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

[causticus]

1. This is a fascinating discussion and I thank you much for the thoughtful critique.

I'm in agreement about the type of shared labor organization of yore that might emerge when post-industrial conditions become a thing.

It doesn't follow from that that they must revert to a condition in which the husband is the wife's lord and master, is pretended to be more intelligent and moral than she, and will have sole control of their cash income and life decisions.

My best guess on why that type of patriarchy was so commonplace in the past,

(a) has to do with the same reason that elective monarchies so often end up turning into hereditary monarchies. If a civil war erupts every time a king dies and half the country is left in ruin, it becomes very logical to observant people that having a means of passing down rights of succession that doesn't involve endless debate, intrigue, and bloodshed, might prove to be a safer and more expedient method. Even if this means the son of the king is a complete idiot or is morally depraved. Of course there were notable exceptions to this rule (like perhaps the Celtic Druidic societies where elective kingship held on for a long time), but I digress. Now on the level of the individual household, anyone who has experienced unresolvable arguments between husband and wife knows how "hellish" that situation can be, and potentially devastating to the whole household and family. Thus the expediency issue comes into play again; if one party de jure has the final say, then crippling stalemates can be avoided and everyone can move on with the next round of business. There's likely other factors involved here, but that would go way off on another tangent.

(b) what I like to call "hyper-patriarchy" is something I see as being the legacy of the Ages of Aries, which began around 2300 BCE, give or take a century or two. During that age things like Fire, Burnt Offerings, Blood Sacrifices, Horse-aided Warfare, Warfare in general, Metal-smithing, ect. were the main motifs. Warlike nomadic pastoralist tribes ended up conquering, assimilating and bludgeoning the snot out of most other peoples. Under this new social order we started to see the role/position of women denigrated and in some cases women being treated like chattel slaves. This became as far cry from the earlier Age of Taurus societies, where men were officially in charge (probably for the reasons stated in the above point) but women were generally had a lot more rights and were seen as being just as valuable as men. Aries social arrangements carried over into the next Age, Pisces, though with some modifications. How things will shape up in today's "New Age," Aquarius is anyone's best guess, though this age does seem to involve traits like idiosyncrasy and the tolerance of differentiation, which seems like something that doesn't play well for extreme conformism and people being boxed into rigid roles and expectations.

2. Defining "feminism" is something that might take a 30,000+ word dissertation to fully flesh out. As there have been different versions/waves of it, each of them asserting very different ideas. So we're talking then about feminism in the plural form.

My husband preferred to define feminism as "the radical notion that women are people."

Hah, I like to call that the "Motte and Bailey" re-definition of terms for the sake of momentary convenience. It's the same gimmick the believers and proponents of various ideologies use to make their favored ideology sound more palatable to the average person. Just like how some Socialists might utter, "Y'know, Socialism is simply the idea that workers are people too!!" (When in fact, we know it's much more than that!!!) Instead, I like to judge ideologies by what the well-known activists and public intellectuals who self-identify as the label-in-question have to say, and what their goals and aims of being involving in ___ism happen to be. So back to the idea of feminism in the plural form. One might ask how the feminism of Annie Bessant differs from the feminism of Andrea Dworkin. And how either of those feminisms differ from the feminism of Camille Paglia. Or the feminism of Anita Saarkesian. You get the general idea here.

It so happens that I was always too weak to think of doing most traditional "men's work", but smart enough to be very good at intellectual labor. It was feminism that gave me the freedom to attend college, be hired for a job requiring education, and write (under my own name yet), which women in more patriarchal centuries rarely or never had. Oh, yes, and the freedom to vote and own property. That sort of feminism, I am vehemently unwilling to lose, and see no reason why the decline of industry means that I should.

3. I would argue that it was mostly the industrial revolution and its myriad labor-saving technologies, conveniences, and massive expansion of bureaucratic/managerial office work, that did away with most excuses for excluding women from non-brawny jobs. That, and Corporate America's push to depress wages across the board (as I talked about in some comments above) by flooding the workplace with a ton of additional labor that hadn't been there before (Big Business must have learned from WWII that women could do all sorts of jobs in a satisfactory manner). Sure, the early waves of feminism helped speed the process along, but I think most of the credit here goes to cheap fossil fuels and its technologies. If none of that happened, most women would still be working on their home farmsteads.

[next_migration]

That's an interesting analysis. Gerda Lerner's history of patriarchy noted that it began well before monotheism, though reached its ultimate heights there, and what you define as the Age of Aries might have been the rough starting point; I don't remember.

If it were not for fossil fuel, most women would still be working on home farmsteads, but so would most men. At the beginning of the 20th century, a quarter of the U.S. population farmed. But prior societies without fossil fuels allowed some people to specialize in arts, sciences, the professions, etc., and I presume future societies will as well. When "people" in that context means males only, the system has been so structured as to deprive women of the chance to exercise their talents. That is bad for those women, of course, but it is also bad for society; the more talented people are cut off from training by their sex, race, class, religion, or whatever, the less productivity there will be. It can't be true that only unpaid labor or only low-status paid labor (e.g., nurse vs. doctor, teacher vs. prof, prostitute vs. senator) is compatible with motherhood - and, of course, not all women will or can be mothers.

Certainly in the future the idea that "everyone should go to college" is going to sink like the Titanic. I will be satisfied if we do not fall back into the idea that even mediocre males merit education and leisure time to utilize it, while female geniuses exist to produce smart male babies.

As for the definition of "feminism", my husband certainly didn't intend his usage as a "gimmick." Neither of us spent any time reading the authors you name, so he wouldn't have been able to say which, if any, named category of theoretical, academic feminist thought he approved of. He simply believed that men should treat women as equals. He loved me for my intelligence and was glad to see me making use of it. That's all. I too do not want to make any more philosophical assertions.

[causticus]

Right, I doubt he himself intended that; rather he was (in good faith) repeating a "feelgood" meme that someone not-so-intellectually-honest originally came up with. The aforementioned "gimmick" is a well-worn rhetorical technique that has been employed by countless missionaries of aggressive faiths (and in the modern sense, aggressive secular ideologies) to present their doctrines as something palatable or reasonable to the people they are attempting to convert, when in fact the missionary is most certainly NOT being transparent about what they are pushing on the innocent person; they are especially not disclosing the entire ideological package and putting it all on the table to be examined objectively.

"Hey there kind sir, I'll have you know that _____ism nothing more than embracing love and light and treating your neighbor nicely. If you agree with that then you are a good _____ist just like me!"

Over the many millennia even the best of us have been fooled by the offerings of sophists, demagogues, and snake oil salesmen.

Of course I think we would both firmly agree that any temperate-minded and reasonable person today would agree that women should have the same civil rights as men. That alone doesn't make one a "feminist" in an ideological sense.

My general rule is to beware of all ___isms (of any and all stripes) and to resist bending the knee to any ideological banner or rallying cry. In my experience, any ideological package tends to be a mix of reasonable-sounding ideas and poison pills.

[next_migration]

Then I am not sure if I am a feminist in an ideological sense. While very strongly favoring equal rights, opportunities, and social respect for women, I'm not attached to any specific ideological framework, e.g., TERF vs non-TE radical feminism vs. non-radical, or whatever. Academic books presenting "theoretical frameworks" for practical or social issues bore me and I'm busy, so I don't read them and really don't know what the feminist theory options are. And I admit that some activists of whatever option really are a pain in the tail when they start criticizing harmless normal social behavior.

On the other hand, while you and I agree that women should have equal civil rights, there are others - like those incels who think it should be legal to rape women appearing in public, or the Dominionists who think women should be stripped of the franchise, or the Taliban who would throw them out of their jobs and classrooms - who disagree. Those men would call me a feminist, as a term of abuse, for disagreeing, but by their definition, most of the American public would be feminists. So should I own it and call myself a feminist, or deny it and let them think I'm admitting I should not have rights?

It seems like there is plenty of room for unnecessary conflict when "feminist" is used as a "cold prickly" vs. "warm fuzzy" word (as JMG has put it) to fight over, but some people are using "feminist" to mean "humorless language-policer who thinks everyone should call their babies 'they/them' or sign consent forms every time they kiss their boyfriend" and others mean "woman who wants to have a job and vote and not get beaten regularly or forced to have C-sections." Probably from the way I phrase that, you can tell that I feel a bit negative about the former and positive about the latter, but there are still too many people (usually but not always men) who feel cold-prickly about the latter definition and others (usually but not always women) who feel warm-fuzzy about the former. If I don't know which you are cold-pricklying about, it's easy for me to bristle up and do my threatened-porcupine act when it may not really be needed.

[causticus]

Sorry for the late reply (which will probably be my last one on this topic).

1. Yeah it sounds like you're simply a proponent of civil rights; one without all sorts of byzantine ideological strings attached. I'd gladly take up that banner too.

2. These are fringe ideas and ones that do not currently hold much of any (if at all) institutional power here in the industrialized West (unlike the great power "progressives" currently enjoy within our institutions). Of course you will find people on the internet presenting themselves as adherents of various "retrograde" ideas, whether unironically or just to troll and get a rise out of the hyper-sensitive. Like with wokesters, I find it best to just ignore and not engage with those people, and if they've intruded into your own online spaces, just to block/ban them from your feeds (or any forum or chat you happen to moderate) if they present those ideas in an antagonistic or antisocial manner. Otherwise if you want to get a quip or two in, I'd say sure call yourself a "feminist" just to get them to reveal their chaotic inner states and then hopefully scamper off to their next target. But yeah, overall at the end of the day, it's just a word....or what JMG like to call "animal grunts we assign different meanings to."

3. Yes it was those "humorless language-policers" (also referred to as "Social Justice Warriors") who hijacked nearly every left-wing social cause starting with the downfall of the Occupy Wall St. movement. Though of course those tendencies had already been lurking under the hood for decades and the SJW "usurpers" (in my view) were merely accelerating the base ideas each to their logical conclusion. Since I started having unfortunate encounters with these raving SJW fanatics, I've come to understand that all leftism is rife with totalitarian psychological elements; leftists never seem to run out of applecarts to knock over. It's because of this that leftist movements always devolve into mass hysteria and the sort of purity-spiraling that ensues, and when left unchecked, the hysteria further devolves into mass killings. See: the historical records for many examples of this dynamic at play. Ultimately it takes a Cromwell, Napoleon, or Stalin to put this to a stop.

4. On the "warm fuzzy" vs. "cold prickly" reaction that certain words elicit among different types of people, see again the "animal grunt" quip above. I think it's clear that most human language produces knee-jerk emotional reactions rather than something approaching clear symbolic or logical communication. Because of this, I see the willful usage of language as being a sort of magic art, with the "magicians" here being those skilled in rhetoric, persuasion, and in our modern age, advertising and marketing.