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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Into The Longhouse

Is American society dominated by social norms 'centering feminine needs and feminine methods?'
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How have I missed the whole Longhouse controversy? It started when First Things published this essay by the pseudonymous writer L0m3z, in which he defines what he means by "the longhouse." Excerpt:

In certain corners of the online right you encounter a term that is at first glance puzzling, “The Longhouse.” Maybe you have heard this term. Maybe you have wondered what it means. Maybe this term means nothing to you. Even for those of us who use it, the Longhouse evades easy summary. Ambivalent to its core, the term is at once politically earnest and the punchline to an elaborate in-joke; its definition must remain elastic, lest it lose its power to lampoon the vast constellation of social forces it reviles. It refers at once to our increasingly degraded mode of technocratic governance; but also to wokeness, to the “progressive,” “liberal,” and “secular” values that pervade all major institutions. More fundamentally, the Longhouse is a metonym for the disequilibrium afflicting the contemporary social imaginary.

The historical longhouse was a large communal hall, serving as the social focal point for many cultures and peoples throughout the world that were typically more sedentary and agrarian. In online discourse, this historical function gets generalized to contemporary patterns of social organization, in particular the exchange of privacy—and its attendant autonomy—for the modest comforts and security of collective living.

The most important feature of the Longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother. More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. Many from left, right, and center have made note of this shift. In 2010, Hanna Rosin announced “The End of Men.” Hillary Clinton made it a slogan of her 2016 campaign: “The future is female.” She was correct.

As of 2022, women held 52 percent of professional-managerial roles in the U.S. Women earn more than 57 percent of bachelor degrees, 61 percent of master’s degrees, and 54 percent of doctoral degrees. And because they are overrepresented in professions, such as human resource management (73 percent) and compliance officers (57 percent), that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally.

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So the Longhouse is a metaphor for the over-feminization of our common life. It doesn't strike me as all that controversial to raise the issue. I see that Patrick Deneen chastised First Things for publishing it:

I am not really a part of the "online right" in the sense Patrick means, so I guess I am missing what is supposedly so objectionable about this particular piece. Maybe the author is involved in some dark discourse, I dunno. Not my world. But I think the general point he makes in this essay is an important one to talk about. My podcast partner Kale Zelden wrote favorably of it on his Substack newsletter. Excerpts:

He tells us that these “buffoons” [people like the toxic-machismo creep Andrew Tate] are attractive to young people, young people who notice the adult absurdities that they all lived through the past three years. Adults kid themselves in thinking that the kids don’t judge us harshly. We shut down their schools, we sanded their skateparks, we pricked them with an experimental gene-therapy that none of them needed. And when someone like Andrew Tate goes live and says a few true things in a cluster of really stupid and malign things, they pay attention. You may not like Tate, but I guarantee you many of your boys do.

Our kids know that we are not having serious conversations. They know that they’ve been stuck in a hellscape run by Dolores Umbridges. So how are we going to start having real talk. Some feminists in the UK are doing just that. If you have not read Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, go buy it now. And when Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress (out in April) go buy it and read it. They are brave women, having brave public discussions about all the third rails. It will be interesting to see when more mainstream type men will venture out into these choppy waters. If they do not, the above buffoons will dominate the space.

Kale praises Prof. Deneen, but says he doesn't understand Deneen's objection to the piece:

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If we are trying to have a necessary conversation, why not join in? From what I can gather, he is upset that FT provided a platform for an Anon. If you disagree with something he said, say it. If you think the Longhouse meme is inaccurate, say it and explain why. If you think we are NOT stuck in Den Mother hell, then say it.

Why this reaction? Are the sources quoted the wrong ones? Are only certain people allowed to engage in such discussions?

As usual, the swarm jumped in and tried to shame the editors with versions of “how dare you?” and other Anon’s like 

Peachy Keenan joined in to call out the pearl-clutching. She is certainly not afraid to call them as she sees them. Some of his friends told him to block some of the more spirited but fair rebuttals.

Well, I have to block almost all my tweets now, because the swarm became nasty and intolerable, drowning out the constructive critics. Sorry about that. Maybe Deneen had to do it too. Still, unless somebody can show me that the anonymous author of the Longhouse piece is a bad man, I have to side with Kale. I think it's an important discussion. As Michael Brendan Dougherty pointed out, the Longhouse discussion is really about Safetyism -- and it's something he discussed in this essay, with nobody objecting.

Similarly, the brilliant young Protestant theologian Alastair Roberts talked about gender and our common life in a characteristically complex, thoughtful piece from 2016. Excerpts:

There is an elephant in the room of our social discourse, one salient fact that goes a long way to explaining the tensions between different forms of social and political discourse and their relative sites and means of power and influence. However, this fact is a fact that progressive discourse necessarily dissembles, because it is taboo:

Men and women are different and their differences have an immense impact upon the climate of our social and political discourse.

Jonathan Haidt, writing on Heterodox Academy, describes a striking experience he had when addressing high school students about the importance of open and challenging discourse in the educational environment.

[T]he discussion began, and it was the most unremittingly hostile questioning I’ve ever had. I don’t mind when people ask hard or critical questions, but I was surprised that I had misread the audience so thoroughly. My talk had little to do with gender, but the second question was “So you think rape is OK?” Like most of the questions, it was backed up by a sea of finger snaps—the sort you can hear in the infamous Yale video, where a student screams at Prof. Christakis to “be quiet” and tells him that he is “disgusting.” I had never heard the snapping before. When it happens in a large auditorium it is disconcerting. It makes you feel that you are facing an angry and unified mob—a feeling I have never had in 25 years of teaching and public speaking.

After the first dozen questions I noticed that not a single questioner was male. I began to search the sea of hands asking to be called on and I did find one boy, who asked a question that indicated that he too was critical of my talk. But other than him, the 200 or so boys in the audience sat silently.

After the Q&A, I got a half-standing ovation: almost all of the boys in the room stood up to cheer. And after the crowd broke up, a line of boys came up to me to thank me and shake my hand. Not a single girl came up to me afterward.

The gender divide startled him. After the talk, he led a discussion, within which he seemed to make some progress. In the article, he describes the fact that the boys experience immense social pressure to self-censor, a pressure exerted by the girls:

That night, after I gave a different talk to an adult audience, there was a reception at which I spoke with some of the parents. Several came up to me to tell me that their sons had told them about the day’s events. The boys finally had a way to express and explain their feelings of discouragement. Their parents were angry to learn about how their sons were being treated and… there’s no other word for it, bullied into submission by the girls.

It seems to me that, if we are to speak appropriately about them, the dysfunctional phenomena of our discourse that I have discussed in my previous posts are in large measure failures of healthy forms of gendered socialization. Incidentally, this is exactly the sort of problem we should expect to find in a society that ideologically resists the reality of gender and presumes that it isn’t an insistent natural reality that must be negotiated rather than dissimulated. Though we may hit the nerve of the sacred value of equality, homogeneous and indiscriminate inclusion in speaking of it, the integrity of our discourse itself depends upon careful handling of the relations between and within the sexes.

More:

We should not expect that the realms of politics and the academy can introduce large numbers of women withouundergoing more fundamental cultural and institutional change in the process. Women’s schools and women’s studies are ground zero for the current issues with free speech in the campus. This is not a coincidence.

The underlying problem is not primarily with the ideologies that are being taught in these locations. Rather, the ideologies often seem to function as a rationalization of more naturally female inclinations in discourse and socialization.

Women do not naturally gravitate to a manly code of honour. The social virtues that are elevated in women’s groups tend to be things like inclusion, supportiveness, empathy, care, and equality. Through his and his students’ research on the subject of ‘social justice warriors’, Jordan Peterson has identified that it refers to a real phenomenon in the world, but also suggests that it is specifically related to a maternal instinct: ‘the political landscape is being viewed through the lens of a hyper-concerned mother for her infant.’

This instinct causes all sorts of problems when expressed in an academic or political context. It infantilizes perceived victim, minority, or vulnerable groups (women, persons of colour, LGBT persons, disabled persons, etc.), perceiving them as lacking in agency and desperately in need of care and protection. When persons from such groups enter into the realm of political or academic discourse, they must be protected at all costs. Unsurprisingly, this completely undermines the manly code that formerly held, whereby anyone entering onto the field of discourse did so at their own risk, as a combatant and thereby as a legitimate target for challenge and honourable attack. The manly code calls us all to play to strength, whereas the maternal instinct calls us all radically to accommodate to weakness.

The opening up of the field of front line discourse to people with a non-combatant or non-manly status causes severe problems for men too. Men are naturally inclined to protect women and generally seek to please them. While men bond with their male peers through rough interactions, they do not generally do the same with women. Men spend their whole lives learning to hold themselves back in female company, learning how to pull their punches, how not to speak their full mind, how to avoid giving offence. This second nature can’t simply be put on hold, but must actively be resisted, if women are to be treated as full peers in such settings.

So many men who proclaim the equality of women instinctively resort to ‘white knighting’—rushing to women’s aid—when they see a woman being firmly challenged by a man. As C.S. Lewis once observed, ‘battles are ugly when women fight.’ Unless we are mindful in our handling of them and the men and women who are admitted to them, arguments can become ugly in such conditions too. Honour may be abandoned and matters can become bitter and personal. The eye is taken off the ball of truth and argument and men turn on other men, rather than allow another man to beat a woman. While men are expected to put themselves on the line in debate and risk significant loss, many have a visceral resistance to seeing women experience the same thing.

There is no ideological pill that will easily deliver us from such deeply rooted gendered instincts. Indeed, part of the irony here is that the men who are most stereotypically protective of women within such contexts are often the men who push the hardest for them to be included within them, lest they be wounded by the implication that they are weak. As I discussed earlier, men’s bonds to the women in their lives tend to take precedence over their relations to other men. Protecting women and their feelings frequently takes priority over truth and honour in argument.

I hope you will read the whole thing before you form a judgment on what Roberts's points are. He is a very careful and thoughtful writer, and one who always has something interesting to say.

Roberts -- remember, this is 2016, an election year in America -- quotes from a piece in which a British journalist interviews a Trump voter after Big Orange's election victory:

“I don’t like Trump, but look at what is happening in this country. People have had enough. Imagine you live in Michigan or Wisconsin, or Ohio, or Pennsylvania, or Florida, or North Carolina. You’re getting by ok but it’s fraught with worry and even the good months seem like a respite from it all going, what do you Brits say? tits up. One of you has two jobs. Your neighbour’s wife works at Walmart but that’s getting eaten alive by Amazon and delivery companies. What are your kids going to do for a living? College is expensive and then what? The companies they might work for won’t offer them anything like security. It’s tough out there. And what’s the biggest news story of the last year on TV here other than the election? Other than Black Live Matters protests.”

I shake my head. I don’t know.

“Transgender restrooms. Transgender bathrooms. All the time. Crazy protests on campus. All the time. Crazy, angry, entitled, spoilt people shouting on your TV about justice and trigger warnings and transgender stuff and hating America and how bad the country is when they’ve no idea what life is really about. While tens of millions of people in those states have real concerns about jobs, pay, about the economy, about their children. And this is the next battle that the radicals want to fight? Abolishing men and women? No. Equality yes. This crap? No. And eventually you think: what the hell is going on in this country? And you vote for the one guy that says enough.”

I had to smile when I read that. This week I had dinner in Budapest with a visiting academic, an American who lives in Europe. She's a liberal, but we agreed on how bizarre our home country looks from overseas. She talked about going back home to visit after a few years in Europe, and being gobsmacked by the obsessions of all her college friends: "It was all trans, trans, trans," she said. Seriously, that's all they wanted to talk about. Nothing about income inequality, nothing about war and peace, nothing about better health care -- the kind of bread and butter issues that made her a Bernie Sanders supporter from abroad. She explained that these were all left-wing, highly-educated white females. What startled her was not that they cared about trans issues, but that that was just about the only thing they cared about -- even though none of them were queer. The empathy impulses were off the chart. She made a funny, disparaging remark about liberal white women, her tribe.

What also struck me about the Longhouse discourse is what it brought to mind from my recent interviews with an American academic who was deeply into the occult for some years. One of the things he told me is that there is running through the occult an elevation of the "dark feminine" as a strategy for opposing and overthrowing the masculine. He said it is no coincidence that so much of contemporary occultism is driven by feminists, and that gender-nonconforming people are also drawn to it. He discerned over time that they define themselves broadly against the patriarchal god of Abrahamic religion, and the order it dictates.

Reading the Longhouse essay brought to mind a number of conversations I've had with male friends over the past few years -- normie middle-class Christian guys who want to do the right thing, but who feel hard-pressed by what you might call "toxic femininity." I am afraid to give specific examples, for fear of inadvertently outing some of these men to those who know them, but let me say simply that what these guys have in common is the feeling that they can do nothing right in their marriages or relationships with other women. I think of one man in particular, a friend who emailed a couple of years ago to say that his wife faulted him for not being strong and decisive, but whenever he was strong and decisive, she laid into him for being bossy and uncaring. All the guys I'm talking about are committed Christians with educations and strong middle-class norms. One of these male friends, a younger guy who follows pop culture a lot more closely than I do, said that women like his wife and her friends are bombarded constantly with "you go, girl" messages in media, trying to convince them that the men in their lives are holding them down and holding them back. Along those lines, a middle-aged pal I see once or twice a year told me last year that most of his wife's close circle of friends had filed for divorce in the past year, for no reason other than that they were bored, and thought life had more to offer.

Now, obviously I don't know any of those women or what their circumstances really are, but I find it easy to believe that living in a culture like ours, where men are shat on all the time, and in which traditional masculine traits are not held up with the hope of refining them, but rather mocked and derided, that women would come to think like that. Hungary, where I live now, is significantly more masculine in its public culture than the US is, but I've heard from Hungarian friends that women here get frustrated because often they work harder, and with more discipline, than men, but men are still treated with privilege. Again, I honestly don't know: I'm a guest in this country, and I don't speak the language. I'm just reporting to you what I hear.

Don't you think that we all have an interest in building a culture in which men and women use their particular strengths to work together, for the greater good? I do. Yet I have my doubts as to whether we can actually make useful progress in cultures dominated by female attitudes. Camille Paglia, in her typically provocative way, wrote in Sexual Personae, that feminism wrongly ''sees every hierarchy as repressive, a social fiction; every negative about woman is a male lie designed to keep her in her place. Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate. . . . If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts."

Well, I don't know about that, but the quote makes me think about the essential feminization of a society in which people are trained to despise, or at least to suspect, excellence and achievement, because it might make those who don't meet goals of excellence feel bad. One reason women are inclined to support hiring quotas, I suspect, is because they would rather live with mediocrity as long as nobody felt bad or left out, than achieve excellence if it came at the cost of someone's feelings.

If Patrick Deneen fears that mainstreaming Longhouse discourse opens the door to Nietzscheanism, I would say first that we should be aware of that danger. But more importantly, we should be aware that failing to have these serious discussions only drives them to the Andrew Tate margins -- which, as many of us who had no idea who Tate was till his arrest learned, is not at all the margins for males of a certain age demographic. See, this is why I try to pay attention, however limited, to the discourse to the Right of me, even when I find it distasteful (but not when I find it wicked). How do I know which topics I've made taboo for myself, and whether that taboo is justified, if I don't know what these people are saying? I recognize that there should be limits on intellectual discourse, to keep ideas like racism and anti-Semitism taboo. It is not clear to me, though, why the Longhouse discourse, at least as presented in that column, violates a taboo. It seems to follow logically from the standpoint of the man quoted in the Roberts piece from 2016, about why he voted for Trump.

One more time: if we don't talk about ways the dominance of feminized categories in public discourse and policies harm men, and hurt the common good, we are guaranteeing the radicalization of a new generation of men. Real problems cannot be suppressed forever.