Atlas Shrugged, part III, chapter II
I’ve written about the things that shouldn’t be present in Galt’s Gulch but somehow are: handmade tractors, orange groves, an entire industrial infrastructure that seemingly sprang up out of nothing. However, just as important is what’s not there, because Ayn Rand either didn’t grasp the necessity or simply overlooked it. And one of those lacunae is a huge one.
Rand unintentionally betrays the depth of the problem when Dagny asks Ragnar Danneskjold how he recognizes her:
“How do you happen to know who I am?” she asked.
“First, I’ve seen your pictures in the papers many times. Second, you’re the only woman left in the outer world, to the best of our knowledge, who’d be allowed to enter Galt’s Gulch.”
This is a patently ridiculous question. Why is Dagny, the super-capitalist executive who’s constantly in newspapers and the media, surprised that anyone recognizes her?
But the more important point about this dialogue is what it implies. According to Ragnar, Dagny is the only woman left in the entire world who’d be admitted at the gates of Capitalist Heaven Galt’s Gulch. That begs the question: How many women are there already?
So far, we’ve met only one, the fishwife that’s Rand’s self-insert. This section tells us about a second: Ragnar is married to Kay Ludlow, a Hollywood actress who joined the strike because she was sick and tired of portraying beautiful blonde home-wreckers who are always bested by “the little girl next door, personifying the virtue of mediocrity” (yes, seriously).
“I’ll run along,” he said. “My wife is waiting for me.”
“What?” she gasped.
“My wife,” he repeated gaily, as if he had not understood the reason of her shock.
“Who is your wife?”
“Kay Ludlow.”
The implications that struck her were more than she could bear to consider. “When… when were you married?”
“Four years ago.”
“How could you show yourself anywhere long enough to go through a wedding ceremony?”
“We were married here, by Judge Narragansett.”
So, there’s Kay Ludlow; the fishwife; and Dagny (who, at this point, hasn’t yet agreed to stay). Later in this chapter, we’ll meet another unnamed woman who monologues about Rand’s views on parenting. And that’s it. That makes a grand total of four women in the valley who have any lines of dialogue, and only two of them are even deemed important enough for names. By comparison, how many men are there?
In the order we meet them or hear them named in these two chapters, here’s the list: John Galt, Richard Halley, Francisco d’Anconia, Hugh Akston, Midas Mulligan, Quentin Daniels, Ellis Wyatt, Dr. Hendricks, Lawrence Hammond, Dwight Sanders, Judge Narragansett, Dick McNamara, Ted Nielsen, Roger Marsh, Andrew Stockton, Calvin Atwood, Ken Danagger, Owen Kellogg, Ragnar Danneskjold. There are also unnamed male characters: three who work for Dick McNamara and two each who work for Ellis Wyatt and Andrew Stockton, for a total of twenty-six. Twenty-six men for four women!
There are other women in the valley whom we never see – Galt vaguely mentions that “some of us have wives and children”. However, it seems that a huge majority of the True Capitalists are single men. And even the few who are married won’t necessarily help equalize the balance. As Hank Rearden proves, you can be a True Capitalist and accidentally marry a looter, and another striker tells Dagny later, “there can be no collective commitments in this valley… families or relatives are not allowed to come here, unless each person takes the striker’s oath by his own independent conviction.”
If this colossally skewed gender ratio holds for all of Galt’s Gulch, this society is going to have big problems. Most of the men will have no prospect of romantic companionship, marriage, or family. Are they going to meekly accept this? Considering Rand’s belief that sex is an expression of one’s highest values, that seems unlikely. And if we’ve learned anything from this book so far, it’s that what a good Objectivist wants, he takes, and he doesn’t care who or what stands in his way.
If the Gulchers behave anything like human beings, this would lead to one of two things: either a whole lot of situational homosexuality, and/or debilitating social strife as they compete for the attentions of the few available women. And when two Objectivist men both desire the same woman, there’s almost certain to be explosive violence, considering Rand’s belief that homicidal jealousy is a philosophically proper attitude.
In a fictional world, the text can simply refuse to acknowledge that there’s any problem at all. However, an excess of men over women is a very real crisis looming over China and India, two rising world powers where primitive, patriarchal norms still dominate. Because of these prejudices, many parents seek out sex-selective abortion, practice female infanticide, or abuse and neglect girl children. The result is a gender ratio artificially skewed in favor of boys – in some places by as much as 12% to 15%, which works out to tens of millions of people. In China, these surplus men are called guang gun, or “bare branches”.
But it’s not just loneliness or social isolation that worries the authorities. Mass movements of angry, frustrated, unmarriageable men pose a real danger of creating unrest and instability. The fear is that they’ll turn to crime, gangs, and violence (it’s happened before), or create a demand for bride abduction, sex trafficking and other human exploitation. (On a smaller scale, in the U.S., sexual harassment and assault are endemic problems in oil boomtowns with huge majorities of male workers and few women.) Worse, their rage and bitterness could be channeled into militant ideologies by demagogues, potentially even resulting in war.
Ironically, the gender imbalance of Galt’s Gulch is inadvertently realistic, since Objectivists, like other kinds of libertarians, are very much skewed towards men. Why laissez-faire ideologies consistently fall short in appealing to women is an ongoing debate, although it seems likely that only society’s most privileged would be attracted to politics that promise no support or mutuality, and most of those people are men. The Atlasphere, a dating site for Rand devotees, has 3.5 men for every woman. That’s a cruel joke on all those self-appointed superior men, who may have joined Objectivism because they believed its promise of being able to achieve their desires – only to find that the simple pleasures of love and companionship end up further out of their reach than ever.
Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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