The Patriachy Isn’t the Enemy, Gender Antagonism Is

At the very heart of the gender-sexuality-family-formation complex (see my previous article What Is Post-Feminism?) lies something I like to call “gender antagonism”. This term was initially dis­cussed by the anthropologist (of a feminist structuralist brand) Sherry Ort­ner in her studies of gender relations of indigenous groups in Papua New Guinea back in the 1970s. I, however, use the term in a slightly different manner:

• “Gender antagonism” denotes a measure of the prevalence and inten­sity of resentment that people within a certain population feel towards any generalized ideas of gender categories.

Or, simply put, how bitter women are with men and how hateful men are towards women. But of course, people can hate their own gender, or any other gender category: “those lifeless and bland feminist bitches”, “tho­se slimy, toxic macho men”, “those wet noodle excuses for hipster gay men”, “those filthy, power-hungry, deceptive sluts” and so forth. It’s not just bitterness and resentment, but also contempt, frustration and collec­tive or generalized blame.

We need to understand that gender antagonism corresponds more or less to racism and ethnic conflict, except that it is an antagonism between real or imagined categories of genders. Naturally, gender antagonism grows as an emergent pattern of the whole gender-sexuality-family-forma­tion com­plex.

Here’s an example. So if a girl has a bad dad (who because of his insec­urities treats her and her mother poorly), and then gets a lousy boyfriend who just uses her for sex (because he wasn’t really in love with her, just really pressured to get rid of his stig­ma­tized virginity and desperate to gain sexual experience and she was all he could catch), then she’s quite likely to not like men in general very much. And then she’ll reject approa­ching guys at bars very contempt­uo­usly, hence feeding into the bitterness of these trembling souls who had been trying to work up the courage to go and talk to someone like her for over a year…

And so on, and so forth. Gender antagonism breeds gender antago­nism. It causes shitloads of harm to people’s softest inner places, and it mutilates our inner devel­op­ments, stunting us in our growth as human beings. And it mixes with issues of everything from economic and politi­cal stability, to ethnic conflicts, class relations, and pretty much any issue you can think of. It sucks.

The level of gender antagonism can be reduced only by changing the games of everyday life, by developing people’s abilities to give them­selves and one another what they need. If our anti-heroine above met a really sweet guy, who deeply satisfied her needs, after a few years perhaps her shields might go down and she might feel less bitter about men. And then she will stop feeding into this slugfest of resentment between the sexes.

Or imagine if the first guy she dated would have been much better trai­n­ed at seducing women, so that he wouldn’t have had to “settle” for her, because he wasn’t in a scarcity mindset about sexual validation, and if he were less pressured to get sexual experience at any cost. If he had a rich smorgasbord of women to choose from, he would have gone for some­one else for whom he had more authentic positive emotions. And per­haps he would have had more healthy and secure attachment patterns in the first place, more easily falling in love. And she would have had more satisfying experiences with the other guys she dated, and she would have ended up with a guy who really loved her. And their relation would have been better. Everyone would have saved lots of time and effort, everyone would have been spared a load of misery, and the beasts of resentment would not have been fed with the fresh blood of young hearts.

Gender antagonism not only under­mines other relations, such as eth­nic or professional ones—it also, quite sneakily, poisons emancipatory move­ments. Feminism becomes a mindless carrier of gender antagonism. Wo­men who deeply hate men and feel bitter resentment towards them as a group find outlets in feminist groups and ideologies. Men who despise women become “Men’s Rights Activists” and gather around obviously viru­lent female-bashing gurus. And so forth. Gen­der antagonism and other forms of group hatred such as racism—while understandable and expli­cable—tend to dress up as your only friend in this dark world. But of course, they aren’t your friends. Gender antagonism breeds “bad” femi­nism (or mas­culism), a fight for gender equality that chronically leaves out rel­evant dynamics or perspectives, and hence only serves to wor­sen the situation.

I’m not saying that anger is never good. I’m just saying that gen­der antagonism sneaks in and ruins whatever emancipatory pot­ential femi­nism and masculism might have. Being bitter and resentful makes peo­ple stupid.[i]

Want real, effective feminism? Then find ways to reduce gender anta­gonism. Want to reduce sexual violence against women? Reduce gender anta­gonism. Want to reduce male suicide? Reduce gender antagonism. Want to create freer gender roles in professional life? Reduce gender anta­gonism. Want to improve the quality and stability of family relations? You get the pic­ture.

THE PAINFUL PARADOXES OF LOVE

A certain degree of gender antagonism is unavoidable in any society since the very territory of love and desire is inherently wrought with paradoxes, mean­ing that our hearts and minds always put ourselves and the people around us in impossible dilemmas of various nasty sorts. And these are often fru­st­rating, sometimes infuriating—at times even fatal.

For now, let’s stay with only analyzing some properties of what some of our friends like to call “the heterosexual matrix” (i.e. not gay rel­a­tions, etc.).[ii] If we look at desire and the search for love between men and wo­men, there are quite a few nasty paradoxes bound to mess people up.

First of all, consider the fact that men get nervous around women they genuinely desire and would like to invest in long-term, and that women are attracted to confident men. This means that men very seldom get the wom­en they have the strongest and most sincere attraction towards. This leads them to often being less happy in their relations, still being haunted by tho­se strange ghosts of desire, which means they are more likely to stray or try to “upgrade” (dump their wife) given the opportunity. Resent­ment mass produced. Ouch.

Here’s another one. Both men and women will generally want to catch a mate slightly above their own self-perceived status in the mating hier­archy. This will lead them to invest time and effort in folks they cannot get or cannot keep, which sets them up for repeated failures, which sets them up for bitterness and distrust, which sabotages their relationships.

Another one. Women like men who are assertive and have great social prestige, and men dramatically increase their seductiveness if they dis­play these qualities. Consequently, men need to take social risks in order to gain the attention of women. If they are not sufficiently seductive and they are rejected in public, they risk that others (men and women alike) will perceive them with contempt. And if they are too sexually assertive, they risk that their approaches spill over into boundary breaching and sexual harass­ment. Women feel angry for having been put in a situation where they have to either impolitely turn someone down, or quietly shut up and feel used and manipulated. Men feel that women are insincere about what they want: They don’t give you a chance if you’re a “nice guy” and they accuse you of being predatorial if you make advances, or being fake macho if you try to show your tough side. Resentment grows.

Another one. Species who live in groups are generally divided into “tour­nament species” where one alpha male gets all the punani after violen­tly de­throning the former leader, and “pair-bonding species”, where males and females pair up in families and males compete by being good providers and caretakers. This pattern has repeatedly been found, from birds to primates. The males are bigger than the females in all tourn­ament spe­cies. Among primates, gorillas are tourn­ament and the bonobo chimps are pair-bond­ing. If you look at the physio­logy and behavior of humans, we are some­where in between, perhaps a bit more on the pair-bonding side. Accordingly, both of these deeply ingrained behav­ioral patt­erns exist simultaneously in humans, competing with each other. So even if you happ­en to find happy, stable love, a part of you will often want rough sex with an attractive stranger. And even if you’re Elvis and can get all the ladies you want, you will still feel a bit empty inside for lack of authentic connec­tion and com­panionship. We’re coded to be slightly dissatisfied. And this breeds—are you ahead of me?—frustration, which in turn breeds gen­der antagon­ism.

Or how about this one. Women learn they’re too slutty if they have sex with many men in too fun ways. They always stand to lose their status if they fuck the wrong guy under the wrong circumstances.[iii] But—if they don’t let loose and get really slutty with their men, the men are likely to feel frus­t­rated and not wanting to stay around, which puts women back on the slutty single market where they started. And even if a woman does “every­thing he wants” and really lets loose, she might find that he loses interest and moves on. Or if the relationship breaks down, his bitterness towards women may cause him to post revenge porn online. And hell ensues for the woman.

Or here’s another one for the ladies. All your life has been about being pretty. Pretty, pretty, pretty, hot, hot, beautiful, beautiful, feminine, femi­nine. It’s everywhere: clothing, makeup, commercials, how you’re treated by strangers, if guys fall in love with you and “woo” you or not, your stan­ding in the local girls’ group, your career chances—even starting with Barbie dolls when you’re a kid. If you fail to present a beautiful appear­ance acc­ording to increasingly impossible standards, you pay an enor­mous price. But, dear ladies, if you do manage to be pretty, it suddenly takes all the att­ention from everything else that you do, and everyone around you insists on responding only to this one part of yourself: your looks. Your new boss says he can’t listen to you because you’re too hot, all your guy friends and colleagues have secret agendas, women are bitchy and competitive, quietly holding you back. If you go on TV and say some­thing important, or even win a gold medal, people talk about your hair and your cleavage. And if you lose your beauty, you stand to lose every­thing, including the man who pledged to be by your side. If that doesn’t breed resentment, I don’t know what would.

And one last favorite. Men and women have different patterns of sex­ual lust. When a man and a woman enter a serious monogamous relation­ship, at first both want to have a lot of sex, but after a short while—on aver­age, according to research—the woman’s sexual desire drops to a much lower level, and the man’s stays elevated for a much longer period.[iv] As such, many a man is in for lots of rejection and dis­app­ointment at the very point in his life when he has just committed to not going after other women, which in itself is a high price to pay. There is even a growing sex­ual deficit in males that can be observed at a global scale: guys simply don’t get as much as they’d like.[v] This of course leads to resentment and spurs infidelity. Likewise, men seem to have a much low­er “cuddle-bonding” impulse after sexual intercourse than women, which means that sex can often leave women feeling emotionally vulnerable and abandoned, which then of course undermines the sense of trust in the relationship. And then there’s always the whole thing about women wanting reliable men but still having a secret garden of more ferocious fantasies (searching for online porn such as “extreme brutal gangbang” and “rape” more fre­quently than guys, as com­pared to their overall porn searches, and about 62% having at least some sexy thoughts about forced sex, according to one study[vi]). Mix this with the fact that men really want to be seen as tough but still need someone to take care of their scared inner little boy and that this boy just isn’t part of the female sexual fantasies—all of which results in confusion and disapp­oint­­ment for all parties involved. All of it breeds gender anta­gonism.

I could name many more. But let’s get back on track.

Ah, the paradoxes of sex, love and gender! What a relentless produc­tion plant of human angst and desolation! How elusive that inner peace, that simple sense of aliveness and safety, that sensual and embodied full­ness of being alive! If you’re not very clear-sighted and well-informed on this one, you will tend towards a sim­ple expla­nation for all the suffering you’ve been through: “it’s pat­ri­archy” or “it’s those rabid bitches”.

But it’s not those rabid bitches. It’s a complex host of emergent pro­per­ties of the games of everyday life. We are mutilated not by an evil patri­ar­chal structure, but by a blind and meaningless chaos engine, which is inci­d­entally also the source of all goodness and beauty of life.

And we can hardly do ourselves a greater dis­service than denying the ex­istence of these games (crime 1: game denial) or accepting them in their current, cruel forms (crime 2: game acceptance). These paradoxes of love indeed constitute a vast killing ground of the human spirit. But it is also on these fields of battle and suff­ering that we grow the most as human beings—it is here we find the most fertile ground for inner transforma­tions. Could soc­iety be geared to­wards making us much better equip­ped for man­aging these paradoxes and relating to them more pro­duc­tively? The answer is yes.

These paradoxes and problems cannot really be “solved”. They will be around whether we like it or not, at least until we change the very behavi­oral bio­logy of humans. What we can do, however, is to change how well they are understood and productively related to, and thus how patholo­gi­cally they play out in society at large.

Erich Fromm once wrote that for society to prosper, we need not more distant intellect, but “men and women who are in love with life”. But to be in love with life, we must also succe­ssfully fall in love with one ano­ther.

How many of us will get to have genuinely happy love in our lives? I mean really? There are few greater tragedies in life than our inability to aw­aken deep positive emotions in others, our inability to have our trem­bling hearts and aching bodies met with genuine love and desire. And how cruel is not the opposite, to be loved and included but that our hearts respond only with coldness and inertia—when we are unable to genuinely love and resp­ond to others’ emo­tions?

How import­ant are not these issues to soci­ety, how central to human mis­ery and happiness? How fundamental to any qualitatively rich notion of freedom and equality? How many souls are we unnecessarily condemn­ing to lonely life­times of cold and darkness? How many broken hearts are we generating? How many failed attempts at BDSM?

Can we really afford to keep this issue outside of politics, outside the on­going discussing about the conscious self-organization of society?

We must, as a society, cultivate higher likelihoods for better relation­ships, developing people’s sexual faculties and reducing gender antagon­ism. That’s what a metamodern post-feminist Gemeinschaft Politics would aim to do.

Let us evolve the game of love. Let us shift the landscapes of desire.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on his facebook profile here, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

—

[i]. In terms of MHC (the Model of Hierarchical Complexity, by Commons, as dis­cussed in Book One), people tend to go down two stages when they are very upset about something, very invested in a belief, or something is a very touchy spot. Two stages are the difference between a ten-year-old and an average adult.

[ii]. Butler, J. 1990/2006. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.

[iii]. Armstrong, E. A., Hamilton, L. T., Armstrong, E. M., 2014. “Good Girls”: Gender, Social Class, and Slut Discourse on Campus. Social Psychology Quarterly. Vol: 77(2).

[iv]. Baumeister, R. F., Reynolds T., Winegard, B., Vohs, K. D. 2017. Competing for love: Applying sexual economics theory to mating contests. Journal of Economic Psychology, vol. 63, pp. 230-41.

[v]. Hakim, C. 2015. The male sex deficit: A social fact of the 21st century. Inter­national Sociology, vol. 30, pp. 314-35.

[vi]. Bivona, J. M., Critelli, J. W., Clark, M. J., 2012. Women’s Rape Fantasies: An Empirical Evaluation of the Major Explanations. Archive of Sexual Behavior, vol. 41(5) pp. 1107–1119.