I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that women are flat out just not designed to operate in the same world that we are.
Men live in the world. Women live in the world of men—the world whose boundaries are defined by patterns of male forceful struggle against the elements and one another. In this thread, that statement isn't controversial.
Since the last time I was in here I finished a few books and essays on women by traditional religious writers and 19th century philosophers (the most contemporary people you can trust on the subject). I'm starting to think that women just flat out don't live in "the world" in the same way that we do. It doesn't matter how smart or talented they are; they could have an IQ twice as high as yours and it wouldn't matter.
I'll repost some mixed-together parts of my
posts in the
LGBT thread:
The man imprints the world into himself through struggle with it, whereas the woman receives him—as an imprinted image of the world—into herself and reproduces a new world-as-man. Not only do men
have to struggle with the world, but they
want to: men want the world in the way that a woman wants a man. They want a pleasant, athletic (and, analogically, sexual) kind of struggle: the creative process.
Men—and especially heterosexual men—are very outwardly-oriented creatures: they tend not to really make the intuitive connection between the outward world and their inward world. They don't think about the link between the aesthetic of what they're pursuing, and the isomorphic corresponding potency within themselves that allows and motivates them to engage and succeed in that pursuit. They don't understand that the things they love are a holographic projection of themselves, and that a woman might prefer the source over the projection.
Men engage one another at the margins of their abilities—in competition and collaboration, which are both creative pursuits by which they auto-impress the world's fingerprint. This is why men are more likely to be impressed (not necessarily in a gay way, but that too) if you're super muscular; women appreciate strength—and other masculine virtues—in a more vague, low-resolution, and relative way: they care about "better" and "stronger", but not exactly how many pounds you squat.
This is also why there's such a thing as "girl inches": the ladies are by and large not pulling out the ruler. Gay stuff between men still operates within the masculine mode of marginal engagement—it doesn't matter if you're after the perfect coom or the perfect game of golf: it's all the same machinery under the hood of the car.
The point is that women don't
need that kind of thing, because they also seem to have some kind of faculty—one that men can't understand— whereby they perceive, intuit, or participate in a man directly and holistically. This is the part that I need to read more about and still can't wrap my head around. Although I'd like to know the exact mechanism, it may be a mystery in the religious sense and beyond investigation by a lone autist.
There seems to be a sort of telescopic structure to things: the world <-> man <-> woman. The term that early Christianity uses is that women are the "image of the image" and the "glory of the glory".
Women obviously still live and interact in the world, often out of necessity—but perhaps not as their first love, or as what they're designed to process in a direct, unmediated-by-male-defined-civil-boundaries fashion.
It seems as though people in the past had a clearer understanding of what exactly men and women even
are. Women are honest enough about it in their sexuality.
I could be mistaken. What I do know is that women will read all of this and assume that I have some sort of personal motivation against them to write it, since they think in terms of social dynamics primarily. Men will read this and know the real reason: I'm just "locked in". I don't really feel strongly about women one way or the other; there may be practical applications (I would like to understand the "point of contact between men and women"), but I'm mainly motivated by just want to figure this puzzle out. The mechanisms between men and women are part of the structure of the world. My interest is in the world, here.