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Can men respect women as agents?
For all its hypocrisies, there is one aspect of girlboss feminism that continues to seem valid to me, and which makes me frustrated on behalf of women. I am talking about whether men (and women?) can respect or admire or empathize with a woman on the basis of her actions in the world or the way she wields power.
I was recently tickled but these posts on twitter/reddit:
and
In response to a man's story about "the haunting feeling of fumbling a 10/10":
I bring these examples up not to harangue men but to explicitly set aside the discourse about romantic relationships, in which most men and women seem happy to accept a certain asymmetry. A male friend recently gave me the dating advice that what's important in a partner is that they are "naturally happy", which struck me as a hilariously insufficient and condescending criterion, better suited to choosing a puppy. As a spergy gay man, I don't have a dog in this fight, if it is a fight, but I do find explicit commentary on the expectations of gendered social interaction helpful (and entertaining).
But outside the romantic context, is there not still a weird asymmetry in attitudes? For instance, women seem more able to put themselves in the shoes of male protagonists in fiction, while men generally seem uninterested in female protagonists. I am not here to say that you are sexist if you did not enjoy Captain Marvel. I hate being lectured to in my entertainment as much as anyone and find woke fiction repulsive. But it's generally hard to think of good examples of female characters occupying much mindshare among men. (Skyler White?) Who are the female counterparts to Harry Potter or Sherlock Holmes, popular among both boys and girls (and whose roles and stories do not particularly depend on their masculinity)? And of all feminist talking points, the Bechdel test stands out as one that I actually find revealing.
I am happy to grant or even defend all the usual replies, such as that women are in fact less likely to be out in the world doing extreme, daring, exciting, risky things that make for good stories. Maybe when women attempt to fill traditionally masculine roles, they will be less effective, less capable. Never mind that few women want to be mob bosses or whatever in the first place. But none of that entails that when women are competent actors in the world, men should be uninterested or even annoyed.
On the flip side, one could argue that women actually deserve no "empathy credit" for their interest in male protagonists, or at least no more credit than men deserve for their interest in Princess Leia, if women are only interested in stories about men taking action in the world when that is precisely what makes them eligible mates. But I'm not entirely convinced here.
Of course I don't think it's a moral failing if, say, by some effect of psychology, a man is incapable of admiring a woman for her achievements in the same way he might admire a man. Maybe nothing can be done to change such feelings. But if this is generally true of men, more than the reverse is true of women, then when I see rallying cries of the "nevertheless she persisted" variety, after the cringe has subsided, I must still have some lingering sympathy.
I think that a lot of this comes down to the fact that modern men living in many European/Anglosphere countries have lived for a decade+ under a system in which women wield a massive amount of power over citizens’ lives, and men can see very clearly the failure modes inherent in the way that women’s psychology interacts with access to power. (A recent and revealing example of which is this brief clip of an interview with Biden’s new pick for Director of the CDC, a textbook demonstration of the catty and supercilious nature of a woman given far more power than she should ever have tasted.)
It may at some point have been possible to believe that women given power under the right circumstances, if thrust into power and forced to perform, might do as well as men. Certainly history contains salient examples of exceptional women - Elizabeth I of England, Boudica, etc. - ably wielding power even under extraordinary pressure. (For a fictional example, many would point to Ellen Ripley from the Alien film series.) However, now that so many men are living under the direct consequences of a feminized power structure - in which even most male officials have to cater to and navigate around female preferences and sensibilities - it’s extremely natural for men to bristle against a regime that is always going to feel on some level like an unnatural imposition.
I will say that young boys, for whom sexual ideation has not yet come to totally dominate their interactions with females, might have an easier time connecting with fictional female characters. I might be shredding some of my already-scarce Dissident Right credibility by admitting that I was a massive Harry Potter fan up into adulthood, and I always found Hermione Granger extremely relatable. She’s exactly the sort of spergy, fastidious, precocious pedant that so many of the commenters on this forum almost certainly were as kids. Of course, now we are confronted with the consequences of living under a political regime controlled by Hermione Grangers - the great majority of whom don’t even have the courtesy to look like Emma Watson while crushing us under the might of the longhouse - and reading the series over again with that life experience makes it far more difficult in hindsight to feel any warmth or empathy toward the character.
A world in which a precocious and hyper-intelligent girl could have her energies directed in a positive direction is certainly desirable; I don’t want Hermione forced to be a housewife, her prodigious mental faculties dulled by menial drudgery. Female scholars and researchers have done wonderful work in the past - see Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin - as have great female artists and writers. What I don’t want is a world where those same women’s political sensibilities come to dominate the cultural production, and consequently the political priorities, of our society. (This is leaving aside discussions of hypergamy, and whether or not by opening up more avenues for women to accrue significant power, resources, and status, we throw reproductive/romantic relations between the sexes into chaos.)
Are societies still ruled predominantly by men much more competent than those ruled (in part) by women? Most of the more disastrous decisions in 20th century western politics (eg. mass immigration) were made by parliaments that were 90%+ men.
So, obviously societies rules by men have their own catastrophic failure modes. History is littered not only with incompetent male rulers, but also men who very competently and effectively executed their vision for society, to the immense detriment of everyone involved because their philosophical premises were rotten. The masculine virtues of course have their corrupted forms, and I would dread living under a regime run by men who embodied those corrupted virtues. (Being sent off to get butchered in some pointless war waged merely to satisfy some red-blooded moron’s bloodlust and pig-headed sense of honor would be a nightmare scenario for me personally.)
Now, when we’re talking about the 20th century, it’s a complicated discussion because in most of the nations you’re talking about, women could vote, and even in the ones where they couldn’t, they were certainly far more emancipated, and their preferences taken far more seriously, than in any previous time in history. That arguably had a massive effect on the political trajectory of the 20th century, even if the people actually tasked with implementing those political preferences were still overwhelmingly male. But, of course, you’re right to point out that it wasn’t female leaders who drove most of the disastrous decisions we’re living under today.
Those are in the past, though, and most men living today didn’t experience life under those regimes firsthand. They have experienced life under the gynocracy, though, so its failure modes and frustrations loom heavily in their minds. And even if male-dominated societies suck in their own ways, female-dominated societies are always going to feel more unnatural, more like an imposition, more difficult to live under, for men, which is whose perspective I was talking about.
Right wing movements came to power without any women voting at all in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Croatia, etc. The notable country that went from being a democracy with full women’s suffrage is Germany (and even there women mostly voted along with the male head of the household), and the NSDAP was the only party to not run female candidates because of their open stance that politics was the domain of men; women’s representation dropped from 37 MPs to 0 under them.
In which country did a fascist party come to power with majority support from women, or really any major attempt to cater to women’s preferences? Most mid-twentieth century right wing parties were pretty explicit about wanting to roll back women’s rights and restore traditional gender roles.
Why are you assuming that fascism was one of the things I had in mind when discussing the disastrous political decisions of the 20th century?
Is that not what you’re referring to with this passage?
A discussion of “the more disastrous decisions in the 20th century” and “pointless wars caused by masculine leaders” that didn’t include fascism would be an odd one indeed. We could certainly add other countries, but ie the Soviet Union of course was no more reliant on women’s support than any other dictatorship from that era.
It seems there are two separate arguments happening at the same time.
I acknowledged that masculine governments have well-documented failure modes, probably the most obvious of which is a cavalier attitude toward war. I even think that it’s fair to point to the one-two punch of the World Wars - one of which it’s reasonable (although more contentious than you might think) to blame primarily on fascism, the other of which has causes so multifarious that it’s impossible to persuasively pin the blame on any one factor or ideology - as the thing which finally totally discredited the old masculine virtues in the minds of many subsequent generations. I don’t know how long it will take, if ever, for the classic God-and-country martial virtues to re-assert themselves in European/Anglosphere countries; certainly the “specter of fascism” cannot continue to look over our national psyches in perpetuity, but it might take a very long time before people’s mental barriers against unadulterated traditional masculine governance erode.
Still, you haven’t yet offered an affirmative defense of feminine governance models. My contention is that most men would be more psychologically comfortable under a macho fascist-adjacent government - even one that led them to fruitless slaughter - than under the soft gynocratic model of governance under which they live now. If your argument is that those same men are stupid to feel that way, and that they ought to be far more willing to give women an honest go at governance for a while, since men fucked it up so badly a century ago, then it’s an argument we can have.
Yeah, I likely blended the two together through reading rushedly both of your comments.
Imo it's more than enough to argue that modernity (if you consider it to be run by women, which I don't actually) is a lot better than many of the previous societies we can pick from among. All the women-dominant world needs to be is not demonstrably worse than the alternatives for us to take pause before we assume that rolling back women's political representation would improve things. I'm skeptical of the argument that men would be psychologically healthier under a more masculine, authoritarian government, largely because I've lived in a country like that and can't say particularly that men were thriving more than anyone else. I think that kind of thing sounds a lot cooler in theory than in practice. Even assuming it were true, there are lots of things I don't like about society that I consider a fair trade off for overall modern peace and prosperity. I don't much like the psychological experience of going to work and taking orders from my boss either, but I still conclude the modern economy is probably a net win - others are free to disagree.
To loop back though and address broader left wing changes, I'm also skeptical these can be laid at the feet of women either. To take OP's example of mass immigration, America's most restrictive modern anti-immigration bill was passed shortly after all women in America gained the right to vote, and was only reversed in the 60s by Emmanuel Celler, who was many things but not a feminist, and rather than cater to women's preferences ultimately lost re-election because he explicitly did not do so (ie by loudly and publicly opposing the Equal Rights Amendment).
In fact, it's an oft repeated talking point that one of the longest lasting arguments against women's suffrage was that women were on net considered more conservative than men. This held true in the West till pretty recently, with American women more likely to identify Republican than men until the 60s, only noticeably voting significantly more for Democrats by the 80s and the present day gap being a historical anomaly. And keep in mind that crude party preference also obscures things like high women's support for Bill Clinton in the 90s, a candidate who slashed welfare and regulations, passed the strongest anti-crime legislation in a generation and banned federal recognition of same sex couples. Likewise, European women voted for conservative parties more than men until the 70s and in some places later. To take one salient example from our cousin country across the pond, Thatcher would have lost her election if only men were voting, and English women supported conservatives over labor until 2005.
Women are more left wing than men in the past few decades, but a glance at the recent historical record indicates this is in no way fixed. Today's rightist are skeptical of woman's suffrage making everything woke; a century ago liberals were skeptical of women's suffrage because they thought women would restore the Bourbons to the throne.
I don't blame all of the world's problems on men either, nor am I really interested in balancing out past wrongs or whatever; I just need an active argument to draw a line from anyone's liberties to societies' problems. My position is that gender just isn't that important till proven otherwise. There are societies both bad and good, liberal and conservative, across all varying degrees of women's enfranchisement, and their ills or successes usually come from elsewhere.
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