Shall We Dance?

I think I may have spotted a positive trend. Now that’s not a sentence you would expect to read in Slouching Towards Bethlehem is it!

Positive trend? Yes....recently (in a certain kind of feminist journalism) I keep coming across warm-hearted acknowledgements that Masculinity and Femininity are complementary polarities in any sane conception of The Good Life. An acknowledgement that the relationship between a man and a woman has the potential to be the finest fruit that life has to offer. And that when things go wrong, they are often better understood as resulting from a kind of Faustian tango between the sexes than as a simple case of one sex always doing wrong by the other. All just timeless truths and plain common sense you might say - and Yes perhaps these timeless truths have ever obtained in the kitchens and bedrooms of our Western society. But they are ones that have been conspicuous by their absence in the groves of academe and in the fourth estate in recent decades.

As an armchair philosopher it has always seemed to me that the question of steering a fair course through the choppy waters of discourses about relations between men and women is the trickiest of all. But it’s fair to say that masculinity has not had a good press in recent decades. As journalist Kathleen Stock (* see bio note below) remarked recently “Men are pretty much banned from making any generalisations about women good or bad” so it has perhaps been inevitable in our time that any defence of the male of the species has had to come from women. And that is what most of the rest of this essay will be about. (...)

So what about this new more postive feminist journalism? My first instinct was to do my usual thing and try to distil the essence of it into my own overview. But then it occurred to me that it might give a better – more vividly female voice - to just let these women speak for themselves. So the body of this essay will take the form of excerpts from these journalists’ own words - with just a little light annotation from me where necessary, to clarify what is being discussed. It is important to note that - because these are just snippets lifted from quite lengthy articles - wherever you see a string of dots (as in ........) the writer’s subject matter may have moved on quite considerably. So don’t expect a seamless thread of argument. The result will be a kind of dissident feminist kaleidoscope. I include a link at the end of each excerpt so that (barring paywalls) you can see the full text (and all of them are well written pieces). I also give a bit of background info on some of these journalists at the end of this section. So here goes:

What Does Caitlin Moran Know about Men? – Kathleen Stock’s review of Caitlin Moran’s new book What About Men

Moran apparently thinks, not just that masculinity is wholly cultural, but that there’s only one version of it, entirely based on her husband, his mates, and some sons of her friends.... Equally, she seems to think that all women are exactly like she is — dorky, warm, garrulous and funny.....

......She is right that false whispers about sexual misdemeanours can ruin a young man’s life. She tries hard to be sympathetic about this as well as to the idea that young men are beset by images of “toxic masculinity” in a way that is messing them up. And there’s even the odd hint that prevalent feminist approaches might be part of the problem..... Post #MeToo, one legacy of mainstream feminism seems to be the policy of shouting at all men about how terrible they are, in the hope that some of the generalised opprobrium sticks to the right candidates. At the same time, men’s ordinary sexual impulses — sometimes irritating, sometimes welcome — are denigrated and treated as inevitably threatening and sinister....... (...)

.....And it would also be good if we could talk more about what is wonderful about masculinity, and toxic about femininity, without caveats or excuses. When, in the final chapter, Moran eventually gets round to the former......most of the things she thinks we value in men are also things we value in dogs. In fact, I would go further — they are things we value in elderly Labradors. The characteristics she celebrates — being loyal, hard-working, protective, and so on — are all very pro-social and unthreatening to women and children, and unlikely to set the imagination alight of any young man looking for his own hero’s journey.

.......Perhaps tellingly, though, there’s little suggestion in the book that women could learn from men about being more loyal or crying less...... To treat ‘feminine traits’ as a study programme that any man could get up to speed on if he tried seems to be setting men up for failure — and they don’t need more of that..... In any case, perhaps I am female-atypical, but — inviting as it sounds — I couldn’t live in Moran’s smoke-filled, gin-soaked world of warm hugs, tear-stained confidences and frank conversations about bodily fluids for more than 10 minutes at a time. Sometimes, talking about your feelings makes them worse and sometimes responding empathically to other people’s feelings only makes them more histrionic and attention-seeking. It can be very good to talk, but it can also be very good to shut the hell up and stamp off to dig the garden. https://unherd.com/2023/07/what-does-caitlin-moran-know-about-men/

This from Jennie Cummings-Knight at The Centre for Male Psychology in relation to the above-mentioned poster campaign:

Speaking as a woman, I am always fascinated by the double standards exhibited by women with respect to male behaviour. We are only interested in being looked at by men if we find the said man or men to be attractive to us...... in spite of our assertions that we don’t need male attention (see the Toy Story 4 Bo Beep character, developed by feminist writers) and that we want to be taken seriously as we pursue our careers, we still take a lot of trouble to look attractive to men. ...Teenage girls growing up in the 2000s are still hitching up their skirt waistbands as they come out of school on an afternoon. https://www.centreformalepsychology.com/male-psychology-magazine-listings/the-toxic-male-gaze-should-men-staring-at-women-be-illegal?

Interview with Louise Perry (* see below) about her best-selling book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution Prospect Magazine

“I start from feminist priors,” she explains—like an interest in protecting women and girls—“and I end up at some socially conservative conclusions.” She is ardent in her defence of marriage. Her belief in the importance of chivalry stands out too....... At the end of her book, she suggests that young women—in the name of protecting themselves in a hostile sexual climate—should not get drunk in the presence of men; that they should withhold sex for the first few months of a relationship ;and that they should avoid dating apps. Some of the advice would not be out of place in the 1950s. Louise Perry Prospect interview

Feminism Was Never About Equality - Bettina Arndt at Spectator Australia:

I started calling myself a ‘feminist’ as a young woman in the 1970s after reading Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, ironically whilst working a university vacation job as a Hertz Rent-a-car girl, dressed in my bright yellow perked cap and mini skirt, flirting with American tourists

I convinced myself that feminism was all about equality, about creating a level playing field where women could take their rightful place in the world, embracing opportunities once denied to them. But then I watched with increasing alarm as the current misandrist culture took hold, with the male of the species as the punching bag, and women shamelessly promoted and protected, infantilised, and idealised. Feminism had gone off the rails, I concluded. But it turned out that was wrong. Now I know the truth about feminist history – thanks to the formidable Janice Fiamengo professor of English from the University of Ottawa: “Feminism was never sane.....never expressed any appreciation for men nor recognition that men had made any contribution to society or that men had ever acted out of love and concern and compassion for women........ Men and women in earlier centuries lived interdependent lives in which the fragility of life and the presence of disease, the high infant mortality rate, the lack of a social safety net, and the complexities of housekeeping and childrearing meant that most women and men divided their prodigious labours into separate spheres of domestic and public. https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/01/feminism-was-never-about-equality/

by Graham Cunningham, Slouching Toward Bethlehem | Read more:
Image: Tristan and Iseult: Gaston Bussiere 1911/Wikimedia Commons