Women and men

 My outlook on life was conditioned by my upbringing. I grew up in Hertfordshire, but my family were all Yorkshire people, and I think that made a difference; they were independent, forthright, and practical.

My father was an unusual man; looking back I see that he was neurodivergent, but had to create compensations for that in a world where it was not yet understood. He was very solitary and rarely stayed in one place for long, travelling all over the world. So he wasn't at home much. Our household much of the time was my mother, my sister and me. We had friends of course, and plenty were male, but it was a very female household. 

I wouldn't say we ever considered ourselves as feminist; that wasn't part of our vocabulary at all. But my mother came of a line of self-employed people; her mother had managed the accounts and poultry on their family farm, her grandmother had managed the accounts and bakery in her family shop, as well as having trained as a textile designer because her family owned a mill. So, like her family before her, my mother didn't want a job as such, she wanted a holistic life that was organically integrated. She wanted to care for her children and her home. So she made her money buying and selling property, and made the money stretch by growing all our fruit and vegetables and herbs, and raising sheep and chickens. 

In consequence, I grew up not really connected to the workplace mentality of bosses and underlings, and the associated hierarchies of men and women. Furthermore, there wasn't such a hierarchy in our home since my father was mostly not there, and we were all women.

I'm glad of this, because it was a quirk of circumstances that of itself left me free from the resentments and bitterness that can exist between the sexes. The women in our family were strong and felt empowered, but without the need to attain that by denigrating or dominating men.

The feminist movement of the 1970s didn't make a great deal of difference to me personally, because the women I knew growing up never felt the need of liberation. They were never under anyone's thumb, they generated their own income, they took pride in their own areas of responsibility, and they pretty much let the world go by and did their own thing. They worked alongside their menfolk in strong and integrated relationships, both the men and the women having a vital contribution to make.

As a young woman, I strongly espoused Leftist politics, and stayed with that inclination until about five years ago. My family of origin were all on the political Right (though my great-grandparents were not) but I went Left because I felt certain that whatever life threw at me I'd find a way to make it work, so my vote was always for those people who couldn't manage, who needed a safety net to catch them when they fell. 

In the last five years, though, I think society has changed. Cynically opportunistic immigration has sky-rocketed, creating cultural and economic problems. The conversation about homosexuality and gender identity has moved from being a reasonable desire for inclusion to being an aggressive ideology challenging the family as a basis for society. The politics of envy have gained a hold that I consider detrimental to freedom. I do not warm to the socialist vision of society — what people often call 'the nanny state', though God help anyone with that kind of nanny. 

I prefer the greater informality and possibility for self-determination we left behind after the 1970s. I don't like the grid of laws closing in around our lives.

In consequence, after voting socialist all my adult life, in the last five years I went off-piste, exploring what people on the Right in UK politics had to say.

There are aspects of it, and personalities within it, that I like very much. Among those I admire are Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, Ayaan Hirshi Ali, Senator John Kennedy (of Louisiana) in America, Winston Marshall and Connor Tomlinson on Youtube in the UK, and Jacob Rees-Mogg in UK politics. And I liked Peter Whittle of the New Culture Forum, who died very recently.

There are others I admire less, and some I liked at first but found disappointing over time. I don't really like publicly running people down, so I don't want to say who I've gone off as time went on, but I'd like to say why.

Among speakers/pocasters/Youtubers on the political Right in the UK, there seems to be a disappointing level of misogyny. This outlook seems to thrive among young men on the political Right. Though they are deeply suspicious of immigrant cultures in general, their attitude to women would be right at home in Islam, I'd have thought. Let me give you a sample of comments from viewers of the Youtube channel of one such prominent influencer of the political Right, on a variety of his videos. These comments fairly represent the flavour of the group gathering around him because of his own outlook.

If a Woman can't park a car why would you let them fly a plane, it's madness.

They try steal the white mans lands, give his job to women who betray him and to outsiders who hate him, and start wars with those who hate him so he will die. . .and yet the white man endures.

Remember when your little sister would see you playing army and wants to join in but only wants to be a princess and cries and ruins everything and your mum sides with her and says you have to include her or else and so no one has any fun.

Imagine that but an entire society. That's us.

Women secretly like Toxic Masculinity, despite their complains.

You know At this point , i'm convinced that ninety percent of the problems we have in the west can be solved by telling women no

    Replies included:

    A woman's worst enemy is often herself.

    I need to rewatch the "How women; destroy civilizations" video

Women when given power they mess everything up every single time 

“Women In Charge - Chaos Assured”.

It does rather feel like western civilization went into decline after female suffrage. . . . 

women use to play hard to get, now they are hard to want 

Women have destroyed this nation never forget that.

Disappointed by the extent to which Methodism and the Church of England have been dominated in their thinking by the modern version of Leftist thinking (what is generally described as Woke), I have wondered if I would feel more at home in the Catholic or Orthodox wings of the church. But again, I was dismayed by the extreme nature of misogynist attitudes expressed when Dame Sarah Mulally was chosen as the Archbishop of Canterbury. I think these could be summed up by the person who commented on a podcast by a Catholic Youtuber, saying that 'there was a reason Satan targeted Eve rather than Adam'. It felt as if we were regressing to some of the more depressing attitudes prevalent among the Church Fathers — John Chrysostom, Augustine of Hippo, and Jerome, among others — calling women weak and fickle, and the devil's gateway, and created purely for procreation and nothing else.

The thing is, though I find the traditions and liturgies of the Catholic wing of the church beautiful, I would only be pretending if I lined up behind such attitudes.

As to priesthood in the church, and whether it should be extended to women or limited to men, I personally think — neither. I lean more to the Quaker testimonies of peace, equality, simplicity and integrity; but though Quaker meeting is wonderful, it is less and less Christo-centric in the UK (and that matters to me), and I think worship without hymnody is missing something vital, and I don't feel drawn to the political activism of the Quakers.

I would like church to be a circle more than a pyramid. I would like leaders to emerge rather than be imposed. I believe in the priesthood of all believers and the high-priesthood of Jesus; I'm not sure about having a priestly caste within the church. But I could live in peace with it — I don't feel the need to agree with everything; to some extent all institutions are one-size-fits-none. I am still exploring and searching for a way to fit in, a community to belong.

I feel queasy about designation of gender rôles. I do believe that in general women tend towards different occupations from the men. I do think that in general men are more competitive and women more collaborative. I think there are generalisations one can make. But I would want to stop there. When I heard Dr Gavin Ashenden opine that men can be priests and women can't, in the same way women can have babies and men can't, I thought that was a false dichotomy — ideology and biology are not the same thing. 

Looking back in the history of England, at Hilda of Whitby, Julian of Norwich, Queen Elizabeth I, Susanna Wesley — or coming to modern times, such figures as Margaret Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth II — regardless of whether one shares the outlook of the individual woman, how could one credibly say that when women are given power they mess up every single time, or that women are weak and fickle and created purely for procreation? The evidence simply isn't there, the ideology has no inherent logic.

So in all, I find myself truly at home neither with the Right nor the Left politically, neither with the Low nor the High when it comes to church.

I think there is room for anybody's opinion, but I can go along with neither the idea that a man can become a woman, nor with the idea that a woman is the gateway of hell. I think a woman, like a man, is just a person, and that each of us is individually and personally called by God, not according to our body but according to our soul.