Feminism and Nietzsche

I have it on good report that Nietzsche's position on feminism ought to be a very thorny issue for me. Just as a bible believing Christian is supposed to be hurt to the quick by discovering that her Creator doesn't actually value her very much at all. Despite various views presented to me concerning how I am meant to react in order to show authenticity, I still tend to take a higher view of things.

The Neechy is not the revealed word of God -- after all. And I, not being a believer of any sort, don't hold that demonstrating masochism is a basis for anything. Here is a quote from somebody who has taken the time to sum up very well Nietzsche's view on gender:

Nietzsche develops this flexible antagonism between men and women. He generally affiliates the former with the life-defying will to truth exemplified in dogmatic, metaphysical science while pairing the latter with life-affirming qualities [detailed above, as follows: The most powerful magic of life is the castrating woman and her bashful illusions, her “veil of beautiful possibilities.”]. Consider how Nietzsche remarks that woman’s nature is more natural than man’s (and the gay science gives us an idea of a re-naturalized mentality) and as the feminist movement encourages woman to become more like a man, woman denies her natural/life-affirming spirit.

(SEE: http://triceratops.brynmawr.edu/dspace/bitstream/10066/700/1/2004BriggsA.pdf )

The writing above already reads Nietzsche's writings in a way that is more sympathetic to women than most of his followers tend to be. Nonetheless the patriarchal "double bind" is represented here, albeit fairly sympathetically. What is represented is the substance of a certain patriarchal logic.

To try to become something is to make oneself less than nothing, under the patriarchal system: I am to be too enmeshed in my own illusions in order to see that I am being condemned to my own illusions. In terms of the earlier illustration of the Christian ideological view -- that women ought to be made more fearful and modest by self-hate engendered by reading of what the ultimate patriarch thinks of them, many contemporary followers of Nietzsche were already raising the bar too high. One would really have to be in the community of fundamentalist Christians to expect that slightly greater degree of honour and realism that Nietzsche does not extend to us, in assessing the capacities of women.

So, I reflect on the cost of this illusion that Nietzsche wishes to maintain, and how hystericism might seem quite amusing and particularly life-enhancing from a certain kind of male perspective, but it is not half the fun that it apparently appears to be. I reflect, even more, on the episode last night of Two and a Half Men, and its construction of feminism as being made up of a kind of nest of vipers -- a conglomeration, as it were, of castrated women. (You could tell they were castrated, because they had an eerie, voiceless way about them of expressing terror and vengeance, in a blind, deterministic way.) This seems to be the kind of feminism Neechy would condemn -- the kind made up of women who have always been castrated!

For the first time I have seen, in cartoon, the way in which feminism might be understood by certain men: It is the alliance of castrated women. Far better, I perceived, that they, being castrated, did not find any alliance with others in the same boat. They will only drag those who are relatively healthy -- men -- down into their excruciating vipers' nest. It would be better for them to be hysterical mistresses of illusion, influencing men to feel more pleasure in the world, even as their syren songs are instigative of male doom. A sublimated form of Nietzschean kindness might exist in the hidden injunction that women may improve their status of health and get some substance by latching onto a more healthy entity -- that is, a male!

But I -- I come to feminism from another direction. I approach it as one who is not castrated. I look upon these solutions to the condition of women, these Christian and Nietzschean solutions, as being crazy, mockable, hilarious in their reduction of human relations to such a low scope. Haven't they heard? God is dead!

... and furthermore, a healthy man cannot be happy with a hysteric, any more than an unhealthy woman can be happy with herself. And, more funny ... ever more laughable still!! Patriarchy must necessarily sleep in its own rotten bed that it has made out of gender relations. It has to dig itself in, to accept as normal, all of its delusions.

Either that -- Or feminism.