Have you ever met a vegan who had really nice leather seats in her car? I knew one, and her obsession with ethical food purity paired with a commitment to lavish luxury and the height of comfort was deliciously absurd. It’s the kind of contradiction that can bring you to tears of laughter at the sheer incomprehensibility. Recently, a reader sent an email pointing out my own glaring contradiction.
Dina writes that after sifting through the archive “an unfortunate theme emerged that you might not be aware of.” Sounds ominous, precisely the kind of unwitting self-revelation that would cause one to hide happily behind the anonymity of ghostwriting and leave the world of personal opinion well alone.
Dina claims that the theme is “Rage. And ill-logic. And it becomes clear that anti-feminist rage is as unbecoming, dangerous, and incoherent as modern feminist rage.”
She rightly criticizes my flippant remark about Alice Von Hildebrand’s career in philosophy when, in fact, Von Hildebrand was rejected and hampered in her scholarship by overt sexism. Having read Von Hildebrand’s “Memoirs of a Happy Failure” years ago this is something I dimly recalled. When constructing an argument, isn’t the devil always in the details?
My critic also took exception with my discussion of Shirley Jackson’s marriage. She wrote: “You make excuses for the suffering of Shirley Jackson that are GROSS.” Shirley Jackson’s marriage was quite gross, but was my discussion? More on that later.
Finally, to give you the crux of my correspondent’s point: “You claim somewhere else that all that was ever needed for talented women to excel is excellence and drive, and proceed to name the scant instances in a overview of every culture where a woman made a mark. “
Right off the bat, we should clear up some confusion: These articles are not an orderly, well-thought-out scholarly argument; this website is no dissertation of decided opinion. If you like something focused, reasoned, restrained, and orderly, I direct you to the works of philosopher Carrie Gress and others who have made a legitimate career of researching and thoughtfully responding.
I am a mere hobbyist. The absurd novel “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman” by Laurence Sterne pokes fun at the “hobby horses” of all the various characters, their obsessive fixations that color all of their life experiences. Despite an attempt at detached impartiality, my own hobby horses are unfortunately evident throughout.
These posts are, as I explained to Dina, stream-of-consciousness field notes, often unedited, that are meant for working out ideas and experiencing the thrill of trying to say something worth saying. Afterall, whether in the words of Flannery O’Connor (“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”) or Joan Didion (“I don’t know what I think until I write it down.”), the sentiment is the same: If you want to sort out an idea, try to write it down and you’ll find the mess of illogic and personal deficiencies that ever impede our thinking and living on this Earth but which most of the time we can comfortably ignore.
First, a couple of specific notes: Were Alice Von Hildebrand and countless other women rejected and disadvantaged for no other reason than being women? The undeniable answer is yes. As I wrote elsewhere:
There are men who are downright rude to women evidently simply because they are women. Men of an older generation who refuse to refer to accomplished professional women as anything other than their first name, men who presume that women are incapable of a wide range of skills simply because they are women, and there are loads of other examples of some men being rude or condescending.
It is offensive—and is meant to be—when a man refers to a credentialed medical doctor exclusively by her first name alone or, even worse, only “Sweetie.” It is discriminatory when women receive less space in the laboratory when they pull in equal funding and are conducting research of equal or superior quality. Instances like these demonstrably happened and still happen, though at a markedly reduced frequency. Was the precise reason for this decrease feminism? I remain unconvinced. Increasing openness in many institutions to the work of women is not necessarily an indication that feminism gets the credit.
Has feminism ever convinced a sexist person to stop being mean and discriminatory? How do we understand the relationship between the sexes if not through our personal relationships? Our mothers are the people who first teach us what it is to be a woman; our fathers demonstrate manliness or lack-there-of; our sibling and schoolyard squabbles and perceived unfairness show us how the sexes interact; our spousal relationships with their joys, all their pain and insecurity, and fleeting moments of bliss affect the way we view all men and women.
It’s through personal relationships that we can experience a real change in the way we see the world; I question to what extent political messaging and manipulative social engineering can accomplish this. That’s an unsatisfying contention in a world that likes large-scale social engineering and global change, but it does seem to be the way of human nature.
As individuals adopt a more inclusive vision of an institution based on the personal relationships they have, there will be fewer overt barriers to women. This is, in many respects, positive. It is not positive when untethered inclusiveness leads to seeking out women to fill a gender quota. That kind of reverse-engineering is opposed to the flourishing of men, women, and the institutions that make up our society.
More fundamentally, feminism in most of its expressions makes the claim that equal treatment of men and women is necessary because there are no meaningful differences between men and women. For this reason, I am not an “anti-feminist,” as my correspondent suggests, but I am, shall we say, “pro-reality.” It has been my lived experience, like countless multitudes before me, to observe that there are, on average, noticeable and significant differences between men and women, and many individuals and societies flourish when we acknowledge them.
There are plenty of examples of “anti-feminists” defining differences between the sexes in such stark and in-human modes that the results of their widely broadcast personal lives are as ridiculous as their feminist counterparts. I don’t devote time to critiquing “anti-feminist icons,” because they don’t exist. This remains a fringe opinion for the time being and has not had lasting cultural influence—yet. Whilst cleaning and engaged in Advent preparations this week I did spend some time with the videos of the bombastically named content creator “Fundie Fridays.” The personality behind this “snark” channel is warm, personable, funny and, frankly, has good points about the lunacy of many anti-feminists. Utterly charming until there’s a big fundraiser for murdering babies in the womb. So, if you want critiques of the anti-feminists and can handle incessant abortion fundraising, head there.
Back to the main issue: I contend that young women today are not forever beholden in a great debt of gratitude to the feminists who went before. The goal of feminism, as sane and measured people like Dr. Gress note, has always been to remake society. That’s a dangerous game. Just as overhauling the food supply has historically led to mass starvation, fundamentally changing the structure of the family and the roles of men and women can come with unhappy and deleterious results.
A note on Shirley Jackson’s marriage. As I wrote to Dina, “I still do not see Shirley Jackson’s marriage as suffering from misogyny, but—like many we have all been unfortunate to witness—suffering from serious disorders in both spouses. I find it unhelpful to interpret people’s marital problems as class struggles when, in fact, vice and enabling in both people is what contributes to mutual misery. I’m not a Shirley Jackson scholar; I obviously did not know the woman in person. Even if I had had the opportunity to meet her, I could not know the secret core of her marriage as every marriage is unknowable to those outside. I will say, many men like Stanley are now committed feminists and behave in equally vile ways. Many women are now overtly ‘empowered’ yet are still crippled by the lack of self-esteem that keeps them servilely committed to such men. Perhaps I failed utterly to articulate it, but I think there is a more interesting and timeless dynamic than ‘society allowed men to be jerks.’ The Fall is the root, but I don’t think feminism is necessarily the answer.”
I bring this up because I’ve written several times about the dangers of the feminist man. If feminism were the solution to unequal power dynamics in marriage, why has a full half-century of mainstream feminism made the power dynamic in so many relationships so much worse? Answer: maybe it doesn’t work.
Now, to the heart of Dina’s critique: On the one hand, I proclaim a commitment to St. Josemaria Escriva’s exhortation: “Your life, your work, should never be negative, nor anti anything. It is — it must be! — positive, optimistic, youthful, cheerful and peaceful.”
And yet, given the least opportunity I cannot resist the urge to skewer a hardline feminist or an unfortunate feminist icon with an eating disorder. That is quite a contradiction! Pace my thoughtful reader who took the time to write in, I do not feel “rage.” I demonstrate plenty of illogic, I will grant you, but it is not rage that motivates me. What I object to are the unhelpful ideas of unhappy people, especially when such people are engaged in a campaign to persuade people to adopt their bad ideas.
Should we be sensitive to an individual woman who clearly suffered an obsessive and disordered relationship with food? Of course, but if the woman is Helen Gurley Brown and she used a highly influential women’s periodical and published books to promote her own eating disorder and encourage women to debase themselves with promiscuity, her ideas should be resoundingly ridiculed because they are bad ideas.
Likewise, if someone tries to suggest that a line for the women’s restroom at a sports stadium is an injustice demonstrating the oppression of the female sex just as is the violent rape of women in rural India forced to defecate in fields because of a total lack of indoor plumbing, her ideas are unhinged. These bathroom-related phenomena are not the same, and if your ideology drives you to see them as such, your ideas should be laughed at.
Where does ridiculing someone’s deeply held personal beliefs spillover into overt personal animosity? That’s sometimes difficult to discern, more difficult than you might think, especially for women for whom, as Edith Stein rightly notes, identify deeply with ideas, people, and possessions related to them.
I maintain that humor, however hard it is to strike the right balance, is the proper response to the current stage of feminism, whatever “wave” we are now on. Was there some pure form of original feminism that was just about grave injustices against women and ensuring that every woman got the vote? I have yet to see it.
How else but with humor are you supposed to respond to a woman who forbids the man taking her on a date from using the term “crushing it” because she finds it a triggering instance of patriarchal language that cannot be tolerated…all while expecting said date to pay for her meal. That should make us laugh! How are you supposed to respond to the enlightened careerist who encourages other women to demand everything that they have ever wanted from work and family life, interrogating all societal norms, but informs followers that the book “Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters” is meant to hold women back and make them feel bad and they shouldn’t bother reading it. Literally judging a book by its cover: that is hilarious!
I invited Dina and I invite anyone else interested in the relationship of motherhood, virtue, life, and art to write a guest post addressing any of the issues herein or related. I would be delighted to consider thoughtful pieces.
There are lots of interesting opinions out there. Can we salvage feminism as some kind of anti-discrimination philosophy without all the baggage? There are thinking women who take this stance. On the other hand, I have met women who claim they are not grateful for the right to vote and would prefer never again to be summoned for jury duty and find personal property overrated. I’ve met women who are “not into politics” and have never voted because they assume their vote would just duplicate their husband’s (as if this is a bad thing). There are a great many opinions out there beyond “be a feminist or be oppressed.” If you’d like to share one, contact me here.
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