Feminism, a triumph of biological illogic over reproductive realities

Those poor, deluded German CDU demonstrators who last week denounced their party – with their winsome SHAME ON YOU placards – for agreeing to AfD demands to cut immigration speak for their well-meaning class all over Europe. Yes, they probably also agree with “a woman’s right to choose”, and that women should have full and rewarding careers, just like men. 

That’s the nonsense that results when an entire civilisation goes on a sun-holiday away from reality and then stays on the beaches. Paradoxically, the most articulate exponent of careerism for women, Ursula von der Leyen, is innocent of the existential heresy that is cursing the West: she is a mother of seven.  But she is exceptional in every sense. Women’s fecundity-strike is bringing about the strange death of Liberal Europe. Population decline requires immigrants to service Europe’s economy and top up pension funds. This in turn is causing acute anxieties amongst native populations from Galway to the Baltic, and Narvik to the Aegean. These anxieties are called “racist” by those not suffering from them, such as those lovely CDU demonstrators. But strongly disapproving of social phenomena and calling them bad names doesn’t make them go away. Only children think they do.

The intellectual victory of feminism over the past fifty years has been a triumph of biological illogic over reproductive realities.  The fundamental heresy is the belief (now amounting to an unassailable dogma that is as central to modern values as the Resurrection of Christ was to traditional Christianity) that women’s primary role in the world is not biological. This systematic and civilisational denial of a verifiable and irrefutable fact is behind the demographic collapse of the western world. It might well also be the cause of so many previously non-existent or extremely rare behavioural diseases, such as eating disorders, obesity, allergies, asthma, mental illness and suicide, which in toto amount to an epidemic. No scientific enquiry into such an assertion is possible, not least because this would be denounced as reactionary, bigoted, chauvinistic, patriarchal, misogynistic and all those other adjectives that, like “racist”, serve as a firewall against truth-discovery. So too does the abusive fervour that feminists invariably unleash on critics of their implacable dogmas. In their time, communists did much the same.

Women’s evolutionary place in society has been historically defined by her ability to produce, feed and protect babies. This is not incidental to her being. It is central to it. The womb is why women are women. Deny that defining truth, and you soon end up denying what makes your society what it is and makes it possible: the woman’s womb. France without French wombs soon ceases to be France, as France to its horror has discovered, for it has become a characterless, sterilised, hamburger-eating nightmare, with chronic labour-shortage everywhere. Italy, likewise, though perhaps without the hamburgers. Germany is a gothic tragedy, not alleviated by the importation of millions of Arabs, who will no doubt add some fascinating racial and cultural dimensions to its demographic crisis over the next twenty years.

Europe is not unique. North American women are similarly denying their biologic duty. Civilisational calamity awaits both continents, as it does China and Japan. The only continent untouched by the heresy that women are put on this earth to have careers is Africa, but since it has so many other problems, existential catastrophe is probably coming its way regardless. 

The Draghi report into Europe’s technological collapse shone a terrifying torch into an economic engine that is simply not working. Yet even the concept of this thing “Europe” is a quintessentially Bruxellois conceit. Virtually nobody outside the deranged magnetic field generated in the European capital believes in it. Ursula von der Leyen’s recent unveiling of a roadmap towards the revitalisation of the EU’s economy, even when the skilled population of the region is falling off a demographic cliff, makes Mao’s Great Leap Forward seem like Henry Ford’s Model T assembly line. Moreover, her prioritising of the Green agenda represents a classic feminisation of targets. The Chinese certainly see a market for “green” goods in the gullible west, but they are doing virtually nothing to decarbonise their own economy. Both they and the Indians are forging the next stages of their industrial revolutions using energy from coal-burning power-stations. Meanwhile in Britain, the certifiable lunatic-utopian Ed Miliband is taking over there his insane Marxist father left off, promising to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent by 2035.

This is all part of the widespread mental illness of evidence-denial that is central to Europe’s plight. Displacement activities – such as legalising homosexual marriages, which by definition cannot produce babies – serve as an emotional and psychiatric balm for Europe’s well-meaning, feelgood elites, such as those lovely CDU-demonstrators. So long as the state – which means the countries they live in, not the fictional entity of the EU that so deludes the Bruxelleois – satisfies their liberal, pseudo-tolerant urges, all is well. 

None of these nice people would agree that a woman’s fundamental duty is to have babies. But less nice people know there is no way around this truth, any more than we can deny the centrality of gravity. Yet over much of the world, truth-denial has become the obligatory intellectual and social template. Indeed, the requisition of female labour into the workforce has created an economic tyranny without ever being formally endorsed by any government. Two-incomes are now needed to service family mortgages, meaning that married women must work rather than have babies. The outcome?  Few modern families even reach the minimum number of children – 2.1 – needed to ensure demographic stasis. Most European societies are lucky to achieve birth-rates of 1.6. 

Child-rearing is exhausting, and often excruciatingly boring. Contrary to the stereotype that western societies have long cherished, women as a species are probably not genetically programmed to be more caring. The shrill and vocal enthusiasm amongst women’s groups for full-term abortions – morally and practically little different from infanticide – kills that notion as conclusively as the abortionists’ beheading-shears ends a baby’s life. Much of what we had assumed to have been innate about a woman’s appetite for motherhood was probably due to intense acculturation. When the political culture and economic necessity have steered women away from reproduction, a remarkable number – perhaps a clear majority – will not then freely return to what they see as an unfair imposition on half the human race. This process has been facilitated by the naked hypocrisy of feminist groups, which seek the preferential treatment of society’s officer class such as the law and merchant banking, while disavowing the helot-class that cleans sewerage pipes or lays ice-cold breeze blocks in midwinter.

A woman’s biological lot is clearly not fair; nor was the first day on the Somme or the miner pickaxe-toiling at the coalface, inhaling methane. Life isn’t fair, and no philosopher’s wisdom can soften that brutal truth. The protection of the species was the reason for the lifeboat-lore of women and children first. Men and their boundless seed could easily be replaced: the young and the womb that had a mere quarter of century of monthly fecundity could not. Replacing that honourable lore came the exquisitely hypocritical lifeboat-feminism of the 21st century: equality until sacrifice is demanded, and then once again, it is women to be protected, as in Ukraine today.  

This is self-evidently not a workable system in even the medium term never mind in the four-generational cycle of a century. If the start-point of our current madness was 1970, and if we continue on this existential doom-loop, by 2070, there will barely be a functional Caucasian Christian society in the world. Where there is evidence of vitality, that will be probably be because much of the work – including reproduction – is being done by immigrants. This process will rapidly see the replacement of one ethnic group by another, as happened in 19th century North America, or the permanent institutionalisation of ethnic conflict, as in Fiji or Malaysia. Either way, unless Europe abandons the existential heresies of feminism, within a generation or so it will simply become a demographic and cultural extension of Africa. Not much time left.

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.