by Guillaume Faye

Arktos Journal

Apr 25, 2024

Guillaume Faye argues that the crisis of femininity and the feminisation of men contribute to a cultural and demographic decline in Europe, posing significant challenges to the continuation of traditional values and biological lineage.

This is the seventh part of Guillaume Faye’s essay ‘The New Ideological Challenges’, published in 1988. Also read parts one, two, three, four, five, and six.

It is not only ethnocide, cultural warfare, and Western progressivism that cause the dis-identification of Europeans. Alongside the ideological and cultural weapons deployed against us, there is a physiological dissolution of our personality. Deprived of their historical memory, our contemporaries are no longer concerned with securing their lineage. Are the sight of empty cradles and the dramatic contradiction of a society that flatters youth lowly and collapses under the dead weight of the elderly not perhaps the most convincing and tragic signs of Euro-pessimism?

In the late twentieth century, the question of demographic survival emerges with full force. Amid the technological age, in the muggy era of bourgeois abundance, the return of the purely biological torments our consciousness. Despite the prevailing anti-natalist ideology, the demographers’ distress call penetrates the media blockade: Europe is no longer producing enough children. An ageing, present-oriented society, obsessed with the illusion of unnatural youthfulness, abandons both its traditions and its historical future. This further underscores the significance of women. The issues and mythology of women dominate the turn of the century. The image of the woman is the new puzzle, the new epicentre of European consciousness. The woman is at stake: she gives life and ensures demographic continuity; she is also the one who passes on values. In a civilisation threatened by identity loss, the (cultural and biological) women’s issue is of great importance.

In the torn consciousness of the European man plagued by his own decline, the loss of the woman and her possible reconquest today take on a tragic, central significance. Images ingrained in the popular imagination, such as the supposed inclination of European women towards non-Europeans, their infertility compared to immigrant women or women from the Third World, and the growing sexual and social demands of women towards men stripped of their virility, confirm the dramatically rising discomfort of the European man towards the European woman; a discomfort that elevates the importance of the female function in our declining civilisation and prompted Julien Freund to remark that we have ‘moved from the era of anthropologists to that of gynaecologists.’ The myth of the higher virility of the African man, the claim of the European woman to non-fertilisation and independence (remnants of ‘feminism’), the emergence of new sexual customs, the significance placed on the female body and its demands (and thereby implicitly on the possible impotence of the pride-wounded man, who must now ‘prove himself’), all contribute to creating an atmosphere of suspicion against the European woman: she is accused of contravening her sexual loyalty, her biological and generative duty, her task of passing on traditional values.

This suspicion of the woman, a subtle mix of chronic misogyny and gynaeco-maniacal tendencies, whether reasonable or not, now resides in the disturbed consciousness of today’s wounded Europe. The pornographic abundance (‘breasts on the front page!’), characteristic of all our media, acts both as compensation and as an intensification of the frustration felt towards women. This marks the psyche of the European man, tormented by divorce, celibacy, even sterilisation, and homosexuality.

The masculinised European woman, in search of her social status and upon whom the continuation of the biological lineage ultimately depends, sees the traditional features of ‘femininity’ fade just when countless discussions about this femininity prove that it is no longer taken for granted, and when the disconcerting prospect of gender blending becomes apparent The ‘androgynous look’, embodied by rock stars like Grace Jones or Annie Lennox, not only expresses a pathogenic phantasm of egalitarianism (which now denies the differences between the masculine and feminine) but also reveals the subtle will to deprive the woman of her generative and maternal function in favour of the alienated and falsified image of the ‘virile woman’. This prevailing androgyny points to one of the most disturbing aspects of identity loss, namely biological identity loss: the systematic and theatrical elevation of homosexuality and the use of androgynous models in fashion and advertising express a more or less unconscious rejection of fertility and reproduction and are subject to a certain will to biological self-destruction, which aligns completely with the sterilising narcissism of Western civilisation.

The androgynous woman and the theatrical homosexual converge in the same unnatural and uniform style, forming the model of a neutral, completely uprooted, sterilised (in both senses) individual. An individual who has renounced any progeny, any future, any tradition; showing us the sad face of a discouraged European generation obsessed with the tedious theme of ‘No future’; having given up on continuing historically, and only continuing the vulnerable mood of the ‘New Consumer Society’. Thus, it all boils down to the comprehensive emasculation of Europeans, for which they are solely responsible, and which amounts to a self-castration, a suicide, albeit a suicide ‘with a smile’, like that of a sad clown. With a certain pathological joy, a gleeful masochism, a large part of the European elites endorses and promotes the loss of our cultural and anthropological identity and our total decline. This ‘Euro-pessimism’ hides behind an optimism that still lacks credibility: they joyfully anticipate the emergence of a highly fertile society of cultural mingling, from which, supposedly like in the USA, a ‘new identity’ will emerge: that of an ‘open culture’, in which all characteristics would blur. Thus, they wish to present that old progressivist illusion, which Léopold Senghor had already dubbed in the 1960s as ‘Civilisation of the Universal’, as a new path. Fortunately, however, new elites reject this project because they are aware of its obsolescence, because they consider it unaesthetic and demobilising (as it lacks assertiveness), and because they grasp its senile fatalism. Therefore, they strive, albeit clumsily, to rediscover their identity, which should revolve around three pivotal points: the homeland, the national fatherland, and Europe, where the latter plays the role of the great unifying myth, filled with albeit vague, yet extraordinarily enticing images.

(translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister)