Her Painting: A Woman's Touch

The Metapolitics of Women, or The Complete Theory of Women

When I was boy, girls were people to be friendzoned by. I was a scrawny book-smart nerd. You know the archetype. I never had much tact in male relationships either—likely due to being an eldest son implicitly dethroned by parental intervention. I’ve learned a lot about love and have since become a respected man and veteran of marriage. All my siblings are now happily married; so still are my parents and grandparents. My wife’s family is comparable. So, you’ll understand why hearing unmarried children of divorcees spout opinions is maddening. The blind are leading the blind off cliffs.

Relationships between men and women aren’t an unsolvable mystery. The following is the culmination of a decade of social experiments: shouting matches, reconciliations, and in recent years, many I-told-you-sos. I think it’s time for the century-old “women are complex” meme’s funeral.

Start with Men

If you don’t know what Jordan Peterson did, find out through his oldest YouTube classroom lectures—not memes, interviews, Reddit, or Daily Wire poli-tainment—and come back some other time. His current output is the tragedy of being a senior handled by a media outlet, the prophesied “hundred-foot wave” crash has happened, but he left a lasting impact on male culture. Jordan Peterson solved modern manhood. Those who thought him trivial didn’t try his suggestions. He managed to re-justify religion in a postmodern world, proved capitalism is eco-friendly, made identity politics scientifically pathetic, tied hierarchies to biology, and hammered competence mile markers along the road from beta male to fatherhood. While clumsy and no messiah, for a time in 2017 he brought a breath of fresh air to the otherwise dead and unserious field of psychology.

If you’re a man, you need to understand men first before you grasp women. Knowing oneself is a crucial precondition to understanding others and not simply projecting yourself onto everyone else. Male psychology can be easier because men tend to develop single motives and conclusions. They’re single-output machines, so inputs are easier to test. “We” understand men now. The material is available and copious. Classic literature and self-help have a strong male bias from Aurelius to Covey.

But this isn’t about Peterson nor men. One of Peterson’s shortcomings was an insufficient focus on femininity, and some admitted failures to conceptualize it outside the male context. He correctly identified the evolutionary impact women have on men as selectors, but his progress ended there. That wasn’t enough for me, and since before Peterson’s rise, I’ve studied the fairer sex. If you understand men, you’ll be able to understand women to the same degree.

The formal question I want to answer is:

“If men are heroes of the monomyth, what are women?”

Fairness to the Fairer

I have three warnings before you engage with the ultimate treaty in the war between the sexes. If you believe gender and sex are mutable, you’re not going to make it. If you hate either half of humans, come back when you grow up. If you think solutions come from politics or law, good luck fixing anything in your life.

Entire nations can be politically, religiously, and legally divided in the face of the same facts. This is due to how people weigh and organize those facts, producing different conclusions with the same data. I assert that answers to long-standing questions about women are simple with the correct perspective. Nearly all modern people subscribe to incomplete perspectives, fooled by what is loudest to abandon what is perfectly effective but no longer cool or trendy.

This seeming aside is going to matter in a minute. If one has the correct perspective lens for a matter, it will explain more things and enable consistent correct predictions without bias or twisting. Newton’s laws are laws because, sans nuclear physics, they never fail. The same holds true for an ideal lens to look at ourselves and others through. In the case of women, what good and evil women have in common perfectly defines women if it clicks into place over any woman. I say I’ve nailed it down.

The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black

My wife, a fellow millennial and Harry Potter book fan since childhood, has a silk scarf of his godfather Sirius Black’s family tree. This elaborate mural is woven with stories about women and men. Yet darkly, there are black scorch marks over certain portraits of both sexes, irreversible and intentional magical damage. These were family members shunned forever, primarily excommunicated by the matriarch Walburga Black for perceived “crimes” against magical racial purity. Her pureblood supremacy took no prisoners: Sirius himself was torched from the home at sixteen for liking bikinis and motorcycles. You should know one scorch mark is Cedrella, Ron Weasley's paternal grandmother, for marrying outside magic blood. Many characters are related through marriages in this extended family tree, on both sides of an essentially magical race war between the purebloods and, well, everybody else. This family serves as a fictional House of Medici, and historians can name many family trees that have seen similar intrigue.

The meme of torn family pictures is not a new one, and it's one key to understanding how women operate. The Black mural itself is a story of Walburga Black’s, as told by a rampantly self-inserting female author who included people and stories she knew. How appropriate is it that the Black family tree is named the color of the Yin-Yang taijitu’s female side? It’s like naming the family Chaos. And it’s not just a record of the family, but Walburga’s worldview specifically. It may be fictional, but again, it’s told by a woman prone to do similarly up at the author layer. Deciding who is “in the family picture” or in the story is what women do. My thesis is that with some additional clarification, this is all that women do. Walburga is the family tapestry. J.K. Rowling is the Harry Potter franchise. Is it cringe? Perhaps. Yet in the way men make one goal their whole being, a woman makes a story her whole personality.

It’s All The Painting

Try this lens on: women are creatures of narrative.

I call it, “The Painting.” Not just any painting. The Painting. Inside the mind of a woman is exactly one painting. It manifests in the real world too: in her cleanliness, her appearance, her relationships, and online presence. If a man’s role in myth is protagonist of the hero’s journey, then a woman’s role is the storyteller. The Nintendo game isn’t called the Legend of Link. (As an aside, Miyamoto allegedly named Zelda after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novelist wife. See how new info proves a correct lens true? That’s why it felt right to a game dev to make Zelda storyteller, and named her after one)

If there is drama in a family, people will literally use the term “in the picture” to describe the state of a family. “Is [estranged lover] still in the picture? Is [abusive ex] out of the picture?” The painting is the picture people are “in” or “out” of. The painting also encompasses how its inhabitants dress and where they live. Vain women have paintings of only themselves. The key is that women not only possess a single clear painting of the world, but that they have write and delete access to it. Infanticide and abortion are deletions. Real life close-knit local communities, a dying thing, were once built upon collective tapestries of united women, loving neighbors trading cookies and inviting each other over for dinner.

Becky and Stacy

Let’s look at some women for a moment. (No, not like that.) We'll call them Stacy and Becky. You know where I’m going with this.

Becky is a significant social media influencer and may have a lot of money based on her fashion (even in hidden poverty). She knows how to run her Instagram account, and always puts the prettiest face forward. The few who know her have seen how much she has organized and pinned on her Pinterest and Tumblr. Rumor is she has an OnlyFans. She's very sex-positive and has a high body count if her commentary on the latest dating apps is any indication. Her bio and profile pages are tattooed with silly causes—she'll let all the ladies know where she stands each news cycle. She absorbs every current narrative.

Stacy, by contrast, takes after her mother both physically and spiritually. She doesn't get much attention outside of her Facebook circle, but her husband and children are all she talks about. She posts recycled normie stuff occasionally, but it's mainly wholesome. She doesn't talk about it much, but she does volunteer work on the side while her kids are at school, where she’s also active in PTA and paying attention. She's worried about the future being created for her kids to grow up in, but she does her best to insulate them from nonsense and keep them safe. She's pretty open to exchanging recipes if you just ask. She’s embedded in a centuries-old generational narrative.

In time, if you're wise you'll begin to see that Becky has no idea who she is or what she wants. She never had a good relationship with her parents, she's getting older and about to be replaced by younger women. She isn't happy about this, but insists it's her life and her choice, she's a totally happy dogmom and loves being childfree. Pay no attention to the empty wine bottles. A century from now, she simply doesn't exist. She's a sad statistic and economic burden.

Stacy isn't a perfect mom but her stumbling efforts will be remembered the rest of her kids' lives. She knows what her mom and grandmother taught her, and built more on them. She's beautiful without being slutty, knows how to find clothes that fit. Her grandkids will bless her for her recipes and heirlooms long after she’s gone.

Her Painting of Choice

Every traitorous cheater has a painting warped or shrunken down to her own selfish face. If a woman loses ties to her own family tree and fails to start her branch, she'll make her painting of celebrities or government. She'll engage in xenophilia, love of outsiders. Too often these end up single mothers, and willingly exploit themselves or are exploited, all while decrying it. If she has children, she may threaten to scorch them off the painting for her own ideology, and her exploitations of relatives will all be for selfish motives. Her love will be conditional, and she won't want her kid in her life if they don't obey her every command. Stand still, smile more, sit down, shut up, and look at the camera of her every whim. Worship the ground she walks on or get out. Negative reaction to her post? You’re blocked, reported, and hopefully banned.

The good woman, on the other hand, knows her family, where she came from, and has a strong desire to perpetuate her family's values. It won't be enough to have her painting, she will see the best in the man she chooses, and try to integrate him into her family, and herself into his. She'll engage in homemaking as much as she can, will take care of herself and her family's health, be thrifty, and ultimately make wherever she lives a better place. She believes in her family and community.

Get Her Story Straight

There’s an obvious reason, then, why women need to talk things out. A woman’s problem is not solved until she can get the story straight. Worse yet, if a man rushes in and fixes the problem she’d like to discuss, narrative reality is set in stone before she is able to know whether it was the right course of action. It is no wonder then that women complain about aggressive problem solving before meditation. Sort out the story, declare what will occur, and then act it out. Finally, return and report and close the loop. Planned action is superior to hasty reaction.

Activists angrily yelling for men to “shut up and listen” are inadvertently onto a truth—most memetic propaganda is. A stoic man is quiet and reserved—immovably so. If men want to build bridges to women, they need to listen and ask questions. You don’t need to be armed with all the answers: the protagonist is the one asking the questions. Some woman-understanding is in order, yet “mansplaining” is better replaced by active “man-doing” (as we say, “man up”), or Socrates’ “man-asking”. If a woman isn’t given proper chances to tell the story, she’ll never have a coherent one or be able to improve it. To the extent modernity is ruled by tyrannical women demanding ever more empowerment, it may be proof no power can ever fill a picture frame; she must learn to love and worship someone other than herself.

The Good Gossip

Women talk. That’s well understood. It’s also well understood that they can destroy lives and careers and do far more damage with words than a man can with weapons. Many wars in ancient times were fought on the egging of a woman’s insistence. The opposite influence must also exist. A culture will be utopian very quickly if only local women deemed it to be so. The male perspective rushes to politics, but the fabric of a shared narrative painting keeps their men from harming each other. A female collective’s story of their men united against external threats, who build and create great things, acquire resources, and solve problems would result in that ideal society. Online we live in the opposite, where lonely men see porn and vain and exploitative women, while these women are hellbent on portraying nothing but their own reflection at others’ expense.

There is a typical form of gossip that happens in good communities, where a tragedy befalls a family, and all the other families rush to help. No signal flare was put out. Gossip and whispers were spread, some almost psychically, between the women. They knew what to do, or what to tell their husbands to do, and people moved miraculously as one. If women take this effect seriously, the world could change for the better quickly. Yet it takes good mentorship by fathers and mothers to draw out this sensibility, which we desperately lack.

The People on the Mantle

When you examine a woman, ask yourself this: if her brain is a living room, what do you see? Specifically, in her brain is a fireplace with a giant picture frame setting above it. Who is in that picture frame? If it’s herself or her dog, turn and run away as fast as you can. If the tabloids are stacked above the fireplace, you’re going to have a bad time. If it’s a picture of you or her family members on the other hand… you’re talking to a good mother, a keeper, an angel.

I really want to burn this deliberately incomplete image into your head of a giant golden picture frame above a fireplace. I even found you a stock photo.

Every happy successful home I’ve entered (and in my case, there have been thousands) has walls littered with pictures of family and religious iconography. Sometimes it’s in the entryway, or along a staircase.

A good man must become the thing a woman wants to put above her fireplace. If you’ve learned anything about yin, you’ll give women the space and resources to let their chaos blossom and take roots. You’ll also be kinglike not just in your respect, but guide her with a firm hand—women rightly despise weak men. Bachelors, women are correct to lament your barren living space. You aren’t equipped to beautify it, so next time let her know the job position is available.

If you’re a woman, stop listening to silly girls telling you what goes on the metaphorical mantle. You need something better than “Live, Laugh, Love” (which erased Faith, Hope, Charity) and no nonsensical quote about empowerment or raising your voice or being heard is going to help you get your story straight. Religion might. Paint your home’s walls something vibrant, with intent. Every single thing you touch in your life is a reflection of what’s right or wrong with you. You already know this with the time you spend on makeup and fashion. If you’re desperate for an aesthetic, cottagecore wouldn’t hurt; it oozes nature, narrative, and creation. Yet for a good woman, it’s not about her, but those she loves. Which hero or family goes on the mantle?

Who is in the painting above her fireplace? Men, do you deserve to be there?