“How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being?”
The most common thing people ask me (well, maybe second, after “how do you pronounce your name?”)[1] is how I can be both a conservative and a feminist. The shortest answer is Freud over Marcuse. I’m an inveterate contrarian, but Amanda at Pandagon comes surprisingly (if hyperbolically) close to summing it up:
The patriarchy, while being unfair, is the only way we have to maintain civilization itself, and without it, we’ll descend into anarchy with people killing each other in the streets. It’s a tad unfortunate that women’s ambitions, rights, and very souls have to be destroyed to maintain the system, and that even men, no matter how unwilling, have to be forced to uphold this oppressive form of masculinity that can destroy the bodies and spirits of gender non-conforming men, but we all have to make sacrifices to keep society going, don’t we?
The sort of patriarchy I oppose is the porn culture embodied by Sex Week, the idea that women are best considered to be sex objects. The sort of patriarchy that involves drawing distinctions between men and women is fine; the male dominance this entails is unavoidable. (This is why a recognition of privilege is so vital for conservatives. If we aren’t trying to destroy power imbalances, we have to recognize their full extent.)
Society requires the repression of certain instincts and desires. Freud’s critique is that society often represses more than it needs to: “if civilization imposes such great sacrifices not only on man’s sexuality but on his aggressivity, we can understand better why it is hard for him to be happy in that civilization.” Society doesn’t need to destroy women’s “ambitions, rights, and very souls” for its survival. Ambitions must be shaped and rights must be balanced with duties, but society makes our souls more human.
Of course, contemporary constructions of gender can be immensely damaging (e.g., pressure for men to repress any emotion besides anger). The solution, though, is not to create a non-repressive civilization, but to transgress, subvert, and reform our own traditions so that we repress the bad and nurture the good. A fair way of doing it would be nice, and is certainly something we should strive for — but we mustn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
[1] The emphasis is on the first syllable: ‘nik e le. (WordPress refuses to show a schwa.)
Marcuse and Amanda Marcotte? Ugh. I really, really hope that I don’t sound like them.
On a different note, it seems like this kind of feminism only actually differs in the world of theory, not of policy, yes? Still down with paid family leave, non-discrimination, access to contraception and all those good things?
Generally, yes. The thing is that the intellectual justifications we use for our policy options — our theory — inform more than the policy debate. They constitute our value system, so using Marcusian arguments for access to contraception bleeds over into all our other conversations. Policy requires you to work with people you agree with on conclusions but have radically different premises, and those premises can — in small but cumulative ways — poison the very premises that brought you to your conclusions in the first place.
cool you saytik! Write more!