The Other McCain

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

Quota-Mongers, Gender Nihilism and the Insane Logic of Radical Feminist Theory

Posted on | December 18, 2015 | 53 Comments

 

Ashe Schow at the Washington Examiner reports:

For further evidence that outrage feminists believe gender trumps all else, a new report from the Women’s Media Center bemoans the fact that more articles about campus sexual assault in major newspapers were written by men than by women.
Forget the content of those articles — women should write about rape, and men should write about whatever the modern feminists tell them they can write about. . . .

(Actually, feminists want men to shut up.)

WMC claimed that the gender of the writer skews the content.
“Furthermore, our research shows that the gender of the writer had a significant impact on how stories were covered, with women journalists not only interviewing the alleged victims more often than male journalists, but also writing more about the impact of the alleged attacks on alleged victims,” WMC wrote.
“A higher share of women journalists covered university policies and the prevalence of rape on campus, while a higher share of male journalists focused on campus proceedings and sports culture on campus,” they added.

You can read the whole thing. Feminists want to control who is allowed to write about rape as a means of controlling the narrative. Remember that feminism is a totalitarian movement to destroy civilization as we know it. Totalitarians rely not only on propaganda to promote their own ideology, but also seek to suppress dissent and silence opposition. Feminists have succeeded in effectively prohibiting criticism of their ideology on university campuses, and now seek to extend their hegemonic dominance throughout the culture. What feminism cannot withstand is the kind of sustained critical scrutiny that points out the fundamental absurdity of the feminist movement.

New Deadline for Submissions (May 15th, 2016):
F–k Your Gender Neutral Prison!
A Nihilist Insurrection Against Gender
Due to strong and intensified interest in the anthology, and to the increasing attention being given to Gender Nihilism and other critiques of Western Feminism and Transgender politics, it has been decided to push the deadline to May 15th. This is the new deadline for submissions.
When originally this anthology sought submissions this was a fairly new set of ideas, that mostly existed in online communities and did not have a lot of crossover appeal. Over the months these ideas have exploded and expanded into infinite directions of critique, expansion, and interpretation. It is because of this that I am expanding the anthology and pushing back the deadline.
There is a ‘crisis’ in Western Feminism and Transgender politics: the crisis of the female subject, transmisogyny, homonationalist imperialism and the (settler) coloniality of gender. Lost, driven out, abused, alienated and isolated — we are the victims of a regime of boundaries and definitions, a panoptic gaze of disciplinary behaviors and the ever-shifting goalposts of authenticity. We are the sacrificial lamb at the altar of respectability and profit. The ontological notions of gender and the essentialist politics of every gender based community, even ‘radical’ ones, has pushed us to this. We, much like those before us, call for the Death of the Female Subject and an opposition to trans identity politics of every form.
We cannot allow ourselves to be destroyed through what others call “liberation.” Our close friends call for an infinite expansion of gendered ontologies, new essentialisms, and new identity markers they wish would become intelligible in the eyes of others. Our distant friends see imperialist warfare as the highest form of gay and trans justice. They wish only to be murderers wrapped in a rainbow flag and the military insignia of their nationalist home. Our enemies hold on with their last breath the sex essentialism and gender ontologies of men and doctors – believing they know the real truth.
In every case, we see nothing as the only alternative to their reforms and reactionary essentialisms. We are declaring war. This war will not be fought with rainbow flags and military inclusion, hate crime legislation or prison construction, gentrification or settler-colonization, state recognition or ‘visibility’ politics. This war will be fought against the alienation of daily gendered life.
Inspired by Baedan: The Journal of Queer Nihilism this anthology would focus on the false ontology of gender and essentialism, radical trans politics, transmisogyny, the coloniality of gender, homonationalism, queer nihilism and more.

This is at once both manifestly insane and entirely logical as a consequence of feminist gender theory — the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix. — which denies the reality of human nature.

Translating academic jargon to plain English, feminists believe that equality between men and women can only be achieved by eliminating all differences between men and women. Feminist theory is premised on the denial that there are any meaningful natural differences between men and women; all apparent differences are a result of the artificial influences of a male-dominated society and culture (“patriarchy”). Feminists believe that the traits we think of as human nature — the masculinity of men and the femininity of women — are a coercive imposition of male power, which maintains the patriarchal order through systematic violence against women that Dee Graham called “sexual terror.” The key institution of patriarchy, according to feminist theory, is what Adrienne Rich called “compulsory heterosexuality.”

“All women are prisoners and hostages to men’s world. . . .
Each man is a threat. We can’t escape men.”

 

Anyone who wishes to make sense of feminism must begin at the beginning, tracing this ideology to its origin in the radical Women’s Liberation Movement of the late 1960s and ’70s. Arguably the most important early statement of the movement’s beliefs and objectives is the 1969 Redstockings manifesto:

Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. . . .
We identify the agents of our oppression as men. . . . They have used their power to keep women in an inferior position. . . . All men have oppressed women. . . .
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. . . .
Our chief task at present is to develop female class consciousness through sharing experience and publicly exposing the sexist foundation of all our institutions.

What is crucial about the highlighted passage is the assertion that only women are able to understand their condition of oppression, and that only their “feelings” are “the basis for an analysis.”

Male experience and male feelings are irrelevant. Nothing any man says has any validity to feminists, who assert that their subjective “feelings” about their “personal experience” are a form of knowledge superior to whatever any man can ever claim to know, dismissing in a single phrase (“products of male supremacist culture”) everything that Aristotle, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Locke, Burke, Marx, Freud or any other man has ever said about the human condition. Males know nothing, and this negation of male knowledge is essential to understanding feminism as a totalitarian ideology based on a belief in female supremacy.

This is what confuses people who naively accept feminist claims that their movement is about achieving “equality.” Disregarding all evidence and logic to the contrary, feminists insist that women are still as much “an oppressed class” in 2015 as the Redstockings said they were in 1969. (Never mind, of course, the many articulate critics of feminism who denied that such “oppression” actually existed. Steven Goldberg’s 1973 book The Inevitability of Patriarchy was the classic refutation of that claim, but there is no need to repeat Professor Goldberg’s arguments here.) A careful examination of feminist arguments reveals that what they assert is not the equality of men and women, but rather the intellectual and moral inferiority of males. After all, if men were virtuous and intelligent, we would not need constant lectures from feminists about how stupid, wrong and evil we are. Rebecca Solnit’s recent 2014 bestseller Men Explain Things to Me is a shrewd distillation of this feminist worldview. Although she is careful to insert disclaimers of the “not all men” variety into her arguments, the astute reader perceives that Solnit never met a man whom she considered her equal, and condescends to tolerate males only insofar as they acknowledge her infinite superiority to them. She has no faults or weaknesses; she is omniscient in her wisdom, incapable of failure or error. To disagree with Rebecca Solnit is to be not merely wrong, but also evil. Therefore, no man can speak in her presence except to praise her.

Feminist ideology justifies and rationalizes this narcissistic perspective, and raises the question of how any man can be expected to love a woman who regards him with complete contempt. Supposing that Rebecca Solnit is actually desirous of any romantic involvement with males, on what terms would such a relationship be acceptable to Her Majesty? This question expresses the mystery that has perplexed critics of feminism for more than four decades. Stipulating that everyone is free to arrange their domestic life as it pleases them, where are the men who will agree to serve as subjects under feminist dictatorship? What sort of sadomasochistic psychology could possibly be a basis of mutual attraction? Encountering a woman who never speaks of males except to scorn them as her inferiors, only a man with a depraved appetite for humiliation could desire her companionship.

This is the obverse, incidentally, of what is wrong with “pickup artist” (PUA) discourse. Men who proclaim that they consider sex to be a sport, and view all women as natural prey in their game, thereby disqualify themselves as desirable companions. Would any self-respecting woman wish to add herself as just another number in the long roster of the PUA’s conquests? If he disparages all his previous partners in this manner — just so many pretty fools he has “played” — why should any woman imagine that she would be an exception to the otherwise universal rule? PUAs and feminists mirror each other in their narcissistic selfishness and derogation of the opposite sex. It would be an interesting experiment to see what would occur if the notorious Daryush (“Roosh V”) Valizadeh were to gather a half-dozen or so of his most adept young PUA disciples and infiltrate the next National Young Feminist Leadership Conference. Could the habitual womanizers and implacable man-haters find love together? Certainly, they deserve each other, but I digress . . .

Feminism’s function as a rationalization of selfishness makes it impossible that any feminist could ever justify or defend the normal roles of men and women as husbands and wives, mothers and fathers. Marriage requires cooperation and parenthood requires sacrifice, and feminism encourages women to adopt an attitude of extreme selfishness that is incompatible with any sense of conjugal or maternal duties.

Feminism condemns marriage and motherhood as oppressive “institutions” by which “male power” is used to “keep women in an inferior position,” to quote the Redstockings manifesto. The co-founder of the Redstockings collective, Shulamith Firestone, was emphatic on this subject in her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex: “Pregnancy is barbaric,” (p. 180), and women are “the slave class” (p. 184), because “marriage in its very definition . . . was organized around, and reinforces, a fundamentally oppressive biological condition” (p. 202).

 

Accepting these assertions as the premises of the feminist syllogism, we cannot reject the obvious conclusion of the argument. Here we may quote Rebecca Solnit’s book (p. 62), where she says “feminism made same-sex marriage possible”:

Because a marriage between two people of the same gender is inherently egalitarian — one partner may happen to have more power in any number of ways, but for the most part it’s a relationship between people who have equal standing and so are free to define their roles themselves.

“The personal is political,” radical feminist Carol Hanisch famously proclaimed, but Rebecca Solnit makes no disclosures in Men Explain Things to Me that could help us understand whatever personal stake she might have in the same-sex marriage issue. Has she ever married? Does she have children? If she made any mention of either a husband or offspring in her book, I missed it, and spending more than an hour skimming through online profile features about her divulged no evidence that she has ever married or given birth. A life of unmarried childlessness is entirely common among feminists, of course. There is a long roster, from Shulamith Firestone to Amanda Marcotte, of women who condemned men, marriage and motherhood from the perspective of the barren spinster. Given the fact of Rebecca Solnit’s enthusiasm for same-sex marriage, and that she has lived almost her entire adult life in San Francisco, some might suspect she has followed the feminist syllogism to its obvious conclusion. Avoiding mere speculation, however, we may cite many other authorities on this subject. For example, in 1978, Professor Linda Gordon wrote an essay, “The Struggle for Reproductive Freedom: Three Stages of Feminism,” that was included the anthology Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, edited by Zillah Eisenstein. Professor Gordon wrote:

“The lesbian liberation movement has made possibly the most important contribution to a future sexual liberation. . . . What the women’s liberation movement did create was a homosexual liberation movement that politically challenged male supremacy in one of its most deeply institutionalized aspects — the tyranny of heterosexuality. The political power of lesbianism is a power that can be shared by all women who chose to recognize and use it: the power of an alternative, a possibility that makes male sexual tyranny escapable, rejectable — possibly even doomed.”

This article was quoted in Feminist Politics and Human Nature (1988) by Professor Allison Jaggar, who commented:

“The abolition of compulsory heterosexuality would have an enormous impact on the system of male dominance. . . . The abandonment of compulsory heterosexuality would reshape the sexuality of both girls and boys and, if psychoanalysis is correct, would have tremendous consequences for the structure of the unconscious and for people’s sense of their own gender identity.”

Let us stipulate that both Professor Gordon and Professor Jaggar are correct in their analyses. However much I dislike seeing heterosexuality described as “male sexual tyranny,” we must remember that feminism requires the negation of the male perspective. The man’s experience, and his feelings about that experience, are entirely invalid in feminist discourse. He must remain silent, because only feminists have any basis for analyzing their oppression. Because it is impossible for any man to dispute what Professor Gordon and Professor Jaggar say, I am compelled to agree: Feminism and the “lesbian liberation movement” are essentially one and the same. Heterosexuality and feminism are fundamentally incompatible, and therefore the success of feminism means that the “male sexual tyranny” of heterosexuality is “doomed.”

 

Once you accept the premise of feminist theory — “Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total. . . . All men have oppressed women.” — it is impossible to reach any other conclusion. Feminism aims to destroy “the system of male dominance,” as Professor Jaggar calls it, and this requires employing what Professor Gordon calls the “political power of lesbianism” to destroy “the tyranny of heterosexuality.” If you disagree with this conclusion, your argument is not with me, but rather with these eminent professors. Disagreeing with feminists, however, is now considered a hate crime. This was made clear in June 2014:

Efforts are underway to stop the anti-woman group “A Voice for Men” from holding its first international conference in Detroit the last weekend in June. This “Men’s Rights Advocates” group, based in Houston, promotes male supremacy, sexism and sexual violence against women. It was designated a hate group in 2012 by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes against oppressed people in the U.S.
Hundreds opposed to the conference rallied and marched through downtown Detroit on June 7. Organized largely through social media, the diverse and mainly youthful crowd rallied at Grand Circus Park where speakers denounced the misogynist, hate-based terrorism of MRAs and their anti-woman agenda. Some spoke about surviving sexual assault. Several raised the group’s anti-lesbian-gay-bi-trans-queer agenda and racist nature of MRAs. The LGBTQ community was well represented in the crowd, and Motor City Pride weekend started later that day. . . .
UNITE HERE Local 24 representatives passed out signs to “Boycott Doubletree” and denounced the hotel for hosting the conference of bigots. The union is waging a struggle for union recognition, decent wages and dignity for hotel industry workers, many of whom are women and people of color.
Unafraid and undeterred by male supremacist threats and possible MRA spectators, the protesters marched right up to the Doubletree Hotel and held the street in front of it. . . .
The crowd chanted “Hey, Doubletree, what do you say, would you host the KKK?!” and “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, MRAs go away!” as hotel management refused to accept more than 3,000 petition signatures demanding Doubletree cancel its reservations for the “men’s rights” conference.

Heterosexual males are the KKK, and anyone who speaks a word in favor of men must be part of an “anti-woman . . . hate group.”




 

Category: Sex Trouble

Comments

53 Responses to “Quota-Mongers, Gender Nihilism and the Insane Logic of Radical Feminist Theory”

  1. NeoWayland
    December 22nd, 2015 @ 4:59 pm

    If you bother to read my comments, you’ll find I don’t try to hide what I am saying. After all, I am a pagan libertarian posting openly on a conservative mostly Christian board.

    If you had asked me about the “culture wars,” I’d tell you that war is the wrong way to think about it. War is backed by force. If you can’t convince someone that your way is right without resorting to force, you’re doing it wrong.

    What you believe isn’t important to me. Your freedom to choose what to believe, that is vital. That is what I will defend.

  2. NeoWayland
    December 22nd, 2015 @ 5:02 pm

    I think you’re wrong there.

    Libertarianism presumes that people can mostly work out their differences for themselves.

    Yep, I’d have to agree that libertarianism is anti-nation.

    It is very pro-freedom though. And very individualist.

    A nation has no virtues or vices except what it’s citizens choose.

  3. NeoWayland
    December 22nd, 2015 @ 5:04 pm

    Even if you think it is the wrong choice, we’re obligated to let people choose for themselves. How else will they know which choices work and which do not? If we deny them the freedom to choose, we create the very tool that others will use to deny us that very same freedom. When we make the choice for them, we’re telling them that we don’t consider them responsible to make their own choices. Take away their choice, and we are treating them as something less than a real human.