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

[methylethyl]

I think you're absolutely right about feminism being a product of cheap energy and the modern workplace. Even now, it's a lie that can only be sustained in the corporate office landscape. There are still a lot of professions that are almost exclusively male, and you don't exactly see hordes of women clamoring to sign up for those jobs either: commercial fishing, logging, welding, industrial painting, mining, road crews, electrical linemen, auto body repair, engine repair, diesel mechanics, HVAC repair, appliance repair, sandblasting, underwater welding, oil rig work, merchant marines... and whether people recognize it or not, our modern lifestyles are completely, helplessly dependent on the jobs these men are doing.

As a religious person, I'd *like* to agree with you that traditional roles will win out in the end, just because we have more kids. But the numbers don't work out. One of the things I get to see from inside one of the most conservative churches in existence is the annual church census. And the cliche is true: God has no grandchildren. Orthodoxy in the US is doing better than most other churches, in terms of retaining our young people, average age of parishioners, sex ratios, and overall number of active members year-over-year, but our numbers are still dismal: overall more funerals than baptisms. The kids go off to college and don't come back, for the most part. A few do. Everybody knows which ones they are before they leave for college, TBH, because they're the ones who are *already* deeply involved in the life of the church, and chose their college based on its proximity to a good church community they could join. But the majority don't stay in the church, and even among those who do stay in the church, most follow an essentially secular lifestyle. Their kids don't stay. When our parishes grow, it is mostly through adult conversion.

So... if traditional gender roles become more common in the years to come (and I think they will) it'll likely be for economic reasons, not because we more traditional types are having more kids. Just because kids grew up that way, doesn't mean they stay that way. Our young folks are just as susceptible to modern cultural mores as anyone else.

[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.

[illyria2001]

Most women don't want to use men as sperm banks...actual sperm banks are much better for that, because the males involved aren't interested in custody of their progeny or using them to get back at their ex's. And the idea that modern feminists only want men for this, or for their wallets? Ridiculous. Feminism is the *reason* that women can make their own money that goes in their own wallets. If you keep women out of the workforce so they have to depend on men to survive economically -- so they won't starve or end up on the streets, homeless -- that's what will lead to women seeing men as only a meal ticket or three hots and a cot! Women do not want to tie themselves to men who can throw them and their children out on the streets as a whim (for example, if the man finds a younger woman and he wants to trade up, or if the current wife gets sick or isn't as pretty anymore -- I'm lookin' at you, John McCain). Women who are in the workforce and make their own money aren't the gold diggers that so many men worry about. If these women are with you, it's because they actually want to be with you, not because they'll starve or die of exposure without a man (any man).

[nodrog]

Or, as it was said long while back:

"Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see."

Now all this is delivered in a gray tone of total conviction. The last time I heard that tone, the speaker was explaining why he had to keep his file drawers full of dead pigeons…

James Tiptree Jr.,

"The Women Men Don't See"

[next_migration]

The many traditional societies that did not treat women as men's property also had sex roles in work, not because women are all too frail to do real hard work (evidence to the contrary is everywhere) but because some tasks can't be done while heavily pregnant or supervising a nursing two-year-old. The fact that girls were steered away from those tasks proves not that women's productive labor was inconsistent with childbearing, but that it was essential. A family couldn't survive if the mother went on extended "maternity leaves" for each child; she had to be able to keep working while caring for infants (frequently producing most of the family's calories), so she had to specialize in tasks more consistent with that - which could include anything from foraging over long distances to weaving to running brewpubs.

I'd like to know what sort of future you or Mr. Martin envision in which women will lack work that is respected as such. Is the vision of a dark age so deep that all men are employed as peasants or murderers, in which case the employment of all women as housewives/breeders will be no worse? Or is it of a late medieval/early modern-like society in which a talented boy will still have some hope of becoming a doctor, merchant, teacher, writer or artist, while his sister can only be a wife/breeder? Jobs using intelligence, like most skilled handicrafts, are largely compatible with parenthood, and the lie that women lack the talent for either has been wholly debunked. This scenario would require a Christian Taliban to come in and ban women from all paid jobs or good jobs, then restrict girls' schooling so future generations would never discover their talents.

For context, Mr. Martin also recently posted on Ecosophia an explicit call for the mass slaughter of gay people, making me suspect that the latter scenario is exactly what he has in mind. Does he think Western women would submit? It would require the complicity of more men than the Proud Boy types to enforce it; does he think average Western men these days want it? Many are now accustomed to relationships in which both parties are there voluntarily, love each other, and are close if not best friends. Those men appreciate their wives' and sisters' abilities, and don't want them to be forced into being disgruntled "dependents" confined to homes where they work without getting credit for it.

As for fertility and "replacement rates", I regard this as a non-problem. The planet can't support eight billion people for long. With the impending loss of carrying capacity in large regions, can the US landmass support 340 million people indefinitely? Certainly not with the per-acre productivity one would expect in a dark age, if one predicts that. This means that the population must eventually decline. To the extent that that can happen by people having small families, rather than by women wearing out their bodies producing many children who then die of disease and famine, I think it is a good thing. The time may come when the population is seen as undesirably small and growth is valued - if so, it will be valued by both sexes - but that time is a long way off.