Everyday antifeminism (beauty pageants, the woman question, gender war, Maria Katasonova) [there's nothing original here, I warn you]
▧ This can only be as rudimentary as a caricature. ▧ At a primary stage of the revolution, the traditional society’s disciplining of female sexuality is taken up by the state, party, and their various organs. The revolution is permissive. It is carried out by radical intelligentsia, who either believe fervently in, or will at least pay lip service to, free love and the equality of the sexes. This egalitarianism is more potent than belief in Marxism, after all. So, the revolution, even if it is disciplinary, is also a progressive project, attempting to redress the excesses of traditional family and clan supervision, as well as lifting the limitations placed on women. Although not always to the satisfaction of women, and not without resistance from men that resented or feared more thorough liberation, the construction of a new social order resolved the woman question. ▧ A strong, healthy woman, unadorned, representing the desires of her class, was the symbol of progress. ▧ I will give you another caricature. ▧ The end of socialism meant re-opening contention over the woman question. The social order of socialism, or, more generally, the forms of social organization for postwar industrial civilization, began to be dismantled. The market triumphed over the state. At the same time, the recovery of the traditional order was impossible, too; if it retained any vitality, its tenets were as incompatible with liberalism. ▧ A strong, healthy woman, adorned how she sees fit, consumed by individual drives, is the symbol of progress. ▧ These paired accounts are not perfect. I have told you that already. They are not particularly original, either. The same goes for everything I will say here. ▧
▧ Let me go over familiar ground. I have written before about the postsocialist crisis of masculinity, usually in the context of China. The same patterns can be generalized to other contexts. You will need to be creative. ▧ As the industrial economy built under socialism was torn down, men remained tied to it for a little longer than women. Women were liberated earlier, which means that they were tossed out onto the market to fend for themselves and, often, provide for their families. The traditional was decimated; socialist feminism could not be reclaimed. ▧ I have been thinking a lot about the power of the beauty pageant at the close of socialism and the opening of the market economy. The appeal of them was, I think, that they neatly metaphorized the new social order: an individual woman, unmarried and unburdened, through her own beauty and guile, could compete to open up a new world for herself. ▧ For men, traditional virtues and the masculinity of the socialist era were also outmoded. They were forced to cling to them, however, since they had filial obligations and were often still tied to the remains of the socialist economy. Women, fearful of being trapped by men tied to these defunct social institutions, chose in significant numbers to remain independent. In significant numbers, too, women were picked up by the macho eunuch, as Kam Louie terms the feminized, urbanized bureaucrats and businessmen that came to dominate. ▧ This is the story—the triumph of deformed new archetypes of masculinity—that Zhou Xiaowen tells again and again, perhaps most clearly in Rush of Youth (1992), which has the liberated Ai Fei (Shi Lan) choosing to give up on her relationship with the taxi driver, Dalong (Chang Rong), to fulfill her fantasy of fame. She sells him out over a meal of Kentucky Fried Chicken and Coca-Cola. ▧
▧ Please, let me go over more familiar ground! Let me harangue you about gender warfare. Let me remind you that East Asian populism is increasingly driven by explicit antifeminism. Part of President Yoon Suk Yeol’s appeal was his promise to strike a blow against gender equality activists; he has carried out his threats. In China, valorizing traditional values has accompanied attempts to subsidize motherhood and childbearing, which fits with popular opinion about the excesses of the feminists. The Liberal Democratic Party in Japan holds onto power in part because they uphold promises to a base of culturally conservative support. Moving west, Russian politicians and activists have leaned on the same rhetoric. ▧ Well. Yes. The triumph of liberal individualism and thorough atomization has led to this, I would say—this state of widespread dissatisfaction with personal relationships, this pandemic of loneliness, this panic about demographic instability tracked down to the individual level, a complete misery… Feminism is a more legible target. It is better to argue about the woman question, even if it more complicated now than in the previous two centuries, than consider thoroughgoing economic reorganization. This is easier, too. It only requires setting the clock back to pre-industrial traditionalism or the postwar industrial social order—and selectively, only covering certain social spheres. ▧
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