“Empowered Femininity” and the Clock-Bomb of Digital Love

From my own fieldwork, I can state that, when confronted with such anti-social behaviors, the first reflex is to shut the perpetrator off and to move on to the next candidate. It takes less than five such attempts to realize that the first case was not just bad luck, but in fact a grueling trend which seems to worsen, the more time and energy one spends in the virtual world. Subsequently, when it becomes obvious that there is an immensity of rotten humans out there doing their best to ruin other people’s belief in love and happiness, the innate need to contribute somehow to the improvement of the world emerges: the emotional thought that, even if a romantic involvement is not possible, at least one could make a difference in someone’s life by showing him the goodness in humanity and the value of being a genuine, authentic human being. This is the point where a downward spiral of betrayals, lies, eternal postponements starts, experienced by the vast majority of women who have ever delved into the dark depths of online dating. There are two consequences:

The first consequence is that a profound and very toxic lack of trust in men and their ability “to be normal” or “to be civil” begins to creep in into the minds and souls of the women. A worldview with men as notorious liars, manipulators, cheaters, unable to behave appropriately, be it in family, at work, going out with friends, or simply in the street, crops up. This increasing lack of trust affects large parts of the women’s daily activities, and eats at the very fabric of their interactions with other humans, as it is not limited to the male population. At some point it starts to attack their perception and processing of the female citizens as well. They question themselves as social entities, and inadvertently, need gradually more validation and re-assurance from those around them. The lethal virus of flakey behavior and broken promises induced by online activities is steadily taking over the features of cancerous tissues, destroying the healthy, positive, strong essence which a normal social education had been providing.

We all have insecurities and weak points in ourselves, of which we are painfully aware – or not. We all depend, to a higher or lower degree, on others for support and validation. This is what makes as human. The ability to be vulnerable and to trust is what allows us to live with the others and to need them. Clear, powerful, robust boundaries give us a sense of self as individuality, but belonging to a specific community, as fluid as the concept of “community” has become nowadays, is what protects us from being completely exposed to external attacks and predators. Trust enables us to feel comfortable with those we love and who love us. Back-to-back in times of danger and face-to-face in times of joy, trust binds and protects, builds the foundation for the future (“those generations coming after us will continue and finish what we have started, in the same way as we have been continuing what those before us have started”) and creates the sense of immortality beyond the biological limitation of the individual physical life. The past turns, thus, into a reservoir of energy and hope, transcending its purely historical function of delivering legacies of knowledge and technology. Trust is hope, and its loss equals a dissolution of the human spirit worse than biological death.

The second consequence is a hardening of these women’s femininity – which leads, eventually, to the loss of their femininity. This is a double-edged phenomenon. On the one hand, multiple discourses within feminism have repeatedly argued for complete equality between men and women. On the other hand, the power of the feminine instance and of femininity in its most fascinating dimensions resides in its regenerative abilities, its function of motherhood and its comforting glow, its visionary optimism and solar energy. It is from here that we need to reconsider femininity and its loss through a wrongly understood and applied feminism as well as through the masculinization of mating strategies resulting from illusionary, consumerist dating practices. The result of this re-formulation process is the reinvigoration of femininity and its re-positioning at the center of humankind, a fundamental factor in the survival of the species.

Feminism, as it was envisioned and outlined by its Founding Mothers, was the effort to win back femininity and feminine essence as well as feminine energy from the increasingly, dangerously powerful, unstoppable, all-consuming modernization, with industrialization and urbanization being its two main factors. When Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex (Le Deuxième sexe) in 1949, she referred to the culturally constructed differences between men and women, and how these are exploited by being naturalized through education and role-models. Raising awareness on the differences between genders and on the necessity to accept those differences, was, in this reading, Beauvoir’s task, not the disempowerment of men and their overpowering by women. Moreover, Julia Kristeva’s references in her seminal work The Revolution of the Poetical Language (La Révolution du langage poétique) from 1974 to motherhood and motherly love in the semiotic spaces of language and arts, which impact and formulate politics and economics, and thus set societies and technologies of power in motion, were not meant as a cry towards limitless sexual liberation and elimination of men. They were, in fact, an act to awaken insight and caution, to indicate of the lurking dangers within the modernization project, based mainly on features such as physical strength, the pressure to advance and impose progress, to dispose of those unable to keep the pace, either by killing or by displacing them, mostly associated with masculinity and the masculine worldview (see Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy , 1992; Stjepan Meštrović, The Postemotional Society, 1997). Emotions and tender nurturing were not part of the modernity as pursued and developed by technocrats and idealists: they are, though, the fuel on which the engine of femininity works, on which the polarization between masculinity and femininity thrives and, in turn, creates the beautiful contrasts in life and in the world.

As it happened, aggressive movements in the 1950s and the 1960s, followed by a snowball-like succession of misunderstood publications and fake celebrities, created alongside several decades the image of the “feminist woman” as void of femininity and emotions, a “smaller man” (physically speaking), capable to compete with her male counterparts in any field: the “Alpha female”, a highly mechanized androgynous creature. In spite of the astronomical pressure to “achieve like a man”, recent history has proven that this is not, realistically, the biological case, as separate standards of physical prowess in almost every domain have gradually emerged and stayed in place. Educated to be assertive and bold, to reject her feminine gender as “weak and objectified” by instruments of the political discourse, unable to resist as a singular voice in the “lonely crowd” of misguided fellow citizens, the late-modern woman finds herself in the new millennium confronted with expectations and tensions she could not possibly deal with.

The so-called “crisis of masculinity” and the disintegration of the social fabric, visible in huge numbers of single persons, single households, single parents and an unprecedented rate of divorces in the affluent, post-industrialized nations – tendency increasing – is a direct consequence of the “crisis of femininity”, of the impossible choices late-modern women are facing and compelled to make, of the contradictory loyalties they are supposed to submit to, marching against nature and defying fundamental laws of the biology: i.e., the basic polarity between male and female, survival and death, procreation and extinction, belonging and isolation, ultimately, love and hatred.