The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Feminist Omerta

Posted on | March 11, 2011 | 47 Comments

Permit me to offer a simple analogy:

Feminism is to women as Mafia is to Sicilians.

Students of organized crime know that what we call “mafia” was, during its heyday, actually known to its members as La Cosa Nostra — roughly translated, “this thing of ours.”

That wild thought occurred to me as I contemplated the various women raking me over the coals in the comments of Little Miss Attila’s post about Sarah Palin and feminism, for example Roxeanne de Luca:

A lot of left-brained, educated women are infuriated by Stacy’s line of reasoning – we know ourselves to be equal to men (Stacy’s line about equality implying interchangeability aside, because they really are not the same thing at all), and don’t see why the laws and our society should not reflect that.
The disservice to the conservative movement is two-fold: first, it turns women away from it (and we do know that young, unmarried women win elections for Democrats); second, it ignores the fact that the progressive movement is like a virus that infects many hosts. Feminism is not the first, nor will it be the last, movement that the progressives have attempted to hijack. Why on earth we would not fight for feminism, rather than letting the progressives take it, is beyond me.

Wise gentlemen comparing “Stacy’s line of reasoning” to the reaction it has generated will recognize what’s going on here: We are at that stage of the argument you have with your wife when whatever started the argument has ceased to be relevant, and the point of the argument has become: She is right, you are wrong, and your refusal to acknowledge her unquestioned rightness is regarded as an intolerable insult.

The First Rule of Holes suggests that I should stop digging now, but before I lay aside my shovel, let me explain why my writing about feminism so profoundly offends women — even many women whom you would not normally expect to defend feminism:

  1. I actually know what I’m talking about — Look, I’m 51 years old and have been a voracious student of history since childhood. My Donkey Cons co-author, Lynn Vincent (Sarah Palin’s collaborator on Going Rogue) has praised my “encyclopedic” knowledge of political history — a comment which is not coincidental considering that, in fact, I’d read the entire World Book encyclopedia by the age of 12. Just as I’ve read more Marx than most Marxists, I’ve read more about feminism than most feminists. Sitting on my desk right now is Susan Brownmiller’s memoir, In Our Time. If I were just some random ignoramus ranting about “feminazis,” they could shrug it off, but I’m not, so they can’t.
  2. I remind them of somebody they don’t like — This is an unfortunate hazard encountered by any male writer who criticizes feminism: For many women, it triggers a mental association with every dipwad chauvinist a–hole they’ve ever known in real life. Friends might cite in my defense the fact that, in real life, I’m just a happy-go-lucky goof-off, but this is irrelevant to the mental-association problem. To every woman who has ever been passed over for a promotion that instead went to a guy, or otherwise felt herself subjected to sexist discrimination, the guy who criticizes feminism is mentally associated with That Awful Creep. This isn’t necessarily my fault, or the women’s fault, it just is what it is.
  3. Women writers have an investment in feminism — Here is where the term La Cosa Nostra comes to mind: For women writers, feminism is “this thing of ours,” a subject on which they expect to exercise a monopoly. You will note here a distinction between women who write for a living, or at least as an amateur vocation, and women who have no ambition to be regarded as “writers.” Insofar as any woman aspires to be a writer, one of the subjects about which she can always write — and never have to worry about competing for readership with male writers — is feminism. And unless she wants to be exiled to the outer darkness occupied by women writers who are avowedly anti-feminist, what she writes about feminism will in some sense celebrate feminism as a good and worthy movement.

So you see why my writing about feminism makes me such a convenient target, even of conservative women who are despised by actual feminists. No matter how much historical evidence I cite in support of the fact that Second Wave feminism was deeply rooted in the anti-American Left — both Betty Friedan’s pro-Soviet Old Left and the radical New Left roots of the Women’s Liberation Movement — they will not concede the point, because I was born with a penis, and no one born with a penis can be permitted to write with authority as a critic of feminism.

When I made Friedan’s CPUSA-friendly past the focus of my original post, Attila’s reaction was “What about Gloria Steinem, huh? Huh, smart guy?” So I then demonstrated in the update that Steinem was a Janey-come-lately opportunist who jumped on the Women’s Liberation bandwagon nearly two years after Shulamith Firestone and others launched New York Radical Women, the seminal organization of that movement.

Next? Predictably, in the comments of Attila’s post, Cassandra takes us all the way back to Seneca Falls Convention of 1848!

It should be clear, I think, that a critique of modern feminism, a particular movement arising in the 1960s, does not obligate me to go rummaging amongst the whalebone corsets of antebellum womanhood, at a time when the ink had barely dried on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. But though this seminal “feminism” of the Victorian era has no actual relevance to my argument, Cassandra’s gesture — “See there, smart guy?” – invites a brief examination of that subject.

The most historically important women in the 19th-century women’s-rights movement were Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Anyone may Google and plow through the available online references about these women and, unless you have a “personal fantasy” of repealing the 19th Amendment, you probably won’t find anything objectionable in their biographies. We need not concern ourselves with such 19th-century feminists as Victoria Woodhull — although we well might, we won’t — merely for the sake of putting a guilt-by-association taint of radicalism on the women’s suffrage movement.

Yet one notes among the founders of that movement a distinct whiff of religious heterodoxy — Quakerism and Unitarianism — and one reads in Mrs. Stanton’s biography that, after the preaching of the famed evangelist Charles Finney quite nearly led her into a teenage nervous breakdown, she developed an attitude that some today would describe as “secular humanism.” However unobjectionable we might find the agenda of these early feminist leaders, then, it is certainly remarkable that none of them were orthodox Bible-believing Christians — not a Presbyterian or Baptist nor even any Episcopalians in their ranks.

Furthermore, Mrs. Stanton published a very interesting book, The Woman’s Bible, the full text of which is available online. What she undertook here was a critique that, as Susan B. Anthony said, “questioned the Divine inspiration of certain passages in the Bible.” What I found particularly striking, however, was one of the commendations of The Woman’s Bible:

My Dear Mrs. Stanton:—I regard the Bible as I do the other so-called sacred books of the world. They were all produced in savage times, and, of course, contain many things that shock our sense of justice. In the days of darkness women were regarded and treated as slaves. They were allowed no voice in public affairs. Neither man nor woman were civilized, and the gods were like their worshipers. It gives me pleasure to know that women are beginning to think and are becoming dissatisfied with the religion of barbarians. . . .
Eva A. Ingersoll

Christianity “the religion of barbarians”? What an interesting recommendation to be included in Mrs. Stanton’s book!

And who was the author of this singular praise? Eva A. Ingersoll (née Parker) was none other than the wife of “The Great Agnostic,” Robert G. Ingersoll. We may learn elsewhere that Ingersoll was admired by Mrs. Stanton, that on at least one occasion in 1870 he shared the stage with Susan B. Anthony, and that he once declared: “As long as woman regards the Bible as the charter of her rights, she will be the slave of man. The Bible was not written by a woman. Within its lids there is nothing but humiliation and shame for her.”

Heterodoxy, agnosticism, skepticism of the Bible’s divinely inspiration — even outright contempt for Christianity — such were the religious views we find among, and in direct proximity to, leaders of the 19th-century women’s rights movement. This may not dissuade Attila, Roxeanne or Cassandra from defending feminism against my specific criticisms, yet I think it does lend support to my contention that it is wrong to speak of “mainstream” feminism or, as Attila says, “the more universal variety.”

As a distinct movement in history, feminism has always been a species of radicalism, the irreligious views of Mrs. Stanton being as radical in the context of 19th-century American culture as any militant “progressive” agenda is today.

In a phone conversation with Attila yesterday, I said that her attempt to define and defend some sort of non-radical feminism puts her in the position of the Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution, subject to a metaphorical annihilation at the hands of the Bolsheviks of the movement. “Conservative feminism” is an oxymoron, “moderate feminism” is intellectually untenable, and if you refuse to march in lockstep with the radical feminists, you must sooner or later decide to become an anti-feminist — an apostate to the radical cause.

That the leaders of the National Organization for Women did not put an ice-ax through Tammy Bruce’s skull for her Trotsky-like “deviationism” does not change the fact that Bruce is now a renegade held in contempt by the official spokeswomen for the Stalinist feminist cause. (In the context of all these Russian analogies, I suppose I’m an old Tsarist exile, or perhaps a Ukrainian kulak.)

What is at stake, you see, is actually something far more important than the exclusive prerogative of women to write about “feminism” and their resultant indignation at an impudent male’s intrusion on their literary turf. I would be perfectly happy to stand aside and let conservative ladies take care of this matter, if more of them would emulate such excellent examples as Carolyn Graglia’s Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism. But it won’t do for me to stint from my labors while so many self-described conservative women (and the “recovering lefty” Attila) not only refuse to declare open warfare on feminism, but indeed try to claim the “feminist” label for themselves.

To see Roxeanne de Luca pursue the illusion that she might wrest feminism from the grasp of progressives (who have, she says, “hijacked” it) is like watching Charlie Sheen rant about “winning” while his career comes crashing down all around him. And I am doing a “disservice to the conservative movement”? Because my “line of reasoning” is allegedly offensive to “left-brained, educated women”? (Implied: Any woman who defends him is a right-brained ignoramus!)

This is a war of ideas, of course, and the injured feelings of Roxeanne or any other woman are not my responsibility. My target has always been the idea of feminism and none of these antagonists was so much as mentioned in my original post. It was only when Attila slung at me a calculated insult – ”oversimplified fiddle faddle” (!) — that my defense required me to confront my accuser, only to find others endorsing her slur. Like La Cosa Nostra, it seems the feminists enforce their own sort of omerta, and this is their rule: In any argument between a man and woman, no woman can take the man’s side of the argument.

Never mind that Attila insulted me without any provocation: She is a woman, and therefore I must be wrong — so say they all. The collective solidarity of identity politics must triumph, and any woman who betrays sympathy for the Patriarchal Oppressor is doing a “disservice to the conservative cause.”

Well, the First Law of Holes requires me to stop digging while I’m still barely halfway to the fiery pit of Hell, so I’ll lay aside my shovel and beg your pardon, ladies, for having disturbed the proceedings of your coven.

“We must then make up our minds in accepting Women’s Rights to surrender our Bibles, and have an atheistic Government. . . . Adopt the infidel plan, and we shall corrupt our women without purifying our politics. What shall save us then?”
– R.L. Dabney, 1897


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Category: Feminism, Little Miss Attila, Rule 4

Comments

  • http://thatmrgguy.wordpress.com/ Mike

    All I can say is…DAYAM!!!!!

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=705855851 Joy McCann

    But Stacy–if you really did know what you were talking about, how would you so persistently get it wrong?

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  • http://twitter.com/darleenclick darleenclick

    with all due respect, RSM, you use a lot of words and still miss the point. Regardless of your grasp of the minutia, you still are arguing from a framing of your own design; you declare –>thisthisthis<— is so narrowly defined Amanda Marcotte will be sending you flowers.

  • big sarge

    Stacy is absolutely correct, of course. A corollary to this point is what I used to run into when discussing (ok, arguing) abortion with hardcore “feminists” years ago: my opinion was meaningless because I’m a man, and therefore had no legitimate opinion about it. My counterargument that the opinion of those seven men who agreed with them in the Roe v Wade decision sure seemed to matter a great deal never made a dent.

    Go figure…

  • Anonymous

    What else can be said, Stacy, but “You Da Man!”

  • The Wondering Jew

    “It should be clear, I think, that a critique of modern feminism, a particular movement arising in the 1960s, does not obligate me to go rummaging amongst the whalebone corsets of antebellum womanhood, at a time when the ink had barely dried on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo”– Definitely the money quote of this article.

    Unfortunately, I think the genie is a bit out of the bottle on feminism and, as a practical, matter, I’m not sure whether co-optation isn’t a better strategy than destruction (since I am skeptical that the latter will happen). But as a historically-informed essay, it’s well done.

  • Joe

    “Just as I’ve read more Marx than most Marxists, I’ve read more about feminism than most feminists. ”

    Jeeze Louise Stacy. That combination is more powerful than a bottle of melatonin and a handful of lunesta and ambien, washed down with a few shots of whiskey.

  • Joe

    Stacy is correct of course, just don’t tell my wife.

  • Anonymous

    Stacy, the error of your post is similar to the error a lot of liberals make when arguing against federalism: they argue that because “states rights” was invoked historically by people who didn’t like blacks and didn’t want them equal, therefore any invocation of states rights is bad and a cover for racism. One doesn’t follow from the other. Similarly, merely because feminism may have originated with some radicals (as many social movements do, including the one that led to the American Revolution and the one that led utlimately to abolition of slavery), it does not follow that feminism is therefore by its nature necessarily radical.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=705855851 Joy McCann

    Also, you might want to back this up: “Insofar as any woman aspires to be a writer, one of the subjects about which she can always write — and never have to worry about competing for readership with male writers — is feminism. And unless she wants to be exiled to the outer darkness occupied by women writers who are avowedly anti-feminist, what she writes about feminism will in some sense celebrate feminism as a good and worthy movement.”

    Show me what Cassandra, Darleen, Roxeanne, Beth, Cynthia and I have written that celebrated feminism as a “good and worthy movement.” Because we’ve all in reality been very critical of it.

    Throw up, Stacy.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=705855851 Joy McCann

    Also, you might want to back this up: “Insofar as any woman aspires to be a writer, one of the subjects about which she can always write — and never have to worry about competing for readership with male writers — is feminism. And unless she wants to be exiled to the outer darkness occupied by women writers who are avowedly anti-feminist, what she writes about feminism will in some sense celebrate feminism as a good and worthy movement.”

    Show me what Cassandra, Darleen, Roxeanne, Beth, Cynthia and I have written that celebrated feminism as a “good and worthy movement.” Because we’ve all in reality been very critical of it.

    Throw up, Stacy.

  • Anonymous

    I love Stacy.

    @Joy and @darleeneclick
    Why do feminist come off as misandrists so often to men?

  • Anonymous

    I love Stacy.

    @Joy and @darleeneclick
    Why do feminist come off as misandrists so often to men?

  • http://twitter.com/darleenclick darleenclick

    BTW Stacy, I’m 56 y/o and if I haven’t read as extensively every scribble of my peers and older “sisters” during the Burning-Bra years, it was because they bored me because their long lists of grievances (and tactic of mixing legitimate concerns with the vapid, silly or problematic) “substantiated” with “historical fact” was just as lacking as your argument now.

    Joy, Cass, etc, and I are talking about the Forest of the inherent, Constitutional rights of Woman, and you’re trying to beat us over the head with the trees of leftist/gender-”feminism.

  • http://twitter.com/darleenclick darleenclick

    Because gender-feminism isn’t about women’s rights as citizens but about substituting The State as the most important partner in an individual’s life (aka Leftism). It’s about “tearing down the Patriarchy” in order to make all individuals regardless of sex dependent on Government.

    You could easily ask why liberals come off as anti-business. The rhetoric used by gender-feminists in service of the real agenda is typical of Leftists railing against running dog capitalists.

  • Joe

    Honey, just in case you see this. I am kidding.

    Sorry Stacy, I am throwing you under the bus.

  • http://theblaze.com Glenn Beck

    Stacy:

    They just wanna kill the Father; our Father. They wanna kill the males, especially the white males. They love dead white males. It’s the rage all across the college campuses. It’s a conspiratorial plot, I tell ya, funded by the CFR (Council of Foreign Relations) aka NWO (New World Order) to divide and conquer America by aiding and abetting different groups against each other while reaping the profits from the misery they’ve inflicted while at the same time consolidating their power. The feminist movement is a tool being employed by the New World Order as a means to break down the the family by destroying the heterosexual male role model in society, by demonizing the father, the son and the holy spirit. Wake up and smell the eternal. Little Miss Atilla and Roxeanne de Luca and their feminist-socialist ilk are part of a Satanic plot to destroy our American way of life of freedom and rugged individualism.

    It’s the Great Whore of Babylon, dude. It’s a holy war. Beware of the Prince of the Power of the Air. Kill your television.

  • Anamika

    ‘Feminism’ of the 70′s never addressed female superiority. Female Empowerment believes in it. Annoyingly so, as a matter of fact. Many issues that were percieved as a troublesome tipping of the scales, were evasively talked past as if it would be the proverbial letting the Jinn out of the bottle, as if we’d not be able to get “her” back in again and what would ensue, would be unimaginable, if not downright unacceptable. It was compared to playing with Uranium.

    Sorry for sounding like a little imperious shit disturber. Having more than the “pat” intellectual “speech bubbles”, as in comic book impressions was dire. I wanted an interconnected description of the issue where one can say “that’s it, that’s really it”.

    In any case, it would be helpful for Stacy and Little Miss Attila to each define their use of the term ‘feminism’ and how this discussion fits into the history and contemporary discussion within the bounds of feminism.

  • Anamika

    Save yourself now! Don’t stop with your television. Go out to the garage. Get a hammer. Be brave, now…this is important…take the hammer and smash your computer screen to bits. It’s the only way. Believe me. You have to do it.

  • Anamika

    Save yourself now! Don’t stop with your television. Go out to the garage. Get a hammer. Be brave, now…this is important…take the hammer and smash your computer screen to bits. It’s the only way. Believe me. You have to do it.

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  • http://www.haemet.blogivists.com Roxeanne de Luca

    While we may be feminists, or support feminism, we are also critical of Marcotte, Valenti, the Palin-haters, and a lot of other people who are hell-bent on co-opting the term “feminism” for their ideological agenda. The radical leftists get a lot of mileage from, “Feminism helps all women, and the feminist litmus test requires that you be pro-choice, pro-ObamaCare, anti-life, etc etc”. Well, you’re then trying to convince the 88% of women who call themselves feminists that those litmus tests are wrong, or you can point out that a movement which has the support of huge numbers of pro-lifers, Catholics, Christians, stay-at-home moms, and conservatives hardly requires adherence to liberal dogma.

  • DaveO

    BLUF: When you use their language, you fight on their home ground, under their rules, and the outcome is, as you mention, foreordained.
    My two cents, adjusted for hyperinflation:

    The debate uses the terms of, characters created by, and tactics of Feminism. Perhaps if you were to change the direction of the debate. Instead of ‘feminism,’ focus on ‘womanism.’ Instead of hating men for their power, and insisting only men should wield that power as feminists do believe, behave, and vote – why not examine an alternative path of success?

    The outrageous outrage directed at Governor Palin proves conclusively that feminism is morally dead, and intellectually bankrupt. The active undermining of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, with its active misogeny perpetrated and approved of by feminists of both genders is additional proof. Feminism may have been about empowering women, but only to the end of electing selected men to rule.

    Womanism, however, celebrating all aspects of woman. Being a worker, mother, politico, intellectual, daughter, artist, coach… a freedom to be one’s self without having to pay dues to women who will hate a woman’s success just because she is successful. My understanding of Cassandra, Attila, et al is they use the language of feminism, but they seem be looking at womanism.

    By sticking to feminism and its language, you won’t convert anyone. You lose, and in losing, other arugments you make on other topics become dismissable.

  • Flemming

    Dear Roxeanne!

    I have a question for You: Don’t You think that feminists and “feminists” have to stand side by side, facing the almost insurmountable obstacles for Real Significant Victory (for feminism)?

    Perhaps the ‘feminist movement’ as a whole only has 10% totally integrous, serious ‘workers’- the 90% might be just half-baked ‘feminists’ (many of them would be males) ?

    There is hardly any evidence,historically,that any politico-social-spiritual movement has ‘made it’ due to the ‘pure’ 10%

    The cause of feminism is so overwhelmingly important, we just can’t afford endless internal bickering about, who are the REAL feminists,who are the FALSE ‘pretenders’ just my opinion.

  • http://pointofagun.blogspot.com/ Dave C

    Didn’t Jessica Valenti (however you spell her last name) pretty much declare that feminism belongs to whoever she says it belongs to? As long as she was pro-abortion, social justice and whatever else was the hot button of the day for liberals at the time.

    Then– and only then– could a womyn be considered a feminist.

  • Anamika

    Flemming,

    I hope you and Roxeanne de Luca don’t mind me taking on the question you pose.

    As you probably know, feminism is comprised of an array of differing voices. The family tree is has quite a canopy by now, and not all of the limbs agree with each other.

    Still, change has happened, both despite and because of a multitude of varied voices, male and female. So, no, I don’t feel that feminists and “feminists” (as you say) need to stand together, though of course that is useful when working on specific projects.

    However, I would like to submit that as long as something is a “feminist issue”, Real Significant Victory for Feminism (as you call it) is inconceivable. It is only when it flips over into the realm of general issue, something that appeals to even those who wouldn’t normally term themselves feminists, that something stands a chance of Real Significant Change. Such a
    change may be seen to be not a victory for feminism, but a victory for everyone touched by the change.

    This whole notion of “Real Significant Victory for Feminism” has at its base a sense of “us vs. them”. Basically, if Feminism achieves a significant victory and is the “winner”, who, then, is the “loser”? Could be, that the “loser” is anyone who is not a feminist. Could be, that the “loser” is every one of us, as where is this victory mentality bound to lead us but deeper into the same pit of fighting against the Other.

    Ana

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  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=705855851 Joy McCann

    Well, that’s the problem. Usually, when Stacy says “feminism,” I just read it as “radical/gender feminism,” and get on with life. And the last time he challenged me for using the term, I quoted Humpty Dumpty–and that was it. (“When I use a term, it means what I want it to mean.”)

    But it’s a bit much for him to start proclaiming that Govornor Palin doesn’t know her own mind, and is somehow mistaken when she calls herself a “feminist.” That was disrespectful.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=705855851 Joy McCann

    Well, now you’re trying to slide away from Stacy’s insult against Governor Palin–and me–by simply throwing away the word that is in dispute, and coming up with a new one to replace “equity feminism,” which is simple the “we want a fair shot” segment of modern womanhood.

    That’s fine, but it doesn’t allow us to communicate effectively with anyone who doesn’t already identify as a conservative–no one new comes into the “tent” with your approach, and there is no way to talk to outsiders using any common phrase. We are back to the Babel/babble problem.

  • Anamika

    Maybe instead of ‘feminism’ it would have been better to explore this as a dynamic of the treatment of the ‘under class’…

    the ‘invisibles’….

    which is a big part of Sarah Palin’s ‘crusade’ and her appeal to her followers.

    To me, she doesn’t represent ‘womanhood’… certainly not the ‘ideal’ [as if there is any such thing]…..but rather just one aspect of the many expressions of ‘woman’.

    It’s easy for me to ‘hear’ her from her highest intent because she represents an aspect of ‘womanhood’ that I accepted and
    embraced long ago.

  • Anamika

    Maybe instead of ‘feminism’ it would have been better to explore this as a dynamic of the treatment of the ‘under class’…

    the ‘invisibles’….

    which is a big part of Sarah Palin’s ‘crusade’ and her appeal to her followers.

    To me, she doesn’t represent ‘womanhood’… certainly not the ‘ideal’ [as if there is any such thing]…..but rather just one aspect of the many expressions of ‘woman’.

    It’s easy for me to ‘hear’ her from her highest intent because she represents an aspect of ‘womanhood’ that I accepted and
    embraced long ago.

  • http://twitter.com/CathPrdDaughter Mary Rose

    “Conservative feminism” is an oxymoron, “moderate feminism” is intellectually untenable, and if you refuse to march in lockstep with the radical feminists, you must sooner or later decide to become an anti-feminist — an apostate to the radical cause.

    When I started to take my Christian faith seriously in 1982, I was just beginning to dabble with feminism. I tried to find books that were about “Christian Feminism.” Not surprisingly, I didn’t find many and this was after hanging out at the “womyn’s” bookstore and attending events for months.

    The one thing I noticed about the books I was reading at that time was the instant attack on the Bible and Christianity. I never read once an attack on Islam or the Koran; when even back then I could see oppressed women at a level unknown to modern Christianity. And men were attacked as being patriarchal and generally not worth much except to lift a basket full of rocks.

    After much prayer, I was led away from feminism, sensing that God didn’t want me on this path. Years later, I had an epiphany of sorts, and what I’m going to type next will most likely irritate any woman who still has a soft spot for this ideology: Feminism is woman’s attempt to gain security apart from God.

    That is still my position today, fourteen years later after I received those words during a time of prayer. Women can be fearful things at times. Years of being disappointed by men can build up such a wall that some will mistakenly believe that wall for “strength.” It’s not. It’s hiding and then trying to punish men for the sins of others.

    I am probably one of the most vehemently anti-feminist readers you have, Stacy. I am firmly on your side. Your knowledge and expertise on this subject is, in my mind, indisputable yet there are those who feel obligated to attack simply because you’re a man.

    Needless to say, I run around with a pretty traditional group of Catholic women. My blog will never be linked from any female writer who supports feminism unless they’re taking issue with what I say. However, I admit the life I lead is not by following the world’s terms or conditions. There are plenty of strong, brave women in the Bible I admire and consider role models.

    And Stanton, Stein, Steinem, or O’Hair isn’t included in my list. Period.

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  • http://twitter.com/alwaysfiredup alwaysfiredup

    “yet there are those who feel obligated to attack simply because you’re a man. ”

    Oh please. The “attacks” (woeful overstatement there) are no more because Stacy is male than that the Tea Partiers dislike Obama because they don’t like black people. We disagree because we believe him to be in error.

    Stacy doesn’t accept equity feminism. It doesn’t matter how many women identify with this movement, to him it is an illusion. Well, Gonzo Journalism is also an illusion; there was but one practitioner, now deceased, and nothing like a coherent ideology. Stacy is just using that rhetoric to soak up tip jar cash and get a free vacay at reader expense. He has no right to call himself a gonzo journalist because a) there is no such thing and b) even if there is, he has strayed from the founder’s example. (At least I hope so; that sort of drug abuse would not be healthy at his age.) Right?

    An ideology doesn’t need a million followers and a completely consistent body of literature in order to be valid. It only needs one. Gonzo journalism exists because Hunter S. invented it and there are some people who still (loosely) follow his example. Equity feminism has far more than one adherent, at least as demonstrated in these comments; ergo, it is a real ideology. Some shared history with gender feminism does not negate its existence.

  • Anamika

    Having been raised with the Christian mythology — and loving so many parts of it, other than its use of the concept of original sin to “keep women in their place”, I was deeply indebted to Elaine Pagels for her insights from the first book I read “Adam, Eve and the Serpent”.

    For many years I struggled with “being woman”, often in rebellious ways……often with resentment.

    Elaine was one influence that helped me to see “the fall” in a much wider — and fascinating context — one that inspired me, rather than shamed me.

    I also was introduced to the Gnostic Gospels by her — most impactfully, the Gospel of Thomas and Mary Mag.

    She does a great service in ‘freeing’ people raised in, and devoted to, the best that is Christianity.

  • Cass

    ..my opinion was meaningless because I’m a man, and therefore had no legitimate opinion about it

    And if any of the women arguing with Stacy had actually made that argument, you might have a point. Fortunately, on the Internet reality is an infinitely flexible construct. If you don’t like what happened, just make something up.

  • Cass

    Sorry Mary Rose – I had two windows open and this ended up in the wrong place. I meant to respond to an earlier (similar) comment but my response applies equally to your statement here:

    Your knowledge and expertise on this subject is, in my mind, indisputable yet there are those who feel obligated to attack simply because you’re a man.

    Again, if anyone has made that argument, I have missed it.

    Making things up doesn’t make them so.

  • Garlic

    The issue of Mary The Magdelene seems relevant to the ‘why’ of the current affair.

    Some information, a short and cogent summary, can be found here (but more is of course available via Google et al):

    http://www.lionofgod.com/view_article.php?id=32

    ‘The Magdelene’ was (according to my studies and vision, and to testimony supplied by certain unnamed students of esoteric Christianity) the title of the head or top rank of a certain ‘fertility cult’, which predated the birth of Jesus by hundreds or possibly thousands of years.

    There is some evidence that this ‘cult’, always headed by women and a woman, was the predecessor of the so-called ‘Essene’ brotherhood. Or, as some have speculated, the original ‘Gnostics’ branched out to form the Essenes AND this female-oriented ‘fertility cult’, of which one Mary was the head, as the life of Christ progressed to the time that his ‘anointing’ became relevant.

    There is a saying, that ‘history is written by the winners’; the Catholic Church has had its way with humanity and the written records for too long. Recent findings, from the Gnostic records in the Red Sea Scrolls to the later ‘Gospel of Judas’, reveal a history of human awareness which was an embrace of the totality of experience, and not a narrow rejection or filter system designed to allow the survival only of politically approved ‘life-forms’.

    In this regard, in our recent times, we find the emergence of the woman-spirit which has secretly carried in its spiritual womb, the seed of love and embrace which may now, if we are fortunate, emerge to anoint us all; and such anointing is sorely needed, as is awakening of the spirit of life, as we face once again the promise of military/political deployment of nuclear weapons, and the iron fist of universal fascism as ‘acceptance of the rules of global commerce’.

    We ask; why exists, such death-fists as so enjoy their destructive impulses?

    One answer is this; the extinction of the ‘fertility cult’ of ‘Goddess’, as manifested as dedicated living women, who as genuine flesh and blood, would example and share (anoint) not only of the spirit, but also of the blood; and the humble acceptance by all, of the multiplicity of the human form; how woman is man and child, from spirit to seed, from seed to birth, from child to sharing seed, an endless cycle of change, rooted in each and every form and phase of existence.

    To see this changing mandala as it manifests over time, is to see and know our nature as human life, and the blessing of perception, awareness and memory; and why not pause, for as long as it takes us to allow our awareness of this buried aspect of our nature to once again arise, and to see it in its rightful place, as a sun whose nurturing warmth extends as it does for our own continuation.

    Lacking this, we die; but our deaths are characterized by the symptoms of slow starvation of spirit, as our ability to receive is diminished by those whose threats would make us keep our mouths shut, and thus to also avoid imbibing, as much as talking.

    We are also assailed by diverse poisons, which are painted on the images of natural life, to make toxic the portraits which best represent us and our possibilities; natural is denoted as ‘nudity’, as the joyous union of joining in sex is condemned as ‘carnality’; those who killed and pillaged their way to the top of the social heap, now reap the rewards of absolute control, but their victory has assured the creation of a growing hoard of mindless zombies whose appetite for living flesh does not discriminate between master or slave; such ‘gangs’ of murder death rule by terror, in the mold of the death’s head that gave them unnatural birth, and whose foetid breath sours the very atmosphere of the planet itself.

    No wonder, the chains placed on the neck, wrists and ankles of the woman; for it is she, who enables and carrys the cycle of life. What power is there, in her frame? Only that of the continuance of our ‘race’, and such power, if allowed to run free, would paint the landscape in the colors of life; and this does conflict with the death-factory of iron and steel, whose motto of ‘expediency’ has poisoned us all, to the last one.

    And no wonder, the arising of the divine physician; and not as one, but as many. Surely we have ears to hear the song of anointing, and eyes to see the blessed form of woman, surviving the plagues of suppression, and turning even rape into a new chance for taking it right, by opening of heart to the bloodflow of nature as love.

    All for now…

  • Anonymous

    Saturday night for short?

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  • Quartermaster

    What I’ve seen here is a lot of Stacy bashing and very little content on the Feminista side.

    The Feministas have pretty much shown Stacy McCain to be correct – Stacy is male, and therefore has nothing legit to say about Feminism.

    The women bashing you Stacy are more of the same thing I’ve been seeing for years and have made the term Feminist such a slippery thing. Call my wife a feminist and she bridles, even though she has bought much of their line.

    One poster stated the problem with Feminism quite clearly, “Feminism is woman’s attempt to gain security apart from God.”

    The attempt to connect feminism with abolitionism and the Temperance movement is laughable. Temperance especially. Temperance was about preserving families against the influence of demon Rum. Feminism is about anything but preserving families.

    Frankly, what I’ve seen here tells me the women bashing Stacy are not conservatives. Anything but. They are just more of the sisterhood.

    One thing I’ve noted. Feminists are utterly invulnerable to reason and truth. If Palin is a Feminist, then she is no conservative. There is enough evidence out there to call into question her status as a conservative.

    The woman who thinks Christianity oppresses women because of original sin being laid at the feet of Eve really needs to get back in scripture. Paul was quite easy on her, and not at all kind to Adam.

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  • Fltelepath

    Could you repeat that?

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_NGORHRWCE44JCG7S6YQWWTM76U John

    I don’t think you’ll find anybody here who is against true equity feminism — provided equity really does mean equity, rather than protecting people like this from their own folly:
    http://www.the-spearhead.com/2011/02/04/jayme-biendl-victim-of-equity-feminism/

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