Orbiting ourselves vs being needed

I saw the following post on social media and thought it worthwhile recording it here. It describes, I think, a type of archetypal experience that we have as men and women.

It reminded me of a passage I read years ago from a biography of Alice James, the sister of the novelist Henry James. She lived alone as a spinster. In 1889, she was visited by her brothers:

As the three of them sat and talked, as they exchanged memories and opinions, the afternoon became for Alice a soul-quickening experience wherein the family itself seemed to come richly back into being, a revived and reintegrated presence. Her isolation was overcome for the moment by the sense of being once again a surrounded and nourished member of that family.

When her brothers left, Alice was plunged again into solitude:

she confessed with bleak clarity that she could never allow it to be "anything else than a cruel and unnatural fate for a woman to live alone, to have no one to care and 'do for' daily is not only a sorrow but a sterilizing process."

As the "Feminist Turned Housewife" points out, modern liberal culture is pushing people toward this kind of solitude. In part, this is because the aim of life is held to be a freedom defined as maximal individual autonomy. This assumes that we can develop solo, outside of relationships with others, and that stable relationships can be sacrificed to autonomous choice.

Another reason is that the dynamic described in the post, one in which the man feels that his masculine qualities and efforts are needed by his family, and the woman feels that her feminine nurturing presence is needed, requires higher aspects of our nature to be successfully maintained. We have drifted a long way from a concept of virtue, of cultivating the higher qualities of our nature. Instead, there is an ethos of "empowerment" in which we are encouraged to act in any direction we choose, without negative judgement, as long as we uphold the same right for others. In this modern ethos, it is assumed that individuals are pursuing their own wants and desires, and therefore rejecting the idea of service to others.

And so there is little concept of a common good of family life that a man and a woman might deliberately seek to uphold. After all, for men to commit to the role described in the post, they would need to have some confidence that their wife would be both loyal and appreciative (and, also, to have some level of respect for him as a man). The wife, for her part, would need some confidence that she would be loved and supported, and that the man would use his position within the family for the good of its members (i.e., that he really would achieve a strength and steadiness in his presence within the family).

This represents a mission for both the husband and wife, one that tests their character and their commitment to the higher goods of family life. And it requires that both spouses deliberately orient themselves to this mission, rather than one alone.

It can be done, because it is such a deeply embedded aspect of our natures as men and women. But it's not easily done within the current cultural frame. 

Mixed messages

You are probably aware that there are two very different takes on the recent Barbie movie. There are some on the right, like Michael Knowles, who think the message of the film is terrific. There is a scene toward the end of the film in which Barbie rejects having a relationship with Ken and tells him that he is enough as he is, but also that he has to find out who he is outside of any relationship with her.

Knowles interprets this in a red pill way. Given that all of the men in the film are shown as simps, who live only for validation from the women, he thinks this is Barbie telling Ken that he is not fit for relationships until he is his own mental point of origin, as the manosphere puts it. For Knowles, the message is that Ken needs to be more masculine, and stronger in his own frame.

This is plausible, but I don't think it is what Gerwig is aiming at. I am on the other side of the fence - I think Barbie is an unabashedly feminist film and that Gerwig believes that problems within feminism can be resolved by men and women going their own way. As I'll demonstrate in a moment, this is the message that at least some feminist women are taking from the film.

There are two problems within feminism that the film seeks to resolve by uncoupling Ken and Barbie. The first is equality. The philosophy of the film is that we have been created without any given ends and that therefore we have to make meaning for ourselves. And this then means that the power to have our self-chosen purposes and ends realised in society becomes critical. Power, though, is a zero sum game. If men have more of it, women have less of it and vice versa. In the film, this is shown as "either/or" - either the men have power or the women do.

So how, then, do you have equality? One way is to do what modern society formally does, and insist on levelling down any power structures. For instance, if white people have more power in a traditionally white society in the sense of dominating its cultural expression, then this has to be deconstructed, whereas the cultural expression of minority groups has to be supported and promoted.

There is something of a nod to this solution in the film, in the idea that the Kens must become activists to gradually improve their position, just as women must do in the real world. Still, the pursuit of power remains a zero sum game, in which whatever women gain, men must lose. And Gerwig believes that at this social level, men must lose. 

So how does someone who sees the world through a modern frame resolve this? How should men respond to a world view based on a zero sum game in which they are slated to lose out? Gerwig says that there is a positive side to feminism for both men and women, one in which both have equal status. And that is that both sexes can equally act as autonomous individuals, shaping their own meaning, via solo development, without regard to the other sex. The Kens can do this just as much as the Barbies can. If each sex goes its own way, their own self-generated life aims can be pursued, without imposing on the other. There is no more reliance on the other sex, no more enmeshing, and therefore no loss of power to pursue our aims.

A feminist mother (Wendy Hahn) took her 15-year-old son to the Barbie movie so that he would absorb exactly this message. She wrote:

In 2023, I am fighting to raise a son who doesn’t become the next Kyle Rittenhouse, Brock Turner or Elon Musk.

Movies, like books, invite dialogue. As a former high school English teacher, I wish all teachers would assign their students to watch “Barbie” in place of summer reading selections like “The Grapes of Wrath.” 

....in the end, Stereotypical Barbie tells Ken to get a life that doesn’t depend on others for happiness ― a life that gives him equal status without infringing upon the status of anyone else. I want that for your sons and my son as well.

The idea is that we can all have "equal status" if we don't "depend on others for happiness". In the context of the film, this means men and women going their own way. The purposes or ends in life no longer revolve around marriage. There is a sacrifice of love for the empowerment to fulfil our own individual ends.

That this is Gerwig's intention is suggested by the fact that her next film has a similar message. Gerwig wrote the screenplay for the upcoming film Snow White. It stars Gal Gadot and Rachel Zegler. An interview with these two actresses went as follows:

Interviewer: You said you were bringing a modern edge to it. What do you mean by that?
Rachel Zegler: I just mean that it's no longer 1937. We absolutely wrote a Snow White that...

Gal Gadot: She's not going to be saved by the prince.

Rachel Zegler: She's not going to be saved by the prince and she's not going to be dreaming about true love. She's dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.

There is a sacrifice of love for power (I am not endorsing the Disney version of "true love" here). Marital love is sacrificed for girl power. The two are set against each other, as they have been within feminism for over a century.

The one exception to this messaging in the Barbie film is that there is some support for the mother/daughter relationship. I expect that this is because there is no zero sum game involved here (mothers, it is said in the film, help launch their high flying daughters into society).

The other problem within feminism that the film tries to resolve is that of cognitive dissonance. Women, we are told in the film, are oppressed because they have to walk a tightrope, for instance, by being thin but not too thin. The kinds of examples given are not all that persuasive: they do not seem, for instance, any more difficult than men having to be bold in approaching women, but not too bold.

However, feminism has, in fact, created significant areas of cognitive dissonance for women. For instance, if the aim is to attain power, then the traditionally feminine qualities will seem lesser than the traditionally masculine ones. So women need to have masculine traits and dial down their feminine presentation to other women, but still retain enough femininity that they will not make themselves entirely unattractive to men. 

Similarly, women who are brought up in a modern feminist culture will absorb from an early age the idea that their role is to assert their own power against that of men. However, this conflicts with the feminine impulse women have to "let go" and be receptive for the right man when it comes to forming relationships with the opposite sex. It is difficult, in other words, for women to have a boss babe mentality and still successfully pair bond with a man.

The film does try to put forward the idea that women can be leaders and still have something of the feminine left in them, but even so you have to imagine that many women who take feminism seriously will have a considerable burden of cognitive dissonance. In my observation, there are many feminists who do not walk the tightrope successfully - they don't come across to men as sufficiently feminine and so the men look elsewhere for partners.

One way to resolve this cognitive dissonance is simply to downgrade the significance of relationships in human life. If relationships don't matter that much, then some of the burden is relieved.

What all this illustrates is how important the intellectual frame is. Imagine if the frame was different. Let's say, for instance, that the masculine and the feminine were thought of as meaningful goods that the individual gets to embody. If these are fully realised within a relationship with the opposite sex, then there exists a common good for men and women to serve, i.e. our own individual good is tied together with a larger, communal good. The focus would shift away from competing for power with the opposite sex. What would matter instead would be the way we order ourselves toward this higher good. The questions to be focused on might be how I as a man can best embody the masculine through my role as a husband or a father, or how I as a woman might best express the feminine through my role as a wife or a mother.

Reframing Barbie

I have now seen the Barbie movie. It is not a children's film, but deals with issues of the meaning of life from a feminist perspective. It is useful to look at because it connects feminist politics with a modern metaphysics - and we get to see what is lost in the process.

I do need to set out the basic plot to explain this (so...spoiler alert). We begin in Barbie land which is a matriarchy where not only do the Barbies rule politically, but the Kens (the male dolls) are merely accessories. The Kens try to impress the Barbies but the Barbies aren't that interested, as every night is girls night.

Then Barbie is afflicted with an existential angst and is forced to go to the real world (where humans live). Barbie had expected to be greeted there as a heroine who had empowered women; instead, the patriarchy still rules. Ken loves that he gets some respect in the real world and returns to Barbie land to set up a patriarchy of his own. Barbie gets to meet her creator in the real world, and then returns to Barbie land with a mother, Gloria, and her daughter. Together they attempt to restore the matriarchy.

The best place to begin in analysing the film is with the metaphysics. Barbie's creator (a God figure) tells Barbie that "I created you so you wouldn't have an ending", i.e. that there are no ends or purposes to her life, but that she must choose for herself what she will be and do. The assumption in the film is that there is no given meaning to things, none given by a creator, so that everything is made up by ourselves and that we as humans subjectively create our own meaning and purpose.

This is the essential frame through which all else follows. What you see in the film is how some things, once thought to be a core aspect of being human, radically lose meaning within this frame.

This is particularly true of relationships between men and women. Some reviewers complained that the film was man-hating. I didn't find this to be so, not directly at least. The men are nearly all well-intentioned. The problem is that they are portrayed as entirely superfluous in the lives of women. They exist not only as a potential threat to women's autonomy and agency, but even more so as irritating figures who get in the way of women in their daily lives, i.e. who are merely tolerated. There is one husband portrayed in the film (Gloria's), but he is like a third wheel to the mother/daughter relationship, and he brings no meaning or purpose to their lives.

Similarly, at the end of the film Barbie rejects having a relationship with Ken. She tells him that he has to find meaning not in relationship with her but on his own. She effectively tells him that he must go his own way, and that he is enough by himself.

It is a savagely cold message but it makes sense within the frame. If we are to aim at maximising our autonomy, understood to mean our freedom to self-define, because this is how we assert meaning, then relationships are merely limiting. We are most autonomous when we develop solo, outside of relationships with others. Hence, love is rejected in the Barbie movie, for the sake of empowerment.

Imagine if the frame was different. For most of the Western tradition, love was thought to connect us meaningfully to higher goods and purposes and was therefore worth cultivating. Similarly, to truly develop who we are as men and women, it was once thought that we would do this in relationship with each other, as husbands and wives and fathers and mothers within a family, as a natural setting for human life. A significant regard was attached to fatherhood and motherhood to the point that it was possible, for instance, to speak of maternal honour.

Relationships are regarded in the Barbie film as just meaningless flummery. In Ken's patriarchy, the men are romantic and want to help the Barbies by demonstrating masculine competence. The Barbies are happy, admire the Kens and do little things for them like bringing them beer. But the female role is to be something like a "bimbo" that does not engage the higher nature of the women (a merely "helpful decoration" as the film puts it). When matriarchy is restored, Barbie triumphantly says that the women once again have "brains and autonomy". Again, this only makes sense within the modern feminist frame. In the older frame, relationships had a significance that would ask of both men and women something of the best within their natures - it was a field of human life that would justify giving the best of ourselves to those whom we loved. There was, potentially, a nobility to this kind of love.

Which brings us to motherhood. The film is conflicted here. Early on, motherhood is given a drubbing. The film shows little girls rejecting motherhood by bashing their baby dolls on the ground. The narrator dismisses the idea that women experience motherhood as a worthwhile thing. Throughout the film what matters is women holding political power or judicial power or winning prizes for science or journalism. However, in the real world, Gloria is just an ordinary woman with a boring office job and for her the relationship with her daughter does matter. Gloria's love for her daughter is perhaps the one human touch in the entire film. Later, we are told that mothers do have a purpose, which is to launch their high flying feminist daughters into the world. There is nothing said about women who might end up with sons instead.

Why are there mixed messages here when it comes to motherhood? I'm not sure. Perhaps the one last bastion of human love in this feminist world is a purely female one between mother and daughter that has as its ultimate purpose female empowerment. 

Another difficult message in the film is that of equality. Within the feminist frame there is no common ground between men and women. There is no mutual service to a family or nation, nor do men and women fulfil aspects of their own created nature in relationship with the opposite sex. What there is instead is a pursuit of empowerment so that we might get to follow our own autonomous will. This, however, is a zero sum game. If men have power to set the world to their own desires, women lose power and vice versa. This is part of the basic plot of the movie. There is either male supremacy (Ken land) or female supremacy (Barbie land). One side has to win or lose.

The film tries to take the moral high ground by suggesting that each sex might gradually fight for and win political rights within these systems. The film also asserts that equality can be achieved by the Kens accepting, just like the Barbies, that they don't need the opposite sex and that they can be self-defining autonomous agents just like the women. It is somewhat radical for the film to suggest this, as feminists usually assert that men already have this power. The film is conceding that men are more likely to still want to uphold a pre-modern ideal of the sexes being in relationship with each other. Equality is possible, according to the Barbie film, if both sexes go their own way.

But there is another problem with equality. Barbie decides, at the end of the film, that what she really wants, even at the cost of becoming mortal, is to become a person so that she can be one of the makers/creators instead of one of those being acted on. What this illustrates is that the feminist frame is necessarily elitist rather than egalitarian. Most people are not going to wield power in society - they are not going to be part of the elite who get to move things according to their will. The film is honest enough to concede this in the character of Gloria, who is an exploited office worker who does not even have enough time to go on a vacation with her daughter. In other words, the kind of power that the feminist frame suggests will allow us to make meaning will be illusory for most people. There will be a tiny number of winners at the top, but most will be losers.

There is another confusion that arises here. On the one hand, we are supposed to rise to a godlike status of being makers/creators who thereby infuse meaning into existence - a kind of Nietzschean Übermensch:

For Nietzsche, the Übermensch is...a being who is able to be their own determiner of value; sculpt their characteristics and circumstances into a beautiful, empowered, ecstatic whole; and fulfil their ultimate potential to become who they truly are.

However, the film depicts women as complaining that under the patriarchy they are expected to meet standards and that this is oppressive and that, instead, people should just accept who they are, as they are (at the end, Ken comes to the realisation that he is "Kenough").

So which is it? Are we self-defining, empowered meaning makers or just good enough as we are, any way that we are? 

Perhaps one problem for the feminist frame here is that there does not exist within it any basis for objective standards, so meeting these will necessarily feel oppressive and/or arbitrary. But if this is true, then why bother self-defining? If what you already are is enough, and as good as anything else, then you may as well stay with it. The power you are striving to have, that of autonomous self-definition, is not even needed. But where then does meaning come from, if we are not subjectively making up our own meaning or purposes, as an expression of our agency, but are just accepting who we already are? If I am enough as an ordinary office worker like Gloria, then why suggest that women must find meaning in being movers and shakers as creatives or executives?

So how to summarise the film? On the one hand, I think it is better if these trends within modernity are brought to the surface, as they are in the movie. Better to see openly where things are headed and on what basis. The problem, though, is that even people who are opposed to the trends tend to argue for something else from within the feminist frame itself, which can only ever slow down what is happening rather than genuinely alter the course of social change.

On the other hand, I do find it sad that things have reached such a low point, that men and women are being split off from each other within mainstream culture. It is a defeat for all of us, men and women.

Romance & reason 1

Eva Illouz is a Moroccan born sociologist who writes intelligently on the topic of relationships. In her book Why Love Hurts (2012) she makes an argument that I made as far back as 2003 (here), namely that the modern value of autonomy conflicts with stable, committed forms of love.

Why? She explains in this quote (p.136):

The cultural motif that defines and constitutes worth here is autonomy, which in turn explains why requesting promises is conceived as exerting “pressure”...This idea makes sense only in the context of a view of the self in which promises are viewed as posing limits on one’s freedom: that is, the freedom to feel differently tomorrow from the way I feel today. Given that a limit on one’s freedom is viewed as illegitimate, requesting commitment is interpreted as an alienation of one’s own freedom. This freedom in turn is connected to the definition of relationships in purely emotional terms: if a relationship is the result of one’s freely felt and freely bestowed emotions, it cannot emanate from the moral structure of commitment. Because emotions are constructed as being independent of reason, and even of volition, because they are viewed as changing, but, more fundamentally, because they are seen as emanating from one’s unique subjectivity and free will, demanding that one commits one’s emotions to the future becomes illegitimate, because it is perceived to be threatening to the freedom that is intrinsic to pure emotionality. In commitment, there is thus the risk of forcing the hand of someone to make a choice that is not based on pure emotions and emotionality, in turn alienating one’s freedom.

The basic point is that if I wish to be autonomous, I must have a freedom to self-determine my own life. I cannot do this if I make a serious commitment to another person as this would curtail what I might choose to do at some later time. 

Eva Illouz adds depth to the argument by noting that the problem is made more pronounced when relationships are defined in purely emotional terms, i.e. as "the result of one's freely felt and freely bestowed emotions". If this is how relationships are defined, as they mostly are in modern life, then what happens in the relationship won't be swayed by reason or prudence, nor is it possible to think of commitment as being settled in the will. 

Eva Illouz

She repeats this argument, i.e. that there is a contradiction between the aims of autonomy and love, with a quote from Judith Butler (p.131):

In fact, I would even claim that it is precisely the development of individuality and autonomy that makes modern erotic desire fraught with aporias. As Judith Butler claims: “Desire thus founders on contradiction, and becomes a passion divided against itself. Striving to become coextensive with the world, an autonomous being that finds itself everywhere reflected in the world, self-consciousness discovers that implicit in its own identity as a desiring being is the necessity of being claimed by another.” Such a claim by another person is beset with contradictions, because “we have to choose between ecstatic and self-determining existence.”

Eva Illouz goes on to make an argument I only partly agree with:

I would suggest that, to the extent that in modernity men have internalized and most forcefully practiced the discourse of autonomy, autonomy has the effect of exerting a form of symbolic violence that is all the more naturalized and difficult to perceive. Consequently, autonomy is (and must remain) at the center of the project of women’s emancipation. (p.136)

Clearly, men dominate the rules of recognition and commitment. Male domination takes the form of an ideal of autonomy to which women, through the mediation of the struggle for equality in the public sphere, have themselves subscribed. But when transposed to the private sphere, autonomy stifles women’s need for recognition. For, it is indeed a characteristic of symbolic violence that one cannot oppose a definition of reality that is to one’s own detriment. (p.137)

Her argument is that men can get what they want from relationships as autonomous beings (sex), but that what women want is recognition (commitment), which is what the focus on autonomy makes difficult to achieve.

She is right that it is usually men who are the gatekeepers of commitment. However, it was feminist women who did most to impose autonomy as a value on relationships between men and women. It has been women who have changed the terms of engagement; men have played more of a reactive role (though there are exceptions to this, such as the playboy ethos promoted by the likes of Hugh Hefner).

The other difficult aspect of Eva Illouz's views is that she is committed to the values she identifies as damaging relationships. She frankly acknowledges the problem that modernity has damaged relationships, describing her book as being:

the product of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of conversations with close friends and strangers that left me perplexed and puzzled by the chaos that pervades contemporary romantic and sexual relationships

To some extent, she poses the issue as an imbalance in autonomy:

On the contrary: I would contend that men can follow the imperative for autonomy more consistently and for a longer part of their lives and, as a result, they can exert emotional domination over women’s desire for attachment, compelling them to mute their longing for attachment and to imitate men’s detachment and drive for autonomy. It follows that women who are not interested in heterosexual domesticity, children, and a man’s commitment will find themselves more likely to be the emotional equals of men.

Although this sounds reasonable, I don't think it captures what is happening. Most women have been persuaded that they should defer serious commitments and play the field whilst young; it is only when it comes time to settle down that they face the issue of commitment from men being described here, and mostly from a certain class of men. And then in later years it is women who initiate most of the breaking of commitment via divorce.

Again, she argues in the following quote that the problem is the distribution of autonomy:

I argue that such false consciousness – feeling responsible for being left – is explained by the ways in which several features of our moral universe intertwine with the power of men, i.e. the structure of recognition in romantic relationships (and probably in modernity in general); by the fact that the ideal of autonomy interferes with recognition and operates within a fundamentally unequal structure of the distribution of autonomy

This, once more, is only partly true. It is predicted that 45% of American women aged 25 to 44 will be single by the year 2030 - so the issue of "recognition" does exist for women in this age group. However, this is not because of an unequal distribution of autonomy as part of the structure of society. Society has gone to considerable efforts to make women autonomous in their personal lives. For instance, when women are in their "player" phase then the expectation is that society will enable this via abortion on demand, access to contraception, the absence of slut shaming etc. Similarly, when women are in the motherhood phase, they are enabled to achieve this independently of men via subsidised child care, access to IVF, single mother welfare payments etc. And if women wish to be independent through divorce, then this too is enabled via alimony, child support payments and decisions regarding child custody.

So what is her conclusion? She is not one of those moderns who believes that love should be sacrificed to autonomy. She defends love as a meaningful bond. Her solution is to restore an ethics to relationships,

...so as to devise new strategies to cope with emotional inequalities and meet women’s larger social and ethical goals...What should be discussed, then, is the question of how sexuality should be made a domain of conduct regulated both by freedom and by ethics...this book suggests that the project of self-expression through sexuality cannot be divorced from the question of our duties to others and to their emotions...For when detached from ethical conduct, sexuality as we have known it for the last thirty years has become an arena of raw struggle that has left many men and especially women bitter and exhausted. (pp.246-47)

It's a good quote (even if it is framed in terms of women's goals rather than a common good), but it is followed by this:

This book is thus a sobered endorsement of modernity through love. It recognizes the necessity of values of freedom, reason, equality, and autonomy, yet is also forced to take stock of the immense difficulties generated by the core cultural matrix of modernity. 

She is walking an intellectual tightrope here. She wants to be part of the modern gang, whilst at the same time recognising the significant harm being done. Even so, her book is thought provoking and insightful - I intend to post again on some of the issues she raises.

Clementine's confession

Clementine Ford is notorious here in Australia as a man hating feminist who is nonetheless given considerable exposure in the media. As an example of her feelings towards men, she was criticised in 2020 for complaining that Covid was "not killing men fast enough".

What I'd like to comment on is her description of her journey to motherhood. She begins her story with the assumptions she made about marriage as a girl:

I assumed that one day I would be married. It wasn’t a question of ‘if ’ but of ‘when’. I wasted little energy worrying about the chap involved, presuming he would arrive just as the seasons did.

I've read this kind of thing from women before. It's the idea that marriage will just happen by itself without any effort or cultivation of character from themselves. It is true, I suppose, that women can find a husband due to things that happen naturally, like their looks, rather than being selected on achievement. Even so, I think this assumption that things will just fall into place is a significant error. Women do still have to preserve the things that nature grants them: not just their looks, but feminine qualities of character and, also, as we shall soon see, an ability to love and to pair bond with a man. There are also challenges that women will face as wives and mothers that girls should be raised to expect and to have the strength to deal with. 

The mentality that "everything will just fall into place, and I will get my happily ever after just as a matter of course" is a dangerous one, a Disney outlook that sets women up to be disappointed in life. 

Clementine Ford then followed exactly the modern girl pattern of life. She spent her formative years in her teens and twenties pursuing a number of short term relationships with men, before changing course in her early 30s, meeting the future father of her child and then asking for a child at age 34:

after the torrid years of my twenties, with the series of broken hearts that decade brought (mostly mine, sometimes other people’s), I met the man who would become my son’s father.

It needs to be noted here that a woman spending such a long time having affairs and having a "series of broken hearts" is terrible preparation for marriage. It is, in effect, practising for divorce. We aren't designed to repeatedly go through this process and still have our pair bonding faculty intact.

She waited until her son was four and then, predictably, dropped the bombshell on her partner (I don't think they were married) that she was leaving him. It is not unusual for women to wait until the youngest child is about this age, as the child is a little more independent by then and the mother is less reliant on the father for support.

Her explanation of why she left her partner is the one I expected. Despite the fact that he was going out to work to support her, she blamed him and resented him for the disruption to her life caused by motherhood:

In the pre-dawn hours, after another night of broken sleep and relentless feeding, I’d look at the man lying asleep next to me...and think, I hate you.

One of the things I had always valued about our relationship was how independent we could be of each other—which is to say, I had valued how independent I could be.

I am an introvert by nature, and the emotional toll of being so busy also means I have to recharge in solitude. When it was just the two of us, it was an ideal situation. But the introduction of a third, defenceless creature to our situation upended all of this.

For the first time in my life, I needed help. I needed respite. I needed to feel supported in some fairly basic ways. And like so many women stunned by the reality of the ‘happy ever after’, I felt myself to be abandoned.

I experienced the shock of motherhood and its impact on our relationship as a huge betrayal, and I blamed him for most of it.  

She blamed the one person doing the most for her for her predicament. It would have helped if she had had a more realistic view of motherhood. To her credit, she does admit that she had unrealistic views:

The genteel life I imagined for myself was cast in soft, pastel focus. I would finally be a published author. I’d have a placid, chubby little baby who cooed at all the right times and cried only when absolutely necessary, which would be never. And I’d have a loving partner who supported me emotionally in both of these endeavours, understanding without question or conflict what needed to be done and simply getting on with it.

The last part I've also heard before: the idea that some women have that their husbands/partners should simply intuitively know exactly what needs to be done and to put things right. It is a gross misunderstanding of men and of the masculine role within a relationship.

I do agree with Clementine Ford that first time motherhood can be tough and that it's best if supports can be in place for the woman experiencing it. But this support traditionally came from other women within the family, perhaps a woman's own mother, or her sisters, or her aunts. The problem with expecting a husband/partner to completely take over this role is not only that he will be away for considerable times at work, and not only that he will have no experience of what is happening himself, but even more crucially that he will then be responsible for a woman feeling comfortable in her new role and so be blamed if she does not - to the long term detriment of the marriage.

Sometimes when the topic of divorce is mentioned it is claimed that women initiate divorce in order to rid themselves of abusive men. But in my observation the Clementine Ford cases are the more common ones. Her partner loved her, but she left him and dissolved her family without even communicating to him her unhappiness or the reasons why she was leaving:

My desires were modest, but they were important. I wanted to stop feeling sad. I wanted to start feeling happy.

In the months before I decided to leave my relationship, I found myself thinking about what I wanted my life to look like. Did I want to wake up at fifty and realise that I had no idea who I even was anymore beyond being someone’s mother or someone’s wife?

I didn’t feel seen, and the knowledge left me with a deep wound.

Outside of my home, I was championed and celebrated...Yet despite this, when I laid my head down at night I felt invisible. I couldn’t understand why this man who claimed to love me didn’t also seem to notice that I was disappearing.

On an afternoon in late May, I piled the last of my things into my car and drove away from the house I had shared with a man I had once loved.

I did not cry as I drove away, just as I had not cried as I listened to him ask me again, Why? Why are you doing this?

[In fact] I hadn’t cried much over the break-up...by then my heart had sealed over. I had watched myself moving slowly out of the relationship long before I moved out of the house, but he, like so many people seemingly blindsided by the end, had not noticed.

Even being a writer with a considerable national profile wasn't enough for her. She was "disappearing" and "didn't feel seen". 

The truth, I think, is that Clementine Ford had wanted to be a mother much more than she wanted to be married. She chose a man she knew was conscientious and decent to play a certain role for a certain time and then she returned to the kind of independent girl lifestyle she was more habituated to, but with the benefit of also being a mother:

I drove to my new flat, and I looked at the new home that I had made and I wondered at all the possibilities left to me...There would be love, I knew that. There would be laughter. There would be magic. 

I love living alone. I love having my own space...

I imagine a world in which our entire notion of ‘family’ is reinvented. Where women’s desire for motherhood is divested from our belief that it can only happen if we enter into a nuclear partnership.

I feel as if I have the best of both worlds now. I am a mother, and this brings to my life a particular meaning and resonance that is important to me.

But I am also a woman outside of this, and I don’t need to struggle to remember this fact. I move easily between the two states of being, without the risk of one consuming the other.

She wants to be a mother but also to be "a woman outside of this", which I think is her way of saying she wants to be free to express her sexuality in the pursuit of affairs.

She says that she "chose well" when selecting the father of her child as he has stuck around and they still all get together at times for meals and movie nights.

So, is this a future pathway for relationships? I don't think so. If women were to generally treat men the way that Clementine Ford treated her partner, then men would quickly lose interest in the idea of family. Nor do children raised in single mother homes generally fare as well as those raised more traditionally.

And the "magic" isn't happening for Clementine Ford to the degree she expected. She is in her forties now. She recently uploaded a Facebook post of her clutching a glass of wine, drunk and talking about how romance is a lie and that it's better to be alone. 

"I had lunch today with my researcher. I'm very drunk, that's why I'm slurring. We were talking about how more women of age like us need to impart to young women that everything you've been told about romance is a lie and the best thing you can aspire to is life on your own terms." 

You can only imagine that things will get worse as she ages. She is already cynical, already jaded and incapable of imagining a committed relationship. She has banked everything on sexual attractiveness:

I took my friend and researcher Jane out yesterday for lunch and we got absolutely trollied. Evidently I then went home and made some stories and took about a million photos of me in my knickers. Reassuring to know that even when I’m absolutely plastered, I’m still hot.

 
Anyway, even though I’m sozzled here I’m going to share this because the advice is sound. As a woman in her middle years (and living her best life), I want to keep telling women just beginning the journey that they are all the ingredients they will ever need to make a bloody great meal...Don’t settle for some bozo because you think it’s better than being in your own company. My company is great! Stay single, stay hot.

Is she really going to live by this "stay single, stay hot" philosophy in her fifties? In her sixties? In her seventies? 

Clementine Ford, drunk advice

I would hope that young women reading this would take her example as a fate to be avoided. 

Let me end on a more positive note. I've been on holiday and have had the chance to spend time at the beach. Whilst there I saw three young couples (they arrived together as a group of friends) who between them had a small army of toddler children (I counted nine). The children played happily on the sand, the husbands flirted a bit with their wives (one of the husbands swept his wife off her feet and they laughed together as he carried her to the waves). At one point one of the girls accidentally knocked over her little sister. The dad took the baby out of his wife's arms so that she could comfort her daughter.

Perhaps you had to be there, but I was struck by how "right" all this was - by how powerful this idyll of family life is as a human good and as part of the design of human life. 

Repression, DV & the Freudian left

Earlier this summer eleven Australian women were murdered over a three week period. It led to a debate on social media about domestic violence and how it might be tackled.

On one side of the debate were those who emphasised two things. First, that women are the victims of violence and men the perpetrators. Second, that the solution is for men to change, in particular, by becoming less repressed and by better expressing their emotions. For instance, one woman I engaged with ("Megwa") began by demanding that we "Fix the men". When I asked her what she meant by this, she replied "by taking down the patriarchal bs that inhibits teen boys from showing their emotions, oh sorry, fighting’s okay, but don’t cry."

a) The narrative

There is a strong tendency in these debates for the facts to be filtered to uphold a narrative of men as perpetrators and women as victims. This is despite the fact that men are considerably more likely than women to be the victims of violence (for instance, 70% of those murdered in Australia are men). 

It is true that men are also more likely to be the perpetrators, though not to the extent that those who believe in the narrative imagine. For instance, my female colleagues guessed that when it comes to domestic violence that 95% of the perpetrators are men. The real figure is not nearly this high. The NSW Government provides up to date data on those brought to court by police on charges of domestic violence (i.e. physical assault). In the period from October 2021 to September 2022, there were 10,790 men proceeded against by NSW police and 4,531 women, giving a roughly 70/30 split. 

If violence is caused by the socialisation of men, how then do you explain the 30% of domestic violence assaults that are perpetrated by women? There must be another explanation.

b) Men and emotions

There is a commonly held belief that problems in society are caused by boys being socialised to repress their emotions. If boys could be raised to be more girl-like in their emotions, the theory goes, then you would not have the pathologies of "toxic masculinity". 

This idea is taken so seriously that there are organisations in Australia which go to schools and conduct group therapy sessions for the boys to guide them to release their feelings as a future model of masculinity.

Where does this belief come from? It is a survival of left Freudianism, one of those "accretions" within the larger political culture. I'm not as well versed in left Freudianism as I'd like to be, but my current understanding of it runs as follows. Freud himself thought that repression led to discontent within the individual but that it was necessary for civilisation. The left Freudians, in the mid twentieth century, took a different approach. They thought that it was not enough to have a political revolution to reform society - this had been tried in places like Russia but had led only to a new type of authoritarianism. To succeed, there had to be a psychological transformation of the individual and this would occur when the individual ceased to repress their instincts, feelings and emotions.

You get a sense of this left Freudianism in the claims that masculinity is toxic because it leads men towards dominance and power which is exerted in oppressing women through acts of violence and that the path forward is for men to not be socialised to repress their emotions and feelings. In other words, we have a left Freudian claim that an authoritarian personality type is being created via psychological repression.

This is often joined together with another accretion within our political culture, namely the leftist belief that there are power structures which have denied humans an Edenic existence of living in peace, harmony and equality. In this case, the power structure most usually targeted is the patriarchy, which is held responsible for encouraging boys to repress their feelings.

The American feminist Gloria Jean Watkins (commonly known by her pen name bell hooks) wrote a book titled The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love (2004). In this work, she gives voice to these ideas about men. She complains that,

...masses of men have not even begun to look at the ways that patriarchy keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving. To know love, men must be able to let go the will to dominate.

She adds:

...by supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness. 

c) Criticisms

1. Lack of awareness

My first criticism of this common approach to ending male violence is that those who hold it aren't aware of where their ideas come from, i.e. that they are blindly following the accretions within modern political culture.

2. Rousseau

My second criticism is that there is a faulty assumption about human nature in this view, one that shares with Rousseau the idea that humans are good by nature but corrupted by society. This suggests that human nature is perfectible and that it is therefore reasonable to demand an end to male violence as an immediately achievable goal (some of those commenting on social media believe that it is within the power of men to stop other men from being violent). There is too little acknowledgement that human nature is flawed and that a complete eradication of violence is not a likely prospect, even in the most rationally ordered social settings.

3. Solipsism

Some of the women involved in the debate assume that if men are to have emotions they must be experienced and expressed in the same way as women - otherwise they do not exist. It is difficult to explain to these women that a man can have a rich inner life without being "emotional". Men are generally more able to be analytically detached from their feelings and to express them less overtly, but this does not mean that a man is incapable of love and other deeply felt inner states. 

Despite claiming that men are emotionally numb in a patriarchy, Gloria Jean Watkins makes two telling admissions. First, she admits that men are able to love women for who they are, whereas women are more likely to care for men on the basis of a man's performative role:

We struggle then, in a patriarchal culture, all of us, to love men. We may care about males deeply. We may cherish our connections with the men in our lives. And we may desperately feel that we cannot live without their presence, their company. We can feel all these passions in the face of maleness and yet stand removed...Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being. When we love maleness, we extend our love whether males are performing or not. Performance is different from simply being. 

Second, she admits that she did not like her own partner opening up emotionally because it undermined her sense of his masculine strength:

When I was in my twenties, I would go to couples therapy, and my partner of more than ten years would explain how I asked him to talk about his feelings and when he did, I would freak out. He was right. It was hard for me to face that I did not want to hear about his feelings when they were painful or negative, that I did not want my image of the strong man truly challenged by learning of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

4. Raising boys

The idea that the key to raising boys is to encourage emotional vulnerability is not harmless, because it disrupts one important aspect in the raising of boys, namely the "make strong" ethos. It is normal and healthy for fathers to want to encourage physical and mental strength in their sons. This does not mean that boys or men should never seek help with problems, particularly if these are acute, but this is not the general mindset by which men seek to develop who they are as men.

5. Tackling violence

If the aim is to reduce the level of violence in society, it is important to understand what promotes it. The data suggests that violence is more likely to occur within a social underclass marked by drug and alcohol abuse, unemployment, homelessness and mental health issues. Anglicare Victoria has suggested that these factors are present in about 80% of cases of domestic violence. In cases of female homicide victims:

James and Carcach (1998) suggest that almost 85 per cent of victims, and a little over 90 per cent of offenders, belong to what can be described as an underclass in Australian society.

The aim should be, therefore, to do what can be done to limit the size of this underclass in if we wish to reduce the prevalence of violence. Asking ordinary men to cry more is not a targeted solution.

6. Repression & emotions

If the aim is to promote a healthier inner life for men, then the left Freudian idea of not repressing our feelings, instincts and urges is misguided. The better aim is to rationally order these feelings, instincts and urges both toward our own good and toward the common good. It is more in the failure to achieve this that our inner life is radically diminished and that we are cut off from sources of love and connectedness, i.e. that we become emotionally and spiritually damaged or broken. 

If we truly want to help men live an emotionally rich life, then we should encourage earlier family formation; a more stable culture of family life; an opportunity to provide and protect for a family; a more secure experience of fatherhood; a reasonable work/life balance, including an opportunity to cultivate male friendships within male social settings; an opportunity for serious participation within a religious tradition; an active participation within a polis; and a culture which connects men to their family lineage and to their own ethny and culture.

Dating & disorder

I've read a few posts by a young English writer for Vogue magazine by the name of Annie Lord. She writes on relationships and gives some insights into the state of dating culture among young people in the UK.

Much of what she describes is familiar. Annie Lord wants to date hot guys, but these men tend to trifle with her and so she ends up disappointed. She has occasional casual hook ups; is worried at the age of 27 about hitting the wall; and is starting to feel jaded with the whole dating scene.

To her credit, she does take some accountability. She understands that she too is undermining the culture by dismissing men on the most trivial and unreasonable grounds. It is also a positive that she acknowledges that there is something wrong with the way dating culture works today, i.e. that things are disordered.

Annie Lord

In theory, liberalism does not order human goods. For liberals, in asserting that some goods are to be preferred to others, we limit what people might choose to do or to be, i.e. we discriminate or exclude. It is therefore the case that some liberal moderns would not acknowledge a state of disorder, because they have no ordering principle, so they cannot distinguish between order and disorder.

In practice, liberals do rank goods. The highest ranked good for many liberals is individual autonomy, understood to mean having the power to act as a free agent and to enact whatever arbitrary choice one wishes to make.

Ever since the very first wave of feminism, Western women have had to choose between this good of individual autonomy and that of love and family. This has put young women in a difficult position, because the instinct toward love and family is a strong one, but it is pitted against an equally strong ideological commitment to autonomy. 

You get a picture of the ensuing internal division in Annie Lord's writing. She clearly would like to find her man, at times to the point of obsession, but she also belongs to a culture which she describes this way: 

Nowadays, for many people I know, love is the last priority. The idea of putting a relationship over your friend or career is presented like the craziest thing you could ever do. “Don’t do that for a man!” friends say because now you must do everything for yourself. And that’s what I’ve been doing.

This is a nice description of the "non serviam" attitude I discussed in my last post, in which women reject the idea of ever doing things for a spouse. Interestingly Annie Lord goes against the usual script by adding the following thought:

But what if doing something for a man is doing something for yourself?

This is interesting as it is a rejection of the zero sum game attitude to relationships, in which it is thought that if one sex gains the other must lose. It suggests, correctly I think, that we develop through what we give as men or as women to family life.

My social milieu is dominated by the most left-liberal of women, so I have some understanding of their approach to relationships. Listening to them can be disheartening. They tend to believe that women should be able to follow any passion or prompting and that men should just fall into line. For instance, if a wife suddenly decides she would like to live in Finland, there should be no barriers to her carrying through with this and that it is her husband's role to follow along. 

Oddly, they see this as a movement toward equality between men and women, because they have persuaded themselves that men are already empowered to do whatever they have a mind to do. The reality is that their concept of equality gives absolute supremacy to the arbitrary will of women; it is like a version of The Handmaid's Tale but with the sexes swapped around.

Unsurprisingly, the relationship success rate amongst these women hovers close to zero percent. 

We do need to order goods. This does not mean claiming that one good is always and in every respect a blessing, and others always evil. It is "ordering" - making a decision about what is the higher good and what is the lower. And it is not just individuals who need to order in this way. As Annie Lord's writings make clear, it doesn't work for just one individual to order rightly if the entire culture has become disordered. There are certain aspects of life that we cannot succeed in alone and that need to be ordered at the communal level.

The focus on individual autonomy has one other negative effect. It encourages a highly individualistic mindset, in which the only unit of society is the individual. Within this mindset, the concept of a spousal union is entirely lost - it no longer registers. A husband and a wife no longer act together for a common purpose, with united interests. For my left-liberal female acquaintances, if a husband acquires anything, this is considered to be to the detriment of his wife. He has gained something, therefore she has lost out. It is assumed that he will put this resource to the purpose of empowering himself, for his benefit, leading to her disempowerment and loss of control and standing. Again, this is in the most striking of ways a zero sum game approach to relationships.

How did we get to this state of affairs? It goes all the way back to metaphysics. We have inherited an understanding of man and the world from a variety of sources, much of it from the early modern period. You can recognise, for instance, the influence of Hobbes in some of this. Hobbes was very strongly materialistic and thought that everything we did was materially determined. Even so, he believed in a certain kind of freedom, namely that of having the power to enact our own individual passions rather than others having the power to have us enact theirs. 

If you accept such an Hobbesian framework, then relationships do necessarily become a zero sum game. It is no longer the case that men and women, as social creatures, fulfil their telos - their ends or purposes - in relationship with each other, as a common good. Instead, what matters is my individual "empowerment" in enacting whatever materially determined passions or desires happen to arise within my will.

The metaphysics needs to be reset.

Haili on love & freedom

Haili Blassingame has written a story for the New York Times explaining why she broke up with her boyfriend of five years:

I longed — not to be alone, not to be without love, but for freedom and autonomy. Since we had gotten together, I had felt our identities weaving into a beautiful quilt, and I didn’t see how to disentangle myself without alienating the man I loved.

 She goes on to add:

I was resisting something greater than our individual relationship, and my resistance was political.

She has opted instead for something she grandly calls solo polyamory, which basically means having non-committal sex with different people:

I liked how solo polyamory cherished and prioritized autonomy and the preservation of self, and I found its rejection of traditional models of romantic love freeing.

Her mother prudently warned her about this understanding of freedom but to no avail:

I knew my mother would be devastated by the breakup. A divorcée of 20-plus years, she often warned against “ending up like me,” a woman untethered to a man.

Haili doesn't want to be boxed in:

What I want are relationships that operate with a spirit of possibility rather than constraint.

Haili is acting both with and against the culture in adopting these ideas. On the one hand, most young women are not opting for a lifetime of solo polyamory. There are still very many young women who choose coupledom.

On the other hand, Haili is following our state ideology to its logical ends. Our state ideology is liberalism, understood to mean the maximising (and equalising) of individual autonomy. As Haili points out, we lose autonomy when we are in closely bonded relationships with other people. Therefore, the relationship with her boyfriend became a "constraint" that she needed to be freed from.

It's rare for the liberal principle to be applied exactly this way, though there have been cases in the past. Alexandra Kollontai, a radical woman of the early twentieth century, wrote about how the New Woman would forsake love for the aim of independence:

this motive was a leading force in my life...to shape my personal, intimate life as a woman according to my own will...Above all, I never let my feelings, the joy or pain of love take the first place in my life...

I still belong to the generation of women who grew up at a turning point in history. Love...still played a very great role in my life. An all-too-great role!...We, the women of the past generation, did not yet understand how to be free...

It is certainly true that we...were able to understand that love was not the main goal of our life...It was, in fact, an eternal defensive war against the intervention of the male into our ego...

A biographer of the Danish writer Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), most famous for her novel Out of Africa, noted that,

The most compelling heroines in Dinesen's tales...make a sacrifice of sexual love for some more challenging spiritual project─self-sovereignty, knowledge, worldly power─which enables them to be themselves.

It's possible that the conflict between love and autonomy is more acute for women than for men. Women in love are more likely to blend their interests and their beliefs into those of the man than the other way round - and not because of male intransigence, but rather from feminine impulse. The autonomy principle therefore puts women in a difficult position. To love fully might be perceived as transgressing the aim of maintaining an autonomous self.

Should women therefore not love fully? Well, one obvious way to answer this is to question the idea that autonomy should always and everywhere be the highest good in life. Kollontai herself associated the liberal idea of freedom as autonomy with loneliness and solitude for women in a comment on a novel by the French writer Colette:

Freedom, independence, solitude are the substance of her personal desires. But when Rene, after a tiring long day's work, sits at the fireplace in her lovely flat, it is as though the hollow-eyed melancholy of loneliness creeps into her room and sets himself behind her chair.

"I am used to being alone," she writes in her diary, "but today I feel so forsaken. Am I then not independent, not free? And terribly lonely?" Does not this question have the ring of the woman of the past who is used to hearing familiar, beloved voices, to being the object of indispensable words and acts of tenderness?

Apart from this, when a woman is in a relationship with a strongly masculine man, there is something to balance any loss of self from the blending process. Such a relationship allows a woman to settle into her deeper feminine self - so she gains more in terms of selfhood than she loses. (Something similar applies to men. Men might experience their love for their wife as a finer quality of self, i.e. it gives expression to a significant aspect of self that otherwise would not be present.)

Finally, I mentioned earlier that Haili is an outlier in embracing solo polyamory as a means to pursue autonomy. However, it is likely that many women do allow this pursuit of autonomy to at least weaken their orientation to love. They might, for instance, decide to defer a commitment to more serious relationships until they are in their late 20s; they might hold back from truly giving themselves to their husbands when married; they might too be more inclined to jettison their marriages once they have achieved the basic aim of motherhood. Haili and her ideas should not, therefore, be too lightly dismissed.

Four types of female love

First a disclaimer. I'm always a bit hesitant in publishing these kinds of posts, because they are based on my own, necessarily limited, experiences and observations. I put them forward more as ideas for others to work with, rather than as cast iron, unassailable expressions of truth. 

It seems to me that there are at least four types of female love. The reason for trying to understand each type is that female love for men is not always as stable as that of men for women. Men's love has the advantage that it tends to trigger the male protector/provider instinct, and so men will feel that they are fulfilling a basic aspect of manhood in directing their strengths toward supporting their family. It is an anchor point. Men also seem better able than women to find a transcendent aspect in their love. The male mind is able to combine a love for an individual and flawed woman with an experience of what is transcendent in feminine beauty and goodness. And men experience this love for a woman as a higher expression of their own nature. All this can be powerful enough to motivate men to remain attached to the same woman throughout the course of a life. Yes, there are other factors that push the other way. Men do have an instinct for sexual variety. Nor are men wholly immune to becoming too emotionally damaged for stable attachments. Nonetheless, it is generally easier for a man to attach in a stable way to a woman than for a woman to a man.

So what are the four types of female love? 

1. Libidinal love

This is love that is based on sexual attraction. When women have this feeling, they often describe it in terms of a physical response, rather than an emotional one ("I had butterflies in my stomach"). It is a strongly visceral response in women, one that has little to do with higher, transcendent aspects of mind. 

What triggers this kind of love? Unsurprisingly, primal, visceral instinct. For this reason, it can seem baffling to high minded men. Women might, for instance, respond to men who trigger a sexual thrill, perhaps by being bold, or looking menacing, or breaking the rules, or having a certain arrogance. Libidinal love favours bad boy qualities.

You get a sense of this by reading female "romance" novels. These novels are designed to trigger this libidinal love feeling in women. They are extraordinarily primal. They evoke ancient "bride capture" customs: the hero will often simply force himself in some way onto the reluctant heroine. The hero himself is untamed and outside of polite society (but, in a nod to the next type of love, also someone who has inherited tremendous wealth and status).

Female libidinal love is problematic for society. Libidinal love often doesn't last. It leads women to engage in either one night stands or serial monogamy in their party years. Its impact on men is mixed at best. At its worst it encourages a player type culture amongst men, or perhaps even a "gangsta" one - or an imitation of it. It is not a basis for successful, lifelong marriage.

2. Opportunistic love

Women, more than men, have a capacity to love opportunistically. A woman might reach a certain age, want a wedding, a house, children and financial support, and set out to find a man on this basis. If she finds a man who can provide these things, she might then be willing to embark on a relationship, even if there is little genuine sexual attraction (libidinal love).

There have no doubt been countless marriages based on opportunistic love. But there are three problems with these marriages. First, the lack of sexual attraction is likely to be a cause of frustration on both sides, perhaps even eventually leading to the collapse of the marriage. Second, if the woman secures the things she wanted - the wedding, the house, the children, the financial support - the basis for her love diminishes and she may opt out of the marriage. Third, these marriages often have an unhealthy beta dynamic in which the husband must always qualify himself to his wife.

In the days before easy divorce, opportunistic love would not have broken up marriages, but it would have undermined the happiness of the relationship.

3. Altruistic love

This was the type of love most characteristic of my mother's generation of women (those who married in the early 1960s). It was described well by Marie Robinson in 1958:

Related to this feeling in her, to her sense of security, seeming almost to spring from it, indeed, is a profound delight in giving to those she loves. Psychiatrists, who consider this characteristic the hallmark, the sine qua non, of the truly feminine character, have a name for it: they call it “essential feminine altruism.” The finest flower of this altruism blossoms in her joy in giving the very best of herself to her husband and to her children. She never resents this need in herself to give; she never interprets its manifestations as a burden to her, an imposition on her. It pervades her nature as the color green pervades the countryside in the spring, and she is proud of it and delights in it. It is this altruism, this givingness, that motivates her to keep her equilibrium, to hold onto her joie de vivre despite whatever may befall. It stands her in marvelous stead for all the demands that life is going to make on her—and they will be considerable. When a woman does not have this instinctually based altruism available to her, or when she denies that it is a desirable trait, life's continuous small misfortunes leave her in a glowering rage, helpless and beside herself with self-pity.

I think this is exactly right. This distinctly feminine type of altruistic love was, for most of the women in my mother's social circle, able to hold at bay the resentment and self-pity that women can be prone to, and carry with it a warmth and joy of feminine personality well into old age. 

The damage done by the absence of this kind of love can be seen in an excerpt from a biography of Alice James, the sister of novelist Henry James. Alice, a spinster who lived alone, was visited by her two brothers in 1889:

As the three of them sat and talked, as they exchanged memories and opinions, the afternoon became for Alice a soul-quickening experience wherein the family itself seemed to come richly back into being, a revived and reintegrated presence. Her isolation was overcome for the moment by the sense of being once again a surrounded and nourished member of that family.

When her brothers left she was plunged again into solitude:

she confessed with bleak clarity that she could never allow it to be "anything else than a cruel and unnatural fate for a woman to live alone, to have no one to care and 'do for' daily is not only a sorrow but a sterilizing process."

This aspect of womanhood is not so evident today, perhaps because it stood in the way of the liberal aim of creating a society based on individual autonomy. But it remains a potential within female nature, one that provides a stronger basis for lifelong marriage.

(There does exist a masculine version of this, in which men act for others - but it has a different quality to the feminine version. It is more a case of men using their masculine strengths to create a protected and secure space for their family, and to provide for the material needs/wants of their family.)

4. Caritas love

This is a love (that both sexes can experience) that is more likely to be found among those with serious religious commitments. It could be described like this: my love of God, and my willingness to serve Him, leads me to love and to will the good of my spouse and my children. This is a love, therefore, that is settled in the will. As a matter of deep conscience, I will remain faithful to my spouse, as to God, and I will serve Him through service to my family. I do not need my spouse to be perfect to retain my commitments, and I will seek to overcome my own weaknesses and temptations that might undermine the promises that I have made. I might see marriage as a sacred commitment, a sacrament that it is not mine to break. I might see family as a sacred community, one in which I am charged with the deep mission of the spiritual welfare of my spouse and children. I will actively orient myself to the love of my spouse.

This is the most profound basis for marital commitments, but realistically it won't ever be universally held within a society. It has declined as a serious orientation to Christianity has diminished. It works best, of course, if both the husband and wife hold to it; a marriage can still fail if only one spouse is motivated by caritas. 

It was the type of love that the poet Sir Thomas Overbury advocated as a true basis for marriage in his poem of 1613 titled "The Wife". Although he did want a passionate love, he recognised that this was no guarantee of a wife's loyalty. He thought, therefore, that even though beauty was an important quality, it was most important to look for "good" in a wife. He wrote:

Gods image in her soule, O let me place
My love upon! not Adams in her face.

Good, is a fairer attribute then white,
’Tis the minds beauty keeps the other sweete;

 And what did he mean by "good"? He explains:

By good I would have holy understood,
So God she cannot love, but also me,

He is recognising that the firmest ground for marital commitments is the one founded upon the caritas type of love.

Conclusion

You might think that the aim of a society should be to reject the first two types of female love, the libidinal and the opportunistic, and work instead with altruistic and caritas forms of love. That, though, would be a mistake. The first two are fundamental aspects of female nature that cannot be glossed over. 

For instance, it is much better if a man is sexually attractive to his wife. We know that if a man is too agreeable, or too nice, that he won't trigger this attraction. We don't want the attraction to be triggered by a race to see which man can cover himself with the most tattoos, or best imitate a bikie. But there are other ways a society can help men to be more sexually attractive to women.

How can a decent man trigger sexual attraction in a woman without going gangsta? Well, he can be physically fit and muscular. He can be self-confident. He can have ambition. He can be rough around the edges. He can show competence in things that women consider masculine (e.g. fixing things, building things, outdoorsy things). He can avoid fawning and simping, and have a sense of his own masculine attractiveness. He can be dedicated to a mission in life outside of marriage and family. He can lead adeptly.

As politically incorrect as it is to say it, men can aim to demonstrate forms of masculine power and dominance and competence. And a society can help this along. For instance, it is normal and natural for mothers to instil in their infant sons some "caring and sharing" values. This is an important part of the socialisation of boys. But after about the age of seven it should be mostly complete, and it then becomes more important that boys are socialised in a masculine way within male spaces. A society should take care to give fathers time to spend with their sons in active masculine pursuits. And between the ages of about seven to sixteen, it is helpful for boys to be educated at boys' schools with a largely male staff. These male environments can be challenging for the more gently natured boys, and some might even come out worse for the experience (by never successfully adapting), but for most boys it will have the positive effect of instilling a more spirited and competitive masculine mindset (e.g. by learning to stand up for yourself, to learn better how to keep boundaries, to hold frame when under duress etc.).

As for opportunistic love, this too needs to be understood as a matter of policy making. Society once did this in a blunt way. Marriage allowed a young woman to leave her parents' house and form one of her own, i.e. to be independent. It gave her children and material security. If she divorced she had only a limited claim to these things. Our society has, with equal bluntness, gone the opposite way by associating independence with being single, and by rewarding women with the children, house and money on divorce. A society needs to get the balance of this right if it wants marital stability.

And how do we restore "essential female altruism"? That requires a rolling back of a number of things. Because liberalism wants to make our sex not matter (as being a predetermined quality), liberals aim at a gender role convergence in which men and women play the same role within the family. This undermines a woman's sense that she might give to her family in a unique way as a woman. Similarly, the liberal emphasis on autonomy means that women are raised to believe that an independent career is what matters and that work done for family is therefore to be thought of negatively as an oppressive limitation, a burden that must be shared equally between men and women or else outsourced.

Marie Robinson thought this to be the case, even back in 1958. She described one of her clients, who was cut off from this feminine altruistic love, as follows:

The whole emphasis in her early upbringing had been on achievement in the male world, and in the male sense of the word. She had been taught to be competitive with men, to look upon them as basically inimical to women. Women were portrayed as an exploited and badly put upon minority class. Marriage, childbearing, and love were traps that placed one in the hands of the enemy, man, whose chief desire was to enslave woman. Her mother had profoundly inculcated in her the belief that women were to work in the market place at all cost, to be aggressive, to take love (a la Russe) where they found it, and to be tied down by nothing, no one; no more, as her mother put it, than a man is. Such a definition of the normal had, of course, made her fearful of a real or deep or enduring relationship with a man.

Finally, there is the issue of caritas. In a secular society, with a materialistic world view, this understanding of love will not prosper. What I would urge men to understand, even those men without religious belief, is that this is not without negative consequences. The churches did once help to create a more secure setting for family life.

Molly on love

I recently wrote a post on duality between men and women, pointing out a basic way that the instincts of men and women fit together in a complementary union. However, I was careful as well to note that relationships between the sexes aren't always simple to navigate. Take, as an example, the following tweets from an American woman named Molly. She begins with this:

She elaborates with the following:

Her base impulse was to associate love with an intensity of feeling, and this intensity of feeling was brought on by the thrill of uncertainty, of being left on the edge of her seat not knowing if the person would stay or go, of not knowing securely what the other person felt, of chaos and pain and so on.

This attitude has been recognised in the manosphere for some time, with young men being advised not to give away commitment too easily but to make a woman work for it; to remain something of a mystery; to keep excitement in the relationship and so on.

Even so, it's not an attitude that fits well with marriage. In marriage a man makes a firm and clear commitment to a woman - she is not meant to feel uncertain whether he will stay or not. Similarly, in marriage a man vows to protect and provide - he is not meant to make her experience chaos and pain.

So what's the solution? Well, at least part of the strategy is the one that Molly herself suggests, which is to try to overcome base impulse with something more elevated, namely a love that is settled in the will, that wills the good of the other person, that is willing to self-sacrifice for the larger good of the marriage and the family, and that aims to cultivate, as best we can, the finer qualities of our masculinity and femininity (as Molly puts it both for ourselves and for our spouse).

But this more elevated concept of love doesn't come to all people readily. It helps if it is part of the culture, of the ground within which people grow and form character. It cannot be taken for granted, but needs to be deliberately fostered generation by generation.

Stacey's feminism

I saw the following tweet this morning:

It was followed by this exchange:

Stacey seems to be pushing the idea that women should pursue their collective self-interests whilst men should also pursue women's collective self-interests. I replied:

And that's where feminism is at. There is an assumption, a remarkable assumption, that men in the past pursued their collective self-interests at the expense of women. So that it can now be justified as "equality" if the reverse is true and we have a society in which both sexes pursue the material self-interests of women.

This ideology helps to explain why there is so little gratitude for the sacrifices of men, past and present, within a feminist culture. How can there be gratitude when feminists assume that men did not make sacrifices, but instead acted out of a collective self-interest?

I think Stacey and other feminists are in for a shock. If feminists were to succeed in convincing people that the point of life is to pursue our self-interests, then relationships between men and women would degrade very quickly. Stacey is trying to circumvent this by requiring men to follow women's self-interests, rather than their own. But that just sets up an ideological tension. She is, in effect arguing:

1. The point in life is a pursuit of one's own material self-interests.
2. Men should pursue women's self-interests.

The second part of the argument contradicts the first. Therefore, it's not likely to hold in the longer term.

Stacey is wrong about Western culture. I've been reading Our Borders, Ourselves by the late Lawrence Auster. In the chapter "What is the West" Auster observes that "one of the characteristic features of Western culture is the drive toward self-transcendence". He elaborates by describing this as "the idea that man attains the true order of his being only by being united with a truth outside his own being." Auster complains that this aspect of Western culture has been undermined:

On the Left, the reduction of the human being to the power-seeking and resentful self not only denies the spirit but by doing so denies the balance of earthly and spiritual that is the essence of the West.

Young Western men have been drawn historically to family life for many reasons. Obviously the sex instinct played a part, as did a desire to have children and to fulfil masculine aspects of self related to being a father and husband. In the past, too, there was a social function to marriage, as sex roles were more differentiated than they are today. Men who wanted to preserve their own family and national traditions would also have sought out marriage.

But added to all this was the drive that Lawrence Auster describes. A man's love for a woman can, at its best, focus a man on a good outside of his own self that (hopefully) balances both the earthly (a flesh and blood woman/carnal desire) and the spiritual (the good of love/a transcendent sense of the feminine/mystery in the unity and drawing together and attraction of the masculine & feminine). This then can powerfully inspire a man toward sacrificial love and toward deeper loyalties and commitments.

But it only works if a man keeps the balance right (e.g. does not idolise & remains aware of human infirmities & works within the limits of human nature) and if women inspire this kind of love by embodying feminine virtue sufficiently.

And here's the thing. Whereas Western women were once raised toward habits of feminine virtue, they are now encouraged to rebel against it. Lawrence Auster writes about this in his book, in a section titled "The Rebellion against the Father":

In all its forms, the phenomenon we've been discussing represents the loss of authority in a father image. Symbolically, the father is the structuring source of our existence, whether we are speaking of male authority, of the law, of right and wrong, of our nation, of our heritage, of our civilization, of our biological nature, of our God. All these structuring principles of human life, in their different ways, are symbolically the father. The rebellion we've discussed is...a rebellion against the father. The belief that the universe is structured, intelligible, and fundamentally good, and that one can participate in this universe - this is the experience of having a father, which is the opposite of the experience of alienation that drives contemporary culture. (p.12)

We live in a culture shaped by intellectuals who have rebelled against the "structuring sources of our existence" and who prefer to stand, instead, within their own individual orbit, as beings defiantly organised by their own will and desires and choices alone.

There is an element of this mindset, it seems to me, in the aggressive way that some women promote abortion, or refigure their bodies with tattoos, or speak gracelessly or dress immodestly. The same kind of women will often hate male authority figures (commonly identified these days as old white men), but will believe at the same time in a diffuse, universal ethic of care. The latter is the go to version of morality because it is not a structuring principle of reality - it doesn't judge right or wrong and nor does it direct our loves and loyalties in any given direction (hence the apparent contradiction of leftist women hating conservative men with a passion whilst at the same time claiming universal benevolence).

Lawrence Auster wrote about the effect of feminism on men and women that,

All that's left to attract them to each other is their bodies, their bare utility, or their power, with the further result that...the love, sympathy, and friendship that used to prevail between men and women is reduced to jungle combat. (p.134)

You can see this in Stacey's feminism. Men exist for utility (serving women's purposes). What matters is a contest for power and material self-interest.

It's not difficult to predict that women will get far less out of men this way than under the old culture, in which men thought of marital love as one aspect of attaining "the true order of their being".

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.