Suzanne Venker, best known for theorizing about the imaginary war on men in an article I criticized here, has decided to answer a few burning questions for us. For instance, when she said for women to “embrace their femininity,” what did she mean?
Well, let’s just say the post begins by quoting Tracy McMillan, also a leading Worst Person Alive candidate, and gets worse from there.
Oddly, I agree with some things Venker says. Our culture is incredibly femmephobic: as a culture, we hate, fear, and despise feminine things, including gentleness, compassion, sensitivity, deference, adornment, giggling, and the color pink. Unfortunately, some aspects of the feminist movement have fallen prey to this cultural femmephobia and portrayed “women’s liberation” as the liberation to be as masculine as the dudes. (See also: pretty much anyone who criticizes staying home with children as anti-feminist.) But turning from hating women to hating things associated with women is not a feminist victory.
Femininity is powerful. Hard femmes who will kick your ass without breaking a nail. Self-sufficient people who can grow their own garden and can their own food and bake their own bread and would do just fine if dropped in your hypermasculine zombie apocalypse fantasies, thank you. Soft power and manipulation and killing with kindness. Solidarity and self-love found in nail salons and teenage sleepovers. The self-sacrifice and devotion required to be the primary caregiver of some pretty damn cool kids. Lipstick and foundation as armor to shield you from the daily microaggressions of a misogynistic society intend on grinding you down. That matters.
The problem I encounter is when Venker suggests that women have to be feminine and men cannot. A woman can honor and respect the feminine, and still choose not to be feminine herself. Similarly, if a man wants to embrace femininity, he should be perfectly welcome to do so. Of course, if a woman wants to embrace femininity or a man not to, that is also wonderful. Every gender presentation should be open to people of every gender.
Ms. Venker, however, has science for us!
Fortunately, there’s been an explosion of brain research in the past several years to help explain male and female anatomy. The best books are Dr. Louann Brizendine’s “The Male Brain” and “The Female Brain.”
I presume this is some odd use of the word “best” I was previously unfamiliar with, given that Dr. Brizendine’s book is notoriously full of inaccuracies and errors.
Neuroscience is incredibly new. There’s a lot of really basic things we don’t understand yet, like “why do we dream?” and “how is language implemented neurally?” and “what neurochemical things are happening when Ozy can’t get out of bed because life hurts so much?” If we can’t explain things like that, why would you assume that we can state categorically that and how men and women are different?
You cannot ignore that culture and upbringing plays an enormous role in how people behave, not to mention that thanks to confirmation bias we tend to notice people who fit the stereotypes and not notice people who don’t. People can continue to believe a stereotype that isn’t true just because they believe it. (Yeah. Brains are kind of awesome.)
The second half is another one of those “I agree, but no” situations. For instance, Venker says that if marriage and lasting love is your goal you must become comfortable with sacrifice and capitulation! I entirely agree with this. I mean, I wouldn’t say “capitulation” exactly, but as far as I can tell in every long-term committed relationship there are a certain number of “I love cabbage but she hates the smell, so I won’t eat it” and “his dream is to live on a boat, so despite my apathy about the water off I go” issues. If you’re going to wait for someone who is exactly compatible with you in every way… well, you’re going to be waiting for a long time.
Unfortunately, Venker’s idea of what you’ll have to sacrifice has absolutely nothing to do with actual compatibility issues.
Just because you make your own money doesn’t mean your guy can’t pay the bill. Just because you value independence doesn’t mean you can’t take your husband’s last name. Just because you can do the same job a man can do doesn’t mean you need to let him know it.
Um what.
The first two are just… bizarre. I honestly have a hard time imagining someone being like “I didn’t want to get married to her, but then she let me pay the bill and mentioned wanting to take my last name, and now I am in LOVE.” But what they lack in relevance they make up for in anti-feminist cliche goodness. Seriously, what next, is she going to pull out the “who opens the door?” thing? (By the way, the optimal rules are “the person who invites pays” and “the person with the coolest last name keeps it.” Can someone give me a column at Fox now?)
As for the third… call me a feminazi, but I think being dishonest is a really bad setup for a relationship. If he doesn’t love you unless you pretend not to know how to reduce a fraction, kick ass at video games, and kill scary bugs, he doesn’t love you. He loves the imaginary you that you made up to keep from hurting his manly pride. If that’s something you want in your relationship… well, your kink is not my kink. But it sounds like a sad and empty way to love for me.
Thing of Things 
“Oddly, I agree with some things Venker says. Our culture is incredibly femmephobic: as a culture, we hate, fear, and despise feminine things, including gentleness, compassion, sensitivity, deference, adornment, giggling, and the color pink.”
I’ve got two objections to this:
First: Have you noticed that this argument can only be effective if it is false? If the reader truly hates gentleness and compassion, then all you are doing is disparaging women by calling these things feminine. It only works if each reader loves gentleness and compassion, but suspects everyone else of hating them.
Second: You’re failing the ideological turing test really badly with this statement. Society is drenched with praise for women, gentleness and compassion. You have to go for really fringy, low status people to find any example of explicit criticism of these. Nor can you say all the pro-woman, pro-gentle, pro-compassion talk is all insincere, because who’s it supposed to be impressing? There’s nothing outside of society looking over our shoulder to make sure we say the right things. Any member of society that insincerely praises women, gentleness, and compassion has to think that ve is impressing some other member of society.
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I think Ozy may have been engaging in hyperbole, as evidenced by the addition of “the color pink” at the end. That reads as a tongue-in-cheek statement to me. I could be wrong though…
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oh noe! If that’s true then I failed the ITT by failing to pick up on it.
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In your second, are you referring to the Women are wonderful effect (I’m worried about selection bias in the studies), or more generally?
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This is why I hate generic statements about “society”. Society is a Necker cube. You can easily prove it hates gentleness and compassion, and just as easily prove it hates machismo. Society is not a person, and has as many opinions as the number of people in it (plus several times the population of rabbis).
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I think there’s some truth to that, but I think maybe you take it too far in this case.
Consider the statement “in terms of official ideology, the united states has switched from being pro-racist to anti-racist since 1930”. I don’t think you can really argue that statement is false, or that it’s my arbitrary way of seeing facts that could just as legitimately be seen as the opposite. You can add all sorts of caveats and qualifications to it, and they are valid, but the statement is True, and it can’t get much Truer without getting longer.
In a similar sense, it’s true that in terms of explicit ideology, the US is pro-woman, pro-gentleness, and pro-compassion.
I’m not saying that ideology is logically consistent, or consistently applied in practice, or that there aren’t other things that are valued more highly or given a higher priority.
I’m just saying you aren’t going to find any high status person arguing that women, gentleness or compassion are bad. Instead, they will reframe whatever issue they are debating to avoid having to say that.
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I think you could easily find some SJ activists who will claim that the current official US policy is both “racist”, and “anti-woman”. The problem is that everyone defines these terms differently, which is the point that stillnotking is making (I think). You can claim all you want that your statement is True, and they will keep claiming that it is False, and the problem is that you define “racist” as “non-white people are not allowed to vote”, and they are defining “racist” as “non-white people have a lower median income as compared to white people”. So, you are both right, but without precise definitions (ideally, accompanied by error bars), you will never agree on anything.
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Re: last names, I like the solution that has recently become common in Denmark (and probably the rest of Scandinavia): Married couples have two last names – one from each partner. If either partner has more than one last name themselves, they pick whichever combination sounds best. (So e.g. Poul Vang Jensen and Merete Østergaard become Poul and Merete Vang Østergaard). To me, this feels much more equal than one party adopting the other one’s name, though that does happen, too, when all possible combinations are judged weird-sounding, or one party has a very common and therefore boring last name.
This way is also more practical in case of divorce. My grandparents married before this became common, so my grandma took my grandpa’s last name, and when they had kids, they got my grandpa’s last name, too. Then, when my mum was four, they divorced. It was pretty bitter, and they were angry with each other throughout my mum’s childhood. Yet my grandma kept the name, because otherwise she’d have a completely different surname than her children, and that meant a lot to her symbolically – it’d feel like the kids weren’t really hers.
Nowadays, if the kids have a combination name and the parents get divorced, the parents can each change back to birth surnames, and it’ll still be obvious from the surnames that the kids “belong” to both parents.
It’s possible that I see surnames as such a symbolic thing partly *because* I grew up seeing this solution as normal, though. I’ll test it with an anecdote: An acquiantance of mine was named Sarah Bjerg Sørensen, where Bjerg was from her mum and Sørensen from a father who was never very present in her life. As soon as she turned 18, she changed her name to just Sarah Bjerg. To me, this seems like a reasonable thing to do. Is that also true for non-Scandinavians?
(all personal details in this comment have been obfuscated)
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In the US, such last names are generally hyphenated (e.g Sarah Bjerg-Sørensen), in order to distinguish them from a middle name and a single last name. It’s not rare, but not terribly common either, and tends to be associated in the popular imagination with having very politically correct parents.
Personally, I think it’s better than the simple patrilineal approach, but leads to obvious problems when children with hyphenated last names marry in turn—you mentioned a solution, which is to just let each of them pick one, but this seems apt to result in hurt feelings within families of origin on at least some occasions.
My preferred solution would be to do away with family names entirely in favor of a gender-neutral (and poly friendly!) version of patronymics—hyphenate the names of your parents (however many they may be) and “schild”* (with necessary modifications for euphony) to the last one. So in your first example, any offspring would take the last name Merete-Poulschild. No forced decisions, no gendered norms, and it adapts easily to variable and/or changing numbers of (acknowledged) parents.
*If anyone can think of a consistently better suffix, that would be find too.
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My preferred solution would be to do away with family names entirely in favor of a gender-neutral (and poly friendly!) version of patronymics—hyphenate the names of your parents (however many they may be) and “schild”* (with necessary modifications for euphony) to the last one.
Oy, no. We have enough of a problem now with debt collectors coming after the wrong person because they share a name with someone else, among other mistaken identity issues. Surname diversity is a lot greater than given name diversity (except perhaps in Korea and a few other places).
This sort of thing works in Iceland because it has a tiny population; it’s easy to correct any mistaken identity issues. It would not scale well to a country the size of the United States.
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So threaten them with legal action, and then follow through.
And since the median number of non-disowned parents per individual is two (at least, I’m pretty sure!), you shouldn’t be thinking about first-name diversity but combination-of-two-first-names diversity, which is almost surely greater than surname diversity, for a reasonable definition of “diversity” (which is actually somewhat non-obvious here). The fact that some people will only have one just *atronymic adds to the different possibilities, as does the fact that some people will have 3+.
Besides, why should we let debt collectors determine our naming systems?
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“Debt collectors” here is metonymy for “the various horrible things that can go wrong when you are mistaken for someone else.” If you want, you can substitute “government bureaucracy misfiles your paperwork in someone else’s folder and you pay the price for it” or “person who shares your exact name says something objectionable on Twitter and the doxxing pitchforks and torches come out for you as well’ and any number of other situations.
Side note. The absence, AFAIK, of specific words in English like однофамилец (person with the same family name) and одноименник (person with the same given name) is really inconvenient for talking about this.
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This seems unnecessarily complicated. How about we just stop changing people’s last names when they get married? I have never understood the purpose of the practice. But then, I am something of an anomaly because my mom never took my dad’s last name. When I got married, my wife didn’t take my last name, either; again, I didn’t see the point of it, and although I don’t think she had strong feelings about the issue either way, she opted to keep her existing surname.
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I realize that I am an idiot, but I can’t delete my comment. This doesn’t solve the problem of which name the kids take. This is another thing that simply did not occur to me because I really dislike kids and never plan on having any. In my parents’ case, it was my Dad’s last name, so I guess that’s still perpetuating a patriarchal system.
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“The person who invites pays” is a terrible rule. One, because even though it’s gender neutral in theory, in heterosexual mating it’s the man who’s expected to do the asking, so it’s sexist in practice. Two, if you’ve been flirting right, the invitation is just a formality, and is perhaps not issued by anyone in particular – “We should get together sometime.” “Sure! How about Friday?”
More importantly – what’s the sense behind this rule? Are you doing someone a favor by having dinner with them? Does them asking you prove they like you more than vice-versa? Both of you are taking an equal risk on each other, and facing an similar return, so why should one person bear all the costs? Answers: no, no, and they shouldn’t.
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There is a practical sense to the rule. The one inviting choose the place, and therefore the cost of the outing.
In theory, I like the “share the bill for the first date, then partners take turns inviting each other, with the person inviting paying”. It may fail for the reason One you are giving.
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My rules for paying-for-dates:
First dates: The invitee should always offer to split the check. The inviter may insist on paying, at which point the invitee should either accept gracefully (and gratefully) or offer to pick up some small portion of the evening (the tip, or the wine, or dessert) or you have the “No, I insist” “No, I insist” fight until somebody gives up.
If no such offer is forthcoming, the inviter must take the temperature of the room and of the date and choose whether to bring up splitting the check, pay without saying anything, or escape from a bathroom window.
Occasionally, a person will offer to split the check and then secretly harbor a small resentment of the other person’s cheapness when the offer is accepted. This is an excellent opportunity to weed out people who have weird secret mind-reading expectations.
Subsequent dates: Will fall into either a splitting-the-check habit, or a taking-turns-paying habit. In a splitting-the-check relationship, both people should take opportunities to pay for small things like drinks and desserts because it’s nice to get stuff and it’s nice to give stuff. In a taking-turns-paying relationship, dates should be chosen to be considerate of both people’s income levels (the richer person either pays for more dates, or more expensive dates.) Taking turns is sustainable only so long as both people feel a genuine outpouring of generosity towards the other one; as soon as you get into the territory of “Well, you DID pay for the tacos yesterday, but this lobster dinner is a lot more expensive than those tacos, so…” you have to go back to the splitting-checks default.
If you are celebrating good news, always offer to pay.
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Subsequent dates: Will fall into either a splitting-the-check habit, or a taking-turns-paying habit.
Taking turns is strictly superior from a psychological point of view. The psychic disutility from having to pay for something has been experimentally shown to be somewhat scope-insensitive (can’t find the link at the moment) — it hurts almost as much to have to spend $20 as it does to spend $40, so you are better off spending 0, 40, 0, 40 than you are spending 20, 20, 20, 20.
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“The one inviting choose the place, and therefore the cost of the outing.”
Might not a simpler solution be just talking about it? “How about Les Frères Heureux?” “Nah, too heavy. How about KFC?”
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@Navin
I like surprises, both giving and receiving (after checking for the obvious limits). And sharing places/stuff you like is a good way to get to know someone.
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Have you seen Cordelia Fine’s neuroscience book Delusions of Gender debunking some of the male/female brain claims and showing how most of them are caused by bad test design and go away in more rigorous studies? I think you’d like it.
All the male/female brain stuff is extremely irritating to me, mostly because all of it states that I am male, as does Simon Baron-Cohen’s “extreme male brain” hypothesis of autism. I’m female, and calling me male is not going to make me respect you.
Also, gender heuristics (If a male and a female in a relationship are ambivalent as to who should be holding doors, default to male) don’t seem that bad, but gender roles (all men must hold doors for all women) are just terrible and overly general.
http://www.cordeliafine.com/delusions_of_gender.html
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“Heuristics, not rigid gender roles” strikes me as a sensible rebuttal to a common pattern of reactionary argument:
1. Relationships work better if one partner does X and the other does Y. (Generally this is a fairly plausible assertion, though not necessarily proven.)
2. On average, men are better suited to X than women are, and women are better suited to Y than men are. (Generally weaker, but still plausible.)
3. Therefore fixed gender roles and compulsory heterosexuality are essential in order to have lasting, stable relationships!
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I haven’t read anything by Suzanne Venker, but I’m going to echo a comment I made on another post in which you briefly mentioned Christina Hoff Sommers: having read *this* post, I don’t understand why you dislike her so much. I realize the title is hyperbolic but it really seems like you have fairly minor disagreements with her (at least, of those disagreements you’ve enumerated here). Additionally, I’m not sure you’re being very charitable to her position in the paragraphs you quoted; particularly the second one.
I guess what I’m getting at is that you seem to have use pretty inflammatory language when discussing prominent women who have arguably anti-feminist positions, and I find this strange in contrast to the calm manner in which you deal with people like Heartiste or Maymay who are, IMO, genuine assholes. (Whether or not one likes Maymay’s work it is pretty hard to pretend that their conduct is not abhorrent.)
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I am tempted to steel-man Suzanne Venker’s argument, just to be contrary, because calling her “the worst person alive” is so hyperbolic. So, here goes:
“Feminists will tell you that, in order to be a proper woman, you must do exactly what they tell you to do. Specifically, you must do exactly the same things that men do, only better. Today, many women believe this; and as the result, relationships between men and women have turned into an endless game of one-upmanship, where both partners keep trying to out-compete one another.
The feminists are wrong, though. You shouldn’t blindly follow anyone’s edicts, be they men or feminists. Instead, you should consider what makes you happy. If that involves staying at home and raising the kids, great, go ahead and do that. If that involves excelling at a high-paying job, go ahead and do that too, but do it because that’s what you want, not out of some warped sense of duty to beat men at their own game. Speaking of which, whenever you do manage to beat your spouse at something, be gracious about it; no one likes a gloater.
In addition, being in a relationship sometimes involves letting your partner do what he wants, not what you want — and vice versa. If you try to have it your way every time, and in every situation, then your relationship will no longer be based on love, but on coercion. Feminists will tell you that letting a man have get upper hand at anything is a deadly sin, but that’s not how loving people treat each other. So, don’t be like that.”
(I’m not sure how to steelman the “male brain, female brain” stuff; I don’t know enough neurobiology for that)
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The problem with your steelman is that I think the gender existentialism is a core part of Venker’s argument – she’s not saying “Stay home with the kids if it makes you happy,” she’s saying “you are a woman, therefore you will only be truly happy if you stay home with your kids.”
I’ve been interested in trying to put together a steelman for the male brain/female brain argument, but realistically that will never be something I quite have the right combination of time and motivation to do…
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Yeah you might be right about that. In this case, I’ll have to leave the steelmanning up to you…
Personally, I think that gender essentialism is kind of irrelevant to the whole issue. People have preferences, some of those preferences are effectively immutable, and, for practical purposes, it doesn’t matter much how those preferences got there.
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I have to disagree. The optimal last name rule is clearly “the two families play capture the flag at the wedding. Whichever team wins, both spouses then have that last name.”
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the rest of the sentence I can understand, but “Femininity is powerful. Hard femmes who will kick your ass without breaking a nail.” sounds like “doing karate while one of your legs is in a block of concrete is obviously awesome-er than regular karate, because it needs a lot of strenght and energy to compensate for, so yay for unnecessary limitations!” What you want is the power, not that huge chunks of it to be used for, say, compensating the fact that you can only use your right hand, because the left is unladylike. It’s like those running in heels events: some people can run in high heels (and the destruction of their legs is slow enough that they can go home without limping), but nobody should feel that she needs to get 150% health just so she can spend 50% on extras like that. Or that running in heels is noble-r than running in running shoes. Or swimming with some stylish blocks of concrete dangling from your legs.
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