The irrationality of late-stage feminism

I’ve been reading one of the great classics of Western literature, Boccaccio’s The Decameron.  It was written in the middle of the 14^th century, at the height of the Florentine Renaissance.  A collection of 100 short stories told by 10 noblemen and women over the course of 10 days – hence the name – it is one of the first great books of modern times, and, simultaneously, one of the last of the Middle Ages.  Even if you’ve never heard of it, it may sound familiar.  Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is based on it.  Chaucer came across the book on a diplomatic mission to Florence, and was so taken by it that he borrowed not only its structure but some of its stories.

The subject is love and lust, with all its nobility, humiliation, exaltation, eroticism, degradation, silliness, cupidity, stupidity, folly, savagery; in short, every human emotion and all of the things we humans do to ourselves and others to satisfy our most primal need, as seen through the eyes of a 14^th-century Florentine literary genius.  Some of the stories are achingly sad, some shockingly violent, even horrifying, others laugh-out-loud funny, many highly erotic and a few close to pornographic.  (I started reading from an old translation in a volume printed in the 1930s, which advertised itself as “unexpurgated” – heavens!  Well, yes, the whole text was there, but one section of a story was printed not in English but in the original medieval Italian, which even modern Italians might have trouble deciphering.  The “explanation” given was hilarious.  In truth, it wasn’t untranslatable as claimed, it was nearly-X-rated and unbelievably funny, as a later translation proved.  Sorry, I can’t summarize it here.  You’ll have to read it yourself.  This is a PG-rated blog, after all.  But I will say it involves a very naïve girl and a desperate young hermit who finds a Bill-Clintonish way to maintain his vow of celibacy – sort of.)  Boccaccio was no prude, and, apparently, neither were his contemporaries, inside or outside the church.  Churchmen and women play the leading role in many of the stories; like the tale of the gardener at a small convent who found himself taking care of all the needs of 9 nuns, and raising a large family without incurring the expense of doing so.  He was a busy, busy man, and frequently tired, although usually seen with a smile on his face.

Here is what strikes me every time I pick up The Decameron and read another story:  There is nothing antique or ancient about it.  The characters who inhabit Boccaccio’s world still inhabit ours; only the details have changed, and the details give it a slightly exotic quality that only accentuates the essential sameness.  It speaks to us today not because the world of 14^th-century Florence was so different from our own, but because it was so much alike.  We know these people; they are our family and neighbors and friends and enemies, feeling the same things we feel, thinking the same way we think, suffering all the same faults we do and still, somehow, exalted only slightly below the angels.

Which brings me (finally!) to the subject at hand: I would love to hear thoughts about The Decameron from a denizen of the #MeToo world.  In truth, I’m not quite sure what to expect, although I have a suspicion it would be a shocked denunciation that would leave the purest of the Puritans and the most strait-laced Victorians envious, if a bit nonplussed by the profanity.

Here is a book that depicts and accepts male and female sexuality as it is, straight, no chaser.  The most fortunate are happily married couples who live contentedly until death parts them.  For all the others, each sex knows what it wants and isn’t afraid to take it, if it can be done without risking eternal damnation or social ostracization (usually) and if one’s spouse can be kept in the dark (mostly).  Men are the sexual aggressors, but at the same time wholly under the spell of the women with whom they are hopelessly in love.  The women know it, revel in their power over their lovers, and take full advantage of it; they can be just as aggressive as the men, if necessarily more subtle.  Cuckolded husbands wreak terrible revenge, as do abused and humiliated wives.  Young lovers burn with uncontrollable passion, sometimes with a happy ending, sometimes not.  Powerful men do what they will with the female servants, and the servants comply; only a high-born lady need worry about her virtue.  (Powerful women occasionally enjoy themselves with their male servants, too, in spite of the mortal danger to both.)  Rape is terribly punished, but a blurry line is drawn between that and unwanted sex to which the woman, however reluctantly, consents.  Most controversially today, adult men lust after young girls barely out of puberty, and fathers freely sell them into marriage to men who are of high-enough social status or, at least, rich and powerful.  (Child betrothal is uncontroversial, and marriage at 13 or 14 is unremarkable.)

And it’s all accepted, just a part of life.  In the book, the women laugh and sigh and cry at the stories no less than the men, even if there is the occasional blush to be seen after the racier ones.  In truth, the women are no more offended than the men, even if they’re supposed to be.  The blush is there only because of social expectations.

Now, let’s stipulate that social expectations and sexual mores have evolved, mostly for the better.  Who doesn’t find the idea that children, especially girls, can be treated as something close to chattel repugnant and immoral?  It’s a better world where men and women choose their own mates, and wait until reaching maturity to do so.  The contempt in which Boccaccio and his contemporaries held the church was well deserved; its corruption is infamous even today, and today’s problems, as serious as they are, pale by comparison.

But can we also agree that any movement, if carried too far, can become every bit as damaging and objectionable as the situation it was intended to remedy?  Is it a better world where a boy simply admiring a pretty girl can be labeled sexual harassment?  Really?  If that’s the case, then there isn’t a straight man in the world who isn’t guilty.  Is it a better world where college girls are expected to party just as hard as the guys, in spite of the fact that drunken sex in such situations is as predictable as the sunrise?  No – a better world would be one in which both boys and girls are expected and required to maintain control over themselves at all times, including and especially the responsibility to avoid situations in which unwanted sex, drunken or otherwise, could happen.  We can agree that the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s leveled the playing field, but can we also agree that it came at a terrible cost: It erased, or at least blurred, the rules governing appropriate sexual behavior for both men and women, creating a free-for-all that has been bad for both sexes.  The explosion of rape, sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy of unmarried women, and abortion that occurred in the following years were all predictable – and predicted – consequences.

The feminist movement that came of age in the 60s had a valid point:  As a society we profess a belief in equality, but equality between the sexes was simply and clearly not the case.  As a society, we conceded the point and resolved to fix the situation.  In many ways there has been great progress.  More women than men are now enrolled in college, and more women graduate.  Among the younger cohort, equality of pay is the reality.  There are very few jobs these days that are seen as “men’s work” or “women’s work”, although we’re not likely to see any women on NFL teams now or in the future, or, if we value our lives and property, many female firefighters, either.  Only a handful of women possess the strength and other physical abilities required for the job.  Those that do, though, are welcome to apply, whereas that wasn’t the case in the bad old days; and, if we’re truthful, their sex gives them a leg up.

But facts are stubborn things, and feminism has run into a most stubborn fact.  Men and women are different, and that difference is biologically-based and wholly natural.  Most people, of course, including most feminists, sensibly recognize this and make their peace with it.  But radical feminism has not and cannot. It is dedicated to the proposition that not only must there be equality before the law and equality of opportunity (a la the Declaration of Independence), there must be equality of results (a la Marx).  This being an impossibility while there are such things as men and women, and elimination of men and women being manifestly impossible, radical feminism has settled on the next best thing – the elimination of the masculine and the feminine, to be replaced with, well, no one is quite sure, but something close to gender neutrality.

All of this could be dismissed as the crackpot theorizing it is were it not for two very important things.  The first is the position that radical feminism has had for many years in college and university faculties and curricula, particularly in its most elite schools.  One need only look at the mission statements and course offerings of the Departments of Gender Studies – meaning, almost exclusively, a radical take on women’s issues – to understand this.  I’ll save you the trouble, though.  Here is the statement on ETSU’s Department of Women’s Studies web page:

“Graduates from our program provide a pool of accomplished critical thinkers who are focused on civic engagement, social justice, and change and who can help to satisfy the continuing need to improve the lives, opportunities, and futures of women, LGBTQ individuals, and other marginalized persons or groups.”

And just one course offering:

WMST 2010– Intro to Women’s Studies (Section 002, TR 11:15AM-12:35PM & Section 003, TR 11:15AM-12:35PM)
This course provides a broad interdisciplinary perspective of the academic field of women’s studies.  In this course you will learn to speak eloquently about gender and sexuality; examine your own preconceived notions about Gender; examine and deconstruct society’s underlying assumptions about Maleness and Femaleness; laugh at the absurd notions we all carry around about Gender, Sex and Women’s roles in everyday life.

All I did was copy and paste straight from the website.  Oh, and fix a typo; academics are busy people, after all.  It’s quite typical of what you’ll find on almost every college’s website.  You will make up your own mind whether it is education or indoctrination in right-think.

The second is the hold that radical feminism has in popular culture.  The bumbling, incompetent husband with a supercompetent wife who loves him anyway is a staple of half or more of the sitcoms ever made.  For every ripped superhero there must now be a ripped superheroine. (A term that these days is, no doubt, considered sexist, but having outed myself as someone who rejects the radical-chic worldview, I’ll use it anyway.  But you gotta love Wonder Woman’s costume, bare shoulders, bare legs, metal bra and all.  Captain America it isn’t.)  “Toxic masculinity” is out. (For a good example, read this review of “American Sniper”, one of the most wrenching and realistic movies of recent years, and which was almost universally admired by movie-goers and the vast majority of critics.  A snippet – “American Sniper may well become the favorite film of some future racist-tyrant chokeholder…American Sniper is not the nuanced trauma-of-violence conversation our country needs.”)  “Metrosexuality” is in – what in earlier days was referred to as “effeminacy”.  Even Disney cartoons these days can’t seem to bring themselves to feature men in a truly heroic role; instead we have heroic, sword-wielding heroines battling the bad guys, as in Frozen, Mulan, and Moana.  Also in – a hypersexualized version of both men and women that badly distorts reality, to the advantage of neither.

And an anecdote to drive home the point.  Our grandson was born a couple of years ago in Boston’s famed Brigham and Women’s Hospital.  Our son and daughter-in-law met a nice young couple there, both educated at Harvard, who politely but adamantly refused to say whether their baby was a boy or girl.  “It” would choose its own gender.  Even when challenged by another woman, a bit more direct than our daughter-in-law, who wanted to know whether “it” had balls or a vagina, they refused to say.  Crackpot or not, such things are no longer beyond the pale among the highly educated/indoctrinated.  I remember the words of child psychologist John Rosemond at a seminar many years ago:  Most children grow up just fine in spite of their parents’ best efforts.  Let’s hope he was correct.  If not, then these well-meaning but deluded parents are guilty of psychological child abuse with unknowable consequences.

The ‘60s feminists who championed sexual freedom and equality have been replaced by a new generation who have discovered to their surprise that, given the opportunity, (some) men will be pigs and (some) women will be sluts.  But, given their slavish devotion to an untenable ideology, the wholly-predictable results of piggishness and sluttishness can never be the woman’s fault.  Men are always the aggressors and women always the victims who must at all times be sheltered and protected.  How deliciously ironic – what could be more Victorian!  Sexual freedom, it would seem, is a one-way street.  The woman is free to flirt, to entice, to seduce, to have sex when and with whom she pleases, but so much as an unappreciated look or touch from a man is sexual harassment if she so decides.  If this sounds ridiculous, ask Clarence Thomas or Brett Kavanaugh how amusing it is.  Or the most recent prominent victim, the great singer Placido Domingo.  Now 78, he stands accused of sexually harassing many women earlier in life – given his current age, much earlier in life.  The accusations have effectively ended his career in the U.S., although (not yet) elsewhere in the world, where a somewhat more realistic understanding of sexual relations still seems to rule.  (Heather McDonald has an excellent article on this injustice here.)  What could be more Puritan!  Although the Scarlet Letter is now only applicable to the men involved.

In short, radical feminism has moved into an irrational world in which masculinity is toxic and femininity is degrading, in which men can’t be men and women can’t be women without being false to themselves, and in which sex has been separated from any notion of love or procreation and made into nothing more than a means to the end of satisfying one’s carnal appetite.  One need not hold to 14^th-century ideas of the proper roles of men and women in society (and I don’t know anyone who does) to recognize just how dangerous this is.  It is in defiance of human nature; and as badly as human nature is in need of taming (indeed, that’s what civilization is about), all the evidence points to the conclusion that it can’t be changed and efforts to the contrary always end badly.  Our betters in the academy and the media – and, to a very great extent, in government – have spent more than a half-century ignoring the evidence in pursuit of their utopian goals, to our detriment.  Let’s hope that Stein’s Law is, in the end, correct:  If something can’t go on forever, it will stop.

– Kenneth D. Gough © 2019