Is Western Civilization Misogynistic?
Resentment combines hatred and love/desire. Self-hatred and dissatisfaction often leads to imagining that someone else has it better and to resentfully desiring to be that someone. That other person is then viewed as an obstacle to attaining the desired state which is almost always illusory. The Other is imagined as wafting through life, his nose in the air, disdainful of mere plebeians and somehow immune to all the usual dissatisfactions and disappointments that everyone else experiences.
Hatred that begins with self-hatred is projected onto the Other. With feminism, men are imagined to stand in the way of women’s liberation. Every male achievement, past, present and future, is just another slap in the face of women. That is why it is rhetorically useless to give counter-examples to attacks lambasting men as a group.
In the nineteen eighties, feminist Hélène Cixous compiled a list of binary opposites related to the dichotomy between male and female: culture/nature, intellect/emotion, mind/body, order/chaos, language/silence, presence/absence, speech/writing, light/dark, good/evil – which could include abstract/concrete, general/specific, sun/moon. Cixous claimed that the first term in these lists is valued over the second term.
Cixous is right that these opposites exist and she is also probably correct that the first item in these dichotomies is more connected to the male and the second to the female. It is immediately obvious that in most cases, neither can exist without the other, just as the biological difference between men and women is necessary for the continued existence of the species.
She is even probably right that men tend to gravitate to the first term and women to the second. Such a tendency is akin to a déformation professionnelle. Right-thinking men should make an effort to ameliorate this tendency. Positivism, for instance, seems like a particularly male disease and has an air of unapologetic belligerency about it. Everything that is really important is invisible and to that extent is “not there.” Consciousness, emotion, love, morality, value, and nonphysical beauty are immune to technological intervention and measurement. The male technologist is thus impotent in the face of what is important: the sacred; an image it would seem someone like Cixous would relish.
So another male/female dichotomy would be known/mystery. One term is meaningless without the other. To say that one term is better than another is simply a fallacy. Each term makes the other possible. There is no foreground without a background; no meaning without a context.
Abstract thought needs the concrete. It is the concrete from which examples are derived.
Good male thinkers take these feminine aspects of reality into account, just as some bad female thinkers wish to reject the masculine aspects as phallogocentrism.
The focus on technology and manipulation, on the known versus the mysterious, seems to be primarily an Enlightenment phenomenon, though Guenon traces its beginnings back to a misunderstanding of Plato. The Catholic Middle Ages had plenty of room for mystery. The triune God Himself is mysterious. Tradition is mysterious because it exists as a result of trial and error, not theory and no one necessarily knows why a traditional practice exists. The past is mysterious because no counterfactual experiments can be performed to test historical hypotheses and the future is also a mystery.
The pursuit of knowledge only exists because of the absence of knowledge – because of the mysterious and one of the things a thinker comes to know is the existence of mystery. The solution is not to overcome these dichotomies but to recognize the value of both.
Feminism is a mistake because it demonizes the passive, the receptive, the absent, the natural, the sought. In an instance of “the grass is always greener,” it imagines that the masculine is better – which is simply to make the same mistake some male intellectuals make – and then produces resentful women.
Misogyny is primarily a female invention perpetrated by women. Feminists despise the homemaker, the housewife, the person who makes the career of someone else possible and all the accoutrements of femininity – skirts, makeup, painted nails, modesty, delicacy. Heterosexual men have no reason to despise such things. Generally speaking, practices that emphasize sexual difference and characteristics produce a positive reaction in the opposite sex. Broad shoulders and a tight bum for men versus curves for women.
In order to live with the opposite sex, it is necessary to make compromises and to take a step in his or her direction. Everyone embodies some masculine and feminine characteristics with males tending to exemplify the former and females the latter. Each sex is somewhat exotic for the other and represents the unknown; bearing in mind that each person tends to be somewhat unknown both to himself and to others, so some of the struggle lies just in understanding another person.
Feminists have demonized men as the oppressors of women and along with it the masculine; manliness. They have rejected the feminine as unworthy and something to be shunned. So the feminine woman is also vilified. The masculine man is hated. The feminine man is likewise hardly worshipped. Only masculine women are worthy of approval – but then they exemplify everything hated in men – so misogyny exists only in conjunction with misandry. Perhaps it is in unconscious recognition of this abhorrent nihilism that so many liberals want a post-gender utopia.
Historically, it is true that Greek Classical culture, 6th and 5th century B.C., was a surveillance culture for women which reduced women to the level of women in many modern Muslim countries. But women prior to this period were not similarly restricted. The Iliad and Odyssey, stories concerning pre-Classical times, are filled with strong, sympathetic, dynamic women. They are definitely women; not men in drag. These female characters are portrayed as important, three-dimensional human beings who love, fear, hate, beg, chastise and argue. Helen is perhaps a bit of a cypher, but Iphigenia, Hecuba, Clytemnestra, Cassandra are not. Their sex is not despised and they are taken completely seriously by the male protagonists. Penelope is one of the most important characters in the Odyssey and is no fainting violet. Likewise, Medea, Electra, Phaedra and others in Greek Tragedy are not hated or despised as women, although some of them suffer from the failings of many human beings and are positively scary.
Women in Roman culture were historically important. Viking women were nearly as intimidating as their male counterparts, similar, perhaps to Klingon women in Star Trek. The cult of the Virgin Mary is pro-woman. In truth, the Middle Ages were more pro-women than the present; certainly more pro-feminine. Dante’s Beatrice in The Divine Comedy is loved and respected. In fact, she is superior to Virgil as Dante’s guide ushering Dante to paradise. Shakespeare’s women are fully fledged people. They suffer from the same moral deficiencies and virtues as the men and they are taken completely seriously.
Before modern science’s obsession with prediction and control, the feminine aspects of reality were valued more. By focusing on the known, in order to manipulate it, the mysterious is denigrated. The idea that the universe is a machine seems like a hyper-masculine perversion. The universe as an organism, the prevalent view in the Middle Ages; as something growing, moist, ensouled and alive, smacks of the feminine. The fact of female pregnancy gives women a special relationship with the organic and alive.
Being deficient in emotional intelligence is more typically male. A quick Google search indicates that autistic boys outnumber autistic girls, 4:1. A male professor I know does not believe life exists because “life” is a poorly defined concept and according to him, every time someone attempts to define life, he is unable to exclude factors that machines cannot also duplicate. Likewise, in a recent BBC podcast documentary, the man and woman robot experts who were interviewed still think that the existence of consciousness in dogs is an open question; a view only possible among the emotionally and intuitively stunted or the mentally retarded. The woman, however, was specifically interested in making a robot who could deal with emotions; as frighteningly misguided as that is.
Feminists are right to be alarmed about a hypermasculine fixation on the known, definite and abstract in the name of prediction and control. I too find such things repugnant. But it is an insane reaction to this to end up rejecting both the masculine AND feminine aspects of reality. If feminists wanted to say, “we women embody and exemplify more readily than you men, those characteristics that have been downplayed and rejected by scientism,” then they would be correct.
Perhaps feminists recognize that STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) subjects are the most economically valuable with higher rates of remuneration and want to get in on the action. If emotional sensitivity, intimacy, openness to mystery, a fine attunement to the concrete, an emphasis on context rather than formalism – if these things were the route to success and glory as perhaps was more the case in the Middle Ages – then perhaps feminists could bring themselves to value the feminine once again and to celebrate women’s greater abilities in these areas.
As it is, the more typically feminine value of compassion is destroying society. Thanks to feminism, masculinity has largely withdrawn from the cultural scene. Despite the feminist rejection of femininity, there is a de facto hegemony of the feminine in education, the mainstream media and the ruling elites. Reality will not be denied. Power-seeking women use what they have available to them and the feminine emphasis on compassion and motherliness becomes a weapon. Pretended compassion for supposed victims becomes Zeus’ lightning bolt with which to strike the opponent; the new scapegoating that poses as anti-scapegoating. Proof that the compassion is a mere pretence can be seen in its selectivity. For instance, in a recent hiring search that I know of, the search committee was given a list of approved races fit to jump the queue – the rest were to be as thoroughly ostracized as white men. The rejection of Christianity with its revelation of the scapegoat mechanism embodied in the Passion of Christ also contributes to the rise of scapegoating.
An excess of compassion leads to a medal for showing up, lowering academic standards, political correctness, a desire to avoid hurt feelings, “equality,” and a rejection of truth when it conflicts with any of these things.
The situation is one of misandry and feminine self-hatred. Accusations of misogyny just increase in number. The word “misogyny” is now being used by many instead of “sexism,” contributing to the proliferation. Any suggestion of dimorphism and thus an acknowledgement of reality now can be stigmatized as the hatred of women. The projection of the hatred of women onto men will not cease until women stop hating themselves.
Originally published: https://sydneytrads.com/2017/02/19/richard-cocks-6/
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