Hugo Schwyzer takes conservative nepotism beneficiary Jonah Goldberg to task for arguing that women should be given a little more power in “backwards” cultures. You’d think that would be a good thing but Goldberg’s arguing only that women should have only enough power to be more effective “gatekeepers.” (Emphasis mine.)
Jonah concludes his piece … with this gem:
“Women civilize men. As a general rule, men will only be as civilized as female expectations and demands will allow. “Liberate” men from those expectations, and “Lord of the Flies” logic kicks in. Liberate women from this barbarism, and male decency will soon follow.”
Give Jonah credit. He’s not blaming women directly for their failure to civilize men. Rather, he’s blaming certain cultures that fail to give women sufficient authority with which to do their civilizing. But that doesn’t change the basic problem in his argument, based as it is on pseudo-science, Victorian sentimentality about women’s “nature”, and a William Golding novel about pre-pubescent boys.
Goldberg says “Women civilize men. As a general rule, men will only be as civilized as female expectations and demands will allow.”
Which would be… Goldberg, a man, setting expectations for male behavior. Very low expectations, sure, but not ones set by women.
Which is, of course, the nice little trap men like Goldberg want to set for us: expect to be able to indulge your more infantile and/or animal impulses; then either blame women letting us live up to the expectations we ourselves set, or else resenting women for using sexual access (the only leverage we permit them to have) in order to get us to act like actual adult men. The minor “upside” for anti-feminists like Goldberg is that men are absolved of all responsibility for, well, responsibility. The infinitely larger downside is that women are expected to have all the responsibility but none of the authority (we just call them “bitches” when they try to make us do the task Goldberg assigns them.) The end result isn’t even zero sum, it’s negative sum: grown men and women are reduced to Cathi Hanauer’s acute phrases The Bitch in the House
Quick question for Goldberg: what does he imagine, say, Aristotle, or Augustine, or, Confucius or, I dunno, Maimonides, or even Tolstoy would think of his assertion that women are a civilizing influence on men? I happen to think all those gentlemen were dead wrong to believe men are uniquely moral and civilizing compared to women. But Goldberg and his desperately anti-feminist ilk just as wrong to imagine their fantasy of essential gendered women’s morality is any more real.
Another quick question: Goldberg, like Satoshi Kanazawa and millions of other anti-feminists, believes women’s magic lady part… and their “power” to withhold it... are the only thing that civilizes men. To which I’ll just rephrase Holly’s observation: Does that all those gay artists and writers and politicians and freakin’ gay fry cooks for that matter never get around to contributing to society because they’re way too busy not withholding sex from each other?
In fact we men set expectations all the time. In fact the whole idea that women don’t have anything better to do with their own sexuality than to use it to manipulate men’s behavior (coughno-sex classcough) is a completely male expectation.
Screw Goldberg and the coin-operated horsie he rode up on. I expect better of him.
