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Crazy: #RadFem Announces ‘Major Shift or Breakthrough in My Feminism’

Posted on | July 8, 2014 | 59 Comments

 

Regular readers remember Witchwind, the radical feminist that commenters have nicknamed “Windy.” She’s a wacky man-hating disciple of Mary Daly and Dee Graham, and inspired worldwide laughter with her anti-intercourse rant: “PIV is always rape, OK?”

Last week, Witchwind made an announcement:

After a succession of intense and mind-blowing discussions with friends, recent events and several weeks of trying to get to the bottom of why I find radical lesbianism so misogynist, I’ve just experienced a major shift or breakthrough in my feminism. One thing led to another, and I realise that the essential problem i’m trying to talk about is much larger than radical lesbianism, and relates to separatist communitarianism as a liberation strategy — the idea we should form a small, elitist community separate from women as much as from men, rather than focus on our potential to bond with all women and on all women’s potential to wake up to our reality. . . .
I do have the impression of having having found a missing link which now helps me to see the whole picture with much more clarity and depth. Therefore my focus will no longer be on radical lesbianism and identity politics as such, but on the wider phenomenon of separatist communitarianism, whether it be radical lesbian, lesbian feminist, radical feminist, “intersectionalist”, etc.
When our bonding with women is based on the exclusion of other women, then we aren’t really bonding with women but erecting a fictitious shield of “us” vs “them” to protect ourselves from persecution (a threat in which we include women), but which prevents the spreading of feminism to other women by preventing our contact and bonding with such women. . . .

If that makes sense to you, seek psychiatric help immediately.

You can read the entire 2,500-word excursion into lunatic gibberish, but it doesn’t become any more coherent. Insofar as it is “about” anything, it is about Windy trying to find an anti-male ideology that, while understanding female heterosexuality as women’s brainwashed cooperation with their own oppression, does not have the effect of blaming/shaming women for their heterosexuality.

To-may-to, to-mah-to.

Having spent the past six months plowing through the radical feminist syllabus (“Fun With #RadFem: ‘You Magnificent Lesbians — I Read Your Books!’“), I could imagine an effective manifesto/agenda for their movement, and might even be worried about their potential for success — if they weren’t so hopelessly batshit crazy.

This has been an impediment to feminism for decades: It is a movement organized around the grievances of neurotic misfits, and has attracted to its banner every type of kook, weirdo and nutjob imaginable.

In this sense, a mentally ill Women’s Studies professor is simply following in the insane footsteps of Women’s Liberation pioneer Shulamith Firestone, who suffered a nervous breakdown after publishing the 1970 feminist classic The Dialectic of Sex and eventually died alone as a 67-year-old schizophrenic.

Majoring in Crazy Studies

One of the reasons that radical feminism is so influential on university campuses, but generally disdained outside academia, is that the campus environment is a consequence-free unreality. Tenured professors can (and do) preach all manner of impractical nonsense and, on campuses that are home to thousands or tens of thousands of impressionable young women, it is fairly easy for the tenured radicals to attract scores or hundreds of misfit followers.

For example, there are nearly 30,000 women enrolled at Ohio State University’s Columbus campus. How many of those students are majoring or minoring in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, or pursuing graduate degrees in that department? Suppose that the WGSS department enrolls just 2% — one in 50 — of women at OSU. That’s almost 600 students, a drop in the bucket relative to the total enrollment, but still a substantial force, if they can be organized and deployed as activist “shock troops” in protests, etc.

Anyone who questioned the legitimacy of Women’s Studies as an academic discipline would be shouted down as a misogynistic Neanderthal, and so this department is protected from outside criticism by a sort of force-field of political correctness. Within that protective cocoon, fanatical ideologues are permitted to promulgate the most astonishing radical nonsense. Consider, for example, the freshman-level course “Gender, Sex and Power” (WGSST 1110), which is the prerequisite to all other courses in Ohio State’s Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies department. A recent section of WGSST 1110, taught by Varsha Chitnis (a graduate student pursuing her Ph.D.) included in the course syllabus Andrea Smith’s article “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy”:

Heteropatriarchy is the building block of US empire. In fact, it is the building block of the nation-state form of governance. . . .
As I have argued elsewhere, in order to colonize peoples whose societies are not based on social hierarchy, colonizers must first naturalize hierarchy through instituting patriarchy. In turn, patriarchy rests on a gender binary system in which only two genders exist, one dominating the other. . . . Just as the patriarchs rule the family, the elites of the nation-state rule their citizens. Any liberation struggle that does not challenge heteronormativity cannot substantially challenge colonialism or white supremacy.

From there, Smith goes on to complain about “the family being conceived of in capitalist and heteropatriarchal terms,” so that rhetoric about protecting the family leads to “increased homophobia.” Smith argues for challenging “the concept of the family itself,” in order to “reconstitute alternative ways of living together.” In case you were wondering about Andrea Smith, she is on the faculty of the University of California-Riverside, having received a Ph.D. from the infamous “History of Consciousness” program at UC-Santa Cruz (“The Worst School in America”). So, through the content of this Women’s Studies course, the crackpot radicalism of a fringe figure (Smith was denied tenure at the University of Michigan) is imported from California to Ohio, at taxpayer expense.

Lest any reader think that I have cherry-picked an isolated and anomalous example, let’s look at the syllabus for another recent section of WGSST 1110, this one taught by graduate student Sonnet Gabbard, who awards 15% her course grade for students’ “Transgressive Digital Art Project,” whatever that means. Among the assigned readings is “Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism” by lesbian activist Suzanne Pharr, and “Desire for the Future: Radical Hope in Passion and Pleasure,” by Amber Hollinbaugh, who is (I’m not kidding) Executive Director of Queers for Economic Justice.

Paying the Radical Tax

Keep in mind that we are discussing the freshman level introductory c0urse, taught to 17- and 18-year-olds, and required — a mandatory prerequisite — for any Ohio State student who wishes to major or minor in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Examine the syllabus for any section of this OSU course, and you will find it crammed with the writings of radical lesbians, inspiring any outside observer to wonder if any heterosexual woman has ever gotten a Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies degree from OSU.

Yet within the force-field of political correctness that surrounds this academic cocoon, there is no one who finds this radicalism unusual. The lesbian inmates are running the feminist asylum, and the fact that taxpayers are footing the bill for all this is something that apparently no one at OSU — nor anyone in the Ohio state legislature — can be bothered to notice. So it is nearly everywhere. When the Women’s Studies program at a state university in South Carolina was abolished after hosting a conference  that featured the performance of a one-woman play called “How to Be a Lesbian in 10 Days of Less,” everyone was shocked because this had never happened anywhere else before.

In case anyone wondered why Ohio State University was singled out for scrutiny, the answer is: My choice was entirely random. Pick any major university, look up their Women’s Studies program and look up the syllabus for the introductory course, and compare your findings. This kind of radicalism is ubiquitous in Women’s Studies curricula, and it is no surprise that the most popular anthology of feminist writings — Feminist Frontiers, widely used as a standard textbook — is edited by radical lesbians.

Inside their taxpayer-funded campus sinecures, then, Women’s Studies professors are handsomely rewarded for promoting an ideology that strikes most people as fringe extremism. Yet the supply of Women’s Studies majors vastly exceeds the demand and, outside the elite circle of tenured professors and celebrity feminist authors, those who have spent their collegiate careers soaking up “gender theory” nonsense find themselves marginally employable, even as they are confronted with a reality harshly at odds with the worldview into which they were propagandized as undergraduates.

From this clash between academic theory and the reality of ordinary life emerges the ranting lunacy of radicals like Witchwind. What kind of jobs can these intellectual cripples find outside academia, if they can’t find some non-profit “activist” group to hire them? One imagines such women, disheveled and ill-groomed, standing at intersections and holding up crudely lettered cardboard signs:

“Gender Studies Major: Will Criticize Patriarchy for Food”

The saddest part is that this miserable man-hating madness is funded by taxpayers who have no idea what is being taught inside the Crazy Factories of the Feminist-Industrial Complex.

If the heteronormative patriarchy were as all-powerful as feminists claim, then surely there would Republican legislators calling attention to how tax dollars are being used to subsidize this nonsense at state universities across the country. There would be hearings to investigate this and committee reports to expose the truth: What is cost and what are the benefits of Women’s Studies programs? For example, what is the annual cost to Texas taxpayers of The Center for Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin? What is being taught in this program, and what kind of careers are pursued by alumni of the program? I’d be willing to bet the average Texan doesn’t have the slightest clue what’s going on in Austin.

When we see occasional eruptions of madness — not just insane pronouncements by bloggers, but radical feminists unleashing anarchy in state capitols — there is no need to wonder where this craziness originates: It is acquired in the classroom, where it is taught by academic kooks who would be locked up in insane asylums if they weren’t tenured university faculty members.




 

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Category: Feminism

Comments

59 Responses to “Crazy: #RadFem Announces ‘Major Shift or Breakthrough in My Feminism’”

  1. concern00
    July 8th, 2014 @ 5:40 pm

    “on all women’s potential to wake up to our reality…”

    The arrogance manifest in that one statement is astounding. It denigrates women as a whole and any misogyny attributed to men is trivialized in an instant.

  2. M. Thompson
    July 8th, 2014 @ 5:50 pm

    Yep, if anyone took a look at these departments, they would be run out of public universities very quickly.

    And maybe Accounting and Engineering could get decent places.

  3. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    July 8th, 2014 @ 6:03 pm

    Do these gals like TOM’s Rule 5?

  4. John_LC_Silvoney
    July 8th, 2014 @ 6:10 pm

    Radical feminist treatise:a.k.a. Schizophrenic ‘word salad’.

  5. concern00
    July 8th, 2014 @ 6:17 pm

    Using lots of big words incoherently is apparently meant to prove something.

  6. RKae
    July 8th, 2014 @ 6:45 pm

    Please be on guard, people!

    Please don’t assume that this nonsense can’t go mainstream!

  7. PeterP
    July 8th, 2014 @ 7:05 pm

    Don’t tell me: human v animal distinction is a cultural fiction.

  8. The Daley Gator | Radical Feminuts, educated BEYOND their hat size
    July 8th, 2014 @ 7:15 pm

    […] Here is a classic example of how a mind is a terrible thing to indoctrinate […]

  9. Quartermaster
    July 8th, 2014 @ 7:29 pm

    It already is on the meth addled left.

  10. Dianna Deeley
    July 8th, 2014 @ 7:31 pm

    A minor example of how this stuff seeps out of its proper sphere:

    A couple years ago I was reading up on the Chamber Ardent Affair. Most of the more recent books were useful, well-researched and taught me something. One book, however, more a pamphlet, really, presented no source documents, it merely purported to study how this long, messy, and secret affair reflected how women’s bodies (especially the body of Madame de Montespan, the royal mistress) were interpreted as proxies for power.

    I believe I still have it, but it may have suffered from its crash landings that concluded its many flying lessons.

  11. Alan Markus
    July 8th, 2014 @ 8:05 pm

    I’ve been trying to find the “gobblydegook generator” for the subject of feminism – maybe create my own fake feminist blog and wow them with my knowledge and expertise.

    This is stuff I came up with on a site for business gobblydegook and changed a few words to make me sound like an expert on feminist issues. Changed a few words here and there. Note – none of this is intended to make sense, only to give an aura of knowledge and “expertise”.

    At base level, this just comes down to knowledge-based feminist paradigm shifts. We can make a window to discuss regenerated reciprocal experience-based anti-feminist paradigm shifts.

    Today marks the 20th anniversary celebrations of our interactive fem rad ideological concepts, as correlated to hetero PIV as rape.

    You really can’t fail with total relative contingencies. It’s time to revamp and reboot our ‘Outside the box’ transgendered feminist flexibility. Only feminists stuck in the 90s still go for ‘Outside the box’ third-generation matrix approaches.

  12. RS
    July 8th, 2014 @ 8:34 pm

    I’d like to also make a major announcement. After a couple of hours of watching the intense and mind-blowing shellacking Germany gave Brazil in the World Cup semi-finals, I have resolved to open another beer.

    Thank you.

  13. RS
    July 8th, 2014 @ 8:36 pm

    Update: My focus shall no longer be on the empty bowl which heretofore contained onion dip, and will now be directed toward the guacamole I have stashed in the back of the fridge.

  14. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    July 8th, 2014 @ 9:40 pm

    That made far more sense than anything these feminists said.

  15. An American Girl in Italy: Ruth Orkin | Batshit Crazy News
    July 8th, 2014 @ 9:51 pm

    […] TOM: Radical Feminist has breakthrough breakdown… […]

  16. CDM
    July 8th, 2014 @ 10:01 pm

    “One of the reasons that radical feminism is so influential on university campuses, but generally disdained outside academia, is that the campus environment is a consequence-free unreality.”

    Bingo! In fact, that reasoning could apply to an major ending in “Studies”. Honestly, who would hire a Gender Studies major or, for that matter, anyone who majored in any “Studies”? These people are practically lawsuits waiting to happen.

  17. Hanzo
    July 8th, 2014 @ 11:31 pm

    Hah, Windy. No doubt. What an inane gasbag.

  18. Julie Pascal
    July 9th, 2014 @ 12:07 am

    Well heck… if she’s going to from now on refuse to view normal women as the enemy and stop sequestering herself off from the world, there may well exist the opportunity for healing. Not *bonding* mind you… but possibly healing.

  19. K-Bob
    July 9th, 2014 @ 1:29 am

    That was mind-blowing.

  20. K-Bob
    July 9th, 2014 @ 1:31 am

    You broke Google!

  21. K-Bob
    July 9th, 2014 @ 1:33 am

    I think I read that somewhere before. I think it’s what you get when you run Swiss-German technical manuals through a translator.

  22. K-Bob
    July 9th, 2014 @ 1:34 am

    Accounting and Engineering: keeping proper track of explosions since the earliest days of the Military/Industrial complex.

  23. Adjoran
    July 9th, 2014 @ 1:42 am

    Ever notice how the feministas – and for that matter, radical leftists in general – always use the same vague jargon. Their lexicon is not small, but over the course of almost any extended essay they will work in a large number of their catch-words and phrases.

    AND, the end result is gibberish. It makes no sense at all. This may even be by design, related as radical leftism and feminism are to “deconstruction” and “postmodernism,” which reject the concept of inherent meaning in all things.

    It’s almost like the old silly word game “MAD-Libs,” where you choose words to fill in the blanks in a paragraph, but you don’t see the paragraph first. When the result is read aloud, it’s so stupid it’s funny.

    Coincidence? You be the judge!

  24. Adjoran
    July 9th, 2014 @ 1:49 am

    How would you go about criticizing the Gender Studies Department on a modern campus anyway?

    Any questioning by a male is going to be met with a full-on assault, and in most cases with the backing of the Administration. Hey, college presidents and deans saw what happened to former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers when, as Prexie of Harvard, he mentioned that maybe there were fewer women in science and math because women didn’t like science and math as much as men do.

    And a female who questions the Wymyn’s Dept. is going to be facing a lot of angry lesbians.

  25. Adjoran
    July 9th, 2014 @ 1:52 am

    Wait until she approaches you on the street with some of this “communitarian” talk, and then come back and tell us how well she is healing!

    I am still not convinced she isn’t really a parody.

  26. TroubleAtTheMine
    July 9th, 2014 @ 5:52 am

    There was also Andrea Dworkin and Kate Millet, both extremely influential in the forming of the modern feminist movement. But there are so many demonstrably nutso feminists, it’s hard to find one who seems sane. The ones who do seem sane, like Christina Hoff Sommers, are absolutely loathed by all the other feminists.

  27. TroubleAtTheMine
    July 9th, 2014 @ 5:56 am

    I can’t stand Dawkins but this bit he does about feminists talking about science (Newton’s Principia is a rape manual) is amusing.

    (A bit NSFW, depending on where you work)

  28. ZION'S TRUMPET » “Communitarianism”, “Intersectionalism”, and Other Totally Worthless Shit Taught at our Universities
    July 9th, 2014 @ 7:31 am

    […] Crazy: #RadFem Announces ‘Major Shift or Breakthrough in My Feminism’ […]

  29. Jeanette Victoria
    July 9th, 2014 @ 8:28 am

    I’m missing to good ole days when crazy people were sent to happy Acres not given professorships at an university

  30. Jeanette Victoria
    July 9th, 2014 @ 8:29 am

    It’s word salad sounds like it should mean like something but doesn’t. Schizophrenics talk the same way

  31. Jeanette Victoria
    July 9th, 2014 @ 8:30 am

    LOL I just posted the same thing

  32. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    July 9th, 2014 @ 8:56 am

    Alrighty:

    Are there other stigmatized things that you can explore?
    There’s so much stigma in kink, all of it, everything. I think a lot of this is specific to the queer community, but a lot of self-described feminists feel a lot of guilt about preferring to be submissive or liking degradation, and I think a lot of feminists have trouble reconciling that with their feminism. And this is a place where they can see that it’s common, and sometimes that’s all you need to know that it’s okay. I think that’s why I feel less intimidated in public sexual spaces: because you can see a flavor of everything going on, and you can feel less stigmatized by your own sexual desires.

  33. Jim in Monroe
    July 9th, 2014 @ 9:06 am

    You had me at
    “If that makes sense to you, seek psychiatric help immediately.”

  34. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    July 9th, 2014 @ 9:24 am

    Here is feminist hell: Make Tom Selleck a samwich!

  35. M. Thompson
    July 9th, 2014 @ 9:28 am

    Engineering helps you get the loot, Accounting keeps track of the loot.

    And Navies take prize.

  36. Quartermaster
    July 9th, 2014 @ 10:48 am

    I think minds are still blown in Brazil. Even German players were asking what happened.

  37. Julie Pascal
    July 9th, 2014 @ 11:06 am

    Yeah, I was being deliberately optimistic. My reaction to the idea that this woman is going to go out into the world so that she can bond with me and convert me to the wonders of a female-only world, on account of who wouldn’t prefer one, eh?, is just a wee bit creepy.

    Yes… I’m going to bond with the breeders, and open their eyes to the truth that their sons, fathers and husbands are all of what is wrong in the world and that womyn-love is a higher and more complete way to be…

    But who knows… maybe if she really does do what she plans to do and stops viewing other women as the enemy she’ll eventually have to admit that her problems are her own and not caused by this outside patriarchial force.

  38. robertstacymccain
    July 9th, 2014 @ 11:29 am

    . . . maybe create my own fake feminist blog and wow them with my knowledge and expertise.

    Something along the lines of the famed Sokal Hoax has crossed my mind, too, but I don’t have enough spare time to do it the way it ought to be done. I could describe the mischievous ideas that have percolated on the twisted fringe of my imagination, but don’t want to be accused of giving other people wicked ideas.

  39. Dianna Deeley
    July 9th, 2014 @ 12:17 pm

    Er, how?!

  40. ThePaganTemple
    July 9th, 2014 @ 12:18 pm

    These women all have daddy issues, and that’s basicaly it in a nutshell. They are either screwed up because they were screwed by their daddies, or because they weren’t.

  41. CDM
    July 9th, 2014 @ 2:02 pm

    You could say, “What kind of job does a Gender Studies program actually prepare one for?”, “How many people actually get jobs based on what they learn?” In other words, how effective is this in helping you get a job?

    Although, those kinds of question would probably be heteronormative and patriarchal.

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  43. Laguna Beach Fogey
    July 9th, 2014 @ 2:56 pm

    Clearly, women should not even be receiving a university education in the first place.

    Why are we educating these creatures?

  44. Quartermaster
    July 9th, 2014 @ 3:55 pm

    Postmodernism infiltrated science better than a century ago. Evolution is the first Postmodern myth.

  45. Quartermaster
    July 9th, 2014 @ 3:56 pm

    OK.

  46. Quartermaster
    July 9th, 2014 @ 3:58 pm

    Either way they are screwed [up].

  47. Quartermaster
    July 9th, 2014 @ 4:01 pm

    When I read that my mind saw “Skoal.” So I had to click.

  48. K-Bob
    July 9th, 2014 @ 6:23 pm

    It’s kind of the same thing, anymore.

    Just like I’d never let my kids accompany me on a visit to such a home, I’d never let my kids go to a liberal University, either.

  49. K-Bob
    July 9th, 2014 @ 6:32 pm

    I searched on
    [ Chamber Ardent Affair ]
    and got nothing useful on the first page. Totally useless results, so I don’t know to what “affair” you are referring.

    (I think I need help with that last sentence.)

    I’ve noticed Google is having more and more trouble with fairly specific search terms. You can even struggle to find results on extremely specific terms that are more than likely covered somewhere. Something like
    [ Excel 2013 VBA format linestyles ]
    (I just made that up–I didn’t try it) will frequently yield zero useful results, no matter how many pages you click through.

    Makes me miss Alta Vista.

    Anyway, I found the lack of results mildly amusing.

  50. Quartermaster
    July 9th, 2014 @ 7:38 pm

    Does your wife know you’re looking for an affair?