The gender post

At the conclusion of a week that marked Leon Panetta's announcement about military women in combat roles, the essay by the 11-year-old "transgendered" girl in response to the MEC's inaugural address (see my "Hey, did any of you other frogs . . . " post below for links re: these developments), and the  40th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, my thoughts turn to the matter of what, if anything, is intrinsically masculine of feminine.

As regular readers know, I'm adjunct faculty at one of our state universities.  On my way to the mailroom, I pass by a bulletin board devoted to new course offerings.  Recently, the big excitement there was the fact that one can now get a minor in women's studies at our campus.  The flyer announcing this flatly stated as a given that gender is merely a social construct, that expectations based on biological distinctions are arbitrary, with no roots in how males' and females' respective hormonal ratios drive perception or behavior.

It's nothing that hasn't been commonplace for some time.  I recently posted about a situation at the school from which I got my master's degree in history, Butler University in Indianapolis, in which a young man drew the ire of his political science professor for daring to question her instruction at the beginning of the semester to approach assignments in her class without regard to one's gender, ethnicity, religious affiliation or American citizenship.  Look for this deconstructionist presupposition to become ever more codified as the new "Common Core" curriculum comes to prevail.

Feminism expects today's university students to be big boys and girls about coed dorms with unrestricted visitation, to keep arousal under wraps no matter how close the quarters.  Not that there isn't frolicking going on.  Actually, "frolicking" may be an inaccurate term.  According to Helen Rittelmeyer's article "Sex in the Meritocracy" in the February issue of First Things, the point nowadays is not to congratulate oneself on his or her degree of liberation, but to, as with everything else about the highly focused modern student, to bring one's A game to the table:

every admitted student believes he must be excellent at anything he tries. In the old Yale, campus culture developed from the upper-class traits that most students shared and the rest hoped to adopt. In the new, more diverse Yale, the only thing students share is ambition, and it determines attitudes toward grades (anything below an A-minus can be disputed with the professor), extracurriculars (hardly anyone spends four years in a club without achieving a leadership position), and even drugs. Instead of marijuana or cocaine, Yale’s pharmaceutical network now traffics mostly in Adderall, the wonder drug that, as one girl told me, “makes you want to work.” Surely this is the first generation of college students in which even the drug users are more interested in working hard than getting high.

This overachiever’s mentality has also determined campus attitudes toward sex. Few notice the connection, because the end result—sexual permissiveness—is the same as it was in the sixties and seventies, when the theme of campus culture was not overachievement but liberation, and the eighties and early nineties, when it was postmodernism and the overthrow of all value judgments. The notorious Yale institution known as Sex Week—a biennial series of sex toy demonstrations, student lingerie shows, and lectures by pornographers—wouldn’t have been out of place in either of these eras. Consequently, Yale’s sexual culture is often mistaken for mere depravity by outside observers who assume that it is just another byproduct of moral relativism. 

It would be more accurate to say that Yale students treat sex as one more arena in which to excel, an opportunity not just to connect but to impress. Every amateur sonneteer secretly believes his verse to be as good as the United States poet laureate’s, and every undergraduate programmer suspects his code rivals the best in Silicon Valley. It’s not very different for Yale students to say that, if pornography is the gold standard of sexual prowess, then that is the standard to which they must aspire.

I've also, in previous posts, mentioned that a Fortune 500 company has its world headquarters in the city where I live.  It runs a day care center / preschool that does a booming business.  Certainly it facilitates its employees' ability to check in with the offspring, but the point is to make it convenient for mom or dad to put in the long hours with a bit less parental anxiety than would be the case with some other child-care arrangement.  This corporation also has, as I've found out in the course of working on articles with a diversity angle for local magazines, a system of "affinity groups," which address not just nationality or gender, but "orientation" or whatever it's called these days.  The point here is that this company is, in its own estimation, a world-class, ISO-certified, seriously excellent organization that brings on board the best and brightest human beings regardless of demographic identity.  Just in case someone within its ranks gets to feeling the need to have that identity affirmed, however, he or she can seek out the appropriate affinity group.  And the company offers a convenient way to address those mommy feelings that can arise in the course of meeting benchmarks and continuously improving.

Which, of course, brings us to the most highly-focused, excellence-driven realm of all, the military.  We are assured that our nation's defense apparatus can surmount such already-established glitches in warrior equality as the effect of eros on matters ranging from unit cohesion to pregnancy rates, to the impact of the menstrual cycle, to the role of dignity in the circumstances under which one relieves oneself.

The usefulness of gender-blurring is not a new tactic for the Left.  In his memoir Radical Son, red-diaper baby David Horowitz recounts a night at a Communist Party summer camp when he was a kid, when the bunk-bed chatter turned to a comely female counselor.  A make counselor came to the cabin door and admonished the lads to watch the "male chauvinism."

This can't be had both ways, though.  There is a group of women in Congress that includes RINOs such as Collins and Snowe but some FHers as well, and it is on record as wishing it had more influence, since women legislators are more inclined to be collaborative than confrontational.  In other words, they like the way it feels to reach compromise, even if their supposedly immutable principles get the short shrift.

So women, in college, in the industrial world, and in the military, are supposed to  focus with ruthless objectivity, or fight with a fierceness that leaves no room for this collaborative inclination, and men are supposed to subdue, to the point of rendering it as good as nonexistent, their instinct for protection and chivalry.

It's just not going to work for the reason that men and women, the assertions of the world's gender-studies professors notwithstanding, are different.  They exhibit two different ways of being human.  Eventually, this manifests itself anywhere and everywhere, as has been noted by even some of the proponents of women in combat who acknowledge that not a whole heck of a lot of women are going to sign up for that duty.

It should also be noted that those in the leadership positions among our enemies are, to a person, men.  Ultimately any conflict has to be concluded, and that means strategically addressing its instigation at its root.  That, in turn, means thoroughly understanding the degree and kind of ugliness that only a male human being is capable of.

We can increase the ratio of technocrats, bureaucrats and focused soldiers to other kinds of human beings, but there will always be some feral creatures among us, and they do not respond to re-education, indoctrination or sensitivity training.  The civilized portion of our species has to take them out, and that requires resolute manliness on somebody's part.