Not quite getting there

Over at blue milk the interviews with feminist mothers continue. The following is from Chantelle:

What is the impact of motherhood on your feminism?

I think, for a long time, feminist notions for me were bound up in a specific contemporary form which defines feminist ideals along traditionally male roles in society – being career orientated, being independent, being a leader. Being a mother didn’t fit easily into this paradigm, and that has caused me to take another look at what feminism could/should mean for me. I feel that what often passes as equality actually forces women into certain roles either at the expense of motherhood or in addition to motherhood

This is an intelligent framing of the situation. Feminism follows modern liberalism in thinking of autonomy as the proper organising principle of society. Left-wing feminists commonly assert that men have arranged society so that they gain the privilege of autonomy at the expense of oppressed women. Therefore, the traditionally male career role is held to be the superior one which represents liberation and equality for women.

Chantelle tells us that when she became a mother she began to question whether the aims of autonomy (independence, careers, power) should be the feminist ideal.

This is the moment at which a traditionalist like myself would take the simple step of putting autonomy in its right place. Rather than being the sole organising principle of society, autonomy should be thought of as one good amongst many. The point of politics would then become (in part) to find the just balance between a range of goods.

Chantelle, though, doesn't take this step. Instead, she wants society reorganised to maximise female autonomy and careerism:

I feel that what often passes as equality actually forces women into certain roles either at the expense of motherhood or in addition to motherhood, without any changes being made societally. In other words, women were encouraged to change, with relatively few negotiations being made on the system level. So, although it is now acceptable for a woman to have a career and a family, maternity leave (at least in the US) is almost non-existent, few fathers choose to stay at home or reduce their workload to take part caring for children, and for these reasons women with children are still viewed unfavorably by employers in ways that men with children are not. Studies of academic professionals, at least, show that there is a strong discrepancy between the effect of having children on female and male professionals and that to me signifies a bias that needs to be addressed.

The important thing for Chantelle is still the aim of women following the traditionally masculine career path. She still holds to this view despite her own apparent lack of career enthusiasm:

I have a PhD in the humanities, which basically means I can no longer keep hiding in higher education and should really figure out what I want to be when I grow up. Or maybe I will just get another degree. In the meanwhile, I am spending most of my time taking care of the little guy whose picture is posted all over this blog, and I am doing a lot of reading and writing, just because I want to and not because I have to.

Chantelle's rethinking of the feminist paradigm didn't really go that far. The emphasis is still on how to make motherhood less of a hindrance to careers, rather than asserting motherhood as a good in itself.

When feminists become mothers

Students in New Zealand were asked in their geography exams this year a peculiar question. They were given photos of five city scenes ranging from a park to a business district and asked to explain how each image could be viewed from a feminist perspective.

Dr Julie Cupples, a feminist geographer from Canterbury University, answered the question for a newspaper by claiming that the suburbs are highly gendered given that many women are at home with children “and the interesting stuff that is happening downtown they are excluded from”.

So the “correct” feminist answer involves an assumption that motherhood isn’t so interesting and that women who are at home with their children are being denied access to something better.

Where does this anti-maternal assumption come from? It stems from patriarchy theory. According to patriarchy theory what matters most is that we are autonomous. The motherhood role is thought to be less autonomous than the traditional male career role, as it is based on a “biological destiny” rather than on an individual career path, and because it involves financial dependence on a husband. If the motherhood role is inferior, though, patriarchy theorists must deny that it is a natural one for women. Therefore, patriarchy theorists claim that gender is an oppressive social construct, imposed on women to uphold male privilege.

What happens, though, when feminists actually do become mothers? Is there a collision between patriarchy theory and real experience? Do feminist women still feel that autonomy is the key good in life?

The answer seems to be no, at least according to a set of interviews with feminist mothers I read recently.

The first to be interviewed was Theresa, who is a stay at home mum with a partner and a young son. At one level she is quite an orthodox feminist. She defines feminism this way:

My feminism supports a woman's right to make choices and challenges the status quo when it comes to limitations - no matter who's defining the status.

This is the typical autonomist line that we must be self-defining agents, so that the aim of politics is to remove impediments to individual choice in any direction.

And yet Theresa no longer thinks of this kind of autonomy as the highest good. She now values her own family higher. This means that she doesn't attack the family as an oppressive restriction on her personal autonomy; instead, she identifies her own interests with that of the family and she seeks to act for the benefit of her family.

The attempt to maintain an autonomist politics whilst identifying positively with her family leads to this curious position:

What makes your mothering feminist?

The fact that I'm doing what is right for my family and not what's best for society or some other outside influence. I make the choices. With my husband. Not my priest or my husband's boss or the mayor of our city or the writer with a big paycheck.

She still applies the logic of autonomy theory to the wider society, but from the vantage point of her own family, rather than herself as an individual. Even so, the basic shift is away from the absolute value of autonomy:

I grew up knowing that I shouldn't sacrifice myself to a job or a partner ... Yet, now I also know that the act of sacrifice is ultimately good for me, connecting me to the world and making me human.

This reminds me of what Alice James, sister of the famous American novelist Henry James, had to say of her spinsterhood:

to have no one to care and 'do for' daily is not only a sorrow but a sterilizing process.

Marjorie was the second feminist mother interviewed. She too is a woman who followed an autonomist culture by valuing independence above all else, by intending to remain childless and by intending to return to work once she had children. Again, though, after she had children she began to value family more highly than these forms of autonomy:

I am shocked and bewildered by how much I love my kids and love mothering them. I have a vague recollection of swearing I would never have children (and double- and triple-swearing that I would never have children), but I can't remember why now ...

I have also been surprised that I absolutely need my husband and family and friends to get through it all. I think I first said, "Me do it myself," at two years of age and said it until the moment before Martin was born. I absolutely need them to help me.

I don't feel like I've sacrificed my career in a negative way because the alternative was sacrificing this time with my children, which, to me, would have been the worse option. I thought I was going back to work, but I didn't even consider it once I had the baby.

The one aspect of patriarchy theory Marjorie still clings to is that of gender being an unnatural, oppressive construct. Yet, given that she herself is following a traditional gender pattern of stay at home motherhood, she feels conflicted:

I sometimes feel compromised and have trouble identifying as a feminist mother since I get so bogged down by the stay at home mother/housewife stereotype.

It's a pity she doesn't realise that once you no longer hold autonomy to be the one, overriding value, there is no reason to judge the traditional female role as inferior and therefore no need to attack gender as an oppressive construct. Her residual feminism is making her feel unnecessarily uncomfortable in what she is doing.

The third interview is the saddest. Rose is a sole parent with three children. The father of the third child is a "baby daddy" - he has some kind of parenting role but is not her partner.

How has motherhood changed her feminism? She says in answer to this question that "I stopped being so angry at men when I had a son".

Unfortunately, Rose tried to apply the autonomy principle to her own children. She raised them, as Theresa put it, to challenge the status quo when it comes to limitations. She undermined her own authority as a parent in doing so:

My eldest two were encouraged to speak their minds, make their own decisions - to treat me as an equal. This - backfired somewhat.

For me, the egalitarian basis for feminism had dictated everything ...

When her daughter became a teenager the lack of parental authority had major consequences:

It was the beginning of a nightmare ... I think we had two years of pretty solid verbal abuse ... The biggest shock was the self-destructive ways these kids chose to behave ... we had drinking, drugs, self mutilation, eating disorder ... My kid and a couple of others made it their mission to be as aggressive as possible to just about everyone ...

She changed tactics:

These days I want them to respect me. I want to be treated as head of the household. I think that what I didn't teach them was that as a woman, as their mother, as a person who had strived to do the best for them, I was worthy of their respect, even if they didn't like what I had said.

Raising her children to challenge authority and rebel against limitations didn't create a sense of autonomous freedom in her family, but led instead to conflict and family breakdown.

Rose has travelled the least distance in rejecting an autonomist version of family life. When asked what feminism has given mothers, she mostly lists government programmes which allow her to be "independent" as a single mother:

What specifically has feminism given mothers? - the right to support their children if their partner leaves instead of being dependent on family ... Free education for children. The sole parent pension. Acceptance of childcare.

Finally there is Ariane. She recognises that the feminist orthodoxy has been anti-maternal:

I think at times feminism has belittled the role of mothers, as if a stay at home mum has betrayed women.

She makes, though, a similar mistake to Marjorie. Although she recognises that the sexes are different and complementary, she nonetheless seems keen to prove that gender is an open quality. She tells us, for instance, that her son was "hammered by his peers for dressing up as a princess and dancing like a ballerina" and that she has "no opinion" on the genders of the two involved parents kids should ideally have (which in itself belittles mothers by suggesting that it doesn't matter whether or not children have an involved female parent).

Overall, the message which comes through is that feminist women do tend to change in their attitude to autonomy when they become mothers. Although none of the women interviewed ceased to identify as a feminist, they did make a transition from a more orthodox attitude in regard to independence and careers to one in which autonomy was no longer the sole, overriding good.

Now a baby tax?

This is what the modern environmentalist movement has come to. Associate Professor Barry Walters has written an article for Australia's top medical journal dealing with the issue of climate change. The professor believes that a woman giving birth to a child is engaging in "greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour" and should therefore be hit with a "baby levy". He wants families to pay a $5000 baby levy at birth and an annual carbon tax of $800 per child. People who get themselves sterilised would be rewarded with a carbon credit. In the professor's own words:

Far from showering financial booty on new mothers and thereby rewarding greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour, a baby levy in the form of a carbon tax should apply, in line with the polluter pays principle.

The professor is making this suggestion despite the fact that Australia has a fertility rate of 1.8, which is well below replacement level.

Nor is he alone in expressing such views. Dr Egger, the director of the Centre for Health Promotion and Research in Sydney has declared his support for Professor Walters. There is a list here of others who have advocated radical measures against human populations, including a Melbourne neuroscientist, Dr John Reid, who said last year that:

[one] human way to reduce the population might be to put something in the water, a virus that would be specific to the human reproductive system and would make a substantial proportion of the population infertile. Perhaps a virus that would knock out the genes that produce certain hormones necessary for conception.

I should say that I'm someone who loves nature and has chosen to live close to the countryside. Ordinarily, therefore, I would support efforts to preserve the environment.

But not when the movement is aimed at a power grab and not when it becomes a vehicle for misanthropes.

Holding the stage

Talk about a man out of his time. Just as Western high art was collapsing in the mid-twentieth century, one man stood against the stream in its defence. He was a Canadian opera singer, a heroic tenor, named Jon Vickers.

There's an interview by Bruce Duffie in which Vickers explains some of his views on art. It's worth reading in full, but the sections I enjoyed most are these:

BD: Do you think that opera should speak to everyone?

JV: Absolutely. I'm not sure that it can speak to everyone, but it should attempt always to speak to everyone. There is a great difference between entertaining the masses and seeking to make them turn their eyes symbolically to that idealistic, divine struggle that is the example of manhood and womanhood. You understand? That element within mankind which is divine. I think that once we lower our sights from that which is unattainable, that degree of perfection which is totally beyond our understanding, beyond our comprehension and beyond our grasp, then if we only shoot at the tree-tops we'll only hit the tops of the fence posts.

* * *

BD: Is the music the servant of man or is it the other way round - is man the servant of the music? ...

JV: We are all servants of Man if, in my thinking, we recognize the divinity with the word "Man." I think that we cannot judge Manhood by men. We must judge men by Manhood. And when we speak of Manhood, we talk of that spark of the divine in man. And if that spark isn't there, then in our definition of man we have lowered the whole standard of work.

* * *

BD: You say that we are losing this in the vocal decline of our age. Will it ever come back?

JV: I'm not sure that there is a vocal decline.

BD: An aesthetic decline?

JV: I think there is a decline in exactly what we are talking about. There is a dis-inclination to demand of our artists truth.

BD: Are we lazy?

JV: No, I think it is a very long-developing process. I think it's developed possibly over the last 20 years. People will laugh when I say it, but I feel there has been for some years now a ground-swell of demand for mediocrity. They don't want excellence. We don't have positive heroes anymore; they're negative heroes. What do we attack? We've attacked all the great pillars of civilization. We take great heroes of history and so far as we are capable we snoop around in the excretia of some of these heroes until we find a flaw. So because a hero is not perfection, which if he was he would be God himself, then he's nothing more than anybody on the street.

* * *

BD: Should we not observe monsters at all?

JV: Yes. But I don't think we should embrace their philosophies. Look at the philosophical lines. In France, Voltaire showed the revolution; and then came Napoleon, and Napoleon was a monster. He was a great genius, but he was a monster. The same thing happened in German thought - Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud. The destruction of Christian principles, the lowering of man's sight from divinity to an acceptance of man's own majestic intellectual capacity that by himself he would pick himself up by his shoestraps and elevate himself to being divine. And, of course, what was the result? Hitler. And Stalin.

There have been some debates lately about the positive and negative effects of Christianity on Western civilisation. Vickers stands as an example of the more positive influence.

For example, when Vickers says that "I think that we cannot judge Manhood by men. We must judge men by Manhood" he is clearly rejecting the nominalist, anti-realist trend within modernist thought. He is asserting the reality of an entity "Manhood", external to our own wills, by which we might be judged and to which we might aspire.

Not only would modernist thought deny the reality of such entities, it would treat them as oppressive constructs which limit a man's freedom to self-determine according to his own will.

Vicker's Christianity allowed him to confidently assert a philosophical realism, which meant that he could positively look to and defend the ideals of his own civilisation.

A second interesting aspect of Vicker's Christianity is that it was not in the least productive of effeminacy. Vickers was a powerfully masculine presence on stage. For instance, Monteverdi's operas are often sung with high-pitched voices in the male roles (counter-tenors or mezzo sopranos). Although this does produce a beautiful sound, it doesn't heighten the dramatic interplay between the male and female characters.

So it's stunning to hear for the first time Vickers play the role of Nero in Monterverdi's Coronation of Poppea. This You Tube video isn't of great quality but it does convey Vicker's stage presence. I hope you enjoy it.

Tracee's victory column

Left-wing journalist Tracee Hutchison has been moved by the victory of Kevin Rudd ... to new levels of incoherence.

Her victory column begins with this:

It's hard to identify the exact moment I knew Australia was experiencing a seismic shift in identity and direction over this past week.

I'm not sure I'm living in the same country as Tracee. A seismic shift in identity and direction? Just from switching from Liberal to Labor?

Odder still is the "exact moment" Tracee finally settles on to mark this seismic shift in identity. It seems that Kevin Rudd's wife did a "shimmy" whilst standing next to him on election night:

If ever there was an image to differentiate the old from the new on election night, it was Therese Rein's shimmy ... It was sassy and confident and delicious. And 100% woman. Suddenly we had a first couple who were smart, successful AND sexy. It was magnificent.

It's not an easy thing to push Therese Rein into the sexy category. It's a measure of Tracee's euphoria that she gives it a go.

Then we have Tracee's glee at the appointment by Kevin Rudd of some female ministers:

Finally, we have a group of women in the highest office in the land who don't make me feel like a freak.

Women who are the daughters of migrants, women who are single and/or childless, openly gay, unmarried with children, married with children but who haven't taken the surname of their husbands and others who have.

This is beyond odd. Tracee herself is a single, childless career woman. She admits here that she is so sensitive to her situation that she feels like a "freak" if women like herself aren't in power. She wants her own situation to be made normative because it helps her with her own psychological issues.

And what of the fact that the Liberals also had single childless women as ministers (e.g. Julie Bishop)? Is it not possible for Tracee to be consoled by Liberal women?

But Tracee keeps it all going:

It is significant and noteworthy that half the women Kevin Rudd has given high-profile cabinet and portfolio responsibilities to are childless and/or unmarried — the Deputy Prime Minister to name just one. It is a great moment for generational change and validates the often difficult choices so many of us have made to pursue our careers. And it is so very welcome.

Yes, it's all about Tracee feeling "validated". Strangely, earlier this year she put a different spin on her childlessness. It wasn't a noble choice of hers, but something forced on her by an epidemic of feckless men. After watching the competition between three men to be named the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby, she wrote:

I suspect I wasn't the only single, childless woman of a certain age who belched up a slightly sour-tasting ironic burp ...

... it seemed incredible, from my experience, that each of them seemed so desperately keen to own up to firing the winning sperm.

If only there were men queueing up for fatherhood duties with such fervour in the real-life version of what happens to women in their late 30s. With due respect to the many doting fathers I know, who love and support their kids in one — or two — homes, I seem to know a lot more women who have either given up chasing child-support payments from absent and/or financially gymnastic fathers or given up the idea of having a biological child at all.

If anecdote is the litmus test for truth, the latter category feels like an epidemic. Especially if you're immersed in that special something that happens to women when their body clock starts shrieking like a wounded hyena and there's not a willing bloke within cooee.

... There aren't enough blokes with sufficient enthusiasm for child-rearing to go around.

You might think that Tracee would be most concerned to repair the damage done to family formation in this country, in order to spare younger women the sadness of unchosen childlessness. Instead, being stuck with it herself, she wants to make it a kind of high principle.

Finally, there is Tracee's attitude to country. She tells us that the sight of Therese Rein's seismic shimmy made her overflow with patriotism:

I felt my body jolt upright with exultant anticipation and gushing love of country.

Is this the same Tracee who, in questioning the appropriateness of ANZAC Day, wrote:

why does all of it have to come with an Australian flag draped around its shoulders? It frightens me.

Tracee is frightened by the quietly held patriotism of ANZAC Day and the sight of the Australian flag, but gushes with love of country when her candidate's wife moves on stage.

I wouldn't mind Tracee following the impulses of her mind, if it represented a liberation from ideology and released her from the grip of political correctness. I expect, though, that she identifies too closely with her side of politics for this ever to happen.

Lessons of 2007

The Liberals have been defeated and what does the media say? You read everywhere that the Liberals must turn away from their socially conservative wing and to the left - or else face a more permanent electoral ruin.

It's an odd lesson to draw. Consider the following:

a) The Labor Party won by studiously avoiding any upset to the socially conservative instincts of the electorate.

b) The state Liberal parties are all more "socially progressive" than the Federal party and all are out of office.

c) The most unpopular Liberal policy was Work Choices, which was more of an economically liberal measure than a socially conservative one.

However, I do believe that the Liberal Party has to consider the future carefully. If you look at an electoral map of Melbourne you find that the Liberals can only rely on a tiny belt of four safe seats. The north, the west and most of the south now belong to Labor.

The problem for the Liberal Party is that migrants generally vote Labor. In a Parliament of Australia electoral survey it was found that:

a) There are 18 seats in which more than 22% of the population was born in a non-English speaking country. In 2006 Labor held 16 of those seats. It now holds all 18. Labor holds 27 of the 29 seats with the highest proportion of electors born in non-English speaking countries. (p.39)

b) 32 of the 33 electorates with the most people who can't speak English well voted Labor in 2007. (p.43)

c) The 24 electorates with the most Muslims all voted Labor. (p.29)

d) These results don't seem to correlate to levels of income. Of the 37 poorest electorates, 23 were held (in 2006) by the Liberals/Nationals, 12 by Labor and 2 by independents. (p.57)

How might the Liberal Party react to this information? They could, I suppose, conclude that they have to be especially nice to migrants to win their votes. The problem is that the Liberals could not have done more for migrants during their term of office. Migration was set at record levels and education policy favoured fee paying students from overseas. Despite this, the trend for migrants to vote Labor continued, leading to a loss of the Prime Minister's own seat.

A more realistic option would be for the Liberals to drop their commitment to high levels of immigration. They would have to stand up to the big business federations in doing this, but otherwise the move would be a popular one. It would also secure a more viable long-term future for the Liberal Party.

Bahrainis seek immigration reform

The Arab Gulf states have their own immigration problems. Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have proposed a six year residency limit for foreign workers. The Bahraini labour minister believes that most of the foreign workers in his country cannot assimilate or adapt because of their cultural and social backgrounds. He recently complained that:

In some areas of the Gulf, you can't tell whether you are in an Arab Muslim country or in an Asian district. We can't call this diversity and no nation on earth could accept the erosion of its culture on its own land.

I can't fault the Bahraini minister for acting to conserve his own culture. However, the situation in the Gulf does raise some further questions.

For instance, if the Bahraini minister believes that non-Muslims cannot adapt or assimilate to an Arab Muslim culture, then the same difficulty of assimilation must also occur when Arab Muslims seek residence in foreign countries. If mutual adaptation or assimilation isn't possible in Bahrain, then why would it be possible in France or Finland?

Also, if the Gulf states are so dependent on foreign labour (there are currently 14 million foreign workers in the Gulf), and if this labour force is thought to be too foreign to assimilate or adapt, then why are Middle Eastern refugees being sent to all the way to the West rather than to the nearby Gulf states? The Gulf states are very wealthy and are very much in need of a more assimilable labour force. It would seem to be a good match.

Heterosexuals just 10 percent?

During an otherwise standard sex education lesson, I was astonished to hear the teacher in charge claim that heterosexuals make up just 10% of the population. She chided the students for their mistaken belief that heterosexuals were a majority. The students were told that for 80% of the population sexuality was fluid and changed in any direction over time.

This has to be one of the more extreme instances I've observed of redefining reality to fit your own ideological purposes. Presumably the sex ed teacher is following the ideal of liberal autonomy in which we are supposed to be self-determined in all things which matter. If our sexuality is fixed it can't be self-determined, so it helps the theory if our sexuality can be made fluid.

This is the basic idea behind queer theory, which has been promoted widely in schools in the US:

For the queer theorist, all unambiguous and permanent notions of a natural sexual or gender identity are coercive impositions on our individual autonomy - our freedom to reinvent our sexual selves whenever we like. Sexuality is androgynous, fluid, polymorphous ...

So we shouldn't be surprised if activists aim to overturn heterosexual norms. I hadn't, though, expected the bold move of relegating heterosexuals to minority status.

Are men and women equal?

In a recent post I claimed that it is liberalism which leads to the feminist belief that women are the victims of oppression and inequality:

The liberal starting point ends badly: in feelings of loss of humanity; in assumptions of oppression and inequality; and, for some, in a rejection of love and relationships.

A regular reader posted a comment suggesting that the feminist belief in inequality was more than an assumption, as men really are superior:

The inequality of men and women is not an assumption, it's a reality. It's evolved. Unless you are a female spotted hyena, you just have to like it or lump it.

I thought this comment worth responding to at length, as it involves some important issues. I'll say at the outset that I disagree with the idea that men are superior to women. This is not because I hold to a politically correct belief that everyone is equal. Furthermore, I think it's healthy for men to assert themselves confidently in their relationships with women.

So why don't I think men superior? The big issue, I think, is how we judge the quality of people. If we follow modernist ideas, and reject the existence of "transcendent" (i.e. really existing) goods, then the measure of man is power. I will be held to be superior if I prove my dominance by holding power over others. I can achieve dominant status through money, through a professional career and through political power.

If we accept this "proof" of superiority, then I cannot blame feminists for acting the way that they do. It's inevitable that some women will be too proud to accept an inferior status, particularly when they know that they have the ability to prove themselves dominant in careers, money and politics over many men.

It's a pity, though, if women accept such a proof of their own quality. It means that they are forced to compete to prove themselves on traditionally masculine terms; the more feminine side to life will inevitably be neglected.

Which leads to the question: what happens if we accept the existence of transcendent goods, as Western societies traditionally did? We then have an alternative way of judging the quality of people, namely according to how finely they embody some aspect of the good.

Looked at this way, there is a lot to admire in both men and women. Men, at their best, are loyal, courageous, persevering and good-humoured, and their dispassionate intellect serves them well in acting justly and in seeking knowledge. Women, at their best, are warm, vivacious, graceful, beautiful, empathetic, considerate and intuitive. Women, more than men, are often present in the moment for others.

So which constellation of goods is superior? The question makes little sense for two reasons. First, it's difficult to measure in any objective way whether the finer female qualities represent a higher good than the male qualities or vice versa. It might be possible to have a personal preference, but there's no obvious way to prove such a preference to be true.

More importantly, the question of superiority is misconceived because the male and female goods grow out of each other; therefore, if you think of the masculine qualities as being particularly fine, you must recognise that they wouldn't exist without the feminine qualities being strongly present (and vice versa).

If the women of a society no longer embody the higher feminine goods, then it's unlikely that men will be inspired to fully develop their masculine qualities. Similarly, femininity can only flourish when men are moved to create a protected space for it.

So it's not even so much a question of stating that men and women are equal, as this tends to miss the point of what determines our quality as men and women.

A romantic feminism? Really?

This just doesn't fit my experience:

New research shows feminism and romance go hand-in-hand, with egalitarian men and women enjoying better intimate relationships than the new breed of young men and women who dismiss the pioneer movement as unfashionable.

So I tried to do a little research on the research. It wasn't easy as the academic paper hasn't been released to the general public. I can, though, suggest three reasons to doubt the findings.

The first concerns possible bias. The study was undertaken by a feminist academic, Laurie Rudman, and published in a feminist journal. Rudman had conducted previous research showing that women often shied away from feminism because they thought it harmed romantic relationships. This is the political context for Rudman's "makeover" of feminism; if women can be persuaded that feminism is good for romance, they will more readily embrace it. So are we dealing with "advocacy" research?

The second reason for doubt is that other research has reached different conclusions. For instance, I reported in April on a major study which found that women were, on average, happier in traditional, gender-based marriages, partly because such marriages were generally more "expressive" (the husbands put more "emotion work" into such relationships):

Men who are married to more traditional-minded women ... are more likely to devote themselves to spending quality time with their wives.

... adherence to traditional beliefs and practices regarding gender seems to be tied not only to global marital happiness but also - suprisingly enough - to expressive patterns of marriage ...

women's gender role liberalism ... [is] associated with lower levels of women's happiness with the affection and understanding they receive from their husbands.

Finally, it's not enough to look at individual relationships. There are no guarantees in individual relationships - it is, of course, true that there will be feminist partners with better relationships than many more traditional couples.

But what is the overall influence of feminism on society? Does feminism generally encourage stable, committed, romantic relationships between men and women?

I don't think so. I remember being at uni at the height of third-wave feminism in the mid-1990s. It was striking how little interaction there was between male and female students, let alone signs of affection. It was romantically cold.

It was noticeable too how popular music changed in the 1990s. The love ballad gave way to more aggressively sexual songs and music videos.

There was a change, too, from the older custom of dating, to one of more casual "hook ups". This was lamented just a couple of weeks ago by Andrea Burns in a Herald Sun column:

THE date is dead. Time of death? Some point between candlelit dinners and "you can come along if you want to".

But sadly the esteemed tradition of dating is a thing of the past ...

Try to lock in the average bloke for a date and you might as well try to pin down a shadow.

It's a shame because the perfect date is something many women fantasise about ...

If we are not careful we'll have spent the entire courting process boozed and wake up at 35 with a baby and some dude we picked up in a bar.

And what is the situation in Sweden, the home of feminism? A recent article on relationships there noted that Stockholm is the world's divorce capital; that marriage is becoming increasingly rare; and that the Swedish preference for IKEA style disposable consumer goods mirrors the easy, commitment free attitude to relationships.

So it will take more than Laurie Rudman's research paper to persuade me to change my mind on this issue. I remain sceptical that feminism is good for romance.

The worst of feminism

A popular feminist website carries this dark as night assessment of men, women and society:

all humans are conditioned to despise women. A woman ... can never be humanized. The American legal system, as a matter of fact, effectively outlaws humanity for women. It does this in many ways ... One of the most insidious is its assertion that women are in a perpetual state of 'consent' unless they specify in front of 147 witnesses that they have withdrawn it ... It is by this cunning method ... that the future of rape as the cornerstone of human social order is secured.

Rape is the dominant culture's most cherished method of controlling the female underclass, of moulding us into a self-replicating supply of fearful, impaired, coercible receptacles ... It is by popular demand that, decades after American women were first deemed "liberated", the countryside remains infested with unjailed rapists. These freely roaming rapists are patriarchy's enforcers.

One reader was moved to comment:

This idea that rapists belong in prison makes my head hurt. Damn near every dude on the planet is a rapist! As remarkable as the U.S. prison industrial complex may be, it is entirely unequipped to deal with the jailing of half this nation's denizens.

The solution to rape is not one that will ever be brought about under capitalism, as it involves the recognition of women as agentive, sentient humans. I don't expect this to happen during my lifetime, so I ... never go anywhere without a big knife in my pocket.

Where do such ideas come from? You might answer, reasonably, from unhappy souls. There's more to it, though. There is a progression of thought from mainstream liberalism to this kind of radical patriarchy theory.

It goes like this. Liberalism states that our humanity is contingent: that we are only fully human when we are self-determining, autonomous agents. Feminists then argue that women are less autonomous than men and are therefore treated as less than human. Leftist feminists then add another argument: the reason why women are less autonomous is not because of any natural differences between the sexes, but because a group of people ("men") have set up gender as a social construct to obtain a privilege over women.

This oppressive structuring of society is termed the "patriarchy". Those who believe in patriarchy theory view all social relations between men and women as serving male privilege. Therefore marriage, love, romance, sex, gender roles and sex identities are held to be oppressive to women. The more radical patriarchy theorists tend to be a glum lot: because they see women's oppression as systemic (as basic to the way society works), the only cure is a revolutionary overthrow of all social structures and the emergence of a hazily conceived non-patriarchal utopia.

The patriarchy theorists might have an unrealistic view of men and society, but they're grounded enough to know that such a radical transformation is a long shot. So they see themselves as doomed to a vulnerable existence as sub-human victims of a monstrous social system.

It's more likely that they are victims of their own belief system. It's not the "patriarchy" that they need to challenge, but the chain of political ideas I outlined above.

Do we really have to accept the idea that our humanity is contingent and not invested in who we are? Must we really accept the idea that it is autonomy alone, and not some wider set of qualities, which determines our humanity?

The liberal starting point ends badly: in feelings of loss of humanity; in assumptions of oppression and inequality; and, for some, in a rejection of love and relationships. What we need is a less ideological beginning, so that we don't become alienated from important goods in life.

What are we defending?

Until recently, a section of the right was united around a "counterjihadi" cause. This unity has been shattered by Charles Johnson, the operator of the Little Green Footballs (LGF) site, who has accused his former European allies of being racists.

The rift has exposed something significant. Those on the right are not fighting to defend the same thing. There are some whose politics is bounded by their identification with political liberalism: they are fighting to defend a political creed. There are others who, even if they accept this creed, also wish to defend a particular tradition, culture, people or national existence.

Let's start with Johnson. He was a left-liberal until the terror attacks on the World Trade Centre. Like some others on the left, the terror attacks shook up his politics. He began to see Islam as a threat to his political values and he dismissed the left as being too unrealistic (too "idiotarian") to recognise this threat.

Hence the logo at Johnson's website which shows his little green footballs being hurled at a cowering hippy leftist and a Muslim jihadi "lizard".

If you understand why Johnson is against the left and against Muslim jihadists, it's easier to explain his unease with others on the right. He remains a purist liberal. He just believes that Islam and the left are a threat to what he values.

So when others on the right also transgress his liberalism, why wouldn't he make a fuss? In his own way, he is being consistent.

The problem is that it isn't difficult to transgress modernist liberalism. The idea of modernist liberalism is that we must be self-determining, autonomous agents in order to reach a full humanity. This means that everything which is "other" determined is a restriction on our freedom and on our human dignity from which we must be liberated.

Most of the important, sustaining aspects of life, though, are other determined. Therefore, liberalism ends up placing its own fatwahs on the very things which mean most to people - and all in the name of "freedom".

And so Johnson's European allies were found wanting. Most of them have attempted to be mainstream in their politics, and some even sound at times like mainstream right-liberals. However, it's true that most of the groups attacked by Johnson wish to limit immigration in order to preserve something outside of political liberalism, such as a people, culture or tradition.

It seems that this alone was too much of a transgression for Johnson to bear. He attacked the Europeans and embarked on an undignified hunt for evidence of unsavoury connections (he found a couple of Celtic crosses and some old photos).

Johnson is trying to delegitimise the Europeans - to have them placed beyond the pale. His campaign seems to be failing. In part, this is because some of those who agree with him politically still think an alliance is necessary. Partly it's because some key figures just don't believe that the Europeans are extreme in the way Johnson is claiming.

Some further reading:

Johnson's nemesis

Blogosphere bannings

How can it be both things?

Most readers will be aware of recent events at the University of Delaware. The 7000 students residing on campus were expected to attend diversity training based on the theory of "whiteness studies". The students were taught that all white Americans were, by definition, racists:

[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.

The training has been suspended for the time being. I thought it might be interesting, though, to read through the diversity training materials prepared by Dr Shakti Butler.

I've outlined previously the basic idea behind whiteness studies: that whiteness was invented to give some people an unearned privilege at the expense of oppressed people of colour.

Dr Butler's training materials hold faithfully to this idea for over ten pages. She defines race itself not in neutral terms but as "a specious classification of human beings created by Europeans (whites) ... for the purpose of establishing and maintaining privilege and power". She then gives us a potted history lesson intended to prove that:

a small group of colonial slave owners invented the "white race"

This is everything you'd expect from a whiteness theorist. What's surprising is the argument Dr Butler makes on the very next page. She supports her case with the research of Dr Frances Cress Welsing:

Dr Welsing analyzes the root causes of white supremacy. She demonstrates that the genes of white people are recessive compared to those of people of African descent. Thus, if whites and African-descended people mate and create children, the family tree will have more darker skin offspring.

Dr Welsing concludes that the virulence of white supremacy stems from white fear of genetic annihilation. In other words, if white/African sexual interrelationships become the norm rather than the statistical exception, in a few generations there will be no more white people. An historical analysis of the perverseness of white fear of intermarriage, from 1691 to the present, lends much credence to this perspective.

Dr Cress Welsing further asserts that white people keep this fear in their white closets. I agree.

Does Dr Butler not realise that she has contradicted her first, lengthy argument? We were supposed to believe that Europeans invented a fictitious category of race out of a lust for power and dominance. Now we are told that it is the biological reality of race which is the problem, and that Europeans are vulnerable because of recessive genes. Europeans have suddenly gone from inventing a fictitious category of race to hiding their unique problems of racial preservation.

How can you explain an academic advancing such irreconcilable arguments? Perhaps Dr Butler thought that adding on an argument with the aura of the physical sciences attached to it might bolster her case.

At any rate, it seems that Dr Butler doesn't really believe much of the guff that whiteness theorists rattle on with. The one idea that she really sticks to consistently is that of "white exceptionalism" - that whites are to be proved to be unique in acting against the proper norms held to by other groups.

This is weak ground for Dr Butler to occupy. What are we to make of the "anti-racism" of someone who picks out whites this way? Nor is it difficult to show that whites are not unique in the particular respects claimed by Dr Butler.

Is Gillard setting women up for conflict?

Julia Gillard, deputy leader of the Australian Labor Party, made this prediction back in August:

There will come a time when we women will be judged purely on achievements and strength of character rather than whether we ascribe to what are seen as feminine traits, fit a particular model of attractiveness for public life or have fruit in a fruit bowl.

This is an unfortunate way of putting things. It cuts women off from what is feminine in two ways. First, Gillard seems to deny that femininity is something irrevocably connected to womanhood. She states that women may or may not "ascribe" to feminine traits, as if femininity is something that can be picked up or discarded as a personal choice. Similarly, she doesn't simply speak of feminine traits, but of qualities "which are seen as feminine traits", as if to doubt their objective existence.

Worse, Gillard separates a woman's achievements and character from her femininity. The way she puts things you would think that femininity is not a substantive part of what it means to be a woman - that it isn't a core aspect of who a woman is and what she has to offer.

What is supposed to be cutting-edge feminism puts women in a difficult position. It makes what is distinctively female a negative, secondary quality.

Imagine having a female identity but seeing what is distinctively female as being inferior and in opposition to your life goals. Isn't this an unsuitable framework for a woman to live her life by?

A leftist baulks at dangerous logic of whiteness studies

There is a dangerous logic to whiteness studies.

Whiteness theorists argue that racism is peculiar to whites. The sole purpose of whiteness, they claim, is to create a society in which whites benefit from an unearned privilege at the expense of people of colour.

As I pointed out in a recent article, this puts whites in a vulnerable position. The last thing you want, in a modern liberal society, is to be identified as the group preventing the final achievement of human equality:

Whiteness theorists are creating a picture of whites as a “cosmic enemy”: as a force in the world standing in the way of justice and equality. Groups who are regarded this way shouldn’t be surprised to find themselves targeted for removal. Here, for instance, is the “solution” of Dr Noel Ignatiev, a Harvard academic and whiteness theorist, to the “problem” of whites:

"The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race."

"... The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition."

I'm not alone in recognising the dangerous logic of whiteness studies. It has been remarked on too by someone on the other side of politics, who is himself committed to a radically leftist anti-racism.

I'm referring to a radical activist by the name of Pete Spina. In an article published in March 2006 he establishes his leftist credentials as follows:

I am white (3rd generation Irish and Italian American) and am an active anti-fascist and anti-racist. I am an anarchist.

Spina complains that he is increasingly hearing from fellow radicals the idea that "the color of racism is white" - that racism is peculiar to a white identity and to the maintenance of white privilege.

He criticises the logic of this view. First, it means that racism isn't connected so much to "unequal or oppressive social dynamics" as this would mean that non-whites could also be racist. Since non-whites (supposedly) can't be racist, then unequal social dynamics can't be the defining cause of racism. Instead, the existence of "whiteness" has to be.

Spina then observes:

A contradiction arises: anti-racists confront racists and racism with the ultimate intent of ending racism. If racism is determined by whites, then the only solution to racism is a solution to whiteness. [my emphasis]

For Spina, this is a dangerous idea as there are those who hold to what he calls an "extrinsic view" of race who might target whites violently:

the Extrinsic argument says that whiteness is both a social and a biological construct, not simply a social one, therefore any solution to whiteness would have to include a biological "solution" to retain consistency in the Intrinsic view ... a scary thought that ranges from genocide to eugenics or forced/voluntary sterilization.

Spina even recognises the psychologically unhealthy effect that these kind of ideas have on the Western political class:

If there is no solution to racism other than self-destruction, then self-destruction (or self-righteousness) is all that is necessary. It creates a syndrome of disempowering, self-deprecating white guilt.

... the mindset that racism is due to whiteness alone allows white radicals to play the victim for a time. The new burden of the white radical becomes that of struggling bravely to overcome the oppressive force of white privilege within oneself in a way that dramatizes one's role as victim ...

The fetishization of victimhood, so ingrained in the political fabric of the oldline, and liberal left, has found a clever new way of working itself back into the collective unconsciousness of white radicals.

If Pete Spina can see this as a radical, then we should have some confidence that others too will recognise the defects (logical and moral) of whiteness studies.