The Feminist Case Against Feminism

"Enemy Feminisms," the post-Christian right, the ongoing baby bust, and more in this week's digest.

What I’ve been reading: Against Method by Paul Feyerabend.

A friend of the newsletter is helping to put on a conference in Southern Indiana in this April called Radical Family Camp. A lot of it looks to be about building productive households and improving your financial management. The topics and schedule are online for review.

In response to my post this week about tradition without traditionalism, Benjamin Mabry commented:

One of the things I like to point out when a conservative calls me a "postmodernist" is that this kind of traditionalism is a fundamentally postmodern attitude. Jean-Francois Lyotard describes the postmodern position on temporality as "epitemporal," which is the translation of the temporal past into a series of spatial places. Rather than understanding the past as a flow from which we cannot return, it's just another location which we can revisit. Postmodern approaches to the past create epitemporal spaces where the past and present are brought adjacent to one another and overlap. Frederic Jameson calls this the historicity of pastiche. The 50's become a theme or a style rather than a time, and by imitating that style we can in some way blend the present-day to the pastiche-past. We delude ourselves into thinking that we've crossed that chasm of past and present in the stylized re-presentation of the past.

Conservatives who want to roll back the clock, to return to the past by imposing a past-stylization on present social forms is an entirely postmodern approach. As much as they squeal about anything postmodern, they're the very epitome of the conditions of postmodernity.

Checking in on the Post-Christian Right

There was another internet flareup this week when online MAGA personality Ashley St. Clair announced she had a baby and Elon Musk was the father. Assuming this is actually true, that would make something like 13 kids by four different mothers for Musk.

We’ve come a long way since the 1980s, when Sen. Gary Hart had to drop out of the presidential race over allegations of an affair. This matter is unlikely to affect the bankability in conservative circles of either Musk or St. Clair.

For the record: what Elon Musk is doing isn’t right. I’m with him on pro-natalism, but this isn’t the way to do it. He seems to be motivated by ensuring that high IQ individuals like himself have lots of kids so we don’t end up living in an Idiocracy. This isn’t surprising due to the prevalence of a belief in “genetic Calvinism” on the irreligious right. The idea being that since genes are so deterministic in our life outcomes, our family circumstances are not important (or are themselves a product of the parents’ genetics). But from what we know so far of Musk’s children as they grow up, this isn’t working out. His oldest kid is estranged from him, a public critic, and appears to be troubled.

Children need a father, not just a hefty child support check.

Also for the record: Ashley St. Clair is in the wrong, too. It always takes two to tango in these situations.

In the real world, single parent households underlie almost all of our social dysfunctions. The United States has the highest share of its children in single parent households of any country in the world. (The genetic Calvinists must think Americans have the worst genes in the world). If we don’t seriously attempt to lower this level, we can forget about solving many of our social ills.

But we should expect that this sort of thing will increasingly be the norm in a post-Christian right. Given the growing dominance of working class voters, whose social lives are often dysfunctional (cf: Robert Putnam and Charles Murray), in the Republican coalition, we should expect more Jerry Springer like behavior to be embraced in their leaders. And indeed we do.

Interestingly, the Presidency is the one office where a traditional family pattern remains dominant. I believe there have only been two Presidents that have ever been divorced, both conservative Republican icons: Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.

The Feminist Case Against Feminism

Valerie Stivers had an interesting review of Sophie Lewis’ latest book Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation. Lewis is the author of the previous books Full Surrogacy Now and Abolish the Family.

Stivers notes that Lewis case isn’t so much against “enemy feminisms” as against feminism itself. She writes:

Lewis’s flavor of progressivism is by now familiar to everyone in its general outlines if not the specifics. Enemy Feminisms sets out to demonstrate that feminism has historically been a handmaiden to other forms of oppression, and continues to be so to this day. Feminisms, Lewis argues, have been “eugenic, colonial, deadly to indigenous lifeways, explicitly antiblack, knowingly dangerous to sex workers, violent to queer and feminine people, and even, weird as it may sound, misogynistic and patriarchal.” She argues that the history of feminist writing and scholarship has sought to obscure this understanding, thus demonstrating the West’s “cultural allergy to self-knowledge.” And she imagines that facing these truths will help future feminists commit to the radical total revolution of her dreams, which would result in “unmaking the mode of production that underlies the logic of gender,” and a better world for everyone.

…

Despite Lewis’s blind spots, it should be acknowledged that almost everything she says is true. She’s engaging in the kind of tear-down and call-out culture that has made leftism unpopular lately, but she’s smart, and her willingness to lay out the unpalatable parts of an argument is a strength. I have liked her, if that’s the right word, since a 2022 article in The Nation entitled “Abortion Involves Killing—And That’s Ok.” This has always seemed to me to be the underlying truth of our culture’s position on it. Enemy Feminisms does a similar service in revealing the hidden truths many are unwilling to confront.

Lewis makes credible arguments that many of feminism’s causes have been to the benefit of some women at the expense of others, and that those benefitted have been some form of “good” or privileged woman, while those harmed have been the “bad” or underprivileged. I felt for the poor British housewives being improved by Mary Wollstonecraft. When Lewis says that “Wollstonecraft clearly hated British wives’ active cultivation of feeling and bodily pleasures,” I find myself agreeing. Certainly it’s true that feminism has a history of claiming solidarity with people experiencing other forms of oppression, mostly racial, for its own benefit, without practicing much practical solidarity in terms of improving the position of those groups. Comparisons of the plight of women with the plights of enslaved people have been popular, specious, and self-serving.

Click over to read the whole thing.

The Baby Bust Continues

The Atlantic predicts that there will be a baby bust in heavily Democratic counties as a result of the second Trump administration.

A few years ago, Gordon Dahl, an economist at UC San Diego, set out to measure how Trump’s 2016 victory might have affected conception rates in the years following. And he and his colleagues found a clear effect: Starting after Trump’s election, through the end of 2018, 38,000 fewer babies than would otherwise be expected were conceived in Democratic counties. By contrast, 7,000 more than expected were conceived in Republican counties in that same period. (The study, published in 2022, was conducted before data on the rest of Trump’s term were available.) Over the past three decades, Republicans have generally given birth to more kids than Democrats have. But during those first years of the first Trump administration, the partisan birth gap widened by 17 percent. “You see a clear and undeniable shift in who’s having babies,” Dahl told me.

And the Financial Times took at look at Busan, South Korea’s second city, which is at risk of “extinction” due to its low birth rates and outmigration:

For most of the 20th century, Busan was a thriving hub of trade and industry. But the city is now in the throes of an exodus of the young that has left it ageing faster than any other metropolitan area in a country that already has the lowest fertility rate in the world.

…

The Korea Employment Information Service, a government agency, last year officially classified Busan as “at risk of extinction” — when the imbalance between the working and non-working populations makes a city economically unsustainable.

The city of 3.3mn shed 600,000 people between 1995 and 2023. Demographers warn this trend is accelerating as the city’s population ages and Seoul tightens its grip over the country’s economy.

…

“Successive governments pursued a policy of national centralisation as a way of maximising efficiency to compete with Japan and China,” said Busan’s deputy mayor Lee Jun-seung. “We got left behind.”

Lee Sang-ho, a researcher at the government employment information service, known as KEIS, said centralisation had pushed Busan and other South Korean regional economic centres into a “chain reaction of decline” exacerbated by intensifying competition from China.

“Most of the major provincial cities outside the metropolitan area in the country are experiencing a similar phenomenon,” Lee said. “Rural areas with small populations were the first to be hit, followed by small and medium-sized cities, and now it is hitting metropolitan areas like Busan.”

…

At 0.72, South Korea’s fertility rate — the average number of children a woman is expected to give birth to in her lifetime — was in 2023 the lowest in the world. But despite attracting young people from all over the country, Seoul’s fertility rate in 2023 was even lower — at 0.55. The OECD considers a fertility rate of 2.1 to be necessary to ensure a broadly stable population.

“While Busan’s population is expected to decrease by 33.57 per cent between 2020 and 2050, Seoul’s population is expected to decrease by 21.45 per cent over the same period,” said Kim Se-hyun head of the Population Impact Assessment Center at the Busan Development Institute.

Click over to read the whole thing if you can get past the paywall.

Best of the Web

Anthony Bradley: The Wounds of Fatherhood: How Popular Music Confronts Paternal Neglect - A great piece by Bradley

The voices of these artists are not just individual cries of pain; they are cultural testimonies to the devastating impact of fatherlessness. These songs—spanning rock, pop, and hip-hop—serve as an indictment of a society that has normalized absentee fathers while underestimating the catastrophic consequences of their absence. The depth of rage, sorrow, and longing found in these lyrics makes one thing abundantly clear: the failure of fathers is not just a personal failing, but a social epidemic with generational consequences. The artists who have poured their trauma into music are proof of what happens when boys and girls are left without the steadying hand of a loving father.

Magdalene Taylor: The Future Childless Cat Guys - There are likely to be more never married, childless men than there will be women. And as they age, these men can become very socially isolated. It is going to be a big problem.

Joel Carini: Ten things I learned from Jordan Peterson

NYT: Why Gen X Women Are Having the Best Sex - The media is now applying the Boomer “70 is the new 30” type logic to Generation X.

Jonathan Keeperman: A Blueprint for American Cultural Renewal

A fascinating discussion between Tyler Cowen and Gregory Clark.

Christianity Today: Founding Congregation to Exit Christian Reformed Church - This is a very interesting and unusual case. After a series of resounding conservative victories at denominational synods, it is the liberal churches that are exiting the CRC. These are some of the most prominent and traditionally influential congregations in the denomination too.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention in World magazine and was a guest on the Kingdom and Culture podcast this week.

New this week:

• Tradition Without Traditionalism - Religious conservatives need to draw on the past without living in it.

• My podcast this week was with Titus Techera on how social media destroyed elite control.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Cover image: Elon Musk by Debbie Rowe/The Royal Society, CC BY-SA 3.0