Kate Marland: The free market cannot fix the gender wars it helped create

Restoring societal equilibrium requires moving beyond shortcuts and instant gratification, in favour of a meaningful, long-term vision.

(Veronica Foster, known as “The Bren Gun Girl,” May 1941. Courtesy: National Film Board of Canada/Library and Archives Canada. MIKAN 3195801.)

It’s justifiable to search for a scapegoat in the gender wars. In times of conflict, it can be tempting to veer towards total war in our quest for an identifiable and solvable cause of our fertility and marriage rate crisis. But we can only write so many think-pieces on how liberal feminism has destroyed the West or how the manosphere has poisoned the well for men.

As with so much of the discourse on the right, we seem to have gotten quite good at ruminating over these problems and somewhat accurately diagnosing some causes. While our right-wing ecosystem has been a willing bystander—and even champion at times—of the decay of our ancient moral, sexual, and social norms, generally speaking we are starting to have real conversations about the impact of decades of cultural drift.

We have reached a general consensus on things like the importance of a two-parent household and the negative impact of ‘girlboss’ culture, porn, marrying late, and the quest for endless optimisation. But beyond entering some Noah’s Ark-styled time machine where we return to the 1950s, what is the solution?

In so much of this discourse, are we simply applying band-aid solutions to the real cancer that has taken root in our nation? We’ve championed an understanding of what it means to be human that has put us on the fast-track to a life as lonely cogs in a wage-earning, tax-paying machine. In our modern age, we have unprecedented access to every gadget, pair of shoes, meal, cocktail, exotic vacation and at the same time are feeling more meaningless and less grounded than ever.

The force untethering us from each other is not an insufficient Canada Child Benefit or even too many women in the workforce. It’s a culture centred around market worship that is leading to crashing marriage and fertility rates. Anna Khachiyan (of Red Scare fame) pointed this out on Twitter:

“Basically the problem with our society isn’t even ‘women’ or ‘phones’, it’s that the built-in short-term perks and amenities created by general affluence make it so that no one is willing or able to iterate past their immediate whims and imagine what their life will be in the future or acknowledge that they too are subject to aging or consider what this will look like at scale. Affordability is a huge factor, of course, but partly a self-reinforcing one.”

“Women” and “phones”, and even affordability are consequences of the domination of market worship culture, but not the ends in themselves.

A few weeks ago, on stage at the Canada Strong and Free Network Ottawa conference, moderator John Weissenberger rattled off a series of alarming statistics on the state of the union for young people, including the growing divide between young men and women, increased dislike of young men by young women, and decline in interest in bearing children. Mr. Weissenberger posed the question to me: what should we do about this? And how can we, as conservatives advocating for a full court press on culture, do something to get us off the path of doom and gloom?

My response (video here): what did we expect was to happen? Why are we surprised that this was the result of the uprooting of an entire generation?

Our society has evolved in such a way that a gravitational force is pulling us towards self-actualisation, instead of building families and communities. Instead of feeling rooted, grounded, and part of something, we are profoundly unmoored. Paul Kingsnorth discusses this phenomenon in his book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity.

In the book, Kingsnorth discusses the importance of roots and the need for a sense of belonging to something that is bigger than us. Without roots, we are open to influence by nefarious forces, easily derailed by the distractions of our modern age. Kingsnorth argues that in our uprooted state, we have made false idols of “economic conquest, unending ‘growth’ built on turning all life into ‘resources’ for human consumption, scientism disguised as objective inquiry, manic forward motion, and the same old quest for perfectibility.”

It’s easy to see the truth in this statement. We took a generation of young people and said to them that their only path was to leave the place they grew up and their families, move to a city centre, go into debt to receive an education, get an email job, and live in a 400 square foot box in the sky. In any free time that remains, we’ve gutted the institutions that historically provided community, like churches, community centres, cultural centres, and instead replaced them with social media, Netflix, and, if you are one of the supposedly more well-adjusted, happy hours and binge drinking with your friends.

We then say to young women that we will orient everything about this society towards getting you into the workforce and keeping you there. If you have a child, which at this point would put you in a shrinking portion of the population, the expectation is that you would put them immediately in daycare so you could return to your corner office.

We have said to a generation of young men that they are valueless misogynists and must sit back to subvert their own interests to that of young women. We’ve removed risk, competition, brotherhood from everyday life, forcing an unnatural homogeneity between the sexes that goes against base instincts and denies basic differences in service of an equality of outcome that increasingly is generating net-negative results.

Restoring equilibrium will require more than pro-natalist policies, efforts to improve men’s mental health, or changing the culture around motherhood. Look to Hungary’s example: efforts to implement pro-natal policies like tax relief for mothers and support for married couples have not had any meaningful impact on fertility rates. Perhaps we can do something unprecedented and craft the exact perfect constellation of policy proposals that would bridge the divide between young men and women and boost our fertility rate to replacement level.

More likely, we need to be having serious conversations about our addiction to the instant gratification and short-term vision that our modern society has fostered and encouraged. In a society where “the world is your oyster” and anything and everything is available at the tip of your fingers, course-correcting is going to be more than a matter of policy. So much of our conservative movement in Canada revolves around the relentless pursuit of progress and GDP-maximising as the ultimate good, so it is no wonder that we have structured our personal lives in similar fashion.

As I said from the stage at the Canada Strong and Free Conference, it’s not a question of what we do about all these liberal young women who hate men. It’s a question about whether relentless worship of optimisation and efficiency at the cost of our historic social, moral, and cultural norms is a path we want to continue down.

Kate Marland is Deputy Editor at Without Diminishment. She presently runs youth outreach for the Canada Strong and Free Network, and formerly oversaw the Montreal Economic Institute’s Liberty and Leadership program. She also worked as a commercial litigator in Ottawa.