Andrew Sullivan And The Feminist Rejection Of Nature

Andrew Sullivan has a fine new column in New York magazine's website that deserves attention, about the nature of being male, and how nature — or perhaps, more fittingly, Nature — is not to be denied:

... [I]n the years of being HIV-positive, my testosterone levels had sunk, and I decided, given my lassitude, depression, and lack of sexual desire, to go on hormone replacement therapy to get me back in a healthy range for a 30-something male. It was a fascinating experience to witness maleness literally being injected into me, giving me in a sudden jump what had been there all along, and what I now saw and felt more vividly. You get a real sense of what being a man is from an experience like that, as the rush of energy, strength, clarity, ambition, drive, impatience and, above all, horniness overcame me every two weeks in the wake of my shot. It was intoxicating. I wrote about this a couple of decades ago, in an essay I called “The He Hormone.” The visceral experience opened my eyes to the sheer and immense natural difference between being a man and being a woman, and helped me understand better how nature is far more in control of us than we ever want to believe.

Sullivan goes on to observe that it is now "taboo" to discuss naturally occurring differences between men and women, particularly ones with demonstrable biological origins. The belief that such differences are not inherent but socially constructed are a fundamental tenet of much modern feminism, gender feminism particularly. Steven Pinker attacked this in The Blank Slate in 2003; it has made little difference in the academy, and in lay feminism. "It is strikingly obvious", Sullivan continues, "that for today’s progressives, humans are the sole species on this planet where gender differentiation has no clear basis in nature, science, evolution, or biology. This is where they are as hostile to Darwin as any creationist."

If most men are told that what they are deep down is, in fact, “problematic” if not “toxic,” they are going to get defensive, and with good reason. ... And men, especially young men in this environment, will begin to ask questions about why they are now routinely seen as a “problem” ....

This week, in the New York Times, Tom Edsall bravely exposed the politics of this. He looked at the data and found, believe it or not, that gender-studies feminism is not shared by all women by any means, and is increasingly loathed by men — and not just older men. “2016 saw the greatest number of votes cast by young white men in the past 12 years — markedly higher than their female counterparts,” says Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, a psychologist at Tufts.

... Trump understands this dynamic intuitively. Bannon believed it was integral to the Trump project, and wants the slanted elite discourse on men to continue and intensify. I think this issue was an under-acknowledged cause for Clinton’s failure. At some point, Democrats and liberals are going to have to decide if they want to “problematize” half the voting population.

The recently deceased Ursula K. Le Guin populated an entire world with an androgyne race in her novels set in the Hainish universe. That was fiction, of course, but feminist theorists who start every explanation of male behavior with "men are taught to..." apparently believe we live in such a universe. Certainly Laurie Penny, who can be counted on to ignore every major point Sullivan made, has not disappointed in that regard, and neither Jessica Valenti's impressively lazy response.

Meantime, we have an election later this year. It will surely be interesting to see who shows up for it.