As we saw earlier, Ayn Rand always accorded primacy to any sort of intellectual contribution. To reproduce John Galt’s statement, “The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him…” This intellectual capability became the sole standard against which Rand characters were to be measured, even when they were distinguished by gender. Rand’s female heroes intellectually outweighed most of her male characters. In Atlas Shrugged, for instance, Dagny Taggart, the Vice President of Taggart Transcontinental, was shown as exponentially more competent than her brother Jim Taggart, the President of Taggart Transcontinental. As the engineers said, “That’s who runs Taggart Transcontinental… That’s the Vice President in Charge of Operation”. Contrast this with Rand’s debased portrayal of the woman Gail Wynand, from The Fountainhead, first fell in love with. After professing his love to her, Gail never bothered to see her again because her first reaction was to ask “Do you think I’m prettier than Maggy Kelly?” In Rand’s sense of values, concerns only with physical aspects of the body were utterly undesirable.

When functions of the mind are so important, any lack of intellectual capability is not simply a lack of something, but a lack of any sort of worth. Unintelligent women, in Rand’s fictions, are always paired with evil men. In her stories, a woman of intelligence, confidence and strength attracted a parallel man, who was exclusively one of her heroes. Ayn writes:

“The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer- because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut .”

On the contrary, Jim Taggart, an epitome of everything Ayn revolted against, found the uncertainty, awkwardness and low social standing of Cherry Brooks highly pleasurable. He seemed to be deriving a sense of superiority from it. However, the rational, autonomous, intellectual self that Ayn’s Objectivism implores men and women to emulate, with its emphasis on capability, is not neutral between the sexes, as it superficially appears to be. It is, on the other hand, as Alison Jaggar claims, a “male” self. Jaggar speculated that as a consequence of the original sexual division of labour, mental activities were increasingly prioritized over bodily activities. As a result of the amount of time men could devote to cultivating their minds, they tended to devalue the body. This served to undermine all of women’s domestic and reproductive roles. It is the same undermining that Rand resorts to. Despite calling herself a male chauvinist, Rand was particularly appreciative of Betty Friendan’s The Feminine Mystique. Friedan, too, believed that it was the absence of any intellectual pursuit, in the form of a meaningful career, which was the root cause of women’s unhappiness. As has been aptly put by someone, “If, after years of physical and emotional energy in being a wife and mother, a woman is told she made the wrong choice, that she could have done something “significant” with her life instead, her reaction is not likely to be a positive one. It is one thing to tell a person he or she should try a new hairstyle; it is quite another to advise a person to get a more meaningful destiny .”

Do not be mistaken, dear readers. Even though emphasis solely on the physical aspects of the body is undesirable, beauty is not inconsequential in Rand’s framework of stories. Beauty of Dominique Francon and Dagny Taggart, Rand’s two female heroes, adds a crucial element in her novels. Dagny and Domique are, first of all, conventionally beautiful- perfectly proportionate bodies, golden hair, exquisitely vicious mouths. Hank Rearden’s attraction for Dagny and Gail Wynand’s attraction for Dominiue emerges from their beauties. Their intellect only serves to intensify that attraction. Combined with this is the fact that Rand’s female heroes embodied other mainstream feminine characteristics. They were slender and femininely elegant.

Rand’s idea of femininity goes further. The essence of femininity, according to her, is hero-worship- the desire to always look up to a man. Hero-worship entails fierce admiration, which can only be experienced by a person of strong character. With such absolute statement, Rand almost burdens her heroines with such a restricted view of femininity. If the heroines are truly strong, then they must indulge in hero-worshipping a man. This is exacerbated by Rand’s opinion that a woman has to be first worthy of the hero she worships. For a woman to always have a man to worship instills the belief that she always has to consider at least one man superior to herself because “… to act as the superior, the leader, virtually the ruler of all the man she deals with, would be an excruciating psychological torture… she would become the most unfeminine, sexless, metaphysically revolting figure of all: a matriarch”. This is Rand’s justification for why a woman should never be the President of the United States of America. Her notion of femininity is not devoid of notions of female subordination in general. For Ayn, the look of being chained is the most feminine of all aspects. This association of femininity with subordination takes its ugliest form when Rand shows the rape of Dominique by Howard in a positive light. The rape was shown as an attempt to own her (which was the goal), and Howard wanted to own her, because he loved her. Even when we are open to any sort of domination that plays out in sexual encounters, Rand’s conception to always make the female surrender is immutable. At the end, it seems like Ayn Rand wanted to live some of her own fantasies through her characters. If you ask me, what she wrote can, at its best, be described as a miserably failed attempt at trying to be kinky.

We started our last post with the claim that Rand’s writings can easily influence an uncritical mind. The statement holds true especially when we take the little spectacle Rand throws at us (in the form of strong, intelligent female heroes) and brand it as something closer to “feminism”. Her depiction of her heroines is, most starkly, devoid of any variation- they seem to have popped out of a single mould of characterization. If we put Ayn Rand on a spectrum of feminism, then I can only see her sitting close to Sidney Sheldon!­

References

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

Ayn Rand, About a Woman President

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought

Mimi Reisel Gladstein, ‘Rand’s Gender Politics: A Potential of Cognitive Dissonance’, The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Volume 14, No. 2 (December 2014) 163

Minna Salami, ‘Black Panther deserves an Oscar – but is it a feminist film? No way’, The Guardian available at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/18/black-panther-oscar-feminist-film-wakanda

Thomas Gramstad, ‘The Female Hero: A Randian-Feminist Synthesis’ available at http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~thomas/po/female-hero.html