Trying to make sense of this Lauren Hall piece on Linda Hirshman is like trying to drown yourself in the Dead Sea. Publishing vicious attacks on a woman for a book she wrote years ago is just odd. Couching those attacks in a rich fluff of non-sequitur-filled vulgarized evo-psych is a humiliating public display of scientific illiteracy.
Apart from being self-satisfied and intellectually shallow, Hirshman’s arguments are undermined by two philosophical blindspots. The first involves her inability to see or acknowledge the real source of inequality between the sexes.
The major reason that the feminist movement fails to gain ground in the average woman’s life… is that the radical feminists ignore human nature. If how humans behave is socially constructed, we can, of course, construct away sex differences. Social constructionists ignore the past million or so years of human existence, evidence from most of the animal kingdom and almost all mammalian species, and the spoken and unspoken preferences from women themselves, from all cultures and time periods. Women aren’t taught to love babies, and the reaction of a mother on first cuddling her newborn is not the result of either social conditioning or rational calculations… It’s hormones, it’s biology, and, unfortunately for the feminists, for most women, it’s destiny. We want to have and hold children because that’s how our bodies are set up.
Check out Hall’s transparently selective acquiescence to nature. I assume she believes we should resist certain “natural” impulses–defecating in public, sleeping with people to whom are not pair-bonded, slaughtering outsiders. But in the event that various impulses reinforce Hall’s politically conservative assumptions, resistance is suddenly an outrageous defiance of the natural order. We must have lots of babies because “that’s how our bodies are set up,” civilization be damned. I look forward to Hall’s argument in favor of giving up in the face heroin addiction, as an addict’s brain is “set up” to demand more of the same. And I assume that were her students at the Rochester Institute of Technology to start a hot class-wide orgy on the classroom floor, Ms. Hall would throw up her hands and say “It’s hormones!” Carry on, nothing to be done about it, you can’t be happy if you resist nature. Culture, after all, is a myth perpetuated by women’s studies departments.
The fatal flaw in this poor man’s evo psych is its suspicious willingness to view any current social pattern as the inevitable, immutable outcome of evolutionary logic. Hall’s argument could have been given at any point in history to justify any particular racial or gender inequity. Actual evolutionary psychologists understand that social construction and human nature play off of one another, which is why some women can don burqas, others monokinis, without creating massive confusion in the scientific community.
This would all be bad enough without the random attacks on Hirshman and the mischaracterization of her views. I do not think, for instance, that Linda Hirshman believes women need to be “taught to love babies” and rationalize their way into enjoying a “newborn’s cuddle.” I suspect that while she understands the evolutionary drive to reproduce, she also believes that a meaningful life involves a careful weighing of the trade-offs among various goods. She argues (I think) that a full human life involves productive labor, that choice feminism is conceptually flawed, that equality in the workplace has not equalized the division of labor in the domestic sphere, and that financial independence is crucial to gender equality. All of that seems accurate to me, though I doubt Hirshman and I would agree on the policy implications of these beliefs.
Instead of trusting that education (or natural rationality) will have given women the analytic skills to take their own lives in hand, Linda Hirshman, a self-proclaimed “philosopher”, probable narcissist, and definite ideologue argues that the domestic life is a degraded life…Apart from being self-satisfied and intellectually shallow, Hirshman’s arguments are undermined by two philosophical blindspots….
I guess you could call Hirshman a “self-proclaimed ‘philosopher.’” She’s also a professor of philosophy at an elite institution and holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Illinois. And… probable narcissist? Keep in mind that this not a blog post; it’s an attempt at journalism published in the web magazine Culture11 and promoted on their front page.
Is this what happens when traditionalists decide to embrace their mammalian status? Because next to this stuff the explanatory powers of Kirk Cameron & co. look truly impressive.
Gender-equality.
Equality.
These are absurd notions as commonly applied. Men and women are not equal universally, rather they are equal only within limited contexts. Don’t believe me? Try weightlifting.
The problem with the classical feminist movement isn’t that “men and women are biologically different and that explains the status-quo,” as you repudiate that silliness just fine. The problem is that they are universalists and guilty of the gravest of intellectual sins, namely context dropping.
There ARE gender differences that will manifest themselves in culturally distinct gender roles just as there will always be those that don’t conform to said roles. The appropriate role of evolutionary biology is to discover and define just how much of current (and perhaps historical) gender roles are the result of biological differences.
Only then can we even know what “equality” looks like. Maybe equality is an equal distribution of all races and sexes in all areas of life… maybe it isn’t. It’s hard to say what equality is until we know what humans are.
That Kirk Cameron video on bananas is awesome!
I had no idea.
[...] DC and journo and blog arena are watching with interest [This also comes in the wake of Kerry Howley's charge that Lauren Hall's C11 feature on Linda Hirshman was bizarre and unprofessional, and Conor's [...]
Women aren’t taught to love babies, and the reaction of a mother on first cuddling her newborn is not the result of either social conditioning or rational calculations
It’s quite interesting (and telling?) that in arguing for the possibility of repressing natural desires and behaviors, you compare the above to genocide, public defecation, and drug abuse. The real question is whether the desire to cuddle babies OUGHT to be stifled and controlled (as should the desire to commit genocide)? Or whether, perhaps, domestic pleasures offer every bit as much opportunity for human “flourishing” as (say) being a clerk at Wal-Mart, and hence Hirshman’s ridicule and demeaning of domestic life is wrongheaded.
Parents have to be taught to love babies. Anyone who’s ever been sleep-deprived by a toddler is familiar with the impulse to throttle the brat. Anyone who says child-rearing is completely “natural” is, I submit, someone who has never tried to rear one.
Actual children never seem to appear in any conservative’s discourse on the family, just like actual situations involving actual pregnancies never seem to matter to the “pro-life” contingent. I wonder why that is.
Of course you’re right that claiming that all the differences we see between men and women now have to do with innate natural differences is bullshit. And of course there’s all sorts of difference in the way men and women are expected to act, particularly when it comes to child rearing. At the same time, I think that it’s very likely that women have a stronger tendency toward nurturing behavior to infants than men, and that a society in which men and women had exactly as much social pressure on them to have babies and take care of them would be a society in which the average baby was handled a lot more by women than by men.
The issue is how to get to a society in which a woman who has no interest in having children isn’t maligned for that, and where a man who wants to work part time or leave work to spend more time with the kids isn’t looked down on. It matters to acknowledge genetic differences because if you don’t you’ll keep looking at these average differences in child care effort with the assumption that they represent sexism when they may not.
One kind of cool factoid about how malleable this stuff is though: Orangutan males generally provide no parental attention beyond guarding females with their young, but when an infant’s mother died in Brookfield Zoo, the father, who was reared in a zoo, began taking care of his son, even letting him ride on his back, which is totally unheard of for any great ape males. So culture matters in other primates too.