The Other McCain

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

War Against Human Nature: What Feminists Pay $47,030 a Year to Learn

Posted on | May 17, 2015 | 87 Comments

“Feminism confuses many people who do not understand that the movement has a political philosophy — a theory — and that this theory is fundamentally incompatible with human nature. In fact, feminists do not believe there is such a thing as ‘human nature.’ Instead, they insist, all human behavior (especially including sexual behavior) is ‘socially constructed’ and, because feminists believe that the society that constructs our behavior is a male-dominated system which oppresses women, everything that we accept as ‘human nature’ is part of that oppressive system.”
Robert Stacy McCain, Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the War on Human Nature, p. 3

It takes a lot of money to learn how to disregard — or condemn as “oppression” — ordinary common sense about human nature. When my wife and I went to the accountant to have our taxes done, one of my business expenses was the approximately $700 I’d spent buying feminist books from Amazon.com during 2014. This was necessary for my research into radical feminist gender theory in the book Sex Trouble. The research continues because, as I say in the introduction to the first edition, Sex Trouble is “a work in progress,” and my current plan is to publish a revised and expanded second edition in August. Here are the 10 most recent books I’ve purchased in the past two months:

Each of these titles was purchased for a reason. For example, Estelle Freedman is a Stanford University professor who is hugely influential in academia, being for example the editor of The Essential Feminist Reader (2007), an assigned textbook in many introductory Women’s Studies courses. That she was also editor of a 1985 collection of lesbian-feminist essays is not a coincidence and, when I encountered a reference to Professor Freedman’s earlier work in the notes of another feminist book, I decided to check it out. (Very interesting.) As to the 1975 book co-edited by Charlotte Bunch, well, you can Google her name and perhaps figure out why Professor Bunch’s controversial past might be highly relevant and newsworthy in 2016.

What nearly all of these books have in common is that they are either written or edited by Women’s Studies professors or else, as in the case of Adrienne Rich, are by authors whose works are included in the Women’s Studies curricula. As readers of Sex Trouble know, the book focuses on academia — the Feminist-Industrial Complex — because it is by institutionalizing their power in colleges and universities, with Women’s Studies departments as the engine of their influence, that radical feminists have gained hegemonic authority within elite culture.

“I am a gender abolitionist because gender is
a social construct that oppresses everyone.”
“The threat of violence alone affords
all men dominance over all women.”

Academic feminism has received relatively little critical scrutiny (Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women’s Studies by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge being a commendable exception), and most people have no idea what kind of bizarre nonsense students are being taught nowadays. If you think of feminism as mere “equality” in the sense of basic fairness, you need to read Sex Trouble and find out what feminism really means. And it’s only $11.69 in paperback, which is a lot less than you’d pay to study this stuff at college.

Friday, in discussing Kate Spencer (a feminist victim of “body shame” and other patriarchal oppressions), I mentioned that she had gotten a bachelor’s degree in Women’s Studies from Bates College, an elite private liberal arts college where annual tuition is $47,030. Here is the official description of that program:

The goal of the Program in Women and Gender Studies is to enable learners to recognize, analyze, and transform gender relations as they appear in everyday life. The program provides the opportunity to study women as social agents whose identities and experiences are shaped by systems of race, class, sexuality, and national power. At the same time, to study gender is to refute simple assertions about women, men, and gender binaries, and to strive instead for richly detailed accounts of the political, economic, and technological conditions through which relations of power have been established and maintained.
Analyzing gender enriches our ability to apprehend the differing social roles assigned to individuals, the inequitable distribution of material resources, and the ties between structures of knowledge and larger systems of privilege and oppression. Courses examine women and gender relations in multiple cultural, historical, and material contexts, encouraging the use of transnational, multiracial feminist perspectives.

The chairwoman of the department is Professor Rebecca Herzig:

Historian Rebecca Herzig holds the College’s only full-time faculty appointment in Women and Gender Studies. She teaches an array of interdisciplinary courses on science, technology, and medicine, as well as the program’s required methods course, Methods and Modes of Inquiry. Her latest book, Plucked: A History of Hair Removal, is available now at nyupress.org.

A small school like Bates College (with fewer than 1,800 students) can afford only one full-time Women’s Studies professor, but because the field is “interdisciplinary,” it is also taught by faculty from other departments. By this cross-departmental influence, feminist ideology permeates the curriculum. Thus, the Bates College Women and Gender Studies faculty also includes Holly Ewing (Associate Professor, Environmental Studies), Leslie Hill (Associate Professor, Politics), Sue Houchins (Associate Professor, African American Studies), Erica Rand (Professor, Art and Visual Culture), and Emily W. Kane (Professor, Sociology). In case you’re wondering what kind of innovative scholarship these eminent academics are sharing with their students, I’ll point out that Professor Kane is author of The Gender Trap: Parents and the Pitfalls of Raising Boys and Girls (2012) and Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in Childhood (2013). Perhaps you will not be surprised to learn that Professor Kane is implacably hostile to “traditionally gendered childhoods” and “conventional gender expectations,” which she blames for “persistent gender inequalities.”

This is what feminism has been about for more than 40 years. In 1969, the feminist collective Redstockings declared:

We identify the agents of our oppression as men. . . . Men have controlled all political, economic and cultural institutions and backed up this control with physical force. They have used their power to keep women in an inferior position. . . . All men have oppressed women.

The “inferior position” of women and the “power” which men use to oppress women — the source of those “persistent gender inequalities” denounced by Professor Kane — are simply the results of normal human behaviors, i.e., masculinity and femininity, love, marriage, sex, parenthood and the traditional family. Normal relations between normal men and normal women are both the cause and effect of women’s oppression, whereby women are “exploited as sex objects” and “breeders,” as the Redstockings declared:

We are considered inferior beings, whose only purpose is to enhance men’s lives. Our humanity is denied.

Is this true? Was it true in 1969 or at any previous time? Did your father exploit your mother as a “breeder”? Was your grandfather the agent of your grandmother’s oppression? Was your great-grandmother’s humanity denied because your great-grandfather kept her in an inferior position as a “sex object”? This is what feminist theory teaches, that human history has been nothing but a gigantic patriarchal conspiracy through which men (all men) have oppressed women (all women), and the overthrow of this collective oppression requires a revolution:

Because we have lived so intimately with our oppressors, in isolation from each other, we have been kept from seeing our personal suffering as a political condition. This creates the illusion that a woman’s relationship with her man is a matter of interplay between two unique personalities, and can be worked out individually. In reality, every such relationship is a class relationship, and the conflicts between individual men and women are political conflicts that can only be solved collectively.

To achieve this solution, the Redstockings proclaimed, feminists must “develop female class consciousness . . . exposing the sexist foundation of all our institutions.” They denied “the existence of individual solutions,” condemning what they described as the false assumption “that the male-female relationship is purely personal.” The co-founder of Redstockings was Shulamith Firestone who, in her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex, declared that “the end goal of feminist revolution must be . . . not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself” (p. 11). Firestone called for “an end to the incest taboo, through abolition of the family,” so that “sexuality would be released from its straitjacket to eroticize our whole culture” (p. 55). She flatly declared “Pregnancy is barbaric” (p. 180), described women as “the slave class” (p. 184), and envisioned a “new society” in which “humanity could finally revert to its natural polymorphous sexuality — all forms of sexuality would be allowed and indulged” (p. 187). Firestone denounced the family because “it reinforces biologically-based sex class (p. 198) and asserted that “marriage in its very definition . . . was organized around, and reinforces, a fundamentally oppressive biological condition” (p. 202).

The fact that Shulamith Firestone was clinically insane (a paranoid schizophrenic who died alone in 2012 at age 67) might serve as sufficient rebuttal to her doctrine, but by the time her madness became evident — she was committed to a psychiatric unit in 1987 — the radical movement she helped launch had gained a solid foothold in academia, publishing, law and politics. Firestone and other early leaders of the Women’s Liberation Movement had been political activists of the New Left. Others were journalists (e.g., Marilyn Webb, Gloria Steinem, Jill Johnston, Susan Brownmiller). It was only after the radical feminist movement shattered into incoherent splinters in the mid-1970s that the creation of Women’s Studies programs at colleges and universities provided the institutional infrastructure around which the Feminist-Industrial Complex has since been built. Thousands of professors are now employed to indoctrinate students in this ideology, and no one in 21st-century academia dares criticize or oppose feminism for fear of being accused of “discrimination” or “harassment.” What the Women’s Studies major “knows” is never contradicted by any authority on campus, and what she “knows” is that all women are victims of male supremacy.

“Male power is systemic. Coercive, legitimated, and epistemic, it is the regime.”
Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989)

“Recognizing that the ‘personal is political’ allowed women to identify . . . that what they took to be their own personal failings . . . were not just individual experiences. . . . The ‘private’ world was recognized as the basis of the power men wielded in the ‘public’ world of work and government. . . . The concept that the personal is political enabled feminists to understand the ways in which the workings of male dominance penetrated into their relationships with men. They could recognize how the power dynamics of male dominance made heterosexuality into a political institution, constructed male and female sexuality, and the ways in which women felt about their bodies and themselves.”
Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West (2014)

Because feminism now controls the terms of academic research and discussion about human sexuality, the university student today never encounters any articulate defense of normal behavior.

Love, marriage and motherhood are condemned by feminists, as is heterosexuality, per se. All of this is implicit in feminist gender theory — the “social construction” of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix. — and anyone who does not accept this theory is subject to denunciation as a bigot, a misogynist, a homophobe.

Parents pay for their children to learn how to think this way — tuition at Bates College is, I repeat, $47,030 a year — and the question is, “Why?”

As I say, I spent about $700 buying feminist books last year and probably understand it as well as any heteropatriarchal oppressor ever could. Yet the Sex Trouble project is a continuing effort funded by readers who understand the importance of “Taking Feminism Seriously.” Because I’ve been able to purchase many of these books used from Amazon, my total cost for the 10 feminist books I’ve purchased in the past two months was $136.42, and this library of lunatic literature will keep growing. Why? Because if God will grant me another few months of life, I expect to make some appearances at university campuses next fall, and it can be predicted that young feminists will challenge my analysis: “But you don’t understand feminism!”

Yet there will be a table beside me, and on that table will be these stacks of books, you see. So I’ll gesture to the table, and perhaps hold up a few of the books to cite the titles and authors by name, before answering the angry student: “No, ma’am. You don’t understand feminism.”

Doesn’t that make you want to hit freaking the tip jar?




 

 

Comments

87 Responses to “War Against Human Nature: What Feminists Pay $47,030 a Year to Learn”

  1. DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » War Against Human Nature: What Feminists Pay $47,030 a Year to Learn
    May 17th, 2015 @ 1:04 pm

    […] The Other McCain waxes philosophical. […]

  2. RS
    May 17th, 2015 @ 1:09 pm

    It’s funny. I looked over my son’s curriculum at his respected regional STEM university to see that none of that stuff is listed for his degrees in Math and Computer Engineering. Plus, annual tuition, room and board is less than a third of Bates College. I’m pretty happy right now.

  3. RKae
    May 17th, 2015 @ 1:15 pm

    When leftists and radicals become obsessed with a buzzword, you can bet they’re misusing it.

    In “gender studies” I see a constant flinging around of the word “rethink.” What they mean is “indoctrinate to MY perspective.” Because the fact of the matter is if you rethink old gender roles and come up with the same conclusion that your grandparents came up with then the feminists go apoplectic.

    Hey, I rethought it. What more do you want?

    It’s like 9-11 truthers. When I pooh-pooh their notions, I get hit with “Oh, so you just accept the ‘official story’ without question!” or “So you’re one of those people who just believes everything the media tell you!”

    No. I look into things. I rethink them. In fact, my FIRST order of business upon hearing of a conspiracy is “Let’s see what you got.” I’m ready. I’m open.

    As for gender roles: True, that after centuries, people tend to say “We just do this because we’ve always done it; now shut up and stop asking questions.” But that does not automatically make an action or a tradition wrong!

    Sorry, feminazis, after hearing all you have to say, taking careful stock of it all, and (as per your suggestion!) RETHINKING things, I have concluded that the old ways work very well indeed.

  4. Adobe_Walls
    May 17th, 2015 @ 1:21 pm

    My second daughter attended two semesters at ECU. Even with the money she was doing poorly. As for my four kids they’ll have to make do with the same education I got. I came into this world with nothin and I’ve still got most of it left.

  5. RKae
    May 17th, 2015 @ 1:22 pm

    Well, keep your hands off my nothin’, ’cause I’ve worked hard for it!

  6. robertstacymccain
    May 17th, 2015 @ 1:27 pm

    “… if you rethink old gender roles and come up with the same conclusion that your grandparents came up with then the feminists go apoplectic.”

    Bingo. It always amuses to me, as someone who was a long-haired teenage rock-and-roller (and also a Democrat) in the 1970s, how feminists leap to the conclusion that anyone who opposes their movement or criticizes their ideas must be a stereotypical male chauvinist a la Archie Bunker. Feminists rush to claim that their critics must be either (a) a neurotic suffering from insecurities or sexual “repression”; or (b) a hateful misogynist defending his “male privilege.” Feminists assume that their critics are ignorant of what feminism “really” is, and that opponents of feminism are unsympathetic to the real suffering and legitimate grievances of women. Nothing you say in your own defense as a critic of feminism can ever suffice, for the simple reason that feminists are deranged fanatics who could no more reconsider their worldview than Mohammad Atta could question the Koran’s doctrine of jihad.

  7. robertstacymccain
    May 17th, 2015 @ 1:35 pm

    Honest private-sector poverty is far better than government-subsidized poverty.

  8. Matthew C. Masotti
    May 17th, 2015 @ 2:05 pm

    Excellent research. Seems to me that “feminist” ideology is grounded in Marxism—something I suspect most self-professed “feminists” would readily admit. Leaders in the Soviet Union officially made ‘gender equality’ a foundational element of the ideal proletarian-based society, despite ruthless misogyny in their personal lives…again, following Marx.

  9. concern00
    May 17th, 2015 @ 2:08 pm

    One of my favorite feminist paradigms is this:
    “The threat of violence alone affords all men dominance over all women.”

    Why don’t they just stand up to the violence and smack down their would be attackers? Men and women are equal right? So the threat of violence shouldn’t be a uniquely female perspective.

  10. Art Deco
    May 17th, 2015 @ 2:15 pm

    Shulamith Firestone departed public life around about 1972, midway through young adulthood. She did not want to be a professional feminist a la Kate Millett and Gloria Steinem, and it seems a bit unsporting not to make a note of this. Her one subsequent literary work was an account of a meander through the mental health system.

    One should also note that people with schizophreniform disorders migrate through various states through the course of their life depending on a number of variables and ‘insane’ is a bad description of most of them. Clayton Cramer’s brother or John Hinckley might be properly so described, but most just have trouble in social situations or activities of daily life. The tragedy of Shulamith Firestone is that she did not have anyone to take care of mundane business for her, either a husband or a sister, and was perhaps beyond appreciating the efforts of anyone who might have.

  11. RS
    May 17th, 2015 @ 2:18 pm

    That’s because “indoctrination” only goes in one direction. As I approach 60 with my youngest still in high school, I’m informed that my Christianity is undoubtedly based solely upon the way I was reared as a child and the influence of my Christo-fascist parents. Usually, I start listing the names of philosophers and thinkers I’ve read in detail starting with Hesiod to the present, many in their original language and most of whom my interlocutors don’t even know. Yet, the vast majority of these smug pseudo-intellectuals would rather don a philosophical mantel without question in the same manner they’d order a “Number 1 with a Coke” at their local drive-through McDonald’s.

  12. Art Deco
    May 17th, 2015 @ 2:19 pm

    No, it’s grounded in affluenza.

  13. RS
    May 17th, 2015 @ 2:21 pm

    Let’s not forget, the amount of domestic violence initiated by females is most definitely not insignificant. It is, however, ignored because its mere existence threatens Feminist ideology.

  14. Fail Burton
    May 17th, 2015 @ 2:32 pm

    A few years ago a heavily racialized version of this gender studies cult came into the core science fiction community with elbows flying, attacking everyone and everything. The speed with which it became the default orthodoxy and a crusade was pretty stunning. The fear was palpable. Most people had no idea what had hit them. All they knew is that if they didn’t cave in they were accused of hating non-whites, women and gays. People had no answers to the surface plausibility and cleverness of these circular black hole arguments tested and perfected over a half-century.

    To confuse the matter even further, there was every evidence a lot of the crusaders themselves were on the receiving end of a cleaned up and not clearly understood version of this racialized French Queer Theory. All that was clear was this was all a direct continuation of an anti-Jim Crow, pro-gay and pro-feminist movement falsely passed of as equal rights feminism. Well, the truth turned out somewhat different, but the confusion remains. This is not anti-Jim Crow but a (mostly) female black supremacist movement, a lesbian-centric supremacist movement and gender feminist movement, not one of equal rights. In other words it was a perfect storm to mainstream hate speech and even madness. A lot of people have been suckered in on the theory goodness somehow comes out the other end, just like the ’60s.

    Evidence of the alliance between confusion and radicalism lies in the at the time president of the Science Fiction Writers of America John Scalzi’s post about “white privilege” in 2012 and in the 2014 unprecedented awards sweep by first time novelist Ann Leckie for her SF novel Ancillary Justice. Both are middle class, married and in their late ’40s. They would seem to be radical chic flak catchers and nothing more.

    Leckie’s main character can see no gender, but there is no evidence Leckie even knows who Judith Butler is or the implications of what her novel is selling, since she never exploits the idea like Butler, Joanna Russ or Monique Wittig would’ve; it’s more like slumming.

    However feminist SF bloggers did know who Butler was and immediately understood the implications of the book and raved about it from day one and all reviews were first and foremost about gender, though as I say, it is not an intrinsic part of the plot. Any port in a storm however launched an otherwise forgettable novel into history.

    The confusion remains so great that even though the term “social justice warrior” wouldn’t exist were it not for these trigger warning broads nor the Sad Puppies Hugo Awards movement itself exist, there is almost no mention of the radical feminism which set the whole thing off. That is the very definition of “mainstreaming.” It seems SF is going to have to take quite a few more blows to the nuts before it wakes up and fully realizes what it is attacking it. Right now it’s being stupidly parsed as liberals vs. conservatives, and that’s a losing hand for men.

  15. Fail Burton
    May 17th, 2015 @ 2:36 pm

    That may be so, but when it’s a sociopathy directed outwards into a popular movement of hate falsely passed off as “justice” we have every right to call it madness and point to the harm this women contributed to society by virtue of the simple fact it was never pointed out she was mad.

  16. Adobe_Walls
    May 17th, 2015 @ 2:38 pm

    Your Christianity is undoubtedly based in part in the way you were raised. That’s how civilizations survive.

  17. concern00
    May 17th, 2015 @ 2:38 pm

    Yes, fair point. It just seems that half the feminist narrative – rape culture and male violence – actually relies on the weaker nature of women, which doesn’t gel with the whole equality trope. Before we know it women will be trying to become firefighters and rangers.

  18. RS
    May 17th, 2015 @ 2:40 pm

    The exposure was, sure. But over the years, I’ve tested it again and again and read my way through other thinkers and becoming exposed to other ways of thinking about the world. That’s why I inserted the word “solely” in the comment above.

  19. Dana
    May 17th, 2015 @ 2:52 pm

    Our esteemed host wrote:

    Did your father exploit your mother as a “breeder”? Was your grandfather the agent of your grandmother’s oppression? Was your great-grandmother’s humanity denied because your great-grandfather kept her in an inferior position as a “sex object”?

    Given that Mr McCain has told us, many times, that he has fathered six, six! children with his long-suffering wife, I’m certain that we can say that yes, he has exploited her as a”breeder.” 🙂

  20. Matthew C. Masotti
    May 17th, 2015 @ 3:02 pm

    Engels was Marx’s affluent patron.

  21. Ilion
    May 17th, 2015 @ 3:17 pm

    … feminists leap to the conclusion that anyone who opposes their movement or criticizes their ideas must be a stereotypical male chauvinist a la Archie Bunker.

    At the same time, Archie Bunker was the stereotypical Democratic voter of the pre-leftist-controlled Democratic Party.

  22. Dianna Deeley
    May 17th, 2015 @ 3:30 pm

    I always feel like hitting the tip jar! Your clarity of presentation, along with the sarcasm and humor, are quite worth paying to read.

  23. Art Deco
    May 17th, 2015 @ 3:53 pm

    it was never pointed out she was mad.

    As far as I’m aware, her family never published her psych file or offered a precis of it. Schizophrenia among women very commonly does not appear until after age 30 and Firestone uttered not a public word between the ages of 26 and 53. There’s no compelling reason to believe that schizophrenia was her problem in 1969.

    Schizophrenics are much more likely to be odd than mad.

  24. Adobe_Walls
    May 17th, 2015 @ 3:57 pm

    I suspect the the exploitation was mutual, as it should be. Given the quality of their offspring I believe the she got as much as she gave.

  25. Fail Burton
    May 17th, 2015 @ 4:14 pm

    I’ve read that book. Like all radical fem maunderings it is a mad woman who then goes searching the stacks for rhetoric that proves society is and has been mad for 10,000 years, not them.

  26. Dana
    May 17th, 2015 @ 4:31 pm

    Not possible. We already know, as our host has documented for us so many times in the past, that all heterosexual intercourse is rape, because the Evil Cisheteronormative Patriarchy® has removed from women the ability to consent to such a thing; all that they can do is be duped into thinking they are interested.

  27. Jeanette Victoria
    May 17th, 2015 @ 4:47 pm

    Who wants to make a bet that these women have some sort of clinical psych problem which is why they chose to go into women’s studies. It’s like getting a degree in crazy to legitimize one own lunacy

  28. Quartermaster
    May 17th, 2015 @ 4:49 pm

    You’ve just described most people that go into Psychology programs.

  29. robertstacymccain
    May 17th, 2015 @ 4:56 pm

    Ah, if you could be cloned!

  30. Jeanette Victoria
    May 17th, 2015 @ 4:57 pm

    LOL I have a degree in psych but by then of my 4 years I knew it was junk and I wasted my time getting a useless degree.

  31. robertstacymccain
    May 17th, 2015 @ 5:19 pm

    Thanks for that recap of the sci-fi SJW controversy. Much like GamerGate and the campus “rape epidemic” hysteria, these feminist eruptions often catch people off-guard for the very reason that this radicalism is prevalent within elite academia but seldom described in any detail outside academia. Unless you’re majoring in the humanities or social sciences, you’re unlikely to encounter Queer Theory or other obvious manifestations of intellectual feminism. At the same time, a sort of fog of egalitarian ideology blankets the modern university campus, so that being accused of “hate” (racism, sexism, homophobia) automatically triggers a defensive flinch-reflex: DENY! Almost never does the accusation of “hate” prompt the targeted person to reply, “What do you mean by that? What have I done or said that is false or harmful to anyone?”

    You have to study progressive ideology in a great deal of depth (I’ve been an amateur student of Marxism and Soviet history for about 20 years) before you learn to spot the errors in their arguments, which usually involve a false (but not stated) premise. That joke you made that was cited as evidence of “hate”? Oh, well this is “hate,” the progressive believes, because it is proof of prejudice, which leads to discrimination. Your joke perpetuates a [racist/sexist/homophobic] stereotype, and therefore YOU’RE A NAZI WHO WANTS TO KILL SIX MILLION JEWS!

    This implied chain of causality — prejudice, stereotypes, discrimination, HOLOCAUST — exists within the progressive’s mind, and most people don’t even recognize it for the tendentious bullshit parody of logic it is.

    My advice to anyone targeted by this kind of attack is to remember your Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. You cannot be forced to defend yourself, and it is only the arrogance of the progressive accuser which makes him think that he has the authority to indict you in this manner. Don’t freak out. Don’t panic. Think carefully about anything you say, but remember you don’t have to say anything.

  32. robertstacymccain
    May 17th, 2015 @ 5:34 pm

    She did not want to be a professional feminist a la Kate Millett and Gloria Steinem …

    What happened was that Firestone, like Doctor Frankenstein, created a monster she could not control. The radical egalitarian “collective” mentality of the Women’s Liberation Movement attracted a lot of Marxists and other crazy women whose resentments were aimed not just at male supremacy, but at the idea that anyone was qualified to be a leader of anyone else. The same process of internal cannibalism had previously turned the civil rights movement into a carnival of ethnic fascism, and the anti-war movement of the New Left spawned a sort of neo-Stalinism and terrorist “guerrilla” cults.

    Firestone walked away from organized feminism about five years after she helped create the Women’s Liberation Movement, but if she ever recanted her indictment of “male supremacy,” the nuclear family, etc., I missed that apology.

  33. Adobe_Walls
    May 17th, 2015 @ 5:50 pm

    There is still much to recommend ”just saying so”.
    You’ve touched on something fundamental when you touch on the discrimination/prejudice angle. One problem the left has is that they can’t tell the difference between prejudice and discrimination. To a point, discrimination is wrong even if not illegal. Prejudice on the other hand is natural. This is where leftists go astray, while it’s some what defensible to consider one’s prejudices justified or even noble, they can’t tell their prejudices from their discrimination. If their prejudices are absolutely justified and there’s no difference between prejudice and discrimination/oppression then send them to the Lubyanka is not just OK but righteous.

  34. WarEagle82
    May 17th, 2015 @ 5:55 pm

    So I have XY chromosomes and I like women. But how do I know I am NOT a lesbian trapped in a man’s body?

    I mean, how can I know what a “man” really is since it is the hetero-normative patriarchy that has socially constructed the gender binary and imposed it upon me. What a bunch of male, chauvinist pigs!

    Plus, this is the internet and I could be a dog for all I know. Or is that species-ist?

    The world has become so much more confusing since feminazis took over academia….

  35. robertstacymccain
    May 17th, 2015 @ 6:03 pm

    The Women’s Liberation Movement was like a big bomb full of crazy shrapnel, and we’ve been dealing with the wounded victims ever since.

  36. Art Deco
    May 17th, 2015 @ 6:16 pm

    Did the book tell you she was hearing voices or that she fancied she was under surveillance or that her relatives complained she had stopped bathing? If not, the book is not an indicator of a schizophreniform episode.

  37. Art Deco
    May 17th, 2015 @ 6:22 pm

    No, she didn’t. She had one thing to say in the last 40-odd years of her life, and that was a collection of short stories about people in ruins. An indicator, perhaps, that she made it her business to appreciate real pathos and not self-manufactured pseudo pathos.

  38. Matt_SE
    May 17th, 2015 @ 6:33 pm

    Human nature, like belief in God must be renounced because there can be no higher power than the Cause. It would also go to prove that nobody was responsible for the state of humanity, and we all know how much leftists need their Goldsteins.

  39. Matt_SE
    May 17th, 2015 @ 6:35 pm

    I’m getting the idea that they want to take down society first and foremost, at all costs. It doesn’t much matter to them what perverted manner they use.

  40. Matt_SE
    May 17th, 2015 @ 6:36 pm

    You’re CURED!

  41. Matt_SE
    May 17th, 2015 @ 6:51 pm

    The boredom of affluenza drives them into the quasi-religion of Marxism.
    Idle hands really are the Devil’s tools.

  42. Matt_SE
    May 17th, 2015 @ 7:01 pm

    I’m just going into engineering at university myself. They hide the crazy in general requirements.
    At my U, humanities come in several categories: [H] = history, [G] = global, [C] = cultural, etc.
    You want to take a minimum of classes, so you take ones that intersect (coincidence?).
    I spent 2 hours one day looking through one list to pick the class that was least crazy.
    I decided on “Asian-Pacific-American Studies,” because I don’t recall a lot of racial mumbo-jumbo there.
    One of the textbooks is titled “I Love Yous are for White People.”
    Yeah…

  43. DeadMessenger
    May 17th, 2015 @ 7:08 pm

    “I Love Yous are for White People”??? What the hell does that have to do with anything, let alone the topic under discussion? Boy, I sure am glad that I went to engineering school before all the modern crazy. Because I went there to learn about electricity and engineering, and everything else was unnecessary bs. Except math.

  44. DeadMessenger
    May 17th, 2015 @ 7:14 pm

    Not in my case. I was raised in a cult. I’d say that these days, at least half of all true Christians in the world had no kind of Christian background. I mentor some of them online every single day.

  45. DeadMessenger
    May 17th, 2015 @ 7:22 pm

    Tell you what Walls, I didn’t want to put either myself or my parents in debt for my education, so I worked both full time and part time jobs at the same time that I went to college (private one) part time. Took me 8 years, but I earned it myself. Honors student, too, with a perfect GPA. Because I wanted it bad enough.

    Funny thing was, because I spent my own money on it, I made my profs actually teach me stuff. If they weren’t, I’d go to the Dean and b1tch until he did domething about it.

    My point is, if I could do it, so can your kids. I’m not special, I’m just persistent.

  46. DeadMessenger
    May 17th, 2015 @ 7:24 pm

    Used to be a time when most folks believed that. Doesn’t seem to be the case these days, though.

  47. DeadMessenger
    May 17th, 2015 @ 7:36 pm

    I was just going to say that. Physical violence? Well, a S&W beats four aces, I always say. Alternately, my dad and brothers will find you, and kick your a$$ (at the minimum). So threat of violence doesn’t fly in the face of reality.

    This is why only an insane person would want to destroy the family unit. That’s where your support and protection comes from. Which is why evil governments don’t want you to have strong family ties. (And since our government is leading us down the road of familial destruction, what does that say about it?)

  48. DeadMessenger
    May 17th, 2015 @ 7:38 pm

    I’ve read there’s a non-trivial level of domestic violence in lesbian “marriages”.

  49. RKae
    May 17th, 2015 @ 7:54 pm

    I left the faith completely, had every opportunity to fall for anything else the world had to offer, and all my experience and lots and lots of heavy thinking brought me back to Christianity.

    If I was “mind-controlled” into Christianity (as anyone on the left believes I was) then why did the church allow me to completely walk away from the faith? Were they that certain I’d come back eventually?

    It was a case of “If you love something, set it free, and if it doesn’t come back…”

    Is there any other group that will do their followers that favor? The feminists certainly don’t. They won’t allow anyone to walk away.

  50. RKae
    May 17th, 2015 @ 7:59 pm

    The numbers are indeed scary.