A Woman’s Place

Men and Marriage.
by George Gilder.
Pelican. 219 pp. $15.95.

Certain controversial books, as George Orwell suggested in Nineteen Eighty-Four, are influential in inverse proportion to their availability. Whether ruthlessly suppressed or merely remaindered, these books eventually acquire a patina of veracity deriving partly from the simple fact that one cannot find them on the average shelf of the average library.

George Gilder’s Sexual Suicide, published in 1973 to an almost unanimous chorus of hostile comment and removed from print as quickly as propriety allowed, has long since achieved the whispered celebrity which Orwell ascribed to the fictional Emmanuel Goldstein’s The Theory of Oligarchical Collectivism. Older American conservatives regard it as the ultimate compendium of sexual heresy, a book which shamelessly flies in the face of each and every tenet of feminist orthodoxy. But Sexual Suicide has been more talked about than read in recent years, and there are many younger conservatives who have no idea that George Gilder was once chiefly known not as an advocate of entrepreneurial capitalism but as an opponent of feminism.

Not long ago, suspecting that the time was ripe to circulate his thesis once again, Gilder approached several publishers about bringing out a new edition of Sexual Suicide. The idea made sense. What publisher would pass up the chance to reissue a fabulously controversial book by the author of the best-selling Wealth and Poverty? But it turned out not to be so simple as all that. According to Gilder, “protests from feminist editors” caused every New York publishing house he approached to turn down his proposal. Perhaps some unwritten chronicle of the intellectual history of the present decade will contain a footnote recording the fact that George Gilder had to go to an obscure publishing house in Louisiana in order to find a taker for Men and Marriage, his “revised and expanded” edition of Sexual Suicide. Certainly nothing could be more characteristic of the current climate of opinion than the manifest unwillingness of feminist intellectuals to give Gilder even the semblance of a hearing.

Gilder’s book, it turns out, is every bit as heretical as rumor long has claimed. His extensive revisions will only serve to heighten the righteous outrage that Men and Marriage will evoke in any feminist who bothers to read it. And one can hardly blame the feminists, given their initiating assumptions, for wanting to suppress a book which advances in all seriousness the supreme heresy: that a woman’s place is in the home.

This may sound like a reductio ad absurdum of what reason insists must surely be a more elaborate position. But George Gilder’s thesis can nonetheless be reduced without too much violence to this bald statement. The complexities of Men and Marriage lie not in the author’s thesis but in the reasoning behind it.

For Gilder, “the differences between the sexes are the single most important fact of human society.” Two of these differences are central to his argument: male aggression and female childbearing. Primitive man, Gilder explains, discharged his inborn aggressive tendencies through hunting. When agricultural societies began to develop, ritual behavior replaced hunting as a means of dealing with aggression. But the capitalist revolution provided men with a new and superior structure of motivation: the nuclear family. As Gilder writes:

The crucial process of civilization is the subordination of male sexual impulses and biology to the long-term horizons of female sexuality. . . . In creating civilization, women transform male lust into love; channel male wanderlust into jobs, homes, and families; link men to specific children; rear children into citizens; change hunters into fathers; divert male will to power into a drive to create. Women conceive the future that men tend to flee; they feed the children that men ignore.

Gilder sees marriage as an institution which civilizes men by making them fathers. Monogamy and the nuclear family canalize male aggression and prevent a society from adopting the “unmarried male pattern” of behavior.

Men and societies that abandon these institutions do so, Gilder warns, at their peril. Our own society, by encouraging women to shake off their traditional roles as mothers and housewives, is weakening the nuclear family and unleashing the ominous forces of male aggression. The results, Gilder believes, have been all too predictable: divorce, homosexuality, ghetto crime, rising illegitimacy among the poor, declining birth rates among the middle class.

Men and Marriage places the blame for these apocalyptic developments squarely on the women’s movement and the “ideology of sexual liberalism,” which Gilder sees as a species of Marxism. (“The men’s role that feminists seek is not the real role of men but the male role of the Marxist dream.”) The only alternative to the “sexual suicide” of Western civilization, he contends, is a return to a society in which traditional sex roles are accepted as both proper and innate, where most men are providers and most women nurturers.

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Though to present Gilder’s arguments so briefly may be to oversimplify them, their distinctive flavor is easy enough to convey. Always a romanticizer, Gilder has reached new heights in this line in the fourteen years since Sexual Suicide was first published. Dreadful purple patches soil nearly every page of Men and Marriage (“And then arises the fire that purges and changes him as it consumes his own death. His children . . . they will remember. It is the only hope”). Gilder is never far away, one feels, from something very much like hysteria. And his politics have also hardened noticeably since 1973. Allying himself unhesitatingly with the “so-called reactionaries” of the fundamentalist Right, Gilder embraces their ideological diversity with startling enthusiasm:

The idea that America might find renewal from a melange of movements of evangelical women, wetbacks, Dartmouth Review militants, South Asian engineers, Bible thumpers, boat people, Moonies, Mormons, Cuban refugees, fundamentalist college deans, Amway soap pushers, science wonks, creationists, Korean fruit peddlers, acned computer freaks, and other unstylish folk seems incomprehensible to many observers who do not understand that an open capitalist society is always saved by the last among its citizens perpetually becoming first.

Needless to say, this is not the customary language of serious intellectual discourse. What Gilder has written is less a treatise aimed at persuading the undecided than a tract designed to reinforce the committed. Men and Marriage is full of references to the ideology of “sexual liberalism.” Can there be any doubt that Gilder’s goal has been to construct a comparable ideology of sexual conservatism? One notes with interest that Gilder’s first chapter, “The Princess and the Barbarian,” is literally cast in the form of a myth. The whole of Men and Marriage, in fact, reduces to a myth, a poetic vision of masculinity and femininity as idiosyncratic and unscientific as Das Kapital or The Interpretatation of Dreams.

What is frustrating about the approach is that the insights on which Gilder’s sexual myth is built are genuinely compelling. Time and again one encounters striking passages that are rooted in cool observation rather than in some fantastic construct of a fevered imagination. When Gilder analyzes the way in which black masculinity is undermined by the welfare system, or suggests that male homosexuals are promiscuous largely because they lack a female check on the natural promiscuity of males, one immediately recognizes an original mind at work. Like its predecessors Visible Man and Wealth and Poverty, Men and Marriage is in its best moments a valuable, stimulating, and persuasive book.

But it is nonetheless far from being a systematic analysis of human sexuality or even a systematic defense of the nuclear family. And there are more than a few passages that lead one to suspect that, his gushing admiration of women notwithstanding, Gilder’s true notion of their place in civilized society is motivated by something akin to misogyny (“Jeane Kirkpatrick, a rather obscure professor promoted to UN ambassador and national eminence by the Reagan administration, began whining about sexism and discrimination when that same administration failed to put her in charge of U.S. national-security policy”). Compared with a serious discussion of conservative sexual ideology like, say, Roger Scruton’s recent Sexual Desire, Men and Marriage begins to look in places suspiciously like the work of a crank.

The impression is an unfortunate one. George Gilder is no crank, and had he tempered his rhetoric and written Men and Marriage with the skeptical reader firmly in mind, he might well have given us the Losing Ground of the sexual revolution. But Gilder has insisted instead on preaching only to the converted, and so for all the good his steamy jeremiad will do, he might just as well have written about the decadence of atonal music as about the dangers of feminism.

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