Modern Feminism’s Motte-and-Baileys
A Critique of Modern Feminist Equivocations
See if you can spot what is wrong with this argument:
Socrates is Greek; therefore, Socrates is a language.
From reading this, you should immediately know what the problem is. I switched the meaning of the word “Greek” without telling you. Socrates is Greek in the sense that he was born in the country of Greece and lived in Greece his entire life. However, halfway through I pulled a bait-and-switch and started talking about Greek in the sense of the Greek language. So, while I used one word: “Greek”, I was using it in two different senses.
When you do this with entire concepts or beliefs, you have a motte-and-bailey.
The motte and bailey castle was popular in the Middle Ages. The bailey was comfortable and desirable to live in, but it was vulnerable to attack. On the flip-side, you had the motte, which was situated upon a hill surrounded by a ditch or a moat. The motte is much easier to defend, but it is not as comfortable or as desirable as the bailey. Thus, when you can, you will seek to live in the bailey, but when you’re under attack, you will retreat to the motte in order to defend the bailey. Notice that while the motte and the bailey are related to each other, they are still separate and distinct.
How do we do this with ideas? Well, suppose Alice believes that there is no such thing as right and wrong, good or evil. She thinks these terms are essentially meaningless and do not correspond to reality. This belief is her bailey: it’s where she wants to live and do business. Bob might challenge her moral nihilism and say, “Hang on a minute? Of course good and evil and right and wrong are real and meaningful concepts. When I say that it is morally wrong to mistreat a person based on his or her race, I am saying that it is really wrong, in reality, for everyone, everywhere, always, no matter what.” Realizing the weakness of her own position, Alice must retreat back to her motte. She replies to Bob by saying, “I understand your concern, Bob, but morality is a social construct. Your moral values were constructed by society, so they cannot possibly be objective.”
Whether you find Alice’s response convincing or not, you should be able to spot the bait-and-switch that happened. At first, she was saying that good and evil do not exist and that there is no such thing as right or wrong. However, when she came under attack, she defended a much more modest position: not that morality is fiction, but that morality is a social construct. In doing so, she has effectively lied to Bob—she is intellectually dishonest—and she certainly hasn’t actually responded to his objection. That is the rhetorical motte-and-bailey in action.
Now, what does this have to do with modern feminism?
The Wage Gap
Consider the following claim:
Women earn 77% as much money as men earn for doing the exact same job.
This claim, while popular, is demonstrably false, and in the United States, wage discrimination on the basis of gender has been illegal for about sixty years. When I worked as a janitor cleaning the county buildings, my female coworkers received a wage that was identical to mine: the minimum wage for our state (at the time this was $11.50/hr). This was the case even when one of my female coworkers sustained a car accident and was put on “light duty”, meaning she could not perform labor-intensive tasks such as lifting or carrying anything that weighed more than ten pounds. Despite doing less work than I was doing, her wage remained identical to mine (and rightly so). So, while you will hear this 77% figure all over the place, there is simply no data to actually substantiate it. This claim is a bailey. Here is the motte:
On average, women earn 77% as much money as men do.
This is a completely different claim, but it is much easier to defend because it is merely making a description of the general earning trends of working women compared to men. This claim is actually much closer to reality than the first one because it takes into account the fact that women—generally speaking—tend to work fewer hours than men, are less likely to work overtime than men, are less likely to compete for higher and better-paying positions than men, or choose different job positions or job fields than men. Again, these are only general trends and will not be representative of every woman in the laborforce (case and point: all of my bosses were female when I was a janitor). The bait-and-switch comes in when you want to make a case for a discriminatory wage gap (the bailey) while defending the real 77% statistic that accounts for the wage disparity and shows that it has nothing to with sex discrimination (the motte). In this sense, it becomes manifestly clear that the wage gap is a myth.
Gender Differences
There are no biological differences between men and women.
The concept of gender is a fiction.
Transgender women are women.
This particular bailey is so popular, even the ACLU has started tweeting it. However, it is one of the easiest to refute, which is why the following motte becomes necessary almost immediately:
The scientific evidence concerning gender differences is not strong enough to support the claim that nature has significantly contributed to the differences between males and females.
This is much easier to defend because the differences between men and women are quite superficial in day-to-day life. Whatever differences there might be biologically between men and women are usually completely overridden by the characteristics of the individual person. Thus, while men on average tend towards the extreme highs and lows of the IQ bell curve and women tend towards the middle, it does not surprise us at all to find women Ph.D.’s. While women tend to be physically weaker than men, it does not surprise us to find effective and deadly women soldiers and medal-winning women Olympians.
So, what makes this a true motte? It has to do with a confusion in the different senses of the word “different”. Women and men differ in form, not in value, capacity, or function. That is to say, women and men have separate and distinct genetic characteristics that manifest in different ways, such as in having different sex organs. What is socially constructed is not our genes, but the roles our culture assigns to each gender. It is fine to say that gender roles are social constructs because that is just a fact, but gender itself is a biological reality that can be repeatedly tested and verified. In that sense, transgender women are not women. We may choose to treat them and interact with them as though they were women, and we are well within our rights to do so, but this does not change their underlying, intrinsic biological characteristics. Given that the ratio of women who reproduce to men who reproduce is somewhere around 80/40, it would be quite shocking from an evolutionary standpoint for natural selection to fail to produce some personality differences. This trend in our species history points to why women generally value security, whereas men generally value liberty (of course, it is perfectly rational to value both).
As it happens, though, many English Feminists (including the author of the Harry Potter novels, J.K. Rowling) knew this long before I was even born.
Abortion
While there are some prominent pro-life feminist groups, it seems that most feminists are pro-choice. Given the decades of heated debate surrounding this issue, it’s hardly surprising that this topic comes with its own motte-and-baileys. Here is one of the most common ones that I’ve seen:
Women should be allowed access to abortion on demand.
If we’re honest, then if the unborn is not a human person with intrinsic moral value, then there is no moral reason to deny women access to abortion on demand. There would only be practical reasons, such as the strain and trauma that abortion can have on a woman’s body. However, most pro-life advocates argue—quite persuasively from both science and philosophy—that the unborn is indeed a human person with infinite intrinsic moral value. The overwhelming consensus in the field of embryology is that life begins at conception. The philosophical arguments for the personhood of the unborn are myriad and quite strong (maybe I’ll write a blog post in the future highlighting my favorites?). While there have been some really great responses from feminist philosophers, these are unfortunately far less common than this next motte:
A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with her body. All women have the right to bodily autonomy.
The power behind this motte is how intuitively obvious it is. To deny it would be to dehumanize women by denying their agency. At least, that is how it appears on the surface. There are two problems with this motte. The first is that it is a philosophical claim that has nothing to do with the political policy of abortion on demand. The second is that this claim actually doesn’t make any sense. Let me explain.
The concept of bodily autonomy is one of the two characteristics that define bodily integrity, the other characteristic being self-determination. Self-determination means that a human being has both the capacity and the freedom to make decisions in the world, and bodily autonomy means that a person has total control over their body and its functions. Assuming no handicaps or illnesses, all human beings have bodily integrity in this sense. However—and this is very critical—this is not the same as a person having the right to do whatever they want with their own body. No one actually has bodily autonomy in that sense. For example, I do not have the right to beat someone to death with my body. I do not have the right to rob a bank with my body. These are things that I do not get to do with my body. Thus, it is just false that any person can do whatever they want with their own body. We do not have bodily autonomy in this sense.
Bossy
This one has more to do with individual character than it has to do with anything pertaining to women’s issues specifically, which is why I find it odd that feminists have made it an issue to call a woman bossy. Presumably, men are just as capable—if not more capable—of being bossy as women. Yet, we still get this bailey:
Women should be able to tell men what to do without complaint.
At this point, the common objection is to say that is never acceptable for a person to be bossy. Being bossy is insufferable. It is a very nasty attitude to have. This is the case whether the person being bossy is a male or a female, but if you call a girl or a woman bossy, feminists often respond with this motte:
Men should not be so quick to call women bossy when they are really demonstrating leadership skills that, if they were being displayed by a man, would be encouraged and nurtured.
Again, there is hardly anything disagreeable here. Leadership is leadership, whether it is exemplified by a man or a woman. However, the reason why this a motte is because the original conversation was not about discouraging women from being leaders. It was about discouraging women from being bossy. Good leaders are not bossy. Moreover, not only are good leaders not bossy but oftentimes, bossy people are not good leaders. If they are effective leaders, it is usually by accident.
Objectification
This particular motte-and-bailey is, in my opinion, the most complex of all the examples I am writing about, but it is also one of the most common and has the most variations, so it is worth considering. First, it cannot go unnoticed that men generally find women sexually attractive. This is no fluke; it is biology. Second, men often give women unwanted and unwelcome sexual attention or sexual advances, often in the form of cat-calling, inappropriate questions, unsolicited sexual remarks, and sometimes even stalking. I do not think any of these things are acceptable ways for men to behave. However, there is a feminist bailey that I think is equally unacceptable:
Women are not especially beautiful, attractive, or desirable in any way or manner that would distinguish them from men. Thus, men should not find women particularly attractive, as this reinforces the patriarchy.
This bailey is almost always implicit, likely because of how patently absurd it is. Attraction exists fundamentally as a mental experience and one that no human being has any control over. Sexual attraction is a biological impulse that occurs naturally within all human beings, and it cannot be suppressed or eliminated simply by “deciding” to no longer experience. Furthermore, it is quite ridiculous to say that women are not especially beautiful. We deliberately use different words (in English, at least) to distinguish the types of aesthetic appeal that men and women have. Women are beautiful, graceful, genteel. Men are handsome, rugged, classy. Women are babes. Men are hunks. Both are sexy but in different ways. The sexual dimorphism of human beings is the product of millions of years of evolution, or it is the deliberate design of God, or it is both. It is so incredibly obvious that it is no wonder that you rarely hear this bailey uttered aloud. Instead, you get the motte:
Men need to stop treating women like they are sexual objects. It is wrong for men to objectify women.
Once again, how could anyone disagree with this motte? Isn’t this just the bare minimum of what is required in order to be considered a decent human being? Clearly, objectifying women is wrong…in one sense.
Now, if men are treating women as nothing more than an object, a piece of meat, then that is definitely immoral, irrational, and deserving of moral blame. However, this is far rarer than you might think. Even the cat-caller, as contemptuous as he is, does not think that women are nothing more than an object. He must necessarily think that women are free moral agents, otherwise, why would he be cat-calling them? Men do not cat-call paintings, or sunsets, or pin-up calendars, or pornographic material. Men only cat-call people. We still say that men ought not cat-call, and we are right to say this, but it does not follow that the cat-caller or someone like him is treating women as a mere object. That would be absurd.
In the proper understanding of objectification, we must talk in terms of forming sentences. Subjects act and objects are acted upon. Subjects are active and objects are passive. You can say Alice frightened Bob, where Alice is the subject and Bob is the object. However, you can also say that Bob was frightened by Alice. That transforms the sentence from the active voice to the passive voice, but is also does something else: it turns Alice from the subject into the object—the object of fear.
But, suppose that Alice did not frighten Bob. Suppose Alice delighted Bob. That places Alice as the active subject of the sentence. However, this is identical to saying that Bob was delighted by Alice. Now, Bob is the subject and Alice is the object: the object of delight.
I’m sure you can see where this is going.
Now let’s have a look at the objectionable scenario: Bob finds Alice attractive. Bob is the subject, and Alice is the object: the object of attraction. But wait a second…this sentence is in the passive voice. What happens if we rephrase it in the active voice? You get “Alice attracts Bob”. Now Alice is the subject and is actively attracting Bob. What does this mean? Whenever you have a transitive verb, the subject becomes the object in the passive voice. The subject is objectified. There’s just one problem with that. Objectification is a quirk of grammar. It is unavoidable, inescapable, and inevitable. It is beyond the control or willpower of any human being because grammar is universal. The subject/object duality is universal. Transitivity is universal. They cannot be escaped.
What this means is that objectification is neither good nor bad. What is bad is men being unable to control their sexual urges, or men mistreating women whom they find attractive, or other such things. However, that is a separate discussion altogether. Women are sexually attractive, and saying that does not objectify women. In fact, it subjectifies them.
Responding to Critics
It is no secret that many on the Right are highly critical of feminism. Many understand modern feminism to have a negative influence on culture, either because many feminists are in favor of abortion, or because some feminists promote what the Right considers to be promiscuous behavior (but this is hotly debated even within feminist circles), or because the modern feminist is generally hostile and aggressive towards men (or at least masculinity). The response from many feminists, especially younger feminists, was a common bailey:
If you don’t like feminism, or if you’re against feminism, you are a misogynist.
This particular response is incredibly weak, since it completely sidesteps the grievances that people have with feminists. It does nothing to address the criticisms. It is little more than an insult disguised as a reply. A lot of feminists seem to at least subconsciously recognize this, and will often follow up immediately with the motte:
The definition of feminism is the belief in the political, economic, social, and personal equality of the sexes. Who could be against all that?
Indeed! Who could be against something that is so wholesome as the equality of the sexes? That seems desirable for any society. The problem is that this is not what people think of when they think of feminism. People do not take issue with feminism’s push for equality between the sexes, but they do take issue with people who call themselves feminists saying such incendiary things as “Kill all men” (which even if interpreted as hyperbole is still an unkind thing to say), “Abortion is still legal; die mad”, and “Masculinity is toxic”.
Indeed, the more radical feminists do not even fit the definition of their own motte. Their political ambitions are that of ascendancy, not equality. They want economic privilege such that they are paid just as much as their male coworkers regardless of how much or how little work they put in. They attempt to achieve social dominance and then get indignant when people rightly point out their insufferable behavior. They also think themselves better than everyone else and beyond criticism since their cause is so obviously righteous to them. In that sense, these radicals are not feminists at all, according to their own definition.