Change and its Discontents

This Kay Hymowitz article about how thanks to feminism nobody knows who should pay for dinner and so basically the world is doomed was published a while back, but I first saw it yesterday. I found it sort of grimly fascinating but couldn’t really find the words to express my feelings about it. But I bugged the twitterverse to get someone else to write about it and Will Wilkinson delivered:

I think I first saw this kind of argument clearly laid out in Tocqueville. If I remember correctly, he noted that there is a kind of soothing clarity in stratified societies with brightly marked class lines. When classes are stable over generations, and there is little mobility up or down, conventions that govern class relations become settled, making it easy to know how to behave toward those above and below one’s station. Moreover, when classes are fixed and mobility is limited, there is little anxiety about improving one’s position, since there’s so little prospect for doing so. American-style democratic equality creates a pattern of unceasingly stressful striving for relative rank, and all this mobility up and down produces a confusion in manners that can lead to dangerous social frictions and resentments. It becomes too hard to know what to expect of others, or what others expect from us.

This is, as far as I can tell, Hymowitz’s argument about gender relations in the post-feminist era. Women attaining something like social equality with men has created not so much liberation as a kind of toxic confusion. When women are free to be individuals, free to want different things than other women, men can’t be sure what any particular women might want from him. To open the door for her or not!? To pick up the check or not!? To be a nice guy like she says she wants or a bad boy like she really wants?! These unresolved and unresolvable questions has led inevitably to the contemporary condition in which men are either unlovable whining sad sacks or misogynist assholes who cite a cartoon version of Darwinism to justify treating a woman as little more than an upgrade from Jergens and a sock. If we don’t like it, we only have feminism to blame. Or something like that.

Exactly. As Will says, this phenomenon is real enough and it’s worth taking seriously the fact that it bothers people. But it’s really not worth taking seriously the idea that this cost outweighs the benefits, both the benefits in terms of justice and the benefits in terms of drastically enhancing the scope of opportunity available to both men and women. At any rate, Hymowitz by just really going on at length manages to lay out the underlying logic of a lot of contemporary social conservative anxiety in a way that you rarely see set out.