Feminism today has become a bastardisation of the movement's earliest ideals of removing from society those things which discriminate against the female gender in particular and both genders in general.
Early feminists had a vision in which men and women were treated equally by both society and the state. In their vision, a woman who wanted to be a doctor or a bricklayer should have the same right to choose as anyone else. If she wanted to be active politically, either as a passive voter, or as an active campaigner, she could be and should be allowed to do so. Furthermore, women should be accorded the same levels of medical care as a man would normally receive and also be given equality over matters of tax, income, inheritance, property ownership, education and other things traditionally held to be a male preserve. By and large, all of these things have been achieved. Women have never had such great opportunities as they have today and have never been afforded greater protection in law. However, in some cases women have been given too much opportunity and legal protection and the equality balance has swung too far in the opposite direction. Among some feminists this has raised the cry that men are now "getting a taste of injustice and if they don't like it, its tough!" This kind of sentiment simply shows the speaker up for what they are and does nothing to right the wrong. The tragedy is that this vengeful and rather stupid attitude is so common. The dangers inherent in such beliefs and attitudes are many and should not be taken lightly. These beliefs are evidence not just of a vengeful nature but of an extreme wing of feminism that ought to be feared and prevented by all right thinking people.
Feminism today is a movement that has been high jacked by the stupid and unthinking to such a degree that is has become as dangerous a political philosophy as any branch of Marxist theory ever was. The reason for this danger is not based simply in the faulty ideological constructs of the movement, but in the way in which it has permeated the political thinking of so many powerful governments and governmental organisations. This permeation has brought the state into areas of family life that are not just intrusive and unwelcome but are also deeply damaging to the very idea of family itself. An idea cherished world-wide for countless millennia. The effects of this intrusion and destruction of family life are already being felt world-wide and the radical feminists are only half way through their stated aim of outlawing marriage and the concept of fatherhood.
Jim Kalb on his Anti Feminism page on the web has the following to say about the effects of modern feminism:
"The harsh things that can be said about anarchism and communism can be said with yet more force about feminism, because the latter seeks to eliminate something that touches us far more deeply than private property or the state. Like the other two ideologies, feminism can be presented as a lofty and necessary ideal set up in opposition to a long history of dreadful injustice. After all, things like gender that are implicated in all social life are necessarily implicated in all social injustice. Nonetheless, the practical implementation of feminism, especially by force of law, can only lead to catastrophe. Like anarchism it calls for categorical opposition to authority and hierarchy, and like communism for ceaseless radical reconstruction of all aspects of life, and consequently for absolute bureaucratic control of everything. Both principles are thoroughly destructive, and the fact they contradict each other does not render them harmless.
The result of the victory of feminism has been disorder cascading from America throughout the world, from the most immediate personal relationships to high culture and international politics. Feminism has meant suspicion and hostility where mutual reliance is an absolute necessity. It has meant growing deceit, heartlessness and brutality in daily life, resulting in particular suffering for the weak. It has meant confusion and misery for the young, who have been deprived of stable family life and concrete ideals of adulthood. It must therefore be opposed as a destructive fanaticism based on a gross and wilful misapprehension of human life."
These are very strong words but they should not be discounted for that reason alone. They are not the words of some fanatical women hater trying to undo feminist ideals for the purpose of restablishing some mythical tyrannical male rule over women. They are the words of someone who has patiently observed the true effects of feminism over the last forty years and become sufficiently alarmed by all he has seen to sound a warning to others.
Feminism today rarely gives us the facts of a situation. Rather it gives us an interpretation of a situation and then dares us to disagree. If we are brave enough to disagree then we may find our position within the organisation we work compromised. At best we will be howled down, written about, excoriated and condemned. This is nothing short of intimidation and should, by itself, provide a warning to us that all is not well. Take the great rape debate that is raging across America at the moment and is happening here in Britain also: Catherine MacKinnon writes, "Compare victims' reports of rape with womens' reports of sex. They look a lot alike.... In this light, the major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it.""*1 To most rational people this view would seem perverse and dangerous and the implications of such views being roundly adopted by society too horrendous to think about. Yet these views are gaining ground simply because the audiences of them are too frightened of the results of opposition to them.
For young women attending feminist conferences, daring to stand up and object to such remarks would mean total exclusion from the feminist group and allegations of anti feminist viewpoints being made against her. The one thing that feminism will not tolerate is dissent. Thus for the politician worried about women's votes it becomes too dangerous to object and so they capitulate. Pretty soon after that capitulation these views become enshrined in law. Once they have been made law, the terrible injustices that flow from them have to be ignored or the politicians have to admit to cowardice. We all know that politicians cannot admit to any weakness at all. Even apologising seems beyond most of them. This is the nature and effects of radical feminism today and it is perfectly illustrated in another part of the article the MacKinnon quote above comes from. "Dead serious, eyes wide open with concern, a college senior tells me that she believes that one in four [victims of rape] is too conservative an estimate. This is not the first time I've heard this. She tells me the right statistic is closer to one in two. That means that one in two women are raped. It's amazing, she says, amazing that so many of us are sexually assaulted every day.
What is amazing is that this student actually believes that 50 percent of women are raped. This is the true crisis. Some substantial number of young women are walking around with this alarming belief: a hyperbole containing within it a state of perpetual fear."
It is these views and others like them that lead Jim Kalb to make the statement reproduced above that, "Feminism has meant suspicion and hostility where mutual reliance is an absolute necessity. It has meant growing deceit, heartlessness and brutality in daily life, resulting in particular suffering for the weak."
Modern feminism is the enemy of the people adopted by politicians and imposed by judges. It is a perverse, pervasive and dangerous ideology that must be stamped out and resisted wherever it shows itself. Modern feminism is no longer about equality but about control and revenge. Its influence is spreading like cancer through a body and its effects are killing the body social just as surely as any cancer would kill our physical bodies unless we cut it out.
The question that troubles most people who look into the boiling miasma that feminism has become is, "Is there any hope?" Well, yes there is! Radical feminism is in the process of self destructing. It is a cancer that is eating itself. So confused has it become and so self mutilating that is no longer attractive to any man or woman with half a brain. The feminist theory of "patriarchy" (A male conspiracy to rob women of rights in order to subjugate them) has become so discredited as to be laughable. The ordinary man and woman in the street are so preoccupied with just paying their bills and surviving day to day, they have no time to indulge in conspiracies against each other. They never have had the time. Neither did they ever want to. Ordinary people just want to live together and get along. Sure, these people often hold attitudes about the opposite sex that are wrong and inaccurate but this is based on a lack of understanding and not some terrible dark conspiracy designed to rob half of the population of their rights. Consequently they have rejected the great feminist tenets of male organised hate against women. The only conspiracy that exists today is the one carried by feminists in their confused heads. That does not mean that we should become complacent and do nothing. Feminism has been brainwashing the populations of every westernised culture for the last forty years with its own special brand of paranoid thinking. That this brainwashing has had an effect is, I hope, amply illustrated in this article.
John M. Ellis is professor of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95060.*2 He writes, "If misrule by an oppressive "patriarchy" were a correct interpretation of the past, the logical remedy would indeed be immediate corrective measures: hiring goals and timetables for reaching the parity in all spheres that feminists believe should have existed all along. And so, instead of letting the situation take its natural shape as women choose from among the careers newly available to them, feminist anger about the patriarchy leads them to distort the situation by forcing it immediately into what they consider a correct shape.
This distortion colored the recent search for an Attorney General. Not content to remove the barriers to change and then wait for it to occur naturally, the Clinton administration decided to force it to happen by limiting the search to women. The result was a public-relations disaster that demeaned women (and the office) by implying that they needed to be protected from competition with men. It happened because the administration was captive to the unreal view of the past promoted by radical feminists... Feminist writers on literature routinely use the literature of past ages only to find evidence of patriarchal oppression at work, but, because they take the conditions of modern life as a standard to apply everywhere, their work becomes irrelevant to literature produced by societies whose structure they fundamentally misunderstand. In both cases women are missing the opportunity they now have to take their place among the genuine intellectual leaders in their fields. Meanwhile new and damaging female stereotypes are being created by the obsessive harping on victim status that has become so obtrusive a part of the thought and public comment of many of these recent entrants into the professions. The lesson is clear: when women believe that a continuing patriarchal conspiracy is the only reason for the differentiated roles we inherited from our past, that belief becomes yet another barrier to their progress.
The sad thing is that this wrong turn occurred just as women had largely overcome initial resistance to change in the workplace. That there will be significant change in the numbers of women in the professions and in government is no longer controversial, and in recent years women have been establishing an impressive record in government. A short list of the most able members of the Bush administration would certainly have to include Lynn Martin, Carla Hills, Linda Chavez, Condoleezza Rice, and Lynn Cheney. But feminists now seem bent on undermining these gains by discrediting themselves; indeed, the word "feminism" has become so tainted by the recent excesses that more and more women shy away from it. The feminism typical of campus women's studies departments has little credibility among the general public."
The effects of the brainwashing of millions of young women are indeed painful for men. Watching television I am struck by how many times in one evening I see a woman or a bunch of women attack everything their male colleagues or counterparts say and then go on to whine about how men do not respect them. Yet men are still extraordinarily patient in dealing with these harridans and often just smile benignly and ignore their unprovoked attacks. The impression given to the audience at home is not evidence that the man under attack is somehow "stupid" or "immature" but that the females doing the attacking are models of the very thing they are accusing the men of being. The evidence presented by these events is these the women do not have the slightest understanding of the way men think and are therefore best ignored when trying to fathom the differences between the sexes. That is what is happening to feminism as a whole. The people instinctively know the difference between a real expert and one pretending to be so. Feminists are largely people pretending to have inside knowledge but who, in reality, are simply confused and led by irrational hate. In effect, they are models in miniature of the Marxist philosophy there were born out of.
The masuclisation of women by feminist ideas is a far more serious and worrying trend. There is no doubt that more and more females are becoming aggressive and violent. The figures relating to female perpetrators of domestic violence in homes all over the world are horrifying and are growing with every new study. The courts and prison services are reporting an explosion of female crimes. Babies are being abandoned or murdered in ever increasing numbers. Divorce rates are climbing steadily and 70% of them are being initiated by females. Single mothers are infesting society like a plague and their confused offspring are getting involved in drugs and alcohol misuse in numbers never before seen. Teenage suicide rates are the highest ever known. Angry fathers, grandmothers aunts and uncles desperate to see children snatched from them, but prevented by laws directly attributable to feminist ideology, are protesting in huge and growing numbers world wide. Male health issues are always seen to be taking second place to female health issues and the resentment caused is massive and growing. Magazines are full of articles blaming everything that is wrong with society on men and encouraging females not to accept responsibility for anything bad or illegal. Judges in court rooms are filled with anti male bias and the police forces of westernised societies are full of the same prejudices. Schools are reporting ever more frightening attacks on other pupils by gangs of female bullies filled with ideas about "girl power" they have been programmed with by all girl groups such as "The Spice Girls." These people are children showing they are not yet mature enough to understand the difference between assertiveness and aggression yet at the same time being encouraged to have unbridled sexual experiences and get pregnant without having to accept responsibility for their actions. All of these things are encouraging the worst kind of female bullies to stalk the streets, board rooms and playgrounds of our nation yet while they bully and intimidate, the press encourages them to see themselves as mere victims. All of this is directly attributable to the radical feminist ideals and propaganda society has been saturated with.
Copyright © 2003 George Rolph. Used with permission.
George Rolph is webmaster of
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