Identity-suicide & ideology
The ancient & worthy Harvey Mansfield, America’s premier political scientist, had some words to say about feminism, woke, & trans madness on the occasion of receiving recently an honor. Read it all in the Claremont Review of Books, & here’s a particularly useful way to understand why our latter-day liberals fail to escape traps they set themselves:
The importance of feminism to woke. Behind self-expression are the thought & political power of feminism. For what is feminism? It is the assertion made by Simone de Beauvoir in her book The Second Sex (1949) that a woman has no permanent definition, only a historical one. Woman has been defined up to now by the imposition of power. With more power women can rise from second sex to first. Whether women will be equal or superior to men is left unsaid, but it would seem that the effort to equalize women will require treating them as superior during the transition. To destroy any definition of woman imposed by the power of men the women’s movement destroys what it calls “essentialism,” which is any effort to define. Indeed, the first target of the movement was femininity, opposed by Betty Friedan as The Feminine Mystique (1963). For women, femininity is letting yourself be put on a pedestal & defined by men. Beware of the courtesies of men! They try to impress you with your worth & dignity while denying you power. They offer you fake power. It’s no wonder that our Justice Ketanji Brown refuses to define herself as a woman. This refusal is what makes her a woman.
This refusal also causes feminism to lose its claim to be the first sex to the transgender persons. Suspended between the two traditionally given sexes, these brand-new identities stand for determined irresolution & constant identifying without ever coming to an identity. They are neither above sex nor a new sex. The transgenders are in control in the sense that everything is done to appease them & to ensure that they are included in the democratic whole. Lacking identity, they are pure identity before it commits suicide by defining an identity, thus surrendering to essentialism.
In fact, the transgenders are fakes. Most of them are men pretending to be women—fake women. They are the consequence, & represent the consequence, of feminism: the empowerment & elevation not of women but of fake women. Feminism has no guide for itself; it is a failed rebellion against nature. Feminism, one should add, is indebted to Karl Marx as well as to Nietzsche. In Marx it found the advancement of equality, to combine with Nietzsche’s will to power. The final stage of history in Communism, according to Marx & Engels, is the abolition of the division of labor that is responsible for human oppression. For women, this means the abolition of social roles, the disappearance of the housewife, of the routine & confinement as well as the artifices of femininity. Out of the kitchen they go & into the heady, exciting, outdoors realm of sexual harassment by liberated males.
Woke has much of the given, definitional femininity about it, the nature of woman from which Beauvoir led the prison escape. Only the most dedicated feminists will reject the small courtesies of sexist gentlemanliness, & responsibility for less-noticed advantages such as needing a mentor & appreciating “support.” These reveal the dependence of women, now transferred from the men in their lives, who love them, to government or employer with their impersonal bureaucracies, so as to disguise their sexist origin. Measures to control “bullying” are directed at the male rather than the female type of that human trait & nothing is said about indignities from not being brave enough to confront the bully oneself. The word “sissy” is no longer heard. As regards woke in general, the most obvious feminine aspect is its reliance on women’s weapon of shaming, given focus by the use of pronouns to raise consciousness of guilt instead of argument to convince.