On feminism

I've been meaning to write an entry on feminism for a while now. There seems to be a lot of discussion about it lately, and I'm not 100% sure why.

Maybe it's because people are realizing that we've entered a a new age. Call it the death of ideology. Pre-feminist America (epitomized by the 50's) was an age of conformist ideology. There were rigid definitions of what constituted masculinity and femininity, and those norms were vehemently enforced even when they contradicted human nature. Dad went to work to support his 2.3 children. He worked his 40 hours a week, and he achieved in proportion to how much he worked. Mom stayed home, raised the kids, maintained the household, and catered to the sexual needs of her husband. Sex was a duty, not a pleasure.

Then came the 60's, and along with them feminism. Suddenly, we wanted equality. In all things. It was the ultimate democratic ideal. Parity in race, parity in economic status, parity in gender...The Man got us down, and if only He got out of the way, we would reach our nirvanic ideal civilization composed of those identifiable only by their one imporant distinguishing characteristic: they were people.

The problem was, we have since discovered, that it was an artificial ideal. People do not default to a difference-agnostic, non-hierarchical societal structure. We had this implicit assumption that there was some external force, some authority, weather it be the government, organized religion, entrenched racism, or what-have-you, that was standing between us and enlightenment. And in many cases there was some entity that looked like that...the George Wallaces of the world. But I think we made the mistake of assuming they were the fundamental obstacle between us and our 60's ideal when in fact they were simply reflections of a prior age that hadn't yet caught up with the shift in public consciousness. They were less active evils than simply inertial remnants of a dying age.

Now we're being forced to come to grips with the fact that the fight against injustice really isn't an external fight at all. There is no "they" that are actively perpetuating a lot of the shit we rail against. Sure, we have the neocons and the evangelicals, but even they are simply a product of their environment. Both are a movement born of the encroachment of urban existence on small-town mentality, and the struggle to salvage identity is what has given rise to the evangelical movement. But, I digress. Point being, people are, at core, utterly irrational animals that quite naturally fall into many of the patterns we always assumed were foisted upon us. We naturally follow alpha males no matter how batshit insane they objectively are. Women are attracted to assholes. Men are very superficial, visual creatures who will evaluate a woman based on her looks. It's turning out that these aren't so much artificial cultural artifacts as ingrained biological programming. And we're finding that fucking depressing, as well we should.

It is on that basis that I've always had trouble with feminism. I always agreed with the observations but disagreed with the conclusions. Sure, society is dominated by male-centric forms of social and organizational interaction, women are seen as sexual objects more often than not, etc. etc. etc. All of that is unquestionably true. But any alternative would involve an active, conscious effort on the part of both men and women to fight their natural tendencies to organize a society that way. And the larger the group of people you're talking about, the less likely that is. To paraphrase a line from Men In Black: a person is reasonable; people are primitive, scared, hysterical, and irrational.

Fighting human nature is a fundamentally losing proposition. There's a strong tendency for societies to correct against mechanisms that fight human nature. Look at how much effort communist China has to put into maintaining their societal structure, for instance. They have to spend huge amounts of energy and wealth into controlling information and putting artifical incentives in place to bribe people to stay put in the current power structure. And it's still falling apart.

No, until we find a way to coax it out of our DNA, men are going to pursue money and power, and women are going to pursue the men who have money and power. And I mean that in the most abstract sense..."power" is a very malleable concept in the modern day. Some women go for guys who control vast corporate empires or are very typical competitive alpha males. But "power" in a guy can simply be confidence, direction, self-esteem, assertiveness, etc. Any quality that might suggest he's capable of supporting her. After all, a guy with poor self-esteem, who is self-effacing, and who admits his limitations is an utter turn-off, yet those same qualities are nowhere near the kiss of death in a woman. It's an utterly instinctive power dynamic for a guy to be the caretaker and the girl to be cared for, and it's one that will inevitably play itself out on a larger scale in society. Why is anyone surprised that there are proportionally fewer women in positions of power? Fewer women are going to have competitive enough personalities to seek out those positions, and of those that do, of course they are a priori going to have a hard time being seen as leaders because of their gender. Again, I reiterate: it's not because of some artificial conspiracy on the part of the Old Boys Network so much as it is very basic human nature.

Don't like it? Fine...but realize in order to change it, you're going to have to fight our most basic drives.