WHEN the editor of this website fearlessly dared to suggest that the feminisation of society had a several adverse consequences, I felt it was my duty to thank her through the letter pages of TCW.
To recap, I congratulated Kathy Gyngell for her bravery in venturing into territory normally avoided by all but the denizens of the manosphere.
I referred not only to the shocking suggestion that the ‘rise of women’ might not have been an unmitigated success but the assertion that female emancipation might be implicated in our deepening social and political divisions. Worse still, I averred that complete social collapse might be the end result to which we are headed.
It appears that these ideas, once unthinkingly dismissed as mere misogyny, are being taken up by female commentators of some standing, Dani Sulikowski for one, of whom more later.
First, take Helen Andrews. A long time conservative political commentator, Andrews caused a bit of a storm with her NatCon speech last September which plunged full-on into this issue. She calls it the ‘great feminisation’.
This is the phenomenon whereby women have not just achieved equality in influential positions but have surpassed parity and become dominant in many areas.
In part you may blame boys’ failure in education, but, as Andrews puts it, there is also the ‘finger on the scales’. She refers to unfair practices such as DEI, which are de facto discriminations against men, as well as the operation of feminised HR departments (all of whom should be sacked, according to Andrews).
Do watch her speech – and note the expression on the face of the man in camera shot behind her, especially when she opines that unchecked universal feminisation will cause the complete collapse of our society.
Be that as it may, the ‘rise of women’ is certainly far from delivering the feminist promise of a society of happy-clappy unanimity and respect. What has been achieved is division and acrimony on a scale unseen in these islands for centuries.
But, as I pointed out in my letter, this phenomenon is not unprecedented. The emancipation of women is not the unique invention of the white Western world, contrary to the hubristic belief that we alone in history have had the wisdom to achieve it. On the contrary, the emancipation of women has recurred repeatedly in all sufficiently advanced civilisations – and shortly precedes their fall.
And this brings me to the serious purpose which motivates my regaling you with my thoughts on the matter.
I believe the only hope we have of avoiding the usual consequences of this phenomenon is to encourage a widespread understanding of its causes. In evoking ‘the usual consequences’ I reference some authors whose work I now summarise briefly.
In 1934 the Oxford anthropologist J D Unwin published Sex and Culture. In it he addresses the relationship between sexual mores and cultural vibrancy. Unwin’s headline finding was that sexual restraint is correlated with the rise of a vigorous culture while sexual licence is correlated with the later decline of that culture.
Here the greatest degree of ‘sexual restraint’, which is correlated with the greatest cultural strength, means no sex outside marriage and strict monogamy without divorce. In contrast, the greatest degree of ‘sexual licence’ can be understood to align with our prevailing Western ‘liberalism’. According to Unwin’s analysis of all historical precedents, a society which adopts such sexual licence will collapse within three generations, which he aligns with a century.
The collapse of a great culture does not occur in a vacuum nor does it occur instantaneously. As the culture declines it is inevitable that it is simultaneously, and gradually, replaced by insurgent cultures of greater vigour and unity of purpose (which does not presuppose their niceness). Sound familiar?
It is necessary to drill a little into the details of Unwin’s Sex and Culture.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Sigmund Freud was fashionable among intellectuals. Unwin adopted a Freudian perspective on the cause of the relationship between sexual mores and cultural health. Specifically, he invokes Freud’s theory of sublimation.
The idea here is that a culture flourishes if the energy which would have gone into fulfilling one’s sexual desires was prevented from being expended in that way and is hence deflected into cultural effort. Conversely, if there are no social barriers preventing the natural sexual target of one’s energy, little is left over for cultural effort.
Mainstream psychology today refutes Freud’s explanation of sublimation. The phenomenon survives, however, in the sense that people can channel selfish impulses into socially valued activities, but this is associated more with emotional regulation than the redirection of libido.
Frankly, I don’t buy this explanation. And there is another correlation within Unwin’s work which he tried valiantly to downplay. He noted ‘a female emancipating movement is a cultural phenomenon of unfailing regularity’. The whole quote is important here because Unwin exposes the awkward fact that female emancipation and sexual licence have always gone hand in hand.
He wrote: ‘It is often supposed that female emancipation is an invention of the modern white man. Sometimes we imagine that we have arrived at a conception of the status of women in society which is far superior to that of any other age; we feel an inordinate pride because we regard ourselves as the only civilised society which has understood that the sexes must have social, legal, and political equality. Nothing could be farther from the truth. A female emancipating movement is a cultural phenomenon of unfailing regularity; it appears to be the necessary outcome of absolute monogamy. The subsequent loss of social energy after the emancipation of women, which is sometimes emphasised, has been due not to the emancipation but to the extension of sexual opportunity which has always accompanied it. In human records there is no instance of female emancipation which has not been accompanied by an extension of sexual opportunity.’
Unwin is clearly uncomfortable with pinning the blame for cultural decline on female emancipation – as, indeed, we may also be. But the fact is that his historical evidence cannot discriminate between this and sexual licence, because, by his own admission, they have always and everywhere occurred together.
He wrote: ‘The evidence is that the subjugation of women and children is intolerable and therefore temporary; but we should go beyond the evidence if we were to conclude from this fact that compulsory continence is also intolerable and therefore temporary.’
Unwin here bends over backwards to avoid blaming women’s emancipation per se for cultural decline, preferring to place the blame entirely on the relaxing of sexual mores. That the two things have, by his own admission, always occurred together is something he attempts to pass off as a ‘chance factor’.
He is clearly driven here by a desire to leave the door open for gender equality without cultural collapse by suggesting that compulsory sexual continence might be possible in a society with emancipated women, for which there is no historical precedent and which is also in conflict with our present experience in the West.
Many people will, at this point, be uncomfortable. Is this descending into misogyny? Be reassured. I am with Unwin as regards the possibility of female emancipation coexisting with a conservative position on sexual mores and marriage.
But to achieve it the truth must be faced. And, if we don’t buy the sublimation hypothesis, the key part of this must be the mechanism which underpins Unwin’s observed correlation between female emancipation and cultural decline. What is it?
Part 2 of our four-part series will be published tomorrow.
