The Other McCain

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

Re-Reading Susan Brownmiller
Confronting the Radical Facts of Feminism

Posted on | March 15, 2011 | 48 Comments

“God help us if she ever gets raped — we will be buried under an avalanche of rhetoric.”
James Wolcott, letter to the Village Voice, 1971

Little Miss Attila vowed Monday that she owes me an essay in response to a post I wrote, and she can write a damned book for all I care. Having begun by insulting me — “fiddle-faddle”! – she has repeatedly doubled down every time I’ve defended myself, and keeps treating my defenses as if they were acts of aggression: How dare you deny your inferiority!

This obviously isn’t about me, but about her, and I cannot be responsible for her feelings of indignation at my refusal to kowtow.

What began the dispute (those few who have followed it will recall) was my attempt to briefly recount the history of feminism, locating it as a movement of the Left. In particular, I called attention to Betty Friedan’s Communist history as evidence of feminism’s ideological orientation. Attila responded by throwing out the name Gloria Steinem as an “a-ha!” But this did not disprove feminism’s left-wing origins, as I explained, because Steinem was a somewhat opportunistic Janey-come-lately to the Women’s Liberation movement that began in 1967. It was not until 1969, when Steinem wrote a New York magazine article about this burgeoning movement, that she became publicly associated with the cause.

Given the fact that the actual founders of Women’s Liberation were all closely associated with the anti-war ’60s New Left — including SDS members and several “Red Diaper babies” like Kathie Amatniek, raised by Communist parents — how on earth could a reference to Steinem be thought to refute my original point? (And, it must be noted, Steinem was herself an anti-war liberal, having supported first Eugene McCarthy and then RFK in the 1968 Democratic primaries.)

Attila seems to have presumed my writing about feminism could only be based in ignorant sexist prejudice: No man could be both (a) informed about the history of feminism and (b) an anti-feminist. Thus I eventually felt obliged to mention that I was writing with a copy of Susan Brownmiller’s memoir In Our Time sitting on my desk.

Brownmiller is most famously the author of Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, and was one of the organizers of a seminal January 1971 anti-rape “speak-out” event and a subsequent May 1971 Conference on Rape, both sponsored by New York Radical Feminists. The quote from James Wolcott that began this post is from a letter he wrote, as a college student, to the Village Voice in response to Brownmiller’s article, “On Goosing.”

The inspiration for that article was that Brownmiller had been helping pass out handbills to promote the rape conference when she was groped by a passing stranger. Well, as the feminists taught us, “The personal is political” (a slogan that Brownmiller explains was coined by her feminist friend Carol Hanisch). And so this incident led her to write a mini-manifesto of sorts, to which Wolcott supplied the rejoinder.

If my blog-feud with Attila has done nothing else, it has inspired me to re-read In Our Time. Perhaps I should explain how I came into possession of the book. Years ago, when I worked at The Washington Times, I was a voracious scavenger grabbing up books from the “discard” pile in the newsroom. Publishers flooded the book review editor’s office with their latest volumes, only a fraction of which were ever mentioned in the paper. The leftovers were picked through by the book editor and his assistant and what they didn’t want, they brought down from their office upstairs and dumped on a table in the newsroom.

Being a maniacal bibliophile, I would scoop up everything that seemed even slightly interesting to me. And it was through this process that I amassed a small collection of feminist memoirs.

For some reason, the years 1997-2001 unleashed a torrent of such works. Most were by obscure writers who, I guessed, were hoping to get their books onto the reading lists of university Women’s Studies programs. Skimming through the books during train-and-bus rides home, I discovered that most of these stories had a predictable narrative arc: Young woman goes to college; sleeps with boyfriend; has abortion; breaks up with boyfriend; gets involved with anti-war protests; is sexually exploited by a series of boyfriends from the anti-war movement; becomes involved in Women’s Lib; and, at some point past the prime of her promiscuous youth, discovers that she is in fact a lesbian.

The personal is the political, you see, and by the mid- to late 1990s, the personal was also frequently published, as these middle-aged Baby Boomer women felt compelled to share with a waiting world the tales of their “journey” — God, how they over-used that phrase — toward feminist (and usually also lesbian) enlightenment.

Brownmiller’s In Our Time is both personal and political, but it is also professional. Like both Freidan and Steinem, Brownmiller was a full-time working journalist before becoming a feminist. In Our Time is well-written and well organized and, while the narrative is built around Brownmiller’s own story, it is a comprehensive history of the “revolution” it chronicles.

The book, the author, and the movement are all unapologetically and defiantly left-wing. Attila’s notion that there is some species of feminism that is “universal” — a non-left-wing movement — is utterly refuted by Brownmiller’s book.

Here, I think, is the bone of dispute: The question is not whether there were once widely-tolerated forms of discrimination against women that even conservatives today would find shocking.

Certainly, there were many, many things going on in 1967 that we would find shocking in 2011. To cite one obvious example, 9,378 U.S. troops were killed in action in Vietnam in 1967. By comparison, in 2007, the worst year for U.S. casualties in Iraq, 904 American troops were killed. Young men were being drafted to serve in 1967, and only left-wing hippie freaks opposed it, whereas today we have an all-volunteer military and even most conservatives would oppose a re-institution of the draft. But that doesn’t mean the conservative movement is beholden to the left-wing hippie freaks who were burning their draft cards in 1967, just as the changes in our sexual culture do not require conservatives to make obeisance to the feminist movement.

“My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”
G.K. Chesterton, 1913

Well, today is Wednesday, and I do not suppose that whatever small amount of social change will take place between now and Thursday must automatically deserve applause as Progress. No one can deny that in 1967, women were excluded from certain professions and their career advancement impeded in many areas of employment. Yet neither can we deny that very few women aspired to be, inter alia, fighter pilots or corporate executives in 1967. “Well, why should they have aspired to career paths that were not open to them?” comes the response. We might answer by asking why it was so militantly insisted that all professions must be equally open to women, creating (at least in legal theory) a supply of opportunities as truck drivers and ditch-diggers for which, even to this day, there is not much female demand.

No need to offer such an argument — which the enraged Attila will note that I describe only as a hypothetical (“might”), rather than actually making that argument. However, I wish to point out is that the most ferocious female advocates of workplace equality tend to be also the direct beneficiaries of that equality: College-educated professional women, employed in office jobs of one sort or another. For the high-school dropout waiting tables at Waffle House, the benefits of a rigid enforcement of “equal opportunity” are more difficult to locate.

The collective solidarity of the radical sisterhood, however, insists on telling us that the personal advantages of the professional feminist vanguard are somehow a victory for all women. There is something familiar in that assertion, to anyone who has read Orwell’s Animal Farm: “Some animals are more equal than others.”

The radical feminists of the late 1960s brought with them to the Women’s Liberation Movement the collectivist, anti-hierarchical notions of participatory democracy that they had picked up in the civil-rights crucible of SNCC and the anti-war movement of SDS. There were undertones of Maoism in the insistence of these women that every dispute must be hashed out in long, open-ended discussions, every proposal put to a vote, every publication approved by the group. Everything was organized on an all-volunteer basis — no paid staff, no executive directors, etc. (In Our Time tells of women contributing their welfare checks to pay the printing costs of the newspapers produced by their feminist collectives, which didn’t pay a cent to the women writers whose work they published.)

Women’s Liberation radicals adamantly insisted that there could be no “stars” in the movement, and one of the victims of that egalitarian anti-“star” ethic was Susan Brownmiller. She easily could have been the feminist superstar that Steinem became. By the time Steinem published her first article about the movement — “After Black Liberation, Women’s Liberation,” April 1969 — Brownmiller had been active in the movement for more than seven months. Brownmiller started attending meetings of New York Radical Women in September 1968 in the offices of the Southern Conference Education Fund where, she discovered, part of the furniture was a second-hand sofa she’d given to Carol Harnisch. A writer for the Village Voice and ABC News, she later was asked to write an article about the Women’s Liberation Movement for the New York Times Magazine. “Sisterhood Is Powerful” was published in March 1970.

In that article, Brownmiller disputed Betty Friedan’s warning against the lesbian “lavender menace” to feminism’s mainstream acceptance. Showing solidarity with the radicals, Brownmiler mocked Friedan’s fear as a “lavender herring.” But instead of making her a hero to the radicals, Brownmiller’s article (and subsequent media appearances as a feminist spokeswoman) made her the object of a petition drive at a women’s conference. The petition condemned Brownmiller as “seeking to rise to fame on the back of the women’s movement by publishing articles in the establishment press.” Among those who supported the anti-Brownmiller petition was Rita Mae Brown, a lesbian who had resigned from NOW after Friedan’s “lavender menace” remark. Her argument against Brownmiller concluded: “We don’t need spokespeople and we don’t need leaders!”

In 1971, when the media were elevating Germaine Greer to superstar status and Brownmiller was asked to appear with Greer on the David Susskind show, Brownmiller’s fellow radicals in the audience yelled at her on the stage: “You shouldn’t be up there, Susan.” Brownmiller writes: “My movement sisters were saying: Germaine comes to us as a star so we accept her status and protect her, but you have no right to the spotlight unless we all do.” Since 1969, Brownmiller had been attending a weekly feminist consciousness-raising group, known as West Village One. In 1973, after she had already spent two years working on Against Our Will, she shared with her group the good news that the manuscript was at the point where she could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Brownmiller was shocked and hurt when another group member responded: “Dou you have to put your name on the book? Rape doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to the movement.”

Envy is the root of the egalitarian ethos, and it was inevitable that any woman who enjoyed particular success or distinction as a member of the radical-egalitarian Women’s Liberation movement would be hated for her achievements. Brownmiller had worked for years as a journalist, and fought to expand opportunities for women journalists (among other things, helping organize the famous 1970 sit-in at the offices of Ladies’ Home Journal). Yet the distinction of having her name on a book — a book that it ultimately took her nearly four years to finish — made her a target of these egalitarian resentments. And the woman whose criticism so wounded Brownmiller? She was not herself a writer but, as Brownmiller says, “a gifted organizer.”

Writers get bylines and organizers don’t. This is just the way of the world. But who could explain that in the context of a radical movement whose avowed purpose was to overturn the way of the world?

Sic simper hoc. Why, after all, had Leon Trotsky been demonized by Stalin? As any historian of the Bolshevik movement must conclude, Trotsky was hated for his virtues and accomplishments: A writer of clarity and wit, a persuasive speaker, a charismatic and successful leader of the Red Army. Trotsky’s prominence and popularity made him a natural target of Stalin’s paranoid resentments. All Trotsky’s prior services to the revolutionary cause were, in essence, part of the case against him, and none of his comrades dared defend him. The ice-axe that fatally crushed Trotsky’s skull was wielded by Ramon Mercader, but the assassin acted on behalf of the egalitarian spirit of the revolution Trotsky himself had done so much to advance.

Well, harsh words within a consciousness-raising group are a poor analogy for an assassin’s ice-axe, but the underlying principle — the egalitarian envy of achievement, the resentment of personal distinction, no matter how hard-won — was exactly the same. After all, the full title of Brownmiller’s book is In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution and, by the time Women’s Liberation raised its banner, nearly 200 years of history told the inevitable progress of such radicalism.

“Those who attempt to level never equalize. In all societies some description must be uppermost. The levellers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground.”
Edmund Burke, Reflection on the Revolution in France

Sic semper hoc. As with the Jacobins of Burke’s era, so too with the feminists of our own era. Robespierre must yield to Napoleon, Trotsky to Stalin, and Brownmiller’s radicals ultimately yielded to Gloria Steinem.

Telegenic and extroverted, already a famous liberal journalist who had made many television appearances, Steinem successfully seized the opportunity created by Women’s Liberation. Her attractiveness made her popular with male journalists. “[M]ost of the men I know are in love with Gloria Steinem,” New York Post columnist Pete Hamill wrote in 1970, “and it isn’t difficult to understand why.” A year later, a Newsweek cover feature promoted Steinem as the “unlikely guru” of Women’s Lib, an acclaim that Brownmiller describes as “an insult to the thousands of women across the country who were making the revolution.” In 1970, Brownmiller and some of her fellow radicals had proposed the idea of a national feminist magazine, but were unable to raise the necessary financial backing, In 1972, however, Steinem secured Warner Communications’ backing for Ms. magazine, which debuted as a special supplement to Clay Felker’s trendy New York magazine. Thus did Steinem become the celebrity symbol of the movement.

Brownmiller writes: “During the seventies, I often grew cross as I saw hard-won, original insights developed by others in near total anonymity be turned by the media into Gloria Steinem pronouncements, Gloria Steinem ideas, and Gloria Steinem visions . . .”

What was for the unsung radicals a cause became for Steinem a career — Feminism, Inc., as it were — and I marvel that so many women who still proudly call themselves feminists don’t grasp that concept. Brownmiller, Steinem, Friedan — call the roll of professional feminist leaders on down to the present day and permit yourself to ask the cynical question, “What’s in it for them?”

Whatever any self-identified feminist may consider the general benefits of the women’s movement, can you deny that its benefits were and are greatest to the women who earn their living on the payroll of Feminism, Inc.? How many women today enjoy full-time employment as university professors of Women’s Studies, with tenure, six-figure salaries, and a teaching load of perhaps two classes per semester? What are the salaries of the top officials at NARAL and NOW and the other feminist non-profits? (Memo to liberals: Just because it’s non-profit doesn’t mean nobody gets paid.)

Nor should the searing scrutiny of this cynical calculus be limited merely to the professionals of Feminism, Inc. The dogma of “equal opportunity” and “non-discrimination” is not of equal benefit to all women. The previously example of the Waffle House waitress calls to attention how little working-class women have benefitted from the feminist cause. However, even among the college-educated middle-class careerists who are, as a category, the chief beneficiaries of the women’s movement, the benefits of “equal opportunity” are by no means distributed equally. Every time there is an opening for a promotion in the office, and a (usually male) executive decides he needs to promote a woman — under the aegis of “diversity,” a defensive rationale to forestall the possibility of a discrimination lawsuit — some women will be passed over in favor of the lucky woman chosen for that elevation. Talk to women (and, believe it or not, I do), and you discover that they are well aware that a certain type of woman tends to prosper under the ”diversity” regime. And the majority of working women don’t really like that type of woman.

Something else the feminists seldom mention: There are lots of women who hate working for a woman boss, and dislike working in any female-dominated environment. Someone remarked in the comments here recently that one definition of “misogyny” is when a man treats a woman the way women treat each other. And if you listen to women (which again I must assure you that I often do), you are familiar with many different varieties of women’s cruelty to women.

Consider the hard-working dynamo, hired by a women’s non-profit with an indecisive, passive-aggressive boss. Her fellow employees, the dynamo quickly discovers, are prone to sitting around in endless discussions about what they should do, rather than actually doing anything. The dynamo rolls up her sleeves and gets to work, accomplishing wonders for the organization with her aggressive results-oriented approach. Inevitably, however, her colleagues resent the dynamo’s go-getter attitude. She sometimes skips their interminable staff meetings — where they talk, talk, talk about possible projects they should undertake — because she’s too busy doing actual work. And, strange to say, the dynamo actually expects them to help out with the work part of the job (for which they have neither appetite nor aptitude) as opposed to the let’s-hold-a-two-hour-meeting part (at which they excel). Eventually, the talk-talk-talk faction begins whining to their boss, complaining that the dynamo isn’t a “team player” because she missed a meeting, or didn’t file some bit of inter-office paperwork, or said something rudely honest to one of her lazy-ass co-workers. The talkers eventually make the dynamo’s life such a living hell that she quits the organization, rather than continue toiling in an environment that seems to punish hard work.

Sound familiar? C’mon, ladies: You have your own henhouse horror stories to tell. Every woman does. I know this because, believe it or not, I actually do talk to women. (And I occasionally even listen to them!)

As I have often had occasion to remind readers, when my dissections of feminist claptrap make me the target of the inevitable accusations of sexism and misogyny — depicting me as someone who hates and wishes to oppress women — my argument isn’t with women, but with an egalitarian ideology. Feminism is merely one variety of egalitarianism, and I oppose all such ideologies, which would have us believe that “inequality” is a synonym for “injustice.”

“We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.”
Ronald Reagan, 1964

Friedrich Hayek once wrote a book called The Mirage of Social Justice, a penetrating analysis of the delusional pursuit of an abstract notion of “fairness,” an ever-elusive phantom goal, an impossible ideal that has never existed in human affairs and never will. While I am not aware that Hayek ever addressed himself directly to feminism as a species of the “social justice” snipe-hunt, nevertheless the Hayekian insights still apply, and I will apply them.

For example: It is one thing to address an acknowledged evil like rape, and to decry the fact that in the 1960s and ‘70s, male-dominated law-enforcement agencies and a male-dominated court system routinely let rapists go free because of prejudicial attitudes toward women. Brownmiller tells the tale of a woman who got gang-raped while hitchhiking in the 1950s:

The worst part of her ordeal had been at the police station. “Aww, who’d want to rape you?” an officer teased. Another said she was too calm to be credible — in his view she should have been crying hysterically. After several postponements there was a trail that Sara did not attend, and the men were given suspended sentences.

We can see that such an attitude permitted criminals to go free, undermined public safety, and humiliated women who had been brutally victimized. No conservative would endorse such laxity in enforcement of the law. However, neither would any conservative deliberately distort public discourse about crime and punishment in such a way as to undermine the basic due process rights that protect defendants against wrongful prosecution. And this is what feminism has done, insisting that women never — never! — lie about rape, so that the Duke University lacrosse team was convicted in print by the New York Times, and subjected to prosecution by an unscrupulous district attorney, on the say-so of a dishonest accuser who was subsequently revealed to be a common criminal.

Whereas reasonable reforms of the criminal justice system — and, OK, I’ll even grudgingly acknowledge the utility of “consciousness-raising” on the issue — would suffice to remedy the genuine wrongs in the legal system’s approach to rape, the radical impetus of a revolutionary movement can never accept piecemeal reforms as sufficient. Moreover, it is difficult to credit the demand for more stringent law enforcement when those presenting such a demand are part of an antinomian radicalism that openly espouses the cause of criminals who kill cops, a radicalism that even defends terrorist bombers. That this was the case with the Women’s Liberation Movement, no one can argue.

Deeply entwined with the New Left, the feminists of the 1960s and ‘70s routinely took the side of the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and various cause célèbre criminals of that radical era. Feminists aided and abetted the fugitive Jane Alpert. As a 22-year-old Columbia University graduate student, Albert became involved with a 35-year-old divorced radical, Sam Melville. (“The combination of sexual love and radical ideology was more than irresistible. It consumed me. After a few weeks with Sam, it was obvious to me that I was going to quit graduate school.”) In 1969, Alpert helped Melville commit a string of at least eight bombings in New York, including one blast that injured 19 people.

As a fugitive from justice — during which time she participated in the Weather Underground’s terror-bombing campaign — Alpert was harbored by various feminists. Her “Mother Right” manifesto was published in Ms. magazine, and Gloria Steinem herself helped Alpert get a lawyer when she finally surrendered to police in 1974. One of her radical-bomber colleagues was arrested three months later and Alpert, whom the Left suspected of having informed on her former comrade, was denounced as “a high-level pig” by famed feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson.

So, while feminists were anti-rape, they were pro-bombing, as long as the bombers were their allies in the Left and unless the bombers were suspected of cooperating with law enforcement. And if you see any contradiction in that stance, then you must be a sexist, a misogynist, a male supremacist, a supporter of the oppressive patriarchy.

Like me.

What has been at the heart of my dispute with Little Miss Attila (the reader sighs, recognizing that there might be a light at the end of this 4,000-word tunnel) has always been this question: Is feminism by definition a movement of the Left? Knowing the history of the movement as I did from my own reading years ago, this dispute began when I criticized Barbara Kay’s attempt to re-write that history:

The feminist revolution began as a necessary reform movement, but unfortunately evolved into a marxism-imbued, revolutionary one. Second-wave feminism’s focus soon shifted from women’s equal rights (which are limited to those defined by law) to women’s interests (which are limitless), as perceived through a victim’s lens.

This is a lie. The mythical “evolution” or “shift” of which Kay speaks is directly contradicted by historical fact. Second-wave feminism began with Friedan, a Communist of the Old Left, and was carried forward by anti-American radicals of the New Left. No honest person who has actually studied the movement can deny this and, in attempting to describe a “universal” feminism that nearly all women embrace (or at least, should embrace), Attila is describing a feminism that never existed.

No man can be permitted to say this, however, especially a man whose skill in persuasive writing is so advanced that Attila fears he might persuade her friends that she is in some sense wrong to dismiss his writing as “fiddle-faddle.”

And now Attila says she owes me an essay? She can keep her essay, or write a damned book for all I care. The only thing I’ve ever wanted is whatever modicum of respect my labors might deserve.

It’s gonna be cold day in hell before I get any respect from some of my so-called “friends,” it seems, but at least I dare hope that when I say, “Hit the tip jar,” my real friends will help recompense the hours I’ve spent mired in this tedious argument, when the stubborn facts have always been on my side.

For crying out loud, can’t you see that I’m a victim? I even read Susan Brownmiller, so you don’t have to. That ought to be worth something. Now hit the freaking tip jar.

UPDATE: Thanks to commenter Alec Leamas for supplying further evidence:

“Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism.”
Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (First Harvard University Press, 1989), p.10

“Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included).”
Karl Marx, letter to Ludwig Kugelmann

While I quickly located the original source for the Marx quote, the MacKinnon quote — though widely cited in many secondary sources online — is more difficult to verify. However, I was able to find online an entire chapter of Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. A thoroughgoing radical, MacKinnon utterly rejects the classical-liberal (Lockean) theory of government:

State power, embodied in law, exists throughout society as male power at the same time as the power of men over women throughout society is organized as the power of the state. . . .
Perhaps the objectivity of the liberal state has made it appear autonomous of class. Including, but beyond, the bourgeois in liberal legalism, lies what is male about it. However autonomous of class the liberal state may appear, it is not autonomous of sex. Male power is systemic. Coercive, legitimated, and epistemic, it is the regime.

My critics will answer, of course, that MacKinnon is an extreme example, that we cannot use her to define “feminism,” that there are other feminists who have written more agreeably. But MacKinnon cannot be dismissed as a marginal figure, a kook on the fringe. She is a tenured professor of law at the University of Michigan, and her influence in defining what is or is not “feminism” must be reckoned much greater than our own.

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Comments

  • KG

    All I can say is, damn.

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

    When you go long form you go long form..

  • http://twitter.com/Edison2257 Denise Shean

    Excellent article. Now we have the reason the feminists give tacit support to the Islamists and do absolutely nothing in terms of real help for the seriously oppressed women in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc. — they are too much in love with their ridiculous Leftist ideology to care. But then, they are no different than the Leftists in any other movement.

  • Anonymous

    Feminism equals Bolshevisim thank you for clarifying, we all suspected as much.

  • Pingback: An Epic Essay By Stacey McCain « That Mr. G Guy's Blog

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000577842489 Robert Ramsey

    Did you put a mention of Helen Keller in there,too? She is a perfect example of a woman held up as a woman’s rights idol to the little people and women, yet became part of a hard left movement for women’s rights.

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

    Glad you took one for the team…reading Brownmiller…, As one bibliophile to another…You’re my hero, Dude.

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

    Oh yeah…damn fine essay. I aspire to write like that one day.

  • Joe

    I have to say “damn” too.

    This is not going to end well.

  • Joe

    I have to say the feminists giving tacit approval of the Islamists is something I find rather amazing.

  • http://twitter.com/DaTechGuyblog Peter Ingemi

    Wow!

  • http://twitter.com/darleenclick darleenclick

    [yawns ...rubs eyes] Oh, I get it. You still think “feminism” sprung fully formed in at the same time as the Women’s Lib movement of the 60′s/70′s and has/had nothing whatever to do with any suffrage advocacy. Abigail Adams? Must be someone back more than 50 or 100 years ago so … in the words of precious Ezra Klein … it doesn’t count anymore.

    Joy, Christine Hoff-Summers, Sarah Palin, et al, would offer to disagree with you only on that point even as they would agree that the Left has staked claim on the “feminist” label and jealously guards it as their brand alone.

    Your efforts in historical recall not withstanding, you haven’t advanced the argument one bit (IMHO) on why Palin is too [stupid? ignorant? un-self-reflective?] to know what she is or isn’t.

    That doesn’t translate that you as a man are incapable of arguing against gender-feminism, it just demonstrates that you, as an individal, are incapable of arguing against it while at the same time respecting women as individually as you respect men.

    Why don’t conservatives owe anything to anti-draft hippies? Well, your analogy fails because conservatives at the time could be anti-draft and still PRO-military while Lefty hippiedom merely figleafed their anti-USA/anti-military agenda behind an anti-draft policy. We can see such mendacity today in universities that still refuse ROTC on campus even with the DODT on the way out. It was never about DODT or draft or “too white” officers or whatever. It is about being anti-American (by redefining “America”). Same was with gender-feminists. It isn’t about egalitarianism or women’s studies or glass ceilings — but such things make a great distraction if the agenda is subverting the American principles of individual responsibility and making the masses dependent on the State (to be run be the “self-less, sacrificing” Left elite).

    No equity feminist wants to see the State interfere in the culture. If only a tiny fraction of women desire to be fighter pilots, then so be it. Only a tiny fraction of men desire to be fighter pilots, too. Pursuit of happiness implies choice and that is every individual’s right to go where their talents, ambition and perspiration takes them; regardless if they are convex or concave.

  • Anonymous

    That was worth the price of admission.

  • Anonymous

    Darleen, the fact that the “second wave feminists” claim to be the descendants of the suffragettes doesn’t make it so.

  • http://twitter.com/darleenclick darleenclick

    If I may ask …

    Stacy, you want to put a stake through [gender] feminism’s heart so badly that equity-feminism has to go with it too.

    So, how would you then describe the principles of Palin, Hoff-Summers, and other women who live – and teach their daughters – to follow their talents and desires?

    Certainly, they are to be distinguished from those females who do subscribe to principles that they are to defer to the males in authority in their lives.

    Amanda Marcotte declares all women who are not left-feminists are anti-woman and are little more than self-hating slaves to men.

    How do you wish to distinguish equity feminists from left/gender feminists without lumping them into the “anti-woman” category?

  • http://twitter.com/darleenclick darleenclick

    SDN

    I never said it did. It still ignores that a great many women who identify as [equity] feminists are not left-wing.

    Why do people like Palin and Hoff-Summers have to concede the word to the Left just because the Left has taken it via squatting rights?

    How long must the non-left keep giving ground to the Left? Isn’t it bad enough they have subsumed the word “liberal”?

  • ttc

    I hope you and Atilla didn’t have a falling out with real hurt feelings. That would suck.

  • unclebryan

    Kara Hultgreen could not be reached for comment.

  • http://twitter.com/darleenclick darleenclick

    Stacy

    the word “liberal” has become synonymous with the Left over about the same number of years since the unbottling of Womyn’s Lib.

    will you be doing a 4000 + word denunciation of people like Jeff Goldstein? I mean he describes himself as a classical liberal but is decidely not left.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/EU5DQWQTTHTPO4A4ZYSL3AAV2U Adjoran

    Perhaps we need a whole new classification.

    Neo-fems? Gyno-cons? Vajazzlistas?

  • Mork

    They are Brown People, you see. One can’t expect them to discard misogyny when it’s part of their Brown Kulcha.

    In other words, typical leftwing racism.

  • Mork

    According to Feminist and Racism Theory, the Islamists are first and foremost Oppressed Brown People, and in oppressing their women, they are merely passing down the line the oppression of the Evil White Hegemonists. Therefore it is unconscionable to criticize them for something that is the fault of Donald Rumsfeld…

    C’mon, get with the program!

  • The Wondering Jew

    Very impressive history lesson Stacy– I could probably pick a bone or two with a few of your points, but overall, I think the strength of your argument speaks for itself.

    But I would encourage both you and Little Miss Attila to stop your mutual castigation of each other. No matter who is really at “Fault” for the dispute, such sniping between good conservatives only helps our enemies on the left. A generous hand extended in forgiveness and tolerance would be a chivalrous thing to do here– and we know how feminists hate male chivalry ;-)

  • TR

    I read your essay. Word count function is a wonderful thing lol, and your words are always interesting. I wonder if Tammy Bruce would read it because she is one of the unique women who has been there and there and is now supporting Palin as a possible 2012 candidate. If you send her $5 and join her site, who knows she might read and comment and you might find a whole new west coast niche you could share on your site?

  • K~Bob

    I have a problem with trying to identify the “beginning” of a movement the way you have done here. In studying the philosophy of modern feminism (or any “-ism”), you have to go back to the earliest examples, which, here, naturally predate the coinage of the word “feminism.”

    If you don’t include Susan B. Anthony in a discussion of roots, then you have left out a major part of the thing, and have instead focused on the moment leftists hijacked the movement, and then called *that* “the movement.”

    I think a lot of fairly conservative women appreciated “equality” issues without ever accepting the language of the left and the “social justice” crap that goes with it. Many were attracted to feminism back when it was in it’s post-sixties, radical period. After the “smelly hippie” version went underground, to be replaced with the “Virginia slims chick” imagery, there was a time when “Feminism” was actually more about education, jobs, and health issues.

    That time was ended when the East Coast style, “educated career woman” version was swamped by West Coast style, gay revolution types. It’s when feminist publications became dominated with gay rights issues.

    (Note, gay rights is not the issue here, it’s that feminism was taken over by the gay rights types and then lost its way entirely. The proof of this is how comfortable they have become with Bill Clinton’s sexual predation, and the treatment of women in the Middle East, Africa, and the southeastern Asia “sex slave” trade.)

    The good news is the “Feminism” is pretty much in a stasis point, where it’s about as important a movement as the followers of Ward Churchill. So it’s time some sensible women on the right, like Phyllis Chesler, become more important voices for young women to follow.

  • http://www.facebook.com/smitty1e Chris Smith

    One feels genuinely privileged to share the masthead with you, sir. Bravo.

  • http://www.facebook.com/smitty1e Chris Smith

    Nah. A sibling spat at worst.

  • Anonymous

    Stacy, remember the Law of Holes. Quit digging.

  • Alec Leamas

    “Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism.” – Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (First Harvard University Press, 1989), p.10

    “Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included).” Karl Marx, letter to Ludwig Kugelmann

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  • http://twitter.com/alwaysfiredup alwaysfiredup

    “the most ferocious female advocates of workplace equality tend to be also the direct beneficiaries of that equality: College-educated professional women, employed in office jobs of one sort or another. For the high-school dropout waiting tables at Waffle House, the benefits of a rigid enforcement of “equal opportunity” are more difficult to locate.
    The collective solidarity of the radical sisterhood, however, insists on telling us that the personal advantages of the professional feminist vanguard are somehow a victory for all women.”

    They are a victory for all women. You are looking at equality of outcomes and not equality of opportunity. As conservatives we are not concerned with equality of outcomes, yes?

    Humans prefer the freedom of choice, even if the ultimate selection does not differ from what a totalitarian state would have chosen and provided. In our current age all women, just like men, may aspire to be anything they want to be, whether they actually choose to enter a traditionally-male field or not. The feminism movement has also led to men entering traditionally-female occupations such as nurse and “stewardess” (now the far more descriptive “flight attendant”), so the advantages are not limited to women.

  • http://twitter.com/alwaysfiredup alwaysfiredup

    “the most ferocious female advocates of workplace equality tend to be also the direct beneficiaries of that equality: College-educated professional women, employed in office jobs of one sort or another. For the high-school dropout waiting tables at Waffle House, the benefits of a rigid enforcement of “equal opportunity” are more difficult to locate.
    The collective solidarity of the radical sisterhood, however, insists on telling us that the personal advantages of the professional feminist vanguard are somehow a victory for all women.”

    They are a victory for all women. You are looking at equality of outcomes and not equality of opportunity. As conservatives we are not concerned with equality of outcomes, yes?

    Humans prefer the freedom of choice, even if the ultimate selection does not differ from what a totalitarian state would have chosen and provided. In our current age all women, just like men, may aspire to be anything they want to be, whether they actually choose to enter a traditionally-male field or not. The feminism movement has also led to men entering traditionally-female occupations such as nurse and “stewardess” (now the far more descriptive “flight attendant”), so the advantages are not limited to women.

  • Alec Leamas

    “They are a victory for all women. You are looking at equality of outcomes and not equality of opportunity. “

    Not really. The influx of women into the labor market has depressed wages by creating an oversupply of labor in certain fields. Working class women can’t do a lot of jobs that are the traditionally available career path for working class men (e.g. jobs in the trades) and are turned out into low-paying ministerial and service jobs, often under the authority of men who are not their husbands. For every female rocket surgeon you’ve created scores of women whose lot in life is to perform menial tasks devoid of meaning and prestige for countless hours away from their children. One can argue quite convincingly that feminism’s effects on the labor market have taken the career choice of homemaker away from working class women – it is now often only the luxury of the upper classes to be a chic “stay at home mommy.”

    “Humans prefer the freedom of choice, even if the ultimate selection does not differ from what a totalitarian state would have chosen and provided.”

    Humans prefer a state of uninterrupted bliss. What if this “freedom of choice” requires totalitarian methods to achieve an equality of opportunity? There are things that are quite honestly matters of fact that can neither be said nor thought in making employment decisions. You can’t stand as the beneficiary of these methods and decry totalitarianism at the same time. Have you ever read the CFR implementing the Equal Pay Act? And what if producing equality of opportunity for a select few women is bad for the Nation and its society as a whole? The genesis of the so-called “Second Wave” was Friedan’s examination of the lives of extremely privileged female college graduates – and hardly representative of the lives of the overwhelming majority of women.

  • Anamika

    In Sep 2008, Chrystia Freeland, writing for the Financial Times, called Sarah Palin a “true feminist role model”.

    http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4ad145f8-7907-11dd-9d0c-000077b07658.html

    I thought the article is worth revisiting given the current discussion about Sarah Palin and the feminist label.

    During the Democratic primaries, Gloria Steinem, pioneering feminist and Hillary Clinton supporter, argued that the contest had revealed that gender was “probably the most restricting force in American life”. She illustrated her point by imagining a female version of Barack Obama and contending that no woman with such a slender biography would be considered seriously for the presidency.

    It is now clear that Ms Steinem was right – although proof comes not from the treatment of the Democratic lioness Mrs Clinton but from the responses, particularly on the left, to the Republican newcomer Sarah Palin.

    What Democrats, and progressives generally, will have a harder time accepting is that Gov Palin’s nomination could be a milestone for American women: in many ways she is an even better feminist icon than America’s reigning top gal Hillary Clinton. In contrast with Mrs Clinton, whose most important political decision was whom she married, Mrs Palin is a genuinely self-made woman, who broke into politics without the head start of a powerful husband or father. Moreover, like Sen Clinton, Gov Palin is a working mother role model, giving birth to her fifth child less than five months ago, going back to work three days later.

    The main reason so many feminists are having a hard time getting excited about Gov Palin is that she is rightwing. Feminism has long been torn between focusing on the fight against sexism pure and simple, and waging a broader campaign for a “women’s agenda”, on which abortion rights tend to feature prominently. Gov Palin, a proud social conservative who carried her Down’s syndrome baby to term and is sympathetic to creationism, is on the opposite side of most of those issues.

    But feminists, and the left more generally, also need to be careful not to dismiss the significance of Gov Palin’s gender. In 1851, at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, the abolitionist Sojourner Truth reminded the white, northern women in the audience of the ways in which her life experienc differed from theirs – yet, as she told them: “Ain’t I a woman?” If too many Democrats tell them it is an “insult” to admire Sarah Palin for some of the same reasons they liked Hillary Clinton, the gun-owning, God-fearing, PTA moms of the American provinces may take up that same chorus.

    More interesting for me are the bonafides of the author, Chrystia Freeland. She was the US managing editor of Financial Times at the time. Currently she is, according to Wiki, “the Global Editor-at-Large of Reuters news” since early 2010. She also wrote a book on the death of communism in Russia. She appears sometimes on a public radio debate show named, “Left, Right and Center”. What i’m saying is Freeland is not a political partisan, not a female author of women issues or a social conservative; yet she called Sarah Palin a “true feminist role model.” And in doing so she isn’t denying the feminist attributes of Hillary Clinton.

    I think there is much Stacy McCain and others, who are repulsed by the feminist label, can learn from this.

  • Republican Atheist

    Is Palin a ‘Feminist’? Perhaps by her own definition, but more likely by her own gut.

    Is she ‘officially’ a Feminist, by the standard definitions? No.

    Do ‘real’ Feminists support her? No.

    Real Feminists are NOT idiots and harbour no ‘conservative’ agendas.

    Does Palin ‘break out’ of social molds? Yes… EVEN a woman can be a successful corrupt politician.

    Think of the parallels during the 2008 campaign here:

    - McCain has ‘overcome adversity’ via his airplane crash and surviving prison

    - Palin has ‘overcome adversity’ via being a woman and rising to a position of power

    The GOP spinners were making the above case moment-to-moment; but by doing so they were implying that being a woman is like being a crashed aviator; IOW, doomed.

    The GOP spin ‘narrative’ is ‘you must vote for these underdogs, who have OVERCOME ADVERSITY and are THUS WORTHY of your trust, if not adulation’.

    Are we to use ‘Feminism’ as the fulcrum for all analysis of Palin? I hope not, for if so, would be rampant sexism, acting as ‘gag order’ for all who would object to her obvious, dangerous shortcomings and general lack of integrity.

    Parallels:

    ‘You cannot criticize Obama, because he is BLACK’

    ‘You cannot criticize Palin, because she is a WOMAN’

    And if you criticize both of them, you are a RACIST SEXIST!

    Palin has been ‘set up’, deliberately, as a ‘lightning rod’, but one that is FORBIDDEN to strike at.

    Think about that. It is a perfect ‘lose-lose-lose’ situation; DO criticize her and you lose; do NOT criticize her and you lose; and if she is elected as the GOP nominee for 2012, EVERYONE loses.

    The entire Palin ‘phenomenon’ was bogus to begin with. It was the sort of desperate, bottom-of barrel tactic that the ‘losing team’ in 2008 has fielded in order to ‘win’, by creating such ‘human issues’ asdistraction for the ‘political/national’ issues.

    Palin is thus the ‘perfect political tar-baby’ and Obama was rightly advised to NOT touch her. Given time, she will simply self-immolate in public and burn in her own tar.

  • Republican Atheist

    Is Palin a ‘Feminist’? Perhaps by her own definition, but more likely by her own gut.

    Is she ‘officially’ a Feminist, by the standard definitions? No.

    Do ‘real’ Feminists support her? No.

    Real Feminists are NOT idiots and harbour no ‘conservative’ agendas.

    Does Palin ‘break out’ of social molds? Yes… EVEN a woman can be a successful corrupt politician.

    Think of the parallels during the 2008 campaign here:

    - McCain has ‘overcome adversity’ via his airplane crash and surviving prison

    - Palin has ‘overcome adversity’ via being a woman and rising to a position of power

    The GOP spinners were making the above case moment-to-moment; but by doing so they were implying that being a woman is like being a crashed aviator; IOW, doomed.

    The GOP spin ‘narrative’ is ‘you must vote for these underdogs, who have OVERCOME ADVERSITY and are THUS WORTHY of your trust, if not adulation’.

    Are we to use ‘Feminism’ as the fulcrum for all analysis of Palin? I hope not, for if so, would be rampant sexism, acting as ‘gag order’ for all who would object to her obvious, dangerous shortcomings and general lack of integrity.

    Parallels:

    ‘You cannot criticize Obama, because he is BLACK’

    ‘You cannot criticize Palin, because she is a WOMAN’

    And if you criticize both of them, you are a RACIST SEXIST!

    Palin has been ‘set up’, deliberately, as a ‘lightning rod’, but one that is FORBIDDEN to strike at.

    Think about that. It is a perfect ‘lose-lose-lose’ situation; DO criticize her and you lose; do NOT criticize her and you lose; and if she is elected as the GOP nominee for 2012, EVERYONE loses.

    The entire Palin ‘phenomenon’ was bogus to begin with. It was the sort of desperate, bottom-of barrel tactic that the ‘losing team’ in 2008 has fielded in order to ‘win’, by creating such ‘human issues’ asdistraction for the ‘political/national’ issues.

    Palin is thus the ‘perfect political tar-baby’ and Obama was rightly advised to NOT touch her. Given time, she will simply self-immolate in public and burn in her own tar.

  • Republican Atheist

    Is Palin a ‘Feminist’? Perhaps by her own definition, but more likely by her own gut.

    Is she ‘officially’ a Feminist, by the standard definitions? No.

    Do ‘real’ Feminists support her? No.

    Real Feminists are NOT idiots and harbour no ‘conservative’ agendas.

    Does Palin ‘break out’ of social molds? Yes… EVEN a woman can be a successful corrupt politician.

    Think of the parallels during the 2008 campaign here:

    - McCain has ‘overcome adversity’ via his airplane crash and surviving prison

    - Palin has ‘overcome adversity’ via being a woman and rising to a position of power

    The GOP spinners were making the above case moment-to-moment; but by doing so they were implying that being a woman is like being a crashed aviator; IOW, doomed.

    The GOP spin ‘narrative’ is ‘you must vote for these underdogs, who have OVERCOME ADVERSITY and are THUS WORTHY of your trust, if not adulation’.

    Are we to use ‘Feminism’ as the fulcrum for all analysis of Palin? I hope not, for if so, would be rampant sexism, acting as ‘gag order’ for all who would object to her obvious, dangerous shortcomings and general lack of integrity.

    Parallels:

    ‘You cannot criticize Obama, because he is BLACK’

    ‘You cannot criticize Palin, because she is a WOMAN’

    And if you criticize both of them, you are a RACIST SEXIST!

    Palin has been ‘set up’, deliberately, as a ‘lightning rod’, but one that is FORBIDDEN to strike at.

    Think about that. It is a perfect ‘lose-lose-lose’ situation; DO criticize her and you lose; do NOT criticize her and you lose; and if she is elected as the GOP nominee for 2012, EVERYONE loses.

    The entire Palin ‘phenomenon’ was bogus to begin with. It was the sort of desperate, bottom-of barrel tactic that the ‘losing team’ in 2008 has fielded in order to ‘win’, by creating such ‘human issues’ asdistraction for the ‘political/national’ issues.

    Palin is thus the ‘perfect political tar-baby’ and Obama was rightly advised to NOT touch her. Given time, she will simply self-immolate in public and burn in her own tar.

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  • Anonymous

    I’m jumping into this extended debate – including this one thread – very late. So, I apologize if this question is begging for something already well covered:

    But would you (or other commenter who is supporting some/all of Little Miss Attilla’s relevant points, or LMA herself) please explain to me this importance of recapturing (or maintaining) “ownership” over the word “feminism” and/or supposedly beneficial aspects of this terminology or its associated meanings?

    I mean that as a genuine question – not as a snarky rhetorical question (at least not prematurely).

  • http://aconservativelesbian.com Cynthia Yockey

    I don’t recall any time in the women’s rights movement when lesbians ever were well-treated by straight women or that straight women championed our equality or marched in our parades as we marched in theirs. Especially in the 1970′s we were expected to fight for the equality of straight women and their right to choose, and stay closeted so we wouldn’t embarrass them.

  • http://twitter.com/Edison2257 Denise Shean

    I’ve tried … honestly, I have … but I can’t seem to summon the appropriate level of guilt for not adopting Feminist and Racism Theory.
    It’s toooo hhhaaaaarrrrdddd. ;)

  • Blue Blazer

    Shit-test.Shit -test.Shit-test.You either Pass or Fail.You can stretch this thing out for a while ,but you will either Pass or Fail.Roissy.Roissy. Roissy.

  • Blue Blazer

    There can be only one.

  • K~Bob

    The seventies were a closeted time, to be sure, so I get what you mean. But by the eighties, things shifted, hard. The feminist publications my wife used to get suddenly dropped a lot of the good career advice, and became more about gay rights. The health issues they covered became less about “reproductive health” and more about “sexual health”. The editorials became more stridently leftist, as well. Being a “Career woman” and being a “worker of the world, uniting” are incompatible aspects of modern women’s issues to be sharing the same masthead.

    Suddenly a lot of women who had made it up various corporate ladders looked behind them and found that “Feminism” had pretty much left them stranded.

    That’s when my wife decided to stop wasting money on the various feminist groups, and began focusing her efforts at volunteering time mentoring young girls, and working at organizations dedicated to bringing more women into the sciences.

    Again, this isn’t about gays, per se. It’s about how a movement supposedly concerned with improving the lives of roughly half of the population, has ended up where it is now: ignoring major abuse of women worldwide, failing to promote women in math, science, and engineering, and instead evaporating into meaningless left-focused groups that do odd things like protest specific wars (while ignoring/supporting jihad, which is a form of war).

  • K~Bob

    Your thesis fails. Palin is the most criticized politician in American history. So much for “forbidden.”

    The correct picture is that:

    You can’t criticize Obama without being condemned by nearly the entire MSM, Democrat leaders, and special interest group leftists, for being a vile, knuckle-dragging raaaaacist.

    If you criticize Palin, it’s totally fine, and understandable. If you are a Republican, it’s even exemplary of refined thinking, and deserving of golf-claps and huzzahs.

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