men & women8 quotes

“For women, this ideal of personhood took definitive legal form in the legalisation of abortion, and broader form in the rejection of ‘care’ as in any sense a female domain or obligation. But the net impact of women rejecting a sexist obligation to shoulder the burden of care hasn’t yet been men taking on an equal part of that burden. Rather, it’s been an awkward mixture of poorer people—usually women—being deputised as paid substitute carers, and those most in need of care often going without.”

“The industrial era raised new questions about how the economics of life in common could and should mesh with sexuality and the asymmetric material realities of child-rearing. Over the first two centuries of industrial-era life, men and women re-negotiated those parameters, co-constructing twin spheres of emotional sensibility and market competition: spheres that articulated via the axis of romance. But with the advent of the sexual revolution those spheres began to dissolve into one another. And as we’ll see, the romantic vision of marriage has shed the crucial role it played in balancing relations between the sexes, becoming instead an active impediment to those relations.

Underwritten by economic and technological changes that freed wives from financial dependence, and sexual intercourse from pregnancy risk, feminist advocates for that dissolution envisaged a utopia of joy and pleasure. Liberated from the burden of social constraint heaped for millennia on women, as a means of discouraging unplanned pregnancy, women could at last explore their sexuality untrammelled. They succeeded.

Accelerated by the pervasive metaphor of the virtual ‘marketplace’, in which individual men and women are packaged as products to browse, select and enjoy, casual sexual encounters are normalised today. Now, in a world where romance has lost its function as the connective tissue between desire and material reality, and the Hayekian marketplace serves as governing metaphor even for our most intimate encounters, the prospect of making, or trusting another to make a binding promise of mutual commitment seems ever more remote. Instead, the ‘human’ dream of radically malleable sexual and reproductive identities envisioned variously by Kollontai, de Beauvoir and Firestone has set the stage for a new, nominally feminist vision, foundationally premised on the power of reproductive technologies to eliminate or at least de-nature every embodied limit experienced by men and women.

Under the sign of this bio-libertarianism, governed by the ‘spontaneous order’ of digital markets, relationships are formed and dissolved in an unbounded space marked by what one millennial man of my acquaintance describes as a ‘general film of impermanence. And the radical pursuit of unattached individual freedom this both presumes and legitimises comes at considerable, if asymmetrical, cost to both men and women.

For the price of transition first into an industrial-era marriage marketplace, and now from that into a cyborg-era sexual marketplace, has been the steady dwindling of any space for solidarity - not just between men and women, but between individuals of any kind. As I’ll show, it has instead set off an all-out war on relationships.”

“Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female world.”

“Aggression and eroticism are deeply intertwined. Hunt, pursuit, and capture are biologically programmed into male sexuality. Generation after generation, men must be educated, refined, and ethically persuaded away from their tendency toward anarchy and brutishness.”

“Alas, we have not too little intimacy, but too much. Once there was the world of men and the world of women. Now the sexes, freely mingling, know each other too well, and both have lost their allure.”

“Here are my conclusions after a lifetime of observation and reflection. Maleness at its hormonal extreme is an angry, ruthless density of self, motivated by a principle of ‘attack’ (cf. ‘roid rage’ produced in male bodybuilders by anabolic steroids). Femaleness at its hormonal extreme is first an acute sensitivity of response, literally thin-skinned (a hormonal effect in women) and secondly a stability, composure, and self-containment, a slowness approaching the sultry. Biologically, the male is impelled towards restless movement; his moral danger is brutishness. Biologically, the female is impelled toward waiting, expectancy; her moral danger is in stasis. Androgen agitates; estrogen tranquilizes—hence the drowsiness and ‘glow’ of pregnancy. Most of us inhabit not polar extremes but a constantly shifting great middle. However, a preponderance of gray does not disprove the existence of black and white. Sexual geography, our body image, alters our perception of the world. Man is contoured for invasion, while woman remains the hidden, a cave of archaic darkness. No legislation or grievance committee can change these eternal facts.”

“I see two principal kinds of male homosexuality. The first and most ancient is rooted in identification with the mother, perceived as a goddess. The castrated, transvestite priests of Cybele, honored in disco-like rites of orgiastic dance, survive in today’s glamorous, flamboyant drag queens. The second kind of homosexuality represents a turning away from the mother and a heroic rebellion against her omnipotence. Such homosexuality disdains femaleness and esteems perfected masculinity, which it symbolizes in the ‘hunk,’ the taughtly muscled, arrogantly architectural male form first fully imagined by the Greeks. Greek athletics were a religious spectacle of the beauty of masculinity, formalized in the kouros sculptures that began the Western high-art tradition.”

“Trying to remake the future, feminism cut itself off from sexual history. It discarded and suppressed the sexual myths of literature, art, and religion. Those myths show us the turbulence, the mysteries and passions of sex. In mythology we see men’s sexual anxiety, their fear of woman’s dominance. Much sexual violence is rooted in men’s sense of psychological weakness towards women.”