The Battle of the Sexes is Bullshit
“In every instance of successful reconciliation save Mozambique justice was meted out, but never in full measure. This fact may be lamentable, even tragic, from certain legal or moral perspectives, yet it is consistent with the requisites of restoring social order postulated in the forgiveness hypothesis. In all cases of successful reconciliation, retributive justice could neither be ignored nor fully achieved. . . . Disturbing as it may be, people appear able to tolerate a substantial amount of injustice wrought by amnesty in the name of social peace.”—William J. Long and Peter Brecke, War and Reconciliation: Reason and Emotion in Conflict Resolution (2003)
Just as there are plenty of good reasons to fight fair and refrain from cheating, there are plenty of good reasons to be graceful in victory and graceful in defeat. John McCain understood this far better than most. And he lived by it. As Lindsey Graham put it in his moving eulogy to McCain: “John taught us how to lose. When you go throughout the world, people remember his concession speech as much as anything else. There are so many countries where you can’t afford to lose because they’ll kill you.” The peaceful transfer of power and gentle commerce are cornerstones of civilized life. Taking them for granted is decidedly unwise. Rejecting them outright is downright reckless (e.g., saying that if your side loses the election it’ll be proof that the election was rigged, saying that anybody’s who’s got money stole it).
Ruthlessness is, for the most part, remarkably stupid and shortsighted. As every intelligent eight-year-old knows, getting invited to play the next game is the primary objective of every game. Winning is of secondary importance. If you’ll do anything to win, you’re not playing the game properly. War is an obvious exception to this rule. Ruthlessness is sometimes warranted when you’re at war. Indeed, this is precisely why irresponsible culture warriors are always trying redefine peacetime activities in wartime terms through the use of martial vocabulary and military metaphors (e.g., “the war against women”, “the war against boys”, “the battle of the sexes”, etc.).
In Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (2005), Tony Judt maintains that linguistic choices such as these were central to the way in which the Communist state justified its ruthlessness: “The Communist state was in a permanent condition of undeclared war against its own citizens. . . . The martial vocabulary so beloved of Communist rhetoric echoed this conflict-bound condition. Military metaphors abounded: class conflict required alliances, liaison with the masses, turning movements, frontal attacks.” Judt makes an important point here: namely, that there’s something about the very language of Marxism that predisposes it towards violence. Susan Neiman makes the same point in a more fulsome fashion in Evil in Modern Thought (2002). This point is invariably overlooked by those who wish to exonerate Marx, vilify Lenin, and pretend that Stalin’s horrific crimes are at best a perversion of the master’s teachings. Zizek, to his credit, is a notable exception to this mendacious rule. He forthrightly acknowledges the connection and affirms it, with a sangfroid I find rather disturbing.
Regardless of your motivation, using martial language is profoundly irresponsible. As Lao Tzu rightly observed long ago, the language we use to describe present reality has a sneaky way of shaping future reality: “Watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.” If you treat every competition like a life-or-death struggle, you’ll soon find yourself in the middle of a life-or-death struggle. If you keep acting like you’re at war, you’ll eventually be at war. And if you keep treating me like the enemy, sooner or later, I’ll be your enemy. Peacetime relations between political parties, regions, groups, and heterosexual partners are fundamentally corrupted by military metaphors. Language is a tool and these tools aren’t the right ones for the job. Reaching for martial language when you’re trying to make sense of run-of-the-mill marital problems is like reaching for a flame-thrower when you’re trying to light a birthday cake.
At the dramatic climax of Traffic (2000), Michael Douglas’s character, the guy in charge of the War on Drugs, breaks down in the middle of a press conference and goes off-script: “If there is a War on Drugs then our own families have become the enemy. How can you wage war on your own family?” The overarching message of Stephen Marche’s The Unmade Bed: The Truth about Men and Women in the 21st Century (2018) is of a similar stamp: namely, that the martial language employed by culture warriors is a toxic dead-end. Men and women are not tribes locked in a zero-sum battle of the sexes. Your spouse is not the enemy: “The central conflict of domestic life right now is not mothers against fathers, or even conflicting ideas of motherhood or gender. It is the family against money.”
The Unmade Bed is a deeply moral book. And Marche treats his subject with all of the seriousness it deserves. But it’s also a remarkably funny book. The following scene is a case in point: “I was at a bachelor party, one of those bizarre rituals in which men have to stoop to their stereotype as a kind of recognition of common brutality, and we were all drunkenly heading to a strip club when my wife called. She needed to talk. A man she worked with called her ‘Honey.’ It pissed her off. It pissed me off. It pissed me off that this classic old-school garbage should survive. And so I found myself enraged, genuinely enraged at the sexism of a world that would call my wife ‘Honey’ just as I was entering a business in which I was going to pay to see women naked. Such are the everyday minor anti-epiphanies of living through the twenty-first-century rearrangement of gender. They subtract from rather than add to what I thought I knew about myself and others.”
Marche’s discussion of housework in the last chapter is equally hilarious: “Housework is the macho bullshit of women. And, in this light, it is perhaps not surprising that men have not started doing more housework. Men might be willing to lose the garbage of their own gender stereotypes, but why should they take on the garbage of another? Equality is coming, but not the way we expected. The future does not involve men doing more housework. . . . Caring less is the hope of the future. Housework is perhaps the only political problem in which doing less and not caring are the solution, where apathy is the most progressive and sensible attitude. Fifty years ago it was perfectly normal to iron sheets and vacuum drapes; they were necessary tasks. The solution to the inequalities of dusting wasn’t dividing the dusting; it was not doing the dusting at all. The solution to the gender divide in housework generally is that simple: Don’t bother. Leave the stairs untidy. . . . Never make the bed. . . . A clean house is the sign of a wasted life, truly. Eventually we’ll all be living in perfect egalitarian squalor.” As Marche demonstrates, in loving detail, we’re all in this together whether we like it or not, and we’re going to have to muddle through it together. We didn’t create this mess, but it’s ours to clean up: “Instead of furious despair, what our moment demands is humility and compassion.”
Life has always included a great deal of suffering, marriage has always been difficult, and our moment, like every moment in history, presents us with some unique challenges not faced by our forebears. But the twenty-first-century West is hardly the most challenging place and time to be alive. Much of the “furious despair” Marche speaks of is a function, not of especially difficult times, but of especially unrealistic expectations. We expect far too much of each other, and far too much of marriage; and these poorly calibrated expectations are making us miserable.
We need to become far better at distinguishing between problems and conditions. Problems have solutions, conditions do not. Conditions are merely managed to reduce the frequency and severity of symptoms. Some conditions turn out to be problems—problems with solutions (e.g., stomach ulcers). But the category error is more often made in the other direction. Many so-called problems are in fact conditions. For instance, most so-called “marital problems” are in fact marital conditions. As Jonathan Haidt put it the other day on the Likeville Podcast: “When you get married, you’re basically choosing a set of unsolvable problems.”
Do you get into an epic fight about x at least once a month? Well, guess what, you’ll probably be fighting about x twenty years from now. And that’s fine. Make your peace with it. Quit searching for final solutions! Rather than trying to solve the problem of x once and for all, work on reducing the frequency and intensity of these fights: from, say, one horribly-upsetting-weekend-long emotional bloodbath to one twenty-minute-long spat every two or three months. As Epictetus rightly observed long ago, happiness and freedom are impossible without properly calibrated expectations such as these: “Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not. It is only after you have faced up to this fundamental rule and learned to distinguish between what you can and can’t control that inner tranquility and outer effectiveness become possible.”
Couples who’ve been together for a long time can fight so spectacularly because they’re not just fighting about what happened today, yesterday, or last week; they’re fighting about what happened last year, last decade, or even last century. As you might expect, this makes their fights far more intense than they ought to be. When this dynamic is ramped up to the group level, the results are depressingly predictable. First you get a whole lot of angry people screaming and yelling about stuff that happened centuries ago (to their ancestors) as if it happened yesterday (to them). Before long, a diabolical leader emerges, proposing violent reprisals, such as a program of ethnic cleansing.
Why don’t we just forgive it all? What could be more beautiful than a periodic forgetting of debts? It could renew our relationships, our economy, our international relations? How often do we see people split up and remarry simply because the weight of resentment on their shoulders proves too heavy to bear? They start off fresh with a new partner, also recently divorced, and proceed, slowly but surely, to build up a similarly substantial weight of resentment—which will eventually necessitate yet another divorce, and yet another remarriage.
Why not break this cycle? Why not forgive the debts, get over it, stop bringing up old shit, and move on? Because we shouldn’t ignore the claims of justice, you say. Because it’s payback time. You want vengeance, reparations, public apologies, sackcloth and ashes. Very well, then, have at it, scale Mount Justice. Sometimes, alas, it’s necessary. But be sure to count the cost. The air at the top of Mount Justice is intoxicating, and the views are spectacular, but it’s lonely up there.
—John Faithful Hamer, Love Is Not a Liquid Asset (2020)
The air at the top of Mount Justice is intoxicating, and the views are spectacular, but it’s lonely up there.