Summary: It’s vital to understand not just what’s happening in the gender wars but why. Here Allan Bloom explains the beliefs and goals of the social reformers leading the restructuring of American society. They’re quite frank in writings amongst themselves, but speak to the rest of us in more gentler and comforting terms. {2nd of 2 posts today.}
Excerpt from Allan Bloom’s Love and Friendship
“The Fall of Eros”
The new program to reform society
Now there is a new illiberal tendency that strangely both contradicts and supports liberal tolerance and easygoingness: the imperial project of reform promoted by radical feminism. It wants to enter the bedroom and much more the psyche in order to alter male sexual taste and behavior. It is not so much acts but the meaning of those acts and the disposition of those who perform them that now count.
The new discussion of male sexuality — for it is almost exclusively males who are the subjects of this — produces a distinctly unlovely vision of erotic relations. Male lust, male treatment of women as objects — in general, machismo — are the themes of this new sexual education. It is an education directed not to the sublime or sublimation, but to control. The object is not the relatedness of male and female, but liberation from male oppression, or nature’s oppression, in order to provide women with power or choice, the great word of the movement, choice to make oneself whatever one wants to be, free from the patriarchal structures that are said to have kept even what appeared to be the freest women imprisoned.
Male and female are no longer to be reciprocal terms, and the male habit of supposedly forcing women into such reciprocity is what must go. Of course, rape was always forbidden, and there was a codicil to the liberal formula that limited the right to do anything in your own bedroom to “consenting adults.” But now we are alleged to have a much higher consciousness of what rape and consent mean. What used to be understood as modes of courtship are now seen as modes of male intimidation and playing on the weaknesses and anxieties of women.
The education of male sexual desire in the past was intended to make men into gentlemen, a term reciprocal to lady, a person whose chastity was priceless and needed protection. The new feminist women make no claim to chastity and even ridicule it. It is an affront to raise the question of chastity as a part of the criminality of rape. Whether it be a prostitute or Mother Teresa is unimportant, although not all juries have yet been persuaded of this. Rape is considered bad no longer because it assaults a weak and defenseless person’s modesty, which is necessary to her exclusive attachment to the man she loves. Rape is now bad because it deprives women of power.
Males are the rapists, the date rapists, the sexual abusers of children, the pornographers, the sexual harassers. Male and female sexual relations have to be adjusted to an abstract program of reforming them. There is no thought of the beauty of eroticism or love in any of this.
Every relation is a power relationship
Supporting this unerotic treatment of eros is the hot new principle that all human relations, especially sexual ones, follow from the one motivating principle in man, the will to power. Everything is power relationships, crude power, the will to dominate, to have things one’s own way.
The relationship between government and the governed is one of exploitation. The teacher-student relation is a power relation with the teacher interested only in imposing his views and his person on the student. And above all, the relation between man and woman is a power relationship in which men have exploited and dominated women.
The coarseness of this interpretation is beyond belief, making Marx’s notion of economic relations seem a masterpiece of subtlety. Of course there is power in the government-governed connection, but can anyone who has experienced politics think that is the whole or even the central story? Can Lincoln and Roosevelt be understood not to have cared for the governed, for the just and the good?
And was Socrates merely deluded when he believed that his vocation was that of midwife, evoking only what is already within his students, respectfully trying in the first place to test their potentiality? If one compares Socrates to today’s more advanced teachers, one cannot help but be shocked by the latter’s insouciant indoctrination and abusive treatment of students, which have come to be seen as all too natural, justified by their suppression of the distinctions between knowledge and power, between teaching and propaganda.
The worst distortion of all is to turn love, a relation that is founded in natural sweetness, mutual caring, and the contemplation of eternity in shared children, into a power struggle. This is another one of those games that intellectuals can play.
Society now seen as the war of all against all
But why would anyone want to do such violence to real experience? It is the war of all against all again, and the only possible peace is to be found in artificial constructs. This is the last stage in the attempt to found all human relations on contract, the discovery of complementary interests, rather than on natural inclinations. Abstract reason in the service of radically free men and women can discover only contract as the basis of connectedness — the social contract, marriage contract, somehow mostly the business contract as model, with its union of selfish individuals. Legalism takes the place of sentiment.
It is now asserted that the relation between men and women is not based on their pointedness toward each other and can properly result only from a haggle that conciliates their separate wills to power. All the rest was a long-standing set of myths made up by the phallocrats. The demands of the imperial phallus are the source of all the problems. Its imperialism is to be deconstructed and Plato’s interpretation of it in the Phaedrus
The power and the pervasiveness of this view among the current intellectual elites are hardly to be believed by those who are not amateurs of those elites. It authorizes a veritable thought police, whose actions are legitimized by an almost religious guilty conscience about the harm that sex can do.
The reform of society
The cure for sexism is a much more complicated affair than the cure for racism, because the sexual organs are naturally connected to human functioning, as skin color is not. This view reinforces the lack of sexiness in the liberal view, but it is in a radical tension with the liberal view’s laisser-aller {lack of restraint}. Radical feminists insist that the liberals’ consenting adults, especially the women, consent only because they are forced to by sexist education and public opinion. So we must in the first place reeducate the partners so that they no longer think they need each other. This will put off enjoyment for a good long time.
All the things that used to be thought to be natural must now be overcome in the name of abstract equality. As one says these days, “Gender is not a natural phenomenon, but a cultural one.” The de-eroticization of the world began in our materialistic science and has culminated practically in this last great movement of radical egalitarianism. The most secret and interesting parts of one’s body and soul are being subjected to the intense public light of the third degree.
It is difficult to say how people, particularly young people, react to this attempt, which has swept over the educational system, to dictate the character of erotic feeling and reflection. One can expect that nature will rebel, at least in a few, as it does against all attempts by one tyranny or another to suppress it.
… Nature is, in a way, always present, and that is a great source of hope, but if one is taught to interpret it perversely, and if all institutions and writings around one support that perversity, it requires a great effort of thought and sentiment to recognize it for what it is.
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About Allan Bloom
Bloom (1930 – 1992) was an American philosopher, classicist, and academician. He taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Yale University, École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and the University of Chicago. Bloom championed the idea of education based on the “Great Books” of western civilization and became famous for his criticism of contemporary American higher education. Bloom denied that he was a conservative, saying that he sought to defend the ‘theoretical life’. {Paraphrased from Wikipedia.} His major books:
- Highly recommended: Closing of the American Mind
- The Republic Of Plato
- Love and Friendship
- Recommended: Giants and Dwarfs
- Shakespeare’s Politics
Other posts in this series
- Women dominating the ranks of college graduates – What’s the effect on America?
- A better answer to “why women outperform men in college?”
- Update: women on top of men.
- What’s the future of the family in America? How will that change our government?
- Do we want to bring back traditional marriage? What is traditional marriage?
- The feminist revolutionaries have won. Insurgents have arisen to challenge the new order. As always, they’re outlaws.
- “Mockingjay” shows us a Revolution in Gender Roles. What’s the next revolution?
- The war of the sexes heats up: society changes as men learn the Dark Triad.
- The revolution in gender roles reshapes society in ways too disturbing to see.
- A look ahead at the New America, after the gender wars.
- Books to help us see the strange new world following the revolution in gender roles.
For More Information
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“You should be very very afraid of me”
