Reading Feminist Theory …

Posted on | August 23, 2014 | 124 Comments

. . . so you don’t have to!

Shulamith Firestone, circa 1970

“Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants, and cheap labor. We are considered inferior beings, whose only purpose is to enhance men’s lives. . . . Our prescribed behavior is enforced by the threat of physical violence. . . .
“We identify the agents of our oppression as men. . . .
“We regard our personal experience, and our feelings about that experience, as the basis for an analysis of our common situation. We cannot rely on existing ideologies as they are all products of male supremacist culture. We question every generalization and accept none that are not confirmed by our experience.”
— Redstockings, “Manifesto,” July 7, 1969

There was a nice boost of tip-jar hitters last week, mostly in response to the complete triumph over Brett Kimberlin in the Maryland state lawsuit. Somewhere, there is online audio of the trial testimony, including me reading from “How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog.” Readers have also been both patient and generously encouraging with my “Sex Trouble” series about radical feminism. Putting together these long articles (some of them over 2,000 words in length) is time-consuming, because of the amount of research involved. Ultimately, I plan to compile and edit this series into an ebook, but for now, I’m getting so deep into the research that I’m sure I’ve already read more of this stuff than the average Women’s Studies major.

Today, I ordered $108 worth of feminist books from Amazon, including two early classics, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. I’d previously read extensive excerpts of these, but I want to have them both in their dead-tree entirety, simply because that’s how I work best. I’ve also ordered books by lesbian feminists Jill Johnston, Marilyn Frye, Sue Wilkinson and Dana Heller, as well as Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence, and Women’s Lives by radical feminist psychologist Dee Graham.

That last title is important, in terms of the theme of my series, because Graham’s ideas about male “Sexual Terror” provided much of theory behind Radical Wind’s anti-heterosexual rant, “PIV is always rape, OK?” She expanded on Graham’s theory in August 2013:

No woman is heterosexual. What men call heterosexuality is an institution where men make women captive for PIV, to control our reproductive functions and steal our labour. Heterosexuality, or sexuality with men does not exist, because the only relationship to men that exists is men’s violence, physical and mental invasion — one that men have so well crafted and disguised for so long that we can mistake it for attraction, sexual urges or love. All women’s “attraction” to men is 100% eroticised trauma bonding / stockholm syndrome. There is no other form of attraction to men possible than that. None.

This is a categorical claim; one must either agree or disagree. Radical Wind cites Dee Graham by name four times in this single post, elaborating on the esoteric meaning of Graham’s theory:

All women are prisoners and hostages to men’s world. Men’s world is like a vast prison or concentration camp for women. This isn’t a metaphor, it’s reality. Each man is a threat. We can’t escape men. We are forced to depend on men and male infrastructures for our survival.

Radical Wind says women “are programmed and groomed to react in this way to male threat since birth,” part of what she calls her “female child-grooming theory,” which leads (by the inherent logic of the crazy premises she establishes along the way) to the conclusion that women’s feeling of attraction and emotional bonds to men are actually symptomatic of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Now, there are two things immediately obvious from her claims:

She is comparing the development of heterosexual orientation in women to the way in which pedophiles “groom” their child-victims. Does anyone believe this insulting comparison is accidental? No, of course not. She clearly means to suggest that male sexual interest in women is morally analogous to a pedophile’s interest in children, and that women are victimized by men in the same way that children are victimized by sex offenders.
Any woman who does not reject heterosexuality, who thinks of her own sexual and romantic interest in males as natural and healthy, is suffering from a sort of psychiatric delusion. If a woman believes she genuinely enjoys sex with men, if she is “in love” with her male partner, this simply shows that she is a victim of PTSD — “trauma bonding” — and childhood “grooming.”

Radical Wind makes these arguments with such fanatical certainty that, as I say, we must either agree or disagree. Compromise is impossible.

There is an undeniably totalitarian quality to her ideological rigidity; she declares her doctrines in the manner of a dictator issuing an ultimatum. And if you disagree — as I think every sane person must — you might say to yourself, “Well, that’s just one kook on the Internet.”

Except you’re wrong. She’s not alone in believing this. In 2011, a radical feminist known as CherryBlossomLife cited Dee Graham in asking, “Can Women Escape From Men?” The answer was no, and you can go check the comments to see whether any of her feminist readers disagreed with her radical analysis. She was enthusiastically praised:

“First of all,that’s an excelent post Cherry!. . “

“Thanks, Cherry, for summarizing this. . . .”

“Courageous post. Keep telling the truth! I really wish womyn understood that it’s in their best interest to leave men. . . .”

“Fantastic, measured, informative post – as always, Cherry. Thanks so much for taking the time to write this. . . .”

Are there feminists who disagree with this extreme anti-male doctrine? Where are they? Where are the harsh denunciations of radical feminism from “moderate” feminists? And if they don’t denounce such extremism, aren’t they tacitly endorsing it?

Moderate feminism is a myth. One might as well believe in unicorns or leprechauns as to believe in moderate feminism. What feminists believe today, what they will believe tomorrow and forever, is the same thing that Shulamith Firestone’s group Redstockings declared in 1969: “Women are an oppressed class. . . . We identify the agents of our oppression as men.” The minute a woman says that she does not believe this — if she rejects the claim that men (collectively) oppress women (collectively) under the system of male domination known as patriarchy — then she is not actually a feminist, no matter what she may call herself.

If there are, however, women who call themselves “feminist” who wish to argue against the anti-male/anti-heterosexual doctrines of radical feminism, how would they go about making such arguments? With facts? With logic? With empirical data? Impossible!

“We regard our personal experience, and our
feelings about that experience, as the basis
for an analysis of our common situation.”

If each woman’s own “personal experiences” and her “feelings about that experience” are the only possible basis for analysis, there can be no objectivity, no neutral facts, no empirical method.

If it is her experience that 2 + 2 = 5, if a woman feels that 2 + 2 = 5, then anyone who says 2 + 2 = 4 is obviously trying to enslave her to the oppressive mathematics of male supremacy.

Feminism tells women that if they feel oppressed, they are oppressed. If a woman doesn’t feel oppressed, feminism tells her she’s wrong.

Flip a coin: Heads, feminists win. Tails, you’re a victim of the patriarchy.

+ – + – + – + – +

At any rate, the folks at Amazon — greedy capitalist exploiters! — demanded that I pay actual money for those feminist books, refusing to accept my Patriarchal Express Platinum Card. Therefore, in order to continue my campaign of male supremacist oppression, I must remind you of the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

THE ‘SEX TROUBLE’ SERIES:

Category: Feminism, Sex Trouble

Comments

124 Responses to “Reading Feminist Theory …”

Matt_SE
August 24th, 2014 @ 9:58 pm

Speaking of Physics, perhaps you could explain to us how Ohm’s Law, for instance, is a relative truth.
Ohm’s Law: the thing that enables you to read this message on your screen, among other laws.
Dianna Deeley
August 24th, 2014 @ 10:16 pm

I didn’t just vote for Romney. I gave money and time. I wasn’t crazy about him, but he was (and remains) light-years better than Obama and his collection of collectivist loons. I just hope that, next time, the Republicans nominate someone who wants to win, not lose gracefully.
Dianna Deeley
August 24th, 2014 @ 10:17 pm

I keep coming to a dead halt, right there, and wondering how they don’t.
Wombat_socho
August 24th, 2014 @ 11:20 pm

Sometimes I worry about the cumulative effect on his SANity score, but at this point I think he’s been exposed to so much mind-blasting horror that it just doesn’t matter any more.
PoorPoorConsss
August 24th, 2014 @ 11:45 pm

Moron, you still haven’t refuted my statement that human beings have ZERO knowledge of any kind of absolute truth because our picture of reality is incomplete, and based on our limited, and subjective perception of things. That includes your morals. And, in your last paragraph you agree with my anyway! With all this in mind it’s clear that your concept of “God”, and his supposed moral law is nothing more than a human construct. Try some magic mushrooms, or DMT. That what will get you far closer to what “religion” is than wasting a Sunday morning on your knees in front of statues of religious icons.
maniakmedic
August 25th, 2014 @ 12:30 am

Full disclosure: I’m LDS (though that’s not why I voted for him). I bring that up because when I talked to a friend of mine before the election he said he was voting for Romney specifically because of Romney being LDS (my friend is not LDS). His reasoning? LDS people see the US as the “Promised Land.” Which makes it important and sacred to faithful LDS members (Harry Reid need not apply, the poser). So my friend’s view was that Romney, being LDS, actually loves this country, as opposed to President Fundamentally Change America and his wife, First Time I’ve Ever Been Proud of This Country.

I thought it was an interesting way to look at it since I take the LDS view for granted.
Dana
August 25th, 2014 @ 6:33 am

Is 2 + 2 = 4 not absolutely true?

And when you get into morals, is rape not absolutely wrong?
Dana
August 25th, 2014 @ 6:35 am

Feminists aren’t (necessarily) abnormal, though lesbians clearly are.
Dana
August 25th, 2014 @ 6:39 am

I’d suggest that “trollop” is the wrong word. Straight or queer, she ain’t getting much. She can’t do anything about the fact that she’s attractiveness challenged, but her expression sure doesn’t help her! That look would curdle fresh milk.
Dana
August 25th, 2014 @ 6:40 am

Difficult? Try impossible!
Dana
August 25th, 2014 @ 6:41 am

It wasn’t a hard choice at all, not for me. He wasn’t perfect, but no one is, and even if imperfect was amazingly better than the alternative.
RS
August 25th, 2014 @ 7:33 am

And now, you change the argument for a third time to: We have no Knowledge of Absolute Truth. So, let’s recap:

First Argument: Absolute Truth Does Not Exist because we don’t have an “absolute Picture” does not exist. Patent absurdity. The conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premise.

Then you argue: We can only have a “relative view” of “things, and that includes Truth.” This is different. An incomplete or partial view of something does not negate its existence as a whole. No one disputes that we have an “incomplete view of reality” nor has anyone disputed that for 2500 years. That’s not a huge victory on your part.

Then you shift a third time to argue that an incomplete picture is equivalent to “zero” knowledge of the Truth. Also patently absurd, your pathetic touchdown dances, notwithstanding.

Of course, you try to camouflage the absurdity and your inability to entertain serious philosophical thoughts by gratuitous insults and references to “God” and “morality,” which did not appear in any of my responses to your initial assertion that, “Of course there’s no absolute truth.”
Jeanette Victoria
August 25th, 2014 @ 8:36 am

That was pretty much my view. I keep hoping the GOP will get it and nominate a REAL conservative.
Sex Trouble: Feminism, Mental Illness and the Pathetic Daughters of Misfortune : The Other McCain
August 25th, 2014 @ 9:01 am

[…] Aug. 23: Reading Feminist Theory … […]
Rich Vail
August 25th, 2014 @ 10:27 am

…if they did, I don’t think they would like what they caught…
Dana
August 25th, 2014 @ 2:31 pm

And Mr W wins the internets for today!
Dana
August 25th, 2014 @ 2:34 pm

Really? Look how some male animals bite their mates on the backs of their necks, to hold them in place for this clearly involuntary copulation! It’s rape, madam, rape!
Dana
August 25th, 2014 @ 2:35 pm

Clearly, the male patriarchy has extended down from us wicked humans, and infected lower species! 🙂
Howard Roark
August 25th, 2014 @ 6:32 pm

One of the few righteous things about radical feminism is that it makes its own followers miserable and unhappy
MarkJ
August 25th, 2014 @ 6:54 pm

“Men’s world is like a vast prison or concentration camp for women. ”

Hmmm, if this is true….why isn’t Radical Wind flat on her back right now in a Louisiana rape camp instead of sharing her breathless faculty-lounge-idiotic blog posts with the rest of us?
Whitehall
August 25th, 2014 @ 6:57 pm

Look, they are nuts, completely spinning intellectual fabrications to compensate for their nuttiness. “I’m not crazy! I have a theory.”
Most people recognize it for what it is – nuttiness – and walk away.
Ergo, who cares? Women like this ceased to be entertaining long ago.
brinster
August 25th, 2014 @ 6:58 pm

Wait a minute. Isn’t that Fawn Leibowitz? She’s the girl who was killed in Animal House, so Otter could con the sorority sisters into going out with the rest of the Animal House brothers.
Aletha Kuschan
August 25th, 2014 @ 6:59 pm

Have to say I wonder what
TMLutas
August 25th, 2014 @ 7:05 pm

If I could have my choice of anti-semites, I’ll pick the ones who are against political violence as a matter of principle over every other kind. If a kook has no death list, the chance that he’ll add you to it is zero. In terms of anti-semites, that’s a lot better than the alternatives.
DukeLax
August 25th, 2014 @ 7:07 pm

I believe American gender-feminists are going to keep perverting American law enforcement, keep pushing more and more manufactured statistics Alliances into American law enforcement…until we reach the point where hetero-relationships become such a legal liability for guys that only the poor and un-educated males will dare to date hetero……And only then will hetero-women start to stand up against the gender-feminists.
Alarms & Discursions
August 25th, 2014 @ 7:16 pm

You want to read some Judith Butler if you haven’t yet. She is the most fashionable of the academic feminists.
Fen
August 25th, 2014 @ 7:39 pm

If feminists believe they have been so easily oppressed since the dawn of time, doesn’t that prove they are inferior? No wonder the feminists are nuts – their own theory tells them they are lesser.
anonymous reader
August 25th, 2014 @ 7:55 pm

Mr McCain,

If you are not already familiar with Anonymous Conservative’s work on r/K behaviors, it provides an overarching theory of sexual (and other kinds of) deviance.
jhertzli
August 25th, 2014 @ 8:03 pm

Required reading: “Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic” by Andrea Nye

Sample quote: “Logic in its final perfection is insane.”
Argle-Bargle
August 25th, 2014 @ 8:06 pm

“All women are prisoners and hostages to men’s world. Men’s world is like a vast prison or concentration camp for women. This isn’t a metaphor, it’s reality a simile.”

Fixed. The paragraph, I mean. Not the effed up, psychopathic mind that produced it.
Argle-Bargle
August 25th, 2014 @ 8:07 pm

“reality” should have been crossed out and replaced by “a simile”. Didn’t quite get it to work.
Daniel Freeman
August 25th, 2014 @ 8:41 pm

Culture determines policy, law, custom, and procedure. Feminism has cultural hegemony in the West, so to know the future, we have to understand feminism — and the shining lights that guide it are largely radical man-haters, with a perverse utopian vision based on Marxism.

There are many reasons to call their vision perverse. For one, feminist leaders are generally privileged elitists, and their Marxism is merely cultural; they are far more concerned with internal differences within the 1% than with what separates them from us.

For another, the radicals’ goal — which is to say, the leaders’ goal — is nothing less than destruction of the human family, which they psychotically imagine to be the source of all evil.

It’s so perverse that you might not believe me, in which case I ask you to ponder two questions:

What would it take to end the gender pay gap, and why do the expressed opponents of that gap avoid telling you what it would take?
jbagadonut
August 25th, 2014 @ 8:45 pm

If you’re going to read Kate Millet, you should first read what her sister, Mallory Millett had to say about her.
RS
August 25th, 2014 @ 8:46 pm

. . .the radicals’ goal — which is to say, the leaders’ goal — is nothing less than destruction of the human family, which they psychotically imagine to be the source of all evil.

Quite true. All Leftists/Progressive/Marxists view traditional marriage and the family as the primary impediments to total State control of the individual. The reason for this is that the former institutions compete for an individual’s loyalty. In the Leftist view, they cannot be allowed to stand.
Daniel Freeman
August 25th, 2014 @ 9:02 pm

I agree with you for the most part, but we might have some differences around the edges, since I believe in the two-axis “political compass.” There are right-authoritarians that would be perfectly happy with total Corporate control of the individual, and left-libertarians that that will fight for the death for your right to live in peace — which includes not having to constantly defend yourself against either would-be master.

For a possible example, I am against no-fault divorce, but not against gay marriage, which sets me outside of most easy categories. The way I see it, other people getting married doesn’t hurt your family; but the institution is actually damaged by vows not meaning anything.
RBT1
August 25th, 2014 @ 9:10 pm

“We regard our personal experience…as the basis for an analysis of our common situation.” Of course we will exclude the personal experience of any woman who enjoys sex with a man.
How ‘Fringe’ Is Radical Feminism? : The Other McCain
August 25th, 2014 @ 9:16 pm

[…] a couple days later, the same Kathy commented on my Facebook page where I’d posted my article “Reading Feminist Theory,” asking about my “obsession with fringe feminist theory. . . . What is your […]
Aletha Kuschan
August 25th, 2014 @ 10:02 pm

I agree that “culture determines policy, law, custom, and procedure,” however I am not persuaded that feminism is actually influential in shaping the culture. It garners a lot of attention in the media, attention that conservatives unfortunately magnify by their focusing attention to it. But among women generally, I don’t think it’s influential at all. Even during occasions when I’ve been among left leaning women, I can’t recall anyone talking about feminism. Conservatives need to be careful to avoid becoming force-multipliers for ideas that are held chiefly or even exclusively on the fringe.
Daniel Freeman
August 25th, 2014 @ 11:53 pm

That’s the thing: it doesn’t matter whether or not a majority of women actually approve of feminism, as long as they’re sufficiently afraid to criticize it, so that the balance of culture is shifted. Also, it doesn’t matter if most women are inclined to give feminists material support — votes, money, and votes to allocate money — as long as they’re sufficiently afraid to oppose it.

All that matters is if *most* women that feel brave to speak out do so in the “right” way, and if *most* women that feel confident to give support do so in the “right” way.

Radicals — “change agents” — understand all about shifting the range of socially acceptable debate. So must we. The “Overton window” is a good place to start.

Why are conservatives so caught up in gay weddings, when those don’t break up straight marriages? To say that no-fault divorce is a settled question is to say that you’ve given up on the family.

And that’s how easy it is to shift the terms of the debate.
Toads
August 26th, 2014 @ 12:49 am

‘Feminism’, far from helping women, has instead exposed the full extent of female limitations (moral, intellectual, economic, parental, spiritual, civic) far more visibly than was ever possible before ‘feminism’.

Traditional customs benefited women more than men, as they kept women out of situations were they would tested. ‘Feminism’ instead replaced that with the idea that women don’t have to demonstrate competence, they just have to insist they have it, no matter how many times they fail to demonstrate their claimed abilities.
Toads
August 26th, 2014 @ 12:51 am

Among their rantings, there will never be a mention of how 99.9% of battlefield deaths are of men.

How many US women died in WW2? Korea? VietNam?

Almost all American deaths were of men.
Don Meaker
August 26th, 2014 @ 1:29 am

2+2=4 in some number systems, but not in others.

1+1=10 in binary.
publius
August 26th, 2014 @ 1:30 am

Tarski, Quine, Gödel. If absolute truth exists, it would appear that we are thus far, incapable of saying anything substantive about it. Rhetorical maneuvering regarding PoorPoorConsss thesis notwithstanding, you fail to adduce the predicate for absolute truth.
Don Meaker
August 26th, 2014 @ 1:32 am

I=V/R is a relative truth. It presumes a constant of proportionality R for the resistance. Of course for diodes, op-amps, the value of R is not a constant, but depends on voltage, temperature.
Don Meaker
August 26th, 2014 @ 1:34 am

I am sure among crazy people, there are some who find her attractive. To crooked eyes, truth wears an awry face.
publius
August 26th, 2014 @ 1:35 am

I have no interest in making PoorPoorCons’ arguments for him/her. However, Ohm’s Law is subject to potential abrogation in the light of new data. To treat any current scientific framework of understanding as an apotheosis is fundamentally unscientific.
publius
August 26th, 2014 @ 1:46 am

Conflating morality and truth theory.
publius
August 26th, 2014 @ 1:49 am

One need not resort to relativism in order to craft a withering criticism of absolute truth claims. Model agnosticism is quite sufficient.
publius
August 26th, 2014 @ 1:52 am

If morality supervenes on absolute truth, we’re well and truly f*cked.
edtastic
August 26th, 2014 @ 3:06 am

” however I am not persuaded that feminism is actually influential in shaping the culture. ”

Have you been living under a rock? It’s concepts not only shame social policy,buy they’ve been defining the relationship between the sexes for at least a half century. The fact women don’t speak of it directly doesn’t mean that haven’t embraced the ideas put forth by feminists.

What should most concern those fighting the misandric influence in feminism is it’s influence on social policy through our institutions which it feminist have become adept at manipulating into doing their bidding. We’re all living with the consequences of bad or gender biased policy. This isn’t a minor distraction from more vital issues since feminist activism is quite often the thing keeping socially conscious people from focusing on larger issues.

We’re at a moment where challenging it’s hegemony over social justice concerns is possible and we shouldn’t let it pass. It’s sad enough we’ve allowed them to deceive generations of idealistic youth who should be busy fighting for the underclass instead of navel gazing and talking about how oppressed they feel or how being male makes them privileged without concern or consideration for our failing sons.

We have a lot to unravel here and it may be another generation before we even begin to undue the damage created by distorted public perceptions.