A feminist art of living

There's an American feminist academic called Jacqueline Scott (and, as it happens, an English one too, but more on her later) who has explained what she calls her "Art of Living":

Practicing the art [of living] means consciously trying to flourish by resisting offered definitions and actively seeking to define oneself. Friedrich Nietzsche referred to these offered (he might also use the verb "imposed") definitions as "nooks". They can sometimes be nooks of comfort and security, but they can also be nooks of imprisonment.

Regular readers will know that I see this kind of attitude as central to liberal ideology. The liberal idea is that the highest good is an autonomy in which we are supposed to be self-determining or self-defining individuals. Therefore, whatever is predetermined in our identity is thought to impede us - it is thought of in limiting terms as a strait-jacket or, in Jacqueline Scott's terminology, an imprisonment.

She continues on with this:

The art of living involves making conscious decisions as to how one conceives of oneself and practices a meaningful life. The assumption underlying this art is that one's identity and conception of a meaningful life are "up for grabs". With the art of living, then, one does not "discover" one's self, one creates it.

What she is saying is that if you think of yourself as a self-defining individual, then you are assuming that you don't have any essential identity or nature; you begin as a blank slate and you go on to create yourself from your own "conscious decisions".

That is a kind of existentialism: a belief that existence precedes essence (i.e. that first we exist and then we create what we are). Existentialists like to talk about people having authentic selves, which has always struck me as odd - how can your self be authentic if you have no essence and just make up who you are?

Jacqueline Scott briefly touches on this issue:

It was at Spelman that I established my first guidelines for my practice of the art of living...avoid sacrificing my authentic self (meaning my conception of it) in the name of pleasing or placating someone else.

At least that's clearly put. She believes that you are being authentic if you follow your own concept of self rather than changing it to please someone else. The problem, as she herself notes, is that the self you are staying true to is just a conception you have of yourself. You could just as easily have a different one. So why not change it to please others?

Here's another odd thing about existentialist authenticity. Jacqueline Scott is a black American woman but she is engaged to a Jewish man and has converted to Judaism. And yet she is, as she discusses in her writings, a Nietzschean nihilist. She writes:

There were many other aspects of Judaism that seemed less "natural". How in the world could I pray to a God in whom I could not wholeheartedly believe?

Indeed. But I suppose that in some ways it's easier if you are an existentialist to accept such a situation. If you are only dealing in self-generated concepts, then being Jewish isn't so much about accepting the truth claims of Jewish theology, but about finding a way to work Judaism into an image of self.

Finally, the other striking thing about Jacqueline Scott's beliefs is that it's difficult to see how she has come independently to her own identity as her liberal/existentialist philosophy demands.

As we've seen, she adopted Judaism to fit in with her boyfriend's background. She got her feminism from her parents:

I grew up in a household in which both of my parents considered themselves feminists, and in which...my mother was an active member of the Panel of American Women.

Her philosophy is also the standard one for Western intellectuals - she hasn't really avoided the spirit of the times in that regard. And, of course, her other sources of identity, of being black and a  woman are also things that she was born to.

So it's difficult to see her as a self-created entity. She has been influenced by the culture she grew up in, by her parents and her fiancee, and by inherited qualities of her sex and race. So her philosophy hasn't even worked out on its own terms.

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Feminist woman discovers that race trumps sex

Cinnamon Heathcote-Drury is a 41-year-old single Englishwoman, whose claim to fame is having taken some portrait photos of celebrities.

She is also a pushy type of feminist as the following story makes clear. She was standing in a supermarket line when she noticed a Muslim family putting their items onto the checkout line. Mum was putting the items on, whilst dad was with the kids. It seems this rankled her feminist sensibilities:

She was waiting to pay at the checkout when she noticed a man with two small children also queuing. They were joined by a woman wearing a hijab and a long black tunic who began unloading an overflowing trolley, one item at a time.

She says: 'I glanced over and thought, “This poor woman's going to be there for hours.” Her husband was standing closest to me, so I said to him, “Will you help her?”

'He said, “I've got the children.” I said, “Well, I can help her” and he replied, “What's it to you?” I said, “This is what feminism's about - women helping women.”

He said, “Oh, get lost.” I looked at the woman and said, “We live in a society in Britain where rights are equal - if you need help you can ask for it.” 

In a good mood I would have laughed at her. In a bad mood, I would have told her to get lost, just like the Muslim father did.

I do the supermarket shopping with my wife. When we get to the checkout she usually starts to put the shopping on the line. Sometimes I step in and take over, but sometimes I supervise our young children (too young to be left alone).

A single feminist woman is in no position to either understand or object to such dynamics.

I suspect that what she really didn't like was a hijab clad woman in her local supermarket. I'm not a great fan of it either. But she does a good job of presenting herself as a leftist, and the British left is committed to open borders and diversity - with hijabs being the inevitable result.

Anyway, a nasty surprise was in store for Cinnamon Heathcote-Drury. The Muslim wife didn't take kindly to being helped by a Western feminist. It seems that she initiated a scuffle in which she kicked and tore the hat off her feminist "helper". In doing so, the Muslim mother fell over onto the supermarket floor.

The police arrived and took statements. To her surprise, Cinnamon Heathcote-Drury discovered that the system was biased toward ethnic minorities, that nobody was interested in her side of the story and that she was charged with a kind of hate crime, namely "racially aggravated assault" (but eventually found not guilty in court).

Some lessons for Cinnamon Heathcote-Drury?

1. A never married woman should be a little careful when directly intervening in the family dynamics of others.

2. Don't assume that non-Western women are going to put the sisterhood above their ethnic loyalties.

3. In the liberal hierarchy claims of racial oppression usually trump claims of sexual oppression. A Muslim male card trumps a Western female card. In such a situation Western women lose moral status.

4. If you don't want hijab clad women in your society, it's no use taking it out on Muslim families shopping in the local supermarket. The choice is either to get political and change opinions about open borders or else accept that diversity doesn't just bring doner kebabs it also brings hijabs.

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Texas police department accused of discrimination for upholding equal standards

A police department in Texas has been accused of discriminating against women by making them sit the same physical fitness test that male applicants sit. 63% of men pass the test but only 19% of women.

The federal lawsuit says that the disparate results,

constitute a pattern or practice of resistance to the full enjoyment by women of their rights to equal employment opportunities regardless of their sex.

The federal government wants the women who didn't pass the test to be compensated:

It also wants the city to hire some of the women turned away in the past and to offer them retroactive seniority and back pay.

There is no indication though that some of the men who failed the test will be similarly hired and awarded back pay and promotions.

What all this goes to show is that the real driver of liberalism is not equal opportunity but the aim of making our sex not matter. If there are more male police than female police, then sex is still shown to matter, which liberals cannot tolerate.

Which is one reason why the drive to have women in combat roles in the army is so problematic. It seems almost inevitable that standards will be lowered in order to get an equal entrance and promotion rate of women in such roles.

Do police officers need to be physically fit, strong and aggressive? Well, sometimes they do. A reminder of this occurred in France last month. Two female officers intervened in an argument, a man knocked over one of the officers, took her gun and shot her dead  and then chased after the other officer, caught up to her and shot her dead as well. Would the criminal have been less likely to take on two large, physically fit and aggressive male officers? I suspect the answer is yes.

One of the slain policewomen

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Interesting public response to Girl Guides' decision

I reported yesterday that the Australian Girl Guides have changed their promise, most notably to pledge that they would "be true to myself and develop my beliefs".

I criticised the change, thinking that I would be largely on my own in doing so. But the reader comments in the Herald Sun today are quite good - they have picked up on the shift in philosophy that the new promise represents.

Here's a sample:

Andrs: When people believe in nothing but themselves, what kind of a society are you bringing up?

Footscray Man: God out, Queen out. New Age self-congratulation in.

AJ: I notice it's gone from helping others to being primarily about the individual. I guess that's the world we live in nowadays.

We live in interesting times. The minds of some Westerners have been influenced to a mighty degree by liberalism, others have resisted. Pity that the resistance isn't better organised, but it's out there nonetheless. We have to encourage it as best we can.

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Australian Girl Guides adopt a new pledge

Australian Girl Guides used to make this promise:

I promise to do my best;
to do my duty to God, to serve the
Queen and my country;
to help other people; and
to keep the Guide Law.

But the promise has now been modernised to this:

I promise to do my best;
To be true to myself and develop my beliefs
To serve my community and Australia
And live by the Guide Law.

Much of it is the same, but look at the second line of the new promise. The guides now promise to be true to themselves. But in what sense? And they promise to develop their beliefs. But which beliefs?

Are all beliefs equally worthy of being developed? Does it not matter which beliefs we develop? Is the act of developing any kind of belief really more worthy than having and following good or true beliefs?

The message of the new pledge is that the beliefs themselves don't matter as long as you are developing some sort of belief. That comes across as a let down compared to the first pledge which more robustly asserts a set of meaningful relationships and commitments.

And if all beliefs are equally worthy of being developed, then why take the promise itself seriously? There's a contradiction here. The promise itself hints that beliefs are just beliefs, perhaps with a personal meaning, but nothing more. And yet the girls are expected to promise to follow a particular set of beliefs. But why do this if there is no truth or larger meaning underlying the particular set of beliefs the girls are promising to follow?

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So obvious as to be ridiculous

Twenty years ago I was studying at Melbourne University and thinking that my female peers were absolutely nuts.

They had decided that family formation was something to be shoved off to their late 30s. It seemed crazy to me - why would you imperil something that was so important by leaving it to the absolute last moment?

Tory Maguire is an Australian writer who has a column in today's Herald Sun in which she finally acknowledges that she and her friends were mistaken in wanting to delay things for so long:

I remember when I was at school having conversations with my girlfriends about how we were all going to wait until our late 30s to have kids. That gave us a whole 20 years to have a great time before starting a family, which we thought would be as easy as saying "OK, now it's time".

Of course, nothing is that simple.

Just ask Virginia Haussegger, one of the first to sound the alarm on this topic, with her 2002 column "The sins of our feminist mothers".

Haussegger argued women who were raised to believe they could put off children until their career was established were sold a lie. At the time it caused a storm and spawned a book.

Now it seems so obvious as to be ridiculous.

It's interesting how political ideas change over time. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, at the height of third wave feminism, the emphasis was all on female autonomy. What mattered was propping up female independence of men. That's one reason why the single girl lifestyle was pushed so hard for so long; it's not that women wanted to abandon marriage, but that a long delay allowed independence to be drawn out for much longer.

It wasn't easy to criticise feminism at the time - if you raised objections you were labelled sexist or misogynist. There was a lot of pressure brought to bear to suppress dissent.

Nonetheless the orthodoxy eventually cracked. I was a one man opposition on campus at the time, when a conservative documentary maker, Don Parham, made a film called Deadly Hurt which criticised feminist attitudes to domestic violence. (Don Parham has a website here)

Parham's documentary came at the right time. It allowed others to speak up and make criticisms - feminism was no longer untouchable.

And then some years ago the men's rights movement took off. Instead of just a few scattered critics of feminism like myself there was now a small movement.

The political atmosphere when it comes to feminist type topics is now very different to what it once was. For instance, Tory Maguire also published her column at an independent opinion site called The Punch. It's not, as far as I'm aware, a conservative website, but look at the cartoon and the comments accompanying the post.

That cartoon would not have been published in 1990 - it would have been thought too subversive of the political projects then underway. And though the comments aren't particularly traditionalist, nor are they written from an ideologically feminist perspective either. The conversation about whether or not to delay family hasn't been strangled as it would have been 20 years ago.

So what happened to propel the men's rights movement into existence? I am guessing that the attitude that men were supposed to adopt, that they were privileged oppressors who should devote themselves to propping up female autonomy, just became too far distant from the reality of men's lives and from what younger men were able to endure.

Another factor, perhaps, was the disruption to relationships that happened to Generation X. It became harder for men to do the normal thing of finding a female partner and then having the motivation to commit to careers. The feeling that "things aren't what they're meant to be" would have been strongly present for many men.

And there's a lesson in this for traditionalists. We shouldn't presume that Westerners will forever assent to the idea that their role is to identify with the other rather than having a collective life of their own. It might seem now that this type of belief is so orthodox that it's impregnable, but so did feminism seem to be in this position just two decades ago.

As the position of Westerners declines, the idea that we are a privileged social construct might well lose its hold on some members of the political class. That could happen particularly early in Australia, as the professions here are likely to be held increasingly by other groups.

And if that point of "unendurability" does happen, having even a small group of traditionalists would be a tremendous advantage in pushing things along. For instance, when the men's rights movement first appeared it was relatively open to suggestion. But there were too few traditionalists active in the movement and so it gradually veered toward "reimagining liberalism" rather than rejecting it. I suspect that if there had even been 20 traditionalists early on the outcome might have been different.

Is it really impossible to imagine getting a layer of traditionalists ready for opportunities that might arise in the coming years?

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A feminist says "I do" too late

This is a post about a feminist shooting herself in the foot. It's also a post about the disconnect between what feminists tell other women and what they want for themselves.

Jessica Bennett is an American writer who met the man of her dreams when she was 23. When she was 24 her boyfriend proposed in a grand romantic fashion:

I loved him desperately. I knew, as much as I would ever know, that he was the one I wanted to be with. We balanced each other. I wanted to frame his dimples.

But she turned him down. She was a feminist who was oriented to career and independence. Still he stuck with her, whilst she devoted herself to writing tracts against marriage. One article she wrote put a positive spin on infidelity, another declared marriage to be an outdated institution, inferior to the European model of de facto relationships:

...when these egalitarian, independent couples decide not to marry at all, they lose none of that stability. Just take a look at couples in Europe: they’re happier, less religious, and more likely to believe that marriage is an outdated institution, and their divorce rate is a fraction of our own.

But what of the boyfriend who had so much wanted to marry her? What was his response to his girlfriend writing against marriage? This is what transpired between them:

I told my boyfriend about the article, and he rolled his eyes. I assured him it wasn’t about us, but he said it didn’t matter. Over the years, he explained, I had convinced him that he didn’t believe in marriage, either.

Ah, so all the cynical stuff wasn't supposed to apply to her own relationship. What she wanted and hoped for in her own relationship was one thing; what she wanted for the rest of society was another.

But she didn't manage to quarantine her relationship from her public beliefs. Her boyfriend took her at her word and lost his own belief in marriage. And just at the time that she was finally changing her mind and warming to the idea of a wedding:

Then one day, in the most tired of clichés, I, too, started daydreaming about a wedding ... I began to wonder what he and I might wear, who would be there, and whether we’d write our own vows.

I brought the issue up tepidly, to feel him out. Lying in bed one night, I asked: “Do you still want to do it? Do you really not believe in it?”

“I’d marry you at City Hall,” he replied, then dropped it.

Another time, he threw my argument back at me: “Why do we need marriage? It’s only a piece of paper.”

Some time later he broke up with her abruptly and moved out:

We had spent seven years living in a 600-square-foot New York City apartment, inseparable and intertwined. Yet in the end, the relationship ended in one night. No discussion required.

Which now, after all those years of marshalling arguments against marriage, has led her to the view that,

there's something to be said for saying "I do".

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