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causticusI 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:
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:
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 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.
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-11 01:09 am (UTC)This was an eye-opening thing I observed while traveling in the developing world and staying in the homes of farmers and laborers. Yes, the women did the household work. But it was totally unlike the work we do in our own homes today in the industrial west: all the work was *social* work. All the women of the household did the work together, so it went very fast and was cheery. It was never, ever a young mom stuck at home all day with just little kids to look after, losing her mind trying to keep the house clean by herself while the kids dump 8 million legos on the floor. That's not a thing. Little kids, when not nursing, can be foisted off on any girlchild older than about 8 so that the women can get real work done. And there are very few toys. The women have a whole host of little cottage industries going on, often *with other women*. The women run the marketplace-- they are the ones running 98% of the little stalls and shops, they are the butchers and poultry-sellers and fishmongers and vegetable dealers. The husband goes out on the fishing boats, or farms the squid, or leases the fields and grows crops-- and more often than not the wife is the one who handles the cash transactions involved in selling what he grows/catches. For the most part, the work they do isn't lonely, isolating drudgery, which is what everybody hates about housework these days. There's nothing social possible about using a washer and dryer. Not so when we all gather round the tubs and scrub clothes together. Vacuum cleaners? Can't even hear yourself think, much less converse. But when everyone grabs her whisk broom and sweeps the house at the start of the day... that's when the day gets planned.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-11 01:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-11 01:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-16 10:14 pm (UTC)Weirdly, just having a washing machine means you *must* have more clothes to use the machine efficiently. Otherwise you run out of clothes to wear before you can put together a full load. Ditto for dishwashers and dishes-- when you don't wash your own dishes, you carelessly use more of them, and you *need* more of them or you run out of cups when the washer's only half full. Sweeping is much faster than vacuuming. The only reason wall-to-wall carpet happened was because of affordable vacuum cleaners. The vacuum cleaners caused more work. And what of the refrigerator? Oh, now that means you only have to buy groceries once a week! Who needs milk delivery when you can get a whole gallon that will keep? But for people who live without that appliance (and I have done so for almost a year), getting something to cook for dinner is a pleasant daily outing, the food is better because it's fresh, and it's a little bit of social contact.
Cars... yeesh. Cars mean we can have everything zoned so there's never a place to buy food in walking distance. The mere presence of widely-affordable vehicles so altered our landscape, that in most places you almost can't buy groceries without a car. Everything's too far away. So while overseas, I lived without a fridge just fine, walked to the market or the store every day, chatted with the ladies there, and it was great! I can't do that back stateside. I'd have to get in the car and go to the store every day, and what a drag that would be!
Don't get me started about how much crap we all own, and how much harder, and more time-consuming, it makes cleaning our houses! Every time I go through my house and try to declutter all the junk people have strewn across every flat surface, I'm envious of my friends back in the village, who just didn't have enough stuff to make their house ever look cluttered. And didn't need it, either. We are dominated by our stuff, and it is suffocating us.
But that is how feminism happened in America. It was totally inevitable once we had the nuclear family, fridges, washing machines, cars, and carpets. Children shipped off to school, women sealed off from the community and from each other, doing each their work all alone, thankless work, pointless work, isolated work. Work that any trained monkey could do. Who could be happy that way?
It'll be an interesting adjustment, when all that starts to go away. The work will be harder, require more skill and knowledge... and it'll be more valued and less lonely. It is a weird sort of tradeoff. People in my great-grandmother's day (and she did laundry with her girls, with a boiling tub over a fire in the yard!) knew the value of a good, savvy, intelligent, shrewd woman running the household. It could determine how many of your children survived, and whether they went hungry or not. We've been so prosperous for so long that we haven't needed that kind of thrift, skill, and ingenuity. But I think we'll rediscover it.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-18 03:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-18 10:43 pm (UTC)In fact, I respect the domestic economy. In pre-industrial days both men and women usually worked at home, or in nature around their home, and taught their work to their kids. It would be a benefit in many ways if most of us could go back to doing that. In the meantime, I completely agree that it makes sense for many families to have a full-time homemaker if possible, of the old-fashioned seriously-skilled type. But she [or he!] has to have reason for confidence that she's not going to be either living under her husband's thumb or worse her whole life, or dumped and left to starve when the kids are grown and her chance of getting any decent job is long gone. If both husband and wife are subsistence farmers, their profound dependence on and need for one another is mutual; if husband is making $200,000 at the law firm or tech hub and wife is a subsistence homemaker, she will be largely at his mercy, and had better be very sure indeed of his character and commitment.