I love these women. I grew up surrounded by smart, confident women. You can’t help but love and respect them, even when you do disagree. They’re both a delight, but Camille consistently makes me laugh out loud. She is one of rhe most entertaining people you could possible watch.
I think if there’s any problem they haven’t considered, it’s that they might not be as representative of their sex as they would wish. Now, this is a lesson I’ve learned from my own sex. I’m an atypical man, I’m a bit more androgynous. And I’ve often resented (and been the punching bag) of the more manly cadre within my sex. And I’ve often thought that they should be less like that and more like me. And maybe I’m not entirely wrong.
But that’s not what they’re like. They are more aggressive than me, less verbal, more competitive, less aesthetic, less sensitive, more technical, more typically manly than me by almost every metric. And maybe that’s how they’re supposed to be, this large middle of the group we call men. And maybe the solution for them isn’t to stop being who they are and become me. Maybe they’re meant to find balance for who they are in relationship with women, who will resist and counter and balance them out in an intimate dialectic. And over time I eventually learned to resent our differences less and understand them more. But it’s still painfully obvious to me, as a sexually atypical man (but still a man) what extremes and problems men frequently fall into.
So yes, “fainting couch” feminism, as she so glibky puts it, may be a problem. But it’s not clear that the solution is for all those women to be just like Camille, any more than the solution for “breaking couch” men is to be more like me (and it’s not clear that either is really possible). Maybe the problem is partly the isolation and seperation of the sexes. Maybe those greater extremes that are, frankly, actually the great middle of the sexes, are meant to find their balance in understanding and having relationships with one another (not just romantic relationships, I actually think parental relationships are a really big part of what’s broken).
It might be hard to hear, but it’s at least possible that a certain portion of women fundamentally want greater protections, and that Camille is a relative outlier. As for myself, I have had to learn to accept that a lot of men are fundamentally more aggressive and want to throw themselves into crazy, risky, and more competitive situations than I do. Maybe we need both of those instincts in a fully functional human society, and that’s why they are regularly and normally distributed, including according to sex. Learning to accept, while still being critical, of the eccentricities (and strengths and pathologies) of your own sex is part of becoming a mature person.
So I don’t really disagree with them at all. I’m just not convinced from my own experience that the solution of turning those other women into these women (or other men into me) is viable. Maybe they need to become the better, more healthy version of who they are, find some other kind of balance. Still, having these conversations is part of that process.
I’m glad that I have the freedom to be a man, a heterosexual man, and be the person who buys the clothes and does the decorating and shopping and laundry and cooks the meals and who likes to cuddle and snuggle and takes care of the kids during the day. I like it, I’m good at it. I’m glad that the system has that flexibility, and it doesn’t compromise my identity as a man. I hate cars and sports. My wife outearns me many times over. I’m shorter than her, I’m quite a bit younger, I have health problems that make me physically frsgile;by all typical masculine measures I’m a loser.
But I’m a full contributer to my family in these and many other ways. Yet I also recognize that I’m not typical, and I don’t expect other men to be like me. They’re who they are, and that’s good, and we need them. The vast bulk of male society and economy and culture is made by and for the more typical man. But there’s still room for me, and room for me to be the kind of man I am. So much that I even got a wife who appreciated that I was the only guy she knew in college who had a nicely decorated room, with its own tiny tree at Christmas, and who loved romantic Italian poetry. And we’ve also got room for people like Camille. And I think that, as Douglas Murray would say, would have been a great place for the train to stop. But it didn’t. It blew through the station into antagonism and denial of sexual differences, demonization of masculinity (and traditional femininity), tyrannical attempts to mandate outcomes, aggressive policing of speech and conduct, and all the other shrill demands of modern feminism (to put it as Camille would). And maybe people like Camille actually helped that happen without realizing it. Being more androgynous, she shares the appreciation of more typical male qualities, including in men, but has a resentment for and lack of appreciation for traditional femininity. Since not all women could be her, her attacks on it, in the good cause of making space for someone who wasn’t like Tha, left little room for that great middle bulk of women who learned that traditional femininity was an oppressive and reprehensible trap (at her feet, no less). So where were they all to go? So they made a space. They made third wave, postmodern, feminism. They wanted a home for who they were, and found the only place allowed them, if they wanted to be female heroes and not the despised housewives their professors told them was slavery and indignity and tawdry, banal, blonde, baking boredom and meaninglessness. They turned qualities that were a source of real power and excellence and strength into a distortion and manipulation and war on men and on their former selves, their forebears. But they don’t just want to be weak or use weakness to bully others and have the government stand as a tyrannical mother. They want to protect the weak and care for the weak and use that care in a powerful way. That’s a good instinct, and their solidarity makes them an almost irresistible force. The problem is that it’s been distorted and pathologized and misapplied, using its power to prevent it from being questioned and pushed back on and counseled into its proper, most functional form and channels.
Lower class women, on the other hand, as Camille has pointed out, just kept being women, and so retained their sense and strength. For a while. Things tend to trickle down. I love Camille, but until she can make peace with traditional femininity as well as masculinity, and make a place for it in feminism, her platform will be incomplete. I know what it’s like to suffer at the outside of the average. I spent plenty of time getting bullied and kicked around, physically and mentally and emotionally, by that ideal. I understand why she can’t stand Doris Day. I understand the longing to be free of that comparison you have no interest in fitting or ability to meet. But we have to learn to accept and understand and appreciate as well as resist and correct, especially those things it is not in our authority to change.
I would also like to bring up the perspective of people like Mary Eberstadt, who wrote Primal Screams. In her work, she carefully documents the cost of the devolution of traditional gender roles, and as well makes an argument that humans have a distinct nature, and you can’t mess with it too much without seeing some consequences, among which is that people will begin to look elsewhere to have those needs be met, those identities be defined, and to use those capacities they have. And that can have unanticipated and disruptive consequences.
This is the counterpoint to Camille Paglia, who I truly adore, much more than I adore Eberstadt. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think she has some great points. What you’re really getting from these two is exploratory, creative feminism arguing with conscientious, ordely feminism. One explores the boundaries of what it means to be a woman, the other secures the foundations. One produces all kinds of novel and interesting goods, the other preserves society and produces the fundamental goods that sustain the species.
In my mind, I can hear them arguing with one another. They both present dangers, and they both present opportunities. I think they’re both important to listen to. One says, we want the freedom to risk being raped and not having kids or stable family relationships, because we want all the opportunities to explore what else might be out there! The other says, that’s fine for you because you’re willing to pay the price personally for what that costs you. You don’t pay any personal price for being pro-pornography and pro-sadomasochism and pro-nonmanogamy. But other people, and particularly children, pay a real price for it. It’s all just a fun display for you to study and watch at art galleries and on Real Housewives. But making that attitude into the basis of popular societal values causes widespread effects, and not everyone can live a life like yours, without some serious consequences, and the rest of society ends up picking up the check for it.
And they’ve both got a point. And negotiating things between the two, creating a world where both are preserved, is a problem. And the other problem we have is that there’s a destructively anarchic and selfish and a destructively tyrannical and collectivist version of those respective viewpoints. And the most likely result is that we end up with an opposition between the two worst versions of them instead of the two best versions of those ideologies.
Radical order and radical freedom both come with costs, one for the outliers and one for the average. Ideally you want to protect both as much as possible. But if you sink the average, you’ll sink the whole ship, along with the outliers. As strange as it sounds, intrepid explorers like Camille rely on the stability of the bourgeoisie to make her life possible. They keep the whole society stable and productive and moving forward through the generations. As much as she declaims postmodernism for destroying the world she loves, it’s really just a reaction to the void opened, in part, by her own exploding of all the walls that kept the world together.
So Camille speaks to my heart, I’m almost dangerously high in openness myself. I like to explore the borders of chaos. But I know that I only have that freedom and strength because I stand within the strength of my family. If I didn’t have that I don’t think I would even be alive today.
Making Nobody Happy 