Andrew Hagen

Maureen Dowd has a provocative excerpt in the NYT Magazine today from her new book, effectively mourning the death of feminism. (*) The post-Baby Boomer generations of women have not been true to the ideals of 1969, she says, and now the return of the Stepford Wife is upon us. Men are attracted to maids and not their female peers. Successful white collar career women can’t find husbands. A man wants a soft, nice girl, not an intelligent, critical woman. With all the success of women in the workplace, what has really been achieved?

Dowd is not the first to make her basic point. It is a time of retrenchment if not retreat for feminism. Now is an appropriate time for feminists to engage in reevaluation and self-critical inquiry.

Dowd’s essay presumes that thanks to feminism, women “get to” have their own careers, and “enjoy” all of the things that men get to “enjoy” in their working lives. Work can be fun. A career can be fulfilling. If you choose it carefully and work hard at it, it can all be terribly worthwhile.

That said, no one wants to spend most of their life slaving away at a disliked job. Even in a career you love, you will have to spend time doing spade work and generally grinding out work you do not enjoy. So why do people go to work? They sacrifice their time largely because they are trying to help their family. They are trying to live in a nice place or save up enough to send their kids to school. They want to put food on the table and enjoy the quality of life they desire. While a carefully-chosen job can fulfill your desire to do good, and even be a lot of fun, the main reason you work is not because of the work, but because of the end result.

For most of the massive influx of women entering the US labor force since the early 1970s, the driving force wasn’t to seek power, privilege, or a good time in a career. The desire was to maintain or improve the quality of life for their families. Since that time economic pressure on families has been intense. Only recently since then has personal average income risen in real terms. To pay the mortgage or maintain what they already had, many families needed the wife and mother to get a job. It wasn’t really a question of seeking status or feminine liberation for them. They needed to become dual income families.

Career-oriented women are not really at an unfair disadvantage in the marriage market. Undeniably, however, men and women in America today have become distanced and even estranged from one another. There is no single cause of this alienation. My own feeling is that both men and women have too often forgotten that marriage and love involve deep sacrifice and compromise to be paid willingly. You can view it as a game, and play it ruthlessly. The ones who do, though, suffer mercilessly. A career is not something that you ideally “get.” It is something that you give. The same is true of a healthy relationship.

Feminism encouraged women to envy men. One of the key problems with modern feminism is that it has treated people as objects in that it urged women to “get” their own career, power, privilege, perks, and money. If you really want those things more than anything else, you don’t want a career. You should become a criminal, such as a mobster or a crime lord. You embark on a career because you want to make money in a good and decent way. If you really want a healthy intimate relationship, you must be prepared to give much and get little. Careers, like relationships, involve a steep cost that is paid on a daily basis and is rewarded meagerly until the long term, when you can look back and have pride and fulfillment.

You don’t get married primarily because you want a nice wedding. You get married because you want one day to be able to happily look back at all the years you spent together. You have a baby not because you enjoy giving birth. You have a baby because you want one day to look on your grown child and see him or her living a better life than your own. You have a career not for the power, but because you want one day to look back at all that you have accomplished with pride. You don’t have a family so that you can have a career. You have a career so that you can have a family. Feminism has too often missed that basic point.

Men do not outright object to intelligent women. In the 70s women’s lib era, feminists stated that they wanted men to be vulnerable. It wasn’t a new request. The ideal for men is versatility. A man is to be tough when needed, and kind when needed. We expect both from the same man. We always have, and always will. You can draw a line from that male ideal to the female ideal of being strong when needed, and kind when needed. You don’t have to point to the ambiguity in the word critical to recognize that while a man values the intelligence of his female life-mate because of how she uses her brain to help him, he also values her sensitivity to avoid misusing that intelligence against him. If you love him, you don’t want to nag him. You want to help him, as he wants to help you. There is no respectable objection to a smart bride, but no man wants a harridan. Walking that line isn’t easy for any woman. Nor is it easy for a man to be alternately tough and kind at the proper times. We make mistakes, and forgiving the mistakes of our loved ones requires us to bear great costs and emotional burdens. We take on that cost not out of a cruel calculus of maximizing our advantage, but because to do so is love.

Equal rights for women face real challenges today and in the future, but most likely we will not have a complete rollback to the era when women were unable to follow a lifelong career path if they wished, or escape abusive marriages. For the immediate future, we will have more of what we are already seeing: a backlash against the excesses of so-called “women’s lib.” Socially acceptable single motherhood, no-fault divorce, day care for children, and other changes have been mixed blessings for women from the beginning.

True feminists (believing in the political equality of men and women) should not fear the present crisis. They should embrace it. Now is a time to reevaluate and reexamine. Now is a time to learn from the mistakes of the past. Now is a time to craft a new, more effective feminism that can be given to subsequent generations so that they may have better lives, having learned from our mistakes.

Dowd is too pessmistic. The gains of the past need not all be lost, but many can be saved to create a firmer foundation for the future.

Some blogs with interesting reactions to Dowd’s excerpt are: Bumblebee Sweet Potato (†); Intolerantelle (‡); the Anchoress (a rather censorious blog) (§); A Few Thoughts (Elaina M. Avalos) (**); and Almost Girl (††).

Dowd’s book will be published next week. (‡‡)

A ghazw is an Islamic warrior that takes part in gha-ziya. (*) The ghazw raids frontier lands in order to clear the land for jihad and eventual expansion of “the Muslim world” (the umma).

As Tony Blankley notes in a recent audio interview (†), for the past several hundred years, most Muslims have considered North America and Europe to be “neutral,” and not the targets of Islamic conquest. Now, unfortunately, more and more Muslims see North America and Europe as the next targets for Islamic conquest. Thus we have many raids by ghazw warriors intended to soften up the defenses of the intended conquests. At the same time the strategy of dawa is used to ruthlessly exploit multiculturalism, diversity ideology, and “tolerance” on behalf of the overall divide-and-conquer strategy. At last, the Western powers are betrayed from within through the Trojan horse of “benign immigration and refugees” and assorted fifth-columnists, while Islamic powers such as Iran gain the upper hand militarily through the stockpile and use of nuclear weapons. This is the radical Islamic strategy. It is now rapidly becoming popular within Islamic culture.

The purpose of the Global War on Terrorism is ultimately to defeat and discredit radical Islam now, before it gains the upper hand militarily.

The recent bombings in New Delhi, India occurred during Ramadan and now a Kashmiri Islamic terror group has taken responsibility for this cold-blooded mass murder. The current estimate is 59 innocent human lives destroyed. (*)

The context is the recent earthquake that has killed an estimated 58,000 people in the Kashmir region. Trying to exploit lowered security because of humanitarian efforts, or trying to disrupt humanitarian relief operations mark these bombings as utterly ruthless.

Ruthless is the enemy that liberal democracy faces. Ruthless is using a passenger jet as a missle. Ruthless is exploiting Shia-Sunni divisions in Iraq. Ruthless is taking advantage of open borders and racial and religious tolerance in Western countries to wage war on those same countries. Ruthless is using weapons of war against crowded, peaceful markets full of innocent people.

In the wake of publicity surrounding Iran’s poorly concealed efforts to build a stockpile of thermonuclear warheads, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, called this week for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” The New York Times has the full text of the speech, translated from the Persian. (*)

Our dear Imam [the Ayatollah Khomeini] said that the occupying regime [Israel] must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine. Is it possible to create a new front in the heart of an old front. This would be a defeat and whoever accepts the legitimacy of this regime [Israel] has in fact, signed the defeat of the Islamic world. Our dear Imam targeted the heart of the world oppressor in his struggle, meaning the occupying regime. I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world. But we must be aware of tricks. . . .

The issue of Palestine is not over at all. It will be over the day a Palestinian government, which belongs to the Palestinian people, comes to power; the day that all refugees return to their homes; a democratic government elected by the people comes to power. Of course those who have come from far away to plunder this land have no right to choose for this nation.

Ahmadinejad is not the topmost authority figure in Iran. That position is held collectively by a council of mullahs. The council has backed away from Ahmadinejad’s statement, saying Iran will abide by its UN obligations. (†) Of course, their statement must be considered in the context of the Shia practice of taqiyah. Iran is a Shia-dominated country. Taqiyah is a practice of Shia Islam, and, some say, all of Islam, that commands Muslims to lie and dissemble in order to advance the goal of Islamic world domination.

Let us not play games or hide under a rock. The only sane respose to Ahmadinejad’s vow to wipe Israel off the map is to prepare for a war that would destroy the Iranian regime, allow the people of Iran to live in freedom, and protect other countries.

Since his groundbreaking Shield of Achilles, many of us have looked forward to Philip Bobbitt’s next book. Currently titled Terror : Can We Win This War? it is pushed back to 2006, unfortunately. (*)

Bobbitt has an excerpt from the new book on his web site. († PDF) If it is any indication, Bobbitt will extend the Shield analysis to Al Qaeda as a market state, and generally confirm that his new theory of international relations is superior to those currently in vogue.

The real challenge to Bobbitt’s Shield is whether the GWOT is thinkable as World War IV. If it is, Bobbitt’s argument that The Long War encompassed WW1, WW2, and the Cold War is premature. If the Cold War ended in 1991 with the Peace of Paris, and the GWOT began with 9/11, then it seems odd that the period of peace between the “long wars” was only 10 years when other periods of peace in history since 1500 AD lasted many decades, especially when we had WTC 93, the USS Cole, and so on. Is the GWOT merely a series of skirmishes? Of course not.

A better solution may be to consider the GWOT as part of the Long War. The essential conflict of the GWOT is after all the struggle of parliamentary democracies against the forces of Islamofascism, jihad, and “totaliterrorism,” if you will. Paul Berman has written about Sayyid Qutb providing the ideological link between European totalitarianism and Muslim terrorism. (‡) Perhaps Bobbitt’s Shield theory could build on Berman’s link and find a convincing common thread from WW1 to WW2 to the Cold War to the GWOT, as I believe there to be.

That leads us to solutions. I continue to be uncomfortable with the market state concept because it so often looks more like a disintegration of the old than an architecture of the new. Bobbitt positively blurbed a recent book on how the EU is going to become the dominant power in the 21st century. The EU has no unifying language or traditions. It is a favorite of the old international relations theorists, though, because it fits with a NAFTA/EU/Pacifica/Islam supercontinent approach, but that strikes me as ultimately not different from Orwell’s Oceania and the rest of his 1984 dystopia. The market state also seems too close to the sci-fi cyberpunk “megacorp-dominated future” concept to be at all likely. Surely we can hope for a better future than that.

History shows that political communities do not survive when they get too big. The only way the countries of 300 million to a billion in population are sustainable today is coordination through electronic communication technologies. Loyalty and solidarity does not warmly exist within particularly large communities such as these. When a better opportunity comes along, people will take it. Inevitably, a better, smaller form of political organization will arise and will discredit the market state.

As Bobbitt’s Shield analysis shows, there will arise states or state-like political organizations that show they can advance the interests that people already have. An example is Al Qaeda. This terrorist organization helps fulfill the evil fantasies of its adherents. Can there be such an organization, except dedicated to justice?

This would lead to reviewing basic concepts such as capitalism, race, culture, religion, environment, and the modern industrial state. If technology and science can advance to a new level, perhaps the existing trends can continue. Otherwise, environmental constraints will limit economic growth and result in reduced prosperity, magnifying the chaos. Even if the necessary advances can be made to allow the march of civilization to continue unabated, the fundamental problem remains of catching ethics up with natural science.

To extend Bobbitt’s thinking in the excerpt a bit, one might argue that the entire cause of the GWOT is the presence of WMD in the hands of men of obsolete ethics. Is there not an imbalance between availability of technology and effective ethical demands, especially those on Muslims? Even if you presume that danger naturally comes from Muslims on jihad, the West has not developed the ethical or political armament to defend against a jihadist skyjacker or perhaps a WMD-equipped terrorist. Instead we paralyze ourselves with irrelevant debate on “racial profiling.” Thus we return to the basic problem posed of how human organization can lead us back to a balance of natural science and human ethics. The short answer of reverting to a pre-industrial human state would be a bitter pill. The difficult thing is to find a sociopolitical organization whereby these problems can be resolved.

Massachusetts citizens have had their right to vote on marriage taken away by a court. Now, a well-organized effort is underway to gather the signatures of Massachusetts citizens. Then, if the signature drive is successful, the Commonwealth will hold a vote on whether marriage should be protected. (*)

Power to the people.

Ethanol continues to inspire debate. (*)

From the start, the debate over ethanol has centered on a few simple questions: Is it cheaper to produce than fuels made from fossil fuels? And does it create more energy than it takes to produce it? But despite decades of research, the debate continues over the wisdom of pouring billions of dollars into ethanol production.

Ethanol production needs additional study.

The Islamic holy month, Ramadan, begins on October 5th this year and lasts about a month, depending on the phases of the moon. (*)

Numerous terrorist attacks have previously occurred during the month of Ramadan.

On his radio show on September 28, William Bennett said:

But I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime you could if that were your sole purpose you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do but your crime rate would go down. So these these far out these far-reaching you know extensive extrapolations are I think tricky.

(*) Bennett purports to be a philosopher. The very act as described would constitute genocide, which is a crime of great magnitude. Therefore, what Bill Bennett said is nonsense on its face.

To “abort every black baby in this country” would not lower the crime rate. Instead it would create a crime wave of unimaginable proportions.

Furthermore, Bennett’s remarks are offensive. His defense of speaking hypothetically doesn’t wash because his remarks were indecent and impolite. (†)

While black people do commit more crimes than average, the proper way of addressing that is to address the issue directly. Is it because of poverty or culture? An open discussion of this or any other public issue should be welcome.

Bennett should not be forced off his radio show because he made his remarks. This is a free country. What is highly likely to occur, however, is that Bennett has shredded his own credibility. Unless he somehow puts out the fire, few people are going to care what he thinks anymore, the show’s ratings will decline, and he will be out looking for work.

As an occasional listener to his show, though not at the moment in question, I can say that Bennett’s credibility with me is shot.