Reframing Barbie

I have now seen the Barbie movie. It is not a children's film, but deals with issues of the meaning of life from a feminist perspective. It is useful to look at because it connects feminist politics with a modern metaphysics - and we get to see what is lost in the process.

I do need to set out the basic plot to explain this (so...spoiler alert). We begin in Barbie land which is a matriarchy where not only do the Barbies rule politically, but the Kens (the male dolls) are merely accessories. The Kens try to impress the Barbies but the Barbies aren't that interested, as every night is girls night.

Then Barbie is afflicted with an existential angst and is forced to go to the real world (where humans live). Barbie had expected to be greeted there as a heroine who had empowered women; instead, the patriarchy still rules. Ken loves that he gets some respect in the real world and returns to Barbie land to set up a patriarchy of his own. Barbie gets to meet her creator in the real world, and then returns to Barbie land with a mother, Gloria, and her daughter. Together they attempt to restore the matriarchy.

The best place to begin in analysing the film is with the metaphysics. Barbie's creator (a God figure) tells Barbie that "I created you so you wouldn't have an ending", i.e. that there are no ends or purposes to her life, but that she must choose for herself what she will be and do. The assumption in the film is that there is no given meaning to things, none given by a creator, so that everything is made up by ourselves and that we as humans subjectively create our own meaning and purpose.

This is the essential frame through which all else follows. What you see in the film is how some things, once thought to be a core aspect of being human, radically lose meaning within this frame.

This is particularly true of relationships between men and women. Some reviewers complained that the film was man-hating. I didn't find this to be so, not directly at least. The men are nearly all well-intentioned. The problem is that they are portrayed as entirely superfluous in the lives of women. They exist not only as a potential threat to women's autonomy and agency, but even more so as irritating figures who get in the way of women in their daily lives, i.e. who are merely tolerated. There is one husband portrayed in the film (Gloria's), but he is like a third wheel to the mother/daughter relationship, and he brings no meaning or purpose to their lives.

Similarly, at the end of the film Barbie rejects having a relationship with Ken. She tells him that he has to find meaning not in relationship with her but on his own. She effectively tells him that he must go his own way, and that he is enough by himself.

It is a savagely cold message but it makes sense within the frame. If we are to aim at maximising our autonomy, understood to mean our freedom to self-define, because this is how we assert meaning, then relationships are merely limiting. We are most autonomous when we develop solo, outside of relationships with others. Hence, love is rejected in the Barbie movie, for the sake of empowerment.

Imagine if the frame was different. For most of the Western tradition, love was thought to connect us meaningfully to higher goods and purposes and was therefore worth cultivating. Similarly, to truly develop who we are as men and women, it was once thought that we would do this in relationship with each other, as husbands and wives and fathers and mothers within a family, as a natural setting for human life. A significant regard was attached to fatherhood and motherhood to the point that it was possible, for instance, to speak of maternal honour.

Relationships are regarded in the Barbie film as just meaningless flummery. In Ken's patriarchy, the men are romantic and want to help the Barbies by demonstrating masculine competence. The Barbies are happy, admire the Kens and do little things for them like bringing them beer. But the female role is to be something like a "bimbo" that does not engage the higher nature of the women (a merely "helpful decoration" as the film puts it). When matriarchy is restored, Barbie triumphantly says that the women once again have "brains and autonomy". Again, this only makes sense within the modern feminist frame. In the older frame, relationships had a significance that would ask of both men and women something of the best within their natures - it was a field of human life that would justify giving the best of ourselves to those whom we loved. There was, potentially, a nobility to this kind of love.

Which brings us to motherhood. The film is conflicted here. Early on, motherhood is given a drubbing. The film shows little girls rejecting motherhood by bashing their baby dolls on the ground. The narrator dismisses the idea that women experience motherhood as a worthwhile thing. Throughout the film what matters is women holding political power or judicial power or winning prizes for science or journalism. However, in the real world, Gloria is just an ordinary woman with a boring office job and for her the relationship with her daughter does matter. Gloria's love for her daughter is perhaps the one human touch in the entire film. Later, we are told that mothers do have a purpose, which is to launch their high flying feminist daughters into the world. There is nothing said about women who might end up with sons instead.

Why are there mixed messages here when it comes to motherhood? I'm not sure. Perhaps the one last bastion of human love in this feminist world is a purely female one between mother and daughter that has as its ultimate purpose female empowerment. 

Another difficult message in the film is that of equality. Within the feminist frame there is no common ground between men and women. There is no mutual service to a family or nation, nor do men and women fulfil aspects of their own created nature in relationship with the opposite sex. What there is instead is a pursuit of empowerment so that we might get to follow our own autonomous will. This, however, is a zero sum game. If men have power to set the world to their own desires, women lose power and vice versa. This is part of the basic plot of the movie. There is either male supremacy (Ken land) or female supremacy (Barbie land). One side has to win or lose.

The film tries to take the moral high ground by suggesting that each sex might gradually fight for and win political rights within these systems. The film also asserts that equality can be achieved by the Kens accepting, just like the Barbies, that they don't need the opposite sex and that they can be self-defining autonomous agents just like the women. It is somewhat radical for the film to suggest this, as feminists usually assert that men already have this power. The film is conceding that men are more likely to still want to uphold a pre-modern ideal of the sexes being in relationship with each other. Equality is possible, according to the Barbie film, if both sexes go their own way.

But there is another problem with equality. Barbie decides, at the end of the film, that what she really wants, even at the cost of becoming mortal, is to become a person so that she can be one of the makers/creators instead of one of those being acted on. What this illustrates is that the feminist frame is necessarily elitist rather than egalitarian. Most people are not going to wield power in society - they are not going to be part of the elite who get to move things according to their will. The film is honest enough to concede this in the character of Gloria, who is an exploited office worker who does not even have enough time to go on a vacation with her daughter. In other words, the kind of power that the feminist frame suggests will allow us to make meaning will be illusory for most people. There will be a tiny number of winners at the top, but most will be losers.

There is another confusion that arises here. On the one hand, we are supposed to rise to a godlike status of being makers/creators who thereby infuse meaning into existence - a kind of Nietzschean Übermensch:

For Nietzsche, the Übermensch is...a being who is able to be their own determiner of value; sculpt their characteristics and circumstances into a beautiful, empowered, ecstatic whole; and fulfil their ultimate potential to become who they truly are.

However, the film depicts women as complaining that under the patriarchy they are expected to meet standards and that this is oppressive and that, instead, people should just accept who they are, as they are (at the end, Ken comes to the realisation that he is "Kenough").

So which is it? Are we self-defining, empowered meaning makers or just good enough as we are, any way that we are? 

Perhaps one problem for the feminist frame here is that there does not exist within it any basis for objective standards, so meeting these will necessarily feel oppressive and/or arbitrary. But if this is true, then why bother self-defining? If what you already are is enough, and as good as anything else, then you may as well stay with it. The power you are striving to have, that of autonomous self-definition, is not even needed. But where then does meaning come from, if we are not subjectively making up our own meaning or purposes, as an expression of our agency, but are just accepting who we already are? If I am enough as an ordinary office worker like Gloria, then why suggest that women must find meaning in being movers and shakers as creatives or executives?

So how to summarise the film? On the one hand, I think it is better if these trends within modernity are brought to the surface, as they are in the movie. Better to see openly where things are headed and on what basis. The problem, though, is that even people who are opposed to the trends tend to argue for something else from within the feminist frame itself, which can only ever slow down what is happening rather than genuinely alter the course of social change.

On the other hand, I do find it sad that things have reached such a low point, that men and women are being split off from each other within mainstream culture. It is a defeat for all of us, men and women.

The original "What is a woman?"

The American political commentator Matt Walsh released a documentary recently titled "What is a woman?" It showed the difficulty many moderns have in answering an apparently simple question.

The question was posed, however, much earlier by the woman credited with kickstarting second wave feminism, Simone de Beauvoir, back in 1949 in her book The Second Sex. Her discussion of the question is interesting because it deals with the metaphysical origins of modernity. 

She opens her argument with this:

But first we must ask: what is a woman? 

She acknowledges that some people would answer that there is a feminine quality that women embody and express, an "essence", that is part of the definition of womanhood. However, she rejects the existence of such a quality of femininity:

It would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity. Is this attribute something secreted by the ovaries? Or is it a Platonic essence, a product of the philosophic imagination? Is a rustling petticoat enough to bring it down to earth? Although some women try zealously to incarnate this essence, it is hardly patentable. It is frequently described in vague and dazzling terms that seem to have been borrowed from the vocabulary of the seers, and indeed in the times of St Thomas it was considered an essence as certainly defined as the somniferous virtue of the poppy

But conceptualism has lost ground. The biological and social sciences no longer admit the existence of unchangeably fixed entities that determine given characteristics, such as those ascribed to woman...Science regards any characteristic as a reaction dependent in part upon a situation. If today femininity no longer exists, then it never existed. 

She claims that there are no innate qualities, and notes that in her time the sciences held character to depend on the social environment. But if there is no such thing as femininity, and we are simply products of our environment, then what does it mean to be a woman?:

But does the word woman, then, have no specific content? This is stoutly affirmed by those who hold to the philosophy of the enlightenment, of rationalism, of nominalism; women, to them, are merely the human beings arbitrarily designated by the word woman. Many American women particularly are prepared to think that there is no longer any place for woman as such; if a backward individual still takes herself for a woman, her friends advise her to be psychoanalysed and thus get rid of this obsession. In regard to a work, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, which in other respects has its irritating features, Dorothy Parker has written: ‘I cannot be just to books which treat of woman as woman ... My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, should be regarded as human beings.’

This is interesting for several reasons. First, it shows that at the end of the long first wave of feminism, the same result occurred that we are seeing today. The term "woman" lost all meaning. Today, if you ask a progressive what the term means, they will simply say "whatever a woman wants it to mean". If you follow up by asking "can it mean anything then?" they will answer "yes". In 1949, the category was also thought to lack any signifying substance - it was held by progressives to be an arbitrary category that should be jettisoned.

Simone de Beauvoir

Second, Simone de Beauvoir is aware that this attitude has its origins in certain philosophical positions, including that of nominalism. Nominalism is the belief that there are only individual instances of things and that universals have no real existence but are only names. In this view, the feminine is not a really existing quality or essence that gives a distinct nature to women.

Simone de Beauvoir's position on nominalism is complex. On the one hand, she thinks it inadequate because she believes the categories of man and woman to be real - unlike certain later feminists she rejects the idea that there is liberation in escaping the category of woman. However, she also rejects the idea of the masculine and the feminine as being innate qualities that men and women embody and express:

But nominalism is a rather inadequate doctrine, and the antifeminists have had no trouble in showing that women simply are not men. Surely woman is, like man, a human being; but such a declaration is abstract. The fact is that every concrete human being is always a singular, separate individual. To decline to accept such notions as the eternal feminine, the black soul, the Jewish character, is not to deny that Jews, Negroes, women exist today – this denial does not represent a liberation for those concerned, but rather a flight from reality. 

Her defence of the distinction between men and women is not exactly encouraging:

In truth, to go for a walk with one’s eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that they do most obviously exist.

Which leads her back to the question her book is intended to answer:

If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through ‘the eternal feminine’, and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question “what is a woman”?

I have not read all of the remainder of her book. Part of her answer is that women have been defined only in relation to men, as "the Other". She wants, in line with modernity, for women to be autonomous. She has the following negative take on traditional womanhood:

Humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not an autonomous being

Her solution is the familiar feminist one of claiming that the differences that have existed between men and women are not the product of an innate masculinity or femininity but are due to socialisation:

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female acquires in society; it is civilization as a whole that develops this product, intermediate between female and eunuch, which one calls feminine.

I'm sorry to disappoint, but I'm not really sure what her answer is to the question "What is a woman?". She seems to focus on the idea that women are not by nature feminine (which she takes to be a negative thing) and should be autonomous in the sense of living for themselves. She writes of her dislike for marriage, motherhood and family and promotes free love, abortion and careers.

She lived to see her preferences realised in Western society. But we do not live in a culture that can answer the question she raised back in 1949. Our culture still does not know what a woman is.

So why is the future female?

I was walking through a local shopping mall some time ago when I saw an unusual advertising slogan painted on a shoe shop window. It read simply "The Future is Female".

Now, I'm a bit late to this party, as it turns out that what follows is already common knowledge among some groups online, but this slogan has an extraordinary origin. It comes from the title of a manifesto published in 1982 by a radical lesbian separatist feminist by the name of Sally Miller Gearhart:

Gearhart outlines a three-step proposal for female-led social change from her essay, "The Future–-If There Is One–-is Female":

I) Every culture must begin to affirm a female future.

II) Species responsibility must be returned to women in every culture.

III) The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race.

Gearhart meant, quite literally, that the future would be female - she thought that through the use of modern technologies of cloning and ovular merging that a society made up overwhelmingly of females could be created.

It gets more interesting. Gearhart feared the existence of male spaces:

Gearhart does not base this radical proposal on the idea that men are innately violent or oppressive, but rather on the "real danger is in the phenomenon of male-bonding, that commitment of groups of men to each other whether in an army, a gang, a service club, a lodge, a monastic order, a corporation, or a competitive sport." Gearhart identifies the self-perpetuating, male-exclusive reinforcement of power within these groups as corrosive to female-led social change. Thus, if "men were reduced in number, the threat would not be so great and the placement of species responsibility with the female would be assured."

As so often happens, what was radical in 1982 is less so today. Gearhart's radically separatist feminist message is now so commonplace that it can be used to attract customers to a shop in a suburban mall. And in the decades after 1982 most male spaces in society were made unisex - from the boy scouts, to football clubs, to the army.

Gearhart managed to combine this hostility to men and to the masculine with high-minded professions of her commitment to universal love, declaring that "love is the universal truth lying at the heart of all creation". I suspect that leftists are attracted to such professions because they leave our real commitments formless and indistinct. But this very commitment to formlessness is now making Gearhart's slogan less meaningful. We live in a society that dares no longer to clearly define who or what a woman is, and it is thought wrong to define things as masculine or feminine or even to assert a "gender binary". In this scenario, the future is simply unsexed.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Stacey's feminism

I saw the following tweet this morning:

It was followed by this exchange:

Stacey seems to be pushing the idea that women should pursue their collective self-interests whilst men should also pursue women's collective self-interests. I replied:

And that's where feminism is at. There is an assumption, a remarkable assumption, that men in the past pursued their collective self-interests at the expense of women. So that it can now be justified as "equality" if the reverse is true and we have a society in which both sexes pursue the material self-interests of women.

This ideology helps to explain why there is so little gratitude for the sacrifices of men, past and present, within a feminist culture. How can there be gratitude when feminists assume that men did not make sacrifices, but instead acted out of a collective self-interest?

I think Stacey and other feminists are in for a shock. If feminists were to succeed in convincing people that the point of life is to pursue our self-interests, then relationships between men and women would degrade very quickly. Stacey is trying to circumvent this by requiring men to follow women's self-interests, rather than their own. But that just sets up an ideological tension. She is, in effect arguing:

1. The point in life is a pursuit of one's own material self-interests.
2. Men should pursue women's self-interests.

The second part of the argument contradicts the first. Therefore, it's not likely to hold in the longer term.

Stacey is wrong about Western culture. I've been reading Our Borders, Ourselves by the late Lawrence Auster. In the chapter "What is the West" Auster observes that "one of the characteristic features of Western culture is the drive toward self-transcendence". He elaborates by describing this as "the idea that man attains the true order of his being only by being united with a truth outside his own being." Auster complains that this aspect of Western culture has been undermined:

On the Left, the reduction of the human being to the power-seeking and resentful self not only denies the spirit but by doing so denies the balance of earthly and spiritual that is the essence of the West.

Young Western men have been drawn historically to family life for many reasons. Obviously the sex instinct played a part, as did a desire to have children and to fulfil masculine aspects of self related to being a father and husband. In the past, too, there was a social function to marriage, as sex roles were more differentiated than they are today. Men who wanted to preserve their own family and national traditions would also have sought out marriage.

But added to all this was the drive that Lawrence Auster describes. A man's love for a woman can, at its best, focus a man on a good outside of his own self that (hopefully) balances both the earthly (a flesh and blood woman/carnal desire) and the spiritual (the good of love/a transcendent sense of the feminine/mystery in the unity and drawing together and attraction of the masculine & feminine). This then can powerfully inspire a man toward sacrificial love and toward deeper loyalties and commitments.

But it only works if a man keeps the balance right (e.g. does not idolise & remains aware of human infirmities & works within the limits of human nature) and if women inspire this kind of love by embodying feminine virtue sufficiently.

And here's the thing. Whereas Western women were once raised toward habits of feminine virtue, they are now encouraged to rebel against it. Lawrence Auster writes about this in his book, in a section titled "The Rebellion against the Father":

In all its forms, the phenomenon we've been discussing represents the loss of authority in a father image. Symbolically, the father is the structuring source of our existence, whether we are speaking of male authority, of the law, of right and wrong, of our nation, of our heritage, of our civilization, of our biological nature, of our God. All these structuring principles of human life, in their different ways, are symbolically the father. The rebellion we've discussed is...a rebellion against the father. The belief that the universe is structured, intelligible, and fundamentally good, and that one can participate in this universe - this is the experience of having a father, which is the opposite of the experience of alienation that drives contemporary culture. (p.12)

We live in a culture shaped by intellectuals who have rebelled against the "structuring sources of our existence" and who prefer to stand, instead, within their own individual orbit, as beings defiantly organised by their own will and desires and choices alone.

There is an element of this mindset, it seems to me, in the aggressive way that some women promote abortion, or refigure their bodies with tattoos, or speak gracelessly or dress immodestly. The same kind of women will often hate male authority figures (commonly identified these days as old white men), but will believe at the same time in a diffuse, universal ethic of care. The latter is the go to version of morality because it is not a structuring principle of reality - it doesn't judge right or wrong and nor does it direct our loves and loyalties in any given direction (hence the apparent contradiction of leftist women hating conservative men with a passion whilst at the same time claiming universal benevolence).

Lawrence Auster wrote about the effect of feminism on men and women that,

All that's left to attract them to each other is their bodies, their bare utility, or their power, with the further result that...the love, sympathy, and friendship that used to prevail between men and women is reduced to jungle combat. (p.134)

You can see this in Stacey's feminism. Men exist for utility (serving women's purposes). What matters is a contest for power and material self-interest.

It's not difficult to predict that women will get far less out of men this way than under the old culture, in which men thought of marital love as one aspect of attaining "the true order of their being".

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Terf or trans?

Maya Forstater

Maya Forstater is a feminist who believes a man cannot be a woman. For uttering this thought on social media she was fired from her job. An employment tribunal in the UK upheld her dismissal. The judge found that holding to the idea that a man cannot be a woman violated the dignity of transsexuals and was "not worthy of respect in a democratic society".

Now, I'm sure that most traditionalists will be appalled by the case. The assertion of a basic aspect of reality is being declared by the courts to be "not worthy of respect" and therefore not a protected belief. It is a sign of our disordered times.

I'm sure, too, we can agree with Maya Forstater when she declares:

I struggle to express the shock and disbelief I feel at reading this judgment, which I think will be shared by the vast majority of people who are familiar with my case.

My belief … is that sex is a biological fact, and is immutable. There are two sexes, male and female. Men and boys are male. Women and girls are female. It is impossible to change sex. These were until very recently understood as basic facts of life by almost everyone.

… This judgment removes women’s rights and the right to freedom of belief and speech. It gives judicial licence for women and men who speak up for objective truth and clear debate to be subject to aggression, bullying, no-platforming and economic punishment.

So do traditionalists stand with Maya? Well, yes and no. I have no doubt we would support her in speaking up for objective truth when it comes to the issue of sex being an immutable, biological fact.

But things are not as straightforward as they might seem. After all, feminists like Maya Forstater also push their own version of unreality.

Both the "terfs" (feminists like Maya Forstater who believe that sex is immutable) and "trans" have a common philosophical starting point. Both believe that we should be subject only to what we ourselves determine as individuals.

But they have a different take on this liberal principle. For feminists, the unchosen fact of sex, of being male or female, exists as a biological reality, but it is to be made not to matter. Feminists achieve this by separating out sex and "gender". Feminists declare that our sex is real, but that masculinity and femininity are mere social constructs, based negatively on an attempt by men to oppress and exploit women. Therefore, the aim is to deconstruct the distinctions between men and women, so that there is something like an equality of sameness.

Transsexuals also separate out sex and "gender". But their take on this is different. They believe that gender is innate but is not connected to our biological sex. Therefore, I can identify as a woman even if I am, as a matter of human biology, a man.

If you look at this dispassionately, is the feminist idea any less radical or any less damaging than the transsexual one? Both are based on the idea that you can separate out sex and "gender". (There is an argument to be made that feminists, in separating the two, paved the way for transsexualism.)

Maya Forstater spoke at a feminist conference in May of this year and said:

I think the position that women exist as a sex is something like gravity. That's going to be held by people across the political spectrum. I think it's important to make the distinction between people who say men should be men and women should be women meaning that sex is innate and is linked to masculinity and all the gender stereotypes we are trying to fight against and the position that says that sex is innate and that gender is something that is imposed on us.

She declares that women exist as a sex but denies that there is any meaning to being a man or a woman as "gender is something that is imposed on us". Sex exists but is wholly irrelevant to who we are is the feminist mantra. This separating out of sex and "gender" is a radical denial of sexual reality, just as is the transsexual claim that we can be a woman if we are a man.

If we accept the feminist view we are forced to live a lie just as much as if we are forced to address a man as "ma'am". Let me give just one example of this. Every year at my workplace we have a lunch before the Christmas holidays where we farewell people who are leaving. By the end of this I am always struck by how different women are to men. When a woman steps up to give the farewell speech for another woman, she is already struggling. She starts to fan her eyes to try to stop the tears, she tries not to look at her friend who is leaving, her voice starts to fail her, she stops to try to compose herself, but fails and the tears begin. She is handed tissues, she starts again, now her colleague is also crying, then other women in the audience. One year the whole process had to be abandoned because of the emotional scenes. I just sit there in wonderment, not thinking badly of women (it's touching in a way), but struck by how different the interior life of a woman must be to that of a man.

But Maya Forstater wants me to think that no such differences exist and that what I am observing is just "gender" that is "imposed on us" and that has nothing to do with our existence as men and women.

I think we have to call out the lack of commonsense in both the feminist and the trans positions. And we have to recognise that both are engaged in a common project of separating out sex and "gender" - a project that we as traditionalists very firmly reject.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Ginsburg on feminism

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, once defined feminism as follows:

"Feminism … I think the simplest explanation, and one that captures the idea, is a song that Marlo Thomas sang, 'Free to be You and Me.' Free to be, if you were a girl—doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. Anything you want to be. And if you’re a boy, and you like teaching, you like nursing, you would like to have a doll, that’s OK too. That notion that we should each be free to develop our own talents, whatever they may be, and not be held back by artificial barriers—manmade barriers, certainly not heaven sent."

This definition conjures up a feeling that feminism is an expansive movement, one that is opening up new vistas of human experience to people, more opportunities, new fields of endeavour.

Maybe this is what some feminists intended or hoped for. I would argue, though, that in practice things have moved the opposite way - that there has been a narrowing of life for most people, a "thinning" of human experience, especially of those aspects of life that once provided a sense of meaning, identity and emotional support to individuals.

Why have things moved the wrong way? It is important to understand that the principle set out by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as a matter of logic, disallows as much as it permits. And what it disallows is, arguably, much more significant that what it grants.

What Ginsburg is arguing for is the autonomy principle, namely that what matters is a freedom to self-determine. Whatever is a barrier to us self-determining is thought of as a limitation, a cage, from which we have to be liberated.

We do not get to determine our sex. Therefore, according to the autonomy principle our sex should not influence what we might do or be in life. Ginsburg herself wrote:

The gender line helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage

And the Marlo Thomas song that she believes defines feminism has the stanzas:

They're closing down 'Girl Land'
Some say it's a shame
It used to be busy
Then nobody came

... And soon in the park
That was 'Girl Land' before
You'll do as you like
And be who you are.

There is an unfortunate logic at play here in which a girl can only "do as you like / And be who you are" by denying her own girlhood, something that you would think would be at the core of who she is and how she identifies.

It is the same when it comes to family life. To be autonomous means being independent. But a stable, successful marriage requires that men and women cultivate those aspects of their given nature, and those social roles, that make them truly interdependent.

Similarly, successful relationships require that individuals discipline themselves to a higher concept of behaviour, one that promotes high trust and one that places relationships within a larger concept of the good (of service to family, community, nation, God). But autonomy emphasises that we be free to act as we please, to act, as the song puts it, "as you like" without limitations. And so there is a shift to a low trust society with an unstable culture of family life.

There is also an assumption made by those who push autonomy that what matters most as a measure of life is our career. Career success is thought to override other aspects of life that were once thought significant, such as family. We are supposed to live primarily for one thing alone, for our job and for the values associated with it - for work values.

This is more than acceptable to those who have the most power in society. First, because it represents their own value set, but also because it focuses human life on patterns of work and consumption that benefits the plutocracy at the top of society.

If you think back just a few generations, an individual might have felt deeply connected in terms of purpose, social role, belonging, pride, self-worth, commitment, love and identity to the communities they were a part of (town, city, state, nation etc.); to family life and the goods associated with this; to their manhood or womanhood and the identity/values/roles attached to this; to long established ideals of moral behaviour (including to honour); and to the experience of what was "transcendent" in life (not self-determined, but a given part of existence) that connected us to the good, the beautiful and the true (in nature, in art, in religion, in love).

Can we trade all of this for a working life within a corporation or institution and claim that our lives have been expanded? That we have a wider circle of life? Or even that we are freer to be ourselves?

In my own experience, the answer is no. It feels instead as if life is being directed, over time, into a singular and narrower channel. This channel begins with the idea that what matters most is that we are self-determined, moves on to the related idea that our lives are then measured by self-achievement within the market place, which then means that we ideally cultivate "executive focus" skills as a means to this success, which then means that our lives are increasingly regulated by the needs and demands of the corporations or institutions we work for.

I am not entirely against this aspect of life. The pressures of work can help us, for instance, to achieve a higher level of self-governance and therefore build character. My concern is that there is little to delimit it, to provide boundaries to prevent it entirely dominating the culture we inhabit.

Which brings me to a further problem with Ruth Bader Ginsburg's approach to expanding life. According to her, the aim is to remove limits or barriers, as this will then give greater opportunity. But limits or barriers are not always a bad thing. They can protect. They can provide a delineated space within which certain aspects of life can be safely cultivated. They can demarcate, i.e. mark out spaces within which the variety of life can be maintained.

If we really wanted to maximise "self-determination" the smart thing would be to establish, as a community, an understanding of a common good, i.e. of what matters most in our individual lives within a community and then to act to secure this common good. This would give us a much greater control over the course of our lives.

As things stand now, our lives are being radically shaped by forces that we feel are alien to us: by powerful interests in society, by distant government, by a media we have no control over, and by a political philosophy which promises freedom from limitation, but which fails to delimit or protect or uphold, and which therefore places no barriers to the ever expanding dominance of work and consumption as the major source of values in modern life.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

A tale of two women

This is a story of two young attractive women. Their lives have gone in very different directions because they have adopted such different life philosophies.

The first woman is Chidera Eggerue. She is of Nigerian descent and lives in the UK. Here is one of her recent tweets:

As you can see, Chidera has bought into a left liberal world view. She believes that the reason we don't have freedom and equality is that there is a power structure ("patriarchy") which only exists because one group of people, men, wanted to exploit another group, women.

This left-liberal belief goes back a long way. The power structure identified as being responsible for the world's ills changes over time. It was once thought to be the aristocratic order, then the bourgeois one, and is now a combination of whiteness and maleness. I've written about its earlier forms here.

What I'd briefly like to point out is one of the consequences of believing in "patriarchy theory". If you are a woman and you believe that throughout human history men have organised to exploit you, then what will you think about men, marriage and relationships? Inevitably, at least some of the women holding these ideas are going to lose a sense of warm, positive regard for men.

Chidera Eggerue

It's therefore not surprising that Chidera has become an advocate for the single life. She has written a book titled What A Time To Be Alone which has the following blurb:

In What A Time To Be Alone, The Slumflower [Chidera] will be your life guru, confidante and best friend. She’ll show you that being alone is not just okay: it’s just about the best freaking thing that’s ever happened to you.

Unsurprisingly the book also has the basic liberal message that what matters is our autonomy - our freedom to be self-determining individuals. A review of the book describes it as having:

a message of self-determination outlining that any woman can be who she wants to be

The second woman, Caitlin Huber, lives in the American Midwest. Her life philosophy is very different to Chidera's. She is a Christian with a more traditional outlook of cultivating feminine character.

Caitlin Huber

In her description of how she tries to live her faith she includes this:

4. Guarding My Mind & Spirit

I actively try to guard my mind and spirit from negative influences: this may sound a little "woo-woo" but hear me out. Scripture calls us to think about things that are "lovely and noble."

And in a post on cultivating feminine character:

A strong and beautiful character does not happen overnight however; it must be nurtured over a lifetime. As we nurture our character, we can lean into our naturally feminine traits and instincts to further cultivate femininity.

...We instinctively have the ability to nurture as women, but that does not mean a strong character will not help us nurture BETTER. In fact, a character rich in the virtues of discipline, kindness, faithfulness, and loyalty will allow us to nurture more effectively than one lacking in character altogether.

...The character is what we can fall back on when times are tough. Character helps us get through tough situations and moral conundrums. Good character built upon solid morals helps us make life-giving decisions so that we can live a stable, and positive life, fit and ready to nurture those around us and ourselves.

Character is different than your "Heart"

I see a ton of Women's ministries focused on our "hearts." We try to nurture our hearts, listen to our hearts, follow our hearts, and speak from the heart.

This advice has good intentions, but part of the problem is that hearts are wishy-washy. They are prone to emotional ups and downs, frivolous desires, constant confusion, and weakness. The heart should be relied upon sometimes in life, but I think that if you are going to put a ton of energy into nurturing anything in your life, let it be your character.

...Character can be created, nurtured, and forged through adversity, pain, and discipline. Through choosing the right way, the moral way, and the strong way, we will be able to forge strong character, and in turn, live effective, successful, and beautiful lives.

What can we say about this philosophy? First, it is not premised on a sense of being wronged by men. Therefore it is not surprising that Caitlin is married and looking forward to having children. Her tweets often describe the simple satisfactions of a happy domestic life:

Second, Caitlin's philosophy is a good example of what we might return to if we could only discard the influence of liberalism on our culture. Not being ruled by a liberal philosophy, Caitlin can freely accept that she has a distinct nature as a woman, one that has important virtues attached to it, that a woman will rightly seek to cultivate. She is also free to live by the standards that were once so much a part of the Western tradition, including orienting herself to the more noble aspects of character, as well as to what is lovely within womanhood.

Chidera's liberalism is a civilisational dead-end. It leads logically to solo development, rather than to family formation. It drives a wedge between men and women. It does not recognise the goods of personal character as this would limit choice - it emphasises instead that we be non-judgemental, even toward ourselves ("self-acceptance"). It preaches empowerment, but this only really means getting to follow any impulse or desire, no matter what it is.

Liberalism is unfortunately very deeply embedded in the minds of many Western men. It's not an easy thing to purge from our society. I would appeal, though, to any young men reading this to consider what is at stake, not just for the West, but for their own personal lives. If we were to jettison liberalism, and encourage women to cultivate feminine character, would we not have a better chance at living fulfilling personal lives, as husbands and fathers within a family?

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Power without justice

I've written a lot on feminism at this site, mostly about the connection between feminism and the liberal project of maximising individual autonomy.

I happen to know a few high profile feminists and this has given me some insight into the way they think. I've come increasingly to believe that gender politics is used by these women not for the purposes of securing their vision of justice (maximum autonomy for women) but simply for competitive advantage against men in securing the markers of a successful upper middle-class lifestyle, such as professional status, income and cultural/political influence in society.

It's a dreary and demoralising vision of society, one in which men and women are divided into opposing social classes, competing eternally against each other for material things.

Which brings me to a review by Laura Kipnis in The Atlantic of a new feminist book. Laura Kipnis describes the vision of society outlined in this book in similar terms to what I set out above:

One of the unfunny witticisms going around during Hillary Clinton’s first presidential run was that she’d never get elected, because she reminded men of their first wife. When a male friend relayed the update during her second run—no, she didn’t remind men of their first wife; she reminded them of their first wife’s divorce lawyer—I recall barking with laughter. The joke distilled all the male anxieties of the moment: Something was being taken away from them, their balls were in a vise, pissed-off women wanted men’s stuff and were going to be ruthless about trying to get it.

I recalled this joke while reading Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, which shares what might be called a divorce-court view of the gender situation in America. Men and women are on opposing sides, and women will succeed only by quashing men and seizing the spoils: the big jobs, the political offices, and the moral high ground.

The rest of the review is by now very familiar. Social enemy no.1 is the white male:

The primary target for this accumulated rage is, of course, men—white men

But white women are also coming under attack:

83 percent of Democratic women were furious at the news at least once a day. But the oppositional fury isn’t exactly tidy, Traister acknowledges. For many of the women of color whom she quotes, the anger is equally directed at white women.

Rebecca Traister blames "white heterosexual marriage" for the continuing loyalty between white men and women:

the real culprit behind his election, as Traister sees it, is white heterosexual marriage. Analyses of 2016 voting patterns reveal a stark partisan divide between married and never-married white women

Imagine reaching a state of mind in which loyalty between a husband and wife is condemned as undermining the more perfect division of the sexes into hostile, competing social classes.

Patrick Deneen, in his book Why Liberalism Failed, writes about how liberalism, even in its earliest forms, preferred to base itself on "the low" (e.g. harnessing self-interest) rather than aspirations to the high (such as appeals to a common good). He notes of current social problems that,

These maladies include the corrosive social and civic effects of self-interest - a disease that arises from the cure of overcoming the ancient reliance upon virtue. Not only is this malady increasingly manifest in all social interactions and institutions, but it infiltrates liberal politics. Undermining any appeal to a common good, it induces a zero-sum mentality that becomes nationalized polarization for a citizenry that is increasingly driven by private and largely material concerns.

Instead of men and women working together selflessly for a common good (e.g. the family, the nation), and thereby creating stability, trust and improving social standards, the left is pushing a vision of a "nationalized polarization" with men and women standing against each other in competition for power and social resources.

It strikes me as being so bleak a vision of society that it is likely ultimately to bring about a collapse rather than an enduring social order.

Mistaken at its core

A reader sent in this criticism of feminism made by a rabbi. I think it's well argued.

“Feminism,” the rabbi said, “like other associated liberal concepts, is mistaken at its core. Feminism sees people solely as individuals, that they are not members of a family, of a nation, or even of society at large. Feminists are not good neighbors. They prefer loose personal connections so they can focus on themselves. This is not appropriate human behavior, which should involve concern for those around you. It’s no wonder that feminism has destroyed families, with both men and women as its casualties.

“People are not meant to live in isolation; they are a part of something. All of halacha (Torah law) regarding families does not relate to individual men or women but to a formula for healthy family life, which automatically includes how life is best lived by men and women — as husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. Feminism promotes external individual achievements, such as female army service, without much interest in family life.

“Due to the feminist movement, many men are more reluctant today to form connections with women. They feel that they are looked upon with suspicion and that they need to prove their innocence. They feel that they are constantly being scrutinized under the watchful eye of the feminist police."

A rich vein of insight into the liberal mind

Lisa Wade is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Occidental University in the United States. She is a leftist feminist who worries about the direction of America under President Trump. Her article on this is interesting, not only for the radical conclusions it draws but also for its insight into the liberal mind.

Before I begin on her article, though, I thought it useful to point out the way the Lisa Wade defines feminism. I have previously argued that feminism is liberalism applied to the lives of women. Lisa Wade agrees:

When prompted to define feminism, Wade answered that she considers feminism to be “the desire that our choices in life and feelings about ourselves are dictated by who we are, not our sex.”

“I just want everyone to be themselves,” she said.

Liberals have this worldview in which being a man or a woman is not being ourselves, because these are predetermined qualities and the liberal individual is supposed to be an autonomous, self-determining individual. So being a man or a woman is not supposed to matter. As masculinity and femininity imply that we are influenced in who we are by our sex, they too are thought of negatively as "prisons" or "limitations" that not only curtail our freedom, but in the leftist view have an even more sinister role of enforcing privilege and inequality.

Which brings us to Lisa Wade's article. She begins by noting that liberals have a faith in an arc of moral progress:

The first thing that must go is the belief among progressives that we are on some fateful journey to a better place. We know that America’s grand democratic vision of “all men are created equal” didn’t initially include all men, or any women, and that we have never granted the promised equality. Yet many of us still hold fast to the idea that America is a great nation, managing the cognitive dissonance by envisioning the country as on a journey toward perfection. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, echoing the abolitionist Theodore Parker, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

It is important to take this in. It is an example of how Western intellectuals "immanentize the eschaton." Rather than seeing history as recording the rise and fall of civilisations, with each civilisation struggling to avoid its decline, the leftist/liberal believes that he is participating in and helping humanity progress towards its ultimate end point of moral perfection. He believes that such a thing is possible and that it gives meaning to history and to those pushing the way forward to "social justice." This helps to explain the sometimes cult like nature of Western liberalism, in which individuals cling to a set of beliefs that to an ordinary observer would seem self-destructive.

But here's the catch. This faith in progress depends on society heading ever further along liberal lines toward the bringing down of men and of whites as "privileged" classes. But the success of President Trump shows that progress is not running in the direction it is supposed to. Therefore, thinks Lisa Wade, the older half measures adopted by the progressive left have to be jettisoned, as they aren't powerful enough to keep the revolution on track.

According to Lisa Wade, the liberal left once thought it sufficient, to achieve equality, for men to adopt their feminine half and women their masculine half:

Implicit in the metaphor is the idea that we will have reached gender equality when men and women alike embrace both halves of their humanity: masculinity and femininity. As a nation, Hochschild argued, we are halfway there. To fully revolutionize gender relations, we just need to get moving again.

Thirty years is a long life for a metaphor, and it’s still here because it’s been useful and descriptive, reflecting a lived reality. But we are in Trump’s America now. The metaphor of the stalled revolution, however useful it has been, posits a linear past and future. It assumes that stall is equivalent to stasis: that we are still in the driver’s seat, the path is still there, and we’re still aiming at something good. The metaphor doesn’t allow for the possibility that the world has shifted around us, setting us on a path that we may no longer want to be on. It certainly doesn’t contain the prospect that we are—that we have been—moving toward something terrible.

Lisa Wade senses (hopefully correctly) that the revolution has not just stalled, but that there is a reaction taking place in society. So the assault on the privileged class, namely males, can't any longer be anything so "soft" as "embrace your feminine half and become androgynous." No, it has to be something sterner, it has to be a total rejection of and attack on masculinity in its entirety:

The quaint balance of masculinity and femininity that the metaphor promised is no longer desirable, if it ever was. Instead of advocating that women compete with men on masculine terms and men mix in just enough femininity to distance themselves from the most toxic versions of masculinity, we need to start being honest about what being a man has come to mean. Trump’s rise has made it terrifyingly clear that his toxic version is not at all peripheral to 21st-century modern masculinity. It is central. It is authoritarian. And it is lethal.

If we’re going to survive both President Trump and the kind of people he has emboldened, we need to attack masculinity directly. I don’t mean that we should recuperate masculinity—that is, press men to identify with a kinder, gentler version of it—I mean that we should reject the idea that men have a psychic need to distinguish themselves from women...

In fact, we should be as suspicious of males who strongly identify as men as we are of white people who strongly identify as white...

We are here in Trump’s America in part because we have been too delicate in our treatment of dangerous ideas. The problem is not toxic masculinity; it’s that masculinity is toxic...It’s simply not compatible with liberty and justice for all.

If we are going to finish the gender revolution, then, we need to call masculinity out as a hazardous ideology and denounce anyone who chooses to identify with it.

People wonder why the West has gone the way it has. I would point out that one reason is that our intellectual class has adopted the worldview set out here by Lisa Wade. She isn't hiding anything, she has laid it all out for us.

It is not easy for an intellectual to give up what is effectively a quasi-religion. I would hope, though, that as the decline becomes ever more obvious that an increasing number of Western intellectuals will query the idea that liberalism is a philosophy that leads to social or moral progress.

What do Swedish Youth policies really tell us?

You may have seen reports that the Liberal Youth of Sweden has called for incest and necrophilia to be legalised:

'We don't like morality laws in general, and this legislation is not protecting anyone right now,' Cecilia Johnsson, Liberal Youth chairperson in Stockholm told Aftonbladet.

'We are a youth wing and one of our tasks is to think one step further.'

And this is how liberalism functions. If you believe that there is nothing inherently good, except for the freedom to choose for yourself, then you will seek to extend this freedom to choose as far as you can. One generation will take it so far, then the next one will push the boundaries further and so on.

Remember, the only real sin in liberalism is not respecting other people's rights to choose likewise. So there is no offence for a liberal if two people choose to commit incest, or if someone consents before they die to permit themselves to be used for necrophilia.

I took a look at the website of the Liberal Youth of Sweden and their policies are what you might expect of a right-liberal party (i.e. a party which thinks of market freedoms as particularly important). In other words, the Liberal Youth of Sweden are consistent and principled in following a liberal philosophy. Here are some of their policies:

1. Abolish the Swedish monarchy. Why? Because it is something that people are born into rather than choosing for themselves.

The office of the Swedish head of state is inherited - it is an old tradition and undemocratic, contrary to fundamental liberal values...Who is Swedish head of state should not be decided by who happens to be born into it...

2. Impose feminism. Remember, there are no values for liberals except the freedom to self-define and self-create who we are. We don't get to choose whether we are male or female, therefore our sex becomes an oppressive restriction on what we might choose to become.

[We are] feminist youth, because we see that today there are strong norms in society that dictate how men and women should be. We have different expectations of a person depending on what they have between their legs, and we treat people differently depending on the sex they have. This separation between men and women leads to discrimination and the lack of freedom for the individual and makes it harder for the individual to live the life he or she wants, for fear of condemnation from the environment. A person's value is not in their sex, and therefore we want to actively combat the gender roles and norms that make it difficult for people to realize themselves and restricts their options.

3. Transsexualism. The pattern here is easy to identify. It is about unconstrained choice to self-define or self-determine:

People should have the right to choose what sex they want to belong to. Which biological sex you are born should not play any role for which gender you want to belong to later in life.

4. Open borders. The policy fits the principle. If the only value is a freedom to choose, then people should be free to move to any country they want to:

In a liberal world, everyone has the right to live where they want. No state has the right to keep people in a country - or to deny them to get into another. Man's freedom of movement and his right to move stands above all else. Therefore, we in the Liberal Youth support free immigration. Freedom of emigration and immigration is a matter of course for all the world's citizens. The EU must abolish the barriers for people to be able to come to the European Union. Labour immigration should be encouraged by abolishing work permits and visa requirements.

Note: This policy could easily be rejected pragmatically, on the grounds that it would be unmanageable. There are some voices in Europe expressing this view. The problem is that you also then get the Merkels who claim that the policy actually can be managed. It is better to oppose the policy in principle, by challenging the liberal idea that a freedom to choose "stands above all else". The principled opposition is to remind liberals that issues of identity, culture and kinship are core aspects of how we fully develop our personhood and that longstanding, distinct national cultures have a value in themselves (as unique expressions of the human soul) and draw out the love and commitment of those who belong to these communities.

5. Marriage. Can't fault these guys for sticking to principle. They want any number of people of any sex to be able to marry. So a man could marry two other men. Or a woman three other women. Why not, if the only thing of value in human life is the act of autonomous choice?

The state should not interfere with the sex of the person you want to marry ... [We] also believe that the state should ignore how many people you want to marry. There is a strong norm in today's society that makes people who choose to love and have a relationship with several people at the same time be viewed with great skepticism. But who or what you want to be with is your business and no state should prevent it.

The Liberal Youth is a right-liberal party so there are also various policies about deregulating the market.

What do we draw from all this? I would suggest the following:

a) It is not a good idea to oppose these policies on the basis that they "go too far." This might well be people's instinctive response, but the problem is that as long as the underlying principle is accepted, then the policies are principled and over time people will get used to them. What "goes too far" today will be the norm for the next generation.

b) You don't need conspiracy theories to figure out what has happened in the West. Yes, the way things get organised and financed is sometimes done clandestinely by various powerful forces. But the West has shifted in line with the dominant political philosophy. The first step in changing the direction of society is to promote better political philosophies for our political class to follow.

c) The Liberal Youth is actually a right-wing party. It is a free market party of the right. So the point is not simply to reject the left in favour of the right. The more important thing is to break with liberalism, whether of the left-wing or right-wing varieties.

d) Breaking with liberalism means breaking with the idea that the only thing of value is a freedom to autonomously self-define or self-determine. Because we have been caught within a liberal politics for so long, it can be difficult at first to articulate the alternatives to the liberal idea, but the alternatives are certainly there. Is it really true, for instance, that there is nothing of value in the predetermined manhood or womanhood that we are born into? Does this manhood really not contribute in any way to a man's sense of his own personhood? Liberal claims are in many cases built on sand, they just need to be effectively challenged.

e) If left unchecked, liberalism will continue to develop along logical lines toward increasingly radical policies. There is no stopping point.

f) Currently, nearly all of the mainstream institutions of society follow the liberal philosophy. We cannot rely on these institutions to act for the good whilst we ourselves sit back and watch.

g) Nor can we somehow dramatically and suddenly force change. It is a matter of perseveringly building up an alternative politics, especially one that is articulated in a sophisticated enough way to attract younger members of the Western political class.

Camille vs Hanna

In my last post I wrote about the American feminist Hanna Rosin's declaration that men are now obsolete.

But men have an unlikely defender: the lesbian academic Camille Paglia. She's written a column of her own in Time magazine in which she complains that feminism has been unjustly hostile to men:

A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism.

And that feminism has denied sex distinctions between men and women:

Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology.

The hostility to men and the suppression of sex distinctions does not make for a happy personal life for women:

When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as women.

Again, it's noteworthy that it takes a lesbian academic to remind us of this aspect of heterosexuality. Men have a stronger sense of themselves as men when in the presence of truly feminine women; women have a more profound sense of themselves as women when in the presence of strongly masculine men. Therefore, in attacking masculinity women are damaging something that they need for themselves.

Camille Paglia makes another interesting point, namely that many feminists, despite claiming to be leftists, end up seeing participation in the market as the highest end in life. They do not escape the "economism" of the right:

What is troubling in too many books and articles by feminist journalists in the U.S. is, despite their putative leftism, an implicit privileging of bourgeois values and culture. The particular focused, clerical and managerial skills of the upper-middle-class elite are presented as the highest desideratum, the ultimate evolutionary point of humanity.

Camille Paglia then reminds feminist triumphalists, who believe that men are done for, that civilisations rise and fall, and that in a declining civilisation women will inevitably need the support of men. Even now, women still rely on men to keep the wheels turning:

Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments...The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role — but women were not its author.

Suzanne Moore: the thrill of anger

Yesterday I reported on a controversial newspaper column by English feminist Julie Burchill. Julie Burchill attacked transsexuals but went down in flames (the Guardian/Observer even went to the lengths of deleting her column).

But what originally sparked the whole feminist vs transsexual argument? It was a column by another feminist, Suzanne Moore. And this column is also of some interest. It's a piece in praise of female anger. And the bit that upset the transsexuals was this:

We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual.
 

What interests me isn't the reference to transsexuals, it's the complaint of not being happy or loved properly. It's not something that feminists can seek redress for from the state. It's not something that translates easily into a political crusade. It's something that could only be fixed by feminists changing things about themselves and how they relate to others.

But Suzanne Moore isn't going to change. She is going to continue to promote female anger:

Why are we not telling our inbred overlords that we are not as nice as we look? Partly because we are afraid of our own anger. It’s not a pretty sight. Seeing red and letting go is, for many women, a dangerous activity. We are only ever a few HRT pills away from being a monstrous regiment. Women’s rage is also never seen as what we say it is actually about. It is inchoate, unreadable and uncontrollable. It is, of course, also totally thrilling.
 

She recognises that feminism has disrupted family life, admits that this isn't "easy", but also sees it positively as a challenge to capitalism:

While some kinds of feminism meld well with the logic of late capitalism, others challenge it. The stark facts are as follows. Wherever women become educated, they have fewer children and when they become financially independent, the model of monogamous marriage breaks down. Freedom is neither easy or easily defined.

She's right that women's financial independence is one factor in making family life more unstable (divorce levels rise with each rise in a wife's income relative to her husband's and it's more difficult for women to find professional peers to marry the more that women dominate the professions). Her response is that freedom "isn't easy". But where does that leave those women who are angry at "not being loved properly"?

Then she writes this:

I see my daughters’ generation written off as pretty much everything I took for granted is being systematically stripped away from them. Jobs, housing, free education. The expectation that these young women would have the same choice or more even than their mothers is being shattered. They have less. This is why so many of us are seeing red.
 

Talk about batting for team woman. What if she had a son? (She has three daughters by three different fathers.) Would she really not care about her son's interests? Would she continue to present all men as being born-to-rule Old Etonians as she does in her column?

But it's not so much men in general that Suzanne Moore sees as the enemy. Specifically it is white men. She complains, for instance, that "The ideas of quotas is still abhorrent to those born to rule: white men." This is interesting as there are now so few white males going to university in the UK that there is talk of introducing quotas to get more rather than less white men on campus.

It's the same old shtick. An irresponsible albeit privileged white feminist wants to portray white men as a powerful clique attacking the poor and marginalised in society.

It's such a long distance away from the kind of relations between men and women that you would need to uphold a civilisation. That's why it's pointless for Suzanne Moore to complain that her daughters' generation has fewer choices than her own. How could it possibly be otherwise? If you trash the family, if you trash the men of your own nation, then how can you possibly expect the swing of society to be onward and upward?

One final thought: part of her shtick is to shift blame for what is happening in society. The truth is that we live in a feminist society and have been for decades. So if things are getting worse then feminists ought to be a bit self-critical. Suzanne Moore shields herself from this thought, though, by pretending that we are living in "late capitalist" society or a society run by a powerful and malevolent clique of white men.

Someone ought to introduce Suzanne Moore to Hanna Rosin. Hanna Rosin is a feminist who takes a completely different line, namely that we have reached a point at which we can talk about "the end of men". Women are the dominant sex in a postindustrial society, asserts Hanna Rosin. The problem is to find something for men to usefully do. Far from society being ruled by a malevolent clique of enemy white men, men have been made redundant by modern society and are more to be pitied.

I don't buy either of these narratives, but I find it curious that Suzanne Moore should be sticking with the "white men born to rule enemies" mantra whilst Hanna Rosin believes we are goners and losers.

The feminist fight is....

I've often asserted that feminism is liberalism applied to the lives of women. That means that feminism is the attempt to make women autonomous (self-determining, independent, self-defining).

That's not a great secret. Over the years of writing this blog, I've collected any number of examples of feminists claiming to be interested primarily in female autonomy. And I've got another one to add to the list.

The former First Lady of France, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, made the news recently when she rejected the label of "active feminist":

I'm not at all an active feminist. On the contrary, I'm a bourgeois. I love family life, I love doing the same thing every day.

This led to criticisms from feminists, including a Salon writer, Mary Elizabeth Williams, who defended feminism as being a fight for female autonomy:

you should know that “the fight” is just being an autonomous person in the world.

Ross Douthat also raised the issue of feminism and autonomy in a recent column. Douthat believes (as I do) that below replacement levels of fertility are a problem for advanced societies. But he has met resistance in raising the issue with leftist audiences. This is his appeal to the feminists in his audience:

Likewise for readers who regard any talk about the moral weight of reproductive choices as a subtle attempt to reimpose the patriarchy: Can it really be that having achieved so much independence and autonomy and professional success, today’s Western women have no moral interest in seeing that as many women are born into the possibility of similar opportunities tomorrow?

Douthat is no doubt to the right of much of his audience but he still seems to agree with feminists that the pursuit of autonomy is the higher aim for women in Western societies.

So what's wrong with making autonomy the higher aim?

If what matters is that we are self-determining, then predetermined aspects of life will seem like negative impediments to be overcome. And this includes our sex, our ethny and the traditional family, all of which are inherited in some way rather than self-created. So we lose much when we make autonomy the overriding good.

And how do we maximise autonomy? We are most autonomous when we live a single person lifestyle. That's why Douthat's appeal is unlikely to be effective. If what matters to women is independence, autonomy and professional success then why marry and have children? Marrying and having children decreases independence and autonomy (and in some cases professional success). A liberal society which is focused on maximising autonomy will gradually trend toward more people living alone (as do 50% of Swedes).

Finally, the emphasis on autonomy shouldn't be accepted by those who believe that there are objective goods for humans to be oriented toward. Autonomy is an option for those who don't believe that such goods exist and who opt to believe instead that value or meaning is created through the assertion of human will. If you believe that the only value that exists is the act of self-determining choice, then it won't matter so much what people choose or what they are oriented toward, but rather that they are "equally free" to self-determine.

Getting Girls wrong

National Review Online is supposed to represent the conservative opposition in the U.S. But I hardly ever read it and when I do visit I'm inevitably disappointed.

I had a look at it this morning and read a review by Betsy Woodruff of a new HBO TV series called Girls. Betsy doesn't mince words when reviewing the show:

it’s impossible to tell whether Girls is reflecting or shaping culture. But given how popular the show is and how much scrutiny it has drawn, it’s worth speculating as to which is the case. And for the sake of Western civilization, let’s hope it’s the former. That’s because if Dunham’s vision is prophetic — if it’s helping to forward a larger cultural shift, rather than just depicting a self-contained subgroup — then I think it’s safe to say it’s all over for us.

So there's something in the show that is simply incompatible with civilisation - it's that bad. But what?

At first it seems as if Betsy is going to make a conservative criticism of the show. She notes that the characters are uninterested in morality and devoid of responsibility. And the characters really are living morally bleak lives. In an early episode one of the characters finds out she is pregnant, her friends gather at the abortion clinic but she misses the appointment because she's hooking up with a man at a bar. In another scene from the show the lead character is told she has HPV but a friend reassures her by noting that "all adventurous women have HPV".

But it turns out that Betsy is quite happy with the modern girl lifestyle. What worries her is not what the girls are doing but that they're not proud enough to finance it for themselves. It's that right-liberal versus left-liberal argument again. Both accept that the goal is to be an autonomous agent. For right-liberals like Betsy this means being self-reliant and not depending on the state. For left-liberals it means the state empowering people to live autonomously. Betsy seems to believe that civilisation depends on people taking the right-liberal option and financing their own abortions and contraception rather than expecting the government to subsidise the cost.

Let me give some examples, starting with the worst of the lot. Here is Betsy criticising Girls by comparing its "new vision of women" unfavourably with the vision pursued by second wave feminists:

Second-wave feminists lionized the independent woman who paid her own rent and busted through glass ceilings and ran for Congress. Being totally self-sufficient was the goal. The idea was that women didn’t need men, whether those men were their fathers or husbands or boyfriends or presidents. By contrast, Dunham’s new vision of women as lady parts with ballots is infantilizing and regressive.

What does that paragraph tell you about National Review Online? To me that's a radically liberal view of the world. The aim is to be totally self-sufficient (autonomous) even to the point of not needing fathers or husbands or boyfriends. Betsy thinks that this is an adult and progressive approach to life, because it makes women self-reliant and independent. A left-liberal would simply reply that if justice means women not needing men, then the state can promote justice by increasing the number of women not needing men. Otherwise some privileged women will live a fully human life (independent of men) and others will miss out - an offence against human equality.

And here is Betsy complaining that Girls is not feminist enough:

You’d think the feminist elevation of agency would result in women who take pride in being responsible for their own bodies. You’d hope that telling women that they can do whatever they want would imply that they’re responsible for what they do. You’d think serious feminists would argue that true empowerment is something you lay claim to, not something the federal government dispenses in all its benevolence. But for Dunham, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Again, there is no in principle disagreement with the philosophy of modernity here. Betsy is just upset with the idea that the left wants women to rely on the state in pursuit of their modern girl lifestyles. If they paid for it themselves, she'd be happy with it.

She makes the same criticism here:

In fact, for all practical purposes, the patriarchy no longer decides whom American women can sleep with and when. That’s great. But if you don’t want men in Washington telling you how to use your sexuality, you shouldn’t expect them to subsidize it. But Dunham seems to actually believe they should. Dunham makes tons of money, and I’m quite confident she can afford to pay for her own birth control. But she doesn’t seem to take pride in that...

Again, she has no problems with the decline of traditional morality - she thinks it's "great" that women can be promiscuous and can use their sexuality for whatever purpose they want. Betsy seems to be unconscious of the possibility that not all choices are the same when it comes to sexuality: that some choices might be elevating and others degrading; that some choices might prioritise love and a commitment to family whilst others might impair the ability to pair bond; and that some choices present risks to health and well-being.

The show itself is possibly a little wiser than Betsy in this regard. Girls does at least portray the more negative consequences of the sexual revolution. It doesn't pretend that if only people paid for their own contraception all would be well.

The thing is, I don't think we need to fear Girls. The lifestyle depicted in the show is so far gone that anyone who adopts it is simply lost to us. Girls portrays left-liberalism in such deep decay that it presents us with the opportunity to demonstrate something much better.

Which is why I fear Betsy a lot more. We are not showing the better alternative if the most right-wing criticism we permit ourselves is to complain about people not self-funding their modernist lifestyles. The opposition to left-liberal decay is, at the moment, a sham and that is what is really holding back a necessary response to it.

W.L. George - when a male feminist gets it wrong

We sometimes forget that feminism is now a very old political movement. There were feminist writers in the early 1800s, but it seems to have been picked up at an institutional level by about the 1860s. The first wave reached a peak of radicalism in the years before WWI.

One of the male feminists of this radical pre-War period was an English writer by the name of W.L. George. He wrote a tract called Feminist Intentions which I want to look at. George began his piece as follows:

The Feminist propaganda...rests upon a revolutionary biological principle. Substantially, the Feminists argue that there are no men and that there are no women; there are only sexual majorities. To put the matter less obscurely, the Feminists base themselves on Weininger's theory, according to which the male principle may be found in woman, and the female principle in man. It follows that they recognize no masculine or feminine "spheres", and that they propose to identify absolutely the conditions of the sexes.

George recognises that the feminist programme is a revolutionary one in that it aims to overturn the principle of two distinct sexes, male and female. Sex is to be made not to matter, in keeping with the liberal principle that what is predetermined is an impediment to individual autonomy.

George's second paragraph is also worth reading:

Now there are two kinds of people who labor under illusions as regards the Feminist movement, its opponents and its supporters: both sides tend to limit the area of its influence; in few cases does either realize the movement as revolutionary. The methods are to have revolutionary results, are destined to be revolutionary; as a convinced but cautious Feminist, I do not think it honest or advisable to conceal this fact. I have myself been charged by a very well-known English author (whose name I may not give, as the charge was contained in a private letter) with having "let the cat out of the bag" in my little book, Woman and To-morrow. Well, I do not think it right that the cat should be kept in the bag. Feminists should not want to triumph by fraud. As promoters of a sex war, they should not hesitate to declare it, and I have little sympathy with the pretenses of those who contend that one may alter everything while leaving everything unaltered.

That last sentence is a good insight. Are there not many Westerners who sign on to a radical liberalism without recognising what they are bringing down in the process?

And George is not entirely faultless here either. He expected that feminism would "strengthen the race"; and that it would improve the character of both men and women. I wonder what he would say if he could travel forward in time and witness ladette behaviour, or the thugging up of men, or the declining fortunes of the Western family and the Western peoples:

Therein lies the mental revolution: while the Suffragists are content to attain immediate ends, the Feminists are aiming at ultimate ends. They contend that it is unhealthy for the race that man should not recognize woman as his equal; that this makes him intolerant, brutal, selfish, and sentimentally insincere. They believe likewise that the race suffers because women do not look upon men as their peers; that this makes them servile, untruthful, deceitful, narrow, and in every sense inferior.

Similarly, George thought that if traditional marriage were abolished that it would liberate men and women to have unions based on love alone - he didn't foresee the coarsening of relationships and the instability of family life that would result:

Their grievances against the home...are closely connected with the marriage question, for they believe that the desire of man to have a housekeeper, of woman to have a protector, deeply influence the complexion of unions which they would base exclusively upon love, and it follows that they do not accept as effective marriage any union where the attitudes of love do not exist.

Next comes an argument that time has proven to be utterly wrong. George says that the feminists of his time wanted women to be economically independent, in part, because it would then allow women to choose the best men as mates and that this would have a eugenic effect - which would then benefit the race:

Under Feminist rule, women will be able to select, because they will be able to sweep out of their minds the monetary consideration; therefore they will love better, and unless they love, they will not marry at all. It is therefore probable that they will raise the standard of masculine attractiveness by demanding physical and mental beauty in those whom they choose; that they will apply personal eugenics.

The men whom they do not choose will find themselves in exactly the same position as the old maids of modern times: that is to say, these men, if they are unwed, will be unwed because they have chosen to remain so, or because they were not sought in marriage. The eugenic characteristic appears, in that women will no longer consent to accept as husbands the old, the vicious, the unpleasant. They will tend to choose the finest of the species, and those likely to improve the race. As the Feminist revolution implies a social revolution, notably "proper work for proper pay", it follows that marriage will be easy, and that those women who wish to mate will not be compelled to wait indefinitely for the consummation of their loves. Incidentally, also, the Feminists point out that their proposals hold forth to men a far greater chance of happiness than they have had hitherto, for they will be sure that the women who select them do so because they love them, and not because they need to be supported.

Something like the opposite has happened. The emphasis on being independent and career focused has led many upper class women to delay family formation and then either to settle in a panic or else fail to reproduce; nor does it seem to be true that when women no longer need men to provide for them that they then select men of mental and physical beauty.

George next tells us that feminists want to loosen the marriage tie. However, they want the man to continue to pay even if the woman chooses to divorce as:

The rebels must accept situations such as the financial responsibility of man, while they struggle to make woman financially independent of man.

George then starts to dream of a utopian future:

Personally, I am inclined to believe that the ultimate aim of Feminism with regard to marriage is the practical suppression of marriage and the institution of free alliance. It may be that thus only can woman develop her own personality, but society itself must so greatly alter, do so very much more than equalize wages and provide work for all, that these ultimate ends seem very distant...

....in common with many Feminists I incline to place a good deal of reliance on the ennobling of the nature of the male.

George is claiming that all the sacrifices men make for women as husbands and fathers has the ultimate effect of suppressing a woman's personality. So why would a man make such sacrifices if the effect is a negative one?

And can it really be said that a feminist sexual revolution has ennobled the nature of the male? It's more likely that it is we who look back to George's era and notice a stronger culture of masculine nobility that what we have today.

George also noticed that some feminist women of his time wanted to lay claim to children as theirs alone, with the father having no rights:

One feature manifests itself, and that is a change of attitude in woman with regard to the child. Indications in modern novels and modern conversation are not wanting to show that a type of woman is arising who believes in a new kind of matriarchate, that is to say, in a state of society where man will not figure in the life of woman except as the father of her child. Two cases have come to my knowledge where English women have been prepared to contract alliances with men with whom they did not intend to pass their lives,--this because they desired a child. They consider that the child is the expression of the feminine personality, while after the child's birth, the husband becomes a mere excrescence. They believe that the "Wife" should die in childbirth, and the "Mother" rise from her ashes. There is nothing utopian about this point of view, if we agree that Feminists can so rearrange society as to provide every woman with an independent living...

George did not have a high opinion of the New Woman - the radical feminist women of his own time:

The "New Woman", as we know her to-day, a woman who is not so new as the woman who will be born of her, is a very unpleasant product; armed with a little knowledge, she tends to be dogmatic in her views and offensive in argument. She tends to hate men, and to look upon Feminism as a revenge; she adopts mannish ways, tends to shout, to contradict, to flout principles because they are principles; also she affects a contempt for marriage which is the natural result of her hatred of man.

But, like most revolutionaries, he thought this was a necessary transitory stage and that new social conditions would then create a more ideal type of woman. In his words:

The New Woman is like a freshly painted railing: whoever touches it will stain his hands, but the railing will dry in time.

George then floats another idea, which is that women should wear a uniform:

One tentative suggestion is being made, and that is a uniform for women.

He seems to have associated an interest in appearance with sexually distinct feminine women - something which contradicted the idea of making the sexes the same. Hence a uniform for women.

Finally, George finishes with this:

Thus and thus only, if man will readjust his views, expel vir and enthrone homo, can woman cease to appear before him as a rival and a foe, realize herself in her natural and predestined role, that of partner and mate.

That strikes a false note. For a man to expel vir (manliness) and enthrone homo (humanliness) is not a readjustment of his views - it is overthrowing his own sex and his distinct identity as a man. Here again is the radical insistence on abolishing sex distinctions.

And George "readjusts" the truth by claiming that women traditionally appeared to men as rivals and foes, and only by getting with the feminist programme can women finally become partners and mates. The traditional understanding was not that men and women were foes but that they had interdependent and complementary roles; it is feminism which has institutionalised the idea that men and women are competing for power in the cause of maximising an individualistic autonomy.

One thing I hope this post has demonstrated conclusively is that feminism did not begin with Germaine Greer, nor even with Simone de Beauvoir. It existed in a radical form long before these women arrived on the scene. And the aim has been much the same, namely to make sex distinctions not matter; to maximise female independence and autonomy; and to promote relationships on female terms.

The sad thing is that George believed his feminist programme would strengthen the race, ennoble men and women, and create a more loving culture of relationships. In this he has been proved disastrously wrong.