What’s Wrong with the World

Now I've read Crescat's observations, it seems obvious that 'anatomical reductionism' will transfigure both men and women into 'sex objects'. However, since it wasn't obvious to me five minutes ago, I've learned something.

Lydia's comment is much better written than Crescat's post. (I still can't get accustomed to deliberately coarse language being used by men, let alone women.)

Thomas Fleming of Chronicles argues that the feminists were always predominantly men, and their real goal, regardless of what they said, was to liberate women from traditional morality and family arrangements so as to increase their potential number of sex partners.

I find Fleming's take on it somewhat implausible, though maybe I'm missing something. Implausible, because a man supporting the cause of feminism for the reason Fleming gives wouldn't likely see much in the way of returns until he is too old to enjoy them, or more likely, dead. I suppose a man could have supported feminism for what he saw as the "common good" of being able to enjoy licentious living in future generations, but this is not the sort of goal you typically find among altruists.

What I find more plausible for first causes of feminism is I think more simple, and a common pattern among humanity: Women were desiring and demanding something that would not, in the end, be beneficial for them, and men did not have the spine to oppose it. Both men and women were dealing only in the short-term, without thought to future generations.

Thanks for drawing our attention to the post and adding your thoughts, Lydia.

I have no doubt that Fleming is exaggerating, as is his wont. There _were_ men like that, though. It's not hard to find them. I believe Bertrand Russell would be a good example, and he managed to enjoy the benefits for many-a year. Another example, less well-known though more blatant, was a fellow of the beatnik generation (I believe I have that generation label right) named Gershon Legman. There is a chapter in a book called _Representative Men_ in which Legman is described as helping young men to seduce their girlfriends. The boys would bring the girls to his intellectual parties at his apartment, where he would harangue them about free love. (IIRC, this was in the 50's.) Legman expressly wrote (I forget in what book now--might have been _Love and Death_) about the liberation of women brought about by birth control. He definitely managed to "benefit" himself from all this "liberation" during his lifetime.

You can see the problem with Lydia's version of Crescat's claim if you compare it with an analogous claim about racism. Imagine someone who said this:

"Anti-racism, by vehemently rejecting a broad and praiseworthy concept of whiteness in the name of promoting equality, implicitly reduces the meaning of being a white person to the possession of a certain skin color. After all, we can't say that whiteness has something to do with superior intelligence, with being protective and strong. We must make whites and non-whites equal, which means we must make them the same in all respects we can manage, which means the only difference we are allowed to admit is the stark difference of skin color."

Sorry, no. If you claim that the differences between whites and non-whites have primarily to do with skin color, you don't thereby imply that individual white people are reducible to their skin color. Similarly, if you claim that the differences between males and females have primarily to do with the possession of certain organs, you don't imply that individual males are reducible to their organs.

(By the way, plenty of feminists acknowledge that the differences between males and females go beyond differences in their organs. So, Lydia is doubly wrong here. But I'm primarily interested in attacking the false logical claim.)

(Also, I didn't read the Crescat's post, so I don't know if the Crescat is making the same error that Lydia is making here.)

Well, actually, Roen, most people _do_ believe that "whiteness" is about nothing but the color of one's skin. Notice how your comment shifts from the reduction of the significance of race to the reduction of the entire person of a certain race. My post is about the reduction of the masculinity of men. Now, what we're asked to believe in "anti-racism" is that race is unimportant and does not matter. What feminism (at least, one extremely prominent strand thereof) asks us to believe, similarly, is that masculinity does not matter (at least, where masculinity is not *just bad*). Since normal men cannot help knowing that masculinity _does_ matter, that avenue is not open to them. Having had this thing that they know matters reduced to nothing more than anatomy thus has the effect of making them think that their anatomy and the function it performs is itself exceedingly important, since their masculinity is important and since they are not allowed to give that masculinity any more general meaning, at least none that has positive connotations or that they are allowed to take pride in.

As you point out, there is also the "gender difference" strand of feminism, and indeed some self-styled feminists are capable of jumping from the "gender sameness" to the "gender difference" strands as it happens to suit the agenda of the moment. Either men and women are just the same or else women are *much better* (more empathetic, insightful, blah, blah).

That's not very helpful to men, at least. I suppose some young woman might manage to cling to "gender difference feminism" so as to get some sort of positive, non-sexual feminine identity out of a feminist ideology, though frankly, I haven't seen that happen. But that's hardly going to work for men, who are the villains of the piece and the distinctly inferior gender on that version of the tale. I don't imagine "difference feminism" would be very comforting to the mother of a boy, or to a traditionalist woman who would like her daughters to have some good, mature men to grow up and marry.

Women were desiring and demanding something that would not, in the end, be beneficial for them, and men did not have the spine to oppose it. Both men and women were dealing only in the short-term, without thought to future generations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette#Origins

It's really kind of funny: feminists claim that the only difference between males and females is the organ itself, (and that difference is clearly changeable so they say), but at the very same time the evolutionary psychologists insist that there are vast swathes of sociological and psychological differences produced by eons of pre-human and early human survival processes. Men do Z in order to get women to do X, or women have A trait because it affects men psychologically as B. There are thousands of differences to explore.

Any endocrinologist (and any observant father) knows that a woman's hormones are much more complex than a man's - she has to be able to produce eggs, keep them warm to enable conception, and then generate a whole new organ to feed the embryo, shift things around to allow birth, and then become a lactating mother - and then back to "normal". Her body virtually re-invents itself with each conceived child brought to weaning.

Since, as Steve just emphatically reminded us on other threads, those differences in genes, expressed in different hormones, produce different ways of thinking and behaving, the obvious reality is that the reductionist feminist cannot possibly cope with biology as it actually exists. And my (thankfully limited) experience with such feminists is that they just about literally shout down any discussion of deeper biology because they cannot stand to hear the evidence.

Well, to be fair to sociobiologists, I will say that the ones I've encountered haven't been very favorable to feminism, and for the very reason you raise, Tony. A fun book to read (that shows just how hair-raising the effects of feminism already were decades ago) is _Feminism and Freedom_ by Michael Levin. The sociobiological just-so stories (some not repeatable) are a weak point of the book, but his comments about feminism are often very shrewd. His thesis--that feminism is incompatible with human freedom--is quite true, and its truth has been borne out again and again since the book was published. (Oddly enough, a column by the same name, "Feminism and Freedom," by supposedly "reasonable feminist" Christina Hoff Summers was just published on-line during the last couple of days. I read part of it and am inclined to say it's not nearly as worth reading as Levin's diametrically opposed book, though of course much shorter.)

And to be fair to feminists, the more intelligent and reasonable ones don't claim that there aren't statistically detectible distribution patterns of qualities or traits that differ between the sexes; they simply argue that statistical tendencies in groups are not a valid basis for any law that permits or requires discrimination against individuals.

Or more simply, it doesn't matter if (for example) in practice, almost no women actually want to be in the Army or are particularly suited to do well as soldiers; if even one wants to and can, the law has to permit all women the opportunity to try.

But yes, more generally, you can't demolish femininity as a cultural expectation without also demolishing masculinity as a cultural expectation, because the entire point of those cultural expectations is to tailor socialization towards the aptitudes most generally statistically distributed to each sex; if women are no longer taught that they're expected to seek male protection or demand male fidelity, men will rapidly come to consider themselves under no obligation to provide either. Whether the cost of that security is worth the gain in freedom is a question asked many many times before, of many many other issues.

My own centre-seeking instinct suggests it must be possible to maintain generalized, socially healthy cultural expectations without making them into the ironclad, absolute prescriptions that feminism once rightly railed against; and if it is impossible to find a happy medium, perhaps it is incumbent to err in the direction of freedom rather than restriction. But it would please me if just once somebody admitted, "Yes; this is what this freedom will cost us -- I will not conceal or avoid that truth. I think it is worth it." I have a lot more respect for people willing to admit what their goals and ideals will cost.

Lydia, the psychological process that you are describing might actually occur. I'm open to the possibility that it does occur. It's intuitively plausible. But if you are still trying to express a "simple, undeniable point," then you are not succeeding. But if you've given up on whatever your simple and undeniable point was, and have now shifted to a different point, then that's fine with me.

Regarding your current claim, it is again useful to think about an analogy with race. Imagine a white person who is initially convinced that his whiteness matters a lot. Then the white person is told (by someone he trusts) that his whiteness amounts to nothing more than a skin color. At this point, the white person *might* conclude that his skin color matters a lot. But then again, the white person might instead conclude that he was mistaken in the first place to believe that his whiteness matters a lot. Presumably, different racist white people would react in different ways to the news that whiteness=skin color. We're not going to solve this one from the armchair.

Likewise, if a normal man is told (by someone he trusts) that his masculinity is reducible to his anatomy, it's entirely possible that he will conclude that anatomy matters a lot. (And by the way, anatomy does matter a lot!) But it's also possible that he will conclude that masculinity doesn't matter so much after all. What we've got here is an empirical question.

Roen: What you're missing is the reality that sex matters, objectively, more than race or skin color. While race does matter, the magnitude of its importance pales in comparison with sex, the latter being much more difficult to suppress (if not impossible), and its suppression being much more personally destructive.

Terrific post, Lydia. Yours I mean. I didn't read hers.

Regarding your current claim, it is again useful to think about an analogy with race.

It's almost never useful to analogize race, in my judgment. The opportunity such analogies offer for the sophistical and the unscrupulous is too sizable to need much illustration.

It's intuitively plausible. But if you are still trying to express a "simple, undeniable point," then you are not succeeding. But if you've given up on whatever your simple and undeniable point was, and have now shifted to a different point, then that's fine with me.

So what is this point at issue? Let's revisit. "Feminism, by vehemently rejecting a broad and praiseworthy concept of masculinity in the name of promoting equality, implicitly reduces the meaning of being a boy or a man to the possession of certain organs."

If, Roen, your response consists in something like "well, you may well be right; empirically I can grant that much evidence is on offer," with the qualification that Lydia is overstating the certainty of the argument -- why, you two are not that far apart in substance. You agree that feminism does contribute to the reduction of masculinity a less human, more animal essence.

It's almost never useful to analogize race, in my judgment. The opportunity such analogies offer for the sophistical and the unscrupulous is too sizable to need much illustration.

Analogizing race isn't that hard. You don't even have to use an analogy, you can just compare it with the essentials of sex:

The African races as a whole are the product of women being able to select men who fit their male ideal. Hence the African races are usually more masculine than others-their men highly sought after, their women less so.

The Asian races as a whole are the product of men being able to select women who fit their female ideal. Hence the Asian races are usually more feminine than others-their women highly sought after, their men less so.

The other races of the world fall somewhere in the middle of this masculinity/femininity derivation. And Europeans have come out on top by being aggregately in the middle and willing to intermarry to keep it that way.

Now I have no accepted scientific vocabulary/controlled experiments to support those observations, but I guarantee you that any layperson with eyes in his head is going to have them opened far wider when he hears them. If that's 'unscrupulous,' it at least has the benefit of landing them far closer to the truth than any YOU MUST TRACK EVERY GENE plan.

I suppose there'a a parable in here somewhere about being careful what you wish for, or your children will look like it, but that's all the abstract theorizing I can do for the day.

Jeff's response to Roen is so good that I can do no better than to repeat it:

What you're missing is the reality that sex matters, objectively, more than race or skin color. While race does matter, the magnitude of its importance pales in comparison with sex, the latter being much more difficult to suppress (if not impossible), and its suppression being much more personally destructive.

Roen,

Your comparison to race is idiotic. Racial variations are matters of degree, not kind, aside from a few racial quirks like disease susceptibility. Gender differences are primarily ones of kind, not degree, as most women and most men tend to exhibit rather significant, group-based differences.

"What I find more plausible for first causes of feminism is I think more simple, and a common pattern among humanity: Women were desiring and demanding something that would not, in the end, be beneficial for them, and men did not have the spine to oppose it. Both men and women were dealing only in the short-term, without thought to future generations."

I might suggest something even more nuanced (wishy-washy?):

Women desired a beneficial good -- full political and legal equality with men, and full cultural respect and dignity in that equality -- and launched a social crusade to acquire these things. Men, or a sufficient majority thereof, eventually saw the justice in these claims and gradually cooperated in their realization; an accomplishment that, though fulfilled in many places and cultures, is not yet universally so.

But some of the movement's leaders, perhaps unwilling to abandon the defining purpose of their lives -- in an example of what I'll call Lewis's Principle of Crusade Corruption: All those who struggle against resistance to promote or uphold a truth eventually become more enamoured of the struggle itself than of the truth which was its purpose -- conflated equal cultural respect with identical cultural attitudes, and began to fight not only for the right to equal status before the law but equal sexual license in the culture. And men, or a sufficient majority thereof, recognized both the increase in sexual access this could provide and the money to be made off a sexualized marketplace, and gleefully cooperated in this "liberation". And so the struggle for an objective good -- equal legal freedom and cultural dignity for women -- wound up directly contributing to social ills that have undermined much of what that freedom and dignity was meant to enhance: collapsing marriage rates and skyrocketing family breakdowns, abortion rates in the millions, and the economic distortions that come from doubling the workforce without properly distributing skill-set availability to need.

Most evils, in my observation, tend to come about not because people want evil things but because they want good things in excessive degree, or impermissible ways and contexts; because they insist upon their right of saying "Not Enough" while denying anyone else the right to say "Too Much".

So, Stephen J., if the feminist movement had settled down and declared its goals accomplished in, say, 1920 with the granting of the right to vote to women, all would have been well?

Let's please remember that there was nothing restrained about the feminism of the 1960's. Contrary to the revisionist history some people want to write, it's not as though the feminist activists of the 1960's merely wanted laudable and reasonable things.

Tony Esolen wrote a fine piece on this subject a few years back: "A Requiem for Friendship: Why Boys Will Not Be Boys and Other Consequences of the Sexual Revolution" --

http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=18-07-021-f

So what characteristics would you use other than physical? Where are women deficient in relation to men?

Stephen J, your notion has something to be said for it. Hypothesizing that you are right for the moment, we should find that women in the period from 1920 or so to about 1960 or so should have been a mini "golden age" for women (well, perhaps silver, at best), after they had at least basic legal rights and the beginnings of other legal equality, and before shrill feminizers (of both sexes) pushed the agenda beyond all possible human good.

I know that feminists certainly don't call that period a golden age. But there are better reasons to take a hard look at the question. I would take just one component of change: the family wage. When men were being patriarchal and hogging all the rights to the vote, they were also economically responsible for the bulk of the family income, and employers (and the culture generally) was prepared to pay a father a wage sufficient for him, his wife, and his family. When women entered the stage and then sought to earn a comparable wage, labor supply increased without an increase in population and so there was no major increase in demand. It was thus unavoidable that the employer would decrease wages overall, thus leaving neither father nor mother the capacity to earn a family wage. This means that some women entering the labor market on supposedly "equal" terms as men disrupts the possibility of other women to refrain from entering the labor market: their husbands can no longer earn a family wage, forcing 2-working-parent families. Which leaves children being UNraised - and all the attendant ills: mental, emotional, spiritual and physical disorders, spreading throughout society.

It is then possible that the "legal equality" (it is really legal sameness, which is another matter) sought has economic and social impacts that could not be clearly forecast beforehand, but are far greater than women would have been willing to pay. And, in fact, the results may be that the few especially unfeminine women who benefit most would still be willing to "pay" the cost, because most of the cost is being borne instead by women who don't really want the effects of the kind of equality demanded by their outspoken sisters.

A notable number of the women I know are more than glad to be able to get out of the house and work. But a significant number of the women working would be more than glad to put most of that work behind them and be able to stay at home except for maybe weekend work or something like that. The cultural shift that introduced legal sameness is the same shift that eventually produced the situation that disallows most women the opportunity to stay at home with kids. It is not just a matter of getting a freedom and then paying the cost, the cost is itself a loss of another kind of freedom, and we are not listening to the women who prefer that.