To all those who think we're going to insult women and try to force them back into the kitchen or whatever, you're in the wrong place. And likewise, to all those who think we’re going to show the slightest sign of conciliation toward feminism and its derivative doctrines, you are also in the wrong place. You get it; today, we are talking about feminism and deconstruction. These terms are, to me, highly absurd, and I will spend the next hour trying to demonstrate that, and we'll start immediately by clarifying the title of this talk. " Ending Feminism"—it’s intentionally blunt, and I know very well that this title will trigger reactions before I even begin: either excitement—which is why I included this warning—or deep disgust and revolt. "Oh my god, he wants to take away our hard-won rights, " and so on. And that will be the unique aspect of my endeavor today, as I am just as at odds with this new vision of virility and masculinity that the media has abusively labeled " masculinism." It's actually absurd. There is a masculine reaction that, I think, was necessary in many respects. Given what men have been hit with lately, with the desire to de-virilize them at all costs and blur the differences between men and women, this reaction is understandable, even if it takes some rather absurd forms. I didn't come here to explain that the " accomplished man" is the one who talks the loudest, makes the most money, sleeps with the most women, and turns his inability to govern his own passions into an outward sign of virility. That is not traditional virility. In fact, this reaction— which, once again, the term " masculinist" should be taken with a grain of salt—is just as pathetic and ridiculous as what we call feminism. Yet, feminism is not ridiculed or presented as something for teenagers having a crisis in their bedroom. You see, it's presented as an extremely noble cause, even though it is extremely destructive. What I have come to defend here is something we hear about quite rarely, when it comes down to it. I have come to defend something much older, much deeper, and in my opinion, much more beautiful. And we are very far from the predatory man. The authentic man is not a predator whose goal is to imprison women and crush the world. Quite the opposite. It is actually much more beautiful. The possibility that femininity and virility actually exist, that both are good, that they are neither identical nor enemies but highly complementary, and that sexual difference is not a humiliation inflicted upon half of humanity nor a mere social construct, but a constitutive dimension of human essence at the very ontological level. And I would especially like to start with something that seems to have become extraordinarily difficult to say . Feminism, as it is doctrinally constituted with its entire foundation —it's a very heterogeneous bloc at times—has no property rights or exclusivity over the defense of women. None. That's why I titled this " Authentically Defending Women." Well, I don't know what title I'll finally use; I'll think about it. But you will see, it is probably one of feminism's greatest cultural successes to have managed to install this equivalence in people's minds. To love women, to respect them, to wish them well, is to be a feminist. Critiquing feminism, therefore, necessarily means having something against women. But why? Why would a family of doctrine that appeared at a precise moment in history —a moment that was very doctrinally unhealthy, moreover, and I believe I have demonstrated this throughout my lectures—have received the moral monopoly on feminine dignity? At what point? Why would we have to accept an entire anthropology of emancipation to consider that a woman should not be humiliated, brutalized, abandoned, or used? Why would we have to subscribe to de Beauvoir, Millett, Delphy, Firestone , or Butler to think that a man who bullies his wife is a coward? That a father who flees his responsibilities is unworthy of his fatherhood? That a seducer who treats women as consumer objects manifests absolutely no masculine greatness? I want to reclaim this ground, to reappropriate it, and once again, I do as I please. I say this at every conference, and it doesn't matter if it bothers anyone. The defense of women is too important to be abandoned. To feminist cretinism, and the defense of men is too important to be abandoned to, quote-unquote, " masculinist" or "virilist" social media junk and vendors of virility-reappropriation workshops. You have the same thing on the feminist side, you know, where chicks start screaming into cushions or I don't know what. Because once again, I would like this conference to do something much more positive than just throwing punches for an hour—and we will be throwing a lot of punches, don't worry. But if, at the end, a woman leaves this lecture with nothing but a list of doctrinal errors committed by feminism or feminists or feminist doctrines, I will have failed my subject; the same goes for men. I want people to leave— that’s my goal for this lecture, anyway—with something rarer: a positive idea of what the human sexes are. Not a list of mandatory functions, not a sociological or anthropological uniform, not an injunction to become a caricature of a traditional woman or man. I would like each of us to be able to look at who we actually are and learn to take responsibility for the sex we have been assigned. And you know this is a Catholic channel, so I will even go further in my phrasing: the sex assigned by God himself. And that is not nothing. So, our subject is absolutely not who is better, man or woman. The very question is absurd, since humanity is split in two between men and women. Which means there is a necessary complementarity to ensure the preservation of the—pardon me—of the species. Nor is it about who has suffered more throughout human history, because that comes up often. Look at men; they went to war. That wasn’t exactly easy, either. Yeah, great. As if we could establish a general ranking of sexual suffering with a spreadsheet. No, my question here is fundamental. How did we arrive at thinking of men and women primarily through rivalry, domination, emancipation, and autonomy, to the point where difference itself ends up becoming suspicious? I won’t develop the social aspects too much here, the fact of pitting women and men against each other to anesthetize social struggle. Obviously, it’s absurd to speak of "woman." There is no such thing as "woman"; there are many women, many social classes, many types of individuals. Obviously, at what point did we move from the perfectly understandable question: "Is this practice fair?" Because it’s normal, what’s happening—that we get beaten , that we can’t file a lawsuit, and so on. To a much more incorrect question: in the end, is every received difference between man and woman potentially oppressive? At what point did we start to think that a real difference necessarily risked producing an illegitimate hierarchy, that a hierarchy necessarily risked producing domination, and that to prevent domination, we ultimately had to neutralize difference as much as possible? And I am going to be precise about the word "feminism," because otherwise we wouldn't be—we wouldn't be rigorous. There is no such thing as "a" feminism, as I told you. There is no homogeneous feminist current that has said exactly the same thing for two centuries. The authors we will encounter sometimes contradict each other violently in this lecture. Some feminists who claim the title want legal equality. Others think in terms of sexual class in an almost Marxist sense of the term. Still others analyze the family as an economic structure. Some, on the contrary, claim a positive feminine difference, and others end up deconstructing the very category of woman. So I’m not going to create an imaginary enemy or lump everyone together. Just as was done with May '68 . There is no "May '68." There are people who think and who contradict one another. But the goal is to bring doctrinal coherence to all of this for our categories of thought. And feminism is not that. That would be far too easy , and above all, it would prevent me from understanding what is truly interesting. How the same logic of emancipation can shift, radicalize, change its object, encounter resistance , and produce its own structural contradictions. We are therefore going to take the authors seriously, as always. And that hurts, because I swear that reading Judith Butler makes you want to go vomit in the bathroom, if I may say so. But never mind, when these authors see something true, we will say so. When the authors in question ask good questions, we will keep them. But then, each time, we will ask: upon what conception of man and woman does this conclusion rest? What conception of the freedom of the body? What conception of nature? What conception of relationships? And that is where I am going to announce very clearly the point of view from which I will speak today. You know it, I always say it, this is not a channel that hides its agenda; I put it in the channel description. I am not going to try to produce a neutral compromise between feminism and Christianity. I am not going to spend an hour and a half explaining that Jesus was secretly a feminist. "Look, he spoke to women." Great, but Jesus was a highly traditional Jew. Or that Saint Paul misunderstood his era, or that the Christian tradition is worth keeping provided we remove everything that bothers the 21st century. No, for me, it is what disturbs Catholic dogma that will be thrown in the trash. You see, I am going to embrace the Christian tradition as a profound anthropological criterion and as the foundation of our civilization. Man and woman are created . They receive a nature they did not invent. Their body is not foreign material that a sovereign consciousness has come to inhabit temporarily. Their sex belongs to their concrete way of being human. Their dignity is equal by definition. Their difference is as real as it is obvious. And this difference is not ordered toward war, but toward communion. And it's not defined just because men have something dangling between their legs. It is much deeper than that. It goes down to fundamental psychology and even goes down to the soul. The soul of man and woman are not the same from a Christian point of view . That is the starting point. So right away, if all this puts you off and for you, I’ve just stepped outside of methodological seriousness because I subscribe to Christian dogma, you can effectively leave the lecture and go look at more anthropological, materialist studies, and so on. Only then will we be able to discuss what it means concretely: specific virtues, vocations, motherhood, fatherhood, authority, chastity, family, and self-gift. But at least the criterion will be stated frankly, and you won’t be able to hold that against me. And I believe that is precisely what is missing from a huge number of contemporary debates. We never discuss things without asking what the thing we are talking about actually is. We discuss women's liberation before even defining what a woman is. We discuss toxic masculinity or whatever before defining healthy masculinity. We discuss social roles without asking if there is something in sexual difference that precedes social roles. We discuss freedom without asking if freedom consists simply of removing constraints or if it possesses a positive purpose. I must refer you to the treatise on liberty. It is exactly as if I told you , we must liberate the horse. OK, but from what? From the chain that prevents it from walking, that's great. From its four legs because they constitute a limitation on its possible movements that it would like to avoid? There, you have a problem. A liberation only makes sense in relation to the nature of what is being liberated. You can remove from a thing what prevents it from being itself. You can also, in the name of liberation, begin to remove what constitutes it. Do you see what I mean? And I think that is where the real battle behind feminism lies. It is much deeper than voting, salary, career, or the distribution of household chores. These questions are not absurd, but they are not the ultimate level that must be reached here. The final level is more dizzying. Does my freedom consist of fulfilling a received nature , or does it consist of gradually diminishing the authority of everything given to me before my own choice? And you can make the link with the lecture on May '68, with the lecture on Nietzsche, and with my lecture on Marxism. Because if you choose the second answer, you will inevitably encounter the body. And the body is a scandal for absolute autonomy. The body doesn't do what you want, right? Try stopping your heart just like that, it's a bit complicated. You'd have to drown yourself in a pool. Well, it's incredibly complicated. Try dilating your pupil while staring at a light source. So, you'd have to take psychotropic drugs and everything. You don't have total control over your body . Sometimes you have spasms, you, well, it's complicated. We didn't choose our bodies. We don't even know why we're this size, or why we look like this. So today, modernism, which is freezing its way toward transhumanism, already starts with the fact that we can change gender, change our face, and so on, you see. But the body has its own determinations. It also makes me vulnerable. It makes me dependent, it places me within a generation. Meaning that, specifically, my head is a male lineage that goes back to the very origins of humanity. So, that's several million years. The body reminds me that I come from someone, I come from my father, and that I can pass on life myself. I will be a father, if God wills it, of course. And among all bodily realities, sexual difference is particularly unbearable to a philosophy that dreams of a subject entirely self-authored. Because it tells me before any decision, you are not all of humanity on your own; you are humanity in a sexed modality. So if I am a woman , there are things I won't be able to do. I would have a very hard time joining the special forces of an army worthy of the name. You see? Because I have an inherent disadvantage for doing pull-ups, for carrying my own weight, for carrying 25 kg bags, and so on, perhaps for operational management or other things. And likewise, if I am a man, well, listen, it might make some people laugh, but I'm sure some are frustrated by it, why not? But I can't carry a child, I can't be pregnant. That's just how it is, it will never change. I can do whatever I want. I've seen some very strange couples wearing fake breasts to nurse babies because there are men who dream of breastfeeding. Well listen, you cannot breastfeed babies naturally because you will actually never be able to produce milk, by definition. And that is why this lecture will not simply be a history of feminism. We will just use this rigorous history so that people truly understand that the issue has been studied and understood like Nietzsche's lecture on modern freedom. It is a lecture on the given, not the data. It will be a lecture on nature and on the way modernity has gradually learned to suspect what precedes choice . It falls within our themes. And that is where authors like Guénon or Girard will become very, very important for our question. Not because they wrote a general theory of feminism that would spare us from reading feminists, no, but because they give us tools to understand certain broader transformations. On one hand, the erasing of qualitative differences in favor of an increasingly uniform conception of the individual. On the other, the rivalry that arises when we no longer know how to think about relationships except in terms of comparison, imitation, and competition. But I won't spoil what is going to happen too much. We are going to, we are going to start now. I just want you to understand the promise of this lecture, or at the very least my undertaking. We are going to try to do two things simultaneously. That is what makes this subject difficult. Destroying a doctrine is not enough. One must make visible what it prevented us from seeing. We will therefore look at how feminism managed to become a general framework for interpreting the relationship between the sexes. How some of its major figures gradually shifted the question from justice to the emancipation from the given, and how this logic can end up making femininity itself difficult to think of positively. But at the same time, we will rebuild. You know that the goal of these lectures is not just to clash, but to offer something in return, and not something from my own little invention. I would not have that pretension, but rather to reconnect France and our civilization to its deep roots regarding what a man is and what a woman is. And we will move past all the absurd caricatures, fundamentally. That is perhaps the paradox that I really want to examine today. What if feminism had ended up, in the name of defending women, making femininity increasingly difficult to accept as a good thing? That is the real question we are going to pose, and we will go back to the beginning to answer all these questions. We will start first of all with reality. Even though I gave a doctrinal disclaimer in my introduction , we don't start with the Bible, we don't start with political theory, we don't start with social demands, we start with the most basic reality in the sense of the periodic table. The human being is a sexually dimorphic species. There you go, period. The human being is a sexually dimorphic species. We do not first encounter neutral human individuals to whom a society would then distribute two costumes and assign genitals, first names, and roles called men and women. We first encounter men and women because the human body itself is organized according to sexual difference. That is how we are made, with a sexual polarity. This difference obviously spans reproductive organs, but it is not limited to them. It concerns embryonic development. It concerns gonads, sex hormones, puberty, secondary sexual characteristics, certain average morphological differences, body composition, and all of this is understood around an extremely simple biological reality. Sexual reproduction automatically assumes two complementary functions within the species. That is a biological fact. One organized around the production of the small gamete, the other around the production of the large gamete. A sterile man obviously does not stop being a man because this function is not currently being fulfilled. A menopausal woman does not stop being a woman because she can no longer conceive. Obviously, we do not define an organism solely by what it manages to do at the moment we look at it, but by the type of bodily organization to which it belongs. The demonstration will be rigorous, so please engage your brains. And yes, there are anomalies of sexual development. That is also a fact that cannot be denied. There are hormonal variations, pathologies, atypical cases , just like everywhere else in biology, because we are, after all, in a rather chaotic world regarding biological development at the level of genetic code degradation and so on. But the existence of an anomaly does not destroy the structure of which it is precisely an anomaly. A child can be born with six fingers. That does not make the number of fingers according to which the human hand is organized indeterminate. You see what I mean? Because we hear this argument a lot. There are people born straddling two sexes, but that does not define a biological norm. This is why we must start here before asking what society does with sexual difference. We must recognize that it did not invent it. But careful, and this is where we must avoid a symmetrical error, precisely. Biology tells us that there exists a man and a woman. It is not enough to tell us what it means to be humanly a man or humanly a woman. We can measure a testosterone level. We will never get the definition of courage in the results of an analysis. We can observe a uterus. We will not read the dignity of motherhood there. We can describe the average muscle power of one sex compared to the other. That will never tell us why physical strength should be used to protect rather than to terrorize. A science can describe a function. It does not, by itself, produce the moral purpose of that function. This is a crucial distinction I must make here, because we are going to reject two opposing reductionisms throughout this development. The first consists of saying everything is socially constructed, therefore it means nothing. And the second, which would consist of saying everything is biological, so a blood test is enough to explain fatherhood, motherhood, love , fidelity, and vocation. Both are extremely poor. The human being is corporeal, but it is a human body. A body inhabited by intelligence, will, relationship, freedom, transcendence, and responsibility. We must therefore move from the biological to the anthropological, and only then can we speak of Revelation with a capital R and what it tells us about this human reality that we did not invent. And that is precisely what Genesis does. It does not create sexual difference by religious decree. It receives a reality from the world and gives it meaning in the order of creation. God created man in his image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. One must hear both affirmations at the same time, because our entire lecture will hinge on this. First affirmation: man and woman belong fully to the same humanity, same origin , same nature, same ultimate vocation, same fundamental dignity before God. Woman is not a secondary humanity, a reproductive appendage, a creature between man and animal. Second affirmation: this equality does not suppress the difference. The text does not say "God created a neutral human being who then manifests itself accidentally in two meaningless forms. It says male and female." That is the first thing that Christian thought can hold together, and that modernity has enormous difficulty holding together. Equality of dignity and deep, real difference. And finally, why do we have so much trouble with this idea? Because we have gradually gotten into the habit of thinking of equality in the form of similarity. If two people have the same value, they should be able to be described in the same terms. If they have different functions, we immediately suspect that one function is superior to the other. If one receives something that the other does not, we are already looking for who dominates whom. But that absolutely does not follow. A difference is not a hierarchy of dignity. And even when there is a hierarchy of function, it does not mechanically imply a hierarchy of personal value. In an orchestra, the conductor does not become ontologically more human than the violinist. In an organism, the heart is not humiliated because it does not think, and the brain is not oppressed because it does not pump blood. I am deliberately using simple analogies because the difficulty has become almost sterile. We have forgotten that one thing can be different from another without being inferior to it. And as soon as we rediscover this obvious fact, many false problems will actually disappear on their own. Man does not need to be a woman to recognize her dignity. A woman certainly does not need to become a successful man to prove she is fully human. The second account of Genesis goes even further because it is not content with just affirming the difference. It shows what it means. I am just making a small, important aside . Does what I am saying here seem obvious to you? But know that in the context of the Bible's writing, we are talking about societies that were very underdeveloped and where women were considered property throughout most of humanity. And the text of Genesis comes along and inscribes woman fully into humanity. You see? In short, in Genesis , the man is alone. He is surrounded by the world. He names the animals. He is already exercising something like intelligence and mastery over creation. But the text tells us suddenly, it is not good for man to be alone. Notice carefully, the man's lack is not solved by more possessions, more territory, more animals, more power, or even by a friend similar to him. It is solved by the appearance of someone who resembles him enough so he can recognize himself in her, but who differs enough from him so she is not simply a double and can pose a challenge to him. In fact, this is bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. That is what the text says. It is a cry of recognition. Finally, someone who belongs to my nature but who is not me. And this gives us a second fundamental idea. The primary meaning of sexual difference in the biblical narrative is not rivalry, it is communion. It is extraordinarily important because a considerable part of modern thought starts from conflict to explain relationship. Who holds power, who works for whom, who sets the standards, who benefits from the institution, who is dominant, who is dominated. These questions can be very relevant in certain situations. Power dynamics and abuses exist. They are everywhere you look. But if you use domination as the fundamental category to understand the relationship between man and woman, you’ve already lost something. You can no longer see otherness as anything but a potential threat. Yet, Genesis offers us the opposite. Otherness makes possible a communion that a being locked within its own identity cannot produce alone. The other is not, first and foremost, someone who steals something from me. They are the one through whom I discover that humanity is greater than my way of embodying it. Man discovers something of the human through woman that he cannot simply deduce from himself. Woman discovers something of the human through man that she does not simply possess within herself in an identical form. And it is precisely because they are different that their union means something. And there comes the fall. And you see that the angle from which I am approaching Genesis here is ultimately not a religious question. It is about how this text teaches us something about the two sexes. And precisely there comes the fall, and there finally comes domination, and we must keep the order of things. Shame, accusation, rupture, disordered desire, fear, the desire to possess the other—these come after the breakdown of the relationship with the divine. That is why, in the Christian view, male predation can never be presented as the normal and moral expression of virility. It is exactly the opposite. It is masculine power turned disordered. And we really must understand this distinction because our era often does something conceptually catastrophic. It observes a corruption of a reality and concludes that the reality itself is suspect. A father becomes tyrannical. Fatherhood is a structure of domination. A husband abuses his authority and beats his wife every night. Masculine authority is oppression. Men use their physical strength against children or weak beings; masculine strength becomes toxicity. But no, the corruption of a power does not tell us that this power was bad. It tells us that it needed to be ordered. If a doctor poisons his patients, you cannot conclude that medicine is bad. You say that a doctor has betrayed the purpose of his vocation. But it is the same thing for masculinity in the Christian tradition. Christianity judges man based on the purpose of his power. So, let’s talk about that virility, precisely because we are faced with two equally mediocre caricatures. The first is that of the macho, the machismo that is very popular in Mexico. The person who believes that virility consists of occupying space, impressing other men, conquering women outside of marriage, and so on, displaying permanent aggression, never showing vulnerability , and turning every relationship into a competition. The second caricature is a reaction to it. Since we have identified this stupidity with so-called toxic masculinity, we eventually no longer know how to define manhood in a positive way. He must simply try to be all trembling, all scrawny, not dangerous, not talk too much, not take up too much space because otherwise he might offend women and, above all, constantly ensure that his masculinity produces no significant difference. I call a guy like that a girl. I say what I think; it’s no big deal. In one case, we have a territorial primate; in the other, a masculinity so erased that it no longer means anything at all. The Christian tradition rejects both. Because the first virtue of a strong man is not to defeat someone, but first of all to govern himself. Aristotle understood this, and Thomas Aquinas incorporates it into a much broader anthropology. Virtue is not the destruction of a power, but its ordering. Courage is not the absence of fear. A man incapable of perceiving danger is not courageous; he is a man who is oblivious. Surely you realize that fear is an evolutionary function when you see a T-Rex in front of you. Now, I am not saying that we lived at the same time as T-Rexes, but you can imagine that primary feeling of fear—it is something very healthy. Let’s say a bear instead. Courage consists, rather, in governing fear to remain firm before a good that deserves to be defended. Temperance is not the disappearance of desire. It is desire that is put back into order. Justice is not powerlessness. It assumes precisely that I am able to take something, yet I choose to give everyone what is due to them. That is the immense thing our era should rediscover within itself. Being self-mastered is more virile than crushing others. A man who does not know how to resist his anger or his sexual urges and hits because he is frustrated is not showing an excess of masculinity. A man who rapes women out of sexual urge has no self-control. He is not only a monster who, for me, would deserve the death penalty by the way, but above all a human piece of trash who has betrayed the calling of his physical strength. Do you see what I mean? This man is governed by his anger, by his impulses, like a 4- year-old child with even greater selfishness, and in cases of rape, he can destroy someone's life because for me, rape is actually a form of murder by definition. That is why I speak of the death penalty. And without going as far as physical coercion in sexuality, a man who cannot contain his sexual desire and considers women as opportunities for consumption—even with their consent, as we see today, people going to nightclubs, sleeping with strangers—that man has nothing virile about him. He is a slave to his genitals. You can surround him with three gyms, a lumberjack beard, and a very nice Lamborghini. He remains a slave, and therefore an extremely weak man. Masculine strength only truly becomes what it is and remains virtuous based on what it serves. Why is a man physically more powerful on average? The Christian question is never very complicated. How is he going to use it? It is, what does this strength command him to do? The traditional answer is almost exactly the opposite of predation. It is protection. Being capable of placing one's own power between danger and those less able to face it. That is why it is so absurd to contrast virility with gentleness, as if gentleness consisted of having no strength. Christian gentleness is a controlled strength. It is not a weakness. Weakness is a sin in certain circumstances. Know this. The trained horse is gentle. Not because it has no power, but because its power does not go in every direction. And the truly virile man, who has therefore trained himself, is exactly that. Someone whose presence makes strength reassuring instead of threatening. And it is also here that we must speak of authority, since the word itself has become almost suspicious. The Christian tradition is not anarchist. It believes in authority , in hierarchy. It believes in order, in fatherhood. It has even spoken very explicitly of a hierarchy and a marital order where the man assumes a specific responsibility, notably with the text of Saint Paul who says, "Wives, be subject to your husbands; and husbands, treat your wives as your own body." So there is an immense subtlety within the text. Authority is not the right to satisfy one's personal will over someone else. That is called tyranny. Authority is the duty to lead a reality toward its good. It therefore possesses a purpose external to the whim of the one who exercises it. And the greater that authority, the greater the duty. That is exactly why the Christian doctrine of male authority can never be used to justify a petty domestic despot . And yet, there are some who use it for that. Because the model given to husbands is not Caesar; it is Christ. And that is where Saint Paul becomes much more dangerous for the man than for the woman, in truth. If we read the text to the end, which few people do. Yes, there is the language of the head. Yes, there is an order. Yes, there are words that greatly offend our contemporary sensibilities. Fine. But we don't care about contemporary sensibility; it will pass like everything else. Let us also read the measure given to husbands. Love your wives as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her. Strange, isn't it? You really want the title of head, and therefore leader? Magnificent. Look at what the head does. It gets down on its knees before its disciples. It washes their feet, it takes blows, it carries the cross, and it dies. Saint John Chrysostom understood this perfectly back in Christian antiquity. You demand of your wife what the text asks of her, so accept what the text asks of you. Love your wife to the point of self-sacrifice. It's more troublesome for men, isn't it? He pushes the image to the extreme. Even if you had to give your life, suffer a thousand times for your wife, and endure everything for her, you still would not have reached the measure of Christ because He did it for strangers. So this isn't exactly the charter for the husband who wants his shoes brought to him because he just discovered Ephesians 5 on the internet, is it? Christian authority is cruciform, or it becomes an imposture. That is why traditional virility can be summed up in a few words much more serious than domination. It is mastery, responsibility, stability, courage, protection, fidelity, transmission, fatherhood, and authority. That's powerful, isn't it? And I would particularly like to insist on stability because we talk about it very little. A man often becomes truly precious when he becomes a point of support, someone whose word means something. That is what I also develop throughout the treatise on ethics. I have a chapter on men and women, and I actually rely more on that for this development. Someone whose presence is not subject to all his moods. Someone who does not disappear as soon as the cost of his actions appears. Someone who accepts that a promise made yesterday limits his freedom today. There is an African proverb that says —and I rededicate this lecture to Burkina Faso and all my friends there. A man is master of his decision, but slave to his given word. And I find it is a very powerful thing to say. A father, in this sense, is not simply a man who has biologically fathered. Any animal can father. Any idiot can get a woman pregnant. Fatherhood begins when a man accepts to take lasting responsibility for the life he helped bring into the world. And that is why Saint Joseph is a much more virile figure than all—again, use huge quotation marks—of these influencers on virility or whatever with their workshops. I swear it makes me laugh so hard. Go check out these virility workshops. So they do these pathetic little military drills. Just join the army, guys, it's easier, you know? Joseph doesn't need to explain that he is—again, use the quotation marks, I'm sorry to use these terms, they are so pathetic. Alpha; he doesn't put himself at the center. He doesn't demand that we admire his authority. He receives a situation that turns all his plans upside down, clearly, because the goal wasn't to have a woman pregnant by someone else. And he stays, he protects , he goes into exile when he must, he works, he ensures a daily presence, he takes upon himself a responsibility for which he is not even, as I told you, biologically the origin. Look closely, his masculine greatness consists precisely in not making himself the center of his own masculinity. Have you seen Saint Joseph's discretion in the Gospel? You know, it was Tariq Ramadan who said to Villiers: Chirac or Jesus? I ask you today: Saint Joseph or Andrew Tate? I've been telling you for 5 years that this guy is an aberration. Now he's in jail. I never slander people, but when we touch on those kinds of sins, I become quite aggressive. The guy used his degenerate money from reality TV to go exploit poor women in Eastern Europe, selling their bodies. He played the 2000 s-style pimp. And honestly, how can you listen to a man who is like that and who talks to you about tradition at the same time? It's pathetic. So I ask the question again: Saint Joseph or Andrew Tate? Saint Joseph makes the safety of Mary and Jesus possible. That is a man. That is why, when people explain to us that traditional virility is supposedly essentially predatory, I want to ask: which tradition are you actually talking about? Because, in the Christian tradition that founded our civilization, the great silent paternal model—you know, the kind that defines a society through its models—is a man who puts all his strength and his life, unto death, at the service of a woman and a child who have been entrusted to him, from whom he didn't even really gain anything in any way whatsoever. Let's move on now to femininity. And here, we must do the exact same work of clearing away, because femininity has been buried under its caricatures. A feminine woman does not necessarily mean a timid, decorative, silent woman who does needlepoint, likes little flowers, and has no political or metaphysical opinions. It does not mean a less rational intelligence either. And why am I telling you this? And why am I telling myself this? Because often I myself, you know, we are old-fashioned men, so we sometimes make remarks that are highly inappropriate, and I apologize for that. But if that is your definition of femininity, what do you do with Joan of Arc, Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Hildegard of Bingen, or a mother capable of keeping a family standing tall during a catastrophe? If that is your definition, it is a bad one. The Christian tradition has never needed to transform women into fragile little things in order to recognize sexual difference. And above all, we must immediately eliminate the stupidity that consists of equating feminine with weakness. Femininity has its own strength. It does not necessarily express itself in the same forms as masculine power. That does not make it any less real. The word I would like to start with here is receptivity. And I know exactly what some will say. Passivity, that’s the problem. Our civilization has become so fascinated by external action, production, mastery , and autonomy. that it imagines receiving must necessarily be inferior to sending. The one who acts gives; the one who receives depends. Therefore, the first would be free and the second would be diminished. That is metaphysically absurd. Everything that exists as a creature begins by receiving. We received existence before we could do anything with it at all. We receive a language before we can speak freely. The intelligence receives reality before it can judge. We receive the love of others before we can respond. That is maternal love. For those lucky enough to have a mother at birth, it’s not something everyone gets. Even truth—we do not manufacture it. We make ourselves capable of receiving it. 2 + 2 does not wait for our will to choose it. To make it simple, I refer you to the treatise on liberty. Therefore, to receive is not to be inferior. Receiving properly requires, on the contrary, great power, an openness stable enough to welcome something that is not oneself, without destroying it or being destroyed by it. And it is here that the female body acquires an extraordinary anthropological significance. I'm not going to draw you a picture. Man is made to send, woman to receive. It is anthropological, it is also biological. I am not reducing the human being to that, obviously. And once again, not because every woman must be biologically a mother to fulfill her being, but because the female body manifests in a particularly clear way this logic of fruitful reception. And so, even a sterile woman is authentically a woman by her very conception. So, I am absolutely not reducing it to that. Do you understand? In generation, a woman receives within herself a life distinct from her own, but she does not receive it as a box receives an object. Her entire organism works for the growth of this life. It nourishes, transforms, protects, and adapts. Pregnancy is precisely the perfect example that destroys the simplistic opposition between activity and reception. Go ask a pregnant woman if it is just being passive and sitting on a table. The woman receives, and by receiving, she becomes extraordinarily active in the service of what is received. She does not manufacture the child as one manufactures an object. She welcomes a life, she makes it grow. That is why the central word of traditional femininity is not passivity , it is fecundity, the ability to receive something and give it more life . And that applies to all aspects of life, not just pregnancy. This principle does not obviously stop at bodily motherhood, as I am telling you. And the Christian tradition proves it better than any contemporary discourse, since one of its most exalted feminine forms is precisely the Blessed Virgin Mary. If a woman were only a reproductive device, the nun would be an anthropological absurdity. A nun, these are women who take vows, like a sister, for example. Yet, she is not at all. She simply demonstrates that feminine fecundity goes beyond mere biological generation. What do you make of the existence of women who take vows of chastity if Christianity reduces a woman to being impregnated? A bunch of ignoramuses. A woman can help a family grow, certainly, but also a community, a work, an intelligence, a wounded person, a spiritual life. She can provide a place where something becomes more of itself. And this obviously applies in a thousand concrete ways. It is not about turning all women into a universal wet nurse. It is about recognizing a symbolic and bodily orientation without reducing it to a mechanical and biological function. Mary becomes absolutely central here because she unites almost everything that modernity has separated. Receptivity and freedom. Humility and power, motherhood and intelligence, obedience and will. We sometimes caricature her "fiat." When you say " fiat," it’s when she says, uh, "let it be done to me according to your word ," as the great model of the woman who submits and asks no questions. But the Gospel tells exactly two things. Mary listens, she questions, and then she consents. And her consent only has meaning because it is fully free. A stone does not consent, an automaton does not consent. A person says yes. The Marian fiat is therefore a sovereignly active reception. She does not produce God. She does not give herself her own vocation. If you think you can give yourself your own vocation , you haven't understood what a vocation or a priesthood is, for information. She receives something that entirely surpasses her, and through her consent, she becomes the one through whom this gift enters history. And this is where Christian thought fundamentally conflicts with a certain modern idea of freedom. And I always come back to it, but repetition is very good for pedagogy. We have gotten into the habit of thinking that I am all the more free the less I depend, the less I receive, the less I owe, and the more I am the author of myself. That is a successful life. The more we love, the more we become dependent on realities we do not control; the more children you have, the less you have your own time. You marry, you voluntarily renounce an infinity of future sexual and emotional possibilities. You give your word, you allow your "self" of yesterday to limit your "self" of tomorrow. You commit yourself to a vocation. You accept that a particular good gives shape to your existence. And yet, no serious person would say that the faithful man is less free than the one who is incapable of promising anything at all. Freedom does not reach its peak when it keeps all possibilities open. It reaches it when it becomes capable of giving itself to the good. That is why dependence itself must be rehabilitated. What I am saying here is a manifesto for dependence, provided it is distinguished from servitude. I depend on others. You do too; you don't stock your own supermarkets, you don't generate your own currency, you aren't even sitting on a chair you made yourself, probably. We are born absolutely dependent. We will likely grow old dependent. We depend on people who grow our food, make our medicine, maintain the networks, teach us, care for us, and above all, any true loving relationship creates a voluntary dependence. If your disappearance means nothing to me, it's because I don't love you very much. And if you say "I am dependent on no one" and your husband or wife could disappear and it does nothing to you, ask yourself some questions. The problem is therefore never dependence in itself. The problem is: what dependence, ordered toward what reciprocal good, according to what justice? Feminism often identifies dependence with domination. The Christian tradition distinguishes between them. A woman financially trapped by a violent husband is in a situation that is not just. A woman who freely chooses to organize part of her life around her family and is materially dependent on a husband who himself depends on her domestic, emotional, and educational work is not automatically oppressed, because one can describe an interdependence. Otherwise, every family becomes an exploitation system simply because no one there is self-sufficient, and thus society itself becomes an exploitation. And here, we arrive at something very important: it is that masculine and feminine virtues are not airtight boxes . It would be foolish to say that courage belongs to the man and gentleness to the woman. Mary possesses a gigantic courage and Joseph an immense gentleness. It would be foolish to say that men think and women feel; some women have been Doctors of the Church and plenty of men have had the emotional intelligence of a kitchen chair. No, the great virtues are human. Prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance. Charity, but they can receive different accents and forms of embodiment within a sexual existence. Maternal strength is not paternal strength in a diminished form. Paternal tenderness is not a failed imitation of maternal tenderness. The same human good can flow through two distinct bodily, relational, and symbolic styles . If I still wanted to summarize two orientations in two sentences, knowing immediately that they do not constitute exhaustive definitions, don't make me say what I haven't said. I would say this: "Authentic virility learns to carry what is heavy.""Authentic femininity learns to make what is received grow." Man must obviously also make things grow and woman must also carry; let's not turn a polarity into a condominium agreement. But look at what these two directions produce when they are ordered. Strength becomes protection, reception becomes fecundity , authority becomes service, dependence becomes communion. Sexuality becomes the possibility of gift. And look also at their corruption. Strength without order becomes domination. Reception without freedom becomes servility. Authority without purpose becomes tyranny. Fruitfulness turned against the other can become emotional possession. And desire, without any form of commitment to purity and chastity, becomes the consumption of the other, like eating a pizza. Ultimately, this is precisely why Christianity can never simply place the man on the side of good and the woman on the side of submission. Or the reverse. Both sexes are in need of conversion. And I said sex, I did not say gender. I am not Anglo-Saxon. And the very act of using the word "gender" already carries an absurd doctrine. Man must be saved from predation, pride, power, fleeing from responsibility, and concupiscence. Because we are men; if there are men listening to me, most likely, you know what masculine concupiscence is, right? Woman must be saved from her own possible corruptions . Manipulation, vanity, possessiveness, emotional instrumentalization, refusal of the gift. We have all fallen. And it is very important for our subject because the radical feminist reading tends precisely to distribute the blame differently. The structure of the problem will be located in the power relationship between two sexual classes . Christianity rejects this simplification. It does not deny that a man can abusively dominate a woman. It affirms something much more universal and much more terrible. The desire for domination runs through the entire human heart. It changes form according to the available power, but it is no one's biological monopoly. And without a doubt, if women had had as much physical power as men, the same abuses would have appeared. And it is also here that complementarity takes on its true meaning. This word is sometimes spoken in such a soft way that it no longer means anything at all. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, each brings their own little touch. That's great, but we don't care. Christian complementarity rests on something much deeper. No sex alone exhausts all the symbolic possibilities of the human. And the difference reminds everyone that they are not self-sufficient. This does not mean that a single person is a half-being. The person of Jesus Christ himself would be enough to make that image absurd, as would all Western monastic life. It means that even the single person exists in a sexed human world. Receives their life from a man and a woman. We can't come from anywhere else, can we? Discovers humanity in a difference they did not produce. Sexual differentiation teaches us something metaphysical. I am not everything. I cannot simultaneously be both poles of generation. I receive from the other something that I cannot be in exactly the same way. And perhaps we are touching here on the true scandal. Sexual difference is a limit. Yes. So what? Since when is a limit an injustice? Being a human being already means not being an angel, not being a horse, not being an oyster, and even not being God. It's terrible. Being French does not mean being simultaneously born into every civilization. Having a body means that you are somewhere and not elsewhere at the same time. Every form, every morphology is a limit. And have you noticed how modernity wants to destroy its limits, but artificially, through a perpetual delirium that leads only to depression and unease? If there is no limit, there is no longer any form. A musical note is beautiful because it has a determined pitch. If it wanted to be all notes simultaneously to avoid any discrimination, we would get noise. Press all the keys on your piano. To exist is to be determined. The question , therefore, is not how to abolish all the determinations that precede me. The authentically human question is rather how to freely fulfill what I have received. And that is where we have finally posed the problem that will allow us to understand feminism. I haven't bypassed my reasoning, I haven't gotten ahead of my reasoning, but what I am going to tell you now had to be recontextualized first in a clear definition of what the Christian tradition is. Do you see what I mean? Because if freedom means accomplishing a good from a received nature, sexual difference can become a vocation. But if freedom means progressively becoming independent of every unchosen determination, then sexual difference will inevitably become suspect. And in fact, why did I lay this stone for you? Because from this stone that founded our civilization—and which had its drifts, mind you—came what follows after. So you cannot understand what came after that without understanding what that "after that" had not understood. Do you understand what I mean? That is where we are. You know what we are going to defend and what we are going to attack. An equal dignity without identity. A sexual difference that begins in the body but is not exhausted by biology. A virility in which strength becomes mastery, responsibility, protection, and sacrifice. A femininity in which reception becomes a freedom, a fecundity, a growth, and a gift. And above all, this immense conviction, incomprehensible to modernity. I can receive something I did not choose without it being an act of violence against my freedom. And now, we are ready to talk about feminism. As I told you, if I took so much time to define all of this and recall what our tradition is, it is so that we have a criterion. We know what we mean by man, by woman, by sexual difference, by virility, by femininity. And we have refused the equation that poisons almost the entire contemporary debate. Difference equals hierarchy, hierarchy equals domination, domination equals oppression. Only now can we look feminism in the face. And I would like to begin by granting it something that might surprise those who expect me to bring out a flamethrower. Defending a woman against an injustice is a noble cause. But this sentence does not at all mean that women have constituted throughout history a class oppressed by men constituted as a dominant class. It is historically absurd. These are two entirely different propositions, and one of feminism's intellectual successes has precisely been to slide one into the other. That a woman may be wronged because she is a woman, that a custom may be bad, that a husband may be unjust, that an institution may need reform—that is certain, assuredly. But to then construct all of human history based on a fundamental political opposition between the two sexes is a huge leap, ladies and gentlemen. A duchess and her servant do not become members of the same social class simply because they are both women. No more than a male servant becomes a partner in domination with the duke he serves simply because they both possess a Y chromosome. Real history is defined by birth, fortune, class, profession, family, religion, war, nation, age, and political power. Feminism would gradually propose reinterpreting an increasing part of this complexity based on an additional category that would sometimes end up claiming to organize all the others: the power dynamic between the sexes. And it is precisely to understand this shift that we must begin with a woman I have no desire to caricature. That is Mary Wollstonecraft. When she publishes A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, her central argument is not that there is no human nature. Everyone must invent their own identity. Her language is that of reason. We were not yet in the absolute delusions we see today; she spoke of virtue, education, and moral responsibility. She notably reproaches a certain type of female education for creating women destined to please rather than rational creatures capable of virtue. She demands that women cultivate their intelligence, that they be able to become true companions to their husbands, that they properly educate their children, and she even demands that chastity and morality cease to be one-way feminine obligations. If a moral rule exists, it applies equally to men. But obviously, she writes in a universe where freedom must precisely allow for understanding duty and the true good, not for sovereignly inventing what is good. And here, we are forced to ask an awkward question for what follows. Where is the problem with that? A woman must develop her intelligence, well yes, of course. A woman must receive an education, certainly. A man must be chaste just as he demands chastity from his wife. Absolutely. A spouse must be able to become a rational interlocutor for her husband rather than a decorative child kept intentionally in ignorance. But obviously, and even notice something fascinating. Wollstonecraft still anchors feminine dignity enormously through notions of virtue, wifehood, motherhood, education, children, duties , and reason. Which will lead to her being criticized by modern feminism. Quite obviously, as you might well suspect. Her feminine ideal does not consist of making motherhood insignificant, nor of neutralizing sexual difference. She thinks that a better-educated woman can precisely become a better wife and a better mother. If men themselves become better husbands and better fathers, QED. In other words, even if I would challenge certain presuppositions already present in her work, we are still very far from the idea that women's emancipation would require the emancipation of the feminine itself. That is what bothers feminists, meaning that a feminine essence exists that is predefined and to which one must conform. But it's the same for us, my good ladies, you know it, we are men, we have to conform to it. It's not easy either, is it? And precisely, many feminists who saw what she contributed say, "Yes, but that's because society just wasn't ready. Finally, to welcome true feminism and all that; in short, all this is extremely important for our demonstration because it allows us to distinguish two things that we constantly confuse. Defending a woman's rational dignity and building feminism as a metaphysics of emancipation are not the same operation. I should clarify, because I forgot to mention it , that Ms. Wollstonecraft lived in the 18th century. So we are talking about proto-proto-feminism, for the record. She is interesting precisely because she prevents us from telling an infantile story where there are, on one side, those who want women to suffer and, on the other, those who want to liberate them. No, the real battle is going to shift elsewhere. What is freedom? What should it liberate from? And what should it lead toward? And that is where we arrive at our good old homegrown figure, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre's partner. Does that tell you her pedigree already? I want us to do her justice before tearing her down. It pains me because her argument is more intelligent than the slogan version we usually hear. When she says, " One is not born a woman, but becomes one. "She isn't naively saying that a newborn has a neutral body and that people decide to give it a uterus. Obviously, on the contrary, she dedicates an entire chapter to biological data, just as we did at the beginning of the lecture. She recognizes that reproductive differences are real, that they constitute an essential element of the feminine situation. What she refuses is that these biological facts are enough to produce a determined human, moral, and social destiny. That holds up in the absolute. It holds up. In her own text, she therefore distinguishes the biological fact from the historical and existential meaning that society has given it. And when she returns to the formula decades later, she explains again that woman in the social and historical sense is not simply a natural given, but the result of a history. So you have proto-Judith Butler here, and Judith Butler too—we won't caricature her excessively—but here, for me, we are almost in psychiatry, but we will get to that. In short, Simone de Beauvoir, let's stay, let's stay home. That is precisely why we must go much deeper than the quote, precisely because the real problem with Beauvoir is not that she supposedly forgot the existence of biology. No, she did not. The problem is the metaphysics through which she interprets the body. And I told you, May '68 and that whole clique of new philosophers lack the metaphysical rigor that the ancestors they criticize had. Beauvoir is an existentialist. She thinks of the human subject through freedom, the project, self-transcendence—what she calls transcendence, which is absolutely not one. And her introduction to the second volume is extraordinarily clear. Existence is fulfilled in projects that open up the future. When transcendence falls back into immanence, into stagnation and submission to data, there is a degradation of existence. And when this situation is imposed, it is oppression. Woman, according to her, is precisely placed in this contradiction. She is a free subject, therefore called like any subject to a transcendence that is not one. I insist once again. But masculine society tends to fix her as the other, as an object, as a being of immanence. I’ll remind you of the difference for those who don’t know. Transcendence is that which is beyond. Immanence is that which is within its own principle. And here, I would like us to stop everything for 30 seconds, if you will allow me, because that is where the whole machine is hidden, actually, and where things go wrong. We can discuss wages, education, and how women should be able to be engineers if they want to , and so on, for three hours. Great. The principle lies elsewhere. Why does transcendence hold this privilege? Why would the project toward the outside, the transformation of the world, and the surpassing of the given be the superior measure of human accomplishment? Why must immanence— the act of remaining, maintaining, preserving, receiving, carrying, and ensuring the continuity of life— appear as stagnation? It’s strange, isn't it? Understand my question clearly. I am not asking if a woman should be locked at home against her will. That would be a diversion. I am asking why a philosophy of freedom has already dealt the cards in such a way that what looks more like conquest, external projection, transformation, and independence is spontaneously given the name of transcendence, while a large part of the realities traditionally associated with the feminine finds itself exposed to the suspicion of immanence. Once again, with the terms transcendence and immanence used by Simone de Beauvoir, for me, it doesn't hold up at all. But anyway, let's take up her terminological category. And de Beauvoir goes very far in this direction when she analyzes reproduction. Her biological chapter does not deny physical facts, as I told you; it sometimes describes them using a vocabulary of alienation that is extremely revealing. In it, woman appears more surrendered to the species through pregnancy and the constraints of reproduction, while man more easily recovers his individuality after the generative act. Well, for us, it takes 10 minutes, you see. Sure, 10 seconds for some, but, uh, for women, it’s 9 months of pregnancy. After that, it gets complicated. Well, yes, the man is useless during all that, obviously. Even further, Beauvoir explains that humanity tears itself away from the simple repetition of life through projects and activity. In her historical reconstruction, man gains prestige precisely because he transforms the world, while motherhood ties woman more closely to her body and to the species. It is strict materialism, ladies and gentlemen. It is, in fact, strict materialism. Simone de Beauvoir defends external activity as superior to internal activity. It is anti-traditional. And frankly, the suspicion must change sides here. We are told that tradition supposedly despised women because it measured them against men. But aren't we precisely measuring women's emancipation according to a strangely masculinized anthropological ideal? What does a human being accomplish? Someone who projects themselves, produces, transforms, conquers the outside world, goes off to fight? Mike Tyson escapes biological servitude; he will be independent. And what becomes embarrassing in this architecture? Well , you have grasped the problem. Exactly what the female body manifests most visibly. Pregnancy, vulnerability, interiority, mutual dependence, the continuity of generations, the fact that a human life can be fulfilled not only by producing something on the outside, but by carrying someone on the inside and fulfilling oneself inwardly. I am not, therefore, accusing de Beauvoir of wanting to make women like just any man; that would be crude. I am saying something more precise. Her existentialist conception of human fulfillment is actually a definition of male fulfillment, unconstrained by the things that weigh upon the female body. What do you expect that to produce in people's minds? Her conception already favors a certain figure of autonomy and transcending the given, and this figure necessarily enters into tension with an anthropology of reception and fecundity . And that is where her famous" One is not born a woman "takes on all its power, because as I told you, we take this phrase out of context and say," But yes, look, you have a uterus, you are a woman. "Yes, but she is not stupid, once again; she knows what that is. What interests her is the transition from the female body to this thing called femininity, and she is going to destroy all traditional femininity. And for me, the trick and the trap is that, in fact, for her, an accomplished woman is a woman who denies this biological reality she describes. Because this biological reality brings enormous constraints upon a woman's life. If you have been pregnant and are listening to this video, you know what it is like to be pregnant. We men do not experience that . She refuses to let a feminine essence immediately dictate coquetry, passivity , maternity, a certain psychology, or a certain role. Once again, regarding many of these caricatures, that is not stupid. A woman is not programmed by her X chromosome to like pink, speak softly, know how to bake an apple pie, and so on. But the decisive question then becomes, if we are being serious, is there really nothing between raw biology and arbitrary social construction? Is there not a sexed human nature capable of multiple but non-arbitrary cultural fulfillment? Is there not an anthropological meaning of the body that is neither a biological automatism nor a societal invention? And that is exactly the space that the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition allows us to think about, which existentialism tends to make much more difficult. A nature is not a pre-written script in which every gesture is determined. It is a set of powers oriented toward certain goods that freedom must fulfill in a concrete way. Let’s take a very simple analogy. The fact that human beings possess a natural capacity for language does not mean that a baby is born reciting Racine. It requires culture, education, a specific language , and interlocutors to practice. French is cultural, Chinese is cultural. Rules of politeness are cultural. Does that mean that language itself is a purely arbitrary invention imposed on a creature that would naturally have no particular relationship to speech? Of course not. Culture actualizes and configures a natural capacity. Well, the entire question of masculine and feminine lies right there. The fact that certain expressions of femininity are cultural absolutely does not prove that femininity is only cultural. And that is exactly the shift that Madame de Beauvoir will allow: showing with good reason that woman is not reduced to her biological functions. Then opening an intellectual space in which what transcends biology becomes more and more easily attributable to history , to education, to social relations, and to power. Notice, by the way, something very interesting. At the end of The Second Sex, Beauvoir does not simply dream of the disappearance of all man-woman relationships. She still imagines a reciprocity where each remains an" other "to the other and where their natural differentiation persists. She even writes that emancipation does not consist of denying a woman's relation to man, but of refusing to be trapped within it. This is essential because it will allow us to see the subsequent radicalization . Beauvoir opens a door, others will go through it much further, and that is precisely why it would be intellectually lazy to hold her responsible for everything that comes after. But she provides an opposition that is extremely fruitful for feminism . The free subject against what fixes it, transcendence against immanence, existence against substantialized roles , autonomy against dependence. And once you have placed the battle here, the question becomes almost inevitable. How many things deemed feminine are actually instruments that keep women in immanence, in the sense of Simone de Beauvoir? I’ve insisted on this for the 40th time, but the term means nothing here. And here, we’re going to take off. So, buckle your seatbelts, because we’re getting to Kate Millett , and with her, an absolutely decisive change occurs. The man-woman couple becomes explicitly thinkable as a political relationship. Millett explains that we must broaden the word" politics "beyond elections, parliaments , and governments. For her, politics designates structured power relations by which one group dominates or governs another group. And she proposes applying this category to sex itself. The relationship between men and women can thus be understood as sexual politics, that is to say, as a power relation between two coherent groups. Once again, let’s grant what must be granted. There is power in human relationships because there is polarity . A husband can manipulate his wife, a wife can manipulate her husband, a parent can crush a child, a superior can exploit an employee. The family does not possess a mysterious immunity to sin simply because it is a family. Very well. But notice what happens when you make power the fundamental political category of the relationship between the sexes. Take a married couple: they love each other, they have children, they divide up tasks—I don't know, the guy works, the wife cooks, they make decisions. Very quickly, one can ask who earns more, who decides, who does the housework, who put their career on hold, who legally owns what, who depends materially on whom. All these questions are legitimate if you are looking for a specific injustice. But if your framework already assumes that the sexes are political groups and that their relationship is structured by domination and subordination, every difference becomes a self-evident clue. Protection can hide control; a gift can mask exploitation. Authority becomes privilege. Dependence becomes subjugation. Difference itself becomes suspect because it constantly risks producing an asymmetry of power. It reminds me of a Simpsons episode, you know, where Marge becomes a student and Homer pays for her studies, so he works at the plant. And she has a feminist professor who says to her," How shameful! Don't you see that your husband is exploiting you by paying for your studies, because in fact, you owe him something? "That's it. She takes it badly. And that is how we begin to transform intimacy into a permanent tribunal. Not because one should never judge an intimate injustice, but because love possesses a logic irreducible to power. Irreducible. If I love someone, I can voluntarily give them more than what strict commutative justice would require. I can do something without asking for an equivalent counterpart. I can take care of my child for 10 years without sending an invoice for 200,000 bucks or whatever for night hours. I can interrupt my sleep because my wife is sick. She can reorganize part of her life because I am going through a catastrophe. If every asymmetry must immediately be translated into the language of domination, then the gift becomes conceptually and intrinsically suspect because the gift is almost always asymmetrical at the moment it is given. Love does not abolish justice, obviously, but it surpasses it. An anthropology incapable of thinking about this transcendence necessarily ends up understanding the family as a very poorly regulated business. And that is what we are going to see with Christine Delphy, who is much more systematic. Delphy theorizes what she calls the domestic mode of production and analyzes patriarchy in contemporary industrial societies as a system of subordination and, notably, an economic foundation of the family. Once again, I'm just clarifying something here. Patriarchy might sound like an insult in your heads. For me, patriarchy is a human ideal because it comes from the patriarchs. Do you know who the patriarchs are? Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It is a society built on masculine authority. I find that extremely healthy, but we will perhaps come to that one way or another. Since women's domestic work is not paid like salaried work, she can view it as being appropriated through a relationship of exploitation. She even insists on the fact that the lack of payment does not come from the nature of the task, since the same activity—babysitting, cleaning, preparing a meal—can be paid when performed outside the family relationship. So, for her, the woman is a kind of slave. You see the hatred in these things that have destroyed everything. And there, her initial observation is intelligent. Housework is really work. That is true. Raising a child is work. But obviously, cooking for five people every day is crazy hard work. And our economic civilization commits a rather remarkable absurdity by spontaneously considering as productive what passes through the market, and much less what concretely sustains life. If a woman watches her own children, she doesn't have a paycheck, and you have people who will say," She doesn't work. "" Oh really? " Have you ever watched children full-time? If she watches a stranger's children at a daycare, then she is working. That is work. Mind you, there is something deeply absurd in this economic vocabulary, but precisely because family labor has value, does it follow that it must take the form of a wage relationship so as not to become exploitation? That is where Delphy progressively traps the family gift within an economic category that cannot contain it. Imagine a mother who gets up four times during the night because her baby is sick. Unpaid work. Very well. Who is exploiting whom, the baby? Let's imagine a man who takes a grueling job for 30 years because he wants to allow his wife and children to live properly. Do you know any men like that? His salary goes into a joint account and pays for the housing of four people who did not work the hours with him. Is he being exploited by his family? Obviously, you can reply that the two contributions are different and reciprocal. Exactly. And as soon as we say that, we have left market logic to enter the traditional domestic logic. Everyone contributes in a particular way to a good that is common. The family is not a business in which each individual must receive the exact market value of what they produce. How foolish! In short, it is precisely a community in which a considerable portion of goods circulates without a price because it circulates in the form of a gift. And mind you, let's not make the opposite mistake. The word family does not automatically sanctify just any situation. A husband can treat his wife like a servant. A wife can treat her husband like an ATM. A father can abandon all difficult tasks to others. A mother can use the children to pressure her husband. These are real injustices. But you see the difference between the Christian analysis and the materialist analysis. The former asks whether everyone is justly fulfilling the duties of their state and directing their actions toward the common family good. The latter is tempted to ask who is appropriating whose labor. These are not just different answers, they are two different paradigms for viewing the family. And here, we must do something that conservatives do too rarely. Now, I must clarify, I am not a conservative because I believe that the current state of society is not worth preserving. Therefore, the word conservative no longer has any meaning. I am someone who wants to rebuild. What conservatives do, let's say, is defend domestic work with much more vehemence than the feminists themselves. Because if you accept the modern idea that true fulfillment is primarily measured by career, income, and economic independence, you have already lost. You are simply negotiating a better place for women in the world built by the market. So it is a transition from one form of slavery, in your view, to another form of slavery. But why would raising four children be worth less than producing PowerPoint presentations for a bank? Why would accompanying a dying parent be a withdrawal from the world, while selling insurance is participation in social life? Why would creating a stable home? Would passing on a language, habits, a faith, a memory, cooking, educating, caring, organizing, consoling be described as not working simply because no client receives an invoice? If you really want to defend women, perhaps start by stopping the contempt for the activities to which entire generations of women have given their lives. And here, a magnificent paradox appears. Materialist feminism wants to valorize domestic work by calling it work, but at the same time, it risks accepting the market as the hidden measure of its dignity. Why is it so necessary to demonstrate that this, too, is work? Because in our modern imagination, paid economic work has become the paradigmatic form of social contribution. So, we translate the home into the language of the factory: hours , production, appropriation, exploitation. But perhaps the problem stems precisely from the fact that we are trying to measure the home with the instrument of the market. Perhaps a mother is not an unpaid employee of her children. Perhaps a father is not the contractual financier of a domestic consumer group. Perhaps the family is precisely the place where human economy finds its original meaning. Administering goods to allow people to live together and carry out their earthly existence, rather than transforming every relationship into an equivalent exchange. And here, we arrive at Shulamith Firestone, because with her, the reasoning will stop circling the problem. It will head straight for the center. Firestone very explicitly adopts a Marxist structure. This is common to many feminists, moreover, since feminism is, after all, a materialism. It must be said, in many respects. If the economic class struggle supposes that the dominated class takes possession of the means of production, then the liberation of women supposes that the dominated sexual class takes control of the means of reproduction. She considers the biological basis of reproduction as one of the fundamental roots of the sexual class system and envisions that technology might eventually allow for the decoupling of reproduction from female pregnancy. Her revolutionary horizon does not consist only of improving the conditions in which women become mothers. It aims for the very abolition of the sexual class system and envisions a world where genital difference would lose its cultural meaning and where artificial reproduction would free women from the biological necessity of bearing children. What a beautiful future. And here, I almost want to thank Firestone, really, because radical thinkers have an extraordinary quality, and you have to admit it: they take the principles that moderates prefer to leave half-hidden to their ultimate conclusion. Personally, I have infinitely more respect for someone who takes things to the end. You see, de Beauvoir said," Yeah, but we aren't just uteruses, we have to do other things, we have to be a bit more like men. "No, Firestone, she says," No, no, who cares about the uterus, we’ll build machines to make kids. "You see, that's all over. At least it's clear, it's not hypocritical. With Firestone, no need to pretend anymore. What is the scandal? It is no longer just a bad law , it is no longer a salary, it is no longer insufficient education, since women have it. It isn't even the husband anymore; it is the biological fact that man and woman are not placed symmetrically before generation. The woman carries the child, the man does not carry it. So he has more life time to do all kinds of crazy stuff. And this asymmetry, in a philosophy where freedom is thought of as independence from received determinations, becomes a political problem. But really, who committed this injustice? And this is where the question becomes, excuse me, almost funny. Who decreed that women would bear a child? Is it the Parliament of Louis X, the patriarchy? Did they hold a meeting of patriarchs? Was it Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Did they say," Alright, let's go. "No, we have returned exactly to the point I announced at the beginning. When emancipation becomes the abolition of all unchosen asymmetry, nature itself ends up in the dock. And Firestone has the honesty to say it. If pregnancy creates a structural difference between the sexes and if this difference necessarily produces a sexual class, then it is no longer enough to reform society. Technology must modify the very conditions of reproduction. That is the entire movement. And look at the distance we have traveled since Wollstonecraft. We still have a woman whose reason must be cultivated so that she becomes a moral agent, a worthy wife, a capable mother, a virtuous creature placed with dignity before man under an objective moral norm. With Beauvoir, the problem shifts. Woman is a free subject, but a combination of biological and historical situations threatens to fix her in immanence. Once again, in the sense of Beauvoir—I insist, I cannot stand what she did with these terms. She must conquer her transcendence, in quotes, without being locked into a destiny. With Millett, the sexual relationship becomes explicitly political because the man-woman relationship can be analyzed as a structured power relation between groups. With Delphy, the family can be described as a site of a mode of production in which domestic labor is appropriated and exploited. And with Firestone, it's a fireworks display; the dialectic finally reaches biology. If reproductive difference materially grounds sexual classes, complete emancipation requires that we can one day emancipate ourselves from this difference itself. Does it hold up? One cannot deny that it holds up. At the very least, it is coherent. And now, I think we can understand why I refuse to speak of feminism as a movement that defends women. That would be like defining Marxism as" it doesn't like poverty, "okay? But that is not where philosophy is found. No one likes poverty. Philosophy begins when you explain what man is, what freedom is, what a class is, what power is, what labor is, what the purpose of life is, what the family is, what nature is, and what exactly we must be liberated from. And that is where feminism becomes much more interesting and much more contestable. So from now on, from this point forward, anyone who claims that feminism has a monopoly on the defense of women is committing a doctrinal absurdity, and I have demonstrated why: because a movement can start from a perfectly understandable indignation that we all share and then provide a false explanation for it. I see a woman who is unhappy in her marriage. I can conclude that a particular man is unjust. I can conclude that a particular custom is bad. I can also conclude that marriage is structurally an institution of appropriation. These are not the same propositions at all, and the emotion provoked by the first never constitutes proof of the third. And that is perhaps the most important methodological point of this part. A real victim does not prove a general theory of victimization. A violent man exists. This does not prove that masculinity is organized around violence. And you make the connection with the conference on May 68 since it's the same process. It's taking specific injustices and transforming them into systemic injustice. An exploited wife exists. That doesn't prove that marriage is essentially exploitation. A woman unjustly prevented from achieving something exists. That doesn't prove that every specifically feminine determination is an oppressive limitation. Otherwise, we are turning concrete suffering into rhetorical fuel for a metaphysics that no one has yet proven and that no one will prove. And that is exactly where we must reclaim the defense of women. A woman is suffering. Very well. Tell me what happened to her. Tell me who did what. Tell me what duty was violated. What virtue was betrayed? What injustice must be repaired. But don't ask me to accept, before the investigation, that her misfortune is an episode of an ontological war between two sex classes. And above all, don't ask me to believe that the solution necessarily consists of making women less dependent on what constitutes them as women, because that is where the reversal becomes humanly tragic. A doctrine claims to defend women, then learns to view motherhood with suspicion because it creates an asymmetry. It wants to protect women, then interprets marital interdependence through the model of exploitation. It wants to recognize the woman as a subject, then becomes suspicious of any objective content of femininity because that content risks limiting the subject's self-determination. And gradually, the question is no longer just how to stop a man from hurting a woman? The question becomes from how many feminine realities must a woman be liberated so that she is finally free? Dare to contradict me, feminists. Contradict what I just said. Go ahead, I'm waiting. And that is where you start to feel something dizzying. Because, if motherhood is suspicious, if complementarity is suspicious, if interdependence is suspicious, if a sexual division of responsibilities is suspicious, if bodily difference itself cannot receive any meaning prior to individual choice, then at some point a question will inevitably return. A very simple question, and perhaps the most embarrassing of all for this clique. What is a woman? What is it, a woman? Do you recall the J.K. Rowling affair when she said only women have periods and she faced a boycott or something? What is a woman? The statement is quite simple. Feminism ends up losing the woman. We started with a movement that claimed to liberate her, and notice the path traveled. What happens when suspicion reaches the very category in whose name everything had begun? There is a difficulty I would call comical at the heart of this whole machine. To say that women are oppressed, you must at least be able to designate something called women. It sounds silly what I'm saying, right, but actually, it’s not being done. If I announce that bakers are exploited and you ask me what a baker is, and I reply that the category of baker is an unstable construction produced by discursive practices that refer to no sufficiently determined prior reality, our social conversation becomes complicated. A baker is, basically, a guy who makes bread professionally. And it is precisely a difficulty of this order that contemporary feminism is facing because , by having denied everything, there are no more women. For a very long time , it could assume its political subject : women. It could contest what was said about them, what was asked of them, the place assigned to them. But something had to precede the demand in order for it to be the object of that demand. And here, we are going to take off even more. So, hold on tight because people are going to talk. Judith Butler. I'll put a picture in the edit so you're comfortable at home. She begins Gender Trouble by putting this obvious fact into crisis. Can feminism simply presuppose a stable category called woman when that category is itself produced and regulated by the power structures that feminism claims to contest? Routledge summarizes the shift very simply. Butler starts by questioning the category" woman, " rejects the traditional feminist appeal to a natural or essential notion of the feminine, and then makes famous the idea of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior inner reality. And I will once again avoid caricature because it would make us lose exactly what is philosophically interesting here and what we must rigorously criticize. Butler does not say," This morning I am a man, tomorrow I will be a woman because I decided to put on a dress. " That's...we've reached that point with all the LGBTQ XW y and so on stuff. I think it's called gender fluid or I don't know what. Performativity is not a small, voluntary theatrical performance executed by an already constituted subject who would choose their character from a closet. It is almost the opposite. In Butler’s work , the gendered subject itself constitutes itself—you saw that I said" gendered, "since we are talking about gender, and thus this whole crowd . I am using her vocabulary. The gendered subject itself is constituted through the repetition of acts, norms, and practices that produce the impression that a stable identity already existed behind them. The Stanford Encyclopedia summarizes this idea by stating that gendered subjects are constituted by iterative acts that sediment over time, and that gender is therefore not an ontologically prior property of the subject. But something that is produced continuously and can, at least in principle, be subverted. Great. Great. Now, look at what just happened. Beauvoir could still say," Basically, the body exists, but that's not enough to determine me. "We had a biological sex, and we discussed what history built on top of it. With Butler , the separation itself becomes suspect . Why imagine, on one side, a pre-discursive, material natural sex, and on the other, a cultural gender placed upon it? In Gender Trouble, Butler asks if what we call sex is not already produced within the same cultural field that produces gender. The philosophical literature dedicated to her work precisely summarizes her position as a challenge to the simple distinction between natural sex and social gender. See the leap? It’s powerful, isn't it? We are no longer just saying that a woman is not condemned by her biology to a certain profession or a certain character. A reasonable proposition. We start asking to what extent the very way we identify the body as sexed is already caught up in normative and discursive categories. And that is where I would like to bring back our first part. Why did I do all that in the first part? And we’re going to do it a bit forcefully because we’re men. We had specifically started by separating three levels. First, there is a biological sexual reality. OK? Second, this reality receives, in humans, an anthropological significance that cannot be reduced to hormone levels. OK. Third, cultures produce a multitude of customs, clothing styles, and conventions— sometimes intelligent, sometimes idiotic—around this difference. OK. Butler’s reasoning has real critical power at the third level. Yeah. A society can take a convention and naturalize it. The fact that a woman wore a certain haircut in 1840 does not mean that the female hair follicle possesses a theological essence oriented toward the bun. Yes, a society can call what is merely habitual" natural. "Yes, a repeated norm can end up seeming obvious to us when it is actually contingent. It is true; all of this is intellectually useful. Wow! We certainly had to wait for Judith Butler to figure that out. But from this critique, does it follow that the natural distinction itself is produced by the process that produces the cultural representations of that distinction? That is where we cannot follow. Judith, I am sorry, my dear Judith, we cannot follow you because it is the same slippery slope. That our access to reality happens through language does not mean that language creates the reality it accesses. A child learns the word mountain within a culture. It is not the word that raised the Alps. Societies carve out, describe , classify, and name the body, but the body does not begin to exist the moment discourse names it. And I immediately know what the serious philosopher will answer. Butler does not deny bodily matter. She questions the discursive regimes through which materiality becomes intelligible as sex. Great guy, great. But that is precisely where the metaphysical question must return. Does the social intelligibility of a reality constitute that reality, or can it also receive something that precedes it? If the obstetrician says" it's a girl, " it's a girl. Some would be offended. Well, it's a girl. There is no...Do you see what I mean? There is no weird human stuff. Well, is it merely an act that inserts the newborn into a normative regime, or is it first a true judgment about a bodily organization already present before it opens its mouth? Our answer is the second, obviously. My answer is the second. Language can then add a thousand absurd or legitimate expectations. It did not create the sex it recognized. And we arrive at the historical paradox that I find almost admirable in its logical purity. Feminism begins, as I told you, with a subject: woman. It fights for woman, it speaks in the name of woman, feminism. Then it criticizes traditional definitions of woman because they are supposedly too narrow. Very well. Then it criticizes the idea that there is a feminine psychological essence. Super father. Then it criticizes the idea that a feminine nature can normatively found roles. OK. Then certain branches contest the stable distinction between sex and gender, and finally the category" woman "disappears. It becomes philosophically problematic because claiming to define it risks excluding certain identities or reproducing the norms that constituted it. Butler does not hide this difficulty in Gender Trouble. The book opens with the problem of the political subject" woman "for feminism and the danger that a supposedly common identity is itself produced by the legal and discursive structures it seeks to fight. So, allow me to ask a silly question, dear audience. How can we conduct a politics of emancipation for a subject whose every substantial definition becomes suspect? Isn't that an absolute theoretical contradiction? It is a problem that has, moreover, permeated feminism itself. If" woman " possesses a sufficiently stable objective content, then we must say what it is? Ah, that is problematic. And accepting that a certain reality precedes political discourse. Oh dear, how do we do that? If the category has no stable content outside of practices that are always reconfigurable, then I ask what exactly is meant by the claim that women as women have a common history of oppression? On what reality is this oppression distributed? You cannot simultaneously use a category as a massive political unit when it comes to accounting for historical domination , and make it almost elusive when it comes to defining its referent. At some point, the subject of emancipation must surely be something before being emancipated. Stop me if I'm wrong. And see now the price paid by the concrete woman. At the beginning of our lecture, we told her something quite simple. Your femininity has a positive content. It begins in your body without being reduced to it. It is neither your hairstyle, nor your profession, nor a mandatory temperament, nor biological motherhood as the sole destination. But it means something. Your female body is not a material noise to which only culture would later give meaning. However, the more the thought of emancipation becomes unable to accept a received content of femininity, the more it finds itself condemned to do something quite strange. It defends the freedom to be a woman better and better , while saying less and less clearly what is positively feminine in the fact of being a woman. Your feminism is actually super, super negative. I would be very uncomfortable in my own skin as a woman if I subscribed to your doctrines. One can defend one's identity, one's expression, one's recognition, one's construction. Very well. But the question remains. What exactly is loved when we say that we love femininity? And here, we are going to call the boss if you want. We are going to call René Guénon with an important caveat. Obviously, Guénon did not produce a theory of contemporary feminism. I am not going to make him say things he did not write , but I am taking a much more general tool from him. In" The Reign of Quantity ", he devotes a chapter to what he calls uniformity versus unity. His argument is that true—pardon me —true unity is not obtained by the suppression of qualitative determinations. On the contrary, the more a civilization reduces beings to abstract, comparable, and interchangeable units—that is the whole idea of statistics, by the way— the more it produces quantitative uniformity, which is not true unity. Guénon thus contrasts qualitative differentiation with a standardization in which individuals become increasingly comparable as mere numerical units. And here, we will apply it to our problem. What does a certain modernity call equality? Very often, the possibility of applying the same criteria, the same paths, the same measures to individuals. That obviously makes magnificent sense before the law. Two people equal in dignity must not be subject to double standards. But who would oppose that? But if you transport this principle out of the legal order to turn it into an egalitarian human metaphysics, you get something very different. Qualitative difference itself becomes bothersome. If a man and a woman are equal, one asks why their function differs. Why must I carry a child if I am entirely, metaphysically equal? And why don't I carry a child? If I want to carry a child, after all, I'll do what I want. If their function differs, one asks who is privileged. If the body, if their body exposes them to different vocations, we will seek to neutralize symmetry through technical progress. And gradually, equality will cease to mean equal dignity. It will begin to mean a quest for functional equivalence. But really, that is not the same thing. And we can now say something that would have seemed almost banal for centuries. Man and woman are equal; they are not equivalent. Equality answers the question of dignity. Equivalence answers the question of interchangeability. You can have the former without the latter. And Guénon helps us understand why a civilization dominated by quantity struggles to tolerate this type of distinction. Quality resists common measurement. If two different beings have the same dignity nonetheless, you need a metaphysics capable of thinking unity above uniformity. Why did I open my Part 1 with Genesis? Because it is a metaphysics. If you no longer have this metaphysics, the simplest method consists of gradually making everything that prevents individual units from being comparable by the same criteria disappear. Look at our vocabulary of success. Have a woman and a man had exactly the same academic and professional path, the same income, the same number of years spent in the labor market, the same access to command positions? Those are things that can be counted. That is true. Now, try to measure the quality of a mother's presence over 15 years. Try to calculate in GDP the fact that a father comes home every evening, remains faithful to his wife, reads stories to his children. Or Spinoza, I don't know, transmits a language, a memory, a religion, a way of carrying oneself. Try to assign a productive coefficient to a grandmother who keeps an entire family united and as soon as she dies, everyone drifts apart. We are very bad at counting what is not quantitative. And consequently, the ideal of emancipation risks taking as its measure precisely what our civilization knows how to count. Income, career, institutional power, economic autonomy, statistical representation. But women, you are being fooled if you believe that is what success is, and men too. And then you get this extraordinary scene. A woman announces she is temporarily leaving an extremely prestigious profession to raise her children. And immediately, everyone has to add 15 precautions to verify that she hasn't just betrayed a century of emancipation. Oh, screw that. Why would it automatically be more worthy to organize a merger and acquisition than to educate four human beings? Why would producing a financial product be objectively a greater social contribution than passing on to a child the ability to speak, work, pray, respect others, and not become a savage ? I am not saying a woman shouldn't work or that a man should never stay with his children. I am asking where this hierarchy of prestige comes from that we take for granted today and which is rotten to the core. And here, feminism strangely meets a great modern force it often claims to fight. The market. You are a pure product of the market because the market really loves the abstract individual. The rootless individual is a better consumer than the person solid on their backbone and their foundations. Let’s be clear. I am not going to explain to you that a secret council of multinationals invented feminism to sell daycares. That would be stupid. I am talking about an anthropological convergence, and this same feminism that produced this society with supposedly free women has objectified them more than ever. In fact, now you must still be beautiful, be women, and be mothers, but on top of that, you must have a career, because otherwise, you will fail at life. That is exactly it. What is the ideal worker for an extraordinarily mobile economy? Someone whose private obligations do not stand in the way of career demands for too long, who can change cities, pace, schedule, delay family burdens, outsource part of the care, and adjust their fertility to the professional calendar. And what is the ideal individual of a certain conception of emancipation? Someone whose inherited dependencies do not determine their trajectory, who possesses economic autonomy, and who can choose to take on the constraints that their body or family once imposed upon them. The two logics do not have the same origin, but they produce the same individual. Do you see? Mobile, autonomous, available, comparable. That is why I always find it amusing to see certain multinationals enthusiastically celebrate the most advanced forms of individual emancipation and respect for LGBT XW 48, or whatever it is. Perhaps the revolution and human resources have finally discovered that they share the same intern. Well, imagine that. And the result is not necessarily a more feminine society. It might be exactly the opposite. Women were told: you were trapped in a world built by men. Free yourselves. Great. What form did this liberation take? Fully entering into a model of production, competition, and career advancement that was precisely built upon a level of availability historically easier for men than for mothers. And then, when the female body brutally reminds us that an asymmetry exists—pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, constraints, menstruation—we do not necessarily question the structure of success. We ask medicine, technology, laws, and institutions to allow women as much as possible to remain competitive by the same standard. But at what point did we ask if the standard itself was actually good? Perhaps a truly pro-woman society should not only allow women to perfectly occupy a masculinized professional world. Perhaps it should also relearn how to publicly honor the goods to which the female body makes our civilization particularly sensitive . Generation, care, dependency, transmission, endurance. And I am returning to René Girard now. I never noticed René Girard has the same first name as René Guénon. I am not attributing to Girard a critique of feminism that he did not formulate. I am using his analysis of mimetic desire and rivalry. For Girard, human desire easily becomes triangular. We desire an object because someone else points it out to us as desirable. When model and disciple become close enough to pursue the same object, the model becomes an obstacle, and imitation can turn into rivalry. The association of mimetic research precisely sums up this transition from proximity and imitation to rivalry, until the moment when opponents become doubles who resemble each other more and more as they fight. Now, we will apply this to sex. We applied it to war in the video on Clausewitz. We are applying it to sex. For a very long time, men and women could obviously be jealous of each other, dominate each other, or hurt each other. Sin did not wait for the 20th century. Remember Adam's reaction when he learns of the fall. But they did not necessarily pursue the same social objects by the same measure. As soon as emancipation asserts that a woman must demonstrate her equality by accessing the same goods as a man, in the same way and according to the same criteria, something changes. Same career, same prestige, same independence, supposedly the same sexual freedom, same relationship to fertility, same family standing, same ability to depend on no one or to hit walls. The other sex gradually ceases to be an" other "with whom I build something. They become the model of what I lack and the rival who possesses what I claim. And this is where Girard produces an almost perfect intuition for our subject. The more rivals become alike, the more intense their rivalry will become. We spontaneously imagine that removing differences will remove conflict. That is false. Girard forces us to consider the exact opposite in his magnificent demonstrations. I invite you to read his entire body of work. Great anthropologist, great philosopher, great French metaphysician . Difference can sometimes maintain a distance that prevents total mimetic rivalry. When everyone wants the exact same object in the same place and in the same measure, the potential conflict becomes inevitable because the two resemble each other more. Two football teams don't fight because they play different sports. They fight because they want the same ball in the same match for the same goal. You can't put a boxer against a footballer because the footballer is after a ball, the boxer is after the guy's jaw. It's —it's not the same sport. Apply that to the so-called, well obviously, contemporary gender war. The man becomes jealous of the advantages attributed to women. Look, she got a job because—because she's a woman. Yes. Well listen, if someone gives me a job because I'm a man, I'll take it. Anyway, if it's a job I want. The woman becomes jealous. Of the advantages attributed to men. Everyone keeps track of the other's sacrifices. Who suffers the most? I'm the one who suffers. Who works the most? I work more than you. Who earns more? Uh, I earn more than you. I'm the one who decides at home. Who has more sexual power? Ah, I'm a man, I want what I want. Who initiates divorces? It's women who do all the divorcing. They're all really just prostitutes. Oh my, did you see what they call them? The incels. Who gets the children after divorces? That's it, women die more at work, no, it's the men. We are the ones really dying at work. Who does more domestic chores? But we women, we do everything at home. And on top of that, we have to work. who takes more risks, and each side miraculously finds statistics confirming they are the true victim. Talk to men: anti-feminist, I'm the victim. Talk to women: feminist, I'm the victim. That is mimetic rivalry in all its splendor. But I don't want to be a victim, guys, you know? I'm not a victim. Men and women no longer look at each other to ask what they can give together. They look at each other to verify who receives more. And notice how that is exactly the opposite of love. In love, I can rejoice that the other possesses a good that I do not. You know, I make plenty of money. Uh, spoiling my wife is a, it's an immense pleasure. I don't care. I buy myself ten-thousand-dollar watches from time to time, that's enough for me. In rivalry, the other's good becomes proof of my deprivation. In complementarity, their difference enriches me. In rivalry, their difference insults me. In love, I ask myself: what can I give? What can this difference bring me? You know, difference is either a bridge we build or a wall. Difference is like stones. You can build a bridge to connect and grow, or a wall to separate . In the politics of resentment, I ask: what do they have that I don't? And that is how we end up transforming the couple itself into a negotiation between two unions. You did the dishes three times, I did them four. I earned 60%of the income. You did 70%of the laundry. Very well. Maybe we can make an Excel sheet and determine which of the two is the conjugal proletarian. But a family cannot survive based on that logic. It assumes precisely that each can give more without turning a gift into a debt. A pregnant woman will give something her husband will never give. He will never be able to balance that account. Do you know what a pregnancy is? It is the toll on a woman's body—not the destruction of women's bodies, mind you—but the fact that there is this imbalance. He will bear other things that a woman could never bear. That's not an injustice, it's a sexual interdependence. I'll go further. It is a divine interdependence . Justice does not necessarily require that everyone performs the same operation. It requires that everyone directs their capacities toward the common good with a reciprocity of giving. And that is where the war of the sexes becomes destructive. It interprets every asymmetry as a potential debtor's balance. Go to hell with your logic. We don't want it. We don't want it. It destroys the whole society. So, this is what we can now reproach feminist modernity for, much more profoundly than any particular claim. It sought to cure domination through similarity, but it actually produced rivalry. It sought to preserve equality by making differences increasingly politically insignificant, and it made it increasingly difficult to speak about what is good in those differences. It sought to prevent a definition of women from confining them , and some of its branches ended up making almost any definition of a woman suspicious. It sought to deliver women from the masculine measure, then invited them to measure their success by the criteria of a productivist civilization historically built around male availability. It wanted women to stop being considered inferior men, and it sometimes ended up offering as supreme freedom the possibility of becoming as undifferentiated as men before the market, sexuality, and the body. And for me, ladies and gentlemen, you know what I call that? A total failure. You failed. Not that a woman can become a minister, surgeon, or university professor. That's great. I have had great professors in many settings, women at the university, very intelligent women. I remember my competition law professor, who was extremely brilliant. Not that a father changes his child's diapers, that's great if he wants to do that. The problem is not the circulation of activities. The problem is the loss of the principle that allows us to distinguish between activity and identity, equality and equivalence, freedom and indeterminacy. A woman can practice surgery without her body ceasing to be feminine. That is why I oppose it, and I am not hurting anyone. I really don't want to hurt anyone. I know that people who go through transsexualism, who undergo sex change operations, it's a terrible suffering. But I say it, and I have the right to say it. Changing sex through surgery is not changing sex. One cannot change sex ; it is not possible. There is a biological fatalism; no matter what one does, I think an individual has more merit, strength, and will find more peace in the end by working to accept themselves rather than changing themselves. The same applies to cosmetic surgery. A man can spend 6 months taking care of a newborn without becoming a mother. Tasks do not create the sexes. A modified physical expression does not change the physical foundation. And precisely because the sexes precede them, we can have an immense variety of concrete situations without having to conclude that the difference itself no longer has meaning . And that is where we have arrived with this conference. What did feminism promise? To restore woman to herself. Certain very prevalent expressions of contemporary feminism have led to an intellectual world where" woman " becomes a category that must be constantly deconstructed, where bodily difference must be politically neutralized as much as possible, where the sexes are invited to pursue the same goods by the same measures, and where their relationship is more and more easily interpreted through the categories of power and rivalry. And that results in all the bogus cinema and video games where there are 50 kg women fighting against 90 kg guys who are all muscle, trained in combat, and the women smoke 50 guys barehanded. You see? Because it must at all costs be proven through ridiculous propaganda. Look, women can do what men do. Women cannot do what men do. They can do many things that men do. They cannot do everything that men do. Just as men cannot do everything that women do. A man will never be pregnant, with apologies to Arnold Schwarzenegger for those who get the reference. So perhaps it is time to do exactly the opposite of all that. Not asking how to make woman more like man. Not asking how to make man less masculine so that he can no longer dominate. But asking how to restore man and woman in such a way that their difference becomes a gift again instead of a grievance. That masculine strength ceases to be predatory because it rediscovers its purpose. That femininity ceases to be suspected of passivity because it rediscovers its own power. And that equality finally ceases to demand un-differentiation. Because at this stage, it is no longer a matter of defending a theory. We must rebuild a civilization of difference. And I conclude this way and I say what I want , founded on the divine order of things . Thank you very much.