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Women & Culture War

Reader GingerMan points to these two James Poulos posts — here’s the first, and here’s the second — as being accurate descriptions of the culture war, as it touches upon human sexuality. GingerMan writes: It comes down to belief in natural law vs. the liberation of the protean self. The precise problem facing cultural conservatives […]

Reader GingerMan points to these two James Poulos posts — here’s the first, and here’s the second — as being accurate descriptions of the culture war, as it touches upon human sexuality. GingerMan writes:

It comes down to belief in natural law vs. the liberation of the protean self.

The precise problem facing cultural conservatives is that we have a rights-based legal and constitutional framework combined with a large and polyglot cultural society. Coming to agreement upon the boundaries of natural law seems to be well nigh impossible in such an environment, therefore only procedural liberalism can fill the vacuum.

Poulos writes, in his first column:

In a simpler time Sigmund Freud struggled to understand what women want. Today the significant battle is over what women are for. None of our culture warriors are anywhere close to settling the matter. The prevailing answer is the non-answer, a Newt-worthy challenge to the premise that insists the real purpose of women is nothing in particular.

Such an answer may or may not be a landmark in the progress of the human race, but it is anathema to most conservatives of any political party, and for that reason conservative folkways, prejudices, and ideals are once again on trial.

Poulos explores the divisions on the cultural left about the purpose of femininity, and of women, if indeed there is purpose there. If women are entirely free to define themselves and to choose their own behavior, then that puts them in conflict with others on the cultural left. In his follow-up column, written in response to an avalanche of contempt from the left, Poulos writes:

It’s not very controversial to point out that sex and gender are foundational to the culture wars. But it is apparently extremely controversial to claim that we can’t make sense of how and why they’re foundational without acknowledging that the root of the battle is over reaching — and enforcing — a consensus about the relationship between what women do and who women are.

This despite the fact that many on both sides of the culture war are frank about their desire to craft an enforceable consensus on issues like abortion, birth control, prostitution, gay marriage, and gay adoption.

For many on both sides, the belief is that their opponents really do stand for barbarism and against civilization. Supporters of the right to choose to have an abortion are believed by many pro-life people to support a barbaric, uncivilized act. Those who would restrict officially recognized marriages to one man and one woman are seen by many gay marriage advocates as using the power of the law to atavistically reverse the partly organic, partly hard-fought progress of civilization.

I confess I don’t really understand what James is advocating for, other than the general point that GingerMan discerns, and James’s view that the clash of orthodoxies here is more than our political system can bear. But that itself is enough. Read the responses to James’s columns, and you see how fierce this battle is. There’s a reason it’s called a culture war — and I do wish the left would disabuse itself of the pretense that only the right fights it.

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