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Gilder's Conspiracy
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12310 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1987 |
2,555 Words |
| Author
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Anthony Astrachan
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George Gilder is a polemicist and a prophet, two titles he probably relishes, and a social scientist - a label he would probably hate to own.
I give him high marks as a polemicist, an artist in controversy over some opinion or doctrine. He argues with a powerful voice against his vision of an enemy ideology or world view, which he saw as "feminism" in Sexual Suicide in 1973 and describes as "sexual liberalism" in his new, revised version of that work, Men and Marriage. The principal tenets of this sexual liberalism are "the obsolescence of masculinity and femininity, of sex roles, and of heterosexual monogamy as the moral norm." one of the sex roles that this ideology wants to make obsolete is "male dominance in politics," which Gilder says is "part of the sexual constitution of all civilized societies." Sexual liberalism instead is producing a society "that at once denies the existence of natural male aggressiveness and is utterly preoccupied with it."
Gilder also deserves high marks for one aspect of his performances as a prophet. He warns against the doom he foresees for a sexually liberal society in prose that clangs with passionate sincerity, and he offers a vision of hope for averting the doom, if little optimism about realizing that hope.
Gilder founders both as prophet and as social scientist, however, on the same fundamental: the reality he describes does not jibe with the reality that anyone but a devoted disciple or an ideological ally perceives.
He laments that sexual liberals run America and then identified these elders of sexual Zion as the majority of sociologists, elementary and high school teachers, university professors, and government officials a.k.a. bureaucrats, and a smaller but unspecified number of people in the higher ranks of business and the professions. There are two problems here: Very few of these people have anything to do with the governing of America except for the last-named elite, and very few in either of these occupations or the groups that really run our society agree with the sexual liberalism that Gilder describes.
I doubt that more than a handful (hardly a baseball park full) of Americans of any sex or sociology believe in the planned obsolescence of masculinity and femininity or want to reduce manhood to anonymous mush. Nobody knows for sure, because nobody, including Gilder, has seen the need to ask a significant number of people how they feel about such "sexual liberalism."
After nine years of research involving 400 lengthy interviews and a look at most of the surveys on related topics. I estimate that at most 10 percent of American men believe deeply in equality and power for women, while another 25 percent have pragmatic reasons for accepting some of the changes that Gilder protests. I'd guess that somewhere between 40 and 65 percent of American women want some forms of independence and equality on what used to be called feminist terms. Throw in some of the ambivalents of both sexes, who pay lip service to those ideals but do little or nothing for them in daily life, and you might produce the majority that the Equal Rights Amendment used to get in public opinion polls. The people in this ephemeral total, however, do not shape a great majority of societal decisions (ERA was defeated, as Gilder note with paeans to Phyllis Schlafly, ignoring the men who backed her). Nor are
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