Gender discourse has become stupid. I do not mean controversial, or incendiary, or even wrong, though it manages all three on a good day. I mean stupid in the technical sense, as a failure of the intellect to perform its basic office, which is to notice that the world is more complicated than one’s theory of it. The conversation is now carried on at a pitch of abstraction that would have been laughed out of any seminar or conference room at any point before roughly 1990, and it is sustained by combatants who appear to believe that millions of strangers, whom they will never meet, are fundamentally knowable by the team jersey they were issued at birth.
The spectacle has the curious feature that its two warring camps, who cannot be in a room together without calling for the other’s excommunication, are in fact engaged in the same enterprise. Both insist that the category does the moral work. Both regard the opposition as so foundationally corrupt that engagement is pointless. And both have arrived, by opposite routes, at the same terminus, which is the decision to stop looking at the people the whole argument is supposedly about.
Start with the feminists. Not the moderate kind you meet at dinner parties. The serious writers, widely read, whose arguments are quoted on social media every day and taught in women’s studies departments as canon.
I mean people like Andrea Dworkin, who in her 1987 book Intercourse, argued that heterosexual sex cannot be disentangled from male domination, that the act itself is marked by occupation, that a woman cannot meaningfully consent inside a system built to extract her consent. Or Amia Srinivasan, whose book The Right to Sex became a minor sensation in 2021, arguing that who we find attractive is political, that the patterns of desire in any society are shaped by power, and that the erotic preferences of men are, in aggregate, one of the mechanisms by which women are kept in place.
These arguments are not on the fringes. They are the water the daughters were baptized in and the air the sons learned to hold their breath against, taught on every liberal arts campus from Wesleyan to Sarah Lawrence, by women who had learned them from women who had learned them in their own turn, recited now with the unembarrassed fluency of a catechism, in seminar rooms where the tuition runs to eighty thousand a year and the central discovery of the semester is that the patriarchy has, once again, been found to be responsible.
There is a woman on X, and I know her although we have never met, who posts at three in the morning about her ex-husband. She does not say it is about her ex-husband. She says it is about capitalism, or about the male gaze, or about a study from the University of Michigan which has found, to nobody’s surprise but her own, that men are slightly worse than previously believed. The thread runs to 15 posts. By the eighth she has mentioned a specific brand of running shoe. By the eleventh, a specific restaurant in Cambridge. By the thirtieth, you could, if you were curious and had an afternoon free, reconstruct the entire marriage and file for divorce on her behalf.
I follow perhaps fourteen of these women. I have told myself, on several occasions, that I am going to unfollow them, and then one of them will post something like men will literally start a land war in Asia before going to therapy, and I will think, well, not this one, this one is different, this one is funny, and I will keep her, the way a man keeps a houseplant he has no business owning, out of a vague sense that letting it die would say something unflattering about him.
And then at two in the morning she will post a thread explaining that to be reasonable itself is a tool of patriarchal suppression, and I will be alone in a quiet house, reading by the light of my phone about how men are, once again, the problem, and wondering, with some seriousness, whether I am.
Then there is Andrew Wilson, the Christian populist who recently sat down with Konstantin Kisin on Triggernometry. Wilson says out loud what a growing constituency now believes, a constituency one encounters with increasing frequency at weddings, where a groomsman you last saw at a fraternity formal in 2010 will corner you by the bar to explain, with the patient condescension of a man who has recently completed a podcast, that the decline of Western civilization began the moment women were permitted to open their own checking accounts.
Women should not defer their childbearing years for college, because their biological window is narrow and college ruins them for marriage. Women should not vote, or should vote as part of a household, which in practice means their husbands vote for them. The draft applies to men, not women, and until that changes, women have not earned the franchise. Rights do not exist; they are social constructions maintained by force, and since women cannot wield force at scale, they are always appealing to men’s benevolence anyway. Feminism, to Wilson, is a century-long error, and the correction is a return to the stakeholder democracy America had at its founding, when the head of a household cast one vote for everyone under his roof.
Wilson’s argument is coherent in its own way, sure. Grant his premises and the conclusions follow. The premises are that morality is grounded in God, that Christian ethics produce the best outcomes, and that force decides everything in the end. The rest is just engineering.
What Wilson shares with far left feminists like Dworkin, despite every surface disagreement, is the treatment of men and women as classes whose behavior is explained by their biology or their social function. He would be offended by the comparison, though he clearly should not be. The operation is identical. A particular man or a particular woman is a stand-in for a role the ideology has assigned in advance. The individual is a data point in a case the theorist has already decided.
But here is an author you’ll seldom hear interviewed on podcasts. The psychologist Andrew Solomon has spent a career writing against this exact move.
He wrote that identity has a vertical dimension, the traits we inherit from our parents, and a horizontal dimension, the traits we discover only by finding others like us. A deaf child born to hearing parents is their child and also something the parents cannot fully comprehend without effort. The parents’ job is to love what the child actually is, not what they expected, and to resist the temptation to dissolve the child into a category.
He would tell them you’ve written well, and that much of it was true. Men’s power has disfigured the lives of women. You had seen that plain, and set it down, and the seeing was not the error. But you have built a theory in which good men cannot appear. You have built a theory in which the father of a disabled child, sitting up through the fourth night in a row to keep her from hurting herself, is functionally indistinguishable from a rapist because both are men. Your theory has no room for love that crosses the category you made central. And a theory that will not house love is not a theory at all, but an inventory taken in an empty house, and the inventory of an empty house, however precise, tells you nothing of the family that once dwelt there.
And to Wilson I would say something harder.
You want to return women to the household because you believe it produces flourishing. You say this with the confidence of a man who has never had to watch the plan come apart in his hands.
I am a father. And my son, like every son, is not what anyone expected, because no child ever is. The plan does not survive him. The plan was never going to survive him. And I sit up some nights, in a house that is quieter than I ever thought a house of mine would be, and I think about him, and about his mother, and about the family we were going to be and the family we turned out to be instead, and I understand something I could not have understood at twenty, which is that flourishing is not the correct alignment of bodies to roles. Flourishing is the willingness of a parent to love a child who does not match the plan, and of a partner to love a partner whose life does not fit the template, and of a man, finally, to love himself as the thing he is and not the thing he was supposed to have become.
Your system explains every family difficulty as someone failing to fit their role. It has no account of the harder case, which is the role failing to fit the person. That case is real, and common, and it is the case in which love is actually tested. Your theology is silent there, because silence is all it has. It was built to enforce the template, not to meet the person who cannot live inside it.
The moral work, on both sides of this polarized debate, is designed to avoid the work of looking. Looking at the particular woman, the particular man, the particular marriage after the cameras are off and the categories have been dissolved by fatigue and time. Both of you offer a way to render verdicts on people they have never met, as if the categories did all the work. The categories do not do the work. Love does, attention does, the daily choice to take seriously the person you have been given.
This is why the gender discourse is stupid, and why it is worse than stupid. It is an evasion, and the people conducting it would be embarrassed, I think, if they let themselves name what they were evading. They are evading the sight of one another. There was a time when a person’s church and a person’s marriage and a person’s town did the quiet work of requiring that sight, often clumsily and sometimes cruelly, but requiring it. That time has passed. We ended it ourselves, in installments, and for reasons that seemed sufficient. What rose in the vacancy is judgement, sold in bulk by the category and bought by audiences who have been relieved, at last, of the burden of looking at anyone in particular.
Men and women are not interchangeable, and I have never wanted them to be. The difference between them is one of the great gifts of being human, and the places where that difference meets and holds and generates something neither could have made alone are among the places I have been most moved in my life.
The category into which a person was born is the beginning of their story, never the end of it. Each soul carries inside it a history no other soul has lived, a grief no other soul has carried in the same shape, a capacity for love that was waiting for a particular person and will recognize that person when it finds them. To love anyone truly is to learn this history, slowly, and to be changed by the learning. There is no shortcut. There has never been a shortcut. And there will never be a theory, of the left or the right, that can do this work for us.
Because the work is the point, and the work is what makes us, in the end, worth loving in return.
