Gender roles

Hindu (ॐ) depiction of Gaņeśa (गणेश)

Gender roles |
Friday – February 20, 2026

Gender roles have caused much uproar lately, especially in the political arena, and it seems that most people engaged in this so-called "debate" have no sense of the primordial and traditional relationship between the sexes, something that I lightly covered in my "miniseries" on feminism, or between the "genders" as modern people like to call it. I've covered this neologism in the past and recently I wrote about the concept of "Gender-queer" where I mentioned something called "Queer theory", but I never elaborated on that point, something I don't intend to do in this post either but nonetheless something that I will be forced mention or at any rate touch upon. I intend to remain somewhat disconnected, aloof if you will, from the hysteria and antics of politics, and apart from this I once again need to assert that I owe no allegiance to any factionalism, and often many of the people who may be interested in my views will tend to be more wrong about this subject in particular than even the most fanatical proponents of the humanist axiom, but more on this later.

    Yes, why is "Queer theory" important? Well, the "founder" or intellectual star behind the term "Queer theory" Judith Butler states in many of her works, particularly in her magnum opus Gender Trouble from 1990, that gender is essentially performed, rather than something that can be said to constitute an intrinsic and imperative quality, and this view of gender is really derived from the overriding theory of "postmodernism", the complete rejection of hierarchy and order as essentially meaningful or even useful in the organization of society and life, and against this background it would be frank to assert that "Queer theory" belongs in the category of epistemological heresy that I mentioned in my previous post the other day. But what makes Judith Butler and "Queer theory" important isn't so much this "theory" as the latest expression of the modern deviation, but rather her insight that indeed there are many aspects of gender that can be said to be essentially performative, and indeed this "performance of gender" is actually a distinctively modern phenomena and much of the so-called qualities that are ascribed to gender are really just modern demands rather than any real qualities or functions found in the primordial tradition among men and women or indeed in any traditional society stemming from a true tradition, and in fact most of the so-called traditional gender roles that all of these so-called "conservatives" will be sure to lament and assert as fundamentally "masculine" or "feminine" are actually nothing but extensions of quantity; indeed, most of the masculine gender role today has nothing to do with the primordial quality of masculinity and the same can be said about femininity. Really, what the modern world requires of ordinary people, that is to say the vast majority of men and women in the "rank and file", as the militaristic and dangerously aggressive neanderthals of modern so-called men would refer to the caste system", of the Vaiśya (वैश्य) and below is really something quite extraordinary: of modern men the expectation is that he should function both as an obedient laborer and taxpayer, but also that he should be able, at any moment, to fill the role of the warrior, but this is no true warrior in the traditional sense of that word – this is a monstrous beast of the lowest order. This imposed warrior expectation on all men above and below a certain age, so-called "military aged" men, has no place in traditional societies; this bastardization of the warrior is a completely modern concept, something that I've covered in my post on modern warfare, and this role of warrior was in all traditional societies filled by the Kṣatriya's (क्षत्रिय) in Hindu tradition and noblemen being the western correlative. This confusion and mingling of the castes in the name of egalitarianism and democracy means that the "performance of masculinity" has taken on a character that is completely modern. Really, there is no such thing as a masculinity derived from the "Primordial Body" in modern societies; what makes up masculinity is something entirely corporeal in nature that has nothing, I repeat nothing, to do with traditional masculinity. Yes, femininity has also been much compartmentalized into a modern bastardization, but the primordial connection is still there, even though the proponents of the liberal and humanist order are working relentlessly to sever this connection as well, read Abortion.

    For instance: it seems commonplace, as I mentioned, that men should take on the role of warrior, provider, and protector, but all of these qualities have nothing to do with each other, nor are they in any traditional sense related exclusively to masculinity, and the conservative urge to conscript into one being, the modern man, all of these qualities is just an expression the true nature of conservatism – the protector of the status quo that is the material order. The qualities of warrior, provider, and protector belong, in a traditional society, exclusively to those men who have earned their rank, but there is no such thing as an expectation that any and all men, including those least capable, should show any aptitude in any of these domains, and this understanding was quite normal until fairly recently. Indeed, what conservatives label "traditional" gender roles are no such thing, and the usage of the word "traditional" in this connection amounts to a crime against language, an enormous and monstrous fraud, but these people are of course too stupid and too happy in their ignorant and dense reactionarism to even consider the historiography—from a completely material point of view— in order to recognize their own stupidity and laziness. This historiographical point of view, material though it may be, was at least considered and described by people such as Judith Butler and the other "hypermodernists", in an attempt to contextualize what they and the rest of the moderns deem gender, and to this point it is true that they again succeed in being right for the wrong reasons, again something I mentioned in my post the other day, for all of this work inevitably serves to rectify nihilism rather than the promotion of life in the primordial tradition, and this is because they lack skillful means and because they approach the issue of gender from an entirely material point of view and most of all because they, like all the other moderns, operate under a fundamentally liberal and humanist framework that asserts that the paramount value of anything substantive in manifestation is that of the final liberation; truly, in this regard it would be quite right to label Judith Butler and the other "hypermodernists" as anti-traditionalists. Indeed, the aforementioned "crime against language" that of so-called "traditional gender roles" is really something that came about in the peculiar confluence of nationalism, and again what conservatives, dense and stupid as they always are, refer to as "traditional" when it comes to the performance of gender is really such a recent development that the only word that would be right to describe this falsely labeled "tradition" is modern: indeed, the idea that mother should stay "home" and that father should "work" is a modern concept that survived for a couple of decades during the previous century, really during the height of the industrial age, that's it; in no other way would it be right to deem this dynamic between men and women traditional other than in the sliver of time when this was the case on a cultural level, and even then this was hardly the complete dynamic between men and women.

    Gender roles are surely sociological constructions, and this is the case in particular with modern "masculinity", but this "sociological construction" serves a completely material purpose that, again, has nothing to do with the primordial aspects of masculinity and femininity. Take again the concepts of work and a home: to what traditional society can these words be applied? None, there are no, and there have never been any, traditional societies where people refer to their small and compartmentalized living space, their unit, as a home, this too completely in keeping with individualism; and there are just as well no traditional societies where "work" constituted anything other than pure subsistence, at least not for the vast majority of people. If one actually seeks to understand traditional masculinity and femininity, here I refuse the usage of the "gender" neologism, one has to look beyond the industrial age and indeed beyond the nation-state and all other aspects of the modern world, and only in this context may such a thing as a "traditional" masculinity and femininity be understood, and if one seeks further insight than this one has to put these fundamentally natural and cosmological qualities (masculinity and femininity) into their properly metaphysical context, as derivatives of the primordial substance and as inherently differentiated manifestations of this primordial unity – only this could begin to describe traditional in so far as it applies to masculinity and femininity.

    With that final realization I encourage you to immediately depart any "debates" about this subject, for such a forum will no doubt only serve to cause further confusion. This confusion is of course in keeping with the individualistic assertion that free inquiry is a paramount foundation of any stable society – another modern and fantastical notion.

Reginald Drax – February 20, 2026.