I recently wrote two articles on Geoff Dench’s work: one explored how George Gilder’s story of the princess and the barbarian influenced him, and the other outlined how he deepened these insights using the fairy tale of the princess and the frog.
Academia largely neglected both men. Belinda Brown, Geoff Dench’s widow, has suffered a similar fate. But in this podcast she shares the ideas that she hasn’t had the opportunity to air elsewhere.
Her work, mostly available on Academic.edu, has some central strands. Overall, “societies which abandon fatherhood and patriarchy,” she says, “simply will not survive.”
She regards patriarchy as a product of female choices:
Women choose mates with a high levels of status and resources.
This makes men compete to attain status and resources. The more they get, the better their access to sex.
Men want power and status to oppress women but to attract them.
Sex is their reward.
Crucially, “by encouraging men to provide them, women pull men into the chains of dependency which lie at the core or any human society.” The princess, as Geoff Dench put, transforms the frog.
Women have numerous biological adaptations to monogamy.
Concealed ovulation
Continuous sexual receptivity
The female orgasm
Discomfort with casual sex
But men, too, become wretched when deprived of contact with their children. And this is also highly evolved. Male provisioning is at the heart of our evolution to homo sapiens, facilitating a longer childhood and larger brain size.
Whereas a mother’s whole focus is on the survival and wellbeing of her own children, the father functions as a “bridge to the outside world”. The mother will cooperate with others if this provides a means for her child’s interests to be fulfilled, but “ultimately she is in competition with other mothers for resources and the interests of the home and family are particularistic.” Yet moving into wider society is necessary for maturity.
Men facilitate this. Men differ from women and from non-human species because they like to fight and compete as a group. They have one foot in the home and the other in the social world.
Fathers ‘are much more likely to take their children on trips and adventures, bicycle rides and so forth, to explore the outside world.’
Fathers focus much more than mothers do on playing, preparing children for work by interacting with objects, people and following rules.
Fathers engage more in ball games and other sports, introducing children to competition.
Fathers encourage more risk taking and rough play, confronting children with failure.
Fathers tend to focus more on solving problems than soothing feelings.
Fathers are less likely to steal the struggle from children. Tie your own laces. Make your own lunch.
Fathers help to knit their children into society. But destroying the patriarchy erodes the role of the father. Feminised education causes falling male attainment in education, and this exerts downward pressure in the employment market, which “undermines the male ability to provide.” But the welfare state substitutes male provisioning, and custodial arrangements give no de facto rights to the father Combined with “the persistent portrayal of men as risks to families”, this reduces parenting to the mother’s role. As fathers lose access to status and resources, families weaken.
This is the Marxist aim of the feminist project. It regarded the family as oppressive and unnatural. Hence feminism focussed unambiguously on the need to destroy the family, as Kate Millet made clear:
“Why are we here today?”
“To make revolution.”
“What kind of revolution?” she replied.
“The Cultural Revolution.”
“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?”
“By destroying the American family!”
“How do we destroy the family?”
“By destroying the American Patriarch.”
“And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?”
“By taking away his power!”
“How do we do that?”
“By destroying monogamy!”
Instead, the state proceeded to take over the provider role. The family is supplanted by the state as a harem of single mothers. (Who’s your daddy now?)
But the irony is that “male providers now constitute the real difference between the lives of ordinary women and those of the privileged few.”
The provider role, then, wasn’t so much about creating dependency among women as it was about motivating men and getting the most out of them.
You can find more of Belinda’s work here.
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