Female Marxism Part V: Frozen Women

A student recently told me about a book she had just read, Annie Ernaux’s classic of anti-motherhood indignation, La Femme Gelée. She said the book, which describes Ernaux’s life as a housewife and mother, made her feel as though she were “in prison,” and as though such a repetitive life of caring for babies, cooking meals, shopping, doing house chores, sleeping with her husband — I assume they must have spoken occasionally as well, but apparently Ernaux is selective for the sake of driving home a point — would have to be unsatisfying and “powerless.”

I have read of Ernaux, but have not read the famous book itself, and I will not, since I am beyond that time of life when one chooses one’s activities as though one were going to live forever. Nevertheless, I have a few thoughts related to the book’s themes, which of course are now generic and a universal catechism, which I offer mostly in response to the effect of such literature on the minds and lives of young people I know and like, such as the above-mentioned student.

Annie Ernaux, a hard feminist in the style of her role model, Simone de Beauvoir. Her book makes you feel that being a wife and mother is like being in prison, because of course that was her intention in writing it. Feminism, which claims to be a movement aimed at empowering women, seeks to negate five thousand years of actual women by teaching that everything they did was worthless and showed only “powerlessness.” 

When someone tells you that everything everyone ever did in the past was wrong and foolish, you ought to be suspicious of them. What is it that bothers them so much about past human beings that they need so badly to reject and condemn all of them, and everything they did?

It is a simple fact of human nature that women are the ones who bear and give birth to children, and hence without mothers, there would be no human race. It is a simple implication of this natural fact that many women, in fact most, will experience a natural urge to have children, and therefore a natural urge to protect and care for their children as a primary mission in their lives. And it is a very reasonable conclusion for women (reason is also part of human nature) who wish to have and raise children, that they should seek good men to have children with, and provide certain benefits for those men as a fair exchange for the protections and material support they need to be successful mothers.

All of this is nature, biology, and common sense. Feminism hates all of these things, and by implication, as you see in Ernaux’s book, hates — really hates — all women who choose to live this way. (Pity can be one of the most impressive expressions of hatred. It assumes a position of superiority.)

As a result of feminism, this natural element of women’s nature is fading away. Those “old-fashioned,” “powerless” women who would do anything for their children, whose meaning in life was found in raising healthy and talented families, making a happy home, providing the conditions that would make their husbands proud and devoted — those “pitiful” and “oppressed” women who thought that life was about something higher than themselves and their personal pleasures — are disappearing year by year. And so is Korea, and Japan, and Italy, and every other country in the so-called “advanced world,” where most young women have decided they no longer want to be mothers, that marriage is for powerless losers, and freedom means doing whatever you feel like doing without having to think about anyone else, or anything greater than yourself. The world in which feminism has taken over the souls of everyone, male and female. 

There are various kinds of prisons. Perhaps all ways of life on earth have some elements of prison in them. Life may be partly a matter of choosing which kind of prison you are willing to live in, or which kind will do the least harm. It is far from certain that feminism’s prison is the one that will do the least harm.

Another way to say this: There are many kinds of power, but feminists only admit one, the kind they understand, which may be the least important and the most trivial.