RadixJournal - January 09, 2018


Bowden! - 7 - The Feminist Mystique


Episode Stats

Length

52 minutes

Words per Minute

140.61552

Word Count

7,414

Sentence Count

318

Misogynist Sentences

134

Hate Speech Sentences

41


Summary

Jonathan Bowden joins Richard and Vanessa to discuss feminism, its origins, where it came from and where it went from there. They discuss the first wave of feminism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and how it changed the course of history.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Vanguard, a podcast of radical traditionalism.
00:00:24.560 Here's your host, Richard Spencer.
00:00:27.380 Hello, everyone. Today, it's great to welcome back to the program our friend and contributor, Jonathan Bowden.
00:00:36.500 Jonathan, thanks for being back with us. How are things over on your side of the Atlantic?
00:00:41.700 Yeah, it's a bit frigid, a bit cold these days, but probably nothing to what it's like on your side, but otherwise well.
00:00:48.500 Excellent. Today, we are going to talk about another big and important issue for our movement, and that is feminism.
00:00:58.200 It's obviously an issue of major importance for the world as well.
00:01:03.020 Jonathan, what makes feminism so complicated and interesting is that it's had all of these various waves, as they call them,
00:01:15.600 and they've often put forward contradictory philosophies and objectives, but maybe that's what's made feminism so long-lasting and powerful in a way.
00:01:27.260 But to get the conversation started, just talk about that initial impulse towards feminism, where that was coming from, where do you think it cropped up first?
00:01:43.660 What was kind of the first, first wave, so to speak, of feminism?
00:01:47.760 Do you think this was with women's suffrage, or was it with some of the many liberal revolutions that occurred in Europe over the course of the 19th century?
00:01:58.220 Where do you think that original urge came from?
00:02:02.920 Yes, that's a complicated and quite a difficult one.
00:02:06.820 I mean, textually, it goes back to Mary Wollstonecraft's The Rights and Wrongs of Women,
00:02:11.400 and, you know, Rights of Women, as against Tom Paine's Rights of Man, produced in a similar time frame at the beginning of the 19th century,
00:02:20.780 sort of coming out of the latter end of the 18th century.
00:02:24.180 And she was part of a radical sort of ferment of opinion around William Godwin and his extended family into which she was intermarried.
00:02:34.260 But the political drift of feminism in its first wave that's discernible has to be in and around the Great War, 1914 to 1918 in Europe,
00:02:48.880 and just after, where you have a militant movement for women's suffrage, concentrating on the vote, but often extending out into other areas.
00:02:57.540 And you have that split into two wings between those who will pursue purely non-violent means,
00:03:04.640 who've been largely forgotten by history, the suffragists, and those that were prepared to use direct action and indeed even violence to get their way,
00:03:13.620 the suffragettes, who are the ones that history remembers.
00:03:17.200 They're the ones who were force-fed in prison.
00:03:19.760 They're the ones who chained themselves to railings.
00:03:22.520 They're the ones who are saucy police officers.
00:03:24.780 They're the ones who threw themselves in front of derby winners and were trampled to death on newsreels at the time,
00:03:31.660 to great and extended excitement and social convulsion.
00:03:36.080 So that was the first real sort of wave, which then fed into the swinging 1920s,
00:03:44.380 as Europe and the West relaxed into a hedonistic decade after the slaughter of the Great War and prior to the coming Depression of the 30s.
00:03:53.160 Second wave feminism, as it's so-called, is correlative to the 60s and sort of has a whole new generation,
00:04:03.560 skipping out several generations in actual fact, between the first and the second waves.
00:04:08.860 The second wave is notorious for its theorists and its polemics,
00:04:13.360 and it's going outside the box of what is understood to be political and looking at all areas of life,
00:04:21.820 often in a rather caustic and adversarial way.
00:04:25.780 Culturally, the second wave, you could argue, had far more impact than the first wave,
00:04:30.280 but they wouldn't have amounted to anything without the first wave.
00:04:34.180 And the first wave did genuinely convulse the society,
00:04:39.440 because nothing divided opinion, like the issue of whether women should get the vote,
00:04:45.460 because it was axiomatic of all sorts of other matters in the society.
00:04:50.200 By giving them the vote, it indicated that women could do almost all jobs that men could do up to a point.
00:04:59.020 And it opened the professions to them, it opened the universities to them,
00:05:03.520 it opened higher education institutions to them,
00:05:07.320 it opened a world of politics and political representation to them, not just voting.
00:05:12.560 And so, in a way, it changed the world,
00:05:16.080 and that's why the sort of dynamite of the vote was used.
00:05:21.800 What do you think was the reigning philosophy of the early suffragists and suffragettes?
00:05:29.840 Was it a liberal one?
00:05:32.380 Do you think it could be connected with some of the early social democratic and kind of Marxian movements?
00:05:39.960 What do you think about that?
00:05:43.180 Well, I think the honest answer is yes and no.
00:05:46.100 The truth is that female politics resembles male politics pretty closely,
00:05:51.640 in that there's a range of opinion, right, left, and center,
00:05:56.420 as what surprised many suffragists when women got the vote, particularly bourgeois women,
00:06:02.640 is they voted pretty much along the same lines that men did,
00:06:05.920 and were perceived to have the same social and economic interests that men did.
00:06:10.320 But there have been times when the gender gap has been one way and then the other.
00:06:17.780 For example, today, in the Western world, which is quite clearly Anglo-Saxon, the Anglophone world,
00:06:25.520 there seems to be a marked preference for center-left parties amongst women,
00:06:29.800 as against center-right parties amongst men,
00:06:32.880 and that drift and gap is quite discernible.
00:06:36.020 But there have been times where women have been much more conservative than men,
00:06:39.140 and on certain issues women remain a lot more conservative than men.
00:06:44.680 On law and order issues in the 50s, 60s, 70s,
00:06:49.320 women often had much more conservative attitudes than men.
00:06:54.460 And so it's debatable in a way.
00:06:59.040 Certainly, a large number of bourgeois supporters of female suffrage just wanted the vote as a coping stone, really,
00:07:09.760 as a sort of seal of approval for their admission into social life.
00:07:14.380 And once that happened, they reverted to essentially a conservative tradition.
00:07:20.460 Some of the first women to be elected, of course, into parliaments were on the conservative side,
00:07:25.220 because it was inevitable that women from a very bourgeois background would be the best-educated women
00:07:31.040 and would be the women who wanted in some ways to protect the status quo,
00:07:36.360 and all that the suffrage did for them was allow them to do so.
00:07:39.800 In the past, they would have done that through men, really.
00:07:42.660 Then they had a chance to do it on their own behalf.
00:07:46.400 It is true that the vanguard movements were associated, for the most part,
00:07:52.680 with liberal and with social-democratic causes and with the culture of the left, generally speaking.
00:08:00.000 That's because it was seen to be an out-of-left-field movement.
00:08:02.980 It was seen to be a movement for radical change,
00:08:05.960 and it inevitably adhered to the left rather than the right.
00:08:09.040 Yeah, just to add on to what you were talking about earlier,
00:08:13.640 a good friend of mine often will tell a powerful anecdote about female voting.
00:08:21.360 And if you'll forgive me, I'm forgetting some of the details,
00:08:24.400 but as with anecdotes, it's kind of the essence of it is what matters.
00:08:29.740 And that is, there was a revolutionary parliament in France,
00:08:33.520 and they were actually bringing up the question of whether women should vote.
00:08:39.780 And actually, the people who most vigorously opposed it were the far left of the parliament.
00:08:46.320 And those who supported it with greatest passion were actually what we'd call the right,
00:08:50.840 and even the clerical right.
00:08:52.900 And the reason for this was that,
00:08:56.720 and I think in some ways both were rationally correct
00:09:02.020 to hold those viewpoints,
00:09:03.640 and the reason was that,
00:09:04.720 was that women, if given the chance to vote,
00:09:07.660 would most likely vote the way that their priests told them to vote,
00:09:12.120 and that women in this sense were a kind of force of conservatism,
00:09:15.880 that they would maintain the existing religious and aristocratic order.
00:09:22.360 The far left didn't really want women to vote in this way.
00:09:25.960 But, of course, now in our time,
00:09:28.920 it seems like if we want to think about,
00:09:33.120 particularly in America,
00:09:34.280 what we discussed a little bit last time of this idea of the majority strategy,
00:09:39.180 where you have the large white majority,
00:09:41.240 and it's being dispossessed and attacked by a large rainbow coalition.
00:09:47.500 The women are kind of the,
00:09:49.380 how do I say,
00:09:50.540 traitors or kind of a wedge in this,
00:09:53.460 that the women,
00:09:55.100 for whatever reason,
00:09:57.180 maybe purely out of sentimentality,
00:10:00.220 want to vote for center-left parties,
00:10:03.320 the parties that push the buttons about,
00:10:05.760 you know,
00:10:06.040 taking care of the children or whatever,
00:10:09.140 and that they are kind of on the wrong side
00:10:13.000 of the dispossession of America's white historic majority.
00:10:17.840 So, you know,
00:10:19.500 it's a,
00:10:19.960 it's again,
00:10:20.540 it's a very complicated issue,
00:10:22.340 and the social manifestations of women's suffrage can,
00:10:29.380 can,
00:10:29.900 you know,
00:10:31.140 occur in quite different ways.
00:10:33.700 Let me,
00:10:34.380 let me also ask another question about this.
00:10:36.660 You know,
00:10:36.960 in some ways,
00:10:37.700 I want to move on to second wave feminism,
00:10:40.160 because that's,
00:10:41.360 you can find at least tracks that are more obnoxious,
00:10:46.260 extreme,
00:10:46.820 and things like this.
00:10:48.180 But I want to stick a,
00:10:49.640 for just for a little bit longer to pre-World War II feminism.
00:10:55.640 And I'm thinking of someone like Margaret Sanger.
00:10:58.300 And she's in many ways a fascinating individual.
00:11:01.820 She's,
00:11:02.080 she's probably,
00:11:02.840 nowadays,
00:11:03.980 she's looked upon as,
00:11:05.320 by many liberals,
00:11:06.060 as a,
00:11:06.840 as a wonderful,
00:11:08.120 heroic,
00:11:09.320 right-thinking woman,
00:11:10.180 who,
00:11:10.860 was fighting for the rights of women to use contraception,
00:11:15.300 and women's rights in general.
00:11:17.480 But then we,
00:11:18.200 if you take a little closer look,
00:11:19.620 and you peel away a few layers of the onion,
00:11:21.900 you find that she was a eugenicist of sorts,
00:11:26.700 that she was afraid of,
00:11:29.360 of the feeble-minded and weak and so on and so forth,
00:11:34.920 overwhelming the healthier stock of America,
00:11:38.700 and that in a democracy,
00:11:40.460 something like that would be truly terrible,
00:11:43.420 terrible consequences.
00:11:44.520 She,
00:11:44.660 she actually was,
00:11:45.780 she would kind of flirt with people like Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant,
00:11:50.180 people who are,
00:11:51.720 now would be considered,
00:11:53.520 you know,
00:11:53.920 totally beyond the pale,
00:11:56.520 fascist,
00:11:58.000 racialist types.
00:11:59.800 So,
00:12:00.380 you know,
00:12:00.740 when,
00:12:01.440 maybe,
00:12:02.800 in some of these first waves of feminism,
00:12:06.140 that we might think we know what it's all about,
00:12:09.440 if we,
00:12:10.080 if we see it through the lens of modern left-right politics,
00:12:13.260 so to speak.
00:12:13.820 But actually,
00:12:14.500 it's something quite different.
00:12:17.240 Do you have any thoughts on that?
00:12:18.320 Some of the,
00:12:18.900 the different strands of first wave feminism and how,
00:12:23.700 how they're kind of surprising when you look at them from our standpoint.
00:12:28.520 Yes,
00:12:29.060 I think that's very true.
00:12:30.160 I think first wave feminism can't be divorced from the past backgrounds of
00:12:35.400 most of the women who advocated these positions,
00:12:37.460 although there's been a careful pick and mix of the women concerned so that
00:12:43.100 they seem part of a progressive continuum.
00:12:46.420 There are many contradictions.
00:12:48.320 It's inevitable that these ultra bourgeois women,
00:12:55.560 for the most part,
00:12:56.860 will often have radically sort of conservative values.
00:13:02.100 And a few of them will have cross fertilized left,
00:13:06.320 right values,
00:13:08.000 and elitist values at that,
00:13:10.660 despite the fact that they're in favor of doing the vote for themselves.
00:13:13.500 And this means that they're not in the favor of the vote for others.
00:13:18.680 It also shouldn't surprise us that,
00:13:20.620 when a lot of female literature is published sort of in the late 19th,
00:13:28.540 20th century,
00:13:29.500 in a sense,
00:13:30.000 sort of elite literature,
00:13:31.460 it turns out not to be left wing,
00:13:33.240 particularly.
00:13:34.500 A lot of feminist publishing houses have been used by the fact that a lot of the
00:13:38.240 literature they publish in the early days isn't really at all progressive,
00:13:41.920 progressive in their own terms and in the left terms.
00:13:46.500 That's because the women who wrote it came from upper class backgrounds.
00:13:50.980 They were the women who were educated at the elite university level in all female colleges
00:13:55.280 during that era.
00:13:56.340 And their values and what they produced reflect that.
00:14:01.140 You also have a marked partiality for forms of ultra-conservatism amongst certain early female champions.
00:14:10.620 And it's not for nothing that some of the political leaders who emerge first from the dispensation
00:14:16.580 that it gives women the vote turn out to be on the right rather than the left.
00:14:20.680 Over the time,
00:14:23.840 eugenics and feminism have almost completely separated out.
00:14:27.700 But because feminism is concerned with biological and reproductive health
00:14:32.620 and wanted to give women control of it,
00:14:35.540 abortion, of course,
00:14:36.620 cuts two ways.
00:14:38.920 And although an asthma to the Christian right,
00:14:41.580 abortion does feed into a eugenic agenda.
00:14:45.000 Indeed,
00:14:45.460 without some concept of abortion,
00:14:47.320 you couldn't have eugenics in a meaningful sense.
00:14:50.680 Because how are you to act to prevent these people that certain eugenicists believe
00:14:55.160 shouldn't be born or encouraged from being born in the first place?
00:14:59.220 So there's an inevitable correlation between certain socio-biological and Darwinian ideas
00:15:05.580 and certain evolutionary ideas and feminism of a particular sort,
00:15:11.720 particularly as of the unideological feminism.
00:15:14.220 So it's inevitable that the sort of Mary Stokes wing of the movement will come out of eugenics.
00:15:25.340 And the family planning and abortion and pro-choice movements are all deeply mired in feminism on the one hand
00:15:34.300 and eugenics on the other.
00:15:35.760 Yes.
00:15:36.760 Yes.
00:15:37.680 Actually, the religious right in the United States,
00:15:40.500 and I assume in Europe as well,
00:15:41.760 have picked up on this.
00:15:43.580 And they'll usually make inflated claims of,
00:15:48.880 you know,
00:15:49.420 abortionists.
00:15:50.580 They really want to rid the world of Africans or something like that,
00:15:55.100 or, you know,
00:15:55.460 connect Margaret Sanger with Hitler and,
00:15:57.500 you know,
00:15:58.860 various things like that.
00:16:00.140 But obviously this kind of rhetoric is overdone,
00:16:04.580 but it might actually have a kernel of truth to it.
00:16:09.040 But it also points out the egalitarian nature of the so-called religious right in the country.
00:16:17.880 Let's move on to the second wave of feminism and the 1960s.
00:16:24.940 And I would say that,
00:16:26.100 you know,
00:16:26.460 if you talk to an average Joe in the U.S.
00:16:29.820 or Europe,
00:16:31.100 who's maybe a conservative thinking guy,
00:16:34.720 pretty normal,
00:16:35.680 good instincts,
00:16:36.800 he probably thinks that,
00:16:39.640 when you say the word feminism,
00:16:41.180 he probably thinks of some woman who's,
00:16:43.280 you know,
00:16:43.960 tattooed and maybe earringed and has totally outrageous views and hates men and was probably,
00:16:51.780 you know,
00:16:52.000 got dumped when she was at the prom or the dance or something and became a lesbian and just has,
00:16:59.760 you know,
00:16:59.960 has,
00:17:00.340 is driven purely by resentment.
00:17:02.880 And he probably has a,
00:17:04.900 that kind of man-hating feminist stereotype in his mind.
00:17:09.880 And in some ways,
00:17:10.940 a lot of that is associated with that second wave of feminism that came with the new left,
00:17:17.220 that came with the 68 revolutions and so on and so forth.
00:17:20.500 And in the U.S. and Europe.
00:17:23.080 So maybe,
00:17:23.680 Jonathan,
00:17:23.960 maybe you can give us an introduction to this movement.
00:17:27.840 And it's obviously quite different.
00:17:30.000 It has a different vibe,
00:17:32.640 so to speak,
00:17:33.180 to it.
00:17:33.660 And it probably has a different philosophical grounding as well.
00:17:36.700 It might not even be related to earlier feminism.
00:17:39.080 But,
00:17:39.280 but what are your views on the impulse behind feminism that arose in the 1960s and beyond?
00:17:48.340 Yes,
00:17:50.220 I think this is the feminism that most people associate the term by,
00:17:54.160 whatever their view.
00:17:56.520 Feminism in the 60s and thereafter,
00:17:58.700 and some of its precursors in the late 50s,
00:18:01.300 tends to be a movement that's concerned almost completely with revolutionary politics,
00:18:07.900 particularly sexual and psychological revolutionism.
00:18:11.480 It only just about fits into Marxism because it relates to biological or pseudo-biological
00:18:17.020 and sort of quasi-biological theories.
00:18:21.380 It's associated with a sort of range of alternative society and slightly madcap women,
00:18:29.000 like Germaine Greer,
00:18:30.920 who wrote a book called The Female Eunuch,
00:18:33.300 which at one level is a sort of,
00:18:35.160 quite well done,
00:18:36.400 but hysterical rant about the role of women in society,
00:18:40.280 most of which is utopian in a way because it wants the female role to be changed out of full recognition
00:18:46.220 to such a degree that you could argue one of the subtexts is that sort of women become men over time
00:18:55.380 and men become women over time,
00:18:56.880 which was one of the unstated psychological goals of second-wave feminism
00:19:06.240 was to see a feminization of men in relative terms
00:19:10.880 and a masculinization of women in relative terms.
00:19:14.740 And that's not a totally stupid notion when you look at the theories that some of them were proposing.
00:19:22.380 Well, they seem to have succeeded in this to a large degree.
00:19:25.040 Yes, I think, well, feminism is unusual in that it's one of those revolutions that succeeded.
00:19:30.280 In absolute terms, of course, it's completely failed
00:19:33.060 because it addressed itself to utopias that are not possible of realization.
00:19:41.080 And things like radical feminism, the total separation of female and male lives,
00:19:46.780 women living separate beehive-like existences in communes,
00:19:51.960 that's all failed.
00:19:53.500 Yeah, I'll jump in here.
00:19:55.040 And then you can get back to your thought.
00:19:56.500 But actually, Alex Kurtigich was suggesting that I read Valerie Solanos' track,
00:20:03.000 The Scum Manifesto.
00:20:04.760 And Scum, in this instant, means the Society for Cutting Up Men.
00:20:10.600 And she essentially...
00:20:12.540 Yeah, she's probably the most...
00:20:13.680 She was an American, of course, and schizophrenic, but she was the most extreme feminist that there's ever been.
00:20:21.460 Yes.
00:20:21.640 Other feminists do partly regard her tirade as sort of exhibitionistic, sort of Sadian and tongue-in-cheek.
00:20:31.400 But, yes, she advocates physical attacks on men.
00:20:35.860 And, of course, she did physically attack Andy Warhol.
00:20:38.360 She shot him in the stomach with a gun.
00:20:40.220 I...
00:20:41.220 Yeah.
00:20:41.960 From which she later recovered.
00:20:43.680 And she was in prison for three years because of that.
00:20:47.740 She got up quite lightly because of this regard.
00:20:50.640 She was an act of insanity.
00:20:52.080 Yeah, she represents, in some ways, the lunatic fringe, even the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe within that particular movement.
00:21:01.960 Although there will be feminists who will defend her because she represents a sort of nethermost position
00:21:08.200 or a sort of position which it's not possible to get beyond, a sort of virulently sort of man-hating position.
00:21:16.120 But there are positions, misandrist, I think it is, a word that's never used, really, but means female detestation of men,
00:21:25.260 the misogyny being a male detestation of women, which is a quite well-known word.
00:21:30.460 If you take a book like The Woman's Room by Kate Miller, there's a stronger detestation of men in that as anything in Solanus,
00:21:41.400 but it's not as expressed as in a grotesque way.
00:21:46.540 So Solanus is a deliberately absurdist text.
00:21:51.020 But that wing of feminism, radical feminism, as it's called, with a large R,
00:21:55.880 which is counter-propositional biologically and yet is rooted in biology
00:22:00.120 because it wants a total separation of the sexes
00:22:04.220 and, in the end, advocates lesbianism, even for heterosexual women,
00:22:09.460 hence books like Lesbian Nation and that sort of thing,
00:22:14.180 which come out of this particular milieu.
00:22:17.620 Feminist groups had internal debates in the 70s and 80s about lesbianism
00:22:24.580 when the vast majority of women had to confess that they were biologically heterosexual
00:22:28.940 and, therefore, this wasn't an option for them.
00:22:31.740 And they had endlessly pained debates about whether they should have political lesbianism instead,
00:22:36.960 but it never really got anywhere.
00:22:40.240 So that wing of feminism, the more lunatic fringe,
00:22:44.820 radical elements of what is in any case a radical doctrine,
00:22:49.300 have fallen by the wayside,
00:22:50.900 although there are important theorists associated with the anti-pornography movement.
00:22:56.940 such as Andrea Dworkin and so on,
00:23:01.520 who come out of the radical wing and which are still current.
00:23:07.040 Yet another odd reverberation
00:23:09.220 is the association that anti-pornography feminism has with conservatism,
00:23:16.600 particularly religiously-notivated conservatism,
00:23:20.260 unlike libertarianism, for example,
00:23:22.120 which would take a laissez-faire attitude towards commercial pornography.
00:23:26.700 Yeah, let's put some pressure on this.
00:23:29.540 I actually had porn down as an important subject I wanted to discuss.
00:23:34.380 It obviously didn't really, at least to my knowledge,
00:23:37.720 really come up with first-wave feminism.
00:23:39.940 But you have an interesting anti-porn movement
00:23:44.260 that did work hand-in-glove with the religious right, so-called.
00:23:50.760 You actually had, I believe,
00:23:52.640 one of the iconic porn's first leading lady, Lovelace,
00:23:58.020 I'm forgetting her first name,
00:23:59.640 who was in Deep Throat,
00:24:01.100 one of the early large pornography movies.
00:24:06.760 I think it was the first feature film that was kind of a porn.
00:24:09.560 And Lovelace eventually became part of the anti-porn movement,
00:24:15.700 worked with Vorkin and people of this nature.
00:24:19.140 Yet, I mean, this is, again,
00:24:20.820 it gets back to how I opened the conversation.
00:24:23.040 What makes feminism this lasting movement
00:24:26.300 is its ability to mutate
00:24:28.280 and ability to take on contradictory positions.
00:24:31.540 Because you have now,
00:24:33.120 throughout the 90s and 2000s,
00:24:35.520 I'm sure it's still going on,
00:24:36.600 you have whole courses at major universities
00:24:40.980 in the United States and Europe,
00:24:42.320 and I'm sure as well,
00:24:43.940 on porn as this, you know,
00:24:46.740 way of female power or pure liberation,
00:24:51.380 or they probably have other terminologies
00:24:54.400 to describe that I don't even understand.
00:24:56.880 And in some ways, there's two,
00:24:58.660 it's kind of a yin and a yang to this.
00:25:00.420 There's the evils of something like pornography.
00:25:03.200 It's just expressing how men want to treat women
00:25:06.120 as objects and, you know,
00:25:08.840 want to abuse them and so on and so forth.
00:25:11.840 But then it also,
00:25:14.160 porn might be seen on the flip side
00:25:16.140 as this pure expression of a kind of Marcousian,
00:25:20.940 you know, id-driven society,
00:25:23.140 a pure liberation of social relations
00:25:26.140 as an orgy and so on and so forth.
00:25:28.100 So feminism, I mean,
00:25:30.880 maybe this is part of the power of feminism.
00:25:32.940 It can kind of flip back and forth
00:25:35.960 between things and radically re-evaluate
00:25:39.200 its social positions.
00:25:42.980 Yes, I think that's true.
00:25:45.000 But in a way, it's bound to be like that
00:25:47.400 because it is slightly ridiculous
00:25:50.020 that half of mankind has a viewpoint.
00:25:52.120 Right.
00:25:52.800 And if there was a movement called manism,
00:25:56.700 if there was a movement of men,
00:25:58.480 it would immediately divide
00:25:59.680 into all the subsections
00:26:01.060 because men don't agree on anything.
00:26:03.380 Right.
00:26:04.020 And so there's a degree to which
00:26:06.020 to expect women to agree on anything
00:26:08.440 beyond a few superficials.
00:26:11.560 It is fought with difficulty.
00:26:14.680 So you have to frame the thing
00:26:16.560 that women feel they're in a subsidiary place,
00:26:19.540 and therefore that gives them
00:26:22.600 an alliance with each other
00:26:24.300 that then enables them to align
00:26:26.680 around certain core issues.
00:26:28.760 But even then,
00:26:29.640 they'll still be divided
00:26:30.640 on most other issues.
00:26:32.860 There's the Marxian legacy.
00:26:34.780 It's almost like the female
00:26:36.060 as a proletariat.
00:26:37.300 You know, they are oppressed
00:26:39.840 by the current state of being
00:26:43.420 and therefore they become
00:26:44.500 a kind of world historical actor.
00:26:46.540 You know, they become
00:26:47.160 the universal subject or something.
00:26:48.640 It's like a Marxianism,
00:26:50.700 gendered, so to speak.
00:26:53.660 Yes, there's a bit of that going on.
00:26:55.880 Although amongst conservative women,
00:26:58.560 and Dworkin once wrote a book
00:27:00.020 called Right-Wing Women,
00:27:02.320 which is about right-wing women
00:27:04.080 on the right of the Republican Party,
00:27:08.040 because those are the sort of
00:27:09.420 most discernible right-wing women
00:27:11.060 she could find.
00:27:12.940 And they've always been
00:27:14.080 a source of fascination
00:27:15.280 to feminists what makes women
00:27:18.460 otherwise conventional
00:27:19.760 and adopt what they consider
00:27:21.640 to be a male's concentric view
00:27:23.640 once they've achieved
00:27:25.320 just civic equality
00:27:26.820 in terms of careers and jobs
00:27:29.620 and money and things of that sort.
00:27:32.180 And this is the fact, of course,
00:27:34.420 there's a large area
00:27:35.280 of social conservatism,
00:27:37.000 which is part of the female view as well.
00:27:39.240 Right.
00:27:39.640 The view that basically
00:27:40.680 women have a different role
00:27:41.800 in life to men
00:27:42.800 and have different tasks
00:27:44.920 in life to men,
00:27:45.980 but they're not particularly concerned
00:27:48.380 if they're allowed
00:27:49.140 to do male tasks.
00:27:50.540 So if a woman wants to be a judge
00:27:52.720 and goes all out to be one,
00:27:55.260 the general conservative
00:27:56.700 female attitude now
00:27:57.940 is why shouldn't she be one?
00:27:59.720 And she may be quite a tough-minded
00:28:01.520 right-wing judge at that
00:28:03.280 when it comes down to it.
00:28:04.760 But they don't necessarily think
00:28:06.360 the world should be upended
00:28:07.880 so that women can be judges.
00:28:10.600 It's just an add-on
00:28:11.620 to the female role
00:28:12.720 that remains otherwise unchanged.
00:28:15.660 Feminism, like a lot of these movements,
00:28:17.400 is a movement that's only superficially
00:28:20.220 touched the lives
00:28:21.200 of the overwhelming majority of women.
00:28:23.700 Still, after all the propaganda
00:28:25.340 the other way,
00:28:26.760 67% of women,
00:28:28.340 about two-thirds of all women
00:28:29.720 in most societies,
00:28:31.220 want the traditional option.
00:28:33.640 They want some sort of a stable
00:28:35.180 marital or other union,
00:28:37.760 and they want a family with children.
00:28:40.780 And that's pretty much what they want.
00:28:44.080 And feminism doesn't really have
00:28:46.020 too much to say to those sorts of women,
00:28:48.520 although it always postulates
00:28:51.380 the notion that it never stops
00:28:52.720 trying to address them.
00:28:54.240 So the bulk of women
00:28:55.660 remain uninfluenced by it,
00:28:57.460 although they have taken advantage
00:28:58.880 of the successes
00:29:00.440 that feminism has scored.
00:29:03.020 Because although it's one of these movements
00:29:05.200 that can be seen to have failed
00:29:06.560 completely in its own utopian terms,
00:29:09.880 its effect on society
00:29:11.320 has been so great,
00:29:13.000 and its effect on men
00:29:14.240 has been so great,
00:29:15.560 that in a way it has succeeded
00:29:17.680 far more than other radical currents.
00:29:21.340 It succeeded because it's forced the law
00:29:23.940 to maximize those areas
00:29:26.360 of female-male equality
00:29:27.900 and to desprivilege areas of inequality
00:29:31.380 that did exist in the social
00:29:33.260 and civic space between men and women,
00:29:36.460 to the degree that now
00:29:37.840 men who talk openly
00:29:39.880 about opening those spaces up again
00:29:42.000 are frowned upon by other men
00:29:44.180 and are in a very small minority.
00:29:46.080 Yes, you know, it's interesting
00:29:48.960 just to tell two little quick anecdotes.
00:29:53.200 I did notice,
00:29:54.160 I'm now involved in an oppressive
00:29:56.680 bourgeois marriage,
00:29:58.160 but when I was dating,
00:30:00.920 I did notice that
00:30:03.080 it was still tacitly accepted
00:30:06.520 that I would be paying for every meal.
00:30:08.700 And if I, you know,
00:30:10.080 if I happened to take a girl
00:30:11.620 on a date and say,
00:30:12.720 oh, you're going to split it down the middle
00:30:14.100 or something like that,
00:30:14.760 I'd probably get a very nasty look.
00:30:18.600 At the same time,
00:30:20.000 if in that,
00:30:21.040 during that date,
00:30:21.780 if I had ever suggested something like,
00:30:24.600 oh, don't you think,
00:30:25.540 since men are the head of the household,
00:30:28.080 that maybe they should be paid more
00:30:29.720 across the board,
00:30:30.680 that that's a good thing,
00:30:31.580 and it's not really unfair.
00:30:33.100 It's actually fair
00:30:34.580 because men have more financial obligations
00:30:38.280 than women.
00:30:39.320 Again, I would probably get
00:30:40.620 a horrified and disgusted look.
00:30:43.800 So I think, you know,
00:30:46.180 feminism kind of,
00:30:47.260 it succeeds in particular areas,
00:30:50.480 maybe fails in a couple,
00:30:51.700 but succeed in general.
00:30:53.720 Let me talk a little bit
00:30:55.600 about something different than,
00:30:57.900 totally different than someone
00:30:59.040 like Valerie Solanos,
00:31:02.280 whom I'm sure most people
00:31:04.600 in the population,
00:31:06.120 even someone who might call
00:31:07.520 themselves a feminist,
00:31:08.560 would probably declare
00:31:09.460 that she was mentally ill
00:31:10.860 and maybe was acting purely
00:31:12.720 out of hatred.
00:31:14.400 And that is the kind of,
00:31:17.340 let's say,
00:31:17.960 modern girl feminism
00:31:20.040 that represents a kind of
00:31:23.180 compromise solution for women
00:31:25.880 that is actually quite attractive
00:31:27.880 and is about them,
00:31:29.940 you know,
00:31:30.680 playing with the big boys at work
00:31:33.060 or, you know,
00:31:33.620 having the ability to get a job.
00:31:35.660 Even if they eventually
00:31:36.700 might want to have a family
00:31:37.740 a little bit later,
00:31:39.120 that they still have
00:31:40.620 the opportunity to go
00:31:42.060 become a stockbroker
00:31:43.260 or something like this
00:31:43.960 if they want to.
00:31:45.320 And yet,
00:31:46.160 they really don't hold,
00:31:47.960 if you meet these women,
00:31:49.820 they are otherwise
00:31:51.760 normal and healthy.
00:31:52.960 They don't hold any views
00:31:54.300 of men are evil
00:31:55.460 or should be destroyed
00:31:57.460 or anything like that.
00:31:58.980 So it's a kind of
00:32:00.080 acceptable compromise feminism.
00:32:03.160 And I don't want to make this
00:32:05.240 too much of a leading question,
00:32:06.780 but I think it is worth
00:32:08.600 pointing out
00:32:09.480 that since the 1970s,
00:32:12.360 real wages have either stagnated
00:32:15.740 or probably more likely declined.
00:32:18.860 And what I mean by real wages,
00:32:20.180 I mean the wage paid
00:32:21.860 paid to a family member,
00:32:23.620 to a head of a household
00:32:24.680 minus inflation.
00:32:26.840 Essentially,
00:32:27.820 the wage is not keeping up
00:32:29.140 with price increases.
00:32:31.280 And what we had
00:32:32.520 in the 80s and 90s
00:32:34.100 was in essence,
00:32:35.040 mom went to work
00:32:36.140 in the sense of,
00:32:37.640 you know,
00:32:37.820 you could,
00:32:38.640 dad,
00:32:39.100 if he had a normal job,
00:32:40.740 he could no longer
00:32:42.000 sustain a family of four.
00:32:44.780 It was impossible,
00:32:45.940 particularly with,
00:32:46.800 you know,
00:32:47.040 education costs,
00:32:48.220 medical costs going up,
00:32:49.260 so on and so forth.
00:32:50.760 And so,
00:32:51.980 in a way,
00:32:52.980 mom had to go to work
00:32:54.340 and that that dovetailed
00:32:57.440 with,
00:32:58.160 you know,
00:32:59.520 this kind of more palatable
00:33:01.400 feminism that came out
00:33:04.800 of all these waves of feminism.
00:33:06.700 So,
00:33:06.920 in a way,
00:33:07.300 one could say that
00:33:08.140 the glorious Steinems
00:33:09.420 of the world
00:33:10.060 and so on and so forth,
00:33:11.420 they're kind of
00:33:12.280 the central banker's
00:33:13.460 useful idiot.
00:33:14.780 And what I mean by that
00:33:16.240 is that it was,
00:33:17.400 due to things like inflation
00:33:18.880 and economic malfeasance,
00:33:22.760 it was impossible
00:33:23.900 for the man,
00:33:25.760 the single breadwinner,
00:33:27.560 to have a family.
00:33:29.260 And these women
00:33:30.820 were out there
00:33:31.280 thinking that they were
00:33:32.160 pursuing something radical
00:33:33.500 by suggesting that women
00:33:34.820 go to work.
00:33:36.020 But really,
00:33:37.060 they were just justifying
00:33:38.540 and maybe even sugarcoating
00:33:40.020 the economic decline
00:33:43.080 of the Western world.
00:33:45.620 so I guess
00:33:48.100 that's maybe
00:33:48.520 my own take
00:33:51.480 on it all there.
00:33:52.500 But you can
00:33:53.060 pick up on that
00:33:54.860 if you'd like to talk
00:33:55.520 about that economic
00:33:57.200 element to it.
00:33:58.640 But maybe,
00:33:59.220 Jonathan,
00:33:59.460 you could just talk
00:33:59.960 about that
00:34:00.820 more palatable
00:34:01.980 kind of compromise
00:34:03.000 feminism
00:34:03.640 which seems to be
00:34:05.260 embraced
00:34:05.840 by,
00:34:08.000 I would say,
00:34:08.960 a vast majority
00:34:09.620 of women.
00:34:10.020 Yes,
00:34:11.900 it's a sort of
00:34:12.700 very practical solution
00:34:13.900 and women have always
00:34:15.800 been a very practical sex
00:34:17.280 at one level
00:34:18.000 of consciousness
00:34:18.700 and this middling
00:34:20.200 solution
00:34:20.820 where you take
00:34:21.620 a bit of
00:34:22.220 the small r,
00:34:23.460 radical feminism,
00:34:24.800 and kick the rest
00:34:25.620 into touch
00:34:26.420 and basically
00:34:27.320 can see it
00:34:28.080 as a conceit
00:34:29.440 and as a way
00:34:30.460 to move forward
00:34:31.400 on the career front
00:34:32.580 is an eminently
00:34:34.400 sensible way
00:34:35.220 of looking at it.
00:34:36.600 It's not necessarily
00:34:37.520 what men always wanted,
00:34:38.840 but it's a solution
00:34:40.060 that in a sense
00:34:41.500 neuters
00:34:43.640 the more virulent
00:34:44.600 aspects of feminism
00:34:45.800 whilst retaining
00:34:46.960 a considerable dose
00:34:48.160 of it.
00:34:48.920 There was a theorist
00:34:49.740 in the 1920s
00:34:51.500 called Wyndham Lewis
00:34:52.500 who wrote a book
00:34:53.720 in 1926,
00:34:55.560 I think,
00:34:55.880 called The Art of Being Ruled
00:34:57.140 in which he suggested
00:34:58.440 that capitalism
00:34:59.240 is real motivating
00:35:00.680 force behind feminism
00:35:02.180 because the whole point
00:35:03.700 was that the family
00:35:05.000 was an archaic
00:35:06.480 and reactionary institution
00:35:08.360 that was pre-modern
00:35:09.820 and that floated
00:35:10.960 uneasily in the marketplace
00:35:12.240 and that dammed up
00:35:14.000 in an alternative lifestyle
00:35:15.460 all these producers
00:35:16.700 and consumers
00:35:17.560 that could be let loose,
00:35:19.620 but they could only
00:35:20.140 be let loose
00:35:20.800 if women were prized
00:35:21.760 out of the home
00:35:22.620 and were treated
00:35:23.540 as auxiliary men
00:35:24.780 and were used
00:35:25.780 in the workplace
00:35:26.480 in that manner.
00:35:27.480 And it's a remarkably
00:35:29.240 prescient analysis
00:35:30.420 given that
00:35:31.220 it was regarded
00:35:32.080 as quite mad
00:35:33.580 when he came up
00:35:34.220 with us in the 1920s
00:35:35.620 if it actually
00:35:36.500 appalled almost
00:35:37.540 painstakingly
00:35:39.500 with what's happened.
00:35:41.000 Yes, without question.
00:35:41.780 Also, the welfare state
00:35:43.060 benefits from it.
00:35:43.800 You have women working,
00:35:45.120 they're paying more taxes.
00:35:47.020 You know, divorce
00:35:47.800 benefits
00:35:49.140 certain economic groups.
00:35:51.480 You have,
00:35:52.140 if you're owning apartments,
00:35:53.380 you're going to benefit
00:35:54.440 by the family
00:35:55.920 no longer being intact.
00:35:57.940 And so,
00:35:58.460 in a kind of horrible way,
00:36:01.300 feminists are,
00:36:03.300 again,
00:36:03.540 the useful idiots
00:36:04.920 of the banking system
00:36:07.200 in American capitalism.
00:36:10.000 Yes, it's sort of,
00:36:11.340 and you see that
00:36:11.980 in the cultural area
00:36:12.900 as well,
00:36:13.540 where a sort of
00:36:14.980 sex-in-the-city feminism
00:36:16.540 totally divorced
00:36:18.620 from, in many ways,
00:36:20.400 the lifestyle instincts
00:36:21.660 of the left,
00:36:22.660 which can be
00:36:23.320 quite puritanical,
00:36:24.440 goes with a hedonistic
00:36:27.780 free-market capitalism.
00:36:29.400 You see this sort of
00:36:30.200 combination
00:36:30.800 of feminism
00:36:32.240 and libertarianism,
00:36:33.940 and feminism
00:36:34.960 and libertarian capitalism,
00:36:37.200 and the two going
00:36:38.100 along together.
00:36:39.320 You see this
00:36:40.020 in the sort of
00:36:40.920 female-issue magazines
00:36:43.120 like Cosmopolitan,
00:36:45.040 which are the female
00:36:46.080 equivalent of
00:36:47.380 pornography
00:36:48.160 in many ways,
00:36:49.640 motivated, again,
00:36:51.920 being by the market
00:36:52.780 and what it is felt
00:36:54.360 the market will bear.
00:36:56.340 And quite distinct
00:36:58.460 to the traditional
00:36:59.820 romantic fiction,
00:37:01.760 so-called
00:37:02.300 female emotional
00:37:03.260 pornography,
00:37:04.680 which,
00:37:05.100 endless stories,
00:37:06.980 fictionalized,
00:37:08.880 about romances
00:37:09.720 between men and women,
00:37:10.840 which tend to adopt
00:37:11.780 as very deeply
00:37:12.540 socially conservative
00:37:13.500 and sort of
00:37:15.160 old-fashioned
00:37:15.980 timber.
00:37:17.940 Cosmopolitan
00:37:18.580 and Sex and the City
00:37:19.560 are the exact inverse
00:37:20.720 of all of that,
00:37:22.100 and advocate
00:37:23.740 an almost predatory
00:37:25.120 and sort of
00:37:26.900 slightly,
00:37:27.760 sort of,
00:37:28.500 sluttish
00:37:29.340 sort of sexuality
00:37:30.240 for women
00:37:31.120 that traditional
00:37:33.160 moralists
00:37:33.880 were appalled by
00:37:35.100 and also regard,
00:37:36.520 and women on the whole
00:37:37.720 have tended to regard
00:37:39.080 as a harmful lifestyle
00:37:40.440 for women,
00:37:41.580 but it's now
00:37:42.280 a sort of market-tested
00:37:43.580 to destruction
00:37:44.320 attitude
00:37:44.880 that's favoured
00:37:46.600 on every newsstand.
00:37:49.160 Oh, without question.
00:37:50.300 I don't want to
00:37:51.040 sound too haughty
00:37:52.360 by saying this,
00:37:53.300 but I'm afraid
00:37:54.580 that so many
00:37:55.740 of the women
00:37:56.820 who move to,
00:37:58.600 say, London
00:37:58.880 or Manhattan,
00:37:59.840 they get a job
00:38:00.960 in their
00:38:01.400 Little Miss career growl,
00:38:03.840 and at some point,
00:38:05.400 they live the
00:38:06.180 Sex and the City
00:38:06.720 lifestyle.
00:38:07.600 At some point
00:38:08.160 in their mid-40s,
00:38:09.660 they wake up
00:38:10.840 alone and lonely
00:38:12.300 living with cats,
00:38:14.240 and it's,
00:38:15.860 again,
00:38:16.340 I'm not trying
00:38:17.520 to demean anyone,
00:38:18.840 it just seems
00:38:19.480 to be the case,
00:38:20.360 and there seems
00:38:21.500 to be the hangover
00:38:22.880 of the Sex and the City
00:38:24.140 lifestyle,
00:38:24.800 which is,
00:38:25.200 I don't think,
00:38:26.520 anything anyone wants.
00:38:27.960 So, Jonathan,
00:38:28.840 expound a little bit,
00:38:30.420 if you would,
00:38:31.320 on how feminism
00:38:32.860 has changed men,
00:38:34.860 and I think it's
00:38:36.000 something a lot
00:38:36.760 more complicated
00:38:37.700 than wissification
00:38:40.240 or men have become
00:38:42.020 like women.
00:38:42.740 I think it's
00:38:43.580 something deeper
00:38:44.740 and more varied
00:38:46.240 than that.
00:38:46.720 Yes, I think it is.
00:38:49.440 I think what's
00:38:50.120 happened is a whole
00:38:51.080 storehouse
00:38:52.200 or memory chain
00:38:54.060 of male archetypes
00:38:55.280 and types
00:38:55.840 has gone down,
00:38:57.260 has been sort of
00:38:57.980 zapped and
00:38:58.680 factored down.
00:39:00.460 Certain types of
00:39:01.800 sort of raw
00:39:03.300 heterosexuality
00:39:04.540 in a relatively
00:39:05.380 traditional
00:39:05.980 and sort of
00:39:06.860 very masculine,
00:39:08.540 capital M
00:39:09.140 sort of a way,
00:39:10.000 have gone down
00:39:10.540 the memory hole.
00:39:11.280 but so have
00:39:12.740 elements of
00:39:14.220 the dandy
00:39:14.840 and the
00:39:16.900 sort of
00:39:17.680 overstepping,
00:39:19.180 flamboyant
00:39:20.180 sort of heterosexual,
00:39:21.540 those roles,
00:39:23.260 which were quite
00:39:23.980 marked
00:39:24.540 and quite varied,
00:39:25.780 the sort of
00:39:26.080 bohemian male
00:39:27.020 roles as well,
00:39:28.680 of a more
00:39:29.440 traditional type.
00:39:30.660 They've gone as well,
00:39:31.980 or they've been
00:39:32.880 rather neutered
00:39:34.280 and confined
00:39:34.960 as well.
00:39:35.720 and there's a
00:39:38.020 whole intermediate
00:39:39.000 zone of
00:39:40.000 masculine identities
00:39:41.140 that have had
00:39:42.100 their card marked
00:39:43.300 and have gone
00:39:44.320 into the past.
00:39:45.460 The question is
00:39:46.400 why has this
00:39:47.060 occurred?
00:39:48.000 And I think the
00:39:48.620 motivation is almost
00:39:49.620 completely male
00:39:50.620 and completely
00:39:51.680 internalized.
00:39:53.280 I think it's
00:39:53.880 many men
00:39:54.600 do not feel
00:39:55.480 that they can be
00:39:56.240 successful in
00:39:57.060 private life,
00:39:58.440 do not feel
00:39:59.080 they can attract
00:39:59.720 the women they
00:40:00.240 wish to attract
00:40:01.100 or be seen as
00:40:01.840 attractive to
00:40:02.600 such women
00:40:03.260 and certainly
00:40:04.700 not get along
00:40:05.560 the side of
00:40:06.200 them if they
00:40:07.680 are otherwise
00:40:08.480 than the present
00:40:10.060 sort of postmodern
00:40:11.000 man.
00:40:11.960 They feel that
00:40:12.940 they've got really
00:40:13.540 no chance in
00:40:14.600 the private life
00:40:15.360 states if they
00:40:16.560 remain loyal to
00:40:17.980 traditional and
00:40:20.020 rather heedless
00:40:21.040 masculinities that
00:40:22.940 are in conflict
00:40:23.840 with the egalitarianism
00:40:25.200 of the present
00:40:25.740 order.
00:40:26.740 And this is
00:40:27.280 something where
00:40:28.120 theory is all
00:40:28.840 very well,
00:40:30.100 that if you want
00:40:30.740 to have a sort
00:40:31.720 of a happy
00:40:33.000 or beneficent life,
00:40:34.360 you have to
00:40:35.200 do various
00:40:35.860 things to make
00:40:36.700 that turn
00:40:37.320 around in
00:40:37.960 the private
00:40:38.420 area.
00:40:39.780 And men
00:40:40.800 have basically
00:40:41.580 just bitten
00:40:42.160 on the bullet
00:40:42.740 really and
00:40:43.420 have adopted
00:40:44.020 a whole new
00:40:45.760 set of masculine
00:40:46.820 constructs in
00:40:48.240 order to be
00:40:48.820 successful with
00:40:49.580 women.
00:40:50.340 And they think
00:40:50.920 they've actually
00:40:51.340 been quite clever
00:40:52.260 because they've
00:40:53.360 adopted an
00:40:54.000 element of male
00:40:55.140 feminist language,
00:40:56.800 posture and
00:40:57.720 behavior in
00:40:58.940 order to get
00:40:59.560 on with women
00:41:00.300 once equality
00:41:01.460 was formalized
00:41:02.800 in civics and
00:41:03.700 in law and
00:41:04.820 in social
00:41:05.280 behavior.
00:41:06.480 Men haven't
00:41:06.920 changed deep
00:41:07.640 down that much,
00:41:09.280 maybe, but
00:41:10.460 behaviorally they've
00:41:11.460 changed a great
00:41:12.200 deal.
00:41:13.180 And this shows
00:41:14.080 that men don't
00:41:14.780 revert to being
00:41:15.560 something else
00:41:16.240 when they're on
00:41:16.720 their own these
00:41:17.400 days except very
00:41:18.340 occasionally and
00:41:19.940 under the influence
00:41:20.700 of all-male banter
00:41:21.940 or drink or
00:41:22.680 whatever.
00:41:23.600 So that's pretty
00:41:24.300 rare.
00:41:25.680 It's not the
00:41:27.980 reversal that
00:41:28.800 scandalized
00:41:29.400 feminists would
00:41:30.020 expect on the
00:41:30.800 whole either.
00:41:31.440 So I think a
00:41:36.120 lot of men
00:41:36.960 feel that in
00:41:39.760 order to have
00:41:40.300 successful families,
00:41:41.520 in order to have
00:41:42.080 successful private
00:41:43.060 lives, they
00:41:44.460 need to downplay
00:41:46.760 certain prior
00:41:48.120 forms and play
00:41:49.620 up certain
00:41:50.820 attitudes and
00:41:51.620 variants which
00:41:52.320 are acceptable
00:41:52.900 today.
00:41:54.040 And I think
00:41:54.580 that's happened
00:41:55.120 right across the
00:41:55.780 board.
00:41:56.980 Yes, as we
00:41:57.700 discussed off-air,
00:41:59.160 our side sometimes
00:42:01.280 underestimates the
00:42:02.660 importance of
00:42:03.500 that 20% of
00:42:05.580 things which is
00:42:06.340 nurture as
00:42:07.500 opposed to
00:42:07.940 nature.
00:42:09.000 And in the
00:42:10.320 case of men,
00:42:11.180 it's almost as
00:42:12.340 if the post-feminist
00:42:14.040 man is a new,
00:42:16.000 different biological
00:42:17.200 species.
00:42:18.160 I mean, he's not
00:42:18.760 exactly.
00:42:19.280 but that nurture
00:42:21.660 of the equation
00:42:23.100 is quite
00:42:24.220 powerful.
00:42:25.820 Yes.
00:42:26.640 Well, no one
00:42:28.380 would engage in
00:42:29.060 politics, no one
00:42:30.020 would engage in
00:42:30.700 any social
00:42:31.260 ideology if the
00:42:32.920 20 to 25% of
00:42:34.480 things which is
00:42:35.520 nurture as against
00:42:36.780 nature was
00:42:37.360 unimportant.
00:42:38.380 So it's in some
00:42:39.620 ways the crucial
00:42:40.300 vortex through
00:42:41.180 which everything
00:42:42.460 becomes the way
00:42:43.200 it's bound to
00:42:43.740 be.
00:42:44.000 if you just
00:42:46.060 left it to
00:42:46.700 nature, you
00:42:47.760 would end up
00:42:48.380 with a semblance
00:42:49.140 of what nature
00:42:50.040 wanted, but you
00:42:51.760 would probably
00:42:52.520 give the game
00:42:53.240 away to all
00:42:53.960 sorts of people
00:42:54.640 who wish to
00:42:55.380 denature nature
00:42:56.620 as much as
00:42:57.160 possible.
00:42:58.320 So nature on
00:42:59.820 its own isn't
00:43:00.460 enough, and men
00:43:02.140 have not
00:43:02.540 fundamentally
00:43:03.300 biologically
00:43:03.940 changed, but
00:43:04.800 their behaviorism
00:43:06.020 has altered out
00:43:07.380 of all
00:43:07.700 recognition.
00:43:08.220 If your average
00:43:11.380 man in the
00:43:11.880 1920s looked at
00:43:14.020 what happened
00:43:15.000 today, he'd
00:43:16.300 be baffled, and
00:43:17.420 yet a part of
00:43:18.020 him wouldn't
00:43:18.440 be, because
00:43:19.420 he'd just
00:43:19.940 perceive it as
00:43:20.680 a tactic which
00:43:21.540 is adopted in
00:43:22.400 order to be
00:43:22.940 successful.
00:43:25.540 Do you think
00:43:26.520 that's all it
00:43:28.460 is, is a
00:43:29.160 tactic, or do
00:43:30.040 you think that
00:43:30.760 it's a...
00:43:31.660 It's a tactic
00:43:32.060 that goes quite
00:43:32.860 deep.
00:43:33.420 I think it's
00:43:34.500 rather like
00:43:35.760 learning a
00:43:36.300 stage part in
00:43:37.480 a play.
00:43:38.220 But you
00:43:39.100 learn it so
00:43:39.840 well, it
00:43:40.420 sort of
00:43:40.820 becomes your
00:43:41.900 ombit.
00:43:43.200 It becomes
00:43:43.700 what you
00:43:44.380 wish to be
00:43:46.100 when you're
00:43:46.500 off set.
00:43:48.660 I think it's
00:43:49.740 a part that's
00:43:51.540 being learned
00:43:52.440 to such a
00:43:55.280 degree that
00:43:56.480 it's become
00:43:56.980 second nature
00:43:57.720 now.
00:44:00.440 Maybe that
00:44:01.360 proves that
00:44:01.960 part of the
00:44:02.480 prior masculinities
00:44:03.620 were also
00:44:04.200 slightly rhetorical,
00:44:05.840 that they
00:44:06.160 proved themselves
00:44:07.300 to be so
00:44:08.000 adaptable and
00:44:09.160 so changeable.
00:44:10.740 But I think
00:44:11.540 it's the
00:44:12.220 pressing need
00:44:13.180 to be
00:44:13.600 successful in
00:44:14.940 this area,
00:44:15.720 which is the
00:44:16.240 prime motivator.
00:44:17.960 Also, I think
00:44:18.760 it just goes
00:44:19.800 with egalitarian
00:44:20.800 discourse.
00:44:22.160 Because what is
00:44:23.100 the alternative?
00:44:24.460 If the
00:44:24.820 alternative a
00:44:25.840 sort of cult of
00:44:26.620 male superiority,
00:44:28.440 many men would
00:44:29.580 feel uncomfortable
00:44:32.160 with that,
00:44:33.000 because the
00:44:33.700 idea of
00:44:34.240 superiority and
00:44:35.160 hence
00:44:35.400 inferiority in
00:44:36.740 any area
00:44:37.520 strikes people
00:44:38.680 as axiomatically
00:44:39.900 discomforting in
00:44:42.700 present circumstances.
00:44:44.460 To bring this
00:44:44.840 conversation to a
00:44:45.600 close, let's
00:44:46.100 talk a little
00:44:46.520 bit about the
00:44:48.020 woman question
00:44:49.660 from a deeper
00:44:51.260 and anthropological
00:44:53.220 standpoint, and
00:44:54.340 that is the
00:44:54.880 role of the
00:44:55.660 woman in the
00:44:56.200 West.
00:44:57.480 Certainly, it's
00:44:58.460 no coincidence
00:44:59.460 that so many
00:45:01.100 of these
00:45:01.340 feminist movements
00:45:02.360 were arising
00:45:03.720 out of Europe
00:45:06.360 writ large.
00:45:08.400 Even if you
00:45:09.180 want to blame
00:45:09.720 Marxism on it,
00:45:10.900 it's arising out
00:45:12.180 of the European
00:45:12.700 milieu at some
00:45:13.560 level.
00:45:14.600 And a lot of
00:45:15.640 that has to do
00:45:16.220 with the fact
00:45:16.720 that despite
00:45:18.140 some of the
00:45:18.700 horror stories
00:45:19.540 told by leftist
00:45:20.740 academics, women
00:45:21.700 are treated better
00:45:22.840 in the Western
00:45:23.320 world than they
00:45:24.000 are in the
00:45:25.600 rest of the
00:45:26.060 world, quite
00:45:26.620 frankly.
00:45:28.300 One likes to
00:45:29.420 imagine the
00:45:30.280 oppressive
00:45:30.940 bourgeois marriage
00:45:32.100 or something,
00:45:32.740 but the
00:45:33.360 oppressive
00:45:33.740 bourgeois marriage
00:45:34.680 is actually, in
00:45:36.540 comparison with
00:45:37.360 most other gender
00:45:39.220 relations around
00:45:39.820 the world, quite
00:45:41.260 equitable.
00:45:42.800 And so it's
00:45:44.060 probably no
00:45:44.880 surprise that
00:45:48.000 feminism would
00:45:48.920 grow out of
00:45:49.720 the Western
00:45:50.040 world.
00:45:51.060 And so there
00:45:51.800 seems to be a
00:45:52.480 tension in the
00:45:54.140 West between,
00:45:55.780 let's just call
00:45:56.700 it liberalism,
00:45:57.560 granting people
00:45:58.040 more quality,
00:45:59.740 thinking that
00:46:00.800 people can
00:46:01.300 transcend their
00:46:02.780 biological or
00:46:04.840 material rootings
00:46:06.340 and kind of
00:46:07.280 decide for
00:46:08.220 themselves.
00:46:09.420 And then also
00:46:10.400 another deep
00:46:12.240 Western tradition,
00:46:13.780 which is the
00:46:14.560 family.
00:46:15.320 And which in
00:46:15.840 many ways, I
00:46:16.420 should point this
00:46:16.980 out, if one
00:46:18.620 wants to be a
00:46:19.220 crude Darwinist,
00:46:21.060 in some ways the
00:46:21.660 monogamous family
00:46:22.820 is also a great
00:46:24.600 victory for
00:46:25.320 feminism.
00:46:25.700 I mean, obviously
00:46:26.560 if we were going
00:46:27.300 to truly live in
00:46:28.220 a Darwinian
00:46:29.160 atmosphere, we'd
00:46:29.960 have some sort
00:46:30.540 of polygamy where
00:46:31.460 the big man, the
00:46:33.520 strongest guy, gets
00:46:34.740 all the women and
00:46:35.820 all the weaklings
00:46:36.980 are either killed
00:46:39.080 or serve as
00:46:40.860 slaves or
00:46:41.480 something.
00:46:42.340 But in many
00:46:42.880 ways this
00:46:43.320 tradition, a very
00:46:44.820 deep tradition, one
00:46:45.820 that predates
00:46:46.400 Christianity, of
00:46:47.900 the family and
00:46:49.160 monogamous
00:46:49.720 relations, that is
00:46:51.760 also something
00:46:52.380 uniquely Western.
00:46:54.720 You know, you
00:46:55.280 don't see a lot
00:46:56.140 of monogamy in
00:46:57.160 say the Old
00:46:58.080 Testament or in
00:46:59.180 Semitic traditions,
00:47:00.140 but you see
00:47:00.760 polygamy and
00:47:01.520 tribal relations.
00:47:02.560 But that
00:47:03.040 monogamous family
00:47:03.960 is something
00:47:04.320 uniquely Western.
00:47:05.120 So, you know,
00:47:06.580 just taking up on
00:47:07.440 some of these
00:47:07.880 thoughts that I've
00:47:08.780 put forward,
00:47:09.540 Jonathan, what do
00:47:11.000 you think is,
00:47:12.160 from an
00:47:12.900 anthropological
00:47:13.540 standpoint, the
00:47:14.960 role of the
00:47:15.940 woman in our
00:47:17.680 European culture?
00:47:18.720 Yes, I think
00:47:21.640 it's really the
00:47:22.900 traditional role.
00:47:24.000 It's the role
00:47:24.820 that predates
00:47:25.940 60s feminism.
00:47:27.740 I think it can
00:47:28.960 be compatible
00:47:29.620 with doing
00:47:30.240 various jobs,
00:47:31.680 but I think it
00:47:32.560 is the mother's
00:47:33.320 role and it's
00:47:34.720 the traditional
00:47:35.380 female roles
00:47:36.840 extended out into
00:47:39.440 the educational
00:47:40.120 area, into
00:47:40.980 nursing, into
00:47:43.580 areas like that.
00:47:45.020 that, but
00:47:45.500 essentially it's
00:47:47.200 the sort of
00:47:50.720 the mother role,
00:47:52.300 the Madonna role.
00:47:53.640 Of course, there
00:47:54.200 is a sexual role
00:47:55.200 as well, and
00:47:57.400 the sort of
00:47:58.900 scarlet female
00:47:59.980 role is part of
00:48:01.600 that continuum
00:48:02.360 because it has to
00:48:03.160 be, because all
00:48:03.940 wearers have to be
00:48:04.880 covered by it.
00:48:06.240 So that's all part
00:48:07.380 of the package.
00:48:08.480 And all of those
00:48:09.300 survive in the
00:48:10.220 West quite
00:48:12.680 markedly, actually,
00:48:13.740 despite feminism's
00:48:16.060 impact.
00:48:17.080 So feminism's
00:48:18.120 changed everything,
00:48:18.900 yet everything's
00:48:19.440 remained the same,
00:48:20.300 or all of the
00:48:21.400 female lifestyles
00:48:22.700 that pre-existed
00:48:23.840 feminism coexist with
00:48:25.840 those that have
00:48:26.360 been changed by it.
00:48:27.860 I think what's
00:48:28.540 really happened is
00:48:29.440 that feminism
00:48:29.860 hasn't changed
00:48:30.620 women at all.
00:48:31.820 It's changed
00:48:32.280 certain female
00:48:32.940 patterns of
00:48:33.460 opportunity, but it
00:48:35.060 hasn't changed
00:48:35.640 women one iota.
00:48:36.800 What it has
00:48:37.420 changed is it's
00:48:38.180 changed men a
00:48:38.880 great deal.
00:48:40.240 I think men
00:48:40.920 have been the
00:48:41.440 real recipients of
00:48:42.520 feminist ideology.
00:48:43.740 men have been
00:48:45.760 transformed by it
00:48:47.860 or have been
00:48:48.680 reluctantly so
00:48:49.920 transformed because
00:48:51.740 they feel that
00:48:52.440 there's no option
00:48:53.340 but to accept a
00:48:54.840 certain dose of
00:48:55.740 it in order to
00:48:57.080 have some
00:48:57.940 successful private
00:48:59.160 life.
00:49:00.220 So I personally
00:49:02.180 believe that it's
00:49:03.440 feminism's act of
00:49:04.420 action on the
00:49:05.800 male gender that's
00:49:07.300 the crucial issue.
00:49:08.840 Women have changed
00:49:09.940 to a degree because
00:49:11.000 they've adopted some
00:49:11.840 of its vocabulary
00:49:12.620 but men have
00:49:13.860 had to adapt to
00:49:15.620 a much, much
00:49:16.640 greater degree
00:49:17.520 because it was an
00:49:18.600 alien vocabulary
00:49:19.580 as far as they
00:49:21.680 were concerned.
00:49:22.800 They have adopted
00:49:23.620 it and they have
00:49:24.640 had to get rid of
00:49:26.460 or junk an
00:49:27.880 enormous prior
00:49:29.320 traditional male
00:49:31.000 set of vocabularies
00:49:32.360 only a proportion
00:49:33.560 of which are
00:49:34.040 heard anymore
00:49:34.940 even amongst
00:49:36.600 men, even when
00:49:37.340 they're on their
00:49:37.780 own.
00:49:39.220 So feminism
00:49:39.760 has bitten
00:49:40.440 very deep
00:49:41.440 and has
00:49:42.520 changed men
00:49:43.640 but probably
00:49:44.500 not for the
00:49:45.020 best.
00:49:45.860 If you look at
00:49:46.500 the way men
00:49:47.120 are depicted
00:49:47.640 in 1950s
00:49:48.940 films which
00:49:49.640 is sort of
00:49:50.180 before the
00:49:50.760 cultural watershed
00:49:51.580 and how
00:49:53.580 women and
00:49:54.260 men are
00:49:54.640 depicted and
00:49:55.440 allow themselves
00:49:56.180 to be depicted
00:49:56.880 and depict
00:49:57.480 themselves more
00:49:58.500 more is the
00:49:59.960 point, from
00:50:01.300 maybe 1970
00:50:02.220 onwards, you
00:50:03.360 notice a really
00:50:04.260 radical transformation
00:50:05.500 in the way
00:50:06.680 masculinity is
00:50:07.760 configured, the
00:50:09.900 way heroic
00:50:10.460 masculinity is
00:50:11.360 configured, the
00:50:12.260 way all forms
00:50:13.120 of masculinity
00:50:13.700 are configured
00:50:14.620 and certain
00:50:16.460 traditional forms
00:50:17.600 of masculinity
00:50:18.280 where the
00:50:19.560 Humphrey Bogart
00:50:20.460 character slaps
00:50:21.520 the woman because
00:50:22.200 she's misbehaving
00:50:23.260 would now be
00:50:24.280 regarded as so
00:50:25.220 unacceptable as
00:50:26.800 to cause a
00:50:27.720 frisson if
00:50:28.440 they were to
00:50:28.840 occur in
00:50:29.440 contemporary
00:50:29.880 cinema, for
00:50:30.620 example.
00:50:32.620 Well, it's
00:50:32.880 interesting that
00:50:33.500 there's a deep
00:50:34.600 ambivalence with
00:50:35.480 all this.
00:50:35.940 I've noticed
00:50:36.360 this with the
00:50:37.140 success of the
00:50:38.420 television show
00:50:39.100 Mad Men, which
00:50:41.020 in some ways
00:50:42.040 represented men
00:50:43.700 behaving badly
00:50:44.580 and so women
00:50:45.200 could kind of
00:50:45.700 gawk at the
00:50:47.160 oppressiveness and
00:50:48.620 outmodeness.
00:50:49.360 So you'd have
00:50:49.920 men, you know,
00:50:51.000 openly hitting on
00:50:52.120 their secretary and
00:50:53.380 lots of ass
00:50:54.380 slapping and
00:50:55.260 having, you
00:50:56.440 know, little
00:50:57.220 affairs during
00:50:58.420 lunch breaks and
00:50:59.300 so on and so
00:50:59.700 forth.
00:51:00.340 At the same
00:51:00.800 time, if it
00:51:03.100 were just that,
00:51:04.020 I don't think
00:51:04.380 it would be a
00:51:05.120 successful show.
00:51:05.880 It might be a
00:51:06.360 successful show
00:51:07.080 for men, like
00:51:08.040 on the Vice
00:51:10.540 network or the
00:51:11.880 Spike network.
00:51:13.080 It's some kind
00:51:13.980 of stupid
00:51:15.080 jock, you know,
00:51:16.520 all men
00:51:17.540 programming cable
00:51:18.800 network.
00:51:19.200 but the reason
00:51:20.940 why Mad Men
00:51:21.760 was successful
00:51:22.360 was at some
00:51:23.460 level that
00:51:24.740 Don Draper
00:51:25.720 figure, that
00:51:26.540 tall, dark,
00:51:28.200 masculine,
00:51:29.260 strong, self-
00:51:31.460 confident, willing
00:51:32.680 to put someone in
00:51:33.500 its place type of
00:51:34.420 man, is something
00:51:35.680 deeply attractive to
00:51:36.800 women and it's
00:51:37.860 something that they
00:51:38.840 continually long for,
00:51:40.920 maybe even despite
00:51:41.760 themselves, but
00:51:42.380 certainly despite
00:51:43.080 feminism.
00:51:44.240 But Jonathan, I
00:51:45.140 think we have
00:51:46.280 just scratched the
00:51:47.720 surface on this
00:51:48.860 issue.
00:51:49.800 Well, thank you for
00:51:50.460 being with us and I
00:51:51.620 look forward to
00:51:52.140 talking with you
00:51:52.760 again next week.
00:51:54.700 Thank you.
00:51:55.080 That's right.
00:51:55.440 All the best.
00:51:56.040 Bye for now.
00:52:13.540 Bye for now.