Over at Booker Rising I read an interesting bit of speculation as to whether or not women select for patriarchy in contemporary American society. The answer is, only hot women do.
You know the saying. Good girls go to heaven and bad girls go anywhere they like. It's true in our society but only near the top and the bottom. That's because in the middle, life is so easy. Why indeed would a women choose a dominant male if all of her needs could be met by a sensitive new age guy with a 75,000 salary?
I've tried to critique feminism in the contexts of evolutionary biology, conservative philosophy and cultural traditions but I never seem to get a handle on the whole thing. It only comes through to me in short examples that make perfect sense. For example, most guys (and speaking for myself, definitely me) feel quite manly going to Home Depot to buy some lumber or power tools in order to build something for the house. You know it's a job for a man and you know that you're doing the provider thing. It feels like hunting and gathering. You get home, you sweat, curse and build the damn thing and when it's done the family marvels and hands you a beer. Manly. On the other hand there is nothing quite so un-manly as the poor schlub in the supermarket being told to get some radicchio by his wife over the cellphone.
Another element of suburban life that leaves me gobsmacked is seeing Mercedes sedans parked in the handicapped zone. If our lifestyle can be so comfortable as to give essentially crippled people 300 horsepower chariots, then we are really flipping evolutionary biology on its head - at least while the oil lasts.
And so while we have crafted out an economy of rewards where women can do most everything men can do, is it any wonder that both women and men are more highly sexualized than ever before? The great failure of feminism is that it doesn't really tell women what to do with all that 'freedom' and 'equality'. It hasn't really created a new woman, merely women who do what men used to do, which is make enough money and have enough mobility in society to take care of themselves. Feminism hasn't changed how women actually raise children when they do, it suggests that child-rearing is just an arbitrary selection among many. The revolution is in contraception, fertility and virility drugs, but feminism doesn't adequately modify our understanding to prescribe what to do with all that. What works? Still the same old basic drives. Women want to be hot, men want hot women. Women want to be wanted by men who can get hot women (as opposed to men who want hot women but don't stand a chance). This is as it ever was, except that it has accellerated in this country to levels of public obsession and obscenity.
Of course I have no problem with the idea that women should have money and mobility. The question is whether the amount of money and mobility should overturn patriarchy. Should a woman be the breadwinner in a married family? Should she wear the pants and let the dad raise the children? I think that in a society as wealthy as ours with a white collar middle-class so full of cellphone shoppers that the inverted model could be stable. But it certainly could not and should not upset the norm. I worry about a suburbia filled with single women and small dogs.
I have no real conclusion here. The territory to cover is vast. I'm merely observing that a certain amount of middleclass cushion is taking us into an area where our entire lives can be led by fashion, wrecked and even recovered by yet another fashion. This is not what we have evolved to be. It is more temporary than the warm spot in this Ice Age.
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