Genderism is not Feminism's Fault

But There's Enough Blame for Everyone

Every once in a while, predicable as a summer drought, some bearded jackdaw swoops into twitter space cawing that “it’s all feminism’s fault,” “it’s all feminism’s fault,” or “it’s all women’s fault,” “it’s all women’s fault.”

It’s okay, we crones and witches toss our loaves and fishes in the air anyway, all day and all night – the sun never sets in twitter space – offering the Way and the Truth and Sustenance to all who suffer and are weary, jackdaws and songbirds alike.

On the one hand these critics say that transgenderism was the natural result of feminism’s claim that there was no difference between men and women. And on the other hand they say feminism created the first identity politics, which led to all the others and the queering of everything.

These seem contradictory claims. If there’s no difference, how can there be a politics of difference? If there’s no difference, imagine men as a field of yellow and women also as a field of yellow. What does anyone transition to or from, and why?

Matt Walsh was the most recent to cackle his animosity toward feminists, maybe because they pointed out his theft of women’s ideas for his movie, “What is a Woman.” Best counter-argument: women have no ideas.

I studied his proposition: feminists claimed there was no difference between women and men except for the (really insignificant) physical differences. And his conclusion: so therefore men could be women.

There’s a logical leap there equivalent to the cow jumping over the moon, and I finally realized I shouldn’t even take it seriously. It’s simple male animus toward women.

But I would like to explore the idea that women may have felt a need to make the claim that there is no difference, except the physical, between the sexes.

Does anybody remember that for thousands of years men in a variety of cultures insisted women were different than men in ways that justified enslaving them for male needs and wants?

Aristotle claimed that, unlike men, women had no souls. This would have reduced women to the level of animals, who were also regarded as soulless. It’s hard to imagine anyone could claim that the two sexes of the same species could be differentiated that much. The logical extension of that would be that humans (male) mate with animals (female), sometimes resulting in human offspring and sometimes in animal offspring.

Time and again men have claimed that it was dangerous to permit women to have the sort of education that would introduce them to ideas. Using their minds too much would affect their wombs, men said, and from there loop back to their minds to render them mad. Hysteria was a disease of the womb and because of the womb, women were too fragile to be allowed the full range of human experience. Women were to be kept relatively mindless in order to protect their reproductive capacity and their ability to serve men, raise children and maintain a home.

Feminists, even in mid twentieth century, were making a claim against a belief with a long tradition that women were lesser than men, lesser in our humanity. Men were human. Women were “not-quite.” What feminists were saying was that while our bodies might be smaller, weaker, and slower than male bodies, our minds were not.

We – I mean all animals, possibly fish, and even very possibly plants --are embodied consciousness. In humans, consciousness includes our reasoning ability, our emotions, our will, our imagination, our memory, our intuition. Feminists have argued that neither male nor female has a greater capacity, ability or scope in any of these functions. We are therefore equally human.

This was a very important claim to make and is one that we must continue to make. Because of that claim, the public world finally opened up to women in the west, in the 1960s and 1970s. We were allowed into universities and from there into workplaces and careers. From this position we can wonder what came first – the claim that women were less then human (which led to their confinement under the care of a man), or the claim that women’s place was the prison of the home under the care of a man (which led to their apparent ignorance).

In the civilizations that have left records, which have all been patriarchies – meaning the institutions, structures and laws were designed by men, from a male perspective and for the benefit of men -- men are required to compete with each other and to sort themselves into a hierarchy of good, better, best.

What would they gain by having to compete with women as well? And what would they lose? I think we are seeing very clearly, possibly for the first time, what men lose when women compete with them for knowledge, status, and rewards. They lose a lot. They lose jobs, top spots in almost every category of human endeavor, money, opportunity for advancement and – perhaps most importantly, their choice of mate from the women competing for them in the wings.

Women have proven in the last 50 years that they can be better than men in most fields of endeavor. They have proven they don’t need a man to maintain them financially. And they have proven they can choose motherhood without choosing husbands too. All of this has been very disturbing to some men. For them, their worst nightmare has come true and we are watching the multiple avenues of revenge as well as multiple avenues of adaptation.

Who would have thought that a woman’s movement exposing workplace sexual harassment would be checkmated by a male movement that claims “getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is.” 

Benjamin Boyce thinks this too is women’s fault. Who would have thought it was women’s role to tell men how and why to live?

He means this vision has worked for men. Did anyone ask women?

Women’s status as equal to men’s in terms of human potential and ability is now unarguable. Yet, there are differences between the sexes beyond the merely physical. These are personality differences, sometimes also thought of as psychological differences. How important are they? And why are a breed of social scientist – the evolutionary psychologist or biologist – so obsessed with them?

Feminists have argued that our psyches/personalities are constructed through our interaction with outside forces. They call this social conditioning, but academics like Stephen Pinker have labelled this “blank slateism.” I think this must be a strawman. Most feminists have borne and raised children, and so they know that children are not blank slates when they emerge from the womb, but come with pretty distinct proto-personalities.

Social conditioning is not a one way process, messages are not transcribed like music onto blank CDs. Imagine for a moment a dysfunctional family – the dad kicks all of his three kids (or if you prefer the mom routinely humiliates them). The three kids all respond differently, with one withdrawing, one kicking other kids in turn, one blaming the non-offending parent. The parental message has interacted with the developing personalities of living humans and altered them all, but differently.

How our personalities develop depends on how others respond to our proto-personality traits as well as how we respond to the outside world. One thing is certain – the world that girls occupy is markedly different than the world boys occupy. They may look the same, but if you think of the myriad messages boys and girls are sent as audio files, the sound boys hear is as different from the sound girls hear as Beethoven is from Joni Mitchell.

And that’s how no male is ever conditioned as a girl is. If you were subjected to acid rock, even it you hated it, even if you rejected it, you were not raised on the music of Nina Simone. And you can’t pretend you were. Even if when middle age comes, you  listen to Simone non-stop for a year, you cannot be a person whose soundscape was nothing but Simone for the first 16 years or so.

I think social conditioning is still a pretty unpopular hypothesis. “Experts” have argued within recent memory that advertising toys and candy to children is harmful and should be banned, and that watching violent video games is harmless and should be accepted. In the first case they have acknowledged that children are influenced and shaped by messages directed at them, and in the second they deny such influence or shaping.

Millions of dollars are spent by advertisers to influence people while these advertisers simultaneously claim their advertisements have no effect on people and are not responsible for human behaviour.

I think western individualism has led many of us to idolize personalities. We form personality cults, and we also lionize our own. I’ve heard so many acquaintances brag about their love of chocolate, or of stick shifts, as though it says something definitive about them, as though it’s part of their uniqueness. Never mind the fact that had they been raised in Vietnam, for example, they might not know anything about chocolate or automatic transmissions. Many of us hug our preferences to our chests, loving what they say about us.

I suspect we would like to think we emerged fully ourselves from the thigh of Zeus, like Dionysius, or from his head, like Athena, quintessentially ourselves from the moment our foot touched earth. Unchanging and unchangeable, never to be mistaken for anyone else who has ever lived. Maybe never so vulnerable as a human infant.

And I think that is the nub of it. A person under the influence of another is weak. The louder we claim to be uniquely ourselves and impervious to others, the more we deny that we were ever that weak.

We allow ourselves to be inundated with advertising – purposeful, targeted social conditioning – and claim not to be influenced by it. The same people who benefit by this denial benefit by the targeted marketing of gender ideology to children, claiming kids are not influenced by bright colours, glitter, unicorns and cartoon gingerbread people.

We buy so much when we deny that we are being sold.

It’s not a spiritual perspective, if I can use the term “spiritual” to refer to having meaning or purpose. To look for meaning in our lives invariably means aspiring to be something we apprehend we could be, but are not yet. Becoming that requires undoing some of what we are and transcending some of what we are to find something we might call “wholeness.”

It is in part a psychological journey and the best resource that I have found is not in a feminist text, but in a psychotherapeutic work.  Therapists know they have to help survivors of childhood abuse, for example, face the specific details both of the abuse and of their responses to it. In the 1980s and 90s there was a lot of talk about the “scripts” we carry in our heads and how to change them.

But the field of evolutionary biology/psychology is hard at work trying to find elements of our personality that are coded in our genes, a result of evolutionary improvement. Watching Gad Saad in conversation with Jordan Peterson on his Youtube channel recently I heard evolutionist Saad complaining about why people don’t believe evolutionary psychology instead of social conditioning is responsible for who we are.

Then he remarked to Peterson – it seemed a non sequitur -- that if you want to know everything about a woman’s sexuality all you have to do is study romance novels. They’re all the same, he said, there’s an alpha man – superior in physique, intellect, finance and breeding – who is reckless and needs to be healed by the love of one good woman.

Peterson nodded sagely, “ah yes, the beauty and the beast archetype.”

Well, if we’re going to use the junk entertainment churned out and marketed to women as evidence of innate female psychology, then surely we also have to look there to find evidence of innate male sexuality. I could say everything we need to know about male sexuality is visible in the porn they watch. It’s all the same, one or more men viciously attack a young woman or adolescent, spitting contempt on her, until he orgasms.

I don’t see how breaking down a young women so that she is unfit for purpose after two or three years is an evolutionary strategy. Nor do I see how chasing after reckless men to save them with your love is an evolutionary strategy for females. Can men not see this?

Both these behaviours and the attitudes that prompt them are most easily accounted for as pathological responses to some form of abuse or neglect or negative messaging. To call them part of our evolutionary heritage is to truck in mystical essences that seem awfully similar to the mystical essence of “gender”, unprovable and unfalsifiable.

When I was in school, my teachers told me genes control biology, not behaviour. If behaviour, or the attitudes that guide behaviour, are genetically programmed, then humans have much less free will than we like to think. Women are doomed to agreeability regardless of the danger that might put them in, men are doomed to risk-taking even if it leads to high accidental death rates.

As innate qualities they’re unchangeable and no one can do more than shrug. We just have to accept a certain amount of male violence and a certain amount of female self-destructiveness. Oh well. So who benefits from this belief? Those who might otherwise feel a responsibility to enact societal change.

I wonder if, among other motivations (huge profits, misogyny, sexual fetishism) genderism is actually a reaction against the self-care, recovery and therapeutic movements of the eighties and nineties.

I remember when everyone gave up alcoholic spirits in favour of a glass of white wine, took up jogging and founded health food stores. A desire for self-improvement was in the air. Self-help books filled the bookshelves and finally incest was revealed as the pervasive harm that it is. An unnerving predilection on the part of scout leaders, priests, music directors and athletic coaches for sexually abusing boys came to light. A growing therapeutic movement developed eclectic techniques from gestalt, art therapy, family dynamics therapy, EMDR and focusing. Returning soldiers were diagnosed with dissociative disorders and then survivors of childhood abuse were understood to have the same set of adaptations. That explained a lot. If outright cures were not in order, much mitigation was possible.

People were taking responsibility for their lives. Maybe they couldn’t stop others from hurting them, but they were the only ones who could reclaim themselves from the wreckage. Some feminists objected, asserting that society in general was the cause, and society was responsible for fixing it. But damaged women don’t engage in politics – they self harm, they struggle just to survive, or they succumb. Politics can’t cure the psyche, but it can and should prevent the damage.

Genderism seems simultaneously an extension of the “take charge of your life” ethos and a parody of it. It grants children the authority and autonomy to diagnose their “unhappiness disorder” and choose the “cure.” This is an abdication of societal responsibility. The cure turns out to be just another symptom, but instead of helping the child to overcome, society now demands that everyone conspire to placate the damaged child. We all have to change, not to prevent such damage, but to maintain an illusion that there is no damage. That’s the politics of genderism.

Boys and girls are not that much different in how they deal with suffering. Boys tend to act outwardly and girls tend to act inwardly. That just doesn’t seem as important as understanding that they are reactions to suffering, and working to lessen the ways we harm the young to allow all of us to achieve our full potential, our full human potential, which anyone, male or female, has in abundance.

So who is to blame? All who have created a world where we are told happiness is within our grasp and failure to take it is a personal fault. All who allowed American imperialism to grow to monstrous proportions after the collapse of its rival – genderism is an imperial project. All who allowed pornography to saturate the “airways” because “kids aren’t affected by what they experience.” All who reduced rape to a minor misdemeanour. All who turned a blind eye to the excesses of the wealthy. All who gave their children over to the predation of the marketplace because it was easier than parenting them. All those who told girls they didn’t quite count as much as boys, and all those who told boys they could easily be emasculated.

All those who created a society whose collective nervous system is stretched so tight that people alternate frantically between excess stimulation and oblivion. All those who deny we live in a tightly woven web of interconnection where what affects one affects all. All those who shrug their shoulders and say “live and let live” because they don’t want to differentiate good from evil.­­

We are living in times when all of us, male and female, are all being told not to think. Thinking is dangerous. Don’t strain your pretty little head, or you might find yourself judging, and you can’t do that!

God forbid we should judge what’s good and evil, right or wrong, male or female. Better to stay ignorant and obedient children in a pretend paradise.

Mindlessness is the safest way to be.

Requiem for the Corpse of History