Русское зазеркалье (двуязычная версия)

The second question we are left with in view of today’s sexual freedom is patriarchal family or, rather, what it can be replaced by. It is perhaps very true to say that patriarchal patterns of behaviour enslave women, encourage toxic masculinity, nurture family abuse, psychologically traumatise younger demographics, and so forth, and I am not even trying to argue with someone who would say it. Patriarchal family can do all that. (Kitchen knives can be used as deadly weapons, but people still keep using them, the only class of people from which they certainly must be removed being patients of a mental institution. Doesn’t our passionate longing for a ‘safe world’ actually turn us into patients of a mental clinic?) All that having been said, there is one thing at which patriarchal families are good, and this thing is procreation. Transgender men with a functioning vagina, ovaries, and a uterus still can have children; the same applies to non-binary people. Most of lesbians, too, can conceive and give birth; most of male homosexuals can beget a child. It would be therefore wrong to say that procreation is impossible for anyone whose gender identity is other than heterosexual. The problem is that people stop having many children as soon as they reject the image of a patriarchal family. ‘The world is over-populated anyway,’ some of you would probably reply to that. To me, this reply appears as a way to escape the problem rather than to solve it—because those nations that don’t subscribe to this Western point of view would go on with their patriarchal standards of behaviour and sexual ethics so that your hypothetical children would have no chance to live in a less populated world. Instead of it, they would find themselves in the world where Western societies would progressively shrink in both number and political influence until the moment when Western nations would completely lose the Darwinian ‘struggle for life’ and so become a part of the past. Please don’t think that I would rejoice over the perspective—quite the contrary, I would be very sorry if it happened. The truth is that my sentimental sympathy for the Western nations is absolutely insufficient in order to save them (you, in fact). Something must be done in order to escape the bleak dystopia of Soumission, which is the French title of a novel written by Michel Houellebecq, a contemporary French author. The novel in question imagines a situation in which a Muslim party upholding Islamist and patriarchal values is able to win the 2022 presidential election in France—and to consequently reorganise social standards and family ethics. Is Soumission a horrifying dystopia or, rather, a realistic prediction of upcoming events about which we shouldn’t become too sentimental? We might want to discuss this question today.