Why Mainstream Feminism is Very Bad

Yes, most of today's antifeminism is vacuous, infantilizing, and based on a false conception of womanhood. Exactly like the feminism it opposes.

As promised in my post earlier this week, Why Antifeminism Is Very Bad, here is my review of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). Originally published at Law and Liberty, it argues that today’s mainstream feminism, of which Beauvoir is a founding mother (her derision for maternity notwithstanding), is intellectually vacuous and morally empty. So, in short, today’s mainstream feminists and antifeminists deserve one another. Being right about the wrongs of the other side does not make one right.

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Seventy-five years ago, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir opened her magnum opus, The Second Sex, with the question that most paralyzes us culturally and politically today: “What is a woman?”

As Emina Melonic remarks in her thoughtful essay on the moral weakness of The Second Sex, Beauvoir’s conviction that “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman” reads as though it “could have been said today.” Yet, as Ginevra Davis points out in an excellent American Affairs piece entitled “How Feminism Ends,” “Beauvoir’s woman is certainly female. She is raped, bleeds, and is brutally ‘deflowered’ on her wedding night. She is a rational mind, in a female body; a mind not born, but made, weak.”

In other words, Beauvoir’s contention that womanhood is an acquired state is not reflective of today’s notion that biological sex is a mere “assignment,” guessed at random by parents and physicians. It is, however, constitutive of the idea, commonly credited to Judith Butler, that “sex” and what we now call “gender” are two different things.

Becoming Woman

For Beauvoir, sex remains a genital and chromosomal reality with which no rational person could quarrel. But womanhood—defined as traditionally feminine familial, social, and sexual roles and manners—is learned. What do women learn, according to Beauvoir? Complicity in our oppression at the hands of men. In more than 700 brilliantly thorough pages, Beauvoir details the specific manifestation of women’s oppression and resultant inferiority, and the intricacies of our participation in it, during each stage of the female life.

Beauvoir, who evidently considers herself one of the “certain women who are best qualified to elucidate the situation of woman,” argues that the condition of woman as “the other” is a function of man’s learned brutality and woman’s unfortunate accommodation to the subordinate situation in which he has placed her. Beauvoir rejects Freud’s nature-based perspective on women’s sexuality and maternity. Having lost the faith in which she was raised by her mid-teens, she also rejects the Catholic Church’s teachings on the same.

Thus, in her insistence that what she calls womanhood (i.e., traditional femininity) is synonymous with oppression due to socially constructed barriers to women’s advancement, Beauvoir lays the intellectual foundation for today’s iteration of feminism.

And what a thoroughly embarrassing foundation it is, reliant on two underbaked and narcissistic notions: First, that women’s equality with men must mean that the two sexes are socially and culturally indistinguishable. That is, to whatever extent women fail to achieve equality with men, it is the result of Rousseauian nature’s unfortunate subordination to a male-dominated social order in which a false God is invoked to justify women’s lesser status. It is not the foreseeable result of Hobbesian (or Augustinian, for that matter) nature itself. Second, Beauvoir takes as a premise that pure liberty—not happiness nor purpose nor virtue—is and should be the highest good sought by both women and men. Per Beauvoir, “The only public good is that which assures the private good of the citizens.” In other words, individual rights should be the beginning and the end of women’s liberation; there is no such thing as the common good.

In the remainder of this essay, I will address in succession these two Beauvoirian ideas, in an attempt to further illuminate the vacuousness of the mainstream feminism that is today predicated upon them.

Womanhood and Nature

In her infamous polemic, Sexual Personae (1990), Camille Paglia dispenses in a single paragraph with Rousseau’s conception of benevolent nature to establish that male aggression in relation to sex is a manifestation of nature’s organic violence, not a social or political construction of the so-called “patriarchy.” For her view of human nature, Paglia relies on Marquis de Sade, whose Hobbesian view of humans’ innate brutality she identifies as overlapping with the Judeo-Christian conception of original sin rejected by Beauvoir. For Paglia, it is male-run civilization that controls and mitigates violence (sexual and other), not that creates it.

Among the lines of Sexual Personae that stokes mainstream feminist rage is Paglia’s assertion that “if civilization were left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.” Women, Paglia argues, are subject to nature in a way men are not: “The female body is a chthonian machine, indifferent to the spirit who inhabits it.”

As Davis explains in her American Affairs essay, “the female body—split, distracted—is a poor vessel for greatness,” and an “unsolvable problem of feminist theory.” Because of menses, pregnancy, and comparatively less raw strength, a society made up entirely of women would likely have neither the inclination nor the time to tame nature into civilization, let alone pursue individual “greatness” within that civilization. Per Davis: “A female will never have the most time, the most focus, or the most desperation to make her own name.”

This is why modern feminism, if it seeks to achieve for females not just political equality under the law and opportunities to gratify professional ambition (both of which are necessary and right), but absolute parity with males in society and in the professions (which is impossible, unless “female” is redefined to include males who like dresses and call themselves women), is tragically doomed, and a laughably infantile project.

It is no coincidence that both Melonic and Davis invoke Paglia to illustrate this weakness of Beauvoir. Reading Sexual Personae after The Second Sex is like watching a learned, wise adult explain to an arrogant, precocious child why her most cherished beliefs are the merest delusion.

It’s not that I’m unsympathetic to Beauvoir’s yearning for women to claim for our own a male level of control over our physical bodies. I trust my body and my mind a great deal; I have gone through several pregnancies steadfastly refusing the multiple medications preemptively and prophylactically pushed at me for having a high BMI and, with the last one, an advanced age. Vigorous exercise and copious hydration throughout pregnancy, careful scrutiny of studies on the medications being offered, and a mind focused on matters above my own physical comfort have been my weapons against a medical establishment that I find insufferably paternalistic and self-interestedly overmedicalized in its pathologization of the functioning, fertile female body. If you want to enrage me, tell me about “pregnancy brain” in a way that assumes my will is insufficient to overcome an alleged loss of mental sharpness because a baby is making its home in my womb.

And yet. The humbling reality is that nature comes for all women, per Paglia, ever “a new defeat of will,” no matter how strong the will.

Sometimes it comes for us directly, in the “reproductive apparatus” that Paglia points out can so often “go wrong or cause distress in going right.” And sometimes it comes for us in stealthier ways: Many of us embrace, of our own evolutionarily inflected inclination, the physical, logistical, and professional limitations of motherhood. This is especially true for those of us ambitious enough to experience the professional and other optimizations that we accept in deference to maternity not as unalloyed blessings but as sacrifices—albeit sacrifices worth making for an unparalleled positive good. That is, for those of us who flatly reject the popular anti-feminist notion that “womanhood” and “motherhood” are synonymous or that women are reducible to maternity, but equally reject the Beauvoirian conviction that motherhood makes women inferior.

Maternity and the Common Good

A few years ago, a close friend asked me: “So, will you have another baby?”

I had three sons at the time, aged seven and under. But, despite loving my children beyond all measure, I am not particularly maternal, at least not as maternity is today often sentimentalized. For starters, I identify deeply with Beauvoir’s denigration of “the religion of Maternity” that proclaims, “all mothers are saintly.” I find this sanctification of maternalism patronizing and repugnant in much the same way Beauvoir and Paglia do.

Moreover, while I know no greater joy than cuddling my babies or reading to and playing with my children (and no greater bittersweet pride than watching them grow ever more capable of doing without me), I am a less than enthusiastic housekeeper. Cooking, laundry, cleaning—I spend a lot of time doing these things, but solely because I desire the outcome of having done them. I want decent food for my family to eat, clean clothes for my family to wear, and an organized and reasonably clean house for my family to live in. Clearly, given the choices I have repeatedly made to pursue less ambitious career trajectories in order to prioritize my children and run my household—or, as Beauvoir might put it, to “become woman”—I want these things more than I want to maximize my own professional or intellectual productivity. Yet I do not embroider these tasks with the “feminine genius.” If there is such a genius, it skipped me.

So, by Beauvoir’s lights, my answer to my friend should have been “no.” I’d already sacrificed so much liberty with three children. Why would I so much as consider cleaning up several more years’ worth of smushed bananas and crushed goldfish to have a fourth?

Because, as my friend Rachel Lu explains in her keenly insightful review of Catherine Ruth Pakulak’s Hannah’s Children, I understand the “sacrifices and struggles” of “breeding immortal beings,” and consider attempting to raise them up into what Abigail Shrier calls society’s “load-bearing walls” to be the most important thing I can do, the worthiest contribution I can make. Like Pakulak and Lu (each of whom has five or more children despite acknowledging how hard and expensive children are), I think of children not in terms of “having,” but in terms of “giving.” And like the middling but dedicated high school athlete I once was, I want to give as much as my own unremarkable capacity allows.

This is why, in response to my friend’s query about a fourth child, I answered, “I think so; I think we can manage one more pretty well, so we probably should.” She (a cradle Catholic) responded, fondly, “I think that’s a very Catholic perspective.” Guilty as charged; baby boy number four, named for two saints and the light of his parents’ and big brothers’ lives, just turned one.

But one need not be Catholic to recognize that an orientation toward the unadulterated maximization of liberty, without consideration of virtue, amounts to infantile solipsism, unworthy of an adult with Beauvoir’s intellect.

As the legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon (who, full disclosure, is Catholic) argues in Rights Talk (1991), Americans’ “excessive homage to individual independence and self-sufficiency” is inextricable from an “unapologetic insularity” that “promotes unrealistic expectations, heightens social conflict, and inhibits dialogue that might lead toward consensus, accommodation, or at least the discovery of common ground.”

Nowhere is this monistic insularity more apparent than in feminism’s sophomoric (and illogically self-contradictory) obsessions with “toxic masculinity,” “rape culture,” and “gender identity.”

For this humiliating compilation of nonsense that we today call feminism—which one could be forgiven for assuming must indicate the intellectual inferiority of women as a whole, if one did not know better—we can largely blame Beauvoir.

The question then becomes: How can we ameliorate the intellectual weakness of the mainstream feminism bequeathed to us by The Second Sex?

Once again, we look first to Paglia, whose similarity to Beauvoir in her atheism, her lack of maternity, and her impatience with women’s subjugation by nature does not similarly preclude her maturity, realism, or creativity.

To challenge unto ultimate eradication Beauvoir’s conception of socially constructed femininity and her elision between women’s equality with men and our indistinguishability from them, Paglia wants to get mothers—especially mothers of boys—enrolled as students in universities.

Reasoning with a capaciousness that goes beyond the limits of her own experience (a feat of which Beauvoir deems other women incapable but of which she in fact proves remarkably incapable herself), Paglia contends: If the modal English or “gender studies” class included adult women who had any real experience with nature—as it is made manifest in pregnancy, childbirth, and the raising of decidedly non-toxic (yet, on average, comparatively rough-and-tumble) sons and decidedly non-oppressed (yet, on average, comparatively docile) daughters—all of today’s feminist hooey would be dispensed with overnight.

I say: Amen to that.

Paglia may be an atheist, but per my alma mater’s agnostic founder, Benjamin Franklin, “to pour forth benefits for the common good is divine.”