Sex and Deviance
Page 17
But this idea that women have never been able to equal men in the domain of general creativity (which is the main question, anyway) does not indicate that this is necessarily the case, and that this tendency could not be reversed. A feminine (not ‘feminist’) revolution is perhaps possible.
The only peoples in history who did not make women inferior were Europeans, especially Celts, Germans, Scandinavians, Slavs, and ancient Romans and Greeks. So the idea of total equality between men and women naturally made its appearance, along with its corollary, feminism, which ended up an aberration because it slipped from the idea of equality to that of equivalence. This in fact amounts to denying femininity and modeling women on men.
The form of feminism which defends women (inspired, of course, by the West) is very much alive in the Arab world and even India. In India, for example, although majority polytheistic and pagan, mistreatment of women is a part of the social habitus. In the West on the other hand, feminism has lost its way, deviating toward a utopian ‘women’s cause’ which ends in the denial of the real feminine condition; this feminism borrows its patterns of thought from the most threadbare Marxism, transforming women into ‘proletarians’ exploited by male oppression, making of them no longer a sex but a new sort of social class. Here again, the Aristotelian mean should prevail: no oppression of women, equality with men, but no deviation toward sexual equivalence.
The Androgynous Utopia
Dogmatic Western feminism thus neglects the mere defence of women and their right to their bodily identity on the pretext of their ‘mastery’ of their bodies. It is a sort of ideological bath which aims to abolish feminine specificity. To masculinise women and feminise men, thus constructing the androgyn: such is the goal of the feminist. The doctrinaire partisans of this anthropological chaos are just as much men as women, too. As a utopian ideal, the androgyn is the counterpart to the mixed-race person: a return to entropy, to the indifferentiation of the sexes as well as the races. This confusion reigns in the social realm as well as in that of sex, since women and men are supposed to carry out the same functions, ply the same trades, but also both be bisexual. This paradigm, which comes close to dementia, is a denial of the natural law; but above all, it harms women much more than men.
Indeed, feminism is above all a form of masculinism. To imitate men, to become a man, not only socially but also sexually: such is the unthinkable idea[14] of feminism, which is stronger still than their desire to feminise men. The unisex androgyn of feminist dreams is, at base, more masculine than feminine. The unisex person will have a tiny penis, but a penis nonetheless.
* * *
The feminisation of so-called ‘purely male’ professions is one of the examples, and poses a number of insurmountable problems. This is a manifestation of one of the utopian imperatives of egalitarianism: equivalence between the sexes, or more precisely, their interchangeability. The will (in the West) to impose quotas for women in police forces and Army combat units constitutes one of the most surreal examples of feminist ideology. As perfectly acceptable as it is for women to occupy technical or managerial positions, it is equally idiotic to incorporate them (especially by quota!) in ground combat units, first of all because they are physically unable (statistically speaking) to assume these roles — women not all being potential Amazons — but also because putting the lives of real or potential mothers in danger is unacceptable in a balanced society. The life of a woman, especially a young woman, counts for more than that of a man in such a society, simply because she is a mother, in charge of reproduction and the upbringing of offspring.[15] The presence of young mothers or future mothers where law and order is being enforced or war fought would have seemed, from antiquity up until the last century, a madman’s idea.
* * *
During the First World War (a horrifying inter-European slaughter) women participated in the war effort as nurses and canteen workers, and especially as replacements for men in factories and on farms, but they were never combatants. In the Second World War, it was the same. Women on both sides were incorporated into the Army, but in non-combat roles. Such is not the case today in Western armies, where women are used in combat units in the name of egalitarian unisex ideology. The Israelis were the first to try including women in combat units and to institute female military service, for demographic reasons and because they were vastly outnumbered by the enemies that surrounded them, but they were quickly disillusioned, and the armed soldierettes were relegated to office work.
In the American Army, although the law forbids women from entering into combat (a common-sense measure), the law is not respected. According to The New York Times, of the two million Americans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan (taking account of troop rotations), 220,000 were women, making up 11 percent of the entire contingent and 6 percent of the Marine Corps. In Afghanistan, Special Forces commandos accepted women, which had previously been forbidden. Since 2001, 130 female soldiers have been killed, including 70 in combat.
Female soldiers perform very satisfactorily, often better than men, because for a woman to sign up for a combat unit, she must be more motivated than a man. ‘Women have more feeling in the face of danger. Women fighters display greater aggressiveness, better composure, and more guts: they have them to spare’, explains an American officer (investigative report by Karen Lajon, Journal du Dimanche, 20 December 2009). A woman Colonel explains, putting a damper on the last assertion, that: ‘men are programmed to defend women; it’s in their genes. We are not made for joining the infantry. We would only be a distraction, and so an annoyance.’ The presence of female fighters at their sides changes men’s behaviour: ‘the young men are no longer within that dynamic of protecting women during combat’.
Despite the proven effectiveness of the Lioness Teams among American troops, the use of women in infantry combat units amounts to an utter aberration. With this, we have entered the very heart of anti-nature, of pure and simple negation and confusion of the sexes and their roles. It is the ultimate stage of women’s masculinisation, common to all feminist and ‘parity-ist’ ideology. Esprit de corps, a purely male phenomenon, is disrupted by the presence of women. Inevitably, sexual problems will arise, with jealousy and romantic disappointment never far behind. In schools co-education is counter-productive, but in a military regiment it is worse still. Moreover, risking the lives of women — potential or actual mothers — in battle is symptomatic of a mindset that has entirely lost its bearings.
To be really effective (esprit de corps again), troops must be united ethnically, ideologically, and sexually. Moreover, women naturally have less of a physical capacity as regards muscular strength, resistance and endurance. The incorporation of women in French Army ground units, the gendarmerie,[16] and police forces is already posing great difficulties. Ideology, however, dominates: it is not pragmatic; it does not care about effectiveness; its aim is to obey a dogmatic teaching — in this case, the anti-natural egalitarian dogma according to which everyone is interchangeable with one another.
Confused minds will object: But what about the Amazons? What about Joan of Arc? The Amazons were a myth of Greek antiquity, of course, and not a reality. As for Joan of Arc, it was her very singularity as a woman warrior summoned by God that struck people’s minds as a miraculous exception. In any case, her virginity — assumed almost magically as such, although she had not taken any vow nor entered into any religious order — defeminises her. Joan of Arc was not a woman incorporated into the army of the King of France, but a quasi-divine figure entirely within the unconscious tradition of European paganism, where sometimes, in exceptional circumstances and in order to inspire the minds of men, a woman or feminine divinity would turn warrior, as, for example, Nike, the Winged goddess of Victory, who wore a helmet and carried a spear. But it would have occurred to no one in Athens to incorporate women into the hoplite phalanx.
* * *
Feminist ideology h
as slipped through every pore in our society and taken it over; now it is now showing its true face by negating feminine nature. For a particular woman to decline to become a mother is perfectly acceptable, but to set up anti-maternalism and masculinisation as an implicit ideology is a symptom of a delirium comparable to that of communism, the delirium of Anti-Nature.
There is a striking parallel between this feminist tendency and its demonisation of pregnancy and of mother. It is perfectly legitimate for women to demand control of their bodies, to refuse imposed pregnancy, and to control their own use of chemical contraception. But by the same token, feminist ideology has flagrantly promoted abortions on the basis of convenience — an irresponsible position — and tried to ridicule motherhood, mostly implicitly. By depicting mothers as slaves, feminist ideology has shown that it promotes an entirely individualist, selfish, and anti-natalist model of society, largely unconcerned with the welfare of future generations. When you psychoanalyse the feminist unconscious, you discover a garçon manqué: the wish to become a ‘guy’, a ‘fellow’.
* * *
This ideology of equivalence between the sexes is, as we have seen, a counterpart to that of the equivalence of the races — or of their denial. Let us reconsider Simone de Beauvoir’s famous slogan: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’[17] In Mme de Beauvoir’s unconscious, only male birth is of value. All babies are men, virtually. The common ideal is masculinity. Why did she not write: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a man’? Indeed, if little girls are not born women, what are they born as? Hermaphrodites? In reality, she thought that the body was unimportant, and that we are all born unisex, androgynous, but mainly male. She probably hated her woman’s body. Without knowing it, Beauvoir was an advocate of machismo.
Feminism is fascinated with the masculine body and model of society, which is implicitly taken as the ‘natural’ model. The woman’s body, along with all it implies, is thereby devalued, for it is too heavy to carry. Feminism wavers between a hate-tinged envy of the male body (the penis, the absence of gynecological problems, periods, pregnancies, and so on) and a rejection of the female body as too painful.
This Leftist, Western feminism, which has wrongly labeled itself a ‘liberation movement’, has nothing to do with authentic feminism, which aims at combating machismo and giving women legal equality and equal treatment. Feminist ideology is as anti-feminine as proletarian Marxist ideology was anti-worker and anti-peasant.
There has also been an overall evolution toward masculinising the appearance of women. When you look at photographs of a European or American street scene prior to the 1960s, you can easily distinguish the women from the men. The same photo today would show a unisex, almost indistinct crowd.[18] One of the consequences of these facts is that the perception and recognition of the different sexes has lessened in daily life, simply because of this clothing style. Is not unisex style harmful to the intensity of sexual attraction? There is no mystery about it; everyone is alike. But the most serious point of all is that Leftist feminists see no problem in Muslim women (even those forcibly converted) submitting to the Islamic uniform, including the ignominious veil.
* * *
Co-education, as we have seen, was began to be imposed in both primary and secondary schools in the 1960s by politicised feminists in order to produce a sort of social capillary action for their ideas.[19] Its effects have been catastrophic, especially on the development and sexuality of adolescents. Particularly with the increasing presence of faster-developing African and North African adolescents in French schoolrooms, we are witnessing grave problems, most notably the loss of attention by boys distracted by the presence of girls, tension and conflict relating to aggression toward girls or to sexual rivalries, defeminisation of girls, as well as the disturbance of psycho-sexual development from the constant presence of the other sex at the height of puberty. In actual fact, it is only after puberty, by the time secondary studies draw to an end, that males and females can live together, not during.
* * *
We should mention the feminist notion of ‘dispossession of the female body’. The main criticism of feminist ideology against traditional society is that women were not masters of their own bodies, they had been dispossessed of them by male society. The whole progressive Left followed this line of argument in the 1950s, following Wilhelm Reich[20] and Herbert Marcuse.[21]
The first form of alienation was, of course, the prohibition against abortion, which deprived women of the possibility of making a decision about their own pregnancy, even in cases of rape. Other forms of alienation could be noted: forced marriages imposed on girls, even without their desiring or loving their husbands; tolerance of sexual indiscretions in men and opprobrium cast on those of women, alone in being forcibly constrained to fidelity; the obligation to be virgins at marriage; distrust of feminine enjoyment; prohibition against unveiling themselves in public, and so on.
These arguments are not wrong. Moreover, the conservative milieus of the time justified the alienation of women’s bodies; they explained that, in fact, this body did not belong to her individually, but was a part of the social order since it was the receptacle and instrument of reproduction. If a man’s sexuality, they said, is a matter of his own will, that of a woman was (because of the possibility of pregnancy) part of family and society. Of course, these arguments today seem idle (although with mass immigration, such arguments are returning in force in Muslim milieus, which is preparing some surprises for us). The legalisation of abortion and chemical contraception have masculinised feminine sexuality and given it autonomy.[22]
But by a sort of ideological inertia, feminists continue firing off accusations that women are alienated from their bodies. This remarkable persistence of the need to be complaining about oppression long after it has disappeared is symptomatic of the same victim mentality one finds in homosexual milieus. Women’s bodies are instrumentalised and alienated by eroticism, by pornography, and by the constant showcasing of nudity ‘to excite men’, who thereby consume the female body as an object without a soul, a receptacle for fantasies. The contradiction here is that feminism demanded the freedom for women to show their bodies, and considered the unveiling of nudity and erotic attraction as liberation from the oppressive prudery which hid the female body. Today, however, the ‘new feminism’ has become prudish, so feminism oscillates between puritanism and sexual libertinism. The transformation of women into androgynous beings has been the implicit program of feminism since the beginning of the twentieth century.
In reality, one of the central demands of feminism — sexual control over one’s own body — aims (as in all other domains) to masculinise women. Feminine sexuality can result in pregnancy, a source of dangers and responsibilities, while male sexuality has no consequences for men’s bodies, only possibly on their social existence (paternity). Feminism has always more or less recognised pregnancy as a constraint, as a kind of alienation, and dreamed of women having a sexuality similar to that of men, that is to say, a ‘free sexuality’. But feminists should take heart: in the twenty-first century, women (at least those of the wealthy elite) will undoubtedly enjoy the benefit of conception without pregnancy or delivery, thanks to incubator technology, which will replace pregnant mothers. This will have enormous consequences, as we shall see later on.
* * *
Feminism is based on the same mental schema as machismo: one sex is superior to the other. Feminism is inverted machismo. For feminism, behind its egalitarian façade, considers the female sex superior. This is an untenable position, especially since they want to rob femininity of its essence by masculinising it. This proclamation of the superiority of women over men, whether implicit or openly proclaimed, amounts quite simply to reintroducing the mental schema they are pretending to eradicate. (The same goes for homophile ideology, which now proclaims the superiority of homo- to heterosexuality, and for anti-racist ideology, wh
ich insinuates that mixed-race or non-White people are superior.) This is a classic trait of all Left-wing egalitarianism since the French Revolution.[23]
This tendency to talk up women (which is much broader than the small cadre of feminist activists) as if they were superior but unrecognised beings has something suspicious about it, something annoying and insincere (in somewhat the same way as ‘people of colour’, that is, extra-European people, are talked up out of ideological conformism). Woman must become the new stronger sex she should never have stopped being, but at the price of her femininity....
For feminist ideology, pregnant women and mothers are despised, looked down upon — especially if they are native European. At the very least, one feels sorry for them, along with wives and housewives who are supposedly exploited. In fact, this ideology does not seek to defend women’s rights, as it claims, but to advance a utopian model of the new woman, a kind of photocopy of men. This new woman greatly resembles the new man of Marxism. The two utopias are parallel, and share the same authoritarian tendency hidden beneath their demands for liberation. It was the neo-Marxist Wilhelm Reich who supplied first American and then European feminism with some of its conceptual tools.[24]
Feminist and Marxist forms of reasoning bear a close resemblance: the proletarian worker and producer is at core superior to the bourgeois and the aristocrat who unproductively live on their rents. Women, also essentially superior, have been oppressed by men from the dawn of time, victims of male society. Very well, but in either case — applied Marxism or applied feminism — you only end up with a worker-slave or a sterile woman deprived of all her qualities. Utopian fanaticisms always end in the ruin of what they wanted to defend and promote.