Standup comedians make much of their living by poking fun at the battle between the sexes. The audience laughs in lieu of thanking the comedian for providing an excuse to disavow the liberal convention of overlooking the manifest cultural differences between the sexes. The comedy often becomes sexist in that the comedian exaggerates the differences between the social roles of men and women, but those differences are real.
The Mystery of Sexism
Again, power and cultural influence explain much of this demonization. But there’s a mystery here, too, which is that we should expect heterosexual men and women to have bonded over what’s typically regarded as the greatest experience in life, that being romantic love culminating in sexual intercourse. How could men or women stand to see each other collectively belittled when sexual tension underlies virtually all of their dealings with each other? Shouldn’t the memory or the prospect of sex make those in power ashamed of demonizing the weaker sex, whichever either happens to be? After all, if heterosexual men rule, tend to look down on women, and yet want to have sex with them, what does that make those men? And if women rule, buy products popularized by ads that portray men as buffoons, and yet women are sexually attracted to competent, masculine men, what does that say about women? Why do men and women sabotage themselves by denigrating the object of their greatest affection? Sexism seems self-defeating, as is strikingly apparent in the ultra-conservative Middle East in which many women are so brutally objectified that they become asexual, such as when they’re forced to wear burkas. In that case, archaic religious memes explain why men with the same sexual lusts as anyone else would repress them and prevent women from tempting them by displaying their enticing body parts. Still, this only pushes the mystery back a step, since then we must ask what drove Muslim men to accept such a sexist religion in the first place in spite of their shared sexual experience with women. How could they have been convinced to condemn their sexuality with such thoroughness, overriding their powerful sexual instinct?
What I want to point out now is that sexism corroborates that rather surprising conclusion about sex, which is that however great sex may be in short-sighted hedonic terms, sex is also traumatic for everyone. Most animals have no existential crises, but we’re cursed with them by our knowledge which subverts our hopes and dreams. It’s because sex is a secret horror and heterosexuals are forced to bond over that experience, that as soon as men or women acquire the cultural megaphone, they broadcast their insults against the opposing side. Why? Because each gender reminds the other of that shared horror and of sex’s unsettling philosophical implications. Because whenever we feel sexual lust, we’re partly disgusted and ashamed and we scapegoat the object of our lusts to keep our fragile ego intact.
Feminism and the Emasculation of Modern Men
Men’s objectification of women is well-known and has been comprehensively analyzed by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum (see the introduction of this article). So let’s look closer at women’s sexist attitude towards men. Women don’t have nearly the same physical power over men that men have historically had over women. Moreover, for hormonal or practical reasons having to do with the necessity of raising infants, women may not be as aggressive, territorial, or cold-hearted as men, on average. That is, women generally become motherly as they nurse their babies. Traditionally, men have defined themselves more as hunters, warriors, or leaders than as fathers. And a mother is tenderhearted, nurturing, cooperative, and so forth. Thus, even after women obtained their civil liberties, women are still in no position to enslave men. And yet women’s sexist fantasies are on display in every culture in which profit-seeking companies are forced to compete for the attention of female consumers. Notoriously, those fantasies are incoherent. For example, romance novels are filled with masculine heroes who attest to women’s innate sexual preferences, which is to say that those novels exist for evolutionary reasons, that women crave strong, confident and capable men to protect them while they raise their infants. And yet women also long to punish men for the centuries of misogyny. Thus, popular culture overflows also with crude portrayals of men as dunces, bunglers, or immature losers, as in Judd Apatow movies. In Western advertisements over the last couple of decades, women almost always have the last word while men are the butt of the jokes. The female character just smiles and shakes her head as her husband makes a fool of himself. Again, you see the contradiction here which sets up the mystery: women are sexually attracted to X (masculine men), but some of their fantasies feature the negation of X (emasculated men), given that the pop cultural duncification wouldn’t exist were women not susceptible to it; and the paradox is resolved when we appreciate the two-sidedness of sex, which is at the root of this conflict. Evolution designs women to want certain men, but women are people, not merely animals, and so they become horrified by everything touched by nature’s undead hand, namely by the sex act, by their sexual desires and by the objects of those desires. Thus, as soon as women get a chance to air their existential grievance and to bend the cultural noosphere to their will, they punish themselves and the indifferent natural processes by reveling in a fantasy world in which their sexuality is frustrated, in which men are cretins rather than the barrel-chested, lantern-jawed adventurers that women instinctively long for. This is a case, then, of women’s self-loathing, which explains the contradiction in their sexual fantasies.
Curiously, the romantic comedy movie often features both sorts of men and since this sort of movie is usually formulaic, its dramatic tension consists merely in the question of whether the heroine will end up with the conventional or the unconventional hero. As feminism has become more commonplace, the unconventional hero tends to win out. See, for example, The Wedding Crashers, in which Owen Wilson plays the unconventional hero (his nose is bulbous and he’s funnier than he is physically powerful), while Bradley Cooper plays the conventional one who is eventually demonized as a corporate villain, a sexist cheat, and a spoiled bully. The heroine chooses the former only after he publicly humiliates himself by admitting what a cad he’s been, crashing weddings to pick up women. In fact, the Owen Wilson character stands between the conventional romantic hero (the alpha male)—who’s vilified in this case—and a trio of creepy or emasculated male characters. There’s the somewhat metrosexual Vince Vaughan character who earns his masculinity only at the end when he punches out the Cooper villain; there’s the disgusting Will Farrell character who miraculously quenches his enormous libido by seducing vulnerable women while living with his mother; and there’s the heroine’s Golem-like, closeted gay brother. This movie, then, deals with the conflict between the female viewer’s interests, by settling on the compromise embodied by the Wilson character.
You could go on and on, tracking feminism’s impact on popular culture and studying the ingenious techniques used to tie the mass entertainments into knots so that the producers can ingratiate themselves with the self-loathing female consumer. I’ll discuss just one other example, which is the popularity of gay culture. (The word “gay” is a vacuous euphemism, but “homosexual” sounds too clinical and every other term is fraught with peril, thanks to the apparent presumption that gay people are so fragile they’ll break into a thousand pieces if you try to apply a category to them. So I’ll skirt the issue with the rest of them and resort to the politically correct euphemism.) While gay people’s civil rights didn’t follow from the feminist revolution, the prominence of gay people in popular culture exacerbates the feminization of heterosexual men. This has given birth to a new male orientation, to the so-called metrosexual which I take it is similar to the bisexual except that the metrosexual is sexually attracted only to women while pretending otherwise by means of gay-friendly affectations.
Again, this medial style provides a compromise which mitigates women’s self-loathing due to their cognitive dissonance. What’s happened is just that there are more gay celebrities now than before, and since popular culture infantilizes the consumer, some men have taken to imitating gay people the way babies imitate their authority figures. These heterosexuals pretend to be gay with respect to their choices in fashion and entertainment. (Another example of such infantilization is the way some heterosexual men submit to the fashion industry’s ideal of female beauty, which seems the handiwork of the self-indulgent gay male designers who prefer to work with female models that look like teenage boys.) This imitation of effeminate men hardly appeals to either heterosexual men or women, as such, given their inherent sexual preferences, but the metrosexual thwarts those preferences just half-heartedly enough to allow women to vent their disgust with the obligatory rigmarole of sexual interactions. Women can obey their feminist imperatives and avoid degrading themselves by lusting after dominant males, by engaging with heterosexual men who disguise themselves as gays but who can still dominate the pseudo-feminists in the bedroom. Metrosexuals afford these modern women the chance to symbolically flagellate themselves for having the anti-feminist cravings in the first place, while still delivering the evolutionary goods. Inner female conflict resolved!
Now, you might be wondering whether men are as similarly ambivalent about sex as women. Yes, both sexes project their contempt for their bodies and for the undead processes that lead those bodies to act as instruments for producing another generation of bio-puppets. But, as I said, men have had the advantage of literally enslaving women for centuries all over the world. Men therefore haven’t had to tip-toe around their fantasy of expressing their hostility towards the forces of sexuality; they’ve codified that fantasy in their society’s laws. In traditional societies, husbands own their wives because they regard their women as subhuman. But this dehumanization is just the fulfillment of men’s misdirected fantasy of rebelling against nature. Being rational, self-aware creatures (in addition to being bio-puppets much of the time), men are properly horrified by their animalistic instincts which they overcome through rational and linguistic self-control. But because their self-control is limited and their existential reaction to the world is too distressing to follow for long, they still partake of sex. They too, then, loathe themselves and scapegoat women by dehumanizing them while pretending to be supernatural elites. However, because men actually enslave women, men needn’t fight the battle between the sexes so indirectly, with mere ideological weapons. Men express their sexual instincts by physically dominating women, while their misogyny expresses their incomplete enlightenment, that is, their low-grade horror for sexuality in general.
