This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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Today is the birthday of one of my favorite British writers, Dorothy L. Sayers. The Oxford educated author, translator, and literary critic insisted on the L., as she was nothing if not a stickler for detail.
You may be generally aware of Sayers’ existence — more likely so if you have a library card, a Britbox subscription, or enjoy the sort of detective fiction that Rian Johnson has been ripping off for his “Knives Out” movies. These stories tend to have a much smaller number of deaths (and less grotesque ones) than the American “true crime” genre. The investigators, such as Sayers’ iconic creation Lord Peter Wimsey, are marked more for their wit, banter, and understanding of human nature than their devotion to forensics.
If you are a Christian, you may know Sayers as someone who, while not a member of the infamous men-only Inklings, was a close friend of some of its members, including C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. But that friendship did not include her Oxford graduating classmate J.R.R. Tolkien, who confessed that he “loathed” her books, finding her depictions of sexuality hedonistic. In “Strong Poison,” when she introduces her own stand-in romantic interest of Harriet Vane, Wimsey is weighing the pros and cons of pursuing the woman: “She has a sense of humor … and brains … life wouldn’t be dull. One would wake up, and there would be a whole day full of jolly things to do. And then we would come home and go to bed … and that would be jolly too.” That was a bit too much for Tolkien in 1930, but then no one (at least no one normal) reads Tolkien for his takes on sex.
If you’re a true nerd, you may even know Sayers as a founding member of the renowned Detection Club, whose first members included Agatha Christie and whose first president was G.K. Chesterton. She famously authored the oath to be sworn over a skull by its invite-only members: “Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or Act of God?” She would go on to curate great collections of detective fiction published by some of the top writers in the field.
What you may not know is that Sayers’ life outside of the world of British mystery writing was often stacked with personal drama. Prior to the publication of her first novel, she gave birth to a son out of wedlock, having discovered belatedly the father in question was married. She gave the baby up for fostering and never acknowledged him as her own. The daughter of a vicar, she behaved like nothing of the sort, despite her Christian faith. She loved to smoke and drink and ride her motorcycle, and as an advertising writer in the 1930s, she created the famed Guinness toucan, the ads for which you’ll still find hanging around your Irish local pub.
What certainly deserves to be known and appreciated more about her is that Sayers’ unique life and experience gave her an understanding of human nature that proved prescient for our day and age, and particularly for the fractious relationship between modern men and women. You can find this throughout her work, but its best distillation is a speech given nearly a century ago to a women’s society in 1938, which you can find published in full in the collection “Are Women Human?”
She opens her remarks by saying that she is unsure about the very word “feminism,” and that “under present conditions, an aggressive feminism might do more harm than good.” As she explained in the context of her university experience:
Take, for example, the very usual reproach that women nowadays always want to “copy what men do.” In that reproach there is a great deal of truth and a great deal of sheer, unmitigated and indeed quite wicked nonsense … That battle was won, and rightly won, for women. But there is a sillier side to the university education of women. I have noticed lately, and with regret, a tendency on the part of the women’s colleges to “copy the men” on the side of their failings and absurdities, and this is not so good … The women students, too, have a foolish trick of imitating and outdoing the absurdities of male undergraduates. To climb in drunk after hours and get gated is silly and harmless if done out of pure high spirits; if it is done “because the men do it,” it is worse than silly, because it is not spontaneous and not even amusing.
You can read the entire speech here. The conclusion of Sayers’ argument has always struck me as stunning for how much it reflects the tensions between the sexes that endures today:
Indeed, it is my experience that both men and women are fundamentally human, and that there is very little mystery about either sex, except the exasperating mysteriousness of human beings in general. And though for certain purposes it may still be necessary, as it undoubtedly was in the immediate past, for women to band themselves together, as women, to secure recognition of their requirements as a sex, I am sure that the time has now come to insist more strongly on each woman’s — and indeed each man’s — requirements as an individual person.
It used to be said that women had no esprit de corps; we have proved that we have — do not let us run into the opposite error of insisting that there is an aggressively feminist “point of view” about everything. To oppose one class perpetually to another — young against old, manual labour against brain-worker, rich against poor, woman against man — is to split the foundations of the State; and if the cleavage runs too deep, there remains no remedy but force and dictatorship.
If you wish to preserve a free democracy, you must base it — not on classes and categories, for this will land you in the totalitarian State, where no one may act or think except as the member of a category. You must base it upon the individual Tom, Dick, and Harry, on the individual Jack and Jill — in fact, upon you and me.
This is the warning we in the West should heed today. The anti-relational musings of the chattering class, the grinding down or caricaturization of masculinity, the runaway scared memes of whether a man or a bear in the woods is more dangerous to a woman — all represent in their deepest level a collectivist vision of sex.
This inhuman vision, advocated for by voices on the Right and Left today, is not just a danger to our pursuit of happiness. They are a danger to individual freedom itself. This is not idle talk. Recognize it for what it is: the seeds of Western suicide. Dorothy L. Sayers did. So should you.