Previous generations of feminists have never questioned the relationship between feminism and humanism.1 In fact many of those feminists had gone so far as to believe that feminism is integral to humanism or vice versa. Who could blame them? Feminism and humanism have shared lineage in the Enlightenment, and endorsing such ideas as the human rational capacity, the demystification of oppressive superstition, and the natural equality between one human and all the rest.
It was very kind of those male philosophes to have invited their sisters into the fold. Now, whatever the candlelit corridors of the convents and cloisters had in store for us are matters that haunt us rather than threaten.
But the reasoning woman knows deep down that this enlightened equality cannot persist. In part because the welcoming was only so warmly extended; but also because the longer she stayed, the more constricted she felt.
Ultimately humanism, along with equality and enlightenment, cannot survive in a functional feminist context. So it follows that other cherished principles of the humanist view must be set aside to assure the completion of our design for living. Like tolerance.
Tolerance has been the cornerstone of liberal humanism since its very inception. It is also the crowning virtue for Americans of a certain age. From the 1990s on, for proponents and detractors alike, it was an age of toleration. A Good Society was both diverse and cohesive. That cohesion was made possible through the tolerance we felt for the differences of our neighbor, whether in the open or in private. Though not real in any social sense, tolerance was the guiding principle behind our anti-discriminatory laws and our general moral conduct as a community of individuals. Women were expected to benefit by this in their continued advancement out of subordination. True to its intentions, women were tolerated at previously unimaginable levels. Yet at the same time it is hard to say that they benefitted from tolerance in any real sense. I can’t say that anyone—even men—have ever really benefitted from it.
The Good Society that would arise from our tolerance grew instead into an Agreeable Society on top and a debating society underneath. For the agreeable, the Big Questions—the ideas—had profit margins too minuscule to give much attention to them; while the debaters took to the Big Questions like boys to G.I. Joes. We agreed to disagree. It was an impressive sleight-of-hand. It was easy to go along nicely with it, at least while there was reason to be nice.
In that era, intolerance was simply out of the question. It was something you heard about and categorically repudiated. It was a folkloric phantasm. You never knew anyone who was intolerant and never sought to foster intolerance in yourself. To do so was to succumb to corrosive thinking and bigoted attitudes. And in fairness, most wish that they could be anything but intolerant. It’s not a pleasant thing to be. But if someone is particularly sensitive to cultural ambiance, particularly if that ambiance is forged in tolerance, the likelihood of coming to not tolerate something to an intense degree is strong. Once the nice times give way to a time that is less nice, those little intolerances amass into a larger one.
Such is the burden of the intolerant, the definition of which, when we set aside the blinders of agreeableness, is one who is confirmed in the power of the idea. An idea is not a commodity, a plaything, or a personality affect. It is a potent infector. Yes, some ideas are worthless on their face and require no additional anxiety, but there are just enough to which so many are vulnerable. At the right time and with the right person, an idea can change someone from the inside out until their authentic self is no longer recognized by themselves or anyone else.
You have seen this, haven’t you? That daughter—the honors student with a fondness for animals and an empathy for many kinds of humans. Very practical but also idealistic, wanting, so you thought, to go into teaching, like you—perhaps in a low-income urban area or among migrant children, while somehow having a home in the suburbs. Something along those lines. Yet something went wrong. She slid away from that dream into the nonprofit cesspool of DC, carousing with a bad crowd who cradle their latest unreadable Great Book like a swaddled infant before their fellow Metro passengers. You keep thinking she will be moved by Mrs Dalloway, yet are silently mortified to see her paging through Infinite Jest like a sacred text. Every holiday is a nightmare. She espouses putrid intellectual garbage as though it was small-talk about the weather. What do you do? You debate her; you agree to disagree. You bring out the turkey and the presents. A photo-finish of perfect matronly tolerance. This is what you have been taught and what you have been teaching. What more can you do? You accept that she is a puppet of men, and a slave to one man in particular who smiles politely, wears a college football fleece all the time, is self-conscious about his thinning hair, and provides for your child with gains gotten through you know not precisely what means, but surely not honorable ones. Soon she will give him offspring; you will be a grandmother. Then it will be too late. But to do what? “Cut the strings”? To become “corrosive”? It never occurred to you in all your tolerance.
You would not be alone in feeling this way. Doing nothing—agreeing to disagree—constitutes a form of abuse. In order to protect the dignity of our daughters or sisters, or the respect of our mothers, we must become corrosive to ideas that deserve such a penalty. We must not argue ourselves into an abyss. We must bring those we love and everyone else in turn out into the light, into freedom and into the truth, forcefully but lovingly. It’s demanding work seeking out the most abject intellectual byproducts and scorching them with the purifying napalm of your intelligence. But these are sad, ugly things not fit for consumption in any population. You alone, the intolerant righteous bitch, are able to confront them and banish them and all who are incurable of their influence. It is fair to say that you will earn little more than ire of strangers and loved ones. This is your sacrifice, but you do not bow to the fashionable or the conventional or to civility—the heating pads of the agreeable—you have a long game. For that you will be thanked and lauded, even if you are not around to receive it.
The gynopocene age will be forged by the efforts of such heroines of intolerance. The post-tolerance society we will foster will be one liberated from the obscurantism of civil mutual respect. Respect needs no emphasis, no special language; it is simply asserted perforce, because so much will have been streamlined down to the essentials, or settled entirely. Debate will not go extinct in our sisterhood; but it will exist to serve our social improvement, not the masculine thrill for staging rhetorical dramas of heterodoxy.
All but two primary lines of debate will remain to be addressed. Or I should say two lines on one issue: men. Pleased as men always are to know that the womenfolk are arguing over them, for once it is a necessary matter related to them that cannot be handled carelessly. I’m no psychic, but I see the greatest minds of the Sister Senate (or whatever we’ll call it) breaking down on the issue as either gradualists and accelerationists.
The gradualist (or liberal) faction would favor a program basically in line with my own in spirit but minimalist in execution. They will perhaps favor familial re-allotment, select zones of segregation, and a more nuanced classification of the males between functional and useless. They will find it more prudent and less burdensome to just allow the males to degenerate at their own irreversible pace without our interference or close observation.
The accelerationist (or ultraliberal) faction, on the other hand, will be in favor of the complete and much more vigorous program of male disposal: systematic segregation, compulsory divorce and familial re-allotment, monitored and rigidly classified male communes, monitored reproductive activity, population regulation.
In the gynopocene age, society will reach a point where it is impossible, logically, for a sister to betray the sisterhood. Not that we will be unprepared for certain lapses of judgment: such as when a sister starts to exhibit symptoms that cause her to see the non-women as redeemable. Such a sister will be taken to a convalescence center and given the most attentive care that will cure her delirium and reorient her to the task at hand.
I guess humanism was right about one thing: we really can educate ourselves out of any problem.