Standing up for women

In response to the exchange, “Is the power of women the main reason we’re going down the tubes,” in which a male reader said that the salvation of our society depends on the complete subjection of women, a female reader writes:

I can’t be silent on this one; it was too frightening and painful. Am I to fight the barbaric Muslim invasion in order to put this guy in charge? This viewpoint is NOT merely anti-feminist; it’s anti-female. Some men appear to define themselves as men (apparently confining their definition of “man” only to “warrior”) only by digging a deep divide between the sexes.

It ought to be titled, “Let’s defend the West by sharpening our swords on our own women first.” Why? Because there’s only a hair’s difference for women’s lives between the writer’s linkage of: “Western men are wimps because of Western women’s advances” and the even more blatant institutionalized (Koranic) misogyny of Sharia law with its “keep ‘em barefoot and pregnant in harems.” In a level playing field (the world that our Western values strive to create) in which both men’s and women’s abilities are given a chance, only those men and women who have the “right stuff” would be given the jobs. However, in today’s “liberals-gone-wild world” the jobs are subjected to other things like “quotas” and “EEO regulations” – giving “false” equality to women. There’s a vast difference between allowing everyone a chance to prove and exercise their abilities and having top-down, cookie-cutter criteria applied to favor certain groups—which is the PC-extreme to which “fairness” to women has been taken by the MALE-dominated liberal lawyers and the MALE-dominated liberal media in the US. What sort of a decent male would want to hate and blame women for wanting to have access to decent paychecks and jobs, independent credit, as well as for wanting the freedom to marry or not to marry, to have children or not to have children, to become a doctor or computer programmer as well as only a teacher or nurse—in other words, throwing out the baby of fairness along with the acid bath of feminism?

As Christ knew and frequently demonstrated by His actions, men who mistreat women are not WORTHY of the Kingdom. Christ modeled the value of women in a future Christian society by preventing wrathful males from stoning the adulteress (murdering only the woman for a crime that required male participation – as our author did) and preventing lust-oriented males from divorcing their wives. Christ envisioned a future in which the barbarian desert aggressive male ethics were replaced by a world in which even women were not abused. Anti-female (this is not simply anti-feminist) rants like this could be stopped, if these same male authors took just one nanosecond to “love their neighbor” and imagine their lives as women forced to live in the world these males want to create.

LA:

I agree that he went too far. I think he is one of these guys who believe that women are at the root of all problems. In private e-mail I reiterated the same to him.

But I couldn’t dismiss his basic critique of the damage done by women’s having too much power and throwing the relations of the sexes, and thus the whole society, out of whack.

You’re making a good point: that he wants to throw out the baby of fairness with the bath water of feminism. At the same time, “fairness” (right-liberalism) is not an adequate model for the survival and flourishing of society. There are important differences between men and women and you don’t seem to appreciate that. It sounds as though you want everything on an individualist model. Now, if there’s one thing that traditionalism means, it means that the individualist model is not adequate for civilization, that distinctions, including the distinctions between men and women, matter socially. And that would place limits on what we can do individually.

I reiterate, however, that the way the reader said these things showed an excessive desire to put women down, as though women as such were the problem, rather than a whole order in which basically everyone is out of whack.

Reader replies:

Thanks. I really do appreciate—and celebrate—gender differences. I don’t deny them and wonder at the lack of honesty of those who do. Men do lots of spectacular things better than women and women do lots of less spectacular but emotionally needful things better than men. When it comes to gender stereotypes, I concede that where there’s a lot of smoke, there must be some fire. For example, every time I pass a construction site, I laugh to myself that a society of women would never have invented bulldozers or built skyscrapers or invested in space travel. Most of us females have no interest in doing things like that (although some women do and should be given a chance—there’s wide variations in what we lump under the nouns male and female ). A society built only of men would probably look like the Spartan one did—and the warrior-men would bash crying babies’ brains out on the side of the crib after losing the third night of sleep. Women clearly live in the interstices of the world men create—and I am grateful for the beautiful buildings, the universities, the medical discoveries that result from men’s different brains. But there is a dark side to the energy of men. On occasion it spins of control in their genetic compulsion to compete with and dominate each other—and women often feel the first brunt of this need to dominate and control. So, women depend upon the bright side of men’s aspirations to make our lives bearable. We depend upon men to create the conditions for a kinder society—and a kinder society includes women’s contributions. Our Western society is the “brightest” for women in the world.

I’ve lived in the Mideast and in the Orthodox world—Orthodox society is harsh for women, and Muslim society is pure hell. I don’t know anything about Asian society but I presume it’s terrible, too; things seems to get worse for women the further east one travels. I don’t want to eliminate gender differences—vive la difference—but I don’t want to live in a society that regards my talents and feelings as expendable and chokes off my aspirations under the cover of a burka or between the pages of a Playboy magazine (the exact same unfeeling male brutality in two different guises, to my way of thinking). That’s why I am in awe of Christ—the founder of our Western civilization—who, despite being born in a patriarchal, barbarian desert tribal society, had the vision to cut right through its “received male wisdom”—to recognize the value of women and children. If the males in a society can continue to do the wonders they do with construction and organization and still create conditions that cherish and protect their women and children, all of us would enter the “Kingdom.”

LA:

This is very well stated and I don’t think we have any disagreement. Please note that I did repeatedly tell that reader that his call for “complete submission of women” had no place in the West.

I only disagree with you on a passing point, your description of the society in which Jesus was born as a “barbarian desert tribal society.” No, Jesus was born in the Jewish nation, living under Jewish law. You make the Jews of the first century sound like bedouins!

Reader:

Yes, Jewish was more civilized than Arab tent society, but what about the basic Jewish prayer: “Thank you God for not letting me be born as a woman?” Call me female and therefore prejudiced, but I don’t think Jesus prayed this way—and it must have had baneful repercussions for women in Jewish society, too.

LA:

Yes, I give all honor to Jesus and the Gospels and Christianity for raising the status of women. This is a key thing. I’m not going to defend traditional Jewish law, which I don’t know enough about, but I just want to reply that that Jewish prayer may be more an ironic expression of Jewish male frustration than disdain. It certainly doesn’t appear to have had any baneful effects on Jewish women’s assertiveness, which was probably as vigorous in ancient times as today.

Reader:

You made me laugh out loud. Thanks. Sometimes I make myself suffer from terminal seriousness. It’s important to seek out laughter in the midst of all the insanity.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 22, 2006 07:37 PM | Send