Dr Stoet: do we really care that...

Gijsbert Stoet is a reader in psychology at the University of Glasgow. He has stood against the temper of the times by arguing that it is normal for young men and women to have differing preferences when it comes to careers. He also wants attention to be paid to the performance of boys at school.

Dr Stoet said it was ‘really hard’ to attract girls to subjects such as computing, telling the British Education Studies Association in Glasgow: ‘Girls will say, “Well, that’s boring, I’m just not interested in it”. ‘We need to have a national debate on why we find it so important to have equal numbers.

‘Do we really care that only 5 per cent of the programmers are women? … I don’t care who programs my computers. A wealthy, democratic society can afford to let people do what they want.

‘What is better? To have 50 per cent of female engineers who do not really like their work but say, “Yeah, well, I did it for the feminist cause”. Or do you want 3 per cent of female engineers who say “I really like my job”?’

Dr Stoet went on to question the national focus given to girls’ struggles in subjects such as maths, when boys generally performed worse at school.

‘Nobody seems to be that interested that boys have problems. We have, as human beings, a natural tendency to see women as vulnerable and needing help. But if it’s a boy who needs help, he’s responsible for himself,’ he said.

Dr Stoet believes that people are influenced by a combination of biology and culture; his opponents emphasise the influence of culture alone:

To me, it seems often that some activists find it more important that we have equal numbers of men and women in every job that needs to be done than that people are choosing something they really want to do. That is based on the wrong assumption that those activists think that men and women make those career choices because of the wrong type of socialisation (such as specific colours of toys). They never seem to consider that our vocational interests can at least be partially influenced by our biology.

A French manifesto

There is a French website called Vigi Gender which has helped to lead the fight against gender theory in that country. You can find at the site a post defending sex distinctions, the first part of which I have reproduced (in rough translation) below:

Become what you are

We are born male or female. Our whole being is gendered in its physical, psychological and spiritual dimension. Male and female cells are different: all male cells are XY and all cells of the woman XX. Sex hormones of men and women are different: testosterone in men; in women, estrogen, the hormone of femininity and progesterone, the hormone of motherhood. Several scientific studies show that differences in the aptitude, interests, psychology and behaviour of men and women can be explained in part by differences in male and female body, especially the differences in hormones and the male and female brains.

Man is an incarnate being endowed with a mind capable of reason and will. Our body is a source of meaning; it expresses the person, "my body is me." To deny the body, to deny the influence of the sexed body on behaviour, interests, psychology, skills, not only contradicts numerous scientific studies, but is to deny that the human person; is an embodied being and to make of it a pure spirit, a being which only defines itself.

We are born male or female and all our life we fulfil ourselves as man or woman, we become what we are in completing what we received at birth (nature), and by what we receive throughout our lives through culture (relationship to the father and the mother, education, history, language, customs ...)

If what we received from the culture was completely separated from our bodies, we would not be united, as we would be torn between the meaning carried by our body, and what we received. This would create serious psychological disorders, a despair of not knowing who we are.

The male-female distinction runs through us as each of us is born of this difference. Mankind is founded on this distinction. Neither man alone nor woman alone says what humanity is but in the meeting of the two.

The word "sex" comes from the Latin verb "secare" cut. Sexual difference is like a wound. Sex, as difference, is that which forbids man to look at himself. Thus, knowledge of masculinity clarifies femininity and vice versa.

"The woman becomes a woman in the eyes of man, but it must be said with equal force that the man really becomes a man in the sight of the woman; sexual differentiation is a phenomenon of mutual humanization "(A. Jeannière anthropologist)

Man and woman are of the same nature, human nature, the foundation of their dignity and rights attached thereto. Everyone, as a man or woman is worthy to be loved, regardless of their differences, innate or chosen.

The differences between men and women are a treasure for themselves, for the child and for society as a whole. They do not imply a hierarchy of one sex over the other, but are complementary to the good of each. For this, we learn to understand them, to socialise them, to love them.

Proponents of gender theory argue that the differences between man and woman were created by men to enslave women. They want to impose a society where there would be no difference, where the woman is a man like any other, free from the injustice of motherhood, where only the masculine values ​​of competition and risk can be desirable. This society is simply inhuman.

Another victory in France!

The French Government has pulled the plug on its "ABCD of equality" programme in French schools. That's a wonderful victory for the groups battling the programme, including VIGI gender, French Spring and the JRE (the JRE is the group organising monthly boycotts of French schools - they have had over 250,000 student withdrawals so far this year - a successful strategy it seems).

Why was it so important to confront this programme? The ABCD programme was based on a 'gender theory' which claims that sex distinctions are socially constructed to oppress women. The aim, therefore, was to have a school curriculum which sought to suppress the differences between boys and girls.

This, of course, fits in with the general aim of liberalism of promoting individual autonomy. If the aim is for individuals to be self-determining, and our sex is something that is predetermined, then it will be thought of negatively as a restriction on individual freedom. The aim of liberals will be to make sex distinctions not matter.

Here is one academic explaining the implications of gender theory:

"Claiming the equality of all people regardless of their gender and sexual orientation is deconstructing the complementarity of the sexes and thus rebuilding new republican foundations" (Réjane Senac researcher at CNRS, professor at Sciences Po Paris and University Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, pages 24-25).

In this view, equality means deconstructing the complementarity of male and female. It is a radical outlook. Here is another official statement on what the gender theorists want to achieve:

the report by IGAS (General Inspectorate of Social Affairs) recommends "replacing the terms 'boys' and 'girls' by the neutral terms 'friends' or 'children', telling stories in which the children have two dads or mums, etc." According to the report, the aim is to "prevent sexual differentiation and the interiorisation by the children of their sexual identity."

If you look at the teaching materials supplied to teachers as part of the ABCD programme you get a sense of how far the French state was willing to go to achieve these aims. Teachers in all subject areas were expected to micro-manage their lessons to break down sex distinctions.

For instance, when it comes to Physical Education the gender theorists were not only concerned that girls preferred rhythmic gymnastics to boys, but more than this they were concerned that girls preferred the aesthetic aspect of the sport, whereas boys were more oriented to the ball skills component. Detailed lesson plans were supplied to teachers to overcome this aspect of sex differences.

Similarly, there was concern by the gender theorists that in group play girls were more likely to seek activities in which there was no confrontation, which were calmer and which took up less physical space. The gender theorists were concerned, in other words, by the existence of subtly different styles of play existing between boys and girls, assuming that these were socially constructed to disadvantage girls.

The French people were right to demonstrate against the imposition of such a curriculum:



The banner reads "No to gender theory"

In my next post, I'm going to publish an excellent statement from the VIGI site in defence of sex distinctions.

South African liberal wants to close down boys schools

Thorne Godinho is a white South African who describes himself as "a committed social liberal". He wants to shut down boys-only schools:

The behaviour of the men who attend boys-only schools, and the cultural practices that are an indelible part of the boys-school experience, clearly highlight the problems of masculinity and male-centric and dominated spaces...

...the broader culture and traditions associated with boys-only schools, provide the greatest evidence of why we need to re-consider masculinity and how we see, educate and love men.

In such male-centric and dominated spaces boys are taught about what it means to be a man and how to behave and live as a man. Beyond promoting a culture of violence and abuse, the effect of institutional culture is to promote discipline, outdated standards of masculinity and heteronormativity, and subservience to the institutional culture.

He is right about some of the effects of attending a boys-only school (I went to one myself). It's true that there tends to be a bit more violence; at the same time, though, they are masculinising environments which do promote loyalty to the school as an institution.

But why would Thorne Godinho oppose discipline, institutional loyalty and masculinity? His argument is based on liberal understandings of individuality and freedom.

There are liberals who believe that identity is always uniquely individual. If this is true, then a collective identity is something that is falsely imposed on the individual, restricting our ability to be who we truly are. Freedom, therefore, means liberation from any collective identity, so that we can be free to be who we truly are.

Godinho is consistent in treating collective identities as restrictions on the self: not only does he want men to challenge their own masculinity, he has also written a post titled "How to challenge your whiteness".

Here is Godinho putting the liberal view:

Instead of allowing young men to discover who they are on their own, a collective culture is forced upon them – one which suits their fathers, teachers and people who cling to gender essentialism.

There is no space, no freedom to live as one truly is. In these schools, individuality dies at the hands of an institutional culture which values collectivism, muscle and toeing the line.

The ethical feminist Drucilla Cornell has developed the concept of the “imaginary domain” – the space in which one can claim one’s sexual and gender identity. In the “imaginary domain” exists the freedom of every person to choose how to live, love and be – away from the stifling gender constructs shoved onto us by society. This freedom is categorically important if we truly believe that people are equal and are ethically and morally allowed to determine the outcome of their own lives.

Unfortunately, this freedom cannot co-exist with the institutional culture prevalent in boys-only schools. And the freedom to be as one chooses certainly cannot exist in a space where violence and abuse is utilised as a weapon to enforce power relations and collective subservience to the institutional culture present.

It all hinges on whether masculinity is simply a social construct or whether it expresses something real ("essentialism"). Godinho is homosexual and therefore not likely to experience masculinity as an essence. But what if developing a masculine identity is natural and healthy for boys? Then the whole liberal edifice falls down: a boy's identity and development of self will be helped, not harmed, by exposure to a masculine environment.

Furthermore, there is an inconsistency in Godinho's account of individuality. He talks at times of young men "discovering who they are on their own" which suggests that there is some unique, given identity there to be uncovered. But he then talks about the importance of a freedom of every person to choose what to be - which suggests that identity is something that has to be self-created rather than something given to us.

So are we self-creating blank slates? Or do we have a uniquely given identity?

There are problems with both views. If we are blank slates who are free to choose whatever identity we like, then identity doesn't mean much. It is a random thing that doesn't connect us to anything. But if there is a given identity, then Godinho has to drop some of the liberal pretence that we are free to choose whatever we want to be.

Finally, it should also be noted that liberals don't really give up on collective identity. They just replace natural forms of human community with political ones. Liberals are adept at forming communities based on the political principles of liberalism (i.e. where you claim membership by various kinds of political markers, e.g. using certain academic terminology, following PC codes etc.)

Godinho finishes by suggesting that girls should be used as a battering ram against boys:

Maybe the best way to ensure difference is to flood the halls of boys-only schools with young women. Maybe we need to start exposing pupils to ideas and ways of thinking which do not restrict them. We can begin to challenge the ideology of masculinity and what it’s doing to South Africa’s men.

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

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

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

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

And there's this graph:

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

The evidence seems irrefutable. Women are safest when married.

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

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

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

Her logic goes something like this:

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

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

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

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

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

A return to Clarissa

I was interested to see Laura Wood run a post about Clarissa's blog. I wrote a few things about Clarissa's blog a few years ago.

Clarissa is a liberal academic. In what way is she a liberal? Well, liberals believe that the highest good is the freedom to be a self-determining individual; therefore, individuals need to be liberated from predetermined aspects of the self. What is predetermined? Our sex and our ethny both fall into this category. Therefore, Clarissa writes:

...There are many people out there who feel confused, lonely and lost in a world where modernity is destroying old certitudes, identities and ways of being. Modernity is liberating in the sense that we are a lot less tied to collective identities ascribed to us at birth. Gender identities, normative sexualities, class origins, religious backgrounds still exist, of course. Nevertheless, they are nowhere as binding as they used to be before the advent of modernity. It isn't easy to challenge the identitarian status quo, but it still can be done...

 ...At birth, you are handed a set of norms that you are supposed to observe as a representative of your gender, social class, religious denomination, etc. You accumulate enough of these collective allegiances and you can guarantee that pretty much every aspect of your life will be defined for you...Modernity is terrifying because it erodes the stability of collective identities.

Clarissa admits that liberal modernity uproots people and their identities, but she nonetheless supports this because she believes that it is the path to true individuality and to independent thinking. Traditionalists like myself would argue against this that our individuality gains in depth when we are connected to the deeper forms of individual identity, such as our identity as men or women or as members of longstanding ethnic traditions.

And in practice liberal moderns who have abandoned traditional identities rely to a considerable degree on careers for a substitute source of meaning and identity. Clarissa is no exception: she places great weight on self-actualisation through a career, to the point that she claims that women who stay home to look after their children are suffering from "self-infantilisation" and are being "castrated".

Which is why it's so interesting that Clarissa has chosen to run a post by a guest writer complaining that her female employees are too emotional and high maintenance and that she will only be hiring male employees from now on. Here is how the guest writer starts her post:

I am a woman, a feminist, a mother, and a passionate entrepreneur. I don’t just stand for equality – I have crashed the glass ceiling in every aspect of my life. I get extremely angry when I come across articles that insist there are gender differences that extend beyond physiology. I am fortunate to have had female role models who taught me through their own examples that I can accomplish absolutely anything I desire.

She is setting herself up for a big fall here. No differences between men and women apart from different body bits? Well, experience proved otherwise:

I have had women cry in team meetings, come to my office to ask me if I still like them and create melodrama over the side of the office their desk was being placed. I am simply incapable of verbalizing enough appreciation to female employees to satiate their need for it for at least a week’s worth of work...

I have developed a different approach for offering constructive criticism to male and female employees. When I have something to say to one of the men, I just say it! I don’t think it through – I simply spit it out, we have a brief discussion and we move on. They even frequently thank me for the feedback! Not so fast with my female staff. I plan, I prepare, I think, I run it through my business partner and then I think again. I start with a lot of positive feedback before I feel that I have cushioned my one small negative comment sufficiently, yet it is rarely enough. We talk forever, dissect every little piece of it, and then come back to the topic time and time again in the future. And I also have to confirm that I still like them – again and again, and again.

I am also yet to have a single male employee come to my office to give me dirt on a co-worker or share an awkward gossip-like story. My female employees though? Every. single. one.

Most of my work colleagues are women and I've haven't experienced such behaviours at this level. Even so, I smiled when she wrote "I start with a lot of positive feedback before I feel that I have cushioned my one small negative comment sufficiently, yet it is rarely enough" because I have the same problem with my wife. I've never really figured out a way to cushion a negative comment with her - it never works (reader advice?).

Now, you would think the obvious conclusion to draw would be "well, there are differences between men and women". But Clarissa herself has added to the bottom of the post this comment:

People: in the past 2 hours I have had to Spam 63 comments from losers who tried to inform me that “men and women are psychologically/emotionally, etc. different.” Once again, anybody who embarrasses him or herself by chirping idiotically “yes, men and women are different” will be banned outright. This will be my small investment into sparing these losers further public embarrassment. Stop wasting your time, such comments are not going through on my blog.

Interesting. Clarissa has:

a) hosted a post which complains that female employees show different behaviours to male employees

b) then claimed it is idiotic to believe that males and females are psychologically and emotionally different

Personally, I find it amazing that anyone could go through life without realising that men and women are psychologically and emotionally different. How can you be in a relationship and not have a sense of this?

Clarissa did let through one comment (from a woman) attempting to explain the different work styles of men and women. Such observations are never strictly scientific and are always highly generalised, but I found some of it interesting nonetheless (e.g. the chain of command idea).

Fighting gender theory in France

It's great to see more resistance to gender theory taking place in France.

Here's a quick summary. The French Government released a report claiming that sexism is rampant in French schools. Girls are supposedly the victims of gender stereotypes in education, despite the fact that they are doing much better than boys in terms of graduation rates.

The assumption behind the report is that "gender" (sex distinction or differentiation) is a bad thing that is harmful to women and that therefore it should be collapsed. For this reason, educational authorities in Nantes have approved a day of action against sexism - in which schoolboys have been invited to wear skirts to school.

Usually governments get away with this kind of thing, but there is popular resistance to it in France. There is an anti-gender theory group in Nantes which will be protesting against the skirt day. And a member of the UMP, Véronique Louwagie, passionately denounced the skirt day in the National Assembly, saying:

What do we learn? That the Nantes school district is inviting the boys to wear a skirt on Friday and this is - hold on - to fight against the stereotypical contracts of social sexual relations! You knowingly hid the actions that you intended to take to impose gender theory! Are you going to stop this project of systematic demolition of the values that provide structure for our children, yes or no? (hat tip: Tiberge)

It forced the Government onto the defensive, denying that there was an attempt to impose gender theory in French schools.

It's terrific to see the radical liberals pushed back like this - forced to deny their own agenda. It means that for the time being that the moral ground swings back our way.

To demonstrate just how important this fightback is, consider the agenda that was on the table in France until resistance broke out:

the report by IGAS (General Inspectorate of Social Affairs) recommends "replacing the terms 'boys' and 'girls' by the neutral terms 'friends' or 'children', telling stories in which the children have two dads or mums, etc." According to the report, the aim is to "prevent sexual differentiation and the interiorisation by the children of their sexual identity."

Oh Europe

The Eurovision song contest has been held and the most popular act across the continent was a bearded Austrian gay man in drag, calling himself "Conchita Wurst" (this name being a play on words to refer to female and male genitalia).

Here is the winner:

Mr Wurst appealed for support by drawing on the liberal principles that currently dominate Western thought:

"I created this bearded lady to show the world that you can do whatever you want," said Wurst, the drag persona of 25-year-old Austrian singer Tom Neuwirth, at a recent press conference in Copenhagen.

"If you're not hurting anyone you can do whatever you like with your life and, it's so cheesy, but we've only got one (life)," she added.

He's right that what he does fits in well with liberalism. Liberalism says that what matters is that I choose autonomously for myself what I am and what I do: that I am to self-determine or self-create my own being and identity and that this is what creates meaning or purpose in life.

If that is true, then Conchita Wurst is a better person than the rest of us as he/she is not "limited" by the sex identity that he/she was born with, but has played creatively to mix and match it.

But I don't think it's true at all. There is an emptiness at the heart of liberalism; the assumption is that there is nothing "already there" in life that has intrinsic meaning or value, so the only thing that we can do is to assert such value through acts of unfettered will. But that's lame. Why should we think that the assertion of individual will creates value?

The alternative view is that we fulfil one part of self and identity by being strongly connected to our masculinity (if we are men) or femininity (if women). If we reflect on who we are, and part of the instinctive answer is "I am a man" and that we then have a sense of what is essentially meaningful within masculinity, then we are on track with that one life that we have. It then becomes something to admire if a man is able to represent in his nature and in the way he acts a higher masculine personality.

But what if someone has grown up confused in their identity? My own view is that that is something to be regretted, as a loss of connection between self, identity and objective value. It doesn't mean that that individual can't find other points of significance in life elsewhere, but it's not something to cheer on.

Kirsten Dunst: I feel like the feminine has been undervalued

The actress Kirsten Dunst ruffled a few feminist feathers by making the following comment in a magazine interview:

"I feel like the feminine has been a little undervalued," she says. "We all have to get our own jobs and make our own money, but staying at home, nurturing, being the mother, cooking – it’s a valuable thing my mum created. And sometimes, you need your knight in shining armour. I’m sorry. You need a man to be a man and a woman to be a woman. That’s why relationships work..."

It's an interesting comment. We live in a liberal society which values, above all, individual autonomy. Therefore, women are instructed to aim for independence from men, particularly through careers. Motherhood then comes to be seen as a restriction on women (as a potential disadvantage). That leads to the idea that there should be one, unisex parental role that men and women share equally.

In her comment, Kirsten Dunst articulates some of the limitations of this liberal view. If autonomy is made the overriding good, then other things that we value are lost. For instance, Kirsten Dunst clearly values what her mother did for her as a mother and doesn't want it to be lost in the pursuit of female autonomy. She thinks too that heterosexual relationships are based on a distinction between the masculine and the feminine and that therefore it is better for men to retain something of the masculine role within relationships.

Kirsten Dunst

The beginning of thought

Bonald threw down the gauntlet to liberals earlier this year in a post titled "Rejecting the Enlightenment is only the beginning of thought".

He began by noting that liberals tend to reduce possible alternatives to either the liberal position or something nasty:

One way that the Enlightenment controls the minds of billions, locking them into a degrading and absurd mental slavery, is by making people imagine they know what’s on the other side. “Without the social contract…tyranny! Without separation of Church and state...religious warfare! Without feminism...rape! Without capitalism...communism! Without cosmopolitanism...Nazis!"

Bonald hits liberals where it is likely to hurt most, by noting that this poverty of vision represents "a narrow, unimaginative, and parochial worldview."

Furthermore, liberals - in claiming to be neutral - evade the task of having to justify their particular conception of the Good as being objectively true:

The key to rejecting liberalism (the political expression of the Enlightenment project) is to realize that it’s a swindle. It claims to stand above every particular conception of the Good, granting freedom to all and favoritism to none, when in fact it imposes its own narrow vision on all of us. Its claims to neutrality just mean that it gets to impose itself without ever being forced to argue (or even assert) that its claims are objectively true, and that it never has to assume the responsibility that comes from being a recognized establishment.

But in rejecting liberalism it becomes possible to take a more sophisticated approach to issues of human flourishing. Bonald gives the example of relations between the sexes:

Now that you realize that gender roles are not inherently iniquitous, you can finally start thinking about the proper relationship between the sexes. Just because you notice that women are being treated differently than men in some context, you can no longer automatically conclude that the women are being treated unfairly, as you would have done when you were a liberal. On the other hand, it is possible that the women are being treated unfairly. What’s more, there is the new possibility–undreamed of by liberals–that the men are being treated unfairly. You must dig into the particulars of the case, the historical context and social functions; you must then apply general principles of natural law (none of which are as simplistic as “gender equality”). You must try to conceptualize the universal masculine and feminine virtues that society should foster, remembering that any given instantiation of masculine and feminine roles will be conditioned by culture and economic organization. Given this background, do the laws and culture provide a path for the achievement of masculine and feminine excellence? Or are the man’s protective instinct and the woman’s nurturing instinct being thwarted or deformed? These are subtle questions.

It's a long paragraph, but it gives a good picture of how traditionalists tend to think about such issues and why traditionalism can't be easily expressed through simple slogans.

I'd forgotten about Raewyn!

Yesterday I posted an item about Judith Butler. She is an American academic and is considered the leading proponent of "gender theory" - a belief that masculinity and femininity are social constructs and that gender is therefore nothing more than a mere "performance".

The French Government tried to impose Butler's gender theory on French schools but was met with mass demonstrations from the French public. I posted this photo of Judith Butler to demonstrate just how much of an outlier she is when it comes to matters of sexual development:

A reader (thanks Titus) reminded me of the person who had previously been the world's leading expert on gender, namely Professor Bob Connell of the University of Sydney. His work on masculinity was taken up by the United Nations.

Bob Connell was not exactly sympathetic to traditional masculinity. He believed that an old, unjust social order was built around masculinity; therefore, to usher in the new, just, liberal world order there needed to be a process of degendering society. If only the personalities and the bodies of men could be de-masculinised, social reform would follow:

If the problem is basically about masculinity, structural change should follow from a remaking of personality.

...It follows that a degendering strategy, an attempt to dismantle hegemonic masculinity, is unavoidable.

The degendering strategy applies not only at the level of culture and institutions, but also at the level of the body - the ground chosen by defenders of patriarchy, where the fear of men being turned into women is most poignant.

What we are moving towards is indeed "something rich & strange"; and therefore, necessarily, a source of fear as well as desire.

What does this have to do with Judith Butler? Well, some years after writing this, Bob Connell made a major change in his life. He re-emerged as a transsexual woman called Raewyn Connell:

So, again, we have an extreme outlier being put in charge of government policies on gender and, once again, we have a denial that sex distinctions represent anything natural or desirable.

This is the woman teaching French children about gender?

Last month I reported on a victory for traditionalists in France. Large demonstrations forced the government to backtrack on its programme of introducing "gender theory" into French society.

The Boston Globe has published an unsympathetic report on these demonstrations:

The spark that rekindled the movement was, of all things, a grade school program called the “ABC of equality.” This experimental project, launched by the government in late 2013 in a handful of grade schools, encouraged children to consider that though some biological differences between the sexes exist, other differences are “constructed” by society, a product as much of stereotypes as of physical differences. According to its critics, the lesson plan was inspired in part by the work of American gender theorists like Butler.

....Enough people had become horrified by the new impact of “gender studies” that, in February, they turned out in droves. Nearly overnight, “la théorie du genre” was on everyone’s lips. Gender theory was the “obsession” of the Socialist government, one conservative news magazine declared. Activists contacted public libraries to demand that they pull texts tainted by American gender theory from the shelves.

As a result of all this, Butler suddenly found herself massively famous in France.

The report plays down how radical gender theory is. Here is Judith Butler denying the reality of sex distinctions:

... gender is a performance ... Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction ...

This is almost the exact opposite of the traditionalist view on sex distinctions (we would concede that understandings of sex distinctions are influenced by society; however, at the same time we would hold that there does exist a masculine and feminine essence and that there is an objective ideal which our masculinity and femininity aspires to.)

So who is this Judith Butler who has been put in charge of the sex identities of French children? Well, here is a recent photo:

Yes, she is a lesbian, feminist academic. That is who the modern French state believes is the best person, the expert, to guide young French girls and boys along the path of development toward manhood and womanhood.

The problem with the photo is not how pretty or otherwise Judith Butler is. You don't have to be good-looking to be a good philosopher. I just think it reveals starkly how much at the cutting edge of unfeminine Judith Butler is. She is an outlier, who clearly has never experienced much of the feminine, who is nonetheless being pushed forward as the authority on gender for French girls.

Discriminatory for men to be taller than women?

Liberalism is in some ways in conflict with heterosexuality.

Heterosexuality is the attraction of complementary opposites: of the masculine and feminine. Therefore, heterosexuals generally celebrate sex distinctions.

Liberals want individuals to be autonomous in the sense of leading self-defining and self-determining lives. But this means that qualities that we don't get to self-define or self-determine are taken to be negative restrictions on the individual. One of these predetermined qualities is our sex - the fact of being male or female. Therefore, a liberal society comes eventually to the idea that sex distinctions, rather than being celebrated, ought to be made not to matter.

So the political aims of liberalism will collide at times with our personal desires as heterosexuals.

Here's an example. Men are generally taller than women. There are radical moderns who don't like this, as they see it as an embodiment of sex distinctions. A Swedish newspaper, for instance, in reviewing a television documentary on the issue, told its readers that men ought not to be taller than women and that the only reason they were so was due to discrimination:

But researchers have increasingly begun to explore the role sex discrimination plays in injustice and health risks that particularly affects girls and women around the world

The anthropologist Françoise Heritier conducted research in Burkina Faso for many years before she caught the eye of sex discrimination and the different conditions that gave girls and boys during infancy

The mothers did not feed all the children immediately if they cried. It was the boy who was fed the children directly, while the girls' children had to wait, says Françoise Heritier.

According to several anthropologists, it could be thousands of years of discrimination that underlies the difference in size between males and females.

That reminded me of the views of the radical feminist Alexandra Kollontai in the early 1900s. In her public lectures she longed:

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

So that's what the political philosophy aims at. It longs for men and women to become the same, even bodily.

But the heterosexual longings of women are the exact opposite:

Is height important in matters of the heart? For women it seems the answer is a definite yes.

And, much to the dismay of those holding feminist ideals, it seems that women want a man who towers over them because it conforms to gender stereotypes and makes them feel protected, secure, feminine and delicate.

According to the study data, the dominant reasons females cited for preferring a tall partner are matters of protection and femininity.

"As the girl, I like to feel delicate and secure at the same time."

So how do people manage to combine both liberal beliefs and heterosexuality? They compartmentalise the two. They assent at a formal level to the liberal principle by which sex distinctions aren't meant to matter, whilst unofficially doing what works for them as heterosexuals (this is Lawrence Auster's idea of the unprincipled exception at work). Possibly too it is an example of doublethink.

Will this really help Max?

Why does violence against women exist? The answer we give is important. Leftists often argue that sexual violence is part of a patriarchal system designed to dominate and oppress women. In this view, traditional masculinity itself is created to inflict sexual violence on women; therefore, the blame for sexual violence rests with the ordinary masculine man who has the power to end violence against women by turning against masculine norms.

The traditionalist view is very different. We would point out that masculinity is oriented to the physical protection of women rather than to inflicting violence; that traditional Western societies did not permit violence against women; and that violence against women is associated not with social norms but with anti-social behaviour.

Lisa Price lives in Walsall, England. A year ago she was persuaded that the leftist view was the correct one, having read some information on parenting websites. Therefore, she took the next step and decided that her son, Max, must not be raised along normal masculine lines:

Lisa, a full-time housewife, took the decision to allow Max to identify as either a girl or a boy 12 months ago, after seeing high-profile rape cases being discussed on parenting websites. "Gender stereotypes can be so damaging.

"They teach little boys to be aggressive and dominant over women," she argues. "There’s research out there saying that the whole “boys will be boys” thing basically teaches lads that it’s OK to be a certain way, because it’s in their nature to be aggressive. It’s detrimental for them and for females."



Max Price

Lisa Price also justifies her decision to raise her son to be gender neutral in standard liberal terms, namely as part of autonomous choice. This view assumes that raising a boy to be masculine will hamper his freedom to be whoever he chooses to be:

"If Max wants to wear a pink tutu and fairy wings, then he can wear it," says Lisa. "He’s just expressing himself. I don’t want to put him in a certain box and treat him that way. I want to teach him to be whatever he wants to be."

The focus here is on our sex as being something limiting or restricting to self - which assumes that our self is something set apart from our masculine or feminine being. The traditionalist view is that it is not set apart and therefore the point is not to choose a gender but to best develop the masculinity that is embedded in our identity as a man or the femininity that is embedded in our identity as a woman.

I would note here that Lisa Price herself has followed a feminine path in being a stay at home mother and that she presents herself in a recognisably feminine form. The mum wants something for her son that she has not followed herself.

I wonder too if she has considered what qualities her son will need to be successful in his life. We don't just get to choose what the opposite sex finds attractive in a partner; nor do we get to choose what demands are placed on us at school or at work or in the home. Men do still need to have masculine strengths to bear the burdens placed upon them; the questing and resilient spirit of men also helps us to forge a path and to find our higher fulfilments in life.

So Max's mum is not doing him any favours in steering him away from developing along masculine lines.

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.

Now moustaches are labelled discriminatory

I'm proud to say that Movember began here in Melbourne in 2004. If you're not already familiar with it, Movember is a charity movement in which men grow a moustache in November in order to raise money for men's illnesses, such as prostate cancer.

Movember has now spread internationally, but has found a critic in left-wing academic, Arianne Shahvisi. She complains about men growing moustaches for Movember because of the,

pernicious gendered and racial connotations carried by the practice

What are these pernicious practices? Well, you have to follow some convoluted logic here. According to Arianne Shahvisi if a white man grows a moustache for charitable purposes it thereby "others" men from other ethnicities who have a permanent moustache:

With large numbers of minority-ethnic men—for instance Kurds, Indians, Mexicans—sporting moustaches as a cultural or religious signifier, Movember reinforces the “othering” of “foreigners” by the generally clean-shaven, white majority.

It's a bit unusual to think that beards and moustaches are not Western. I sported a beard and moustache for a time in my 20s and if you go back to the 1800s, it was common for Western men to have facial hair. But that too is read as "racist" by Arianne Shahvisi. She thinks Western moustaches are a reminder of the Western colonialism of that century:

We are not simply considering an arbitrary configuration of facial hair, but one that had particular, imperial connotation to British men of our grandfathers' generation and currently has a separate cultural valence for men from certain ethnic groups. Moustaches, whether or not “mo-bros” mean theirs to be, are loaded with symbolism.

Arianne Shahvisi's complaints don't stop there. She believes that moustaches are not inclusive enough. After all, not every man can grow a moustache and nor can every woman:

Further, the inclusivity of Movember deserves examination. For one, only men (and even then, only some men) can grow a moustache. The decision to focus on the moustache to raise awareness of men's health issues might seem like an apposite one ... but it reinforces the regressive idea that masculinity is about body chemistry rather than gender identity, and marginalises groups of men who may struggle to grow facial hair, such as trans-men.

In solidarity with Movember, some women have also relaxed normative shaving-etiquette during “No Shave November.” Instead of being met with the same teasing words of encouragement, many have been subject to ferocious abuse across social media, reflective of the intolerability of women's body hair...

Nor does she like the Movember parties. According to her they are about,

white young men ridiculing minorities...Across nine cities in the UK, participants dress up in costumes that mock and trivialise racial minorities ... and the LGBT community ... celebrate war and imperialism (gun-toting cowboys, colonial generals in pith helmets, and cavalrymen in slouch hats), and emulate racist fictional characters and sexist stereotypes (such as 'Dictator' Aladeen with a harem of female bodyguards, Hulk Hogan lookalikes, hard-hatted builders).

Meanwhile, female attendees take on the uniforms that now seem fit for any occasion, yet really for none at all: Playboy bunnies, air-hostesses, nurses, cheerleaders. Unsurprisingly again, the woman deemed best-looking or best-dressed picks up the title of “Miss Movember”. Set against this damaging carnival of normativity, an official Movember t-shirt slogan "Moustaches against Establishment" seems particularly empty and hypocritical. This culture is summarised in the language of the website, which is itself a lesson in how to reinforce traditional conceptions of masculinity (witness: 'fighting the good fight', 'moustache army', 'flying the flag'), once again precluding the ostensible aim of breaking down the norms that force men to adopt pre-packaged roles...

Movember parties - carnivals of normativity?

 Those two paragraphs are densely packed. To summarise:

• she has an image of white men as being subhuman oppressors of everyone else. You have to wonder just what goes through her mind when she sees a white man walking down the street.
• she worries that Movember parties are "carnivals of normativity"
• she doesn't like normal masculinity, not even when it is expressed in uplifting phrases like "fighting the good fight." She seems to believe that the proper aim of society is to break down masculine norms

Conclusions? The really obvious thing about Arianne Shahvisi's column is that although it is supposed to be against racism and sexism it is, in fact, an unpleasant diatribe against white men and, as such, is itself racist and sexist. It could hardly be clearer that Arianne Shahvisi looks on white men as being exceptional - in a negative sense.

We're likely to get more of this kind of thing. The academic left seems to want to pursue the idea of "microaggressions" - in which small, seemingly harmless things are revealed to be acts of aggression against minorities.  I don't think this will play out well for the academic left - it comes across badly, like an act of bad faith, as in Arianne Shahvisi criticising Movember.

In Sweden boys play with fluffy go walkies

Sweden has bought into autonomy theory in a big way. According to this theory, the aim of life is to maximise individual autonomy, i.e. the ability to self-determine who we are. Therefore whatever is predetermined rather than self-determined is a prison or straitjacket that impedes our freedom to be whoever we want to be. Our sex is something that is predetermined. Therefore, think the liberal autonomists, it must be made not to matter.

And so in Sweden it is now thought wrong to show boys playing with traditionally boy toys and girls with girl toys. Which means you get advertising catalogues like the one below, showing a boy playing with a toy called "Fluffy go walkies".

A Swedish toy catalogue

Does it matter if Sweden tries to abolish sex distinctions? Yes and no. Sex distinctions are so deeply embedded into us, that they will continue in some form regardless of the policy of the Swedish authorities. They can never be made not to matter.

It is odd, though, for Sweden to journey down this road. In a heterosexual culture, there ought to be a celebration of sex distinctions rather than a statist effort to suppress these differences. It can also be disappointing (and disorienting) to young men and women in their late teens and twenties to find the opposite sex not fully embracing their masculinity or femininity. It takes away some of the context in which young people orient themselves to committed relationships. And, finally, we tend to be most settled in ourselves when we have a deeper sense of our own masculinity and femininity. So it makes little sense to blur gender lines when we consider what is important to individual identity.

It's not just that feminists are anti-male...

The term feminist is very unpopular, even amongst young women. For instance, research by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK found that:

...the label 'feminist' is often forcefully rejected, particularly by young women. New research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) suggests that, in rejecting feminism, women are often seeking to position themselves within conventional norms of femininity and heterosexuality.

"In many contemporary European societies, the term feminism provokes unease and even hostility," says Dr Christina Scharff of King's College London, who carried out the research"...

Playing an important role in the rejection of feminism in both countries are the distorted stereotypes of the 'man-hating feminist', the 'unfeminine feminist' or the 'lesbian feminist'. Many participants in the study did not want to call themselves ‘feminist’ because of these stereotypes.

...Although none of the participants could point to specific individuals, most still viewed the pioneers of gender equality as 'lesbian, man-hating feminists'.

And then there's this:

A study commissioned by the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) and published today found that feminism is regarded virtually unanimously in negative terms, ranging from old-fashioned to "ball breaking".

Those questioned felt women were more equal than ever before and believed that issues such as women's greater domestic role or concentration in lower-paid jobs are the result of individual choice and natural differences between the sexes which had to be addressed by individuals rather than, as the women's movement argued, society as a whole.

The findings of the Future Foundation study, Talking Equality, have sent shockwaves through the EOC.

The suspicions that young women have when it comes to the "pioneers of gender equality" are fully justified. And the problem is not just that a fair proportion of these pioneers were man-haters. Equally significant is that they were women who did not like or accept womanhood or femininity. Many were as anti-female as they were anti-male.

I was reminded of this when reading about one of the major pioneers of second wave feminism in the 1970s, Shulamith Firestone. She wrote:

The end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital difference between human beings would no longer matter culturally.

That is one of the drives of liberal modernity: to make sex distinctions not matter. If you believe that the end goal of politics is to maximise individual autonomy, then you will want to make your life as self-determining as possible, which will then mean that you will reject predetermined qualities, such as your own sex. As you cannot change your sex, the next best thing you'll be able to do is to make it not matter.

A generation earlier, the same ideas were in circulation. In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir could describe the intellectual temper of her own times as follows:

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: ‘I cannot be just to books which treat of woman as woman ... My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, should be regarded as human beings.

That's particularly interesting as it traces the failure to accept sex distinctions to an even deeper change in philosophy: from philosophical realism (which accepted the real existence of masculine and feminine essences) to nominalism (which saw such categories as having no real existence but as being names to group things).

Can sex distinctions be made not to matter? Well, not very easily. A University of California neuroscientist, Larry Cahill, has just recently been interviewed on differences between the male and female brain:

The differences exist at virtually all levels, he says, from those of tiny cells to large structures in the brain, from brain chemistry to what he calls intriguing differences in the way men and women remember emotionally searing events.

And this:

What it is, is just a storm of sex differences, big and little, found all over the place – down to the level of single neurons. We see these differences everywhere, and we started to realize, damn, we simply assume they aren't there. And these sex differences have implications for how the brain works and how to fix brains. That's your big story right there.

For me it's the existence of this huge fire in neuroscience. We've been collectively in kind of denial about it. But we've hit some sort of critical mass in the last couple of years. It's really starting to change.

What starts in Sweden...

In 2009 Toys R Us got into trouble in Sweden for "sexism." They were charged with producing brochures showing girls playing with girls' toys and boys with boys' toys.

Here we are a few years later and Toys R Us have declared that they will not market toys by gender in the UK either:

Toys R Us today bowed to anti-sexist marketing demands and pledged to drop gender labelling for its products.

The retailer declared that it would be more “inclusive” when marketing toys for girls and boys, and said it would draw up plans in the long term to remove “explicit references” to gender in its store.

The move follows pressure from a group called Let Toys be Toys. A spokeswoman for the group gave a classic liberal justification for their demands:

Megan Perryman, Let Toys Be Toys campaigner, said: “Even in 2013, boys and girls are still growing up being told that certain toys are for them, while others are not. This is not only confusing but extremely limiting as it strongly shapes their ideas about who they are and who they can go on to become.”

This is liberal autonomy theory, the idea that we should be self-determining individuals and that therefore predetermined qualities like our sex are "limiting" and should be made not to matter.

It's a key difference in the outlook of liberals and traditionalists. A traditionalist would not describe sex distinctions as "limiting." For us being a man or a woman is a core aspect of identity, one that connects us to a larger good or life principle of masculinity or femininity that we then seek to fulfil in our own lives.

Nor is the liberal position as open-ended as Megan Perryman suggests. Her group, Let Toys be Toys, is a member of an international movement, The Brave Girls Movement. This movement encourages girls to cultivate the following qualities:

independence, ambition, adventurousness, courage, healthy risk-taking, strength, intellect, conflict resolution, self-knowledge, creativity, athleticism, leadership, critical thinking skills, generosity, activism, camaraderie and kindness.

It's a list that, with just a couple of exceptions, focuses on getting girls to adopt more traditionally masculine qualities. It's as if the group is suggesting that there is something wrong or inferior with girls being feminine.

Why would they have this focus? One way to see the answer is that feminists have assumed that men set up a patriarchy in order gain an unearned privilege over oppressed women. Therefore, the theory goes, the gold standard in life has been enjoyed by men - so women therefore have to chase after what men have and do.

The other way to see the answer is that liberals are not as neutral about the aims of life as they claim. Liberalism has evolved to treat careers as the ultimate end in life and therefore it is believed that women should be oriented to competing with men in the workplace. Hence the emphasis on ambition, risk-taking, leadership and so on.

Anyway, we trads will continue to celebrate the differences between men and women; perhaps one day it will be a selling point in promoting traditionalist communities.

The war to make sex distinctions not matter rolls on

Laura Wood has found an interesting story about an American woman, Karla Erickson.

Karla Erickson is very keen to push forward with the liberal aim of making sex distinctions not matter. She admits that women have a biological connection to babies that men do not, first by carrying the baby and then by breastfeeding. She even writes about how special this connection is. Nonetheless, she doesn't think it right that mothers should have such a connection because it sets up an "inequality" (by which she means a difference) in the position of men and women in raising children. She therefore concludes that her role should be to "disrupt" the special connection that exists between mothers and babies and that part of the way she can do this is to refuse to breastfeed any future children.

Here she is on the special bond between mother and child:

For birth moms, we have this physically grounded centrality to the baby-making process that carries through birth. If we breastfeed we deepen rather than disrupt that primacy.

In my case, I was pregnant and carried our son to term. As a result, I was deeply connected to that little guy before he ever came into the world. His heartbeat and mine were connected, as were our digestion and sleep patterns.

...My little son already knew my smell, my voice, and my heartbeat. It was perhaps the moment when my gender was the most salient it has ever been in my marriage: these things that my husband literally could not do, I had done.

And then I breastfed.

Every time I got to breast feed him I was holding my son, singing, whispering, touching, and loving on my sweet little boy.

If I had not breastfed I would have missed all those beautiful quiet times with my son...I had never known what it was like to be that close to another human.

Despite all of this, she concludes with the idea that women shouldn't breastfeed, precisely because it attaches a baby more closely to the mother than to the father - and this then produces "social differences" between men and women:

If we really want to address and redress the ongoing inequalities around the work of making life — the work of raising the next generation — then we have to look at breastfeeding. It’s one thing our bodies do that reinforces the social differences between men and women, moms and dads, and boys and girls.

...Over the years, my husband and I will work to unwind this preliminary advantage, but we could have avoided solidifying it if we had decided to use formula, or to pump and bottle feed our son.

So in a pro-breastfeeding era, I say, “I’m out.” Not because I don’t benefit everyday from that “special connection” to my son, but because I do.

...Sometimes we have to do a runaround our bodies to ensure equity. Sometimes we have to do some social engineering to help dislodge our social aspirations from the dictates of our glands and gonads.

Sometimes, to make sure that the next generation has more wiggle room around the gendered division of labor, we have to tuck away those breasts and reach for a bottle instead.

Why do liberals want to make sex distinctions not matter? Because their aim is to maximise individual autonomy. This means that our life is supposed to be self-determining, which then means that predetermined qualities like our sex aren't supposed to matter.

You might think that Karla Erickson is a crazy lady for thinking the way she does, but she is following through with a philosophy that is widely accepted in society. There are young people today being brought up with the idea that parenting should be strictly unisex and that it is unjust for a mother to spend more time with her child than the father does. Karla Erickson is just pushing that unisex ideal a little further along and with a little more honesty. She admits that there are reasons grounded in biology for a close relationship between mother and child, and that this relationship can be a fulfilling one for a woman, but she wants us to overcome this natural connection in the name of a social ideal.

That's what happens when you adopt the wrong principles for deciding social ideals.

The good side to this for traditionalists is that liberalism is advancing so radically along the lines of its principles that it must inevitably leave behind a good many people. Liberals like Karla Erickson want to suppress important aspects of human nature. That puts us in a good position to defend these positive aspects of human nature and to rally those whose strength of instinct puts them in opposition to a liberal culture.