I appreciate Kate Phelan’s robust response to my review, and I recognize that we agree on many things (perhaps more than Phelan would grant). Our differences, however, are truly central and therefore not small. We differ in our understanding of philosophical anthropology, to which our politics should correspond.
Phelan argues that the biological (rather than political) account of male and female differences posits men as irretrievably violent, because such an account foregrounds the physical differences between men and women. She never quite acknowledges the truth of such differences, so it is hard to know what she thinks about them. In positing women as rapable, she does, it seems, grant an intrinsic physical difference. Yet she reworks that difference as a political one, rooted in the sexual contract intrinsic to modern liberalism. Her solution is to dismantle the sexual contract, a move that would, in her telling, eliminate or perhaps at least minimize the occurrences of rape.
I disagree with this account both on anthropological and political grounds. Phelan and Carole Pateman (upon whom Phelan relies) both assume that the liberal origin stories of politics, like that of Hobbes, are true accounts of the beginning of the liberal state and, therefore, of the postulated sexual contract that flows from such a state. But that seems simply false to me. The liberal state, in both its virtues and flaws, is not historically rooted in a primary state of nature at all. Rather, it is rooted in the particular socio-political context of the late-medieval world. It is not at all clear to me that this world accepted the sexual contract that Phelan and Pateman describe. They would need to make a rigorous historical-legal argument to convince me.
Further, if they are right, the solution would also be the destruction of the liberal state and—what? A return to monarchy? I don’t see either of them arguing that. Anarchy? Communism? Some such sweeping political change would be necessary, which makes the Marxist feminists whom Phelan criticizes as being insufficiently pro-women look more practical than she and Pateman do. I just don’t see how the sex-right could be ended, apart from the wholesale destruction of liberal democracy.
Maybe they mean, instead, that the liberal origin stories are correct in the ultimate origin of all politics. If so, then we still disagree. Accepting these origin stories accepts too much; it accepts that politics is the science of managing power, because human beings are incapable of anything more. In contrast, I believe that the human person is not reducible to his or her passions but is capable of transcending them. If this is true, then the role of politics shifts to creating the conditions for such transcendence, while also protecting those who are weaker from those who do not manage their passions virtuously.
This vision of politics requires two anthropological factors: an understanding of the dignity of the human person, coexisting with his or her capacity for vice. I draw upon Christian theology for this vision. A non-Christian vision could also come to the same conclusions simply by attentively trying to make sense of both the grandeur and the misère of the human being, to quote Pascal.
This anthropology undergirds my conviction that the intrinsic physical difference between men and women does not mean that men are irretrievably violent. It does mean, however, that they have a particular responsibility to become virtuous in their self-restraint, because their fallen impulses can lead them astray. Phelan argues that my anthropology implies that “men who do not rape will be denying their impulses.” But they would only be denying one kind of impulse: the fallen kind. Men also have opposing and transcendent impulses, for the good and the noble.
Indeed, we all do. A simple examination of the conflicts within every human heart should bear this out (Pascal again). These impulses are older and more foundational than whatever political system in which we find ourselves. No political system has been able to wipe out fallen impulses, but some systems are more apt than others to elevate the person and protect his or her dignity. If Phelan wishes to argue that the liberal system is not especially effective in encouraging our nobler impulses, and thus has not been very successful in eliminating misogyny, I would be inclined to agree with her. But that is not at present her position.
More: both liberalism and Phelan’s argument depend upon the anthropology I have presented, even if both do not wish to accept the full parameters of it. Secular liberalism assumes that human beings will continue to believe in the universal dignity of all people, even after the concept has been uprooted from the Judeo-Christian soil on which this belief was nourished.
Phelan also seems to have stealth acceptance of this anthropology. Against my critique that she provides no explicit rationale for criticizing female subordination, she responds: “But to say that sexual subjection is unjust, feminists need no more than the claim that women have dignity such that they are demeaned by subordination. The fact that it is no longer seriously suggested that women’s rightful condition is subjection … shows as much. Franks’ criticism is therefore moot.” But the success of the feminist claim is not due to an anthropology they have made ex nihilo. Rather, they applied the Judeo-Christian one. People holding these convictions are, whether they realize it or not, downstream of it.
Yet that anthropology significantly conflicts with Phelan’s power-based one. She cannot have it both ways. There is no reason, in fact, for people to believe that women have dignity and are demeaned by subjection—there is no reason to even use the word “demeaning” as negative in this context—without the Judeo-Christian anthropology that she rejects. If politics are reducible to power, then subjection is in fact the right and ordinary thing for the victor to impose upon his enemy. Indeed, many pagan political systems held just that. You cannot both reject Judeo-Christian anthropology and live off its fumes.
I will close by correcting Phelan’s interpretation of my audience. I did not, in fact, intend to write only to and for wives. My language probably could have been clearer, but I meant to signal this openness by speaking broadly of “many women” and using a non-exclusionary “and” to describe the variety of experiences. I am a theologian within a religious system that does not see marriage as the highest human calling, and I myself am not married. I certainly do not believe that women’s choices are reduced to marriage or prostitution, given that I live outside of both of those.
But it is certainly the case that many women experience the profound goodness and dignity of their femaleness in the context of marriage and childbirth. An account—yes, also and especially a political one—that is simply contrary to those experiences is not explanatory and therefore does not work, either theoretically or practically. Further, the experiences of single women do not oppose but are continuous with those experiences.
Both women and men are fulfilled within an embodied ethics that aims at communion and transcendence, and I have experienced that both in relation to other women as well as to men. I suspect we all have. An embodied feminism that calls for communion and transcendence is the only humanly coherent option.
