The Dogma of ‘Parity’
To legislate ‘political parity’ between men and women was a stupid mistake. Nevertheless, it is being taken yet further, with economic parity being implemented at the managerial level in large companies. This is a metapolitical victory for feminist utopias. Obligatory quota regulations for men/women in elections (and elsewhere) can only end in the debasement of women. It amounts to considering women as handicapped persons who must be helped in any way possible. It is to risk electing or nominating women for responsible posts ‘simply because they are women’ and thus, possibly, incompetent women. Positive discrimination always harms those whom it is supposed to help. No rigid, mechanical law can replace the naturalness of life. If one wants to repair injustices or discrimination against women, it must be done upstream (the causes) and not downstream (the consequences).
To decree quotas for women on electoral lists, promotion, and employment, (supported by legal penalties) seems odd when one considers that the oppression of young women is tolerated in all Muslim-majority areas. Feminists always reason in terms of laws and rules, when people’s way of thinking is what must be changed.
These legislative measures are contemptuous of women. If a woman is able to enter into politics if she wants to and can get herself elected, why impose a mandatory quota? This obliges political parties (and soon companies) to find women at any cost, or face the consequences. It means taking the risk that the women employed on this basis will actually be unsuitable for the role. This law was supposed to counter the ‘machismo’ of political parties which, so it was thought, kept women out of eligible positions. In reality, women are much less attracted than men to political activity, as all statistics prove. Must one then oblige political parties and trade unions to have equal numbers of both sexes? If so, why not go further still, and have ‘parity in administrative bodies’, companies, the offices of private associations, administrative competitions, high public offices, and the like? It is always the same mechanical and artificial determination to replace organic equilibria and restrict people’s freedom in the name of a false vision of justice and equality. This is one consequence of the communist mentality that has penetrated and animated the whole French public mind. While believing we are defending the cause of women, we are lowering them to the status of a sort of handicapped man.
This logic of forced ‘parity’ has something totalitarian about it, and it resembles another piece of ugly bureaucratic jargon: diversity — which concerns not the sexes but races and ethnic groups, but with the same will to impose quotas and positive discrimination.
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In the summer of 2008, a group of feminist activists called The Beard put on fake beards to carry out publicity stunts against ‘sexism’ and discrimination against women in all domains.[25] They took particular offence in there being too few women in administrative bodies and political assemblies. The Association of French Mayors, for instance, is only 11 percent female. But what if women do not want to be mayors, or deputies, or whatever? Who is forbidding them from running? Of course, to be elected to the National Assembly, one must have the backing of a party to cover campaign expenses and one must have a serious constituency; but none of this is necessary to run for mayor.
The introduction of the famous man/woman parity in political representation (and soon in businesses and administration) breaks with the principle of equality and free individual choice, and poses a serious problem of political philosophy. Under the pretext of strengthening it, such measures actually result in corrupting the principle of equality; for individual equality is being substituted for communal equality (today sexual but soon racial and ethnic), which is contrary to the very Enlightenment principles to which the French Republic appeals. This emphasis of the community over the individual ironically marks a return to the anti-revolutionary ideas of the Ancien Régime (considered ‘Rightwing’ and defended especially by Maurras[26] and Joseph de Maistre[27]). So the anti-racist, feminist Left is using (when it convenient) concepts of political philosophy it judged reactionary and obsolete only yesterday.
In the constitutional revision enacted on 21 July 2008, an amendment introduced by UMP[28] deputy Marie-Jo Zimmermann (who is also president of the National Assembly’s Committee on Women’s Rights) changed the preamble of the Constitution to permit the introduction of quotas, something which was strictly forbidden since the revolution, in the name of liberty and equality. Such a measure, which no one dared oppose thanks to the dictatorship of neo-totalitarian, politically correct ideology, opens the Pandora’s Box of positive discrimination, an extremely slippery principle. For it breaks with the principle of individual meritocracy and splits the social body by sex and, tomorrow, by ethnic origin. Imposing a quota of women (or anyone else) rests on the same logic that allows their exclusion.[29]
We are poking our fingers into the gears of an infernal machine. How far shall we go? Racial quotas? Religious quotas? The process could even be turned against women: in certain areas, there are more qualified women than men. Shall we demand more men? Could there be too many female magistrates, teachers, nurses, executive secretaries? What if there are too many Jews in certain professions or domains, or not enough of them? Shall we legislate under pressure from Muslims, who think that, being much more numerous in France than Jews are, it is abnormal and discriminatory that there should be so many Jews in many professional domains?
Wanting to impose (sexual, racial, religious) quotas by force, as people are starting to do today, is not only to infringe upon the principles of equality and of justice, it is to step onto the slippery slope of a communitarian society riddled with conflict (the underlying idea being that social functions and professions should reflect the ethno-sexual composition of the population with mathematical precision).
This is a good example of the incompatibility between equality and freedom. Real equality, a concept defended by Martine Aubry and a large fraction of the French Socialist Party — which has always remained covertly Marxist — is opposed to the legal equality of the French Revolution, and concludess with the imposition of quotas, injustice and ‘positive’ discrimination. Equal results are substituted for equal opportunity, which results in the granting of unearned privileges. This opens the door to an inefficient society (because it is anti-selective) that is covertly totalitarian, since it replaces meritocracy with rules favouring particular sexes and members of certain ethnic origins.
How far off are mandatory quotas in administration, business, electoral lists — or indeed electoral victors — as a function of their sex and origin? The process is already underway. This is what we are moving towards: an ossified society full of conflict (no one will ever be satisfied with the place occupied by his own sexual-ethnic group), authoritarian, neo-totalitarian and, as always, all in the name of justice, harmony and equality. It is obvious that the contrary of all these will result: injustice, endemic conflict and inequality. Moreover, as these quotas, preferences and privileges become more common, the result in many domains will be that not the best but the favored prevail and dominate.
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What is more, the rule of ‘parity’ will occasion a kind of war of the sexes. It will become easier to accuse a woman of owing her position to ‘positive’ discrimination schemes rather than her own abilities, even when this is untrue. Positive discrimination will also increase racial resentment, as has happened in the United States.[30] A neo-sexism and neo-racism are appearing, at the expense of the White male, in the heart of an anti-sexist, anti-racist society that officially denies drawing any distinction based upon origin, but which breaks this rule through its muddled thinking.
It is perfectly true, however, that discrimination against women occurs in professional life (overestimated by feminists and underestimated by the ‘macho’ male), but sex quotas when it comes to employment and promotion are certainly not the answer. Civil society must live and evolve in i
ts own way, and the State should limit itself to guaranteeing the equality of citizens (and only citizens) before the law (and only before the law). Sexual parity, inscribed in the Constitution of the French Republic, is — from the point of view of constitutional law and legal philosophy — a denial of justice; for it contravenes the very Rights of Man and of the Citizen on which the Constitution is otherwise founded.
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It is obvious that barriers have been erected by men against the promotion of women in political parties and businesses. Such practices are not necessarily based on misogyny as feminists claim, but on much more complicated social and practical mechanisms. Wanting to legislate and punish, to practice ‘positive discrimination’ and the ‘thumb on the scale’, will always have negative consequences.
We have seen it twice: the first time with the government of Alain Juppé,[31] who introduced four women (the ‘Juppettes’) into his cabinet exclusively in order to flatter feminists — women who turned out to be inexperienced; and, more seriously, when Nicolas Sarkozy forced his Prime Minister to employ young women of North African and Black African origin on the basis of entirely feminist and multiracialist motives. In both cases, these artificial promotions turned out to be catastrophic. The women involved were quite simply incompetent, which has nothing to do with their being women, but with their having been chosen according to the wrong criteria (sexual, racial, and ethnic). Now, the only effective way of recruiting real elites is natural selection based exclusively on individual performance independent of any consideration of sex, ethnicity, or any other such arbitrary properties. ‘The right person for the right place’, as the English proverb has it. May the best man/woman win.
Of course, one will always find ‘macho’ tricks and barriers. These must be vigorously combated, not for the sake of women but for the sake of the position. A business enterprise, an administration, or a State are not called upon to be feminist, equal, or diverse, but to be effective. It is just as inadmissible and counterproductive to give a job to a woman because she is a woman as to refuse it to her out of machismo if she is competent. Things must be allowed to evolve according to the order of nature. The International Monetary Fund, the Movement of Enterprises of France, and two large French political parties are already run by women. Their proportion will only grow (without ever attaining the dreamed-of 50 percent). Positive discrimination, quotas, parity — these are all handicaps which generate incompetence and ineffectiveness.[32]
It would have made more sense to emphasise equality of salary and remuneration between men and women. In France today, despite all the ineffective egalitarian laws, women are still mistreated in the professional realm. It is a problem pertaining to mindset more than to laws. Despite being equally competent, women are still paid (approximately 25 percent) less than men. This is unacceptable, because everyone knows many of them have large family expenses (not paid by men) in addition to their work. The further south you go, the more obvious this becomes. In the Nordic, Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon countries, women are treated with much greater professional equality than in Latin countries, not to speak of Asia, North Africa, Black Africa, South America, and so on. The more Nordic, that is, Germanic and Celtic, societies are, the more women are respected — but at the same time, the more they fall for the follies of feminism. It is a difficult balancing act.
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We must also mention the subject of sexual harassment and blackmail of women, which no law can directly solve since it is an attack on the mind. The most common victim of these practices is the pretty woman. Blackmail can either be explicit or, more often, implicit. Cases are common; everyone knows about them but no one mentions them. Sexual blackmail in employment and promotion are not only characteristic of show-business but of all sectors of the economy.[33]
A pretty and talented woman experiences much greater professional difficulties than a man of the same age. More is demanded from a woman than from a man. A woman will not only have a (statistically) lower salary, but in to increase her professional opportunities, sexual favours will be either explicitly or implicitly demanded of her. This practice is universal, including in administration (for promotion and bonuses) and amounts to a masked form of institutionalised prostitution. The repression of this practice is all the more difficult in that many men understand and admit it, yet people keep quiet about it.
The sexual exploitation of women is not limited to wild prostitution, a form of slavery that has become a universal scourge (and which feminist ideology has been totally unable to combat), nor to the general rise of fundamentalist Islam in which, in all countries (including the West), women are treated as inferior. Against this, too, feminist ideology in Europe reacts very softly so as not to be accused of Islamophobia — a cardinal sin. The sexual exploitation of women is a hidden daily reality which escapes the notice of our brilliant sociologists.
I shall deal elsewhere with the matter of beaten and mistreated women, whose exponential increase is obviously correlated with the increasing presence of Muslim immigrant populations. On this question, feminists maintain perfect radio silence. Likewise, no one seems to dwell on this surreal fact: that sentences passed against rapists are extraordinarily light. As for the sexual soap opera of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, delicately referred to as a ‘Lothario’ by his Leftist buddies, people are splitting their sides....[34]
If we want to assess the achievements of feminist ideology — maliciously, perhaps, but conformably with reality — we may say that it has been very strong and effective at promoting free abortion on demand and parity laws, but has been of no concrete use on such subjects as the sexual exploitation of women, domestic violence, the decline in women’s position because of Islam in Europe, the growing number of women mistreated and often killed, and so on and so forth. Feminism amounts to abstract posturing of the purely ideological and dogmatic sort on the part of bourgeois intellectuals who are out of touch with popular reality.
Women who are beaten, raped, veiled, harassed, and/or forced into prostitution or otherwise exploited: feminism is interested in none of that. The great victories are that underage girls should have free and anonymous access to the Pill, that government insurance should reimburse them for convenient abortions, that political parties should be obliged to put forward a predetermined proportion of women for office, that business enterprises should appoint more women to the board of directors, and that women should wear trousers like the guys.
Feminism and Careerism
Everywhere in the West, the goal is to achieve equal salaries for men and women and to attain parity in management positions. The first goal — equal pay for equal work — is both just and realistic; but the second poses problems. Let us examine the question objectively, standing aside from either feminism or machismo.
In the City of London, female participation on boards of directors rose from 2 percent to 3.6 percent between 2000–7, which is microscopic. In France, women represent only 17 percent of salaried managers. Only 6.5 percent of governmental administrative bodies are female, and only 5 percent on executive bodies, where operational power is located. Regarding the number of female CEOs, France ranks 87th in the world. Women’s compensation is lower than that of men by a figure which hovers between 15 and 25 percent; some people explain this as a consequence of machismo, which is something of a simplification, as we have seen. Of course, the French company Areva, world leader in nuclear energy, was run by a woman[35] until 2011, as was Medef, but these are trees that hide the forest.
On the other hand, the feminisation of the judiciary and of national education over the past several decades has been an impressive although negative development.[36] Looking at a photo of heads of state united for the G-20 summit, you can count the women on one hand. Although women are occupying a larger space in politics and the economy, the goal of ‘parity’ seems utopian because of sex differences — the social division of labour by sex —
which is a fact of nature and not only of choice.
Françoise Gri, President of Manpower France, writes (Le Figaro, 7 December 2009):
CEOs know well that it is between the ages of 28 and 35 that, within companies, the nursery of high-potential employees, destined to occupy the most important positions in the years that follow, is formed. Now, it is during these years that most women decide to become mothers. With whatever giant steps science evolves in the coming decades, this biological difference between men and women is likely to remain a decisive factor for several decades yet.
It is for this reason that an increasing number of female employees postpone first childbirth until the age of forty once their career has been launched, which obviously limits the birth rate.
Elisabeth Badinter, a militant feminist who supports absolute parity, recognises that a woman with children is running with a great handicap in her professional life, for she assumes 80 percent of familial and domestic tasks as well. To reach the goal of professional equality, it would be necessary for men, husbands — assuming the women concerned are still living as part of couples — to carry out 50 percent of familial and domestic tasks, or even more, since men experience neither pregnancy nor nursing. No law can oblige them to do so. Moreover, given that divorces are rising among active employees and that women most often get custody of the children, the disparity between ambitious men and women widens still further.
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In 2003, the Norwegian Parliament passed a law that, in a sense, forces nature: publicly traded companies are obliged to appoint 40 percent women to their boards. Such a measure is flawed: what if one cannot find the sufficient percentage available, or enough women competent for these positions? This debate raises several disturbing points: first, you get the sense that being a mother is less gratifying than having a successful career as a mid- or upper-level manager; women’s individual professional success takes precedence over their success in their familial function. Secondly, pushing women to succeed in their professional careers amounts to mechanically discouraging childbirth, especially among the social elite. As always in the dominant egalitarian ideology, we are faced with a utopian vision, this time in the belief in everything at once. Women are supposed to be able at the same time to carry through a brilliant professional career and to be perfect mothers. This is only possible for elite women with no financial worries and for exceptional women (single and childless women not being applicable to this debate). Here again, egalitarianism makes a pretence of letting everyone benefit from privileged status. Moreover, this idea of equal representation in professional careers requires a devaluation of the status of motherhood and the elevation of careerism to the rank of a major criterion of accomplishment for women (an extremely materialistic way of thinking), which leaves women facing the fundamental question: Who am I?
Sex and Deviance Page 18