RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Bowden! - 7 - The Feminist Mystique

Jan. 9, 2018 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

51:49

Bowden! - 7 - The Feminist Mystique

Jonathan and Richard discuss the many “Waves” of Feminism, from the Suffragettes to Margaret Sanger to postmodern theorists of gender and pornography. They also examine feminism’s effect on men, and whether the world needs another hero. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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	Welcome to Vanguard, a podcast of radical traditionalism.
	The Vanguard Here's your host, Richard Spencer.
	Hello, everyone.
	Today it's great to welcome back to the program our friend and contributor, Jonathan Bowden.
	Jonathan, thanks for being back with us.
	How are things over on your side of the Atlantic?
	Yeah, it's a bit frigid, a bit cold these days, but probably nothing to what it's like on your side, but otherwise well.
	Excellent.
	Today we are going to talk about another big and important issue for our movement, and that is feminism.
	It's obviously an issue of major importance for the world as well.
	Jonathan, what makes feminism so complicated and interesting is that it's had all of these various "waves," as they call them, and they've often put forward contradictory philosophies and objectives.
	But maybe that's what's made feminism.
	to get the conversation started, just talk about that, those initial...
	That initial impulse towards feminism, where that was coming from, where do you think it cropped up first?
	What was kind of the first, first wave, so to speak, of feminism?
	Do you think this was with women's suffrage, or was it with some of the many liberal revolutions that occurred in Europe over the course of the 19th century?
	Where do you think that original urge came from?
	Yes, that's a complicated and quite a difficult one.
	I mean, textually, it goes back to Mary Wollstonecraft's The Rights and Wrongs of Women, you know, Rights of Women, as against Tom Paine's Rights of Man, produced in a similar timeframe at the beginning of the 19th century, sort of coming out of the latter end of the 18th century.
	And she was part of a radical sort of ferment of opinion around William Godwin and his extended family.
	...into which she was intermarried.
	But the political drift of feminism in its first way that's discernible has to be in and around the Great War 1914 to 1918 in Europe and just after, where you have a militant movement for women's suffrage concentrating on the vote but often extending out into other areas.
	And you have that split into two wings between those who will pursue purely non-violent means, who've been largely forgotten by history, the suffragists, and those who were prepared to use direct action and indeed even violence to get their way, the suffragettes, who are the ones that history remembers.
	They're the ones who were force-fed in prison.
	They're the ones who chained themselves to railings.
	They're the ones who are saucy police officers.
	They're the ones who threw themselves in front of derby winners and were trampled to death on newsreels at the time, to great and extended excitement and social convulsion.
	So that was the first real sort of wave, which then fed into the swinging 1920s as Europe and the West relaxed.
	into a hedonistic decade after the slaughter of the Great War and prior to the coming depression of the 30s.
	Second wave feminism is its Mm-hm.
	and sort of has a whole new generation, skipping out several generations in actual fact, between the first and the second waves.
	The second wave is notorious for its theorists and its And it's going outside the box of what is understood to be political and looking at all areas of life, often in a rather caustic and adversarial way.
	Culturally, the second wave, you could argue, had far more impact than the first wave, but they wouldn't have amounted to anything without the first wave.
	And the first wave did genuinely convulse the society because nothing divided opinion.
	Like the issue of whether women should get the vote, because it was axiomatic of all sorts of other matters in the society.
	By giving them the vote, it indicated that women could do almost all jobs that men could do up to a point.
	And it opened the professions to them.
	It opened the universities to them.
	It opened higher education institutions to them.
	It opened a world of politics and political representation to them, not just voting.
	And so, in a way, it changed the world, and that's why the sort of dynamite of the vote was used.
	What do you think was the reigning philosophy of the early suffragists and suffragettes?
	Was it a liberal one?
	Do you think it could be connected with some of the early social democratic and kind of Marxian movements?
	What do you think about that?
	Well, I think the honest answer is yes and no.
	The truth is that female politics resembles male politics pretty closely, and that there's a range of opinion, right, left, and center, as what surprised many sophologists when women got the vote, particularly bourgeois women, is they voted pretty much along the same lines that men did, and were perceived to have the same social and economic interests that men did.
	There have been times when the gender gap has been one way and then the other.
	For example, today in the Western world, which is quite clearly Anglo-Saxon, the Anglophone world, there seems to be a marked preference for centre-left parties amongst women as against centre-right parties amongst men.
	And that drift and gap is quite discernible.
	But there have been times where women have been much more conservative than men.
	And on certain issues, women remain a lot more conservative than men.
	On law and order issues in the 50s, 60s, 70s, women often had much more conservative attitudes than men.
	So it's debatable in a way.
	Certainly, a large number of bourgeois supporters of female suffrage just wanted the vote as a coping stone, really, as a sort of seal of approval for their admission into social life.
	And once that happened, they reverted to essentially a conservative tradition, some of the first women to be elected, of course, into parliament.
	Yeah.
	side, because it was inevitable that women from a very bourgeois background would be the best educated women and would be the women who wanted in some ways to protect the status And all that the suffrage did for them was allow them to do so.
	In the past, they would have done that through men, really.
	Then they had a chance to do it on their own behalf.
	It is true that the vanguard movements were associated, for the most part, with liberal and with social democratic causes and with the culture of the left, generally speaking.
	That's because it was seen to be an out-of-left-field movement.
	It was seen to be a movement for radical change.
	And it inevitably adhered to the left rather than the right.
	Yeah, just to add on to what you were talking about earlier, a good friend of mine often will tell a powerful anecdote about female voting.
	And if you'll forgive me, I'm forgetting some of the details.
	But as with anecdotes, it's kind of the essence of it is what matters.
	There was a revolutionary parliament in France, and they were actually bringing up the...
	The question of whether women should vote, and actually the people who most vigorously opposed it were the far left of the parliament.
	And those who supported it with greatest passion were actually what we'd call the right, and even the clerical right.
	And the reason for this was that, and I think in some ways both were rationally correct to hold those viewpoints, and the reason was that women, if given the chance to vote, would most likely vote the way that their priests told them to vote.
	And that women in this sense were a kind of force of conservatism, that they would maintain the existing religious and aristocratic order.
	The far left didn't really want women to vote in this way.
	The women are kind of the, how do I say, traitors or kind of a wedge in this, that the women, for whatever reason, Maybe purely out of sentimentality want to vote for center-left parties, the parties that push the buttons about taking care of the children or whatever.
	And that they are kind of on the wrong side of the dispossession of America's white historic majority.
	So, you know, it's again, it's a very complicated issue.
	And the social manifestations of women's suffrage can occur in quite different ways.
	Let me also ask another question about this.
	You know, in some ways, I want to move on to second wave feminism because that's, you can find at least tracks that are more obnoxious, extreme and things like this.
	But I want to stick just for a little bit longer to – And I'm thinking of someone like Margaret Sanger.
	And she's in many ways a fascinating individual.
	Nowadays, she's looked upon by many liberals as a wonderful, heroic, right-thinking woman who was fighting for the rights of women to use contraception and women's rights in general.
	But then if you take a little closer look and you peel away a few layers of the onion, You find that she was a eugenicist of sorts, that she was afraid of the Feeble-minded and weak and so on and so forth, overwhelming the healthier stock of America, and that in a democracy, something like that would be truly terrible, terrible consequences.
	She actually was, she would kind of flirt with people like Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, people who are...
	Now would be considered, you know, totally beyond the pale, fascist, racialist types.
	So, you know, maybe in some of these first waves of feminism, that we might think we know what it's all about if we see it through the lens of modern left-right politics, so to speak.
	But actually, it's something quite different.
	Do you have any thoughts on that?
	of the different strands of first wave feminism and how they're kind of surprising when you look at them from our standpoint.
	Yes, I think that's very true.
	I think first-wave feminism can't be divorced from the class backgrounds of most of the women who advocated these positions, although there's been a careful pick and mix of the women concerned so that they seem part of a progressive continuum.
	There are many contradictions and bakuna that occur.
	It's inevitable that these ultra-bourgeois women, for the most part, will often have radically conservative values, and a few of them will have cross-fertilised left-right values and elitist values at that, despite the fact that they're in favour of doing the vote for themselves.
	And this means that they're not in the favour of the vote for others.
	It also shouldn't surprise us that when a lot of female literature is published, sort of in the late 19th, 20th century, in a sense, sort of elite literature, it turns out not to be left-wing particularly.
	A lot of feminist publishing houses have been amused by the fact that a lot of the literature they publish in the early days isn't really at all progressive.
	And in their own terms, and in the left terms, that's because the women who wrote it came from upper-class backgrounds.
	They were the women who were educated at the elite university level in all-female colleges during that era.
	And their values and what they produced reflect that.
	You also have a marked partiality for forms of ultra-conservatism amongst certain early female champions.
	Not for nothing that some of the political leaders who emerge first from the dispensation that it gives women the vote turn out to be on the right rather than the left.
	Over the time, eugenics and feminism have almost completely separated out.
	But because feminism was concerned with biological and reproductive health and wanted to give women control of it, abortion, of course, cuts two ways.
	And although anathema to the Christian right, abortion does feed into a eugenic agenda.
	Indeed, without some concept of abortion, you couldn't have eugenics in a meaningful sense.
	Because how are you to act to prevent these people that certain eugenicists believe shouldn't be born or encouraged from being born in the first place?
	So there's an inevitable correlation between certain socio-biological and Darwinian ideas.
	And certain evolutionary ideas and feminism of a particular sort, particularly as of the unideological feminism.
	So it's inevitable that the sort of Mary Stokes wing of the movement will come out of eugenics and the family planning and abortion and pro-choice movements.
	are all deeply mired in feminism on the one hand and eugenics on the other.
	Yes.
	Actually, the religious right in the United States, and I assume in Europe as well, have picked up on this, and they'll usually make...
	Inflated claims of, you know, abortionists, they really want to rid the world of Africans or something like that, or, you know, connect Margaret Sanger with Hitler and, you know, various things like that.
	But obviously this kind of rhetoric is overdone, but it might actually have a kernel of truth to it.
	But it also points out the egalitarian nature of the so-called religious right.
	In the country.
	Let's move on to the second wave of feminism and the 1960s.
	And I would say that, you know, if you talk to an average Joe in the U.S. or Europe, who's maybe a conservative-thinking guy...
	Pretty normal, good instincts.
	He probably thinks that, when you say the word feminism, he probably thinks of some woman who's, you know, tattooed and maybe earringed and has totally outrageous views and hates men and was probably, you know, got dumped when she was at the prom or the dance or something and became a lesbian and just has, you know, is driven purely by resentment.
	And he probably...
	He really has that kind of man-hating feminist stereotype in his mind.
	And in some ways, a lot of that is associated with that second wave of feminism that came with the New Left, that came with the '68 revolutions and so on and so forth in the US and Europe.
	So maybe, Jonathan, maybe you can give us an introduction to this movement.
	And it's obviously quite different.
	It has a different vibe, so to speak, to it.
	And it probably has a different philosophical grounding as well.
	It might not even be related to earlier feminism.
	But what are your views on the impulse behind feminism that arose in the 1960s and beyond?
	Yes, I think this is the feminism that most people associate the term by, whatever their view.
	Feminism in the 60s and thereafter, and some of its precursors in the late 50s, tends to be a movement that's concerned almost completely with revolutionary politics, particularly sexual and psychological revolutionism.
	It only just about fits into Marxism because it relates to biological or pseudo-biological.
	And sort of quasi-biological theories.
	It's associated with a sort of range of alternative society and slightly madcap women, like Germaine Greer, who wrote a book called The Female Eunuch, which at one level is a sort of, quite well done, but hysterical rant about the role of women in society, most of which is utopian in a way, because it wants the female role to be changed out of recognition.
	To such a degree that you could argue one of the subtexts is that women become men over time and men become women over time, which was one of the unstated psychological goals.
	of second wave feminism was to see a feminization of men in relative terms and a masculinization of women in relative terms.
	And that's not a totally stupid notion when you look at the theories that some of them were proposing.
	Well, they seem to have succeeded in this to a large degree.
	Yes, I think, well, feminism is unusual in that it's one of those revolutions that succeeded.
	In absolute terms, of course, it's completely failed because it addressed itself to utopias that are not possible of realization.
	and things like radical feminism, the total separation of female and male lives, women living separate beehive-like existences in communes.
	That's all failed.
	Yeah, I'll jump in here, and then you can get back to your thought.
	But actually, Alex Kurtigich was suggesting that I read Valerie Solanos' track, The Scum Manifesto.
	And Scum, in this instant, means the Society for Cutting Up Men.
	And she...
	That's right.
	She essentially...
	Yeah, she's probably the most...
	She was an American, of course, and schizophrenic.
	But she was the most extreme feminist that there's ever been.
	Other feminists do partly regard her tirade as sort of exhibitionistic, sort of Sadian and tongue-in-cheek.
	But yes, she advocates physical attacks on men.
	And of course, she did physically attack Andy Warhol.
	She shot him in the stomach with a gun, from which she later recovered.
	And she was in prison for three years because of that.
	She got up quite lightly because it was regarded as an act of insanity.
	Yeah, she represents in some ways the lunatic fringe, even the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe within that particular movement.
	Although there will be feminists who will defend her because she represents a sort of nethermost position or a sort of position which is not possible to get beyond.
	A sort of virulently sort of man-hating position.
	But there are positions, misandrist, I think it is, a word that's never used, really, that means female detestation of men, misogyny being a male detestation of women, which is a quite well-known word.
	If you take a book like The Woman's Room by Kate Millett...
	There's a stronger detestation of men in that as anything in Solanus, but it's not as expressed as in a grotesque way.
	So Solanus is a deliberately absurdist text.
	But that wing of feminism, radical feminism, as it's called, with a large R, which is counter-propositional biologically, and yet is rooted in biology, because it wants a total separation of the sexes.
	And in the end advocates lesbianism, even for heterosexual women, hence books like Lesbian Nation and that sort of thing, which come out of this particular milieu.
	Feminist groups have internal debates.
	In the 70s and 80s about lesbianism, when the vast majority of women had to confess that they were biologically heterosexual, and therefore this wasn't an option for them.
	And they had endlessly pained debates about whether they should have political lesbianism instead.
	But it never really got anywhere.
	So that wing of feminism, the more lunatic fringe, radical elements of what is in any case a radical doctrine, Have fallen by the wayside, although there are important theorists associated with the anti-pornography movement, such as Andrea Dworkin and so on, who come out of the radical wing, which is still current.
	Yet another odd reverberation is the association that anti-pornography feminism has with conservatism, particularly religiously-notivated conservatism, unlike libertarianism, for example, which would take a laissez-faire attitude towards commercial pornography.
	Yeah, let's put some pressure on this.
	I actually had porn down as an important subject I wanted to discuss.
	It obviously didn't really, at least to my knowledge, really come up with first-wave feminism.
	But you have an interesting anti-porn movement that did work hand in glove with the religious right, so-called.
	You actually had, I believe, one of the iconic porn's first leading lady, Lovelace, I'm forgetting her first name, who was in Deep Throat, one of the most...
	One of the early...
	I think it was the first feature film that was kind of a porn.
	And Lovelace eventually became part of the anti-porn movement, worked with Vorkin and people of this nature.
	Yet, again, it gets back to how I opened the conversation.
	What makes feminism this lasting movement is its ability to mutate and ability to take on contradictory positions.
	I'm sure it's still going on.
	You have whole courses at major universities in the United States and Europe, and I'm sure as well, on porn as this...
	You know, way of female power or pure liberation or they probably have other terminologies to describe that I don't even understand.
	In some ways, there's kind of a yin and a yang to this.
	There's the evils of something like pornography.
	It's just expressing how men want to treat women as objects and, you know, want to abuse them and so on and so forth.
	But then it also...
	Porn might be seen on the flip side as this pure expression of a kind of Marcusean, you know, id-driven society of pure liberation, of social relations as an orgy, so on and so forth.
	So feminism, I mean, maybe this is part of the power of feminism.
	It can kind of flip back and forth between things and radically reevaluate its social positions.
	Yes, I think that's true.
	But in a way, it's bound to be like that because it is slightly ridiculous that half of mankind has a viewpoint.
	If there was a movement called manism, if there was a movement of men, it would immediately divide into all the subsections because men don't agree on anything.
	And so there's a degree to which to expect women to agree on anything beyond a few superficials.
	It is fought with difficulty.
	So you have to frame the thing that women feel they're in a subsidiary place, and therefore that gives them an alliance with each other that then enables them to align around certain core issues.
	But even then, they'll still be divided on most other issues.
	There's the Marxian legacy.
	It's almost like the female is a proletariat.
	They are oppressed by the current state of being, and therefore they become a kind of world historical actor.
	They become the universal subject.
	It's like a Marxianism gendered, so to speak.
	Yes, there's a bit of that going on.
	Although amongst conservative women...
	And Dworkin once wrote a book called Right-Wing Women, which is about right-wing women on the right of the Republican Party, because those were the sort of most discernible right-wing women she could find.
	And they've always been a source of fascination to feminists, what makes women otherwise conventional and adopt what they consider to be a male's consensual view once they've achieved just civic equality.
	In terms of careers and jobs and money and things of that sort.
	And this is the fact, of course, there's a large area of social conservatism, which is part of the female view as well.
	The view that basically women have a different role in life to men and have different tasks in life to men, but they're not particularly concerned if they're allowed to do male tasks.
	So if a woman wants to be a judge and goes all out to be one, The general conservative female attitude now is why shouldn't she be one?
	And she may be quite a tough-minded right-wing judge at that when it comes down to it.
	But they don't necessarily think the world should be upended so that women can be judges.
	It's just an add-on to the female role that remains otherwise unchanged.
	Feminism, like a lot of these movements, is a movement that's only superficially touched the lives of the overwhelming majority of women.
	Still, after all the propaganda the other way, 67% of women, about two-thirds of all women in most societies, want the traditional option.
	They want some sort of a stable marital or other union, and they want a family with children, and that's pretty much what they want.
	And feminism doesn't really have too much to say to those sorts of women, although it always...
	It postulates the notion that it never stops trying to address them.
	So the bulk of women remain uninfluenced by it, although they have taken advantage of the successes that feminism has scored, because although it's one of these movements that can be seen to have failed completely in its own utopian terms, its effect on society has been so great, and its effect on men has been so great.
	But in a way it has succeeded far more than other radical currents.
	It succeeded because it's forced the law to maximize those areas of female-male equality and to desprivilege areas of inequality that did exist in the social and civic space between men and women to the degree that now...
	who talk openly about opening those spaces up again are frowned upon by other men and are in a very small Yes, you know, it's interesting just to tell two little quick anecdotes.
	I did notice I'm now involved in an oppressive bourgeois marriage, but when I was dating, I did notice that it was still...
	I would have tacitly accepted that I would be paying for every meal.
	And if I happened to take a girl to date and say, "Oh, you're going to split it down the middle," or something like that, I'd probably get a very nasty look.
	It's not really unfair.
	It's actually...
	Again, I would probably get a horrified and disgusted look.
	So I think, you know, feminism kind of, it succeeds in particular areas, maybe fails in a couple, but succeed in general.
	Let me talk a little bit about something different than, totally different than someone like Valerie Solanos, whom I'm sure most people in the population, even someone who might call themselves a feminist, would probably declare that she was mentally ill and maybe was acting purely out of hatred.
	And that is the kind of, let's say, modern girl feminism that...
	Even if they eventually might want to have a family a little bit later, that they still have the opportunity to go become a stockbroker or something like this if they want to.
	And yet they really don't hold.
	If you meet these women...
	They are otherwise normal and healthy.
	They don't hold any views of men or evil or should be destroyed or anything like that.
	So it's a kind of acceptable, compromised feminism.
	And I don't want to make this too much of a leading question, but I think it is worth pointing out that since the 1970s, real wages have...
	I mean, the wage paid to a family member, to a head of a household, minus inflation.
	Essentially...
	The wage is not keeping up with price increases.
	And what we had in the 80s and 90s was, in essence, mom went to work in the sense of, you know, you could, dad, if he had a normal job, he could no longer sustain a family of four.
	It was impossible, particularly with, you know, education costs, medical costs going up, so on and so forth.
	And so, in a way, mom had to go to work and that that Dovetailed with this kind of more palatable feminism that came out of all these waves of feminism.
	So in a way, one could say that the Gloria Steinems of the world and so on and so forth, they're kind of the central banker's useful idiot.
	And what I mean by that is that it was due to things like inflation.
	And economic malfeasance, it was impossible for the man, the single breadwinner, to have a family.
	And these women were out there thinking that they were pursuing something radical by suggesting that women go to work.
	But really, they were just justifying and maybe even sugarcoating the economic decline of the Western world.
	So, I guess that's maybe my own take on it all there, but you can pick up on that if you'd like to talk about that economic element to it.
	But maybe, Jonathan, you could just talk about that more palatable kind of compromise feminism, which seems to be embraced by, I would say, a vast majority of women.
	Yes, I mean, it's a sort of very practical solution, and women have always been a very practical sex at one level of consciousness, and this middling solution where you take a bit of the small r, radical feminism, and kick the rest into touch, and basically can see it as a conceit and as a way to move forward on the career front, is an eminently sensible way of looking at it.
	It's not necessarily what men always wanted, but it's a solution that, in a sense, neuters the more virulent aspects of feminism whilst retaining a considerable dose of it.
	There was a theorist in the 1920s called Wyndham Lewis.
	He wrote a book in 1926, I think, called The Art of Being Ruled, in which he suggested that capitalism is a real motivating force behind feminism.
	The whole point was that the family was an archaic and reactionary institution that was pre-modern and that floated uneasily in the marketplace and that dammed up in an alternative lifestyle all these producers and consumers.
	that could be let loose, but they could only be let loose if women were prized out of the home and were treated as auxiliary men and were used in the workplace in that manner.
	And it's remarkably prescient analysis given that it was regarded as swathed.
	I was quite mad when he came up with us in the 1920s if it actually accords almost painstakingly with what's happened.
	Yes, without question.
	Also, the welfare state benefits from it.
	You have women working, they're paying more taxes.
	Divorce benefits certain economic groups.
	If you're owning apartments, you're going to benefit by the family no longer being intact.
	And so in a kind of horrible way, feminists are, again, the useful idiots of the banking system.
	American capitalism.
	Yes, and you see that in the cultural area as well, where a sort of sex-in-the-city feminism, totally divorced from, in many ways, the lifestyle instincts of the left, which can be quite puritanical, goes with a hedonistic free-market capitalism.
	You see this sort of combination of feminism and libertarianism, and feminism and libertarian capitalism.
	And the two going along together.
	You see this in the sort of female-issue magazines like Cosmopolitan, which are the female equivalent of pornography in many ways, motivated again by the market and what it is felt the market will bear.
	And quite distinct to the traditional romantic fiction, so-called female emotional pornography, which endless...
	There are stories, fictionalised, about romances between men and women, which tend to adopt a very deeply socially conservative and sort of old-fashioned timber.
	Cosmopolitan and Sex and the City are the exact inverse of all of that, and advocate an almost predatory and sort of slightly sort of sluttish sort of sexuality for women.
	That traditional moralists were appalled by, and women on the whole tended to regard as a harmful lifestyle for women.
	But it's now a sort of market-tested-to-destruction aptitude that's favoured on every newsstand.
	Oh, without question.
	I don't want to sound too haughty by saying this, but I'm afraid that so many of the women who move to, say, London or Manhattan, they get a job in their Little Miss career growl, and at some point they live the Sex and the City lifestyle.
	At some point in their mid-40s, they wake up alone and lonely living with cats.
	Again, I'm not trying to demean anyone.
	It just seems to be the case.
	And there seems to be the hangover of the Sex and the City lifestyle, which is...
	Jonathan, expound a little bit, if you would, on how feminism has changed men.
	And I think it's something a lot more complicated than wissification or men have become like women.
	I think it's something deeper and more varied than that.
	Yes, I think it is.
	I think what's happened is a whole storehouse or memory chain of male archetypes and types has gone down, has been sort of zapped and factored down.
	Certain types of sort of raw heterosexuality in a relatively traditional and sort of very masculine, capital M sort of a way, have gone down the memory hole.
	But so have elements of the dandy.
	And the sort of overstepping, flamboyant, sort of heterosexual, those roles, which were quite marked and quite varied, the sort of bohemian male roles as well, of a more traditional type, they've gone as well, or they've been rather neutered and confined as well.
	And there's a whole intermediate zone of masculine identities that have had their card marked.
	I think it's many men do not feel that they can be successful in private life, do not feel they can attract the women they wish to attract or be seen as attractive to such women and certainly not get alongside of them.
	If they are otherwise than the present sort of postmodern man, they feel that they've got really no chance in the private life states if they remain loyal to traditional and rather heedless masculinities that are in conflict with the egalitarianism of the present order.
	And this is something where theory is all very well.
	But if you want to have a sort of a happy or beneficent life, you have to do various things to make that turn around in the private area.
	And men have basically just bitten on the bullet, really, and have adopted a whole new set of masculine constructs in order to be successful with women.
	And they think they've actually been quite clever because they've adopted an element of male feminist language.
	Posture and behaviour in order to get on with women once equality was formalised in civics and in law and in social behaviour.
	Men haven't changed deep down that much, maybe, but behaviourally they've changed a great deal.
	And this shows that men don't revert to being something else when they're on their own these days, except very occasionally, and under the influence of all-male banter or drink or whatever.
	So that's pretty rare.
	It's not the reversal that scandalised feminists would expect on the whole either.
	So I think a lot of men feel that in order to have successful families, in order to have successful private lives, they need to downplay certain prior forms and play up certain attitudes and variants which are acceptable today.
	And I think that's happened right across the board.
	Yes, as we discussed off-air, our side sometimes underestimates the importance of that 20% of things which is nurture as opposed to nature.
	And in the case of men, it's almost as if the post-feminist man is a new, different biological species.
	I mean, he's not exactly.
	But that nurture of the equation...
	Yes.
	No one would engage in politics, no one would engage in any social ideology if the 20 to 25 percent of things which is nurturers against nature was unimportant.
	So it's in some ways the crucial vortex through which everything becomes the way it's bound to be.
	If you just left it to nature, you would end up with a semblance of what nature wanted, but you would probably give the game away to all sorts of people who wish to denature nature as much as possible.
	So nature on its own isn't enough, and men have not fundamentally biologically changed, but their behaviorism has altered out of all recognition.
	If the average man in the 1920s looked at what happened today, he'd be baffled.
	And yet a part of him wouldn't be because he'd just perceive it as a tactic which is adopted in order to be Do you think that's...
	Do you think that's all it is?
	Is it a tactic?
	It's a tactic that goes quite deep.
	It's rather like learning a stage part in a play, but you learn it so well, it sort of becomes your ombit.
	It becomes what you wish to be when you're off set.
	I think it's a part that's being learnt to such a degree.
	That it's become second nature now.
	Maybe that proves that part of the prior masculinities were also slightly rhetorical, that they've proved themselves to be so adaptable and so changeable.
	But I think it's the pressing need to be successful in this area, which is the prime motivator.
	Also, I think it just goes with the egalitarian discourse.
	Because what is the alternative?
	If the alternative, a sort of cult of male superiority, many men would feel uncomfortable with that because the idea of superiority and hence inferiority in any area strikes people as axiomatically discomforting in present circumstances.
	To bring this conversation to a close, let's talk a little bit about the The woman question from a deeper and anthropological standpoint, and that is the role of the woman in the West.
	Certainly, it's no coincidence that so many of these feminist movements were arising out of Europe writ large.
	Even if you want to blame Marxism on it, it's a rising out of the European milieu at some level.
	And a lot of that has to do with the fact that despite some of the horror stories told by leftist academics, women are treated better in the Western world than they are in the rest of the world, quite frankly.
	One likes to imagine the oppressive bourgeois marriage or something, but the oppressive bourgeois marriage is actually, in comparison with most other gender relations around the world, quite equitable.
	And so it's probably no surprise that feminism would grow out of the Western world.
	And so there seems to be a tension in the West between, let's just call it liberalism, granting people more equality, thinking that people can transcend their...
	Biological or material rootings and kind of decide for themselves.
	And then also another deep Western tradition, which is the family.
	And which, in many ways, I should point this out, if one wants to be a crude Darwinist, in some ways the monogamous family is also a great victory for feminism.
	I mean, obviously, if we were going to truly live in a Darwinian atmosphere, we'd have some sort of polygamy where the big man, the strongest guy, gets all the women and all the weaklings are either killed or serve as slaves or something.
	But in many ways, this tradition of...
	A very deep tradition, one that predates Christianity, of the family and monogamous relations, that is also something uniquely Western.
	You don't see a lot of monogamy in, say, the Old Testament or in Semitic traditions, but you see polygamy and tribal relations.
	But that monogamous family is something uniquely Western.
	So just taking up on some of these thoughts that I've put forward, Jonathan, what do you think is, from an anthropological standpoint, Yes, I think it's really the traditional role.
	It's the role that predates 60s feminism.
	I think it can be compatible with doing various jobs, but I think it is the mother's role, and it's the traditional female roles extended out into the educational area, into nursing.
	...into areas like that, but essentially it's the sort of the mother role, the Madonna role, of course there is a sexual role as well, and the sort of scarlet female role is part of that continuum, because it has to be, because all wearers have to be covered by it.
	So that's all part of the package.
	And all of those survive in the West quite markedly, actually, despite feminism's impact.
	So feminism's changed everything, yet everything's remained the same, or all of the female lifestyles that pre-existed feminism coexist with those that have been changed by it.
	I think what's really happened is that feminism hasn't changed women at all.
	It's changed certain female patterns of opportunity.
	But it hasn't changed women one iota.
	What it has changed is it's changed men a great deal.
	I think men have been the real recipients of feminist ideology and it's men who've been transformed by it or have been reluctantly so transformed because they feel that there's no option but to accept a certain dose of it in order to have some successful private life.
	So I personally believe that it's feminism's action on the male gender that's the crucial issue.
	Women have changed to a degree because they've adopted some of its vocabulary, but men have had to adapt to a much, much greater degree because it was an alien vocabulary as far as they were concerned.
	They have adopted it and they have had to get rid of or junk.
	An enormous prior traditional male set of vocabularies, only a proportion of which are heard anymore, even amongst men, even when they're on their own.
	So feminism has bitten very deep and has changed men, probably not for the best.
	If you look at the main men depicted in 1950s films, which is sort of before the cultural watershed.
	And how women and men are depicted and allow themselves to be depicted, and depict themselves more is the point, from maybe 1970 onwards.
	You notice a really radical transformation in the way masculinity is configured, the way heroic masculinity is configured, the way all forms of masculinity are configured.
	And certain traditional forms of masculinity where the Humphrey Bogart character slaps the woman because she's misbehaving would now be regarded as so unacceptable as to cause a frisson if they were to occur in contemporary cinema, for example.
	Well, it's interesting that there's a deep ambivalence with all this.
	I've noticed this with the success of the television show Mad Men, which in some ways represented men behaving badly and so women could kind of gawk at the oppressiveness and outmodeness.
	So you'd have men, you know, openly hitting on their secretary and lots of ass slapping and having, you know, little affairs during lunch breaks and so on and so forth.
	If it were just that, I don't think it would be a successful show.
	It might be a successful show for men, like on the Vice Network or the Spike Network.
	It's some kind of stupid jock, all-men programming cable network.
	But, you know, the reason why Mad Men was successful was, at some level, that Don Draper figure, that tall, dark, masculine, strong, self-confident, willing-to-put-someone-in-its-place type of man, is something deeply attractive to women.
	And it's something that they continually long for, maybe even despite themselves, certainly despite feminism.
	But, Jonathan, I think we have just scratched the surface on this issue.

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