Feminist social explanations are wrong

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.