links presented, WITH comment
one last polemic
Just one link actually, since I sent out a Stack’s worth of links so recently. (Don’t worry, I promise not to make a habit of flooding your inboxes; I’ll send this off and vanish again in due course.) This time, the link in question is to a review of a book by Leah Libresco Sargeant, the saner and more humane interlocutor on the instantly infamous “did liberal feminism ruin the workplace?” podcast that the Times released last week. Sargeant is smart and eloquent, and more importantly, I think she’s operating in good faith, which is why I think it’s especially important to point out that her nominally benign and woman-friendly brand of “conservative feminism” is still very dangerous. Her view is basically a species of gender-essentialism, grounded in claims about the effects of female anatomy on female moral orientation. The basic idea is that, because women can become pregnant (even if they don’t in fact become pregnant, or even if don’t plan to), they are more attuned (or something) to the universal fact of human interdependence. I say “or something” because I think that the actual claim of the book is left conveniently vague. It bills itself as a call for a new kind of feminism, so it needs to at least suggest that there is some deep and distinctive connection between women and interdependence—but since Sargeant has the good sense to believe men are independent, too, she never quite goes so far as to say women are more interdependent. Instead, she hazily suggests that they are more…something. More aware of or sensitive to interdependence? More thrust into interdependence? Or maybe, just a little bit, more interdependent? Something like that. (One objection to this account I did not have the space to raise—and that I took to be fairly obvious—was that not all women are even potentially pregnant. What does Sargeant think of trans women? Of infertile women? Are they, too, constitutionally aware of human interdependence, given that the mechanism of such awareness is prospective pregnancy? Are they, by her lights, not real women?) Anyway, here is a gift link to my review that should work. If it doesn’t, let me know; I know this one won’t go as viral as some of my other stuff, but I really want people to read it, because this topic matters enormously to me. Topics tend to do that, when they bear on your dignity.
A few additional remarks, mostly in the form of responses to frequent objections, while I have you all here as my captive audience. (I promise I won’t make a habit of making remarks either, it’s just that this is a topic in which I am really invested, for the obvious reason that I am a woman who hopes to live a full human life.)
People often respond to arguments like mine by saying something like, “this view means you cannot acknowledge that there are physical differences between people who are sexed differently!” But of course you can. To suggest that one particular claim about one particular piece of anatomy (in this case, the uterus) is wrong is patently not to suggest that the idiosyncrasies of our bodies never matter or merit discussion. We can quite easily acknowledge that someone without a cervix has no need of a Pap smear, or that a woman is many times more likely to suffer from an autoimmune condition than a man, without also accepting that the possibility of pregnancy makes us more sensitive to interdependence.
A stronger version of this objection goes like this: “anyone who does not believe that female anatomy endows women with a particular moral orientation is a closet mind-body dualist!” Which…what? Rejecting one particular claim about how the mind and body are connected is in no way tantamount to embracing mind-body dualism. You can believe that embodiment informs or is even constitutive of personhood (as I do! I love Nietzsche and Heidegger, for christ’s sake,) without accepting the particular contention at issue here, namely, that the possibility of pregnancy has enormous bearing on the female moral ethos. Believe me, friends: there’s nothing like three years of chronic illness and a rousing bout of cancer to really teach a person that, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, illness is a total form of life. And if illness is a total form of life, health must be, too. (For more on this line of thought: see my forthcoming book. It’s not very forthcoming yet, since I’m still writing it, but it will be eventually.) I am not a mind-body dualist. But rejecting mind-body dualism does automatically commit me to accepting every implausible claim anyone ever makes about how the mind/soul and body are linked. And in general, I find the argumentative tactic embodied (ha) in this sort of move quite irritating. It reminds me of the following kind of exchange, which used to be quite common, in the Stupid Times before the Dark Times:
A: That thing you just said is wrong!
B: Don’t you believe in free speech?
A has actually not challenged B’s right or ability to say the thing she just said. Indeed, nothing A has said would lead a reasonable person to conclude she is hostile to free speech. A is asking B to defend the actual content of her statement. But instead of responding to A’s challenge, B deflects, trying to transform the conversation into a more general one, presumably so as to wriggle out of defending the actual thing she said. Similarly, in this case, someone who cries wolf—in this case, “wolf!” is “Cartesian dualist!,” the favorite bogey-cum-strawman of the communitarian right—is absolved of the difficult (in my view, impossible) task of defending the particular biological claim at issue. I’m not going to get mired in a discussion of mind-body dualism, which I have never endorsed. No. That conversation is a distraction, an alibi designed to conceal the weakness of the underlying argument that is actually at issue—an argument about the uterus and its moral implications. I understand the temptation to change the conversation, of course.
In my piece, I wrote, “Sexism has two pillars: the insistence that female biology is moral destiny, and the insistence that female moral destiny is inferior. [The truly indefensible woman on the podcast] accepts both pillars. Sargeant challenges the second but accepts the first. True flourishing lies in rejection of both.” I go on to explain why, arguing that complementarianism (the view that women and men complement each other but play “separate but equal” roles in the emotional/ethical economy of the human project) is a form of specialization—and that specialization, per arguments made by Adam Smith re. assembly lines, is truncating and morally deforming. I think many people are apt to misinterpret this claim. You might think, if you read a touch too quickly, that I am saying the following: as soon as we acknowledge that men and women are different, we open the floodgates, and people who believe that women are worse come gushing in. As it happens, I do think this, but it is actually importantly different than what I said in the piece. What I said in the piece is that gender essentialism is a harm in its own right, even if the second step of valuing men over women never kicks in. Confining women (or, for that matter, men, who are invariably tasked with becoming “providers” and “protectors”) to a small corner of the human moral project is bad enough. It shrinks and blunts them in all the ways that Smith thought assembly lines shrunk and blunted workers. It’s bad.
I think I’ll close comments on this one because I left Substack for a reason. Social media, with its constant stream of screeching demands for engagement, is bad for my mind-body-soul constellation. I don’t want to have to be paying attention to this website today. But I welcome disagreements in the DMs or via email or, if it comes to it, face to face.