Rand’s Rational Individual Could Logically Extend Equal Rights to All humans
Rand has said that Dominique is like herself when she’s in a bad mood (Gladstein 41). Beyond this, Rand’s identification with Dominique represents femininity with ambivalence. Dominique’s figure is a masculinized angularity like Roark’s, only with a slender “fragility” that he lacks. Rand often gives ample figures to pathetic characters, suggesting the bovine passivity of the average housewife, whereas her heroines are liberated from domestic servitude, being highly competent and productive in the public sphere. However, no matter how high their position, they are always dominated by the heroes’ superior masculine power. Rand rejected feminism and said that she would not vote for a woman as president because she believed that a woman must always have a man to look up to (“About a Woman President”), Vibram KSO which Susan Love Brown shows is inconsistent with self-reliance.
Rand’s principles of self-reliance, rationality, and noncoercion are most violated in having the female want to be sexually dominated.3 Feminists object most vociferously to Rand’s depiction of sexuality as a kind of rape (Brownmiller). The sexual encounters in her fiction are violent and brutal, with the heroine nobly struggling against the physical coercion of the man, only to surrender in orgasmic fulfillment of her feminine nature, i.e., being vanquished. Although Roark also acknowledges Dominique’s power to make him suffer when she chooses to marry others, he is stoic and respects her need to prove her independence from him, tolerating her misguided way of being true to herself. Because Rand gives women freedom to make their own choices, some feminists consider Rand’s larger, ungendered claim of primary moral obligation to oneself as her better message to women, one that illustrates the true feminist agenda. Sharon Presley, for example, citing psychological studies to support Rand, argues that traits such as self-respect, personal responsibility, self-reliance, rationality, and originality do indeed correlate with respect for others. She concludes that patriarchy creates a false dichotomy between altruism—an ethic of caring imposed on and assumed by women who unduly sacrifice themselves—and the self-aggrandizing, exploitative egotism that is encouraged in men. Presley maintains that both women and men, who respect themselves, presumably without superiority complexes, are better able to respect others as well. Beyond interpersonal relationships, Rand’s relation of the individual to society is problematic. One problem is that basing morality strictly on the rational individual seems to depend on each one granting equal rights to others on an ad hoc basis, not as a general social contract agreed on by all, as an “all for one and one for all” arrangement. Yet Rand endorses such a social contract (Virtue 28-31). Eric Mack solves that contradiction, suggesting that if all internalized the social contract, everyone’s self-interest would be served. Thus, Rand’s rational individual could logically extend equal rights to all humans, based on their rational potential.
Although she deplores the prevailing lack of Vibram FiveFingers actualization of that potential and has contempt rather than respect for the masses, Rand envisions the possibility of a free, noncoercive, and just society, as depicted near the end of Atlas Shrugged, calling it “capitalism” but admitting that it has never existed. This small group of self-and-other-respecting individuals has dropped out of corrupt society to live as an informal meritocracy. Although members may compete, they lack the ruthless competitiveness of social Darwinism (also supposedly modeled on objective nature), because Rand denies conflicts of interest among truly rational persons. For example, those of lesser ability do not envy, but rather admire those of superior achievement as deserving of higher rewards, and, instead of feeling inferior, they take pride in their own more humble but self-reliant contribution to fair trading (Virtue 57-67).
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