Feminist social explanations are wrong

It is sometimes said that feminism goes too far. The idea is that, although feminism's values may be beyond reproach, its policies and practices are not always so. The complaint is, at bottom, that the single-minded or blinkered pursuit of worthwhile goals is not itself always worthwhile – other goals or values of comparable importance may be compromised in the process – and that single-minded feminism can thereby undermine its value and relevance.

This is a view worth taking seriously, but my view is rather bolder: that feminism is wrong. It is wrong because it is bad social theory: that is, feminist theories provide a wrong diagnosis of social ills. Feminism's alleged tendency to go too far is therefore itself something of a misdiagnosis: it does not so much go too far as go astray. That is, it tends to promote practices that are excessive not merely because of some feminists' blinkered zeal but because they spring from a wrong diagnosis of social problems.

The diversity of feminisms is no obstacle to this claim. The various species of feminism are all about the same thing – they have a distinctive subject matter – and have a defining angle on that subject matter. In short, feminism is about sex and gender relations; and its defining angle is that these relations are to be explained by the damaging effects of male power over women. To claim that feminism is mistaken is, then, to claim that its defining angle is a poor explanation for the phenomena it seeks to explain. I think that this is the case; moreover, I also think that a superior alternative is available.

To explain: Modern (second wave) feminism, confronted, in the 1960s, with the task of explaining women's situation, resorted to the most readily available explanatory model: Marxism's model of class conflict, which had already been adapted to racial issues by the left wing of the American civil rights movement. The feminists did their own adapting, this time transforming the doctrine of class conflict into a doctrine of intrinsic opposition between the sexes. Thus the situation of women came to be explained by reference to male oppression.

It was plain, however, that not all individual men could be described as oppressors – not least those who actively supported the women's cause. So the model needed refining. This was accomplished by shifting oppression from the shoulders of individual men to a male-privileging social structure: patriarchy. This shift failed to satisfy everyone – after all, it failed to explain why the patriarchy should function as it was alleged to do. So grander, more metaphysical versions were invented, in which the source of domination was shifted to the allegedly oppressive character of (male) dichotomous conceptualisation: dualisms.

The important thing to notice about these later versions of feminism is that they share the underlying assumption of the original simple oppression story: present-day conflicts over the social roles of men and women are to be explained by reference to some more fundamental form of conflict. Society is conceived as a scene of a basic division of interests between men and women, whether it be between actual men and women, male political structures and female political inclusiveness or male conceptual hierarchies and female conceptual fluidity. This is no less true of French feminism, with its fountainhead in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. Her thesis appeals to the oppositional model from which Marx drew his account of social conflict and its resolution, that is, Hegel's master-slave dialectic.

So, despite all the appeals to female inclusiveness, and so on, these stories all share an ``us or them'' mentality that derives directly from the background influence of the class conflict model. That is why, despite apparently greater intellectual sophistication, not to mention the much-touted diversity of feminisms, it remains a marker of feminism that, when pressured, it resorts to familiar rhetoric about millenniums of oppression, misogyny and so on. It is also why feminism has become so thoroughly preoccupied with those areas of social life in which there is conflict between the sexes: rape, domestic violence, and so on. In short, whatever its disclaimers, feminism continues to believe that the problem society must deal with and overcome is (some form of) maleness.

This is why feminism generates such an air of trench warfare between the sexes. It can be entirely avoided. Once it is recognised that all feminisms share the conflict model, it becomes possible to start looking for fresh alternatives. A plausible one is readily available and, ironically, it also owes much of its stimulus to Marxian thought.

Marx had observed, in one of his most famous remarks, that ``it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being but ... their social being that determines their consciousness''. This principle is not beyond criticism, since it can lead to the view that all human thought can be reduced to the circumstances in which it is produced. The case of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union -- where modern biology was dismissed as mere bourgeois science – is a salutary example. Nevertheless, the principle is vital when what we need to explain is changes in social consciousness: it reminds us to ask what changes in social or material conditions lie behind the rise of new forms of consciousness.

Now feminism is itself a new form of consciousness, so to apply Marx's principle is to ask: what changes in social being lie behind the rise of feminism? The answer is not hard to find. The transformation of the world of work after World WarII – roughly, the transformation from a manufacturing to a service-and-information economy – combined with the revolution in fertility control, produced clean and safe jobs that women would want, and produced women capable of controlling their presence in the workforce. The significance of these changes for our contemporary social situation has often been emphasised, but that they also explain the re-emergence of feminism is rarely noted; or, where it is, its wider ramifications are not drawn out.

The point is, first, that effective contraception placed a woman's fertility under her control, and broke the nexus between sexual activity and procreation. Thus women gained independence from biological imperatives. Second, the proliferation of forms of employment that depended on social and communicative skills, on brains rather than brawn, that avoided dirt and danger, and that, in a buoyant economy, delivered real differences in standards of living, made employment attractive to women. Economic independence became not only possible for women but attractive to them.

Furthermore, the nature of the jobs meant that employers would want female employees. As Marvin Harris puts it in his brilliant application of the Marxian theory to the postwar US, Why Nothing Works, the changes explain not only why women went looking for jobs but why jobs went looking for women. That is, social changes conspired to make female material independence both possible and attractive – to both employee and employer. Imposed on a social order that, since the turn of the 20th century, had developed around the male breadwinner and his dependants, the consequences could not but be dramatic: feminism, since it did not then exist, had to be invented.

Why did feminism need to be invented? Why had it not existed all along, as a permanent protest against the inequalities of women's lot? To answer this, a fresh look at the realities of the earlier situation is needed. The two crucial factors to consider are historic male privilege and historic male power.

The first is a function of the second. This is obvious enough, but it reminds us that privilege is not equivalent to membership in the paid workforce. For most people at most times, the working life has not been a life of privilege at all. The typical working life is not a satisfying career in an expanding full-employment economy, but a job – that is, a routine, dull, and often dirty and demanding activity. That is why most people in work spend so much of their time dreaming of how to get out of it. Feminist rhetoric about the privilege of paid work reflects, first, its rise in the economically buoyant conditions of the '60s; second, its middle-class assumption that paid work is well-paid work; and, third, its uncomfortable collusion with the characteristic corrosive vice of capitalism – of identifying cash value as the fundamental value.

The important issue is therefore historic male power. Note, however, that it is less influential than is commonly imagined: the attempt to control our environment is a story of only partial success. Moreover, even the human world is only partially controlled by our official power structures. History depends on more than the exercise of male power. Nevertheless, that power is not negligible and it is plain that it has been, largely if not exclusively, the preserve of men.

Why? The feminist answer is all too familiar. But the possession and exercise of power is not necessarily oppressive. The key question is, what is the power for? The short answer is that political power exists to solve a society's problems. The most basic of these problems is physical security, so the first task of power is protection. Political power originates when men organise themselves into groups to protect their societies and territories against the insecurities posed by competing groups of strangers -- most obviously in the extreme case of war.

Similarly, men as individuals within societies have been trained to protect women and children, and their private territories, from male strangers. The name for the code in which they were trained is, of course, masculinity. This means that masculinity is not, as the feminists claim, just a celebration of violence. It is, rather, a code concerned with cultivating the character needed for protecting one's own against external threats. It follows that training for facing violence, and even for being violent where circumstances dictate, are necessary parts of the code. To this extent, then, masculinity embraces violence.

It does not, however, exalt violence. Everyone knows this already – if implicitly. Consider the recent campaign against domestic violence, which ran under the slogan: "Real men don't hit women.'' The slogan was entirely uncontroversial. Everyone, men and women alike, simply took it for granted that it was true. But if we translate it into the terms more familiar to social theory, what it says is that the socially established code of masculinity in Australia (not a society designed for shrinking violets) rejects the use of violence against women. That code exalts strength and courage, but does so for the protection of the vulnerable, not for their exploitation.

Codes of masculinity presuppose that danger is a permanent possibility of human life and so provide a realistic (non-shirking) response. This is why they are more emphasised in circumstances where external threats are more frequently faced, as in small societies eking out an existence in difficult terrain, and less prominent in large and successful social orders. Similarly, in successful social orders they are more marked within the lower strata because men at the top end of the food chain delegate the dangerous and difficult tasks to those below them. This explains why a markedly masculine ethos is more visible in the working class than in the professional classes.

The basic point is that where protection is provided, there power is necessary and privilege is justifiable. The first point was emphasised by the early modern philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who said he wrote his key work to teach the reciprocal relation between protection and obedience. In a nutshell, one cannot protect what one cannot control. Every parent knows this: restriction of children's freedom for the sake of their safety is universally accepted. A moment's reflection will also show that this also explains why in so much past social policy women have been lumped together with children: if they are vulnerable in ways shared with children, but that men are not but can help solve, then men have an obligation to protect and a right to restrict in so far as that is necessary for protection. This is why, in the small and physically vulnerable societies of the past, the figure of the warrior looms so large: the embodiment, simultaneously, of masculinity, leadership and social security. This is implicit on every page of The Iliad, and captured no less vividly in Njal's Saga and some of the other great Icelandic sagas.

(The view being proposed here is often resisted on spurious grounds. It is supposed that, if masculinity is concerned with strength, courage and so on, it must be being implied that women are weak, cowardly and so on. It is not. Codes of masculinity do not describe how men are or what women are not like. Rather, they define what men care about – and codes of femininity do the same for women. The connection between the two is that femininity reflects the freedom that ensues on solving the problem of protection, in values concerned with spontaneity and the free expression of emotion; but its more important value concerns what is to be built on that secure platform – affectionate relationships, especially in the nurturing of the young.)

To return to the main thread: Although in modern life the means have changed, the sentiment – that power and privilege are justifiable as means of delivering safety – has not. In our circumstances, protection is achieved, on a daily basis, by political and economic organisation, and by legal order; and for this reason political leaders, judges and even successful captains of industry are thought justifiably to enjoy privileges beyond the average – as long as they are up to the job and as long as the rewards are not excessive. (And, it should be added, as long as it is widely supposed that the private enterprise economy provides – even if unevenly – benefits for all.)

For present purposes, however, the important point is that the shift (roughly) from brawn to brains in the rise of new forms of protecting -- whether this be by electronic surveillance, new forensic techniques such as DNA analysis or even the attempt to safeguard the future through economic forecasting – means that the class of men is no longer co-extensive with the class of protectors. More obviously, the shift from brawn to brains in the rise of the service and information economy means that neither are they coextensive with the class of providers. The consequence is that men's historic powers and privileges are no longer justifiable: the traditional paternalistic structures of Western society have been rendered dysfunctional by social change and, because dysfunctional, are no longer authoritative. It is the confused recognition of this fact that is the real focus of the form of consciousness known as feminism.

So feminism arose not because women had had enough, not because they finally rose up against millenniums of oppression but (to employ another hoary old Marxist notion) because of the contradictions in their situation brought about by the changes described above. The social transformation was incomplete, uneven, flew in the face of old values, ran into conservative resistance in workplace settings and so on. That is why feminism arose. It is the form of consciousness generated by the incomplete and contradictory nature of the transformation in women's social being.

To see this is also to see why the popularity of radical forms of feminism has declined so sharply among the next generation of women: the contradictions are no longer so sharp and many others seem beyond resolution in difficult economic times (for example, the conflicting demands of work and children). Nevertheless, feminism of more moderate forms survives and flourishes because our inherited paternalistic social order and the codes of masculinity that attend it remain dysfunctional in the sense outlined above. (This is the rational kernel in the much-discussed "crisis of masculinity''.)

If a name is to be given to this alternative explanation, it could be called the theory of dysfunctional paternalism. However it is described, what matters is that it offers a coherent alternative to the oppositional model inherent in feminism. It thereby provides space for overcoming the misplaced mistrust that has soured relations between the sexes. It also does the great service of clearing space for more insightful explanations of social disorders than can be fitted into feminism's narrow explanatory frame. In particular, it encourages the thought that social practices attributed to male misogyny may also be explicable by reference to some form of social dysfunction.

Consider, for example, the problem of female circumcision. Feminism assumes that practices of this kind exist because of male control over, and subsequent cruelty towards, women's bodies -- that the cause is oppressive patriarchy. But this view will not stand up. The first problem is that female circumcision, where it occurs, is commonly performed by the older women, rather than by men. It thus seems to be a reasonable candidate for secret women's business -- that is, a rite that grows up wholly within the separate sphere of female life and ritual – rather than a male-established institution. Second, it occurs in societies that not untypically also practise male circumcision, including sometimes equally extreme practices, such as subincision. These practices are thus not restricted to women, nor is it only non-dominant males who have their family jewels redesigned. So it is implausible to think that these practices can be explained by relations of power and domination. A fresh angle is needed.

Here is one. Circumcision and such practices seem to flourish (if that is the word) in desert cultures. Life in desert or semi-arid environments is life lived close to the edge, where a society's survival depends on a delicate balance between food supply and population. Where there is no way of increasing food supply, population control is a necessity; where population control is necessary, sexual self-control will be valued; no less importantly, so will symbolic representation of sexual self-control. Further, given that a society's future population is a function of the pregnancy rate of the women, we can expect that the pressure for such self-control, and therefore for symbolic representations of its presence, might be felt more keenly by the women -- and that competitive pressures among them lead to their magnification. In this way, we can imagine the more extreme forms of circumcision growing up over time -- and thereby learn to see female circumcision as comparable to the often life-threatening rites of passage endured by boys in desert and other societies in which adult life is a constant struggle for survival.

An advantage of this explanation is that it encourages a more nuanced response to societies in which it is practised. It encourages us to be cautious in our criticism of the societies, but without having to approve of the practices or having to tolerate them in our society. Social practices that arise over time in the face of extreme necessity are not simply to be condemned by the non-necessitous -- that is, just to add insult to injury -- but neither are they to be tolerated in circumstances where such necessity does not exist.

This is one example of the benefits that accrue once the feminists' one-dimensional oppositional model is set aside. Similar benefits will obtain in other examples routinely but wrongly attributed to oppression or misogyny, such as Chinese footbinding. The most important point, however, is that, confronted by strange foreign practices, feminism has led us into uncritical acceptance of oppositional assumptions about relations between the sexes. But those assumptions, on closer scrutiny, reveal themselves to be just that: assumptions.

Once this is recognised, the possibility of a real improvement in relations between the sexes also emerges. The sense of opposition can be replaced by a sense of rough compatibility of outlook, but complicated by other factors: that human beings do not make history under circumstances of their own choosing; that their attempts to bring the physical (and social) world under control frequently has unanticipated side effects that can elude control; and that these difficulties are compounded by rapid social change. In other words, existing tensions between the sexes can be seen to owe more to our lack of control over history than to the fanciful nightmare of Machiavellian males (or maleness) manipulating history to the disadvantage of women.

To conclude: we need to resist the simplistic solutions offered for our social problems. Not least, we need to resist the quasi-animistic tendency to look for someone to blame. If we do, there is genuine space for social hope: the chance to render our social relations less dysfunctional and less paternalistic.

The latter task will be the harder because paternalistic (protection-based) authority endures wherever safety is insecure and so will survive for as long as our social order falls short of Kant's dream of perpetual peace. This should not worry us overmuch, however. If, as I have supposed, the safety of the people is the supreme law, then paternalism, where it is necessary to that end, is justifiable. Feminism, to be relevant, needs to recognise that its proper target is not paternalism but dysfunction – including, of course, paternalism, where it is dysfunctional.

This is, incidentally, the standard appealed to by those who criticise feminism for going too far: to go too far is to provide a cure no better than the disease, to substitute new dysfunctions for old. This criticism, in its proper sphere, is fair enough; but it is also implicitly to suppose that, in other respects, the House of Feminism is in good order. That supposition is mistaken. Feminism's excesses spring, in the main, from its oppositional model – and from the anxieties thereby nourished. It goes too far because, as social theory, it goes badly astray.