IDS is obviously full of shit, but if anything has destroyed the family unit, it is his political party and other parties of the neoliberal right.
Should we return to the old patriarchal order? No. But what is to replace it? A world of permanent singletons and eternal bachelors? Pornography? Hook-ups? Female objectification. In destroying the family, the feminist-left unwittingly opened up sexual relations to the market and aligned female empowerment with careerism and money.
There's a great recent book called The True Life by the philosopher Alain Badiou. He examines the current predicament of the young - their choice between ‘the vortex of consumerism or reactive forms of traditionalism’ - in the context of the gender revolutions. A communist, Badiou at first advances a conservative-leftist defence of a lost established order. The disintegration of the old collectivist ideologies of the Soviet Union and the social democratic state has brought about a condition of total social fragmentation and moral collapse. The representative 21st century individual is an atomised, alienated, disorientated, morally disengaged nomad, attempting to navigate a world in which market forces have colonised every domain of human existence. Manhood was a fundamental pillar of the twentieth century, democratic state order, asserts Badiou. Throughout Europe, males were initiated into state citizenship by universal military conscription. A young male conscript was a participant in something greater than himself for which he might be required to give his life – defence of the liberal order against tyranny. Once his military service was completed he would enter lifelong employment, most likely in a state organisation, and marriage. Now, both professional and industrial state structures have been dismantled, the nuclear family has disintegrated, and nationalised armies have become privatised militias serving corporate interests. And with no clear path to adult statehood remaining, the male has been abandoned to a perpetual adolescence. He is frivolous, emotionally immature, directionless, irrational, criminal even. In the absence of the old initiatic organisations, he might be drawn into their malign replacements: the inner-city gangs, the Jihadist cults, the far-right subcultures.
However, the girl’s condition is the reverse. She is already an adult as a girl, encouraged to succeed in everything she does, to hasten to the position of dominant adult vacated by the male. She must embody the ‘tough, mature, serious, legal, and punitive version of competitive, consumerist individualism’ yet adapt to the fluidity of global markets. In this she is succeeding. Not only do women outnumber men in universities, but so-called ‘female skills’ of communication and social intelligence are in prized by the post-industrial, service sector economy. Since 1970 the number of men leaving the labour force has doubled, while the trend for women has been the reverse.
This new female domination is a false feminism, asserts Badiou - a projection of neoliberalism. ‘There is’, he writes, ‘a whole bourgeois, authoritarian brand of feminism. It is not calling for a different world to be created but for the world as it is to be turned over to woman in power.'
However, the Badiou is thrilled by the possibility of a genuine female emancipation beyond the logic of capitalism. “what do creative politics, poetry, music, cinema, mathematics, or love become’ he asks, ‘—what does philosophy become—once the word ‘woman’ resonates in them in tune with the power of symbol-creating equality?”
The book ends awaiting “the girl, as yet unknown but who is coming” proclaiming to “the sky empty of God” in the words of Paul Valery: “Beautiful heaven, true heaven, look how I change!”
In all, now the old moral and ideological certainties of the patriarchal-state militarist age have collapsed. While this could be a good thing, paving the way for a more enlightened gender culture, there is a danger that feminism will be wholly co-opted by consumerism and/or selfish careerism, and patriarchy will reassert itself in toxic new forms.
Maybe the messianic 'new girl' will emerge blinking in the light of a new dawn, but I am not optimistic.