THE PRINCESS AND THE BARBARIAN

Masculinity vs. Civilisation

Geoff Dench was a British social scientist with a special interest in the lives of working-class men. Because he arrived at unfashionable conclusions, his work is neglected. Many of his books are out of print or difficult to find, but his widow has kindly sent me copies of them.

He argued that patriarchy ‘guarantees that men will be fitted in the society.’ As he explained in Transforming Men,

The case against feminism is male frailty, fecklessness and capacity for sheer obstructiveness and, as a consequence of this, that men need not equal but additional rewards in the public realm, to compensate for their inevitably secondary place in the private domain, and as an incentive to submit to community discipline and to throw themselves into reciprocity. (p. 239)

Geoff Dench, 1940-2018

To understand these concepts of community discipline and reciprocity, however, we first need an overview of George Gilder’s Men and Marriage (1986), which Dench pointed to as a strong influence on his own work. Dench lamented that Gilder ‘had little impact on academic work’ overall, and this book, too, is now out of print.

According to Dench, ‘the kernel of Gilder’s case’ is that the family integrates men into the community. By contrast, as Gilder said, ‘a man oriented towards his next fix, lay, day at the race or drinking session with the boys’ is not ‘durably tied to the social order’.

Gilder illustrated this memorably in his parable of ‘The Princess and the Barbarian’. A princess, answering ‘the call of the wild,’ wandered into a nearby forest, and a barbarian who lived there saw her: ‘The luminous night and the woman alone, the shape and the shadows, reached in beyond his bearded face and bristling chest and touched his sinuous heart.’

When the princess, refusing to go back to his cave, told him he had to abandon his ways to be with her, ‘the idea of a different life frightened and repelled him. He was a nomadic predator, born to run in the forest and prey on the weak.’ The king, too, disliked the prospect of their relationship, ‘but the queen replied with a smile that he too had been something of a barbarian in his day and he had to confess that this was true.’

And the king agreed that ‘the barbarian was certainly a refreshing change from the unctuous courtiers who had previously pursued the princess.’ So the barbarian and the princess married, becoming king and queen themselves and having a daughter. Like her mother, she also ‘hearkened to the call of the wild.’

But to their wealthy kingdom they invited men who ‘told of seductive new ideas’ — men who ‘chilled the king and queen with tales of the death of God and the eclipse of law, and excited them with accounts of the joys of libertine sex.’ And so, when the daughter in turn met a barbarian in the forest — after a brief walk ‘discussing the flaws of the king and the oppressive rules within the walls’ — she slept with him in his cave on the first night.

And then ‘a king arrived from the progressive country of the wise men’ visited the father of the princess. He was the ‘most charming and cosmopolitan man the princess had ever seen’. He had his queen ‘had “drifted apart,” he said, and his marriage “was no longer a growthful experience.”’ The princess accepted his offer of marriage, never returning to the barbarian waiting for her in the forest.

In revenge, the heartbroken barbarian, no longer needing to civilise himself, attacked the two nations, and ‘the mood of license fostered by the wise men induced many young men to join the barbarian in the woods’. Eventually, ‘the nation fell into ruin and the forest became a jungle, ruled by barbarians, where no princess ever dared to tread.’

This parable illustrates Gilder’s account of the relationship between men and women, especially his core claim that ‘the crucial process of civilization is the subordination of male sexual impulses and biology to the long-term horizons of female sexuality.’ Without women and children, men remain barbarians.

Because sex is something women have that men want, women are the ‘life force in our society and our lives’. Although they don’t control ‘the economy of the marketplace’, they control ‘the economy of eros.’ And so ‘what happens in the inner realm of women finally shapes what happens on our social surfaces, determining the level of happiness, energy, creativity, morality, and solidarity in the nation.’

This is why — echoing Darwin’s ‘choosy female’ and ‘competitive male’ — Gilder notes that ‘in every human society the man has to bring something to the woman.’ The man ‘has to perform a service or give a gift.’ But the problem now is that ‘the man all too often comes to the woman seeking the very affirmation that he needs to have already if he is to win her.’

Gilder approvingly quotes the anthropologist Margaret Mead: ’the central problem of every society is to define appropriate roles for the men.’ The male sex drive, then, is ‘the vital variable in civilization.’ And ‘the desire of men to claim their children thus emerged as the crucial impulse of civilized life. It is chiefly in the nuclear household that the man’s connection to his children becomes central. He is the key provider.’

But ‘it is the sexual constitution, not the legal one, that is decisive in subduing the aggressions of young men.’ This is because ‘in a world where women do not say no, the man is never forced to settle down and make serious choices.’ If, however, ‘he finds work that affirms his manhood and a girl who demands that his sexuality succumb to hers, he is likely to become a valuable and constructive citizen.’

So ‘in a society where monogamy rules—in which successful older men cannot easily leave their wives to marry again—young women exercise their power chiefly to tame the barbarians, to induce young single men to support them and their children in marriage.’ And this is why ‘the removal of restrictions on sexual activity does not bring equality and community’.

The reason is that if marriages become more open, they become ‘open not only for the partners to get out, but also the powerful to get in.’ In the parable, the wealthy old king turned serial monogamy into polygyny, destabilising the social order by leaving the barbarian without a woman. Thus ‘a breakdown in the sexual order will bring social ills and injustices far more grievous than the usual inequalities of money and power.’

This is because sexual revolution ultimately liberates more men than women because ‘larger numbers of men than women will command two or more exclusive partners.’ And so, ostensibly ‘released from the cages of sexual repression, the rising numbers of single men are the male victims of the breakdown of monogamy.’

Marriage matters to men. ‘In general, compared to others in the population, the single man is poor and neurotic. He is disposed to criminality, drugs, and violence. He is irresponsible about his debts, alcoholic, accident-prone, and susceptible to disease. Unless he can marry, he is often destined to a troubled and abbreviated life.’

It is the life of the barbarian — men going their own way. A spurious masculine thrill is available to ‘the rapist, the addict impotent, and the playboy,’ but ultimately ‘homosexuality is merely the most vivid and dramatic manifestation of the breakdown of monogamy—an extreme expression of the sexuality of single men.’ Gay cruising is the epitome of pickup.

Thus ‘in any disintegrating society, the family is reduced to the lowest terms of mother and child,’ and Gilder points to the ghetto ‘as the exemplary crisis of our society.’ The black man was the canary in the coal mine. The ghetto shows that ‘without a strong religious culture a secular bureaucracy, with its rationalizing ethic, erodes the very foundations of family life and thus creates the very moral chaos it ostensibly combats.’

In contrast to the emphasis on autonomy in liberalism, ‘in families, men and women routinely make long term commitments and sacrifices that are inexplicable and indefensible within the compass of secular hedonist values. Modern society, no less than any previous civilization, rests on the accumulated moral and spiritual capital embodied in the rock of ages.’

But now children are brought up in ‘a society where sex is continuously advertised and propagandized’. Yet ‘one aspect of sex is drastically downplayed, however, and that is the most important, fundamental, and sexually differentiated part—procreation.’ And this is ultimately a contempt for womanhood because ‘the advocates of sexual integration…seem ready to stop at virtually nothing…not even, so it seems, the ultimate male arena of military combat.’

It has been recognised by all human societies until now that ‘the youthful years of women, far more than of men, are precious and irreplaceable.’ Hence ‘all civilized societies train their men to protect and defend women.’ And Gilder notes that, ‘above all, the arguments advanced for expanding the warrior role of women are as pleasantly devoid as Disneyland of any vulgar mention of sex . . . or war.’

There is no greater female privilege than not being conscripted, and there is no greater horror for a man than having to kill a woman or see female bodies — the soft skin and the gentle curves of the breast and hips — dismembered.

Not only the battlefield but the job market, too, suffers when flooded with women. Gilder notes ‘the substantial drop in employment and rise in unemployment among young men, particularly young blacks, which has also paralleled female entry into the work force.’ This is bad because ‘family breakdown and demoralization can occur with frightening suddenness when government policy destroys the role of the male provider in the family.’

In a stark warning to anyone dreaming of a Brave New World, Gilder warns that ‘the alternative to traditional family roles is not a unisex family; it is sexual suicide.’ Why? ‘The ultimate source of cooperation, community, productivity, and equality in every society is the nuclear family that the humanist vision would erode or destroy.’

Accordingly, Gilder quotes I Ching: ‘the family…is the native soil on which performance of moral duty is made easy through natural affection so that within a small circle a basis of moral practice is created, and then is widened to include human relationships in general.’ And since only women can integrate men into the family, ‘the fact is that there is no way that women can escape their supreme responsibilities in civilized society without endangering civilization itself.’ Hear ye, hear ye.

Warning against an attempt to replace these ‘supreme responsibilities’ with artificial reproduction, Gilder notes that ‘Norman Mailer was thus most profound when he defined the movement of women’s liberation as the fifth column of the technocracy.’ And this is because, as C. S. Lewis warned, ‘man’s conquest of nature, if the dreams of the scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can there be any simple increase in power on man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.’

Ultimately, for Gilder, ‘if we break the tie between sexual intercourse and procreation, destroy the childhood memory of the nurturing and omnipotent mother, banish the mystique of the breasts and the womb and of the female curves and softnesses, we could remove as well much of the special attraction of heterosexual love.’ And hence ‘the alternative to the system of men and marriage is usually the system of men and misogyny.’

The single man, then, ‘is caught on a reef and the tide is running out.’ Who will remember him? What will his legacy be? Only ‘the womb and breasts bear a message of immortality.’ Thus ‘most achievement in the world…reflects the force of family’ and ‘the society as a whole depends on family connections to succeed’. Indeed, ‘parents are the ultimate entrepreneurs.’

Dench’s reading of Gilder convinced him that ‘patriarchal exaggeration of men’s importance obscures the deeper power of women’ and led him to formulate his own framework for the sexes using the story of The Frog Prince, to be explained in part II.

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