The Androgyny Syndrome

.....subtitled 'Splitting la Différence' - a dystopian movie brought to you by Third Wave Productions.

This is the fourth and final part of The Madness of Intelligentsias; my long-essay on the philosophical hinterland of 21st century Liberalism.

The Lovers Statue at St Pancras Station, London - sculpture by Paul Day (Wikimedia Commons)

PROLOGUE

I am too old for there to have been sex education on the curriculum in my school days. But I did have (in Mr George West) a very good physics teacher and so was captivated as a schoolboy by his lessons on electromagnetism - electrical charge, voltage differential, attraction and repulsion etc. It was, you could say, a kind of sex education too - albeit a ‘circuitous’ one.

It seems to me that the most completely defining experience in life – more defining than the culture one was born into; more than whether born rich or poor – is whether one was born a boy or a girl. By “defining” I don’t mean in the sense that a feminist might mean it; I mean in the sense of the sheer imaginative leap it would take to know what it feels like to be the opposite sex. I have only ever managed the faintest of imaginative glimpses of what it must feel like to be a woman...no matter how hard I may have tried.

There’s not much positive that can be said about Mao Zedong but his famous "Women hold up half the sky" beautifully expresses a profound truth about the bond between the male and female halves of humanity.... a bond that transcends any other kind; ideological, tribal or otherwise.

"Women hold up half the sky"

The 20^th c. saw a radical transformation in social mores about the respective roles of men and women in society. This transformation can in part be explained in terms of technology-driven economic change and in part by sustained pressure coming from the activist/intellectual movement that we call Feminism. Thanks to this economic/feminist nexus, the principle of equality of the sexes is now (rightly in my view) an unchallenged Liberal axiom. Where there is profound disagreement, of course, is whether this cultural shift still has a way to go or whether it has overshot. The degree to which such things are susceptible to a virtuous circle of civilising social mores and how much intractably hard-wired into the nature of the human animal is a complex ongoing debate. Females will always play the central part in childbirth and child-rearing (and will always be at a disadvantage in respect of sexual violence and compulsion). Males will always do more of what one might broadly call the physical heavy lifting.

But what, in any case, do we mean by ‘equal’? Do we mean equal as in equivalent or equal as in homogenised?…that (as someone famously said) is the question. When I was a young man, the essential nature of masculinity and femininity was not particularly in doubt. It did not need debating in academic papers nor even talking about, except perhaps in novels. Then in the late 20^th c. Feminism (like all other political causes) got caught up in the radical-Progressive capture of academia. And it began to spin off from its original project - as a corrective to the power imbalance between men and women – to something else entirely.

I would say that no political movement has been as successful at capturing hearts and minds as 20^th century Feminism. It has helped to forge, for we moderns, an ideal about how our conception of The Good Life should translate in terms of the relations between the sexes. This ideal is in its essentials a good one. And I do think some kind of women’s movement was needed at the turn of the 20^th century. [* but see also Note1 below]

I often think that no discussion is more at risk of becoming fraught with misunderstandings than one about relations between the sexes. One needs to tread carefully. It is particularly risky for men to criticise Feminism, although in recent times quite a few women writers have gained a big following doing just that. [* see Note2 below]

Feminism per se can (like anything else) rightly be critically interrogated but it cannot in fairness be dismissed as an intelligentsia mind-game – still less a mad one. It is a much bigger, broader phenomenon than that. But its later, academia-driven pre-occupations:

gravitating from an idea that the masculine/feminine political power balance needed to change to an idea that there is something inherently ‘toxic’ about masculinity per se.

And then seeking to deny even the existence of essential, biological differences between the male and the female of the species

these are indeed intelligentsia manias and are my subject in this final Part 4 of this essay series. I am going to argue that there have in fact been two profound cultural shape-shifts on what one might term the masculine/feminine axis in Western society....ones that need to be considered separately:

The first of them is Feminisation; the idea that the zeitgeist has seen a marked shift towards the feminine over the course of the last half century or so. This too has, in recent times, become axiomatic in journalistic discourse right across the political spectrum. We are talking of a phenomenon that has had huge consequences for the way we live now but one that – as mentioned previously - is at least as much a story of economic and technological change as it is a story of intellectual trends. The question of whether this feminisation of advanced industrial societies should be viewed as a good thing, a bad thing or somewhere in between is very much up for debate. [and a question I will explore in a future essay]

The second great shape shift is one which I am going to label the Androgynisation of our culture...and is my theme in this essay.

Chapter 7: ANDROGYNISM’S CORROSIVE SEXUAL SOLVENT

In the late 1980s, the Chatteringclassosphere began to buzz with a new fashionable groupthink. The gist of it went something like this: the difference between men and women is not so much a case of their different biological and animal natures as something that is “socially constructed”. What’s more, these “socially constructed” “gender roles” are both unnecessary and undesirable. They are impediments to ‘Progress’.

As with all the other intelligentsia fads that have been my theme in this essay series, this ‘deconstruction’ of the realities of sex and gender first germinated in the groves of academe. Of course it did! It was, I would guess, at least partly a consequence of the tendency of this ‘Third Wave’ feminism to disproportionately attract lesbian and otherwise sexually dysphoric academics into its fold (most notably its high priestess Judith Butler). Had this ‘socially constructed gender’ theorising entered directly into the public mainstream, it would have been met with the widespread derision that it richly deserved. Or had it remained hermetically sealed in its esoteric ivory tower, no great harm to our culture need have resulted.

But as I have argued in so much of my writings, an academia/media nexus has become a powerful (if largely unrecognised) feature of our intellectual ecosystem. It operates like a huge agricultural spreader, spraying hyper-progressive fertiliser across the culture but in a concentration initially dilute enough for its toxicity to not be immediately obvious.

movie ad for Romeo & Juliet 1916 (Wikimedia Commons)

‘Radical’ feminism has probably always left the average Western woman – anyone not part of the intelligentsia - somewhat indifferent at best. To most normal, largely apolitical women, its finger-wagging modus operandi will – in so far as they have encountered it – have seemed a case of throwing the Vive la Difference baby out with the bathwater. In its diluted form though, it has become the default correctthink in the entire civic, educational and mass media environment that we inhabit. Its version of sexual equality is now pervasive in mainstream journalism and in tv drama – and is what young people are taught in schools and colleges.

In its diluted form, it has become the default correctthink in the entire civic, educational and mass media environment that we inhabit.

Here are a few examples of its downstream influence on our culture:

It is the reason why now - in a typical European ‘police procedural’ tv crime drama - the chief cop (inevitably female) will not only have the crime solving skills of a Sherlock but also be capable of arresting and physically subduing any violent male thug she might come up against. Classic progressive cognitive dissonance given the incontrovertible reality that 90% of men are physically stronger than 90% of women.

It is the reason why has become ‘misogynistic’ - in polite Progressive society - to notice certain job-market realities . Yes some women would make great security agents just as some men would make great midwives....just not that many. Also women can be great leaders and chief executives but almost certainly fewer of them than men actually want this kind of role. This is the reason why the Western world’s military has come under enormous political pressure to pretend that women are as equally suited as men to all military combat roles. As veteran anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly said it: "Putting women in military combat is the cutting edge of the feminist goal to force us into an androgynous society." And it has been - in the words of this female former US army Special Operations officer - “a cultural revolution, where the truths of human nature are denied in service of ideological dogma [resulting in the] degraded morale and performance of our most essential fighting units.”

More indirectly, it is the reason why in the transgender mania coursed it way through our political and cultural system at Mach speed; accelerating from something of zero interest to 99% of people to an urgent, primary political and managerial ‘issue’ in the space of just a few years. It has played a part in the horror story of irreversible chemical and surgical procedures on confused teenagers (as recounted in this chilling essay by Abigail Shrier)

Worst of all has been its joyless attack on normal sexuality. Of all the Orwellian Newspeak terms we have allowed to insinuate themselves into the language, ‘heteronormative’ must rank as one of the most poisonous. It is an insidious assault on what is likely the greatest joy in the average person’s life. In politically-correctthink the sexuality of the 95% has been relativised as ‘straight’ or prefixed with ‘cis’..... just one option in a great ‘non-binary’ jamboree bag. As I wrote in one of my pre-Substack pieces some years ago: “These so called ‘straight persons’ that one reads of in the media these days should have no need of any sexual identity tag to pin on themselves as some sub-group in a relativist social universe. They are Mr & Mrs Ninety-Five-Percent of all known sexual activity. They are boy meets girl; yin and yang. Virtually the entirety of civilisation’s artistic expression of sexual love was – until these crass times – about these ‘straight persons’. Tristan and Isolde, Paris and Helen of Troy, Miss Bennett and Mr Darcy, John boy Walton and Jenny – straight persons all.”

Worst of all has been its joyless assault on what is likely the greatest joy in the average person’s life.

Then (although more social media transformation than a feminist one) there is the quasi-androgynous online youth culture of “anime” and “manga”. This Unherd piece peers into the teen-Miss Haversham “bedroom-bound dreamworld...snack-strewn beds, figurines and drawn curtains [of its] undeodorised, undersexed disciples”. It makes 80s goths seem almost ‘summer camp’ by comparison. [The whole article is well worth a read although the psyche-world it describes is beyond anything that this 74 year-old man can get his head around.]

Chapter 8: ANDROGYNISM AS A PHILOSOPHY

Judith Butler and Brigitte Bardot beside Midsommer Nights Dreame sculpture by John Gregory (Wikimedia Commons)

I have deliberately deferred the following brief foray into Androgynism’s politico-philosophical roots till after the aforegoing discussion of its effects..... so as to not get side-tracked by its quintessentially bogus intelligentsia mind-games. I find Third Wave Feminist word salads so perverse as to almost defeat my ability to form sentences about them and so I am grateful to dissident feminist philosopher Kathleen Stock for these succinct and cogent ones:

“In radical feminist Utopia, we’re told, there will be “gender abolition”, understood as the complete destruction of, and liberation from, feminine and masculine cultures. That is: in the glorious future, there will be males and females, each with different kinds of body, but no cultural behaviours distinctively associated with the two different kinds of body....The most egregious examples of this disassociation are found in third wave feminists and queer theorists, influenced by Butlerian post-structuralism, who attribute such extraordinary powers to the human psyche they apparently think the mind can dismantle nature by the power of words. Not just sex-based norms and stereotypes, but biological sex itself - not to mention, the facts of sexual reproduction… In other words: Fight the musculoskeletal system!”

Compare and contrast with these Butlerisms:

“We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually it's a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.”

“gender is... the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts”

And this Wikipedia snippet: Postmodern feminists seek to accomplish this goal through rejecting essentialism, philosophy, and universal truths .....For [Judith] Butler, "men" and "women" are categories complicated by factors such as class, ethnicity, and sexuality. Moreover, the universality presumed by these terms parallels the assumed universality of the patriarchy and erases the particularity of oppression in distinct times and places. ... challenge assumptions about the distinction often made between sex and gender, according to which sex is biological while gender is culturally constructed. Butler argues that this false distinction introduces a split into the supposedly unified subject of feminism. Sexed bodies cannot signify without gender, and the apparent existence of sex prior to discourse and cultural imposition is only an effect of the functioning of gender. Sex and gender are both constructed.

There are now very few Westerners who would demur from the idea of womanhood as being on an equal footing with manhood and 20^th c. Feminism can, at least arguably, be credited with helping to bring this about. These gains could surely have been secured though without the later joyless assault on normal sexuality that the above-quoted dysphoric blah blah represents. Perhaps it is the destiny of all activist movements to eventually be hijacked and driven off course by unrepresentative, obsessive misfits and malcontents.

Pretty young women do not wear short skirts and high heels because of ‘the patriarchy’ but because they feel their femininity thereby enhanced. Young men wolf whistling at them is the opposite of ‘misogyny’. Seeking the ‘male gaze’ is (like its sister the female gaze) the primary driver of the trillion dollar female adornment industry. When gentlemen hold the door for ladies it is not to ‘control’ but to charm. Seeking to excise these expressions of la différence from the human condition merely serves to leave it fractious and immiserated. Not a very sexy proposition all in all. In a civilised society, coercive, unsought male predation should of course always be outlawed but Yes, young women do naturally tend to like being the object of male desire. These things will always be in some moral/political tension.

I often read - on Substack and elsewhere - about the ‘global fertility crisis’. The causes are clearly complex and multi-dimensional but could it be that Androgyny Syndrome is one of them? As G. K. Chesterton observed a hundred years ago: “When all are sexless there will be equality. There will be no women and no men. There will be but a fraternity, free and equal. The only consoling thought is that it will endure but for one generation.”

NOTES

*1: Women and the Common Life. In our default Western historical narrative, an unremitting patriarchal dominance of men over women only began to change in the modern era. But in recent times, alternative (or at least more nuanced) narratives have begun to emerge from the historical canon. One notable example is Christopher Lasch who argued that the power of women has, in some ways, actually gone backwards. I will be discussing these alternative historical narratives in a future essay.

*2: Dissident feminist writers are many (including on Substack)... Kathleen Stock, Louise Perry, Mary Harrington, Camille Paglia to name just a few. Heather Mac Donald deserves a mention too though not a feminist.