What Women Don't Want

Liberal online Slate magazine has put one of those tiresome "whither feminism" pieces with a bunch of the usual suspects wondering whether Sarah Palin ought to be allowed to call herself a feminist.

Palin is of course profoundly anti-woman, according to Rebecca Traister:

While she may be a self-identified feminist, Palin's work and thinking is profoundly antifeminist and anti-woman because the policy and the candidates she supports would not help women (besides herself and her hand-picked cohort of Grizzlies) to gain power.

One of the commenters was appalled by the lack of raised consciousness in the current generation of young women:

For me, the most interesting "meaning" of the word [feminism] came from my English comp. classes at a school of pharmacy that draws its students from St. Louis, Kansas City, "out-state" Missouri, and southern Illinois. Virtually all broke out in hives at the mention of the word, and were incredulous that I not only called myself a feminist, and proud of it.

Here's where I think these women go wrong.

First, for women, power is not the most important thing. Nor yet is paid employment. What counts for women is love, love and caring. Feminists have gone to enormous effort to persuade women that power is important and career is important, and they wrecked a couple of generations of women with their political activism.

But the new generation of women is reverting to the mean. Thus money is important to the extent that it makes for a comfortable home and to the extent that it provides for loved ones.

If you want to get the attention of women, don't talk about power, talk about love and relationships.

Secondly, I think that feminists put too much emphasis on the achievement of the movement. The fact is that women have been coming out of the domestic sphere into the public square for the last two centuries, with and without left-wing feminist political agitation. To take a Marxist view, it is the productive forces that create the social superstructure. The fact that it is safe for women to come out of the home, the fact that work is now much less physical and more cooperative, the fact that women have benefited enormously from improved life expectancy, all of these things have propelled women out of the home into the public square.

Conservative women are rising because they understand what most women want, and what they don't want.

What women don't want is to be men. They don't want to be fighting pointless bureaucratic wars in giant organizations and they don't want to neglecting their children while they pursue mind-numbing careers.

The dirty little secret about male careers is that men do it not for money, or power, or glory, but in order to get laid. Men instinctively understand the ancient philosophical notion that, when looking for a man, "girls just want to have funds."