The Other McCain

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

Why Feminists Hate Beauty (And How Capitalism Makes Fairy Tales Come True)

Posted on | March 21, 2016 | 77 Comments

 

Grace Kelly is arguably the most beautiful actress in cinematic history, yet what if she had never gone to Hollywood? Keep that thought in mind the next time you read a Harvard feminist ranting against “the psychology of female objectification,” or denunciations of “the male gaze” in media.

“The male gaze, which refers to the lens through which mostly white, heterosexual men are viewing the world, is a lens of entitlement.”
— Kelsey Lueptow, “4 Ways To Challenge The Male Gaze,” 2013

“Making all the Princesses beautiful, while all the villains are obese or ugly, the Disney Company reinforces the idea that one’s physical appearance is a manifestation of one’s personality. . . .
“The protagonists of these films fulfill unrealistic expectations of beauty, which are then perpetuated as the norm to mainstream society. Giving young girls the idea that they must be beautiful or they will not succeed is incredibly harmful.”
— Melanie Greenblatt, “The Heteronormative Objectification of Women in the Disney Princess Films: A Study of Brand Advertising and Parents’ Perceptions,” 2013

“Western beauty practices not only arise from the subordination of women, but should perhaps be seen as the most publicly visible evidence of that subordination. . . . They are justified by tradition, as in the popular wisdom that women have always wanted to be beautiful and that it is natural for men to be attracted to ‘beautiful’ women.”
— Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West (2005; second edition, 2015)

This kind of feminist rhetoric implies:

  1. Male admiration of female beauty is inherently wrong;
  2. Such “objectification” is not a natural expression of human biology, but is instead “socially constructed” and thus fundamentally political, a manifestation of “male supremacy”;
    and
  3. There is no such thing as beauty, but rather only an artificial preference for certain types of female appearance based in male supremacy and reinforced through media messages.

Feminism’s attack on The Beauty Myth (Naomi Wolf, 1991) would have us believe that Hollywood producers, Paris fashion designers, Madison Avenue advertisers and other sinister forces of patriarchal capitalism have conspired to brainwash us into believing that some women are more beautiful than others. “All Bodies Are Beautiful” has become a popular feminist slogan, and skepticism is impermissible — a ThoughtCrime.

Any man who doubts this ideology — aesthetic egalitarianism, we might call it — will find himself denounced as a misogynist. Men are wrong to prefer Kate Upton to Lena Dunham, according to feminists who wish to silence male praise for beauty, because feminists believe that men’s enjoyment of beauty is harmful, oppressive, sexist. This anti-beauty message has been a core component of feminist rhetoric since 1968, when the Women’s Liberation movement emerged from the New Left and staged its first public protest against the Miss America pageant. Beauty pageants “epitomize the roles we are all forced to play as women,” the protesters declared, proclaiming that “women in our society [are] forced daily to compete for male approval, enslaved by ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards we ourselves are conditioned to take seriously.”

Notice the words “forced,” “enslaved” and “conditioned,” used to imply that these “ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards” are imposed on women against their will. Are women “forced” to play these “roles”? Do women “compete for male approval” because they have been “conditioned” to do so? Before you answer, consider this: No one is offended if we say, for example, that Warren Buffett is rich, Stefan Curry is tall, or Vladimir Putin is powerful. The scale of values by which men are measured in terms of status and prestige is not controversial. There is no “social justice” movement of men complaining that women are attracted to millionaires, athletes and other high-status males, whereas feminism routinely stigmatizes the normal preferences of heterosexual males.

A radical egalitarian ideology derived from Marxism (many feminist leaders of the 1960s and ’70s were “Red Diaper babies,” i.e., children of Communist Party members), feminist theory assumes that every observable inequality between men and women is unjust and oppressive. The propaganda of such a movement requires that women’s lives be depicted as an endless nightmare of suffering, and that males be demonized as enemies who cruelly inflict this oppression on women.

Feminism is a cult and, like all other cults, seeks its recruits among vulnerable young people who are in some way alienated from society.

 

Feminism’s quasi-religious cult belief system explains to the young recruit that her antisocial resentments — toward her parents, her siblings, her classmates in school, her ex-boyfriend — are entirely justified. Her feelings of self-pity and anger are rationalized by feminist ideology, and she is encouraged to focus her anger on targets designated by the cult leaders. She is supplied with a vocabulary of jargon (“rape culture,” “heteronormativity,” “phallocentrism,” etc.) that makes her feel morally and intellectually superior to those outside the cult. Once she has learned to view life through the warped lenses of feminist theory, it is impossible for her to relate normally to others. She becomes disdainful of anyone who does not share her fanatical devotion to the feminist cause.

Eric Hoffer’s 1951 classic The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements shows how political cults like feminism operate. Yet our education system does not make Hoffer required reading for high school students, to inoculate them against the True Believer mentality. Nor do taxpayer-supported schools ever expose students to anything written by the most articulate critics of the feminist movement. No public high school in America would assign, for example, Christina Hoff Sommers’ Who Stole Feminism? or Carrie Lukas’ The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism. There is a vast library of books by women authors — Danielle Crittenden, Carolyn Graglia, Helen Smith, Dana Mack, Daphne Patai, Mary Eberstadt, et al. — who in one way or another dissent from the anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology of radical feminism.

“The discourses which particularly oppress all of us, lesbians, women, and homosexual men, are those discourses which take for granted that what founds society, any society, is heterosexuality. . . . These discourses of heterosexuality oppress us in the sense that they prevent us from speaking unless we speak in their terms.”
— Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” 1978

“I think heterosexuality cannot come naturally to many women: I think that widespread heterosexuality among women is a highly artificial product of the patriarchy. . . . I think that most women have to be coerced into heterosexuality.”
— Marilyn Frye, “A Lesbian’s Perspective on Women’s Studies,” speech to the National Women’s Studies Association conference, 1980

“In contrast to young women, whose empowerment can be seen as a process of resistance to male dominated heterosexuality, young, able-bodied, heterosexual men can access power through the language, structures and identities of hegemonic masculinity.”
— Janet Holland, Caroline Ramazanoglu, Sue Sharpe and Rachel Thomson, The Male in the Head: Young People, Heterosexuality and Power (1998)

“There are politics in sexual relationships because they occur in the context of a society that assigns power based on gender and other systems of inequality and privilege. . . . [T]he interconnections of systems are reflected in the concept of heteropatriarchy, the dominance associated with a gender binary system that presumes heterosexuality as a social norm. . . .
“As many feminists have pointed out, heterosexuality is organized in such a way that the power men have in society gets carried into relationships and can encourage women’s subservience, sexually and emotionally.”
— Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee, Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions (fifth edition, 2012)

“Only when we recognize that ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’ are made-up categories, invented to control human beings and violently imposed, can we truly understand the nature of sexism. . . .
“Questioning gender . . . is an essential part of the feminism that has sustained me through two decades of personal and political struggle.”
— Laurie Penny, “How to Be a Genderqueer Feminist,” 2015

Feminism assumes as it premise that women constitute an oppressed class, “a sexual caste subordinated to the dominant ruling sex, man,” as Barbara Burris and her comrades asserted in their 1971 “Fourth World Manifesto.” Or, to cite a more recent source: “The sexual caste system privileges male heterosexuals over everyone else,” according to Professor JoAnne Myers, co-founder of Women’s Studies at Marist College.

This radical worldview is now widely accepted at elite schools like the University of Southern California, where the executive director of the USC Women’s Student Assembly calls for the “dismantling of our capitalist imperialist white supremacist cisheteronormative patriarchy.”

Let us now return to the question: What if Grace Kelly had never gone to Hollywood? You must understand that it was only the modern technology of cinema (invented by Thomas Edison in the 1890s) which eventually made it possible for the entire world to admire the beauty of Grace Kelly. Born in 1929, the third of four children of a prosperous Irish Catholic family in Philadelphia, she was 23 when she signed her first Hollywood contract for $850 a week. Two years later, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Two year after that, the 26-year-old star retired from acting to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco, and Princess Grace became the mother of three royal offspring, Caroline, Albert and Stephanie.

 

Feminists who denounce the “heteronormative objectification” of Disney movies for promoting “unrealistic expectations of beauty” would have us ignore the implications of Princess Grace’s biography. We now take for granted the technology that took Grace Kelly from Philadelphia to Hollywood to the royal court of Monaco, just as we take for granted the technology that permits a blogger in his pajamas to critique the theories of Harvard students and tenured professors. This technology — produced by a system known as capitalism — is phenomenally powerful and innovative, and capitalism liberates human beings in amazing ways.

Capitalism pays our bills, capitalism feeds our children, capitalism funds the enterprises that provide us with the means of communication and transportation by which an Irish Catholic girl from Philadelphia can become European royalty. Capitalism makes fairy tales come true.

 

Well, why does Professor Jeffreys scoff at the idea that “women have always wanted to be beautiful and that it is natural for men to be attracted to ‘beautiful’ women”? Why does she put “beautiful” in quotation marks, as if the meaning of this word was somehow suspicious or misleading? Or why would other feminist professors speak of heterosexuality as “a highly artificial product of the patriarchy,” by which men “access power through . . . hegemonic masculinity” within “a gender binary system that presumes heterosexuality as a social norm”?

“[Feminism is] a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”
— Pat Robertson, 1992

Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It, an ideology profoundly hostile to everything that brings hope and happiness to human life, including both capitalism and beauty.

Here at the desk in my home office, I am surrounded by stack of books about feminist theory: Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality by Peggy Reeves Sanday (1981), The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory by Marilyn Frye (1983), The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner (1986), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State by Catharine MacKinnon (1989), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler (1990),  Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives by Carole R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim (2002), Theorizing Sexuality by Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott (2010) and Modern Feminist Theory: An Introduction by Jennifer Rich (2014), to name but a few. None of these books, however, are actually helpful in understanding human nature. In fact, we have reason to suspect, confusion is a common result for the many thousands of young students who are indoctrinated in feminist theory in university Women’s Studies courses every year. Why do we need professors teaching theory, when the truth is so simple?

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply . . .”
— Genesis 1:27-28 (KJV)

No student at Harvard (annual tuition $45,278) or Yale (annual tuition $47,600) is taught this truth. It is unlikely a student who believes the Bible would go anywhere near Harvard or Yale. The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved, and no Christian parent would send their children to such infernal institutions, where perverted professors teach satanic doctrines to corrupt the souls and poison the minds of youth.

Feminists reject any suggestion that there is anything natural about human sexual behavior, instead believing women are “coerced into heterosexuality” because of “the power men have in society.” Feminists believe “that ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’ are made-up categories,” and this denial of any natural basis for heterosexual attraction means that male admiration of beauty — and women’s pleasure in being admired by men — can only “arise from the subordination of women.”

Because feminists are “without natural affection” (Romans 1:31), they seek to destroy human happiness. Feminists hate love itself.




 

 


Category: Sex Trouble

Comments

77 Responses to “Why Feminists Hate Beauty (And How Capitalism Makes Fairy Tales Come True)”

  1. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    March 22nd, 2016 @ 1:12 pm

    Everyone should read Virginia Postrel’s http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Glamour-Longing-Persuasion/dp/1416561110

  2. MC227
    March 22nd, 2016 @ 2:05 pm

    Feminists are disgusting pigs that have always been unattractive and are pissed that some kid in 5th grade called them a skank and they just can’t get over it. After bathing in their feminist nonsense for several years they are angrier than ever and more unattractive than ever. And the more miserable they get. What is confusing is the nutless wonder that marries one of these monsters.

  3. Art Deco
    March 22nd, 2016 @ 2:26 pm

    Actually, Melissa Click earned a business degree at one of the state colleges in Virginia, an astonishingly practical course of study given what happened later. It was sometime past that that her mind was infected with a stew of resentment and political sectarianism. I think the certificate in gender studies was something she was awarded around age 29.

  4. Adam G. Yoksas
    March 22nd, 2016 @ 2:27 pm

    Thank you for a detailed response, Stacy.

    Actually, I think you’d be rather impressed with the education of a lot of 35-44 year old liberals. We read Voegelin. We read Strauss. I was part of a generation of political science students to not only have no required course in socialist theory, but not even a course offering in socialist thought. I had to learn most of my Marxism on my own.

    The professors didn’t think it was necessary anymore. They thought Francis Fukuyama was correct when he said we were living in “the end of history” and that Marxism was a dead end. Whatever leftism remained poured its energy into Third Way or literary deconstructionism.

    A lot of that has changed today. Marx is back on the syllabus. But when I was going to school, it seemed like radical leftism was “out of style” so to speak.

    But I can’t help but notice that feminism went through a divorce from Marxism for the reason many divorces happen. Marxism, and its concern for working class men, was “holding her back.”

    I can give you a date when I think it happened, and a text. It was 1982 with the publication of “Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State” in the journal Signs. One of the most insightful lines in it is MacKinnon’s critique of Marxist heavyweight Rosa Luxemburg, “Luxemburg sees the bourgeois woman of her time is a ‘parasite of a parasite’ but fails to consider her commonality with the proletarian woman who is a slave of a slave” (pp. 521-522).

  5. Art Deco
    March 22nd, 2016 @ 2:29 pm

    Melissa Click was employed on the academic (or pseudo-academic) wing of the communications faculty at the University of Missouri. She had a vocational interest in propagating the notion that we’re all putty in the hands of those manipulating words and images.

  6. Art Deco
    March 22nd, 2016 @ 2:32 pm

    Actually, I think you’d be rather impressed with the education of a lot
    of 35-44 year old liberals. We read Voegelin. We read Strauss.

    No, I wouldn’t, because few people are ensconced in the intellectual history wing of the political science faculty. Rank and file partisan Democrats think in terms of quips and slogans, and if you fancy otherwise, look at our Facebook timeline (given that Democrats just have to tell you what they think about the news while Republicans publish pictures of the daughters). John Rawls and John Dewey they’ve barely heard of. It’s Jon Stewart and John Oliver they know.

  7. Art Deco
    March 22nd, 2016 @ 2:39 pm

    Must disagree. Anna Quindlen and Ellen Goodman are not the heirs of Shulamith Firestone. They are the bearers of their own ill-wisdom about the human person (and Goodman is older than Firestone).

    If you want an antecedent to Quindlen, it might be the fictional “Laura Reynolds” in the play Tea and Sympathy, though Mrs. Reynolds was addressing a genuinely problematic character and not a gross caricature of her own manufacture. An antecedent to Goodman would be some idiot dreamed up by Robert Penn Warren, perhaps.

  8. Fail Burton
    March 22nd, 2016 @ 2:54 pm

    It’s not just that their consciousness has been raised. In post-structuralist theory that happens automatically to anyone who is oppressed by “compulsory” conformity of any kind (read: failure). It’s a reworking of the ages old story/myth of an oppressed population being secretly smarter than the people who own them and their nations lock, stock and barrel. It’s the myth promoted by Sayd Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood in his book Milestones; the West is technologically superior but morally inferior. It’s the magical thinking of an inferior personality with esteem issues. Nasser hung Qutb for his magical thinking.

  9. Why Feminists Hate Beauty (And How Capitalism Makes Fairy Tales Come True) | Living in Anglo-America
    March 22nd, 2016 @ 3:12 pm

    […] Why Feminists Hate Beauty (And How Capitalism Makes Fairy Tales Come True) […]

  10. Elmer The Jones
    March 22nd, 2016 @ 3:39 pm

    Turns out there is already an SJW Hitler complete with iconic glasses :

    http://hipsterhitler.com/

  11. pschieber
    March 22nd, 2016 @ 6:55 pm

    I’m a child of the 60’s. Once my friend asked me why I wasn’t a feminist and I replied , ” Because I’m not ugly. I like men and always have boyfriends.” Mr. McCain you are 100% correct.

  12. Adam G. Yoksas
    March 22nd, 2016 @ 7:47 pm

    I agree with you, but this lack of literary foundation isn’t just a Democratic vice.

    Plenty of Republicans haven’t read their Burke, or their Oakeshott, or their Russell Kirk. Maybe that’s why I like to hang out on RS McCain’s blog. Because I can tell from his entries that he’s read that stuff, which is rare to find.

    A lot of conservatives don’t know who those people are, and really don’t care to know. And then conservatives wonder why they have Trump problems?

  13. Daniel Freeman
    March 22nd, 2016 @ 11:35 pm

    There is no “social justice” movement of men complaining that women are attracted to millionaires, athletes and other high-status males, whereas feminism routinely stigmatizes the normal preferences of heterosexual males.

    Well, there’s actually a word for women’s desire to marry up — hypergamy — but even in the MRM, nobody wants to be associated with the kind of guy who complains about it. Women have a right to want what they want, just as men do.

    The point of having a word for it is just to be able to say the obvious: women are sex objects and men are success objects. If you want to be wanted, then you have to be someone’s object. Deal with it.

  14. Daniel Freeman
    March 22nd, 2016 @ 11:39 pm

    It’s also cruel to the women who might think it’s true. It sets them up to get embarrassed by being rejected by guys they shouldn’t have been hitting on in the first place.

  15. Daniel Freeman
    March 22nd, 2016 @ 11:50 pm

    Steve Jobs was the most salient example of a guy who saved decision energy by wearing the same thing every day, but only because most guys with that much money wear suits. I used to think it was silly when I heard of guys letting their wives pick out their ties; now I understand they’re saving energy.

    A woman tried it as an experiment, wearing the same cheap outfit every day. She was happier.

  16. Daniel Freeman
    March 23rd, 2016 @ 12:01 am

    Yes. Stacy is no MRA but I have been, and the anti-feminists are nearly evenly split between left and right because today’s feminists are so horrible that as you point out, even a Marxist would oppose them.

  17. Joe Cavanaugh
    March 23rd, 2016 @ 2:52 am

    oh that is comedy gold. thanks for this. I’ve saved the pic for future lolz.

  18. Joe Cavanaugh
    March 23rd, 2016 @ 2:56 am

    this has to be the most profound difference between the sexes. women complain; they see nothing odd about organizing and complaining about…anything.

    men won’t complain, even if they need to for their own health. men see a problem and when they decide it is insurmountable, they walk away.

  19. Art Deco
    March 23rd, 2016 @ 6:24 pm

    You let your wife pick out your tie and you’re likely to be headed to work in something about as wide as a Firestone steel-belted radial. It will also be embroidered with giant ladybugs.

    Thin ties, monochromatic. Always.

  20. Art Deco
    March 23rd, 2016 @ 6:36 pm

    If you want to be wanted, then you have to be someone’s object.

    The overwhelming majority (20 to 1) will be married at some point in their life. Most people are neither particularly attractive nor particularly affluent.

    There’s actually quite a bit of complaining in red pill discussion. Women’s culture is not static and critiquing contemporary manifestations is legitimate. The probability that a woman would, in the course of her life, file a divorce suit, was around about 15% for the 1930 cohort and around about 40% for the 1950 cohort.

    The difficulty you get in red pill discussion is that they tend to take one or two influential vectors and try to make of them a Theory of Everything in the realm of human relations. Listening to them, you’d think every man in America employed in steady work below the professional-managerial stratum (and not given to criminality or sociopathic bar hopping) was living alone and whacking off to internet porn.

    You also see these absurd discussions with questions like “Is Gen. Petraeus beta?” They’ve constructed a hierarchy of cool wherein some pseudonymous bloke bachelor who persuades large numbers of unattractive women in their cups to lie down with him is higher status than the most accomplished flag rank officer of his generation.

  21. Vibrant C. Mandate
    March 24th, 2016 @ 11:31 am

    Me too. Almost equally, even!

    ( I think Twitter prob. helps facilitate that…)..

  22. Vibrant C. Mandate
    March 24th, 2016 @ 12:01 pm

    The Easter Bunny just got beat up this week in a mall in New Jersey.

  23. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    March 24th, 2016 @ 2:41 pm

    http://cdn.meme.am/instances/17947042.jpg

  24. Wombat_socho
    March 25th, 2016 @ 1:01 am

    And their country is full of insanely steep mountains.

  25. Wombat_socho
    March 25th, 2016 @ 1:04 am

    I was going to mention that, but I see you found it on your own.

  26. What Feminism Is and Isn’t : The Other McCain
    March 25th, 2016 @ 9:38 pm

    […] admiration of female beauty, and women’s desire to attract male admiration. Not only do feminists hate beauty, but they also hate love itself. Pioneering feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson declared, “Love has to be […]

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