Feminism as Entitlement - Pt. 2

Ignoring the unique roles and functions of women and abandoning a coherent vision for society has created a sense of entitlement

“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. “ – Mark Twain

“[T]here is nothing like going through pregnancy, hospital birth and postpartum during COVID to really get the question everything blood pumping. When my plump, wet son was placed on my chest after a grueling multi-day labor I was radicalized. I was angry. I was angry at years of being on birth control without realizing what it was doing, at being told that careers were the path to self-actualization, that I'd 'want to go back to work', that I should work on making my baby comfortable with separation ASAP so I could get back to tax-paying ASAP. I was angry that I fell for it, and I didn't question it.” -Sarah McGovern

Many of our recent cultural ideas have the character of wishful thinking, or play-acting. Men can be women if they really feel that they are. A country can maintain a high standard of living and medicine for all in concert with (functionally) open borders. Capitalism is bad… and not just bad but a kind of Tolkienesque evil that emerged in Europe (of course) and has infected everything. This global Sauron can only be resisted by the noble Ring fellowship of Queer and Indigenous folx. Black Americans are only or mostly struggling due to racism and a kind of ubiquitous and shadowy discrimination, which is rarely identified or explained but is nonetheless there. Paying people a thousand dollars a week in unemployment benefits won’t reduce workforce participation. We can run our economies using available technology purely on wind and solar and geothermal and hydrothermal generation sources without massively impoverishing large numbers of citizens. Police are not just not essential - they are, in the aggregate, harmful and can be beneficially replaced with social workers or unarmed counselors. Massively reducing criminal penalties for assault or theft won’t occasion increases in those behaviors. Etc.

It’s frankly depressing to acknowledge the pervasiveness of these beliefs. I could fill 3000 words just listing them. Jesus.

These have the effect of play-acting because:

1. They’re all demonstrably false

2. They are primarily believed by people with no real expertise in the necessary fields and little practical experience in any field

3. They function as ciphers to express virtue or enlightenment or social status rather than as solutions based on data or experience

4. They originate in theoretical (and often utopian) ideas about human nature and the economy and the environment and incentive structures

5. They are ideas which create a great deal of emotional investment, which is then reinforced by group associations and confirmation bias

These are not serious ideas and, while they might be represented as such (and even believed to be serious) the people who believe them tend to be generally unwilling to argue their merits or specifics with contrarians or dissenters. A belief which originates in an abstract view of the world, is fervently held, has deep emotional resonance, can’t effectively be disproven, and is not up for discussion or amendment by its promoters is not only a political opinion… it is an article of faith. When you tie articles of faith to totalizing views about humanity and the future and destiny you have a religion.

In no area is the set of beliefs probably more fanciful and more emotionally fraught than in our conception of sex and gender roles and feminine privileges and capabilities and functions. These beliefs are strongly linked in the public imagination with women’s suffrage and liberation, as well, and so they are particularly vigorous.

In my experience no business owner is a real radical environmentalist. No black American that I have ever encountered who was not themselves from a prosperous background, and well-educated, believed the nonsensical platitudes of anti-racism. No well-traveled and normally adjusted adult (certainly very few immigrants) really believe that America is particularly oppressive or coercive. Yet many, many normal young women really believe the tenets of modern feminism and have invested these beliefs with a kind of emotional reactivity and irrational faith such that any criticism of them (by men or women) is dismissed outright. Feminism is the dream of modern critical theory: it is what happens when you really convince a huge share of the American public that they are an oppressed group who are entitled to special considerations. It is not optimal for the uses of that ideology yet in that most feminists do not take the next giant step and advocate for the radical transformation of society. Rather, they generally want the kinds of changes which will benefit them, as individuals and as a group: more responsive and honest men to date, better jobs and better pay, legal privileges when it comes to criminal accusations and alimony and child custody, less cultural emphasis on (female… not male) beauty and fitness and virtue, social validation of their impulses and decisions, whatever they might be.

Feminism also has the advantage of being completely inconsistent and infinitely flexible. Is feminism about women not being subject to the male gaze… or is it about women profiting from male sexual desire and commodified beauty? Yes! It is both. It is both feminist to complain about the sexual desires and considerations of men and it is feminist to start an OnlyFans account and profit from those desires. Is feminism about the equal competition of women in the workforce and their elevation in fields like programming and engineering or is it about the freedom of each individual woman to choose her own career and receive maternity leave in the event of her pregnancy? Yes. It is both of these things. Is feminism about the increase of women’s salaries or is it about easier workweeks and more schedule flexibility and less emphasis on ‘work’ and more on ‘life’? Yes… It is both of these things. It is all of these things! Feminism is literally an operative word for any measure which would help women as a class or individuals and is used to refer to ANY decision that any woman makes to advance her own interests. It is probably better to explain feminism based on what it is not. This is not systematic or complete but feminism is not: about the celebration of women as mothers or homemakers. Feminism is not the emphasis on female responsibility. Feminism is not the recognition of women’s unique biology and the special functions and limitations which accompany it.

I will use one modern pair of examples to emphasize my point: it is feminist to profit from, focus on, and aggressively cultivate one’s personal beauty in order to win advantages and money and consideration from men. It is also feminist to believe that beauty is an illegitimate social construct and an artifact of the patriarchy which should be abolished. It might be possible to reconcile these two attitudes (although I doubt it) but feminists don’t even try. Feminists do have some outstanding debates about social issues (pornography and the status and privileges of trans-identifying men in women’s role and spaces, for example) but mainstream feminism takes the Leftward turn on both of these things and for all of the examples I’ve provided there’s absolutely no attempt to discuss or organize the beliefs and goals which explicitly contradict one another.

Feminism has become a politically-tinged vehicle for validating the impulses and desires of half of the population (functionally many fewer than that, since it’s generally incubated in elite colleges) simply because they are women. Believing that your impulses and desires are valid because you’re a woman who lives in the West-or a member of any identity group-is an entitled perspective. Every person, group, job, organization, etc. has strengths and weaknesses, privileges and responsibilities. When it comes to feminists their weaknesses are often denied outright or laid at the door of men (or ‘the patriarchy’, and these two concepts are interchangeable). Their privileges are insufficient, whatever they might currently be. Their responsibilities are nonexistent.

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Where has this incoherence come from? Why did feminism degenerate from a(n often wrong, but disciplined and issues-focused) popular movement to the alternately radical and affirming sludge we see today? I can think of three major reasons:

1. Feminism has already achieved legal, financial, educational, INSTITUTIONAL equality with men. The civil rights were won long ago and at this point women have a distinct ADVANTAGE (in the fields they prefer to explore-feminists are hilariously comfortable ignoring almost every mechanical-, building-, or infrastructure-oriented job in the world; I’ve never once heard a feminist even express a desire to enter these fields). We could go through the statistics but that’s not necessary: women, as measured by educational attainment and home-ownership and income, are flourishing. Men are not… which is a curious state of affairs for a patriarchy to find itself in.

2. Feminism has completely failed to account for pregnancy and childbirth. Many women talk as if PARITY should be the goal in their favored jobs and roles (although this never goes the other way; no one is fighting for more male HR professionals). This ignores the fact that women (and only women) must take two years of their lives growing and bearing babies (not to mention raising them) or society crumbles. Forget the demographic cliff-feminism hasn’t even integrated pregnancy into their OWN plans for women. Their priority has always been to grab maximum professional and political and financial power (while letting men take care of the yucky stuff) and this requires that people go to college, then more college, then grind at work, and apply themselves with the competitiveness and energy and assertiveness of the most dominant men. (Note: this is extremely difficult and so we now have an international focus on work-life balance… not a concept which existed when men were exclusively responsible for these jobs; take from that what you will). This completely ignores the fact that most women want to have kids. Think about it. It CAN be done, and it often is, but these are diametrically opposed goals. A society that wants to reinforce marriage doesn’t incentivize out-of-wedlock births. A movement that values pregnancies doesn’t prioritize young women climbing to the top of the corporate hierarchy. This has a hundred different personal effects for these women and a hundred more negative social effects (many of which are just starting to be felt) but it’s mostly based in one awkward fact: men can’t bear children. If women are doing everything that men are doing and people are bearing children then women are doing a lot more than men in the aggregate and there’s no way to balance the equation. And if you deny that modern feminism devalues motherhood, tell me: what’s one feminist film which celebrates childbirth and motherhood? How about marriage? Let me know in the comments.

3. Women are NOT a class or a coherent group. Families are natural organizing units (the strongest). Tribes can be (although this makes it difficult to build a modern nation-state). Occupations, hometowns, classes-all of these are natural bases upon which to organize movements based on shared interests. Women are not such a class. They are designed to work in tandem with men every day of their lives. It’s rote at this point for fourth-wave feminists to bemoan the whiteness and privilege of earlier generations of feminists (although every single feminists I’ve ever met is well-raised and educated and from a relatively wealthy home, so…) but the fact is that NO movement of women can encompass their interests. In a society like ours it’s not even possible to approximate what a woman wants from life (even if you establish what ‘woman’ means). Consequently we have a situation in which whatever a woman wants to do in any particular situation is ‘empowering’ and ‘feminist’ and if any institution or man doesn’t contribute to her designs he is ‘the patriarchy’. A million young women launching their own heroes’ journeys… to preferential scholarships or corporate lawsuits or OnlyFans. This is not how a political movement works.

   The lie which I see so often among younger women and girls-that women don’t need men for fulfilling lives-is sociological poison. A belief like that can kill a society.