Professional success is thus presented as of greater value than maternity (a case of extreme individualism), and the innate desire for a child that nearly every woman feels is thus thwarted. Be a man, my girl, have a career! Maternity only happens by accident; it is like the fifth wheel on a wagon. A woman hatches one or two pet children, as late as possible, around age forty, once her career is firmly on track.[37]
Men’s behaviour is partly responsible for female careerism. They are no longer perceived by women as trustworthy companions. The family is falling apart, divorces are multiplying (there were 500,000 marriages per year in the 1970s. Compare this with the 250,000 per year today, of which half end in divorce). Many women of the middle class want to get a well-paying job so as not to remain a housewife dependent on a husband who may leave her. So we are faced with an insoluble problem. Apart from manufacturing children in incubators (why not?) and raising them like cattle in government centers (there again, why not?), it is hard to find a way to ensure the perfect professional equality of men and women without the family and the birth rate suffering. For women cannot perfectly fulfill both the role of mother-educator (we speak of ‘maternal language’ rather than ‘paternal language’)[38] and performance in the professional sector. This androgynous model cannot be applied. To hope for a cultural miracle assisted by legislation (for example, male parental leave), that men will divide maternal and household tasks with women, still runs up against that annoying natural law which egalitarianism can’t help but neglect in its dogmatic dreaming. Not only are most men unsuited to these tasks, not being programmed for them, but all psychologists know well that very young children of both sexes need first of all a mother. By definition, ideological utopias fail to see the obvious; this is normal, for they are formulated by intellectuals, that is to say, hemiplegics who prefer constructing imaginary abstract systems based on a virtual world rather than reasoning based on reality.
* * *
The questions of careers and managerial positions for women, of the sharing of household and family tasks, and of the compatibility of motherhood with work outside the home must follow other principles than egalitarianism and feminism. Before we spell out these principles, we must remember two important points.
The first — it was mentioned earlier, but let us remind ourselves — is that women have always worked in addition to performing their role as mothers in traditional peasant agricultural societies. The second is, as Françoise Gri reminded us above, that the most productive companies are those that accord women the largest place in management and on the boards of directors. This does not mean we need laws and punishments to compel them to have 50 percent women in these positions! Rather, we must choose whether we prefer to have productive companies or to renew the generations? The debate is skewed, but at least proves that short-term economic materialism takes precedence over everything else. This being said, what avenues of reflection can we propose concretely?
* * *
Logically, there should be equal pay for those who are equal in their qualifications, performance, and availability. The problem is knowing whether women are less rewarded because of their sex (which would be unjust discrimination) or because they are less competent, less high-ranking, or less available. But it is very difficult, without going back to a managed economy (which has never worked), to impose equal salaries by sex. Legislating against a cultural reality never works. It is up to business enterprises to understand that they must employ and pay people as a function of their competence and objective abilities, and not according to other criteria. Unfortunately, the macho reflex of male cooptation cannot be changed by rigid laws. Nor can the mentality be changed of men who refuse to place themselves under the authority of a woman. In administration and public service, women of equal competence are paid the same as men. In the private sector, this is not always the case for three reasons: networks of male influence, greater financial demands from male employees, and the lower availability of women for maternal and family reasons. This last reason does not apply to single or childless women, or for mothers from the affluent classes.
We must not cherish illusions; exceptions aside, we cannot expect the same professional availability from women who wish to be mothers as from men in any sector, even for management positions. This is why the idea of quotas and rigid pay scales is counter-productive and extremely stupid. It is not the business enterprise on which we must act, by forcing it bureaucratically and legislatively to adopt this or that feminist measure (which will not work anyway, but be somehow circumvented); rather, it is incumbent upon the State to take certain measures in advance, farther upstream, as it were.
Every promising and gifted woman from the working or middle class who hasn’t any particular wealth and who wishes to follow a career and raise children in the interest of society should benefit from a family allowance and reinforced household aid. This is much more just and more effective than paying unearned allowances to unproductive foreigners. Another measure should be taken in favour of women who renounce a professional career to raise children, which could be called a maternal salary. The considerable sums that are presently allotted to State Medical Aid for the benefit of any immigrant, even an illegal one, comes at the expense of what might be directed to family allowances for native French women, as well as to decreasing the public debt. The financial flow must be reversed. The neo-totalitarian ideology — thinly disguised as humanism — which all centres of power share considers such common sense proposals horrifying.
The Feminisation of Values
In his book The First Sex (2006) which created somewhat of a scandal, Eric Zemmour[39] defends the idea that feminism is something negative, that society can only rest on a patriarchal order, that the equivalence of the sexes is an error, and above all that we are witnessing a deplorable loss of manliness that is making men effeminate and women mannish. He denounces not only devirilising and androgynous ideology (propagated through advertising, the media, education, and so on) but also the craven, unmanly behaviour of men in the West. He implicitly preaches the purely heterosexual model of the seducer of women and a society founded on male domination, obviously matched with an equality of rights. He has been accused, obviously, of machismo.
But in reality, women are in no way responsible for the emasculation of men. One may suppose instead that feminism (which appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century) is not only a reaction to the traditional devaluing and inferiorising of women but, today above all, a response to this emasculation of men. In all domains (business, politics, athletics, science, etcetera), women are performing and often showing themselves more effective than men. There is a crisis of masculinity, and women have taken up the slack. In Great Britain it was Margaret Thatcher, that ‘housewife’ so decried by the bien pensant Left, the Iron Lady, who put her country on a strict regimen.
The emasculation of young men of European origin is flagrant in France. What is more, since the 1970s, girls have been performing better in school, working harder, and taking their studies more seriously than boys. Zemmour rightly criticises the effeminacy of social values, centred on protection, assistance, mothering, humanitarianism — ideals which, moreover, serve to compensate for the reality of a society increasingly shaken by a new pauperism, and by constantly rising criminality and insecurity, by barbarisation, and by neo-primitivism.
But things cannot be decreed: if men (and with them, social values) are emasculated, it is their own fault. Women are merely filling the vacuum, taking the place men have abdicated. Besides, many historical episodes (that of Joan of Arc being the most famous) show that women always tend to make up for the failures of men, replacing them.
* * *
Paul-François Paoli, in his work The Tyranny of Weakness: The Feminisation of the World, or the Eclipse of the Warrior (Paris: Bourin Editeur, 2010) defends the idea that European Societies are becoming unmanly, and consequently weak
, through the feminisation of values. He cites the saying of Malraux that ‘woman is the ultimate opiate of the West’. In his view, the decline of Europe is largely due to this feminisation. He enumerates some of the symptoms I myself have uncovered (and which are very easy to uncover for anyone who has escaped the ideological vulgate of political correctness): the androgyny of males and of morals, the defence of the feminine values of gentleness and pacification through management and in politics, the rejection of the figure of the combative and self-sacrificing male warrior, the delegitimation of the idea of conflict and the recourse to force, and so on. All this is the sign of a degenerate society ‘liquefying itself’. In the USA, on the other hand, Paoli thinks that society is still informed by the values of military conquest.
The author also attacks feminist ideology, without fear of veering into politically incorrect territory: feminists are seriously mistaken in imagining that women could reach parity with men and in denying genetic differences. He dares to write (what will make him very unpopular): ‘there has existed and there still exists flagrant male superiority on an intellectual level’. By this he means that, as I myself said earlier, not that women are less ‘intelligent’, but that in all the sciences, the arts, the intellectual and creative disciplines, men are always in the majority and that it will always be so (even though the number of women in these disciplines continues to grow — especially since girls are increasingly getting better marks in school than boys) because this state of affairs is not the result of discrimination but of inborn dispositions.
He also develops a thesis which will be poorly received: this cult of the feminine which is emasculating European men is a source of serious confusion for the young. This is his position, which I shall summarise: ‘fear of the barbarians’ is the basis of juvenile violence and encourages, through the weakness of effeminate European men unable to show severity, a lack of respect for authority and the social disciplines, or disaffection toward school. Islam then imposes itself as a manly counter-model to this lax, maternal, and effeminate society. I agree with this courageous thesis, but I would go further; for Paoli obviously, and unlike myself, has a career to protect and cannot say everything.
The secularisation of Christian charity by the invading Rights of Man ideology is one major cause of laxity in the face of the immigration invasion and the massive and rapid implantation of Islam.[40] Islam has perceived this weakness, this lack of masculine authority and fighting spirit in Europeans, those feminine feelings of pity, and has rushed into the breach. Nothing has done more to excite its conquering and vengeful aggressiveness than this idea that its former masters are becoming little women.
If, today, you compare the attitude of ‘youths’ of non-European immigrant background (not that any sociologist dares to do so, for they are afraid to report what they observe), mostly Islamic or rather re-Islamicised by way of ethnic pride, with that of young male native French, you are struck by the enormous contrast. (Of course, this is not so universally, but applies to a statistical majority.) On the one hand we have conquering barbarians both manly and rebellious (without reason for being so, for they are privileged by welfare payments and the laxity of the judicial system); on the other, native young men without a hint of masculinity about them, weaklings who are morally burdened with guilt, entirely incapable of defending themselves — never mind attacking others.
This contrast, this difference in masculine potential flatters and excites the deep mentality of Islam and the people who bear it; the more the one side retreats, submissive before manly force (‘Kiss the hand you cannot bite’, says the Qur’an), the more the other advances, overexcited, against those they perceive to be weakened, effeminate, fearful — even, and especially, if the latter say they love and respect the former. For Islam functions according to the spirit of submission — not resistance — to the stronger and more masculine, nor (obviously) that of pity for the weak. The Muslim is spontaneously submissive to God (a male), and to manly and strong masters, whoever they may be; but it forces all those who seem weaker than itself, that is, feminised, into submission. Whence, by the way, the treatment accorded women in Islam.
These mental dispositions are not intrinsically peculiar to Islam, but correspond to the mentality of the people who produced that religion. For no religion or ideology escapes the mental infrastructure of the people who produced it. It is an exceptionally lucky break for Islam and the fertile colonising populations it carries in its wake that it is faced for the first time with the soft underbelly of feminised Europeans, morally contrite and neurotic, who cannot be bothered to reproduce but only to consume, to grow teary over ‘humanitarian’ causes, who have lost all ethnic consciousness, who are feminising their armies, their police forces, their penal and educational systems, who say nothing or even applaud when you take their women. The decline of the masculine values of strength, pride, assertiveness, authority (along with the true feminine values of lineage and ethnic preservation) for the benefit of other choices or pseudo-ideals such as consumerism, low-level mass hedonism, humanitarian good conscience — all this sounds the death-knell of Europe.
[1] My grandmothers, both born at the end of the nineteenth century, enjoyed neither the right to vote nor the right to hold a bank account in their own name until the end of the Second World War. Despite this, they were the ones who kept the accounts, managed the household money and decided on family investments — especially real estate. They were the ones who carefully and severely watched over all their husbands’ expenses; you didn’t kid around with them. Of course, presiding over the entire household as they did, they did not receive any personal income. The husband furnished the income, the wife regulated expenses and savings.
[2] cf. Chapter 3, note 6. –Tr.
[3] This is especially the case in hospitals where there is a refusal to be treated by male doctors and by male gynecologists and obstetricians. There are also limits in place on women leaving the house, always having to be accompanied, etc.
[4] Ni Putes ni Soumis, a French feminist group founded in 2002. –Tr.
[5] Fr: tomboy. –Ed.
[6] Let us recall that schizophrenia (from Greek etymology: ‘brain split in two’) is the tendency toward two opposite personalities, and that paranoia (Greek etymology: ‘mind detached from reality; opposed to reality’) is the tendency to create a different world from the real one, the former generally being filled with persecution. These two conditions are sometimes joined, and may be present in certain fanatical or messianic ideologies or religions, albeit with lesser intensity. The delirium is always the same, comprised of a persecution complex, with the tendency to see conspiracies everywhere and to invention alternate worlds and utopias.
[7] Without wishing to be cruel, it must be recognised that all the conventions, meetings, and congresses of feminist movements gather mannish rather than attractive women on their stages; women with aggressive rather than gentle features.
[8] The author’s point does not come across perfectly into English, where ‘authoress’ used to be an accepted word, and where the influence of feminism has often been in the opposite direction, toward carefully-constructed genderless language. But the point stands that in both languages, feminist ideology has inspired unfortunate and unnecessary coinages, as well as clumsy paraphrase. –Tr.
[9] In India in July 2011 a ‘SlutWalk’ was organised to protest the permanent oppression that women suffer. [The first ‘SlutWalk’ occurred in Toronto, Canada on 3 April 2011 in response to a police officer’s declaration that ‘women should avoid dressing like sluts in order to avoid being raped’. –Tr.]
[10] cf. André Lama, Propos Mécréants [Words of an Infidel –Tr.] (Editions des Ecrivains, 2002).
[11] cf. Gérard Zwang, La fonction érotique (Robert Laffont, 1972).
[12] Founder of human
ethology. –Ed.
[13] Paleoanthropologist and proponent of the killer ape theory which sees human evolution as driven by war and aggression, and the hunting hypothesis which considers the evolution of humans as primarily influenced by hunter culture. –Ed.
[14] L’impensé, literally ‘the un-thought’, equivalent of the German Unbegriff. –Tr.
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