2,339 words
Mary Eberstadt
Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics
West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2019
Mary Tedeschi Eberstadt is a onetime speechwriter for George Schultz, author of several books, sometime fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute, and currently senior fellow at something called the Faith & Reason Institute. Eberstadt is apparently Catholic, or at least moves among a group of largely Catholic conservatives, the sort of pundits who write for such non-denominational venues as the First Things website, National Review, and Quillette. Earmarks of such “conservative” writing usually include a hand-wringing despair about lack of religion in public life, dissolution of the traditional family structure, and the ongoing explosion of perverse and transgressive behavior, particularly in matters of sex and gender.
All these issues are of concern to Mary Eberstadt. And like most conservatives of her stripe, she writes in circumlocutory fashion, generally shying away from any analysis that directly names the problem, at least when that problem is one of race or ethnicity.
Primal Screams is an excellent title for this book, because it tries to analyze the culture of temper tantrums and general misbehavior in today’s society, particularly among today’s youth and millennials. “Primal Yawps” might have been more precise (with a nod to Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” in Leaves of Grass), since what we’re really talking about here is the irrational, knee-jerk expression of inchoate emotions.
Eberstadt touches on some of the same issues that Heather Mac Donald does in The Diversity Delusion [1]: the de-platforming of non-Leftist intellectuals and gadflies when they attempt to speak at universities (famously, these include Charles Murray, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Mac Donald herself); falsified campus-rape accusations; and the media manipulation of sexual topics through such movements as #MeToo.
Both Eberstadt and Mac Donald blame these trends on something called “identity politics,” but they can’t really define that nebulous phrase. They use it mainly as a catchall for stuff they don’t like. I would argue that identity politics are merely a byproduct of our Tantrum Society, which has its real origin in our culture of self-indulgence, permissiveness, and our fearful and false cult of “tolerance.” If you challenge any of these things, their defenders will automatically invoke an argument about somebody’s victim status or special needs.
And that’s where the “identity” business comes in: it’s just a pretext, an excuse used in lieu of argument. If a mad, feral, “homeless man” misbehaves in public and you complain, you might be accused of being “ableist,” because you’re failing to respect the crazy bum’s disability. If someone who likes to dress up as a giant opossum demands we all use the “pronouns” xie, xir, or xey when speaking about our furry friend, and we laugh and refuse to, we may well be damned as sexist bigots, or worse. (Something that actually happened to a friend of mine on Discord and Twitter: the very quintessence of identity-politics foolishness.) Such things go on because we tolerate them, and we feel forced to tolerate them because a victim status is being claimed for the mad derelict and the opossum “furry” of uncertain gender.
Eberstadt proposes that identity politics come out of the social dissolution of recent decades: put simply, the breakdown of the family. There are many aspects to this dissolution, and she counts off the more obvious ones. Illegitimacy is widespread, and single-motherhood is enshrined as a righteous thing. Families are smaller, often broken; children often have no siblings, or at least none of the opposite sex. Millennials and younger people have little ease or social experience with the opposite sex. This leads to such things as the “incel” phenomenon of lonely young men who indulge in online gaming and pornography, complain of being involuntary celibates, and seethe with hostility towards their female peers. (It is a measure of Eberstadt’s remoteness from the subject that “thot” and “white sharia” appear nowhere in the book.)
As a suggestion of how family breakdown leads to alienation and hostile behavior, Eberstadt cites some 1950s monkey studies by the psychologist Harry Harlow:
[Monkeys] deprived of tactile comfort and also raised in isolation from other monkeys developed additional behavioral aberrations, often severe, from which they never recovered. . . They were overly aggressive with their playmates, and later in life they remained unable to form normal attachments. They were, in fact, socially inept — a decision that extended down into their most basic biological behaviors.
. . .Even monkeys raised in cages where they could see and smell other monkeys, but were deprived of touching them, developed “autistic-like syndrome.” (p. 75)
Is this what the rise of Asperger’s cases is all about, I wonder? Are they just like monkeys who didn’t learn to play well with others when they were babies? Eberstadt only implies that. But the story is a cute illustration of what might result when children suffer from family dysfunction and social isolation. (And now when I look at the book’s title I can’t get the image of a screaming monkey out of my head. Primal Screams indeed!)
After discussing damaged families and autistic monkeys, Eberstadt segues uncomfortably into a talk about the #MeToo movement. She wants to make the argument that this trend — of young and middle-aged women coming forth to say they were sexually used and abused by men in positions of power — is a product of the same social alienation. To me, this is a bridge too far, and utterly silly.
Men behaving badly, as many noted at the time [October 2017], isn’t exactly viral news. But a great many men taking for granted the sexual availability of women, in one profession after another: that is new. (p. 76)
Oh please. When Eberstadt says “new” she doesn’t mean post-1900. She means the last thirty years or so. Apparently, she thinks Harvey Weinstein was a product of the late 20th century, and there were no Weinsteins in Hollywood with their casting couches — or on Broadway, or in Berlin — some 90 or 100 years ago.
You Can buy F. Roger Devlin’s Sexual Utopia in Power here
It makes for a nice, pat argument, possibly persuasive to people who have little grasp of modern social history. But it’s shallow, it’s strained, and it shows once again that Eberstadt is very far removed from her subject matter. She does not seem to know anyone who was involved in a #MeToo-type scandal, nor does she investigate the political background and context of the movement itself. Describing itself as “nationwide movement against sexual harassment and assault,” #MeToo was entirely a media-manufactured trend, supported if not actually spearheaded by the Left-wing, Soros-funded Media Matters for America. [2]
Most of the initial accusations were old news. The most famous of them, involving Ashley Judd and Harvey Weinstein, was about encounters that happened over twenty years ago. The real reason #MeToo popped up suddenly in 2017 was to attack President Trump. #MeToo was there to remind us, over and over, that Donald Trump been quite a Jack-the-Lad in his younger days, the sort of guy who apparently once said (in a dubious videotape, spliced and released just before the 2016 election), “grab ’em by the pussy.” It’s no coincidence that 2017 brought us both #MeToo and the pink Pussy Hat.
In the end, of course, #MeToo roped in so many notable Weinsteins and Epsteins that it was easy to forget that the original, oblique target was Donald Trump. However, the public was reminded of this fact in mid-2018, when certain interests attempted to derail the Brett Kavanaugh nomination to the Supreme Court by spinning racy fiction about adolescent hijinks.
Eberstadt surely realizes all this, but she has a tenuous argument to make, so she treats the #MeToo movement as something genuine and new, with profound significance for society:
Reading the grislier details of the scandals, some wondered aloud, What’s wrong with these men? Don’t they have mothers, sisters, and other women in their lives? How could they act this way. . . ? The answer is that. . . many men lack exactly such textured, long-running, socially informative, nonsexual experiences of the opposite sex — just as many women lack them too. (p. 77)
I said “bridge too far” — but this is beyond that. It’s special pleading, getting the Harvey Weinsteins off the hook by implying they’re young men whose behavior is due to social isolation and too much internet porn and vidya games. If there’s one person who never needed to indulge much in online porn, it’s Harvey Weinstein. All the pretty polly he ever wanted was there for the taking, in real-life and 3D. He had no lack of interaction with the opposite sex, in or out of bed. He was, innately and compulsively, a sexual predator, doing what came naturally.
Eberstadt’s speculations on the #MeToo accusers are equally vacuous. She supposes that the women got themselves into trouble because they just didn’t know any better. They were like young women who walk through bad neighborhoods at night and get mugged and raped, because they lack common sense.
Many women seem not to have been taught the most basic protective lessons — like not entering a boss’s hotel room at night. In fact, so socially vulnerable are these victims that they did not even know to stand up for themselves — until an international movement gave them permission to do so. They engaged in mimetic victimhood. (p. 80)
Goodness, how naïve. No, actually these women were taking advantage of a situation that they thought would be advantageous, and in many cases, they were right, just like 19th-century French courtesans or 20th-century starlets on the casting couch. If they didn’t complain, “stand up for themselves” later on, it was because they knew what sort of retaliation might ensue.
In the case of Ashley Judd, who did complain and say no, she lost out on a major role in Lord of the Rings because Harvey Weinstein bad-mouthed her to director Peter Jackson.
This is a slim book, most of it a long essay full of Eberstadt’s impressions gained from newspaper articles, some tendentious arguments, and a few obvious errors that any fact-checker could have caught. For example, in her Introduction, she suggests that the white nationalist movements of recent years are themselves a strange outgrowth of “identity politics.” This would be an interesting theme to develop, but she can’t or won’t do that because it’s a subject she knows little about. She simply dismisses such movements as “frightening examples of racism.” She cites the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, but gets the date wrong, and apparently has no idea that the August 12, 2017 rally never took place, as it was canceled when the city revoked its permit. She vaguely recalls that “one woman was killed and dozens of others were injured in the ensuing riot” but doesn’t know or say that those rioters were not “white nationalists” but Antifa and other Leftists.
Obviously, she’s just writing off the top of her head. This is too bad, because the Introduction is the best part of her extended essay. It summarizes her core argument, which is about the “massive, radical, and largely unacknowledged communal dislocations” that have occurred over the past two generations. She calls this “The Great Scattering: the unprecedented familial dispersion, now sixty-plus years in the making with no end in sight.” This is a mystical, visionary notion, like something out of William Blake. Or it would be, if we could nail it down with some facts and visuals.
* * *
To fill out this slight volume, the publishers have engaged a few solons to expand upon Mary Eberstadt’s inspirational text. They are Rod Dreher, Mark Lilla, and Peter Thiel.
Dreher is appreciative and apocalyptic and thanks Eberstadt for having cited his book The Benedict Option (2017). His view of the future is much darker than Eberhardt’s and he literally sees us at the cusp of a new Dark Age, where if anything is to be saved, it will be through Faith and the Family.
Lilla, a self-described “liberal” political scientist, warmly accepts Eberstadt’s explanation of identity politics, agreeing that identity politics (whatever they may be) result from “the atomization and fragility of family life today.” But he rejects Eberstadt’s theory that this atomization is a byproduct of the sexual revolution. He regards both phenomena, along with identity politics, as “actually effects of larger, long-term historical forces. . . One effect didn’t cause the others; consider[ed] in historical perspective, they all happened simultaneously.” (I tend to agree with Lilla, although we’re both begging the question of what these “historical forces” are.)
Thiel’s critique is the least abstruse, and reads like a column in the Financial Times. That’s because his perspective is almost entirely an economic one. The strength of the family, in Thiel’s eyes, derives in great part from the financial conditions of the surrounding society and the prosperity of the family itself. Family formation requires some income buoyancy for the near term, and a sense of expansive viability for the future.
Thiel has his own notion of what identity politics are all about. For him, they’re the same thing as the “Diversity” fad:
Identity politics itself functions as a cheap substitute for economic progress. . . Adding “diverse” directors to corporate boards, “diverse” directors to film crews, and “diverse” undergraduates to elite campuses. . . is cheap. It is also easier, and less threatening to incumbent elites, than structural reform of a stagnant economy that left the middle class behind long ago. (p. 114)
After all the foregoing murk, this summary from Peter Thiel is like a shaft of sunlight breaking through a cave. It doesn’t speak directly to Eberstadt’s concerns, but I rather doubt Thiel cares to understand them.
If you want to support our work, please send us a donation by going to our Entropy page and selecting “send paid chat.” Entropy allows you to donate any amount from $3 and up. All comments will be read and discussed in the next episode of Counter-Currents Radio, which airs every Friday.
Notes
[1] Heather Mac Donald, The Diversity Delusion (New York: St. Martin’s Press), 2018.
[2] As an example, see the Media Matters page here. MMFA has repeatedly connected #MeToo and themes of sexual assault to discussion of Donald Trump.
12 Comments
‘Tedeschi’ is a well known Sephardic Jewish name. Eberstadt of course could be Ashkenazi.
I was thinking along the same lines. The cause of everything Eberstadt seems to want to talk about is going to seem a great mystery if you do not want to look at (a) the take-over of major American institutions by vindictive Jews, culminating in (b) the creation of a new anti-White, anti-male Constitution in the form of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, (c) implemented by Jewish judges and the magic of ‘precedent’. When the cause is unknown, the effect(s) will always appear spontaneous and unmotivated.
@Peoples puppy: I’m wary about people’s stated denominational or ancestral allegiance, particularly if they seem to be cagey about it. In Mary Eberstadt’s case, the Tedeschi does seem to be an Italian or Tyrolean name, meaning (of all things) “German.” Meanwhile her husband (grandson of Ogden Nash) comes from an old white-shoe Wall Street family, and is not, to the best of my knowledge, Jewish.
My puzzlement with Mary is that she is so transparently deceitful. She went to Cornell and was a Telluride Scholar; she’s been a fellow of the Hoover Institute. Why then is her writing so gaseous and unclear? It did not begin with this book; she’s written several. She reminds me of an undergraduate filling out a blue book with an essay, trying to sound smart, but never saying anything of substance, or even anything you can remember.
My guess is that there’s a little carve-out in the sanctioned media for people who can pretend to be churchy; and smart Mary has hitched aboard that gravy train. And so she cranks out books and essays, year after year, burbling about the decline of “faith” and “family,” but never really saying anything we can use.
For other examples of this nonsense-patter, look at David and Nancy French, or Cathy Young, or every third article that gets posted at the Federalist or Quillette.
That does not mean that all “Tedeschi” are Jewish (eg, Alfred Rosenberg – NOT a Jew). I have encountered Mary (not a common Jewish name, at least for the last 2000 or so years) Eberstadt’s writing before, and dimly recalled her billing herself as a Catholic writer. A quick Google search confirms my impression. Of course, she could be a convert (or her family might have been centuries ago; it is scary to me how many European-Americans – that is, European immigrants to America – I have known who were Catholic but told me that their families had originally been Jewish … like I’m an inadvertent “magnet” or something for such types … ). But I think she does strongly identify with the Catholic Church.
As to the hubby, however, I am starting to be suspicious. I thought “Eberstadt” was German. I have read a number of his writings, too, and he has always seemed neoconnish to me (a bad sign re chosenism). He is also someone who scrupulously avoids race, even as he often discusses population decline issues (how that fact should be read is itself debatable). He is descended from Ogden Nash (NOT a Jew). OTOH, his other grandfather was a noted financier. But the biggest ‘tell’ is his picture online. He looks exactly like a middle brother between Jerry Seinfeld and David Brooks. And unlike the wife, I can’t find via a cursory Google search any evidence that he is Christian.
So I am guessing that he is a Jew, and she is a genuine Catholic descended from Jewish conversos back in the “old country”.
Interesting.
A relative of mine has a friend who has dark skin in a country known for being very pale. Recently they had an intimate conversation where she disclosed that her family knew they were originally ‘from Spain’. I explained to my relative that this means that they are Sephardic Jews. This particular friend often gets stopped at parties with people interested to know if she is Jewish. She looks particularly Jewish. Even her voice sounds Jewish and it is a regular occurance for Jews to wander up to her and automatically assume she is one of them despite her being raised catholic.
I am interested in your experiences with this phenomenon. I myself have several
Non-Jewish remarkably Jewish looking friends.
I’ve known people of the following ancestries, each of whom claimed to have Jewish blood, even though several were practicing Catholics or other Christians, as had been their ancestors as far back as they had known (ie, parents and grandparents): Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, Hungarian, Greek, German, and Russian. I know, it’s weird how many European immigrants (or their first generation American-born children) I’ve known whom I’ve later found out were ethnically Jewish despite being religiously Christian (or at least raised Christian, in a couple of cases who had lapsed in their faith).
I knew one very, very Catholic girl (at one point she’d thought about becoming a nun; ended up having a large family {with a total Anglo-Saxon-type white American dude} probably because of the Church’s prohibition on birth control), 100% Portuguese-American, who was completely Jewish-Catholic on both sides. Strange how this pious Catholic family nevertheless maintained awareness of the fact of its very remote Jewish ancestry.
I’ve been suspected of being Jewish myself, which always annoys (though also a bit worries) me, as I do not look at all Jewish (I’m very Anglo-Nordic), and of course I was raised Christian. No one can recall any Jewishness in our family on either side. Nor am I from the East Coast. One Jewess once told me she thought I might be Chosen due to my intellectuality (a classic Chosenite “humblebrag” instance). Someday, when I get some free time and useless cash, I think I’ll get a DNA ancestry analysis, just to verify what I am.
Of course, even if I should prove to have some Chosen in me, I will still identify 100% European. The interesting question, though, for a naturalistic/biologistic movement like ours, is what to do with people who look white, act white, believe themselves to be white, and fight for the white, but who turn out to have some non-European in them. There has to be some cut-off, of course (we don’t want any “Desiree’s Baby” scenarios in the Ethnostate), but where, precisely, should it be? That might be a good topic for an essay and discussion here at CC.
Interesting thank you.
A good friend of mine in school was the most Jewish looking man you had ever seen and his surname came from a village in the foothills of Portugal where many Jews had settled after escaping from Spain.
Remember that if you do a DNA test that only Ashkenazi DNA can be detected not european Sephardic because Spanish Jews never went through a population bottleneck. At most there might be some markers from the middle east.
I look at it as Whites deserve thier own gene pool and they deserve who gets to be in it. Your typical Afrikaner apparently has about 10 percent nonwhite ancestry. This is just one of many examples.
Interesting question.
Thiel’s quote goes into a major factor of why “woke capital” has become such a big trend. It serves a smokescreen to deflect leftist attention from corporate greed and nasty labor practices.
This article can be condensed to:
Jewish men are predatory sexual perverts. The gentile women they victimized had to go along to have a career. The blame lies with the Jews. Period, end of story.
Call me a simp if you will. I don’t shill for Jewish men.
Yes and no. Yes re the predatory behavior of too many of the self-chosen when confronted with shiksa opportunities (though some of the women allegedly harassed were themselves Jews). No, however, in trying to pretend these often smarmy career-chasers are somehow above prostituting themselves to advance their careers. After all, haven’t women been doing that since the beginning of time? #MeToo is another feminist power tactic. I shed no tears for the world’s Weinsteins, but let’s not fool ourselves into believing this particular cause in any way advances the resurrection of the West.
Margot Metroland,
Thank you for this review. I had been thinking about buying this book, seeing it advertised several times in FIRST THINGS, but now I think I’ll pass.
Eberstadt’s blaming identity politics on the sexual revolution (which I think was very detrimental to white well-being – but that’s a separate topic) is ludicrous. I have not read the much discussed recent Caldwell book (Age of Entitlement), though I have read reviews of it, here and elsewhere. He seems to hit that particular nail squarely on the head. “IDpol” is a product of the unconstitutional “civil rights” revolution of totalitarian Negro/nonwhite racial integration. IDpol was originally simply black racial nationalism, albeit with a twist differentiating that particular racial nationalism from other ethnonationalisms in history. That ‘twist’ concerned the method of advancing black racio-national interests, which was almost unprecedented historically (but not quite: elements were clearly present among white anti-slavery abolitionists in the 19th century), but made perfect sense given the environment within which it was expressing itself.
Traditionally, an ethnonationalist movement focused on acquiring the instrumentalities of physical force (assuming ethnonational group formation had already occurred, and ethnonational consciousness among that group already existed). These instrumentalities could take the form of either traditional militaries, or small arms for use in terrorist operations, assuming the ethnonational group lacked the ability to form a full-scale military. The goal of both military force and terrorist tactics. however, is the same: to achieve ethnonational goals via the literal or threatened imposition of physical power.
The ‘twist’ of the Civil Rights (black nationalist) Movement was that they would never, in any remotely foreseeable future, be able to advance themselves via force, either military or terrorist (that blacks have indeed advanced their group power to some extent via street criminal mayhem is more a result of their genetically-inscribed racial temperament than a conceptualized and consciously implemented ethnonational tactic), and thus had to pursue some other strategy. What they, or their (((pushers or handlers))), devised was brilliant. They would hit the white man where he was racially weakest; to wit, in his newly confused (post-WW2) morality. They would “play the victim”. They would weaponize this weird white (and esp Nordic) racial defect known as “white guilt” (ie, this bizarre evolutionary maladaptation unique to whites which causes a confused but substantial portion of our race not only to embrace pathological and group-self-destructive xenophilia, but to see moral virtue in a politics of denunciation, even if objectively mendacious, practiced against their own people) so as to extract wealth and special privilege – particularly at the expense of future generations of whites.
The Civil Rights Negroes were the original victimological IDpol scamsters. They developed an ethnonationalist politics built around blaming gullible (evolutionarily defective) white liberals for their problems. They convinced the liberals that their unequal status and much-exhibited “social pathologies” and associated socio-economic failures were the results of “racial prejudice”, and later, “the legacy of past injustices” (never, of course, of their own agency, their shiftless and/or wicked behaviors). All of this continues to this day, and will continue forever, or until such time as enough whites develop their own ethnonationalist consciousness and commitment, or at least return to a more accurate understanding of justice and guilt, and put an end to the racial ‘huxtering’.
Beyond the blacks, IDpol proliferated over time like the Covid virus, as other groups developed their own senses of victimological consciousness, and concurrently saw that, the liberals having abdicated all reason and justice in the face of weaponized guilt, they, too, could get in on the scam, illegitimately gaining wealth or privilege at the expense of others (ultimately, straight white men, today’s one genuine legally persecuted, or victim, group).
IOWs, IDpol is all about group powermongering, using the Negro Rights Revolution as the original template. It is very little due to sexual depravity, broken homes, no-fault divorce, online porn, or other objectively deleterious but politically irrelevant trends in contemporary American life.
If one accepts the dictum that the basis of political thought is the ability to distinguish friend from enemy, then all politics are really identity politics. ‘Grievance politics’ is more accurate, and denotes a particular tactic (moral condemnation of alleged power structure while demanding concessions from and special treatment by that structure) which is inimical with nationalism, and of which nationalists are clearly innocent.