Kerry Howley

Helen Rittelmeyer, on feminism and libertarianism:

I notice that my libertarian paradise can only sustain itself in a world with stable communities and self-governing individuals, and the only thing capable of producing either is tradition. If I want to live among mature individuals capable of citizenship in a libertarian state, I’d better defend the social norms that make it possible to bring up those people. If I think that organic communities obviate the need for government intervention, then I’d better preserve those communities, even if they engage in soft coercion. If some of their norms treat women differently or even disadvantageously, that might be good or bad but, in any event, is a matter for that community to decide for itself.

This, concludes Helen, “suggests that feminism and libertarianism (or at least certain brands of it) might be at odds.”

I’ll confess that I don’t know what it means to say that “the only thing capable of producing self-governing individuals is tradition.” With a broad enough definition of “tradition” — as in, tradition discourages the outsourcing of parental responsibilities to rabid dogs — I’m on board here. But since Helen is trying to argue that feminism and libertarianism are somehow mutually exclusive, I guess we can take “tradition” to mean “traditional gender roles.” Have people become less adept at self-governing since women entered the workforce? Again, what is meant by self-governing? It certainly seems odd to characterize a culture that encourages women to be financially independent as less supportive of “self-governance” than one that advises them to stay home, watch Passions, and let the other 49 percent of the population suss out the whole money thing. Is the idea that in a left-libertarian paradise pair-bonding would be obsolete? Or that gay marriages kill productivity? Are we talking about a particular population here? Specifics please.

The libertarian antifeminist position seem strange to me, given the emphasis libertarians place on economic growth, and the tendency of growth to upset traditionalist familial arrangements. (Except on a purely individual level, as in “Go have your abortions, I’ll be right here on my FLDS compound.”) Nothing wreaks havoc on your birth rate like a tripling of GDP, as the Singaporeans can tell you. Someone actually interested in enforcing traditional gender roles across the broader culture would be trying to diminish the opportunity cost of staying home by decreasing the returns to employment, rather than, you know, hand-waving and complaining about the decline of the culture in First Things. Open economies aren’t so helpful there; I suggest checking in with the Kingdom of Bhutan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs, because they seem to be doing a bang-up job of it.

Commenters here and here argue that the word feminism is “meaningless,” the evidence being that various people who self-identify as “feminist” nonetheless disagree about the way to best achieve gender equality. Held to the same standard every word denoting every ideology is just a chain of syllables. Adherents to the things we call “Christianity,” “Keynesianism,” and “Maoism,” as it turns out, have had their disagreements too. Somehow we manage to make sense of it all. Ron Paul wants to shut the borders; I want to fling them open; no one ever says that the word “libertarian” lacks content.

Why does ideological disagreement among friends of feminism, specifically, lead to the conclusion that it’s all just sound and fury? Not too long ago I was told how I felt about some elective surgery because, after all, other women feel that way. This is the oldest of hats, I know. But for as long as people think women ought to all behave according to the same transparent feminine formulae, they’ll treat intellectual differences among feminists as internal confusion rather than rational debate. The assumption is that if you happen to disagree with other people with ovaries, the whole lot of you aren’t making sense.

You see how debate among feminists looks to the kind of people who have “theories about women.” They can’t even agree among themselves! Hysterics! Unmoored uteri! It can’t be that women of a similar ideological orientation reasonably disagree on various means toward the same ends. Rather, The Great Woman Machine, in its attempt to issue to the Single Feminist Directive, has malfunctioned. All those feminist debates about sex work? Porn? The patriarchal state? That’s just the machine spitting sparks. Better to walk away and come back when things are all cleaned up, when the chaos is quelled and the collective fembot can make up its damn mind.

There are feminists. There are antifeminists. You really do know the difference.

Todd Seavey accuses me of “rhetoric unbecoming a libertarian” and argues that “mere social forces” cannot be freedom-constraining. Thus, a black man who cannot hold employment by law is unfree, but a black man who cannot hold employment because social custom is such that no one will hire him is as free as any white man. A gay couple who must stay closeted to avoid social ostracism is as free as any hetero couple. A woman who has to choose between purdah and exile from her village is basically living in a libertarian paradise, so long as no one writes the rules down.

This may be true in some parallel world, or under some as-yet-unknown definition of the word freedom, but it’s pretty clearly not true given the world we have and the language we use.

I understand the temptation to describe the world strategically rather than accurately. Certainly a lot of people fear admitting the existence of liberty-limiting discrimination lest they aid and abet the forces of regulation. But it’s really quite easy to acknowledge the existence of, say, unconscious bias, and to argue that regulation isn’t a viable solution. I also understand that acknowledging the existence of norms introduces all sorts of complex, unpleasant, difficult variables into the clean calculus some libertarians prefer. Social planners like to simplify the world to conform to their systems as well.

Todd continues to insist that I think everything antifeminist is unlibertarian, and vice versa. That’s obviously a stupid thing to think; the fact that ideologies share considerable overlap does not render them identical. My point is merely that various historical contingencies—the particularly puritanical brand of feminism popular three decades back, the ill-fated conservative/libertarian alliance forged in response to the cold war—mask the affinity between libertarianism and feminism, and that that’s a shame. It’s also a generational blind spot that won’t last.

Todd Seavey refers to some of my thoughts on feminism and libertarianism and notes that “we can make any philosophy sound kind of, sort of like any other.” Well, that’s true. But it was never my intention to “subsume feminism under libertarianism” and pretend that we should all band together under some anodyne platitude about universal tolerance. I am not that agreeable. It was my intention to point out that most libertarian cocktail party critiques of feminism are utterly insipid and incoherent.

For some reason, various libertarian-leaning men are only capable of acknowledging the limiting nature of social norms when those norms result from recent political action. We all worry that universal surveillance breeds passive adults with no expectation of privacy. We all worry that smoking bans will encourage people to accept the diminution of their choices uncomplainingly. We all realize that the more the state does, the broader most people think its natural scope to be. No thinking libertarian is only concerned with coercion; most of us worry just as much about conformity and passivity in the forms of president-worship and war-lust.

It is extremely weird to recognize this sort of social pressure–the ability of government to create limiting expectations and norms of behavior–and then to immediately dismiss claims about the social construction of gender. States and patriarchies both engender certain patterns of behavior. Humans with female bodies have been dumped into a particular social category with various limiting assumptions, and they’re right to struggle against them.

If Todd wants to argue that women aren’t oppressed because they accept their assigned roles, he’d better be willing to accept the idea that governmental authority is not oppressive because most people don’t complain. Libertarians spend an enormous amount of time telling people that they are, in fact, oppressed. We don’t call it “consciousness raising” when we explain why you ought to be able to shoot up while selling your kidney to a sex worker, but that’s what it is.

Sadly for me, the term “Individualist Feminist” has been captured by women with conservative impulses and an unfortunate obsession with The Vagina Monologues. But it’s not the contradiction Todd thinks it is.

This Wall Street Journal article on Hillary Clinton and the anti-feminist backlash feels truer to me than almost anything I’ve seen written about the gender politics of this election:

Katherine Putnam, president of Package Machinery Co., a West Springfield, Mass., equipment manufacturer, recalls that at a lunch she attended recently, a group of male chief executives “started talking about what an awful b—- Hillary was and how they’d never vote for her.” She says she kept quiet. “I didn’t want to jeopardize my relationship with them,” she says. “But their remarks were a clear reminder that although I could sit there eating and drinking with them, and work with them, instinctively their reaction to me isn’t positive.”

Jean Yarnal, who has worked in local government for 41 years, says she was unnerved recently when a man she knew came into her office and asked for help with a zoning issue. When talk turned to politics, she says, he denounced Sen. Clinton as a “lesbian” and used several slurs. Ms. Yarnal says she didn’t respond, but thought to herself, “That’s the last time I do you a favor.”

It’s a subtle, melancholy piece with a jackhammer-soft headline: “In the barricades of the gender wars.” What an embarrassingly inept use of cliche. Does this feel like a war? Putnam didn’t tear her bra off, throw water in her lunch date’s face and declare eternal sisterhood with Clinton. She is an adult enmeshed in a series of complex and advantageous relationships, and navigating those relationships involves absorbing some slights and repelling others. She continued eating. It’s not war, it’s diplomacy, except you’re the weaker state, and your hosts insist on denigrating your allies.

I understand both the disappointment at Hillary’s now-slight chances and the sense of relief that will come with her defeat. Clinton is uncomfortable to defend because she embodies, to a painful degree, the stereotypically female qualities that male executives will harp on at lunch. There is an earnest hall monitor-ness about her. She wears power awkwardly. I don’t like watching her any more than I like watching Blind Date; I just feel vaguely embarrassed for all of them. But I also understand that self-seriousness is a quality that emerges, in part, from a life spent struggling to be taken seriously. “Be more self-deprecating!” is a truly ridiculous thing to ask an ambitious 60-year-old woman who experienced childhood in the anti-feminist backslide of the 1950s. Or who spent her adult life being pilloried for, alternately, following her husband around like a housewife and being insufficiently vapid to occupy the position of First Lady. (Cough up a cookie recipe, Hillary! Now laugh at yourself.) But I don’t have to like listening to the president of the United States; I do well enough avoiding that experience now. Her apparent lack of charm is not a serious impediment to being an effective executive, though obviously an impediment to getting there.

But I get it. I understand feeling relieved every time I see comments like this one, because nothing is worth enduring this for four years:

Alexa Steinberg, 25, a graduate student at the University of New Hampshire, says she recognizes “that women only make 78 cents for every male dollar, and there are still hurdles for women that I’ll face.” She says she thinks it’s only a matter of time before she’ll be supporting a female candidate for U.S. president — but it won’t be Sen. Clinton. “Politically and personally, she’s trying to take on the male persona, and isn’t a woman in the way I want a woman candidate to be,” she says.

This makes sense until you realize that it’s completely insane. If you tag all the qualities required for electoral approval “male,” and then criticize every woman who embodies them, you aren’t going to get very far. The benefit of having a female president–which this woman says she wants–is in widening the boundaries of female identity beyond “the female persona” (whatever that is). Demands that Clinton conform just reinforce the need for powerful women.

In retrospect, this was inevitable:

Sadly, egg donation has less to do with altruism and more to do with the exploitation of women–particularly young women and often poor women who are usually facing large debts or just trying to make ends meet.

In fact, we contend that human egg harvesting is the newest form of human trafficking.

That’s from a piece in First Things coauthored by an adjunct professor at George Washington University and the founding director of Hands Off Our Ovaries. They’re calling for Congress to adopt a definition of trafficking that encompasses not only Emperor’s Club employees, but anyone who buys a kidney on the black market or eggs on the gray one. Given the breadth of their definition, it seems to me that it would also include sperm donors and surrogate mothers. Actually, given the breadth of their definition, it seems to me that it would include any employment contract of which these activists do not approve.

Even if the authors restrict themselves to adult women selling ova, it’s worth reflecting on the vulgarity of this conflation. Johan Hari here describes a 14-year-old Bangladeshi girl sold into prostitution in Calcutta, forced to service 10 men a day. The average American egg vendor is probably a healthy middle class college student looking for help with tuition. If you’re actually concerned about child slavery, the idea of comparing the experiences of the former and the latter might well strike you as grotesque.

Betsey Stevenson tags modern marriage “hedonic marriage,”  the family having morphed from a “forum for shared production” to one of shared consumption. This is useful and obviously correct; increasingly, modern partnership is about sharing in a self-indulgent, not self-abnegating sense. We watch The Wire together because our emotional reactions register more deeply that way, not because we want to get the most out of our monthly cable payment.

I’ve been trying to get a grip on the feminist literature on nationalism, and–to use the Stevenson framing–I’m wondering why societies that have adapted to the consumption partner model become so deeply critical of production partners. Here’s Pei-Chia Lan’s account (PDF) of a woman being grilled over a marriage visa:

The following conversation is an excerpt from my observation of a TECO officer, a Taiwanese male in his forties, interviewing a Vietnamese woman in her early twenties who was engaged to a Taiwanese factory worker who had lost one arm in an accident.

“Do you want to marry him at your own will?” asked the officer.
She nodded, quietly.
“He is handicapped. Are you really voluntarily entering the marriage?”
“Yes. Life in Vietnam is harsh.”
“Do you actually love him, or are you just doing this for economic reasons?
“I really like him.”
“But you only met him for two days [before getting engaged]! How romantic!
Love at first sight, um? [sarcastic tone] Isn’t this a way to escape from poverty? I
hope you are truly in love, not doing this just for the residency…. Do not remit all the
money home after getting married. He works really hard for it.”

States bestow marriage visas, and so bureaucrats deem it state business to decide what constitutes a “real” marriage. The old models aren’t just discredited; they’re suddenly illegitimate, false, based on deception not just between partners but between partners and the state.  “Do you actually love him, or are you just doing this for economic reasons?” Because what has counted as marriage for most of the institution’s history suddenly doesn’t count here.

I’m not in the habit of praising Caitlin Flanagan. Her paeans to housewifery are supposed to make me want to work less and bake more; instead, they make me want to bury my face in a stack of Linda Hirshman essays. I thought her attack on Hillary Clinton as misogynistic as anything written about the Senator, and her obsession with the sexual modesty of young girls only reinforces the prurience she professes to loathe.

She’s also an enormously talented, deeply intelligent and perceptive essayist. Her pacing is brilliant, her sense of structure confident and fluid. A page in, I had no idea what her January Atlantic essay “A Woman’s Place: Katie Couric’s long day’s journey into evening” was about (I knew it wasn’t about Katie Couric); by the end, I was utterly convinced of a point I hadn’t realized she was carrying us toward. More than a few people have been turned off by Flanagan’s “I’m the grown-up here” pose, but I find it convincing: She really is the grown-up. She has weighed the options available to her, she swears allegiance to no faction or movement, and in the end she is perfectly happy to embrace the gender norms that she was shaped by and forced into. Bound by no ideology, she is honest about the trade-offs women face, the alternate lives they forgo, and so her essays are laced with melancholy. That’s probably why her Couric essay works as well as it does: Couric’s forced, half-psychotic perkiness strained through Flanagan’s melancholy is just devastating. Writes Caitlin, describing her need, as a housewife, for the company of Katie:

The Today show creates a bond with its overwhelmingly female viewers because so many of them watch it, as I did, during one of the most psychologically complex and lonely—and most emotionally fulfilling—times of their lives: their tenure as mothers to small children. Indeed, one reason the show is so successful and profitable is that long ago its producers realized that American households follow a rhythm: early in the morning, there is a great bustling of activity as the working members of families propel themselves out of the cocoon and into the cold world of commerce and adult preoccupation, and then there is a quiet settling down, once the cars have backed out of the driveways and the neighborhoods have been drained of their breadwinners. This is a delicate moment for any mother who spends her days home with children: on the one hand, the number of household residents who feel they own a piece of her has just diminished; on the other hand, she’s been left behind with the babies and the pets.

It is into this emotional void that the Today show’s second hour comes to the rescue, trumpets blaring: out go the first hour’s reports on war and politics and economic trends, and in come pieces on family and shopping and decorating. “The men are gone,” the show seems to tell us. “Now we can talk about the things we love”: the exact way to sneak vegetables into the diet of a finicky toddler, the trick to putting aside a little money for a family treat, the essential components of a first-aid kit for the car—all the minutiae of running a household, presented without irony or scorn by hugely compensated media celebrities. It is the loneliness of at-home motherhood—the loneliness for other adults, for the adult way of life, for the work clothes and schedules and employment itself—that makes the hosts of the Today show crucial. When you turn on the program, there they are: your friends. You half-listen to them, the way you half-listen to your children playing on the floor in the next room, and together the two worlds make up the whole of your enterprise: theory and practice. The host discusses shoes that are supposed to help toddlers walk more steadily, and you turn to your own baby and wonder if you ought to buy him a pair. The Today show pours into the house through the kitchen-counter television or the bedroom television (because the main TV, the big one, is tuned to Arthur or Clifford the Big Red Dog, and you’re half-watching those shows as well), and it is different from other shows. When it is on, the television screen is no longer a barrier separating real life from TV land; the television screen is a window into another room of the house, the one where the grown-ups are.

I have the utmost respect for the late Betty Friedan, but I found those two paragraphs much more affecting, much more descriptive of my own intuitions about the atomism of family life and the isolation of motherhood, than any glib reference to a concentration camp. This, from a woman constantly trying to convince us that stay-at-home motherhood is preferable to corporate lawyering.

Flanagan is not a self-indulgent writer, and the victim here is Couric, not the essayist who once needed her company. Couric, at work, needs to act perkily interested in the minutia of home life, day after day, just like the housewives who smile, inexplicably, through potty training and playdates. Maybe the indignity of segment after segment on infant outerwear is what drove Couric to take a paycut and move to CBS, which, Flanagan argues convincingly, was a colossal mistake, a step down, not up, and a sorry attempt to compete in a dated male status race premised on the culturally clueless assumption that someone, somewhere, is still watching the evening news.