The Other McCain

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

‘A Mad Scramble for Victim Status’

Posted on | September 10, 2016 | Comments Off on ‘A Mad Scramble for Victim Status’

 

Christina Hoff Sommers is old enough to remember the 1960s, and must be amused by the absurd protests that erupt whenever she appears on university campuses. Back in the day, when students rioted over the Vietnam War and the governor sent in the National Guard, it was a serious thing. Nowadays? Fat white girls shouting “racist” at a speaker they don’t like — this is difficult to take seriously and yet, because young people themselves take this quite seriously, it requires our attention.

Dr. Sommers spent years in academia, teaching at the University of Massachusetts and Clark University. During a recent interview with North Dakota State University Professor Clay Routledge of Psychology Today, Dr. Sommers elaborated her critique of modern feminism:

Women are not children. We are not fragile little birds who can’t cope with jokes, works of art, or controversial speakers. Trigger warnings and safe spaces are an infantilizing setback for feminism — and for women. . . .
There is a theory behind the culture of victimhood: It’s called “intersectionality.” This theory posits that racism, sexism, classism, ableism, etc. are interconnected, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing. Together they form a “matrix of oppression.” This matrix is not visible to all of us because elites disguised it via manufactured concepts. Examples include “reason,” and “evidence,” which are supposedly objective, but are in fact can be masculinist, heterosexist, and colonialist “ways of knowing.” . . . However, the theory, following Foucault, teaches that “marginalized others” have access to other ways of knowing, and therefore to deeper, more authentic truths about human reality. They can share that knowledge by speaking about their lived experience while in a safe space. But to provide this kind of safety, members of privileged groups, i.e. white, able-bodied, cis-gendered middle class men, must keep quiet. It’s no wonder there is a mad scramble for victim status on many campuses today. It confers authority and prestige.

You can read the whole thing. My disagreement with Dr. Sommers, as I’ve explained several times over the years, is that she insists there is something called “feminism” which is worth defending, and that the feminist movement has been hijacked by radicals. By contrast, my opinion — and I have provided abundant evidence to justify this view — is that radicals didn’t “hijack” the feminist movement, because they were the ones who built it. Feminism was always inherently radical, intolerant of dissent, and destructive in its goals. Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It, and therefore must be opposed with unflinching determination. This was the stance that made the late Phyllis Schlafly such a heroic figure in conservative history. Despite her own heroic courage and brilliant scholarship, Dr. Sommers’ effort to save feminism from itself is ultimately doomed. Feminism is a cult, and university campuses are the sacred temples of the feminist cult, so that anyone on campus who expresses skepticism toward the cult’s ideology is denounced as a heretic. “Hate speech” is the new blasphemy.

Student protesters accuse Christina Hoff Sommers of ‘hate speech.’

Feminism is a species of mental illness, as I have explained:

For more than two years, I have been urging conservatives to begin Taking Feminism Seriously. When I was assigned to cover the DC SlutWalk protest for The America Spectator in August 2013, I saw first-hand and at close range the kind of delusional madness that has taken hold in the minds of young women under the influence of so-called Third Wave feminism. While it can be argued that Second Wave feminism (i.e., the radical Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s and ’70s) was similarly insane, Third Wave feminism has taken this lunacy beyond every hitherto imaginable limit.

If ever there was any hope that feminism could be reformed, to become a movement that rational and responsible adults could support, that hope was long ago eradicated by the fanatics who lead the movement, including the hundreds of radical professors who are paid to indoctrinate some 90,000 students annually in Women’s Studies programs on more than 700 campuses nationwide. It is these students — irrational extremists trained in the movement’s anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology — who become feminist leaders, acting as commissars who enforce unwavering adherence to the movement’s quasi-religious hate doctrines.

“[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

Every single word of that is as true today as it was in 1992, and certainly Dr. Sommers is aware of the lesbian witchcraft aspect of feminism, considering that her high-school best friend Miriam Simos grew up to become the lesbian feminist witch known as Starhawk. Claims of “access to other ways of knowing, and . . . deeper, more authentic truths,” as Dr. Sommers says, are why feminism is essentially a religion.

“Right now, today, as of writing this, I identify as queer. But I didn’t always. And no, I’m not referring to that awkward, uncomfortable time in my life where I knew that something felt ‘off,’ but I couldn’t quite place it, and so I paraded around in the charade of ‘straight.’ I mean that a few years ago, I identified as homoflexible. And before that, a lesbian. And even before that, bisexual.”
— Melissa Fabello

Melissa Fabello hates men so much that she is now managing editor of Everyday Feminism, a site dedicated to abolishing heterosexuality by promoting LGBTQIA feminism. She condemns heterosexual men as perpetrators of “the male gaze,” “rape culture” and “male sexual entitlement” and boastfully identifies herself as a “patriarchy smasher.”

Ms. Fabello’s outspoken contempt for males is an attitude that is now obligatory in the movement. To quote the title of a recent textbook by Women’s Studies Professor Mimi Marinucci, Feminism Is Queer, and the movement’s implacable hostility toward heterosexual men requires an intensity of devotion that can only be described as religious zealotry.

Melissa Fabello preaches the transformative gospel of her feminist faith:

I often joke with people that feminism has been like a born-again religion for me — that once I found it and let it into my life, my entire perspective shifted in such a way that suddenly, everything made sense — and that I feel compelled to spread that gospel.
See, because when I first started discovering feminism, I realized how many of the bad things that have happened in my life, big and small, have been part of a larger social system. And coming to understand that it was never my fault or about me individually gave me space to start an immense healing process.
And when intersectional feminism found its way into my life, I was even more enamored: Not only did feminism explain what had gone wrong in my own life and the lives of other women, but it explained essentially every awful thing in the world. . . .
Because feminism has changed everything — has regenerated every cell in my body so that I am a completely different person with it than I was without it.
And I’m thankful for that every single day.

Facts and logic mean nothing to fanatics like Melissa Fabello. Feminism’s cult followers are devoted to a satanic doctrine of radical hatred.

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The Sex Trouble project has been supported by contributions from readers. The first edition of Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the War on Human Nature is available from Amazon.com, $11.96 in paperback or $1.99 in Kindle ebook format.




 


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