A man’s disappointment in failed feminism

I believe that feminism has failed in its revolutionary promise. Perhaps naively I assumed that feminism’s project was to reprioritised in our culture’s value system in such a way that the qualities archetypally associated with the Feminine might be valued and privileged as much as qualities archetypally associated with the masculine.

In this sense equality is less concerned with the gender pay gap and the glass ceiling that women face in the corporate work place and more concerned with the re-balancing of our societal pre-occupation with power, hierarchy and strength with qualities of compassion, nurturing and succour.

No sooner have those words left my pen than I feel the need to qualify them in anticipation of a chorus of critique of them. This critique will I anticipate revolve around accusations of essentialism and prescription of gender roles.

Of course there is some validity in this critique but I do not believe it is sufficiently powerful to disqualify the claim the appeal to the archetypal expression of these qualities in a Jungian sense broadly along any gendered lines.

Also, I am speaking about masculine and feminine archetypes in a mythopoetic sense and not in any material or socially prescriptive fashion, so as to imply that women are biologically destined to express these feminine energies nor that their behaviour should be or is curtailed to these domains.

My disappointment in feminisms failure surfaced most recently while watching a French mini-series on that beacon of cultural artefacts Netflix in which a young woman is wrongfully sent to prison after her father’s murder. There she skills herself in the martial arts and then employs these skills in a thrilling and violent story in pursuit of her father’s killer.

It could have been Bruce Willis or some other muscled representation of machismo playing in the lead role instead of the athletic, well-toned young woman who kicked punched and fought her way through the Paris gangster bad lands. The narrative structure was identical, right down to the after action scene where the battered hero comes back to the love interest whose function is to bandage wounds and provide a moments’ tenderness before the next round of ass-kicking commences.

In the old 90’s versions of this scene, Stallone or Schwarzenegger or Nickolas Cage would wince as his paramour applied the antiseptic balm. In the post-feminist version he has made her a meal and served it to her in a bubble bath. Here she suspends her martial arts, sinks into the suds and looks on coquettishly while he wipes his hands on his apron.

The value system structuring the story is identical. The biological sex of the actors  has been flipped but the feminine is still subjugated, relegated to the role of support, a minor player. The audience is not encouraged to identify with the one offering succour and compassion but with the one engaging in the fisticuffs and actualising herself by doing so.

Real change would reflect an honouring of those behaviours and personal attributes relegated to the background regardless of the sex of the actors displaying them.  It would involve  removing the caring function from the domain of corporate structures called ” human resources” and redesigning workplaces in a way that includes children and their care.

It would include reprioritising the allocation of material resources in a manner that reflected the importance of the anima functions of the psyche. Such a re-prioritisation might question why accountants and investment bankers are paid a hundred times more than nursery school teachers.

Can it really be that this project as faltered and that what has emerged from the feminist project is a young woman who not only knows how to throw a deadly punch but can take one too?

Imagine a society where instead of this substitution of the sexes, the narrative shifted to a position where the care and education of children and the qualities necessary to do that well were rewarded and privileged to even half the extent that we do the skilful investment of money or a balletic enactment of martial artistry.

In this view the true task of feminism is not to ensure that women have equal access to becoming soldiers and CEOs, but to envision a society in which the qualities of generativity, succour, renewal, nurture and care are valued and can take their proper place as a counterpoint to our compulsive emphasis on growth, conquest, domination and power.

The feminism this man is interested in is one in which the feminine capacities of individual psyches are potentiated and valued in the collective consciousness we call culture.

Expansions on this theme will be published as I write them and will include ideas about why this failure has occurred and what some of the socio-cultural consequences of it might be.