The "Crisis of Masculinity" and the Conservatism of Prescription

I previously remarked how, speaking of a "crisis of masculinity," feminists have often sounded like conservatives--making similar arguments in similar ways. Admittedly for those who, in contrast with the mainstream's simple-minded and false equation of "feminist" with "left," regard the feminism prevailing within the mainstream as "bourgeois feminism," and the postmodernism supplying it with intellectual foundations an ideology not of the left but of the right, this may not be a surprise. However, this parallel seems to me to bear some examination for those at all interested in a deeper understanding of the point at issue, not least because of how the whole conception corresponds to one of the classic canons of conservatism as laid out by Russell Kirk, the valuation of "prescription"--for the purposes of this discussion, people unquestioningly doing what unquestioned custom says that they should do simply because unquestioned custom says so. One of society's most fundamental prescriptions, of course, is that reaching "adulthood" a young man should let go his passions, pleasures and freedom as "childish things" as they instead concentrate on establishing and raising a family, and then proceed to do the latter by marrying and having children, with their role as "breadwinner" for said family the center of their existence--as, indeed, they argue that men failing to take this path, with all its burdens and sacrifices (it is not for nothing that the stereotypical paterfamilias is, by middle age, pretty grouchy and grumpy), will mean nothing less than the downfall of society.

Of course, one can hardly have a prescription for men centered on marriage and family without also having a prescription for women--and indeed there is a traditional expectation that women similarly let go their passions, pleasures and freedom as "childish things," and, assuming their mate has succeeded at being a family's breadwinner, acquiesce in financial dependence on him as they concentrate on having those children and making a home for them and for the spouse who supports them. In short, women had to play their part so that men could play their part, but all this, as a George Gilder complained a half century ago, was complicated by social developments such as what was then called the "Sexual Revolution" and "women's lib." Gilder's response to these developments was that men and women alike ought to return to the old ways rather than going down what he held to be a disastrous path. Of course, the conservative call for women to center their lives on motherhood and children never went away (indeed, prior to her marriage becoming the only thing the Media Masters of Distraction wanted to talk about Taylor Swift's singleness was a culture war issue), with, indeed, it seems talk of "trad-wives" resurgent. Still, the right would seem to have on the whole become less insistent on women adhering to the entirety of the traditionalist package, while being no less insistent that men play their part to the full--as one sees comparing a Ross Douthat to a Gilder.

As it happens feminists speak the same way as they raise the "crisis of masculinity" they see as a matter of men's old script no longer being viable, but, even as they insist on women's right to decline marriage and children for the sake of pursuing their passions and pleasures and retaining their freedom viewing men who would do the same with suspicion. This is at least partly a matter of feminists associating "men going their own way" in this manner with certain tendencies within the alt-right, but it is also a matter of feminists' essential conservatism--as well as the plain and simple fact that conservatives, supportive of a society with "orders and classes," do not recognize it as incumbent upon them to treat everyone the same way, with their judgments gentler in the case of some than others, and frankly seeing those whose privileged positions they are given to defending as able to honorably refuse what is conventionally required of "everybody." Thus, just as natalism-minded conservatives may see a genteel man of means being a "confirmed old bachelor" as not wholly without honor because of their respect for socioeconomic privilege, feminists see respectability in, even valorize, a woman's refusing the old script, while seeming little concerned that women should have a new one--the very suggestion that there should be a script, that a woman shouldn't write her own script--oppressive, even as they take it quite for granted that men need one, and hold that their eschewing the obligations of the old script is something feminists should not countenance. The upshot is that they sit in judgment on a male gender they see as both dysfunctional and, at the same time, without any claim on anyone else's consideration if it is to make itself otherwise. Indeed, considering feminist criticism of male behavior generally one may be put in mind of how much they sound like conservatives speaking of the poor, or of minorities or foreign groups they view with distaste or worse, particularly where the combination of Othering and harshness is concerned. Thus they say that they are the authors of their own problems, and no nonsense about "society" or anything else is to be brooked, no claim for sympathy or support recognized. Indeed, if they want to improve their lot they had better "take responsibility" and "get their act together." And if in the meantime in protecting ourselves from them a few of them get treated unjustly, well, they have only themselves to blame for that because of their collective failings. That the prevailing feminism is, in the main, the feminism of those highly privileged likely makes it very easy for an upper-class bourgeois feminist to simply apply upper-class bourgeois attitudes regarding one group they do not like to another as, conservatives that they are, they readily express admiration of and offer apologia for the associated injustice, misery and brutality.