The Romantic and the Feminine

The most common use of the word Romantic in our daily lives is to denote love. There is the Romance section in the bookstore and the Romantic-Comedy section in the DVD store. Both these are largely considered as being for a female market, and so therefore is the word Romantic often associated with femininity.

The word Romantic originally meant Roman-like to describe the pigeon Latin that emerged in Western Europe after the fall of Rome. These dialects eventually evolved in what we call the Romance Languages of French, Italian, and Spanish.

In time, a particular type of story came to be referred to as Romances because of the languages in which they were written. All of these stories have four main features: love and adventure in the form of knights and maidens, scenic locations, and some sort of supernatural element, like magical beings or events.

From this we have four uses of the word Romantic. It can be associated with love, but also with adventure, a beautiful bit of landscape, or the strange and supernatural. I do not believe that anyone would assign a specific gender label to a film like Raiders of the Lost Ark, if anything they would call it masculine. In that story we have all the Romantic elements present. It is an adventure story; there is a love interest; it does not focus on landscape like many Westerns, but that element is there; and of course the supernatural element.

Stories that focused primarily on the supernatural were called Gothic Romances. Westerns were likened to the Historical Romances of Sir Walter Scott. So too might we call Space Westerns, like Star Wars, Science-Fiction Romances instead of Space Operas. Most genre fiction in literature, cinema, television, and even narrative video games could be called Romances.

Regarding the Historical Romances and Westerns, people tend to forget that Clio was one of the nine muses who inspired the arts. Her speciality was history. G.M. Trevelyan in his essay Clio, a Muse observed, “The great antiquarian and novelist [Sir Walter Scott] showed historians that history must be living, multi-coloured, and romantic if it is to be a true mirror of the past.”

Another misinterpretation of the concept of the Romantic that is prevalent in our modern language is to associate the word Romantic with the unrealistic, fake, fanciful, or far-fetched. This stems from the supernatural aspect of the Medieval Romances as being improbable.

The truth is that the less-than-factual elements of the Romances made them more interesting. Besides, how many people became historians or archaeologists because of Raiders of the Lost Ark? Or became involved in the sciences because of Star Trek? The Romances inspired attitudes and actions in real life despite being fiction.

The goal of the Romance writer, be it Historic, Gothic, or Science-Fiction, is not to be real, but to be realistic. The objective is the achieve verisimilitude. This is where a Romantic film like Batman Begins succeeds and a camp film like Batman and Robin fails. It marks the difference between a genius like Christopher Nolan and a hack like Joel Schumacher.

It’s unfortunate that we have come to limit the scope of the word Romantic to describe genres strongly associated with the female market when traditionally the word Romantic was either non-gender specific or primarily masculine. Likewise, it is unfortunate that we associate the Romantic with the fake when it is telling us the deeper truths through fiction.

Due to the modern common association of the Romantic with love, to the exclusion of elements that were once more dominant, like action, adventure, and the supernatural, the Romantic is viewed as being a feminine concept. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s funny how critics of the Romantic have blamed Romanticism for The American Civil War and both World Wars, and yet today the Romantic is associated with love and not war.

A few of the key by-words for the Romantic are volition, energy, and action. Why? Because these qualities drive the narrative, whether in a fictional adventure story or in real life history. More importantly, these are considered to be predominantly masculine qualities.

If we look at Romanticism from the perspective of Cultural Philosophy as opposed to literature we see that not only is Romanticism predominately masculine in nature it is also anti-feminists. This is not to say that it is anti-woman by any stretch. Romantics love women, but they are anti-feminist.

The reason is that there are two opposing premises. The Romantics, as represented by the Victorians here, believed that men and women are different both biologically and psychologically. That being the case, then men and women can never be equal because it is logically impossible for two different things to be equal. Although an apple and an orange are equally fruit, they are different and can therefore never be equal, however they can be complimentary. It was this complimentary relationship that was the goal of the Victorians in terms of relationships and the familial division of labour.

The Feminist stance is that men and women are equal except in instances where women are superior to men. This fosters a competitive relationship between men and women rather than a complimentary one and thus the battle of the sexes was born.

The primary casualties in this war have been women forced into the labour market, children in single parent households, and men being socially devalued and alienated from their children. The primary benefactors have been political, financial, and social institutions who feed off the problems caused by the destruction of the family unit and the absence of men.

I am not saying that the Romantic goal is to return women to the home. In the Nineteenth Century, women had yet to prove themselves as doctors, for example, but in the Twentieth Century they have proven their capability, therefore it would be ludicrous to deny any qualified woman such a job.

The Romantic stance is “if you can, then you may”. No person should be denied their chosen profession and its just rewards provided they are capable of performing the required task. However, the competition for these jobs must be fair without any special privileges or considerations.

There is a problem here. Life is not fair because men and women are different. The tool for levelling the playing field for women is the contraceptive pill because it takes reproduction out of the equation. The only way for women to compete with men is for them to sacrifice reproduction.

Contrary to the popular rhetoric, she cannot have it all. There is a choice every woman must make between career and family. Actually, that is not true. The choice has been made for her before she was born.

The way the current economy has developed few women have the luxury to choose between being a housewife caring for the children and a job because few men are in a position to afford a wife and family. It takes two these days. Where in 1911 a man could live a middle-class lifestyle supporting a home, wife, children, and servants while employed by a bank as a common clerk, today’s man would have to be in a much higher paying job to support the same.

Therefore any responsible couple has to examine their joint financial situation before committing to children. The only way she can have it all is through state intervention either through regulating businesses to force them to pay maternity leave (which men do not require) or through state benefits. The third alternative is of course a wealthy husband.

That’s only half the story. Recent government figures in the United Kingdom show that 50% of children are born out of wedlock. According to The Telegraph (12 Sept 2011):

A recent academic study claimed that the Government's benefits reforms have encouraged family breakdowns, since they meant women who left their husbands were better off financially after leaving their husbands because they could claim higher welfare payments and better child care. The introduction of the Working Families Tax Credit in 1999 had a "substantial impact'' on the divorce rate among the poorest households, prompting a 160 per cent rise in separations, the report published in the Economic Journal claimed.

The traditional male figure based on the Romantic model of the man of independent action who voluntarily takes responsibility for protecting and providing for his wife and children is now obsolete due to social forces largely engineered by government. So now government moves in to fill the role. The father is forced-out, the mother is either on benefits or working, and the child is raised by the State as its surrogate father.

Romanticism is primarily a masculine phenomenon and women love the Romantic because most normal women love men just as normal men love women. What a man wants in a woman is a partner and helpmate with whom he can raise children and grow old with. He does not want a battle of the sexes.

To avoid such conflict he will typically simply leave the situation. The result is men rejecting women simply because he has learned that on balance she is not worthy of the sacrifices that he is prepared to make. More and more it seems as though the so-called toxic women glorified in the media in shows like Sex and the City are outnumbering the women of virtue that men truly desire.

So men use the party girls for sex and move on because logically that is all they are good for. To linger too long in the relationship is only to invite emotional hardship. If that seems hard to believe, consider that men are three to four times more likely to commit suicide after a failed relationship than women.

Regular readers will know that I have identified two distinct zeitgeists; The Romantic (1776-1929) and The Socialist (1929-present). The Romantic Era was a more masculine period driven by the male qualities of invention, risk taking, and competition. The Socialist Era is more feminine with the rise of government central planning and social programs intended to control citizens under the pretext of care. Winston Churchill observed:

"The women's suffrage movement is only the small edge of the wedge, if we allow women to vote it will mean the loss of social structure and the rise of every liberal cause under the sun."

This has indeed occurred. According to voting trends, women are more inclined to vote for politicians promising greater social welfare programs at the expense of individual responsibility. The result is greater state authority as votes primarily from women sustain the mostly men in power who arrogantly believe that they can regulate both the economy and society and historically do so to the detriment of both.

If I am correct in my hypothesis that the Romantic is primarily masculine, then it is equally true that the ideal man is the Romantic Man. So how does the Romantic Man function in the predominantly feminine Socialist Era?

This is the existential crisis facing modern man. We do not know what to do. We are lost. We are fish out of water. Some men are not men at all but boys lacking the self-discipline of manhood. Others are frustrated Alphas looking for a fight and not finding a morally acceptable one. Some are simply deluded and think that the old rules still apply. While others still have accepted to role of “mangina” catering to the whims of females as “white knights” and “orbiters” who are more than happy to feed a woman’s ego in return for her validation.

Among the Romantic Men there are various points of view. Some figure that the best course is to keep your head down and enjoy life until the inevitable crash, whether that enjoyment means a solitary pursuit of wisdom or social hedonism. My chosen course is to be openly Romantic regardless of the social mores of political correctness and hope someone listens. I suppose it is for each man to make his own choice.

Whether you look at Romanticism from a literary, historic, philosophical, or cultural perspective, I believe that it is clearly a masculine phenomenon. I would go so far as to suggest that attacks on Romanticism are attacks on the masculine virtues themselves and the common perception of the Romantic as feminine is nothing short of a blatant attempt to strip a man of these virtues. If anything the word represents one more territory to be reclaimed in the common social discourse.

We live in an age where narrative fiction is the primary form of entertainment; be it television programs, films and even video games side-by-side with the traditional forms of written fiction stories and the vast majority of these narratives are Romantic. We have been raised on them. The result of this is that we want adventures; we want to be Indiana Jones or Han Solo or Malcolm Reynolds or Captain Kirk. But then the nanny state steps in and says, “No, you might hurt yourself”. The sad thing is that we obey because it’s the law.

If change is going to happen then it’s a spiritual change that’s needed. I don’t mean God or some New Age awakening. It’s a fundamental break from our existing social programming. The truth is that we are asleep while they live. The purpose of the Romantic life is to live and they live at our expense. I for one won’t stand for that.

Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars [Romantics]. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off. -- Tyler Durden: Fight Club