The science is settled:

However much we’d like to think of gender as a social construct, science suggests that real differences do exist between female and male brains. The latest evidence: a first-of-its-kind European study that finds that the female brain can be drastically reshaped by treating it with testosterone over time.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Feminist gender theory — the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix, to summarize Judith Butler’s influential ideas as succinctly as possible — must be seen for what it actually is, a War Against Human Nature.

Feminists have been fighting this war for more than four decades, and you will be accused of misogyny (woman hating) if you express skepticism about their project of creating an androgynous “equality” by eradicating male/female differences. These arguments about gender roles show how, in so many ways, feminists are trapped in the past, forever fighting battles rooted in the adolescent frustrations experienced decades ago by women who never successfully adjusted to normal adult roles that most people take for granted. The tomboy, the lesbian, the awkward bookish girl who felt marginalized in the high-school popularity competition — we may grant that their grievances against the “system” are real without endorsing their intellectual assault on the social order.

Youthful resentments of slights and slurs have a way of being rationalized by feminist ideology, becoming an indictment of society as oppressive to all women, even though the vast majority of women do not share the grudges that motivate the disgruntled misfits who grow up to become academic ax-grinders. Beyond their tendency to turn their own narrow grievances into theory — because “the personal is political” — feminists rely on ideological certainties that are obsolete because they were formed in an earlier era whose conditions are no longer relevant to the experience of young women who have grown up in a society profoundly shaped by previous feminist “reforms.”

Consider, for example, that when the Women’s Liberation movement erupted in the late 1960s, a prime target was the traditional marriage-based nuclear family, within which most of them had been raised and against which they had rebelled. Young college-educated radicals did not want to follow their parents’ respectable middle-class lifestyles. Just as radical men did not aspire to emulate their fathers’ example as dutiful hard-working husbands with “Establishment” jobs to pay for their suburban homes, radical women rejected the ideal of the Happy Housewife with a kitchen full of shiny appliances. Because the modern feminist movement erupted in this specific context, one still finds feminists railing against the “Ozzie and Harriet” family, a descriptor based on a TV show that went off the air in 1966. (The last surviving member of the cast, David Nelson, died of colon cancer in 2011 at age 74.) How does feminism’s anti-family ideology, formulated in opposition to the social norms of 1968, address itself to today’s 18-year-old college freshman, who was born in 1997, during the presidency of Bill Clinton?

Today’s freshman grew up in a society where divorce, abortion and single motherhood are commonplace, where many public schools promote a “safe sex” curriculum, and where homosexuality is widely considered a civil right. Even if the 18-year-old grew up in an intact nuclear family household, she went to school with many other children who came from what were once called “broken homes,” and her mother probably had full-time employment outside the home. Today’s typical freshman does not feel overwhelming pressure to conform to an “Ozzie and Harriet” lifestyle, which may not even seem possible as a choice for her. Where could a young woman in 2015 hope to find a loyal husband who will provide her that suburban home and enable her to play the Happy Housewife, devoted to raising their children and tending to domestic chores? There are very few 21st-century Ozzies available, even if she wanted to be a latter-day Harriet.

A movement that began in rebellion against society as it existed in 1968 is ill-suited to address the problems facing young women in 2015 and it may be added that, insofar as feminist ideology originally had any basis in science, that science is now as obsolete as Ozzie and Harriet. Reading the foundational texts of the Women’s Liberation movement — including Sexual Politics (Kate Millett, 1970), The Dialectic of Sex (Shulamith Firestone, 1970) and Woman Hating (Andrea Dworkin, 1974) — one finds the authors attacking ideas of psychosexual development that were then very respectable, but which have since been largely or entirely debunked. In particular, Freudian theories have been eclipsed by advances in neuroscience that have enabled us to learn more about how, for example, hormones influence personality and behavior.

You don’t have to be a neuroscientist to understand this. Just read the testimony of a lesbian feminist who spent 18 months on testosterone as a female-to-male transsexual before changing her mind. Why? Because she “never knew anger like this until going on testosterone,” experiencing psychological disturbances that included “a lower frustration threshold . . . burning rage” that was ultimately “unbearable.” Even after quitting testosterone, she found that her moods and attitudes seemed to have been permanently affected by this artificial masculinization of her brain.

This tells us a lot about the biological basis of male/female differences. Once we realize that these differences are inherent to who we are as men and women, the question is how we can teach young people to deal with the reality of human nature, rather than trying to abolish these differences in pursuit of utopian schemes of “equality.”











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