A characteristic of establishment feminism is that it will sell out and abandon women for almost any other Leftist cause. Thus, Tammy Bruce, who was the head of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (1990–1996), wanted to organize protests against domestic violence at the time of the O.J. Simpson murder trial, and she protested the race-baiting strategy of Simpson's defense team. Bruce was censured by the NOW board and overruled about the demonstrations, so she resigned, thoroughly disillusioned with establishment feminism and the Left. Since Bruce is a Lesbian and previously a Democrat activist, her political Odyssey was a dramatic reversal.Most recently, the betrayal of women was obvious in feminism's failure to defend women's athletics against the intrusion of "trans-women," i.e. biological males who "identify" as "women." Thus, on March 31, 2024, the National Organization for Women posted a statement: "Making people believe there isn't enough space for trans women in sports is white supremacist patriarchy at work."
How biological males in women's sports has anything to do with "white supremacy" or "patriarchy" is mysterious, but we often see opponents of Leftist causes smeared with every political crime that the Left has in its arsenal, however ridiculous. Thus, Israel, which demographically is largely Middle Eastern Jews (who are "persons of color"), is attacked as "white supremacist," all in the cause of supporting the terrorist murders of Israelis.
So not accepting that biological males can dominate women and girls in their own sports and athletic competitions makes one, somehow, a "white supremacist" and a supporter of "patriarchy," when the first charge doesn't even make any sense, while the second would seem to be the opposite of the case. I always thought that the moral of the 1992 movie The Crying Game was that men make better women than women do. The National Organization for Women now seems to agree with that.
Or maybe not. The NOW posting was soon removed, perhaps when some more sensible feminists realized that it was, not only absurd, but really a misogynistic attack on women. Yet replacing women in their own athletics apparently remains a Leftist goal; and feminists must think hard before getting swept along with it.
The unfair participation of "trans-women" in women's sports would be stopped instantly if women and girl athletes simply refused to participate when biological men are present. This happens occasionally, and the vindictive reprisals of sports "authorities" then demonstrate their malevolence.
When five West Virginia teenage students were banned from competition after they forfeited a shot put competition against a male, the Attorney General of West Virginia, Patrick Morrisey, had to step in to reverse this retaliation against the students. And establishment feminism did nothing. Indeed, it urges passivity and acceptance on such females.
The towering irony of that is that it is supposedly the "patriarchy" that tells women to be passive and never be assertive or stand up for themselves. This is now the feminist principle: In the face of Leftist ideology, offer no resistance to your rapist, just as you were supposedly told under the patriarchy.
What might worry us is that too many female athletes seem to be intimidated by the "authorites." In the 2024 Paris Olympics, Italy's Angela Carini threw in the towel after 46 seconds in a match against a "trans" boxer, after brutal blows to the face, and broke down in tears. Her complaint was then supported by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. However, a day or so later, Angela Carini caved in and asserted that it was acceptable that she was beated down by a biological man. We are left wondering what threats or inducements had been made against her, despite the support of her own government. She had certainly suddenly learned not to stand up for herself.
And again, from establishment feminism, crickets.
Heroically outspoken about all of this have been J.K. Rowling and tennis star Martina Navratilova, despite the constant vilification showered on them by the radical Left. Very active in the cause has been swimmer Riley Gaines, who was forced to tolerate male genitals in her locker rooms, something that otherwise would have been a sex crime. Now Gaines must put up with demonstrations and physical assaults, while there has been a whole movement to boycott the works of Rowling -- boycotts that the public has totally ignored, to the mortification of the Left.
Ἐγκλινοβάραγγος (Enklinobarangus)
They had jobs, but feminists weren't satisfied; every other woman had to get one too. So they opened fire on homemakers with a savagery that still echoes throughout our culture. A housewife is a "parasite," [Betty] Frieden writes; such women are "less than fully human" insofar as they "have never known a commitment to an idea."
David Gelernter, Drawing Life, Surviving the Unabomber, Free Press, 1997, p. 95
Housewives, not men, were the prey in feminism's sights when Kate Millett decreed in 1969 that the family must go. Feminists do not speak for traditional women. Men cannot know this, however, unless we tell them how we feel about them, our children, and our role in the home. Men must understand that our feelings towards them and our children are derided by feminists and have earned us their enmity. Whether or not this understanding garners men's support, traditional women must defend ourselves because the feminist offensive is, most essentially, a breach of solidarity with us, a disavowel of the obligation to honor the Women's Pact [that religious celibates, professional women, and homemakers respect each other] that women in the movement owed to us.
F. Carolyn Graglia, Domestic Tranquility, A Brief Against Feminism, Spence Publishing Company, Dallas, 1998, p. 97
On May 11, 2024, Harrison Butker, the placekicker for the Kansas City Chiefs football team, delivered the commencement address at the Catholic Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas.
He is Catholic, devout, married, and with children. That was his message. A key part of his statement was this:
Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.This was enough to provoke the furies on the Left. As just noted by Gelernter and Graglia, feminism doesn't want women to have a choice. They must sit in those cubicles or boardrooms, perhaps after having aborted their babies, and be part of a career and professional life, perhaps as no more than drones of corporations, or on their feet all day waiting tables. To establishment feminism, that is "fulfilling," while being a wife, mother, and homemaker is meaningless and stupid.
As Bill Maher carefully noted, Bukter did not tell women not to have careers. He simply opined that most of the women at a conservative Catholic college would want something else. Yet the commentary of the political elite and cultural establishment was that Bukter wanted women in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant, and social progress all rolled back to the evil 1950's -- when, of course, children could play in the streets without worrying about getting shot or kidnapped -- as I did myself. After the 50's kids grew up and moved away, the neighborhood was never the same: the kids were not replaced.
So this exposes perhaps the darkest and most evil side of the cultural elite. They hate marriage and motherhood as a way of life -- and their influence is obvious in the falling birthrate in the United States and Europe, and even in Japan and Korea. But they may sense that this is a fragile victory. Careerism as a way of life has never had that good a reputation, not even among men, most of whose own careers may not be all that "fulfilling" -- especially in offices that become increasingly impersonal and cold because of fears of accusations of sexual harrassment, which can banish even the most innocent forms of flirting or joking. Career women discover that male coworkers -- or at least the wise ones -- may not be interested in socializing with them.
And men increasing perceive a college "education" as both explicitly hostile to men and all but worthless as a key to a middle class lifestyle. Plumbers may make more money, and without the hassle and insult of "cultural studies," feminist "struggle sessions," and the other Marxist propaganda, and now anti-Semitism, of the modern university.
Thus, accusations of "sexism" and "patriarchy" against Harrison Butker no longer accomplish what the accusers expect. Only fellow elitists will nod in agreement,
while most Americans register another example of the vicious and intolerant ideology of fanatics. It is becoming, not just tiresome, but hostile to most people who want and value what used to be considered a normal family life. Even the "I don't need no man" modern woman, who may end up alone with cats, becomes uncertain. At some point, it is too late to change her mind, as contemporary men recognize where they are not wanted, and are even detested, and have checked out. We actually can only hope that Harrison Butker was correct about many of the Catholic women he was addressing.
At first, the organization of the Kansas City Chiefs "disowned" what Butker had said but soon withdrew its statement when it turned out that the public, and Chiefs' players, tended to agree with him. Butker ended up defended by the Chief's quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, its coach, Andy Reid, and Tavia Hunt, the wife of team's owner. Someone in the Kansas City city government "doxxed" Butker by leaking his home address, hoping (as the Left often does) that demonstrators would show up to harrass his family, or worse; but the Attorney General of Missouri said that this was a possible crime (as a threat of violence) and that he would investigate.
Τηλεπατητικός (Telepateticus)
"I am not the sort of woman who goes blonde," writes novelist Jane Smiley, before explaining how she did just that and, in the process, what sort of woman she discovered herself to be. A feminist intellectual and practical Midwesterner, Smiley had always "abjured vanity." She wore glasses and plain white cotton underwear, had a "short, masculine hairdo," and never, ever shaved her legs or underarms. Her looks reflected her convictions. "If I dyed my hair," she thought, "that would lead to makeup, and inevitably, to manicures, facials, panty hose, and the wholesale submission to the patriarchy." But that reasoning itself reflected the stereotypes of an earlier era, the idea that women must choose between intelligence and beauty, mind and body, substance and surface.
In her early forties, Smiley discovered that her studied indifference to her appearance was sending unwanted signals and hiding important aspects of her personality. The man she was interested in didn't see her as a woman. She fretted to her therapist. The therapist sent her to his colorist. Thus began her new life of blonde hair and shaved armpits -- of new pleasures and new meaning. "Sometimes I stand in front of the mirror and simply admire it," she says of her caramel-colored hair. "It is a beautiful, layered, shimmering gold, soft and sparkly, a hair color that has no relation to me and no counterpart in the animal world. I would hate to give it up."
Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style, How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness [HarperCollins, 2003, pp.117-118]
According to 2010 BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] data, the following jobs contain 1 percent female workers or less: boilermaking, brickmasonry, stonemasonry, septic tank servicing, sewer pipe cleaning and working with reinforcing iron and rebar. Maybe the reason female workers aren't in these occupations is that too many are in other occupations. Females are 97 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers, 80 percent of social workers, 82 percent of librarians and 92 percent of dietitians and nutritionists and registered nurses.
Walter E. Williams, "Equality or Inequality," 29 February 2012
More than 90 percent of job-related deaths occur among men...
Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, Basic Books, 2011, p.135
A reporter from the Daily Caller then pointed out that the women on Nancy Pelosi's own staff average 27 percent lower incomes than the men on her staff. Does that show that Pelosi herself is guilty of discrimination against women? Or does it show that such simple-minded statistics are grossly misleading?
Thomas Sowell, "The real 'war on women'," 6 June 2012
For years, even decades, "progressive" criticism had characterized industrial labor as dehumanizing -- constituting the use of persons as machines -- and had dismissed white collar managerial, clerical, or sales jobs as shallow careerism or exercises in pointless, empty, venal, and meaningless commercial mummeries (e.g. Arthur Miller's 1949 "Death of a Salesman"). Yet the disappearance of industrial jobs through increasing automation and the use of robots is greeted with horror; and, more significantly, feminism presented to women an ideology that their only true path of fulfillment was to enter the workforce precisely to fill the sort of managerial, clerical, or sales jobs previously disparaged, with "Rosie the Riveter" the icon for female industrial jobs -- while raising children in suburbia was abject, stupifying idiocy and slavery. To be sure, the feminists were probably thinking more of "creative" jobs in art, journalism, academia, politics, etc. as meeting criteria of human fulfillment, i.e. the sorts of jobs feminists probably had themselves. But on the ground, the number of such jobs is very limited; and most women would find themselves on their feet or in a cubicle, doing things both repetitive and boring, eight hours a day, or looking at a computer screen -- probably with something like Gummy Bear sales figures on it. Even F. Carolyn Graglia, cited above, who began a career as a lawyer, soon reflected that drawing up contracts for corporate clients, although pleasingly remunerative, held little attraction, or promise of it, in terms of personal fulfillment.
Τηλεπατητικός (Telepateticus)
The Master said, "Women and mean persons are hard to deal with;
if you are close, they are not obedient; if you are distant, they are resentful."Confucius, Analects XVII:25, translation after Arthur Waley [1938] and Joanna C. Lee & Ken Smith [2010]
ἔτι δὲ τὸ ἄρρεν πρὸς τὸ θῆλυ φύσει τὸ μὲν κρεῖττον τὸ δὲ χεῖρον,
τὸ μὲν ἄρχον τὸ δ᾽ ἀρχόμενον.Again, the male against the female is by nature stronger and the latter inferior, the former ruler and the latter ruled.
Aristotle, Politics, I.2.12, translated by H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1932, 1998, pp.20-21; translation modified; see here for "male" and "female" in Greek.
Das niedrig gewachsene, schmalschultrige, breithüftige und kurzbeinige Geschlecht das schöne nennen konnte nur der vom Geschlechtrstrieb umnebelte männliche Intellekt: in diesem Triebe nämlich steckt seine ganze Schönheit. Mit mehr Fug könnte man das weibliche Geschlecht das unästhetische nennen.
Only the male intellect, clouded by the sexual impulse, could call the undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged sex the fair sex; for in this impulse is to be found its whole beauty. The female sex could be more aptly called the unaesthetic.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Über die Weiber, Kapitel XXVII von Parerga und Paralipomena II; "On Women," Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume 2, §368-369, Oxford, Calarendon Press, 1974, p.619
Zwischen Männern ist von Natur bloß Gleichgültigkeit; aber zwischen Weibern ist schon von Natur Feindschaft. Es kommt wohl daher, daß das odium figulinum, welches bei Männern sich auf ihre jedesmalige Gilde beschränkt, bei Weibern das ganze Geschlecht umfaßt; da sie Alle nur Ein Gewerbe haben. Schon beim Begegnen auf der Straße sehn sie einander an, wie Guelfen und Ghibellinen. Auch treten zwei Weiber, bei erster Bekanntschaft, einander sichtbarlich mit mehr Gezwungenheit und Verstellung entgegen, als zwei Männer in gleichem Fall. Daher kommt auch das Komplimentiren zwischen zwei Weibern viel lächerlicher heraus, als zwischen Männern.
Between men there is by nature merely indifference; but between women there is already by nature hostility. This is due to the fact that with men the odium figulinum [professional jealousy] is limited to their particular guild, whereas with women it embraces the whole sex since they all have only one line of business. Even when they meet in the street, they look at one another like Guelphs and Ghibellines. Moreover on first acquaintance, two women meet each other obviously with more stiffness and dissimulation than do two men in a similar situation.
Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Women," Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume 2, §368, Oxford, Calarendon Press, 1974, p.619
It was more affectionate than any handshake I'd ever received from a strange woman. To me, woman-to-woman introductions often seem fake and cold, full of limp gentility. I've seen a lot of women hug one another this way, too, sometimes even women who've known each other for a long time and think of themselves as being good friends. They're like two backward magnets pushed together by convention...
When this man whom I'd never met before shook my hand he gave me something real. He included me. But most of the women I'd ever shaken hands with or even hugged had held something back, as if we were in constant competition with each other, or secretly suspicious, knowing it but not knowing it, and going through the motions all the same. In my view bra burning hadn't changed that much.
Norah Vincent (1968-2022), Self-Made Man, One Woman's Year Disguised as a Man, Penguin Books, 2006, 2007, pp.25-26; joining a men's bowling team, disguised as a man.
I use the word 'feminine' in at least two ways: on the one hand, to refer to the socially constructed category of woman that has endured universal and transhistorical oppression and thus to underscore the reality of women's suffering; on the other, to indicate a position of resistance with respect to the patriarchal order, whether it is perpetuated and sustained by biological women or by men. Here the term does not so much refer to actual women as designate a position of critique with respect to the masculinist systems of thought that contribute to women's subjugation. Although such a conception of the feminine does not suspend reference to existing women, it does suspend the notion of an ultimate feminine identity that could function as the ground of sexual difference.
Barbara Claire Freeman, "The Feminine Sublime," 1995 [The Sublime, Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel Gallery & The MIT Press, 2010, p.64, color added] [note].
Hinter einer derartigen Denik- und Wertungsweise, welche kunstfeindlich sein muß, solange sie irgendwie echt ist, empfand ich von jeher auch das Lebensfeindliche, den ingrimmigen rachsüchtigen Widerwillen gegen das Leben selbst...
Behind this mode of thought and valuation, which must be hostile to art if it is at all genuine, I never failed to sense a hostility to life -- a furious, vengeful antipathy to life itself...
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music [1872, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, translated by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, 1967, p.23; Die Geburt der Tagödie, aus dem Geiste der Musik, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1987, 2000, p.17; color added].
Women hate women. That’s what I think it is. Women’s nature is not to support other women. It’s really sad. Men protect each other, and women protect their men and children. Women turn inward and men are more external. A lot of it has do with jealousy and some sort of tribal inability to accept that one of their kind could lead a nation.
Madonna (Louise Ciccone), on why women voted for Donald Trump, The Guardian, December 7, 2016
It's a no-brainer that we should have the right to marry. But I also think, equally, that it's a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. [applause] So, that causes my brain some trouble and part of why it causes me trouble is because fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we're going to do with marriage when we get there. You know, because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change. And that is a lie. The institution of marriage is going to change and it should change and again, I don't think it should exist.
Masha (Maria Alexandrovna) Gessen, Address to Sydney Writer's Festival, Sydney, Australia, 19 May 2012
In a Washington Post column, critic Ann Hornaday accused Hollywood A-listers Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen of inspiring the killing spree carried out by Elliot Rodger in Isla Vista, near the University of California, Santa Barbara, on 23 May 2014. Rodger killed three people by stabbing and three others, including two sorority girls, by gunshot. Others were wounded. He then killed himself. Hornaday said, "How many men, raised on a steady diet of Judd Apatow comedies in which the shlubby arrested adolescent always gets the girl, find that those happy endings constantly elude them and conclude, 'It's not fair?'" Rodger expressed hatred of women for always having refused his overtures, although we later learned that he had had difficulty relating to people his whole life, much to the distress of his parents, who long sought help for him and were in fact on their way to Santa Barbara out of alarm at what he had been saying -- his mother even notified the police, who interviewed Rodger but took no action.
But we should consider what Hornaday is saying. Does she mean that nerdy virgins should take no comfort from boy-meets-girl stories and just accept that they are emasculated losers who will never find love? Does Hornaday have similar objections to, say, Bridget Jones's Diary [book 1996, film 2001], or the vast romance literature, that tells similar stories about women? Or is it just young men that she doesn't care about; for that is what this amounts to. There seems to be real hostility here for shy, lonely, awkward males. They are better not presented with stories of "college life that should be full of 'sex and fun and pleasure'." They might get the wrong idea, like that they could be part of an active social life. Instead, Hornaday comes across like the woman on the dance floor in Play It Again Sam [1972], who says to Woody Allen, "Shove off, creep." Apatow and Rogen might well say to Hornaday, "Perhaps the callousness of someone like you is what pushed Elliot Rodger into a psychotic break." Of course, as in several recent mass shootings, the real problem here was mental illness, in this case in toxic combination with adolescent despair, not misogyny or (as Gloria Allred said) "male chauvinism." But it is always edifying to see unthinking people grinding their ideological axes on other people's suffering.
Ἐγκλινοβάραγγος (Enklinobarangus)
At Brandeis University, we are learning the hierarchy of the new multiculti caste system. In theory, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is everything the identity-group fetishists dig: female, atheist, black, immigrant. If conservative white males were to silence a secular women's rights campaigner from Somalia, it would be proof of the Republican Party's "war on women," or the encroaching Christian fundamentalist theocracy, or just plain old... racism... But when the sniveling white male who purports to be the President of Brandeis (one Frederick Lawrence) does it out of deference to Islam, Miss Hirsi Ali's blackness washes off her like a bad dye job on a telly news anchor. White feminist Germaine Greer [The Female Eunuch, 1970] can speak at Brandeis because, in one of the more whimsical ideological evolutions even by dear old Germaine's standards, Ms. Greer feels that clitoridectomies add to the rich tapestry of "cultural identity": "One man's beautification is another man's mutilation," as she puts it. But black feminist Hirsi Ali, who was on the receiving end of "one's man's mutilation" and lives under death threats because she was boorish enough to complain about it, is too "hateful" to be permitted to speak. In the internal contradictions of multiculturalism, Islam trumps all: race, gender, secularism, everything. So, in the interests of multiculti sensitivity, pampered upper-middle-class trusty-fundy children of entitlement are pronouncing a Somali refugee beyond the pale and signing up to Islamic strictures on the role of women.
Mark Steyn, The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, Don't Say You Weren't Warned [Regnery Publishing, 2014, pp.371-372, color added]
In November, Muslim students in London, belonging to the Goldsmiths University's Islamic Society, violently broke up a talk given by the Iranian feminist and secularist campaigner Maryam Namazie. If that weren't bad enough, the following day the Goldsmiths Feminist Society declared its unwavering support for ... the Islamic Society -- an act whose strangeness can only be explained as resentment of Western values [Feminism?], with heavy infusions of victims' mentality.
Amanda Foreman, "Five Best: A Personal Choice," The Wall Street Journal, April 2-3, 2016, C10, color added; as noted above, here is a feminist organization selling out women again, in this case on behalf of an organization that is four-square against secularism and the rights of women. The bizarre rarely gets more bizarre than this, although "Gays for Gaza" comes close.
Conduct a thorough reading of questionable college rape reports, and you'll begin to see a pattern: A legion of confused young women, long coached that sex means nothing -- casual sex is just something that empowered women do, after all -- who quickly and traumatically realize, either consciously or not that something feels dreadfully wrong...
Bathed in the sexual revolution and its culture of sexual freedom, many young Americans, male and female, now have no idea how -- or why -- to impose even the flimsiest moral framework around the most intimate, exposing, literally naked act in which two human beings can engage. Having been told that sex is easy, meaningless, and always pleasurable, many young people are shocked [shocked!] to discover that's not invariably the case -- that sex is often anything but casual, that it triggers deep and powerful emotions and needs they cannot integrate with the cultural insistence that sex is no big deal. They do not have the vocabulary or the clarity to grasp why. What has happened to them feels wrong, not right. It is disturbing, not ecstatic. And for these feelings, they believe they deserve redress.
Heather Wilhelm, "The 'Rape Culture' Lie," Commentary, March 2015, pp.27 & 29 [note]
Yet studies consistently find that following hookups, women are more likely than men to experience regret, low self-esteem and mental distress. Female pleasure is rare during casual sex. Men in casual relationships are just not as good at bringing women to orgasm in comparison with men in committed relationships: In first-time hookups, only 10% of women orgasm, compared with 68% of women in long-term relationships. These figures don’t suggest a generation of women reveling in sexual liberation. Instead, a lot of women seem to be having unpleasant sex out of a sense of obligation...
The word “chivalry” is now deeply unfashionable, but it describes something of what we need. As the feminist theorist Mary Harrington writes: “‘Chivalrous’ social codes that encourage male protectiveness toward women are routinely read from an egalitarian perspective as condescending and sexist. But…the cross-culturally well-documented greater male physical strength and propensity for violence makes such codes of chivalry overwhelmingly advantageous to women, and their abolition in the name of feminism deeply unwise.”
Louise Perry, "How the Sexual Revolution Has Hurt Women," the Wall Street Journal, August 20-21, 2022, pp.C1,C4.
The former First Lady said this to a crowd in Boston last week: “As far as I’m concerned, any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice in a way. . . . We look at those two candidates, as women, and many of us said, ‘That guy. He’s better for me. His voice is more true to me.’ Well, to me that just says you don’t like your voice. You like the thing we’re told to like.” . . .
I just want to note the irony: Michelle Obama is herself telling women what to like. . . . Those who tell us to be in touch with our own desires are often merely trying to make us believe that what we want is the thing that they are selling. . . .
We’re used to that kind of persuasion, for political candidates as well as commercial products.
It’s harder to play this game out in the open, the way Michelle Obama is doing. Once you call attention to the way the other side drew people in by making them feel that their candidate expressed what they really felt inside, you’re waking us up to the fact that you were doing that too, and you seem rather pathetic complaining that your depiction of the customer’s internal desires didn’t work on many people.
Ann Althouse, October 5, "Notable & Quotable: Michelle Obama and Womens’ Voices," The Wall Street Journal, October 7-8, 2017
BRUSSELS — For the first time, a Belgian criminal court has convicted a man of “sexism in the public space,” for verbally abusing a female police officer who tried to question him after he was seen jaywalking.
The man, whose name was not disclosed, was convicted of sexism, slander and threatening a police officer, and fined 3,000 euros, or $3,725. He did not appear in court, and he can appeal the conviction, but failure to pay the fine could land him in prison, officials said.
“Shut your mouth, I don’t talk to women, being a police officer is not a job for women,” the man told the female police officer during the arrest, according to Gilles Blondeau, a spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office. The officer arrested him and filed charges.
The verdict was the first conviction under a Belgian law criminalizing sexism in a public place. The sexism law was passed in 2014 as an amendment to an earlier law condemning discrimination in general.
"Belgian Man Convicted of ‘Sexism in the Public Space,’ a First," The New York Times, March 6, 2018 -- Thus the totalitarian, and authoritarian ("slandering" a police officer? Is this lèse majesté?), tendencies of Feminism are exposed. Can the Qurʾān be next? Could the surprisingly hidden name of this perpetrator (who ought otherwise be publicly shamed) be embarrassingly Islamic? Who else would say, "I don't talk to women"? What Fundamentalist Christian doesn't "talk to women"?
Das schwache Geschlecht ist in keinem Zeitalter mit solcher Achtung von Seiten der Männer behandelt worden als in unserm Zeitalter -- das gehört zum demokratischen Hang und Grundgeschmack, ebenso wie die Unehrerbietigkeit vor dem Alter --: was Wunder, daß sofort wieder mit dieser Achtung Missbrauch getrieben wird? Man will mehr, man lernt fordern, man findet zuletzst jenen Achtungszoll beinahe schon kränkend, man würde den Wettbewerb um Rechte, ja ganz eigentlich den Kampf vorziehn... Es verlernt den Mann zu fürchten: aber das Weib, das »das Furchen verlernt«, giebt seine weiblichsten Instinkte preis. Daß das Weib sich hervor wagt, wenn das Furcht-Einflössende am Manne, sagen wir bestimmter, wenn der Mann im Manne nicht mehr gewollt und grossgezüchtet wird, ist billig genug, auch begreiflich genug; was sich schwerer begreift, ist, daß ebendamit -- das Weib entartet. Dies geschieht heute: täuschen wir uns nicht darüber! Wo nur der industrielle Geist über den militärischen und aristokratischen Geist gesiegt hat, strebt jetzt das Weib nach der wirthschaftlichen und rechtlichen Selbständigkeit eines Commis: »das Weib als Commis« steht an der Pforte der sich bildenden modernen Gesellschaft.
At no other epoch has the weaker sex been treated with such respect by men as in ours; it is part of our democratic inclination and fundamental taste, exactly like our lack of respect for the aged. No wonder that such respect is immediately misused. One wants more, one learns to make demands, one feels the very degree of respect as practically an insult; one would prefer to compete for rights, in fact one prefers open warfare...
They unlearn to fear man; but a woman who has "unlearned fear" is yielding her most feminine instincts. It is fair and comprehensive enough that woman dares to emerge when that which inspires fear -- let us say the man in man -- is no longer desired by society and hence no longer trained into being. What is harder to comprehend is that in this process women herself degenerates. This is what is happening today; let us not deceive ourselves! Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, women are now striving for the economic and legal independence of an office boy. "Woman as office boy" is imprinted over the portal of modern society as it is emerging.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Marianne Cowan [Henry Regnery Company, 1955, p.167, translation modified]; Jenseits von Gut und Böse [Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 1988, p.8; daß restored for dass; Commis = Kommis = "clerk," in "commercial language"; in French, commis/commise, where commise means "shop-girl"].
To judge by the authors' accounts, women who grow up thinking of work as a choice, rather than a necessity, appear more susceptible to the idea that work should be about passion. That idea sounds nice, but the sorority sisters who thought this way often ended up choosing work that didn't cover the cost of child care, or they quit when their jobs turned out to be something other than a font of bliss.
"After a Diploma, Tough Choices," by Laura Vanderkam, The Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2018, A13, review of The Ambition Decisions, by Hana Schank & Elizabeth Wallace, based on interviews of the authors' own sorority sisters over 15 years after graduation.
The problem, of course, is that the modern person, let alone the modern feminist, does not take seriously Genesis 3:16-19. To work for a living, "in the sweat of your brow," is a curse upon man from God [3:19], just as labor pains are a curse upon woman [3:16]. The trendy recommendation that women work like men imposes upon them the unenviable condition of living under both curses. The dilemma is then resolved in the modern way by childlessness.
Ἐγκλινοβάραγγος (Enklinobarangus)
Lady, since I am going now beneath the earth, as my last entreaty I ask you to care for my orphaned children: marry my son to a loving [φίλη] wife and give my daughter a noble [γενναῖος] husband. And may they not, like their mother, perish untimely but live out their lives in happiness in their ancestral land.
Alcestis, addressing Hestia, the goddess of the Hearth, Alcestis, by Euripides, 162-169, Loeb Classical Library, Eurpides: Cyclops, Alcestis, Medea, translated by David Kovacs [Harvard University Press, 1994, 2001, pp.170-171]
Man erkennt einen Philosophen daran, daß er drei glänzenden und lauten Dingen aus dem Weg geht, dem Ruhme, den Fürsten und den Frauen.
One knows a philosopher thereby, that he avoids three shiny and loud things, fame, princes, and women..
Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral [Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 1988, p.107; daß restored for dass]; The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, translated by Francis Golffing [Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956, p.245; translation modified]
On September 19, 2014, a mentally disturbed veteran, Omar Gonzalez, jumped the fence at the White House, ran across the yard, through the unlocked front door, and far into the building before being tackled by an off-duty Secret Service Agent. A sniper was ready to shoot Gonzalez on the lawn, but he didn't because the man didn't seem to have any weapons. In fact, he had a knife. This was a grave embarrassment for one and all.
Several versions of the story mentioned that Gonzalez "overpowered a lone entrance hall guard" after entering the building. If anyone wondered how such a person could "overpower" a trained Secret Service Agent, other stories, outside the Politically Correct Press, supplied the fact that the agent was a woman. We never learned about the size or physical capabilities of this agent, although being knocked down by an intruder, which apparently is what happened (given the reluctance of sources to give details), implies that the size of the agent was comparable to the average of human females. Also, we are given to understand that the agent was unable to pursue Mr. Gonzalez, which implies a fairly violent, even disabling encounter.
This event is worth remembering in January 2016, as the Defense Department announced that women will now be included in combat roles across the military, including even the Marines. Since the Army had determined years ago that women generally only have half the upper body strength of men, and are obviously usually of smaller, lighter, and less robust build than men, which means, not just less strength, but less resistance to injury. As a result, the suspicion, or certainty, has been that the military, and the Secret Service, have lowered physical standards just to achieve the political purpose of "gender equity" in the organizations. This has also been seen in other physically demanding public employment, such as police forces and fire departments. The occasional denial, with other evidence to the contrary, does not persuade.
Since the purpose of the military, police forces, fire departments, and the Secret Service is to protect and defend, often in very physically demanding circumstances, the substitution of political criteria of service for physical ones seems ill conceived and dangerous, both for those serving and for those they are supposed to protect. Criticism of this all now seems muted, even among conservatives, and it may be that some grotesque and appalling incident will be necessary before second thoughts appear in public discourse. If Mr. Gonzalez had stabbed one of the Obama daughters, it is hard to imagine how far the recriminations would have gone. Meanwhile, polite society seems to think that women are physically able to do anything a man can -- it's what we see in the movies -- and skepticism or dissent from this renders one a moral leper. But the logical end of this is to subject women to registration for the Draft, which probably will not be as popular as other kinds of "equity."
Meanwhile, other problems emerge. Just as a co-ed culture at colleges has now given rise to accusations of a "rape culture" of ubiquitous sexual assaults, sexual assaults in the military have in fact become an increasing problem. This is not surprising. Where the sexes are no longer carefully segregated, in circumstances where privacy all but disappears, one should expect at least a baseline of conflict and crime, which hopefully would be less than in civilian life, because of military discipline, but which is unlikely to be zero, and whose prevelance otherwise may increase because of the noted lack of privacy and the other stressful features of military life.
Concern for the privacy of females meanwhile has declined in public discourse, despite the conspicuous narrative and accusations about the "rape culture." Thus, biological males who decide that their "gender identity" is female, whether or not they wear women's clothes, have the right, in California and elsewhere, to use women's bathrooms. This was parodied in a episode of South Park, but it is not a laughing matter when it means that a person who is physically male cannot be legally excluded or ejected from a women's bathroom. A solution to this is unisex bathrooms, which preserve privacy by only providing for one occupant at a time. Unfortunately, this would magnify a common problem with women's bathrooms, which is that they do not accommodate enough women, leading to long lines at public venues. Also, such unisex bathrooms typically don't include urinals, which means that the toilets become the targets of sometimes poorly aimed male functions, degrading the quality of the facilities for all. All such provisions, of course, become nonsense in the military, where minimal provisions for the latrines are often the best that can be done.
Provisions of privacy for women are not just a matter of protection against sexual assault but very simply to exclude even the most innocent forms of sexual advances. Most women probably don't relish the idea of being hit on in the bathroom -- certainly not by "male lesbians" whose "gender identity" is to be "gay female" with male equipment. The absurdities of this are magnified in a military context; and, with the threat of sexual assault, it becomes a discipline problem that, quite apart from its criminal dimension, disrupts the basic purposes of the military.
The preference of women to be free of sexual advances in the situations where privacy would otherwise be expected also has its counterpart with men. Thus, the virtue of the "don't ask; don't tell" policy introduced by the Clinton Administation in the military was that gay men knew not to make sexual advances on other men in the course of military service. Soldiers and sailors, etc., might wonder whether fellow servicemen were homosexuals, but they need not worry that this would mean being propositioned in the showers, latrines, or head. The determination now, however, is that openly gay service is a civil right and that "don't ask; don't tell" was the equivalent of Nazi extermination camps. As I have said elswhere, I am waiting to see what Muslims think of this -- even as Irān has the literal equivalent of Nazi extermination camps for homosexual Iranians.
In general, however, sexual tension, let alone the threat of sexual assault, not to mention hostility to homosexual practices that are traditionally considered morally repugnant, are not things that are consistent with military discipline and good order. What has overruled these considerations is no more than a self-righteous political moralism, where millennia of condemnations of homosexuality are no more than "bigotry," and where no considerations of prudence can modify the civil rights of females to serve equally with male soliders, even in the showers (as we see in the [hopeful?] movie version of Starship Troopers). Just how much trouble this will allow remains to be seen; and perhaps it is just a grand experiment, in which the lives and well being of people in the military, and those they defend, are now put on the line just to see what will happen. Some might think that many of those in authority and responsibility have simply lost their minds, all thanks to a blind ideology. Or, perhaps it will all work out all right, except for those bigoted Muslims, who, as on New Year's Eve of 2016 in Cologne, think that vulnerable women are fair game.
"Sexism" is the term that was coined by feminists for wrongs of belief or action with respect to women that seemed to them comparable to the wrongs of belief and action signified by racism. However, where racists may be reasonably said to have erred in seeing significant genetic differences between human races, there are real continuing questions, and steadily mounting evidence, about whether human sexual differences of behavior and psychology have a genetic basis.
My jumping off point here comes with four recent books. The first three are 
Christina Hoff Sommers' Who Stole Feminism? [Simon & Schuster, 1994], Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae [Vintage Books, 1991], and Warren Farrel's The Myth of Male Power [Simon & Schuster, 1993]. All three of these people themselves believe in a certain form of feminism, what Sommers has dubbed "equity feminism," which is just the principle that there must be legal and political equality for women. Warren Farrel was actually on the national governing board of the National Organization for Women until he became disillusioned and decided that NOW was not fighting for the proper goals. The fourth book is the powerful recent Domestic Tranquility, A Brief Against Feminism by F. Carolyn Graglia [Spence Publishing, Dallas, 1998]. Graglia explicitly opposes feminism as such, except perhaps the "social feminism" of the 19th century, on the principle that identical laws for men and women, which were opposed by the "social feminism," are harmful to women who chose a traditional domestic occupation. Graglia's argument is especially noteworthy in that it is not from a fundamentalist religious point of view, which is where defenses of the traditional domestic life of women usually, or are expected to usually, come from ("bible-thumping retards"), but the essentially secular and rational claims of someone, not unfamiliar with professional life (Columbia Law School, Wall Street law firm), who does not appreciate a legal regime that has become hostile to her and her family.
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| Costume from the TV series The Handmaid's Tale [2017-2022], based on the 1985 novel of the same name, by Margaret Atwood (b.1939); costume often worn in political demonstrations to imply, as the book did, that Christians and Republicans want to create a misogynistic regime to silence and otherwise oppress women, especially by making them have children. |
On the other hand, most contemporary feminism, and almost the entirety of academic and political feminism, as Farrel discovered at NOW, is what Sommers has called "gender feminism," which is essentially based on a form of Marxist theory that substitutes "gender" for Marx's category of "class," or simply adds the two together, usually with "race" thrown in. This sort of "race, class, and gender" theory is typically a dangerous form of political moralism, with the same totalitarian characteristics as other versions of Marxism have proven to display.
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| A Burka, designed to conceal all the female features of women, sometimes including the eyes, now being reimposed in Afghanistan, where misogyny and the oppression of women actually occurs; American activists never wear this kind of thing in demonstrations because critizicing ʾIslām is politically forbidden. Thus, they wear moral Burkas and are self-silenced, in deference to a religion whose practices are presumably everything they condemn and reject. This is either simple cowardice, or it is a feature of Anti-Americanism that uniquely hates America and ignores injustices elsewhere (except supposedly in Israel). |
One consequence of this is that the substantive content of criticism is rarely addressed but that it is considered sufficient to vilify critics as, in effect, "class enemies," i.e. directing ad hominem arguments against them that their status, in terms of race, class, or gender, or simply in terms of their critical attitude, is sufficient to refute their arguments. Hence the convenient device of dismissing most of Western civilization as the product of "dead white males" -- though for feminism the inconvenient fact remains that Eastern and Middle Eastern civilization (and every other) must also be dismissed as the products of "dead non-white males."
To gender feminism, Sommers, Paglia, and Farrel are no less "enemies of feminism" (and, for that matter, "enemies of women") than Graglia. The three of them, however, have, to Graglia, bought into the essential feminist revolution, which was that laws cannot be different for the sexes. Since gender feminism is really a totalitarian project, it would be nice if there was a basis of reconciliation between the genuine liberalism of Sommers et. al. and Graglia's Burkean conservativism -- as in fact there is.
This essay will not deal with specific anti-capitalist arguments in feminism, since capitalism as such is defended elsewhere. Questions about economic "power," markets, free exchange, and private property will thus not be dealt with here. A good start is with the essay on Say's Law.
Until the controversy over Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas politically revitalized feminism, many wondered why feminism seemed to have been such a vibrant political movement back in the 70's but since then had retreated into Women's Studies Departments at colleges and universities, where no one paid much attention to it except other academic feminists and college administrators. The answer was really simple enough: in the 70's feminism came to be perceived as simply anti-family, anti-marriage, anti-children, and perhaps even anti-religion, not to mention anti-men.
Most early feminists, as especially detailed by Graglia, certainly regarded marriage and family as so burdensome as to approach slavery. Feminism presented the family as a kind of prison, with a working career on the outside as a kind of liberation. This did not take into account that for most people a family has always been the meaning of their life, the finding and creation of the closest relatives that a human being can have.
Men did not go to work to enjoy the self-fulfillment of work. They went to work to support their families, often at jobs that they positively hated, or at least just tolerated for the sake of the income. Few men were so fortunate as to be doing something fulfilling or interesting that paid the bills at the same time. While feminists lamented that women often give up years, or all, of their careers in order to have children, even men with hopes of a fulfilling career traditionally have often had to give up those hopes if they suddenly were responsible for a family [note].
But for most people, who never get anywhere near a professional degree in anything, the whole idea of a "fulfilling career" was a little ridiculous. A job was to make a living, and the worth of living was to have that home and spouse and children and some leisure to enjoy them, working at personal projects or hobbies and watching the kids grow up. Because of that, most men were simply bewildered and astonished by feminism back in the 70's; it seemed to come from some sort of comically different reality. At the same time, any women who knew what the working world was like (like Graglia), and who felt that their primary concern, whether they worked outside or not, was their family and children, not only felt bewildered but insulted: feminism tended to portray home life as some sort of idiocy that no enlightened woman would be interested in.
That is why the women's vote has rarely gone for out and out feminists (until, perhaps, in some 1992 races -- although there was still no "gender gap" in the votes cast for George Bush), even while working women did want equal pay for equal work, etc. On the CBS television magazine Sixty Minutes, in January 1992, Gloria Steinem said that only the "enemies of feminism" ever said that women could "have it all" -- both career and family. That is an astonishing thing for her to have said. If feminists had ever frankly admitted that family would be impossible for a real career woman (as it was for Steinem), then not only would feminism have failed at its own goals but it would simply have been Dead On Arrival for all but the smallest minority of woman; and it is inconceivable who these "enemies of feminism" would have been who could have perpetrated the hoax that women could have had both career and family.
But more important than any misestimation or misunderstanding about what people valued, feminism was perceived as having positive reasons to hate the family: not only ignoring but militantly rejecting the focus of meaning in people's lives. The hostility to the family came from ideological & political reasons: any old social function that the family may have fulfilled was to be fulfilled by the state instead, much more safely and effectively. Safely because children would be outside the influence of reactionary parents, especially patriarchal men. Effectively because they would be in the hands of politically sound professional "care givers." The literature was full of how wonderfully this had been working in the Soviet Union, Israel, etc. What the professionals could accomplish best, of course, was to erase the old sexist gender differences by socializing the children differently. This view rested, then, on the theory that gender differences are the result only of arbitrary social convention.
The problem with the examples cited so warmly, however, was that they were often monstrous acts of totalitarianism, and that they failed. The problem with the theory that personality and gender differences are entirely the result of environment, not heredity, is that it is indeed a prescription for just the kind of coercion and tyranny that most conspicuously tried to exploit its possibilities: if everything that we are is just socialization, then the reasonable thing is to socialize us in the best way possible, and that would be through the agency of those who know best. Those who know best, in turn, would be those politically favored, or at least self-appointed with enough fanfare. The socialization, in turn, would be a thorough indoctrination which, if done to adults, would have been called brain washing -- but then the brain was supposed to have been blank in the first place.
Cambodia took this to the logical extreme: if you simply kill the parents, then that leaves the children in the hands of the state by default. Fortunately, the last line of defense against totalitarianism was the simple fact of human nature. All the power of the state could not really make the "New Man," and no amount of lies could cover that up indefinitely. The Soviet Union crumbled to reveal the people of 1913 emerging from the shadows, wanting the same things out of life that they did then, without all the bombast, promises, fanfare, and lies.
Meanwhile, the legal regime promoted by feminism in the West served to damage the position of housewives and mothers, with "no fault" divorce (now being rethought even by feminists), anti-discrimination law and "affirmative action" to promote women and disadvantage tradtional breadwinner males in the workplace, and, just as importantly, the denigration of the very idea that a husband owes support to his wife.
The charm that totalitarianism had for feminism was real enough, even though the desire to control human nature wasn't just confined to radical theory. It has crept up on us from all directions. F.A. Hayek says there are basically two views on how society should be organized, tribalism and the free market. Karl Popper more crisply contrasts the Closed Society with the Open Society. Ayn Rand says that the paradigm of humanity in the Open Society of the marketplace is that of the trader.
Feminist theory mostly still hates capitalism -- "patriarchy" is often simply equated with war, racism, and capitalism; feminism with pacifism, socialism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, and even vegetarianism -- in short, any case that might be regarded as "progressive" from a leftist point of view. Hence the ironic move of doctrinaire feminists dismissing with contempt Margaret Thatcher, one of the most successful, powerful, and historically important women, and the longest serving British Prime Minister, of the 20th century. Similarly, in 1994, Annie Potts, a Hollywood actress, dismissed Kay Bailey Hutchinson, soon to win election as a United States Senator from Texas, as a "female impersonator." That seems to say that only politically correct women are really women.
What happens under the principles of the free market and liberal democracy with the feminist view that human nature is created entirely by environment is that the view as a political force simply disappears: people can raise their children however they like; and if they have some sort of educational theory or ideology like feminism to use, that's their business. It is not the place of the state to promote one view or another, to label some views as politically sound and others as sexist or anything else.
This is essentially the liberal regime of Sommers and Paglia. It is conformable, however, to the conservative regime of Graglia with a couple of specific provisions. (1) a true libertarian regime does not have anti-discrimination laws about relationships between private individuals, and (2) if family law is seen as it should be, as a matter of private marital contracts, then Graglia's notion of traditional marital duties, of husband and wife, can easily be restored for anyone who believes in them, by their adoption of the appropriate contract. If traditional marriage really is as proven by history as a good Burkean would maintain, then such marriages will be more successful than the alternatives that the legal regime would allow. This is not a matter, however, for political pre-judgment.
Hayek is clear that the marketplace is "unnatural" in a way and that people, yearning for the old tribalism, can simply hate it. The difference is that the old tribal societies were personal. Capitalism is impersonal. Tribalism involved mutual positive obligations. Capitalism involves voluntary trade and contract. Tribalism provided a secure place for everyone. Capitalism denies that absolute security is possible or that we have a right that strangers provide it for us. Tribalism left no doubts. Capitalism tells us nothing. Tribalism always provided for needs, to the extent that the group could provide. Capitalism doesn't care what we need, but will provide what we want....if we will work for it. Tribalism valued people. Capitalism, indeed, values what people do and want, which is reflected in prices.
Thus, Marx accused capitalism of reducing even the family to a cash relationship. The choice, indeed, is between security and insecurity, but also between slavery and freedom and, in fact, between poverty of secure socialism and wealth of insecure capitalism. It is hard to choose between security and freedom, and it is easy to hope that they could be had together, that tribalism (or socialism) could be combined with capitalism. With that hope, "freedom" can be pursued in a way that surprisingly leads to tribal slavery. That is what happened with both Marxism and feminism.
A Closed Society is based directly on interpersonal relationships and is inevitably hierarchical. Feudalism is a system of direct obligations to specific persons, and nowhere is that kind of thing better illustrated than in the Confucian "six relationships." While the "six relationships" are often cited as three pairs, it is possible to flesh out six full pairs; the relations between: ruler and subject; parent and child; husband and wife; teacher and student; older brother and younger brother; older friend and younger friend. In each of these relationships the elder or higher member owes benevolent protection and care to the lower or younger, while the lower owes to the higher conscientious (i.e. not blind) obedience and loyalty. These relationships are mostly established by who one is, not what one does or wants, and this in great measure is determined by birth. There can be security and humanity in these relationships, but there is no such thing as freedom; and it is indeed a "closed," womblike and suffocating arrangement.
Virtually all societies were based on these principles until within the last couple of centuries. The view of feminism is that in these systems women were not even persons. But if the argument is simply that women were stuck in a certain place with a fixed thing to do, without freedom or any opportunity to work for self-realization, then there were simply no persons in these systems since their whole principle was a place for everyone and everyone in their place. The whole idea of personal fulfillment or self-realization or opportunity for individual growth was simply non-existent. Of course, that is why Ayn Rand dismisses these societies as simply vast forms of slavery. But even slaves can be persons. Even slaves can have some rights. And under feudalism there were rights and obligations for every position in the hierarchy. The hierarchs did not have arbitrary authority. Theirs was a place just as much as any other, albeit with more privileges and authority. Even someone at the very top of the system who becomes an individual, like the Egyptian god-king Akhenaton, can come to grief for it.
These hierarchical systems clearly come from our primate past, as they are universal, not just among primates, but among virtually all mammals who live in groups. Once we get back far enough, not only are there no concepts of individual fulfillment or opportunity, but it is clear that there could not even be such a thing since there is actually nothing to do apart from the immemorial activities of the species. Some feminists say that women have been oppressed for 30,000 years. That is just about the time of the emergence of modern humans (H. sapiens sapiens), but those humans were not so different from older H. sapiens, physically or culturally, and not much like us in any cultural form. Instead, with nothing but the addition of tools and language (and religion), human life wasn't socially all that different in its forms even from the life of baboons or lions. All that counted was survival, since survival is all that counts in nature. Because survival was all that counted, the only human activity that really counted was reproduction, and so the only humans who really counted were women. That did not make them individuals. Nature simply doesn't care about individuals when the survival of the group or the species is all that counts. But it is from that level of culture that all the symbols that some feminists now think are evidence of matriarchy were produced -- the steatopygous "Venuses" and so forth.
It is unlikely that there was real matriarchy. James George Frazer already addressed this question in his classic The Golden Bough [1890, 1900, 1906-1915]:
But in order to dissipate misapprehensions, which appear to be rife on this subject, it may be well to remind or inform the reader that the ancient and widespread custom of tracing descent and inheriting property through the mother alone does not by any means imply that the government of the tribes which observe the custom is in the hands of women; in short, it should always be borne in mind that mother-kin does not mean mother-rule. On the contrary, the practice of mother-kin prevails most extensively amongst the lowest savages, with whom woman, instead of being the ruler of man, is always his drudge and often little better than his slave. Indeed, so far is the system from implying any social superiority of women that it probably took its rise from what we should regard as their deepest degradation, to wit, from a state of society in which the relations of the sexes were so loose and vague that children could not be fathered on any particular man. [The Golden Bough, A New Abridgement from the Second and Third Editions, edited by Robert Fraser, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 393]
Although much of Frazer's theoretical approach is now objectionable, and there are other possible explanations for the origin of matrilineal descent, his conclusion about the political power of women in ancient and paleolithic societies is still supported by the archeological and ethnographic evidence, despite popular theories (e.g. Marija Gimbutas) about ancient (pacifistic and earth-friendly, i.e. utopian) matriarchy. But if there was no real political matriarchy, there was certainly was psychological matriarchy. 
Camille Paglia makes the decisive observation about the steatopygous Venuses: they mostly don't have faces, or hands, or feet. The womb of nature is blind and, literally, faceless.
Nor is there really anything to do except reproduce, and hands and feet are not needed for that. Now this sounds dehumanized, but back then there is no other model of humanity to contrast it with. The first human art simply reproduces the forms of nature, and to nature there is no individuality and no value apart from survival. Now we might say that tools and so forth were the beginning of something different, and in retrospect we might like to see the art celebrate all the new tools and their heroic use against nature; but that would have been wholly anachronistic, meaningless, and absurd at the time. The tools were simply used for survival, and all survival was ultimately dependent on and subordinated to fertility. To live that life, however, is to live in the warm, smothering, embrace of the community -- the psychological matriarchy of C.G. Jung's Terrible Mother, who devours individuality for the comfort of unconsciousness. That continues to be the attraction of all forms of tribalism. Feminist yearning for the matriarchy can dangerously find expression, indeed, in yearning for the smothering certainties of totalitarianism.
In the marketplace all that remains of tribalism, the last irreducible unit, is the family. Even if husband and wife do not exist in the old hierarchical relationship, as they well might under Graglia's conservative form of marriage, parents and children inevitably do. It is a case of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny: you grow up in the closed community of the family, then go out into the world. This gives rise to ambivalences. Freedom is getting away from the family, but freedom can also be solitary and lonely. And then there is the purpose of that freedom. Some creative worthy goal is always a possibility; but for most people of average ability and limited ambition, the most worthy goal still seems to be to continue a family and so to make for the next generation the same warm source as the last. Making a living was usually hard, so there mostly was not much chance to reflect on things beyond the benevolent protection of the family.
For the generations after World War II, however, when prosperity seemed so easy (at least to the children), the question inevitably arose about the purpose of a mere endless round of life creating life. Given the opportunity to make a living in various ways, room opens up for something more than just making a living for the sake of one's family. That can expose one even more to the solitary openness of freedom, and because of that most people still decided that family was fundamental in a fulfilling life. There is always going to be a problem, however, if one's original experience of family was unpleasant. The conclusion from that is easily that a family is dispensable or even malevolent. Gloria Steinem seems to have had an unpleasant experience -- a divorced father who went away, and mother who couldn't cope and drifted into mental illness. The result was that she didn't want any kind of marriage or family. If it is not just a matter of what one wants, however, but of a judgment that the institution is wrong and must be overthrown, then this can lead to speculation about human life without families. The taste of freedom in the independence of the marketplace can tempt one to generalize the situation into all of human life. That isn't really going to work, since few people want their entire life to be as cold, impersonal, detached, calculating, and negotiable as relationships in the marketplace. If the market cannot provide the things that were rejected with the family, then perhaps something else can: political life.
Giving political life the old power of the family, however, is the same as to return to a political principle of tribalism. But this is a key move of gender feminism. The slogan, "The personal is political," embodies that connection. It is a slogan full of monstrous and terrible danger. Where in capitalism the personal is separated from the political in that the family is separated from the marketplace, which is served by politics, the abolition of the family exposes the privacy of the individual to whatever political forces, whatever ideology, happens to be ascendant. This literally strips away privacy and posits a political test, not just for everything the individual does, but for everything the individual thinks, desires, and feels. This is consistent with the view of human nature as "socially constructed" -- "environmentalist" rather than "genetic" -- and is precisely what is advocated by feminist legal theorists like Catharine MacKinnon. On that view, there really is no nature, only nurture according to some ideology.
With no nature, nothing is really "natural," no natural feelings, no natural desires, no natural actions, no natural responses. Spontaneity must always be suspect, since the more spontaneous anything is, the more purely it embodies some unexamined and probably discreditable ideological conditioning. It is impossible to be a Taoist on the environmentalist view since "not-doing" cannot produce anything fresh from the Tao, it can only reproduce some stale socialization. Thus one goes about one's life hesitating at each action, feeling, etc., thinking, "Now, does this conform to the Correct View of social existence that I have gotten from my political indoctrination?" If not, then it is time to confess one's political crimes and beg for reëducation from the more enlightened. That kind of life is completely intolerable for any but fanatical zealots and ideologues; and anyone else who is harangued or browbeaten about thinking that way just ends up hating it with a passion. And that is the kind of response that feminism began eliciting in the 70's. The "backlash" that is now decried in the 90's was never against women per se but against the catalogue of political crimes into which feminism wished to transform private life.
Whatever human nature is actually like, whether there are innate differences between the sexes or not, this must be completely irrelevant to political life. It is not up to politics to determine some biological matter of fact. Instead it is the nature of liberal democracy to ignore whatever differences there may be between persons, from whatever source, whether there are differences or not. That, indeed, is the Marxist accusation against capitalism, that some people do better than others, regardless of their needs. And people are different. Some people are smarter than others, some are taller, some have certain desires. What they do and how they fare is determined by the free trade of the marketplace. Whether differences like that align with sexual differences is an interesting question for certain sciences, but irrelevant to politics. To enforce some preconception about how people, or the sexes, must be the same will abridge the freedom not only of what they do but of what they are. Feminism was hell bent to abridge people's freedom in that respect. The choice is simple, freedom or slavery -- freedom to the uncertainty, unconformity, and the openness of the market, or slavery to the coercive power of the state to enforce a preconceived ideological conformity, right down to what people feel and believe.
It is not impossible, however, to say how men and women might, in general, be different. Indeed, it is the popular wisdom of every age in every place that they are, and there is not a whole lot of disagreement in what respects they are different. One precise issue to consider is what feminism likes to call "male violence." There is little doubt that the received wisdom in every culture is that men are suited for war and women, mostly, are not. And men are suited for war because they are larger and stronger but also more aggressive and naturally violent. Feminism can grudgingly admit the former qualities but is adamant that the latter qualities are merely the result of social conditioning [note].
Women would be just as aggressive and violent if they had been taught to be that way, and were expected to be that way, from childhood. This is, indeed, a serious question. And if aggressiveness and violence are entirely the result of conditioning, then feminism would also be right that violent crime by males (90% of the prison population is male) is the result of society conditioning males to commit violent crimes. Thus the view of many feminists that social norms instill hatred of women, since if there is ever any violence against women, the perpetrators must have been trained to behave that way.
This sort of thing seems like sheer, dangerous insanity to someone like Camille Paglia (let alone Carolyn Graglia). To her, it is social conditioning that contains and restricts violence, in which case attacking social conditioning will only result in more violence, not less. She traces the feminist point of view back to the 18th century philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, who said "Man is born free, but now is everywhere in chains." Rousseau's idea was that we are naturally good and pure, but that society has made us evil and twisted. Consequently, we should return to a kind of education that would allow children to just run free, without any inhibitions that traditionally were instilled in them. Since such ideas have influenced not only feminism but a lot of professional educators for the last thirty years, or the last eighty years (starting with John Dewey), it is sensible to now ask if the result has been more violence or less. Clearly it has been more. And we might ask, in more direct response to feminism, whether the sons of families without fathers are, in general, more violent or less violent than sons who have been raised with a strong father present. The answer to that is also that the sons from fatherless families tend to be more violent.
Since Paglia thinks that men are naturally more aggressive and violent than women, we can of course ask why that would be. Many children of the sixties, who firmly believed that all behavior was the result of conditioning, came in for a bit of a surprise when they had children of their own. However they tried to be "gender neutral," many had to admit that the boys they were raising definitely behaved rather differently than the girls. The boys tended to go charging around pounding things and the girls didn't. But in the face of that kind of intimate, albeit anecdotal, evidence, or even systematic, scientific studies, feminist denial can be monumental [note].
The evidence from nature itself, however, eliminates the socialization argument altogether. Among mammals, from sea lions to llamas, we frequently find males fighting each other over females, often over large "harems" of females, where the females themselves seem content to accept the winners of the combat. The most striking example, however, comes with hyenas. While male mammals typically have high levels of testosterone in the womb, which is responsible for the development of primary sexual attributes, hyena females also have high levels of testosterone, and this results in several striking results: One is that hyena females develop apparently male external genitalia. This made it rather difficult to tell male and female hyenas apart, and some naturalists originally thought that hyenas were hermaphroditic (with functioning male and female organs). The second result is that female hyenas are larger and dominant over the males in hyena groups; and the groups are large and important because hyenas hunt in packs, like dogs and wolves. But the third result is probably the most startling: in hyena burrows where the young are born, they begin, not just to fight among themselves, but to actually kill each other. A hyena pup will establish her dominance by killing all her sisters. This kind of thing sets us face to face, not with Rousseau and his "noble savage" in friendly nature, but with Darwin and "nature red in tooth and claw" -- the "law of the jungle."
Testosterone does not cause violence, but it creates a certain potential that can be expressed in different ways. Socialization does not create that potential, and it cannot eliminate it. What socialization must do is provide for constructive ways for the potential to be expressed. But in some ways it is a little more definite than that, with examples like the following: In many cultures, young men get together in groups and do typically foolish kinds of things [note].
Such groups range from the warrior bands found among ancient Germans or the modern Masai (in East Africa) to modern college fraternities and contemporary street gangs. Typical of all these groups are initiation rituals that usually involve discomfort, pain, humiliation (often sexual), or even serious danger. We now call this "hazing." This kind of thing makes little enough sense to adults, none to women, and periodically provokes tremendous outrage when it results in the injury or the death of participants. But every effort to completely stamp it out fails. Trying to eliminate it, of course, often drives it underground and results in more dangerous rituals than would have occurred otherwise.
But the whole idea of male associations like fraternities is anathema to feminism. Feminists necessarily view fraternities, not as vehicles of channeling and socializing male energy into the least destructive directions, but as the very mechanisms by which males are socialized into violent and patriarchal behaviors. Many colleges and universities consequently have been trying to eliminate fraternities altogether. Since that simply drives them off campus, many colleges and universities have tried to make membership in fraternities a punishable offense, even punishable by expulsion. That, naturally, can make secret membership even more attractive. On the other hand, the alternative of trying to make fraternities coed is also very awkward. If sexually humiliating hazing is disturbing enough when men practice it on each other, it automatically becomes sexual harassment or rape when it is practiced on women [note].
That is a non-starter as an institution. And now, with many more women in the military, in mixed sex basic training and housing, scandals have multiplied over sexual fraternization and rape. One "solution" has been to soften up basic training by not even allowing drilling instructors to shout at recruits (-- though I am informed that this is not now the case).
So we might ask, what was nonsense like hazing and shouting drill instructors all for? Was it just an expression of the potential for aggression and violence? It seems more complex than that. In The Myth of Male Power, Warren Farrell deals with this quite well [pp. 294-296]. If warriors or hunters, in the past, went into danger, it helped for them to know how their fellows would react under danger, stress, and fear; and it helped for them to know to what extent they could trust and rely on each other to act in certain ways. Adults with experience of life and of each other don't need artificial means to test themselves; but the young need to learn all those things, and to be trained, preferably in an artificial context first. While such tests and training may be somewhat dangerous, they are not likely to be as dangerous as the real life situations for which they are preparatory. Today, when such training may only be necessary in the military, police, or other dangerous and physically demanding professions [note].
It is nevertheless noteworthy that groups of young men spontaneously engage in the same kinds of behaviors -- rough-housing, showing off, taking risks, taunting each other -- that would have been customary, planned, and controlled in the young men's groups of traditional societies. When those unplanned and uncontrolled activities begin to include drive-by shootings and gang wars, it is clear that there has been a major social failure to deal with male adolescent behavior. The feminist desire simply to get rid of that behavior may already be said to have proved itself a disastrous failure, since feminist ideology and the most socially disruptive expressions of street gang culture have all developed and expanded during the same period of time, within the last thirty years. The only effective way to deal with the young men is to accept, control, and channel their behavior, not to pretend that it can be abolished. At the same time, doing away with the emotionally and physically stressful aspects of military training, because women can't or shouldn't handle it as well, simply means that there will be no training, for either men or women, for the stress and trauma of actual war and combat.
Another aspect of differences between males and females is explored by Deborah Tannen in her best selling book You Just Don't Understand, which is about how men and women use conversation in different ways. Her simple thesis is that men basically use conversation to establish status and women use it to establish closeness. She does not commit herself to whether this difference is the result of nature or socialization. She simply thinks that because it is there (her book is full of examples), it must be dealt with. She does not try to deal with it through moralistic exhortations to abolish it, but simply tries to promote understanding. Her theory, however, raises intriguing questions. Tannen admits herself that men actually do care about closeness, and women do actually care about status. Very rough and tumble competition can create friendships for boys and men (starting with Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh), and status for girls and women can be determined by their closeness to the core of a prestigious social group.
This is reminiscent of C.G. Jung's theory about consciousness, the unconscious, and their relation to sexual differences. Jung thought that anything in the mind that did not appear consciously would appear unconsciously. In sexual terms, that means that sexuality, which appears in consciousness one way, appears as its opposite in the unconscious. That leads to Jung's theory that there is a female archetype, the anima, in the male unconscious and a male archetype, the animus, in the female unconscious. If we apply that to Tannen's theory about conversation, it simply means that the overt seeking of status by men or closeness by women is complemented by the covert seeking of closeness by men and status by women. Nowhere, indeed, is the female status system of "ins" and "outs" more painfully obvious that in Women's Studies Programs. The purpose of conversation there, as explored by Daphne Patai & Noretta Koertge in the recent Professing Feminism, Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies [BasicBooks, 1994], is less the transmission of information or the cultivation of understanding than the transmission of a doctrine. Although the doctrine itself ferociously dismisses "patriarchal" hierarchy, it creates its own hierarchy simply in terms of how enthusiastically its message is received. Conspicuous agreement determines the "ins," rejection, scepticism, or even caution determines the "outs."
The issues that arise about all these differences between male and female require the most serious research and consideration, but this already goes beyond mainstream feminism, which has seemed resolutely unwilling to admit even the possibility of innate differences between the sexes. The closest it has come is to a moral difference between "genders," that the feminine point of view is superior to the masculine. This has usually just meant, however, that the masculine should be abandoned and the feminine adopted right across the board (even, paradoxically, in the military) -- which again presupposes that the "masculine" is something that can be abandoned. In terms of both the received traditions of the past and the best evidence of the present, this seems unlikely. Attempting social engineering through politics, which now extends to sexual harassment law in the workplace and a de-"masculinization" of the military, will most likely result in a phenomenon described by Jung: the reality being driven into the unconscious and expressed in the most destructive and irrational ways, as noted above with street gangs, etc.
The virtue of liberal society is that it allows people to try things their own way. If gender feminists want "gender-neutral" upbringing, they can practice that on their own children (if any). If professional couples want to both pursue their vocations and leave their children to the uncertain values (and behavior) of the nanny, they can do that. And if cultural conservatives want marriage where the husband supports his family and the wife stays home, they can do that, with traditional family law embodied in private contract. But this has never been the program of establishment feminism, whose instinct and preference has always been coercion and social engineering.
One of the most recent quotes at the top of this page is from an address in Australia by Russian Lesbian activist Masha Gessen. She asserts that, although gay people certainly have the right to marry (i.e. homosexually), she actually doesn't believe in marriage and thinks it should not exist. She says that the campaign for gay marriage thus involves lies about its purpose. A significant aspect of this business is that, even though the gay marriage campaign has been pitched as a demand for civil rights and equal rights, which ostensively have been denied to homosexuals, Gessen admits that the real goal of the campaign is to eliminate the rights of others, namely the right of "straight" people to marry, by eliminating marriage altogether.
This may come as news to homosexuals who simply believe that the expedients of private contracts, living wills, and legally sanctioned domestic partnerships do not rise to the level of rights or dignity involved in legal marriage; but it would come as no news to anyone familiar with the totalitarian inspiration of much of modern feminism, which has always been hostile to marriage and the family as private institutions, simply because they represent civil society and individual rights in opposition to the State. Gessen's admission that the campaign involves lies, although demonstrating some commendable spark of conscience on her part, is a larger significant admission about the dishonesty and dissimulation of Leftist politics in general -- the lies are nothing unusual, just standard operating procedure, as when the Bolsheviks promised land to the peasants but then murdered the peasants who opposed collectivized farms.
The campaign for homosexual civil rights, at least as represented by Masha Gessen -- and the audience who warmly applauded her -- is therefore unmasked as an attack on civil rights in general, in concert with the conceptual approach to twist around the meaning of "civil rights" to enhance the power of the State, rather than to restrict it. Gessen's spark of conscience consequently does not go nearly far enough. It does not lead to a determination to stop lying. That she voices her reservations, albeit to a friendly audience, nevertheless betrays a wreckless carelessness, given the propensity of such things to become public (even after a full year), that may bespeak even deeper moral doubts. One only hopes. Or she may simply have recollected herself and become comfortable with the lies.
Starship Troopers, The Shower Scene
A "universal and transhistorical oppression," where the "patriarchy" cannot be blamed on Judaism or the Roman army, but has existed cross-culturally from the depths of time -- perhaps already "socially constructed" by the Neanderthals -- would seem to up the challenge to the Feminist abolition of the "feminine."
And if the "oppression" is really that old, "universal and transhistorical," what sort of "society" was there to make it "socially constructed"? Can it really be known? And if it is known by comparison with the society of living mammals, do lionesses suffer "oppression" when new males take over their pride and kill their cubs? Would that even be a meaningful thing to say? Or is the real complaint with Darwin, with Nature, and with survival, which requires reproduction, something that to Feminists often seems, not just optional, by a vehicle of "oppression" itself?
Even after I got the comedian to notice me, it was hard to get him to stick around with all the no's. He'd go to kiss me, I'd back away, no, no. No. And he'd go, okay, and then he'd leave. I mean, what the fuck? (Feminists, don't write me letters. I understand I'm fucked up.) Bonnie McFarlane, You're Better than Me, A Memoir, An Anthony Bourdain Book, HarperCollins, 2016, p.122 [note] The current frenzy over the "Rape Culture" at American universities should be compared with the previous narrative about the triumph of the "Hook Up" (or now "Hookup") culture at the same places. The promotion of casual, meaningless sex that Heather Wilhelm references goes along with the free distribution of condoms, co-ed dormitories, co-ed bathrooms, and co-ed showers. All of these were intended to promote a culture of free and guitless love and pleasure, in which women could be as easily promiscuous as gay men -- as long as the sex is "safe." However, this sort of regime, with its essentially hedonistic exhortations, was at variance with the popular thesis of Susan Brownmiller that all men are all rapists all of the time. If that is actually the case, then stripping away social and physical barriers around women, and urging them into private and intimate relations with possibly random men, doesn't make any sense.
In doing research for his book I Am Charlotte Simmons [2004], Tom Wolfe got the impression that the free love program had been successful and that college students no longer even bothered to have "dates," but that they simply "hook up" for casual sex -- Political feminism now agrees, but not in those terms. Unsatisfactory sex does not mean that casual sex is heartless and unsatisfying. It means rape -- even if the woman solicited the man, provided him with condoms, and met him, obviously for sex, in his own dorm room -- or even, incredibly, invited him into her own room and her own bed, where they spent the night, with unalarmed roommates nearby -- but with retrospective accusations of rape. This charge can then be prosecuted, according to guidelines set forth by the Obama Administration, without the participation of anyone who knows anything about rape law, or law in general (which means that administrators and Stalinist political activists at colleges sit as judges), without telling the defendant of the actual charges against him, without allowing him the advice of counsel, without allowing discovery of the evidence, and without allowing the cross-examination, or sometimes even the identification and presence, of the accuser. In other words, Feminism wants secret, kangaroo courts that are designed to produce convictions, resulting in sanctions or even the expulsion of male students from colleges. We could call this the "Revenge of Susan Brownmiller," as the narrative of the college "rape culture" is now little different from what she had said.
Thus, having been suckered in with promises of great sex, the modern male student instead has been sandbagged, accused of rape when it may be that all he thought he was doing was going along with the hedonistic hookup Zeigeist. His error, of course, was to accept the Feminist thesis that women feel the same way about sex that men do -- on pain of being called a "sexist" if it is denied -- even while Feminists don't believe this themselves, since men are all rapists. The truth, of course, is simply that Feminists believe that women feel the same way abour sex as gay men, who are not going to be having sex with women at all. This assertion is not true about women either, but it does mean that men can avoid trouble just by being gay.
Curiously, the story in I Am Charlotte Simmons bears a bit more on the "rape culture" debate. When Charlotte loses her virginity, the sex is consentual, but her partner has no affection or care for her. He really has the mentality of a rapist and is callous, predatory, and cruel. His purpose is merely conquest and humiliation. If there is a lot of this kind of thing going on, encouraged by a hedonistic ideology, it seems at once to morally be a kind of rape, even if legally it would not be. This may be the heart of the confusion and ambivalence about the whole thing. If sex in general is encouraged, without "strings," the legendary "zipless fuck," then what D.H. Lawrence called "cold hearted fucking" is liable to be involved quite a bit. But the impession left by such an encounter might quite reasonably be felt as a kind of rape; and so it is not surprising that naive young women might be encouraged to see it as rape in a legally actionable sense, even if this is treated as a matter of "student discipline," and a political issue, "discrimination," rather than something for which you actually call the cops.
As it happens, rape accusations that become sensations on college campuses often do not translate into any urgency about criminal proceedings against the accused. Although we may reflect that campus authorities and activists often realize that they would get nowhere with the police, given the lack of evidence, or its incoherence, the consideration also suggests itself that for the activists the political issue is almost more important than the criminal one -- indeed, rape as a political crime is more important than its status in regular criminal law. When actress Sandra Bernhard voiced the wish in 2008 that Republican Vice-Presidential candiate Sarah Palin be raped by black men, there was no protest about this from Feminists, for whom such an act would be a revolutionary attack by the oppressed on the oppressor, regardless of her female or their male sex. Revolutionary rape against Republican women (traitors!) is perhaps just fine.
And, to return for a moment to Planet Earth, real sexual assault should not be a matter of "student discipline" at all, any more than murder or a knifing would be. Rape accusations should immediately bring in the police, and the colleges could simply take cognizance of the results of any, if any, criminal proceedings. Obviously, this is not good enough for whatever the purpose of the activists is.
Since men should know already that American education has become a "hostile environment" for them, they should take the hint -- and note the other evidence, such as post-graduation unemployment statistics, student debt, and the uselessness of many majors (e.g. ethinic studies) -- and decide that higher "education" is no longer worth it. Feminists, who complain about certain professions or venues being "pink ghettos," are doing their determined best to see to it that college becomes such a place.
A lot of this sounds familiar. Much of it is a repeat, even with some of the same phony statistics, of the agitation that we saw back in the 1990's. Twenty years later, there is now a new generation that has not been through the earlier experience. A salient feature again is the apparent principle that women become morally incompetent under the influence of alcohol more quickly than men do. Thus, in an equally drunk couple, the woman may subsequently decide that she was incapable of giving consent to sex, even if she initiated intercourse, while the male remains fully liable for criminal intent. Where this principle has been applied by colleges in cases, male students have already been successful at getting it reversed in court because of its clear display (ironically) of "gender bias." And a principle that women are less morally responsible than men hardly seems like the kind of thing that feminists would want to establish -- although in the previous period radicals like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin argued that all sex was rape because no women, as victims of the patriarchy, were morally able to give consent. Equally familiar is the bizarre requirement that a woman give "positive consent" for every stage of sexual activity, meaning an affirmative answer to an explicitly posed question. Years ago, this was suggested as a rule for Antioch College, and was soon laughed out of public discourse. Now, however, it is the law of the State of California; and one is left to wonder how such an invasion of privacy could possibly be enforced, or how it is to differ from the general question of consent, or related issues. Thus, if a woman does not give verbal consent because she is passed out drunk, this is no different from the matter already at issue. And if a woman acquiesces to or initiates intercourse, without a positive verbal statement, does this mean that the man remains criminally liable? Or is the women equally liable, if the "positive consent" principle is not simply a one way street, as an instrument to condemn males, as the activists certainly would like? Of course, even if "positive consent" were obtained by signature on a contract, with perhaps a check-list for each "base," this would be worthless, since such a contract carries no obligation, and either party can void their consent or commitment at any time. So such a signature actually signifies no relevant form of consent.
Something else familiar this time around is the principle that it is virtuous and enlightened always to believe the "victim," i.e. the accuser, even when the evidence begins to pile up against them. I have not yet heard voiced the principle, common earlier, that women do not lie about rape (except, of course for Juanita Broaddrick, who accused Bill Clinton of rape -- women accusing Democrats are always lying). I expect it is lurking around there and will be asserted eventually. In such a case, we might ask (devilishly), "Do you believe what the girls said at the Salem Witch Trials?" (in 1692-1693). The automatic reponse would likely be "Yes," since the question might be taken to imply that the "girls" were those accused of witchcraft. However, the girls were the accusers, not the victims: Betty Parris (9 years old), her cousin Abigail Williams (11), Ann Putnam (12), and Elizabeth Hubbard (17) claimed that they were afflicted, and experienced fits and convulsions, because of "spectral" attacks from witches, who were people they knew personally or could easily recognize. Their accusations led to the charging of 150 men, women, and children with witchcraft and sorcery. Twenty people were executed, women and men, mostly by hanging, but one man died from stones being put on his chest to coerce a plea, which he refused to make, and died.
The modern accusations of rape, when often by confused or dishonest young women, thus begin to look like a classic case of a "witch hunt." While the narrative about witch trials is generally that it was the patriarchy oppressing independent women, that doesn't quite square with the Salem case, where girls were the accusers and both women and men were accused. This time, the whole process is promoted as an attack on the patriarchy, i.e. men, regardless of the facts or justice of individual cases. As such, it is far more a genuinely bogus "witch hunt" than were the investigations of people like Senator McCarthy into Communists. There were Communists and Soviet spies. There weren't witches (except in H.P. Lovecraft). And, although there are sexual assaults and rapes on college campuses, there are far fewer than the narrative of the bogus "rape culture" asserts, and the proper response to them is the police, not "student discipline" in kangaroo courts. And young women should get the message that if they are uncertain about sex, it is imprudent, at least, to invite a man into their bed for the night. It is bound to give the wrong impression, both to the man, to the police, and to any possible jury. It's not that it cannot be rape, it's just that it may not be believable -- morally or legally.
But we know what is going on here. The inflamatory "rape culture" narrative serves the political purposes of Feminism, which otherwise leaves people, including women, uninterested. However, to the extent that actual rape charges are discredited, and the principles used in college "discipline" proceedings are countermanded by actual courts, feminists run the risk of the whole business being marked up as "hysteria," unfortuately with its original meaning as a mental disorder of women -- who are afflicted by possessing a womb, ὑστέρα, hystéra, in Greek. This serves the genuine cause of women no more than the principle of their inability to consent under alcohol. But feminism repeatedly suffers from this habit of reviving what, in feminist terms, look like female sexual stereotypes. In 1993, Katie Roiphe already expressed dismay (The Morning After, Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus) that the feminist campaign at that time was reducing women to the moral status of children. Now we have to go through it all over again.
Bonnie McFarlane's sin against Feminism is specific and egregious. It is now a moral axiom in Feminism that "No means no," The joke was, that when a lady says "No," she means "Maybe"; when a lady says "Maybe," she means "Yes"; and when a lady says "Yes" -- she is no lady. And this, of course, was understood against the background that "nice girls" could not admit to wanting sex, and that even her denials might only reflect maidenly modesty and were never final against a determined suitor. Thus, McFarlane's account offends by allowing some truth to both of these features.
This joke was usually coupled with a corresponding one about politicians. This was, that when a politician says "Yes," he means "Maybe"; when a politician says "Maybe," he means "No"; and when a politician says "No" -- he is no politician. Thus, a politician wants to be all things to all voters and does not wish to reject the hope of anyway that he might go their way.
A fundamental move for early feminism was to distinguish between sex and gender, where sex, male or female, Regardless of whether "gender" differences ever were entirely matters of cultural conditioning, and so oppressive discrimination, the clear and simple feminist distinction between "sex" and "gender" has become confused by a couple of developments:
Thus the future of the use of "gender" is unclear. It depends on the true purposes of feminism, which may not be candidly stated to the public. It also depends, of course, on the ability of "gender" feminism to maintain its political influence and success in the face of the falsehood of its theory and the anti-capitalist roots and program of its politics.
Note on Male & Female in Greek
The suspsect is still at large. "Bomb spree in DC, 3 attacks in 15 mins." the New York Post, July 3, 2023, p.6. Of course, there is no suspect. It is the perpetrator, person or persons unknown, who is at large. The history of the recent use of the word "gender" parallels another case of an attempt to redirect language in a way that soon becomes self-defeating. This is the use of the word "suspect" by the police and in legal circles and the press.
When a crime is committed, someone has committed it. This is the "perpetrator." The perpetrator is often at first unknown. The authorities then look for someone who may have perpetrated the crime. When they find someone whom they suspect of having committed the crime, this is a "suspect." A "suspect" is a definite person, who can be named or demonstratively indicated, suspected of being the perpetrator. A suspect may be an unidentified person who is in custody, a known person not yet in custody because their whereabouts are unknown, a known person not in custody because there is insufficient evidence to hold them, or some other variation of this. Because in traditional American jurisprudence a person is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, a "suspect" remains merely suspected until it is proven in court that they are the perpetrator of the crime. But a suspect who is formally charged with a crime and then put on trial tends to then be called the "defendant" rather than just the "suspect."
Nevertheless, the term "perpetrator" is now rarely heard in statements from the police, prosecutors, or the press. It has apparently been decided that "suspect" should be used instead, in all cases, even if this doesn't make any sense. Thus, the police can be found saying things like, "We must find the suspect," meaning that the police must find the perpetrator. "Find the suspect" would properly mean that they already know whom they suspect of being the perpetrator and that this person's wereabouts are unknown, either because they were never in custody or because they were released or escaped from custody. But the original statement is found made in the absence of any actual suspects, and the police may be saying no more than that a crime has been committed and that the person who did it must be found.
I also have found police making the following statements: (1) "the suspect had been in the apartment," meaning that the perpetrator was lying in wait for the victim in her apartment; and (2) "she had facts that no one but the investigators, the victim, and the suspect or someone close to the suspect, would know," meaning that a witness had information that could only have been known by the investigators, the victim, or the perpetrator, or someone who got the information from the perpetrator. If the police had no suspects at the time, which they did not, these statements are bizarre. There was no "suspect" who could have been in the apartment or have been privy to the facts of the case. It is actually not difficult to maintain the distinction between the perpetrator, who in fact committed the crime, and anyone who is found, a suspect, who is suspected of being the perpetrator.
We get an interestingly different case with a policeman saying (3) "when we're up against a suspect or suspects that are armed with long guns," speaking of the need for officers to have firepower to match that of people shooting at them. Again one wants to ask "What suspects?" If people are shooting at you, they are the perpetrators, namely the perpetrators of the shooting. If you have an name for them, or you end up with them in custody, then you have identified or captured the suspects in the shooting case. As suspects, the actual individuals can always argue that it was not them doing the shooting, which sometimes even turns out to be the case. But to speak of "suspects" shooting at police is absurd.
Finally, there is a policeman saying, (4) "the fact that we didn't get any fingerprints that matched [the named suspect] from the scene never led us to believe that he wasn't the suspect." Here the police had what they believed was a fingerprint of the perpetrator, but it didn't match any fingerprints of their suspect, who they nevertheless still believed to be the perpetrator. So we have someone saying, in effect, that they still believed that their "suspect" was the "suspect," even though the "suspect's" fingerprints did not match that of the "suspect." The inability of such language to make the relevant semantic distinction between perpetrator and suspect is probably why the policeman named his suspect rather than actually produce a sentence with the word "suspect" for both perpetrator and suspect. But when he finally does get to the word "suspect," you still what to ask, "What suspect?"
In 2012 I have noticed an excellent example of the misuse of "suspect" in connection with the terrible massacre of movie goers on July 20th in Aurora, Colorado. The person arrested was dressed much like a police SWAT team member, with helmet, gas mask, and body armor. When the police arrived at the theater, in such dress, it briefly looked like the suspect might blend in and be mistaken for an officer; but it was quickly recongized that his gear was not all standard issue, and he was arrested. The police chief of Aurora said that the officers, "suspected" that the person was "the suspect." Well, the person who was arrested thus became the "suspect," but what the officers were suspecting is that the person was the perpetrator. Suspecting him made him a "suspect," but he was suspected, not of being a suspect, but of being the shooter. "Suspected of being the suspect" sounds like the beginning of a comedy routine, like Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?"
The motivation for this innovation in terminology may be that careless uses of the term "perpetrator" may appear or may be interpreted or construed as prejudicial in the case. However, if careful usage were followed, it should be clear that no person who can be named or indicated can be described as the "perpetrator" by the police, and so the proper use of "perpetrator" cannot be prejudical in the case of any actual person. Police spokesmen, prosecutors, or judges, however, who indulge in careless statements, have no difficulty saying and doing prejudicial things regardless of their avoidance of the term "perpetrator." Thus, unnecessarily marching a bound defendant publicly into court through ranks of the press, although highly prejudicial, and intended to be so, not only is commonly practiced but is universally called a "perp" (i.e. "perpetator") "walk." The exercise is no more than a publicity stunt by which the police or prosecutors display their certainty that they have apprehended the perpetrator of the crime. The avoidance of the word "perpetrator" pales besides such practices.
At the same time, the substitution of "suspect" for "perpetrator" means that in time the word "suspect" comes to take on the prejudicial overtones of "perpetrator" itself, i.e. calling someone a "suspect" soon becomes the semantic equivalent of calling them the "perpetator." If the police do have a suspect for a crime, and then they say, "the suspect had been in the apartment," this implies that the person they have identified was in the apartment -- which is a prejudicial statement about their suspect. Even without using the word "perpetrator," this now is prejudicial language. Similarly, to speak of "suspects" shooting at the police, when suspects are identified, prejudicially implies that they are the ones who did the shooting. We can imagine the press conference, "A suspect shot at police. Here is the suspect." This means, not just that this person is suspected of shooting at police, but this person did shoot at police. The legal care originally embodied in the word "suspect" is destroyed when the word is used to mean "perpetrator."
That this process of semantic shift of the meaning of "perpetrator" to the word "suspect" is well in train is revealed by the introduction of a new term to use in the original place of "suspect," namely, a "person of interest." A true "person of interest" may be someone connected with a case who may be, but is not yet, a suspect (they may be a witness or have some other connection to a case); but it is noteworthy that the term has only come into common use as the meaning of "suspect" has begun to shift over to the meaning of "perpetrator" and authorities become relucant to call a possibly innocent person a "suspect." It has not been many years since I heard the expression for the first time. A "person of interest" is thus now free of the prejudicial overtones that "suspect" is taking on and so can be expected to come into increasing use with the original meaning of "suspect."
One may consider that "suspect" should be used in all cases instead of "perpetrator" because it is only suspected that a crime has been committed in the first place. Using the term "perpetrator" prejudicially supposes that a crime has been committed, when the very existence of a crime is something else that must be proven in court. However, the supposition that a crime has been committed is prejudicial against no actual person, and it is actual persons that legal safeguards are supposed to protect. At the same time, there is a venue for legal rulings that crimes have been committed, before the matter ever comes to court. In a death, the ruling of homicide by a coroner, coroner's jury, or medical examiner creates rather more than just the prima facie supposition that a crime has occurred. This is still prejudicial against no actual person. Often the police will not commence a proper investigation until a ruling of homicide has been made.
We do have the interesting cases where a defendant makes a defense that no crime has been committed, or that an actual homicide may nevertheless have been justifiable, e.g. as self-defense. Even the ruling of a coroner or medical examiner may be challenged by expert witnesses, forensic pathologists, for the defense. Do these cases mean that even terms like "crime," let alone "perpetrator," cannot be used until a defendant is properly convicted of a crime in court? No, because this would clearly be to abolish common sense. The public might well be puzzled or infuriated if a police spokesman, in a case of a person dead from multiple gunshot wounds, was forced to be non-committal about whether a crime, let alone murder, had been committed. "Now, we mustn't rush to judgment; there may be some other explanation for Mr. Corleone's fatal gunshot wounds."
Yet the substitution of "suspect" for "perpetrator," let alone "gender" for "sex," is already well advanced in that nonsensical direction. In cases where we expect that precision of language should be important, we get confusion instead, with carelessness the result of an ostensible, but in fact a thoughtlessly ostentatious, concern with the appearance of precision. "Cop talk" is a jargon intended to convey the impression of professionalism and competence; but like much of the jargon of feminism and deconstruction, an impression that obscures the absurdity of the substance is what we get in fact.
One of the most absurd uses of "suspect" is something I have just heard on the radio in December 2016. In New York, on December 4th, a police officer, Alastasia Bryan, was shot and killed by someone lying in wait, as she sat in her car in Brooklyn ready to drive to work. The police spokesman said, "A suspect was waiting for the officer." Now, unless it is only "suspected" that the officer was shot by someone -- perhaps the bullets appeared out of nothing -- this is a ridiculous statement. Whoever it was lying in wait to shoot an officer, that was the perpetrator, not a "suspect." Not until you have some kind of identification, or lay your hand on a person, do you have a suspect. The illogic and absurdity of this is maddening. It only serves to erode the level of public discourse, which, of course, is bad enough anyway. Some reporter should ask such a spokesman, "You said a suspect was waiting; so who is the suspect?" The answer might be, "We don't know who the suspect is." To which the response could be, "Then there actually isn't a suspect, since you don't know anyone to 'suspect'-- to suspect of being the perpetrator, that is." Other spokesmen did refer to the attacker as an "unknown assailant," which, semantically, is in the right territory.
Return to "Against the Theory of 'Sexist Language'"
Return to "Defense of Christina Hoff Sommers"
Return to "Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes"
I don't have to look far for an example, since my own father gave up going to UCLA and working towards an engineering degree when his uncle offered him a job and he decided that he needed it to support his family. And my mother wasn't even a housewife. She worked all her life, except for my first five years.
"Grudgingly" is the key word there. Although the original feminist demand was that a woman should be allowed to do anything she is qualified or able to do, this has slowly shifted over to the requirement that standards be changed to allow more women to qualify for any profession or activity. Although the United State Army determined that, in general, women only have about 52% of the upper body strength of men, both the military and other physically demanding professions, like firefighting, now often have separate physical standards, or special training programs, just to increase the number of women who can pass the training. Why this has happened, or why it is thought to be necessary, has mostly not been a matter for candid admission or public debate.
And one result is that "hyperactive" boys, who now amount to a very substantial percentage of all boys, simply get drugged in school, typically with Ritalin (Methylphenidate).
An interesting comparison is between language about "trouble" as applied to young men and young women. When young men are said to be "looking for trouble," it usually means that violence is in the offing. When they are "in trouble," it tends to mean trouble with the law -- the probable result of violence. On the other hand, when young women are "looking for trouble," often this has only meant taking up an active role in the pursuit of sex. And when young women were "in trouble," this used to be absolutely synonymous with being pregnant out of wedlock -- as when a young man "got a girl in trouble." Once a living could be made off of illegitimate children, through welfare, and out of wedlock pregnancy became "destigmatized," the troublesome nature of this condition has declined -- as though a life in single parenthood poverty was not "trouble" in itself.
In the modern age, one of the perennial challenges of adolescence is to find something to do. This formerly was not a challenge. In Mediaeval and traditional worlds, children would be working by six or seven, usually on the farm for the rural 80% to 90% of the population, and would then be all but entered into adult life by the mid-teens -- with excellent odds of death between 25 and 35 years. But the modern teenager, although generally expected to be conscientious about education and other worthy "activities" (sports, "community service," part-time jobs, etc.), may nevertheless find themselves with a great deal of disposable leisure. This is where the trouble comes in, for both sexes. While the daring, dangers, and follies of testosterone may reduce the boys to the equivalent of a hunting or raiding pack (now in full flood with urban gangs), the girls may discover, not only that recreational sex is diverting in itself, but that childbearing produces a wholly owned source of affection, companionship, and fascination, as, indeed, in traditional life. This (properly) arouses horror in responsible society; but the testimony of under-age mothers is often of their own desire for the love a child will provide. Truly, this is "trouble" only in the modern context, as it is familiar from traditional societies that girls may be hurried into marriage right at menarche -- even as the restlessness and foolhardiness of the boys may be directed or sublimated into suitable channels, especially as it may be older men who marry the girls.
A stunning variation on this was reported in a street gang in San Antonio, Texas, where females could become gang members by engaging in unprotected sex with a male gang member known to have a venereal disease.
Feminism, Note 1
Feminism, Note 2;
Hooking Up in the Rape CultureMost of my sexual interludes sound something like this. "No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Please, I don't want to. No. No. No. No. I shouldn't be doing this. Why am I doing this? No. No. No. I shouldn't be doing this. I can't stop doing this, even though I should stop. I should really stop. Yes. I should stop. Yes, yes, yes. Oh, God, yes, yes, yes! Don't stop. Don't stop. Don't -- oh, you're done? I shouldn't have done that. That was really not something I should've done. I've got to go. Tomorrow? Same time, same place?"...
with the tradtional preliminaries of drinks, dinner, movie, and all the modern equivalents of courting and spooning eliminated. He discussed this separately in the essay "Hooking Up" [in Hooking Up, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2000, p.3]. His own book, of course, was how this was all souless, callous, and emotionally empty.
Nevertheless, the inability of women to give consent under any level of intoxication has been seriously proposed for the law.
Hooking Up in the Rape Culture, Note
while it is clear from this that McFarlane's "No" often meant "Yes." The axiom became a cause amid aggitation over "date rape," when a woman might find herself at the mercy of an aggressive dater, who might coerce or force her into sex, or even drug her so that she wouldn't remember whether she had had sex at all ("roofied" with Rohypnol). In such situations, it was difficult for a woman to prove that the sex had not been consensual. While a woman might not be able to prove that she had even said "No," this issue may also have played out against the background of a very old joke, which I first heard in the Fall of 1967:
Feminism, Note 3;
On Gender
is about physical differences between the sexes, while gender, masculine or feminine, is about characteristics of behavior, demeanor, or psychology which feminism wished to claim are culturally constructed and conditioned and so ultimately arbitrary. Since the moral and political program of "gender feminism" was essentially to abolish gender differences, so that men and women would end up living the same kinds of lives, doing the same kinds of things, and perhaps even looking pretty much the same in "unisex" grooming and clothing, it was important to distinguish between the class of cultural and alterable items, matters of gender, and the class of physical and unalterable items, matters of physical sex differences.
Comment on "Perpetrator" and "Suspect"
The attacks happened in the span of 15 minutes at a Truist Bank, Nike shop and Safeway grocery store, with the sports-apparel business located only blocks from the government buildings.
Copyright (c) 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2011, 2012, 2016, 2023 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
Feminism, Note 4
Feminism, Note 5
Feminism, Note 6
Feminism, Note 7
Feminism, Note 8
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