If you are going to write a column asking what women are for, you should at least posit a guess. The very phrasing of the question is offensive. Tools are for something, not people. If we strip women of their individuality and their autonomy, and simply ask why our species has two genders, we can probably answer this question in a strict biological sense. Women are for carrying the x chromosome stuff and the mitochondria, and for developing the next generation in their wombs. Isn’t that what Mr. James Poulos is hinting at but too afraid to say in any straightforward way?
Here are some famous men who never had children: Francis Bacon, Louis Armstrong, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Friedrich Nietzsche, Copernicus, Leonardo Da Vinci, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and Felix Frankfurter.
What were these men for? Were they for depositing their genetic materials in women’s wombs? How did their failure to be useful work out? What are the implications for political policy?
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.
If this is a significant political battle, it seems only one side is waging it. No one has ever asked me what women are for, until now. The question is more revealing that any conceivable answer. As I’ve said, I could provide a strictly biological answer that would be equally valid for countless species that utilize sexual reproduction. But he didn’t ask me what females are for. He asked me what women are for. Women, it must be noted, are human beings. Human beings are not a means. They are not devices.
Speaking of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Mr. Poulos explains the High Court’s ruling this way:
Lurking beneath this procedural non-judgmentalism was a stubbornly conspicuous judgmental end. Roe couldn’t be overturned, the plurality argued, because Americans might think the Supreme Court was bending to public pressure. The court’s solution was to bend to the public reality that millions of women had altered what it meant to be a woman — and what status that meaning conferred — by having or supporting abortions.
So, here we get to the crux of the matter. Women, through legalized abortion and (left unsaid) the introduction of widely available and effective birth control, have altered “what it mean[s] to be a woman.” The rest of his column mainly consists of failed attempts to be clever.
So, here we have twin ideas. First, there is something women are designed to do (something they are for). They have a purpose. Second, they are no longer doing what they are meant to do. They are no longer useful tools.
Adding to this, women, through their negligence, have altered their status. They are no longer conferred their prior status.
And then there are the implications for society of this change. It’s hard to fight through Poulos’s gobbledygook to find his point, so I will quote him at length here:
Lip service is often paid to the impression that the point of empowering women is to empower them to do whatever they want, but much of the left stops well short of the more radical implications of that easy answer…
…To the growing discomfort of many, that framework hasn’t come anywhere close to answering even the most basic questions about what women are for — despite pretty much universal recognition across the political spectrum that a civilization of men, for men, and by men is no civilization at all, a monstrously barbaric, bloody, and brutal enterprise. A few inherently meaningful implications about what women are for flow naturally from this wise and enduring consensus, but no faction of conservatives or liberals has figured out how to fully grasp, translate, and reconcile them in the context of our political life.
Ironically, one of the best places to look for a way out of the impasse is the strain of left feminism that insists an inherently unique female “voice” actually exists. That’s a claim about nature. Much good would come from a broader recognition that women have a privileged relationship with the natural world. That’s a relationship which must receive its social due — if masculinity in its inherent and imitative varieties (including imitation by quasi-feminized males of quasi-masculinized females!) is not to conquer the world.
Peering through the goop, I see the dark outlines of a concern that women are being defeminized, which is throwing our whole karmic existence out of whack. By denying their privileged relationship with the natural world, they are letting loose the hounds of war and barbarism.
And so we have, more or less, an argument presented to us here that women exist in order to reproduce, that they have turned their backs on their duty and purpose, that this has caused an unhealthy masculinization of society, and that the result will be a bloody and brutish existence for all of us.
That’s a heavy burden to put on women’s backs, don’t you think?
Now, I’ll admit that gaining some control over our reproduction has given women much greater autonomy and more choices in what kind of lives they want to lead, much like changes in divorce laws and social norms around marriage, work, and out-of-wedlock sex. And these changes have consequences. One consequence is that fewer women are trapped in loveless or abusive relationships.
Another consequence is that more children are raised in single-parent homes. In my opinion, if we line up all the pro and cons of the Sexual Revolution, the pros are going to absolutely overwhelm the cons. But, yes, there are some negative consequences you can identify and deplore, if you’re into that kind of thing. Looking at some of the negatives is an appropriate task for public policy.
But unless you are willing to deny women their autonomy and humanity, you don’t ask them what they are for. What were Louis Armstrong and Beethoven for?
