Some mansplaining on women’s access to the workplace

CK MacLeod in reply to Chris says:

Kazzy and Chris,

I’ll answer you together, though I’ll trust that Kazzy will understand if I focus on Chris’s obviously more systematic attempt to think these matters through. The reason that I answer you together is that I think you start out making parallel arguments, as allies, but that Chris’s analysis contains much of my answer to Kazzy, as well as, eventually, my answer to Chris himself.

Chris’s historical summary largely explains, I think, why formulations like “a system designed to promote men over women” and “uniquely designed to benefit [men]” are inadequate. The “system,” as he shows, is a complex social, economic, and cultural reality, a living history that all participants are born into and that none can be said to have “designed.” To whatever extent that system is more “design” than a vast and imperfect assemblage of interlocking more or less spontaneous adaptations, it would be a positive collective work executed over the entire history of the human species, a quasi-artificial ecosystem of ecosystems within ecosystems within a larger ecosystem.

For individual human beings, the vast set of adaptations and adaptations within adaptations is experienced as an already given community in an already given larger world. When anyone performs or attempts to perform alterations in this mass-collectively and trans-generationally produced “fabric of life,” according to whatever moral or practical or mixed notions, he or she does not confront commensurate abstractions only, but must address the real existing lives of really living people as we concretely find them. The resultant friction, conflict, contradiction turns up everywhere, on terms familiar from the communitarianism/multiculturalism vs. individual rights debate in theories of liberalism: At what point does any imposition of ideal liberal precepts of “freedom and equality” equate with the destruction of a “community” or “culture” defined by other commitments, and with valid or possibly valid rights of self-determination? At what point are you destroying the village in order to save it? More generally, condensing a critique elaborated elsewhere (I’ll stick to general terms here and leave the full discussion perhpas to some other day or to bibliography if requested), what is the real content of the “better life” supposed to be concretely when eventually every possible social or personal commitment other than to the abstractions of freedom and equality is defined as retrograde and unsupportable?

Both of you, like others, concede that there may be pain for some people in social change in the direction of your freedom and equality ideal, though to different extents and in different ways you minimize that pain – not the pain itself but its relevance to your program – even in the absence of reliable answers to the above questions. One way to minimize difficulties is to define the discussion in the narrowest and pettiest way possible – for instance, as purely a question, the Megyn Kelly question, of rather successful men uncomfortable with more highly successful women. (Those belonging to neither group may find their personal reserve of sympathy already exhausted by statement of the question.) Another way to minimize and dispense with the concerns of “anxious men” is to treat those men as bearers of collective guilt for the “subjugation of women.” Since men, or at least all men who happen to think and act in the wrong ways as judged by anti-gender essentialists, are unreformed historical criminals, as bad as “slaveowners,” their pain does not matter or otherwise is to be “cheered.”

I’ve already sought to explain why I find this approach both morally dubious and counterproductive, possibly quite dangerous to the interests of the gender-progressives themselves. To review, I have argued that it is morally dubious first and most obviously because it treats the pain of a certain class of fellow human beings as inconsequential (or desirable). Put in public policy terms, and assuming we are even capable of deciding on a desirable and broadly acceptable rate of social change toward a broadly acceptable and accepted goal or set of goals, we could say that we are presented with some large number of people who have been, as it were, trained for jobs that either no longer exist or soon will no longer exist, and that, to whatever extent they will still exist, will require new skills and qualifications under new conditions. Making the matter even more difficult is that we are not talking about simply about losses in jobs in manufacturing or construction or the military or for that matter journalism, among other historically male-dominated professions, we are also talking about entire ways of life, about identity formation from childhood and the perceived possible meanings of life itself (subjects that we mostly merely pretend to understand, and that return most of us to unexaminable, effectively sacrosanct presumptions). People have invested everything, the entirety of their lives, according to the terms of an apparently fraudulent promise made to them on behalf of society at large. Apparently the Kazzy et al proposal for coping with their predicament is “Tough to be you, ha!”

For my own part, I find it strange that the inadequacy of that answer seems so difficult for some to process. It’s a bit of a mystery to me. It leads me think that there is much more going on here, having to do with foundational matters or self-concepts on the same or even deeper levels than the ones we already understand are being disturbed or displaced by “social change.”

People who complain about the complexity of any ensuing discussion that meets this problem on its own terms will have already declared themselves incapable of contributing to it. It may even be that the discussion is inherently too complex: Not just for politics or political discussion but for any of us, since it seems to require us to perform brain surgery on ourselves, or re-think our thinking, for the living organism to modify its own capacity to modify its own capacity to modify its own capacity etc.: It sounds absurd because it describes the final rendering absurd of the only value systems we have for guiding us in the revision of the only value systems we have. It is the logical form, or self-negating illogical form, of that abstract-right/concrete-reality contradiction mentioned earlier – viewed as as though to be resolved one-sidedly in favor of the former. As a matter of political philosophy, it diverts us from policy problems and artificially narrowed FNC debates, and refers us to the nihilistic essence of technologism, a subject that Chris has I think examined at some point, before, like anyone else, returning to his own “false reason” over “none at all.”

Trying to keep things in bounds conceptually, Chris asks a series of questions that look like they might be clarifying:

[D]o you think the anxiety that men whose socialization has not kept up with social change should outweigh the increased opportunity for independence, dignity, and worth provided to women by their increased access to the economy?

Presented on those simple terms, according to certain implied presumptions: Of course not. But the simplicity of the question is deceptive. There is no simple binary decision, nor the same decision in all times and places. It is easy to imagine personal, social, or political predicaments in which the “anxiety” of men or some men, or of many men and women on behalf of men, could entirely justifiably be taken as “outweighing” particular “increased opportunities for independence, dignity, and self-worth.” In general terms, these predicaments will be of the same type (from war to circumstances of sexual reproduction) that occasioned all of those inherited adaptations, all living history, that we imagine ourselves evolving beyond.

Do you simply mean to say that we should recognize this, and take steps to reduce the anxiety without necessarily altering the direction of social change?

Again, presuming we know and agree on the direction and content of “social change,” and that under “anxiety” we include the real and complex difficulties of “backwards men and women” in need of re-training and re-education, then why wouldn’t we take such steps? How could we justify not taking them according to any minimally humanitarian standard as as for simple practical reasons? How could we refrain from taking them without destroying the moral and rational basis of the better society to which gender equality is supposed to contribute?

Last questions:

If you do think it should outweigh the progress we’ve made on women’s rights and freedoms, why do you think that? Is there a principled reason? A pragmatic one (everyone is actually better off if women are not treated as cultural and economic equals, which amounts to roughly the same thing, in general, e.g.)?

As I said, I don’t think the equations are as simple as that, or that solutions on such simplified terms are very useful solutions. More interesting to me, maybe me alone, is how the parenthetical definition points to the limit questions. In everyday life, we avoid the limit questions, which tend to be limit contradictions, questions at the points where everything that seems to make sense for us verges on pure nonsense, and the discussion itself tends to seem nonsensical and contradictory, or too complex and self-reflexive for some banal notion of “good writing” in which everything is just what it is, and so on. We let those discourse-bending questions “decide themselves,” which also means that we don’t decide them at all, which means that we prefer to let them decide us, or that we “live the contradictions” as someone somewhere said – maybe some New Ager or maybe a bunch of them or someone a bunch of them read, I don’t know, and it doesn’t come up on a first page Google search, and I’ve already spent my day on this.

The limit question occurs within the phrase “cultural and economic equals.” I ask again (no one volunteered an answer on the other thread): How far are we supposed to take the critique of gender essentialism? Which if any “differences between men and women” are we prepared to acknowledge as better simply left alone, and why? What are all of those evil retrograde men supposed to be re-educated to believe, and to tell their children, assuming that instruction of their biological offspring will be among their roles? Since the terms of the last “deal” were revised without consulting them, and often against their strong preferences and without regard to their interests as they understood them or their “pain” as they felt it, why should they trust that the new one will be any more reliable? To what extent will the terms of the new deal be mandatory, to what extent optional? If the former, why should they go along peacefully at all, and, if they don’t, what are you going to do about it, and who’s going to do it for you without reinforcing their argument?

I have a lot more questions. Some of them are as follows: Are the decisions on all of these questions moral decisions or practical ones? Is there a difference between moral and practical on these matters? Is heterosexuality itself something that we should aim to eliminate with the aid of technology? If not, why not? If so, to what end? Who should decide and for whom? By what right?

If these questions don’t have simple answers, then how do you know what we’re speeding along toward? Could our lack of answers have something to do with why some things don’t seem to be working out so well as the new regime is progressively elaborated? How much friction is too much?

Perhaps if you just laid this stuff out, people would be less likely to project ideas into the large gaps you’ve left them to fill.

Maybe. At least the one who weren’t already committed to seeing precisely what they are used to seeing.

If Chris or anyone else is interested in a discussion at an appropriate level of seriousness, then I’ll try to return to it as time permits.Report