Tags
Culture Wars, Documetary, Gender, Identity, Matt Walsh, Politics, Sex, What is a Woman, Women
The film “What is a Woman” begins with Matt Walsh reflecting on gender within his own family. So, it’s appropriate that the film ends on a conversation with his wife. Okay, maybe it would have been more appropriate to go the other way around, but the point is that Walsh’s family bookends the whole performance. This is particularly fitting, because it facilitates one of the central features of the film, namely the consistently personal framing of the inquiry. Walsh isn’t just exploring the topic in general; he consistently frames his questions in terms of his own identity and that of his family.
Walsh wants an objective answer to his question, but he consistently frames his questions in personal terms. He is asking these questions in response to progressive ideas about gender fluidity and the social construction of gender identity. Anyone familiar with Walsh knows that he thinks this is all nonsense, but that doesn’t stop him from framing the issues as if he was personally implicated in the possibilities. It isn’t enough to know what being a woman might mean to someone else; as he frames the issues, Walsh wants to know what it would mean to him and his own family. So, he sets out to answer the question of what is a woman? He asks this question as though his own identity were at issue.
Walsh also seems to assume the answer will be universal, and that it will be normative. He wants to have his is and ought it too. Whatever the nature of women, there is little doubt that Walsh knows what this should mean for both men and women.
One has only to see the color-coded dress of his children to know just how rigid Walsh may be in response to this issue.
Walsh spends the first half of the film interrogating progressives, many of them professionals working in medical and mental health fields, asking them what a woman is. He is never happy with their answers. To be fair, the answers he gets here really are less than impressive, but also to be fair, the answers these people actually use in their daily work are simply non-starters for Walsh. When he asks what a woman is, Walsh is looking for a firm biological answer, but he is talking to people deeply entrenched in the world of social constructivism. He knows these people are not going to give him that kind of answer, and so he skates right past the answers they actually do give him.
It’s frustrating to watch this performance. Many of these people seem to have grown so accustomed to constructivist paradigms that they have no idea how to talk to the Matt Walshes the world. He isn’t helping them, of course. His goal is to make them look foolish. They are less interview subjects than marks who have been conned into a discussion with someone who isn’t really interested in what they have to say. And so we get a battle of the just-so narratives. For Walsh’s marks, gender is a social construction, because it just is; for Walsh it certainly isn’t, because it just ain’t.
One of the themes Walsh hits rather hard in this part of the movie is the problem of circular definitions. Using a word to define itself is a problem; it really is, but that problem keeps popping up here for a reason. The social constructivists Walsh is talking to do not wish to define a woman in biological terms, so they keep talking about socially constructed roles and self-perceptions. This leads to a common refrain; they tell him a woman is someone who “identifies as a woman.” There are variations, to be sure, but all these answers lead back to the same question, what is a woman in the first place? If someone identifies as a woman, then what do they think that identity means? Walsh doesn’t get a good answer from any of those he talks to in the first half of the film, and of course he never wanted good definitions from them in the first place.
By the middle of the film, Walsh has concluded that those he has been talking to have no idea what a woman is, none at all.
Much of the second half of the film is spent talking to critics of trans-gendered identity (and in particular, the medical establishment supporting various treatments and legal accommodations for trans-gendered persons. Those talking to Walsh in this part of the film get to make their own points; they get to define their own concerns and elaborate on them in concrete ways. This part of the series is interesting, at least. How many of the claims made here would hold up to scrutiny is an interesting question, but the issues discussed here are a good deal more substantive. This half of the film would have benefited from a sincere exploration of the reasons for these practices in the first place, but it was of course never Walsh’s goal to help us understand the issues. Having made the progressives look like fools in the first half of his film, the second half is spent making them look positively evil.
Walsh begins to claim some of his victories in the second half of the film. He parrots progressive themes with glee in the face of people who will have none of it, effectively setting them for a slam dunk response. Walsh relishes the chance to affirm biological differences between men and women in this half of the film, and to tell horror stories about the consequences of failure to accept these differences. All of these horrors, stem from the failure of progressives to acknowledge the underlying reality of sex, which Walsh clearly expects to be defined in biological terms.
Nothing less will count as truth to Walsh.
Somewhere near the end, Walsh asks Jordan Peterson what a woman is. Peterson tells him to marry one and find out. So, Walsh goes back home and asks his own wife what a woman is.
She tells him a woman is “an adult human female…”
And I wonder how many who watch this realize that this too is a cicular definition?
As was that of Peterson!
These are the final answer to the question Walsh has been asking throughout his film, but it is no more substantive than those answers he was given in the beginning segments. They are just as circular as the answers he rejected throughout the first half of the film! Peterson’s answer tells him to marry one to find out, which begs the question of who would he need to marry to accomplish this. His wife’s answer assumes we are talking about a female, but that isn’t far off being a woman in the first place. Neither of these answers gets Walsh any closer to a substantive understanding of the issue.
The answers given by Peterson and Walsh’s wife are satisfactory to Walsh, and to his target market, but much of that is a function of context. If the answer given by Walsh’s wife isn’t all that theoretically robust, it is clothed in the confidence of a warm kitchen where two people seem to know exactly how to behave.
In fact, the answer Walsh’s wife gives him is rather constructivist in its own right. She actually tells him that a woman is; “an adult human female, who needs help opening (a jar)”
Walsh and his fans might see in this a story about a biological female who knows who she is and a biological male who knows what he is, but social constructivists would hardly find it surprising to see a middle class American woman cooking for her husband.
…and of course letting her man to do some of the muscle work.
It’s become a commonplace observation that women often get called a ‘bitch’ for doing exactly the same things that earn men a reputation for strong leadership. It’s a good observation. Whatever the mental twists and turns that explain this tendency, there is something about gender that seems to skew perception of assertive behavior, making roughly the same conduct objectionable in women and laudable in men.
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