The Status of Women

A reply to Louise Perry's review of *Don't Be a Feminist*

Louise Perry, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, reviewed my Don’t Be a Feminist last month. Or to be more precise, she wrote a detailed critique of the title essay. It’s definitely the best such critique so far. Here’s my point-by-point reply. Perry’s in blockquotes; I’m not.

Any non-evil polemic against feminism must necessarily begin by defining feminism in a somewhat unorthodox manner, given that the definition of feminism that most of us will be familiar with—the definition offered by, for instance, Merriam Webster: “belief in and advocacy of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes”—is so mild as to be agreeable to all but your more reactionary Saudi sheik, and even the Saudis are now permitting women to vote and drive. 

This is an amazing and welcome concession. Verily, the “orthodox definition” is “so mild as to be agreeable to all but your more reactionary Saudi sheik.” Which strongly suggests that the orthodox definition is silly - a thinly-veiled effort to win a culture war by fiat. Yet how could this warped definition of feminism become orthodox? Via fear. Even though the all-but-your-more-reactionary-Saudi-sheik-inclusive definition violates common usage, feminists lash out if you refuse to play along.

So Caplan offers an elegant alternative, one that he believes actually describes the meat of what twenty-first century Western feminism is all about: “the view that society generally treats men more fairly than women.” It’s a good definition in the sense that it identifies a point of disagreement between (at least some) feminists and (at least some) non-feminists. Whether one is willing to, as Caplan terms it, “sign on the dotted line” in response to such a statement does, I agree, tell us something meaningful. 

A generous concession, but I humbly request more. The best data we have shows that this “point of disagreement” is in fact the central dispute between the vast majority of people who call themselves feminists and the vast majority of people who don’t.

But Caplan’s is also a definition that invites people on both sides of the feminist aisle to whip out a scorecard and start adding up instances of gendered unfairness, as he promptly proceeds to do.

To be clear, I’m hardly the person “whipping out the scorecard.” Feminists whipped out the scorecard in the 60s, and have kept it on public display ever since. Indeed, their “scorecard” is more of a jumbotron scoreboard. My value-added: I point out that the familiar score-keepers are stubbornly one-sided. If we’re going to keep score, let’s do so judiciously.

You can see already that the scorecard is getting messy. It turns out that assessing the “fairness” of how “society” treats one half of the population compared with the other is difficult to judge, since there are so many different metrics one might use. Which, of course, is Caplan’s point: he offers up a definition of feminism, only to demolish its priors.

Slightly overstated. A true “demolition” would show that men are clearly treated far less fairly than women. Which I also disbelieve.

As the philosopher Alex Hill has pointed out, “Caplan wants the question of whether one ought to be a feminist to be empirically decidable.” If we accept this premise, then most of us will be forced to concede that men are not, always and everywhere, treated “more fairly than women” in an empirical sense. According to this definition, I am not a feminist. 

Even a staunch feminist could, on my definition, concede that men are not “always and everywhere” treated more fairly than women. In the social sciences, exceptions abound. What I’d like readers to grant is that, on balance, men are treated about as fairly as women. Perry often sounds like she agrees, but does she?

And yet I persist in describing myself as such, and not only because I enjoy confounding my critics’ expectations (although I do). I believe that there is some merit in using a looser definition of feminism that incorporates the recognition of substantial differences between the sexes. I assert that there are important ways in which men and women differ from one another, both physically and psychologically, and that these differences mean that the interests of the sexes are sometimes in tension. 

So far, I’m in agreement. Though it’s strange to call this a “looser definition” of feminism, because the average feminist would probably have an especially high level of disagreement with these claims.

Women are less likely to be found in positions of power. This is true for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that it is women who give birth to babies, and women who tend to experience the strongest emotional pull towards being in close proximity to their young children. This basic biological fact means that all mothers will have to spend a short period of time out of the labour force when they give birth, and many mothers will want to extend that time further in order to care for their children. That’s a completely legitimate desire, but it inevitably impairs a woman’s career progression.

True but misleading. As I said in my original essay, women are indeed underrepresented at the top of society. But they are also underrepresented at the bottom of society.

Combine this with women’s higher average agreeableness (that is, the urge to put the interests of other people before one’s own),

As I explain in my review of Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, this ignores the other big personality gap between men and women: Women are more neurotic, which means they have a stronger tendency to feel and express sadness, anger, anxiety, and so on. What’s the net effect of women’s personalities on women’s self-advocacy? In theory, unclear. In practice, I say women self-advocate more, at least in modern Western societies. I suspect this is close to a human universal, but the data is sparse.

and we end up with an important problem: the interests of women, particularly mothers, are less likely to be given voice in the corridors of power.

Unless, of course, human beings - both male and female - have evolved to care more about female well-being and especially female suffering. Which they very likely have.

Feminism—specifically, a feminism orientated towards maternity—is, I posit, the political movement that exists in order to counteract this problem.    

Question: If our political system is “less likely to give voice to the interests of women,” shouldn’t it be easy to show that our society generally treats men more fairly than women? Yet Perry agrees that the evidence is very mixed.

I maintain, rather, that feminism is the political movement that amplifies our natural tendency to care extra about female well-being and especially female suffering. Feminism transforms a common human emotion into a consistent social philosophy. A philosophy that is consistently unfair to men - and promotes antipathy and self-pity among women.

I can imagine the response on the tip of Caplan’s tongue: that’s not how everyone else uses the term. Again, I agree. I concede that my definition is an eccentric one, even if I think it has merit, and that when most people describe themselves as “feminists” they’re thinking of something closer to Caplan’s “fairness” definition. 

I agree that feminists want to advocate for women’s interests. But if they weren’t convinced that our society generally treats men more fairly than women, they wouldn’t be nearly as self-righteous. The belief that our society generally treats men more fairly than women is what makes makes the feminist movement a moralistic crusade rather than a pragmatic interest group.

Except not quite. There’s a dimension to the real-world manifestation of feminism that is missed in the empirical “fairness” definition, and it’s a dimension that explains a great deal of how the feminist movement actually operates, including why my own brand of maternal feminism is so frequently marginalized. The magic ingredient is status…

As a writer, Caplan is, for good and ill, somewhat blind to the issue of status.

An odd claim. Does not my original essay repeatedly state that men are especially likely to have both high and low status?

A consistent theme in his work is a general insensitivity to the more emotional side of human motivation. 

When I ponder the world, I strive to avoid being emotional. Guilty as charged. But this hardly means I neglect of the power of human emotion. Quite the opposite. I maintain that unchecked emotionalism is the cause of most of the evil in the world.

In Open Borders, for instance, Caplan makes a compelling case for the potential economic advantages of completely free migration (paired, necessarily, with a huge reduction in the size of Western welfare states). Yet there would be important social costs to the open borders future that Caplan envisages… It can also lead to a feeling—particularly among natives at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap—of being disrespected or even despised by those who applaud the arrival of cheap migrant labour.

It could, though I see little sign of this actually happening. Cheap migrant workers normally have lower status than even low-skilled natives. Their status is so low that people publicly complain about them without looking over their shoulders first. Status-conscious natives should actually welcome low-status immigrants, because almost every native can tell himself, “At least I’m above them in the pecking order.”

Status anxiety is not, however, irrational—at least, not always. Status often has a cash value, and by its very definition it has enormous social value. Our preoccupation with status is a product of our evolutionary history, during which the esteem of one’s peers was an important determinant of one’s access to mates and resources. To put it more bluntly: in conditions of scarcity, low-status people often died. As the descendants of people who managed to avoid this fate, we all have a built-in desire to be regarded as high status. 

OK, though the intensity of this desire varies widely. Most humans are content to be average, and only a few are willing to work hard to attain very high status. On average, our desire to conform is much stronger than our desire to excel.

This is highly relevant to feminism. In Don’t Be a Feminist, Caplan raises and rebuts a familiar feminist argument:

Even if men and women spend equal amounts of time toiling, isn’t it unfair that men get to work so much outside the home, while women are stuck home taking care of kids? You could just as easily ask, “Isn’t it unfair that women get to take care of kids, while men are stuck working outside of the home?”

It’s a good question, and it’s asked with a touching degree of sincerity. I should note here that Caplan is a highly attentive father of four: he homeschools his children, and he took on the night shifts when they were babies, including for a pair of twins. This may go some way towards explaining this blind spot. While I agree with him that taking care of kids is both joyful and enormously important, Caplan seems not to have noticed that his admirable tendency to hold childcare in high regard is a long way from being a universal position.

Here’s what I’ve noticed: Almost no one holds childcare in the highest regard. A CEO, Nobel laureate, or senator can count on much more respect than a devoted mother of five. That said, almost everyone holds childcare in high regard. A devoted mother of even one child really can enjoy the respect of everyone who knows her without accomplishing anything else with her life.

Nearly all of us adore our mothers, of course, and most people take a vaguely benevolent attitude towards “the fairer sex.” The “women are wonderful” effect is a phenomenon found in psychological research, which suggests that people associate more positive attributes with women than they do with men. If asked to choose between saving a male and female stranger, for instance, research participants will consistently opt to save the woman. True misogynists do exist, but they are rare. 

Yes!

At the same time, and seemingly counter-intuitively, women are consistently positioned slightly further down the pecking order in terms of status compared with men, as are the roles and preferences associated with women.

No! Women’s status is not “further down the pecking order.” It is compressed. Women are less likely to have both very high and very low status.

As Caplan himself observes, “childhood is much harder for the ‘sissy’ than the ‘tomboy’—and this disparity likely continues into adulthood.” Femininity is not only disfavoured in boys and men, but also very often in girls and women, who are liable to earn labels like “bimbo” and “airhead” for leaning into it. 

Boys are punished more for gender non-conformity than girls. You could interpret this as a sign that “femininity is disfavored.” But isn’t the most natural explanation, again, Perry’s “women are wonderful” effect? A girl can be anything she wants to be, but a boy must measure up.

A classic 1972 essay by the anthropologist Sherry Ortner asked, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” …I want to suggest an alternative: it is not that women are both blessed and damned by their association with nature, but rather by their association with children. 

Human beings have a persistent habit of regarding women as childlike, both as a result of their smaller physiques, and also as a result of their role as mothers.

While this is plausible, this is another two-way street. If human beings tend to regard women as childlike, they also tend to regard men as beastlike. Dirty, crude, rude, lustful, and violent.

This [habit of regarding women as childlike] has its advantages. As Caplan notes, women—like children—are not conscripted in war or tasked with doing dangerous manual jobs, such as logging and waste disposal. Women also enjoy acts of benevolent sexism that are often invisible to the feminists who rage against male chauvinism, not recognizing that men are often far harsher to one another than women realize. 

Not just “advantages.” Net advantages. Even in peacetime at my age, I’d happily trade the right to vote for immunity to conscription. For a prudent young man, this isn’t even a close call.

But the status insult still stings, particularly for women of particularly high intelligence, or with particularly masculine temperaments, who highly resent the more-or-less implicit suggestion that they are intellectually childlike. This, I propose, is the true motivating force behind the feminist agitating that Caplan criticizes so strongly.

I agree that this perceived “status insult” is a motivating force behind feminist agitating. But why think that it’s especially motivating compared to complaints about pay gaps, glass ceilings, sexual harassment, objectification, or violence against women?

My response, in any case, is that both genders face a wide range of “status insults.” Focusing on status insults against women only makes sense if they’re especially unfair. Predictably, I deny that they are. And while you could decry all gender-based status insults as horrific, this seems silly. Because I am male, the world views me as beastlike, but I shrug it off. How?

First, I try to stay numerate. The negative impact on my life is moderate. Nothing to lose sleep over.

Second, I try to be understanding. The “men are beastlike” stereotype has a kernel of truth, and I occasionally act in a beastlike manner myself.

Third, I try to preemptively defuse the insult that I am beastlike with good manners, proper grooming, and so on.

If my daughter feels like society continues to treat her as “childlike” after adulthood, I would encourage her to copy my approach. Stay numerate, be understanding, and preemptively defuse the insult.

So when Caplan asks why feminists don’t envy the women who “get to take care of kids, while men are stuck working outside of the home,” he is missing the point. For feminists intent on masculine status, this is like asking why junior staff who “get to fetch the coffee” envy the guy who is “stuck” as the big boss. Isn’t is obvious? asks the bewildered would-be girlboss. The woman’s role is just…. worse. 

I agree that the “woman’s role is just worse” for some women. But plenty of women feel otherwise. And plenty of men with unpleasant and low-status jobs would prefer the woman’s role if they could get it.

If my daughter ever becomes a bewildered would-be girlboss, I’ll give her two pieces of classic advice. First, if you want to lead, learn how to follow. Second, friendship rules the world. Instead of feeling aggrieved and voicing malcontent, demonstrate your value to the team and your appreciation of your teammates.

Which is also good advice for everyone else, too.