Camille vs Hanna

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suzanne Moore: the thrill of anger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then she writes this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The feminist fight is....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting Girls wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She makes the same criticism here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George's second paragraph is also worth reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George then starts to dream of a utopian future:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, George finishes with this:

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

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

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

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

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

Is Virginia any better as a feminist mother?

Back in 2002, Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger wrote a newspaper column titled "The sins of our feminist mothers". It begins with the following description of her feminist upbringing:

As we worked our way through high school and university in the '70s and early '80s, girls like me listened to our mothers, our trailblazing feminist teachers, and the outspoken women who demanded a better deal for all women. They paved the way for us to have rich careers.

They anointed us and encouraged us to take it all. We had the right to be editors, paediatricians, engineers, premiers, executive producers, High Court judges, CEOs etc. We were brought up to believe that the world was ours. We could be and do whatever we pleased.

Feminism's hard-fought battles had borne fruit. And it was ours for the taking.

Or so we thought - until the lie of super "you-can-have-it-all" feminism hits home, in a very personal and emotional way.

The idea was to be autonomous, hence the slogan of "doing and being whatever we pleased". However, since it was careers which made women independent, women were to aim not at doing whatever they pleased but at a powerful professional career.

And Virginia Haussegger succeeded at this. She became a high profile news and current affairs journalist on Australian TV. But at a cost. She had a loving marriage but when she worked in a different city to her husband the relationship foundered. After her divorce she embarked on a series of casual encounters with men. By the time she met her second husband in her mid-30s, her fallopian tubes had been damaged beyond repair by chlamydia. She had lost the chance to have children of her own.

She wished that she had received a different message from her feminist role models:

The point is that while encouraging women in the '70s and '80s to reach for the sky, none of our purple-clad, feminist mothers thought to tell us the truth about the biological clock. Our biological clock. The one that would eventually reach exploding point inside us ...

And none of our mothers thought to warn us that we would need to stop, take time out and learn to nurture our partnerships and relationships. Or if they did, we were running too fast to hear it.

For those of us that did marry, marriage was perhaps akin to an accessory. And in our high-disposable-income lives, accessories pass their use-by date, and are thoughtlessly tossed aside.

Frankly, the dominant message was to not let our man, or any man for that matter, get in the way of career and our own personal progress.

Autonomy and careers were what mattered. Men were "accessories" to be tossed aside if they got in the way of a woman's "personal progress".

But, in the long run, it didn't seem worth it. A career and a single girl lifestyle made for a comfortable but alienating existence:

The end result: here we are, supposedly "having it all" as we edge 40; excellent education; good qualifications; great jobs; fast-moving careers; good incomes; and many of us own the trendy little inner-city pad we live in. It's a nice caffe-latte kind of life, really.

But the truth is - for me at least - the career is no longer a challenge, the lifestyle trappings are joyless (the latest Collette Dinnigan frock looks pretty silly on a near-40-year-old), and the point of it all seems, well, pointless.

I am childless and I am angry. Angry that I was so foolish to take the word of my feminist mothers as gospel. Angry that I was daft enough to believe female fulfilment came with a leather briefcase.

It was wrong. It was crap.

And now Virginia Haussegger herself is playing the role of a feminist mother, being the guest speaker and "chief feminist flag waver" at an event at the Australian National University. And what advice did she give the young women?

The same advice that she called "crap" back in 2002. She thought it great that the young women had a strong sense of entitlement; she highlighted professional success as what mattered; and she spoke at length of women being held back from achieving career success and pay parity.

Think about this. In 2010 she is telling young women that they will be oppressed by their lack of career and pay opportunities. In 2002, it was a very different story. She admitted then that she and her friends had not been held back at all in their careers and income. They had great jobs, high incomes and a glamorous, comfortable lifestyle. But she had learned that career and money weren't enough for fulfilment. She should not have treated men and relationships as secondary, as mere "accessories".

So why not tell the next generation of women this? Why not spare them from making the same mistake? Why not let them know that they can be oppressed not so much by discrimination but by failing to take the time to nurture relationships? That career and money alone can seem pointless?

Worst of all, why discuss motherhood in such negative terms, as a "breeding creed" that might upset a woman's "career and income ambitions"?

Virginia, aren't you repeating the sins of your own feminist mothers?

So this justifies feminism?

Jill Singer, a columnist for the Melbourne Herald Sun, has written a fighting article. She believes that women are being treated as second-class citizens and should fight back and not take it lying down.

It's another one of those "we still need feminism" pieces. But why does she think women are hard done by? She gives four reasons, the last being the most original.

1) The bedroom

Jill Singer is outraged at the idea that a woman might have sex with her husband when she doesn't really feel like it:

We might as well start with the bedroom. You'd like to think that women these days wouldn't have sex unless they wanted to. Yet nothing could be further from the case.

Evidence is a book by Australian writer Bettina Arndt which encourages women to say yes at times to give their marriages a chance. An offended Jill Singer is not amused:

... the likes of Bettina Arndt, author of The Sex Diaries - an odious little tome that advises women it is their wifely duty to sexually serve their husbands.

The dutiful Bettina would be a hit in Afghanistan today, considering her views dovetail nicely with the likes of the grunting primitives running that women-hating joint.

So Jill Singer wants us to treat Bettina Arndt's views as repugnant, backward and beyond the pale. Which is a pity as Bettina Arndt is doing nothing more than encouraging wives to be generous towards their husbands as an expression of marital love:

it seems extraordinary that sex is treated so differently from all the other ways in which a loving couple cater to each other's needs and desires. We are willing to go out of our way to do other things to please each other - cooking his favourite meal, sitting through repeats of her beloved television show. Why, then, are we so ungenerous when it comes to "making love", the ultimate expression of that mutual caring?

What does Jill Singer really expect? That you can have a system of marriage based on sacred female choice alone? That there is to be no giving or caring from the female side? Arndt wrote her book because she actually listened to some anguished husbands who loved their wives and who wanted their marriages to last but who felt unable, as one of them put it, to "live like a monk".

Jill Singer wants women to fight for a principle which puts the utmost strain on fidelity in marriage. It does not reasonably justify a commitment to feminism.

2) Violence

Jill Singer believes that violence against women justifies feminist outrage:

... while not as severe as the problem in Afghanistan, an unholy number of men here are bashing, raping and killing women.

According to Rob Hulls, Victoria's Attorney-General, violence against women is the leading cause of death, disease and disability in women aged from 15 to 44. It's a disgrace.

Ironically, the only time Jill Singer has gone on record as being the victim of violence the perpetrators were a group of self-entitled young women:

While [the tram] 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.

As for the claim that violence against women is the leading cause of death, disease and disability in women aged from 15 to 44, this is a preposterous lie. That Jill Singer is willing to believe this statistic undermines her credibility.

I've dealt with this rogue statistic many times before. It has also been taken apart by Tim Harford, who presents a statistics show for BBC radio. For the record, the main causes of death for young Australian women are, by a long way, cancer, suicide and car accidents.

A useful counter-statistic, one listed in the Australian Bureau of Statistics Women's Safety Survey (1996) is that women are much less likely to suffer violence when in a married or de facto relationship than when single. Single women are more than twice as likely to suffer violence from any source, four times as likely to suffer violence from strangers and eleven times as likely to suffer violence from a previous partner. Being in a stable relationship with a man does make a woman, on average, more physically secure.

3) Pay gap

Jill Singer is shocked that there is a pay gap of 17% between men and women:

According to a concerned Tanya Plibersek, Minister for Women's Affairs, the pay gap between male and female earnings in Australia is a shocking 17.2 per cent.

A recently announced review will attempt to find ways of reducing this gulf, but we shouldn't hold our breath waiting.

Again, I've dealt with this issue many times before (you can click on the "feminism and equal pay tag" below if you're interested). I'll limit myself here to two points. First, I managed to get into an argument with a feminist on this issue just recently. I did finally get her to admit that women in most jobs are paid the same rate as men. Her fall back position was that amongst executives in private industry a woman with equivalent experience and qualifications would be paid less than a man.

It turns out that even this isn't true. Last year a Carnegie Mellon University study was released that looked at the earnings of 16,000 executives over 14 years. It found that women were promoted as quickly as men of the same age, educational background and experience and earned on average a higher salary. (hat tip: Feckblog)

Despite these advantages, the female executives ended up earning less - but only because they were more likely to quit their jobs:

At any given level of the career hierarchy, women are paid slightly more than men with the same background, have slightly less income uncertainty and are promoted as quickly ... We concluded that the gender pay gap and differences in job rank in this most lucrative occupation is explained by females leaving the market at higher rates than males.

My second point is this: it wouldn't help relationships much if men weren't so committed to holding down their jobs and earning a steady income. Married women generally expect their husbands to be good providers. If you don't believe me, you only have to listen to Jill Singer herself in a column from 2006:

While there's a growing number of women fortunate to have supportive stay-at-home husbands, the majority probably still prefer their man to be a traditional bread-winner.

Just as men hanker for women who are more gorgeous but less clever than themselves, women will generally keep seeking men who can provide for their family in material terms ...

Women might melt at the sight of men who are good with children and doggies, but what really brings us undone is an old-style bloke who knows one end of a spanner from the other and black from red in a balance sheet.

... Snags are for nagging, not shagging.

It seems that Jill Singer is underwhelmed by men who can't take care of the family finances. She recognises that the majority of women feel this way. And yet she somehow thinks that you can have a sexual dynamic in which men are expected to be providers and still end up with equal lifetime earnings for men and women.

4) Public role

Jill Singer does make one telling point at the end:

I was recently invited, for example, to be interviewed on 3AW about single sex clubs.

The male interviewer wrongly assumed I'd be irate about "men only" clubs - but I couldn't care less about them and pointed out I personally favour "women only" gyms.

As he blathered on about how outrageous he thought men's clubs are, it didn't occur to him that 3AW is one of the most exclusive men's clubs in town.

She's caught a radio host following the "liberalism for thee but not for me" syndrome. He deserves to have this pointed out to him.

But Jill Singer follows up with her own feminist syndrome. She says she wants more women in public life, but it turns out that only a certain type of woman, acceptable to her, will do. It's similar to the response of feminist women in America to the idea of Sarah Palin becoming Vice-President. The American feminists unleashed a most bitter and hostile attack on Sarah Palin, much more intense than anything they subjected a male politician to. What feminists seem to want is not more women in public life but more women of a certain kind, made in their own likeness.

What grounds do most women have, therefore, to support feminism? The rate of violence against women who are married to men without mental health, drug or employment issues is not high. The wage gap for Generation X women is small and is not due to discrimination. And the idea of becoming a feminist to deny a husband sex is, hopefully, not going to inspire most women to a lifelong political commitment.

The new feminist frontier?

Feministing is one of the most popular feminist websites. It gets 500,000 hits a month and its founder, Jessica Valenti, was invited to meet Bill Clinton as a prominent liberal blogger. Jessica Valenti tours American campuses, such as Georgetown University, giving lectures on women's issues.

So what's the cutting edge feminist thought at this popular, influential site? One of the most recent articles was about getting your mother to accept that you are in a polygamous relationship. A woman wrote in seeking advice for this problem:

I'm currently in a relationship with a man I love dearly, and I have been for nearly 3 years. It's going well, he's marvelous, we get on great. There's just one thing - this is a polyamorous relationship. He also has another girlfriend, who he's been with for a long time. That in itself isn't a problem. I knew about her before I entered into the relationship and I've never had a problem with polyamory, it suits me fine ... The problem is in explaining this to my parents ... I want to convey that this relationship is every bit as committed as a monogamous one and just as loving. How do you go about explaining this kind of thing with no knowledge of the response you'll get? What if the response is negative? Please help.

The advice from feministing:

Answer their questions with patience. I also caution that words like polyamory may not work for the first conversation. Keep it simple. "Mom, I know you keep asking me about the woman who says she is in a relationship with Jack. They are in a relationship. I've always known about it ..."

If she denigrates the relationship, I would point out ways that he has been great in the past. When he has been at family functions, when he has helped your family, how happy you are together.

And then, and this may be the most difficult part, let it go. It will take time for your mother to understand and accept this (just ask the majority of queer folks who eventually have accepting parents). Keep answering their questions, but also set boundaries. If either of them are rude to your boyfriend or questions his love for you, you can call a stop to that. Your relationship and partner deserves respect.

This is the last and most important part - prove them wrong by actions. Show them that for all of their preconceived notions of what a "real" relationship is, you and your man are happy and love each other. It takes time, but this will be the greatest convincer of all.

Granted, this is not exactly polygamy as there is no formalised marriage and it's a little more open-ended than traditional polygamy. But it's still an effort to normalise a man living together with two or more women. It clearly opens the door for an acceptance of polygamy as found in non-Western cultures.

This illustrates a point that conservatives have made for some time. If you believe that a family is any group of people who love each other and live together, then logically you are committed to accepting polygamy. The modern view of family is therefore likely to lead in the long run to the acceptance of polygamy as a social norm.

It also hints at the real preferences of the more serious feminists. The sexuality of men and women operates at different levels. At one level, male sexuality is naturally promiscuous and female sexuality is hypergamous (meaning that women have an instinct to be with the most dominant male). If human nature only operated at this level then monogamy would be exceptionally rare.

But there are other drives and impulses within human nature. We do experience a higher form of love in which we seek our "complement" in a close, faithful relationship with someone of the opposite sex. It is this which leads on to the traditional Western form of marriage and family life.

I wonder if there are serious feminists who have rejected the traditional family as patriarchal (or as an impediment to female autonomy) and who therefore seek to "liberate" female sexuality - which really means liberating the female instinct to hypergamy.

The family form which corresponds best to hypergamy is, of course, polygamy - as this gives the most women access to the small number of socially dominant men.

So will more feminists come out in support of polygamy? We'll have to see - but I'm guessing the answer will be yes.

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.

Two feminist confessions

Liz Jones is the feminist columnist for the UK Daily Mail. Just ten days ago she attacked women's magazines for focusing on fashion rather than items of substance:

This column is a Part Two of the one I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the paucity of articles in women’s magazines on self-defence, rape awareness – anything intelligent, really ...

As the recession kicks in, fear is our biggest enemy. Women will increasingly be infantalised by the very people supposed to be on our side because, let’s face it, you have to be pretty stupid to spend £2,000 on a Vuitton anything.

People will become even more afraid to stick their heads above the parapet.

Let's summarise this view:

a) You have to be pretty stupid to spend £2000 on fashion

b) Women should be thinking about matters of substance, namely the dangers of men, rather than fashion.

Fast forward to Liz Jones's most recent column. She makes a confession: she is a fashion addict, having spent not just £2000 but £400,000 on designer clothes. She tells us that,

yesterday, with my niece's smart London wedding only days away, I went on netaporter and ordered an Yves Saint Laurent draped jacket for £1,225 and a hand-painted Vera Wang dress for £2,750 - but it really is gorgeous. Ooh, and a Bottega Veneta clutch for £602.

Ten days ago she wrote scathingly that magazine articles about handbags "infantilised" women. Strange then that as she writes her latest piece,

I am stroking my Bottega bag now, like a pet.

The lesson? Don't take what feminists write at face value. Liz Jones is willing to recommend one policy to other women, whilst following another herself.

There is another story about a feminist in today's Daily Mail. Rosie Boycott was an influential feminist of the 1970s, having helped to found the magazine Spare Rib in 1971 and the publishing house Virago Press in 1973.

It turns out that at this very time in her life she was a heroin addict and an alcoholic. She gave up the heroin after spending time in a Thai prison in 1973 for drug smuggling.

It's not that I think you have to be faultless in order to take up a public role - if the bar is set too high then no-one would qualify. But how can you presume to tell other people how to live when your own life is so out of control that you're addicted to drugs?

(In more recent times Rosie Boycott has made criticisms of the feminism of the 1970s.)

A modern marriage

Liz Jones is a 50-year-old feminist who pens a column for the Daily Mail. She has written a lot about her relationships with men. Recently she explained that she has never in her life dated a white man:

I think in the Nineties I fell in love with three black men partly because it was fashionable and gave me a veneer of (here comes a racist word) ‘cool’ that, as a boring Essex girl, I didn’t possess.

I married, on the wave of Asians being the new blacks, with lots of hot new books in the bestseller lists, an Indian (that wasn’t the whole reason but, let’s be honest here, it was part of it).

So when she was in her late 30s she met and married an Asian partly because Asians were the literary flavour of the month and it seemed hip to be with one.

She describes her marriage as a modern one:

Our marriage was, on reflection, a very modern one. I am 14 years older than him. When we met I was earning a huge salary ... he was an intern on a local radio station.

He is Indian and moved, aged 26, straight from his mum's house into mine.

At first I believed that love would conquer all, that our bond was so strong that none of these things mattered. He told me he didn't want children ... I hid the fact that I did.

... I told him to give up his job so that he could write a novel: 'Take six years. What's the rush.' I took a job where I worked 75 hours a week to support us both.

It doesn't seem like a promising basis for a marriage. It reminds me of the premise of an English film I very much disliked called "Love Actually" in which romantic love is supposed to overcome every conceivable kind of barrier.

In real life, things didn't work out so well. Her husband had multiple affairs before leaving for a "young, slim, pretty, Indian woman" he wanted to have children with. Liz Jones, for her part, had lost "her last childbearing years".

Her husband had by then completed part of a second novel:

It is all about me, of course, the older woman in whom he has no interest sexually, with whom he manages the tension because he has nowhere else to live.

He wrote: "I can feel her anger, like cold static in the space between us. I could calm her down, and make things better. I could reach out and touch her ... It works every time. But I won't do that. And I know how much it hurts her that I won't. Knowing this gives me the closest thing I have to happiness."

Her summing up of the relationship rings false:

We tried something different, radical, romantic, and it didn't work out.

Can you have a marriage that is different and radical and still expect it to work as it did in the past?

It's a mistake to think that it is so easy to make a marriage work that it can survive any kind of circumstance. The opposite is true: marriage is a difficult high point of human relationships and it is most likely to succeed under certain conditions.

Liz Jones has recognised that some of her own feminist attitudes were a problem within the marriage. She has confessed to being too strident in her dealings with men:

OK, I admit that feminism the first time around made mistakes. It turned us into man haters (I still, to this day, whenever I am told my BMW needs a new tyre, say, yell at the hapless man serving me: 'You wouldn't dare treat me this way if I were a man!') and set impossible standards.

She wasn't easy to get along with:

I admit I was a nightmare to live with. Like many women who get married later in life, I liked to be in charge, I was super-efficient, I didn't suffer laziness or someone who did not seem to try. I was used to looking after myself and got cross when he tried to do anything nice for me.

She seems to have once believed that her husband might be a "new man", one who would be content with a wholly emasculated role within a marriage:

New men, metrosexual men, men who are in touch with their feelings, who are willing to take a back seat, supporting and nurturing you, don't exist.

They might pretend to be able to cope with you but they are, instead, storing up anger and will hate you for being fabulous, for being independent, for not needing them in your life but just wanting them to be there.

This is just a feminist conceit. It's a picture of a marriage in which the wife is so autonomous that she doesn't need her husband anymore; in which the husband is supposed to give up his masculinity to support his wife even though she doesn't actually need his support or even his presence in her life; and in which a failure by the man to play such a role can only be explained by his resentment at just how fabulous his wife is.

We are supposed to edit such conceits from our minds at an early age. Liz Jones tried to play hers out in real life in middle-age. She has been left with the following prospects:

I will have to stop mourning the life I could have had and get on with another life ...

A week after I got back from Africa I rescued a six-year-old racehorse (she, due to ill-treatment, hates men too), and I am sure my family of five cats will grow more numerous.

I still wish her well, but my stronger wish is that young women will see the damage done and opt for a more loyal and less conceited approach to men and marriage.

The orthodox Ms Dworkin

People think of Andrea Dworkin as one of the most radical of feminists, as a revolutionary. It's truer, perhaps, to call her militantly orthodox. I recently read a brief excerpt from one of her books, which outlines what she believed as a feminist. It's just standard, orthodox, liberal autonomy theory:

Feminists have a vision of women, even women, as individual human beings; and this vision annihilates the system of gender polarity in which men are superior and powerful.

This is not a bourgeois notion of individuality; it is not a self-indulgent notion of individuality; it is the recognition that every human being lives a separate life in a separate body and dies alone.

In proposing “the individuality of each human soul,” feminists propose that women are not their sex; nor their sex plus some other little thing — a liberal additive of personality, for instance; but that each life — including each woman’s life — must be a person’s own, not predetermined before her birth by totalitarian ideas about her nature and her function, not subject to guardianship by some more powerful class, not determined in the aggregate but worked out by herself, for herself.

Frankly, no one much knows what feminists mean; the idea of women not defined by sex and reproduction is anathema or baffling. It is the simplest revolutionary idea ever conceived, and the most despised.

So sex distinctions aren't allowed to matter, because our sex is something pre-determined rather than self-determined. Our true nature as humans is a purely individual one that we create (work out) for ourselves. If we observe sex distinctions at work in society, it's not because they are natural but because they are used by one class of people (men) to suppress the true human individuality of another class of people (women). It is our nature to be radically alone and not connected in any fundamental or meaningful way to others.

It's predictable, unworkable and destructive. If you really believed that women are treated as women, not because sex distinctions are natural and significant, but because it allows men to be superior, then you're putting yourself in a difficult position. You will go through life with the evidence constantly before you of injustice and oppression. If you are realistic enough to see that sex distinctions aren't going to go away, you'll be led toward the belief that society will always be founded on social injustice.

Little wonder then that Andrea Dworkin at one time proposed establishing a separate country for women.

It's a bit dismal, too, this idea that we aren't meaningfully connected to others. Yes, we each live in a separate body, but we can be connected by ties of family and kinship, through love and marriage, and within larger communal identities and traditions.

Dworkin's self-defining individual is not so much liberated as deprived - cut off from significant aspects of our given nature and our heritage.

De Beauvoir's Disturbia

I've been looking at the politics of Simone de Beauvoir, the French feminist who wrote an influential book The Second Sex.

De Beauvoir was a follower of liberal autonomy theory. She believed that a person was not fully human if they were restricted in any way by "given conditions". The aim was to be independent, autonomous and self-determining and to follow a life path uninfluenced by convention, tradition or a biological destiny.

De Beauvoir believed that women had been denied this kind of autonomous "freedom" by men and that she was acting as a champion of women to bring them liberty and equality.

But before women rush out to become Beauvoirists, they might like to consider what autonomy really looked like in de Beauvoir's own life.

De Beauvoir took the ideal of autonomy seriously in her personal life. She quite logically rejected marriage and motherhood, as these were conventional life outcomes for women, rather than a uniquely chosen individual life path; as motherhood tied women too closely to a biological destiny; and as marriage and motherhood represented a formal commitment to others and therefore a restriction on what the individual woman might choose at any time.

So when de Beauvoir met the love of her life, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, they agreed to an open relationship, one which did not compromise their individual autonomy, their "freedom".

There are some who still praise de Beauvoir for her open relationship with Sartre. Hazel Rowley, author of a study of the Beauvoir-Sartre story, has said that,

If we're celebrating Simone de Beauvoir, it's because she had the enormous courage to live in a free, open relationship in 1929 ...

Similarly, a biographer of de Beauvoir, Daniele Sallenave, continues to admire de Beauvoir for her commitment to personal autonomy:

... she showed that women are free to choose their destiny, as much as men, and don't have to obey what is supposedly dictated to them by nature and convention.

Another champion of the relationship was de Beauvoir herself. Later in life she described her relationship with Sartre as her "greatest achievement".

When Sartre first met de Beauvoir, he was upfront in explaining to her his sexual philosophy. He wanted to sleep with many women, with his ideal in relationships being "polygamy, transparency". Sartre was keen to "assert" his "freedom against women".

There was no double standard. Sartre was happy for de Beauvoir to act likewise. She accepted these conditions.

What happened? One biographer describes the results this way:

Yet in this lifelong relationship of supposed equals, he, it turned out, was far more equal than she was. It was he who engaged in countless affairs, to which she responded on only a few occasions with longer-lasting passions of her own ... it is also evident that De Beauvoir suffered deeply from jealousy. She wanted to keep the image of a model life intact. There were no children. They never shared a house and their sexual relations were more or less over by the end of the war ...

... What the letters express is not only De Beauvoir's overarching love for a man who is never sexually faithful to her, a man she addresses as her "dear little being" and whose work she loyally edits. They also underline the mundanity of De Beauvoir's early accommodation to his wishes ...

So the rejection of marriage in favour of autonomy did not bring de Beauvoir a greater degree of equality, but arguably the very opposite. She had to work much harder, and accept a lower position, in order to retain a place in his life.

And aspects of the relationship were more sordid than the above quote lets on. De Beauvoir began to act as a kind of procuress for Sartre, seducing her own school pupils and then handing them on to Sartre:

They hoped to devise new ways of living in a godless world, unrestricted by detested bourgeois institutions. But, in reality, Seymour-Jones demonstrates that their quest became a darker, more collusive joint enterprise through the 51 years of their partnership, with deeply unpleasant consequences ...

De Beauvoir became a glorified procuress, exploiting her profession as a teacher to seduce impressionable female pupils and then passing them on to Sartre ... One of them, Olga Kosakiewicz, was so unbalanced by the experience that she started to self-harm. In 1938, the 30-year-old de Beauvoir seduced her student Bianca Bienenfeld. A few months later, Sartre slept with the 16-year-old Bianca in a hotel room ...

In 1943 the parents of one of these girls brought charges against de Beauvoir for abducting a minor and she had her licence to teach anywhere in France revoked for the rest of her life.

(Isn't de Beauvoir here acting as an exploiter of young women rather than their saviour or liberator?)

After WWII, Sartre lost sexual interest in de Beauvoir, so her role was an unusual one of involving herself in Sartre's "family" of lovers:

From early on [de Beauvoir] organises the comings and goings of Sartre's "contingent" women; she encourages, consoles, manipulates, and continues to do so until the very end for that loose grouping of friends and exes they called their "family". With a few exceptions, she performs whatever Sartre at the Front asks of her, including finding money for him, or having an affair.

How did Sartre describe his relationship with de Beauvoir? He set out the consequence of having such an open, transparent relationship as follows:

"To have such freedom, we had to suppress or overcome any possessiveness, any tendency to be jealous," said Sartre. "In other words, passion. To be free, you cannot be passionate."

So here we have again a modernist rejection of the passions as being opposed to freedom. Little wonder that Sartre was often described as cold in his personality.

De Beauvoir seems to have found it harder to be dispassionate. She was a woman in love and stayed loyal to Sartre no matter how he treated her.

Her ability to love seems to have made it hard for her to think consistently in terms of autonomy. She preferred to see her relationship with Sartre as being ordained or fated rather than freely chosen:

It was as if everything had been preordained from the very beginning. My parents acted as if nothing in the universe could change the normal course of my life, which was to be a nice little bourgeois intellectual. Sartre’s grandfather, who raised him – you know his father died when he was still a baby – behaved the same way, absolutely convinced that Sartre would grow up to be a professor. And that’s the way it was.

... we were fundamentally in accord with our parents’ design for us. They wanted us to be intellectual, to read, to study, to teach, and we agreed and did so. Thus, when Sartre and I met not only did our backgrounds fuse, but also our solidity, our individual conviction that we were what we were made to be. In that framework we could not become rivals. Then, as the relationship between Sartre and me grew, I became convinced that I was irreplaceable in his life, and he in mine. In other words, we were totally secure in the knowledge that our relationship was also totally solid, again preordained, though, of course, we would have laughed at that word then.

So she accepts that her life was subject to fate, leading her to her great love. This doesn't gel with her political ideas - the commitment to autonomy - which so undermined her position as a woman in the relationship with Sartre.

The lesson is that freedom - defined in terms of personal autonomy - is inadequate as a sole, overriding good in society. Would you really wish to sacrifice love for autonomy? Passion? Children? Isn't it better, and more realistic, to define freedom in terms of our opportunity to enjoy and to live by a range of significant goods - rather than by an autonomous self-invention?

What explains Simone de Beauvoir?

I'm reading Simone de Beauvoir's book, The Second Sex, published in 1949.

In my previous post, I briefly summarised de Beauvoir's politics. She held that men and women were distinct, but not for natural reasons. Women were different because they had been "othered".

De Beauvoir was a pioneer of this concept of the "Other". The idea is that for men to establish an identity, it was necessary for them to "other" women - to marginalise women by making them an object rather than a subject, inessential rather than essential, the negative rather than the positive, the exception rather than the norm and so on.

As I pointed out, the dangerous implication of this theory is that it means that no one can have a distinct identity, as to do so involves an act of oppression against some other group.

In particular, it will be thought wrong for any majority group to have an identity, as the majority will be seen as the "subject" group doing the "othering". It will be up to the majority to cease identifying as themselves, and to identify sympathetically instead with the minority "Other".

(Does this help to explain the attitude of writers like Germaine Greer, Michael Leunig and Robert Manne, who have sought throughout their lives to identify with a minority group (e.g. the Aborigines), and who are at pains to show their sympathy with the most alien aspects of the minority culture, even if this conflicts with the liberalism they expect from the majority?)

What, though, led de Beauvoir to explain the existence of a distinct womanhood in this way? Why develop this theory of the Other? Why not accept womanhood in more positive terms?

Here de Beauvoir is a lot less original. In fact, she is orthodox. It turns out that de Beauvoir was following a philosophy of existentialism, which itself appears to be another expression of liberal autonomy theory.

Liberal autonomy theory is the idea that to be fully human we must create our own self - we must be self-determined, rather than predetermined. According to the theory, we are less than human if we are not independent, autonomous creatures who write our own life scripts and are unrestricted in choosing who we are and what we do.

The theory might sound reasonable, but it has unreasonable consequences. It tends to make illegitimate whatever is significant in our life that we have inherited rather than chosen for ourselves. This includes our sex - the fact of being male or female - as this is something we are born into. Therefore, liberals often seek to make our sex not matter, even to the extent of treating sex differences as artificial, oppressive constructs.

It's not difficult to pick up references to liberal autonomy theory in de Beauvoir's book. You can see the assumption that we can be less than human if we are not autonomous in the following quotes:

It was only later, in the eighteenth century, that genuinely democratic men began to view the matter objectively. Diderot, among others, strove to show that woman is, like man, a human being ...

... along with the ethical urge of each individual to affirm his subjective existence, there is also the temptation to forgo liberty and become a thing. This is an inauspicious road, for he who takes it - passive, lost, ruined - becomes henceforth the creature of another's will, frustrated in his transcendence and deprived of every value.

What is the claim being made in the above quote? De Beauvoir seems to think that we create our own value by actively affirming ourselves as a free, autonomous subject. If we do so, we achieve a meaningful state of "transcendence" rather than a meaningless, valueless state of "immanence".

Again, there are high stakes being laid out here. If you accept the theory, then it will seem terribly unjust for anyone to be "othered" into a condition of being the "object" rather than the value creating subject. The whole meaning of life, as well as our status of being human, will be thought to depend on it.

De Beauvoir finishes the introduction to her book by setting out her philosophy at somewhat greater length. She writes:

There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into the ‘en-sois’ – the brutish life of subjection to given conditions – and of liberty into constraint and contingence.

This downfall represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil. Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects.

This is classic autonomy theory - you can hear the voice of John Stuart Mill in it. De Beauvoir believes that life is "brutish" (not human) if we are "subject to given conditions" (if we are not self-determined). We are not free if we are constrained or restricted in transcending who we are (which suggests that there is nothing meaningful in what we are given to be).

Note that this requires "an indefinitely open future", as any definite characteristic of society effectively becomes a constraint on what we might choose. (But a completely "open" society is also an empty one - what de Beauvoir is offering is free choice within a social void, which is a very negative kind of freedom - the one you might experience when you think you have nothing left to lose.)

De Beauvoir continues:

Now, what peculiarly signalises the situation of woman is that she – a free and autonomous being like all human creatures – nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilise her as object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and for ever transcended by another ego (conscience) which is essential and sovereign.

The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego) – who always regards the self as the essential and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. How can a human being in woman’s situation attain fulfilment? What roads are open to her? Which are blocked? How can independence be recovered in a state of dependency? What circumstances limit woman’s liberty and how can they be overcome? These are the fundamental questions on which I would fain throw some light. This means that I am interested in the fortunes of the individual as defined not in terms of happiness but in terms of liberty.

Once more, de Beauvoir insists that the aim is to be free, autonomous and independent, a state of being denied to women because in identifying as "men", males have consigned women to the position of an inessential object - the Other. Men have effectively established their power at the expense of women, they have become essential and sovereign by making women inessential and abnormal.

Obviously, there is nothing wrong with a measure of autonomy and independence. De Beauvoir, though, has tied our status as humans, our life meaning, our freedom and the progress of society to an absolute measure of autonomy, one in which we are unconstrained and in which we create value by transcending our given self.

How is this likely to work out in practice? In my next post, I'll look at how de Beauvoir tried to implement her philosophy in her own life. By looking at what de Beauvoir called her greatest achievement, we get a more practical sense of how autonomy theory is likely to work out in real life.

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.

Feminism ... just ... got ... worse ...

Penny Red is angry:

You bloody traitor, Kathleen Parker. You weak-willed, belly-showing traitor.

What would make a young socialist feminist so mad? How could Kathleen Parker so enrage her?

Penny Red is upset that Kathleen Parker wrote a column in defence of men and fatherhood. Parker's column is worth reading in its entirety, but it ends on this note:

As long as men feel marginalised by the women whose favours and approval they seek; as long as they are alienated from their children and treated as criminals by family courts; as long as they are disrespected by a culture that no longer values masculinity tied to honour; and as long as boys are bereft of strong fathers and our young men and women wage sexual war, then we risk cultural suicide.

In the coming years we will need men who are not confused about their responsibilities. We need boys who have acquired the virtues of honour, courage, valour and loyalty. We need women willing to let men be men – and boys be boys. And we need young men and women who will commit and marry and raise children in stable homes.

I think this is exceptionally well put. Penny Red, though, intensely dislikes the quote because she thinks it is right that men are marginalised, that culture disrespects and dishonours masculinity, and that men and women engage in a sex war.

Here is how Penny Red responds to Kathleen Parker:

Women have been raising children alone for centuries untold, and, since feminist liberation, we have been enabled to provide for ourselves and our children on a more basic level. If that alienates men from their traditional roles of breadwinner and head of the table then too bad. I was raised by a single mother who was also a part-time lawyer; it did me no harm whatsoever, and I fully intend to be one myself one day.

... So, precisely in what way do children ‘need’ fathers - or is it, in fact, fathers who need children? ... The plain fact is that now that women are allowed to financially provide for themselves, we no longer need husbands to raise children effectively, if, indeed, we ever did. What women could do with, fundamentally, are wives –other people, male or female, to share the load of domestic work and money-earning in a spirit of genuine support and partnership. When more men can stomach seeing themselves in the role of 'wife and father', then we’ll have a basis for negotiation.

This is bad enough, but it gets worse. Penny Red goes on to state that a child is only the mother's - that the father has no rights at all when it comes to a child. She is willing to balance this view by stating that the father is therefore under no obligations, financial or otherwise, to the child:

Why is it unarguable that a man should support his offspring? With state help, most women are perfectly capable of doing so on their own ...

... Before they are their own, my kids will be just that - mine - and my money will pay for the nappies and school shoes.

So sorry about your balls, guys, but before they are their own these babies are ours, and they will remain ours whilst they are born from our bodies. We would be only too delighted for you to help us – genuinely help us – with the work of raising the next generation, but fatherhood is a privilege, not a right. If you’re truly man enough to be a wife and father, bring that to the table and we'll talk.

How should men respond to this? There are a couple of ways I think are unhelpful. The first is to get angry and resentful toward women in general. Not all women are Penny Reds. In my own neighbourhood of Melbourne there are many genuinely lovely young women who still represent a more traditional womanhood. The best comeback to the Penny Reds is to find such a woman and live happily with her.

However, it's not helpful either to entirely ignore women like Penny Red. She represents a trend within modernism which has real influence within our culture. If we take the attitude that it's most masculine just to shrug off women like Penny Red, we allow the situation to get worse. A real advantage we have as men is the ability to apply ourselves in a concentrated way to a problem in order to solve it. We shouldn't leave it to sympathetic women like Kathleen Parker to take on the problem of feminism. It should be our aim to work patiently and perseveringly to entirely rid our culture of the negative influence of feminism.

How do we do this? There are at least four ways to argue persuasively against Penny Red's politics.

The first is simply to point out the factual errors. On average, children raised by single women don't do as well as those raised in more traditional families. Nor do most single mothers manage to do well financially on their own. The provider and protector roles of men are not yet redundant, in spite of the role of the state in supporting single motherhood.

The second approach is to point out just how unliveable Penny Red's politics are. Feminism has reached the point at which feminists themselves are rarely able to follow their own principles in practice. For instance, Penny Red declared early in her post that she intended to become a single mother. However, later we learn that she has left herself considerable wriggle room:

I love my partner deeply and would be thrilled to bear a child who carried half of his genetic material. If we are still together at the time my child is born I will be only too happy for him to help me raise it, for him to share legal guardianship and for my child to call him ‘dad’. And this is not because it’s his moral or genetic right, but because I’m lucky enough to have met an emotionally and domestically literate man who I think would make a wonderful parent. But I want him around because he's a fantastic person, not because my kids need a male parent. And if he doesn't want to be involved, I'll manage.

So she does have a male partner and she would be "thrilled" to bear his child and she thinks he would make a "wonderful" parent and she would like her child to call him "dad". But the fact of his being male is just ... well, fortuitous. What seems clear is that Penny Red does want to live with the father of her child, in spite of all her arguments that men are superfluous.

Which leads on to the third problem with her politics. Penny Red, despite wanting to live with the father of her child, has undercut her own position in such a relationship. If men and women were really to believe the arguments that she makes, then how could a woman keep a man in a long-term relationship? If a man no longer believes his role as a father is a necessary one, and if he believes that he has no obligations to a child which, after all, is his wife's and not really his, then a woman is going to have to work overtime to keep him around. She is going to have to really exert herself to keep him happy.

To put it another way, when a man believes that his children are his own in a significant way, and that their welfare depends on his masculine role within the family, then he is much less likely to leave in a crisis. A woman in such a relationship can relax a bit, knowing that her husband has reasons to stay.

The final approach is the most important. What Penny Red has done is to apply, in a radical way, liberal autonomy theory to the lives of women. If the key aim in life is to be autonomous, then why wouldn't a woman assert that her child is her own and not someone else's? Why wouldn't she want to negotiate a role for the father on her own terms? Why wouldn't she claim that fathers are unnecessary and that she as a woman can manage on her own?

So if we really want to undermine feminism in Western culture we have to attack at the root of the problem - by decisively rejecting liberal autonomy theory. This means rejecting the idea that individual autonomy is the overriding, organising principle in society. We need to confidently assert other goods as well, including (as Kathleen Parker does) what is good for the survival of our own tradition.