Is the white girl moment over?

Back in the 1980s one of the women's magazines, I can't remember which one, got roasted for saying that breasts were "in". The obvious rejoinder: When are breasts ever not in? ... and yet ... there are cultures, mostly in Africa, where women's breasts are not highly valued.That said, white girls have hardly suffered from lack of attention over the years.

Some have argued that there are genetic reasons for this. That men will prefer lighter skinned partners for genetic reasons. Maybe.

Whatever the case, being desired and being taken seriously-as any teen-aged girl can tell you—are clear different things.* There was a moment that started about twenty-one years ago when white girls made a pitch to be taken seriously without ceasing to be terribly girly in a very white way. I say about twenty-one years ago because that was when this pop song became a major hit. It's a very white-girl song and that fact was underlined by having one black member in the group.



Notice how much more womanly and sexual the black woman first known as Sexy Spice and then as Scary Spice is than the terribly girly white girls with her. It's not just that she has amazing breasts it's that she puts them right in your face. This is all third generation feminism but she's going for a direct sexual vibe while all the others are going for girly. She's a Samantha Jones in a crowd of Charlotte Yorks.

That comparison is anachronistic as Sex and the City comes two years after this single was a hit. But it works because it was very much in the air. This was the moment when second wave feminism was challenged by something new. Katie Rophie's The Morning After had been published just two years earlier.

There never was a theoretical foundation for third wave feminism. I say that with such bluntness because it wasn't an academic movement. You can trace second wave feminism back to some very serious academic writing. The third wave was characterized more by a whole lot of white girls who didn't so much criticize feminism as break free from it. Whatever it might have lacked in theoretical foundation, the movement was a real cultural moment and you could see it everywhere you looked.

In that sense, the video is perfect. This is rebellion but exactly what they are rebelling against is not at all clear. The upper class as portrayed in the video had long ceased to exist by 1996. These girls revel in the role of rebels but they don't want to threaten anyone.

But they were threatening to feminists. At first, the second wave feminists thought they could simply drown these girls the way people used to get rid of unwanted kittens. It didn't work. They ended up coming off grim and humourless compared to these new girls. Next, second wave feminists tried the old trick of rushing to the head of the crowd and pretending to be leaders with laughable nonsense such as the Riot Grrrls. That didn't work either.

Sex and the City itself was an attempt to respond. Carrie Bradshaw is set off against three foils—women who are her friends but are all a little too too much in one aspect or another. On the one hand, Carrie is opposed to two third wave women, the too girly Charlotte and the too slutty Samantha. On the other hand, she clearly isn't the dour Miranda either.

It didn't work though. SATC was a huge success among women but anyone who was paying attention when men were in the room quickly noticed that not only that we vastly preferred Charlotte but that we actively disliked Carrie and Miranda. And no one is going to marry Samantha. I know, that's not supposed to matter anymore but reality really is the thing that won't go away when you ignore it.

The suicide pact

The rest of the left decided feminism wasn't helping the cause anymore. If the white girls of the third wave had proven anything it was that the influence of second wave feminists on, you know, actual women was far less than they had imagined it to be. Feminists could browbeat women into tugging their forelocks like good little peasants but they couldn't get them to actually live differently.

After a series of increasingly pathetic attempts to gain any real traction, progressive feminists decided to try a suicide pact called intersectionality. The notion behind it was that all oppressed groups were interconnected. You might reasonably wonder how that could possibly be (it can't) but you'd be apt to miss the menace it holds. For intersectionality can be weaponized. If all oppressed groups are interconnected, then anything peculiar to one cause is illegitimate. Thus we have the staggering spectacle of feminism disembowelling itself to accommodate trans women. And you have the increasingly aggressive attacks on "white feminism".

I don't see how feminism itself can possibly survive this, which is why I call it a suicide pact. I don't think the people behind intersectionality particularly care. They never saw feminism as anything but a short term goal in a larger game whose real goal is dismantling free market economies and liberal democracy.

They feel confident enough now that they have been attacking white girls for a while now. The increasingly savage attacks on Coachella, Adele, Taylor Swift and "white feminism" are evidence of this. But will it work? After all, attacks on white men got us President Donald Trump.

My suspicion is that white girls will respond not by getting behind a person as they will get behind a way of living. The universities will be interesting to watch. Currently, university is seen as an end in itself. Sometime soon, I think women, who now make up the majority of university students, are going to start asking themselves some hard questions about how this fits into their larger lives. They are going to start thinking of it as a short-term goal in a larger game. When that happens, look out.






* “A subject and a sovereign are clear different things.” —King Charles I words to the crowd from the scaffold immediately before he was beheaded on January 30, 1649.

Can second-generation feminism survive after Caitlyn Jenner?

For many that question will seem ludicrous. Most people will, I think, wonder why it's even an issue.

It is an issue and has been an issue for a number of years now. Transgender people in feminist circles have started to complain that some issues—most notably, abortion—don't apply to them. These transgender people want to be considered women and feel they have a right to be considered women and, therefore, they have been arguing that claiming that abortion is a feminist issue excludes them as women. More trivially, there was an Australian add for tampons a few years ago that featured a young woman and a transgender person competing in front of a mirror. The woman won the competition by pulling out a tampon. The ad was withdrawn after many complaints were received.

Most recently, there is a fascinating piece in the CS Monitor that attempts to solve the problem in a purely rationalist fashion, as is typical of that publication

Ultimately, though, the debate cannot be resolved because it is based not on any rational arguments about what it does or does not mean to be a woman but rather on competing denunciations of what ideologies that are condemned for imposing unfair notions of womanhood.

Radical feminists argue that Caitlyn Jenner values precisely the unfair standards imposed on women in the name of ideology, which is to say they are culturally imposed values. But the consequence of arguing only against what you feel is imposed and not for what you believe is defining is that it's now open to transgender people to argue that pregnancy, and therefore abortion and menstruation, are merely ideology, social constructs, culturally imposed notions of what it means to be a woman.

Second generation feminism, as Joan Didion noted long ago, was founded on the belief that women could be a revolutionary class. The idea, derived from Marx, was that an oppressed group could, out of their shared experience, come to see themselves as having a common class consciousness that would motivate them to act collectively to change society. On this model, the distinctions between classes would disappear after the revolution. As Didion also notes, most women, especially white university-educated women in the west, remain firmly committed to the ideals of liberal individualism in their personal lives and this causes deep tensions within feminism.

That is hardly unique to feminists. One reason western liberals have consistently failed to see why socialism is always brutally soul-crushing oppressive regimes is that fail to see that it just isn't compatible with individualism. The issue of transgender women drives this issue home with a vengeance.

“These societally defined traits of sex do not define a sex,” wrote Libby Emmons and David Marcus in a piece on the conservative culture site “The Federalist” last week. “Feminists have been fighting for decades, since the suffragettes, to vocalize the non-feminineness of females. We can vote, we can fight, we can wear pants and flats, we can boss a whole room of employees without demurring. To allow the trans movement to objectify women is to accept the oppression of the female sex by the male sex, and to further accept male definitions of what it is to be female.”

To which, the transgender advocate Cristan Williams replies

In many ways, this is a valid critique of culture, says Williams, and perhaps even a valid analysis of ideas of gender. But it’s not really a critique of who transgender people are – since, like biological males and females, there is a wide-ranging diversity of how people express their notions of gender. 

“I don’t take issue with a critique of this specific person, or this specific behavior,” Williams says. “As long as that critique is made of non-transgender women who engage in the exact same behavior.” 

In fact, she says, there are trans women who are very traditionally “fem,” like Jenner, and trans women, like herself, who ride a motorcycle and everything in between. “Somehow, in some way, if I ride a Harley then I’m colonizing dyke culture,” she says of the lesbian subculture that she might be associated with – and accused of culturally appropriating as an outsider. “If I wear a dress, then I’m just a caricature of a woman.”

Both these arguments are, as Alasdair MacIntyre would cheerfully point out, easily recognizable types that are very in our culture and they both appeal to sets of criteria that preclude there ever being any end to argument. All that can happen from here on in is that both sides keep repeating their arguments only more and more shrilly with each iteration.

Ultimately, they who shout loudest will win and I'd bet good money that second generation feminists will very soon learn they are heavily outgunned in this debate. And Williams obviously grasps this as indicated by the remark, "As long as that critique is made of non-transgender women who engage in the exact same behavior." Williams knows it probably won't be because the women to whom that critique might fairly be applied constitute the overwhelming majority of women.

To answer my own question, I think this is the final nail in second generation feminism's coffin. And I further think there is not really anything one could call third generation feminism. There could be such a thing but, as of right now, there are just a bunch of ideas that haven't really gelled. And so long as being a woman is pretty much anything anyone who feels they are a woman want it to be, there cannot be any such third generation feminism.

Yet another female celebrity says she's not interested in feminism

It's Lana Del Rey this time. And the usual suspects are upset.

According to the above same website, the list of female celebrities who want to distance themselves from feminism is long and growing: Bjork, Taylor, Swift, Lady Gaga, Geri Haliwell, Juliette Binoche, Melissa Leo, Carrie Underwood, Sandra Day O'Connor, Dita Von Teese, Marissa Mayer, Beyoncé, PJ Harvey, Carla Bruni, Madonna, Demi Moore, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kelly Clarkson.

Now, imagine you are pro-feminist and a journalist. Looking at the above, don't you think it might occur to you that asking famous women to declare themselves on the subject is not helping the cause? Why would anyone hoping to help feminism keep doing this? Every time another famous woman says she isn't a feminist, it makes it that much easier for other women to distance themselves from feminism.

Not that they are having a hard time as it is. Anyone even vaguely familiar with the polling data will know that the vast majority of women don't think of themselves as feminists. Even in the glory days of feminism, most women held back. In recent years the number of women willing to declare themselves feminist has been steadily declining: in 1992 only 33% of women said they were feminist; by 1999 the number was down to 26%; the last poll I saw said 22%. There is no good reason to suspect that famous women are going to respond any different from a random sample of women. If anything, they are even more likely to distance themselves because they like being famous and are quickly going to realize that they will alienate more women by saying they are feminist than they will by saying they are not.

Here is related issue. The writers at Jezebel, and they are far from alone on this, claim that the source of the problem is that these women fail to understand feminism. They say that feminism is simply about women being equal to men and if you're for that you, as most of us are, should call yourself a feminist. They are dismayed that so many women think that feminism is about hating men or about being angry. Okay, let's take it as read that feminism isn't about these things, wouldn't you, if you were a feminist, begin to wonder if the problem might not be with these women misunderstanding your message so much as the message being poorly expressed in the first place? If a only few people misunderstand your message, you can credibly argue that they are at fault; if lots of people people misunderstand your message, then you are at fault.

I think the ultimate problem here is that many feminists are no longer interested in dialogue. Real dialogue requires that you be open to learn from others; it requires that you be willing to modify your position in response to the interaction. These feminists aren't interested in that. They want agreement and nothing but agreement. That's why feminism-supporting journalists keep asking female celebrities if they are feminist; they see the question as a sort of litmus test and further imagine that celebrities will pay a price for failing to give the "right" answer; the list above shows that no such consequence follows.

Final thought: I wonder why it never seems to occur to feminists that some of their allies are not helping. Alexander Kerensky infamously, and suicidally, said, "No enemies to the left." What he meant by this was that a good moderate never criticizes other leftists for being too extreme; all he ammunition was saved for attacking the right, even moderates on the right. It didn't work out well. Feminists too often make the same mistake. If you really don't want people accusing you of hating men, then you should admit that some feminists do hate men, some feminists are boring and some feminists trade in statistics that are pure nonsense and distance yourself from them. Of course, to do that you'd have to be open to dialogue with people who think feminism should change and ...

What feminism is up against

Right from its roots, feminism has sought to transform society in ways that go far beyond just relations between the sexes. Which is why Ann Althouse's question is such a challenge for feminism:

What if women became fully autonomous, empowered individuals and nothing changed? What would that mean?

Althouse was, in turn responding to something Kim Gordon, who sang with a band you've probably never heard of called Sonic Youth, had said about sexism in the music industry then,

"In rock music people have certain assumptions that it makes people more enlightened and it really doesn't. It was the same thing playing for Neil Young's audience [in 1991] and being reminded that hippies can be really narrow-minded. We were around people who felt like, 'We're groovy, we're cool,' but they were so sexist. It was just in your face all the time."

 and now,

"Are women using their sexuality to sell records because they're empowered? In which case yeah, great. But with some women it's almost inbred and there's pressure of competitiveness: who can be the sexiest? Male executives don't have to say anything because women know. And it's all aesthetically pleasing but it gets a little boring after a while if that's the only side that gets promoted."

I want to slow the music down a bit here because there was an explicit detail about "sexism" then that has gotten lost. The way Althouse has clipped the first paragraph leaves out something that I think is rather important. Here is the head she clips off:

When Sonic Youth signed to Geffen Records after 1988's alt-rock landmark Daydream Nation, Gordon's lyrics became more explicitly feminist in songs such as "Kool Thing", "Tunic (Song for Karen)" and "Swimsuit Issue", which she wrote after discovering that one Geffen executive was being sued for sexual harassment. "I guess I had an authority problem," she says. "In rock music people have certain assumptions ... [here the quote carries on as above].

Back in 1988 an executive at Geffen was being sued for sexual harassment. Gordon wasn't thinking just of men thinking about women in certain ways but of something vile that an actual man had done to an actual woman. And her point wasn't that there was sexual harassment back then too but that men right at the heart of an industry that presented itself as "cool and progressive" did this.

Next, let's note that the song Gordon wrote about the incident was called "Swimsuit Issue". So how did Sports Illustrated get into this mix? It got into the mix because there was an unspoken premise at work that might be expressed like this, "When women's sexuality is used to sell magazines or pop songs it creates a social environment where men think of women themselves as products available for consumption."

You could argue for or against that proposition but even if, like me, you are skeptical, you have to take it seriously. It's a legitimate, coherent and plausible argument.

If we return now, to the second half of the Gordon quote, we can see that that hypothesis has somehow been undermined in Gordon's eyes in the ensuing years (and Althouse takes that as read).

Are women using their sexuality to sell records because they're empowered? In which case yeah, great. But with some women it's almost inbred and there's pressure of competitiveness: who can be the sexiest?

Gordon is not just allowing that women might be willingly doing the dirty work for male executives.  She is allowing that these women might be doing something for themselves that is a positive good as in, "yeah, great" by "using their sexuality". That really muddies the water. It's almost as if she is arguing that the means can justify the end.

The earlier argument was that if you use women's sexuality to sell product, you commodify women along with the product. But now Gordon, and many others, want to allow that the intention and the person who does this intending can change the moral status of the act. This new premise might be stated as follows: "If a woman freely and willingly uses her sexuality to sell product because it makes her feel empowered that is not only acceptable but good."

We might wonder what exactly causes this empowerment. Suppose, for example, that a woman set out to use her sexuality to sell music and it didn't work. What would she feel if the product was ignored? That wouldn't be very empowering. The product is now her sexuality after all. Or, suppose no one bought her music but that the promotional material became very popular because people liked the way her sexuality was presented but didn't like her music. Would that be empowering? Or suppose she sells both her sexuality and her music and she feels empowered by this but a collateral result is that the millions of men who buy her music start treating the women in their lives as sexual commodities?

Gordon's challenge is that she fully understands all these issues but she can see, as anyone can see, that millions upon millions of women are actively seeking empowerment by presenting themselves as sexual beings and that they are even willingly competing with other women as sexual beings. And they are not doing this to get sex so much as sexual status. They seem to regard the recognition this status brings as important, if not essential, to their happiness.

It gets worse.

But with some women it's almost inbred and there's pressure of competitiveness: who can be the sexiest? Male executives don't have to say anything because women know. 

First of all, notice that there is no necessary connection between the claim made in the first sentence and that made in the second sentence. The earlier argument makes a clear and arguable claim about a link between the cause (using sex to sell) and the effect (women being reduced to objects for consumption). Now it's women who are doing the thing that makes Gordon uncomfortable and men aren't actually doing anything to bring it about (but we know it's what they want). Blaming men is more of a reflex reaction than an argument. (And just try reversing that and claiming that you know women want some sort of sexual outcome even though they aren't overtly doing anything to bring it about.)

"With some women its almost inbred..." That "almost" is doing a lot of important fudging work. What Gordon means, but is having a hard time bringing herself to say, is that some women have a very strong desire to achieve sexual status in their own eyes and in the eyes of others that cannot easily be explained as the result of social conditioning; that's the point of saying "almost inbred". And that was part of the point of my earlier post, for while it is certainly true that you can sell beer, music and domain names to men by using women's sexuality, it is also true that you can get very rich using women's sexuality to sell, wine, beer, music, condos, chocolate, cigarettes, TV shows, panties and many other things to women. And you can so far more relentlessly. The Go Daddy ads stood out for two reasons: they stood out because they featured scantily clad women and they stood out because they used sex to sell corporate services. The vast majority of ads for corporate services don't use sex. Ads for products aimed at women are drenched in women's sexuality.

If you want to sell a product to anyone, you have to link the product to their aspirations. What Gordon and Althouse are implicitly acknowledging is that as they have gained more autonomy and sense of empowerment,  women have become more and more likely to seek out products that are associated with women they can see as sexually aspirational role models. This has become so obvious that it cannot be denied anymore.

Go to the New York Times bestsellers lists and visit the web pages of the authors. Look especially at male writers who appeal primarily to male readers and at female writers who appeal primarily to female readers. Ask yourself which group is most aggressively using their own sexuality to sell product? Don't worry, it won't be hard to tell; the difference is not subtle. Men are far more able and willing to separate their sexual status from other issues when determining their own worth and the worth of other men than women are able to do when determining their own worth and the worth of other women. Sheryl Sandberg has to be a sexually aspirational role model to attract large numbers of women to buy her book. Yes, some women would buy her book anyway but most would not. If Sandberg were the male equivalent of a man like Donald Trump (which is to say a man who is only attractive to women because he is rich and/or powerful and otherwise is a bit of a joke) women would not have been nearly as interested in her book.

It wasn't always this way. In the 1980s, Dr. Ruth Westheimer succeeded as a sex-advice columnist by being the very opposite of sexually aspirational. People who listened to her needed to be able to separate the woman giving the advice from what they thought of as sexual. If Dr. Ruth had been young, slim and sexually desirable, it would have detracted from her credibility. Today, the opposite is true and that is due in a large part to market choices made by autonomous, empowered women.

 What if women became fully autonomous, empowered individuals and nothing changed? What would that mean?

I don't the full answer but one thing it would mean is the end of feminism as we know it. That's why somewhere between 70 to 80 percent of women tell pollsters they don't identify as feminists. It's why so many female pop music stars tell journalists that they believe in equality of the sexes but not feminism.

Love is ...

Those of my age will remember that once upon a time, a long, long time ago, there was a line of panties that featured a painfully cute little cartoon character and a caption that always began "Love is ...". "Love" always turned out to be something saccharine and, as The Last Psychiatrist would add, something narcissistic because it was intended to make the wearer feel good about herself rather than encourage her to contemplate loving a man sexually, which, given the location of the printing, is what it should have been about.

Anyway, Dalrock, a blogger I know little about besides the fact that Instapundit reads him and often links to him has hit on something really important this week. I think he gets this one half right but that half is really good stuff:

One of the effects of feminism is that men of my generation have had a much wider opportunity to cook. I can’t think of any men my age or younger who don’t know how to cook. Moreover, I can’t think of any men of my generation or younger who don’t enjoy cooking. This is in stark contrast to the women of the same generations, who (typically) view cooking as an indignity. The reason for the difference in attitude boils down to what cooking is all about. Cooking is an act of love, an act of service to others. It is an opportunity to care for others in a very fundamental way, to literally nourish them through the work of your own hands. This is precisely what troubles the modern woman so much about cooking (or cleaning, or changing diapers). Serving others in the mind of a feminist is an indignity, so cooking, cleaning, or any other act of service and love is the object of revulsion. Women now actually compete to show off their miserliness in caring for others, each trying to outdo the rest in proving they are the greatest scrooge with love. It has gone so far that large numbers of women are quite proud of the fact that they have never learned to cook or otherwise care for others.

I say that this is only half right because he blames feminism for the problem. That's simply not true. The attitude he describes was already common in women of my mother's generation, which preceded second wave feminism.

I think the attitude at base here is very much like that attributed to Sex and the City, which was that women should be able to "F*&k like a man". The implication being that men had sex purely for pleasure without desire for love and commitment. The problem with that thinking is that while some men do indeed do that all the time and while most men try to do that at some times, most men don't do that most of the time. To really "F*** like a man in the way most men actually do it, a woman would need to want to care for, nurture, encourage and support the man she has sex with while willingly accepting that many of the times she wants his love he just isn't going to feel like it—in other words, it would mean going back to what our grand parents understood as married love.

A similar false parallel was drawn with work. The assumption was that men went to work for self-fulfillment and  that what women did while "trapped in the home" was done "for others". Women, tired of living for others, wanted to be "like men". The problem with that is that while some men no doubt did behave as imagined, most didn't. Millions of men went to jobs they hated as an act of love. They did it to nourish others by the work of their hands.

And thus the recurring issue of women wanting "to have it all". Women, rightly, sought the right to join the workforce but expected that, in doing so, they would find a way to be truer to themselves only to discover that even the best jobs consist mostly of tedious, boring work that can only be made meaningful if we do it as a service to others.

One of the many paradoxes of love is that you must experience the one you love as an obstacle to really love them. This so because it is the sense of their being an obstacle that allows us to recognize them as a truly other being whom we need to reach out to love. The person with whom we never felt frustrated or angry with, the person whom, indeed, we didn't sometimes wonder if life wouldn't be better without them, isn't a real person at all but a projection of our narcissistic fantasies. (And this applies most of all to our attempts to love God.)  Everytime we find ourselves crashing into them as an obstacle, that is an opportunity to love.

Remember Kate Bolick?

I’d spent the past year with a handsome, commitment-minded man, and these better qualities, along with our having several interests in common, allowed me to overlook our many thundering incompatibilities. 

Everyone of those "thundering incompatibilities" was an opportunity to love.

But feminism, despite its many problems, didn't create the sense that the most important thing in life is to be true to yourself and that we should try to eliminate from our innermost circle all the people who prevent us from being true our "authentic selves". Feminism is often ugly because it is a symptom of that disease but it is not the disease itself. Women and men were already starting to think the way before feminism and the ugly sort of feminism that is rightly deplored would not have been possible is we hadn't already made that prior move of thinking that the most important thing in life was to be true to ourselves instead of what it really is, being true to another.

(And, no, Shakespeare did not advise us to do this; Polonius is an idiot about everything else, that this spectacularly bad advice is exceptionally credited as a "modern" way to think tells us a whole lot about what is wrong with modern life and nothing about Shakespeare.)

A little light culture: It's a nice day for a white wedding dress

It didn’t matter that I had never dreamt of my wedding day or created inspirational tulle-filled scrapbooks as a little girl; I still knew exactly what was expected of me, and I did not want to disappoint.

That's TracyClark-Flory writing at Salon.  She planned to have a "feminist wedding" but found that, as the day got closer and closer that it was slipping away from her.

White dresses are a major sticking point. Did you know that white dresses used to symbolize virginity? Actually, no they didn't.* But that urban myth apparently makes it difficult for a feminist to wear one at her wedding.

The problem here is that there is no problem. A real act of rebellion would be to wear a white dress anyway even though you weren't a virgin. Well, it would be if anyone was trying to stop you. You can do anything you want at your wedding. You can wear school-bus yellow or silver lamé if that appeals to you. You could get married naked at a nudist colony, or wearing scarlet leggings and a teal blue tank top in Las Vegas, or dressed up like your favourite super hero in a movie theatre you rent for the occasion.

There are 923 words in Clark-Flory's essay. The word "I" appears 51 times. The word "my" occurs 25 times. "Me" makes 7 appearances. The word "he" referring to her future husband occurs twice (and both times he is urging her to stand up for her feminist principles). The word "his" referring to her future husband does not appear even once. The word "we" referring to something they are doing together appears once ("we got engaged") and, most tellingly, the "our" makes zero appearances.

This, by the way, actually has nothing to do with feminism, however much it may appear to. Clark-Flory's feminism is every bit as much an I-I-I-my-my-my affair as her wedding:

... I have no interest in defining what is feminist for other women. All I can speak to are my own feelings about my own feminism ...

All she can speak to are her own feelings about her own feminism. Clark-Flory has no trouble seeing that "modern girdle" is a contradiction in terms, and it is, but she can't see that "my own feminism" is no feminism at all.


* White wedding dresses became popular because Queen Victoria wore one. She picked white because she had some lace she wanted incorporated in her dress. They have remained popular since then because most women really, really, really like them.

Are women unhappy with men?

That they are was one of Hugo Schwyzer's claims.

Well, yes. I think primarily I wrote for women. I designed my writing primarily for women. One of the things that I figured out is the best way to get attention from women was not to describe women’s own experience to them because they found that patronizing and offensive. Instead it was to appear to challenge other men, to turn other men into the kind of boyfriend material, father material, or husband material that women so desperately wanted. Most women have a lot of disappointment in men. And I very deliberately want to go to the place where that disappointment lives and present to them a counter-narrative of something possible.

I pulled the whole paragraph out here rather than just the highlighted sentence because the larger context is really important here. Schwyzer is a con man and he is describing the way he works his con on women. More importantly, he is still working it. This whole apology show is part of his plan to get back in the game.

He, like all con men, has a target in mind. He doesn't target women generally but a very specific subset of women. Cons only work on people who think they are too smart to get conned. That's why Schwyzer works the feminist beat; it's full of women who think they can see through the pretenses of of others. These women manage to believe two contradictory things at the same time: 1) that men are a bunch of selfish, stupid, self-defeating knuckle-dragging buffoons and 2) that they nevertheless have managed to dominate women against their wills for centuries.
 
What I think is really happening is this: a lot of women are discovering that putting off marriage and pursuing a career in larger cities is a sure fire way to end up single and unhappy. They are discovering that lots of men want to have sex with them but no one, including their best girlfriends, really likes them much. Not surprisingly, they are unhappy with their lives. Worse, they don't see any way to make them better. And that isn't surprising. Other than getting into a time machine and going back and telling their 17-year-old self to live her life entirely differently, I don't think there is a solution. So they get angry at men. These are the women who make up the target audience of con artists like Hugo Schwyzer and Amanda Marcotte.

A few additional  thoughts that occurred to me while walking the dog

I think the unhappiness makes itself felt quite early in the game. As early as university, these women discover that their relationships with men are unsatisfactory. This isn't surprising as they are not offering men anything but sex. They offer no guarantees of any sort of lasting emotional commitment. The sort of men who thrive on that are men who are pretty mercenary about the pursuit of sexual pleasure and the ones who aren't soon learn to be.

If you live that way—either as the sex-positive-but-not-seeking-commitment woman or the mercenary-sex-hound man—you tend to train your mind-body complex to respond in certain ways. You tend to, for example, be very poor at maintaining sexual interest in the same partner for very long. You also tend to give up on relationships as soon as they become difficult. Keep doing this through your late teens and early twenties and you will have trained yourself to be very good at temporary sexual relationships and absolutely useless at more serious commitments.

Worst of all, these women dodge all responsibility to learn to love men as truly separate individuals who are profoundly different from them. You can see this most clearly in sexual issues where women dress and behave like male sexual fantasies rather than learn to relate on a more profound level. Why actually relate when he'll be perfectly happy with slutty underwear, a Brazilian wax job and fantasy sex moves you've learned from porn? And then, having encouraged only this kind of connection with men, they turn around and hate the men for it.

I'm not feeling a lot of pity.

Tom Matlack proved right about something

UPDATE: In light of the comment from Mr. Matlack below,  I should have said that I have zero respect for the argument that he and others have made that men as a group need to change or improve rather than attacking him personally as I did. I made a personal attack on him because he was, until today, an anonymous figure on the internet. I regret this and apologize to him for it but will not change what I have said below because I want my indiscretion to be here so everyone can see it.

I should say at the outset that I have zero respect for Tom Matlack and the Good Men Project and I would not normally bother myself with an argument that broke out between him and Hugo Schwyzer coming up on two years ago now. Matlack vs Schwyzer is the intellectual equivalent of the David Bowie vs Lou Reed fistfight; may the least pathetic man win. In this case, however, it is interesting because the least pathetic man settled on something important.

Matlack, the worst sort of whiny, self-hating pussy boy you can imagine, actually turned and snarled at the way our culture runs men down a while ago and wrote a piece called "Being a Dude is a Good Thing", which, even though it amounts to damning men with faint praise, stirred up the fruit loop section of the feminist orchestra including Hugo Schwyzer and Amanda Marcotte.

In the essay, Matlack says a lot of nonsense and one really important thing. The important this is This:

My unscientific theory is from a fundamental disconnect between men and women at the micro level. Men know women are different. They think differently, they express emotion differently, they are motivated by different things, they think about sex differently, and they use a very different vocabulary.

Why can’t women accept men for who they really are? Is a good man more like a woman or more truly masculine?

The fundamental point here is right. Men are, on average, different from women. The "on average" is important. American men, for example, are taller on average than Japanese men but that doesn't mean that there aren't going to be some seven-foot Japanese men. We are different from women and we are different in ways that are worth understanding rather than hating.

This was too much for Hugo. I don't want to go through all the details of the argument, in a large part because there wasn't one. Marcotte, for example, attacked Matlack on grounds of style not substance. What is interesting is what Schwyzer has revealed in his recent overwrought confessions.He was asked, "Was your work designed to please a certain school of feminism but never a realistic model for men?"

Well, yes. I think primarily I wrote for women. I designed my writing primarily for women. One of the things that I figured out is the best way to get attention from women was not to describe women’s own experience to them because they found that patronizing and offensive. Instead it was to appear to challenge other men, to turn other men into the kind of boyfriend material, father material, or husband material that women so desperately wanted. Most women have a lot of disappointment in men. And I very deliberately want to go to the place where that disappointment lives and present to them a counter-narrative of something possible.

Notice how he shifts ground. First of all, Schwyzer is asked if he tailored his writing to feminist perceptions and he immediately generalizes that to say he wrote for "women", as if "feminists" and "women" were identical groups. Second, notice how he takes it for granted that most women are disappointed in men and that he was simply giving them hope that better men were possible. Combine that with the fact that 62 percent of women say they aren't feminists and you can begin to see the light shining through the fog. Schwyzer is admitting that the only way to make a living as a male feminist is to tailor your writing to the fantasies of bitter feminists who are unable to successfully relate to men.

Now, let's flip this around and notice that Schwyzer is implicitly admitting that men wouldn't read this crap. Well yes! I mean if eve Pussy Boy Matlack got his back up, you can just imagine how any man with a thimble full of self respect would respond.

Hey Hugo, how can we miss you if you won't go away?

Poor Hugo Schwyzer had a meltdown and thousands of people are feeling sorry for him laughing so hard they are in serious danger of wetting their pants.

I will cheerfully admit to having been one of many, many people to lay into this awful fraud and I'm glad to see him exposed and sent packing. Assuming he'll actually go. Like Anthony Weiner, Schwyzer is a moral narcissist who just keeps coming back. He seems to want to admit he was a fraud and yet still be loved and taken seriously.

There are two kinds of issues here: there is an issue of alleged academic fraud and there is an issue of moral hypocrisy that is simple fact.

Here's the academic issue: Schwyzer was writing for all sorts of popular publications as a "gender expert" even though his actual field is British and medieval history. As he puts it, "It is a little odd that someone would become a very well known speaker and writer on feminism when he took only two undergraduate courses on women’s studies and that’s it."

Well, actually, it isn't all that odd. I suspect two undergraduate courses is a lot more study than most high-profile feminists ever did. And there is no reason whatsoever that anyone at all shouldn't be allowed to write about feminism just as anyone at all  is allowed to write about Shakespeare. But the issue gets tricky if I, for example, were to start writing about Shakespeare while claiming to have academic credentials to do so, which I do not. Schwyzer claims to have only written for non-academic publications but the issue here is one of personal integrity. Consider, for example, the author description on the piece that I originally responded to about a year and a half ago:

Hugo Schwyzer is a professor of gender studies and history at Pasadena City College and a nationally-known speaker on sex, relationships, and masculinity. He blogs at his eponymous site and co-authored the autobiography of Carré Otis, Beauty, Disrupted.

 Well, you can see how someone reading that just might get the wrong idea about Schwyzer's credentials.

And, as I always say, if you find one rat, you can be pretty sure there are others.

The  moral hypocrisy issue is that Schwyzer argued that men shouldn't date younger women while having sexual relationships with women half his age and cheating on his wife in the process.

Moral hypocrisy is an issue I have written about before and I've tended to argue that hypocrisy is only a symptom of a deeper problem. The deeper problem, to quote myself

The real source of hypocrisy is not believing in anything at all.

That was what was is so depressing about the two cases I mention above. Neither man is aware of himself as a hypocrite because neither is acting against beliefs that actually mean anything to them. Our classic notion of a hypocrite—Mr. Burns running for office on The Simpsons—knows he is lying and consequently makes some effort to hide it. Real hypocrites have no notion. There is no point in even trying to explain it to them.

And Schwyzer is a further example.  He wrote the following:

If there's one tangible thing that men can do to help end sexism—and create a healthier culture in which young people come of age—it's to stop chasing after women young enough to be their biological daughters. As hyperbolic as it may sound, there are few more powerful actions that men can take to transform the culture than to date, mate, and stay with their approximate chronological peers. If aging guys would commit to doing this, everyone would benefit: older men and younger men, older women and younger women.

This proposal flies in the face of everything we're taught is normal and inevitable ...

But here comes the big admission about his personal life at the time he wrote the article above:

One of my themes has always been that men should leave younger women alone and start to have a greater value in appreciating their female peers—that men in their 30s and 40s should be dating women in their 30s and 40s; sort of challenging men to see as sexually desirable women who are their own age. I wrote a piece for The Atlantic on that that got a lot of attention. But the very same week I wrote that I was sleeping with a 23-year-old affiliated with the porn industry, not a student of mine, but who I met through the porn class. And of course, I was also sexting.

The thing that should strike you here is the complete lack of guilt. Until the matter became one of shame by being made public, Schwyzer had no problem doing what he did. He wrote the article the same week he was having the affair. He has no moral beliefs at all.

You can see it in his pathetic attempts at self justification:

For me the motivation was not to get these girls into bed. Sex is only the exclamation point on what you really want. What I am addicted to is affirmation and validation from women. That is what I wanted. That is what this whole thing was set up to get. I didn’t need them to want to f**k me. It made no difference to me if they thought of me as a potential boyfriend or a potential father. What mattered to me is that they had me on a pedestal, that they thought about me. That is the honest truth.

That's the "honest truth" until he asked if he has ever had sex with his students.

Not since 1998. Before 1998 I slept with two dozen female students, somewhere in there, it’s a ballpark thing. That ended when I had a similar but not as bad a breakdown to the one I had now.

It helps to do the arithmetic in cases like this. Schwyzer is 46 years old now. He was 31 in 1998! Even if he breezed through his PhD at a record pace, he would have been teaching only five or six years (and probably less) in 1998. In that time he'd had sex with two-dozen students!

And, oh yeah, that " similar but not as bad a breakdown" in 1998? Schwyzer has said it climaxed when he tried to kill himself and his girlfriend while under the influence of narcotics. How does that count as not as bad? That's the thing you have to grasp: this man doesn't believe in anything at all.

And it tells you an awful lot about feminism that he succeeded so long at being a celebrity in the field.

A manly look at feminism Pt2

We all have cherished beliefs that we can't really defend and we all get defensive and angry when we are called on to defend one of these positions. Ann Althouse hit one of those limits last week. She expressed a lack of sympathy for men who end up paying child support and got a whole lot of pushback in the coments at her blog and elsewhere. And this was her argument in response:

You are free, you need to think about how you use your freedom, and don't just think about your own perspective as you make arguments that law and society ought to be arranged to facilitate your choices. I'd say I'm being quite libertarian. And as for social connishness, I support abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and — it's right there in my quote — I'm not out to punish those who decline to channel their sexuality into committed relationships with child-rearing. I'm just defending legal and political decisions that center on protecting the interests of children rather than the ability of males to avoid the consequences of procreation, consequences that occur even though the male power over reproduction ends — because he controls only his body and not the woman's — at an earlier point in time than the woman's.

She's more interested in "protecting the interests of children rather than the ability of males to avoid the consequences of procreation"? I don't believe that. I suspect she believes it but that is because she isn't being honest with herself about this.

Her problems starts with the line "... consequences that occur even though the male power over reproduction ends — because he controls only his body and not the woman's — at an earlier point in time than the woman's." Let's spell this out. A man controls reproduction by either using contraception or not having sex in the first place. The woman on the other hand has those options plus the additional option of having an abortion if she gets pregnant. In fact, she can have an abortion for any reason at all. She can get pregnant intentionally, change her mind and get an abortion.

So, here is the first question, why should he feel any responsibility for a child that she can unilaterally kill or not at her will? It's not his child anymore once you make that step. Yes, it will become his child if he helps raise it but up until the moment of birth, you can't hold him responsible for something he has no say in.

Imagine what would happen if we gave the man the option of signing off. It should be the woman's responsibility to inform the man that she is pregnant and he should be given the option of signing a form saying, "Yes, I accept the responsibility for raising this child," or "No I do not accept the responsibility for raising this child." And the form should also include an option for his accepting on the condition of a paternity test.

That would even things out. It wouldn't limit her "rights over her own body" in any way. She can still have the child or not. He isn't forcing her either way. (I suspect that one embarrassing consequence of such a step would be a significant drop in the number of accidental pregnancies.)

But that's only the first step. The next problem is no fault divorce. because she can end the marriage any time she wants and be relatively certain that she will get sole or shared custody rights. Plus she gets support payments enforced by law but (and this is very important) she is in no way accountable to him as to how she spends those support payments. In Canada, he isn't even allowed to ask for an accounting which means that in cases where the "support" payments are very large, the woman can spend it on spa visits or a vacation with her new boyfriend.

The point being that the incentives for marriage for men have been severely reduced. Not surprisingly, men are taking this into account in making their life choices.

It's interesting by the way, to see how different groups are responding to this. Men I know who are over the age of 40 or so are often quite angry about it. They grew up with a certain set of expectations and now the carpet has been pulled out from under them. Interestingly, this has effected men who embrace traditionalist values least. They have tended to marry women who embraced the same values as they do. But others can be quite bitter about it.

Younger men, on the other hand, seem to be quite enjoying it. There is a guy we know who lives in a van. He travels all around the country being a photographer. He even has gotten arts grants to do this. There is woman here in the neighbourhood he stays with for a few weeks every summer and winter on his way through. She's a massage therapist, which I expect makes her pretty good in bed—sex and a massage. I doubt very much that she is the only such woman on his circuit.

It's a pretty good deal. You may say, "But it won't last forever." That's true but when he gets to be old enough that he is going to have to settle down he is going to be in a stronger bargaining position that any of the single women available to him. He'll probably be able to marry a woman younger than the ones he is having sex with now.

More likely, he'll just move in with her

And it's hard not to suspect that is why Ann Althouse is a little touchy on this subject.

You are free, you need to think about how you use your freedom, and don't just think about your own perspective as you make arguments that law and society ought to be arranged to facilitate your choices.

That's true enough but if you change the basic social contract, even if you do so for the best of reasons, you have to expect that there will be multiple effects and that you aren't going to like some of them. And don't turn around and try and beat us into submission with a lot of talk about the interests of the child. Between abortion and no-fault divorce it has been made very clear to us that we have no say in those interests beyond paying court-ordered support. Don't expect us to care.

Imitatio project: more mommy issues

Moving along with my five limiting personality factors that a Don Draper type character would have, the next two are

• He has a a lot of romantic baggage that he brings along from the past.
• The replacement he found for his first failed relationship is another weak and ineffectual woman who never grew out of her princess stage. 

 I'll begin by throwing you a curve ball. There is an interview out there where Matt Weiner says his mother was something like Betty Draper. He said it response to someone who argued that the portrait of Betty is too negative. I wonder what she thought of that?

What do his parents think of the show?

“I think they love the show,” he said.

He thinks? They haven’t told him?

“Ah, not really. I think they like to tell other people more than they like to tell me.”

 Hmmmm?

Now read this:

After my first day on the set, I met Weiner for dinner at L’Ermitage hotel in Beverly Hills, AMC’s base for out-of-towners. He was outside finishing a cigarette. Earlier in the day he commanded, “Don’t say I smoke!”

Why not? His face changed, and he seemed about 12 years old. “My parents don’t know.” I found that appealing, though I could see him wince once he said it.

Those quotes are from a New York Times Magazine profile of Weiner that came out during the second season. Reading it, you can see that Mad Men is a mythologized version of Matt Weiner's own life. His parents had moved out of New York to Baltimore and they had nothing good to say about the city. Young Matt visited his grandparents in the city and did fun stuff like see Hair. So the home family in Baltimore and the fun grandparents in New York became the models for Henry and Betty and the fun grandparents in New York were the inspiration for Don and Megan's apartment in New York. (Read the story I link above and you'll find a rich vein of evidence as many of the things Weiner talked about unguardedly back in 2008 have since shown up on the show.)

So let's go back to Betty because she is the person through whom Matt Weiner is working out his mommy issues.

“She is an incredibly beautiful woman who married a man she barely knows because he looks good on paper. Her mother has just died, and she’s realized that when her beauty disappears she will cease to exist. She’s not enough for her husband, and she doesn’t want to accept it. She’s terrified of dealing with that problem because she cannot get divorced, she cannot be single, she cannot start over. She is somewhat puritanical.”

No, I don't think that Betty is exactly like Weiner's mother but Betty went to college and then became a housewife and Weiner's mother got a law degree and never practiced. At times Betty seems to read like the creation of someone who read The Feminine Mystique and then brutally forced history to fit the theory—that is certainly the way most critics read her—but she makes much more sense if read as the creation of a man who has not successfully blown up the relationship he had with his mother. Or, to approach the problem from the other end of the telescope, many of the things that don't make sense about Betty sound like the sorts of things a guy who hasn't outgrown his mother would see in a romantic interest.

Rebuilding the structure

So, I think we are in a position to understand Don better than his creator. Abigail, the stepmother, isn't real. She's just a  caricature and not a believable character at all. Betty is really Don's mother and not his first wife. His, or my recreation of him J.A.C., has a hard time relation to women because he has all this baggage of the relationship with his mother hanging over him.

But that still leaves a puzzle. The temptation is to say that Don marries an infantile Megan and that is his fault. I don't see that. Megan's faults strike me as very much her fault and not his. She just isn't enough woman for him.

Our era doesn't see that. We blame the man for everything. 

Manly Thor's Day Special: Looking at feminism through manly eyes Pt1

As I've often joked, the worst possible thing you can do is to do a good study that comes up with inconvenient results.

You run this risk in a big way if, for example, you do a study comparing the political knowledge of different groups.  Why? Because there isn't a lot of room for questioning your methodology; it's a pretty straightforward project. And there is a good chance that those results are going to cause discomfort because, little as we like to admit this, some groups tend to do a lot better than other groups when you test them on their political knowledge. Or, to put it in a way that people really won't like, some groups tend to do a lot worse than other groups when you test them on their political knowledge.

What groups? Well, women.

In a finding sure to inflame the gender wars, research funded by the U.K. government suggests women around the world, and especially in Canada, are significantly more ignorant of current affairs and politics than men.

How very inconvenient. But facts are stubborn things.

And this result shouldn't surprise anyone who has been paying attention. Compare the good morning shows on the big networks to the evening news and you will immediately note that the morning shows, whose audience is primarily women, tend to focus a lot more on gossip, make up, fashion and other lifestyle issues than they do on politics. Over the last few decades as the media has tended to focus more and more on female readers, they have done so by increasing the amount of gossip they cover. That is why once-respectable newspapers now treat Pippa Middleton's clothing choices as serious news.

No, I don't think this is a good thing nor do I think there is nothing that can be done about it. But nothing will ever change so long as we don't acknowledge that some things are women's fault. The people responsible for the study are desperate not to do that.

The mystery of what causes this alleged knowledge gap is the “extraordinary question at the heart of this study,” said the lead author, James Curran, professor of communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, and director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre.

“I think it’s because public affairs is indeed dominated by men. It may be that there is also patriarchal bias, but it isn’t possible to determine whether reality is being distorted or whether it is merely being reflected,” he said in an interview.

He suggested three partial explanations. One is a “historical hangover” from an age when public affairs was men’s work, and women stayed home. Another is that women can be more busy than men, with less time for news. A third is that the men seem to be more prominent in current affairs, which can discourage some women from taking an interest or feeling involved.

Notice that all of those "partial explanations" treat women as helpless victims of their environment. None of them suggest that maybe the solution might be for women to stop wasting their time on tripe like women's magazines The Vagina Monologues and the like and read the political news that grown ups read instead.

Something to think about heading into the big holiday weekend

I check my stats every week and often re-read the old posts that got the most visits that week. Reading this much-read post*, I was struck by some interesting language use that I missed the first time around:

Even in research about appropriate dating behavior among adults today, “men and women both agree that men should actively pursue female partners and that women should be passive recipients to their advances,” says Jessica Carbino, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at UCLA who studies online dating and relationships.

The two modifiers I have added emphasis to are doing one heck of a lot of work distorting reality.

For starters, ask yourself what "inactive pursuit" would look like. The expression is pure jargon from bureaucrats, not unlike the expression "action plan. These expressions were created because bureaucrats are so notorious for accomplishing nothing.

But the flipside is worse. A passive recipient is someone who just stands there and takes what is dished out to them and that is neither what women do nor is it what is expected of women. Putting it so categorically allows Ms. Carbino to seriously misrepresent what is actually going on in order prop up feminist fairy tales about victimization.

In fact, playing the responsive side of courtship and sex requires a very active recipient and is an enormously difficult challenge, a fact that can be readily affirmed by simply observing how few women are much good at it.


* Much-read by my humble standards.

Sorta political: This question isn't going away

My title is the journalist's favourite threat. What it really means is, "We are going to keep asking this question because we know it's hurting you." Thus the New York Times keeps finding ways to do stories about Mormonism.

But what happens when a question that journalists wish would just go away keeps coming back? For instance, "Can women have it all?" Even if you think it's a stupid question, and I sympathize if you do, the damn thing keeps coming back and that is significant.

To really grasp what is at issue you have to scale the question back. Because the people who ask it don't really mean "have it all". What they mean is that they want personal fulfillment in three areas. And everyone knows what they are. Here, for example, is Rebecca Traister responding to the Slaughter piece that most recently asked the question that won't go away:

After all, if feminism is supposed to provide women with complete fulfillment, and allow them to have it all, then anyone who’s less than fully pleased by her lot – who works long hours, struggles to pay bills, spends more hours over dirty dishes than her mate, who’s guilty about missing her kid’s play or her business partner’s PowerPoint, who feels tugged in ways that she perceives her husband does not – is not simply experiencing firsthand the ways in which sexism, the economic divide, the wage gap and patriarchal models for public and personal life persist. She’s not even simply experiencing the human condition of dissatisfaction and yearning.

 What I want to call your attention to is the thing Traister takes for granted. Because there are a whole lot of things that might make up personal fulfillment but Traister knows that the issue is really about three things. And you can see them in that paragraph: career, children, husband.

And could I remind you that there is an even easier argument to make here than the one Traister makes. Because feminism was never supposed to be about those things. Go back and read the manifestos that early second wave feminists wrote and you'll see that none of those three things mattered very much. Career? Second wave feminists were radicals. They wanted to remake the capitalist system. Children? They wanted to free women from the sense that having children was necessary for fulfillment. Husband? Another "need" the founders of feminism wanted to free women from.

That we got to where we are was the result of a compromise: feminists needed to win women over and women weren't listening to Shulamith Firestone talking about the "dialectic of sex" and the dangers of over populating the planet and the need to free women from childbearing. So some feminists switched tactics and started listening to women and found that the sacred triumvirate of career, children and husband was what women wanted. Only not necessarily in that order!

Thus it was that feminism started focusing on changing the office, the family and marriage.

So guys, sit back and relax: this isn't our problem. We didn't create it and we can't solve it. This is a debate that women are having with other women about what fulfillment for women is and what it should be.

Again, read the Traister piece carefully and you can see that she knows this. She wants the question to go away, so she mocks the women asking it but, in so doing, inadvertently makes it clear what the question is really about:

What does “having it all” even mean? Affordable childcare or a nanny who speaks Mandarin? Decent school lunches or organic string cheese? A windowed office or a higher minimum wage? Public transportation that reliably gets you to work or a driver who will whisk you from kindergarten dropoff in time for the board meeting? Does it mean never feeling stress or guilt? Does it mean feeling satisfied all the time?

Good questions. But if you stop mocking for a moment, it will quickly become obvious that overcoming stress and guilt so they can feel satisfied is the thing that concerns most women. To make it all go away, Traister is just pulling a cheap rhetorical trick here in inflating one side to the point it seems ridiculous. "How dare you complain the caviar is too salty while other women are working for minimum wage!" Meanwhile, the woman reading her piece is actually sitting at her desk in her cubicle eating a tasteless, and slightly damp, sandwich she picked up at the place downstairs and feeling guilty that she isn't working, guilty because her child is struggling at school and she can't help her, and worrying that her husband is dissatisfied with their sex life because she is so stressed out she can't do anything more than go through the motions.

And there is the problem for feminism: affordable childcare, school lunches, minimum wage and public transit are abstract issues for the college-educated, career women who are most likely to support feminism. But feeling secure and loved, having and raising children who can also succeed, and working at a job where they will feel they are doing something productive and useful and where they feel that their work is respected by others matters a whole lot.

And all Traister can do is try to distract them by, wait for it, making them feel guilty for daring to want what they want for themselves.

It is a trap, a setup for inevitable feminist short-fall. Irresponsibly conflating liberation with satisfaction, the “have it all” formulation sets an impossible bar for female success and then ensures that when women fail to clear it, it’s feminism – as opposed to persistent gender inequity – that’s to blame.

It's irresponsible to conflate "liberation with satisfaction"? Really? Here is the question: could any sort of liberation that didn't bring satisfaction be worth it? Hey feminism, you told women that you could revolutionize their lives, do you really believe, even for a second, that they didn't take that to mean you'd enable them, as individuals, to lead more fulfilling lives?






PS: From the archives,

There is a hilarious video below of the Rolling Stones lipsynching and miming there way through a recording of Satisfaction. Watch it but listen to the lyrics carefully and ask yourself, is Mick describing a male experience or a female one? Whoops, doesn't make sense. It is obviously meant to be male but I mean is it convincingly male? Did men in 1965 worry how white their shirts could be? The ads at the time about white shirts were aimed at women not men. I think that whatever the surface meaning, the song really comes off more convincing as a description of a woman's experience. I think that is why only the Rolling Stones could have had a hit with this in 1965. A male singer whose sexuality was less ambiguous than Mick's would have come off sounding like a loser.

Do you have to be unhappy to be a feminist?

There was an interesting response in the comments this morning:

I think you have failed to understand the difference between feminine and feminist. With the way the world works against women, why wouldn't a feminist be unhappy ?

And then I read Simcha Fisher over at the National Catholic Register and found a similar sentiment:

Some women just fall naturally into their roles, and don’t think about it at all. Maybe, as off-putting as it sounds, a feminist is always someone who feels some distress or dissatisfaction with the way women are treated—someone who agitates for change.

Those are similar but not identical sentiments. Fisher's thought is softer: "some distress or dissatsifaction". (See update below as well.)

But does feminism, or any movement for justice, come from unhappiness? is it even likely?

And if you define a feminist as someone who is unhappy, doesn't it more or less have to follow that they need to sustain this unhappiness in order to remain a feminist?

In any case, defining yourself in terms of what you don't like strikes me as a recipe for, well, as a recipe for unhappiness and then more unhappiness ad infinitum. I would think that the only kind of feminist worth being is a feminist who defined feminism first in terms of what was good about being a woman and then second in terms of how society needs to change.

UPDATE: Rereading Fisher's column, I see that I missed that she arrives at a similar conclusion:

But feminism is not all about complaining and protesting. What I would like most of all is for women to ask themselves honestly, without worrying about history or politics, “What is it that I, as a woman, can do especially well? How can I help other women do what they do well?”

Which is pretty good if we add the caveat that not all women will be good at the same things.

Friday is Venus Day

People who don't know their history are _____

Fill in the blank however you'd like. I'd be inclined to say, "normal which is unfortunate".

Today's example is Michael Agger. During episode 9 of Mad Men Peggy Olson complained to a young lefty that many of the same doors that were closed to blacks were also closed to her as a woman. Agger was, well, puzzled by this:

Just one of the many ways this episode showed oblivious men expecting women to act subservient and deferential. The most surprising and curious instance of this was Peggy at the bar with Abe. He's fired up about the civil rights struggle, and Peggy replies: "Most of the things Negroes can't do, I can't do, either, and nobody seems to care." Abe finds this ridiculous and suggests, with thick sarcasm, that women should stage their own civil rights march. Of course, we know that civil rights does help lay the foundation for the women's movement, but it's fascinating to consider that a conscious guy like Abe would miss the parallels. I suppose it hasn't been in the Voice yet.

Michael Agger is apparently a senior editor at Slate. He also has a website and a Twitter account.  What he doesn't seem to have is much knowledge about the early days of second generation feminism. He thinks it unusual that a pro-civil rights guy like Abe would not have much time for the idea that women too were oppressed in 1965.

Let's set him straight. The following are all courtesy of Susan Brownmiller who has three special qualifications as a witness here. First of all, she was there on the inside of the civil rights movement and radical feminism. Second, as a radical feminist no one could accuse her of having a bias against the left. Finally, she wrote a great memoir of her time in the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s called In Our Time.

Brownmiller writes of the early feminists, "The flash point had been their second class status inside the new left ...." In other words, Abe is not surprising but a very good portrayal of a typical new leftist from the time.

Some examples of that second class status.

In 1964, Brownmiller went to Mississippi to help register black voters. Here is what happened:

The night we arrived in Meridian, a filed secretary called a meeting, asking to see the new volunteers. Proudly we raised our hands.

"Shit!" he exploded. "I asked for volunteers and they sent me white women."

Or how about this:

One evening Stokely Carmichael and a few others took a welcome break down at the dock. Camping it up, he joked, "What is the position of women in SNCC? The position of women in SNCC is prone."

Here is what happened at an attempt to introduce a women's rights motion to the full convention of the SDS:

Hoots and catcalls greeted the resolution when it was read to the full convention. New Left Notes, the SDS newsletter, mocked the women's rebellion in its next report with a cartoon of a leggy doll in polka-dot bloomers waving a placard that read WE WANT OUR RIGHTS & WE WANT THEM NOW!

At the 1968 National Conference for New Politics, Shulamith Firestone and Jo Freeman tried to put a resolution forward:

"Cool down little girl," the session chairman told her. "We have more important things to talk about than women's problems."

Anne Koedt "an idealistic socialist" and "a ten year veteran of the left' described her experience trying to get her leftist friends to take women's issues seriously,

"But when I had tried to talk about women's oppression with my other political friends, they thought I was crazy. Some man actually said to me, 'Boy, somebody must have kicked you in the head when you were little.'"

That's just one source and I didn't even use all the examples I could have from it.

Eventually, feminists would split with the left. Although they didn't know it at the time, this was a tremendous stroke of luck as the radical left was about to drive the magic bus off a cliff at the end of the 1960s.

I should note that no other political movement was any more accepting of women's issues in the 1960s. But the notion that women have some sort of natural home on the left or that it is surprising that a civil rights activist in 1965 wouldn't have immediately gotten the point is only possibly for someone who is utterly unaware of what they are talking about. Someone like Michael Agger.

Celebrating: the Patron saint of discount retail

Today is the feast day of Francis de Sales. Always the "de" and never translated as "of" for reasons that are kind of funny if you think about it. I own five books of saints and every single one of them unhesitatingly prints "Francis of Paola" but then "Francis de Sales". This says a lot about our idea of saints, and not just the way Catholics think about saints; it tells us that no one wants to suggest, even accidentally, that there might be a patron say of discounted retail prices.

Well, there ought to be and I hereby, on the basis of no legitimate authority whatsoever, add this to his patronage. Retail sales are a very good thing and the world is a better place for them. Those who hold them and those who attend them now have a patron saint.

And it seems to me, in that regard, entirely fitting that his most famous quote is: "Whoever preaches with love preaches effectively." And anyone who doubts that we live in a debased age, compare that believe with these sentiments where all distinction between moral persuasion and moral manipulation is obliterated.

In his honour, I give you this fascinating discussion:



Lots to comment on here, but for now I just want to highlight this fascinating tidbit from the above:

Ann Althouse: "It might be that there is something at a biological/sexual level with most human beings where they are more satisfied with the man in the dominant role."

Emily Bazelon: "Um, I don't now, you have to cite me some really solid study or else it is going to sound like [inaudible] baloney to me. How can we be wired for men to be in the dominant role."

Ann Althouse: "No, no, no listen to me, In. The. Actual. Sex. Act."

Emily Bazelon: "Oh, Oh I missed that part."

After which they proceed, Ms. Bazelon having no trouble accepting that possibility.

The thing that I have been highlighting in these "celebrating" posts is what has changed and what has not. In the 1980s, that discussion between two self-identified feminists was unthinkable.