The Decline and Fall of Western Art by Brendan Heard

Author:Brendan Heard [Heard, Brendan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781720557852
Published: 2018-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

Feminism and education

“To the much-tossed Ulysses, never done with woman whether gowned as wife or whore, Penelope and Circe seemed as one...”

– Robert Graves

While it sounds cruel to point out, I am afraid it is also necessary to speak of the female role in modern æsthetics – and while my view may not be strictly true in the case of every single woman, it is largely true as a group behaviour or aggregate trait. It is therefore true. When you abandon political correctness and realize equality is a figment, you come to enjoy ‘sweeping generalizations’ for the reason they are largely true. If they were not true (in the aggregate), they would not be ‘hurtful’. So this is not to criticize the few women fully capable of understanding causality and traditionalist concepts but, of course, they are also the women who understand they are very much the minority of their sex, the others being entirely at the whim of cultural trend and perceived authority, are as cows led into thorny pastures yet happy where they are placed.

“Man makes history; woman is history. The reproduction of the species is feminine: it runs steadily and quietly through all species, animal or human, through all short-lived cultures. It is primary, unchanging, everlasting, maternal, plantlike and cultureless. If we look back we find that it is synonymous with life itself.”

– Oswald Spengler, Aphorisms

Men are exceptional at creating culture, at least partly out of nature’s compulsion, to impress women. Exceptional women leaders and thinkers (such as Hypatia or Boudica) who do not interpret the world through the prism of entirely social or hyper-personal thinking are also exceptional enough to rise up within a functioning masculine culture without turning the system upside down to facilitate or ‘free’ their entire gender. Which is what we have done now, so that we might pretend every woman is magically capable of everything men have done, something that proves instantly to be a lie (like a sparrow, quite excellent at being a sparrow, insisting it can do everything a fox does). The saturation of our society at all levels – in politics, judiciary, media and business – with unrestrained female opinion (enforced now by law) has undoubtedly feminized our culture. This is an enormous problem, larger than the art question itself, and you will find very, very few Western women today able to apply a discriminating hierarchy to almost anything, let alone art.

The truth is, a great swathe of the success of Modernism in recent decades has been its easy appeal to women and their ever-increasing say in society. They seem to have a greater tendency to succumb to social cultural edicts from perceived authority, especially if the message is enclosed in a story of compassion, inclusivity and acceptance. They will approach problems socially, which means the edict will not be questioned on its own grounds but judged on its perceived acceptance among peers. When a message is couched in terms of ‘acceptance’ or ‘tolerance’, in terms of doing away with discriminating standards, this will find an appeal to many women.

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