The Antigones

You may have seen at Laura Wood's site a report on a new French women's group called the Antigones.

They have been set up in opposition to Femen, a feminist group originally from Ukraine, but which has also spread to France. The Femen women often protest topless with obscene comments daubed on their bodies.

The Antigones want to be feminine and dignified. I've read some of their published material and it seems to be quite good. They are definitely opposed to the "gender theory" I reported on a little while ago. This is the idea that our identity as men and women is merely a false social construct and that we should be liberated to choose whatever sex identities we like.

This gender theory is obviously very closely tied to the liberalism which is dominant in the West today. Liberalism claims that we should aim to maximise individual autonomy, which means being self-determining or self-authoring, which means that predetermined qualities like being male or female aren't allowed to matter. That then means that there cannot be complementary masculine and feminine essences as part of the reality of things.

The Antigones have set themselves in a principled way against the liberal position. Here are some quotes from a YouTube clip:

Femen, you assert that machismo dominates our society and you fight men. We reply that it is only with men that we will be women in the full sense of the word.

Femen, you demand sex equality. We reply to you that complementarity between men and women is a source of wealth for our society.

From their "Who are we?" statement:

Daughters of our fathers, wives of our husbands, mothers of our sons, we do not reject men. Instead, we are persuaded that it is with them, in complementarity, that we will build our future.

And from an article published at their website (the Google translation isn't perfect but gives a clear idea of the arguments being made):

Everyone has an intuition, an immediate impression, sometimes confused, of what are the male and female identities. Sometimes these are clichés, but we must nevertheless admit that the physiology and psychology of both sexes have specific irreducible genetically transmitted and define their respective idiosyncrasies.

Beyond the visual evidence of the different conformation of the body, biology, cognitive science and ethology have shown that brains are physically different and how they work, how they process information, as well as hormone levels and differentiated control their behavior in response to the same stimuli. Cultural identity unfolding from the image represented the body, so there is a thread invariant of female identity, a feminine essence, an eternal feminine, a "feminine genius", that is, a way of being in specifically feminine world. It seems that the female nature is expressed by what we might call a "sense of closeness" what Julia Kristeva calls "intimate."

At the very least, all this demonstrates that things don't have to be the way they are now. We don't have to have a women's movement which is anti-feminine and anti-male. It's possible to envisage something else.

It's interesting to contrast the Femen women with the Antigone women. The Femen women are rancorous and destructive like so many movements of the Western political class before them. I don't know what the flaws of the Antigone women may prove to be. But these women do seem to have turned in a different direction, one that at least has the potential to be more creative and affirming.

I will watch their further development with great interest.

Leonora

Laura Wood received an interesting letter from a young woman named Leonora, who studies and teaches literature at an American college.

The part of the letter that interested me most was Leonora's reaction to the poetry of Gottfried Benn. Benn was a nihilist/Nietzschean poet of the early twentieth century. He had a very interesting view of how the Enlightenment had brought on the nihilist epoch (which I'll quote in a future post): his nihilism was therefore not directed at the churches or at traditional culture but at the liberal Enlightenment. Even so, it was a nihilism which portrayed human life in the most desolate terms.

Leonora was forced to endure this desolate, nihilistic view of life in her literature class. It caused her a degree of distress, as she wishes to cultivate her more sensitive feminine qualities:

Sitting in that class yesterday was painful and felt like torture. I was fighting tears of anger and hurt feelings, just looked down and could not say a single word the whole entire time. I felt even worse when I realized how all the others were laughing and thought it was funny. I could not find a tiny bit of amusement in someone presenting human beings like that and talking about women in such a trashy way. I just wanted to get out of there – as far away as possible – as the again male professor kept repeating those lines over and over again, pronouncing them worse and more disgusting every time he recited them again.

My own strong emotions and reaction made me wonder if there is something wrong with me! Why did this make me so upset and angry while everyone else seemed to enjoy it? As I reflected on it later that night in bed, I realized how God has been tearing down many walls in and around my heart throughout the past six months. He has made me much more sensitive towards other people and also towards sin and things that are just wrong. He has revealed to me what it means to be a woman and how I as a woman should be caring, loving and nurturing. I am to have a soft and tender heart, feel with others and make this world a much more beautiful place. And that’s what I want with all my heart. I want to be captivating, beautiful, inviting and loving. But with a heart soft like that I can’t handle situations like the one in class yesterday.

I told a male class mate about my feelings after class and his response was, “Well, Benn wrote that to make people think and to cause exactly these controversial reactions. You shouldn’t take it personally, just think about the issues he is trying to raise.” I know I could easily try to let this not get to me, build up some walls around my heart again and not care and laugh like everyone else. But that would be at the risk of my heart, my soul, my purity, and in a way even my womanhood. Why do they expect me to do that? How can I even survive as a woman in such an environment that will constantly cause me pain without manning up?
 

Leonora is trying to maintain her feminine integrity in a hostile environment. It's interesting to hear this from a woman, as I think men have a corresponding sense both of the value of the feminine qualities Leonora describes and also of their relative fragility.

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.

Modern dilemmas

There's an Englishwoman who blogs under the name "Mud" who decided to chuck in her corporate job in order to clear landmines in Laos.

But it seems that her preferred option would be to marry and have a family.

Her explanation of why she resigned from her job is interesting:

There’s never a good time to tell your boss that you find baking more interesting that PowerPoint; that the WI holds more of an appeal than a networking conference and that the very thought of still doggedly working your way up the career ladder for the next 25 years fills you full of cold terror, is there?

...It is ironic that in this most-feminist age of egalitarian opportunity I feel guilty for admitting what I really want in life: a husband, a family, and the space to enjoy them.

And there's the tricky dilemma - you can pursue your career with determination and achieve those goals, but will that make you happy?

If, on the other hand as I do, you believe that 'life goals' (of the husband/children variety) are what you really want in the future, how do you aim for them?

It is a fine line, juggling the balance between maintaining plan B (the career) whilst allowing for the possibility, or encouraging, plan A (the life).

The effort of sustaining plan B (career) was difficult to combine with the pursuit of plan A (husband/children).

She has followed a typical pattern of leaving family formation to her 30s:

And yet is it only now, in our 30s that we are feeling ‘different’ to our male compatriots; feeling a different pull and different priorities emerging; feeling that our paths are not so straight and true as our male friends and colleagues; feeling the worry, as we stare out from behind our suited desks as another friend embraces her new role as ‘wife’ and ‘mother’ – has that boat sailed?

I'm not sure how the landmine clearing option is going to help with the husband/children aim. She recognises herself that it can be defeminising:

Men on the other hand are invariably fascinated, green with envy at the idea of blowing stuff up...as the testosterone rises their perception of me shifts and I can see myself morphing from 'woman' to 'mate'. I may be sitting in a bar wearing a dress, I may even have scrubbed up and be wearing perfume and make-up, but my job confers honorary man status on me. And that just isn't sexy.

Indeed, I find myself going to some lengths to preserve my sense of self as a woman. My toenails are always painted, I've found a local waxist, I wear subtle earrings with my uniform as a badge of pride. I carry perfume in my rucksack - and I'm not afraid to use it. I don a dress at every opportunity. My duty-free make-up collection is bigger than it ever was in my corporate world, and Saturday night application has taken on a certain reverence. But I still struggle to feel feminine.

She then goes on to explain how for years she has experienced an "internal battle" over her femininity. On the one hand she has seen feminine traits as a weakness, on the other hand they make her feel true to herself:

I'd been aware of this rumbling undercurrent for some months, but I only really realised when I was in London in January. I was standing next to the Swede, looking in a mirror ... and it just struck me, I felt powerfully Female. Next to his height, his solidity and his strength I just felt different. Smaller, gentler, softer. And it was lovely. I felt like Me. I had license to ask for help and admit vulnerability, to just Be A Girl.

Isn't it strange, this peculiar internal battle I seem to have been living with for years, challenging aspects of my absolute identity. I don't really understand why I've subconsciously viewed my more feminine traits as weaknesses. Flaws to be crushed or ignored, when in fact they are parts of my character as a woman that I need to open up to.

I'll try to give an example without blithering too much, here is a paradox:

On the one hand, I find myself viewing vulnerability as a weakness and something to be stifled or hidden. It is 'girlie' and therefore something to look down on or rise above.

On the other hand, I am a girl, and I want to take the female role in a relationship dynamic. I want to be the feminine yin to masculine yang - and to feel cared for and looked after. If I am unwilling to acknowledge vulnerability when I find it, then what role is there for a man to feel that his help and support is needed in my life?

It is easy to try to do everything and be self sufficient. But the problem is in that expression. If I am overtly 'self sufficient' then maybe I shouldn't be surprised if there doesn't appear to be emotional room for someone else?

I could be over analysing, but I have a feeling that I'm edging towards (and I hate this expression) 'finding myself'. I just don't know why its taken so bloody long and a dramatic life change to get here!

It's my belief that this "internal battle" is a very common one amongst women - and that it does play a role in confusing the relationship dynamic between men and women.

Note too what she writes about feeling connected to her feminine essence: she writes "I felt like Me". I think the same applies to men who connect strongly to their masculine being - it creates a sense of being who you are meant to be.

Masculine & feminine energies

I write sometimes about masculine and feminine essences. So I was interested to read a post by a woman called Aoefee attempting to set out some of the distinctions between the masculine and feminine.

Aoefee is a very long way from being a traditionalist, but she's reached a point in her life in wanting to accept her own feminine nature:

One of the issues I see facing men and women today is a lack of understanding regarding the differences between the genders. There's too much time spent on how equal we are and not enough on inherent distinctions.

Masculine Energy:

• Goal Oriented
• External Focus/Drive
• Separate/Individual
• Penetrating

Female Energy:

• Ocean of Emotion
• Inner Focus/Process Oriented
• Not Individual/Group/Home Focused
• Open and Receptive

...I think some of the mistakes I have made have been in trying to apply male logic to my goal of meeting a significant other. Although a very feminine woman I've been using male, goal oriented strategies. Setting up seven dates in six days, specifically targeting older men, was a very driven, goal oriented approach for example.

Being open and receptive, a feminine approach, I learned a great deal about men and what they appreciated in women when I hung out in male dominated forums. I learned that men could care two toots about my job and I rarely talk about it now. I learned men like women who dress like a woman and wear heels, skirts/dresses, have pretty hair and maintain a good hip to waist ratio. A woman is allowed to be vulnerable and not have all the answers, she is also valuable when she takes the time to process information and be able to offer meaningful advice. 

I believe men fail to accept women's emotional natures, they rally against it rather than accept it and figure out ways to offset potential chaos. Women NEED a strong force to guide them. We are like the ocean, still, calm and then without much warning we build tsunami waves. A man who recognizes that these things are sometimes beyond the control of the woman (hormones, stress) stays out of the storm and steadfastly keeps the ship going the right direction. He realizes giving her the wheel is a bad idea and calmly ignores her pleading for the driver seat. When a woman has a man who can't be moved by her mercurial nature she is much less likely to feel lost at sea and the storms lessen.

...I challenge you to look at your current relationship and see if you are struggling because you don't understand their energy. Are you trying to make into him into a feminine you? Are you sure the Notebook is the way you want to live your life? Are you trying to make her focused and driven to do the things you feel she should want? Are you helping her be open and receptive to you or are you closing her off?

Obviously not all relationships are going to be the same. I do think it's the case, though, that women will sometimes crash up against their men early in a relationship and find an element of calming security when the man holds firm.

A reply to a reader on female combat troops

One reader didn't like my post The body has meaning. He wrote the following comment:

The original post astonishes me. When I was 12 or so, I thought, "Men are this, and women are that." Then I grew up and realized the world is more complex than that.

The world is not made up of G.I. Joes and Barbie dolls. You seem to suggest that it should be.

Your idea seems to be that men and women each have a distinct, intrinsic nature, from which their proper roles in society can be inferred, en masse. But isn't it reasonable to expect a person to act on the basis of their own nature? If someone wants to do something, such as join the army, then joining the army seems to be in the nature of this person. You would say to them, "But that's not in your nature." I think they should reply, "Clearly it is in my nature, for it is what I want to do." How do you reply to this?

It's a reasonable question to ask. The answer is that masculinity is not only an aspect of the nature of men, but it exists as well as an essence in the sense of it being a quality that has intrinsic value and meaning.

So a man will not only have a sense of his own masculine identity, he will also recognise the existence of a masculine ideal to develop toward, one which brings purpose and fulfilment.

Ordinary preferences and wants do not have this same potential. They certainly do not define our nature as men; if anything, they are to be brought into line (i.e. ordered) according to our efforts to cultivate masculine character.

And the same goes for femininity & women. Women obviously have a feminine nature in the sense that their bodies are more fitted for motherhood than warfare, that women are in general more emotional than men and so on.

But that's not the end of it. Women have the chance to embody the feminine principle in life (to put this another way: to express a feminine essence).

They cannot do this in the role of a combat soldier. It just isn't possible to develop along feminine lines in such a role.

And so a woman who thinks she wants to be a combat soldier has some serious thinking to do. Even if she is at the more mannish end of the female spectrum, and so is drawn more than other women to masculine pursuits, she is choosing a pathway that cannot lead her to an admirable womanhood, i.e. to a womanhood that embodies or expresses that feminine principle of life.

There's another Snow White

In my last post I reported that a "warrior princess" Snow White film was being made. I suggested that modern culture had trouble accepting women as feminine creatures. As if to prove my point, I discovered that there's another film version of Snow White being produced called Mirror Mirror. This one stars the daughter of musician Phil Collins, Lily Collins:



Lily Collins as Snow White



Obviously I can't complain about the promotional picture shown above. That's certainly a feminine representation of Snow White.

But she doesn't stay that way. She ends up as a swashbuckling leader of a group of bandits in the forest. Lily Collins says that:

Our Snow White starts off as the fairytale princess we all know and love and then she progresses into a young woman and much of a fighter.

Just as Kristen Stewart was left with bloodied knuckles after her fight scenes, so too has Lily Collins found the fight scenes difficult:

While “Snow White & The Huntsman” has offered images of a warrior Snow White, Lily too, in “Mirror Mirror,” has some fight scenes.

“This was insane training,” she said of preparing for the role. “I’ve been fight training and fencing for about three months now… I was kickboxing, doing some stuff on wires. It’s been really intense.”

And all that training has left Lily a little worse for wear.

“I’ve gotten a lot of bumps and bruises, but so far no bad injuries,” she said.

So to prepare for the role of Snow White an actress now has to spend three months kickboxing.

Which raises a serious issue. If a girl wants to develop her feminine essence - so that she brings it out to its fullest and most admirable extent - then how does she go about cultivating it?

Modern society does not care much for this task. A girl will get no positive guidance from the mainstream culture. Watching actresses kickbox their way across the silver screen or the TV set isn't likely to help.

But if girls don't cultivate what is most admirable in their femininity, then won't they feel disconnected in their self-identity? And won't it be more difficult for men to feel instinctively connected to them?

Here's one small piece of advice I can offer. A young woman should look at herself in the mirror and observe her body: the elegance of her hands, the slenderness of her arms, the softness of her breasts, the warmth of her eyes and her smile. And she should try to match this truth about her body with her inner presence. Does her inner sense of self match what her own body has developed toward?

A bloody Snow White

A new Snow White is being filmed. True to the modern age, Snow White has been transformed from "the loveliest of them all" into a warrior princess.

Snow White as a warrior princess

The actress playing Snow White, Kristen Stewart, has been doing so many intense fight scenes that she was photographed with bloodied knuckles:

Is this something to worry about? In the sense that it's another example of a trend in modern society, I think that it is. Things go wrong when people don't identify wholly with their own sex. If you are in any way set against yourself as a man or a woman, then it becomes difficult to express yourself adequately in relationships with the opposite sex.

What does the recasting of Snow White suggest to girls? It suggests that to be the heroine you now have to mix a considerable amount of the masculine in with the feminine. It suggests that the feminine by itself is inadequate or inferior.

It's a pity the film makers went this way, as the preview suggests that the film is well made and likely to do well at the box office.

Missing out

What leads women to rethink feminism? Earlier this year an English playwright, Zoe Lewis, explained the transformation in her beliefs.

Before quoting some of her thoughts, I'll set the scene. A liberal society takes autonomy to be the highest good. Feminism is liberalism applied to the lives of women. Therefore, feminism will aim to maximise female autonomy.

How can you make women more autonomous? One way is to stretch out for as long as possible an independent single girl lifestyle based on casual relationships, travel, shopping and parties. Another is to make career (in which women became financially independent) more important than marriage and motherhood.

And what about equality? If you believe that you should be self-determining, then you won't want your predetermined gender to matter in what you do. An autonomous woman will want to "match it with the boys" and prove that she can do whatever they can do. There will be an equality of sameness.

Young women get the message that to be free they should put career first; enjoy an independent single girl lifestyle in their twenties and into their thirties; and prove themselves by matching it with the boys.

Is this an adequate base on which to build a life? For many women, the answer will turn out to be no. Zoe Lewis is one of the women who was burnt by the feminist and liberal take on freedom:

I never thought I would be saying this, but being a free woman isn't all it's cracked up to be. Is that the rustle of taffeta I hear as the suffragettes turn in their graves? Possibly. My mother was a hippy who kept a pile of (dusty) books by Germaine Greer and Erica Jong by her bed ... She imbued me with the great values of choice, equality and sexual liberation. I fought with my older brother and won; at university I beat the rugby lads at drinking games. I was not to be messed with.

Now, nearly 37, those same values leave me feeling cold. I want love and children but they are nowhere to be seen. I feel like a UN inspector sent in to Iraq only to find that there never were any weapons of mass destruction. I was led to believe that women could “have it all” and, more to the point, that we wanted it all. To that end I have spent 20 years ruthlessly pursuing my dreams - to be a successful playwright. I have sacrificed all my womanly duties and laid it all at the altar of a career. And was it worth it? The answer has to be a resounding no.

Her career did not bring the power, glamour and life success she thought it would:

Ten years ago The Times ran a piece about my play Paradise Syndrome. It was based on my girlfriends in the music business. All we did was party, work and drink. The play sold out and I thought: “This is it! I'm going to have it all: success, power and men are going to adore me for it.” In reality it was the beginning of years of hard slog, rejection letters and living on the breadline.

She once thought Madonna was a living embodiment of liberal autonomy: of being unimpeded in determining one's life so that it was possible to do anything and be anything:

A decade on, I have written the follow-up play Touched for the Very First Time in which Lesley, played by Sadie Frost, is an ordinary 14-year-old from Manchester who falls in love with Madonna in 1984 after hearing the song Like a Virgin. She religiously follows her icon through the years, as Madonna sells her the ultimate dream: “You can do anything - be anything - go girl.” Lesley discovers, along with Madonna, that trying to “have it all” is a huge gamble. I wrote the play because so many of my girlfriends were inspired by this bullish woman who allowed us to be strong and sexy. I still love her and always will, but she has encouraged us to chase a fantasy and it's a huge disappointment.

Women are missing out on being wives and mothers because these roles were rejected by liberals in favour of female independence:

This month the General Household Survey found that the number of unmarried women under 50 has more than doubled over the past 30 years. And by the age of 30, one in five of these “freemales”, who have chosen independence over husband and family, has gone through a broken cohabitation.

I argue that women's libbers of the Sixties and Seventies put careerism at the forefront, trampling the traditional role of women underneath their Doc Martens. I wish a more balanced view of womanhood had been available to me. I wish that being a housewife or a mother wasn't such a toxic idea to middle-class liberals of yesteryear.

Zoe Lewis is not alone in having a change of heart. But for some it will be too late:

Increasing numbers of my feminist friends are giving up their careers for love and children and baking. I wish I'd had kids ten years ago, when time was on my side, but the problem is not so much time as mentality. I made a conscious decision not to have serious relationships because I thought I had all the time in the world. Many of my friends did the same. It's about understanding what is important in life, and from what I see and feel, loving relationships and children bring more happiness than work ever can.

There are some important points made in the above excerpt. First, what the liberal emphasis on autonomy leaves out is the importance of love and family. Essentially, what Zoe Lewis is arguing is that "freedom" (i.e. autonomy) is not the sole, overriding good after all. There are other important goods in life that can't be overridden, such as love, home, children and family.

Second, note that Zoe Lewis confesses that "I made a conscious decision not to have serious relationships". Unfortunately, this was part of the middle-class, tertiary educated culture of the times. Women thought that family formation could be indefinitely postponed and therefore did not want to settle into a serious relationship.

This had significant consequences. It meant that women no longer favoured family men. Men were rewarded for being unsuitable in some way. So the attitude of men changed as well. Some adapted to the culture of casual relationships by becoming players. Some withdrew from the whole dating game and adapted to a lifetime of bachelorhood. Some looked elsewhere for women. The result was that when some of these middle class women did finally start to look for husbands they met men who were no longer as keen to commit.

Zoe Lewis makes another notable admission:

I thought that men would love independent, strong women, but (in general) they don't appear to. Men are programmed to like their women soft and feminine. It's not their fault - it's in the genes.

This too is significant. Zoe Lewis now recognises that it's not possible to make gender not matter. When it comes to heterosexuality, opposites attract. Men are hardwired to find the feminine qualities of women appealing.

However, it's not just that men don't go for masculine women. Zoe Lewis cannot deny her own feminine instincts:

Somewhere inside lurks a woman I cannot control and she is in the kitchen with a baby on her hip and dough in her hand, staring me down. She is saying: “This is happiness, this is what it's all about.” It's an instinct that makes me a woman, an instinct that I can't ignore even if I wanted to.

Again, Zoe Lewis in practice was not able to live by the credo of making her gender not matter. She couldn't ignore her hardwired nature (her instincts), even if for political reasons she tried to. As a single woman in her late 30s, these instincts appear to be asserting themselves in the strongest terms, perhaps more so than for a woman who had married and had children earlier in life.

Zoe Lewis now wishes she had taken relationships more seriously in her twenties:

Had I this understanding of my psyche ten years ago I would have demoted my writing (and hedonism) and pursued a relationship with vigour. There were plenty of men and even a marriage offer, but I wouldn't give up my dreams.

I talked to the girls who were the subject of my play Paradise Syndrome in 1999. Sas Taylor, 38, single and childless, runs her own PR company: “In my twenties I felt I was invincible,” she says. “Now I wish I had done it all differently. I seem to scare men off because I am so capable. I have business success but it doesn't make you happy.” Nicki P, 35 and single, works in the music industry and adds: “It was all a game back then. Now I am panicking. No one told me that having fun is not as fun as I thought.”

Women in their twenties are in a strong position. They are at the height of their desirability to men. The danger, perhaps, is that this makes them feel "invincible". They may not realise that their advantage won't last forever and that it's most sensible to find a partner when the going is at its best.

Why else doesn't the autonomy principle work well in real life? It's not just that men prefer feminine women, but the biological reality of a woman's ticking clock:

Women are often the worst enemies of feminism because of our genetic make-up. We have only a finite time to be mothers and when that clock starts ticking we abandon our strength and jump into bed with whoever is left, forgetting talk of deadlines and PowerPoint presentations in favour of Mamas & Papas buggies and ovulation diaries. Not all women want children but I challenge any woman to say she doesn't want loving relationships. I wish I'd had the advice that I am giving to my 21-year-old sister: if you find a great guy, don't be afraid to settle down and have kids because there isn't anything to miss out on that you can't do later (apart from having kids).

We can't determine everything through our own will. A woman still has to consider the reality of her biological clock. It's genetic and hard-wired. Furthermore women want, as part of their nature, loving relationships. Again, this is not something that can be changed according to individual will.

Therefore, Zoe Lewis does something that shows character. She cannot now change her mistakes, but she can try to steer younger women away from her own fate. So she encourages younger women not to reject good men and leave things too late.

Nor does Zoe Lewis take the easy option of blaming men or a patriarchy. She does not believe that it was men who prevented her achieving the right kind of balance in life. It was the feminism held amongst women:

In the future I hope that there can be a better understanding of women by women. The past 25 years have been confusing and I feel that I've been caught in the crossfire. As women we should accept each other rather than just appreciating “success”. I have always felt a huge pressure to be successful to show men that I am their equal. What a waste of time. Wife and mother should be given parity with the careerist role in the minds of feminists.

She now feels it was a waste of time to pursue "equality as sameness". She recognises that a woman who sets out to do this won't ever give parity to the role of wife and mother.

Finally, she again makes the point that autonomy, whilst important, isn't the sole, overriding good to be chased relentlessly at the expense of everything else:

Choice and careers are vital, of course, but they shouldn't be pursued relentlessly. I love being a writer and still have my dream but now I am facing facts. The thing that has made me feel best in life was being in love with my ex-boyfriend and the thing that makes me feel the most centred is being in the country with kids and dogs, and yes, maybe in the kitchen.

She feels that she has missed out on the things that have turned out to be most important to her. She is yet more proof that liberalism is especially unsuitable when it comes to relationships.

Harriet Taylor Mill & the abolition of the feminine

Harriet Taylor Mill, an early English feminist, wrote this in 1851:

Those who are associated in their lives, tend to become assimilated in their character. In the present closeness of association between the sexes, men cannot retain manliness unless women acquire it.

She wants women to become manly so that their femininity doesn't rub off on men. She is assuming first that femininity is something undesirable and unworthy for women and second that women can simply "acquire" masculinity.

Put another way, she wants to abolish sex distinctions - the differences between men and women - in favour of a single masculine identity for both men and women.

Nor was this an unusual position for the pioneer feminists to take. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in 1792 that:

A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head, and I will not stifle it, though it may excite a horse-laugh. I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society ... For this distinction ... accounts for their [women] preferring the graceful before the heroic virtues.

Again, we have the desire to abolish "the distinction of sex"; men and women are to follow equally the masculine way of life - the more graceful feminine virtues are to be jettisoned.

It is ironic that such women came to be labelled feminists when they were so obviously hostile to the feminine.

There were antifeminist women in the 1800s who took a different view. Eliza Linton was the first full-time staff journalist in England in the 1840s. You might therefore assume that she would be a supporter of the early feminist movement. In fact, she was highly critical of it. She objected to the anti-feminine aspect of feminism, as well as its hostility to men.

For example, in the 1860s Eliza Linton addressed feminists as "you of the emancipated who imitate while you profess to hate". She criticised feminists of this era as "the bad copies of men who have thrown off all womanly charm".

Nor did Eliza Linton accept that feminine women were a danger to masculinity. She thought the opposite was true:

with the increased masculinity of women must necessarily come about the comparative effeminacy of men.

This, I believe, is a more reasonable view. A feminine woman is much more likely to engage a man's masculine instincts. If a woman behaved exactly like a man, then to whom would a man's masculine drives and instincts be directed? The complementarity between the masculine and feminine would be lost.

Eliza Linton also disagreed with Harriet Taylor Mill that women could simply "acquire" masculinity. Eliza Linton didn't see sex distinctions as unnatural categories that we could manipulate according to our own preferences. She thought they had some basis in nature and that they helped to guide human action:

I think now, as I thought then, that the sphere of human action is determined by the fact of sex, and that there does exist both natural limitation and natural direction.

Modern science has vindicated Eliza Linton's position. We know more now about the biological distinctions between the sexes that are hardwired into our physical nature, including different exposure to sex hormones and differences in the structure of the brain.

One final point. It is odd, to say the least, for a heterosexual man or woman to wish away sex distinctions. Unless we make a tremendous effort to subdue physical desire and emotional responsiveness we are not ever going to enthusiastically urge women to "acquire masculinity".

Harriet Taylor Mill's philosophy would only suit those who thought of themselves as disembodied, abstracted intellect or character - as the most extreme of intellectual types might do. But this reflects a limitation on their part that the rest of us would be unwise to fall in with.

Can liberals tolerate sex distinctions?

Things don't always go the way of liberal modernism. Take the case of sex distinctions. These are supposed to be made not to matter in a liberal order.

One reason for this is that liberals believe that to be free we must be self-determining. We must be unimpeded in creating who we are and what we do. Our sex - the fact of being a man or woman - is something that we don't get to determine for ourselves. Therefore, it is seen negatively as a "biological destiny" and traditional sex roles are rejected as being merely "conventional" and therefore "restrictive".

This orthodox, establishment liberal view, that sex distinctions must be made not to matter, is set out by Susan Moller Okin as follows:

A just future would be one without gender. In its social structures and practices, one's sex would have no more relevance than one's eye color or the length of one's toes.

Similarly, Carolyn Heilbrun has declared that:

our future salvation lies in a movement away from sexual polarization and the prison of gender toward a world in which individual roles and modes of personal behavior can be freely chosen.

Here in Melbourne there is a private club called the Athenaeum which, since its formation in 1842, has restricted membership to men. A group of 130 high-profile members of the club have been campaigning to change the rules, but have not persuaded the majority of members to do so.

A Herald Sun columnist, Sally Morrell, weighed in on the issue. Her argument was simple but significant:

Of course, once there was the cry of "sexism" the usual gender war warriors came out to once more re-fight the battles of last century.

There was Victoria's Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission chief, Helen Szoke, claiming that while she had no power to change the Athenaeum's rules it was a "matter for common sense" that it should allow women to join.

Common sense?

Common sense tells me that it's actually very common indeed for women to prefer women's company, and men men's.

Barbecues in my childhood always had the women clustering around the kitchen, while the men stood around doing what they do to the snags and burgers.

And nothing much has changed. Look around at the next school social or street party, and you'll see the sexes doing their oil-and-water thing.

Sure, my women friends love the men in their lives, and love socialising with men, but we also love our women-only time.

My book club has no women-only rule, yet not a single man has even asked to join it in the years we've been going, and none of us plans to bring one along soon. It's wonderful to be among just women, free to indulge ourselves in goss and pop-psychology ...

I bet those old dinosaurs at the Athenaeum feel much the same way about their club.

And, I guess, the club offers them much the same kind of service.

A refuge from the other sex, albeit in somewhat grander environs and with a brandy after dinner to boot.

And you've got to wonder why Szoke doesn't also declare war on the women-only Lyceum Club, just a short walk from the Athenaeum.

For some reason the sight of rich women enjoying each other's company seems natural and social, but the sight of rich men doing the same seems sinister and evidence of a conspiracy.

Sally Morrell is arguing that sex distinctions do matter in our lives. That there are times when we enjoy the company of the opposite sex, but also times when we interact in a different way with our own sex.

She is arguing that this is a natural, ongoing, ineradicable, positive aspect of life which does not need to be suppressed.

In accepting sex distinctions as a natural and positive aspect of life, she has no need to explain them as an assertion of superior identity by one group over another, as left-liberals commonly do. So she doesn't assume that when a group of men socialise together, that they are acting to enforce an unjust power structure over women.

She therefore doesn't resort to the usual double-standard in which it's considered alright, or even liberating, for women to socialise or interact together, but thought dangerously illegitimate for men to do so. (Why "liberating" for women? Presumably, in socialising or interacting together separately from men, they are held to be escaping male control and male power - this is the very negative understanding of sex distinctions which leads to the retention of women-only groups, such as schools, sports clubs, gyms and girl guides, but to a voluntary or sometimes compulsory shift to unisex membership for previously male groups.)

I would add one further argument to those made by Sally Morrell. It's particularly important that young men experience masculine, and therefore masculinising, environments. Without this, it's more difficult for boys and young men to develop the strength of character and resilience they need to shoulder the burdens that will be placed on them in their adult lives. It's of considerable personal benefit to women if their fathers, husbands and sons cope well in life. So women, too, have an interest in maintaining male only spaces in society.

There's been one other setback to the liberal programme of making sex distinctions not matter. A couple of years ago I noticed that even feminists were returning to traditionally feminine pursuits:

It seems to me that the more that such feminist women reject femininity in theory, the more that they attempt to bolster it in practice. How else can you explain the feminist craze for the most feminine of interests, such as knitting, sewing, decorating, flowers and kittens.

Kate herself lists her primary interest as knitting; Mindy makes quilts; Laura likes baking and kittens; and Janet likes to sew pink clothes for her daughter. Janet, in fact, runs one website about her passion for laundry and another about her love for motherhood, her daughter, flowers, gardens and sewing.

This return to feminine interests has now become a recognised social trend. In a feature column in the Melbourne Herald Sun, Kylie Hanson writes:

For so long, the feminist movement made housewife a dirty word ...

We were proud not to cook, and shrugged our suit-clad shoulders when confronted with a sewing machine ...

It was dubbed progress ... But what women realised was that turning our backs on domesticity wasn't the easy answer.

Now, younger women are returning to the so-called domestic crafts: sewing, cooking, knitting and gardening.

Doesn't this trend suggest that sex distinctions are more deeply ingrained than liberals suppose? Why else would even the most "progressive" women take up traditionally feminine interests? It's not as if the current generation of women have been socialised to sew and to bake. Nor do they lack alternative pathways. But still they return to the traditionally feminine.

Why would they do so if the feminine only exists artificially to oppress them? Isn't it more likely that women are naturally oriented to some degree to what is distinctly feminine?

The evidence suggests that sex distinctions do matter and should be accepted as playing a meaningful role in society.

What was feminism like in 1949?

I'm just now reading The Second Sex by French feminist Simone de Beauvoir. It was published in 1949 and is considered one of a handful of key texts of the feminist movement.

It was written at the end of the first-wave of feminism, which lasted for roughly 100 years from the mid 1800s to the mid 1900s.

De Beauvoir begins her work by wondering if the subject of feminism hadn't already been done to death by 1949:

For a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman ... Enough ink has been spilled in quarrelling over feminism, and perhaps we should say no more about it.

But she does go on to say more. She tells us that the first-wave of feminism was so radical that it doubted the real existence of a separate womanhood:

Are there women, really? Most assuredly the theory of the eternal feminine still has its adherents who will whisper in your ear: 'Even in Russia women still are women' ... One wonders if women still exist, if they will always exist, whether or not it is desirable that they should ....

Why did people doubt the existence of women? It wasn't, argued de Beauvoir, because of the disappearance of physical distinctions between men and women. There were still individuals with uteruses. Rather, it was that womanhood was thought to require some measure of femininity:

... we are told that femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women ... 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.

De Beauvoir rejects the idea that the feminine has a real, essential existence:

Is this attribute [femininity] secreted by the ovaries? Or is it a Platonic essence ... Although some women try zealously to incarnate this essence, it is hardly patentable.

... the biological and social sciences no longer admit the existence of unchangeably fixed entities that determine given characteristics, such as those ascribed to women ...

So it was already the case in 1949 that femininity was rejected as an artificial social construct.

Once the reality of femininity is denied, there is the option of declaring that the male role should define a single "human" category, applicable to everyone. This is the conclusion that some people had already reached in 1949:

If today femininity no longer exists, then it never existed. 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: ‘My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, should be regarded as human beings.’

De Beauvoir could have left things here. She couldn't accept, though, that there were not two distinct categories of male and female:

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.

So if the existence of "woman" wasn't based on a real, feminine essence, how could de Beauvoir explain it? She turned to the idea of a power differential, in which "male" is considered both neutral and superior and "female" is thought of as the deviant "Other":

... man represents both the positive and the neutral ... whereas woman represents only the negative ... there is an absolute human type, the masculine ... Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him, she is not regarded as an autonomous being ... she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute - she is the Other.

De Beauvoir goes on to develop the idea of the Other in strikingly modern terms:

... no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over and against itself ... if, following Hegel, we find in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility towards every other consciousness, the subject can be posed only in being opposed - he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object.

The way de Beauvoir describes it, there is something oppressive about having the category of the "other" - as this involves one category setting itself up as sovereign, privileged and essential in opposition to another category, which becomes inessential and a mere object.

This is a very radical move. It means that it is somehow advanced to break down any categories of "otherness". Instead of celebrating differences between men and women, or between nations, the focus is on overcoming these distinctions - especially from the side of those considered the dominant "subject" who are thought to be the agents of the othering process.

In other words, the very idea of my being an Australian becomes suspect as it is thought to involve an oppressive act of othering - and it rests more on myself as the "subject" of the othering process to overcome it - to prove that I don't make any such distinctions between myself and others.

What I hope is clear from all this is that de Beauvoir's argument leads her to a very difficult place. If the problem is "othering", then isn't heterosexuality itself suspect? (I'll see if de Beauvoir deals with this problem later in the book) Isn't any sense of a distinct communal tradition suspect?

A second conclusion is that the kinds of ideas common on the left today go back further in time than is commonly supposed. It was not a long march through the institutions that brought them into being some time in the 1960s.

Third, it's interesting to note the intellectual source of the leftist concept of the "Other". Apparently, it can be traced back to a dubious claim by Hegel that "we find in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility towards every other consciousness".

Finally, we should take note of an early step in de Beauvoir's chain of thought. She openly rejects the idea of essences, so that femininity can only appear to her to be an artificial social construct.

This is the part of the argument traditionalists have to go back to. If de Beauvoir is wrong, and natural differences between the sexes do exist, and if there are essentially feminine qualities that can be known to us, then womanhood does have a real and dignified existence - and one that can exist in a complementary rather than a hostile relationship to men.

What I'm suggesting is that traditionalists have a strong position here. We don't have to doubt the real existence of womanhood; nor explain it as a subservient category created by men. It exists as an essential quality in its own right.

A feminine woman can be admired for embodying an important life principle or quality.

There are other important aspects of de Beauvoir's thought to discuss, but I'll take these up in the next post.

Singer's tram rage

Jill Singer, a left-liberal columnist for the Melbourne Herald Sun, had an especially bad experience on a tram recently:

While it stops in Middle Park, a loud and boisterous cluster of teenage girls shove me aside as they make to leap aboard.

"Get out of our way, you effing slut," says one of these charmers ...

The aggression of the girls did not seem fuelled by alcohol or drugs - but by an apparent sense of absolute entitlement.

... It was the "Out of our way!" that inflamed, and the sheer arrogance ... to my shame, I fired back a barb ... "Well, I might be an effing slut but at least I'm not fat".

With this I jump off the tram. The five screaming banshees leap off after me, screaming: "You effing slut" - and worse.

... one girl throws a drink in my face, while another whacks me over the head.

What can we make of all this? It's not something that would have happened a generation ago in Melbourne. Girls didn't generally swear in public in the way described by Singer 30 years ago - let alone assault an older female traveller.

Singer herself doesn't offer much help in suggesting what has gone wrong socially to produce such an incident. She focuses mostly on the personal rather than the civilisational. She feels terribly guilty about calling the girls fat, and she reflects on her own experience of being bullied at school.

So what has changed in society to produce girls like the ones who attacked Jill Singer? I can think of a number of contributing factors.

A more unstable family life probably has an effect. Not all women cope well as single mothers. There are numbers of single mothers who lead difficult and insecure lives, and this seems to breed a survivalist concern for oneself, and a certain kind of toughness, in their daughters. Nor are such families ideal vehicles for transmitting civilisational ideals across the generations - they are too disrupted and vulnerable to really attempt such a larger role.

Certain cultural messages about sex roles don't help either. If people believe that society has been set up as an oppressive patriarchy, then two things follow. First, masculinity will be defined in terms of an aggressive, dominant assertion of power. Second, since men are assumed to be leading the privileged good life at the expense of deprived women, then masculinity will be thought of as the desirable role.

So it's not surprising that women are given the message that it is liberated to act like men, and that "acting like men" is defined coarsely in terms of aggressive self-assertion.

Then there's the understanding, in liberal societies, that a freedom to choose for oneself is the highest good. If this is true, then whatever impedes the sphere of human choice is a restriction to be overcome. It is then thought liberating and empowering to break moral taboos. It is thought moral, or modern, to be transgressive.

And so there is a tension between the idea that a girl swearing in public, or behaving like one of the lads, is liberated, modern and cool, and an instinctive dislike of all this as unfeminine and unattractive. The latter instinct gets less airplay, but it's there all the same. In his latest column, James Foster writes of a friend who also had a problem with trams, girls and swearing:

"One thing that really turns me off when dating women these days is their foul mouths," this guy wrote.

"I was on a first date the other day and she was driving and a tram dinged the bell at her. She said, 'What are you dinging at you (insert rude word)'. I couldn't believe it, I almost fell out of the car. The date only got better, with numerous F bombs being dropped in conversation."

Foster himself then admits that he finds it a turn off if girls swear, boast about their sex life or get seriously drunk.

Other factors? One of the problems with classical liberalism is that it takes selfishness to be a virtue. Spinoza, for instance, wrote that:

The more every man endeavours and is able to seek his own advantage, the more he is endowed with virtue.

Steven Kautz, in a book defending classical liberalism, admitted that:

Classical liberalism is a doctrine of acquisitive individualism, and teaches that man is by nature solitary and selfish, not political or even social ...

It's possible that such ideas were once balanced out by the influence of religion and an aristocratic ideal of gallantry and duty. But as religion and an older gentlemanly code of honour declines, we're left with the political philosophy in which selfishness rules.

Finally, manners and mores tend to be passed on informally from generation to generation. This seems to work best in settled, traditional communities. If the life of a settled community is disrupted, then cultural standards are less likely to be successfully handed down to younger generations.

Alexandra Kollontai: overcoming love

What does modernity mean for women? Last century a radical thinker named Alexandra Kollontai attempted to answer this question.

She was born a member of the Russian nobility, but later became a communist activist. After the October Revolution in 1917, she became a commissar in the Bolshevik government. She was a diplomat in the 1920s and managed to survive the purges in Stalinist Russia in the 1930s.

Kollontai's great cause was women's liberation. She wanted women to remain, above all, independent of men. There's nothing surprising about this attitude: it fits "correctly" with the basic ideas underlying modernism.

According to modernism, our humanity is never secure. We can lose our human status if we are not self-determining - if we don't shape our own selves and our own lives according to our individual will.

This sounds nice, but the devil is in the detail. Kollontai's setting out of the logic of this theory is a warning to us of what it really involves.

Autonomy

In her autobiography Kollontai claims that she knew even as a girl what the struggle for women's liberation required:

That I ought not to shape my life according to the given model ... I could help my sisters shape their lives, in accordance not with the given traditions but with their own free choice ... I wanted to be free. I wanted to express desires on my own, to shape my own little life.

Similarly, Kollontai wrote approvingly of the "new woman" that "she is independent inwardly and self-reliant outwardly".

So the aim for moderns like Kollontai was to throw off whatever seemed to impede or restrict individual autonomy for women.

The first thing to go was the sex distinction. Kollontai saw the traditional male role as the autonomous human one, so she wanted to be defined not as a woman but, in more gender neutral terms, as a human.

In giving up the sex distinction, Kollontai readily abandoned the traditional feminine virtues. She wrote of women that:

it is not her specifically feminine virtue that gives her a place of honor in human society, but the worth of the useful mission accomplished by her, the worth of her personality as a human being.

In a similar vein, Kollontai described modern woman as having "broken the rusted fetter of her sex" in order to become "a personality," a "human being" (note how being female and being human are set in opposition here). She even gave public lectures in which she:

longs for the female body itself to become less soft and curvy and more muscular ... She argues that prehistoric women were physiologically less distinct from men ... Accordingly, sexual dimorphism may (and should) again become less visible in a communist society.

Love

The abandonment of femininity is striking enough. Kollontai took the logic of modernism even further, though, by rejecting love.

For Kollontai, love between men and women was an expression of an older, oppressive order which women in modern social conditions would gradually be overcome. Love was oppressive because the instinct to be 'blended' with a man inevitably caged a woman's autonomy. It was a waste of a woman's energies which ought to be directed to the achievement of her life goal, namely her career.

Kollontai praised the "new women" whose "feelings and mental energies are directed upon all other things in life but sentimental love feelings." She herself, though, was still influenced by oppressive tradition and so had to struggle in life to overcome love:

this motive was a leading force in my life ... to shape my personal, intimate life as a woman according to my own will ... Above all, I never let my feelings, the joy or pain of love take the first place in my life ...

I still belong to the generation of women who grew up at a turning point in history. Love ... still played a very great role in my life. An all-too-great role! It was an expenditure of precious time and energy ... utterly worthless ... We, the women of the past generation, did not yet understand how to be free. The whole thing was an absolutely incredible squandering of our mental energy, a diminution of our labour power.

It is certainly true that we ... were able to understand that love was not the main goal of our life and that we knew how to place work at its center ... It was, in fact, an eternal defensive war against the intervention of the male into our ego ... Our mistake was that each time we succumbed to the belief that we had finally found the one and only in the man we loved, the person with whom we believed we could blend our soul, one who was ready fully to recognise us as a spiritual-physical force ... [Note how Kollontai can't help but use non-materialist terminology to describe the love experience: "blend our soul", "spiritual-physical force".]

But over and over again things turned out differently since the man tried to impose his ego upon us ... the inevitable inner rebellion ensued, over and over again since love became a fetter ... after the eternally recurring struggle with the beloved man, we finally tore ourselves away and rushed toward freedom. Thereupon we were again alone, unhappy, lonesome, but free - free to pursue our beloved, chosen ideal ... work.

When commenting on a novel by the French author Colette, Kollontai writes of the heroine that:

Freedom, independence, solitude are the substance of her personal desires. But when Rene, after a tiring long day's work, sits at the fireplace in her lovely flat, it is as though the hollow-eyed melancholy of loneliness creeps into her room and sets himself behind her chair.

"I am used to being alone," she writes in her diary, "but today I feel so forsaken. Am I then not independent, not free? And terribly lonely?" Does not this question have the ring of the woman of the past who is used to hearing familiar, beloved voices, to being the object of indispensable words and acts of tenderness?

For Kollontai it is the "woman of the past" who hears at home beloved voices and experiences acts of tenderness. Love is not an enduring quality or an important value for her, even if she sought it in her own life. She describes it as a fetter to individual autonomy, just like womanhood.

The experience of great love is an old quality for Kollontai, something not fit for modern conditions, a part of a woman's own self to be dramatically overcome:

The old and the new struggle in the souls of women ... Contemporary heroines, therefore, must wage a struggle ... with the inclinations of their grandmothers dwelling in the recesses of their beings ... The transformation of the feminine psyche, which is adjusted to the new conditions of its economic and social existence, will not be achieved without a strong, dramatic overcoming.

Marriage and motherhood

Kollontai wanted autonomy above all else, which makes it difficult to accept marriage. She states in her autobiography that although she loved her husband she thought of marriage as a "cage" (like "fetter" a word denoting restriction). And so she left her husband to become a political activist:

But as great as was my love for my husband, immediately it transgressed a certain limit in relation to my feminine proneness to make sacrifice, rebellion flared in me anew. I had to go away, I had to break with the man of my choice, otherwise (this was a subconscious feeling in me) I would have exposed myself to the danger of losing my selfhood.

In other words, if her love for her husband became too great, she began to give of herself in the marriage, which then left her panicking that she might lose autonomous selfhood.

And what of motherhood? Kollontai wanted motherhood to be free, in the sense that women could freely choose the father of their child (i.e. it could be any man, not necessarily one they were in a relationship with). Motherhood wasn't to be restricted by requiring a relationship to a man; fatherhood was to be optional, only practised in particular circumstances. Motherhood was also to be socialised, with childcare being provided by the state.

Kollontai thought well of the newer fictional heroines who had "freedom of feeling, freedom in the choice of the beloved, of the possible father of "her" child ... Contemporary heroines become mothers without being married." We are told in one source that Kollontai:

approvingly describes the possibility of maternity now becoming "an aim in itself," distinct from the mother's relations to the child's father. (In this essay and elsewhere, Kollontai only addresses fatherhood in passing as an option interested men could engage in for educational purposes.)

Finally, Kollontai's novel Red Love ends happily, with the heroine Vasya light-heartedly telling her friend that she has left her husband and that she doesn't need a man to raise her child:

“But I haven’t even told you the biggest news of all, Grusha. I saw the doctor. I’m expecting a baby.”

“A baby?” Grusha clapped her hands. “Really? Then how could you let your husband go? Will you let the baby be fatherless, or are you going to be fashionable, and have an abortion?”

“Why an abortion? Let the child grow. I don’t need a man. That’s all they can do – be fathers! Look at the Fedosseyev woman with her three children – they didn’t keep her husband from going to Dora.”

“That’s all very well; but how will you bring it up all by yourself?”

“All by myself? The organization will bring it up. We’ll fix up a nursery. And I’ll bring you over to work there. You like children, too. Then it’ll be our baby. We’ll have it in common.”

Again they laughed.

Comparison

Alexandra Kollontai was brought to such positions by a modernism which is also orthodox in our own liberal societies. So it's no surprise that the West has moved toward the positions Kollontai took several generations ago.

This is especially true of the socialisation of child care; the attempt to make sex distinctions not matter; the "optionalisation" of fatherhood; the priority given to careers as a life aim; and the deferral of marriage in favour of a single, independent lifestyle.

There has not been such an explicit rejection of heterosexual love as that made by Kollontai, although at various times the emphasis has been, as Kollontai would have approved, on short-term casual relationships rather than on more serious commitments.

And if you don't like these trends? Then the response must be to question the principles which generate them. If freedom, understood to mean individual autonomy, is the sole overriding aim, then modern trends will continue. The alternative is not to damn autonomy, but to see it as one good amongst many, and not always superior.

Dating cruelly biased?

Dating is one of the most difficult things for modern men to negotiate. One of the problems is that feminism has encouraged women to pursue independence in their twenties, which translates into careers, travel and casual relationships. There’s little pressure on women at this time to cultivate attractively feminine qualities, or to make the right signals to men seeking serious relationships, or to restrain the impulse to reward bad boy behaviour.

And then when women hit their early thirties it suddenly changes. Instead of quirkiness, or androgyny or attempts to shock, you begin to meet women who make a real effort to be friendly and to present well.

By this time a lot of men have become demoralised or have internalised the non-committal culture of relationships. So there will be some competition for genuine husband material among thirty-something women.

Bettina Arndt has written a column discussing such dating issues. She confirms my own impressions by claiming that when people pass the carefree years of the twenties:

the dating world is suddenly a very different place.

When women hit their 30s, they encounter a “flip,” which shifts the balance of power in the dating game irrevocably in man’s favour, according to blogger Sam de Brito.

After years of grovelling for female company, now it is the men who find themselves in a buyer’s market as women start to panic over finding partners willing to father children.

“Mother nature is particularly unfair to her daughters and it’s about age 32 that many women realise life’s great game of musical chairs is cruelly weighted toward guys”.

Although I agree that the “flip” occurs, I don’t see why we should think of the situation as cruelly biased against women. After all, women have considerable advantages in their mid-20s, which is the more natural time for family formation.

Arndt then gives a sad statistic: by age 35-39 nearly a third (31%) of women are still single (feminists might at least ask themselves what went wrong). It’s not because of a shortage of men – according to Arndt there are nearly 500,000 more single men in their 30s than single women in Australia (the statistic, I have to say, seems excessive).

This surplus of single men has its limitations:

significant numbers of these men are unemployed and low-income – men who are the big losers in the partnering stakes and the most likely to end up never married.

And with many of the successful, better-educated men fishing outside their pool – choosing younger women, or women far less educated than themselves – this leaves a mighty lean pool for successful women.

Arndt draws the most obvious conclusion: it would help women if they attempted to partner earlier, when conditions are most favourable:

we should be encouraging women not to leave their run too late ... The lessons from the past few decades have been that it is in women’s interests to get serious about finding the right partner early – before the competition heats up.

Finally, Arndt takes on the opposition, in the form of comedian Kaz Cooke, who is continuing to encourage women to remain independent:

You don’t need a man to protect you, you don’t need a man for money, and you don’t need a man to make an impact in life and on what you do.

Arndt replies as follows:

Yes, but most women are still attracted to the exhilarating journey of a shared life with a family.

I think Arndt is giving away too much in this reply. Most women will need a man to protect and provide for them and their children. Even with government welfare, it’s still the case that much poverty is connected to single motherhood. A hard-working father is still a real asset to a woman seeking a good standard of living for her family.

And women do still look to men for protection. Consider the reasons given by Angela Epstein for preferring to put her security in the hands of a man. She suggests that her feelings:

may be sourced in the fact that every girl inherits the princess gene which dictates her desire for a strong male role model to cosset and comfort her.

I see it in my three-year-old daughter who runs to her older brothers or her daddy when a dog barks at her in the park. She trusts them more than me to protect her.
There’s a dash of the old “damsel in distress” dynamic at play too ...

The fact is that when we women are tired, weak, compromised, in need of sympathy and vulnerable, nothing beats the strong arm of male capability and its implied protection.

A man who doesn’t think he will be called on to play a protector role is likely to experience a shock on getting married. I doubt if a man can ever be as capable of filling this role as a woman would ideally like. Arguably, one of the skills required of men in marriage is to set limits to the expectations placed on them as protectors by their wives. It’s a difficult role to live up to, and often chastening - the fall from “hero to zero” is a quick one.

Denying the reality of the role does little to prepare men for it and so I would have answered Kaz Cooke differently than Bettina Arndt chose to do. Still, the basic idea behind Arndt’s column – that the delay in family formation is harmful to many women – is an important one to make.

Is Gillard setting women up for conflict?

Julia Gillard, deputy leader of the Australian Labor Party, made this prediction back in August:

There will come a time when we women will be judged purely on achievements and strength of character rather than whether we ascribe to what are seen as feminine traits, fit a particular model of attractiveness for public life or have fruit in a fruit bowl.

This is an unfortunate way of putting things. It cuts women off from what is feminine in two ways. First, Gillard seems to deny that femininity is something irrevocably connected to womanhood. She states that women may or may not "ascribe" to feminine traits, as if femininity is something that can be picked up or discarded as a personal choice. Similarly, she doesn't simply speak of feminine traits, but of qualities "which are seen as feminine traits", as if to doubt their objective existence.

Worse, Gillard separates a woman's achievements and character from her femininity. The way she puts things you would think that femininity is not a substantive part of what it means to be a woman - that it isn't a core aspect of who a woman is and what she has to offer.

What is supposed to be cutting-edge feminism puts women in a difficult position. It makes what is distinctively female a negative, secondary quality.

Imagine having a female identity but seeing what is distinctively female as being inferior and in opposition to your life goals. Isn't this an unsuitable framework for a woman to live her life by?

The problem of the inner woman

What happens when things just don't work out as they were supposed to? Some feminists are now confronting this very problem.

Take a recent article by Laura Kipnis, an American professor of media studies. It was introduced by the following subtitle:

In our post-feminist Western world, women are supposed to be able to have it all. So why are so many dissatisfied?

What answer does she give? Ordinarily, a feminist would blame the patriarchy. The usual argument runs as follows: the primary aim of life is autonomy; men have established a patriarchy to dominate women; women are therefore oppressed by a social system in which men are autonomous but women are dependent; the pursuit of justice, freedom and equality therefore requires women to become independent of men, especially through the pursuit of careers.

Kipnis is strongly influenced by this orthodox view:

For the first time in history, women are relatively free from traditional fetters. No longer is womanhood synonymous with motherhood for those who don't so choose.

... with more control over maternity, record numbers of women are now participating in the workforce, meaning that womanhood is no longer synonymous with dependency. In fact, women can now be entirely free from men should they so choose.

The problem is that women still don't seem liberated. Kipnis thinks that modern women feel such a lack of control and sense of inadequacy that a whole self-help industry has sprung up to tell women how to live their lives.

This is where it gets particularly interesting. Kipnis believes that feminism has hit a brick wall because of a conflict between the goal of feminism (autonomy) and the "inner woman" (femininity):

Feminism ("Don't call me darling, idiot") and femininity ("I just found the perfect push-up bra") are in a big catfight, nowhere more than within each individual female psyche ... Gender barriers have largely crumbled, and women have increasing economic independence from men if they choose it. But one keeps stumbling across a certain ambivalence, an ambivalence among women themselves.

Which is why being female at this point in history seems an especially conflicted enterprise ... Which one should it be? The Feisty Feminist or the Eternal Feminine?

Kipnis herself would prefer to see the feisty feminist triumph. She recognises, though, that feminists underestimated the stubborn desire of the "inner woman" to live in relationship with a man:

Yet it turns out there are rather obdurate female longings with regard to dependency on men, despite pronouncements to the contrary - women need men like fish need bicycles - back in the heady years of the second wave. It turns out that fish are devoted cyclists. Indeed, the problem these days is that the bicycles seem to be fleeing the fish.

Which turns relationships into an "agonised business" for many women:

... we're facing a disastrous resource shortage .... single heterosexual men wishing to couple on a long-term basis. It's not just that demand exceeds supply but also that the majority of single men are - according to field reports from those who've hazarded dating them - "relationship challenged", in flight from commitment, their true feelings, real women.

Thus it falls to the intimacy seeking female to blockade the escape routes and lure those men out of ambivalence and into domesticity.

Kipnis finishes by again emphasising that the "inner woman" is the stumbling block for feminism:

So if something remains a little obdurate about female inequality after the past 40 years or so, it's because feminism came up against an unanticipated opponent: the inner woman ...

Feminism, once construed as a liberation movement, has somehow ended up producing more dichotomies and more impasses ...

So where is feminism supposed to go from here? Is it supposed to wage war on the inner woman in order to achieve its political goals?

The easier option is to drop the underlying assumption that autonomy is the overriding good in life. If autonomy is seen to be one good amongst many, then it can be left to individuals and communities to find a balance between it and other goods.

Finding the right measure is a much less conflicted option than seeking absolute autonomy and being caught between this political aim and your own "obdurate" inner self.

But why is Deveny wrong?

Catherine Deveny woke up one morning, opened her newspaper and found out that athlete Jana Pittman had changed her last name to Rawlinson. Deveny could not, at first, understand what had happened:

Then it dawned on me. She has got married, bizarre enough in itself these days, and changed her last name to her husband's. What an anachronism ...

Wake up! We are in 2007. Women are no longer owned by their father and then their husband. So why are some women still changing their surnames? And why do some men still want them to? It's sad, it's misogynous, it's archaic, it's insecure and it's unnecessary.

Why would you do something so drastic simply because you decided to delude yourself it was easier? Because you are deeply insecure, deeply conservative or deeply stupid. And in deep denial.

Deveny is pretty free with the insults here, so it's not surprising that she attracted a largely hostile response. Most of the criticism, though, focused on her bitterly aggressive style, rather than on her argument.

So why might a woman change her name on getting married? Is she simply a deluded victim of the patriarchy in doing so? Or are there other ways of explaining this custom?

Paternal pride

Societies generally don't have to worry about connecting mothers with their children.

It's possible, though, to have a situation in which men father children, but then don't stay around to help raise and socialise them.

This is roughly what happens within black American families. About 70% of children within the black community are born to single mothers. The social consequences for both mothers and children aren't good; there is an increase in poverty, crime, drug use and gangs.

There is a rational purpose, therefore, in encouraging men to stay. And one way of doing this is to appeal to the instinct men have to feel a pride in paternity, including a pride in family lineage.

My own father often discusses the history of our family (sometimes considerably embellished) and he is obviously concerned to keep the family name going. If you grow up as a boy in such an atmosphere you absorb a basic expectation: that you will marry, father children and do your best to raise them so that they too can successfully carry on the family tradition.

The idea that you would reproduce simply as a sperm donor for a single mother just doesn't match expectations.

That there is a benefit in women encouraging male participation in family life is borne out by research into the "marriage gap" in America. There is a growing divide between upper class women, who continue to believe that paternal investment in family life is important, and lower class women, who are more likely to become single mothers, or remain de facto, or divorce and remarry:

America really has become two nations. The old-fashioned married-couple-with-children model is doing quite well among college-educated women. It is primarily among lower-income women with only a high school education that it is in poor health...

Virtually all — 92 percent — of children whose families make over $75,000 are living with both parents. On the other end of the income scale, the situation is reversed: only about 20 percent of kids in families earning under $15,000 live with both parents ...

Educated, middle-class mothers tend to be dedicated to what I have called The Mission, the careful nurturing of their children’s cognitive, emotional, and social development ... It’s common sense, backed up by plenty of research, that you’ll have a better chance of fully “developing” your children — that is, of fulfilling The Mission — if you have a husband around.

It is the better educated and more ambitious women who most want to keep the father of their children around. They are seeking a high level of paternal investment and they're more likely to be successful if men are encouraged in their instincts toward a pride in paternity and lineage.

A counter-argument might be that a woman could achieve the same desired effect by having her children adopt her husband's family name whilst she retains her own. This is, as I understand it, the custom in some countries such as The Netherlands. It seems, though, that once the children adopt the father's last name, many women find it simpler to also change their own name, and some feel that it improves the sense of family unity if they too share their husband and children's surname.

Status seeking

A while back feminists decided to introduce the term "Ms" as a title for both married and unmarried women. It didn't work. Most women still prefer to use the title "Mrs" after marriage.

The most obvious reason for the failure of "Ms" is that many women still associate marriage with status, and that "Mrs" therefore denotes a positive status compared to either "Ms" or "Miss".

Similarly, it's possible that for some women a change of surname on marriage is another marker of increased status.

Is it rational to encourage this form of status seeking? It depends on what you think of marriage. If, like Catherine Deveny, you're hostile to marriage, then you won't approve of the link between marriage and status. However, if you believe that that marriage is of overall benefit, it does become reasonable to encourage such "marital status seeking" amongst women.

A romantic gesture

You can't ignore heterosexuality in all this. Think of the psychology of relationships between men and women. A man perceives that a woman has something to give. He pursues her and tries to win her over.

A woman in yielding makes herself vulnerable. She gives herself in trust to the man; she places herself in his care.

For a man, there is a kind of thrill in the realisation that the woman has voluntarily consented to yield to him.

At no time is this interplay between men and women likely to be more intense than when we marry. The sense of feminine yielding is much more likely to lead to women changing their name (and residence and even their religion) than vice versa.

Do women experience this as an oppression? I don't think so. For some women, the romantic interplay is intoxicating. They try to heighten the effect by making the act of yielding more dangerous: they place themselves in the care of "bad boys" who can't be trusted to do the right thing.

The columnist Andrea Burns wrote recently about her own addiction to bad boys:

Maybe there is something addictive in the poison relationship? ... I'm talking about a feeling we get that is so powerful we just can't keep away. These boys who treat us so bad, but make us feel so good are everywhere ... No one wants to date a nice, boring bloke. That's just not exciting.

If anything, the "thrill" that women get in yielding and trusting needs to be drawn in at times (which seems to be the theme of various Jane Austen novels).

The problem for Deveny is that these kind of feminine romantic gestures run counter to the official political programme of female independence and autonomy. It's difficult, though, to entirely suppress heterosexual instincts. Most women make some sort of compromise between their heterosexuality and feminist politics; Deveny is too strident to accept a compromise position.