The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Feminism and the Darwinian Dead End

Posted on | July 8, 2018 | Comments Off on Feminism and the Darwinian Dead End

“I don’t want a baby. . . . Nothing will make me want a baby. . . .This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion.”
— Amanda Marcotte, March 14, 2014

“The United States is in the midst of what some worry is a baby crisis. The number of women giving birth has been declining for years and just hit a historic low. If the trend continues . . . the country could face economic and cultural turmoil.”
— Washington Post, June 30, 2017

What happens to people who embrace the Culture of Death? It should be obvious that feminism’s hatred of motherhood — the anti-maternal bias that expresses itself as a celebration of “choice” — must ultimately lead all those who embrace this ideology down the road toward extinction.

Even before I began the Sex Trouble project four years ago, this was already apparent to me, as it must be to any intelligent person who takes time to seriously examine contemporary cultural trends:

Low birth rates lead to economic stagnation and other social and political problems, which pro-life activists have been warning about for years. . . .
For the past half-century, our elite culture has been dominated by the neo-Malthusian “overpopulation” myth popularized by Paul Ehrlich, a myth fostered by a eugenics cabal led by David Rockefeller (see Donald Critchlow, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America, 2001). Progressive feminists like Amanda Marcotte refuse to acknowledge that their “pro-choice” ideology wasn’t developed with an eye toward the rights of women, but instead originated with a racist billionaire who was worried that poor brown people were having too many babies.

In a free society, people can have as many babies as they want, and if Amanda Marcotte doesn’t want to have any babies at all, far be it from me to try to change her mind. Would anyone want to place a helpless infant in the care of a soulless atheist monster like Amanda Marcotte?

The real problem arises, however, when feminism’s cultural influence encourages other women to believe that they can embrace this warped belief system without any negative consequences. Half a century since the start of the modern feminist movement, the secondary and tertiary effects of this destructive ideology are scattered about our society, like the fragmented artifacts of ancient Rome overrun by barbarians. Young women today, born in the 1980s or ’90s, have little if any knowledge of the world their grandparents grew up in, which was blasted out of existence by the radical upheavals of the 1960s. Many problems now affecting young women are, in fact, a direct result of feminism’s “success” in destroying the moral infrastructure of our society, and yet they are told that the solution to their problems is — of course — more feminism.

What we are witnessing in the 21st century are the late-stage effects of cultural decadence, where children raised in chaotic environments — with divorced or never-married parents, no religious influence, surrounded by drug abuse and other social pathologies — grow up to become dysfunctional adults who exercise toxic influence in the lives of others. Institutional commitments to “inclusion” and “diversity” make it difficult to avoid these dysfunctional people, and we are forced to tolerate deviant behavior in our midst. Whether it’s riots on university campuses, drug addicts encamped on the streets or deranged lunatics threatening violence against us, citizens are expected to adapt to the increasing prevalence of antisocial behaviors, which become normalized.

“Oh, look — it’s a gender-fluid bisexual seventh-grader leading a gay-pride parade through the streets of the state capital!”

“Oh, look — a state university faculty member tortured to death by a gay Hollywood executive in a basement BDSM dungeon!”

“Oh, look — an Ivy League student arrested for child pornography!”

These tip-of-the-iceberg occasions — when unquestionably weird behavior makes headlines — are becoming so frequent we might not even notice, because we may be too busy dealing with the larger submerged mass of this iceberg of weirdness as it affects our own lives. A friend, a neighbor, a co-worker or a relative might go off the rails, requiring us to cope with the collateral damage of their antisocial behavior.

The cultural elite consider themselves our moral and intellectual superiors, and if you ask for actual evidence of their presumed superiority — something other than their diplomas from prestigious universities — you’ll find they have nothing to offer. They want to tell you how to live, and what your opinions should be, but beyond their academic credentials (and their careers in positions of cultural influence, for which such credentials are a prerequisite) there is no real evidence they are qualified to exercise the authority they claim. What makes Amanda Marcotte qualified to speak as the Official Arbiter of Correct Womanhood? Nothing, except that she is a feminist, and therefore her authority cannot be questioned. Disagreeing with her makes you an Enemy of Women.

If you consider yourself superior to others, and you want to make the world a better place, shouldn’t you have lots of children? One might suppose that, as an atheist proponent of Darwinism, Amanda Marcotte would subscribe to a survival-of-the-fittest mentality, wherein reproductive success is considered proof of superiority. From a Darwinian perspective, shouldn’t Marcotte’s superiority make her more desirable as a mate? And wouldn’t her offspring, inheriting her superior traits, be a beneficial influence to the future of humanity?

Logical consistency is too much to demand from our moral and intellectual superiors, of course. Our feeble minds cannot fathom the sublime sentiments and sophisticated philosophy that inspire Amanda Marcotte to hate babies and want to kill them. But I digress . . .

Frozen Eggs and Unchosen Women

How does the influence of feminism affect the lives of women? A recent New York Times article offered some insight:

“Freeze Your Eggs, Free Your Career,” announced the headline of a Bloomberg Businessweek cover story in 2014. It was the year that Facebook and then Apple began offering egg freezing as a benefit to employees. Hundreds of think pieces followed, debating the costs and benefits of “postponing procreation” in the name of professional advancement.
In the years since, many more women across the world have frozen their eggs. Many are highly educated. But the decision may have very little to do with work, at least according to a new study. In interviews with 150 American and Israeli women who had undergone one cycle, career planning came up as the primary factor exactly two times.
Instead, most women focused on another reason: they still hadn’t found a man to build a family with.
“The stereotype that these ambitious career women are freezing their eggs for the purposes of their career — that’s really inaccurate at the present time,” said Marcia Inhorn, a medical anthropologist from Yale University, and one of the authors of the study, which was presented Monday at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology’s conference in Spain.
Most of these mid-to-late 30s women were already established in their careers by the time they got to the clinic, the study found.
“They weren’t freezing to advance; they were facing the overarching problem of partnership,” she said. This was the case, even among those who worked for companies that offered to pay for the procedure. . . .
In the United States, the women generally lived in cities along the East Coast or in the [San Francisco] Bay Area. They ranged in age from 29 to 42, with three-quarters falling between 35 and 39. . . .
For about half of these single women, it was uncertainty about when they would meet a man to build a family with that brought them to the clinic, they told the researchers. The next largest group was driven there by a divorce or breakup. (Egg freezing was actually covered by several of these women’s divorce settlements.) . . .

Permit me to do some mansplaining here, as someone who has spent the past four years studying radical feminism. Despite their rhetoric about “equality,” what feminists actually seek is power — unquestioned and unilateral power, a dictatorial authority, the negation of male influence.

As a political movement, modern feminism did not begin with women in the mainstream of American life concerned about improving the lives of ordinary women; rather, it began with radical women influenced by the Marxist beliefs that were prevalent in the 1960s New Left.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1948

Applying a Marxist analysis of “class struggle” to male-female relationships, radical feminists saw women in the role of the oppressed proletariat, with men as the bourgeois oppressor. Just as Marxists deny that the market economy can harmonize the interests of workers and employers, so also do feminists deny that “equality” of men and women is possible in the existing social order, which they condemn as patriarchy (or “capitalist imperialist white supremacist cisheteronormative patriarchy,” to quote one student feminist leader).

From this quasi-Marxist analysis, many logical correlates are obvious, including this: Marx and Engels envisioned the goal of establishing a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” where the sole object of society is to advance the interests of workers; similarly, feminist ideologues envision a dictatorship of women as a ruling class, a social order in which the interests of males will have no consideration whatsoever.

Because their ideology is based in a Marxist zero-sum-game mentality of irreconcilable conflict between men and women, it also follows as a matter of logic that feminism is essentially destructive. The sweeping condemnation of “hitherto existing society” in The Communist Manifesto was echoed in the rhetoric of radical feminists.

“Women are an oppressed class. . . . We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants, and cheap labor. . . .
“We identify the agents of our oppression as men. . . . All men receive economic, sexual, and psychological benefits from male supremacy. All men have oppressed women.”
— Redstockings Manifesto, 1969

“Certainly all those institutions which were designed on the assumption and for the reinforcement of the male and female role system such as the family (and its sub-institution, marriage), sex, and love must be destroyed.”
— The Feminists, 1969

“The enslavement of women in marriage is all the more cruel and inhumane by virtue of the fact that it appears to exist with the consent of the enslaved group.”
— Sheila Cronan, 1970

“The first condition for escaping from forced motherhood and sexual slavery is escape from the patriarchal institution of marriage.”
— Alison M. Jaggar, 1988

Marriage is slavery, an institution which must be destroyed, because all women are oppressed, and all men are participants in this oppression — such were the logical implications of feminism’s application of Marxist analysis to male/female relations as “class struggle.”

The Marxist origin of feminist ideology is necessary to understanding how and why, half a century after the emergence of modern feminism, high-achieving women in their 30s feel compelled to avail themselves of egg-freezing as a means of artificially “postponing procreation.” These college-educated women would like to become mothers, but they cannot find “a man to build a family with,” and are “facing the overarching problem of partnership” — a problem that did not exist when their grandmothers were young women in the 1950s and ’60s.

Hypergamy and the War Against Human Nature

As I have said, the mission of feminism is essentially destructive, and one thing the feminist movement set out to destroy was male economic success, i.e., the greater numbers of men employed in high-paying, high-status professional career fields. Through a variety of mechanisms — including Title IX in the education system, lawsuits accusing employers of discrimination against women, and the implementation of hiring quotas in the guise of “diversity” policies — the feminist movement has succeeded in reducing economic opportunity for men, thus establishing a greater “equality” between men and women. What has followed, as a predictable consequence (and one which feminists must applaud), is that the incentives to marriage have thereby been reduced.

In linking the New York Times article, Professor Glenn Reynolds remarks with deliberate irony: “Maybe it’s about hypergamy.” Maybe, indeed.

Hypergamy (colloquially referred to as “marrying up”) is a term used in social science for the act or practice of a woman marrying a man of higher caste or social status than themselves.

In describing radical feminism as a War Against Human Nature, this is one point that is easiest to understand. Every man knows (or at least, he should know) that career achievement and financial success enhance his status as a desirable romantic partner to women. In every society, men with higher socioeconomic status have a better chance of marrying the most desirable women. Traditionally, men competed with each other for economic advantage, while women competed among themselves to obtain the affections of high-status males. The influence of feminism wrecks this natural pattern, forcing men and women to compete against each other in the workforce, and doing everything possible to provide women with a politically enforced advantage in that competition, thus reducing the relative numbers of men in high-status positions.

Recall that Google — one of the most profitable companies in the world — is being sued for implementing illegal hiring quotas:

In April 2017, Google’s “technology staffing management team” was told to cancel job interviews for software engineers with five or fewer years of experience who were not female, black or Latino, and to “purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline,” according to the suit. . . .
[Google recruiter Arne Wilberg] claims he “repeatedly opposed these illegal and discriminatory hiring practices by complaining to his managers and HR,” telling them “it was illegal to have such hiring quotas favoring certain groups based on race and gender.”
In response to Wilberg’s complaints and warnings Google would occasionally circulate e-mails instructing its employees (to) purge any and all references to the race/gender quotas from its e-mail database … to wipe out any paper trail of Google’s illegal practices,” according to his lawsuit.

Demands for “diversity” in the workplace always result in de facto quotas, which create artificial advantages for some while penalizing those deemed “non-diverse employees.” It is not the case, of course, that a highly skilled white male has no opportunities — he’ll probably do all right, one way or another — but rather that he has fewer opportunities compared to those with similar skills who are not white males. The most likely consequences will be:

  1. A slight loss of efficiency and productivity in firms where “diversity” policies are strenuously pursued; this will have little impact on the bottom line at an enormously profitable company like Google, which controls such a commanding share of a lucrative market that it can succeed despite whatever minor inefficiencies result from its “diversity” agenda;
  2. Increasing social hostility between men and women in the workplace; when female employees know that they can handicap a male co-worker’s advancement by accusing him of “sexism” or “harassment,” men and women can be expected to view each other with distrust;
    and
  3. Declining marital prospects for high-achieving women.

It is this third consequence which the egg-freezing phenomenon brings into focus. It’s not that the women affected by this problem — the difficulty of finding “a man to build a family with” — are themselves committed adherents of the radical feminist ideology I’ve described. Rather, the problem is that their individual choices have been limited because of the political, economic and social influence of that ideology. A young woman might be a devout Christian and a conservative Republican and yet her options are still to some extent shaped by the changes wrought by “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

“What Is to Be Done?” Vladimir Lenin asked in a 1902 essay, outlining his plans for achieving a Communist revolution, and this is what we must ask if we are to avoid the consequences of feminist “success.” When we behold women in their 30s desperate to avoid the Darwinian dead end, freezing their eggs as a means of preserving the possibility that they might someday have children, our first consideration should be to ask: How did they arrive at that destination? What went wrong in their earlier lives that caused these women to miss out on whatever opportunity they had to become wives and mothers in their 20s?

“There is a major gap — they are literally missing men. . . There are not enough college graduates for them. In simple terms, this is about an oversupply of educated women.”
— Professor Marcia Inhorn, Yale University

Professor Inhorn’s study of women who choose egg-freezing would be more helpful for our purposes if she had gotten the study participants to describe their history of romantic relationships. It is not that these women had no previous opportunities for procreation — every year, many teenage girls in America become mothers by the most obvious method — but rather that the available opportunities did not meet their standards. Young women from the American middle class, however, are more or less required to avoid accidental pregnancy before completing their college education. This has given rise to what I’ve called “The Contraceptive Culture,” in which sexual activity is viewed primarily in recreational terms, devoid of moral significance and with no consideration of pregnancy except to prevent this possibility through contraception.

This belief system — college education as the sine qua non of membership in the middle-class, and the attendant necessity of avoiding pregnancy prior to college graduation — involves a number of prejudices that are seldom explicitly stated. For example, there is a prejudice against the possibility of true love in adolescence. Because it is considered impossible for the middle-class girl to marry until she finishes college (i.e., age 21 at the earliest), any romantic feelings she might experience as a teenager are dismissed as transient and trivial. She must be discouraged from “getting serious” with any high-school boyfriend because, it is assumed, she must remain “available” until after she gets her college diploma. There can be no Romeo-and-Juliet romance for the middle-class teenager, because Juliet’s parents have determined (and have encouraged her to believe) that any idea of love must be postponed at least until she has obtained her bachelor’s degree.

Love is forbidden to the middle-class teenager, but this does not mean that sex is similarly prohibited. An implicit assumption of the Contraceptive Culture is that teenagers will (and should) engage in every type of sexual activity — homosexual or heterosexual, including oral and anal sex — at the earliest opportunity, and that it is wrong for adults to discourage or attempt to prevent such “experimentation” (as if two teenagers getting it on in the basement were Enrico Fermi, exploring the frontiers of scientific discovery). Middle-class parents are expected to encourage their children to adopt a sophisticated attitude — consistent with what Wesley J. Smith calls “secular individualistic modernism” — about sexual behavior, and this means viewing sex as a casual activity, without any meaning or purpose except pleasure.

So long as she practices “safe sex” (i.e, using contraceptives and condoms to avoid disease or pregnancy) and her partners follow the agreed-upon protocols of “affirmative consent,” the 21st-century middle-class teenage girl has absolute license to pursue any sexual activity that interests her, without criticism or judgment. Because chastity is considered impossible (and openly mocked by feminists like Jessica Valenti), the question is not whether she will have sex, but only how and with whom she will have it.

Why Doesn’t the Feminist Script Work?

The middle-class American girl is presented with a sort of script for her life. She will become “sexually active” as a teenager, engage in a series of temporary “relationships” lasting from a few weeks to a year or two, graduate from college, get a prestigious job in a major city, move into an apartment shared with a couple of roommates, have a few more “relationships” and then, sometime around age 27, meet Mister Right, the handsome, successful and hopelessly romantic man who will fall head over heels in love with her. They’ll move in together and start planning the perfect wedding, and she’ll get the whole nine yards of a fairy-tale happily-ever-after romance, complete with a big house in the suburbs and two adorable kids. This is probably the scenario once imagined by all the desperate 35-year-old women who are now freezing their eggs as a last hope to preserve their chance of motherhood.

What went wrong? The answer is not merely “an oversupply of educated women,” but rather the belief system which produced that outcome. This is why a finger-pointing “blame game” response — women blaming their problems on men’s attitudes, and vice-versa — is futile. Both men and women have been affected by the cultural changes of recent decades. It is absurd to blame today’s 35-year-old woman, born in the early 1980s, for the attitudes she internalized as a teenager in the 1990s when, among other things, feminists were donning their “presidential knee pads” to defend Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. If the 35-year-old man avoids the responsibility of marriage and fatherhood, while thinking himself entitled to no-strings-attached sexual hookups, where did he get that attitude? Wasn’t this written into the script of countless TV episodes and movies produced by Hollywood in recent decades? Maybe you missed this headline last month:

Dating columnist reveals how
‘Sex and the City’ ruined her life
Julia Allison . . . moved to New York in the early 2000s to live the Carrie Bradshaw lifestyle. She became a dating columnist, a party fixture and one of the first internet celebrities . . . But her pursuits sent her, ultimately, down a path of unhappiness and unfulfillment. Looking back on how the show’s ideals negatively impacted her life, Allison, now 37, tells Doree Lewak: “If I could go back and do it all over again, I wouldn’t.”

Trying to live your life according to a Hollywood script is as foolish as trying to change the world to conform to a quasi-Marxist ideology. Both are delusional pursuits, an attempt to substitute intellectual fantasies for the reality of human nature. The 30-year-old woman who expects that Mister Right will come along and sweep her off her feet (because that’s what happens in the movies) doesn’t blame herself for believing the fictional creations of Hollywood screen-writers. No, she blames men for failing to play the part scripted for them. It doesn’t occur to her that her own Hollywood-scripted beliefs are unrealistic, or that the men who disappoint her never watched the movies and TV shows that influenced her ideals of what “romance” should look like.

Similarly, the college-educated men who act as if they are entitled to casual sex with any woman who strikes their fancy do not bother asking why they feel this sense of entitlement. Didn’t Hollywood provide them with their own scripts — Charlie Sheen as the amoral lothario in Two and a Half Men, for example — that told them such a life was not only possible, but a desirable ideal? Get yourself a diploma, a good job and an apartment, and you can be living the dream! And on college campuses, where female students now substantially outnumber their male peers (undergraduate enrollment is about 57% female to 43% male), any reasonably attractive guy has ample opportunity to “play the field.”

A guy who spent his college days bouncing around from one casual hookup to another isn’t likely to develop a sudden preference for monogamy in his 20s, but instead will probably continue the same pattern of hedonistic behavior. As long as he follows the prescribed protocols of “safe sex” and “affirmative consent,” he considers himself immune to criticism. Hey, equality, right? If it’s wrong to criticize female promiscuity — feminists condemn such criticism as “slut-shaming” — then no one can criticize men for thinking they have a “right” to casual sex without any kind of romantic commitment. Besides, haven’t feminists declared that there are no natural differences between men and women? Hasn’t the young man been told that it’s a sexist “myth” to believe women prefer the security of monogamous relationships? There is no such thing as a maternal instinct in women, according to the same feminists who insist that abortion (“choice”) is the most important of women’s rights.

Everything he has been told by feminists leads the young man to believe that women are (or should be) equally interested in casual sex, and certainly no enlightened college-educated man would want to be a sexist who thinks women should be “enslaved” in marriage and motherhood.

Male Feminists Gather in Aspen to Ponder How to Fix Men — the ‘Heterosexual White Ones’

You see? While 30-something women are freezing their eggs because they can’t find suitable men willing to marry them, “male feminists” believe American society is suffering a “masculinity crisis”:

For Michael Kimmel, an author and professor at SUNY Stony Brook, where he founded the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities, the crisis involves one type of man — heterosexual, white ones — who feel like their power “is slipping.” Tristan Bridges, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, agreed with Kimmel, adding that the crisis affects men who are now contending with “unchallenged entitlement.” For the writer Thomas Page McBee, the crisis involves men who are hurting in the face of society’s stereotyped expectations that they should be more inhumane than humane, more violent than empathic. . . .
What the panelists did agree on is that the crisis is damaging American society—harming men’s educational outcomes, women’s well-being, and the public’s safety. Bridges pointed to research showing that when men feel like their masculinity is challenged, they are more likely to advocate for war, discriminate against homosexuals, express an interest in buying an SUV, and believe in the inherent superiority of men. They are also more likely to express attitudes supportive of sexual assault and coercion.

Perhaps the real crisis, from the “male feminist” perspective, is that heterosexual white men vote Republican by a 2-to-1 margin — 62% of white men voted for Trump, according to 2016 exit polls. When we consider that 77% of homosexuals and 63% of unmarried women voted for Hillary, we may suppose this anti-white, anti-male, anti-heterosexual rhetoric is just political propaganda: “Straight white men are evil!”

Ever notice that intellectuals always believe we’re in a “crisis” whenever Republicans win an election? There must be something wrong with America, according to university professors, if there’s not a Democrat in the White House and Democrat majorities in Congress. Intellectuals like Professor Kimmel and Professor Bridges want to tell you how to live, and what your opinions should be, and if you don’t cooperate — especially if you vote Republican — this proves how inferior you are. By the Darwinian standard of “survival of the fittest,” however, who is superior? Is it the feminists like Amanda Marcotte who insist they are “totally having an abortion” if they get pregnant? Is it the women in their 30s freezing their eggs as a last hope of having children? Is it the male feminists theorizing a “masculinity crisis” because Hillary lost?

The progressive worldview of the elite would have us believe that we are inferior if we prefer to live an old-fashioned traditional life, in small towns with our families, rather than living the way the “elite” live. And it’s not until a Republican gets elected president that the elite’s belief in their own superiority is exposed as a mirage. We should probably pity them, but they can never acknowledge their own failure. They care only about power, and when they lose that? Farewell and adieu!



 

Category: Abortion, Contraceptive Culture, Marriage, Sex Trouble

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