The House That Jill Built

Sugar and spice, all things nice..... and not so much of what little boys are made of.

House That Jack Built images from 1930 Malt Bitters Co. advertisement (Wikimedia Commons)

This Is the House That Jack Built is a traditional English nursery rhyme that used to feature in illustrated books for small children of my generation. It recounts the goings-on of various characters in Jack's house....including the cow with the crumpled horn; the maiden all forlorn; the man all tattered and torn; the priest all shaven and shorn; the cock that crowed in the morn and the farmer sowing his corn. What Are Little Boys (and Girls) Made Of? is another nursery rhyme that sings out from my memories of childhood.

Now, in our internet age, there is another metaphorical house – only this time it is one that features in tales for grown-ups of the Right-wing online ecosystem. This house is a kind of House That Jill Built, although - for reasons I will explain in a bit - it has come to be known as The Longhouse. In one sense it certainly is a long house with a footprint that – metaphorically speaking – has spread half way round the globe. And it is a dwelling place these Rightists most decidedly do not want to live in.

From this notional house, insistent sounds of fretting, nagging and tutting about riskiness are a constant ambient noise. Also spiteful whispering about those who have transgressed the rules of its ‘community’ or simply not quite fitted in. This Longhouse is inhabited by a grand coalition of enlightened souls and oppressed souls. It is a coalition of equals.... somewhat in the mode of Orwell’s Animal Farm. There is a high-caste clerisy of enlightened female and eunuch-male intellectuals. But many middle-ranking inhabitants of this pan-continental house consider themselves equally part of the enlightened. Many consider themselves both enlightened and oppressed. All but the lowest eschelons have been instructed in the need for diversity, equity and inclusion. Maleness is somewhat frowned upon.... but not actually proscribed.

What I am caricaturing here is a conception of our actual 21^st c. Western world as a place that has putatively become excessively ‘feminised’. Feminised to the point of dystopia. Vast amounts have been written about a gradual feminisation of our culture. A shift in the zeitgeist towards the perceived feminine side of our collective human nature - over the course of what some call the long 20^th century - is widely acknowledged right across the political spectrum. Where there is profound disagreement is whether this is a good thing, a bad thing or somewhere in between.

The Longhouse metaphor is succinctly outlined in this Unherd piece as one that “borrows from those anthropologists who describe early human societies as matriarchal, and living communally in village “longhouses”. In contemporary usage, this figurative “longhouse” is a bad thing: a negation of individuality, masculinity and ambition. It’s associated with women, with bureaucracy, with smallness of vision and stifling constraints on anything risky or heroic.” The essay linked to here also has this succinct definition: “the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.”

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Polemics about the over-feminisation of our culture are to be found in abundance and it is not my intention here to add one more to the list. They have their place but can be problematic. Feminisation is such a nebulous societal phenomenon that almost anything specific you might point to is likely to be contradicted or what-abouted by the cherry-picking of examples. And just because our culture has had a bellyful of the “toxic masculinity” slander, it doesn’t mean we need to swerve into a “toxic femininity” counter-attack. Many of the changes feminisation has wrought on our culture can be accounted for as the socio-psychological slipstream of huge technology-driven socio-economic forces. Ever more automation of manual labour and burgeoning of sedentary ‘laptop work’ in advanced economies dominated by services and rich-world welfarism. These are changes that would likely have happened, feminism or no feminism.

“We need to” polemical rhetorical devices never do, in any case, feature in my writing. The ‘we’ being rhetorically addressed is manifestly not capable of taking any collective action in response such exhortations, however wise or necessary. (My essays do however sometimes carry an implicit “I hope we”...and there will be some of that in this one.) But in this essay, I try to approach the feminisation question in a different way.

In this essay I do a bit of Longhouse fly-on-the-wall eaves-dropping - so to speak. What follows, in other words, is my assemblage of an assortment of online writers ‘talking’ in our feminised world.....trying to get a sense of how much has really changed versus how much has stayed the same. It won’t be a balanced audit... its focus will be on what is being undermined more than what might be being enhanced. Regular readers will know however - from my previous essays like this one ; this one and this one - that I take a broadly positive view of the shift that has taken place in the power balance between the male and female halves of humanity over the course of my lifetime.....my sense that women hold up half the sky. But has there been an overcorrection? On balance, Yes I believe there has.

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Here is a guy recounting his experience in what he describes as “a dive bar somewhere in Ohio”. A woman in the bar was upset because her man had been in the toilet for too long and had history of passing out....so she needed help. “Every man in the bar gave it their best shot -- some running and throwing their shoulder against the door..... some trying to pick the lock, -- finally, one of the guys got it open by taking the door off the frame using tools from his truck.... He was the hero of the night ....and that dude was one proud dude, beaming, and recounting the story .....about four times, and each time it got more impressive...

"Lunch atop a Skyscraper" 1932 (Wikimedia Commons)

“All men need to feel like the hero... at least every now and then. They get an immense sense of worth if they are being valued, and appreciated, for rescuing, protecting, building, and solving. While the need to feel important isn’t exclusive to men, the roles that give them the most satisfaction (generally sacrificing their body for the greater good), and how they respond if they don’t have those roles (anger, despair, vengeance), is very different from females.... A society where young men want to save a man trapped in a bathroom, or rush into a burning building, even if only for the momentary adulation of women.......building physical things with real world consequences, stringing power lines, delivering packages, drilling for oil, harvesting food”.

Here is a woman talking about the huge difference between life in one of America’s coastal metropolitan versus one of its flyover states: “If I drive to the garden store, the site manager is going to be barking orders at some teenage boy to haul my mulch and compost to my car for me. If I want help cleaning my house or clearing out my yard, I could ask a few neighbors and by that evening I will have texts from seven teens wanting to help for cash.”

And here is a woman talking up the benefits of having a rich careerist husband: “Once I have divested myself of both children, walked the dog and fought various fires on the school WhatsApp groups .....my hand begins to itch for the easy binary of the dishcloth and the vacuum...... [but] I consider myself to have two occupations...... I am also a writer [and] largely because of my husband’s income, I am afforded three days of childcare a week...... When we had our first child, the door to economic parity slammed shut behind me and....sometimes I experience this as relief, a kind of automatic disqualification from the race”

Here is a female journalist's exasperation at Eat, Pray, Love, the famous/notorious 2006 memoir about ‘one woman's search for everything’ that was subsequently made into a Hollwood movie: “.....this stupid self-obsessed woman with her yoga mat and her Pilates socks and her bloody feelings.....Eat, Pray, Love? How about Binge, Despair, Hate?.....Woman is sad, blah, blah. She has always been sad, blah, blah. She doesn’t love her husband, blah, blah. She is in love with a man called David, blah, blah, but he’s a bit of a prat, blah, blah....”

Here is a young GenZ woman talking about how ”acknowledging women’s innate desire to be sexualized, to be objectified, is sacrilegious; a truth conveniently avoided by both feminists and traditionalists alike” and how “it harms young girls through its complete lack of social regulation of feminine sexual impulses.”

Here is a young male on certain unspoken realities of dating women: “Some time during adolescence, every heterosexual male becomes aware of a discrepancy, as large as a continent, between what society tells them is the truth and their own individual experience. What the naive, kind and gentle adolescent male will notice, over and over again, is that it’s the swaggering, confident alpha male that women want to engage with sexually.”

I also came across this perceptive comment recently on the downside of that hyper-liberal 21^st c. ‘sexual marketplace’:

“Chivalry channelled male aggression and status-seeking into protection, provision, and public honour. Chastity restrained female hypergamy and placed value on modesty, fidelity, and long-term pair bonding......We’ve discarded the mechanisms that once civilised our baser impulses, in the name of utopian liberal ideals, but failed to pause and consider what those constraints were actually protecting us from.”

This illustration of the folly of throwing the folk wisdom baby out with the ‘progressive’ bathwater, puts me in mind of another. A better kind of feminisation would have been one that could celebrate a woman like Margaret Thatcher becoming a leader of millions of men and yet still understand that, in certain circumstances, she might welcome male protection.

Mrs Thatcher and her security team 1982 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Now some thoughts from conservative intellectuals:

Here is American political commentator Heather Mac Donald on “The Great Feminization of the American University”.....”the burgeoning university wellness centers, massage therapies, relaxation oases, calming corners, and healing circles. Another newly installed female college president, Dartmouth’s Sian Leah Beilock, claims that the two “most pressing challenges of our time” are the “mental crisis among young people” and “climate change”.....Mac Donald makes the withering comment that “the feminized bureaucracy does not tell them to grow up and get a grip. It validates their self-pity.”

Here is a First Things article on the consequences of female over-representation at the helm of various institutions that govern our lives..... itself downstream of over-representation in academia.

Here is Harvard evolutionary biologist Joyce-Benenson on the nature of female competition: “Throughout their lives, women provide for their own and their children's and grandchildren's needs and thus must minimize their risk of incurring physical harm....From early childhood onwards, girls compete using strategies that minimize the risk of retaliation and reduce the strength of other girls. Girls' competitive strategies include avoiding direct interference with another girl's goals, disguising competition, competing overtly only from a position of high status in the community, enforcing equality within the female community and socially excluding other girls.”

Here is Australian academic Kenneth Minogue on Liberalism’s obsession with labour market ‘discrimination’; something he calls “a melodrama of oppression”:

“...In a few significant areas, no such demands are made.....rough outdoor work or where lack of ability could lead to instant disaster. Universities are obviously a soft touch because the consequences take decades to emerge....What of areas where women are patently unsuited?.. [witness the] New York judicial decision that a test of fitness for the [police] force - that nearly all women failed - must be discriminatory, and therefore illegal....

.... What does seem to be clear, from the record so far, is that women bring great talents to developing what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science,” but they have no record of creating the “paradigm shifts” that lead in new directions. It may be, of course, that as the feminists sometimes claim, this is because they were never encouraged to engage in these activities. But to need encouragement, to depend on models to follow, is precisely not to have a capacity to innovate.”

On a more positive note, a dissident kind of feminism has begun to emerge in recent times (as I discussed in this essay a while back). One that is beginning to reckon with ‘Longhouse’ discontents like:

A quasi-religious 'safetyism' that exerts a choke-hold on freedom and ambition

overly-fretful and over-indulgent parenting with young men in particular allowed - and even encouraged - to abandoned themselves to semi-permanent adolescence.

normal emotional ups and downs of life becoming increasingly medicalised as ‘mental health’ ‘conditions’ in need of ‘caring’ by an ever more enveloping nanny state.

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And finally: There is a minority anthropological view of the history of womankind that questions the received wisdom that this has been one gradual (relative) emancipation from a patriarchal default. There are variations on this dissident theme but they all have in common the idea that female social power has in fact waxed and waned in different eras of civilisation. Perhaps the best known (not necessarily the best) thesis is that of Christopher Lasch in Women and the Common Life.