Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever blogged about this cliche even though it’s been a staple for years: women’s liberation will turn women into men and men into women. Feminists will transform humanity into a hideous beige species where one gender looks and does the same as the other and then nobody will be in charge and nobody will have sex and we’ll all die out.
Mona Charen, in her 2018 anti-feminist book Sex Matters, says, for instance, that men and women should “accept our natures” rather than changing society to “meet an androgynous ideal.” Tucker Carlson rants that “gender roles are the building blocks of society” and we mustn’t mess with them. Maureen Dowd complained that the college feminists she knew in 1969 were “imitating men” by “smoking, drinking, wanting to earn money and thinking they had the right to be sexual” (I will note here that by 1969, cigarettes hadn’t been seen as a male prerogative in more than 30 years). More recently Vice President JD Vance declared our society is trying to turn everyone, “whether male or female, into androgynous idiots who think the same, talk the same and act the same.”
For long before I was born people have obsessed over the idea that not only are men and women different, the differences are absolute and immutable. A woman can’t be a man, which is to say (depending on the speaker) she can’t be as tough, as smart, as good a leader, as competent at Skill X. A man doesn’t have the skills to clean house or take care of kids. A woman who crosses these boundaries is no longer a woman. A standard fictional plot is a woman with a successful career realizing it means nothing because she’s not a wife and mother! A man who stays home with the kids might as well wear a dress and a frilly apron because he’s no longer a Real Man.
In this worldview, changing gender relations is, as Charen puts it, a Sisyphean task. And for what? To go against our natures. Which assumes that we all have a fixed, limited nature, determined by our gender, and that it’s not natural, perhaps not possible, to exceed that.
Which is bullshit. The range of male and female ability is huge — there are women who can fight, women who can crunch numbers (I have several female mathematician friends), men who can be primary caregivers. Statements that a woman can never do X have been disproven by women doing X. And the overlap between male and female skillsets, abilities, intelligence and emotional drives is massive. Nothing on Earth resembles a human male as much as a human female, and vice versa.
I think the fear of androgyny stems from multiple reasons. Lots of people hate ambiguity and think anything that crosses the lines they’ve drawn for Where Things Go is destroying the fragile house of cards that constitutes civilization. The idea of people defining the good life for themselves — including their role in the world — horrifies many. For many men, manhood is defined as Stuff Women Don’t Do; if women get to do the same things, then the guys are doing women’s work, women’s hobbies, and their penis shrivels.
And, of course, the clear boundary lines we have in America today posit women as subordinate. When women question that nonsense, when they step outside their supposed fixed roles, it becomes obvious there’s no reason for men to have all the perks of patriarchy while women get stuck with cleaning up after them. And contrary to Vance, a large part of American society is cool with this.
It’s bullshit. A woman who does what some people think is guy stuff — be that smoking cigars, fighting in combat, working in neurosurgery or advanced calculus — does not become a man. A man who becomes primary caregiver, or who’s spouse outearns him, is not a woman. This should be obvious. Part of the reason we’re such a mess is that it isn’t.
