Chapter Five  Womanly Nihilism

In the 1970s manly nihilism came to American women. It did not come directly from Nietzsche, who, though not a woman-hater, was hardly a friend of feminism. It had to come indirectly through Si-mone de Beauvoir and others who inspired the women’s movement. Nietzsche was on the right, and he looked for manliness exclusively in males; but strangely enough these seemingly fatal mistakes did not condemn him. They could be shrugged off as inessential. The women’s movement, never fussy or fastidious, took ideas from other men who were not favorable to the cause of women (or otherwise misbehaved with women)—not just Nietzsche but also Marx, Freud, Sartre, Lacan, Foucault.

What interested these women in Nietzsche was the nihilism he proclaimed as fact—God is dead—and the possibility of creating a new order in its place. Nihilism, or the disappearance of nature, represented opportunity, and it should of course be applied to the sexes, as Nietzsche had failed to do. Male/female was not a distinction society needs to respect; it could be female/male, for a start. New identities could be constructed in place of old-fashioned, worn-out natures and a new rank-order installed. Here was the manliness of the women’s movement, appropriated from the high priest of manly nihilism and used against his arrogant chauvinism. The feminists were so assertive as to conceive, announce, and establish a new definition of woman and, somewhat incidentally, of man. The new definitions were in a sense nondefinitions—no more than possible identities—so as to help create the new gender-neutral society.

What was womanly in the woman’s movement? It was in the manner of this accomplishment, which did not come from Nietzsche. The revolution was done by “raising consciousness,” a new method of political promotion borrowed from business psychology. This generation of feminists did not go to the streets, as their sisters had in the campaign for women’s suffrage. They did not flaunt their virtue or appeal to the conscience of society. Working through language, they just asked men and other women why it is natural to use “he” instead of “she” to refer, for example, to a doctor. Isn’t this bias in favor of the male sex? And the males nodded dumbly in agreement. “Why didn’t we think of this? From now on, we must be a little more sensitive.” This was enough; no heavy argumentation was required.

It was not that the feminist women wanted equality for its own sake, an equal sharing of the burdens of society, for example. They wanted equality for the sake of independence or autonomy. And they wanted independence not for its own sake but specifically from what they had previously depended on. They wanted independence from morality, which kept them in subordination to men under the yoke of the “double standard”; and from nature, giving them wombs, compelling them to be mothers, which kept them subordinate to men; and—is the point coming into view?—from men. In order to be free of men, these women wanted to change morality and deny nature. No longer were women destined through reproduction and child rearing to serve the common good and the future of the species. Women could be as irresponsible as men and leave those vital matters to someone else. The feminist women wanted independence from men in order to be as independent as men. The women’s movement is a vindication of manliness as representing the height of human attainment, provided, of course, that manliness be separated from males. As the sign of separation, the word manliness should be repressed. The thing, however, is all around us: only differently in the two sexes.

I am looking at feminism as if manliness were still alive, thriving in the gender-neutral society where it is most denied. Let us give feminism closer attention in its own terms.¹

Why nihilism, you will object. Isn’t that going too far? Feminists today do not believe that nothing is true, everything is permitted. They believe that women are truly equal to men and, therefore, that oppression of women by men should not be permitted.² Actually, however, those two propositions can be found in nineteenth-century women’s movements. (The word feminism came into vogue about 1913, but I will use it to refer to earlier partisans of women’s equality.)³ But they do not capture the novelty of our feminism or the radicalism of the idea behind the gender-neutral society. If we consider two leaders of women’s movements of the earlier period, two great differences between their notions and recent feminism come to view: earlier leaders argue for women’s morality, and they do not argue against sex roles (though clearly they want to loosen them).

Mary Wollstonecraft published her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 during the time of enthusiasm for the French Revolution, when she hoped her arguments would be opportune. Her arguments opposed the opinions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to some degree the philosopher of the Revolution, who saw men and women as separate creatures with different rights. Wollstonecraft is not sure that women are exactly equal to men, women having less bodily strength, but the two sexes have the same virtues and women deserve to have “more equality.”⁴ Women should be freed from the tyranny of having to live in subjection to social opinion and reputation, the fate that Rousseau advocated for women, for this subjection kept them artificially ignorant and encouraged them in various feminine vices, such as to be irrationally religious, sentimental, fond of dress, always agreeable, and cunning.⁵ Like some other feminists, Wollstonecraft was harder on women than on men. Yet one virtue, modesty, is a feminine virtue and also the sum of “private virtue.” Modesty features chastity, and Woll-stonecraft unhappily made a point of it: “to render the human body and mind more perfect, chastity must more universally prevail.” In her own life, love proved more powerful than chastity. When her lapse from chastity became known, after her emphatic declarations in this book, she was ridiculed and her arguments unjustly discredited. It is not mere gallantry to say that there was nobility in her concern for men as well as women. Men should be taught “not only to respect modesty in women but to acquire it themselves.”⁶ Teaching modesty to men is not an item in today’s feminist agenda, unless sensitivity to women counts as modesty. It also has to be said that Wollstone-craft did not have a program for making men modest. She thought that if women were more knowing than they are, and were freed of subordination to men, men would listen to them. She did not consider that if women were more knowing, they might be less modest.⁷

Why should a woman be more knowing? “For it would be as wise to expect corn from tares, or figs from thistles, as that a foolish ignorant woman should be a good mother,” says Wollstonecraft.⁸ Sexual distinctions at present are coercive and arbitrary, but as women’s rights come to be respected, “the sexes will fall into their proper places.”⁹ So the sexes have proper places, the second contrast to our feminism, which denies any such places.

If we turn to the American Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), the difference is not so clear but still visible. Stanton hails the accomplishments of women who have entered the professions and looks forward to more such progress in all occupations. Yet many of her efforts were directed at correcting the legal inequality of wives, and she took it for granted that “nature has made the mother the guardian of the child.”¹⁰ The attitude of modern feminism, we shall see, is hostile to nature and insists on the social construction of sex roles not only in the past, as Wollstonecraft and Stanton maintain, but also for the future. Modern feminists on the whole take a baleful view of motherhood as a trap nature sets for unwary women, to be entered into not automatically or dutifully but only by somewhat defiant choice.

Women at present, Stanton says, are “mere echoes of men…. The true woman is as yet a dream of the future.”¹¹ The true woman is not a social construction but the correction of a social misconstruction, “in violation of every law of their being,” a state in which men are allowed to be more selfish, and women more selfless, than they truly are. “The same code of morals” should apply to men and women, thus producing a “new code of morals”—the old one made equal.¹² Stanton thought that woman’s moral power would exert itself through the ballot box and produce moral reforms, such as those women were already pursuing in movements to abolish slavery and for temperance.

Early feminism had the high moral purpose of creating equality between the sexes by raising men to the moral level of women. It was “the new power destined to redeem the world.”¹³ Nothing like this can be heard in today’s feminism; it wants to create equality by lowering women’s morality to the level of men’s. It claims the privileges of men, which amount to exemptions from morality, and it does so under the names of “autonomy” and “agency.” Stanton makes no appeal to these ideas. She authored the famous Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls in 1848, a sort of copy of the Declaration of Independence that accepted its authority and justified women’s rights by the same appeal made in that document to the laws of nature and of nature’s God.¹⁴ A comparable declaration founding the National Organization of Women in 1966, while referring to the worldwide movement for human rights, offers no ground for women’s rights and merely asserts that “the time has come to move beyond the abstract argument… over the status and special nature of women.”

Wollstonecraft and Stanton differ markedly from our feminism by standing for the greater morality of women and accepting women’s special place in the home. These two differences are related and should not be quickly dismissed as dead and gone. They imply that women should not be independent of men but should serve as their moral teachers and homemakers. And yet the early feminists had a hankering for independence. In 1892 Stanton gave a speech chiding women for their tendency to lean on a man. Although women “prefer to lean,” she said, each must “make the voyage of life alone.”¹⁵ Is this good advice, or could it be better for women to lean on a man?

To help us answer the question, let us look quickly at Oscar Wilde’s play on the subject, An Ideal Husband (1895). In the play, Lady Chiltern is said to make an ideal of her husband, Sir Robert, a politician on the rise—“the error all women commit,” says he. She cannot believe he would have gained his position by fraud, as turns out to be the case. When she finds out, the question becomes, will she stand by her man? Lord Goring, a philosopher-dandy, manages with his considerable agility to extricate her and her husband from the situation. He persuades her that moral principle needs to be tempered by the forgiveness of love and at the same time to be given energy by ambition. Lady Chiltern should not forswear her husband for the early crime that made his career possible, and Sir Robert should not resign from politics from shame because his wife has found him out.¹⁶ Both her love and his ambition must inevitably compromise principle, but neither is possible without principle.

What interests us is that the problem of moral fidelity is shown in the roles of the two sexes. Moral fidelity in the play means not sexual fidelity but fidelity to moral principle in politics. Lady Chiltern has more principle but less ambition than her husband, yet her principle is not abstract because it centers on her hopes for her husband. Her ambition is his, but because it is wrapped up in him, she is not conscious of it as hers. It is not ambition for mere success; she needs to believe that he is morally pure or at least defensi-bly moral. At the end Lord Goring says, “women are not meant to judge us [men] but to forgive us.” But a woman necessarily judges a man through the ideal she makes of him; her very partiality makes her want him to deserve to succeed. In the action of the play Lord Goring, philosopher though he may be, gets married to a perky young woman (Mabel Chiltern) who will judge him (despite her denials), and his love compels him to depend on her. Mabel is not ambitious, and she chooses the philosopher knowing that his interests are “domestic.”

In both marriages the two sexes are mutually dependent, not alone—much less autonomous. Both sexes have to do with morality, men by advancing “upon lines of intellect” and women maintaining morality by “revolving in curves of emotions.” Both sexes use reason, but men abstractly (intellect) and women particularly by fastening on the men in their lives (curves of emotions). Wilde’s play is an essay in the difference between moralism (the “high moral tone” taught by “German philosophy”) and morality. Men and women have diverse inclinations, or the same inclinations, such as ambition, which they feel in diverse ways; but they do not normally follow them to extremes because they fall in love with—the opposite sex. They also make mistakes in following their inclinations and need to have them pointed out by careful observers like Lord Goring and Oscar Wilde. We note the kinship between women and philosophers in three things: careful observing, being withdrawn from the public into domesticity, and furthering their ambition indirectly by leaning on others. Wilde could have learned this from Aristotle, or perhaps he thought it up for himself.

Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886) answers Wilde’s question and also deals directly with feminism. The novel portrays a struggle for the affections of a young woman, Verena Tarrant, between Olive Chancellor, a feminist who is called a “nihilist” at the beginning of the story, and Basil Ransom, an “intense conservative.” Olive advances the feminist thesis that women can live their lives without incurring obligations to men and can cling to “a great, vivifying, redemptory idea without the help of a man.”¹⁷ The idea is of course women’s rights, but rights are not enough and perhaps not even justified if women cannot vindicate them on their own. Whether women can advance an idea without a man was the point at issue in Wilde’s play. Basil, a southerner coming to Boston to visit his cousin Olive, quickly learns to detest the views she is teaching to Verena; he thinks that women are inferior to men, particularly for public and civic uses.¹⁸ Saving Verena from feminism becomes a challenge to his “manhood,” and this is what he does; he wins the contest with Olive and at the end of the novel takes Verena away from a public speech supporting feminism that she is about to give and marries her.¹⁹

Basil says early on that one can’t sympathize with both sides, but that is what The Bostonians does.²⁰ Today we might think that James takes the man’s side entirely, but it would be better to say that, unlike us, he takes it into consideration. He also depicts the failure of a woman (Olive) to govern a woman, her protégée Verena. In both regards, his novel seems outdated, as we in the gender-neutral society have moved past the debate between “sides,” and we do not care for a conclusion that cannot be right. But let us not be impatient with Henry James, for what he says helps to identify our difficulties and his sympathies cannot be inferred from the victory of Basil. In the famous ending of the novel, Verena says she is glad but is actually in tears, “not the last she was destined to shed,” the author pronounces. Her marriage promises to be unhappy, she resentful and he dominating. Can we see what will go wrong? We have to try to discern what “unsuspected truth” lies in each of the two sides and why it cannot be seen by the other.²¹ In a sense one can sympathize with both sides, for James does this and invites us to join him in the use of what he calls moral imagination. But though one might imagine, one cannot take both sides, and thus James chooses Basil over Olive while handing Basil, and us, the prospect of an unhappy marriage.

With the action of the novel James says that unhappy marriage is better than the feminist idea of women’s governing the world without men. What is responsible for a result so generally unfortunate and affecting? In the novel Basil is “a representative of his sex,” not the only one; but he is the only one on show. The feminist cause, however, is represented by several women, “the Bostonians,” so that James can display its variety and consequences. There are: Mrs. Farrinder, a matron majestic in aspect, the teacher and leader of the movement; Miss Birdseye, the venerable abolitionist and credulous all-around reformer; Olive Chancellor, spinster, and noble, anguished mentor of Verena; Dr. Mary Prance, a doctor and successful feminist in practice; and Verena Tarrant, not so devoted a feminist as Olive but a better speaker and more effective popularizer. To make the case for feminism, Verena says that women are superior in morality to men; they are not selfish but generous and full of heart. Women are the part of humanity that is for all—here Verena echoes Praxagora in the Congresswomen—yet women are the very part that is excluded from the government of all. “A new moral tone” can be established that brings peace and reason and excludes “brute force and sordid rivalry.” Yet instead women suffer from the “cruelty of man… his immemorial injustice,” from “the great masculine conspiracy.”²²

Somehow the generosity of women issues in a complaint about the suffering of women that fills women with resentment against men.²³ This is not a desirable new moral tone. Olive, for all her elevation of purpose, was filled with “silent rage” over “the usual things of life” that remind her of men’s iniquity. Thus, while speaking of humanity, feminists are in fact devoted to the “universal sisterhood” and have no way to include in their vision men as they are or might be.²⁴ The suffering they complain of confirms their weakness more than it recommends any competence, and in the midst of Verena’s claim that women are the heart of humanity, she overlooks her own remark that men do not have “the same quick sight as women.”²⁵ James indicates that women’s generosity works in private and in particular, but not when it goes public. Universalized in democratic America, and transformed into political action and oratory, the insightful virtue women have loses its accuracy and intelligence and becomes coarse, inconsistent, stultified, and ineffective. In The Bostonians we see Verena orating when she should be conversing.²⁶ These lady humanitarians would be better off as provincials, as Bostonians.

Basil Ransom, no humanitarian, says to Verena “my interest is in my own sex,” which is being feminized. He grounds his case against feminism on the fact that men are the “stronger race”; this is decisive for him.²⁷ Having a share of southern chivalry, he believes that women’s rights consist in a standing claim to the generosity of the stronger race but no more. Men’s gen-erosity is more forceful and dependable than women’s because it is based on strength rather than weakness. Men are aware that in order to be generous it is necessary first to take care of yourself. Men are also better equipped to operate in public, where appearances matter. So we see that chivalry is a show of male pride, whereas women’s generosity in the relief of suffering is quiet and unassuming (not passive). Basil felt he could not marry Verena until he could provide decently for her, doubtless a point of false pride, James the narrator tells us. He also tells us there is a “thread of moral tinsel” in the idea of southern chivalry, and we see worse than tinsel in what Basil does to Verena at the end. Basil carries her off, declaring “she’s all mine!”²⁸ Men don’t say this today but they haven’t stopped feeling it. Their offer of provision has the character of possessiveness that does not stop at sexual chastity. Basil is perfectly capable of falling in love with Verena while despising her ideas, but Verena cannot do the same. She knows that when she marries Basil she is renouncing her feminism and embracing his ideas: this is the cause of her tears.

Feminists as Henry James presents them do not know how to deal with men. Olive Chancellor isolates herself from them. She does not marry and she tries to keep Verena from marrying, sensing that if she does she will be lost to the cause. “No man that I have ever seen cares a straw in his heart for what we are trying to accomplish.” Olive adds that there are men who pretend to care for women’s rights, “but they are not really men.”²⁹ Perhaps she refers to Mrs. Farrinder’s ineffectual husband. Verena, on the other hand, surrenders to men—to her man. She resembles moderate women of our day who do not dislike men, as opposed to the radicals who like to attack men. Another possibility can be seen in the person of Dr. Mary Prance, who as a “lady-doctor” was independent but not active in public. “Whatever might become of the movement at large, Dr. Prance’s own little revolution was a success.”³⁰ She succeeded by not caring about the movement at large. “Having as many rights as she had time for,” she was in the habit of forgetting that she was a woman, and in this she resembles many successful professional women of our time. In James’s view, women are more moral than men, but their morality is corrupted by “ideas” that universalize their perceptions and intuitions and, like a grainy photo enlargement, cause them to lose their fine subtlety. The worst of these ideas is feminism because it deprives women of their self-awareness. Hence James agrees with Oscar Wilde that in public a woman needs a man to lean on. We do not agree with him, but this does not prevent him from knowing us well.³¹

Yet is it not an unacceptable affront to the dignity of Lady Chiltern and Ver-ena Tarrant that they must give over their public voice to a man? Oscar Wilde and Henry James offer what may appear to be a successful riposte to nineteenth-century feminism as we have sampled it. They say that women cannot govern on their own. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had said that women do not need a man to lean on, but in fact they do. If women are to sustain morality, they must do so from their private roles as wives and mothers and not from the lecture platform. For morality is, in effect, women’s morality. You can give it a fancy definition that seems, or is designed to seem, gender-neutral, but morality is women’s in a double sense: it is women above others whom it protects and it is up to women to enforce it. Women enforce morality by criticizing men, not men in general but particular men, the ones they know and love; and they have access to particular men only in private. The price for a woman of reducing domination by her man is to forbear from a general, public attack on male domination. For the general attack is bound to fail, and it will draw her attention from the particular effort of taming that might succeed. There is a difference between universal pacifism and peacemaking in the home, even though the former is but a generalization of the latter. And in forbearing from a general challenge to men, a woman in effect leans on her man. She is not a mere dependent because she gains the right to criticize him, which is often done fairly well. But to be effective, the criticism must come from within the household. Hence the link between morality and women’s acceptance of sex roles that we see dramatized by critics of feminism, such as Wilde and James, and also admitted by early feminists, such as Wollstonecraft and Stanton.

The problem for feminism, if it wants to escape that criticism, then becomes quite clear. It must counter these critics and find a way to avoid leaning on a man. This is what feminism proceeded to do under the influence of Simone de Beauvoir.

Beauvoir’s famous, founding book, published in France in 1949 and translated for America in 1953, was called The Second Sex.³² From the title alone you see that the book is a complaint against male domination in general, and when you open it, you find it hostile to sex roles and to motherhood.³³ Here is a pronounced contrast to the writings of Wollstonecraft and Stanton, in which we see the desire for women’s independence compromised by respect for women’s nature as previously known. Beauvoir is much more radical; she shares the desire but as far as possible rejects all compromise. In rejecting the tradition of inequality for women, she does not avail herself of the shelter of liberalism, as did Wollstonecraft and Stanton by relying on the rights of man (whether from the French Declaration of Rights or the American Declaration of Independence). Beauvoir does not demand women’s rights but depends instead on a difficult mixture of “historical materialism” and existentialist choice. Her book ends with a quotation from Karl Marx affirming the brotherhood of men and women in a new realm of liberty in the communist utopia.

In the spirit of Marxism, Beauvoir dwells on the material condition that makes it possible to sweep away the remnants of sexism found in earlier feminism; this is contraception or birth control.³⁴ It is clear enough without reference to Marxism that contraception makes motherhood a matter of choice and opens the possibility of greater sexual liberty to women. But contraception does not require women to esteem motherhood less or to select the possibility of greater sexual liberty that (capitalist) technology provides by entering the workforce. Nor does contraception require the use of abortion as a fail-safe device in case the pill doesn’t work. One could accept contraception but draw the line at abortion, believing that it is one thing to prevent conception and another to eliminate it. Thus the difference between Beauvoir and the earlier feminists is not just the advance of technology; it is a difference in ideas. Beauvoir argues that women should not esteem motherhood as much as they have, that greater sexual liberty is not just a possibility but a good thing, and that abortions should not be done reluctantly or regretted. Her argument has been accepted by almost all feminists today, who honor the early feminists but do not take their thought seriously, either overlooking the key differences between their feminism and ours or rejecting them as obviously outdated.³⁵ But we will learn more if we look for the reasons given by Beauvoir that account for those differences.

The Second Sex begins very theoretically on its first page with an attack on the notion that a woman might be a “Platonic essence.” It’s not that the “eternal feminine” has been got wrong but that there is nothing permanently feminine. Wollstonecraft and Stanton were content to say that men had mistaken and underestimated the nature of women, but Beauvoir goes further, arguing that any fixed nature of women is bound to be mistaken. As her first page attacks essences, so the first chapter denies the so-called data of biology. Women are not bent out of their natural shape by conventions, but conventions are all we can have because women have no natural shape. Hitherto women have been defined by men; henceforth they must be defined by women. Why? Because women, being human, have the power to define. To be human is to be transcendent over nature, to redefine what is given, to act freely and with sovereign power. Thus, it is not quite that nature does not exist; rather, nature, which is fixed, is not friendly or hospitable to humanity or human freedom. Unlike Darwin, Beauvoir does not deny that there is “animal nature,” an expression she uses repeatedly. Animal nature is what is given to us, and what is given has nothing of us, nothing human in it. Women have been forced to live at the level of animal nature in immanence, and at present the only human world is “a man’s world.”³⁶

Beauvoir is opposed to essences, but apparently there is an essential distinction in her thought between transcendence and immanence. What is transcendent resists the dictates of nature; thus, it is transcendent to risk one’s life, to be a warrior. It is also transcendent to be creative, to be able to make objects like an artisan (this is called objectifying your will in the external world). And to think noninstrumentally, to be able to forget yourself like artists and philosophers, is transcendental. Immanence, on the other hand, is a life enslaved to nature, reproducing the species rather than advancing it through technology. Seeking pleasure is immanent, as is living for no principled end, for one cannot be transcendent except by acting for the sake of an idea.³⁷ Transcendence has a basis in biology because in reproduction the male leaves the scene, often quite soon, whereas the human female is stuck with hosting the product for nine months, from which one might infer, as does Aristotle, that there is something natural about transcendence.³⁸ But for Beauvoir true, transcendent transcendence is based on an idea and is above biology. She says in a phrase become famous: “One is not born, but becomes, a woman.”³⁹ In this statement she seems both to know, and not to know, what a woman is. At the end of her book she says that woman has a situation rather than an essence, and her future remains “largely open.”⁴⁰

“Transcendence” appears to be Beauvoir’s gender-neutral term for manliness, a self-assertion by means of self-dramatization against a backdrop of chaos. Perhaps “chaos” is not quite right, since Beauvoir does speak of animal nature and does allow differences in men and women in that regard. Even though there are no essences, not everything is social construction. But in her view nature does not allow for the truly human, for human excellence. Nature is more a challenge to us than an endorsement of our good, still less our comfort. Transcendence is all the more impressive, and transcendent, as it is unsupported by anything immanent in nature that is given to us. One could even wonder whether the immanent is posited as unhelpful—for Beauvoir does not investigate the matter—just so that we don’t have to be grateful for any blessings we may have received.

Womanly nihilism is the repetition and the culmination of manly nihilism. To repeat Nietzsche’s formulation: men—and now this includes women—would rather will nothingness than not will. Willing nothingness is a reasonable description of seeking transcendence without knowing, or rather without wanting to know, what the transcendent is. Beauvoir says that woman has no “mysterious essence” but has a “largely open” future. Now, what is the meaning of “largely open” if not unknown or mysterious? That’s why I call our feminism nihilism.

Actually Beauvoir and feminists today have something more definite in mind than transcendence, and that is independence. But independence to do what, and to live how? It could be that women’s independence consists in doing the same things as before but now freely and without compulsion. Tocqueville says, “in America the independence of woman is irretrievably lost within the bonds of marriage.” Yet he thinks it makes a great difference that a woman chooses marriage and “freely places herself in the yoke on her own.”⁴¹ This is not what Beauvoir has in mind “concretely,” as she says. Although she makes some provision for women’s traditional proclivities, it is not enough for her that women merely return to the old family routine with a fresh spirit, using the “manly reason” and “virile energy” that Tocqueville saw in American women more than a century before. The life of independence will be a new one, outside the family in one way or another. One way or another. One way is apparently that women will get jobs, for Beauvoir says vaguely that women’s liberation requires that the “economic evolution of women’s condition be accomplished.”⁴² Yet she goes on to discuss not the economic evolution but women’s narcissism, women’s love, and women’s mysticism while still enslaved to immanence.

The strangest feature of The Second Sex is its almost complete failure to discuss women’s jobs and its almost total preoccupation with another way of escaping the family—sex. Nowadays, with a view to the gender-neutral society, one might think that feminist independence is mainly about the jobs that free them from dependence on men. To be specific, feminists want women to have jobs in the professions; and to be still more specific, in the academic profession, where one can be aloof from men and devote oneself to the study of the destiny of woman. Why is it, then, that today’s feminism invests so much of women’s independence in sexual liberation? Men could not be so free for sex these days unless women were looking for the very same thing. To see why women might do this, let us turn to what Beauvoir expects from sex.

Beauvoir’s book, to repeat, concentrates on sex. It has chapters on sexual initiation, on the lesbian, and on prostitutes. The last chapter on the “independent woman,” displaying the model for the future, is mostly about sex and has only a little on reconciling family and career, the most practical concern. How can one get independence from sex, you are wondering. Beau-voir thinks that it is the passivity of a woman in the act of sex that renders her an erotic object to men and also to herself, thus preventing her from becoming an independent subject.⁴³ So it is in sex, not in women’s weakness or man’s aggression—hardly mentioned by Beauvoir—that she finds the primary cause of women’s oppression.

Being passive in sex is “required by society,” says Beauvoir. But though being a sex object is oppressive, it seems to be more natural for a woman than a man.⁴⁴ A woman’s eroticism has a “peculiar nature” that urges her toward monogamy, it is true. But Beauvoir says it does not destroy women’s independence. Even within monogamy there is the possibility of “virile independence,” by which she means adultery or open marriage.⁴⁵ Thus with “undemanding generosity” man and woman can live in “a condition of perfect equality”—a condition admittedly rare but nonetheless an example to all. Being two autonomous individuals, they cannot quite be called a couple, but they live together, mostly.

Yet Beauvoir in her womanly realism appears to accept, without saying so, that the second sex will always be second. For though a man can be human (that is, transcendent) without ceasing to be a male, a woman cannot be. To realize her femininity she must be an object, which is to say she must renounce being a subject. The emancipated woman, therefore, suffers a conflict between her sex and her humanity. Her humanity requires her to be complete, which includes her dependent sexuality; she cannot renounce her sexuality without renouncing her humanity.⁴⁶ One could add that the conflict in the condition—or nature?—of a woman comes to sight especially in the emancipated woman like Beauvoir herself who cannot blame society for its oppression. And if women are conflicted, men too will be affected by having to deal with them. What man wants a monogamous woman on his hands—who also thinks she is full of virile independence? What woman wants an asserted equality that devalues woman’s femininity as “immanent” and then doesn’t deliver the equality of transcendence that it promises? In this situation of never-ending alienation it seems that certain rules of sexual morality will still be required and that autonomy is not all it’s cracked up to be. Have we strayed beyond Beauvoir’s book? No, she led us there by virtue of the honesty and experience that give a tinge of realism to her overblown philosophy of transcendence.

Let’s return to the question of women’s leaning on men for their ideas. Beauvoir is an intelligent writer who merits our careful attention, but she is not a great thinker, and she leans on great thinkers, who were males. Anyone, male or female, who is not a great thinker leans on great thinkers. All our ideas come from them (usually through lesser intermediaries like Beau-voir), and if any human beings are truly autonomous, it is they. The feminism that Beauvoir influenced derived from Marx and Nietzsche, a strange combination of left and right that flourished in France after World War II and then in America. Another prominent instance of that combination was Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir’s life companion in her sense of a very honest but not very strictly monogamous relationship.⁴⁷

Marx contributed the thought that human alienation could be ended only by abolishing the division of labor, because specializing in one kind of work leaves a person narrow and incomplete. Division of labor arises from the production of material things, and Marx devoted most of his life to the study of economics, which would reveal that capitalism would necessarily collapse into a communist utopia where the division of labor had been abolished. Under communism a person could fish without being a fisherman and do many other things without devotion to any one thing, including the economics that Marx was forced to focus on. Sounds great! But what about sex roles? Marx admitted that they would have to go too, and it’s easy to see why. Particularly if production is the core of humanity, the division of labor in reproducing human beings leaves each of the sexes lacking in the experience of the other, hence alienated from full humanity. Men need to learn how hard, women how easy, reproduction can be. Economics, it seems, would have to be extended or transformed into biology to make possible sex changes that would allow an alternation or combination of male-female experiences. In our century we know that this is not altogether science fiction, that there are people who want and are able to choose their sex.⁴⁸ (They do so, however, to specialize and not to be everything.) The idea of a society without roles comes from Marx.

Nietzsche, as we have seen, supplies the idea that sex is power (in which he is joined by Freud). To love is to exude power onto an object, a “sex object,” the Other of which Beauvoir complained in discussing copulation. In this view, the lover has power and spends it on his beloved, as a male spends his semen. This is a masculine view of sex, according to which love goes from high to low, the lover being superior to the beloved. Opposing it is a view we shall study in Plato, in which sex is not power but attraction, not from high to low but from low to high, the beloved being superior. Love is a dependency, even an enslavement. This view of love, the true one, is hardly ever discussed by feminists, but one sees the effect of it in their distrust of love when felt by women. A woman in love justifies and invites the oppression of the man she loves by giving him power over herself: better to have the “autonomy” of an open marriage with many lovers, or homosexuality, or—well, not celibacy.

Now, how do we match the autonomy of Nietzsche on the right with what seems to be its opposite on the left, Marx’s communism? Very easily. The ideal of communism, “the free development of all,” has as its condition “the free development of each,” and the communist utopia is really an individualist utopia in which, every individual having what he needs, none depends on another.⁴⁹ Communist solidarity, like feminist sisterhood, exists in the movement, to be sure, but this is mutual dependency only on the way to abolishing itself. Neither Marx nor Nietzsche had any use for morality, especially sexual morality, in the enforcement of which they might have looked to women. On this important matter, Beauvoir and her feminists followed Marx and Nietzsche, not Wollstonecraft and Stanton. Marx and Nietzsche in their diverse ways very conveniently made morality unnecessary. Either morality is mere ideology that echoes economic class relations (Marx) or it is an exercise of power that oppresses the strong (Nietzsche). Yes, for Nietzsche, the strong are oppressed. This antidemocratic possibility has not gained entry into feminism, for feminism does not appreciate the power over stronger men that women lose when they let go the authority and superiority that come with the guardianship of morality. It is difficult for them to carry on the pleasurable duty of henpecking if all they can say to a husband is “treat me equally.” He can answer by asking why he should do so if he is stronger.

These were the thinkers Simone de Beauvoir depended on, and to them we could add her friend Jean-Paul Sartre, whose work can be seen in hers.⁵⁰ Did Beauvoir lean on Sartre? However she may otherwise have behaved toward him, she was not entirely submissive in ideas. She had her own voice and she found it on one occasion that deserves to be inscribed in the annals of womanly reproach to men. The “interview” between these two enduring companions took place in 1975 and was printed as a dialogue between them under the title “I would like to interrogate you on the question of women.”⁵¹ To begin, Beauvoir gets Sartre to admit the oppression of women, a fact that he, life-long surveyor of oppression, had overlooked until that moment. He had seen only particular cases of women put upon by men. It was true that he considered himself superior to women, but then he thought himself superior to many men, too. After this disclosure Sartre accuses himself of male chauvinism (machisme), though Beauvoir declares that he has always treated her as an equal. She then asks him how the struggle of women relates to the class struggle, and he makes an important point: women are not a class. As we have seen in discussing Marx, the end of the class struggle, and the liberation of the proletariat, do not bring the liberation of women. Half the human race is omitted by the merely economic argument of Marx. Women’s liberation must be accepted in its “specificity,” which according to Beauvoir requires that one look at myth about women.⁵²

Although Beauvoir says her method is “historical materialism,” it is not Marxist; she looks at the biology of women’s bodies, at the psychology arising from them, and at the anthropology of myths about them. And she does this with a view to creating new “concepts” for the undefined future. Except politically, she and the feminism she made are closer to Nietzsche than to Marx. Why did she stay on the left? So as not to surrender to or “lean on” men as Nietzsche and all the other triumphant men on the right insisted. She would not have had as easy a time with Nietzsche as with her man Sartre. And Sartre was not to every modern woman’s taste. In this wonderfully revealing short interview he says he approves of the feminist struggle but cannot contain a certain comic sexism. In pondering the sexual differ-ence, as if for the first time, he arrives at all the stereotypes and gives them high-flown expression. He says that when conversing with women, he lets them suppose they are equal to him, but of course “it is I who took the lead in the conversation. I took the lead because I had decided to take the lead.” Beauvoir finds a certain machisme in this, but neither of them stops to consider where manliness fits in the combination of Marxism and existentialism that they espouse. But isn’t it true that in order to be tough-minded, as both consider themselves to be, you have to be tough or depend on someone who is tough? It doesn’t seem that you can think yourself into being tough. But perhaps we should not be too quick to deny that manliness is teachable.

Beauvoir taught the notion of transcendence, a kind of manliness, to other feminists who passed it on to the women’s movement, where transcendence became a political goal and achievement. Let us track Beauvoir’s influence in the construction of the gender-neutral society, the society, as we now see, in which women can be independent. Beauvoir’s influence is greater with radical feminists than with their more moderate sisters. What is radical feminism and what is moderate? A radical feminist attacks the family; a moderate one accepts it (though probably doesn’t defend it). I will use this simple criterion to navigate through the diverse world of feminism. According to this crite-rion, Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique (1963), which preceded the radical feminist books we will assess, presents fairly moderate feminism. A quick look at moderate feminism will reveal the greater depth of the radicals closer to Beauvoir.

However diverse, all feminism today is looking for ways to keep women independent of men. The main way, one might think, is for women to pursue careers. Having a career lets a woman achieve economic independence from her husband so that she can leave him or survive being deserted by him. Even if she remains married, her contribution to the family treasury changes the terms of marriage, giving her equality or more equality than she would have if she depended entirely on her husband’s pay. The importance of women’s careers seems to be confirmed by the massive shift in recent decades of women into the workforce. Feminism could have advocated this change and facilitated it by addressing some of the difficulties women would face when as wives they went to work. Who would take care of the children? Who would make the meals?⁵³ How could a wife get her husband to do 50 percent of the housework? How could she make up for the loss of pride he might feel from no longer providing for her? These questions were barely asked, let alone answered, even by moderate feminists. Women were to be protected at work by laws on sexual harassment, and their children were to be provided with government-subsidized day care. In both of these programs proposed by feminists, government substitutes for husbands and women are induced to put their trust in impersonal bureaucracy rather than in a man who loves them. Both are designed to make it easier for her to work, not to combine career and family. Both, in fact, facilitate divorce as much as marriage. Neither requires that women come to terms with sexual difference, or, which is our topic, with manliness.

Moderate feminists, then, do not speak practically about careers. But the radical feminists hardly say anything at all about careers; their preoccupation is with sexual liberation as opposed to sex. If they had wanted lots of sex, one could call it an obsession. But they are interested in liberation, a release of power or “empowerment,” as we say, not in sex. As with Beauvoir, the radical feminists want to annul the passivity of the female and to avoid the condition of sex object. Sex they would do dutifully for the sake of the whole movement, perhaps, but as women they show themselves to be very unerotic. Not for either desire or love are they preoccupied with sex. It is actually for the sake of—prepare for a surprise—morality. Sexual liberation will make them, and everyone else, more authentically human.

The radical feminist morality rejects the “bourgeois” morality so prominent in previous feminism. Consider three important feminist books published in 1970: Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. These authors show the logic of transcendence, learned from Beauvoir, in their promotion of sex.

Germaine Greer sprinkles her text with highlighted quotations of Mary Wollstonecraft, whom she admires, but none of them have to do with the chastity Wollstonecraft so insisted on. Greer begins her book by disparaging the “old suffragettes” as “genteel middle-class ladies.”⁵⁴ Kate Millett, in her discussion of the “sexual revolution” from 1830 to 1930, dismisses the morality espoused by feminists in that time as “naïve optimism”—as if one could raise boys to be as “pure” as girls. She declares herself in favor of “sexual freedom” for women and espouses a sexual revolution whose goal would be “a permissive single standard of sexual freedom.” She does not say what, if anything, would not be permitted. Her target is the double standard of sexual morality that permits, or more readily excuses, transgressions by men as contrasted to those by women.⁵⁵ Shulamith Firestone notes the kinship between feminism and Freud and approves Freud’s understanding of sexual morality as repression and not elevation. But she observes that the sexual revolution of the sixties, welcomed by men, was a snare for women who believed that men had just now learned to appreciate them for their intellect and other fine qualities. Yet she, too, wants a “more natural polymorphous sexuality” that includes no restraint that she cares to name.⁵⁶

None of our three revolutionaries has any criticism to make of male behavior in sex or proposes any standard to which men should be held.⁵⁷ Their concern is only for women; and not only should women not be required to be more moral than men, but it is carelessly implied that men too should be liberated from the lesser standard traditionally imposed on them. It seems that abandoning the double standard in sexual morality means abandoning any standard. These women do not worry about violence in sex, and they do not refer to the respect in which one should hold one’s partner (points that would be made soon enough in the light of reason and experience). Their point is sexual liberation from morality, not with it. But we do not have far to look for the transcendent morality that demands liberation from morality.

It used to be said that motherhood and apple pie were the two things exempt from public criticism in the United States. No longer! The list is down to apple pie, and even that is the pie your mother made. In Millett’s book, “holy motherhood” is presented sarcastically as a feature of Hitler’s Germany; in Greer’s, motherhood is derided as imitating mother ducks who “act as instinctive creatures, servants of the species.” (Note Beauvoir’s notion of womanly immanence in this accusation.) Ms. Firestone, a deeper thinker, quotes Beauvoir in order to argue that women’s reproductive biology, and not the social construction of patriarchy, is the cause of women’s oppres-sion.⁵⁸ You can’t blame men; it’s nature that’s at fault. But did not nature give men aggressive biology to complement women’s reproductive biology? Don’t we have to deal with men’s manliness as well as with women’s femininity? Firestone, together with other feminists, has her eye more on the disadvantages of women (as she thinks them) than on the advantages of men (as she also thinks them). She is not so unfriendly to aggressiveness or so disdainful of men for showing it as one might expect.

With dislike of motherhood goes rejection of domesticity. Firestone does not care for housework, which she calls “domestic chores.” She hopes that a larger household with a dozen or so members would eliminate the waste and repetition of the nuclear family without sacrificing intimacy.⁵⁹ With other feminists she assumes that the household is within, or constitutes, the realm of necessity as distinct from the realm of freedom. It is “domestic slavery,” as Engels said. Well, let us not be romantic about making the beds, cooking the meals, and so on. But the feminists make no room for the pride of a woman in good housekeeping, which if they noticed they would dismiss as a delusion. Yet if you add decorating and adornment to housekeeping, the result can be a delight to the eye and the soul. Women seem to desire more than men to make a nest and to take responsibility for making it. To do this, they sometimes need the help of their men, and they nag them responsibly and more or less charmingly according to their skill. The situation is quite different from a negotiated fifty-fifty split of odious tasks in the workplace, for the necessities of housework are alleviated and dignified by the consciousness that they are done, spontaneously by women and with a reminder by men, out of love.

These radical feminists do not care much for love, however. Women as of now, they believe, are liable to fall in love and to be carried away by romantic delusions about successful (read manly) men who are stronger and taller than they. To address this susceptibility, Greer has a chapter in The Female Eunuch in which she considers romance from the man’s point of view. “Many a young man trying to make out with his girl has been surprised at her rapt-ness and elation, only to find himself lumbered with an unwanted intense relationship which is compulsorily sexless.”⁶⁰ Poor fellow! Greer’s feminism will be good for him as well as for the women she liberates for unencumbered sex. Or have I got it turned around? Perhaps unencumbered sex is good because it liberates from love.

Shulamith Firestone says that love is “the pivot of women’s oppression today.” She believes that love in its simple, unromantic sense is acceptable; true love—love between two equals—would be a mutual exchange of vulnerability so that neither party could be hurt. She exposes the fact that falling in love is taking a risk, giving a hostage to fortune; and the solution is for both parties to open themselves totally to the other (assuming that both are equally vulnerable).⁶¹ Total risk is your insurance against risk. But typically, today “true love” is idealization of one party by another, a corruption reflecting an unequal balance of power. Now it might seem that when a woman’s lover idealizes her, an inferior woman could become equal to a superior man. In this way chivalrous romance would at least counteract if not overcome the oppression of patriarchy, and the legendary indirect rule of women over stronger men would be vindicated. In general, the phenomenon of wrapping a man around your little finger is underestimated or dismissed by feminism, but Ms. Firestone has an answer for the difficulty. A woman idealized by a man lives a lie, she says: “her life is a hell.” Either she is anxious that her man will find her out and see that she is inferior, or she lives the lie successfully and feels inauthentic.⁶²

Firestone is not satisfied with this discussion of love, however, as it still focuses on love between two parties. Such a focus she calls “the sex privatization of women,” a process by which men conceal their predatory, con-temptuous disregard for any difference between one woman and another and feign fidelity to one supposedly lucky member of the class of women.⁶³ She proposes doing away with “sex privatization” both as pretense and as fact so that women can be as forward, even as predatory, as men and neither sex will have to pretend otherwise. There will be households still, but they will not be formed of families. They will have about ten members and last for about ten years, thus preventing “family chauvinism” (no family reunions! no genealogies!) while providing intimacy and care for the children that Firestone hopes will be reproduced artificially.⁶⁴ This would be a household of in-laws without the “natural” ties that bring on inequalities of power. Firestone has no serious objection to the way men behave and greatly exaggerates when she implies that no man is ever a gentleman. But the exaggeration gives her a model for women: imitate men at their worst.

Of course, men at their worst, as Firestone conceives them, are not really at their worst. Somehow her men are led by sexual appetite alone and do not commit acts of violence against women. Perhaps they do not need to if women do not feel any modesty and are never in a mood to resist. Resistance, after all, would imply that a woman is being choosy and is committing the error of “sex privatization.” Later feminists certainly take notice of male violence and rail against rape, but that stance, while more realistic, doesn’t solve the problem. To resist rape a woman needs more than martial arts and more than the police; she needs a certain ladylike modesty enabling her to take offense at unwanted encroachment. How dare you! But only a woman can be a lady, and the feminists have deconstructed “woman” because they think it is a product fashioned by men. According to them, being independent from men requires women to embrace the extreme of abandoning any difference between women and men. Becoming manlike is a strange way of proving you are independent of men (ladylike would seem to be a better way). But from the beginning, the desire for independence is compromised when you pursue it with a view to men. The desire to be independent of men leaves you still in the grip of men. This will show them! We’ll refuse to be women. In response one may say that women and men have this in common—they are happier and more attractive when they live for the sake of something above themselves on which, in a sense, they depend. That something might be making a family together, a task that creates something independent. Being independent is not just sitting there without a commitment to other human beings but doing something with them so as to be entitled to the respect of leading a useful life.

Refusing to be women, our three feminists from 1970 therefore mount an attack on nature. Nature imprisons women in the home, gives them over to childbearing and child rearing, and makes them dependent on their husbands. Or is this “nature” in quotation marks a social construction imposed by men whose interest is to imprison women and then make them think that everything they are forced to do issues from their “nature”? Here we have an interesting difference of opinion between Firestone and Millett (perhaps joined by Greer). Firestone really believes that nature made women distinct from men by giving women wombs. She doesn’t blame men for this discrepancy. Since men weren’t given wombs, it was reasonable and natural of them not to behave as if they had been given them. By this logic patriarchy is the work of nature, not by choice of men. Patriarchy can be overcome, Firestone asserts, only by conquering nature through artificial means of reproduction; she mentions (this is 1970) “some awesome implications” of cloning.⁶⁵

Millett, by contrast, taking the side of John Stuart Mill, declares that “‘nature’ is preeminently a political gesture,” by which she means artificially imposed. Thus for Millett, patriarchy could have been avoided and deserves to be blamed.⁶⁶ But if patriarchy could have been avoided, why is it universal? Why is there no example in history of a matriarchy or gender-neutral society to which we could have recourse to inspire and reassure us today? We would be on firmer ground in blaming men if we could be sure that patriarchy is not inevitable. As things are, it appears that men are always in the position of being able to make a “political gesture” by creating a “nature” in quotation marks that favors their domination. But if men always dominate, they must be stronger and more able to impose on others; their strength would have to come from something outside themselves, that is, from nature. Those who begin from “nature” are brought by this route back to nature. As we have seen, men have the power to assert, and those who have the power to assert their nature also have the power to remove the quotation marks that would call attention to their assertion and deny its naturalness. The feminists are right to allege that anyone who claims to act “by na-ture” is adding human imposition or “social construction” to nature, but they do not see or do not care to admit that the manly assertiveness responsible for social construction is also by nature. Of course, nature has its way whether we assert it or not, but it has its way differently if we do not assert it. Thus the gender-neutral society cannot destroy manliness, but it can repress it and confuse it.

Sigmund Freud was an important figure to the feminist three.⁶⁷ Complacent sexist though he was, he proved that the family, rent by the Oedipus complex, was, to say the least, naturally disharmonious. A family in which father and son compete for the love of mother can be held together only by a fierce repression that belies the innocence and the legitimacy of a family in the mode of Ozzie and Harriet. And the feminists liked the sexual primi-tiveness implied in this picture of the family, to say nothing of Freud’s concentration on sex. Freud laid before them the notion of “polymorphous perversity,” which was very much to their taste (or, as we shall see, very appealing to their sense of moral duty). Freud had coined the phrase in 1905, but it was updated for the benefit of the sexual revolution of the late sixties by Herbert Marcuse. For Freud, polymorphous perversity was the original, or primitive, or natural character of human sexuality, later channeled and repressed to make the family possible and human society livable. To call it “perversity” surely implies that it is against nature as well as inconvenient, but we can set that difficulty aside. In any case, what Freud presented as a problem our three feminists with the prompting of Marcuse declared to be the solution.⁶⁸

The original human sexuality should be liberated rather than repressed, and polymorphous perversity should become the rule of civilized as well as primitive life. Again we see that feminism in its desire for independence surpasses the liberties that randy males had taken for themselves and for themselves only. “Polymorphous” goes well beyond (or is it only somewhat beyond?) the successive conquests of Don Giovanni, which, in order to be conquests, presuppose the modesty of women. The fun of sexual conquest, moreover, depends on its being a transgression of modesty and morality—a point that Freud understood well. But feminist sexuality is not fun and is not erotic. It is transgression on principle.

Germaine Greer says that her principle is the pleasure principle. Never mind that in Freud the pleasure principle is opposed to the reality principle (there’s something unreal about pleasure). Now when you hear that someone holds the pleasure principle, you know that she doesn’t care about pleasure. The pleasure principle is for someone who is really earnest about pleasure, which again means that she wants to be earnest rather than seek pleasure. When Greer tells us at the end of her book what really moves her, she says it’s “the joy of struggle.”⁶⁹ It’s the joy of leading a revolution and transgressing the conventions of society that have held women down for millennia, coupled with the realization that there will be no pain and no punishment in the attempt. Of the three writers, Greer is the only one who seems to enjoy being naughty; Firestone and Millett enjoy being sober and responsible. All three share the combination of prudishness and licentiousness characteristic of radical feminism, as if the bodies of Casanova and de Sade had been invaded and captured by the spirit of Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They feel it is their duty to promote, if not to practice, polymorphous perversity, and to do so not for the fun of having sex but in pursuit of a new society of women liberated from sexual morality so as to be liberated from men. In this pursuit any definition of woman is abandoned or destroyed and replaced by a fierce determination not to be defined: traditional sexual morality falls before a new moralism demanding power and transcendence with no stated goal. This is why I have called feminism “nihilism.” It says that being a woman is nothing definite and that the duty of women is to advance that nothingness as a cause. A certain nobility attaches to the cause even if we are not invited to say what it might be. But this is only because we think we know something of the definition of a woman—knowledge these feminists reject.

These three feminists are revolutionaries, but they are the first revolutionaries not to give a single thought to the use of violence. Jesus Christ was an unarmed prophet of peace, but his revolution was unpolitical and not of this world. These women want to change the world by introducing a new, very worldly independence to the lives of women. Having been oppressed for millennia by men, how do they expect to overthrow their oppressors? Especially when, for all the feminists know, men oppress women in accordance with their nature? Marx said that the bourgeoisie will not abdicate, that vio-lent revolution by the proletariat is necessary. How do feminists conceive that men will not defend patriarchy? In fact, men did not defend it but instead of fighting amazingly surrendered almost to the last man. How this happened I do not want to say, but I do want to remark on the strategy and tactics of feminism. For in the manner of its attack on patriarchy we see why one can speak of womanly nihilism. The feminists knew more of the nature of woman than they cared to admit, and they relied on womanly devices.

Our three feminists never directly admit the weakness of women in relation to men. They do not face the facts that rape is done by men to women (and sometimes to other men), not by women to men; nor that one often hears complaints of wife-beating but seldom of husband-beating (it does occur). They do not explain why patriarchy held sway everywhere until now. In Sexual Politics, Kate Millett says that men have bigger muscles but that superior physical strength has no authority within civilization. Civilization! Two pages before, she said that all civilization has been oppressive patriarchy; now we see that patriarchy was not so bad after all.⁷⁰ Patriarchy either created or tolerated civilization, and civilization was very good for women because it nullified men’s advantage in big muscles. In fact, men must not be so bad either because despite their advantage in bodily strength they consented to its being nullified—they abdicated. You could even say they behaved as gentlemen. Shulamith Firestone has a different view, but it comes to the same thing. She says that civilization relied on male supremacy to liberate human beings from their enslavement to biology, only to re-enslave women with romantic delusions.⁷¹ In that case men were not such gentlemen and did not abdicate, but men are still responsible for liberating humanity from their own bigger muscles even if they took away liberty by foisting romantic love on unwilling women. (Yet isn’t it better to be wooed insincerely than beaten up?) Firestone takes the acquisition of “culture” for granted; once it exists, feminists can work within it to transform it. As with Beauvoir, the proletarian revolution is the necessary though not sufficient condition of liberation. Yet if a violent male revolution is necessary to women’s liberation, we have to conclude that women must depend on men for their liberation.

Anyone might object that men always depend on women, and particularly in the building of civilization. To advance that point, you have to accept the value of sex roles, which these feminists do not. As we see, they would rather have women stand for nothing than for something, because any quality or virtue is a prison for women and being nothing is liberation for them. Since these feminists take no account of men’s greater strength, they also disregard the strength of women together with their contribution to civilization. In truth, strength comes in two kinds: men have greater force, women greater endurance. This great truth of common sense gets in the way of the nihilistic denial of sexual definition, so it must be ignored. In sum, it is clear that civilization is a boon to women. It greatly reduces the advantage of men’s muscles and it validates the advantage women have over men in… we shall see in an instant. At least in the beginnings, civilization was built on slavery; that we must admit. Aristotle tells us, however, that one mark of civilization is to distinguish between slaves and women.⁷²

Germaine Greer has the solution that will make possible a nonviolent revolution. “Women’s weapons are traditionally their tongues,” she says. She doesn’t want women to be meek and guileful because that sort of dissimulation is slavery. Women who are free do not entreat, inveigle, or cozy up to you. They talk straight and tough, sprinkling their discourse with four-letter words for emphasis. In case of trouble with stronger males arising from this approach, like true revolutionaries they can always call the police. But wait! Greer had spoken out against a “masculine-feminine bipolarity” earlier in the book; what is this about women’s traditional weapons?⁷³ In this implicit, grudging recognition of weakness, feminist nihilism becomes womanly. Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re. Manly in substance, feminism is womanly in manner. Rather than by violent revolution, feminism undertook to bring on the gender-neutral society by raising consciousness. Unlike the manly suffragettes, who broke the law and demonstrated scandalously in public places, the feminists, who in their writings dispensed with morality and claimed to be ready if not eager for polymorphous perversity in matters of sex, were so law-abiding in their behavior that none of them spent a moment in jail.

Raising consciousness was intended to make women and men aware of how much society is prejudiced against women. The prejudice is so powerful that it is barely noticed; it is embedded in our language and in the pronouns we use many times every day. To use “he” for the impersonal pronoun, for example, when referring to a doctor or lawyer, conveys the assumption that situations of power and authority are normally held by males. Raising consciousness by substituting gender-neutral pronouns would excite the ambition of women and induce men to welcome the change. It would make clear that doctor and lawyer are nouns equally available to women and men rather than presumed to be male. So the formula he/she was born, together with variations with the same aim, including the use of “she” as the impersonal pronoun, giving tit for tat and getting revenge for women after millennia of male oppression. This particular new convention was not imposed by the government (though the government soon adopted it) but was first insisted on by feminist copy editors at publishers (particularly university presses), subordinate employees whose job was to check copy for errors in spelling and grammar and who inserted gender-neutral pronouns on their own. By working through changes of language, feminists were able to correct social prejudice without having to demonstrate or even argue for reform. How could one answer them that the impersonal pronoun “he” did not favor men or that women were not equal to men?

Consciousness is a word used by Marx, and consciousness-raising is a compound of neo-Marxist origin that was apparently first used in 1969 in the Red Stockings Manifesto, coauthored by Shulamith Firestone when she helped found a radical feminist group in New York.⁷⁴ Although it is not used in the first edition of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the term appeared in a later edition after it had worked its way not only into the mainstream of feminism but also into American public discourse. The term is a reminder that feminism came from the left and that it owed much to Marx’s critique of liberalism; many of the early feminists considered themselves Marxists, and Friedan herself was either a communist or close to communists in the 1940s.⁷⁵ Marx’s theory was directed above all against the division of labor, which he thought to be the source of all oppression; his associate Friedrich Engels extended Marx’s theory to sex roles, concluding that under communism they would have to be abolished. Original Marxism argued, to be sure, that consciousness was determined by economic forces, but when events showed the economic argument to be implausible, neo-Marxism arose to say that consciousness might revolt by itself. (This was what Beauvoir was saying to Sartre in the interview discussed above.) The way to liberation that economics could not provide was open to psychology, and feminists turned gratefully to (male) psychologists. Friedan actually studied with two of the most important: Erik Erikson, who touted the concept of identity, and Kurt Lewin, who pushed sensitivity. Erikson, following Nietzsche, showed how identity could be both an individual and a social creation, but Lewin had an even greater success with the notion of sensitivity, to which we owe the Sensitive Male. The gender-neutral society is much indebted to post-Nietzschean psychology of this sort.

Sensitivity was a movement in social psychology that had some success after World War II in corporate management. Businessmen would get together to meet in a “T-Group” or “encounter group” where they would begin by disregarding all existing hierarchy among those present. They would then proceed democratically to make a new hierarchy or—surprise!—confirm the old one and in the process teach sensitivity to one another. To become sensitive meant to become aware of your tendency to throw your weight around and hurt other people, especially to hurt their feelings. Comment in T-Groups was supposed to be personal rather than abstract because abstractions give offense and reduce intimacy. “You’re a fool!,” for example, is the kind of abstract description that gives offense. When you have to respect personal feelings, however, those feelings become immune to moral judgment and do not have to face critical challenge—as they do when you are told to stop sniveling. Here we see a sudden access of democracy through the exposure and purging of aggressiveness, done by males to themselves as if they were too impatient to wait for the feminists to do it to them.

Sensitivity, like political correctness at the end of the century, was (and is) the insinuation of opinion into others without either argument or imposition. It is an effective rhetorical method traditionally used by women to deliver a surprised reproach: Tut, tut! With expressions such as “You just don’t get it!” women can get what they want without having to ask for it directly, thus without asserting themselves. Applied to their careers, which are now part of their identities, women can have their merit recognized without having to call attention to it. That is why the heroes or heroines of feminism have not been great doers like Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth, or Catherine the Great. The mightiest woman of our time, Margaret Thatcher, is no model for feminists, partly because of her conservative opinions, of course, but also because her renowned insensitivity makes them uneasy. Feminists prefer to seek out and confer recognition on unnoticed women from the past; they favor obscure authors rather than great names like Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, who, having been noticed before feminism came on the scene, are somewhat tainted by association with corrupt patriarchy. By taking advantage of sensitivity, feminists ensure that their manly revolutionism has a feminine touch. Sensitivity, we note, has nothing to do with having sex but is intended to open the doors for women’s ambition, not merely to let women pass through in the literal sense. Sensitivity is what has happened to gentlemanliness in our day.

Conscious that I have moved from speaking of three or four radical feminists to feminism in general, I would not want to leave the impression that I have given a complete picture of feminism. Beauvoir, Firestone, Greer, and Millett are only the original core of feminism, and feminism today has moved on to issues not raised by the pioneers. And we have not yet considered Betty Friedan, the first of the American pioneers, who was a moderate according to my rather desperate definition of not wanting to abolish the family. The Feminine Mystique came out ahead of the radical books that I have discussed above, and it had much greater influence. “I am still awed by the revolution that book helped spark,” said Friedan with good reason twenty years later.⁷⁶

Friedan’s book starts with the “problem that has no name.” But it turns out to have a name, boredom—the same problem known in another language as ennui that had been the accusation against the bourgeoisie throughout the nineteenth century. Ennui was what Emma Bovary suffered from, and it led her to adultery. But Friedan thinks that “sex-seeking” is still part of the feminine mystique in which women have been imprisoned in their relationship to a man; and besides, suburban adultery is not as exciting and unconventional as Madame Bovary’s sad adventure. Unlike the radical feminists, Friedan does not dwell on sex. She wants to answer the voice within women that says, “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.”⁷⁷ This “something more” proves to be a job, or rather, “creative work of her own.” Creative work enables a woman to sense her freedom or her autonomy, says Friedan at the end of her book.⁷⁸

“Something more” is a moderate goal if it means recognizing that being a wife and mother in our time is no longer a full-time occupation and that being a male is no longer necessary for many professions and jobs. Without assailing all previous societies for having practiced and all previous thinkers for having countenanced patriarchal oppression, one could moderately call for an adjustment in favor of women to the new circumstances of life. Of course, there would be problems in making this adjustment, and feminist thought could address them by considering how women might combine job and family and how men might be persuaded to relax those demands of their manliness that seem to require them to resist such changes. For both points thoughtful deliberation is the key, not raising consciousness. None of this is to be found in The Feminine Mystique. The author is awed by the revolution her book made, but revolution is what she wanted. She wanted autonomy for women, for that is the word she used; and autonomy is not something more but something other than “my husband and my children and my home.” Autonomy is not a policy of accommodating others but a demand that they adjust to my will, or to the will of all those who think like me.⁷⁹

Friedan, by contrast to the more radical feminists, left husbands and children relatively unscathed, but she unloaded a bitter denunciation of the housewife—going so far as to call the American home a “comfortable concentration camp” and to compare housewives with its inmates. ⁸⁰ This excess, later regretted, was not what most feminists felt or wanted to say, but it reveals a very immoderate cast of mind. Friedan also says that a woman is a “human being of limitless human potential, equal to man.”⁸¹ Here she flirts with nihilism, both affirming and denying an essence to human being. But the main point is to claim for women anything that men have. All womanly qualities are rejected in her attack on the feminine mystique, leaving only the desire to be autonomous, like a man. Anything characteristic of women, in which women might find comfort and take pride, is deliberately thrown overboard. No sort of femininity is proposed to take the place of the feminine mystique. Women are to find themselves by looking inward and seeing nothing valuable there but limitless potential, just as she supposes men do. Yet men who want to play with their lives as if they were supermen, or little toy figures of Nietzsche, have always had to face women as their critics. The trouble with feminist women is that they don’t have wives to teach them sense. Their autonomy is not a substitute, much less a recipe for moderation.

Other feminist moves toward moderation can teach us something further about manliness. When women in their feminism try to be manly, they expose to view hidden preconditions of manliness that may be concealed by the familiarity of sex differences. Thus the radical feminists show what would be required in the way of independence to give women the lives of men. But when moderate feminists recoil from that picture they show what women, perhaps reasonably, dislike about manly independence. Is autonomy good for women? If not, is it such a good thing for anyone? Is identity? Is transcendence?

Naomi Wolf raises the question whether a woman’s beauty gets in the way of her autonomy. Wolf is a feminist writer who made a name for herself with a book, The Beauty Myth (1991), that developed Friedan’s notion of the feminine mystique. Beauty is a myth foisted on women by men, and women are much too impressed with it. Women shouldn’t pride themselves on their beauty, shouldn’t sacrifice for it, shouldn’t allow themselves to be ranked by it. Beauty is a form of enslavement—that is, of course, to men. Here is a truth known to all beautiful women, hence to Ms. Wolf herself.⁸² Beauty also enslaves women who wish they were beautiful. And it enslaves men who admire beautiful women and want to be attractive to them. Still, if you were a beautiful woman, would you trade your looks for autonomy? Wolf is known more recently, in the 2000 presidential campaign, for having advised Al Gore on how to be or appear more manly (more “Alpha male”) and thus more attractive to voters who are not repelled by manliness. This was a notable concession on her part to the male side of the beauty myth, though in her advice to wear agreeable colors she may have been confusing sexy (trying to be attractive to women) with manly (not seeming to care about that).⁸³

Wolf’s doubts about feminist radicalism became evident in two books where she related her discoveries that polymorphous perversity was not so good and motherhood not so bad. In Promiscuities (1997), she retold stories of women who learned from their first sexual experiences not how polymorphous they might be but just how distinct they were from men. Wolf lamented the “silencing of the female first person sexual voice” and aimed to correct it in her book, but one wonders whether it is in the interest of women to blurt out their sexual voice and thus incite men to the aggression they are already too much in mind of.⁸⁴ Moderation in women seems to require the modesty they are inclined to anyway, but Wolf leaves that point to more conservative, antifeminist women.⁸⁵ Obviously at some point modesty has to yield, but without it there is no task for impetuosity and life diminishes into routine. When the feminists ask, “What is it about the word ‘no’ that you don’t understand?” the answer is whether a woman is being modest.

One problem of women’s autonomy is that women are the weaker sex. This is a hard thing to say, and not only in these days. Women are stronger in endurance than men and in whatever enables them to live longer, and many women have admirable strength of soul. These are not small advantages. But in strength of body most men are easily stronger than most women, as well as more aggressive. The difference remains despite the equalizing tendency of both technology and democracy, which diminish the importance of strength and aggression. When women drive cars and shoot guns, when everything conspires to equalize them with men, the fact that women remain weaker is all the more notable. No doubt, the “weaker sex” is a phrase better left to be understood than to be stated, still less repeated, for it is ungentlemanly to make a point of one’s greater strength. Yet gentle-manliness would not be needed if there were no weaker sex. So let’s tell the truth. Now that women are equal, they should be able to accept being told that they aren’t, quite. Just how important this leftover fact is, is hard to say, except to remark that in everyday life it reinforces traditional courtesies and sex roles. A truly moderate, realistic feminism would confront this awkward reminder.

Besides being weaker than men’s, women’s bodies are made to attract and to please men. These facts, causing women to be in a sense subject to men, cannot help but affect women’s autonomy. Feminists often avow their desire to secure control over their bodies. Hitherto, they say, women’s bodies have been on call to men, all women have been prostitutes to men, an assertion some feminists would insist is not exaggerated. How can women have self-control (that is, moderation) if others—men—control the readiest and most needful thing to control, one’s body? Polymorphous perversity, or promiscuity, is one answer because one can gain a measure of control of one’s body by offering it freely to all. With many lovers, one has none or is subject to none, one hopes. Or is it nonsense to think that turmoil in one’s sex life is independence? To be independent it seems that one must have some calm. Another answer is homosexuality, so that one gains control over one’s body by keeping it away from men. Men bring anxiety and heartache, and their big muscles add to the problem by magnifying both their means and their presumption. Add to this the solid mahogany they often have instead of brains. Why then ask for trouble by sleeping with men? It’s better to find some substitute. A third, more moderate solution is not to compete with men or to compete with them indirectly by not challenging them, not giving them notice of a threat. But this way, though effective, is an age-old, prefeminist maneuver that cedes formal sovereignty to the stronger sex and thus again feeds male presumption and confirms male authority.⁸⁶ It might be that women rather admire presumption and authority.

“Control over one’s body” is a phrase often used to claim the right of abortion, an act that frees a woman from the troubles of giving birth and child rearing but does not save her from regret or from the risk of becoming callous if she should get in the habit of preferring her convenience to other, more valuable things. Autonomy sounds good when it is claimed for the sake of nobility, much less so when it is for convenience. To insist on keeping the right of abortion absolutely intact, with no concessions to reasonable doubt, betrays the presence of moralism in those who rail against that fault when they confront the other side of the debate. And there is a debate on abortion in which women should feel free to think for themselves—autonomously, if you like.

Can you be autonomous without having an identity? Or does having an identity cut down your options and cramp you too much? Let us turn now to identity, a notion that seems to contradict the characterization of “womanly nihilism.” To have an identity means precisely that as a woman you are not nothing. You have rejected the womanly essence, the “eternal feminine,” because it enslaves you to men. But you do not stop with rejection; you replace the essence allegedly created by nature and actually created by men with an identity you have created for yourself. Clearly it is not really an identity if it has no specific content. An identity of creativity or “choice,” in which your main idea is to keep your options open without specifying what is to be created or chosen, simply repeats the negativity of rejecting the old essence. So again, if you hear the question “Is there anything about the word ‘no’ that you don’t understand?” the answer is, “to what will you say ‘yes’?” Under the old code, a woman turning down a man does not have to answer, but the new code does not permit such reticence.

In general, the answer we get from feminists comes from psychology, from the sort of psychology derived from Nietzsche, the big bad wolf standing behind feminism who said that psychology is the queen of the sciences.⁸⁷ Ye t though derived from Nietzsche’s heady “honesty,” identity is a tame, rou-tinized version for democracy’s everydayness. An example is the “different voice” that Carol Gilligan, whom we now examine as a feminist, finds in women. In her book In a Different Voice (1982), she finds it not in a select few but in all of them. Working as an assistant to the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, Gilligan grew restive under his assumption that a healthy identity develops toward recognition of ever more universal rights.⁸⁸ This identity, she thought, was too abstract and too much suited to the abstractness of males. She began to see that women are relational rather than abstract; they find frightening the male insistence on rights with its corollary of noninterference with, unconcern for, others. Moreover, women relate to others without standing on ceremony or insisting on hierarchy; women are more democratic than men. But in this influential book men are never discussed!

Without saying so Gilligan returns to traditional sexism, but only to the female half of it. She criticizes the maleness of feminism and praises the womanliness of women but still manages to remain a feminist. Her definition of voice as “an intensely relational act” omits the male voice of assertion that we have studied (why can’t you relate to someone by telling her what to do?). She contrasts the ways that women and men describe themselves without noting the obvious fact that the men she quotes are all boasting.⁸⁹ How can women do the jobs of men unless they are equally assertive? It seems doubtful that relational women will get to the top; they will likely remain stuck in the middle where their good humor and their talent can be exploited. To do better while remaining relational they would have to stop caring and start scheming. Gilligan illustrates the feminist tendency to claim equality on the ground that a woman can do anything a man can do and then, after equality is admitted, ask for special treatment because a woman is more vulnerable. She forgets that in demanding justice, a man might be asking for what is due to him because of his abilities. Still, let us not rely on harsh male logic, always so self-serving. It is well to treat women as women, and this includes recognizing their merit even when they don’t boast about it. But let women be grateful for the generosity of this justice when they see it. They do thank you for it in their terms: “you are very supportive.” This is not the sort of praise a gentleman likes to hear, but it is better than being denounced for sexism. If Carol Gilligan is right about women, feminism needs more revision than she has given it. Perhaps women shouldn’t be quite so ambitious as the radical feminists want them to be? That is what their “identity” according to Gilligan tells them.

“The elusive mystery of women’s development lies in its recognition of the continuing importance of attachment,” according to Gilligan.⁹⁰ Where, then, is the idea of transcendence—a kind of detachment—said to be the human idea and the goal of liberated women by Simone de Beauvoir? Gilli-gan, though a professor, is not nearly as theoretical as the elite of academic feminists who transcend the crowd of ordinary women by the thoughts they think and the words they invent. To be sure, the academic feminists base their psycho-philosophical theories on the work of two men particularly, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. Both were French, and they provided sophisticated simplification of the thoughts of great minds (such as Nietzsche and Heidegger) for the use of academic disciplines. Difficult thoughts were brought down to the level where common professors could handle them, and the reduction was disguised by processing it in heavy jargon. Lacan, for his part, made sense of Freud for the feminists by expressing his thought in the theory of language. He wrote an influential article entitled “The Signification of the Phallus.” The phallus is a “signifier.”⁹¹ It signifies both demand (or power) and desire (or lack); here Lacan does his best to bring eros or attraction back to sex. But his best is not very good if only because reading his prose is not an experience with beauty.

While Lacan helped out the feminists with Freud, Michel Foucault translated Nietzsche for them into a theory they believed they could use.⁹² Fou-cault took from Nietzsche the idea that knowledge is a form of power (“will to power”) rather than the result of a simple desire or yearning to know.⁹³ Foucault easily found the power of knowledge in the ambition of modern science to bring rational control, especially “discipline,” to human affairs. He studied the forerunners of today’s social science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and applied his insight to the “disciplinary system” enforced on sexuality so as to make sex more sensible and suitable for the bourgeoisie. He looked not at the central organs of society but at its “capillaries,” where he discovered that the vaunted personal liberty of bourgeois liberalism was, in fact, social enforcement of exclusion and “marginality.” Its purpose was to create “docile and useful bodies.” To counter the rational disciplining of society, or perhaps just to expose it so that others might counter it, Fou-cault developed not a science of his own but an “antiscience” or “genealogy” (Nietzsche’s term) that would substitute “discursive” talk for scientific rigor. A discursive genealogy of social power would avoid any judgment of what is essential, for seeking the essence of things causes science to be “totalizing,” overbearing, and tyrannical at the expense of groups (such as homosexuals) it relegates to the margin of society. Foucault focused on the naïve, non-scientific discourse of resistance among the marginalized.⁹⁴

All this was a sublime revelation to feminists. The only difficulty was that for some reason Foucault himself—like Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Lacan—had not applied his analysis to women. Overlooking the fact that power was masculine, Foucault had accepted the essentialized domination of men and unfortunately marginalized women. He could be hoist on his own petard, and he was. He of all people should have known that masculinist power has always subjugated women “through their bodies,” but his own essential nature held him in its surprisingly tenacious grasp. Subjugation through their bodies refers to women’s natural weakness relative to men, to the mutual natural attraction of men and women, and to the function of reproduction that naturally occupies women more than men. Canceling all that subjugation requires overcoming the relevant powers of nature or, in sum (and for the sake of being sure), denying nature. This denial, we have seen, is what is meant by nihilism.

If women are not defined in some fixed respects by nature, then women are either what they make of themselves or what they are made by others, either creators or creatures. We are back to the distinction set forth by Beau-voir between transcendence, making yourself, and immanence, being made by others—which means by your context and inheritance. The distinction is embodied in an excellent debate held in 1990 between two feminist professors, Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler.⁹⁵ Their exchange brings out the difficulty of a woman’s wanting to be transcendent and at the same time refusing any natural essence of womanhood. Beauvoir tried to do both, but Benhabib and Butler together show why this is not possible. Each of them takes hold of one point and lets the other drop, Benhabib standing for transcendence and Butler representing contextuality.

Benhabib, closer to the old left, wants to criticize the traditional role of women, and believing that if you criticize you must be above what you criticize, she thinks that women must elevate themselves to improve their situation. To do this they need a strong sense of subject or self with the power to reform. The trouble is that having a self means having an essence that limits what you can do with your self, all the more if it’s a strong self. You might, for example, have a strong self irresistibly drawn to your children. Butler for her part does not care to be stuck with a definition, which she regards à la Foucault as a “ruse of power.” She is in the fancy postmodern left and believes in infinite openness with no exclusions or “binary” (either-or) definitions. The advantage to this position is that a woman, now undefined, can move into anything, since nothing is regarded as unwomanly. The drawback is that she is then defined by her situation, “constituted by her positions,” not by herself. Her definition having been deconstructed, her context moves in and takes her over.⁹⁶ Her husband and the children won’t let her go. By being infinitely open she is perfectly flexible and therefore has no resistance to outside imposition. When a woman lives beyond definition she has nothing of her self to insist on, and she becomes the very sort of passive patsy feminists abhor. Well, she can insist on her tenure: postmodernism is nihilism for professors.

So it’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t: this is the failure of womanly nihilism. If you have an identity, you cannot do everything; if you can do everything, you have no identity. But let us not drop womanly nihilism altogether. There is something reasonable in a woman’s reluctance to be defined, and that is her desire these days to “have it all.” To be specific, having it all is having both career and family and not being confined to one of them. Having a family will naturally be more demanding for a woman than a man so that less is left for her career. But as a man shares in the desire for a family, so a woman shares in public ambition. She may have less ambition or a different ambition, but being a political animal like a man, she too likes to rule, if in her way. So too—and I am speaking as always “for the most part”—she can be defined in her way. Her definition is less abstract than a man’s just as her life is less abstracting, more rounded, and more attentive to the world around her. She is distinctive by not always striving to be distinctive.

Feminism prompts us to a further reflection more friendly to it. Feminism wants transcendence over previous definitions of womanhood. This is what it learned from Simone de Beauvoir, who learned transcendence from Nietzsche. But it wants transcendence for the sake of independence, and the trouble is that the two are not consistent. Independence means that you are satisfied with yourself; transcendence means that you are not. In relations between the sexes independence means that you do not need the other sex because you do not want to be dependent on it; transcendence means that you do need it because you want more than your own sex. Feminism is not to be blamed for this inconsistency. Not only feminists but all human beings want both completion and incompletion in this way. Homosexuals would admit that society depends, and so they depend, on heterosexuals. It’s the utopian fervor of feminism that brings out the difficulty, which is otherwise concealed by the complacency of convention. Certainly manly men are both disdainful of women and chivalrous to them without reflecting on the problem. And the gender-neutral society does not know whether to ignore the sexual difference (independence) or abolish it (transcendence). So let us think again about the sex roles.

To be of one sex makes you partisan for your sex but also makes you yearn for the other sex. A profession or occupation is in a sense complete, and there is nothing about the role of carpenter or professor that makes the one yearn to be or be with the other. Sex is different because the two sexes are inclined, for the most part, to each other. Neither sex finds satisfaction only in itself but only or mainly in the other; this is a desire for transcendence of oneself. Now what is the character of the transcendence? Is it a desire to make our humanity universal so that the sexes are at last equal? So says the liberal doctrine of the “rights of man,” which despite its somewhat sexist language holds the promise of sexual equality. Notwithstanding the scorn of feminists for sexist liberals, it is to liberals rather than Nietzsche that feminists are indebted for the idea of equality that is their fundamental premise.

Or is transcendence the desire for a more perfect humanity rising above the limitations of the sexes and combining their excellences? This would be a vertical transcendence as opposed to the horizontal liberal transcendence, and we find it in the classical philosophers. Plato and Aristotle have much more to say about men and women than do the liberals, for whom the sexual difference is something of an embarrassment. We will turn to the two kinds of transcendence in the next two chapters, beginning with the liberals who are closer to us.