A Thermodynamic Interpretation of History CHAPTER 4: The Liberation of Women 4. 2. The Problem of Cultural Feminism ACADEMY | previous section| Table of Content | next section | GALLERY

Copyright © 2004, 2005, 2006 by Lawrence C. Chin. All rights reserved.

After the surge of the second wave of American women's movement the majority of feminists converged on cultural feminism, leaving behind liberal feminism, the beginning point of American feminism. A superficial look by an outsider on feminism and women's movement in America gives the impression that it is just another of the series of utopian movements sweeping the Western world since the commencement of modernity (Enlightenment). Since feminism has been more intense and advanced in the U.S. than elsewhere in the Western world, and since there have not been that many "revolutions" going on here as in the European continent, American feminism, especially cultural feminism, seems to be the one channel through which the utopian quest of the West expresses itself in the (Anglo-)American world. After all, the civil rights movement and others like it are more like liberal feminism, that is, they do not seek any utopian ideal, no fundamental transformation of the structure of human existence to reach an ideal state. Their proponents demand no more than equal participation, i.e. to be just like the dominant group. On the other hand cultural feminists do not want women to be just like men, but to infuse a different culture of women into the male-dominant world in order to transform the structure of existence hitherto operating on male principles and presumed to be heading toward world-destruction. Cultural feminism shares with other utopian movements a critique of existing society as fundamentally flawed and the envisaging of a solution to transcend the flaw and reach a New World. In this way it also acquires the appearance of a spiritual dimension. In this way too its form is derived from, just like these others, the immanentization of Christianity, of the Christian eschaton, which has so characterized the modern history of the West. This origin of feminism in the deformation of Christianity will be treated in Chapter 11; here the focus will be on the specificity of the ideological foundation of (American) cultural feminism of the second wave.

The irony of cultural feminism, the same as for such other utopian movements as Marxism, is that, despite its intention, the women it has liberated and infused into the public world of production are women exactly like men, who are termed here "The Mass Women", and who, added to the already destructive Mass Men -- that ominous product of Western modernity --, end up accelerating (perhaps more than doubling) the destruction of the world rather than saving it. This is its result. This disjuncture between intention and result is consequent upon its second irony, the anachronicity within its very ideological foundation, its world view: the mistaken assumption of the correlation between male domination and world/ Earth-destruction. The cause of this is its limited experiential horizon, as said, the limitation of its memory of oppression to only the formative period of Western nation-states. Looked at from the horizon of world history, the picture that emerges is quite different: the destruction of the Earth is correlated with the liberation of women in modern time in general, while the "classical patriarchies" embodying the worst oppression of women result in no destruction of the Earth and are always intensely preoccupied with the maintenance of the cosmos, the warfares associated with them being generally far less destructive than during the period of women's movements.¹ Thus there has been no serious environmental pollution in imperial China, where for nearly a millennium women had their feet bound, were physically immobilized, and were passed around as reproductive machines rather than let function as human subjects; but the destruction of the environment first became a problem during industrialization in the West when the first wave feminism was emerging, whose success coincided more or less with the first world war; and the depletion of the ozone layer happened (and Global Warming reached serious levels) during the second wave feminism. Of course feminism did not cause these, but the point is that what caused these was the mass mobilization necessary for the formation of nation-states and the modern economy and which was responsible for the rise of feminism as well. But because of this failure in historical insight, cultural feminists, while condemning the exploitation of third world women by the corporations at home, do not notice that it is because the Mass Women which they have produced at home each own 20 pairs of shoes that the corporation went to Thailand to employ the women there to make shoes at low wage. The feminists have not been attentive to the hardly insignificant correlation that the rise of the second wave feminism during late 1960s and early 1970s corresponded to a time when massive import of cheap consumer products from the third world (chiefly Asia) was supplanting the domestic manufacturings in America, when the American economy was transiting from manufacture-based to service-based, when, that is, capitalism was maturing into an all-out consumerism which required the mobilization of women to earn money in order to digest the excess consumer products. Note that women are the chief consumers of these lower level consumer products (clothing, daily household products) but also -- more and more -- such higher level ones as automobiles. Before their "emancipation" (their mobilization to earn money) women depended on men's salary to consume these; the overall effect of "emancipation" therefore seems to be to increase women's consumptive capacity for these, whether they continue or not to spend men's money in addition to their own. It seems then that the cultural feminists, in their overzealous soteriological fancy, fail to consider if the trickling of their soteric exhortation down to the level of Mass Women might actually contribute to the destruction of the environment by the disposal of the increased amount of cheap products and the increased carbon dioxide emission from automobiles, etc. Again, this does not mean that chaining women back to the kitchen should be promoted to save the Earth from pollution by these "defecations",² because the classical patriarchies did not do less well than the liberation of women in the business of the destruction of the Earth as a result of oppressing women: Both the oppression and the liberation of women have some other origin than, as the Radical Feminists believe, in men's desire to dominate and women's overcoming "false consciousness".³ The origin lies in the pressure of the thermodynamic flux, however indirect, on life and the human social collective to conform to the flow of energy.

J. Kirkpatrick, in Dictatorships and Double Standards (1982), enumerates the four components of the critique "common to various utopian ideologies including Marxism, Communism, and some variants of Puritanism, and to such New Left thinkers as Herbert Marcuse and Frantz Fanon". First, attack on current patterns of human existence as corrupt or destructive, etc. Second, attribution of such failing patterns to "bad social organization" and so on which can be cured through transformation of the structure of existence. "Third, attack on dominant conception of reality by way of a doctrine of 'false consciousness' that invalidates the [prevailing] ideas and preferences... Fourth, the recommendation of a new epistemology which makes knowing a function of ideology", that is, consciousness-awakening (p. 103 - 4). Note that this description we shall take as neutral. They characterize most religious movements as well -- since the very point of religion or any spirituality is to see the current existence as flawed and as in need of being saved from. The difference comes in with regard to whether it aims at transformation of the outside world or just the self as salvation (i.e. to attain the other world). This points up the fact that utopianism in general and cultural feminism in particular are secularizations of religion (Christianity), earthly substitutes when the faith in the original religion has been exhausted.

In their critique the cultural feminists see the world destruction as an external reflection of the oppression of women. "There is... a congruence between women's subjective experience of oppression and the objective realities of war, imperialism, and the technological destruction of the environment. Contemporary theorists hold that this is because masculine destructiveness correlates to a denial of the female... All [cultural feminists] perceive masculine psychology as a primary factor in female subjugation and the destructive military imperialism that dominates world politics." (Josephine Donovan, Feminist Theory, 1985, p. 171-2) This relates to the first and the first half of the second characteristics of utopianism, the diagnostic, that the world is corrupt and faces destruction, because the pattern of human existence embodies the hatred and subordination of the female: the "right-handed world". It may be true that if women rule pervasively (rather than occasionally as they do today, in which case they usually just behave exactly like and are as corrupt as male rulers) warfare and interstate competition in generally may subside, but, as said, the correlation of the "denial of female" with environmental destruction hardly stands. The "bad pattern of existence" can then be cured by the incorporation of the female. "In order to counter this masculine ideology, these feminists believe that women must turn their 'left-handed' world into a subject, into a cultural ideological source." (Ibid.) This completes the second. "For such an ideological transvaluation to occur... it will be necessary to establish a clear theoretical idea of what constitutes women's 'left-handed' world, its culture and values, and how it relates to women's historical material base." This is the forth, the recommendation of a new epistemology and the location of its origin. Thus Donovan proposes to ground "the new feminist moral vision" by first "identifying the basic and universal features of women's historical situation" (the origin) and then suggesting "how these historical structures may have contributed to the formulation of a particularly female epistemology and ethic." (Ibid.) A quick summary of this epistemology and ethics and their supposed origins (according to Donovan) will be given before we turn to a more detailed critique of this "left-handed worldview" in relation with some of its exemplary exponents.

The essence of this peculiarly female "left-hand" epistemology -- or the female gnosis, as will be seen later -- Donovan summarizes: "A substantial body of evidence has been produced that suggests that women's judgments are based on a fundamental respect for the contingent order, for the environmental context, for the concrete, everyday world. Women more than men appear to be willing to adopt a passive mode of accepting the diversity of environmental 'voices' and the validity of their realities. Women appear less willing to wrench that context apart or to impose upon it alien abstractions or to use implements that subdue it intellectually or physically. Such an epistemology provides the basis for an ethic that is non-imperialistic, that is life-affirming, and that reverences the concrete details of life." (Ibid., p. 173) This is pretty much the worldview of the exemplary exponents to be examined below.

As for the cause of women's special epistemology, Donovan does not think it necessarily to have derived from women's biology, but more from women's social or even historical circumstances, "a number of determinant structures of experience under which women, unlike men, have nearly universally existed. First and foremost, women have experienced political oppression." (Ibid., p. 172) In view of this, "it is not difficult to hypothesize how women may have developed an environmentally aware, or holistic, vision. The primary condition of powerlessness has necessarily meant that women have had to be aware of their environment to survive, for that environment -- insofar it is patriarchal -- has continually impinged upon them. As Meredith Tax pointed out... 'Women are hyper-aware of their surroundings. They have to be. Walk down a city street without being tuned in and you're in real danger.'" (Ibid., p. 173) As will be shown (in "Cultural Feminism's Transition to Victim Feminism"), the origin of the ideology (among American [white] females) of their being special and trapped in a world of dangers is, of course, not in actual facts, but can be discerned when examined in the comparative light of its closest correlative, the white supremacist view of the specialness and yet fragility of the "Aryans", and thus revealed to lie in the "gnostic" structure of cultural feminism or, in general, its lineage from Christianity.

"Second, nearly everywhere and in nearly every period, women have been assigned to the domestic sphere. While it is true that in preindustrial societies the division between public and private labor may not have been so rigid as in industrialized nations [actually, as in the formative nation-states with formative capitalism as their metabolic mode], women have nevertheless been consigned to the domestic sphere and to domestic duties -- including child rearing or mothering -- throughout recorded history [actually for prehistory as well, since the beginning of our species, Homo sapiens sapiens]." (Ibid., p. 172) "In the domestic sphere, while women have been able to carve out a separate space of their own and to sustain separate cultural traditions, they nevertheless even there were continually at their masters' beck and call. The fundamental 'interruptibility' of women's projects may also have contributed to women's sense of personal vulnerability to environmental influence, fostering a sense of being bound to chance, to circumstance, of not being in control of one's world. The resulting consciousness would be one of flexibility, of relativity, of contingency." (Ibid., p. 173) "Third, women's historical economic function has been production for use, not... for exchange... mean[ing] creation of material consumed by the immediate family like food, clothing, not goods sold off or exchanged, so it is... not valued for its abstract or exchange worth but for itself -- for its immediate physical worth." (Ibid., p. 172 - 3)

"Fourth, women experience significant physical events that are different from men's... [such as] menstruation... childbirth and breast-feeding..." (Ibid.) And also "the fact that until recently, with the advent of relatively effective methods of birth control, women could not have sexual intercourse with men without having to risk pregnancy, would have contributed to a feeling of being tied to physical realities that impinge upon one's projects. A woman could not have ignored this physical context; it was there..." (Ibid., p. 173 - 4)

As a first detail of the female "epistemology" should be enumerated the female experience of time produced in the context of domestic production for use (rather than exchange), childrearing, and housekeeping. "[Kathryn Allen] Rabuzzi [in The Sacred and the Feminine: Toward A Theology of Housework (1982)] finds that women's fundamental experience in the domestic sphere is one of repetition and waiting. Unlike the traditional male experience of linear historical time through quest, the quintessential accomplishment for Western males, the home-bound woman experiences time as a stasis -- either as a perpetual repetition or 'eternal return' (to use [Mircea] Eliade's term), or as a pattern of passive waiting. From the point of view of the Western male questor stasis is a negative experience, but Rabuzzi urges that it be reconsidered... [as] a positive alternative to the masculine mode of questing and conquering. This sensibility involves an adaptation to contingency, a kind of serendipitous passivity where one flows with the waves. 'Responding in this way to the whim of the moment is markedly different from imposing your will on time...' This is different 'from the assertive striving more typical of the masculine temporal mode, questing.'" (Ibid.) The implication seems to be that this mode of temporality forms part of the female secret gnosis which, if unleashed into the public world to supplant the male mode, would "save the Earth" being destroyed by "questing". Note that Western academia has long been dominated by the discourse -- frequently to exalt the superiority of the West -- of a contrast between the "linear time" (history as the linear progression toward a goal) which the West alone possessed and which they inherited from the Israelite Yahweh historicism, and the "circular time" of all other cultures which had not been "fortunate enough" to inherit Christianity. E.g. Mircea Eliade himself saw a "temps cosmique" which predominated equally in Classical Greece, the tribal Germans, Japan, and was especially manifested in the "mythico-ritual" of the New Year Festival of the Mesopotamian empires (la rénovation périodique du Monde), and which, "surtout dans le cadre des travaux agricoles, finit par imposer l'idée du temps circulaire et du cycle cosmique." (Histoire des croyances et des idées religieuses, I., p. 53 - 54) This is a phenomenon to be noted again and again here, the seeming convergence of the "(white) female culture" of the cultural feminists with the Eastern (and other tribal) cultures. Is this really a convergence or is the "female culture" simply symbolism adopted from Eastern cultures imported in a nostalgic spirit of romanticism but picked out for its rebellious, contrary character to the Western culture of the formative period of nation-state and of capitalism? An Eastern culture, moreover, which has in fact been a male culture of classical patriarchies which have oppressed women far more than the analytical, "questing" culture of the formative modern West has done? More sophisticated scholar such as Eric Voegelin has questioned the existence of "circular time" in pre-industrialized cultures, and our opinion is that there is really no such thing as circular time but that the opposition is between differentiated and un-differentiated time. The irony is that (Ch. 11.1 "A Genealogy of Feminism") it is precisely the Western experience of "linear" progressive time which has made possible the rise of feminism only in the West and not elsewhere. If "adoption of symbolism" is not the answer, then we suspect that the housewives here operate in the mode of "stasis" simply out of the mind-destruction to which prolonged mindless and repetitive domesticity has reduced them -- differently than the non-Western men who operated in the stasis of time out of profound experience of the harmony with and within the cosmos, as proper to the mode of cosmological civilizations and tribal existence. But, in any case, the positive value of "stasis" for the preservation of the Earth seems undoubtable, as it is fundamentally incompatible with the earth-destroying (classical) capitalism. But what about consumerism?

Carol Gilligan's In A Different Voice (1982), written in response to Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of moral development, has since become one of the foundational components of the second wave American cultural feminism. Lawrence Kohlberg attempts to expand Piaget's four-stage developmental sequence of moral maturation beyond adolescence (to which the latter is restricted) by adding two additional stages that supposedly characterize the final moments of moral maturation of any individual. The developmental sequence consists now of six stages, divided into the three main stages of preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. Moreover, he obtains the last stage, the sixth, the most mature possible stage of moral reasoning, from John Rawls' Theory of Justice, this latest version of the Kantian ethic (as opposed to utilitarianism since John Stuart Mill and so on) in the tradition of analytic philosophy thus being grafted onto the empirically derived child-developmental sequence of Piaget. Such a justification of the product of a highly technical tradition of thinking through an empirical research on ordinary peoples -- now Kohlberg basically holds that all human beings of all cultures and all time, when passing beyond the conventional stage, will converge on John Rawls' Theory of Justice, which is thus agreeable by all when they have become "mature enough" -- could not be accepted without skepticism, and our opinion is that, since analytic philosophy is a product of the Enlightenment in the Anglophonic world, Kohlberg's theory is suspect of being valid only within the perspective of contemporary Anglophones. The only thing that can be universally and for all time true is the approximate developmental sequence of the three main stages of preconventional, conventional, and postconventional, "or egocentric, sociocentric , and worldcentric; or 'me,' 'us' and 'all of us'", to use Ken Wilber's words. (A Theory of Everything, Shambhala, 2001, p. 19) The researches to test whether the sequence is universal have revealed that no one in the third world and no female in the Anglo-American population seem to have developed beyond the conventional stage to attain the Rawlsian "justice." Thus then Gilligan proposes that (white) females perhaps follow a different developmental sequence that culminates in an ethic of care instead of justice, that women's moral reasoning is based on an awareness of conflicting responsibilities rather than on a understanding of competing rights, that is, that, instead of engaging in a quantitative, mechanical balancing of conflicting rights in accordance with the vision of the world as composed of autonomous agents, women in their ethical concerns try to sustain the network of relationships by a process of communication, in accordance with their vision of the world as a web of relationships. The next characterization of the female epistemology, of the "female culture" -- as holistic, synthetic, relationship-oriented -- is thus born and opposed to a "male culture" based on autonomous agents negotiating with one another according to abstract rules of contract, which, note this now, is not universally male, and not even just Western, but rather comes into being within a specific culture during a specific historical period, the Enlightenment Anglophonic world which suddenly starts seeing the human collective in terms of a "social contract." The ethic of justice is the latest manifestation of this Anglophonic Enlightenment (formative capitalist!) paradigm. Could it then be that the ethic of care is just a manifestation of a new, emerging paradigm specific to the Anglophonic world of the post-Enlightenment (consumerist!) era and so not specifically female at all? (For a more detailed summary of the Kohlberg-Gilligan controversy, see "The Kohlberg-Gilligan controversy in detail" below.)

Note that the empirical researches since the start of the Kohlberg-Gilligan controversy have found no particular gender correlation for both the ethic of care and the ethic of justice, many females seeming to operate according to the ethic of justice and many males, the ethic of care. But the cultural feminists have thoroughly integrated the ethic of care into the (white) "female culture" and in the process have transformed the "female" moral development into an exact opposite of the "male" moral development: the former based on a horizontally flat, expansive, decentralized, holistic network of relationships and the latter on a concentrated, unified, vertical hierarchy of unconnected, autonomous agents. As Ken Wilber spells out the problem with this (mis-)transformation of Gilligan:

The holistic, environmentally aware, and relationship-oriented "female mode" is then extended to the domain of epistemology of science. This has two aspects. One is that of attitude, such that, as Evelyn Fox Keller has pointed out in "Feminism and Science" (1982), the maternal role of women has determined them -- if and when they are scientists -- to adopt the standpoint of "'letting the material speak to you' or of allowing it to 'tell you what to do next'", in contradistinction to the traditional (Newtonian, Cartesian) scientific standpoint of "aggressive manipulation of nature" such as "proposed by Francis Bacon" (Donovan, ibid., p. 175). The cultural feminists would like to name Martin Buber's I-Thou mode "female" and the I-it mode of Enlightenment-rationalism -- against which Buber, Heidegger, and a host of contemporary (male) philosophers, together with the feminists, rebel -- "male". This epistemological stance, just as the female morality of Gilligan, is founded on that aforementioned female nature of "a fundamental respect for the contingent order, for the environmental context, for the concrete, everyday world", that "willingness to adopt a passive mode of accepting the diversity of environmental 'voices' and the validity of their realities", or "unwillingness to wrench that context apart or to impose upon it alien abstractions or to use implements that subdue it intellectually or physically." (Ibid., p. 173.)⁴ Just as in the Gilligan rebellion, evidences are again produced. "Recent psychological testing confirms that women exhibit perceptual habits consistent with the above-described episteme. Tests such as the Witkin's Embedded Figures Test... and the Rod and Frame Test..., which measure 'spatial decontextualization,' show that women tend to see the context of a phenomenon more readily than men, who are more prone to lift a figure out of its context and to 'see' it and consider it separately..." (p. 176)

As even Donovan implicitly recognizes, what is condemned as "male" and "patriarchal", this decontextualized world analyzed down to independent and discrete, dead objects with fixed properties moving about according to strictly deterministic rules and dominated by a subject in an I-it mode, is just the Newtonian, positivist paradigm of Enlightenment-rationalism. "However, developments in 20th century science, such as Heisenberg's Principle of Indeterminacy... and Einstein's Special and General Theories of Relativity..., have challenged the validity of the Newtonian paradigm. The new vision of the universe that is emerging is no longer of an Other that operates in predictable, mechanical fashion, but of a contextual network in which every discrete entity is defined relative to its environment and subject to the positional relativity of the observer. Under this perspective black and white, I-it dualism is no longer possible." (p. 180) The second aspect of the extension of "female culture" to epistemology is therefore the possibility (or rather the reality), "as Robin Morgan has suggested in a recent work, The Anatomy of Freedom (1982), that there is a congruence between the new feminist thought and the new physics." (Ibid.)

Morgan articulates this second aspect under the title of "The New Physics of Meta-Politics" (Ch. IX). She begins with the fundamentals of cultural feminism: oppression of women equals world-destruction and humanity's suicidal gesture; and the liberation of women, the liberation of their creative energy, equals world- and humanity-saving. But under the second aspect the novelty lies in how this "liberation" specifically entails a world-saving epistemology or world view: "... and even beyond that, feminism is, in its metaphysical and metafeminist dynamic, the helix of hope that we humans have for communication with whatever lies before us in the vast, witty mystery of the universe." (Morgan, ibid., p. 283) In other words, the reality experienced by women as one of continuous change (menarche, menopause, and all that in between), the traditional and universal (so assumed here) assignment to them of "the positive values of 'humanism', pacifism, nurturance, ecoconsciousness, and reverence for life" (p. 284), etc., shall, "[a]t its most superficial... lead to sophomoric superstition and political evasion, but at its most profound... can lead to political change as deep as those religious and cultural revolutions which affected not only sociopolitical and economic aspects of society but, in a longer-lasting manner, consciousness itself... [And] it is happening." (p. 284) It is happening since, firstly, relativity has shown space and time to be inseparable in a four-dimensional continuum, simultaneity to be a relative concept, and energy and matter to be two sides of the same thing, the Newtonian view of absolute space (space as an immutable three dimensional container) and absolute time (time running at the same pace for all) and discrete objects with fixed properties all going out of the window; since, secondly, the uncertainty principle -- that the more accurately one determines the momentum of a subatomic particle, the more one is unable to determine its position -- has dissolved the Newtonian view of the absolute and strictly deterministic abstract laws; and since, finally, Niels Bohr's "Complementarity" has demonstrated that "the 'particle picture' and the 'wave picture' are two complementary protrayals of the same reality, even if they can't be charted at the same time. In other words, despite one's methods being limited to either/or, one's conception can embrace both, and glimpse the whole. From this philosophy an entirely new holistic direction in physics was born." (Ibid., p. 289) Then there is Geoffrey Chew's S-matrix theory, that "there are no fundamentals whatsoever in the universe -- no fundamental laws, principles, building blocks, equations, constants. Rather, the universe is seen as a network of web of events continuously and dynamically [but actually, self-consistently] relating." (p. 290)

The female epistemology, now confirmed by the new physics, and the salvation of the world effected by the liberation of women, form a circle of mutual reinforcement. The cultural feminists believe the female epistemology to be so confirmed -- the final truth at last coming out! -- and to be world-saving at the same time because they subscribe to what is called the "standpoint theory", that "the oppressed may make better biologists, physicists, and philosophers than their oppressors." "[B]ecause women have been oppressed they are better 'knowers.' Feeling more deeply, they see more clearly and understand reality better." "Thus we find the feminist theorist Hilary Rose saying that male scientists have been handicapped by being men. A better science would be based on women's domestic experience and practice. Professor Virginia Held offers hope that 'a feminist standpoint would give us quite different understanding of even physical reality.' Conversely, those who are most socially favored, the proverbial white, middle-class males, are in the worst epistemic position." (Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism: How women have betrayed women, Simon and Schuster, NY, 1994, p. 74 - 5.) It is because of the epistemic advantage enjoyed by (white) women that their episteme not only gets confirmed by the latest findings of physics but also seems to be the only thing that can save the world. It might very well be that oppressed people tend to be more sensitive in daily interpersonal relationships than the oppressors in the same culture because the latter are more arrogant, but it is difficult to see how this might amount to an entirely different world-view that re-appears in subatomic super-colliders.

What is really going on? We note that the "female mode" of I-Thou -- letting reality speak to you -- is also the mode of, say, the imperial Chinese, such as manifested in the users of yijing metaphysics who persistently try to read and understand what nature (the cosmos) is trying to tell them and to live according to nature's message: hence the emphasis on divination as opposed to imposing order and design on nature: the principal objection against the Newtonian I-it mode. This "female mode" can also be interpreted as embodied by the Daoist philosophers who have been famous for identifying suffering and disorders as resulting from the human tendency to excessively impose order on nature, and who took salvation precisely to lie in going along with nature (following the Dao). Though Daoism was only briefly adopted as the philosophy of governance by the royal court during the Han dynasty, the sort of passivity it advocates has always remained part of the Chinese spirit. The passive "female mode" has in fact been the predominant epistemological approach of such a typical cosmological civilization as China, and even the relationship-oriented ethics resembles more or less the way in which men relate to each other in a "traditional" (i.e. pre-industrialized) society -- yet China and the traditional societies that assign the "female mode" to men are far more patriarchal than the Western patriarchy of the Enlightenment era. What is true is that these traditional patriarchies are not ecologically destructive.

These comparisons reveal that the feminist postulation of the "female culture" is really just rebellion against the positivist Enlightenment-rationalism which is not particularly male nor patriarchal, but simply a temporary phase the West is passing through, but which the feminists misconstrue as "male" and "patriarchal." Thus Morgan names the patriarchal dark past which the new episteme has overcome as the model in which reality is assembled from ultimate building blocks, the atoms, and in which material and matter are seen as real, corresponding to this being the social model in which the ultimate units are the individuals who are arranged in the hierarchy of chiefdom, monarchy, feudalism, and bourgeoisie-capitalism. (Morgan, ibid., p. 292 - 3.) What is happening is that the West is trying to get out of its Enlightenment straitjacket and cultural feminism is simply a reflection of this. Now what is the historical meaning of this "rebellion of the West against itself"? Why is it that this metamorphosis of the Anglo-American world has to conduct itself under the disguise of a gender struggle, of the "liberation of women from oppression"? The psychological motivation that has prompted the feminists to rebel against their own culture is easy to discern: ressentiment. Their hatred of men (justified or not) and their identification of the present cultural form as patriarchal have caused them to search for a separate identity of their own which has to be superior to, and always the opposite of, that cultural form. If the dominant form is x, women would have a form that is exactly the opposite of x and which is superior precisely in being the opposite: a typical reactionary ressentiment. In the end it really does not matter what x is. If cultural feminism had been born in China instead, the "female culture" would have taken a completely different form than the I-Thou contextual mode because it could then no longer be the opposite of the dominant culture identified as male. But because the Western Enlightenment mode emerges by inverting the traditional cosmological epistemological relationship between humans and nature, the opposite of Enlightenment would come up, at least superficially, so similar to that of the pre-Enlightenment culture. This is the deeper reason behind the congruence between the culture of pre-industrialized societies and the "female culture." And this is also the reason behind Fritjof Capra's recognition, in The Tao of Physics, of a (in fact superficial) parallel between modern (i.e. post-classical, post-Enlightenment) physics and "Eastern mysticism."

That the "female culture" is just reactionary against Enlightenment can be most readily appreciated when other sorts of reactionary against Enlightenment are brought into comparison, such as Nazism. We will have further opportunities to examine the extraordinary parallels between Aryanism and cultural feminism (even with regard to the emphasis on egalitarianism that they both share and which underlies the feminists' love of the "non-hierarchy of the female mode"). For now simply consider the similarity between Nazi's bashing of the "new physics" and the feminists' bashing of the "old physics". "'German physics?' asked Professor Philip Lenard of Heidelberg University... '... In reality, science, like every other human product, is racial and conditioned by blood.'" This is just the same as the cultural feminists' consideration of classical physics as conditioned by masculine gender. "Professor Rudolphe Tomaschek, director of the Institute of Physics at Dresden, went further. 'Modern physics,' he wrote, 'is an instrument of [world] Jewry for the destruction of Nordic science....'" This is the same charge as that of the feminists that classical physics is an instrument of patriarchy for the destruction of femininity, or even that Newton's Principia is a rape manual (Sandra Harding's charge; Sasha Nemecek, "The Furor Over Feminist Science", Scientific American, Jan. 97).

Although both the Nazis and the cultural feminists of the second wave, in their "reaction" against Enlightenment-rationalism, attack analyticism and exalt intuitiveness and an organic connection with the earth-environment, the former attack relativity as being too analytical and dead and the latter praise it as being precisely the anti-analytical model needed. Morgan, for example, praises relativity for exactly the same reason for which the Nazis despise it: "One of the nicest things about relativity theory is that it proves how accurately many different people from different perspectives can all be telling different truths about the same truth at different (or the same) times, rather like a subtle slant-rhyme scheme in a sonnet." (Ibid., p. 311) The reason for this is pretty much the same as why fascism hates communism and vice versa, although both are reactionary against Enlightenment politics. In the end, the Nazis probably have it right in that both relativity and quantum mechanics are far more rational, far more analytical, than classical mechanics, and that their achievement in fact lies in resolving the logical inconsistencies within the classical mechanics of Enlightenment (c.f. "Zeno's Paradoxes of Motion"): the universe is ever more revealed as operating within a tight logical frame.

The invention of a "women's culture" of course was a political necessity when women decided to fight against an oppression left from the past. Compare, for example, Lucia Valeska's observation ("Heterosexuality is far more than a private matter between a woman and a man; it is, in fact, a mandate that all women be forever divided against each other through a compelling allegiance to one man at home and all men outside the home"; "The Future of Female Separatism", in Building Feminist Theory, p. 28; quoted by Donovan, p. 164; for more on the lesbian feminists' insight concerning the relationship between compulsory heterosexism and male domination, c.f. ftnt 4. in Ch. 11. 1., "Origin of Feminism") with Simone de Beauvoir's: "The reason for this [i.e. the bad-faith on women's part, their male-identification] is that women lack concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. They are not even promiscuously herded together in the way that creates community feeling among the American Negroes, the ghetto Jews, the workers of Saint-Denis, or the factory hands of Renault. They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men -- fathers or husbands -- more firmly than they are to other women. If they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to white men, not to negro women. The proletariat can propose to massacre the ruling class, and a sufficiently fanatical Jew or Negro might dream of getting sole possession of the atomic bomb and making humanity wholly Jewish or black; but women cannot even dream of exterminating the males. The bond that unites her to her oppressor is not comparable to any other." (The Second Sex, p. xxv.; emphasis added.) But a culture that needed to be, and has been, invented has been confused with a culture that has really existed. The proclamation in "The Fourth World Manifesto" (after the same problem of male-identification is pointed out) is in full seriousness and as such delusional:

When asserting that what we ordinarily observe to be culture differences are merely superficial differences underneath which is the primordial culture difference between women and men across the globe -- and this difference is founded on, just as Donovan has said, the sexual division of labor -- Burris (et al) adds that "national culture" (i.e. what is usually thought of as "culture") is just the dominant male culture in that region. This makes the female culture invisible, but it is there. We have however demonstrated that this "female culture" of the second wave is really just a construct invented by mixing a typical romanticistic reaction to Enlightenment-rationalism (which the "female culture" of the first wave cultural feminism was) with elements from pre-industrialized cultures (e.g. traditional Eastern cultures). American white female feminists have in the end done the same as have many African-American activists in inventing an "African culture". The latter of course are in a certain way more fortunate than the former, since they do really have a culture -- if they so desire -- back in Africa, whereas, sadly, there has never been a female culture since the onset of human civilization.

Now the historical reason, the Vernunft, which has prompted the feminists to rebel against Enlightenment is however to be discerned by understanding what the metamorphosis of American society in which they participate is. What is really going on then becomes quite obvious: capitalism has to metamorphosize into its mature form of consumerism. Note that the adoption of or convergence with Romanticism and the cultural form of pre-industrialized humanity as the most obvious counter-formula to the Enlightenment rationalism which underlies formative capitalism does not exhaust the feminist-invented "female culture". We can best understand the metamorphosis by considering a third, brand new element that feminists have added to the "female culture": fragmentation and nihilism. Hate to speak like a Marxist -- that the cultural discourse of a society is a superstructure conditioned and determined by the substructure below of relations and modes of production -- but it seems really true of modern day society below the philosophical level, below those who are able to transcend the culture altogether. Then we see that Enlightenment I-it positivism serves quite well as the epistemological superstructure of formative capitalism, but it can no longer be so in the new era of consumerism. The relationship between "relationship-oriented holism" and consumerism we shall see later; consider now only the "third element." Once I was told by a female professor that she didn't believe that reality could ultimately be reduced to small chunks (speaking in favour of S-Matrix and bootstrapping over against the dominant quark-model) and that a unified theory that explained everything with one principle was possible -- that a reality which remained as disconnected fragments was fine with her (speaking against the system-building spirit of the nineteenth century European intellect which was itself in the spirit of Romanticism!). The frequent (cultural) feminist espousal of a fragmented reality which is furthermore meaningless (e.g. Nancy Jay's view, in Throughout Your Generations Forever, that sacrifices and religious practices in general have no inherent meaning, no objective that participants are trying to effect with these rituals) seems to me to be simply consumerism-talking. Consumerism favors diachronic fragmentation in place of continuity in that it aims for consumer products that are short-lasting and use-and-throw-away because this way will increase consumption: sell more products. (Think about how a new model of a brand of car appears every year that differs only in the most trivial way from the old models, and how the cars are engineered to be obsolete in a definite interval of time.) It furthermore favors synchronic fragmentation in place of "unified system" because this way will increase the categories or kinds of consumer products needed - again, sell more products. (Think about the endless varieties of cellphones; or about the strange American way that "working out" somehow requires wearing some specialized synthetic work-out suits: simple T-shirts originally good for all occasions will not do now.) It finally favors meaninglessness of things (nihilism) because this way makes people desire quantity (more) at the expense of quality: a consumer-oriented publisher does not want people to be engaged in Plato's Republic which, with its depth of layers and layers of meaning, stimulating the mind, might occupy someone for decades; rather it wants people to like People or other meaningless gossip magazines or fast-read consumer novels which consumers can read fast, forget fast, and throw away fast: it can then sell more. As the substructure determines the superstructure, this consumerism mentality has invaded American academia to produce the nihilistic and fragmentation-favoring post-modernism and cultural feminism that deny the possibility of any "Unified One [and often Linear] Objective Truth" -- labeling it "patriarchal", oppressive, in order to prevent access to it, thereby succeeding in destroying our mind, our care for truth and meaning, and in turning us into the good, mindless and indiscriminate gluttonous consumers that consumerism needs. When cultural feminism attacks as patriarchal biased ideology any "male" comprehensive, linear, and unified explanation of many things at the same time it is in fact itself pronouncing the dominant ideology of consumerism. (As the proverb has it: when you point one finger at someone else, you overlook that three other fingers are pointed back at you -- and one at God.) When cultural feminism espouses relativism, processualism, and contextualism, or that any thing can be interpreted in endless different ways, none better than the other, or that the process of investigation will never one day end up in The Truth, The Meaning, but will continue forever -- like women's never-ending spinning, but, really, just as consumerism never wants The Product that satisfies human needs in that respect once and for all -- or that there are no fundamental laws or principles and all "categories" and "norms" are illusory, it is really just trying to turn academic discourse into the stream of disconnected, short, and meaningless commercials (more like "flashes") we are subject to everyday on TV, on mass-media: brain-killing through brain-"flushing" (intestinalization of mind, later). (Ken Wilber's criticism of post-modernism [ibid. p. 37] therefore hasn't hit the target.)⁵

Fragmentation and nihilism have already shown up in Morgan's celebration of the S-matrix: "no fundamentals whatsoever in the universe..." but more importantly in her vision of the feminized future: "All fundamental laws, categories and categorizing, and 'norms' of behavior are discovered to be illusory. Fundamentalism vanishes along with fundamentals. Consciousness is re-invented anew out of a new consciousness. A balance emerges between the individual and the collective/species/sentient life/universal movement; uniqueness and commonality are seen as un-contradictory; differences and similarities are held in a celebrated balance, each self-consistent and mutually involved." Then: "All facets of consciousness flower, new forms of intelligence develop and create still newer forms in turn..." The normless never-ending change seems simply like a description of the consumer market: same is different, different same, forever something new, the old never any authority.... (C.f. Fredric Jameson's description of the environment of consumerism later on.)

This "female culture" as a superstructural reflection of consumerism not only socializes consumers in this manner, but also shows up as the best model for running a business or doing business in today's global consumerism. Stuart Kauffman, a principal figure in the study of complexity and self-organization at the Santa Fe Institute, has noted (At Home in the Universe: the search for laws of self-organization and complexity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) a speech once given there by the economist Sidney Winter about the restructuring of enterprises in the post Cold War era:

So in place of the gigantic, holistic (in the old sense now!), all encompassing structure of hierarchy which used to work well during the formative period of capitalism, global consumerism now demands the division of the whole into small, equalized chunks, "in the hopes of increased flexibility and overall competitive advantage." (Ibid.) It is easy to imagine cultural feminists jumping onto this new paradigm for organization and claiming it as the "female culture" that is at last breaking loose from underneath the "patriarchal culture" which they would identify with the old vertical structure -- as Fritjof Capra seems to be doing in his The Web of Life⁶ and as M. A. McClure has explicitly done in a mid-1990 article entitled "Chaos and Feminism -- A Complex Dynamic: Parallels Between Feminist Philosophy of Science and Chaos Theory" (see Epilogue 2, "The Consumerization of Art, Culture, and Mind"). But in reality what is happening is just that capitalism is going through a paradigm shift in order to augment itself, and that feminists are trying to facilitate such transformation of capitalism by adding to it the noble connotation of "female" and "liberation from oppression". But more importantly, we see that feminist "thinkers" are as much determined by the substructural economic environment as are any other mediocre thinkers who could not transcend and escape their culture and speak something other than their culture, and thereby end up being merely "ideologues". Kauffman, himself determined in this way, and so, together with Capra, enthusiastically jumping onto the new wagon of the culture of global consumerism, tries to find out the underlying reason of "how and why flatter, more decentralized organizations -- business, political, and otherwise -- might actually be more flexible and carry an overall competitive advantage" (p. 246), that is, why, "contrary to intuition, breaking an organization into 'patches' [i.e. small fragments in semi-independence from each other] where each patch attempts to optimize for its own selfish benefit, even if that is harmful to the whole, can lead, as if by an invisible hand, to the welfare of the whole organization." (p. 247) The reason lies in the laws of complexity and self-organization. We shall understand the details of his argument in the next chapter. For now note only that the triumph of this flattened, horizontal and fragmentary model (which the feminist would claim as "female") over the holistic vertical model (which they would call "male" and "patriarchal") simply designates the conclusion of the Enlightenment-era struggle where the Anglo-American way has out-competed the French-Continental way -- therefore having nothing whatsoever to do with gender -- and that the triumphant, fragmentary way, when, "substructure determining superstructure", it gets applied to the understanding (rather than manipulation) of reality, produces the most negative, destructive effect on the mind.

Adaptability of singular organizations is not all. Just recently Thomas Friedman has written a book, The World Is Flat, to describe how globalization has completely restructured the business-industrial environment of the contemporary economic cosmos from locally concentrated vertical orders to a flattened, planetary-wide chain or network of production in which the flattened companies and factories are all connected with one another at the grass root level. The whole economic cosmos itself is now a flattened, non-hierarchical, and fragmented (in a sense) network of relationships and connections, reflecting the "female mode" of cultural feminists. (Of course the direction of reflection is the other way round.) Consider simply the global chain of supply - from Taiwan through China and Malaysia to the U.S. -- in the production of even a single laptop; and the breakdown of the top-down authoritative mode caused by the efficacy of horizontal connectivity and communication effected by internet technology and so on, making possible whole scale out-sourcing, in-sourcing, open-source. Friedman especially makes the point that the human relationship skill required for survival and prosperity in this new economic environment is no longer the old fashion vertical command and order-following, but precisely the relationship, communication, and understanding mode characteristic of the cultural feminists' care ethic. This is especially the case since, as the classical, formative, industrialized manufacture-based capitalism since the 1900s in America has transited into the post-industrialized, consumer-oriented economy since the 1960s this new consumerist economic order is, as mentioned, dominated solely by service industries (some call it "semblant capitalism", that is, a capitalism without the production of products as basis but consisting mostly in monetary and financial services) -- and services are all about dealing with people (consumers) and relationships, while the top-down command structure was good for the old manufacture industrialism which saw bosses and managers giving orders to employees who made things rather than talked to people. Again it is in this larger context of global consumerism -- the offspring of the triumphant Anglo-American mode -- that the most complete view of the historical Vernunft of American feminism becomes possible. The American feminists produce, just in time, i.e. right at the dawn of the new era of global consumerism, this horizontal modus operandi which they term "female" and thereby package as some precious truth formerly oppressed but now liberated to the light of the day, in order to facilitate its adoption by the participants in the new economic cosmos: ideological superstructure follows -- or even precedes, in the case of the pioneer cultural feminists -- the re-structuration of the mode and relation of production and consumption. But in this "new world" analytical skills, which the feminists associate with men, are still increasingly needed as in computer engineering and production management; hence a new trend toward synthesis of the "male" and the "female" sets in, men being naturally analytical and mathematical and women relational and linguistic and one side complementing the other as if Nature had so intended: Wilber's integral attempt and that of many other ideologues emphasizing the balance between the analytical manipulation of objects and the relation of persons, between "self-assertion" and "integration" (Capra, The Web of Life, p. 10), all serving as the new -- post-feminist -- ideologues.⁷

Cultural feminist theorists in universities represent therefore either ideologues of globalization or warriors of consumerism trying to colonize the last territory which consumption has not touched. But outside the academia, in the "real" world, cultural feminism has not many ears. Instead, out there it has wide-range influence only in its vulgar form. As said in the summary introduction, "the social success of feminism in America lies in its providing a peculiarly effective solution to the dilemma of consumerism (the mobilization of more consumers) during the second wave..." The radical feminists burst onto the scene of history in the 1960s, and the proliferation of feminist theories afterwards -- when the dust is settled, the effect of all this talk is women entering the work force in large number. Most of these "working women", of course, knew not a thing about Mary Daly, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kate Millett, Susan Brownmiller, nor any of the pure "theorists" cited in this work. They might have heard of Betty Friedan and NOW. What they certainly have known is that "time has changed", that women now can do just about any job that men are doing, that the old expectation that women cannot feed themselves but can only bear and raise children under the protective and providing umbrella of a husband is a lie; what they certainly have experienced is that the aspirationless dependence on a husband to feed themselves is now something of a shame, a failure to live up to the true potential of a woman (e.g. Susan Faludi's Backlash) -- despite the prostitutive behaviour of many women in the metropolitan cities who continue looking for a cash machine. What, in other words, has influenced women to "work", at least in respect to their psychology, their self-image -- economic considerations aside -- has been the trickling down of the lofty liberation and messianic ideology into the popular domain to result in a work ethic of feminist origin. A voice has been installed in them, "calling" (Ruf) them to a "profession" (Beruf) which becomes identified with "liberation" (Freiheit). Arbeit macht frei. Many American (white) females actually feel ashamed when having to respond upon inquiry that they don't have any particularly "admirable" profession, and many of them feel pride when they do. They are the new liberated women. The parallel with the Protestant ethic (Calvinism) in the 1600s and 1700s (the formative period of capitalism) is obvious. ("Nun ist unverkennbar, dass schon in dem deutschen Worte 'Beruf' ebenso wie in vielleicht noch deutlicherer Weise in dem englischen 'calling', eine religioese Vorstellung -- die einer von Gott gestellten Aufgabe -- wenigstens mitklingt..." Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,, p. 63)⁸ The success of the feminist ideology in vulgar form, in respect of its acceptance and then domination in society and media, lies in the work ethic it has, willingly or not, produced just in the critical time when a higher rate of consumption is demanded by the growth of economy. Working women by now form an indispensable and permanent part of the new consumerist economy. (By 1990s women constitute 45% of the American work force! Assuming, reasonably, that most men have continued working after "women's liberation", this means that production and the buying power of the population have nearly doubled!) This is why even during the time of ideological backlash (Reagan era) women continue to enter the work force (Faludi, ibid). The feminist work ethic and the spirit of consumerism.

The effectiveness of this "feminist work ethic" in solving the tensions within consumerism is most visible when viewed in light of the situations of other consumerist cultures -- and here too, although we emphasize that the reason for the successful transformation of American society by the second wave feminism cannot be understood without consideration of the context in which it occurred, i.e. the beginning of global consumerist economy and global division of labor, our analysis of cultural feminism of the second wave risks being incomplete precisely on account of this incomplete consideration of the global scene. Let us look at the issues one by one. Japan, like all other post-industrialized (i.e. consumerist) nations, is suffering from the problem of population decline because the women here just as in other European countries are no longer interested in giving birth. Consumerist economy depends on the mobilization of women into public production, but without a liberation -- let alone a messianic -- ideology and with the persistent hold of traditional male chauvinism the stereotypic job for the young women of Japan who enter into "professions" is as "escalator dolls" or "office ladies". "An escalator doll is a young woman in her 20's who stands by the escalator all day and welcomes you to the floor of the store or office building. She says goodbye and thank you when you leave. You find these at Mitsukoshi (the classiest department store...), the Toyota main showroom in Tokyo, the government offices and the corporation offices (Sony, Toshiba, Nissan..). Other women serve as temporary labor to bear the bumps generated by the economic cycle. It is these people (and foreigners) who get laid off in order to permit a system of lifetime employment for the Japanese males. Escalator dolls (and their counterparts within corporate offices, 'Office Ladies') must often sign a contract with the employer stating that they will quit when they reach the age of 25. The true purpose of these girls (besides serving tea and welcoming guests) is to be marriage material for the men, who are at work for such long hours that they have difficulty to find women on their own... almost all women in Japanese companies, regardless of professional status or level in the organization are required to prepare and serve tea daily for the men as part of their daily chores." (Louis LeClerc, 1992) During the Asian economic depression of the late 1990s, however, these "office ladies" proved importantly positive for Japanese economy undergoing downturning. Because of the entrenched male chauvinism there, the young women, witnessing the stifling confinement of the life-long housewife role of their mothers, were increasingly unwilling to marry early, but lived at home, earned money as "office ladies", then spent it on such consumer products as of fashion, etc., sustaining the clothing industries during this hard time. Wary of the implication of a shrinking population for the future growth of economy, but unwilling to resort to the method of "population import" (immigration), the Japanese government is offering higher and higher financial reward as incentive for women marrying and staying home as wife and mother. To no avail -- as some female activist there has rightly remarked, women would not be happily reproducing without the demolition of male-chauvinism which antagonizes women against society. Could the widespread female-placating attitude among the American population -- after the dust of women's movement has settled -- be a factor conducive to the fact that American society is the one post-industrial society among all that has a growing population because -- in addition to immigration -- women are also reproducing at a rate surpassing the death rate? Perhaps Europe too, e.g. Germany, worrying about the same problem population decline poses to future economy, and where destructive war has definitively purged any liberation and messianic fervour from public consciousness to leave people interested only in the "practical" and never in such idealist extreme as the American radical feminism of the 1960s, has something to learn from the American solution? Russia, too, where, it is said, "men are kings" and where the shrinkage of population reaches crisis level -- because, again, women have been so antagonized toward their "biological destiny" -- resorts to governmental exhortation on women to give birth. May it do better with the spread of a mentality of "women as gnostically special"?⁹

It seems, correlation-wise, that the mobilization of women for public production tends to have the effect of diminishing women's interest in reproduction, but that feminism, by creating a "women-friendly" environment, serves to mitigate against this diminution; hence America, with the strongest tradition of feminist consciousness permeating the society, maintains a replacement rate of reproduction among women (women gladly taking on both male and female roles); but countries formerly communist (e.g. Russia, Latvia), with the harshest tradition of mobilization of women for public production for the sake of increasing the power of the state, but without a feminist tradition to help this and mitigate against this at the same time, suffer the most from depopulation due to low rate of reproduction among women; while Western Europe and Japan are somewhere in between.

However much Japan fails at gender equality when compared "forward" with the American society, compared "backward" (with traditional agrarian patriarchies) it exhibits definitive "progress" in this matter, to the extent required by the exigencies of the new economy. Young women are working and earning money, even if only on the unrespected, menial "servicing" levels. That is, women are allowed to own property in their own right. Some women there (movie stars and singers) rank among those with the highest income. The society can afford such widespread discrimination against and devaluation of women because, despite being more or less the richest nation in the world, Japan's economy is organized much differently than the American. Its rise to power is from the position of periphery and so its tactics are essentially supplemental to and parasitic on the "center".¹⁰ "Japanese policy is to intentionally use foreign cash profits not to buy a foreign country's exportable products, but rather its capital assets like companies, real-estate and art..." (LeClerc) This combined with the "protection of the home market" which impedes the massive consumption of cheap products by its population, means that the Japanese society is not as entirely consumer-oriented as the American -- that it is geared toward moving from the periphery to domination at the center through satisfying the gluttony of others -- that it consequently does not need woman producer-consumers on the same par as men but just somewhat more productive and consumptive than the incomeless domestic slaves in the agrarian patriarchies. In this sense there is probably a hidden connection between the liberation of women in American and the devaluation (but not exclusion) of women in the work market in Japan, just as there must be a connection between the exploitation of women for their cheap labor in the just economically emerging third world nations (e.g. Southeast Asia) and the liberation of women in America: in the latter connection the third world women produce lower level consumer products for the American Mass Women (and Mass Men) to consume whereas in the former connection women in the peripheral economic power house serve as maid and cheer leader for the men working to produce higher level consumer products for the consumption of these American Mass Women (and Mass Men). The world is an interconnected network nowadays, and the feminists cannot analyze the situation of American women in isolation from that of women elsewhere. We are not saying the connection is as is described here, but we are suggesting how to look for it.

Moira Gatens notes in 1991 in regard to Western economies: "The historical conditions of the sexual division of labour means that when women enter the labour market they carry the private sphere with them... The confusion in the (female-dominated) service and secretarial industries, concerning the hidden job description is well documented in feminist sociological studies. Occupations that are female-dominated are overwhelmingly analogous to the tasks of mothers/ wives/ housewives, that is, to the type of work women have traditionally performed in the private sphere. Many jobs require of women those skills which are stereotypically associated with the wife's role, for example, tension management, submissiveness and, far too often, sexual availability." (Feminism and Philosophy, p.135) Such description, increasingly outdated for the advanced consumerist economy of America, but which fits quite well with the Japanese situation, is typ-ical of the transitional period between formative capitalism and full-blown consumerism. This means that Japanese home economy is stuck at this transitional period. What about when Japan does become the number one economic power in the world, when the world market has been saturated with its products, will then it turn toward itself as aggressively as it has done toward the others? Will then it grant its women full membership in the economy in order to digest the excess?

The two important faults of the feminists are their short-sightedness and schizophrenic conception of women with its concomitant one-sided thinking about world-transformation. In this connection we come back to the problem of the historical function of cultural feminism with its "relationship-oriented holism". As Rosemary Radford Ruether comments, in New Woman, New Earth (1975), in regard to the relationship between "sexism and ecological destructiveness": "Women must see that there can be no liberation for them and no solution to the ecological crisis within a society whose fundamental model of relationships continues to be one of domination." (p. 204) What is then the solution, i.e. the relationship between contextualized holism and ecological salvation? Take as an example of the same spirit Jodi L. Jacobson's "Closing the Gender Gap in Development", State of the World, 1993 (Lester Brown, et al.), which is most illustrative in that it is also an examination of the situation of women in the more backwater regions of the Third World. She first states that "[I]n the not-so-distant past, subsistence farmers and forest dwellers were models of ecologically sustainable living, balancing available resources against their numbers" (p. 61). Note that the traditional female slavery typical of classical patriarchy belongs precisely to this type of "ecologically sustainable living", an economy where women frequently contributed a large but un-recognized portion of the resources consumed in the family.

Globalization (international division of labour) has caused the disintegration of many traditional subsistence economies, so that in sub-Saharan Africa, Indian subcontinent, Latin America, and the Caribbean, agricultural production switches increasingly to the growth of cash crops (p. 64 & 67). In traditional subsistence farming, "[u]sing traditional methods, women farmers have been quite effective in conserving soil... fallowing (allowing land to rest between plantings), crop rotation, intercropping, mulching, and a variety of other soil conservation and enrichment techniques" (p. 68). Under the "customary laws and practices" frequently in effect among subsistence farmings women "usually had equal rights to use [lands] in accordance with their family's needs" even though they rarely owned these lands directly (p. 70). The acquisition, in recent decades, of lands in these backward regions by private owners and government agencies for the purpose large-scale planned mechanized farming of cash crops has consistently favored male landholders and left female farmers to increasing poverty, these women farmers having to resort to having more children to help with labor and raise their status but trapping themselves in a vicious cycle of having more children to feed but less resources to feed on, while frequently ignored by their men who use their increased wealth from the new system to improve their own living standard first. Women's burden increases as "[g]reater migration of males to cities, low wages, abandonment, divorce, widowhood, and -- in some cultures -- the practice of having more than one wife all have conspired to reduce the amount of labor and of income contributed to families by men" (p. 72). Jacobson decries these injustices which the women of the Third World backwater regions suffer as a result of globalization. She furthermore laments over the environmental degradation caused by the new cash crop system as a consequence of misguided government policies, increased population by women in poverty feeling forced to reproduce more (p. 76), and, e.g. African women farmers having "little choice but to continue to practice [agricultural methods] such as sharply shortened fallow periods, that are neither environmentally sustainable nor viable over the long term" (p. 73). In consistently attributing the cause of these new miseries of women to the gender bias (favoring men) in the new, cash-crop/ exchange oriented economic system being instituted in the Third World, Jacobson fails to discern, and mention, that this new system which operates at the expense of women only comes into being because the Mass Women and Mass Men in the First World are consuming its products, i.e. globalization only comes to be because the consumption rate of the First World has dramatically increased, due in large measure to the "liberation" of women (mobilization of women to earn money) here which almost doubles the income available to each household for their consumption. This is the first fault of the feminists, their persistent short- or one-sightedness. Short-sightedness furthermore causes her to fail to see that the new poverty problem in the Third World due to globalization can only be temporary, since, as said, once the First World market becomes saturated, market interests will have to turn first men and then women of the Third World into first-rate consumers, thus "emancipating" the women there out of poverty. This first fault then leads to the second fault. Jacobson thus proposes her solution: "These ends [increasing women's control over resources, etc. in order to improve family welfare] can most easily be achieved in the short run by directing resources into the formal education of young girls and the formal and informal education and training of older women. At the same time, policies that increase women's access to information and training as well as credit will improve their employment prospects and enable women entrepreneurs to establish business, earn income, and create jobs" (p. 79). This definitely will make women exactly like men, women working side by side with men in production for exchange in the new consumerist world-order. Note that she is arguing this from a mixture of (traditional) liberal and cultural feminist position: "Ultimately, the changes needed to make women equal partners in development are the same as those required to sustain life itself. Nothing could be more important to human development than the reform of policies that suppress the productive potential of half the earth's people." (Ibid., emphasis added) Latter is like the traditional liberal feminist argument of John Stuart Mills and Mary Wollstonecraft: making women as "productive" as men are -- making them work like men -- is good to human development -- but moreover to life-preservation?! Elsewhere she reveals her cultural feminist bent in stating the importance of women to the preservation of bio-diversity and the protection of water cycles maintained by forests. "Tribal women in India, for example, have been found to know medicinal uses for some 300 forest species" (p. 75). Yet this special female gnosis -- holistic relationship with nature -- is precisely what is to be lost when women are made to be "productive" in the public world of production for exchange. At the same time that feminists emphasize women's special world-saving qualities which men lack, they attempt to transform women into men. This schizophrenic position is responsible for feminists' persistent one-sided preoccupation with transforming women (their productive stations in society) without any concern with modifying what destructive behaviors there are among men (production and consumption of consumer products: questing) -- somehow they come to identify world-saving with doubling the destructive behavior of men by making women acquire it also. What logic is there -- for the purpose of saving the earth - in woman working and thus driving a car of her own in addition to the car driven by her male counterpart? Isn't it more logical -- in order to try to save the earth and achieve gender equality at the same time -- to persuade men not to drive, rather than making women drive also? During the 1990s "global emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide climbed more than nine percent" (Press release of State of the World, Jan 10, 2002). Has the "liberation" of women - mobilization of women into public production - no relationship with Global Warming? "Liberated" American women all driving, in addition to men still driving -- has this "liberation" not doubled the American contribution to the Green-house Effect? (By the mid-1990s, U.S. contributes 35% of the global emission of green house gas, EU 25%, Japan 15%, Russia 7%. And now, China....)

Jacobson has bought into Ruether's solution: "[H]armony between the human community and natural system has nothing to do with anti-intellectual or antitechnological primitivism. The human capacity for technological rationality... needs to be freed from its captivity to ruling-class domination... What is needed is democratization of decision-making over technological development and equalization of its benefits. It must become impossible for a small ruling class to monopolize the wealth from world resources, while transferring the social costs to the people in the form of poisoned air, water, and soil." (Ruether, p. 205) In other words, the solution is getting everyone involved in industrialized production and wealth acquisition so that everyone can transfer to everyone else "the social costs in the form of poisoned air, water, and soil." The trickling of capitalism down to the ordinary, mass-level, i.e. mass-capitalism or consumerism: the essence of the decentralized and fragmented flat world which the cultural feminists champion. This "solution" is excellent for the expansion of consumerism but terrible for the earth.¹¹ Cultural feminism therefore reinforces the expansion of consumerism -- and the destruction of the earth -- under the disguise of an earth-saving liberation of the oppressed. We shall see later how the passivity of the female mode converges with the Eastern mode only in words but never in practice. The lesson emerges that the reactionary against something tends to be just more of that something again. Hence the Nazi reaction against analytical rationalism is just more rationalism, such as manifested in their bureaucracy of murder, and the feminist reaction against analytical rationalism is just more exploitation and destruction of the earth through the democratization of the process. So much of I-Thou, so much of the maternal mode, if in the hands of an élite, might have a chance of harmonizing society with the environment as have done the pre-Enlightenment cultures, or of producing an earthly paradise called Herland as envisioned by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; but in their vulgar form among Mass Women they just end up destroying the earth faster -- and humans' own mind also -- through excessive consumption. The earth-saving female mode of synthetic holistic episteme, besides reflecting and so reinforcing the structure of the consumerist economic cosmos, is simply a successful ploy of self-deception to blind oneself to what one is really doing -- just as consumerism needs.¹²

What the feminists persistently overlook is the correlation between prosperity (of the consumerist style) and environmental destruction and between modest subsistence or even poverty (of the traditional agrarian economy) and environmental conservation. When the women of the Third World become "emancipated", i.e. become first-rate consumers like women of the First World - which will happen because of market force - globalization will have accomplished itself. Can the earth survive 6 billion and more people all pursuing the "American (consumer) dream"? The emancipation of women in America which, by suddenly increasing the consumption rate of American society, sucked in all the cheap consumer products produced by the emerging Asian economy, can in fact be considered the starting point of globalization. (For this reason it should perhaps be investigated if those who have profited most from American feminism might be the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans who, thanks to the dramatic rise of the consumption rate of the American population effected most importantly by feminism, have been able to sell so much to America, and, with ever increasing trade surplus in their favour, to derive so much profits with which to develop their countries and to effect the "rise of Asia".) If global consumerism should have such devastating effect on the earth as to lead to world-wide extinction (including us), then feminism may be seen as the chief motor leading us to our natural destiny -- extinction.

(Cultural) feminism is therefore really just a consumerist ideology (a secular religion of consumerism), and its goal, on the objective side, is making women more "productive" (in the public sphere) and consequently more consumptive, helping to create global consumerism (without at the same time compromising too much their reproductive task), while removing any possibilities of objection to global consumerism (on the ground of environmental destruction) by pronouncing just the opposite: "making women 'productive' is world-saving": a typical technique of power. On the subjective side, as it reflects the consumerism mentality, it labels any sort of human yearning for Truth and Meaning of Life as "patriarchal biased ideology", thereby socializing all of us into robotic, thoughtless consumers (socialization on the side of consumption), while (incidentally?) providing for a new business culture (socialization on the side of production). This is the (thermodynamic) world-historical function of feminism. Its operation is to first of all instill a work-ethic in women while dismantling any oppositions to the expression of this female work-ethic by labelling them "patriarchal"; and secondly to reinforce consumerism by socializing us into its mentality. Of course the feminists themselves cannot notice this, because power always manages to fool its agents. While the "world" has survived two others (Marxism and Aryanism) of the triad (substitute Christianity) to which feminism belongs as the "third" and "final", it is not clear if the "world" can survive feminism, which aims to destroy the very foundation of the world, the Earth-environment.

This is not a traditionalist (right-wing) critique of feminism: there is no interest expressed here in "women staying home and raising babies". The critique is of the way in which the idea of "liberation" is so inverted from its traditional sense that it means today the exact opposite of what it used to mean. When asked, "What is the solution (to world-destruction, to the oppression of women, if feminism is not the true answer)?" We'd always give the traditional answer: liberation is the maximal degree of self-actualization which in its true form always correlates with the minimal degree of participation in the stifling dissipative cycle of the social collective. E.g. turning women from housewives ("reproducers" and "processors") into philosophers rather than into "producers". This is of course never possible on the large-scale, since the majority of the human race will always only be capable of production, consumption, defecation, and reproduction, and not much else.

The second wave feminism started with the radical feminists in the 1960s, mostly in New York. Since its beginning radical feminism was cultural and thoroughly of the "gnostic" type. Some detail of this is the topic of Ch. 11. 3. Kate Millett, remarking of the "exciting" time when she was writing her would-be classic: "Sexual Politics... owes a great deal to a long-vanished debating society called Downtown Radical Women, where each detail of the theory of patriarchy was hatched, rehearsed, and refined upon again; to friends in New Haven, graduate women at Yale, who would stay up nights speculating on the origins of patriarchy, the discovery of paternity... Other books were emerging at the same time too: Robin Morgan's Sisterhood Is Powerful, Shulamith Firestone's Dialectic of Sex, all the pamphlets that were collected together into the Notes from the First Year. We were all in this together, knew each other, were collaborators in the creation of a different consciousness... These were the days of the millennium." (Introduction to Sexual Politics, 1990 reprint.) This statement is not an exaggeration. The eruption of this new, thoroughly iconoclastic consciousness around New York, the City of the World, even if the concrete product of this consciousness was only a vulgar Independent Woman with a Work Ethic, ushered in a new era and a new mode of supraorganismic integration and metabolism in the context of the Global Interaction Sphere, breaking down the sexual division of labor that has been in force for 100,000 years since the inception of our species! Power fools people (e.g. the feminists) in mysterious ways.

Footnotes:

1. "Classical patriarchy" is to be defined as "a polygynous elitist warrior and highly ritualized society practicing female infanticide." See Chapter 8.2. "The Origin of Classical Patriarchy in Noosphere Consumption and the Interaction Sphere: the Case of China." Among the classical patriarchies then are China and India before modern time, or pastoral nomad warrior societies such as the Mongols or the Hebrew of the time of Old Testament. Note that Medieval Europe is weak as "classically patriarchal" and the European society since the constitution of nation-states is not classical patriarchy. In fact, European modern history can be defined as moving away from the model of classical patriarchy. We will encounter this problem in 8.3., "The Nature and Foundation of Classical Patriarchy and the Problem of 'Western Patriarchy.'"

The problem of the non-correlation between male-domination and environmental destruction and the actual correlation between women's liberation and environmental destruction is also explicitly outlined in Chapter 8.1., "The Breakdown of the Cultural Feminist Concept of Patriarchy" and worked out throughout Chapter 8.

2. Although this may certainly work as a solution, in the sense of reversing the economic trend of consumerism. But such saving of the Earth will mean also the collapse of the current economy with the ensuing social chaos for humans. Besides, there are quite many other means to save the Earth that do not involve such outdated injustice.

Deforestation became a problem for England already by the 1500s, as no trees were left for ship-building, which was a major reason for the English colonization of North America: the search for wood.

3. The definition and identification of Radical Feminism follows that of Josephine Donovan: "... I am using 'Radical Feminism' to refer to a specific theory that was developed in the late 1960s [in America]." (Feminist Theory, p. 208) The theory: "[R]adical feminists... believe[d] that all these issues [of social justice and peace] were interrelated... that the personal is political; that patriarchy, or male-domination -- not capitalism -- is at the root of women's oppression; that women should identify themselves as a subjugated class or caste and put their primary energies in a movement with other women to combat their oppressors -- men; that men and women are fundamentally different, have different styles and cultures, and that the women's mode must be the basis of any future society." In other words, "that male supremacy and the subjugation of women were indeed the root and model oppression in society and that feminism had to be the basis for any truly revolutionary change" (p. 142). Emphasis (mine) underlines what's specific of radical feminists; their messianic spirit indicates prefiguration of cultural feminism (of the second wave) that has consolidated after the 1980s.

4. (Update, May, 2006) Human beings' "being-in-the-world" can be fundamentally analyzed into dealing with things and dealing with people, so that Martin Buber has distinguished "between two kinds of fundamental relationships which he calls 'I-It' and 'I-Thou'." (Paul Roubiczek, Existentialism -- For and Against, p. 141; Ich-Es, Ich-Du). The impersonal seeing of another person from the outside (her, him) can be assimilated to the I-It mode. "This corresponds roughly to our distinction between the objective and subjective methods" (ibid.). Each type of method carries with it a whole series of modalities. Whereas the I-It mode is manipulation, the I-Thou mode is meeting, encountering (Begegnung). Whereas the I-It manipulation is only about the past and the future ("As long as we are preoccupied with practical life, we are determined by the past upon which we must build, and we are constantly planning for the future; the present is a barely perceptible dividing line where the future incessantly slips back into the past"; p. 146), the I-Thou is about the present: "Yet obviously, if our existence is to be a full one, we must live in the present, give it content and duration, concentrate on what we actually experience, without paying attention to the passage of time" (ibid.). "Gegenwart... gibt es nur insofern, als es Gegenwärtigkeit, Begegnung, Beziehung gibt. Nur dadurch, daß das Du gegenwärtig wird, entsteht Gegenwart... Insofern sich der Mensch an den Dingen genügen läßt, die er erfährt und gebraucht, lebt er in der Vergangenheit, und sein Augenblick ist ohne Präsenz." (Ich und Du; "There is the present... only insofar as there is present-ing, meeting, and relationship. Only through the fact that Thou becomes present, does the present arise.... Insofar as man lets himself be satisfied with things which he experiences and uses, he lives only in the past, and his 'moment' is without present.") One can see how much the cultural feminists' -- and contemporary Anglophone society's -- stereotype of men is an I-It agent only and of women, the full, I-Thou person. (See Footnote 6.) Of course, "'[i]t is not possible to live in the bare present. Life would be quite consumed if precautions were not taken to subdue the present speedily and thoroughly.' The objective method, therefore, is necessary, but Buber's emphasis is on seeing its limitations and on making us aware of the indispensable subjective method.... 'Without It man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not a man.'" (Roubiczek, p. 147.) This is because a person becomes a person, an I, only through the Thou. ("Der Mensch wird am Du zum Ich.") "If we grew up in complete isolation we could not develop a human mind at all, a fact which has been confirmed by reports about children growing up among wild animals." (Roubiczek, p. 150.) The Enlightenment, or the formative, production phase of capitalism, however, because of its need for technology and with its just bourgeoning scientific worldview (classical mechanics as immature science), has overemphasized the I-It manipulative mode at the expense of the I-Thou relational, (inter-)personal mode. And, because it favors men as producers (see below), it has nurtured them as thoroughly I-It, even though I-Thou and I-It are not gender-related. Buber -- along with many other spiritual revivalists at the time -- is specifically rebelling against the spiritual depravity of the Enlightenment mode, attempting to remind us that we are not living to our full potential there. "Alles wirkliche Leben ist Begegnung." ("The actual/ effective life in its entirety is meeting.") "Das Grundwort Ich-Du kann nur mit dem ganzen Wesen gesprochen werden." ("The fundamental word I-Thou can be spoken only with the entire being.") But as formative, manufacture-based capitalism transits into its mature, consumption, service phase, it needs to rid itself of the I-It mode too; hence -- the thesis below -- the capitalist forces masquerade as cultural feminism in particular and as women and the new ideologues in general to fight against its former I-It mode and to promote the new I-Thou mode appropriate to the service industry.

5. This "female culture", as simply a subspecies of the consumerist culture, hangs naturally together with other subspecies of consumerism: modern art, monolangualism, "multiculturalism", etc., all sharing the same essence of fragmentation and meaninglessness. C.f. Speculum Americanae. The "consumerization" of academia in America is furthermore reinforced by firstly a natural human tendency toward differentiation and secondly by its "democratization." We will analyze later this problem. For now it is only pertinent to point out that it has become the task of cultural feminists to celebrate the consumerization of higher education as something positive and to condemn any opposing trend, because only in this way can the universities themselves be transformed into places where the mind is destroyed instead of being formed, where education is just more consumption of "paper stuff", just as global consumerism wants it.

6. (Update, July, 2006) In the beginning of The Web of Life Capra asserts that "[u]ltimately these problems [poverty in other nations, environmental degradation, ethnic and tribal violence] must be seen as just different facets of one single crisis, which is largely a crisis of perception. It derives from the fact that most of us, and especially our large social institutions, subscribe to the concepts of an outdated worldview, a perception of reality inadequate for dealing with our overpopulated, globally interconnected world" (p. 4). He simply cannot be more wrong. He identifies the outdated worldview as the "mechanistic worldview of Descartes and Newton" and the new perception that will save us as the "holistic, ecological view" (p. 5). His description of the old paradigm is the same as Morgan's: "This paradigm consists of a number of entrenched ideas and values, among them the view of the universe as a mechanical system composed of elementary building blocks, the view of the human body as a machine, the view of life in society as a competitive struggle for existence, the belief in unlimited material progress to be achieved through economic and technological growth, and... the belief that a society in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male is one that follows a basic law of nature." This old paradigm, as we explain here, is simply that of the manufacture or production phase of capitalism. He then identifies the current paradigm shift as from self-assertion to integration, which in our framework is really the shift from a production-emphasized to a consumption- and service-centered paradigm. He compares the two paradigms side by side:

------------------------------------------------------------- 
           THINKING                         VALUES

Self-Assertive   Integrative    Self-Assertive   Integrative

rational         intuitive      expansion        conservation
analysis         synthesis      competition      cooperation
reductionist     holistic       quantity         quality
linear           nonlinear      domination       partnership
--------------------------------------------------------------  

12. The entire package of the cultural feminists' reversion back to cosmological symbolism becomes finally intelligible as part of the larger picture of consumerism's restructuration of our mode of being back to the cosmological mode. Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi's feminine time recapitulating the eternal return of pre-modern cultures, for example, reflects the re-cyclization of time under consumerism. We will understand this fully in "The Religious Structure of Consumerism," Speculum Americanae, using Dell deChant's analysis.