What can no longer be pretended

In my previous post, I wrote about the conversion of Tony Blair's sister-in-law, Lauren Booth, to Islam. There was a lot of thought provoking commentary on the story, both at this site and elsewhere. Over at The Thinking Housewife, Laura Wood made this interesting argument:

My guess is that she sought to embrace God in socially acceptable form. She might have lost more friends if she had become a pious Christian than a pious Muslim. She did not risk social annihilation, not in the self-annihilating, anti-Christian Europe of today.

And at View from the Right, Sage McLaughlin wrote an excellent comment (worth reading in full), in which he argued that women like Lauren Booth were becoming wearied by aspects of the liberalism they subscribed to:

the real fantasy that is wearying to them right now is the desolating and exhausting make-believe world offered by liberalism. What they cannot forever pretend to accept is the universal sameness of all peoples (contradicted both by reason and by daily experience), the lack of differences between men and women that matter socially (ditto), the impossibility of miracles, and a self-created multiverse of cosmic exiles, estranged in essence and locked in their own drab mental prisons impervious to the liberating expansiveness of real transcendence. Nothing could be more pathologically masculine than such an oppressively abstract wonderland, at odds with women's natural desires and so hostile to the natural bonds of family and community.

There's evidence for what Sage McLaughlin asserts in a few of Lauren Booth's newspaper columns. For instance, Lauren Booth moved with her family some years ago to the French countryside in order to enjoy the lifestyle. But it turned out badly.

In part, this was because she felt the loss of connection, as Sage McLaughlin puts it, "to the natural bonds of community":

We have become part of the statistics of the boredom and loneliness that expats with limited French can experience, even as they portray themselves as having that ‘dream life’ in the sun.

She also felt the loss of connection to her own family. She spent years commuting to England to work whilst her husband stayed home with their daughters. It was an arrangement which bred mutual resentment:

I have been the partner who earns a living, continuing to travel back and forth to the UK ... With bank accounts in two countries, a partner with no income and the turbulence of both the financial and the job market to take into consideration, I needed to be a fiscal pedant to get the books right. I never trained as an accountant.

Soon I was feeling disjointed, neither able to pursue career choices in the UK fully, nor be a constant part of either my children’s lives nor my husband’s friendships locally. We were soon in trouble. With the banks. With the taxman. And with our marriage...

Last year, in secret, Craig went to see a lawyer. He was told that as I worked away from the home, he would get the house, the kids, a cut of my income – everything – in a divorce.

...I don’t know what the future holds, only that the time has come for me to put my children’s need to be close to me at all times before our love of la vie en rose.

It's also true that Lauren Booth feels uncomfortable with the growing ladette culture in the UK. She has complained that ladette culture,

tells young women that being female means less than being a male.

And here’s the crux of the matter, the very heart of why more and more young women ape the worst excesses of some men: if mothers don’t hail the attributes of being a woman to our daughters then why shouldn’t those daughters aspire to be young men instead?

By female attributes, or social mores, I mean that we have it in our genes to be ‘the gentler sex’.

That playing with dolls leads to caring about how we dress, that by encouraging our daughters’ interest in neighbours’ babies (and good old babysitting) we also encourage the gentler aspects of a girl’s character.

Oh how unfashionable! What next, eye-fluttering and giggling? Well, why not? In British culture, sexual competitiveness has replaced mutual respect. So why aspire to something so ultimately self-defeating as sameness?

How tragic that being a young woman is significant for many girls only because by baring their flesh they can use this to win male attention.

France, where I live with my daughters, is not (yet) experiencing the same level of teen-girl violence. I watch in fascination as my daughters Alex and Holly, aged eight and six, behave differently when they speak French than they do English.

They tilt their heads and a little smile that can best be described as coquettish (in its most innocent form) plays on their lips. In English they are blunt, bold and straightforward.

This may just be a language-based social tic. Except that what they are learning at school is undoubtedly how to be young ladies. Here, you see, girls are both consciously and unconsciously encouraged to be coy, polite and ‘coquinne’ (cute).

We can all cringe at these words but bigger values seem to hide just behind them. This idea of femininity means that girls are considered as worth protecting, by society and their male peers.

...Girl violence comes from self-loathing and insecurity. No happy, stable human being gets a ‘kick’ out of harming another. Girls who carry out such attacks have been brutalised by society. The message in UK schools and beyond is this: be the same, to be different is to be the ‘weaker’ sex, fight for your rights.

I will fight for something a little different. I want my girls to be ... girls.

Now, that could have been written by a traditionalist, rather than by a woman who has devoted much of her life to the left.

I think we should be encouraged by this. It shows the possibility, as Sage McLaughlin wrote in his comment, of women becoming wearied by the liberal fantasy of making gender not matter.

Unfortunately, Lauren Booth chose to respond to her feelings of loss of community, of womanhood and of transcendence by turning to a non-Western tradition. But her case does show how individuals can turn, how they can weary of what liberalism offers and seek alternatives.