A good friend has suggested that I write down the shortest possible summary of everything I’ve learnt, or believe I’ve learnt, from my twenty-something years’ worth of researching and writing about, women, feminism, and the relationship between the sexes.
Hardly an easy task, but never was a suggestion more welcome! So here goes.
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“Everything concerning women is a mystery, and the mystery has one solution: pregnancy” (Nietzsche).
“Men and women are similar in some ways but different in others” (Plato).
Both the similarities and the differences are partly biological, partly socially “constructed.” Any further attempt to disentangle the two will only lead to absurdities,
Attempts to solve the problem by drawing analogies with other animals are very problematic. This is because a. There are so many species, all of them different form each other, with which to compare; and b. The decision as to which ones are or are not relevant is necessarily arbitrary.
No known society treats its male and female members in exactly the same way. Pregnancy and giving birth apart, the most important reason for this is physiological. Even in modern societies many jobs require plenty of strength and stamina. Fields in which men, on the average, enjoy clear advantages over women.
For over a century now, each generation of feminists has proclaimed its own version of “the new women.” She who smoked like a man, drove an automobile like a man, attended university like a man, wore pants like a man, entered the professions and worked like a man, boxed like a man. and even—would you believe it—ejaculated like a man. All this, under the banner of “empowerment”! But underneath little if anything has changed.
In all known societies, the higher up the slippery pole of power, wealth and fame you climb the fewer the women you meet. Among those you do meet, far fewer have made it by their own efforts as opposed to those of their male relatives.
Furthermore, whatever success career women have enjoyed has come mainly at the expense of other women. Why? Because, for every successful career woman, there are two or three others who serve her in doing household work, minding children, and so on. To this extent, but also because successful women tend to have fewer children, feminism is self-defeating.
Whatever success feminism has had has had is mainly due to the prevalence (in the West) of the so-called Long Peace. It will pass (in Israel, my own Israel, it is starting to pass right now). I am not aware of feminism achieving very much in Russia or Ukraine. Let alone the Sudan.
Last not least: In all known societies, it is what men do that people consider the most important of all (Margaret Mead). This is even more true of women than of men; as the Dutch poet Chawa Weinberg put it, “If men were to bleed, how large and imposing the sanitary napkins.” Hence I do not see feminists’ great successes. All I see is PE; it is like pursuing a mirage.
As the Bible puts it: “Unto him your passion, and he shall rule you” (Genesis 3.16).