2018 Conference Talk
The Two Faces of Modern Misandry
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While in accord with the spirit of this conference, when it came to speaking at it, I found myself weighted by the impression that I had little to add to what I had already said elsewhere on its theme, and, a bit weary of listening to myself, thought I might do us all the favor of getting out of others’ way by giving not a whole paper, but only a couple of thoughts. The first is on our principal business here, and the second is on the spiritual dimension of opposition to patriarchy, a perilous subject with which I have not previously dealt.
The Negative Force of Egalitarianism
In Sexual Politics (1970) Kate Millett wrote, “Perhaps patriarchy’s greatest psychological weapon is simply its universality and longevity.” Well, yes . . . to be sure . . . but one must add that universality and longevity are something more than “psychological weapons.” They are also the best evidence of what sociologist Steven Goldberg, to whom I am sure Allan Carlson and others will be referring, calls patriarchy’s inevitability. It is difficult for me to imagine that this observation, even apart from Goldberg, does not loom in the thought-background of all feminists as intelligent and deliberative as Kate Millett.
This inspires, in me at least, a certain admiration for their assiduity in pursuing what they may in their hearts fear is a lost cause. There is something heroic in feminist resolve, exhibited in their struggle against the hard realities of history. (And let me add that I am here treating feminism as a coherent phenomenon with an articulable philosophy, which may be summarized as the establishment of the female by the diminution or elimination of the male.)
That resolve is not unlike the Christian’s in the face of his Lord’s promise that “in this world you shall have tribulation”—although no comparable authority is there to give feminists the assurance, “Be not afraid, for I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Whatever comfort the feminist finds in her fellowship, she and her society are lonely in the world, fulminating Invictus-like at the stars in their courses. It is hard for her to kick against the pricks, hedged about as she is by intolerable maleness on every side, “the gold lion, the bearded bull—which breaks through the hedges and scatters the little kingdom[s] of [our] primness . . . the masculine that none of us can escape” (C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength).
The feminist successes at castration—much encouraged by men who use it not to advance any women’s cause but to frustrate competition from other men—fail with the dying of the cultures where it is done. The suppression of maleness, as Camille Paglia has indicated and Christina Hoff Sommers has explicated, is a form of cultural suicide. A stable containing only mares and geldings hasn’t much of a future. Like the parasite that destroys its host, those organizations that advance the anti-maleness of egalitarianism, the apparently more benign form of feminism, as a principle of operation, as so many churches do, are terminally ill, learning the hard way that the maleness of males is necessary for survival.
If it sounds odd, as it does to many today, to characterize mere egalitarianism as anti-male, we must understand what it is that patriarchy among Christians stands against. The faith is less concerned today with the blatantly misanthropic and ultimately genocidal fish-needing-bicycle variety of feminism, since that is so patently absurd that it needn’t be opposed by anything but its definition. Rather, the principal concern of the Church’s quotidian struggles against feminism is its more presentable and seemingly more reasonable egalitarian form. This is the kind that, in its elemental desire to equalize the sexes—its elemental desire to equalize the sexes—denies maleness to the male, the maleness that in the social context produces patriarchy as its natural result. Sexual egalitarianism is a form of misandry—hatred of the masculine—and is just as radical and destructive as the more explicitly negative varieties.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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