Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Female Aristocracy

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April 2, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

14:44

The Female Aristocracy

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	Well as Megan noted I really do think.
	I mean they are an oppressed group.
	Oh yeah, this scene reminds me very much of the Lacedaemonian vase where you see a painting of thousands of helots getting together to listen to educated helot leaders talk about how oppressed all the helots are by the Spartans.
	In fact if I had to draw a direct parallel I'd say it's more like the Buchenwald labour camp in Germany that operated from 1937 to 1945 where all the Jews sat around and said, hmm well we're oppressed, we're forced to work.
	Shall we get round have a large gathering and then discuss how bad this is and what we're going to do about it.
	I'm sure any helot or Jew would sit around and say exceptionally rich white women talking about rich white women problems is definitely oppression.
	I mean how much do you think these women have spent on their clothing?
	These are not women who have got any problems and a general rule of thumb for oppression is if you're wealthy you're not being oppressed.
	And another good rule of thumb is that if you're not being oppressed don't sit around and talk about how you understand what being oppressed is like.
	Women are certainly not oppressed.
	By their own standards and surveys 80% of consumer purchases are female and 87% of women control the household budget.
	If you are controlling all the money and you're not earning it then you sound like a feudal lord.
	You are not fucking oppressed.
	And so they fight for power within their own oppressed group.
	Oh that's a very good point actually because I mean if we're talking if by oppressed group we're saying rich people who do very little actual labour and still reap all the benefits of that labour anyway then we are talking in fact about an aristocracy.
	The feudal lord analogy really holds here because medieval wars were the wars of the nobility to every single one almost.
	These are all powerful people who have claims to areas that they they then press with military force.
	It was the right of feud.
	Everything about this is starting to look more and more like a noble hierarchy.
	Because yeah, the nobles did fight amongst themselves, but for your average common man, he didn't give a fuck who the current lord was because it made no difference.
	You know, he had no particular allegiance.
	It wasn't there was no nationalism.
	You know, if a if a particular lord was really good or kind or whatever, then yeah, he could foster personal ties to the people that he ruled over, of course.
	But it wasn't a de facto, well I'm English, therefore I support the English king.
	If William the Conqueror turns up and starts doling out gold, then you'll support William the Conqueror.
	The only difference is that the female aristocracy doesn't have access to force, which is why they have to do everything socially.
	This is why they ostracize.
	If you go back to Jermaine Greer's point about women being afraid of abandonment above everything, then ostracism is the perfect punishment for social people.
	If you're afraid of being abandoned, we will abandon you, and you will feel the wrath.
	When a woman loses the popularity war, she is destroyed but not killed.
	That's it.
	Only difference.
	I mean the Catholic Church used to ostraciise people as a way of forcing them to conform with whatever the leader of the group was saying.
	Which is all ostracism is really the group will which is always formed by one or two people in it.
	It's it's balmy watching these rich people sat on a stage telling middle class white women that they're oppressed.
	You've got a funny definition of oppression.
	It's because they're legends in their own minds, though.
	You know, they think that they're the aristocracy.
	They're so great.
	Listen to them talk.
	You know how it goes.
	Oh, anything a man can do, a woman can do better, yada, yada.
	You've heard it a million times.
	And now they've got to, well, we're so oppressed.
	We have it so bad.
	We need more.
	Because every woman, I think, really thinks that she deserves to be the king.
	She thinks she is the best, the most important, the centre of the fucking universe.
	And everyone should listen to her.
	And they don't like it when they realise they're not.
	I think this is a form of compensating for that.
	Well, we're doing pretty well, but we're not on top.
	Why are we not on top?
	Oh, because it takes a lot of work and actual merit to be on top.
	Whereas, you know, any snake oil salesman can sell snake oil to idiots, which is what these women have done.
	And what this has done is validated their own assumptions that they're so fucking great.
	I'm not the one sat on stages in the Sydney Opera House with thousands of people applauding my every word.
	They are.
	You know, so I can see why they would think that.
	Especially when they've convinced themselves that that snake oil really does cure every single disease.
	So this has got them this far, and this is very far.
	This is much better than me.
	I should have done this.
	But they're not getting to the very upper echelons, because to get to the very upper echelons, you have to prove yourself.
	There is no getting around it.
	But now we come to a bit of a conundrum.
	Because these women, in their opinion, have proven themselves.
	They think their snake oil works.
	Therefore, they think, now that they have a substantial following, they think this proves their point that they are as good as they say.
	This is an achievement.
	However, it's actually not.
	Because it's not a cure for all diseases, which is why not everyone is a feminist.
	So they've come to a position where they think they've got achievements.
	They cannot seem to progress past where they are at the moment because the power structure requires merit.
	What these idiots would call the patriarchy, which is actually just the meritocracy.
	And now, because they have no further merit and they've reached as far as a feminist can get on feminism, they now have to rationalize why they are not getting any further.
	And the two options they seem to have that I can see are it's either that they're not good enough to go any further and they're not as good as they think or they are being actively prevented in some way which would be a form of oppression.
	Now, I don't think anything is actively conspiring or coincidentally coming together to prevent them from getting any further, apart from their own lack of merit and their own inability to be honest with themselves.
	This is entirely their own fault for being snake oil salesmen who have lied to themselves their whole lives and don't even know that they're wrong and are not prepared to entertain the concept that they might be mistaken.
	And anyone who can't entertain the concept that they might be mistaken is wrong from the start.
	There is nothing that can't be disproven if evidence comes to light to disprove it.
	So, you know, and this is the problem with these people.
	They're not prepared to do that because I think too much of their personality and careers hinges on it.
	There's no way they're going to backtrack now, is there?
	So basically for them it comes down to I'm either not as good as I think I am and I really think I'm bloody amazing or I'm being oppressed.
	So naturally they think they're oppressed despite being fabulously wealthy and having the freedom to organize this particular gathering.
	Eva, what do you think?
	I think we're really going down a track here which worries me because it's that sort of thing about, again, looking at girls, stereotyping girls, stereotyping women, saying these are things that women do and girls do.
	This is a good point, but unfortunately stereotypes do exist for a reason.
	I defy anyone to tell me they haven't seen this kind of behaviour in women.
	I mean, we're all human beings and we go the full spectrum, you know, from good and evil.
	Good and evil are redundant terms here.
	Nobody in this is evil.
	It's about victorious and not victorious.
	It's about power.
	It's not about virtue.
	I think, you know, this sort of this way we're stereotyping a particular gender and a particular set of relationships is a very sort of Anglo-Western and various other things in many ways.
	Everyone's stereotypes and they're generally just shorthand for people who do this kind of thing, of which there are likely people who do a certain kind of thing.
	And it also does ignore the fact that we are actually looking at an incredible variation of the way things do.
	I mean, I'm a sociologist, so I tend to come to this from a broader thing.
	Yes, I agree with Jermaine, you know, we're the oppressed group.
	Of course you do, or the entire narrative falls apart.
	But I think I'm much more interested in the fact that how that actually interacts.
	And one of the things is that I think we need to look at why women behave.
	We can be both incredibly supportive and have lots of women friends and we do very well with the women's things.
	Yes, and being incredibly supportive is a way of raising one's status in a group.
	It's a way of forming alliances.
	Social power is based on who supports you.
	You have to cultivate people to form alliances with them against your enemies.
	And we can be incredibly controlling.
	And one of the reasons I suspect that the controlling stuff happens is because we do not determine our lives.
	Ah, yes.
	The oppressed group that is very controlling but is not in control.
	Stop contradicting yourselves.
	We don't determine what are the priorities.
	We don't determine what government does.
	We don't determine the big politics things.
	Politicians aren't just one gender, but they are always wealthy.
	I wonder if that's the determining factor.
	We're pushed inwards into the interpersonal because the other stuff is blokey type stuff.
	I mean, boys bash the hell out of each other.
	I mean, I wonder how many people would be here looking at the audience if this is a session and all men hate each other.
	You know, it's just not something people even bother saying and even bother exploring.
	Not many, because I think your average man would think something like this.
	Well, that's stupid.
	I've got loads of mates who don't hate me.
	I'm not wasting my time on that.
	It has no value.
	Because men know that their friends like them.
	That's the thing.
	They know they like them because they didn't acquire them to acquire status.
	The thing I find in common with groups of friends is that they've proven themselves.
	They have been there for time.
	Men do not start up these little firecracker friendships that women start, where they're such best buddies all of a sudden.
	Men are slow and ponderous and wait for someone to prove themselves to be a decent person.
	And then they emotionally commit to that person as a friend.
	That's why male friendships tend to last a lot longer than female friendships.
	And even when men don't talk for a long time, they go back to each other and they generally fall into the natural rhythm of the friendship that they had before.
	Because it's, you know, generally men don't speak to each other just because events in life take them apart, not because they don't ever want to speak to that person again.
	And I think we've got to be fairly careful that we're talking about the spectrum of everything there and we tend to focus on some girls are bitchy, some girls do this, some girls do that, some women do this, some women do that, some women are shaped by their household tasks, some women are shaped by their relationships.
	An awful lot of us are also shaped by our workplaces.
	Yeah, and it's amazing that coming from such diverse backgrounds, women all share this same trait.
	This is why they talk about it.
	It's because it's universal to the female gender.
	In varying degrees, I will agree, but it does seem to be something that all women have encountered at some point.
	And ever notice how those women who get ostracized by the groups of women then go and hang out with the lower orders of the working caste, who they prefer the company of much better, otherwise known as the men, who have formed whole hierarchies and codes of honour based around cooperation and competition, which is exactly the same as what the women have done, except they've just done it in a different way.
	The women's hierarchy, it it it's, it's competitive and it has to be cooperative, like we've seen, and it becomes incredibly damaging emotionally because it's so ruthless, whereas the male one isn't.
	You know even that even defeat for a man doesn't mean you have to lose your honour, whereas defeat for a woman is the end, you're out of the club.
	And now you're gonna have to go hang around with the men because you're a fucking loser and we're gonna jeer at you in the hallway whenever you pass.
	We're gonna sit there and whisper pshh, ps about you and you're gonna you're gonna, hate it.
	It'll really bother you.
	I've seen it so many times, you know, at school, at work, in any kind of social setting with women.
	It's just what they do, and I don't even think it's a gender thing.
	I think any, any group that was in this position would do the same.
	Any aristocracy that's serving under a king that isn't part of their group, that isn't an aristocrat, despises that king because he shows them that, as great as they think they are, someone from another group is greater, so they're not on top, which nobody here has mentioned, and one of the things that appalls me as a sort of forty year old veteran of sort of fighting for women stuff is that we haven't changed workplaces.
	They're still run very much on Matro male lines.
	The power structures are still Matro male, we have more women in top positions, but they actually haven't changed anything.
	That was one of the big mistakes we made.
	You guys have have made a lot of big mistakes.
	Yes, you can rail against the meritocracy all you want.
	Things are this way because they work, they are productive, they make money.
	This is the only way we know how to do it at the moment.
	What you are suggesting is markedly less efficient than choosing a meritocracy.
	You are saying it must be done on gender lines, as if all women are naturally better and all men are naturally inferior.

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