Wednesday, December 1, 2010

How can one be conservative and feminist?

I am rather snarky, and the title could be answered with "easily" or "creatively" and both would be true. However that is not what I am here to talk about. No, but rather conservative feminism is best called such because it seeks to conserve many positive aspects of older, more traditional society which supported the functioning of women, while rejecting and opposing patriarchy, and further especially opposing the social consequences of modernism which were it not for the efforts of the feminist movement would have served purely to benefit men.

 Conservative feminism has nothing to do with supporters of Sara Palin, nothing to do with the modern American conceptualization of the conservative. It is indeed a decisive rejection of this. We may better call it National-Syndicalist feminist were it not for the negative connotations of that term in the sense of the old regime of the Francoists in Spain. Monarchist or Primitivist may be a better appellation. Still, conservative is the most accurate, and merely perverted by present society. Another, more 'politically correct' terms would be Kerala Feminism, and to the subject of Kerala, the Kerala way, and the Indian social compact I will doubtless return many times. Still, as far as modern societies go the metrics for Kerala provide a reasonable guide on creating a happy and sustainable society, and thus the justification for such attention.

 What you will not find here, therefore, is a worship of modern democratic capitalism, a rapidly failing ideology and the latest of the many ideologies of the past 200 years, created in an attempt to harness the energies of modernism, which has proved unworthy of the challenge of managing a society. Nor will you, however, find any patience with socialism, an equally bankrupt product of recent society. What we are interested in developing is a feminist critique of the modern world from the practical perspective of the maternal-authoritarian; in short, a defence of the wise rule of the crone and of the traditionalist, even in patriarchal societies, view of the State or Nation as an extended family of which the monarch is father--save that from a feminist perspective we take this to be a depiction of the ideal state (which will never be achieved in reality, as there is no interest here in utopia) to be the state with Queen as Mother, with traditional communal rules--the fueros of the Habsburg government in Spain--restraining the power of the government, and therefore a rejection of the one-size-fits-all approach of modern capitalist democracy, the idea of innate egalitarianism, and other things which have led to a society in which individual uniqueness and spiritual development have been crushed.

 The belief in a particular spiritual directive is abjurred from with the utmost vigour here, however. These principles are intended to be generally applicable, and I will ultimately take the time to refute the Pauline view of Christianity as a service to those sisters who hold true to the redeeming message of the Christ, as the Christian religion is not inherently opposed to feminism (and indeed requires no hilarious modern contrivances such as the black Jesus or female Jesus to work, either, but may be grounded purely in historical consideration). The correctness of any kind of doctrine as well as the actual existence of a spiritual realm may be ignored; the health of civilizations is determined by spirituality even if no deities or spirits exist, due to the fundamental nature of the human psyche, and that is enough for me to remain the proponent of such things.

 Beyond this, however, simple commentary on world events can prove very constructive, and this is what I shall endeavour to provide as much as possible. In this I reasonably expect to be brought under two fires, to use the old parlance, for many of my views are horrifying equally to the modern conservative and the modern leftist, and doubtless some of them are dreadful to other feminists. They are however grounded in the spiritual view of the world, and a profound respect of traditional, which I will tend to show within the limits of my skill is better serving of human existence than our present condition in the western world, and therefore must be spoken.

 And as a final note, I would deeply welcome any Aristasian sisters as readers. I do not consider myself an Aristasian, but only because I am a romantic fool enough to think I might be able to do something about the world, and, in the old blood of my family, enough of a cossack woman to be frowning and shaking my head at the main point of critique I have with Aristasian, that of the Victorian modesty draping their moral code. The Victorian era itself was a product of the industrial processes which led to the crisis of modern society, and the sacred erotic should be celebrated... Nor should mere language be used as a determinant of decency. The rough-hewed people of the world will always have different and looser mores than the fine ladies of a high society, and this should be respected and cherished, for nothing is universally applicable, neither within societies nor betwixt them, so long as human uniqueness remains. Preserving that uniqueness, then, from the conformal obsessions of an egalitarian society, would be my fondest aspiration.

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