Houellebecq & Liberal Modernity

Michel Houellebecq

There's an interesting review at American Affairs of Sérotonine, the latest novel by French author Michel Houellebecq.

The reviewer is none other than Thierry Baudet, leader of the Dutch party Forum for Democracy, which made significant gains in the elections in The Netherlands earlier this year.

Baudet notes that the characters in Houellebecq's novels are portrayed as grappling with the alienating effects of liberal modernity - of a society which is focused on maximising individual autonomy to a degree that dissolves traditional forms of identity and belonging and which also makes stable, enduring relationships difficult to maintain:

At some point in the course of their lives, all of Houellebecq’s characters are forced to acknowledge that their romantic ideals have be­come untenable in the modern age, since individualism has made profound, long-term relationships impossible. This simple idea forms the fundamental conviction of Houellebecq’s work. It echoes, in certain ways, Marxist Verelendungstheorie: as technological inno­vations have made jobs boring and interchangeable, and as free trade has destroyed traditional farm life and honest labor, we now pass through life as atomized wage slaves in the service of incomprehensible, unfathomable government organizations and overwhelmingly powerful multinational corporations. Erratic consumer preferences, capricious fashions, and an unpredictable herd instinct dictate the opinions (or the whims and fancies) of most of us who no longer have a family, a home, a church, and a nation to reinforce our sense of identity. Unable to chart a course for ourselves, we are floating around in an empty sea. Rudderless. All control of life—andof who we are—is lost.

The fault lies on both sides of the mainstream political spectrum. As a European, Baudet labels these the social democrats on the left and the liberals (classical liberals) on the right:

Now this fundamental point which Houellebecq makes time and again deserves further reflection, because it challenges the very fun­damentals of both the contemporary “Left” and the “Right.” It challenges modern anthropology as such. Both the social-dem­ocratic and the liberal wing of the modern political spectrum (re­spectively advocating the welfare state and the free market) wish to maximize individual autonomy. Liberalism and socialism differ when it comes to the most effective way to achieve that objective, but they do not differ in the objective itself. They are both liberation movements; they both want the complete emancipation of the indi­vidual.

And both base their vision of society on the (unfounded but supposedly “self-evident”) principle that every individual enjoys certain “inalienable rights,” which by definition eclipse all other claims, and to which all other ties, loyalties, and connections must ultimately be subordinated. Over time, all such institutions that the individual requires to fully actualize a meaningful existence—such as a family and a connection to generations past and future, a nation, a tradition, perhaps a church—will weaken and eventually disappear. Today, even new life (in the womb) may be extinguished to avoid disturbing the individual’s freedom. In the Netherlands (where I live), suicide is facilitated to ensure that here, too, no constraints—such as the duty to care for your parents—are placed on the indi­vidual.

It is this fundamental assumption of the modern age—that individual autonomy (be it through free markets or welfarism) leads to happiness—which Michel Houellebecq challenges.

The weakness that Baudet identifies in Houellebecq's writing is defeatism. Houellebecq captures the descent skillfully but cannot see a way out.

There is much more in the review - I recommend clicking on the link and reading it in full.

The Bible, nations & migration

Scott Greer makes a good point in this tweet:

As an example, when an American Catholic priest, Fr Frank Pavone, announced his support for border protection he was roundly condemned by people who assumed that this was unChristian:

It seems to me that there is an important issue to be resolved here when it comes to Christianity. I'm going to try to explain what the issue is and how it might be resolved, but I want to make it clear at the outset that I do so without claiming theological expertise, so I am very much open to listening to other points of view.

The issue is that there seem, at least on the surface, to be two principles in the Bible that run against each other. Those who think that the Bible is supportive of open borders can point to some passages in the New Testament. The most powerful one is Matthew 25:31. In this passage, Matthew writes of the second coming of Jesus and of Judgement Day. He writes that Jesus says "I was a stranger and you took me in" as one criterion of who will be judged righteous.

Another is the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke. In this parable, the "good neighbour" is a Samaritan who has mercy for an Israelite, despite the two groups being in opposition. The field of mercy, benevolence and compassion is here defined as extending even to our enemies (which fits with the "love thy enemy" principle).

Unsurprisingly, there are liberal Christians who, on the basis of such passages, argue for open borders or for large scale refugee programs. An example:

The Australian Catholic Migrant and Refugee Office bases its support for immigration and refugee programs on the ground that:

In the Gospel, Jesus compels us to welcome the stranger (Matthew 25:35)

Is it, then, an open and shut case? Does Christianity compel us to accept a borderless, nationless, one world philosophy?

Well, no. There are other passages in the Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments, which clearly indicate that it is part of God's design for people to live in nations. The aim is not to dissolve such distinctions.

Even the Matthew quote, about the second coming, begins with the natural division of mankind into distinct communities: "All the nations will be gathered before him." This suggests that Matthew himself thought that the "take in the stranger" message was not to be understood in a way that would undermine the existence of unique nations of people.

From Paul (Acts 17:26) "From one man he made every nation of humanity to live all over the earth, fixing the seasons of the year and the national boundaries within which they live."

From Deuteronomy 32:8 - "When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, When He separated the sons of man, He set the boundaries of the peoples."

Remember, too, the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9). This describes humanity attempting to defy God's plan for people to live in separate nations, with different languages, which then displeases God. God punishes those who seek to erase national distinctions.

There is more, which I will try to explain shortly. But I'd like to return to Matthew. How can you reconcile the principle of hospitality that Matthew sets out ("I was a stranger and you took me in") with the Biblical principle of a humanity divided into distinct nations with borders established by God?

I think it helps to consider how hospitality might have been understood within the existing Hebraic tradition and culture. Here is how one professor describes the background to New Testament hospitality:

The terrain surrounding Jerusalem is rugged and unforgiving: rocky hills with little water to the west, forbidding desert to the east, scorching temperatures most of the year. Travel could be dangerous, so hospitality to the traveller was an ongoing need and a sacred duty. The New Testament is full of images and stories of guests received, both those already known as friends and those strangers who are taken in and transformed into guests. Among nomadic tribes, the guest comes under the protection of the host, who guarantees inviolable safety. The important elements of hospitality include the opportunity for cleansing dusty feet, scented oil to soften dried skin and mask odors of the road, food, shelter, security, and companionship.

It should be noted too that there had been, historically, a custom of nomadic pastoralism among the Jews:

A nomadic camp consisted of about 25 to 50 members. Any less and it would be difficult to protect the family and any more would be difficult to feed. Usually the oldest member of the family was the head, or chief, of the tribe. The remainder of the clan would consist of his brothers, sons, nephews and grandsons as well as their wives and children. Each clan was an independent entity with the chief as judge and ruler. He had the ultimate authority in all manners including where they go, discipline, management of the flocks and herds and the daily tasks of the camp.

When a clan became too large to support, it was divided and separated with all of the clans belonging to one tribe. The name of the tribe was generally that of the original family patriarch and each clan of the tribe carried the name of its original patriarch.

...One of the major responsibilities of the clan is to provide hospitality to anyone who comes to them. This may be a member of a related clan or even an enemy of another tribe. In both cases it was the responsibility of the clan to provide food, shelter and protection as long as they were within their camp.

You can see from this:

1. Hospitality is especially important when conditions of travel are difficult. You have to imagine a time before modern transport and communications systems.

2. There was already a well-developed culture of hospitality existing at that time, in which protection was to be afforded the traveller.

You can see why Matthew would not have thought it a contradiction to accept hospitality as a test of benevolence whilst at the same time accepting nations as a divinely ordained plan for humanity.

Hospitality was embedded within the culture, to the point that it had rituals that were observed. There was likely to be a single guest who would be temporarily hosted before continuing his travels. The guest might be known already to the clan (lowest level of benevolence) or be a stranger (higher level) or even from a hostile tribe (highest). However, most guests would have been fellow Jews.

Given that a patriarch ruled the clan, that guests were mostly travellers, and that most guests were fellow Jews, it's not the case that the culture of hospitality would have ceded either political power or cultural dominance to a radically different population.

In other words, hospitality as a test of benevolence would not have led to many millions of permanent residents arriving suddenly from a different continent.

The problem is that there are some Christians today who want a form of hospitality that does have this outcome, i.e. one that would lead the host nation to be subsumed under the weight of mass immigration. For instance, the female pastor quoted above claims that there are no limits on immigration allowed by the Bible:

This seems to me to be taking the letter of the law rather than its underlying principle.

Earlier I wrote that there were other reasons for doubting that the Bible compels us to have open borders. One of them is that there are multiple defences of "storge" in the New Testament, the type of love that is generally associated with love of family and nation.

The use of terms like "agape" and "storge" to describe different kinds of love is not always clear cut, but one scholar describes "storge" in the New Testament as denoting "a natural affection, a sentiment innate and peculiar to men as men...Hence of the natural love of kindred, of people and king (the relation being regarded as founded in nature)".

Paul, in Acts 1:31, says of the unrighteous that they are without storge, translated usually as "without natural affection". This is part of a longer text in which Paul states that God reveals himself to man in the creation, but that the unrighteous choose to act nonetheless in a series of naturally disordered ways, one piece of evidence for this is that they lack "storge".

Then there is Paul's second epistle to Timothy, in which he writes "But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love [without storge], unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous."

That Paul regarded such natural kinship relations, and the duties flowing from them, as being part of a rightly ordered community is evident from other passages. Paul writes for instance, in 1 Timothy 5:8, that "if any provide not for his own, and especially for those of his own house, he has denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever." Similarly (1 Timothy 5:4) "But if any widow have children or nephews, let them learn first to shew piety at home, and to requite their parents: for that is good and acceptable before God."

This idea of love of kin and country as a naturally ordered affection survived into the culture of Christian countries. Metternich in 1820 wrote of "one of the sentiments most natural to man, that of nationality." And in 1828 Eliza Fenton, on a sea journey to Australia, was unsettled to find that one of the crew was an Englishman turned Arab. She observed that,

His taste seems to lie in laying bare the unsightly movements of the human heart and crushing its better feelings, or dwelling on them with bitterness and ridicule...Poor fellow! though it always makes me nervous to hear him speak, I pity him too; he may not always have been what he now is; has he been made this [way] by disappointment or alienation from the humanising relationships of life?

The significant point in all this is that the loves that we have for family and people, i.e. the natural affections (and duties) that flow from kinship, are not alien to New Testament thought, and their absence is considered proof of unrighteousness and of the fall of society and social relationships in the end days.

Finally, I'd like to look at some of the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church on the question of both patriotism and immigration.

The Catechism (2241) is supportive of secure borders: "The second duty is to secure one's border and enforce the law for the sake of the common good." As the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it (in the entry on "justice"): "It is the function of the State to protect its subjects in their rights and to govern the whole body for the common good."

Also from the Catholic Encyclopedia (on "migration"): "The justification [for restriction] is to be found in the right of a nation to control the variations of its own population....Restrictive measures are also justified...on the general ground that a national family has a right to say who shall join it."

From Catholicism.org:

Patriotism is a great virtue. To be a patriot is to love one’s fatherland. This means that it is to love the land of the people that sired you. Patriotism is a natural overflow of the virtue of piety — that is, the virtue of the home. As piety would have us rendering what is due in justice to parents and other family members, patriotism would have us render the same to our nation, its government, and our fellow citizens. Both of these are a matter of justice, for the virtues of piety and patriotism are parts of that cardinal virtue. Over and above justice is the theological virtue of charity, which also enters into a consideration of Catholic piety and patriotism. After God, we love our neighbors, that is, those who are “nigh” to us, meaning near us. Those most near to us are our parents and our siblings.

Our charity, as well as the just demands of piety and patriotism, spread out in broadening concentric circles from the family home to the neighborhood, to the town or city, to the state, to the region, to the nation (or empire), of which we are a resident, citizen, or subject. If we see our country as “our people” — something much more possible in homogeneous, non-pluralistic societies — it is much easier to see how piety quite naturally becomes patriotism...Thus patriotism is a rootedness in the land and its people.

Does love discriminate?

In my last post I criticised a newspaper column written by Nicole Ferrie. She didn't like Senator Cory Bernardi arguing that the traditional family is an ideal to aim for. Instead, she believes that all family types are equal, on the basis that all that a family needs is love and respect.

One thing I missed in that post was the headline to Nicole Ferrie's column: "Love does not discriminate." It's the sort of nice sounding comment that's easy to gloss over.

But then the thought struck me that, hey, love actually does discriminate and in obvious ways. For instance, if you say that love doesn't discriminate then you are denying the possibility of heterosexual love, in which we love only those of the opposite sex and discriminate against those of the same sex. Similarly, you are denying the possibility of monogamous love in which we discriminate against all others in favour of just one person.

Marital love is discriminatory - we love our spouse in a preferential way. Patriotic love likewise is directed at one country and discriminates against others. And what about friendship? If love doesn't discriminate, then isn't friendship a bit meaningless? Doesn't feeling friendship with another person mean that you love them in a different way than you love others?

What about paternal love and maternal love? Aren't these directed at our own children, thereby discriminating against other children?

Even when it comes to feeling love for a stranger, this is at least partly directed at those strangers we meet or have some potential connection with. The Good Samaritan, after all, didn't help out all strangers equally; he tended to the injured man he met on the road. He didn't give his money to all strangers equally.

I think it's worth pointing this out, as obvious as it is, because it is an important criticism to raise against liberalism in general. If you are a liberal, and you want individuals to be able to self-define their own goods, then any kind of "supporting goods" that you raise in an argument have to be either vaguely universal and abstract or else aimed at promoting an equal choice.

For instance, if Nicole Ferrie wants people to be able to choose whatever family type they want, then it helps her to argue that "all that you need to make this work is vaguely universal and abstract quality x"  - which she lists as love and respect. If "all you need is love" (in a vague and abstract way) then the way is clear for people to be free to choose in any direction as autonomous individuals. A vaguely universal love doesn't stand in the way of anything.

But what if women need marital love? What if a child needs (optimally) paternal and maternal love? Then suddenly some choices become more objectively moral than others, which then contradicts the liberal idea that we can self-define our own goods however we want.

Hanna Rosin celebrates loveless youth

Confused about the state of relationships? Well, if you're not now you will be after reading Hanna Rosin's latest piece, "Boys on the side" (warning: it's crude in parts)

Rosin's essay is a clumsy attempt to reconcile the conflict between the liberal demand for an autonomous, independent, single person lifestyle based on career and casual relationships, and the normal human desires for love and family.

Rosin begins by celebrating a coarse hook up culture, which she believes is used by young women to avoid serious relationships with men so that women can dedicate themselves to career and independence:

The sexual culture may be more coarse these days, but young women are more than adequately equipped to handle it, because unlike the women in earlier ages, they have more-important things on their minds, such as good grades and intern­ships and job interviews and a financial future of their own. The most patient and thorough research about the hookup culture shows that over the long run, women benefit greatly from living in a world where they can have sexual adventure without commitment or all that much shame, and where they can enter into temporary relation­ships that don’t get in the way of future success.

OK, that makes it sound as if success in life is measured by career and independence. The message is repeated in this passage:

Single young women in their sexual prime—that is, their 20s and early 30s, the same age as the women at the business-­school party—are for the first time in history more success­ful, on average, than the single young men around them. They are more likely to have a college degree and, in aggregate, they make more money. What makes this remarkable development possible is not just the pill or legal abortion but the whole new landscape of sexual freedom—the ability to delay marriage and have temporary relationships that don’t derail education or career. To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture. And to a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school, cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping their own ends in mind. For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.

You would think that a woman's sexual prime would be the most logical time for a woman to try to attract a serious suitor - but Hanna Rosin doesn't see it this way. It's only when a woman is past her sexual prime that a serious suitor might be considered - before then he is "a danger to be avoided at all costs" as he might "get in the way of a promising future".

Now if what really matters is career and independence then why not give up on marriage altogether? Marriage, after all, requires a commitment to others. And Hanna Rosin does at times run down the idea of marriage. She writes:

There is no retreating from the hookup culture to an earlier age, when a young man showed up at the front door with a box of chocolates for his sweetheart, and her father eyed him warily. Even the women most frustrated by the hookup culture don’t really want that. The hookup culture is too bound up with everything that’s fabulous about being a young woman in 2012—the freedom, the confidence, the knowledge that you can always depend on yourself.

Women want a hookup culture, she writes. It's fabulous. It represents freedom and self-reliance. She goes on to claim that,

Young men and women have discovered a sexual freedom unbridled by the conventions of marriage, or any conventions.

So it's all clear to this point. The hookup culture, whatever distress it might cause to young women, is a source of freedom and progress for women. A lack of conventions is held to be a good thing. Best not for women to have serious or lasting relationships with men. Flings with unsuitable men are the way to go.

But then the clarity fades away. All of a sudden we get this conclusion:

But that’s not how the story ends...Ultimately, the desire for a deeper human connection always wins out, for both men and women. Even for those business-school women, their hookup years are likely to end up as a series of photographs, buried somewhere on their Facebook page, that they do or don’t share with their husband—a memory that they recall fondly or sourly, but that hardly defines them.

Oh, really? So women are to spend ages 15 to 35 rejecting a deeper human connection in favour of independence and freedom, and then at the very last gasping breath of their youthful fertility, they are suddenly to change and decide that human connection matters after all.

Come on Hanna. You can't justify wasting a woman's sexual prime on independence and freedom from convention if a deeper human connection as experienced in marriage proves to be the stronger value in the long run anyway.

If independence and sexual freedom really are the higher values to live our lives by, then we shouldn't marry at any age. We should be like the Swedes and live alone. But if a deeper human connection as expressed in marriage is the higher value, as Hanna Rosin seems to believe it ultimately proves to be, then we shouldn't waste it - we should marry in a timely way that allows us to share our sexual prime with our spouse.

Hanna Rosin seems to expect otherwise intelligent people to engage in a kind of self-sabotage - deliberately rejecting serious suitors when in our prime, only to seek them out when we're past it.

P.S. Something I missed is the significance of Rosin's final words "but that hardly defines them". The implication is that women don't want to define themselves when they're married the same way they might when they're in their 20s and hooking up. Which means that even Rosin recognises that the two identities don't go together well. She seems to be trying to reassure her female readers that they can bury the younger self that doesn't fit with being a wife and mother - the self that they might potentially be ashamed to let their husbands know about.

Feminists for polygamy

OK, so Kate Bolick writes a lengthy article confessing that she cannot make up her mind between autonomy and intimacy - leaving her single in her late 30s.

I've posted a couple of traditionalist replies to this, but how would a feminist respond to Kate Bolick?

Jessica Mack is a feminist who is critical of Kate Bolick for suggesting that women can't have it all: Mack insists that you can have intimacy without compromising autonomy. But what exactly does this mean? How can you retain a freedom to choose however you like whilst still committing yourself to a relationship?

Mack offers several suggestions. First, she thinks one option is to have open relationships:

Sex columnist Dan Savage has written for decades about the pragmatism of non-monogamy in making marriages work. Feminists often, and rightly, decry the double standard that men can sleep around, while women cannot. Savage suggests that rectifying this is not about confining men to fidelity, but rather encouraging women to break out and explore. I may be out on a licentious limb here, but I would argue that the concept of non-monogamy will be the biggest relationship issue we will grapple with in our time.

I wonder if Jessica Mack would suggest this if she weren't 28 and childless. If she were 38 with a few children in tow she might not think giving her husband/partner free rein to roam such a good idea. Anyway, open relationships might well preserve a measure of choice, but most likely at the expense of intimacy.

Jessica Mack's second suggestion is even more noteworthy. She thinks that polygamy might extend autonomous choice, presumably by not limiting us to just one spouse:

Disruption is also afoot in the west of the US where Kody Brown, a friendly polygamist, is filming a reality show about his life with four wives and 16 children. Brown recently launched an historic lawsuit to challenge Utah's bigamy laws. Earlier this summer the Browns' lawyer penned a stellar op-ed laying out a logical and nearly irresistible argument for polygamy as a viable relationship model.

So Jessica Mack the feminist believes that the argument for polygamy as a viable relationship model is "nearly irresistible". I wonder what the average married woman thinks of this and whether feminists like Mack really represent their interests.

You can see why polygamy is connected to autonomy - it means that we aren't limited to marrying one person. But from reading feminist commentary elsewhere, there's possibly another reason why polygamy appeals to some feminists. If you aren't committed to being a wife and mother, then those roles might seem too demanding. You might think that having more than one woman in the house to share the role would lessen the burden and allow you to do other things. But here too greater autonomy is still at the expense of intimacy - it is motivated by a lesser commitment to the relationship.

Her third suggestion is the usual liberal one of replacing a single form of marriage with a plurality or diversity of forms, so that you get to autonomously choose which one to participate in. Each form is thought to be equally valid:

Young women need to know that intimacy doesn't have to be a casualty of autonomy, and that sometimes it actually develops as a result...In order to move forward constructively, we need a multiplicity of relationship models to inspire and reassure us. We need trans couples on TV, we need non-monogamy champions, we need people married 40-plus years like my parents, and we need Stevie Nicks who, at 62, is purposefully single so that she can "always be free".

Note though that it's the purposefully single Stevie Nicks who gets to claim the mantle of freedom fighter. I wonder too if Jessica Mack really understands the commitment it takes from a husband to remain monogamous. A traditional marriage like her parents isn't a likely outcome in a society which champions non-monogamy. Chances are that Jessica Mack is helping to take away the one choice that most women really want to have.

Kate Bolick tells us why

Kate Bolick

Kate Bolick is the latest in a spate of women to regret leaving marriage to so late in life. Her explanation of what went wrong is well worth reading.

She begins by noting that she had a terrific chance to marry in her late 20s, which she turned down:

In 2001, when I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. Allan and I had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. He was (and remains) an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind. My friends, many of whom were married or in marriage-track relationships, were bewildered.

Why would she do that? Her answer is twofold: the autonomy theory she was brought up on led her to prioritise independence over relationships, and she assumed that there would always be men for her to partner with.

Let's begin with the assumption that there would always be eligible men seeking her out. Kate Bolick is a very physically attractive woman. She describes how in her 20s she managed easily to pursue serial long-term relationships with men:

Today I am 39, with too many ex-boyfriends to count and, I am told, two grim-seeming options to face down: either stay single or settle for a “good enough” mate. At this point, certainly, falling in love and getting married may be less a matter of choice than a stroke of wild great luck. A decade ago, luck didn’t even cross my mind. I’d been in love before, and I’d be in love again. This wasn’t hubris so much as naïveté; I’d had serious, long-term boyfriends since my freshman year of high school, and simply couldn’t envision my life any differently.

...That we would marry, and that there would always be men we wanted to marry, we took on faith.

Despite the advantage of her good looks, she now doesn't have the pick of men but feels she must settle. Where have all the "good men" gone? She observes:

...as women have climbed ever higher, men have been falling behind. We’ve arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up—and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don’t want to go out with.

Most of the men have already married, others have dropped out. And fewer suitable man are available anyway as women have pushed up the career ladder, with many of their male peers losing the motivation to do likewise. (Note the language Kate Bolick uses: "finally ready to start our lives". In her mind her 20s were just a kind of play life - a wait until her real life could finally begin in her 30s. But why delay your real life for so long?)

Bolick does recognise here the major issue that as women do increasingly better in education and careers than men that it becomes more difficult for women to marry up:

the decline of males has obviously been ... bad news for marriage. For all the changes the institution has undergone, American women as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be “marriageable” men—those who are better educated and earn more than they do. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity ... the new scarcity disrupts what economists call the “marriage market” in a way that in fact narrows the available choices, making a good man harder to find than ever. At the rate things are going, the next generation’s pool of good men will be significantly smaller. What does this portend for the future of the American family?

Bolick is aware, too, that as her youth and fertility decline that she is losing ground in the dating market to younger women:

I am fully aware that with each passing year, I become less attractive to the men in my peer group, who have plenty of younger, more fertile women to pick from.

All of these are important and meaty issues which are covered very well at various sites on the net. But the other part of Kate Bolick's explanation is rarely dealt with, perhaps because it requires a more fundamental rethink of modern values.

Kate Bolick tells us very clearly that she was raised to prioritise individual autonomy. And the logic of autonomy was that she should remain independent for as long as possible.

...the elevation of independence over coupling (“I wasn’t ready to settle down”) is a second-wave feminist idea I’d acquired from my mother...

I was her first and only recruit, marching off to third grade in tiny green or blue T-shirts declaring: A Woman Without a Man Is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle, or: A Woman’s Place Is in the House—and the Senate, and bellowing along to Gloria Steinem & Co.’s feminist-minded children’s album, Free to Be...You and Me...

...my future was to be one of limitless possibilities...This unfettered future was the promise of my time and place...We took for granted that we’d spend our 20s finding ourselves, whatever that meant, and save marriage for after we’d finished graduate school and launched our careers, which of course would happen at the magical age of 30.

Limitless possibilities. An unfettered future. No restrictions on what can be autonomously chosen. Someone brought up to believe in this isn't going to think seriously about how our choices need to be ordered and about how a workable framework to society needs to be organised and maintained.

Here again Kate Bolick writes about her prioritising of independence over love:

When I embarked on my own sojourn as a single woman in New York City...it wasn’t dating I was after. I was seeking something more vague and, in my mind, more noble, having to do with finding my own way, and independence.

She continues later by praising the Mosuo in China for their matrilineal culture in which there is no stable marriage commitment:

The matrilineal Mosuo are worth pausing on, as a reminder of how complex family systems can be, and how rigid ours are...For centuries, the Mosuo have lived in households that revolve around the women...

Sexual relations are kept separate from family. At night, a Mosuo woman invites her lover to visit her babahuago (flower room)...there are no expectations or rules. As Cai Hua, a Chinese anthropologist, explains, these relationships, which are known as açia, are founded on each individual’s autonomy, and last only as long as each person is in the other’s company. Every goodbye is taken to be the end of the açia relationship, even if it resumes the following night. “There is no concept of açia that applies to the future,” Hua says.

But the really important quote is this one:

In the months leading to my breakup with Allan, my problem, as I saw it, lay in wanting two incompatible states of being—autonomy and intimacy...

This is what she sees as her problem. This is why she dropped the man she might have married and had children with. And she is right - autonomy and intimacy (i.e. autonomy and committed love) are incompatible. You have to decide on how to order them: do you sacrifice a measure of your autonomy to enjoy the good of marital love? Or do you reject a stable relationship to maintain autonomy?

Most of us decide that the fulfilment of a good marriage and having children is the higher good. But Kate Bolick, having been raised from girlhood to value autonomy above all else, has never been able to come to this decision decisively.

She is still caught in a kind of limbo in wanting both things. This is clear in her writing in which she jumps from regrets about not having married and her missed opportunities to ideas about marriage being a false historical construct to be replaced by more flexible living arrangements.

Her current compromise appears to be a desire to find a community of women to find companionship with. That is probably one of the worst options she could take.

Anyway, the larger lesson is that there are losses in making autonomy the overriding good in society. We can certainly value autonomy, but it's wrong to think of it as the highest, ordering principle of society.

Kia Abdullah: competitive womanhood

Kia Abdullah is in the news because of comments she wrote on Twitter. She wrote that she felt no sympathy for three British teenage boys who died in a bus crash in Thailand whilst on a "gap yaar" and that she smiled when she learned two of the boys had double barrelled surnames:

Is it really awful that I don't feel sympathy for anyone killed on a gap yaar? That's awful, right? Yes, I'm a terrible person ... I actually smiled when I saw that they had double-barrelled surnames. Sociopathic?

So who is Kia Abdullah? She's a 29-year-old twice divorced writer who grew up in a Bangladeshi family in Tower Hamlets in London.


Kia Abdullah

Why so callous? She has written that although she is proud of her working-class origins she nonetheless has a chip on her shoulder and that she regrets never having applied to Oxford or Cambridge. Her writing is also peppered with the belief that Bangladeshis like herself are held back in their aspirations by racism. So perhaps she thinks that students with double barrelled names who can afford a gap year are privileged white people whom she can feel no empathy toward.

But she's hardly done too badly out of Britain. She graduated from the University of London, has had two novels published, was appointed an editor of Asian Woman magazine, was then appointed a columnist for Asiana magazine and has recently been a columnist for the left-liberal Guardian newspaper. It's difficult to see exactly how she has been held back, whether by being working-class or Bangladeshi or female.

Here's something else that's interesting about Kia Abdullah. Despite growing up in a Bangladeshi family, she absorbed the modern girl ethos just as thoroughly as any middle-class white girl. In one column she engaged in some self-reflection on why she and other women like her feel the need to be in competition with their boyfriends and husbands:

....a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly prevalent among my circle of friends and acquaintances: ambitious, successful and talented women suffering from an ever-diminishing sense of humour, and an unrelenting need to prove that they are equal, if not superior to, the men in their lives. It seems that showing signs of need, weakness, dependence or sometimes even personality, somehow compromises our quest for gender equality.

This type of behaviour is perhaps necessary in some arenas. When there is still a substantial pay gap between the sexes and people feel comfortable expressing sentiments such as "woman + ambition = bitch" in a public, albeit anonymous, forum, women need their armour of cold tenacity and competitiveness, but professional battles seem to be increasingly spilling over into personal lives.

It's what I refer to as the superwoman complex. So many modern women have fought so hard for freedom and independence that even when we have careers, homes and husbands, we still can't take a back seat and stop trying to prove ourselves. I may be wrong about the wider community of British women, but it's certainly something I see in my generation of British-Asian women who arguably have had to fight harder and longer for independence.

I am certainly guilty of this type of truculence. I react against all forms of dependence, stressing time and time again that I am independent and autonomous. During the course of my most recent relationship, I felt a constant need to prove that I was smart, secure, strong and self-sufficient. I was fiercely competitive and felt a relentless need to prove that I was right: a need that almost emasculated the man closest to me. In short, I couldn't stop fighting. I, like most women, want financial security, comfort, love and warmth, but for those of us who have grown up fighting patriarchy, it's difficult to allow a man to guide and support us, be it a father, lover or a boss.

It's a significant confession. She's saying that women are brought up to value being independent and autonomous and so become competitive with men not only in the workforce ("armour of cold tenacity") but even in their personal lives ("I felt a constant need to prove that I was smart, secure, strong and self-sufficient. I was fiercely competitive and felt a relentless need to prove that I was right"). She understands that this is at odds with her feminine need for financial security, comfort, love and warmth but that if you have grown up "fighting patriarchy" it's "difficult to allow a man to guide and support us, be it a father, lover or a boss."

You get some idea from this how Kia Abdullah managed to be divorced twice by the age of 29. It's also an insight into the mindset of a certain kind of modern girl; it shows how once women are persuaded that they should be independent and autonomous that relationships then become competitive as women won't allow themselves to admit to needing men and become determined to show that they are equal or superior to men in all fields of life. Hence the "harshness" that men sometimes intuit about a certain kind of modern woman.

We are bringing young women up with a set of political values that doesn't allow much of their natural femininity to be freely expressed - and this is particularly true of those young women who spend the longest in the education system and who are best able to discipline themselves to serve abstract ideals.

Was free love really so free?

Have you ever heard of the Oneida Community? It was founded in the 1840s by the American John Humphrey Noyes.

Noyes started out as a theologian. He recognised that the Bible was strong on marriage, but thought that believers were called upon to live in a "resurrection state", i.e. to live posthumously, as if in the afterlife. And in the afterlife there were no laws regarding marriage or divorce. Instead, there was openness and service to all, equally.

Noyes therefore held that believers should reject monogamous marriage and replace it with pantogamy, in which there would be no "selfish possession" when it came to sexual relations. As the Oneida Handbook put it,

In the resurrection, marriage was to be superseded by universal unity ... We have thus far carefully traced the doctrine of Christ and Paul on the subject of marriage ... We have found them not in favor of divorce, and not polygamists, but pressing toward the cessation of marriage itself ...

pantogamy ... recognizes the continued existence of the sexual relation, but excludes ownership, and replaces human beings where they were as children - in friendship and freedom, without selfish possession.

... in that posthumous state which we are taught to pray for and expect on earth, the relation of the sexes will be that described in Christ's prayer - "that they may all be one, even as I and my Father are one" - which we call pantogamy.

It seems that if you were an American radical in the 1830s you still had to find justification for your views in the Bible. But this wasn't Noyes's only source of authority. He mixed the Bible with scientism - his aim was to achieve "scientific" forms of social organisation (rather than "sentimental" ones).

And he often sounded something like a radical left-liberal, believing in feminism, freedom, equality and progress to human perfection.

It was Noyes who coined the term "free love" to denote the abolition of marriage and its replacement by non-possessive, multiple sexual relationships. He founded a community of several hundred people on this basis that lasted for 30 years. So how did it work out in practice?

The commune

The commune had a conception of itself as being "free, open and democratic," as "enlightened," and as practising "sexual freedom".

It also saw itself as feminist, with women there pioneering the wearing of pants and working alongside the men:

Always concerned for the plight of women in modern society, under Noyes' belief in the equality of the sexes, the group went in for communal cooking and housekeeping as well as group farming, the men and women sharing in all the work.

But the "free love" practised at Oneida was in reality not so free and not so loving. The community was highly regulated, with "a complex bureaucracy of 27 standing committees and 48 administrative sections" for just 300 people.

One of these committees, headed by Noyes himself, decided who would be allowed to embark on a sexual relationship. There was a principle of Ascending Fellowship, which meant that older members of the community were paired up with younger members. This meant that Noyes and a few of the other older men were paired up with very young girls (twelve or thirteen years old). Noyes at times used his power to determine relationships to maintain control over the community.

So relationships weren't really so free. And there were limitations on love as well. Couples weren't supposed to get too attached to each other, as this was thought to be too exclusive and detrimental to a commitment to the community. It was condemned as "idolatrous worship".

Nor was there much opportunity for maternal or paternal love. In the early years of the community, Noyes sought to prevent children being born. Men were supposed to practise "continence" as a form of birth control (i.e. withdrawal). Later on, Noyes became interested in the science of eugenics. He set up another committee, with himself at the head, to decide on applications from those wishing to conceive.

The children born from this system of stirpiculture were allowed to stay with their mothers, for breastfeeding purposes, for 15 months. Afterwards, they were removed to be raised communally by those considered expert at the job. The children were rotated at night between different members of the community according to a principle of "non-attachment".

So there was sex and work but a repression of marital love and maternal love. In this, the Oneida communists (a term they used themselves) were strikingly similar to later radical moderns. I'm reminded of the Spanish anarchists of the 1930s who passed a resolution stating that for those comrades suffering from "the sickness of love ... a change of commune will be recommended". Alexandra Kollontai, the Russian Bolshevik of the 1920s, wrote similarly that love was,

an expenditure of precious time and energy ... utterly worthless ... We, the women of the past generation, did not yet understand how to be free. The whole thing was an absolutely incredible squandering of our mental energy, a diminution of our labour power.

It is certainly true that we ... were able to understand that love was not the main goal of our life and that we knew how to place work at its center...

For those who wish to control or manage people according to a perfectionist ideology, love and marriage will often be looked on as a threat - as binding people to each other and creating independent sources of loyalty and commitment.

It's interesting too that Noyes promoted mediocrity as best suited to life in an egalitarian commune:

We must all be mediocre and avoid abnormal or excessive development in the individual, since forms of excellence are at the expense of other individuals who are less endowed.

How did it end?

Two factors led to the demise of the Oneida community. First, there were younger men who did not accept that the older men should have the rights over the younger women. So an oppositional faction to Noyes emerged.

Second, when the women were finally allowed to have children, they then started to want to marry for the purposes of security. There is possibly an insight into the nature of women here. When women are young and childless they are possibly more accepting of acting from sexual impulse alone. But when they have young children, the instinct for the security provided by a husband is at its strongest. Women at this point in their life can develop the qualities associated with the "loving wife and mother".

Perhaps that's one reason I'm troubled by the advent in Australia of paid maternity schemes. At just the time that a woman might look to her husband for security and develop the qualities in herself that are likely to ground a lifelong marriage, the government steps in to provide security instead.

Anyway, an ageing Noyes did finally concede and allowed the women to marry. By the 1880s, the Oneida experiment went into decline.

There are many conclusions to be drawn from the Oneida Community. But perhaps one of the most significant is that attacking traditional marriage is unlikely to lead to a "sexual utopia" in which people freely and equally exchange partners.

At Oneida, in spite of the idealism and the rhetoric about free love, once the traditional restraints were gone the older men used their power in the community to win sexual access for themselves to very young women (to girls). They were in effect reverting to the customs of more primitive societies: they were enacting a civilisational regress rather than a progress.

Whatever its faults, traditional marriage is more egalitarian than the alternatives (allowing everyone a strong chance to partner, to have a sexual relationship and to bear children); it avoids generational conflict (in which fathers and sons are set against each other in competition for women); it is pro-natalist (as the emphasis is not on keeping all women available for sexual purposes); it provides protection for women from more primitive customs of pairing girls with much older men; and it also forms an independent unit of society that helps to prevent total power over individuals by those governing society.

She found him handsome?

You may be aware of the story of Katie Piper. An English girl blessed with good looks, she worked as a TV presenter and model. Then she met a man on the internet, Daniel Lynch, and embarked on a relationship with him.

Two weeks into the affair, he attacked her, raping and beating her. She didn't report him, and even agreed later to go to an internet cafe to read an email he had sent her.

Lynch, though, had arranged for a friend to throw acid on her face. She has since courageously gone through 30 operations to overcome her injuries, but is permanently disfigured.

Lawrence Auster has commented on the story, noting that liberalism leaves some young women naive and vulnerable:

What is there to say? Women have basic weaknesses built into their nature. Traditional society provides girls and women with an upbringing, a formation, that gives them the ability not to give into those weaknesses, for example, to fend off alluring but dangerous men. But in liberal society, they have no formation, no guidance, no upbringing, except for the liberal message to be open, to pursue your desires, and not to judge people.

One thing that struck me about the story is Katie Piper's description of her first encounters with Daniel Lynch:

when 33-year-old Daniel Lynch, a martial arts enthusiast, emailed Katie to say he’d been following her career, she admits she was instantly attracted.

‘He was wearing a martial arts suit in his picture and I’d been doing some promotional work for martial arts in the UK,’ she explains.

‘We seemed to have a lot in common and, to be honest, looking at his picture, I fancied him.’

A few days later Lynch turned up at a promotional event in Reading where Katie was working.

‘He seemed quite shy and nervous when we first met,’ she says. ‘We just had a nice, normal chat. He was 6ft 4in, quite macho-looking and handsome. I liked what I saw.’

Handsome? I don't think there is an iota of handsome in the face below.

He looks like the thug that he is. Prior to attacking Katie Piper he had convictions for violence and had been jailed for throwing boiling water on the face of another man.

But Katie Piper, a well-spoken English woman from a comfortable home, thought him macho looking and handsome and liked what she saw. She was sexually attracted to thuggish features in a man.

This relates, I think, to something I wrote about in a recent post. In most societies sex, romantic love and marriage are integrated so that each influences the culture of relationships between men and women.

Feminists have demanded, though, that women be "sexually liberated", meaning that they are to pursue relationships without regard to romantic love or marriage.

If a woman like Katie Piper had been influenced by a culture of marriage, it's highly unlikely she would have selected a man like Daniel Lynch. A culture of marriage makes for a well-considered and forward looking choice of mate. A woman will want a man who will be emotionally stable, loyal, and a good provider. She'll want a good role model for her children. She'll want someone with whom she can create intelligent and attractive children. She might, too, prefer a man of similar background, so that she can see herself in her own children and perpetuate her own lineage and culture.

If a woman like Katie Piper had been influenced instead by a culture of romantic love, she may have acted more impetuously, without thinking about the larger consequences of her choices. Even so, she still would probably not have chosen a man like Daniel Lynch. She might have preferred to look for a man who cut a dashing figure, who had wit and intelligence, who had achieved some prominent position in society, who was confident and popular with women and so on.

But what if a woman like Katie Piper is "sexually liberated" in the feminist sense? Then none of the above matters as much. It no longer matters if a man like Daniel Lynch is low IQ, emotionally unstable and unconfident in his dealings with women. What he does have is a raw display of high testosterone in his thuggish features and his propensity toward violence. This is what makes him sexually appealing and even "handsome" to a well-bred Englishwoman.

In the past, it was more likely to be the lowest socio-economic class which pursued relationships crudely through such basic sexual markers, without regard for a culture of romantic love or marriage. Perhaps England has now reached the point at which a middle-class culture is failing and giving way to lower-class mores.

So what's to be done? One thing to consider is that returning to a culture of romantic love isn't enough. You can believe in love and still be terribly naive about relationships. If all that matters is falling in love, then why would your culture provide you with any guidance? It wouldn't need to, as it's all based on feelings in the moment.

The balance between sex, romantic love and marriage matters. All three need to influence us in the "internal culture" of our minds when we relate to the opposite sex.

But the mainstream culture is increasingly losing the romantic love and marriage aspects. What can we as individuals do in response to this?

We can't completely overcome the influence of the mainstream culture. However, if a man maintains a loving and functional relationship with his wife and a close relationship with his daughters, then I think it's more likely that his daughters will continue to select for men in a more traditional way.

I think it's true too that young women who are less exposed to the influence of feminism in higher education (and who therefore don't make a feminist "sexual liberation" a kind of personal belief system) are also more likely to select for men more traditionally.

Whether talking openly to daughters about these issues helps or not, I'm not sure. But parents could at least try to point to the dangers of certain choices and behaviours. We could try to make our daughters aware that openness and non-judgementalism can have tragic consequences in real life and that they need to act prudently in their relationships with men.

Can feminists set the terms of sexual liberation?

One thing that feminists stand for is sexual liberation. But sexual liberation from what?

Relationships can be oriented to sex, to romantic love and to marriage. In most cultures, there is an element of each, but the balance can change.

For much of Western history, culture was directed primarily toward marriage. A man in such a culture will be looking for a woman to be his life partner and a mother for his children. He is therefore likely to value a woman for her beauty, her intelligence and her good nature. In upper class culture it was also important for a wife to be of equal social standing, of good reputation and to be suitably accomplished.

If you read Jane Austen's novels (from the early 1800s), you notice a change in the mix. Austen continues to disapprove of relationships oriented primarily to sex; there is a condemnation of flighty younger sisters who pursue sexual flings with men of doubtful character. Propriety and family honour do still count for something in the Austen novels.

But Austen also portrays as villains (or as figures of fun or pity) those who marry in the interests of their families. We are to act more in terms of our own individual emotions and not be swayed so much by issues of family connections.

By the end of the 1800s, Western culture was more oriented to romantic love than it had previously been. What does a man focused on romantic love look for in a woman? An idealised feminine beauty, grace and goodness.

By the 1970s, second wave feminists began to demand sexual liberation. What this meant, in its historical context, was the pursuit of relationships by women without regard to marriage or to male expectations of romantic love.

It's not surprising, therefore, that feminist women often spoke negatively of women being put on a pedestal (idealised) and of marriage being an oppressive feature of a patriarchy.

And so feminism helped to usher in (with the help of male sexual liberationists like Hugh Hefner) the modern culture we have now, in which many young people are oriented to casual sexual relationships.

But there's a catch. What do men who are oriented to one night stands look for in a woman? One thing: hotness. That's what matters most if all you are looking for is sex.

And this enrages the feminists who helped usher in the sexual revolution. They complain unceasingly about women being sexually objectified. Just recently I read an article by a feminist woman on the theme of "what I want in a man". She wrote:

I want men who don't bet on sleeping with women, who don't rate women on their appearance on a scale of one to ten. I want a man who ... doesn't base his treatment of me on how hawt I am.

Feminists seem to expect men to value them for their intelligence, their accomplishments, their character, their status and so on. But to get this they would need to support a culture more oriented to marriage, in which men are selecting a life partner. This they can't do as they want to be liberated from such a culture. But it is inevitable that men who only want sex from women will mostly value sex appeal, i.e. "hawtness".

Little wonder that feminists get so angry and frustrated. They're caught in a trap and it's only likely to get worse. There is a growth in the "game" or "seduction" movement, in which men are adapting to a culture based on casual sex and picking up. Although it's possible for men who want a longer-term relationship to use these seduction techniques, those men leading it tend to be very "sexually liberated", which means that what they value in women is hotness. It doesn't matter so much to them if a woman is kindly natured, good with children, admired socially or compatible in her personality. Why should it if what they are looking for is sex alone?

Feminists aren't getting what they want. Yet, as full-blooded moderns this is what they think they are owed. They have the modern technological mindset that things should be arranged so that their own will and desire are sovereign.

What specifically do they want? Women who are oriented to marriage will be looking for men who will make good husbands and fathers. They will want men who are stable, conscientious, hard-working, loyal and family oriented. But a "sexually liberated" feminist has set herself against all this. She wants to pursue relationships without regard to marriage.

This leaves her freer to pursue socially dominant men or to seek out drama in relationships. So there are modernist women who keep pinning their hopes on a "Mr Big", even if such men never commit to them and there are women who select edgy kind of men, the bad boys who take risks or who are untrustworthy or who are capable of violence or who break the law.

The problem is that these preferences do not give women control. Pursuing casual relationships with socially dominant men or risky men puts women in a weaker, vulnerable position.

So there are feminists who seek various social technologies to give them the upper hand, so that it is they and not men who have "agency" in the relationship. They want to ensure that sexually liberated relationships ultimately play out on their terms.

What have been some key policies of second and third wave feminism? Abortion on demand has been one and this is predictable if you are a woman who wants to technologically manage a culture of casual relationships.

And then there is the issue of rape, which is an obsession with some feminist women. What's important to note here is that the obsession is not with criminal rape - with the few men who act against the law to violently attack women. Feminist women are far more interested in "date rape" - with some feminists openly advocating the idea that women could be given absolute power in relationships through date rape legislation.

Here's how one feminist woman believes she could get 100% personal sovereignty in sexual relationships via date rape laws:

Imagine that all women are considered by the courts to abide in a perpetual state of non-consent. “No” becomes the default position, and does not require re-stating at any time. In fact, “consent” would not apply to women at all; we would exist as inviolable entities, 100% human beings with full personal sovereignty, the way men do now. We could, if the idea didn’t gag us with a spoon, have as much heterosex as we want, but the instant we don’t want, the dude becomes, in the eyes of the law, a rapist. This shifts the onus onto the dude not to be a barbarian. He can reduce his risk of being sent to the gulag by ceasing to rape, dominate, prod, cajole, shame, nag, or act like a prick. He can avoid it altogether merely by keeping it in his Dockers.

But, again to the frustration of feminists, the date rape tactic isn't working. In part, this is because most people still think of rape as a serious criminal offence rather than as a social technology. Therefore, most people are inclined to defend men who unfairly suffer the accusation. So there are feminists who want to tone down the criminal aspect of a rape accusation. Catherine MacKinnon, for instance, once wrote that,

Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated. You might think that's too broad. I'm not talking about sending all of you men to jail for that. ["A rally against rape" Feminism Unmodified]

Note that it is a woman's feelings or will, rather than any clearly defined act, which defines rape, thereby giving women the ultimate power and control in a relationship and that MacKinnon seeks to downplay the idea that all men would suffer criminal sanctions.

Here's another example:

I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire. [Robin Morgan 1974]

Rape here is redefined in terms of female agency; what matters is not a lack of consent but that what happens is a product of female, not male, desire.

Most women, it should be said, do not follow feminists in rejecting marriage in principle. It's common, though, for women to think of their 20s as being "sexually liberated" and then to finally orient themselves toward marriage in their 30s. This means that they seek different qualities in men, or perhaps even different kinds of men, at different times of their life.

Consider this online advice to men about what women look for:

Forget about the theory that women like bad boys. While this may be the case with some women in their twenties, most mature women have had their fill of bad boys. Monroe women and any other women are now looking for a nice, kind, caring and thoughtful man.

This switching of preferences in a woman's 30s won't always work. It means that when men are in their youthful prime (ages 15 to 35), they will be asked to adapt to women who aren't oriented to marriage and who are looking for casual relationships with bad boys. By the time women are ready to switch it will often be too late. Many men will have grown out of their instinct to be husbands and fathers and some might harbour resentments towards women. Women who have spent a decade or more pursuing the drama of casual relationships might find it difficult to settle into a more predictable pattern of married life.

And it represents too a waste; the person we are supposed to have the most significant connection to, our spouse, will not be the person we share our youthful passions with.

Should we then return to the situation of the 1980s in which culture was oriented more strongly to romantic love? No doubt this was a more spiritualised and less crude culture of relationships, but it was inadequate in its own way. What kind of wisdom or foresight does a man require for romantic love? What kind of concern will he have in his relationships for his family, his community or his tradition? None. He can be a fool for love.

There's an English film, Love Actually, which even celebrates this aspect of a romantic culture. It portrays couples who fall romantically in love in ways which dissolve all other considerations. The Prime Minister falls in love with the tea lady. An English writer falls in love with, and commits his life to, a Portuguese woman he cannot speak to. One couple fall in love whilst acting in a pornographic film.

The evidence seems to be that it's difficult to integrate the romantic and sexual lives of men and women outside a culture that has a serious orientation to family. Feminists thought that they could control the outcomes of the sexual revolution in favour of female agency, but many seem to be angrier than ever about a culture of relationships that they themselves largely instigated.

Game and sex

There are some popular websites which advocate men learning game to be more successful with women. I've read some of these sites with mixed feelings. There's some good advice about typical female testing behaviours and how to respond to them. But the gamists themselves don't seem all that content, despite claiming success with many attractive women.

I think it's because game isn't enough - it doesn't change the dispiriting conditions in which modern dating takes place.

Back in the 1930s an Australian feminist and communist named Jean Devanny wrote a short story about a male communist who believed in absolute sexual liberty. Both men and women were to have sex with whomever they pleased. All went well until our male communist found his wife in bed with another man. In principle he had to accept her actions. She for her part tried to persuade him that sex itself was just a meaningless physical act that he shouldn't be too fussed about:

... she was right; her attitude was the only one if they were to continue living together. He must conquer himself. What was she saying? - "Make too much of this silly sex act. It doesn't mean anything, really. It is the smallest thing in life. It takes up only a moment or two out of millions of moments. The things that matter are comradeship, congeniality, friendship and kindness ...

This is a purely materialistic view of sex, in which sex expresses nothing beyond itself as a physical act. And the logic too is that for sex to be made wholly free it must be made meaningless.

Jump forward to 2007. Laura Sessions Stepp published in this year a book about the attitudes to sex of young upper middle class women. What she found is that these women had decoupled love from sex. They hadn't given up on love, but had deferred it. They were too busy with their "projects" for serious relationships. They treated sex as just sex:

Stepp follows three high school girls and six college women through a year in their lives, chronicling their sexual behavior. These girls and women don't date, don't develop long-term relationships or even short, serious ones -- instead, they "hook up" ...

Why hook up? According to Stepp, college women, obsessed with academic and career success, say they don't have time for a real relationship; high school girls say lovey-dovey relationships give them the "yucks."

Laura Sessions Stepp herself is concerned by the situation:

Stepp is troubled: How will these girls learn how to be loving couples in this hook-up culture? Where will they practice the behavior needed to sustain deep and long-term relationships? If they commit to a lack of commitment, how will they ever learn to be intimate?

But the woman reviewing the book, Kathy Dobie, wants to set Laura Sessions Stepp straight:

The author is conflating what the girls refuse to conflate: love and sexuality.

In other words, Kathy Dobie thinks it wrong to think that love and sex should go together. Sex is ... just sex. It's Devanny's communists all over again, but this time writing in The Washington Post.

Laura Sessions Stepp really does try to hold the line. She advises young women:

He will seek to win you over only if he thinks you're a prize.

She also opposes the reduction of relationships to the physical aspect alone:

Stepp is most thought-provoking when she considers the culture at large: All the females she interviews come from reasonably well-off families, we're told, and all are ambitious. "Hooking up enables a young woman to practice a piece of a relationship, the physical, while devoting most of her energy to staying on the honor roll . . . playing lacrosse . . . and applying to graduate programs in engineering."

Kathy Dobie again disagrees. She thinks it a worthy experiment to make sex a less meaningful part of relationships:

In a culture that values money and fame above all, that eschews failure, bad luck, trouble and pain, none of us speaks the language of love and forbearance. But it is not hooking up that has created this atmosphere. Hooking up is either a faithful reflection of the culture, a Darwinian response to a world where half the marriages end in divorce, or it is an attempt at something new. Perhaps, this generation, by making sex less precious, less a commodity, will succeed in putting simple humanity back into sex ...

And perhaps as this generation grows up, they will come to relish other sides of an intimate relationship more than we have: the friendship, the shared humor, the familiar and loved body next to you in bed at night. This is the most hopeful outcome of the culture Stepp describes, but no less possible than the outcome she fears -- a generation unable to commit, unable to weather storms or to stomach second place or really to love at all.

Love and sex have been decoupled and both have been relegated in significance and priority.

It's worth noting that Kathy Dobie is the modern girl par excellence. She has written a book about her own early sexual experiences. She came from a good family, but at the age of 14 she began to chase boys for sex and, as a sexually liberated modern girl, she went for "the confident, aggressive, dirty-minded ones."

Why did she do it? She explains in the book that she wanted to feel "as alive, as bold, as free" as the bad boys around her (which makes her sound like a vitalist - as someone who responds to a nihilistic culture by seeking out sensation and excitement).

So let's say you're a young man and you are confronted with modern girl culture. You meet women who choose to have sex with the "confident, aggressive, dirty-minded" boys and who aren't psychologically oriented to love or to attracting love or to the entanglements of something serious.

Even if you learnt techniques to make you fit better into the confident, aggressive category of man, would this really satisfy? Wouldn't it be dispiriting to exist within a culture in which sex is both decoupled from love and from any meaning larger than itself? In which women aren't oriented to love? Would you really see the women produced by such a culture as a prize worth fighting for?

I should say at this point that not every woman has taken on the modern girl ethos. There do still exist women who put love, marriage and family first. If game techniques help some men attract these women, then it could have some benefit.

But it often seems to be the case that gamists have accepted the modernist conditions, and then I don't wonder that they seem discontented even when they get more of what's on offer.

Because it isn't enough. It's not that men are incapable of casual sex. But a man's nature can't be reduced to this. We do want to connect in a deeper way with a woman, and this requires a culture in which women are oriented to love and in which sex expresses something of ourselves. We are bound to feel alienated when this is not on offer.

What went missing?

Earlier this year I wrote a piece on the three great "conversations" in the Western tradition:

There have been three important "conversations" in European culture. One is the materialistic, naturalistic, scientific one. Another is the formal religious one, marked by a Christian concern for individual salvation through the avoidance of sin. The third conversation is also spiritual, but not tied formally to religion or theology or to salvation or sin; it is a conversation on what impressed the European mind as being of spiritual meaning or worth in life.

We are used now to the materialistic conversation dominating what we discuss and in what terms. The Christian conversation is still there, but cordoned off to a minority of the population. The third conversation is now almost entirely lost to us, even though it was once as prominent as the other two.

What is also striking is that there is so little crossover now between the conversations. It was once not unusual for an individual to hold all three realities together: a man could be a believing Christian, conversant in theology; he could at the same time recognise the reality of the material world, and be educated in the scientific processes describing this world; and still again take part in a conversation about the role of character or moral virtue in the spiritual life of man.

And here's the thing. When I read books about the radicals of the early twentieth century, I recognise immediately what I dislike about their politics. At the same time, though, it's hard not to notice that even the radicals of the time were usually more embedded in all three of the European conversations than an ordinary, conventional man of today. In this sense, they were still more cultured, in spite of their political radicalism.

I was interested to learn, in researching my recent posts on Simone de Beauvoir, that she too seems to fall into this category of relatively cultured mid-twentieth century Western radicals.

No doubt she was mostly committed to a secular materialism. Consider, though, her views on love between men and women:

Love has been assigned to woman as her supreme vocation, and when she directs it towards a man, she is seeking God in him ... Human love and love of the divine commingle ... because human love is a reaching out towards a transcendent, an absolute.

This is taken from her book The Second Sex. I only have a partial quote and so I'm not sure of the exact context of what she is saying. Still, she seems at least to be "conversant" in an aspect of the human experience not usually dealt with so openly today.

A commenter at this site, Franklin, did recently write something similar to de Beauvoir. In a discussion on relationships he stated that,

Man, both male and female, has an innate desire for transcendent love, for something out of this world in this world.

This places a considerable degree of meaning in human relationships. If a man experiences the transcendent in his love of women, then he will appreciate all the more (and be particularly attuned to) those women who bring out their finer, more womanly qualities.

There will be a deeper reason to appreciate what is admirably feminine in women and to feel alienated by moves toward an androgynous, grungy culture in which gender difference is repressed.

De Beauvoir's quote reminds us, too, of one reason why many women are discontent with metrosexuality in men. There are women who want to admire us for our stronger, more masculine qualities - the ones that we ourselves instinctively feel carry the most significance.

De Beauvoir may have been relatively cultured in her ability to participate in the different Western conversations; she did women a disservice, though, in making her final political stance so one-sided.

She chose in her politics to tell women that femininity was an oppressive construct created by men in a process of "othering". This entirely fails to reconcile what de Beauvoir had written of in the quote above: that individuals experience the finer qualities of the opposite sex to have a significant meaning and to inspire love.

De Beauvoir knew the conversations but she failed to hold them together.

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?