Building up our houses

I've often thought that one thing missing in modern life is older women passing down healthy social mores to younger women (what can you pass down when the social creed is "do whatever you will"?).

So I was pleased to see an example (via Dalrock) of a woman trying to pass on some good advice about marriage to other women. Her name is Heidi Stone, and I know little about her except that she appears to be an American Protestant Christian.

She begins by noting how many marriages are failing in her social circle. She then points out to her female readers that divorce often does not lead to a happy future relationship:

Remarriage for women, as we age, becomes less and less likely. Should we get started talking about the cost of child support? On both sides? What about how alimony can financially cripple either party’s ability to provide for a second family. It doesn’t happen or it takes too much of the paycheck.

Simply? It makes sense to just stay married. Especially for us, ladies. Especially for us.

That’s you and me, darlin’. You and me. We’ve already invested our perky selves, baby-making hips, and the “looks cute in a two-piece” years. We’ve given them to the man we wake up to and the children we make dinner for and unless we are careful, that investment might not pay off.

I know I want to reap the rewards of that investment.

I’ve earned those rewards. There is no way I want to jeopardize where I end up and how I live because I didn’t have the courage or willingness to pursue my marriage and family with integrity now. Before the hurricanes and menopausal tornadoes.

See, to be blunt, we don’t fare well in the re-marriage market as only 25% of women who are divorced in their 30’s-40’s actually remarry. Men will generally marry at a rate closer to 50% but, even then, they aren’t looking at our Match.Com profiles. They tend to marry women far younger than themselves the second time and, well, that rather gives a raspberry to both our aging marketability and our chances at second time marital bliss.

So only 25% of women who divorce in their 30s and 40s will remarry, and only 7% of single women aged over 50 will ever even cohabit again with a man:

The people most unlikely to find a partner and settle into a new long-term relationship are women aged over 50, with only 7 per cent moving in with a partner.

If a woman "invests" her youthful beauty and fertility in marriage, then she maximises her chances of being in a loving relationship with a man in her later decades (in the second half of her life). If this is ignored, then many people will live alone from middle-age. In trailblazing feminist Sweden 52% of households now consist of only one person:

Why, then, does Sweden stand out when it comes to the high number of single households? Trägårdh says that Sweden is a "radically individualistic" country with a social structure that enables people to live independently - that is, to avoid having to rely on one another.

"It has something to do both with values and with the types of institutions we have created in Sweden in more recent decades," explains Trägårdh.

"Individual autonomy has been important for a long time here, as well as the idea that relationships - even in family and love - should be voluntary. And our institutions guarantee the possibility for relationships to be voluntary, for individuals to make the decision to leave a relationship if they so wish."

The emphasis in Sweden is on the liberal aim of maximising individual autonomy by making it easy to dissolve marriages and to live independently of anyone else - but they have succeeded so well in this aim that a majority of households now have just one person (in comparison the percentage of single person households in nearby Poland is 24%, in Singapore it is 11% and in India 3.7%.)

The next part of Heidi Stone's advice is equally good. She asks women to think about the mistakes that wives sometimes make that bring down their own houses:

This is to the sisters who bulldoze their own security and future. Shingle by shingle. Tear by manipulating tear. Guilt trips by angry blaming.

Every day, systematically destroying their homes, one snark, one bitterness, one resentment at a time the foundation crumbles until there is nothing left to preserve. Nothing left to fight for or hold on to.

I don’t have to make a list, we are familiar with the usual suspects. Anger, resentment, bitterness, defensiveness, and arrogance. No one needs to be convinced those elements are at the heart of poor choices. Toxic to our warmth and hospitality.

But we justify. We excuse our failures. When we are at church thinly masking our dishonor of our spouse with a carefully worded prayer request or trying to explain our behavior to our friends… Maybe we spend too much time searching for a friendly ear when we believe we’ve been horribly “wronged”.

But there really is no limit to the depths of ugliness in the human heart. Have you thought about how disrespect and comparison, victimhood, and slander can pull down your house?

Men are brought up to think that failure or success depends on their own efforts, their character, their strength. But the fate of some marriages is decided not by the actions of the husband, but within the mind and soul of the wife. The marriage rests on her ability to manage her thoughts and emotions, so that she does not dwell on the negatives, or hold on to grievances, or seek to belittle, or slide between a sensitivity to being patronised and a feeling of superiority.

Is it not one task of a human culture to help women to inhabit the better part of themselves ("our warmth and hospitality") rather than the more destructive parts? Is it not important for men to take an interest in this, given that men seek emotional and physical intimacy with their wives but are unlikely to genuinely achieve this if women cannot overcome the kind of failures that Heidi Stone describes?

A bank redefines marriage

The corporate world is increasingly jumping on board liberal causes. Recently for instance the ANZ bank has come out in support of same sex marriage. The bank posted tweets in support of same sex marriage; after some criticisms in response to this they followed up with this tweet,:

I left this response:

Which led me to think about the nature of marriage. It seems to me that marriage is, in part, an anchoring institution. As you get older you become aware that the distinctions between men and women are not only a source of attraction, but also a source of difficulty in keeping relationships between men and women stable.

Men do need, at the deepest level, a physically and emotionally intimate relationship with a woman. However, this is not easily achieved. Even with the best intentions, there are any number of differences in the way that men and women perceive and process relationships that can bring about a failure to hold things together.

So why not then just accept a whole series of relationships throughout life? One reason is that we are given a period of time in our youth when our passions run high so that a bonding with another person might be well secured, leading to a stable companionship in later middle age and beyond.

This period of life doesn't last forever. If we don't take advantage of it to bond with one person, but instead experience repeated relationship failure, then relationships later in life become very difficult (for instance, after the age of 50 only 7% of single women will ever again cohabit with a man).

So marriage serves its purpose when it anchors our commitments in our youth, enabling a lifelong relationship between a man and a woman, in spite of the inevitable frictions that arise in joining together the male and the female.

Marriage is also an institution of transmission, and as such its anchoring role takes on added importance.

Through the institution of marriage, we transmit in a stable way a bloodline, a family heritage and history, property, and culture and values. It is how we reproduce ourselves across generations, it is how we honour our forebears, it is how we enact our instinct to impart something of ourselves to our children and grandchildren. Here too marriage is an anchoring institution, without which there can be no secure transmission across generations.

What all this means is that it is in the nature of marriage that commitments be stable and exclusive. Without this marriage loses its value and meaning as an institution.

Modern liberal societies have already significantly undermined the institution of marriage. Many people now see marriage only as an expression of love so that if love is no longer felt the marriage is readily dissolved. There is no longer an anchoring of the relationship.

Similarly if marriage is only an expression of love then it is not intended to carry on a family tradition in a stable way across generations. It need not be fruitful, it need not be grounded in a larger, meaningful enterprise that not only helps to bind the spouses together, but which also ties together their own identity and life purposes to the role of the marriage.

So the question then is do we uphold the deeper traditional understanding of marriage as an anchoring institution, and as an institution of transmission, if we include within it the marriage of two men or two women.

I believe the answer is no. Although it is true that some homosexual men and women have enduring relationships, in general the culture of homosexual relationships is not based on an exclusive anchoring of two people together. Male homosexuals often have open and promiscuous relationships, and polyamory is also common within a homosexual subculture. There is also a tendency for sex to be understood in purely hedonistic terms within the homosexual subculture.

This helps to explain why queer theorists are just as likely to talk about the need to subvert the norms of heterosexual marriage as they are to seek the right to be included within it.

If marriage is just about equal rights, specifically the right to marry anyone we love without any discrimination, then as a matter of logic we have to accept easy divorce, polyamory, as well as same-sex marriage. But marriage then becomes something radically different to its original meaning and purposes. It is not hard to see that this new understanding of marriage will leave many people adrift in life.

If anything, we need to go the other way and restore something of the original culture of marriage rather than continuing along the liberal modernist path.

The unleashed family

This is happening more quickly than I thought it would. A judge in Argentina has ruled that a woman can marry her stepdaughter. Why? According to the judge:

The Argentinian constitution guarantees all its citizens the right to procure their own happiness, which carries with it the right to be treated with dignity by the laws of the country in all areas of life, including marriage.

You don't have to be a genius to figure out that by this logic any kind of consensual marriage is morally justified. It not only justifies two women marrying, it also justifies a woman marrying her stepdaughter and it also clearly justifies a man marrying more than one woman. After all, if a man believes that marrying two or three or four women will make him happy, then he is exercising his constitutional right to "procure his own happiness," is he not?

Unless liberalism is overthrown as the state ideology it is only a matter of time before polygamy becomes legal.

The one virtue of the liberal approach to morality is that it is simple. If it is your desire, and doesn't directly interfere with the desires of others, then it is moral. The alternative is more "intersectional" and therefore more complex for the reason that reality itself has different dimensions, each of which needs to be ordered within a common framework.

For instance, someone might recognise his larger communal tradition as representing an important good and therefore believe that it is important to ask whether a certain action will harm or serve this tradition. He might also recognise the existence of qualities that are inherently good and take these as a measure of the rightness or wrongness of an action. Or he might recognise a natural telos (a purpose or end) to who he is as a man and ask whether his desires are rightly ordered to fulfil this telos or not. Perhaps he has a sense of the sacred in life; of his own higher or lower nature; of what is either noble or base in human conduct; of whether an action produces consequences that harm the individual or the society he lives in, for instance, by leading to crime or instability or poverty or ill health.

Human desires are wayward. We can experience contradictory desires during the course of a day. It is the task of a culture to discipline these desires within a moral framework, one which aims to raise us toward our higher spiritual ends, to fulfil our created nature/telos, and to serve the larger communal tradition we belong to, identify with and love. A society can be measured by the degree to which it gets this moral framework right.

A bit of magazine advice

Not sure if there is a logical end point to this kind of thing. Look at the magazine cover below (a lifestyle magazine for the Melbourne Herald Sun):

Notice anything odd? Maybe a close up will help:

The cover is advertising a story about "Women who are single, sexy and over 60." It's Carrie Bradshaw and the Sex in the City lifestyle being promoted now to women of grandmotherly age.

The magazine story itself is what the internet writer Dalrock calls "divorce porn," i.e. it is trying to sell divorce to women as a great lifestyle move.

The story was first published in the British newspaper, The Telegraph, back in January. The Melbourne version has the heading "Meet the freemales. Deprived? No. Lonely? Definitely not. These women are happily single, sexy and 60 - and their numbers are on the rise."

The gist of the story is that women who grew up as part of the sexual revolution want to pursue the same ideals into their 60s, leaving their husbands and marriages in order to live a life that "has infinitely more possibilities" than anything experienced by previous generations of women, choosing instead of marriage a great "adventure" and doing so alone.

In a way, these women really are acting out the values of liberal modernity. In liberal modernity there are no goods that exist as part of an objective reality. Instead, value is created by the act of choosing our own subjective goods. So what matters is being free to self-determine what we do. Marriage restricts our ability to act however we want at any given time. Therefore, a liberal modern might think it "liberating" to reject marriage in favour of the "infinite possibilities" of life as a single 60-something woman.

Our commitments to others are easily dissolved in the liberal schema. It is noticeable that no thought at all is given to the husbands that these women have left. Nor to the damage done to the institution of marriage itself. There is no mention of the duties we might carry to others, instead one woman is thought of as liberated because she rejects the idea of "caring for others" - she readily admits that she is "more selfish" than those who choose to marry.

The tension here between marriage/family and liberal values is resolved in favour of liberal values. And so you have the spectacle of a major newspaper publishing "divorce porn" for women in their 60s.

Laurie Penny sets out the true goal of feminism: the state must replace the husband

Laurie Penny is a radical English feminist. In a column for the New Statesman she has called for women to walk away from marriage. There are passages in her column which are very significant, as they reveal what feminism is really pushing toward. So I'd encourage readers to persevere with this post as it touches on fundamentals.

She begins by asking whether marriage is "worth it for women who value their personal autonomy." Straight from the beginning you can see that she has adopted the liberal ideal that the highest good in life is personal autonomy. Feminism, therefore, becomes the attempt to maximise personal autonomy for women (it is assumed by feminists that men already have this precious commodity).
So why does marriage harm women's personal autonomy? Laurie Penny gives an unusual answer: she claims that it involves unpaid emotional labour. The idea seems to be that women are being exploited by undertaking emotional labour within marriage that is not remunerated.

I don't want to dwell on this as it's not the most significant aspect of Laurie Penny's article. I will just point out that it is very odd for someone like Penny who is supposedly anti-capitalist to conceptualise something as intimate as marriage in terms of the market. It is also blinkered for Penny not to recognise that husbands also "perform unpaid emotional labour" in a marriage; in fact, on men's sites there are complaints that men do too great a share of this within modern relationships (which happens to be my experience.)

What Laurie Penny writes next is reasonably important:

Not so long ago, marriage was most women’s only option if they wanted financial security, children who would be considered legitimate, social status and semi-regular sex. Our foremothers fought for the right to all of those things outside the confines of partnership, and today the benefits of marriage and monogamy are increasingly outweighed by the costs.

Feminists wanted women to be autonomous and to have the goods that women traditionally obtained within marriage without having to be married. In doing so, marriage inevitably took a mighty hit - Laurie Penny herself believes that in taking away the goods of marriage feminists have made the costs of marriage greater than the benefits for women.

But the key part of Laurie Penny's column comes next. What is the next step for feminism in liberating women? Well, according to Penny there still remains one little problem. When women shun marriage they might well have access to welfare, but they don't have access to a husband's earnings and so are not as well off as married women financially:

there's still a price to pay for choosing not to pair up...It’s also about the money. Over half of Americans earning minimum wage or below are single women – and single mothers are five times as likely to live in poverty as married ones. This has been taken as proof that marriage is better for women – when it should, in fact, be a sign that society must do more, and better, to support women’s choices

And here is where Laurie Penny is unusually honest. She says outright what others would might try to obscure. She approvingly quotes another feminist writer to the effect that the state should be expected to act as the husband of single women, guaranteeing the same sort of income that married women might expect:

Traister is relaxed about the prospect of single women asking that the support a husband might once have provided be publicly available. “In looking to the government to support their ambitions, choices and independence through better policy,” she writes, “Single women are asserting themselves as citizens in ways that American men have for generations.”

Now, it has to be said that this would only be one more step along the same feminist path that we have already travelled a long way along. The state already acts as husband to sole mothers. It already enacts laws allowing women to divorce husbands and continue to live off their husband's earnings. So no wonder that Laurie Penny thinks she is on a winner.

But if marriage is already teetering, then this would surely finish it off - which is Laurie Penny's stated intention. She writes that she believes "in dismantling the social and economic institutions of marriage and family".

Like the feminists of the early 1900s, she believes that by dismantling marriage you would then have "pure" relationships between men and women, equal relationships based on love alone.

I believe in all of that not despite my squishy, tender heart, but because of it. I’m a romantic. I think love needs to be freed from the confines of the traditional, monogamous, nuclear family – and so do women...In the real world, love is perhaps the one truly infinite, renewable resource we have – and it’s beyond time that we had more options. I want more options for myself, and I want them for all of us, not just as a feminist, but as a romantic, too – because it’s the only chance we have of one day, at last, meeting and mating as true equals.

She is deluded, just like the first-wave feminists. The reality is that when you don't need anything from the opposite sex, you don't form "pure" attachments, you become fussy, demanding, ungrateful and unrealistic toward the opposite sex. If Laurie Penny's policy were really to get off the ground, then you could expect women to treat men worse, not better. Women would probably find themselves even less willing to commit to relationships and confused about the reasons why - but probably believing that the available men were just not quite good enough for them.

The moral of the story? If we want to have a successful culture of family life then we need to reject the idea that personal autonomy is always and everywhere the highest good in life, the one that defines freedom. We also need to maintain or even attempt to restore the goods of marriage, the goods that were carelessly subverted by the state in modern times.

What do Swedish Youth policies really tell us?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A different understanding of marriage

In a previous post on marriage a reader left this comment:

The traditional concept of Marriage in Christian (an indeed all major religious) tradition is of a social institution and not a personal relationship. Marriage, like other social institutions, must have a vision and goals which are in line with the common good of the society and families from which the bride and groom originate.

The principle functions of marriage are the procreation and enculturation of children, and the care of the elderly and the sick. Marriage does not, therefore, exist primarily to fulfil personal emotional or sexual gratification needs. Its primary purpose is the preservation and perpetuation of the social order.

The Christian view of Mary and Joseph as the model family requires that the righteous man marries within his own tribe. Husband and wife should, as Mary and Joseph, be of common ancestral descent. Thus the genetic heritage and gifts which God created in each ethnic group be preserved.

I do understand the point being made here. It is a reaction against the current failing understanding of marriage. When people marry now, they still often say the traditional vows, but do not really mean them. For instance, whilst it is undoubtedly true that women at their weddings want their marriages to succeed, what many are really vowing is to stay with their husbands as long as they still have a feeling of love toward them, with love understood as a romantic feeling. If the feeling goes, then the marriage was not "fated" to last, it simply wasn't meant to be, and it is then thought right to move on.

Obviously, this way of doing things means that many marriages will fail. It only takes one bout of marital weariness and it's over (see here).

My reader puts forward a different model, one based on an authoritative assertion of marriage as a social institution, rather than a personal relationship. Would it work? Well, one thing in its favour is that most people do follow whatever moral beliefs are authoritative in their society. So as long as the belief in marriage as a social institution retained moral authority, it would most likely be more successful than the current model.

Even so, I'd like to put forward a different way of framing marriage, one that ties together the personal and the social. First, for a culture of marriage to succeed there needs to be a sense of the "offices" of husband/father and wife/mother. These offices are part of what fulfil our created natures as men and women; they add a sense of meaning and accomplishment to our work in the world; and they bring a sense of fruition to our lives.

These offices are a deep expression of our manhood and womanhood and, as such, tie our personal identity closely to our social roles within the family. They also give us a reason to commit to marriage and family in a stable way over and above the romantic relationship we have with our spouse.

But these offices are no longer as effective as they once were in anchoring our family commitments. One problem is the emphasis in liberalism on "freedom as individual autonomy". If the aim is to be an autonomous, self-determining, self-creating individual, then inherited social roles, particularly those based on our unchosen biological sex, will be thought of negatively as restraints on the individual. So over time marriage will be reconceived as an increasingly personal union alone, minus the social offices.

A second issue is the feminist idea that the offices of wife and mother were constructed for oppressive purposes; i.e. that rather than being part of the fulfilment of a woman, or of a fruitful life, that they are the very opposite, a way of women being subordinated in society. Therefore several generations of women have been raised not necessarily to reject marriage itself, but rather the significance or worth of the role/office of being a wife and mother.

This is especially true of the wifely role which has been widely cast as being old-fashioned or disempowering. In contrast, there do still exist some women (including women with careers) who uphold some of the older culture attached to the motherhood role and this does help to cement their marital commitments. There are some women, in other words, who might not stay in a marriage for the sake of their husbands or societies, but who will do so for the sake of their children.

For a culture of marriage to succeed there also needs to be a certain understanding of love. Emotional feeling is not the only test of love; the love we are called on to cultivate in marriage is one that should be settled in the will and be expressed, in part, as fidelity and service. Nor should we see love as being passively fated, but rather as something that we are actively oriented to, i.e. that we will love the spouse we are with, with all that this entails (e.g. the emotional maturity to forgive).

Finally, our stable commitments to marriage and family can also be reinforced by our perception of the good. Our commitment to community or tribe or nation is drawn partly from the identity and connectedness we draw from them, but partly also from the good that we perceive in them. This good can be understood in a secular way (e.g. the positive role that family plays in the emotional development of the young), but also in a religious way, as a transcendent good, by which I mean a good that exists independently of human agency and which might be experienced as something like "the eternal in the moment of perception".

Romantic love can be experienced as a transcendent good (finding your "soul mate"), although this is not what anchors family commitments. But so too can the life and character of a family - this can be experienced as a unique expression of a transcendent good, something of inestimable value, that you would not then ordinarily choose to dissolve (just as you would not ordinarily choose to dissolve your own tradition if you saw in it a unique expression of a transcendent good).

Marriage & a traditionalist counterculture

I thought Suzanne Venker made a good point in a discussion on why modern marriage is failing:

If women no longer expect or even want men to “take care of” them — since women can do everything men can do and better, thank you very much, feminism — perhaps the flipside is the assumption that women don’t need to take care of husbands, either. And if no one’s taking care of anyone, why the hell marry?

Her argument makes sense. It means that if we want to restore a culture of marriage we need to think through ways in which men and women can return to complementary gender roles (if we set up society so that men and women don't need each other, then sexual relations are likely to deteriorate.)

However, I don't think her argument explains everything. There are women out there who do want men to take care of them but who still carry the assumption that they don't need to take care of their husbands in return. How do we explain this phenomenon?

It possibly has to do with a misunderstanding of love itself. If you were to ask young women today what love is I expect that many would think of the physical or emotional sensations evoked by a passionate feeling of romantic love (butterflies in the stomach, not wanting to be apart etc.). What's missing is the understanding that genuine love instils a settled commitment in the will toward both fidelity and a desire to "do well toward", i.e. to serve and uphold.

This latter understanding of love has bit by bit leached out of Western culture. It was once applied not only to conjugal love (marriage); but to our wider families; to people and place; to our culture and tradition. It survived longest within a culture of family life, where love and commitment remained twin concepts at least for my parent's generation.

I think what survives now amongst the more responsible educated women is the idea that they should stay married out of a commitment to their children, i.e. that their children would be hurt if they abandoned their marriages. It's the last bit of culture that still supports marriage (at least within certain socio-economic groups) - and if that goes, then perhaps the whole thing collapses.

So how might a traditionalist counterculture push things back in the right direction? First, marriage can't be seen in isolation. If it is good to love, and if love is connected to loyalty, commitment and service, then that is true as well of our love for our own people and culture. A counterculture would need to promote as part of an ideal of personhood this understanding of love and of the higher nature of men and women.

Second, a counterculture would need to reassert standards. In liberal theory there is no morality per se, nothing inherently right or wrong, or higher or lower. What is moral in liberal theory is the act of defining your own good. This does then generate a kind of morality, in which it is thought wrong to oppose the "define your own good" ideal, so that the worst things are to discriminate, to be judgemental, intolerant, fundamentalist and so on.

A counterculture would need to erase this whole way of thinking about morality and instead reassert as a standard or ideal what is higher within human nature. How can you ask people to act to uphold the good, if there is no good, except for the act of choosing and not discriminating when it comes to the choices of others?

Finally, if there is to be change, it is likely to be carried through by a cultural elite - elite not in terms of money or political correctness, but in level of culture and character. To create such an elite will most likely require select entry schools and then some kind of supporting institutions.

A feminist challenge: what to do when the facts are against you

What to do about domestic violence? Two American professors have pointed to research which shows very clearly that women are much safer when married to the biological father of their children:

This social media outpouring makes it clear that some men pose a real threat to the physical and psychic welfare of women and girls. But obscured in the public conversation about the violence against women is the fact that some other men are more likely to protect women, directly and indirectly, from the threat of male violence: married biological fathers. The bottom line is this: Married women are notably safer than their unmarried peers, and girls raised in a home with their married father are markedly less likely to be abused or assaulted than children living without their own father.

Just how strong is this research? Well, look at the graph below. The first column shows the incidence of violence (toward children) in families with married biological parents; the highest one (over ten times higher) shows that for a single parent with a partner.

And there's this graph:

This time the graph shows domestic violence towards women. The two lowest lines, the ones which barely register, show levels of domestic violence for married couples. The highest one represents single mother with children families. It's difficult to tell exactly but it looks like the single mother rate of domestic violence is over 30 times that for married women.

The evidence seems irrefutable. Women are safest when married.

But that's not a conclusion that feminists are likely to want to draw. So what is a feminist to do?

Enter Australian feminist Clementine Ford. She remains undeterred and argues as follows:

The concept of male-bestowed ‘protection’ is one that harms rather than helps women. A society which operates along paternalistic lines is one which undermines the rights of women to exercise their own autonomy and protect themselves. Instead of advising women to tether themselves to a ‘decent’ man who’ll willingly marry them and protect them from the world’s villains, we should instead be enforcing a zero tolerance policy towards those people who abuse. Men are not the conservators of women, and it’s not their morally bestowed obligation to protect us. As human beings, it is the moral obligation of everybody to refrain from harming others.

Her logic goes something like this:

1. As a feminist and a liberal modernist she holds individual autonomy to be the key good in life
2. It is not autonomous for women to depend on men for their physical safety
3. Therefore, society must be remade so that women can protect themselves and not need help from men
4. This requires society to make sure that no man ever commits an act of violence against women
5. Therefore society had better make sure that no man ever commits an act of violence against women

The moral thing, thinks Clementine Ford, is for women to be autonomous, therefore we must insist that people act in ways that conform to this moral outlook.

Note that the primary concern of Clementine Ford is not to safeguard women and children from violence. It is to promote female independence from men. That is why she will never accept "male-bestowed protection" even if it is effective in terms of minimising the risk of women experiencing violence.

The problem with Clementine Ford's approach is a basic one, namely that she makes the good of autonomy the sole, overriding moral aim.

That can't end well. It's dangerous to think that there is one single good that society has to be forced to conform to. Better to recognise a range of goods that have to be ordered into a workable framework.

The future of marriage?

Well, this was predictable. A group of three American women have "married" each other and are now expecting a baby.

I don't know on what basis liberal moderns can object to this. If marriage is understood to be a public commitment ceremony only, then any conceivable configuration of marriage can take place (why not three men?).

The alternative (traditional) understanding sees marriage as a uniting of distinct and complementary masculine and feminine persons, as an embodiment of faithful love, and for the lifelong purposes of conceiving and raising children and maintaining an intergenerational link of family.

It is from this particular understanding of marriage that marriage becomes something that involves two persons only; that it becomes exclusive; and that it has a lifelong character.

You can't take away the traditional understanding and then expect marriage to retain the same characteristics that it once had.

White working-class women should be single mums?

There is an article at Slate titled "Just say no: for white working-class women, it makes sense to stay single mothers".

There are some good points made in the article. The gist of the argument is that employment prospects for women have risen over the past few decades, whereas those of working-class men in the US have declined. Therefore, there is a much smaller pool of potential breadwinning partners for white working-class women. Those men who actually are in a good position to marry have so much choice that they're in no hurry to settle down. Rather than marrying a man who will be, in effect, a dependent, white working-class women are making the "logical" choice to become single mothers.

I can't vouch for how accurately the article portrays the situation facing young women. What is interesting, though, are the remedies proposed.

The writers of the article are adamant that women should still have the autonomy to raise children by themselves via state aid if they so choose:

Those who would promote marriage seek to do so largely by taking away Lily’s independence...Charles Murray would cut programs such as Medicaid, food stamps, early childhood education and child care, mandatory family leave, and other policies that make it easier for women like Lily to raise a child on their own.

So what do the writers recommend? Well, this:

In our view what would make the most difference to this unfair marriage market are  policies that would increase the number and quality of jobs available to working class men, retraining and unemployment benefits that fill in the gaps between jobs, and ongoing support for women’s autonomy.

Let me say, first, that it's a step forward that white working-class men are not being portrayed as privileged oppressors but instead as a group that is losing out in significant ways in modern society. It's true, as well, that it's important that quality jobs be offered to these men to allow them to play a breadwinning role within a family.

But I doubt that you will ever have a stable culture of family life when female autonomy is made such a moral aim. If young women are told that it is their right, as an autonomous individual, to raise a child alone supported by the state rather than by a husband, then some will inevitably take that option (see here for an extreme example of this).

The idea that female autonomy is untouchable seems to run deep: KJ Dell'Antonia wrote a column criticising the Slate article, but even she asserted that,

Should working-class women (or, for that matter, all men and women) be able to raise children alone? Absolutely, and the more we tailor policies, school hours and cultural expectations to reflect the fact that many parents are both solo breadwinner and single caregiver, the better off all families will be.

But if it's OK to decide to raise a child alone, then what is wrong with the trend for white working-class women to do so? KJ Dell'Antonia reaches for the "it's not an authentic choice" option:

No parent “should” raise children alone unless it is a real choice, not a choice created by a culture that is determinedly setting so many young people adrift after high school without the wherewithal to envision, plan for or create a better life for themselves.

She then goes on to provide evidence of how outcomes for children in single mother homes are statistically worse than for other children, particularly for boys (but this then raises the question of whether a government should encourage single parenthood through its welfare policies - why do this if the outcomes for children are, on average, worse?).

It seems we've reached an interesting moment in politics. It is now being recognised on the left that white working-class men have been left behind to the point that they are now in a poor position to marry. That then means that women have to raise and support children by themselves (and with state aid). Perhaps these leftist writers recognise that autonomy for these women is not such an easy or happy path - or perhaps they are hesitating at the brink of accepting a regress to societies in which men exist unproductively on the margins.

Why a feminist opposes marriage

Jessica Valenti is a well-known American feminist. She has written a brief post called "The Marriage Con" explaining her opposition to marriage.

She begins by noting that conservatives have defended marriage by arguing that it helps to channel male aggression and sexuality in socially productive ways and that it has emotional benefits for women.

She doesn't bother to rebut these claims. She just states that:

The truth is that this desperate nostalgia for traditional marriage and antiquated gender roles will never be stronger than women’s will to be free from constraining norms.

That's the liberal autonomy theory again. Jessica Valenti has decided that the primary good in life is to be autonomous (to be self-determining). She therefore doesn't like traditional marriage as it includes gender roles which are, to a certain extent anyway, not self-determined but predetermined.

Jessica Valenti has elsewhere said that:

My parents have a wonderful marriage, but they have been together since my mother was 12, married when they were just teenagers and are barely ever separated. They even work together. As a result, I have always thought of marriage as involving the loss of a certain amount of autonomy.

Note how the autonomy principle trumps everything else. It doesn't matter if the decline of marriage sends young men off the rails; it doesn't matter if the decline of marriage leaves many women lonely and sad; nor does it matter if her parents enjoyed a wonderful marriage based on a strong sense of fidelity.

The fact remains that traditional marriage has the potential to curb her autonomy; therefore she rejects it as antiquated.

This story has another interesting angle, though. Back in 2009 Jessica Valenti met the man of her dreams and got married. When trying to justify how she reconciled her anti-marriage feminism and her personal decision to marry she said:

“You come to a point where you give up on holding yourself to a perfect feminist ideal — it just feels stifling."

Is that not some kind of unprincipled exception? The reality is that most people do not always and every time put autonomy first. There are other great goods in life that also deserve a look in. One of them is the desire to marry and form a family. This necessarily is a "constraining norm". It means that we commit ourselves to one other person to the exclusion of others. It means that we accept parental responsibilities that can be onerous at times. But we do it for the sake of a greater good.

Jessica Valenti's wedding - yet politically she is against marriage

Jessica Valenti can't bring herself to admit this, as it would put a dent in her belief in autonomy as the overriding good in life, and so she justifies her marriage by saying that she was tired of always holding herself to an ideal.

Can Elle Hardy's definition of the right hold?

I was interested to come across a post at The Guardian titled "What's wrong with the Australian right - and how to fix it." It's written by a young woman named Elle Hardy. She claims to be a rightist, but here's the problem. She attempts to define the right as follows:

It is of course difficult to define the range of views held under the banner of those who consider ourselves "right", as it spans conservatism and liberalism. But broadly, we can class our fundamental beliefs as follows: limited government, belief in the rights of the individual, and the desire to preserve the institutions that make our democracy function.

This is the problem with attempts at "fusionism" between conservatism and liberalism. The fundamentals of liberalism remain untouched, and the role of conservatism is limited to preserving liberalism itself.

That's why Elle Hardy has not escaped that limiting framework of politics, in which the big debating point is still how to best regulate a society made up of millions of abstracted, interchangeable individuals each in pursuit of their own self-interest.

For left-liberals the answer is regulation by an interventionist, technocratic state. For right-liberals like Elle Hardy the answer is regulation by the free market (and along the formal lines of statements of individual rights). She sees the market as a source of morality and freedom; her politics is a vision of Economic Man. And so she writes:

Intellectual and moral leadership is required to bridge the gap between populist policies, with which we must grapple as ardent democrats, and the promotion of fundamentals such as free markets and natural rights.

She complains about the left,

rejecting the benefits of technological advancements such as fracking and necessary workplace relations changes to compete in a globalised economy. We need to build the intellectual heft to prosecute the case against the propensity for government intervention.

And that,

As many of the left devote their time to demonising capitalism, posting comments from their iPads, it is crucial that we continue to endorse its benefits and inherent morality...Foreign ownership of farms, and the natural shift of our economic base away from manufacturing are both positive things, and we cannot allow a selective fear of Chinese capital to flourish.

Even when she writes to defend civil society, she does so in reference to the market:

A strong civil society helps to keep government out of our lives, strengthens our interactions with the free market, and aides inclusiveness

Which leads me to the main point I want to make. We are kidding ourselves if we think that this right-liberalism is a suitable vehicle for defending the traditions we belong to. To help prove my point, take marriage as an example. What does someone with Elle Hardy's mindset think about marriage?

Not much. She writes:

Historically, the institution has much of which it should be ashamed. Marriage likely evolved due to men’s desire to secure their agricultural and human property, and ensure legitimate succession...

Marriage has been antithetical to liberty for the majority of human beings who have inhabited earth throughout the ages, most notably women (or girls, as so often has been the case). Today, in many parts of the world, legalised marriage continues to be a tool of oppression...

The history and traditions of marriage show it to be a patriarchal institution of the highest order. 

Why, then, are Western liberal democracies so polarised between defending and fighting for something which has been such a pejorative concept to so many, for so long?

According to Elle Hardy all that matters is the right to choose whatever we want as long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others. Therefore, the state should not restrict who may or may not marry; marriage should be a private matter in which we might marry a group of people if we so desire:

When Kevin Andrews preached his views to us last year, he disguised socio-economic disparities to make the case for marriage in his book Maybe “I do” – Modern Marriage and the Pursuit of Happiness. Central to his argument was the logical fallacy of the slippery slope: “Once the state can no longer insist that marriage involves a commitment to a member of the opposite sex, there is no ground (other than superstition) for insisting that marriage be limited to one person rather than several.”

There is no justification in his diatribe as to why government should play a role in enforcing this view. The principles of liberal democracy hold that consenting adults should be able to make any union they so wish, provided it does not interfere with the rights of others.

There is simply no role for state regulation of group marriage, homosexual marriage, or heterosexual marriage in a democracy

Finally there's this:

That which we know as marriage – a nice, albeit expensive, celebration of commitment, which comfortably dissolves into drunkenness and bad dancing – is not a bad thing in and of itself. On a semantic level, it would be futile to try to stop the use of the word marriage, or to change its heteronormative nature. But it is important for people to be able to define marriage of their own free will.

We must immediately, symbolically, give all people the right to marry whoever they choose.

I rest my case. This is liberalism and not anything that can truly be termed conservatism. She does not want to conserve an institution that is inherently meaningful, she wants to uphold the right of the individual to self-define what the institution means. It is the right of autonomous choice that matters to her and this leads her to take a very negative view of marriage as being an impediment to individual freedom, rather than an institution which fulfils aspects of our natures as men and women; which provides a relatively stable environment for the expression of marital and parental love; and which encourages individuals to invest in the societies they belong to.

You can't say fathers are essential if...

In 2008 Barack Obama gave a Father's Day speech in which he lamented the absence of so many fathers in African American families:

...if we are honest with ourselves, we'll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing - missing from too many lives and too many homes...

You and I know how true this is in the African-American community. We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled - doubled - since we were children. We know the statistics - that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.

Ryan T. Anderson, a scholar from the Heritage Foundation, has drawn the same conclusion from this that I have done many times at this site:

“If the biggest social problem we face right now in the United States is absentee dads,” Anderson said, “How will we insist that dads are essential when the law redefines marriage to make fathers optional?”

There are mixed messages being sent to men. On the one hand, Obama is using the authority of his office to encourage African American men to believe that without their input there will be a destructive breakdown of family life within their community. Men, he is saying, your involvement is necessary - get to it.

But Obama also believes that marriage should be legally redefined so that it is no longer between a man and a woman. The message to men here is that families do not need fathers. The paternal role is a merely optional one.

How will this contradiction be resolved? Early indicators point to a victory of the "men are optional" side of things.

When Australian Senator Cory Bernardi argued that children being raised by both their biological father and mother was a gold standard to aspire to and that boys from single mother homes were statistically more likely to end up before the courts an avalanche of criticism descended on him.

His views were described as nonsensical, judgemental, offensive and old-fashioned with "no place in Australia of today."

And that's what you have to expect. A society cannot forever run on contradictory lines. Either fathers are merely optional within families or they aren't. Our society has decided that fathers are optional.

That is going to have momentous consequences over the next couple of generations. In the meantime, traditionalists will be distinct in insisting that the paternal role is a necessary (a foundational) rather than an optional one.

I'll finish with a brief extract from Senator Bernardi's book, summarising his views:

"Social policy should continue to advocate for the best possible social environment for children. More often than not, as studies have shown, that environment is a family with a child's married biological mother and father. Of course, there will always be exceptions to this - some traditional families fail miserably at childcare and some step-families do a wonderful job of raising children - but it should not deter society as a whole from encouraging its citizens to pursue the traditional family model."

French socialists plan a "silent revolution"

I always feel a bit on the back foot when it comes to the issue of gay marriage. A lot of Australians have been persuaded already that gay marriage is a matter of conferring a right on a group of people and that there will be no negative consequences.

If you're one of those Australians I would ask you to read on with an open mind. Tiberge at Gallia Watch has translated part of a debate in the French senate on the family. France recently legalised same sex marriage, despite very considerable public opposition. Now a further new law is being considered, one that will promote a "diversity" of family types.

The debate begins with a comment from the ruling Socialist Party Minister for the Family, Dominique Bertinotti:

I am convinced that the Senate's efforts will be towards the consolidation of this advancement for equality. This law is part of a silent revolution.

She states openly in the French senate that what is happening in France is a "silent revolution." She is not arguing that nothing significant will change; rather it is a revolution from above - from socialists like herself.

Alain Gournac, from the more conservative UMP, then reminds her of the mass, popular demonstrations in defence of the traditional family that have taken place in France:

The silence of a million people in the street!

But the socialist lawmaker is undeterred:

Sexuality is henceforth disassociated from conjugal life and from procreation.

She is saying that marriage and having children is no longer based on the heterosexual couple of husband and wife.

Another female Socialist Party senator, Michelle Meunier, then chimes in:

This bill is part of the slogan of our Republic. It allows homosexuals to have a family. Let's admit it. It leads the family out of the fantasy of "one mother, one father and one child"...

She labels the traditional family a "fantasy." The debate has reached a point at which the traditional family is denigrated in the French senate.

Charles Revet, again from the UMP, then calls out to object:

It's not a fantasy! What are you saying!

But the Socialist Party senator continues:

...because that family has never been universal. In all periods, parents have brought into the world children that they couldn't or wouldn't accept responsibility for. In all periods, children have been raised by persons other than the father and mother. What causes the problem is this idealized "hetero-patriarchal-white" family, that is further and further removed from reality. The law must adapt. (...)

Again, she reveals her hostility to the traditional family: she labels it the "hetero-patriarchal-white" family and states that it is increasingly removed from reality.

The more right-wing senators reacted with indignation to her comments, but yet another left-wing female senator, Esther Benbassa, a Green, continued along the same theme:

Protect the child? Everybody is for it! The child needs a father and a mother? Pure ideology, just like the concept of a traditional family, the pattern of "daddy-mommy-child" is a broken model which recomposed and single-parent families long ago abandoned.

She states that it is "pure ideology" that a child needs a father and a mother. This is, in effect, dissolving of family relationships. If a man, for instance, believes that his presence within a family is a necessary one, and that by abandoning his wife and children he will do harm, then he is much more likely to stay and to invest a lot of himself in his roles of husband and father. At the same time, if his wife believes his role to be a necessary one, both for her sake and that of the children, she is likely to act to keep him involved within the family.

But let's say a man really believed what Esther Benbassa claimed in the French senate, that a child doesn't need a father. If that is true, then why would a man put much effort into fatherhood? His children don't need him to do this, at least according to the women socialists. So why, then, make such sacrifices for the sake of the family?

The logic of the new family is male disinvestment in family life. It's possible that the female socialists do intuitively grasp this and welcome it as part of their attempts to dissolve the "hetero-patriarchal-white" family. It's possible that there are ordinary French people who grasp the same thing, hence the mass demonstrations against the socialist laws and the abysmal approval ratings for the French President, Francois Hollande.

It seems to me that the only way things might work out in France is if there is a disconnect between what is officially approved and what ordinary men really think and believe. If the state takes as a principle the idea that families don't need a father, but ordinary men hold to the opposite view that their role is a significant and necessary one, then society might be able to hold together.

But isn't there a risk that men will be influenced over time by what is held at an official level to be true? Isn't there a risk that men will be drawn into a state sponsored culture in which the presence of a father within a family is thought to be unnecessary?

Some marriage research

I'm not someone who thinks that the only important role that men play in the family is a provider one. Still, it is a significant role as it's part of the way that a man tries to create a protected space for his wife to have children and create a warm home life for the family.

So upending normal arrangements and having the woman instead be the breadwinner is likely to create tensions within at least some marriages. Here are some research findings released back in 2010:

a 25-year study that tracked 2,500 married couples found that female breadwinners were 40 percent more likely to divorce their lower-earning husbands than women who raked in less than their partners. Reporting his findings in the October issue of Journal of Family Issues, sociologist Jay Teachman at Western Washington University noted that the distinction only becomes apparent when women earn 60 percent or more of the family's income. After that marker, couples became 38 percent more likely to divorce over the 25-year period. Researchers were "surprised about the strength of the effect," Teachman said...

Why might the divorce rate have been significantly higher when wives earn 60% or more of the family income? There are no doubt various reasons, but some suggestions were made in research released in 2007. This research found that when women became the primary breadwinner husbands did less "emotion work" in the marriage, and that more traditional arrangements led to more "expressive" forms of marriage in general:

women who are in marriages that are characterized by more traditional gender beliefs and practices are happier with the emotion work they receive and do receive more such emotion work from their husbands.

...adherence to traditional beliefs and practices regarding gender seems to be tied not only to global marital happiness but also - surprisingly enough - to expressive patterns of marriage ...

Swedish Centre Party supports polygamy

The Swedish Centre Party is one of the parties forming the current Swedish Government. It has taken a turn toward a classical (i.e. right) liberal position in recent years which has helped it increase its support in urban areas like Stockholm. It is also reportedly the richest political party in the world, having sold its interest in a newspaper group for $265,000,000.

The Centre Party recently came up with a new platform after consultation with 10,000 party members. It's a platform which combines both the "small state/free market" aspect of right liberalism, with a liberal emphasis on individual autonomy.

And so the new platform includes a flat tax and the abolition of inheritance tax, combined with a proposal for free immigration and the legalisation of polygamy.

By free immigration is meant something very close to open borders. Prospective immigrants would not need to satisfy any criteria relating to education or employment:

In late 2012, the party began opposing all limits on immigration, such as the requirement for some degree of job skills and a clean criminal record. It supports a plan that would see Sweden's population quadrupled to 40 million inhabitants.

The party justified this policy as part of a commitment to freedom and equal rights:

The Centre Party seeks open borders, free movement and a generous refugee policy. For a party that protects freedom and builds its values ​​on the equal rights there is no other logical position than that one is for a free immigration.
 

But they also want cheap labour:

He stresses that the new, generous immigration policies must be combined with a new labor policy.

Crucial elements are C-proposals on flexible priority rules and lower wages for those who are new to the labor market.

"I think most people would choose to get a job that paid less than going into isolation for ten years.

...It is many times better quality of life to have a job in Sweden compared with living in poverty or on the run somewhere else. That's how you should think."
 

The new part platform also includes the legalising of polygamy. The current leader of the Centre Party, Annie Lööf, came out in support of polygamy in 2006 when she was vice chair of the party's youth wing. The reason she gave for supporting polygamy is the standard liberal one:

"I don't think the state and laws should determine who and with whom my neighbours or I want to live," she wrote in a blog post at the time, according to SR.

"If my neighbour wants to marry two men, I wouldn't move or care. That's his or her choice."

All that matters to a liberal like Annie Lööf is that we maximise our autonomy, understood to mean our power to be self-determining individuals. What's missing is a concern for the nature of marriage itself and the longer-term effects on both the individual and society of changing from monogamous marriage to polygamy.

What's missing too is a sense that when it comes to relationships, we aren't free to choose in any direction. We can only choose within the culture of relationships that exists in society. If, for instance, a culture of polygamy is established, then inevitably there are going to be some men who will miss out on marriage whether they have chosen this or not, and some women who will find themselves with a choice of either having to share a husband or else leave a marriage. Polygamous culture, too, often involves older men with resources marrying much younger women, and women being cordoned off from the relatively large group of unmarried younger men.

If you want to marry well you have to be protective of the culture of relationships in society rather than focusing on autonomy alone.

The proposal to legalise polygamy is being resisted by sections of the Centre Party. It might not get through, but the proposal itself shows the direction that liberal principles are taking the party. If you sincerely believe that people should be free to marry whoever they choose, because individual autonomy trumps everything and because it would violate "equal rights" to deny this choice, then it's difficult to see on what principled basis polygamy will continue to be rejected.

Rachel Cusk: a very modern divorce

Earlier this year writer Rachel Cusk published a book about the break up of her marriage.

The bare details of the marriage are as follows. When she met her husband he was a human rights lawyer and she was a successful writer. They had two daughters together but she didn't want to stay home, so he quit his job in order to raise the girls whilst pursuing work in a creative field (as a photographer specialising in social injustice).

She seemed to have everything that a feminist woman might want in a marriage. Her husband was clearly dedicated to liberal causes and he was also willing to put his career second to hers and to focus on the home as a "hands on dad". He made gourmet meals for her and he also kept up his own interests, holding numerous well-received photographic exhibitions.

What went wrong? It seems that the problem was not his discontent but hers. She seems to have been conflicted about the blurring of gender roles in the marriage, not wanting to do the traditional thing, but not liking the new one either.

Her unwillingness to take on a motherhood role she explains as follows:

Call yourself a feminist, my husband says. And perhaps one of these days I'll say to him, yes, you're right. I shouldn't call myself a feminist. I'm so terribly sorry. And in a way, I'll mean it. She wouldn't be found haunting the scene of the crime, as it were; loitering in the kitchen, in the maternity ward, at the school gate. She knows that her womanhood is a fraud, manufactured by others for their own convenience; she knows that women are not born but made. So she stays away from it, like the alcoholic stays away from the bottle. So I suppose a feminist wouldn't get married. She wouldn't have a joint bank account or a house in joint names. She might not have children either, girl children whose surname is not their mother's but their father's, so that when she travels abroad with them they have to swear to the man at passport control that she is their mother.

What she's saying here is that she's an inconsistent feminist. Feminists say that womanhood is a social construct created by men to oppress women; therefore, a consistent feminist would have nothing to do with the traditionally female sphere. But she couldn't stay away altogether, she found herself "loitering" in it, by having children, getting married and even spending some time in the kitchen. She continues:

My father advanced male values to us, his daughters. And my mother did the same. What I lived as feminism were in fact the cross-dressing values of my father. So I am not a feminist. I am a self-hating transvestite.

She was brought up by both parents to follow male values. She is a transvestite in the sense that she is a woman dressed in these male values imparted by both her father and mother.

I find this sad, but it's probably not that unusual. I doubt that most women are conflicted to the same degree as Rachel Cusk but I get the sense that plenty of women can't easily accept a wholly feminine identity. It strengthens my determination to bring up my own daughter in a way that she knows how much I value what women bring to the world as women.

Rachel Cusk then writes,

I remember, when my own children were born feeling a great awareness of this new, foreign aspect of myself that was in me and yet did not seem to be of me. It was as though I had suddenly acquired the ability to speak Russian: I didn't know where my knowledge of it had come from.

To act as a mother, I had to suspend my own character, which had evolved on a diet of male values. I was aware, in those early days, that my behaviour was strange to the people who knew me well. It was as though I had been brainwashed by a cult religion. And yet this cult, motherhood, was not a place where I could actually live. It reflected nothing about me: its literature and practices, its values, its codes of conduct, its aesthetic were not mine.

So for a while I didn't belong anywhere. I seemed, as a woman, to be extraneous. And so I did two things: I reverted to my old male-inflected identity; and I conscripted my husband into care of the children. My notion was that we would live together as two hybrids, each of us half male and half female. He gave up his law job, and I gave up the exclusivity of my primitive maternal right over the children.

The birth of her children awoke a womanly aspect of herself which changed her, but it was alien to the sense of self she had cultivated up to that point. So when she tried to be a mother she felt she belonged nowhere: she couldn't embrace motherhood as it conflicted with the values she had been brought up with and she couldn't live according to the values she was brought up with whilst in the role of a mother. So she handed the motherhood job to her husband and reverted to her "old male-inflected identity".

So why didn't that then work? Rachel Cusk explains it this way:

I had hated my husband's unwaged domesticity just as much as I had hated my mother's; and he, like her, had claimed to be contented with his lot.

Why had I hated it so? Because it represented dependence.

She didn't like the idea that her husband was dependent on her. Her own self-identity was that she was a "compartmentalised" human being, by which she seems to mean an "isolated unit" that stands by itself without the need of completion from anyone else. She saw this as the ideal, and so couldn't respect her husband as her equal for not attempting the same thing:

My notion of half was more like the earthworm's: you cut it in two, but each half remains an earthworm, wriggling and fending for itself. I earned the money in our household, did my share of the cooking and cleaning, paid someone to look after the children while I worked, picked them up from school once they were older. And my husband helped. It was his phrase, and still is: he helped me. I was the compartmentalised modern woman, the woman having it all, and he helped me to be it, to have it. But I didn't want help: I wanted equality. In fact, this idea of help began to annoy me.

Why couldn't we be the same? Why couldn't he be compartmentalised too?

And so I felt, beneath the reconfigured surface of things, the tension of the old orthodoxies. We were a man and a woman who in our struggle for equality had simply changed clothes. We were two transvestites, a transvestite couple – well, why not? Except that I did both things, was both man and woman, while my husband – meaning well – only did one. Once, a female friend confessed to me that she admired our life but couldn't have lived it herself. She admitted the reason – that she would no longer respect her husband if he became a wife.

But is she really as "compartmentalised" as she makes out? If you read extracts from the book (here and here) there is still a yearning for a complete family life and for a male presence in her life. And she is not entirely immune from feeling the pull of maternal feeling for her children. In the aftermath of the divorce, when the children are upset, she writes:

When my children cry a sword is run through my heart. Yet it is I who am also the cause of their crying. And for a while I am undone by this contradiction, by the difficulty of connecting the person who acted out of self-interest with the heartbroken mother who has succeeded her.

Perhaps it is not such an easy thing to hold together a modernist view of identity and relationships.

Processing Sandra Loh

You might remember that I opened my recent post on Sandra Tsing Loh with a confession that I didn't know how to process her latest article "The Weaker Sex".

Her column described the failure of relationships within her social milieu. The easy response, and one take up with gusto in the comments to the article at The Atlantic, is to criticise Sandra Tsing Loh and her friends for their narcissism and sense of entitlement.

But a comment to my own post made me realise that there was something more positive that might be said about Sandra Tsing Loh. The comment was this:

I can only read this article as a frantic, plaintive appeal for help, for an answer.

Which made me realise that for all its faults Sandra Tsing Loh's article did break with the usual modern girl response to relationship difficulties. Usually women like Sandra Tsing Loh, when faced with relationship failure, take the easy option of saying "We are a group of fabulous, empowered, independent women and men should be climbing over each other to be with us. They don't know what they're missing out on. They're just too scared and overawed. They need to man up and be everything we want them to be. It's up to men to make sure that relationship commitments happen."

Sandra Tsing Loh didn't go down this well-worn path. Instead, she admits that it is the women in her social circle who have the problem making commitments work and she believes it is because gender role complementarity has been broken. Because the roles of men and women are no longer complementary, relationships now rely exclusively on women appreciating men romantically, but women want different, contradictory things from men in a relationship and therefore women are easily disappointed and disenchanted. It leads to women disrespecting the men they are supposed to live with, seeing them as disposable, and in some cases preferring instead to have male support in a platonic way, for instance, in the work an ex-husband might do in helping to look after the children.

And she can't see her way out of this. She cannot find her way to a serious answer.

That's because she cannot bring herself to imagine men and women maintaining gender role complementarity in a marriage, but nor can she imagine a stable romantic satisfaction for women without it.

The way out of the deadlock is to allow for complementary roles for men and women, ones which allow for an expression of masculinity in men and femininity in women, and which then allow both men and women to bring something unique to the relationship that the other person needs.

This can be done in a big way (as in my marriage) or more lightly, but it's unwise to give up on this altogether in a heterosexual marriage.

Sandra Tsing Loh: monster wives

I'm not quite sure how to process the latest column by Sandra Tsing Loh. It's about the dissatisfaction that she and her professional female friends feel with their relationships with men.

They are not dissatisfied because their men are too patriarchal or macho. In fact, they are living the feminist dream life, in which they are the breadwinners supporting their husbands/partners.

On Sandra Tsing Loh's account this makes them:

• resent the free time their husbands/partners might have
• equally annoyed when their husbands are too focused on domestic things or not focused enough
• unimpressed with their husbands' efforts to earn money
• keen to transform their husbands into something else
• more likely to value men as non-romantic, platonic home help than as spouses
• nostalgic for the sense of home that their grandmothers enjoyed

It's not just an anti-male rant. She doesn't like what she and her friends have become: she uses the terms "unwifeableness" and "monster wife".

One interesting point she makes is that in the past when women needed men to support them, there was a reason for women to feel gratitude toward their husbands and that this helped to make marriage more stable. In contrast, for a financially independent woman like herself, it is very easy to dismiss a romantically underperforming partner:

I made the mistake of asking “How was your day?” and he made the mistake of responding, and as I watched his mouth move, I felt my trigger finger twitch and thought those awful words only a woman who needs a man neither to support her nor to be a father to her children can think: How long until I vote you off the island?

In short, this new unwifeableness is exactly what all those finger-­wagging 19th-century British men thundered against. Mundy espouses this brave new world in which, freed from the usual economic and societal constraints, emancipated women can choose males based strictly on romantic feeling. But the flip side is: if romance is all the woman is in it for, the man had better BRING IT—or else. And how much easier is it to put on your hat in the morning, get on the train, and drag home a monthly paycheck than to consistently evoke heady romantic feelings in a (hungry! bloated!) woman?

In fact, very, very few adults possess so much charm that they can long be supported by another adult based on that attribute alone.

And here is Sandra Tsing Loh on missing a sense of home that her grandmothers enjoyed:

The gentle, almost Beatrix Potter–y images make me feel weepy; they actually draw a tear as I remember my own German grandmother—the homemade chicken soup with fresh-from-the-­garden parsley, the warm strawberry crumble cake in the afternoon on a rolling glass tray, the doilies on couch arms, the polished, chiming grandfather clock....

Day by day in our frenetic, chaotic modern homes, how many of us become inexplicably unglued, suddenly losing our equilibrium in a disproportionate vale of anguish, as we open our refrigerator door ... and confront the spillage from the leaking Ziploc bag or the microwave-deformed GladWare that forever will not close. On the one hand, these are a simple technical malfunction; on the other, they are another small but precise omen pointing to a world without the deep domestic comforts—and care, and arts—not of our mothers (many of whom were in a transitional leaving-home-to-go-to-work generation) but of our grandmothers, who still ruled the home with absolute power. No one is taking care of us! No one! And that is no small thing.

But Sandra, why would anyone take care of you if you have told them over and over that you are, above all else, independent? And how could we expect the art of homemaking to prosper if it is treated as an inferior sphere to that of career?