action and more shooting them, but a woman could go and see them because they were about real people.”
Ok …
“Then in the ‘80s, when feminism first flared up, I suddenly looked around and I thought all these men pictures are Schwarzenegger pictures and Stallone pictures that are just pure violence, that are just pure like a drug. I mean, I love them. I would go and watch them all the time, but you couldn’t take your wife to them anymore, you couldn’t both go and see a Schwarzenegger picture. And my wife doesn’t want to see that stuff. And the women’s movies became these intolerable romcoms, that a man could not sit and watch because the idea was that a man is one thing and a woman is another thing. And that is how it came to pass that they could say ‘Well, if a man is like a woman, then he is a woman,’ which is a falsehood, too, right?”
OK, so basically what he is saying is that Harry met Sally … and that’s how trans people were born? I’d love to argue against this more, but I truly have no idea what the fuck he is even saying. How do you argue with someone who thinks that feminism “first flared up” in the 1980s?
All of this insanity, it turns out, is to say that women are just not voting for Donald Trump event though, Klavan asserts, “he is more moderate, more competent, and more honest” than Kamala Harris is, which is an absolute lie from the pit of hell, and that if Harris is elected … monogamy will be over.
OH, and women will become slaves to the government (bad!) instead of slaves to the government (good!)
“Women, if they do not swoon over their husbands, will swoon over government power. They will become enslaved one way or another. They would either become, not enslaved, but taken care of by someone who loves them or they’ll be taken care of by someone who does not know their name and is sucking them dry for their power the way the machines did in The Matrix.
“What this is, is a, an election between the most macho politician who has come down the pike, really since Teddy Roosevelt, and this cackling witch. It is going to be determined on whether or not the atmospherics seduce women into being lied to by the same people they were lied to 10 minutes ago and 10 minutes before that, telling opposite lies.
“What is really going to decide this election is whether the powerful will convince the women to become theirs, or whether we will go on having a monogamous democratic society, this is a battle between men and the women who love them, and men who love women and women alone.”
Or, put in a less awkward way, “women and the men who love them.” And, to be fair, that is true to some extent. Men who care about our bodily autonomy and want to live in a world where we are treated with respect and encouraged to make our own decisions about what we want to do with our lives instead of … whatever hell on earth it is that assholes like this guy want.
