Systems and Debates

by Alain de Benoist

  ‘In a Western world where the religion of love is no longer lethal and the religion of fraternity still claims lives, in an industrial society that has drained itself of all beliefs, hopes, messianisms and faith, the resulting new zoology and anthropology will help us define our possibilities and shed light upon all that makes sexual relations ambivalent’.

  ‘They shall serve to remind us that love, which is not always mutual, remains ambiguous, for it is ever a source of both alienation and deliverance, always mingling suffering with joy and the stench of death with the scent of desire. Enshrined in a nature that simultaneously embodies culture, gender struggle continues unabated, without there being any economic or social means that could put an end to it. […] The new zoology teaches man that he is a solitary warrior in a ceaseless struggle, that his woman will always be both his enemy and his companion and that the sophisticated and the barbaric are ultimately one and the same’.

  Utterly indifferent to the well-being of the masses, love is either anarchic or aristocratic, and sometimes simultaneously both. Individual and selective by definition, it laughs at the collective values of ‘charity’ and ‘justice’.

  Mr Cheverny concludes: ‘Beyond good and evil, pleasure and horror, veracity and mendacity, and never renouncing its ancient alliance with death, love is now preparing to enrich itself with all the resources offered by genetics and eugenics. Never bestowing promises nor consolation, Eros never tires of revealing unto those willing to hear his call the devastating and exhilarating aspects of his false secret and all that is unbearable and scandalous about it. Thanks to him and through him, there have always been free men in the West, men whose very freedom pertains to the privilege and arbitrary grace of the gods: in his presence, never have been any brothers or equals, nor shall there ever be’.

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  Sexologie de l’Occident,661 an essay by Julien Cheverny. Hachette, 660 pages.

  La femme. Antiféminisme et christianisme,662 an essay by Jean-Marie Aubert. Cerf-Desclée, 226 pages.

  The Apparel of Women, a treatise written by Tertullian. Cerf, 195 pages.

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  Regarding the ancient history that surrounds the status of women, see Mr Jean-Claude Bardet’s synthesis work entitled La condition feminine dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen Age663 (in Nouvelle école number 11, January–February 1970).

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  Masculine and Feminine Social Roles

  Ever since the ‘culturalist’ ethnological school (the Cultural Anthropology of the Angl0-Saxons) published its various works, particularly through Margaret Mead (Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, New York, 1948), Bronislaw Malinowski and Clyde Kluckhohn, we have been well-aware of the fact that the actual type of differentiation implied by the sexual repartition of social roles may vary considerably from one society or region of the world to another. Neo-feminists thus believed themselves to have found an argument that would justify their approach.

  Mrs Evelyne Sullerot writes: ‘In certain places, women are never involved in agriculture, while in others, various agricultural tasks are allotted to them. In some places, the wearing of trousers is reserved for men, but in others for women. This series of signs embodies a sort of social sex, one that is as defining for women within society as their eros-related sex is’ (La femme dans le monde moderne,664 Hachette, 1970).

  In actual fact, such observations only serve to prove one thing: that man is a cultural being; that, in the case of humans, cultural facts are grafted onto all that is natural; and that mankind is characterised by significant differences in its social structures and mentalities. To be perfectly honest, one did not require someone like Margaret Mead to become aware of these facts. For the (incidentally relative) variations one that registers here and there — within ‘primitive’ populations, generally speaking — do not distract us at all from perceiving a fundamental fact that defines all human societies: the differentiation between masculine and feminine social roles. The function assumed by each of the sexes may vary from culture to culture and from one nation to another, yet nowhere is it ever identical for both.

  Certain tasks are, incidentally, always assumed by the same sex. It is men who always hunt and trap animals all over the world, whereas women are the ones who prepare and preserve food. Likewise, in virtually all human societies, men are the ones who occupy a dominant social position. Political and economic existence is predominantly their domain. Women’s responsibilities are mostly of a private nature; their ties to the familial world are more pronounced than those to the community as a whole.

  Anthropology

  This gender-based repartition of social roles has long troubled researchers. Ideologies have not been absent from these speculations, either. Having been popularised by Friedrich Engels during the 19th century (The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 1884), the works of Lewis H. Morgan665 have led some authors to believe that the phenomenon is but the product of the ‘environment’ and could therefore be historically dated. This view has been undermined by the opposite theory, which states that all observed cultural variations have a certain genetic basis and, when analysed, ultimately relate to specific biological facts.

  According to the ‘culturalist’ hypothesis, women’s relative subjection to men is allegedly due to the advent of the Neolithic revolution, a revolution that is said to have led to the division of work, a sedentary approach to one’s habitat, private property, etc. This view is also defended by Marxist authors (It should, at this point, be noted that this conviction implies the abolition of all that has stemmed from the Neolithic revolution, meaning the nullification of virtually all of our human history, for the purpose of ‘transforming’ the relations between the sexes).

  The theoreticians of the WLM have all rallied behind this viewpoint. Kate Millett asserts that patriarchy ‘‘lacks any and all biological foundation’. M. Kay Martin and Barbara Voorhies (The Female of the Species) state that the beginning of ‘male domination’ coincides with the transformation of the hunter society into a society of farmers and producers. As for Juliet Mitchell,666 she assures us that the appearance of sexual roles was the result of the establishment of private property; for that is when women were allegedly relegated to the role of an object owned by men, with reproduction acting as a repossession or ownership duplicate (a ‘parody of production’). In Engels Revisited: Women, the Origin of Production and Private Property, Katherine Sacks emphasises the exclusion of women from the process of social production taking place outside the family: it is at that point that new ‘mythologies’ are said to have redefined the aptitudes and positions of the sexes as having ‘always existed’.

  This viewpoint calls for several observations to be made.

  First of all, it relies on an outdated anthropological conception. Morgan’s views on the ‘ages of mankind’ (which Engels used to develop his own doctrine) have now been discarded. Never has mankind undergone any unilinear development, and the different human cultures have not all thus systematically experienced a shift from ‘primitive promiscuity’ before eventually becoming patriarchal.

  All the attempts that have been made to raise individuals within a sexual role that differs from their biological sex (including the experiments conducted by John Money667 and Anke Ehrhardt)668 have, furthermore, never been crowned with success.

  Some ‘culturalist’ theoreticians (B.T. Davies, Paul Rosenblatt, Michael Cunningham) have attempted to demonstrate that biological factors have only a minimal impact when it comes to determining women’s professional choices. This claim itself is subject to caution. Throughout history, there have virtually never been any women philosophers or musical composers, despite the fact that no one has ever strived to prevent them from excelling in these domains. Nowadays, whenever given a choice, a great majority of them tend to take on work positions that suit their own personal characteristics. There are as many men who drive cars as there are women, and yet it is boys that entertain themselves with toy cars
at school. In the USSR, where more than 80% of all doctors are women, the latter tend to dedicate themselves, above all, to paediatrics and gynaecology, whereas surgery is practiced almost exclusively by men.

  These facts find their logical explanation in the theory according to which gender-based differences in social behaviour are the extensions of our innate predispositions, predispositions that result from the natural selection of evolution and from the ever more pronounced adaptation of the sexes to their specific roles.

  Biologically Adapted Gender Roles

  In a study devoted to the psychological differences between the sexes, Josef Garai and Amram Scheinfeld express their conviction that masculine/feminine social roles must be considered to be the result of ‘biologically adapted gender roles’. ‘There are some differences that are inherent in each of the sexes and that have conditioned men and women to master specific aptitudes and take charge of certain functions, which were subsequently institutionalised by professional occupations and cultural prescriptions’.

  In Males and Females, Corine Hutt has highlighted an entire adaptive complex of genetic characteristics that have rendered women more apt to procreate, nourish and raise children and bestowed upon men a superior ability to hunt and protect their families. She clarifies the fact that this adaptation process has not merely impacted our physiological traits, but also our psychological ones. On their part, Jeffrey Gray and Anthony Buffery believe that women’s superiority in the verbal domain stems from a phylogenetic adaptation linked to the necessity of teaching children how to speak (in the case of men, the same process has resulted in a superior spatial aptitude for the purpose of successful hunting). Other authors, including Lionel Tiger, Edward O. Wilson, Desmond Morris and Richard Ardrey, consider the more specifically masculine traits such as a good sense of direction, the tendency to gather among members of the same sex, a more ‘diversified’ way of thinking, etc., to be genetically determined.

  There is every reason to think, therefore, that the cultural aspect has simply taken over from the biological one and has gradually accentuated the dispositions that were already inscribed into the very history of our species, in accordance with a law of evolution that remains, above all, a law of increasing differentiation.

  Mr John Archer of the University of Sussex writes: ‘The most reasonable approach is to consider the pattern of male ‘domination’ to have already been present in hunter societies and to have simply been ‘institutionalised’, ever more strongly, in the new environment of sedentary agricultural communities. […] Any realistic understanding of the origins of social behaviours brings to light a continuous sequence of occurrences rather than a single and specific event that would have taken place in the course of human evolution or history’ (Origins of ‘Male Domination’, New Behaviour, 31st July, 1975).

  The Dream of a Primitive Matriarchy

  Even if culture does not actually create the distinction between masculine and feminine social roles, what is clear is that it does, by contrast, model the latter within the framework of certain structures and following different directions; it is also evident that it favours the establishment of a specific kinship system, gives priority either to masculine or feminine values, etc.

  Considering the example of monogamy, one immediately notices that it is no more of a universal ‘necessity’ that would impose itself upon the human mind than an ‘innate’ pattern characterising each and every social structure.

  In some societies, it is polygamy and, much more rarely, polyandry that prevails. As emphasised by Helmut Schelsky, however, it is also a fact that ‘among the Greeks, Romans, and Germanic peoples, one observes an absolute coincidence between their political expansion and civilisational peak and the adoption of strict monogamy’ (The Sociology of Sexuality, Gallimard, 1972).

  The connection between patriarchy, monogamy, the ceaseless transformation of society, the continuous pursuit of new objectives, the will to power, etc., one that is very pronounced within the European civilisation, is so strong that one may wonder whether the latter would ever have attained such a civilisational level had it not been endowed with this specific type of familial and social structures.

  The supporters of strictly egalitarian neo-feminism are well aware of this fact, and the topic of ‘primitive matriarchy’ (no matter how much it has been sidelined by modern ethnology) continues to hold a genuine fascination among their ranks, since it allows them to hypothetically, at least, catch a glimpse of a social state that preceded the ‘male coup’ embodied by the Neolithic revolution and the advent of the patriarchal Indo-European society.

  In a thick book entitled Das Patriarchat, Ursprung und Zukunft unseres Gesellschaftssystems (S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 1975), in which he adopts the views of Engels, Bachofen and even Robert Briffault (The Mothers. The Matriarchal Theory of Social Origins, London, 1927 and 1959, New York 1931), Mr Ernest Borneman669 asserts that the emergence of the Indo-European culture, founded upon the tripartite ideology involving patriarchy, put an end to a social state that he defines as a ‘feminine’ culture — not in the sense of a female domination over males, but that of the prevalence of feminine values of security, universal ‘love’ and equality (a prevalence which the matriarchal system allegedly guaranteed). His conclusion is that the return to an egalitarian sexual dialectic will remain impossible as long as the European culture continues to be founded on the bases that have always been its own.

  Mrs Françoise d’Eaubonne, according to whom ‘the entirely new dimension of the global political problematic is but the remote consequence of the path that Europe has been taking since the Bronze Age’, has also understood perfectly well that ‘a genuine and therefore mutational revolution, one that would venture beyond the traditional revolutionary mindset just as the latter ventured beyond the borders of a liberal attitude of reform, would imply both a revolution in our economic, social and technological structures, which represent our infrastructures, and another in our basic values, which do not merely act as some vague superstructures, but also enable interiorisation, i.e. the inevitable factor of repetition’. In short, she realizes that ‘a material change, however spectacular it may be, would never have any significance to speak of as long as the moral imperatives of appropriation, expansionism and competitiveness that have accompanied patriarchy and the subordination of women since the very beginning are ideologically maintained’ (in Les femmes avant le patriarcat).670

  Pushing neo-feminism towards its ultimate conclusion, Mrs D’Eaubonne thus proposes that we draw inspiration from the ‘gynocratic societies’ that she believes to have discovered just before the Neolithic period (Jericho I and II, the predynastic valley of the Nile, etc.) so that we may achieve ‘an egalitarian congestion of the sexes’ and the world’s anti-promethean redirection on an ‘eco-feministic’ basis.

  She cries out, saying: ‘Indeed, the patriarchal society, which embodies our planet’s universal social pattern, has vanquished the Great Goddess and forced a dispossessed Boadicea to drink a cupful of poison’.

  In Les femmes de Gennevilliers,671 published by Mercure de France in 1974, Mrs Michèle Manceaux672 writes: ‘Women will only claim their freedom once they are free of the family’. In order to destroy the family, however, one has to abrogate the social structures that shape it, the values that inspire it, and the mental patterns that justify it. The aim is, therefore, to abolish history in its entirety in the hope of accomplishing a return to a pre-historic Eden, the ‘golden age’ that preceded the birth of civilisation.

  Mrs D’Eaubonne claims that, since ‘the preponderance of women’ and the ‘original motherland of primitive communism’ are one and the same, it is then and only then that ‘the proletariat will be able to deny its own proletarianism and women shall embrace their own universality as representatives of the human race’.

  Under various shapes, one encounters this very same theory (now taken to the extreme) in the essays of Ashley Montagu (The Natural Superiority of Women, Colli
er-Macmillan, 1968 and 1974), Elizabeth Gould Davis (The First Sex, G. P. Putnam and Sons, New York, 1971) and Paula Webster (Matriarchy: A Vision of Power, published in Rayna R. Reiter’s Toward an Anthropology of Women, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1975), according to whom primitive matriarchy constitutes a ‘fruitful vision’, despite lacking any genuine empirical or historical foundations.

  In Si je mens673 (Stock, 1972), Mrs Françoise Giroud674 pours her heart out: ‘It would be funny indeed if the primitive woman were to suddenly re-emerge, she who had to be degraded, muzzled, disgusted, and confined in every possible way so that men could find the strength to make other things than what is termed love and proceed to create civilisation’.

  In her work entitled Rape (L’étincelle, Montreal, 1976), Susan Griffin675 coldly asserts that ‘rape is the inevitable consequence of the type of socialisation received by both men and women in the patriarchal society’.

  Identical Criticism

  Through these few quotes, one can perceive the powerful bond between egalitarian neo-feminism on the one hand and, on the other, a kind of ‘ecological’ dissent, with its desire to return to a pre-human and pre-historic nature, its indictment of the European culture and civilisation, its demands for self-governance, its rejection of parental authority, its use of ‘gentle methods’ (which ‘can be used by all’, as pointed out by Mrs d’Eaubonne in a letter sent to Le Nouvel observateur on 2nd September, 1974), and so on. All these political or metapolitical attitudes stem from the same will to criticise; this criticism targets fathers in relation to their own children, men in relation to women, institutions and governmental structures in connection to ‘direct democracy’, culture in connection to nature, and history in relation to pre-history.