Modern Feminism and Liquid Life

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again but already it was impossible to say which was which.
                                  —  George Orwell, Animal Farm

 In a series of fascinating books, "Moral Blindness," "Liquid Life," and "Retrotopia," one of the master thinkers of our time, Zygmunt Bauman, analyzes the besetting dilemma of modern life, namely, the fluid state of cognitive frames that may change without warning, signifying the preferential locating or dislocating of certain acts or categories of human beings. The problem is the confusion caused by “aspects of liquid life that cannot maintain its shape for long” and that flow into any definitional compartment one chooses.

In other words, a thing or a person is what you decide it, he, or she is at any given historical juncture as social and political circumstances change, violating the stability of law and communal understandings and resorting to opportunistic judgments as part of a new and ever-changing consensus. There is no longer any agreement regarding basic civic compacts, customary practices, and civilizational norms, implying an attitude of moral numbness and the aborting of an abiding sense of responsibility to one’s peers.

Such is the cultural and ideological environment in which we now find ourselves, inflamed by ignorance, outright stupidity, bigotry, and scheming expedience. We are living in an era of conceptual delinquency and referential anarchy, a systemic and indelible condition of public and institutional life in which boundaries have become permeable and the persuasive power of gratifying mendacity is opposed only by the dogged and unpopular commitment to difficult, longstanding truth. 

Feminism, given all the havoc it wreaks and harm it does, is perhaps the most visible expression of liquid modernity, the most emphatic symptom of an age, over a century in preparation, in which borders are no longer recognized as necessary or beneficial — physical borders, cognitive borders, biological borders. Hierarchy is anathema. Difference is offensive. Structure is malleable. Objective truth is personal interpretation. Gender is fluid. The concept of patriarchy as a civilizational constant is redefined and demonized as a social ill.

Marriage, the home, the bearing and bringing up of children are considered throwbacks to a more primitive age, a posture most recently highlighted by the hysterical feminist reaction to a traditionally Catholic commencement address delivered by Kansas City Chiefs star player Harrison Butker at Benedictine College in Kansas. Well over 200,000 of the fevered, mostly women, sent a petition to the team demanding he be fired. As Janice Fiamengo comments on her substack, “Let a man praise his wife for her devotion to family, and we witness a stampede of foul-mouthed nasties to their bullhorns.

Butker’s transgression was unforgivable. He spoke against birth control, IVF, surrogacy, and euthanasia, and in favor of natural families. As Fiamengo points out, Butker did not tell women that they should not have careers or that they had a duty to be homemakers, but he praised the traditional vocation of women as wives and mothers as a high calling. Significantly, he encouraged men “to reject ‘the lie that has been told to you that men are not necessary in the home or in our communities.’ On the contrary, he asserted, ‘As men, we set the tone of the culture. And when that is absent, disorder, dysfunction and chaos set in.’”

In the ropy feminist world, inversion becomes the norm. Iron John becomes a beta male, a white knight, or a woman. He can lactate and menstruate, apparently. He can even give birth. With too few exceptions, the nurturing female is now a rule-brandishing dominatrix or a pietistic, authoritarian spouse, as in Aristophanes’ devastating farce Assembly of Women (Ecclesiazusae) (392 B.C.), which satirized the woman as role model and humorously pilloried the female takeover of the Athenian Assembly, leading to social ruin and ruthless feuding among women.

Feminism has not only taken over the institutions of the culture, it has itself become an institution. And yet it is only a sign of a civilization wishing itself into the night, as Oswald Spengler said. A sign is not the object it points to, no less than a symptom is the disease it marks.

This is why defeating feminism, rendering it sane and reasonable, is in itself not possible unless the very temper of liquid modernity is understood and resisted, an effort perhaps of decades and even centuries. It is good to moderate the symptom so that the pain that accompanies it is reduced, but the infirmity persists until it is eventually treated, assuming it is remediable. 

Edmund Burke suggested that such a consummation can happen gradually as the collective sensibility undergoes a mysterious course of spontaneous enlightenment based on a reverence for historical continuity. Maybe. But the war for cultural survival needs to be conducted on two fronts: against the symptom and against the disease, although the symptom is far more readily discernible than the malady. But once the disease is conquered, the symptom disappears.

Ben Bartee at PJ Media understands feminism in its various manifestations, especially in its more radical forms, as “symptoms of a sick society.” He eviscerates the  contemporary practice of rage rituals, “[t]he latest cancerous manifestation of third-wave feminism during which women (arguably witches) convene in the woods to smash things and scream into the ether about real or imagined transgressions against their human rights or whatever.”

If the spirit of the classical Greek playwright Euripides could be summoned from the grave and observe our feminist (r)age, he would not be surprised. The scenes of mainly liberal women beating about in the woods in a fever of destructive rectitude is reminiscent of Euripides’ last play, "The Bacchae" (circa 405 B.C.), in which the unfortunate ruler of Thebes, Pentheus, is ripped to shreds by the demented RadFem hordes of the day. In a bacchanalian bender in the midst of the woods, these insensible votaries include his own mother, Agave, who tears off his head and carries the trophy back to Thebes.

There are strong premonitory elements in "The Bacchae" that apply to our contemporary dilemma in which carceral feminism has come to cultural prominence. In the current historical moment, the trance afflicting our radical feminists is self-induced, leading to a nationwide vendetta against so-called “toxic masculinity.” The belief that the “patriarchy” is responsible for all of society’s ills has produced noxious consequences: the ubiquitous allegations targeting men for sexual misconduct on the flimsiest of pretexts, and, socially and legally, tearing men limb from limb in a fury of pathogenic derangement.

What is also interesting is that Pentheus had worn female attire in order to carry out a reconnaissance unobserved in the forest where the maenads cavort. Mutatis mutandis, a version of his regrettable decision, is currently evident among us, as many men come increasingly to side with the feminist dogma that women are society’s innocent victims and men are ruthless demagogues who must be denounced, punished, brought low like Pentheus, and ultimately feminized. The result is self-evident: a society in which women are growing increasingly departnered and demonstrably dissatisfied with their lot.

Contemporary feminists are Dionysiac maenads in modern form, neurotic carriers of the virus of liquid life which Bauman describes as “obstreperous and unmanageable.” Traditional categories that serve and have served the purposes of a stable and flourishing culture “are either left outside the realm of relevance and unattended, or actively discarded and swept away,” losing “their right to be preserved for their own sake.” Not a good prognosis for the future. “Can culture survive the demise of durability [and] perpetuity,” he asks, as it surrenders to “the fluidity of social placements and the frailty of human bonds?”

Related: The Paradox of the Good Marriage

Such is especially the case in gender roles and relations. The process is complicated and deepened, Bauman continues, by the fact that “role reversal is the rule here, though even that statement distorts the realities of liquid life, in which the two roles intertwine, blend and merge.” Liquid life, Bauman writes in "Retrotopia," “prevents dialogue” and impedes “the proper integration of correlative realities” (italics mine). The “frames” of communal existence “all rest on the firm experience of living in a world criss-crossed by borders, punctuated by border posts” and involving a “wide range of variations on the theme…of integration.” In our context, proper integration of the man and the woman is neither inversion nor merger but moral and domestic reciprocity, a correlative ideal of fruitful existence.

Feminism is the enemy of reasoned exchange and potential harmony. Indeed, all of feminism is a rage ritual, a species of Dionysiac madness in which clear borders and solid categories inherent in viable social life are erased, a sort of malign metallurgy in which distinct substances are smelted and fused, in which opposites coalesce, in which, to quote Orwell, “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength,” in which a vicious terrorist organization can be construed as a victim of oppression, in which oligarchic despotism is recast as liberal democracy, or in our discussion, man is woman and woman is man, a form of hermaphroditic sintering. 

This is the temper of our times, viscid and chaotic, of which feminism is among the most notable features, prominent among a syndrome of effects. But it is the syndrome itself, or its source in the psyche of Western man, that must be come to terms with, studied and understood in its historical configurations, before cultural coherence can be re-imagined, civil life re-established, and men and women begin once again to understand how to be happy together.