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http://salisbury.live.subhub.com/articles/20100526_10
publication
date: Jun 4, 2010
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author/source:
Stephen Baskerville
  
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Gender
politics is becoming too conspicuous to ignore. Triumphalist proclamations
of female political dominance now appear in ostensibly detached scholarly
journals. The trend is real, but it represents much more than ‘the macho
men’s club’ getting its just comeuppance for causing the financial crisis,
as Reihan Salam writes in the prestigious journal Foreign Policy. On the
cover of the august Wilson Quarterly, Sara Sklaroff sees fresher salads and
smaller bus seats as evidence that ‘women are taking over.’ That journals
with pretensions to serious scholarship address on this frivolous level
what may be the most profound power shift since the fall of the Roman
Empire demonstrates that important questions are not being asked. Salam,
Sklaroff, and other prophets of a feminine future are quick with
predictions, but they ignore the trends already well advanced in the
present. The sexualisation of politics — and the politicization of sex — is
the most profound social trend of the last forty years, with roots going
back at least a century. In importance it far exceeds (though is also
connected to) the challenge radical Islam presents to Western society. The
emergence of women into top positions of power is only the tip of the
iceberg. More far-reaching are the vast shifts in political power at all
levels from the family to the United Nations.
‘Sexual politics’ (the term was popularized in a book title by feminist
Kate Millett) has never become a subject of focused critical or scholarly
attention, except by its proponents. Its impact thus goes largely
unperceived and unexamined. Yet it now dominates national and international
agendas. Overtly sexual issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage are
only the most obvious. Every item in modern politics is presented in terms
of its implications for women. The economic collapse is said to bring
special hardships for women, though as Salam points out, the resulting
unemployed are about 80 per cent men. War too is said to fall
disproportionately on women, though obviously most casualties are men. In a
foreign policy where war aims are already promiscuous and undefined,
women’s liberation is thrown into the grab-bag of justifications.
For years, an assortment of otherwise unrelated issues have been promoted
by sexual activists in sexual terms. The vanguard of this trend is in the
United States, where gun control is advocated by the Million Mom March (and
opposed by the mostly male National Rifle Association), drinking laws are
changed by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and Code Pink dominates the war opposition.
The militant Moms Rising is another variation on the theme. ‘Some
commentators argue that the whole agenda in the US is shifting towards ‘the
politics of maternity’,’ observes The Guardian.
The impact transcends current events and has altered our understanding of
the very scope and purpose of the state. Salam quotes historian Stephanie
Coontz arguing that the welfare state benefited men because it created
jobs. In fact, the welfare state throughout the West was overwhelmingly a
feminine and feminist initiative. John Lott has documented how the welfare
state grew up following the enfranchisement of women, who have consistently
voted for its provisions far more than men. As a result, the traditional
state roles of defending borders and internal protection have given way to
a government apparatus extensively involved in childrearing and caring for
the sick and elderly. Government itself has thus become feminized. ‘The
annexation by government of most of the key responsibilities of life —
child-raising, taking care of your elderly parents — has profoundly changed
the relationship between the citizen and the state,’ writes Mark Steyn.
These are responsibilities governments have assumed because they are
precisely the ones women have renounced. Conversely, the traditional
military and police roles increasingly abdicated by the state are
traditionally masculine.
This feminization of state machinery points to another trend with direct
consequences today. For as Salam obliquely reveals, the welfare state functions
are overwhelmingly female-dominated: education, child care, care of the
elderly, and health. These are also the fields now being expanded by the
Brown and Obama governments’ massive expenditures for economic stimulation.
Whether or not this spending will stimulate the private sector where most
masculine employment occurs, it will certainly expand public sector female
employment.
The consequences extend well beyond the economic. For what the welfare
state represents, beyond huge government expenditure, is the politicization
and bureaucratization of roles traditionally performed privately within the
household. Expanding female employment into traditionally male occupations
has taken place largely among the elite. Many more women have entered the
workforce in jobs that reflected the domestic roles with which they felt
comfortable. Rather than caring for their own children within their own
families, women began leaving the home to work in government offices where
they care for other people’s children as part of the public economy:
day-care, early education, and ‘social services’. This transformed
childrearing and other family functions from private into public and
taxable occupations, expanding the tax base and with it the size and power
of the state. Meanwhile, their sisters entering traditional male
occupations were driving down male wages, turning female employment from a
luxury into a necessity. Soon, a political class paid from those taxes took
command positions in vastly expanded public education and social services
bureaucracies, where they supervise other women who look after other
people’s children, further expanding the size and reach of the state into
what had been private life. This has had profound effects blurring the
distinction between private and public. For as feminists correctly point
out, the traditional feminine roles were mostly private. Politicizing the
feminine and shifting feminine roles from the home to the state has
therefore meant politicizing and bureaucratizing private life.
A major manifestation is the politicization of children. Hardly an issue is
raised today without being presented in terms of its impact on children.
Whether the matter is healthcare, environmental protection, gun control,
seat belts, or war, the imperative is made more urgent by what it will do
‘for the children’. Concurrent with the emancipation of women, a huge
machinery has arisen over child welfare. Few journalists or scholars
scrutinize it, and few people understand it until its extensive regulatory
requirements affect their decisions about their own children. It is the
world of ‘social services’: social work, child psychology, child and family
counselling, childcare, public education, child protection, child support
enforcement, and juvenile and family courts.
The US also led this trend, despite being regarded as among the less
extensive welfare states. It is institutionalized in the $50 billion
federal Administration for Children and Families, itself part of the
gargantuan $900 billion Department of Health and Human Services. HHS
dispenses over $200 billion in grants (‘larger than all other federal
agencies combined’) funding local ‘human services’ or ‘social services’
bureaucracies — by far the largest patronage network ever created in the
Western world, reaching into every household in the land, and one that
makes the former Soviet nomenklatura look ramshackle. Britain and Europe
have followed suit with cabinet-level ministries devoted to women and
children. This machinery caters largely to needs created by the sexual
revolution. For the problems it addresses have arisen principally through
welfare expansion itself, unwed childbearing, and divorce. Here too the
vanguard has been British and American women.
As women dominate politics and paid employment, they have less time for
children and families. But the result is not that men share in these
spheres, as we once assumed. Instead childbearing simply declines, and
childrearing is taken over by state functionaries, while men are
marginalized and even criminalized, as Salam recognizes. The most obvious
consequence is the decline in fertility throughout the West and beyond.
Just as welfare was a feminine initiative, so the resulting societies have
become literally matriarchal, dominated not simply by women but by
single-mother households. These communities are characterized by poverty,
crime, substance abuse, and other social ills, all of which correlate to
fatherlessness much more than to race, class, or any other factor. Contrary
to the widespread assumption, nothing suggests that paternal abandonment is
responsible. On the contrary, the evidence is clear that it results from
feminine choice. This is documented as fatherlessness spreads to the middle
class through divorce, where the overwhelming preponderance of filings are
by women. Few involve grounds such as abuse, desertion, or adultery.
Instead most women divorce for reasons such as ‘growing apart’ or ‘not
feeling loved or appreciated’. Because this marginalization of fathers
accounts for social pathologies such as substance abuse and crime, it also
serves to justify almost every expansion of state power — from additional
welfare provisions, to education and health expenditures, to expanded law
enforcement and incarceration.
The most serious consequence of the feminization of politics proceeds from
what is after all the most basic internal government function: punishing
criminals. For the marginalization of men and fathers has increased not
only criminality but also criminalization. If there is an elephant standing
in the halls of power today it is the proliferation or redefinition of
sexual crimes — crimes labelled and defined so that only males can be
guilty: rape, sexual harassment, domestic violence, child abuse,
non-payment of child support, human trafficking. These offences blur the
distinction between private conflict and violent crime, bypassing the due
process procedures and protections of standard criminal law.
Sklaroff predicts that in a female-dominated world ‘there will be more
police’ than ever before so that women can feel safe. When it is no longer
ideologically acceptable to suggest that women be protected by husbands,
fathers, or other men in their families, the need is filled by gendarmes.
Sklaroff’s prediction has already been fulfilled. In The Prison and Gallows
(Cambridge, 2006), feminist scholar Marie Gottschalk documents how the
massive increase in incarceration since the 1970s results from campaigns
not by law-and-order traditionalists (who were hardly new) but by newly
vocal ‘interest groups and social movements not usually associated with
penal conservatism’. Yet she names only one: ‘the women’s movement’. As
Gottschalk shows, the principal pressure group lobbying for more arrests
and incarcerations for at least two centuries has been politicized women.
‘It is striking what an uncritical stance earlier women reformers took
toward the state,’ she observes. ‘They have played central roles in…
uncritically pushing for more enhanced policing powers.’
The feminization of politics and law enforcement is global.
Quasi-governmental organizations like the United Nations and the European
Union were created to prevent armed aggression and war. As they prove
themselves either incapable for that task or irrelevant, they have found
new missions for themselves, creating their own social work bureaucracies
similar to those found in Western governments, which they also propagate
among less developed countries. Most of these emphasize the politics of
women and children. Here too we see, on several fronts, attempts to
criminalize ideologically incorrect behaviour, even matters not previously
considered crimes and even when beyond the reach of any effective
judiciary. Innovations like the International Criminal Court, the
Convention on the Rights of the Child, and measures against human
trafficking are all efforts to take complex political, economic, and social
problems such as underdevelopment, poverty, and war and reclassify them as
crimes whereby alleged malefactors can be prosecuted by politicized tribunals
that lack the detachment and due process protections found in developed
judiciaries.
‘The axis of global conflict in this century will not be warring
ideologies, or competing geopolitics, or clashing civilizations,’ writes
Salam. ‘It won’t be race or ethnicity. It will be gender.’ He may well be
right. But cheerleading for political trends is seldom a constructive
substitute for unbiased inquiry. If we are to avoid the ‘very violent’
future Salam predicts as a result, we should stop gloating and start
understanding.
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