So you are probably thinking I'm going to talk about plummeting fertility rates. Well, yes, but not in the way you are thinking. Because of a book project I am involved in, I have been thinking a lot about the historical arc of feminism. There's been a few stages so far that I have seen . . .
Stage 1: Up to about 1900. Yes, that's thousands upon thousands of years.
"Hi, guys, we are actually human beings, too. We actually have the same intellectual and moral capacity that you do."
Upshot: We women are allowed into universities; women obtain the vote. Women then realize they are still not equal in society to men, and violence against women persists.
Stage 2: Up to about 1990. Yeah, that's less than 100 years.
"Hi, guys, all those laws on the books that y'all created to prevent us from acting as fully autonomous economic/legal agents--we need to get rid of those. Oh, and now we can prevent the conception of children we would otherwise conceive because of our association with y'all."
Upshot: Women enter the workforce in large numbers; law restricting women's rights to make contracts, inherit, own property, have credit, etc. are swept away, and there are now non-discrimination laws. Women can choose to have sex with men without bearing children. Women then realize they are still not equal in society, especially if they choose to have children, and violence against women persists.
Stage 3: 1990 to 2013. Yeah, that's less than 25 years.
"Hey guys, we've been thinking about why we still aren't equal, and the crux of the matter is that we haven't fully emulated you where things between the sexes are really worked out--in the bedroom--and maybe that's the problem. So we are going to have lots of uncommitted sex like you do, watch porn, call prostitution "sex work," and in all other ways try to think about sex the same way you do. Then you will realize we are just like you, and you will treat us as equals.
Upshot: Women then realize they are still not equal in society, and violence against women persists.
Stage 4: 2014-present. The last ten years.
"Hey guys, we've been thinking about why we still aren't equal, and apparently the crux of the matter is our female bodies. If we didn't have female bodies, you would not be committing this level of violence against us; you would not be assaulting us and calling it sex; you would not still exclude us. You'd have bromances with us instead, and treat us like true and equal partners."
Upshot: Women flee their female bodies, as evidenced in the 5000% increase in the number of young women wanting to "become" men. Yaoi.
Now, let me say up front that there are many schools of feminism and this timeline does not do them all justice. I'm just painting in very broad brush strokes here the various strategies women have employed over historical time to seek equality with men.
The first thing to notice is how collapsed the timeline becomes as soon as contraception comes on the scene. You're moving from glacial speed in Stage 1 to warp speed after that technological achievement in Stage 2. We're facing a revolution in the first political order of male-female relations that previous generations--even my grandmother's generation--could never have dreamt of and never foreseen. Once we hit Stage 2, there is no pattern or template for movement forward, as there was in Stage 1 where we find generation after generation of women saying the very same things: "Hey, we actually are human beings, guys!"
Contraception is the key discontinuity in historical time because unchosen repetitive childbearing is so onerous that women could never achieve agency under its conditions. Women were bearing children, on average, every two years like clockwork until they died or hit 50. I am not saying this is bad, or that the women didn't love and cherish the children, or anything like that. What I am saying is that women had absolutely no choice in the matter if they were having sex with their husband. And once you are enmeshed in that wave of childbearing, there is time for very little else, unless you are exceptionally wealthy. It is extremely difficult to fight the system designed to oppress you while carrying that immense burden.
For a while after contraception was introduced, the system lumbered along with the still-intact legacy understanding that women would still get married and still for the most part have children, through Stage 2 and even into Stage 3. I think Stage 2 was an incredibly important time wherein legal systems of subordination of women were dismantled. The world has never seen its like in all its thousands upon thousands of years of history. In a sense, this should have been it, the pinnacle of all our foremothers' aspirations. This should have been the moment when men and women became equal partners, and the "battle of the sexes" ended.
But the real biological difference between men and women was still there, and still at the root of two things women deeply cared about: male violence against women, and male attitudes towards sex where men view sex as if it were a bodily function like urination. In Stage 3 we see women trying the tack of emulating men concerning sex, which brought its own soul-numbing wasteland well-described in Louise Perry's book "The Case Against the Sexual Revolution."
There are women still operating under Stage 3 norms, of course--you see them on OnlyFans hawking their wares. But a younger generation saw the Stage 3 impasse and thought of a different approach--one that would not only tackle the sex problem, but one that would tackle the male violence against women problem. And it would also tackle what I call the heart-to-heart problem--can a man really love a woman? Can he feel about her the way he feels about his best mate?
And that's where Stage 4 comes in. Previous to 2014-ish, most trans individuals were born male, and sought to "become" women, usually motivated by autogynephilia. But from 2014 on, we saw a literal explosion of young women seeking to "become" men--and it wasn't for reasons of sexual paraphilia. No, most of these young women--who refer to themselves as transmen--very much want to be with males in a sexual sense. But they don't want to be women while doing it. They want a real bromance, with real bonding, no violence, no sexual assault--in other words, they do not wanted to be treated as a woman is treated by men in sex. They are hoping to be loved as an equal, finally, by men. And they feel the only way this can happen is if they renounce their femaleness.
Looking at the whole arc, Stage 4 seems like the obvious and inevitable next step, because every other step has utterly failed to bring the safety and equality (and love) that women want in a world with men. Author Ginevra Davis, in a great essay, explains it this way (archive):
"But what would it look like, in practice, for females to be “equal”?
"In the Western world, females are now in a strange position where we can do pretty much anything we want. We compete for any job, get married or not, have children or not, cut our hair, get a nose piercing, and, in the places where most feminist tracts are written, get an abortion. We are free to move in the world, to use our bodies and minds as we please, and to be judged accordingly. But “options,” in an inferior body, are not the same as “equality.”
"In truth, no one really knows what to do with females. The laws of fairness demand equal outcomes for equal minds—particularly in the intellectual spheres, where individuals in Western countries are taught to find most of their moral and economic value. But the laws of physics say it’s not quite possible.
"Today, females look for hope in technology: in artificial wombs and same sex reproduction. And I think that would be such a funny way for feminism to end—if someday, we get artificial wombs, and parents get to choose the body of their child, and they all choose “male,” and females can be, at long last, wiped from the face of the earth.
". . . But if no one wants to say what a “woman” is anymore, it’s because we know.
"A mind in a female body is a mind shrunken, tweaked. And it’s not fixable. It’s not fair. And that small unfairness, multiplied over billions of female minds, defies our sense of how a social movement, and how history, should end. And so we walk them to the drug store, believe their lie, give them some gold stars they didn’t earn, and a few appointments they probably don’t deserve, because what we really want to say is sorry. That it’s harder. That it’s manageable.
"We have always had lies to explain the condition of females: we said that they were contorted, fallen, or morally weak. And for the first 200,000 years of human history, the idea that females were inferior minds, or otherwise half-alive, would have been a comforting lie—because their lives would be miserable regardless. They gave birth without painkillers, gave out somewhat regularly in the process. And females were not slaves, or members of some faraway group: they were half of the population, mothers and wives, someone’s daughter, doomed, through no fault of their own, to a very different fate. And so we needed a fable—an original sin, a Pandora’s box—to explain why they deserved that fate. Their fate has, unequivocally, improved: I would not wish the pre-epidural, prefeminist condition on anyone. But even with all the wonders of modern medicine, the female body still demands much more of its owner’s time than the male body; as a result, females will always be somewhat limited in their ability to create, to contribute to the broader human project, with their minds. Fine. We can tolerate a difference in theory—we tolerate it in practice every day. But for the first time in human history, we must also square the unfairness of the female condition with an understanding that females are equal in their minds—a heartening realization, but one that comes with uncomfortable moral implications. Now, we owe females something: an equal experience of life, or, when we cannot provide it, an explanation. But no man, even the most cynical, wants to look his daughter in the eye and tell her that her life will be smaller, that she might be better suited as a vessel for someone else. No one wants a halfway moral victory; no one wants to end a social movement in awkward silence.
"And so we found a new way to avoid the problem. We made it impossible to describe. . . Of course we all know what a “woman” is, or was. But it might be less painful, in a world where females will never be equal, to imagine that they don’t exist."
This is what Davis sees as "the end of feminism"--the end, because the female body can never be made equal in prowess and in walk-away-from-sex autonomy to the male body. And feminism can't cope with that eternal injustice. So we now have a feminism that has walked away from the female body and therefore the female condition--we have a post-female feminism. We have a feminism that ends in the extirpation of "woman" as a concept, seeing in that evaporation the only possible route to equality. After all, we tried everything else in Stages 1, 2, and 3, didn't we? And none of it worked.
But of course, as long as there are female bodies, according to this thinking, there will always be inequality, and it's those with female bodies that will be at the bottom of the pile, even if we call every single one of them transmen. What is the next step of feminism with regard to the continuing problem of the female body?
I see several possible subsequent futures to Stage 4. One is the eradication of female bodies altogether. It may be possible to coax stem cells into producing egg cells, then IVF with sperm sorted to allow only those with the Y chromosome to inseminate, and then artifical wombs to produce a human race that is purely male. While no doubt men will continue to find ways to subordinate subsets of the male population, there would never ever again be subordination of women by men, because men will have completely triumphed over women and gotten rid of them. In this way, there can never again be a woman treated unequally because women will not exist. The problem of the female body literally disappears.
A second possible post-Stage 4 future may already be coming into sight. And that is that women finally reveal in an apocalypse, which term means "the great revealing," that all this male prowess and autonomy is but a house of cards. That is, women continue to exist but cease reproducing the species. Women play their trump card, and in the absence of the technologies described in the former paragraph, that is the end of the line for both men and women. (Of course, I imagine women could somehow engineer things to reproduce only women, but given what women are like, I do not see that as very likely.) Given the plummeting birth rates around the world today, pundits have already coined a neologism to describe this: auto-genocide. What this term masks is that it is male subordination of females that has caused auto-genocide to occur. If the female body is good only for being abused by males, if it is only ever inferior, then why would women participate in the continuation of the species if they had a choice? Cessation of reproduction is the ultimate trump against permanent female bodily inferiority. And it is truly the "abomination of desolation" that signals the end of it all, not just the end of feminism--for feminism dies as humanity dies.
Of course, there is a third possibility, but it seems so impossible at the macro-level. That third possible future is to institute a real equal partnership between men and women so that female bodies are recognized by all as truly not inferior. But that would involve so many changes--real dual decision-making from the home to the nation and beyond, real cessation of all forms of male violence against women, real economic security for women, a real change in male attitudes about heterosexual sex. I know it's not a fantasy because I know couples that live this way. It really is not impossible at the individual couple level. What seems impossible is to scale this nirvana to any substantial degree.I have no ideas concerning how this third future could be possible; all I know from first-hand experience is that it is not impossible.
Which will the next step be in the great human drama between the sexes? All males, all desolation, or all joyful life? What do you think, dear reader?