The Other McCain

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

‘Fairness’ and Feminism

Posted on | February 28, 2014 | 67 Comments

Just to refresh my memory, I’ve spent the past few days re-reading Susan Brownmiller’s feminist memoir In Our Time. You have to be a hard-boiled, strong-minded conservative not to be outraged by Brownmiller’s account of the extreme workplace inequality that once typified her own field, journalism. And the implicit assumption — this is one of those premises that the Left smuggles into arguments, hoping no one will notice — is that inequality is unjust and unfair.

The fact is that, at the time of the feminist revolution, nearly all adults were married. The median age at first marriage in the 1960s was about 21 for women, about 23 for men. The birth rate was high, the average woman had three or four children, and so the normal situation — the circumstance of the typical American adult — was that Mom was home with her children and Dad was working to support the whole family. Dad’s paycheck was the family’s entire income.

It was a man’s world, baby.

From our perspective in 2014, therefore, it seems completely shocking that women in journalism — an “enlightened” field, dominated by liberals — were consigned to subordinate roles, so that Newsweek, for example, mostly employed women as fact-checkers, and NBC News had only one woman as an on-air TV reporter.

This was the perspective of Brownmiller and other female journalists who joined the Women’s Liberation movement in filing discrimination lawsuits against news organizations in the 1970s.

However, the perspective of the unmarried childless career woman was statistically abnormal at the time  and, in point of fact, is still abnormal: Most women will marry and have children and, whether they work outside the home or not, it is in the interest of married mothers and their children that their husbands be able to earn enough to support them — what some have called the “family wage” concept.

If you have read Caroline Graglia’s Domestic Tranquility (and God knows, I have seized every opportunity to encourage people to read it for the past six year), you know that feminism was not really about women vs. men, it was about career professional women — the single and childless — against wives and mothers. In case the underlying significance of this is not clear, I’ll tell you that on page 6 of In Our Time, Brownmiller reveals that by 1968, she had already had “three illegal abortions, one in Cuba and two in Puerto Rico.”

Abortion and contraception — the Contraceptive Culture — are integral to the professional ambitions of a certain percentage of women, a percentage that is certainly larger now than it was in 1968, but it is only feminist ideology that claims the interests of the childless unmarried professional career woman are coterminous with the interests of all women, and which insists that every example of statistical inequality is evidence of discriminatory unfairness.

You have to be blind or brainwashed not to see the fraudulence of this argument, the claim that women benefit collectively from the privileges that feminist “fairness” provides to elite women. The truck driver’s wife has no stake in this game of “discrimination” played by professional career women. That is a self-interested game played for the benefit of the college-educated career elite, and the vast majority of American women don’t give a damn what percentage of Fortune 500 executives are female.

Once you recognize feminism as the attempt of an elite group of women to advance their own narrow interests by representing them as the collective interests of all women, the claims of “unfairness” and “discrimination” appear in a different light. Most women are not trying to climb the corporate ladder at a Fortune 500 company and yet the grievances of such career women are the engine that drives the constant reiteration of the formula “inequality = injustice.”

And this is where the Marxist origin of feminist ideology becomes highly relevant. When I describe feminism as the ideology of man-hating socialist lesbians, I’m not joking. Sure, there are heterosexual capitalist women who call themselves “feminists,” but if you examine the biographies and ideas of the women who contributed most to the development of feminist ideology, you cannot help noticing the preponderance of Communists and lesbians. For example, feminist “consciousness-raising” was directly borrowed from Marxism by two “Red Diaper babies” (i.e., children of Communist Party members), Kathie Amatniek and Anne Forer, the latter of whom explained to Brownmiller:

“In the Old Left, they used to say the workers don’t know they’re oppressed so we have to raise their consciousness. One night at a meeting I said, ‘Would everybody please give me an example from their o0wn life on how they experienced oppression as a woman? I need to hear it raise my own consciousness.’ Kathie was sitting behind me and the words rang in her mind. From then on she sort of made it an institution and called it consciousness-raising.”

This idea that every misfortune and disappointment experienced by women can be attributed to “oppression” by men is an analog of the Marxist concept that every problem of industrial workers — the proletariat — was the fault of the capitalist bourgeosie.

In other words, there are no coincidental, individual or random problems, but rather every problem is viewed as the result of deliberate, collective, systematic oppression — “class struggle,” in the Marxist idiom — and the challenge of the revolutionary vanguard is to inform the oppressed that they are, indeed, oppressed. That is to say, the oppressed must have their consciousness raised, which is what the entire academic field of Women’s Studies is about.

Conservatives recognize that the Marxist viewpoint in economics is an error, based on the false assumption that economic activity is a coercive zero-sum game, where the wealth of the rich is derived by imposing poverty on the exploited toiling masses. “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,” as Ronald Reagan famously said.

Yet in recent years, it seems to me, conservatives have ceded the premise of feminism’s quite similar argument, so that people calling themselves conservatives are eager to make a “me, too” claim that they’re also in favor of equality, without bothering to examine the meaning or consequences of “equality” in this context.

Marriage is, or at least it should be, based on voluntary cooperation between men and women. If mothers wish to raise their own children, rather than outsourcing the care and education of their offspring to others, then their husbands must be able to earn an income sufficient to provide for the whole family. In such a family-oriented economy, men will be more likely than women to participate in the wage-earning work force; the consequence of this will be that men, on average, will have more years of continuous job experience; as a result, men will, on average, earn more than women and be more numerous in the ranks of management; and the resulting statistical inequality is not systemic unfairness, but a consequence of choices made by individuals.

In the past half-century, the “family wage” system has broken down even as divorce has become widespread and more than 40 percent of children are now born to unmarried women. Are these unrelated phenomena? Is this coincidental? I think not, and neither does Helen Smith, whose book Men on Strike is all about how social changes have harmed men.

All of this is mere preamble, however, to the latest zany ideological excursion by the woman Maetenloch calls “Everyone’s Favorite RadFeminist.” Yes, Radical Wind — she of “PIV is always rape, OK?” fame — has graced us again with her enlightened views:

That’s because the central cause of women’s impoverishment isn’t impersonal and institutional, but comes from men individually stealing from women in their individual homes. The owner, husband, master, stealing from the woman’s own pocket. I only realised how literal it was quite recently. This is the primary pattern of women’s crippling poverty. It became clear to me after hearing story after story of women being ransacked to the bone by their own husbands or boyfriends, it was typical of every abuse story I’ve heard of – these men systematically stealing their salary, signing credits, debts or mortgages in the woman’s name, binding women in suicidal financial situations or reckless business plans, stealing women’s property, flats or houses by signing it in their (the man’s) name, taking siege of the woman’s flat or house and refusing to move out, spending women’s income on drugs, cars, expensive restaurants, gambling, prostitution or whatever their pet fetish is, controlling access to their bank account, or systematically sabotaging their access to work, income or property in any form, by moving her far away from her work, wrecking her chances to find employment in any way possible, sabotaging her relationship with her employer, or finding ways to cut her benefits for childcare, preventing her from using the money she has for herself, etc, etc. The list is endless.

You can read the whole thing. Ask yourself: What kind of men is she hanging out with? This is the simplest explanation for why feminism is a left-wing phenomenon. Left-wing women hang out with left-wing men and left-wing men are selfish jerks.

Sic semper hoc.

By the way: Planned Parenthood will spend $16 million in the 2014 election cycle, because . . . equality!





 

Comments

67 Responses to “‘Fairness’ and Feminism”

  1. M. Thompson
    February 28th, 2014 @ 10:35 am

    Feminism makes me wish I was packing heat…

  2. bridget
    February 28th, 2014 @ 10:45 am

    Pointing out the obvious: many women remain childless without abortion or contraception. You are conflating “childless career woman” with “contraception-using, abortion-having woman,” which is simply untrue.

    Likewise, many men avoid having children by using contraception or encouraging their girlfriends to have abortions. I’m unclear as to why a slutty man should earn a family-supporting wage (to support only himself) while a chaste woman with the exact same expenses should earn less.

    For every unmarried, sexually active, contraception-using female, there’s an unmarried, sexually active, contraception-using male. Just saying.

  3. rmnixondeceased
    February 28th, 2014 @ 10:55 am

    Straw-man (straw-person?) argument. You didn’t actually comprehend anything Stacy wrote, you were too busy looking for something to criticize.

  4. jakee308
    February 28th, 2014 @ 10:55 am

    Of course it’s correct that rich people don’t get rich by taking it from poor people.

    It is also true though that rich people can take actions that benefit them and those actions cause poor people to lose jobs and money.

    I think that’s part of what’s happened in the last 20 years here in the US and made us vulnerable to those arguments of inequity in wealth.

    Many of those who have profited by or are employed in high positions by corporations that have shipped their lower tier jobs overseas yet retain their hqs here and many of their high salaried employees.

    They’ve also shipped in many immigrants under the claim that they can’t find quality workers here or that will do the jobs they require for what they want to pay them.

    And of course the Democrats and Republicans have accommodated them by increasing immigration, allowing illegal immigration and expanding the visas for foreign tech workers.

    All that lowers the earning power of the lower classes. And they are lower classes in many cases because of the failures of their parents, their teachers and their communities.

    That’s one of the reasons so many are out of work now because the lower paying jobs just aren’t there anymore and when the economy takes a dive it’s the service sector that takes the first hit and those are some of the ones that strive the most to attract lower skilled immigrants so they can pay less for the same work.

    It’s more than just socialist and communist agitation and it’s more than just the increase in the benefit classes by the Democrats that have put us in the pickle we’re in.

    All must share some of the blame.

  5. Neo
    February 28th, 2014 @ 11:07 am

    Let’s be clear here.
    Corporations don’t want just any low paid immigrant to work for them. They just want the smart low paid immigrants who come with H1B visas.
    We have plenty of smart high paid folks and plenty of low paid stupid folks. It’s just that there aren’t enough smart low paid folks here already.

  6. bridget
    February 28th, 2014 @ 11:09 am

    Thanks for reminding me that I’m just a stupid woman who needs men to tell her things! I’m so glad that you posted a thoughtful, detailed critique of my comment and didn’t just snark down to me because he’s looking for something to criticise.

    (smirk)

    Perhaps you could enlighten me as to why it is women in the workforce that is driving down wages, not the influx of low-skilled workers that we import by the millions. Or why we can’t make a go of it on one income because of women in workforce, not the easy money that artificially inflated the housing market.

    I’m sure that in your manly-man brilliance, you can also explain how it’s women’s fault that contraception is used, but not equally men’s fault.

  7. Neo
    February 28th, 2014 @ 11:10 am

    You make a good argument for tax breaks/credits for people who shoulder the effort to create and rear new tax payers.

  8. Bridget
    February 28th, 2014 @ 11:11 am

    No, no, no. It has nothing to do with an influx of low-skilled workers and everything to do with women who get MBAs. Duh.

  9. G Joubert
    February 28th, 2014 @ 11:37 am

    Please elucidate upon your thesis.

  10. scarymatt
    February 28th, 2014 @ 11:38 am

    Supply is supply. More women working means more supply, no matter how many straw men and red herrings to throw at it.

  11. rmnixondeceased
    February 28th, 2014 @ 11:38 am

    All things not stated in either your comment nor my reply. Usual leftist tactic, apply accusations withhout grounding in fact. Just fling accusations without basis in an effort at shutuppery. Go pound sand you foolish person.

  12. scarymatt
    February 28th, 2014 @ 11:39 am

    I tried to read the whole thing (Radical Wind), but could not.

  13. Dianna Deeley
    February 28th, 2014 @ 11:39 am

    Stacy, this series of articles has been really informative and enlightening. I wish I had more time to comment.

  14. Dana
    February 28th, 2014 @ 11:54 am

    You touched on the subject with the “family wage” concept, but didn’t explore the obvious economics, which is: men cannot earn an income sufficient to support the entire family by himself precisely because women have joined the workforce in such large numbers.

    Wages are, like any other commodity, set by the laws of supply and demand. In the 1950s, white men had to be paid enough to support a family, or they would go elsewhere; they had no choice. And due to the restrictions on the labor force — basically, only white men were free to work any job, while women and black men were simply barred from many positions — companies had no choice. It was an odd form of unionization, a quasi-legal and completely customary form which held down the size of the available labor pool.

    With the 1960s, women’s liberation and the opening up of positions to blacks as well as whites, the size of the potential labor pool expanded at a greater rate than the economy could absorb, and with the increase in the size of the labor force, the supply vis a vis the demand for labor changed, and labor could be had more cheaply.

    Add to that the acceptance, almost the expectation, that women would join the labor force, and it was no longer necessary that men be paid enough to support the entire family; it was now necessary only to pay a man and a woman enough to support the family.

    Economics is heartless and the free market doesn’t care in the slightest whether someone feels abused or not; the laws of economics simply are.

    So, what has feminism wrought? We have a society where professional women can earn a pretty good salary, but most women are not career women, but simply working class people who have to scramble as best they can in lower wage jobs.

  15. ‘Correlation does not equal causation’ and other rules of logic | The Fog of Law
    February 28th, 2014 @ 12:08 pm

    […] Stacy McCain has been hitting it out of the park for the last few weeks with stories about Kaitlyn Hunt, Miriam Weeks (the Duke p-rn star), and ‘radfem’ foibles.  But he’s swinging at balls that aren’t going over the plate in his glee to blame women’s liberation for the decline in American wages: […]

  16. Minus-Gix
    February 28th, 2014 @ 12:15 pm

    Evidently the Jimmy Choos fit a little too well…

  17. CrustyB
    February 28th, 2014 @ 12:18 pm

    Feminism the ultimate in opportunistic libertarianism. They use bloody fancy talk to fool themselves into justifying killing their own children: Freedom to choose, libertarianism, right to take control of their own destiny, etc. But when co-worker hangs up a Megan Fox calendar they scream hostile work environment and demand that the police, the courts and the government get involved and control what someone else is doing.

  18. Minus-Gix
    February 28th, 2014 @ 12:20 pm

    Don’t forget the corps using their lobbyists to find ways to mess over the less connected. Or when the Idiots In Charge fail epically, its somehow the American Peoples duty to bail them out.

  19. robertstacymccain
    February 28th, 2014 @ 12:25 pm

    Tip-jar hits in lieu of comments are gladly accepted. ;-D

  20. rmnixondeceased
    February 28th, 2014 @ 12:46 pm

    Heh. You contend that the pain felt by a majority of women is acceptable so a minority of women can be richly rewarded? How disingenuously elite and privileged of you!
    Now go pound sand assclown.

  21. rmnixondeceased
    February 28th, 2014 @ 12:48 pm

    She cannot, it’s all chimp flinging crap …

  22. G Joubert
    February 28th, 2014 @ 12:53 pm

    To me it all comes back to basic biology. We are one species, homo sapiens, and in that context neither sex exists outside of the other, nor can it. Their rhetoric taken to its logical conclusion –and you don’t have to go very far to get there– is the extinction of homo sapiens by suicide. These people can’t be that stupid, at least not all of them. So, it’s about power between the sexes, and nothing more, as you say using Marx’s blueprint.

    This entire movement is possible almost entirely because technologies in the modern era allows most work activities to be done by either gender.

    Note that we are only one massive solar coronal ejection or EMP pulse away from a social reset.

  23. Federale
    February 28th, 2014 @ 1:00 pm

    Of course the men who are stealing from women are usually the useless black boyfriends of black women with if either of the two works, it is the woman, but black women tend to want useless black men in their lives knocking them up so they can get more welfare.

  24. Adjoran
    February 28th, 2014 @ 1:20 pm

    Hmmm . . . “Radical Wind” sure seems a man-hater. All husbands steal from their wives? That is one angry chick – or a guy with a gnarly sense of humor. Who knows?

    If the NBC “on-air woman” was Barbara Walters, she got there by sleeping with every news man and director and producer in sight. That is according to her autobiography.

    And the feminists’ old anthem about “equal pay” claiming that women only earn “70 cents for every dollar a man earns” is quite false and misleading. If adjusted for actual job titles, education, and experience in the position, women have actually earned MORE than men for the last 20 years or so.

  25. Kirby McCain
    February 28th, 2014 @ 1:29 pm

    The amphiboly of her comments leaves me unsure of the exact nature of her comments. Beyond debate, women became a larger portion of the job force in the sixties and seventies which affected the ability of married men to continue the sole breadwinner type home. Is it her contention that RSM is obligated to list every conceivable economic factor in the decline of the single income family? Even so, she erroneously introduces low paid immigrants into her faulty argument. These people, who she brought up, wouldn’t be competing for the “family wage” jobs which are talked about in this piece. She said ‘low paid.’ I don’t think she really wanted a critique of her commentary, Mr. President. She just wanted to be heard, as it were, so she’s been heard.

  26. Dana
    February 28th, 2014 @ 1:51 pm

    What has that to do with anything? Businesses offer the lowest wages that they can to get the employees they want, and that has nothing to do with the point you raised; those are purely economic decisions, taken by the people with jobs to be filled, and people looking for jobs.

  27. Dana
    February 28th, 2014 @ 1:53 pm

    Will they go to Wombat’s salary increase?

  28. Kirby McCain
    February 28th, 2014 @ 1:56 pm

    A lot of the discussion here has drifted towards labor and that may not be so helpful. Real Estate agents in the sixties, men? A family wage type career? Look at that field today. Such a dramatic change and fair is fair, this what free enterprise does. But the point I think is being missed, married men are competing against single career minded women. It’s not the plight of these married men which Stacy is so much concerned with as it is the impact on the families in this country.

  29. Art Deco
    February 28th, 2014 @ 2:03 pm

    Again, there are nearly 40 million blacks in the United States. The TANF rolls have (last I checked) about 4 million people on them of whom about a third are black. That amounts to about 1.3 million people at any one time in a population of 40 million. Roughly 4% of black women are on TANF at any one time. I doubt TANF retention is a big motivator.

  30. rmnixondeceased
    February 28th, 2014 @ 2:11 pm

    Yes she has and her disingenuousness displayed ably. Which has resulted in her being dismissed as a serious commentor and told to pound sand, the same thing I often tell others of such ilk.

  31. Art Deco
    February 28th, 2014 @ 2:12 pm

    The fact is that, at the time of the feminist revolution, nearly all
    adults were married. The median age at first marriage in the 1960s was
    about 21 for women, about 23 for men. The birth rate was high, the
    average woman had three or four children, and so the normal situation —
    the circumstance of the typical American adult — was that Mom was home
    with her children and Dad was working to support the whole family. Dad’s
    paycheck was the family’s entire income.

    The total fertility rate was around 3.5 at its peak in 1957. Thereafter, it went on a 19 year long slide. Fertility rates ca. 1968 were around 2.46 children per woman per lifetime. For non-agrarian families, these post-war fertility rates were unexpectedly high. Also, there was a decline in the age at first marriage in the comparatively affluent post-war period. That metric reached its lowest point around 1956. However, this index was abnormally low at that time. From the period running from 1956 to roughly 1986, age at first marriage merely returned to ages which were unremarkable in the 1890s.

    About a quarter of the formal sector labor force was female in 1930 and about a third in 1957. There were a great many working women prior to 1966. The balance of different household types being what it was, one surmises most were married.

  32. RS
    February 28th, 2014 @ 2:14 pm

    Ms. “Wind” is certainly the gift which keeps on giving, isn’t she? Alas, there are not enough terrabytes in the ether to deal adequately with her diatribe. I say only that she needs to spend a few days in a modern divorce court to see whether her thesis that males “steal” from women in relationships is uniformly true. (Hint: It’s not.)

    As for the balance of RSM’s post, he’s spot on regarding Feminism being about advancing a Feminist “elite,” with little to no regard for the average woman. Indeed, that elite actively works to punish those of their own who chose to take a break from a career to rear children. Such behavior is seen as a betrayal of the first order and is not to be tolerated. Certainly, the corporate world is guilty; I would add Academe to that list, as well.

    Finally, regarding the necessity of a two-earner household, I agree with some of the comments regarding supply and demand. However, I think the real problem is that our culture has so devalued the act of child-rearing, that other things have become more important to modern Americans. Sure, rare will be the couple who says that having double incomes is merely a whim. Most will say it’s required to “make ends meet.” Perhaps, but I’ve observed over the years that many, of not most of such people also buy new cars every few years, a house substantially bigger than they need and enjoy numerous luxuries unheard of 50 or 60 years ago. It’s quite obvious: Things are more important than rearing children. Indeed, the children generally are nothing more than a knick-knack to be displayed with all the other acquisitions.

  33. Art Deco
    February 28th, 2014 @ 2:16 pm

    Again, there were masses of working women in this country all through the post-war period down to 1970. Then as now clerical work tended to be dominated by women (bar in retail trade) and then as now, the trades were male preserves. Two things have changed:

    1. A higher percentage of available posts are clean-hands service jobs.

    2. Women have moved into professional-managerial posts in large numbers. Professional-managerial jobs constitute perhaps 13% of the work force. Fifty-odd years ago, this sort of work was 95% male and the women doing it tended to be spinsters.

  34. rmnixondeceased
    February 28th, 2014 @ 2:17 pm

    That’s because you are priveleged by the heteronormative pathiarchy and to be disregarded. Her ‘enlightenment’ is not for you …
    /sarc

  35. Art Deco
    February 28th, 2014 @ 2:26 pm

    With the 1960s, women’s liberation and the opening up of positions to
    blacks as well as whites, the size of the potential labor pool expanded
    at a greater rate than the economy could absorb, and with the increase
    in the size of the labor force, the supply vis a vis the demand for labor changed, and labor could be had more cheaply.

    Unemployment rates were at their post war low around about 1938.

    Age-graded labor force participation rates for blacks were nearly identical to those for whites in 1960 and there had been episodes over the previous generation where black unemployment was actually lower than white unemployment. (If I am not mistaken, Thomas Sowell has identified the late 1920s and the late 1940s as two such periods).

    Blacks were treated unfairly in a systemic matter under the ancien regime, but I suspect if you studied it, you would discover that the true hire bar prohibited blacks from occupying supervisory and line administrative positions in non-black firms. There were biases but not bars in the remainder of the labor force. (The corps of black professionals and businessmen tended to service a black clientele, though you did have exceptions like Percy Julian).

  36. RS
    February 28th, 2014 @ 2:26 pm

    I’m not sure how your comments regarding the etiology of childlessness among women has any relevance to the topic. RSM’s point was that the “contraceptive culture” is that which enabled an influx of women into the professional work force. That influx had a number of effects: Lower wages across the board because of additional labor supply. Too much labor chasing too few labor dollars. This (perhaps) caused more women to enter the labor market at the low end which drove those wages down, as well. Yes, illegal immigration effects certain trades/jobs, but that’s a separate issue.

  37. Art Deco
    February 28th, 2014 @ 2:27 pm

    Excuse me “around about 1968”. (The labor market was in disastrous condition in 1938).

  38. RS
    February 28th, 2014 @ 2:28 pm

    Not sure what any of this means to the discussion. Your first sentence is so vague as to add nothing of substance. As to the second, bailouts play a role how, precisely?

  39. PGlenn
    February 28th, 2014 @ 2:28 pm

    In a perverse way, Radical Wind might be on to something when she writes, “That’s because the central cause of women’s impoverishment isn’t impersonal and institutional, but comes from men individually stealing from women in their individual homes. The owner, husband, master, stealing from the woman’s own pocket.”

    Marxism popularized the term bourgeoisie, and then elaborated on it to create a theoretical class opposed to the proletariat, which grossly oversimplified economic actors in the 19th century but which became completely worthless as a descriptive model toward the end of the 20th century. If a minority of the bourgeoisie reasonably fit the stereotype of a bourgeois family in 1870, by 2010 the stereotype was completely divorced from any real persons.

    In contrast, with feminist theory, this concept of the Patriarchy is also amorphous and increasingly meaningless, yet the members of this imagined patriarchy are not constructs – they are real flesh-and-blood men!

    The feminist bogeymen are not just tangible; they have an office down the hall, or are even squatting in the feminist’s own house; and thus are easier to “relate” to – i.e. they are a “frozen target” in Alinskyite terms.

    And I wonder if that factor makes radical feminism more insidious than Marxism/socialism, although the latter obviously has hitherto wreaked more havoc and has a much higher body count than the former.

  40. rambler
    February 28th, 2014 @ 2:29 pm

    Yup, left wing men are selfish jerks and left wing women are lazy and insecure. They are just perfect for each other!

  41. PGlenn
    February 28th, 2014 @ 2:42 pm

    RSM, this is a thought-provoking analysis.

    The next step is to show the broader socioeconomic implications of the radical feminist agenda – artificially buttressed by the idea that “women benefit collectively from the privileges
    that feminist ‘fairness’ provides to elite women.”

    Personally, I don’t think it’s workable to trace the negative impacts of the ideology for the same reason that “social policy” routinely fails: too many intertwined variables in a hyper-complex modern world. But that doesn’t stop us from demagoguing the hell out of this issue!

    Along those lines, David Horowitz pointed to another line of attack in the last few paragraphs of his recent article, “Why Republicans Need the Tea Party.”

    It’s high time for conservatives/libertarians to turn identity politics against itself.

  42. RS
    February 28th, 2014 @ 2:42 pm

    Ms. Wind suffers from the same malady as all Leftists / Progressives: they view every human relationship interaction no matter how trivial as zero sum. That is, there is always a winner and a loser in every interaction. Thus, there is always an oppressor and a victim. The fundamental truth that in a voluntary exchange of any sort, each party gives up something s/he values less for something s/he values more, such that each are better off is completely outside of the Leftist’s grasp. It forms no basis of his reality, despite the fact that such a truth is intuitive to even the most casual observer. Indeed, Ms. Wind and her colleagues resort to the convenient fictions of “brainwashing,” “Stockholm Syndrome” and/or “trauma bonding” to eliminate the concepts of consent or voluntary behavior in male-female interactions from their reality. And what a reality it is. Just read the last paragraph of the piece RSM linked. Gobsmackingly ludicrous.

  43. PGlenn
    February 28th, 2014 @ 2:50 pm

    I agree completely, but I’m wondering what are the implications of the feminists’ “oppressors” being real, easily comprehensible, palpable, living, breathing, drinking, f—ing boyfriends, family members, next door neighbors, bosses, etc.?

    In socialist/communist movements, the radicals might get some workers all lathered up and then the workers would yell, “Show us some bourgois and we’ll kill ’em!” And the agitators would respond,”Well, how about your boss, for starters?” And some of the men would say, “Oh, no, he’s not a bourgeois . . . call me when you find one.”

    Whereas obviously it’s not that hard for feminists to point to “oppressors” all over the place. “There goes one walking down the hallway . . .”

  44. RS
    February 28th, 2014 @ 3:06 pm

    The real life implications are potentially horrific. These RadFems are nothing, if not evangelistic in their delusions. It would not surprise me to see some sort of crime against a husband or boyfriend perpetrated by someone of lower intelligence who got sucked into the collective delusion. Of course, the RadFems will say any punishment of the perpetrator or social outrage would be merely the evil Patriarchy and its female enablers fighting back. It’s almost textbook paranoia where everything is explained by a conspiracy to destroy radical lesbian feminism.

  45. Oh Good: Social Networking is Not Against Sharia Law | Regular Right Guy
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    […] ‘Fairness’ and Feminism […]

  46. PGlenn
    February 28th, 2014 @ 3:14 pm

    Bridget, but you’re conflating, too – or at least making a logical leap.

    First, RSM was describing, in a big-picture sociological way, how the 1960s labor market largely reflected family patterns of that era. He tacitly acknowledged that highly-qualified individual female careerists were not infrequently unfairly treated in those days.

    You seemed to miss that acknowledgement and instead jumped to assume that RSM would justify (apples-to-apples) wage disparities in 2014.

  47. PGlenn
    February 28th, 2014 @ 3:32 pm

    Before we get to that point, though, I’m also wondering about the cultural damage over the last few decades.

    Alinsky RULE 12: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
    Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go
    after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.
    (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and
    ridicule works.)”

    Compared to the bourgeoisie, the feminist “target” largely freezes itself because it’s real. if Alinsky is right, feminism has effectively “hurt” men. I don’t mean that individual men are victims and all that garbage, but the “institutions” conducive to strong families led by men were weakened. Perhaps part of the reason this happened so quickly was that the target of feminism was such a palpable target and not so much of a theoretical construct, as was Marxism’s target?

    Of course, feminists generally don’t call for all out gender war (“Death to all men!”), and socialism/communism has a much bloodier history, but then (postmodern) feminism (not counting earlier eras of “women’s rights”) is, relatively speaking, in its infancy. It took Marxism like 50-60 years to really break through in a violent revolutionary sense.

  48. Dana
    February 28th, 2014 @ 3:33 pm

    I went over to Witchwind’s linked article, and I came to one conclusion: at some point in her life, she was held captive like the three women held by Ariel Castro.

    Nothing else makes sense.

  49. RS
    February 28th, 2014 @ 4:24 pm

    . . . [T]he “institutions” conducive to strong families led by men were weakened.

    I don’t think there’s any question about that. How much is attributable to Feminism as opposed to other Leftist movements is open to analysis, but it’s obvious that in order for the State to assume complete control over the populace, it must eliminate anything which competes for loyalty. The two big things are Marriage and the Family. Every Progressive program or goal has the destruction of those two things as a result. As our host has remarked more than once, Feminism is certainly Leftist/Marxist in origin. It’s a mistake, however, to view it as the sole cause of social collapse. It has to be viewed in the context of the entire Progressive Movement with the end game being the State as ultimate recipient of affection and loyalty.

  50. PGlenn
    February 28th, 2014 @ 4:31 pm

    RS, sorry, I did not intend to suggest that feminism was anything close to the sole cause of social collapse. Rather, just that it’s impact might be more insidious than we’ve realized partly because its target is 50 percent of the population and those targets are so palpable – i.e., Marxism has to work harder, so to speak, to “freeze” its targets. I’m not sure that this distinction is that important, but it might be.