Don’t sell women short
Katrina Hutchins
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My favorite way to recommend Sons of Anarchy is as a pro-woman masterpiece. It’s a show about biker gang members that run a pornography studio and, later, an escort service when they aren’t murdering people and running guns. But the show’s creator, Kurt Sutter, understood the real experience of women better than most of the online gender discourse.
In Sons of Anarchy, a woman with pregnancy stretch marks can seduce a man in his prime. A grandmother, unskilled and unemployed in any real way, directs the entire gang’s ecosystem. A mother with two children and relative financial stability is nonetheless devastated when she can no longer perform her job as a surgeon.
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Compared to the way feminist careerism and the manosphere see women, Sutter’s imaginary world of drunken orgies and busty barmaids treats women with sobriety and nuance. Political feminists and a certain faction of the male right wing share mirror worldviews in that they both seem to have forgotten women are people, not simply consumers or goods to be consumed.
Feminist careerism’s central misunderstanding is in treating women as disembodied. The biological clock is a bogeyman, and fertility is merely a hurdle to overcome by hustling for a job that can pay for in vitro fertilization or surrogacy. Maximize capital at almost all personal cost.
What this view gets right is that women like meaningful work. We want to contribute and feel that our contributions are necessary. For plenty of women, that desire can be fulfilled by domestic life. Others also have gifts that are better exercised in traditional career fields. Their lives and our society are better for it.
But without integrating the desire for important work and a sober view of biology, many women find themselves running out of time for family building. As the opportunity to have children diminishes, the longing for them often crystallizes with new urgency. By prioritizing career over everything else, women may find themselves limited to their role as a wage earner. Those who insisted this wouldn’t cause existential crises have no respect for what women might be beyond their economic identities.
By contrast, elements of the manosphere seem to view women as merely physical bodies. The only measure of a woman’s worth is how poreless and young her face looks in an Instagram picture. Jon Miller, formerly of the Blaze, received much attention for his tweet saying that Emilia Clarke flew into The Wall “full speed on a dragon,” referencing the age lines that have accumulated around the former Games of Thrones star’s eyes. The tweet itself is merely engagement bait and probably entirely insincere. But enough men online are all too excited to vaguely suggest aging is some kind of female failure.
These men aren’t completely without a point: Female physical beauty is powerful and, almost as a rule, the initial point of attraction for potential mates. They are correct that being attractive or not is a significant force in almost every women’s life. And, maybe unintentionally, their ruthless utilitarianism toward the female form highlights the incongruity between women’s desire to be seen as multidimensional and the normalcy of selfie culture. It’s not entirely fair to habitually present your image with the implicit request for validation and be angry when that image is evaluated, sometimes unfavorably.
However, the manosphere’s performative masculinity tells on itself. There is nothing virile about relishing the effects of time on a woman’s beauty like it is a cosmic punishment. There is nothing masculine about failing to see what a woman in her 30s, 40s, and beyond might be able to offer a man that a woman in her 20s cannot.
Even granting that sexual currency is real and that youthful beauty has the most obvious purchasing power, the idea that female allure cannot shift into new and similarly effective forms is ridiculous. For women, age can mean greater confidence, wisdom, and worldliness that plenty of men find attractive. Only men who have limited experience and confidence with women, and who see them exclusively as consumable objects, would be unaware of this.
Both leftist secular feminists and right-wing masculinity influencers too often appraise only one aspect of women when it is multidimensionality that makes them uniquely female. The female body’s beauty and ungovernable timeline are every bit a part of womanhood as a woman’s spirit and character.
As the line between reality and digital community increasingly blurs, the trap of consumerism will continue to fortify itself and devour fragile, but basic, truths about personhood. If a man, whose greatest artistic work is a seven-season montage of male peacocking, has a firmer grasp on women than self-proclaimed gender experts, it is more important than ever to ground our hermeneutics in real experiences.
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Katrina Hutchins is a video editor and mother from Indiana. She formerly worked for the Daily Caller as an associate editor and AOC impersonator.