“Women have always been the primary victims of war.”

–Hillary Clinton

Life is mind-bogglingly complex. And knowing that, and how engaging fully with that complexity every day would quickly exhaust us, we develop cognitive shortcuts for coping with it. One of the more common of these is to invest words, and the arguments we make with them, with a self-sufficiency and an invariability that they seldom possess. Though people often say, “I say what I mean, and I mean what I say,” things are never really that simple. 

One of the main reasons for this, as Saussure taught us, is that all linguistic meaning is relational in nature; that is, that the operative meaning of a given word is heavily dependent, on one hand, on its interplay with the other words in the sentence or paragraph in which it appears and, on the other, the set of semantic values “assigned to it” through repeated usage by those who fluently write and speak the language in question. 

Because most people, especially in the expert class of the US, live and work in a single semantic ecosystem day after day, and thus often have scant access to cultures and subcultures that might imbue the terms they use with a different semantic value, they tend not to think very much about the unstated assumptions embedded in them, or the many arguments that depend on these terms for their salience.

For example, the Cambridge Dictionary defines terrorism as “violent action or threats designed to cause fear  among ordinary people, in order to achieve political aims.” According to this definition, the US dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US invasion of Iraq, the NATO dismemberment of Libya, the current Israeli destruction of Gaza, and the recent assassinations of Iranian scientists and their families all qualify as acts of terrorism. And yet, you will seldom if ever hear anyone in the Anglo-American, Western European, or Israeli cultural spaces use the term to describe these actions. 

Why? 

Because the media and academic allies of those that have planned and carried out these actions have also executed campaigns of media repetition designed to imbue the term terrorism with an unstated but pervasively accepted limitation: that it only really applies to situations where the actions of the type mentioned in the dictionary definition of terrorism are visited upon people in the above-mentioned cultural spaces. 

To become aware of the hidden presumptions embedded in words and the arguments that are frequently attached to them is to gain much greater insight into the true, and often similarly obscured, strategic goals of those who most assiduously wield them. It is also to be frequently viewed as an annoyance by the elite-allied culture-planners who would prefer that most of the public remain blissfully unaware of the existence of discursive black boxes such as these. 

All of which brings me, believe it or not, to the issue of feminism and the premise that it has “liberated” millions of heretofore oppressed women during the last six or seven decades of our history 

Before getting into that, however, I should underscore at the outset that I harbor no desire to tell anyone, never mind any woman, how he or she should live their life. And as part of that, I am, needless to say, against all institutional practices that prevent women from acceding to any job they want to do and are capable of doing. People should always be free to choose the life path they feel most suits their personal needs and desires. 

Rather, I am interested in exploring the seldom mentioned cultural presumptions at work in what might be termed the dominant, or perhaps better, “mass media” version of the discourse of feminism. 

To liberate someone is to release them from undue or unfair restrictions on their natural rights. It is also to point them implicitly toward situations and social spaces where those restrictions are relatively absent and where they thus live in a state of much greater freedom. 

From what I see and read, our media feminism presents the domestic realm, and especially the tasks related to childbearing, child-raising, and what used to be called homemaking, as a prime locus of female oppression. 

And what, again, according to the most widespread strains of feminism, are the spaces where women can most fulfill themselves and be “free?” 

It’s in the labor market where they can become “equal” to men by appearing smart, commanding, and, of course, earning a salary. 

Assuming that what I’ve said is more or less accurate, what are some of the hidden presumptions buried in this line of thinking? 

One is that the commercial marketplace is the supreme arbiter of the value of a human being, something that is quite a departure from centuries of Christian thinking that has held quite the opposite view; that, in fact, human value is intrinsic and if indeed it can be enhanced in any way during the course of our lives, it is through good works and charity, and by providing life-enhancing support to the sick, our wise elderly, and our life-brimming children.

Another is that while domestic work and raising children are tedious and boring, life in the labor market is much more soul-nurturing and fulfilling. 

A corollary to this belief is that men have long been fulfilling themselves in wildly wonderful ways every time they leave the home to toil. 

Drudgery? Bodily injury? Boredom? Harassment by stupid bosses? Heck no! Just week after 50-hour masculine week of deep personal growth and enhanced dignity. 

And this is where we see the ridiculous class bias built into this popular feminism, one that imagines the male work world of Don Draper in Mad Men is more representative of reality than the many, many more lives of men like sanitation workers, miners, and commercial fishermen who engage daily with grueling and dangerous work. 

It is precisely this line of “feminist” thinking that absurdly and paradoxically holds up traditionally male workspaces as places of great personal liberation that can lead Hillary Clinton to make the ridiculous statement quoted at the outset of this piece which presumes that men being mutilated and killed in industrial numbers on the battlefield is somehow less awful that the admittedly terrible privations that women have traditionally suffered on the home front. 

But Tom, we live in a commercial world. What would you have people do? 

The first thing is to remember that financialization of the type that we are currently living through is a relatively recent phenomenon and not inherent in markets. Now wholly separated from any vestiges of the religiously-rooted ethical postulates that once held it somewhat in check, it is a system that cares nothing for your soul, your personal growth, or your family’s well-being. Indeed, through its ever more frenzied and scattered pace it makes it increasingly impossible for workers to even meditate on these goals day-to-day, never mind moving toward achieving them. It is thus pure folly to make this unhinged system the vehicle or guarantor of one’s value pursuits, or to donate to it hours that could be spent fortifying affective ties to your loved ones. 

Sure, we all need to work. But before sending ourselves or our children into the work force shouldn’t we perhaps all stop and seek to establish, through dialogue, a set of life-giving practices having nothing whatsoever to do with workplace achievement so that when the financialized and corporatized marketplace does what it inevitably does and deems us disposable, we will have skills that will hopefully allow us to lead our lives with purpose and a modicum of joy? 

Sound overly idealistic? 

It shouldn’t, as this is what most people did as a matter of course before heading into the workforce in previous generations. Back then, everyone knew that work was work and only quite rarely and secondarily a place where one could expect spiritual enrichment. It was understood that this much more important thing could only really be fully developed outside the often-alienating parameters of the workplace.

But thanks in no small part to the constant messaging of media feminism, this realistic view of work was replaced by a class-deformed understanding of the workplace, in which working like a man for the man was portrayed as glamorous and the key to self-actualization. 

And thanks in part to this sacralized vision of work, a reshaped economic system arose premised on the necessity of every family having two earners, with the “second” of those earners, most often a woman, often taking a job with few benefits and little stability. 

These are, of course, the very type of cheap jobs corporations love for their “flexibility,” which is just another way of speaking about jobs that can be minimized or disposed of easily when the company’s bottom line is threatened. 

Funny how I’ve never seen a poll asking women with children who work in low-wage, no benefits, come-in-or-not-when-the-boss-tell-you, chain-owned convenience stores and fast-food restaurants—a human cohort that outnumbers that of female executives, doctors, and lawyers by several orders of magnitude—how “fulfilled” they feel with their work. Or whether they’d prefer to live in an economy in which staying home to raise their children and keep house was a more realistic option.

And I don’t expect to see one anytime soon, as it would most likely give lie to the oft-repeated idea that the workplace, as opposed to, say, the home, the church, or the community, is the best place for someone to realize their deepest dreams and desires. 

As I said above, I hold no brief for anyone who would bar a woman from working a certain job or who harasses her on the basis of her gender. But ensuring that discrimination of this type does not occur is, in my view, quite different than erecting a corporate-friendly mythology that assiduously portrays the workplace as a, if not the, principle site of spiritual growth and fulfillment for women. 

Work is work. And for most people in an increasingly depersonalized society and economy, it is—in this if nothing else, Marx seems to have been right—as often as not a source of alienation that numbs them and drains energy needed for engaging in arguably more important life pursuits. 

Isn’t it time we admit these realities more frontally and stop enticing our young females into the workplace on the idea that is the prime space of personal growth and fulfillment before they’ve even been meaningfully exposed to the ideas and traditions—which, of course have been cartoonishly portrayed to them in recent years as seamlessly oppressive—that have animated female power, purposefulness, and joy throughout the ages? 

With this countervailing information on the table, they would, it seems, at least be in a better position to mindfully decide how they really want to spend the precious hours allotted to them in this thing we call life.