What is feminism about?
It is about the sexual, political and economic equality of the sexes.
A post-feminist society would have this equality.
I define this equality not in terms of relative equality (we would likely still have gender wage gaps for example), but in terms of equality of opportunity and equality of capabilities. The later of these is a term coined by Amartya Sen and latter refined in many useful ways by Martha Nussbaum, specifically for applications in gender theory. It refers to the extent to which someone can be who they want to be and do what they want to do. An important related notion is that of functionings—the extent to which someone with capabilities actually does become who they want to be and does what they want to do.
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| As usual, Hayao Miyazaki, the greatest of the new mythologists, is way ahead on this stuff |
Are we heading in the direction of a post-feminist society? Is this still what feminism stands for? Is this what elite women want?
I daresay the answer to all three questions, at least in the short-term, is ambiguous.
I daresay that in many ways we are actually heading towards a kind of neo-patriarchy where both men and women seek to lay claim to the advantages traditionally associated with being a patriarch.
Two misunderstandings are driving this trend. The first is an association of ‘masculinity’ with autonomy, agency and what De Beauvoir called a desire for 'transcendence'. This term refers to a desire to use willpower and affirmation to bring meaning to life and reshape your existence to better align with your values. De Beavuoir contrasted it with 'imminence', which corresponds to activities that merely sustain life, like doing the dishes and cooking. Peterson's version of this is to say that masculinity is about taking responsibility, and specifically for manifesting logos. Historically of course, culture only permitted men to engage in such activities, while women bore the lion’s share of imminent duties. A corollary to this is that people associated ‘femininity’ with supportive, nurturing, dependent, accommodating and other tropes of playing second fiddle.
This leads into the second, related misunderstanding, which is an association of ‘wife’ with being somebody’s bitch. You see this in some interpretations of Annabelle Crabb’s very important and influential (if riddled through with poor statistical inference) book The Wife Drought. The argument of that book is that in order to be extremely successful in your career—in order to be ‘elite’—you need to have a partner who is a full-time homemaker, especially if you want to have kids.
You also see this in Jordan Peterson’s insistence that his wife take his name because otherwise she would be marrying a ‘wimp’. But surely if she does take his name then he is marrying a wimp. Where is the equity here? There isn’t equity, is the short answer. There is a fundamental imbalance. And as long as people understand gender and relationships in this way—as a battle over who gets to claim the masculine tropes of agency, autonomy and responsibility for logos and who takes at best the supportive role but often just the role of bitch, we will never get to a post-feminist society, only a neo-patriarchal one.
What a post-feminist gender politics would look like is first a situation where men and women are capable of functioning in whatever manner they might wish independently. I think we are extremely close to this point today.
However, a post-feminist relationship politics also requires that people form couples that are based on mutual compromise and sacrifice of autonomy, agency and purely self-directed transcendence in order to develop a mutually supportive and encouraging, interdependent partnership that allows both parties to engage in individual transcendence and also to engage in transcendence as a unit. Indeed, where the transcendence of the couple becomes the ultimate concern of both parties and the transcendence of the individual members of that couple as individuals is penultimate. This constitutes an equitable relationship in which the parties are interdependent.
Neo-patriarchy is instead a situation where one partner’s agency, autonomy and transcendence is sacrificed for the sake of the other party’s agency, autonomy and transcendence. This is not equitable but there is a degree of interdependence. It is of a type similar to that of the angler fish, where the male latches onto the female and becomes a parasite, his internal organs slowly dissolving until they share a bloodstream, and he provides her eggs with fertilisation when she needs it.
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| When MRAs use sexual dimorphism as an argument for why women should look plastic, show them this picture |
This is the kind of imagery that many people associate with 1950s housewifery—being a useful parasite to a higher-agency individual. Unsurprisingly, most feminists are revolted by the tropes of that era. But three things are frequently forgotten here.
First, housewives were the primary source of labour for all charitable organisations in the 1950s. Yes, this was unpaid labour, and that’s bad, but it was also meaningful labour. Nowadays all these organisations have to pay their staff so that individuals of both genders can engage in charitable work while still being independent. A step forward on balance, but not without inherent trade-offs.
Second, wives and elite wives in particular bore substantial responsibilities when it came to the social life of the couple. They were the ones who organised holidays, charitable activities, social outings, attendance at gala balls, guests over for dinner etc.
Finally, a large of number of breadwinner men handed over their cheques to their wives on payday. So men had their transcendence in their careers, but in many cases they gave their wives responsibility for the transcendence of the household. This is doubtless an imperfect arrangement, but it should not be glossed over.
The apex of this kind of housewife is the first lady of the White House (sadly we don't have a first man right now), especially someone like Jacquie Kennedy or Michelle Obama. Of course it seems that the person with real agency in the relationship is the President. His wife is raising the kids (a potential source of transcendence too hastily dismissed by De Beauvoir). But she’s also hosting all the world’s leaders, managing the White House’s intense and extremely influential philanthropic activities, promoting government policy in many domains, and acting as a role model for all citizens, not just women. I would not say that this is an entirely equitable relationship, but it is a complementary relationship that both parties benefit from substantially.
Being the wife should be associated with the boss antics of Michelle Obama not the doting, largely passive or at least entirely secondary character of Elaine of Corbenic in T. H. White’s The Once an Future King (an obscure reference I know, but it is perfect and everyone should read this book).
But this is a distraction. This isn’t about wives and husbands—that is the language of patriarchy—it is about partners. That’s the language of equality and post-feminism.
The fundamental driver of our drift towards a neo-patriarchal culture is the association of autonomy, agency and transcendence with ‘masculinity’ and support, nurture and care with femininity. ‘Good’ men are those who excel at transcendence, and ‘good’ women are those who excel at imminence. Unsurprisingly, there is a dearth of people who want to be women and an increasing number of women with many feminine qualities who feel some desire to identify as a man, much like Camille Paglia does.
This is all wrong! Autonomy, agency, transcendence, responsibility for logos, support, nurture and care are all qualities possessed by good people. They are not gendered! You can be feminine while high in agency—look at Audrey Hepburn, Brit Marling, Ronda Rousey, Maria Sharapova, Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg etc. And you can be masculine while also displaying caring qualities and being supportive of your partner: look at Brad Pitt, Justin Timberlake, Hugh Jackman and Vincent Ostrom.
It is, however, hard to be a good person in the Aristotelian sense of good as virtuous if you aren’t autonomously pursuing your goals and supportive of those you care about.
What's missing from the contemporary debate about gender, affirmation, happiness and power is a deep understanding of what it means to be a good person. And couples will never transcend neo-patriarchy to the promised land of post-feminism until they focus less on gender and more on just being good people who care about each other as individual good people worthy of compromise, support and encouragement.
Perhaps what people are struggling with here is defining masculinity and femininity in some way other than via the fulcrum of agency. I’m thinking about this at the moment. Peterson, Paglia and numerous other commentators have lots of good things to say. For now, I will offer only a single quality: emotional valence. Men are biologically wired and culturally encourage to repress their emotions to some extent so that they can be effective in high-stress situations and functional in a life with a high level of background stress. The most obvious evolutionary drivers of this are warfare and hunting large, murderous animals, but one shouldn’t forget that life throughout most of history involved a high-degree of background stress. The extent to which men need to be effective in these settings has declined rapidly in recent centuries, and so increasingly we value other qualities in men. Women still aren’t typically attracted to soft men, and still expect blokes to kill spiders for them.
Meanwhile, women are more biologically inclined and more culturally permitted to live with their emotions. As a consequence, they tend to be more sensitive to growing resentment and other simmering emotional problems in a household or group and more capable of diffusing (or fanning) these things than men, who tend to resolve things through fighting and making up afterwards. They are also more capable of sensitivity and empathy and thus of viscerally supporting someone through an emotionally difficult period. Women will tend to be more aware than men of the emotional fallout of otherwise rational decisions. All of these qualities make it important to have women and men in workplaces and households. These qualities are also why men tend to be more open with their intimate partners than with anybody else, even their mothers.
One other small difference that I haven’t had time to quite work through yet is that men have (on average) greater risk-appetites than women. This difference has at least some biological basis. Men were historically rewarded for taking risks to rise to prominence and thereby get access to more women, whereas women would always have attention, it was more about making sure men stuck around. Consequently, men and women often pursue agency in different ways. Men look for the big payoffs, women take more diligent, steady steps in their chosen direction.
That’s all I’ve got for now, but I will have a lot more once I’ve had more time to read and think on these topics.
Peterson is telling young men not to be wimps, because doing so undermines their masculinity. This is perhaps in response to radical feminists who seem at times to be explicitly telling men to be bitches (and meanwhile not sleeping with men who do kow-tow to them because of course such men are not biologically attractive). But Peterson’s language reinforces toxic masculinity, and with it, patriarchy. Centrist, liberal feminist women then see the only way forward as the co-option of patriarchal norms and words like wimp for themselves. But let’s not forget that patriarchy is something we associate with fuckwits. Setting off a culture-war wherein everyone competes for patriarchy as the prize is shit for everybody. We can do better.
If you're interested in what a post-feminist couple might look like, I highly recommend (quite randomly because it's basically a movie about a cook book and food blogging) Julie and Julia. Both couples in that film are amazing, especially Tucci and Streep, if only because they are from such an old era and yet so thoroughly modern.
This article is substantially motivated by this (excellent) interview between Jordan Peterson and Camille Paglia, intellectual heroes of mine with whom I frequently disagree, especially here.
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