Yesterday, it came to me that perhaps the most destructive aspect of feminism is that it empowers young women at the expense of everyone else. Although I had observed that older women are usually more reasonable and have a much better perspective on the matters of family and decent behavior, I tended to attribute that to generational differences. But that can’t be true any longer, because the only women who were really untouched by feminism during the years it would have been relevant to them are very, very old these days. Today, a woman at retirement age would have been right in the middle of the sexual revolution during her most fertile and sexually active years, but these women do not seem thrilled by the behavior of the younger cohort.
In my short writeup of Charlotte Raven’s piece, I exposed the discomfort some older feminists have with the rampaging sexuality of today’s younger women. Certainly, young women seem pretty out of control today, but are they really much worse than they were in the late 1960s-70s? Probably not. The 1970s, which I can just barely make out through the mist of earliest awareness, were excessively libertine. In fact, the advent of AIDS had a chilling effect on sexual license in the 1980s, and the rampant “anything goes” promiscuity of the 70s was shut down for a while.
So it isn’t as though sexual behavior is significantly worse than it was decades ago, although promiscuity might be more socially acceptable. According to some of the men and women I know who were young during the 1970s, there was plenty of fun to be had. In fact, at the local university, one sorority became a brothel during the 70s, and was eventually shut down. Some of my friends’ mothers did stints as hookers back then. They never told me or their children about this, but word of these kinds of things gets around. Rock band groupies were notorious, and women at concerts were a seething mass of sexuality. Listening to girls screaming at Beatles’ concerts is probably one of the most intimidating sounds I’ve ever heard on tape.
Women who are pushing retirement now lived the sexual revolution with as much abandon as young women “hook up” today. Human sexuality is a biological constant, so there’s nothing qualitatively different about today’s young women (except perhaps environmental estrogen), but there is an important difference.
That seething, sexually chaotic mass of the early stages of the sexual liberation was a demographic mammoth. The young women of the baby boomer generation had disproportionate power due to numbers. Their goals in the early stages were exactly the same as young women’s goals are today: empowerment. Women seek power through sexuality, and they wanted free reign to do so. They got it, and now we have a culture and legal regime dedicated to allowing them free expression of that powerful sexuality.
Young men express power through force. Not only violence, but that sublime mental and physical athleticism that only young men possess. The R&B singer/dancer, the metal guitarist and the young professional athlete epitomize youthful male power. Unfortunately, the street thug does as well, so the dark, dangerous aspect of the young male is greatly feared in peacetime. Stanley Kubrick did a brilliant job delving into the subconscious fear that society has for male force. Several of his films captured the terrifying brutality and bestiality that young men are capable of. Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket and The Shining come to mind. Even Kubrick’s male computers were homicidal!
His art, and that of others, was taken as a warning. Those in power should fear the masculine, and rein it in. The silly liberals who defended young men were setting themselves up to be beaten and smashed by them. People took that to heart, and soon policy began to reflect the new attitude toward young men. Young men were deliberately disempowered, and male tendencies suppressed and punished.
However, at the same time the equally disruptive sexual power of young women was aided and encouraged by these powerful people who had grown to fear young men. For powerful men, sexually liberated young women are intoxicating. There is a symbiosis between socially dominant men and fertile, sexually powerful young women. Together, they can exercise a great deal of control over society — so long as most men are pacified. Younger men, who do not have much social power, are left out of this.
But there is another group that is explicitly disempowered: older women.
In years past, women who survived past their childbearing years exercised a great deal of control over family matters. Even – and perhaps most strikingly – in staunchly patriarchal societies, such as traditional Italian Catholic, Confucian Chinese, and Orthodox Jewish, these matriarchs held enormous power and sway. The Chinese nai nai, the Italian nonna, and Yiddish bubbe were formidable, highly influential people in their families and out. In my own culture, Ma Joad of The Grapes of Wrath epitomized the American matriarch. They had earned respect through a life of work, childrearing and devotion to their family, and even the toughest of young men would humbly submit to them in the confines of the home.
I suspect that the second wave feminists who are increasingly nervous about the direction society has taken are starting to realize that now that their sexual power is all but gone, there will be no dignified role for them. Many of them are childless, many divorced, and many put their children in the hands of others to further their careers. Their role as matriarch is greatly diminished by their failure to earn it. But even the women who do deserve it are being upstaged by their daughters and granddaughters, who have been told over and over again that they can do whatever they please, and any criticism they may get from the older women in their lives is only the result of jealousy.
There is always some danger in empowering the young. Authority requires perspective that can only be gained from maturity. There is also evidence that the brain changes as we age, giving us better control over impulses and potentially rash decisions. For women, the disappearance of the hormonal cycle that accompanies fertility probably promotes mental stability. Today, instead of having older women calling the shots in the family, we have young women, overflowing with hormones that drive a great deal of their behavior, exercising power and control over everyone around them. This is one reason it can be such a nightmare to work with younger women, who are so often capricious and volatile.
I would like to think that older women could be allies in an effort to restrain the rampant sexuality of young women and their alpha male partners in crime, but unfortunately too many of them were disciples of feminism for their entire productive lives. It is very difficult for people who have supported an ideology for a long time to admit that they lived for an evil cause, and I’m not sure more than a fraction of older women will do so. However, I remain hopeful that a few will break ranks and add their voices to the growing number of people in the Anglosphere who are saying “enough!”
After all, it is not only ordinary men who stand to gain from the defeat of feminism: grandmothers, too, would find their lives vastly more rewarding and their influence greatly expanded. And so, in one of those curious twists, we men may find ourselves advocating for the return of the matriarch.
