Feminsim Will NOT Survive the Industrial Collapse

[causticus]

I noticed an interesting comment on the Ecosophia monthly Open Post a few weeks back. It touches on a topic that I think very often gets dodged or ignored in the collapse-sphere, perhaps with the exception of Jim Kunstler's blog; he certainly has the stones to bring up topics that make most modern people very uncomfortable. I too might ruffle a few feathers with what I have to say here. Anyway, I procrastinated a bit on writing up something about it, but I figured I'd do so sooner or later. Anyway here's the comment:

FWIW, I think that modern feminism has a limited shelf life for the following reasons:
(1) Much of “womens’ liberation” is an artifact of modernity, and will not survive its passing. The main reason women can use men like wallets and sperm banks, then discard them when they are through with them, is that such women are actually “married” to the State, via modern welfare systems. When modern welfare states go away, so will the above life strategy.
(2) Radical feminist women (and Wokesters in general) are not having children at replacement rates. The only people who are reproducing at or above replacement levels, are more traditional (and usually deeply religious) groups of people. Since “the future belongs to those who show up for it,” I expect that more traditional sex roles will be re-established for that reason alone, if no other.

I strongly agree with this analysis. IMO, it's much more coherent than the usual Mainstream Right's responses to feminism, which usually amounts to pegging feminism as some kind of Marxist conspiracy that cropped up in academia starting in the late 1960s and then spread like a cancer onto the whole society, devouring of the Holy American Dream one savory morsel at a time. In fact, feminism is one among many of the productive of the industrial age. By "feminism" I mean in the most general sense, gynocentric identity politics and its various ideological iterations and activistic incarnations. Since there are in fact many different "feminisms," from this point on I will speak of the general doctrine of "gender equality" rather than continuing to invoke the rather vague label "feminism."

But first, I'd like to point out MG's response to this comment above:

Martin, to my mind it’s a mistake to treat things as this kind of either/or binary. There wasn’t just one set of traditional sex roles — check out the history of women’s legal status sometime, and you’ll find (for example) that the Protestant Reformation saw a dramatic decline in women’s legal status, with women being deprived of legal rights they’d had for centuries. When the welfare state implodes, no question, things will change — but that doesn’t necessarily amount to a lurch straight back to Victorian attitudes, you know.

Now, I don't think any and all criticism of postmodern sexual mores must automatically harken back to Victorian takes on this issue, but yes, I do agree that there is no one monolithic doctrine or practice of traditional sex roles. That indeed is a valid observation to make. Though this is not the first time I've seen "Victorian" used as a Strawman-mascot for traditional sexual mores across all pre-industrial cultures. When used in this manner, I think "Victorian" serves as a quick and convenient deflection from genuine criticism of the so-called "Sexual Revolution" and its aftermath. I believe the points Martin made in his original comment certainly qualify as genuine criticism. In reality, it seems there is a whole wide world between the extremes of severe prudishness / sexual repression and "anything goes" hyper-individualistic licentiousness, and most of that generous terrain I'd say squarely falls within the realm of traditional family arrangements and sexual practices.

I'll explain further. Again, I'll agree that there is no one monolithic doctrine or practice of traditional sex roles among the world's great cultures, BUT there is most certainly a common set of patterns we can easily observe among all cultures that have developed into notable civilizations. (Greece/Rome, China, Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, the Maya, among many others) They all valued marriage and stable family structures. NONE of them extolled the "virtues" of women or men running around and sleeping with a cornucopia of different partners. Few-to-none of them even tolerated the idea of sex before marriage. None of them promoted sterile/childless lifestyles as something positive or desirable for the average person. None of them ever advanced the idea that men and women are the same or that they should all work in the same occupations. NONE of these cultures championed women spending their most fertile years spending all day working outside of the household (maybe unless they were slaves or courtesans/prostitutes). No, those traits are those of our own modern industrial western culture. Some of these are also the sexual traits of a dying civilization (see: the fall of Rome). To defend the current/modern version of those attributes "just because!" is to engage in the sort of apologetics that involves lots of usage of the special pleading fallacy, or even the slippery slope argument like idea that any scaling back of modern gender egalitarianism means backsliding into the fields of that horrific Victorian strawman.

But back to the main theme of this post. The idea that men and women should be engaged in the same occupations is one that can only find fertile ground when we have machines and energy slaves doing most of our "back-breaking" work. The social classes today which most strongly promote "gender egalitarianism" are those comprised of people who mostly work in climate-controlled offices. We could say that office jobs are androgynous; which means they privilege neither the nature of men or women. If one's work-existence is limited to the office then they might indeed start believing that men and women can easily do all the same kinds of tasks. But take away the machines and their energy slaves and this delusion suddenly collapses like house of sand! Once we find ourselves back to those grueling pre-industrial conditions, then the sexual mores of olde' will be back with a vengeance. Men will be back to doing brawny jobs and women will go back to taking care of the household and other tasks that don't require a ton of muscle or life-threatening actions each day. But in general, men AND women will be working with their hands most of their waking hours. Both will be too busy and tired to be worrying about any sort of decadent or boutique identity politics; nor will there be any social media platforms left as an arena to spend one's waking hours fighting about these soon-to-be inconsequential abstractions. And no aspect of this impending future need involve any Victorian* neuroses. Neither does the future absence of a welfare state to subsidize the collapse of the family mean a return to Victorianism. But it does means that modern gender ideologies will cease to exist as anything the state (what remains of it) can or will enforce on the general populace.

Now, one more response in that threat I found to be interesting; one that ties into some of the points I made above:

It’s interesting when a couple makes a real attempt to live sustainably ‘off the grid’ (to a greater or lesser degree) they tend to go back to what some would term traditional gender roles. As you say, once you take away the safety net, and also machine labour, it is pretty simple that men are better/capable at some things and women are better at others, and thats where things tend to fall. Either sex has authority in their domain, and the other one helps out in ways they can.

What industrial society has done is to denigrate traditional womens ‘work’ and raised mens work to be overly important, so that a woman can only be ‘successful’ if she competes with men in the traditionally masculine fields. This is more to the benefit of the industrial system than individual women (or men).

Historically, mens task were actually less important day to day than womens. Mens tasks are traditionally high impact but only occur/succeed every now and then, like hunting, building the home, or defending the family.

Womens tasks were the care, maintenance and functioning of the family and without them the whole thing collapses.

Of course, these are generalisations and not locked binaries, and everyone has elements of male/female within them to a greater or lesser degree.

It would be interesting to follow up same sex couples living this way to see if the same thing happens depending on personal preference.

It's my view that the effort to confuse men's and women's work goes back to when Corporate America started admitting women into the workplace (and away from their families!!) en masse, and how they immediately framed this as a "women's empowerment" issue. No, in fact companies did this specifically to depress wages across the board. It's the old "scab labor" trick from the Robber Baron era. Only this time around, big business caught onto the idea that they could rebrand their labor-degrading practices as "social justice" causes. Ditto with illegal aliens doing manual labor jobs and any criticism of this practice is suddenly "racism." It's amazing how much the masses have bought into these lies and how easily they are fooled by these gimmicks time and time again. Though fortunately, more and more of us having been waking up to the truth on these matters.

I'll end this with the simple acknowledgement that this issue is super-sensitive and not easy to discuss around casual company. A "psychology of previous investment" (JHK term) has set in and now tens of millions of women (and many men) defend as a sacred cow the idea that the mass of women should spend their most fertile years being a cubicle serf. Supporting one's husband is now a high (cultural) crime, whereas being a slave to a corporate boss who doesn't give two flicks about the female employee in question is somehow ok. To me this attitude reeks as a type of Stockholm Syndrome plus lots of cognitive dissonance. But maybe that's just me.

---
*It is in my view, that Victorianism could be seen as a modern-age culture movement. Its "mores" are more a cartoon caricature of the traditional family and its values than an authentic expression of how traditional families manifested in the older agrarian nobility the Victorians fancied themselves as emulating. In a nutshell, Victorianism was cultural movement that came about as a modern industrial merchant-class (middle class) attempt to crudely approximate older aristocratic culture norms from previous eras. In essence, a very upright LARP. We could say this movement was something akin to the Hellenistic-era moralists like the Stoics trying to combat the decaying culture of their own era.

Comments

[jprussell]

I think your key points that there are underlying realities that most traditional gender roles are based on and that demographics will play a key role are spot on. If I might add three things that I think are relevant to build on the above:

1) Back when I was in the army, a friend of mine of a rather conservative and religious persuasion lent me a book on traditional fatherhood. It made the excellent point that the "Leave It to Beaver" idea of "traditional" family values (or the Victorian one, for that matter, as you point out in your footnote) was actually a product of industrialization. In pre-industrial society (this book focused mainly on colonial America as a positive example), the womenfolk contributed rather a lot economically through cottage crafts like spinning, sewing, weaving, and so forth. As you and methyethyl above commented, these roles were respected, acknowledged as important, but as different from what men did to contribute. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name or author of the book and haven't been able to dig it up, and my friend can't find it on his shelf.

2) Coming directly from point 1), in that social prestige tends to be pretty tightly correlated with economic contribution, in your reply to methylethyl above, you mention that PMC office jobs are the high status jobs to get. Even in cases where you can work out alternate economically-satisfactory arrangements, a lot of modern women don't feel like they're living up to their potential or being valued, independent human beings unless they have a job that pays well and confers high status. Then you get into the trap of "if both parents are working, you need daycare, and if you want to pay for daycare, both of you need well-paying jobs" (ask me how I know about this one). As you say, as these kinds of arrangements become economically unviable, I expect a lot of return to mom, grandma, aunts, and neighbors watch each other's kids while the men go do physically demanding stuff outside.

3) One big factor that I think underlies a lot of what changed along with what will likely change again in a deindustrial world is readily available, effective, and convenient birth control. Having a liberated sexual life is a lot more desirable if you can be reasonably sure you won't end up with an unwanted baby and no one to help take care of it. When it comes to the sexual norms attached to gender roles, they tend to be some kind of negotiated truce between men's desire to not raise kids that aren't their own and women's desire to have a man (or more rarely, men) around to help take care of her and the kids. I suspect that as sex starts leading more reliably to kids again, women will start relearning the wisdom of "why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?" and men will start demanding some concessions of their own. Whichever groups or communities start figuring this out sooner will likely do better than folks who try to cling to either a childless life or unrestrained promiscuity.

If I somehow got to design the future, I would love for women to be able to retain the option to live whatever kind of life they want, and for men and women to be treated as equally worthwhile and worthy of respect, even if the default is that men and women tend to do different work, have different social lives, and so on. Given what times of decline and dark ages have looked like in the past, I don't have especially high hopes, but I guess we (and our descendants) will see.

[causticus]

1) That books sounds kind of amazing, ngl

2) I think that future historians might regard the two-parent income arrangement as the biggest scam ever pulled on the American populace. And after that, centrally-run public schooling as one of the greatest evils of this era. These schools should more appropriately be called daycare prisons and government indoctrination centers.

3) Yeah, I expect "lifestyle choices" like casual sex and hookup culture to largely disappear once cheap and readily-available birth control is no longer all that available. On traditional gender roles, I think they are largely based on many millennia of lessons learned through trial-and-error mixed with careful observation of human nature. I would wager the various experiments of our own "sexual revolution" have been tried many times in the past and have been reliably proven to fail. Thus the failures make their way into various cultures mythological tales, philosophical discourses, lists of maxims/proverbs, and religious literature. To leave this point off on a humorous note, in the past "having a liberated sexual life" was generally something reserved for kings and wealthy aristocrats, FWIW.

On that last part, I'm inclined to feel the same way. I do think that choice is important and that of course not every woman (or man!) wants to have kids and that this decision should be respected by the society around them. Having said that I think the average man and average woman desire to have families. Childless lifestyle niches have always existed in most civilized societies, and people who chose to go this route can live this way as valuable contributors to their communities.

[jprussell]

More on 1), since you expressed an interest:

At the time, I found it intriguing, but maybe didn't buy into it whole hog. These days, I really wish I could re-read it in light of some of my changed beliefs and worldview. I've tried searching Google Books by a variety of keyword combinations and haven't been able to find it. That being said, the main themes were roughly this:

1) As mentioned above, "traditional" gender roles as understood in the late 20th century are actually way newer than most of their advocates claim. Instead, patriotic, conservative Americans would do better to look at the colonial period for inspiration.

2) According to the book (as I remember it 10-12 years later), men's role in colonial America was something like this: work in the field (or at a full-time craft, like blacksmithing or woodworking), handle pig and larger livestock, handle external financial transactions, represent the family in the community and politically, and educate the children (especially religiously). Women's role was: care for small children, do cottage crafts, cook, clean, manage non-political social life with neighbors, handle gardens and poultry, teach kids basic manners and social graces.

3) Drawing on the above, both men and women had important economic contributions to make and important childrearing responsibilities. This meant that neither men nor women looked down on childrearing or on making money, and neither could claim to be dominating any field of building a household.

4) Combine this with the social expectations and courting behaviors of the time, and you acutally tended to have well-paired married couples who supported and respected each other, where each had prestige and respect for different reasons and both contributed to a succesful household economically and socially.

One reason I wish I could track the book down is that I would love to explicitly compare it to Seed of Albion. There's every chance that it was painting things in a rosy light to make its point, but many of its points are congruent with Seed of Albion, and the different perspectives would be interesting to hold against each other.

[causticus]

Fascinating. I'll have to read up more on colonial period family and community arrangements.

[methylethyl]

1) Ivan Illich makes this point in his book "Gender". But I've never seen this laid out more clearly than in Elizabeth Wayland Barber's book "Women's Work"-- which is a history of weaving and textiles.

[jprussell]

Thank you! I'll check both out.