Mr. Kalb’s blurb introducing this article implies he’s less than impressed by the author’s concerns. However, many of the left-liberal-type problems that beset today’s world strike me as being partly the result of a shift in attitude from the masculine toward the feminine in domains where the feminine is wholly inappropriate.

I agree with Dr. Sax when he says,

“I think we can all agree on one point: there have been fundamental changes in American culture over the past fifty years, changes that indicate a shift from a male-dominated culture to a feminine or at least an androgynous society. The question is, what’s causing this shift?”

As examples of the shift to a feminized society, Dr. Sax cites the world of men’s magazines, Hollywood, and electoral politics. But there are more wide-ranging manifestations, such as the immigration problem and the rapid disappearance of ancient ethno-cultures which it portends.

Women being unable to perceive the existence of distinct countries, these will disappear where women’s influence on politics grows excessive (via the franchise), since women cannot see what steps are necessary to preserve them, or even that preserving them is in the least desirable.

Distinct countries and ethno-cultures are not on women’s radar screen. Talk to women about them and you might as well be talking to a space alien just arrived from the planet Neptune. What women see, fundamentally, are the worlds of babies/young children, and romantic relationships, and things related thereto. They are fundamentally blind to the existence of things external to babies, romance, and interpersonal relationships — such as, for example, distinct countries and ethno-cultures, the whole tradition of impersonal jurisprudence, etc.

Consider these two reader’s comments by Mr. Auster:

http://www.counterrevolution.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=1378

The problems he discusses in both of them amount in large part really to just the inappropriateness of many aspects of the feminine view of the wide world which lies beyond the one of domesticity.

Women, who of course rule the domestic world as utterly, effortlessly, expertly, and unselfconsciously as a porpoise swims in the sea (think of anything written by Jane Austen or Oscar Wilde, among many other well-known depictions of this), are abysmally unsuited to having aught to say about the wider worlds of countries, wars, international geopolitical problems, impersonal jurisprudence, broad national and international ethnocultural questions, etc. (in dealing wherewith they give the appearance, as Dr. Johnson said of women in a related context, of a dog walking on its hind legs). They don’t have the synapses for the world outside of domesticity (just as men don’t really have ones for the world inside of it). When women gain undue influence in that domain, everything goes haywire and begins to come crashing down about our ears. Women who manage to pull it off, even pull it off quite spectacularly, such as Queen Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Queen Victoria, and Lady Margaret Thatcher are women having enough femininity to know instinctively to make use of the judgements of able, manly men around them. Needless to say, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Mary Robinson, and Hillary are not in this league (in Hillary’s case, for example, I said MANLY men around them, not femmelettes … ).

I agree with Dr. Sax and others who’ve commented in this way on certain of today’s unprecedented problems that excessive feminine influence on domains where it has no business intruding is one of the root causes of those problems. I see Dr. Sax’s concerns as potentially extremely important.

I feel, moreover, that whether or not plastic containers prove to be the feminizing influence he fears they might be, women voters will continue to exert in many ways a socially disastrous effect via the ballot box until certain things, such as the continued existence of countries, society’s ongoing respect for and accommodation of the natural division of humans into two sexes male and female, and other formerly commonplace notions, are taken off the table of things subject to change through the electoral process and put instead into a category of “immutables” — things that are permanent and cannot be changed by any process short of scrapping the entire constitution and starting all over again.

Otherwise, sooner or later a scumbag like Bill Clinton will come along and, installed in power by means of the women’s vote, undo what so many of us hold more dear than almost anything else.

I thought Dr. Sax’s points about the feminization of culture were well-placed and well-stated. I’m doubtful of the “poison in the water supply” theory though because there are too many such theories.

I’d agree with Dr Sax that there is increasingly a view in modern society that women are superior to men. One (male) Australian journalist, for instance, recently felt comfortable to open an opinion piece with the lines: “Let’s face reality here: women are not equal to men they are better. Women are smarter, more intuitive, less aggressive and better decision makers.”

However, in blaming environmental pollutants, Dr Sax’s timing is wrong. He notes that plastics were introduced in the 1950s and 60s. This though was the period of modern history in which feminism was least influential. How does Dr Sax explain the feminisation of culture which occurred from 1850 through to the 1940s? There were no plastics in the mid-nineteenth century, and I doubt that the use of industrial pesticides was widespread.

Eliza Linton was one of the few to resist nineteenth century feminism. What she describes should be familiar to us all from our own experiences. For instance, in the 1860s she criticised “the masculine woman, who tries to make herself the bad copy of a man”; similarly she spoke of feminists as “you of the emancipated who imitate while you profess to hate.”

By the 1890s she had begun to note the feminisation of men. She wrote that “We are disabled by fads, and the men are effiminated by women, morally effeminated” and that “with the increased masculinity of women must necessarily come about the comparative effeminacy of men”. Her comment on the introduction of women’s football in the 1890s was that it “is one to make all but the most advanced of the sexless men and unsexed women who head this disastrous movement pause in dismay at the lengths to which it has gone.”

The feminism that developed from the 1850s was initiated by liberal men in the government of the day. It was based on liberal views that the individual will should be liberated from the fact of gender; that gender as an organising principle of life was an impingement on individual rights.

Eliza Linton put the conservative view that “the sphere of human action is determined by the fact of sex, and that there does exist both natural limitation and natural direction”. However, the dominant liberal forces did not accept that our status as men or women gives a “natural direction” to certain aspects of our lives.

It is a question of principles and not plastics or pesticides.

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