Corporation Promotes Lesbian Feminist Slogan Expressing Anti-Male Rage

Posted on | October 23, 2017 | 3 Comments

 

“The Future Is Female” originated in the extreme fringe of the lesbian separatist movement of the 1970s. By the time Alix Dobkin was photographed wearing this slogan on a T-shirt — promoting a feminist bookstore in New York — the so-called Women’s Liberation Movement that arose in the late 1960s had burned out and fragmented. Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, however. In the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, Third Wave feminists have repeated the error of their predecessors, doubling-down on their anti-male rhetoric and hurling accusations of “misogyny” at anyone who criticizes them.

 

Consider the case of Elise Williams, content editor for the online advertising firm Inuvo, who used their site Earn Spend Live as a platform for a “feminist rant” endorsing this radical anti-male slogan:

The other day, Earn Spend Live’s other co-founder, Meleah, rocked her “The Future is Female” tee. As someone who 1) knows Meleah and 2) knows the meaning and origin of this famous saying, I didn’t even bat an eye. I said “love it” and went about my business. But she later told me that at one point during the day, a woman took her to the side, hugged her, and told her that “with love,” she wanted to let her know that her shirt could be offensive. “What if little boys saw it? What if my 26-year-old son saw it?”
Meleah insisted that the interaction was overall a pleasant one — the woman was nice, Meleah politely told her that little boys had 45 presidents and a million superheroes to look up to so they’d be fine, and that was that. But no matter how “nice” this interaction was, it just didn’t sit well with me. And once I did a little reading on the internet, I discovered this is actually a fairly common reaction, especially for women with sons. . . .

Let’s briefly interrupt this “feminist rant” to point out that (a) Meleah Bowles has purple hair, (b) neither Ms. Bowles nor Ms. Williams has any children, so that (c) they are discussing a “future” that will include none of their own offspring. On her Instagram profile, Ms. Williams calls herself a “cat mom,” while Ms. Bowles’ Twitter profile describes her as devoted to “coffee, dogs, and TV.” No husbands, no children, no family — this is what “The Future Is Female” means, and Ms. Williams emphasizes that she “knows the meaning and origin” of this anti-male/anti-heterosexual slogan: “I love it.” Ms. Williams continues:

I only recently became a feminist. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment — it’s not like you get sprinkled with holy water or you get a free t-shirt — but I’d say it happened while we were creating Earn Spend Live. I had a super privileged upbringing (white, middle class, the works) and amazing parents; I was never made to feel like I was less than men. Plus, I only had a sister, so unlike most of my friends, I was never compared to my brother or told to do the dishes while he mowed the yard. . . .

Notice that Ms. Williams attributes her “super privileged upbringing” to her “amazing parents,” so that we may assume that her father deserves some credit for her good fortune, but never mind that:

But after becoming attached at the hip to Meleah (a proud feminist with blue, sometimes green, sometimes purple hair and t-shirts that say things like “The Future is Female” and “I <3 the Female Orgasm), entering the “real world,” and hearing the stories of older, more experienced female professionals via Earn Spend Live, I realized that I had actually been a feminist in the truest sense of the word my whole life; I just had never been taught the meaning of the word and I had no idea the struggles other women faced. . . .

You can read the rest of that. The point is that, in the process of “creating Earn Spend Live,” Ms. Williams became “attached at the hip” to the purple-haired feminist Ms. Bowles and, as a result, decided she “had actually been a feminist . . . my whole life.” She now endorses the lesbian separatist slogan “The Future Is Female” and is being paid to promote this radical anti-male ideology by her corporate employer, Inuvo.

Meleah Bowles (left) and Elise Williams (right).

Does Inuvo CEO Richard Howe know what he is funding? Are the stockholders, board of directors and customers of Inuvo aware of this? How did a publicly-traded corporation become a sponsor of radical feminism? Well, you hire one social-justice warrior (SJW) and then she’ll begin recruiting others, and next thing you know, you’ve got a feminist cult on your payroll — kind of the way SJWs took over Google and other tech companies. If a corporation is profitable (and Inuvo reported more than $71 million in revenue last year), executives may figure there is no harm in hiring a purple-haired English major and giving her a project like Earn Spend Live, whose mission is “to create a community of women helping each other grapple their finances, navigate their career, and live life to the fullest.” This could be social justice as a marketing strategy, a bit of corporate virtue-signaling to position Inuvo as a “progressive” company. More cynically, it’s a form of litigation insurance: if any female employees at Inuvo ever claim to be victims of discrimination, the executives can just point to the purple-haired SJW running this “community of women” and say, “See? We’re all about equality!”

What does Inuvo’s endorsement of “The Future Is Female” mean? The company’s hiring of Meleah Bowles cannot be an accident. Her senior thesis in college was a denunciation of weddings as a “patriarchal ceremony,” an analysis based on Third Wave feminist gender theory:

Feminist rhetorical criticism is critical to a feminist understanding of gendered institutions, such as bridal ceremonies. . . .
Like feminist rhetorical criticism, feminist critical discourse analysis is concerned with the construction of gender. . . .
Feminist discourse is, at its most basic, a way of discussing the gender dynamics of power particularly as they relate to and reinforce the patriarchal structure of society.

Because Ms. Bowles posted this radical feminist essay to her personal blog as a sample of her “professional writing,” certainly whoever makes the hiring decisions at Inuvo must have been aware of it. Nor has Ms. Bowles made a secret of her far-left politics — an Obama voter who supported Bernie Sanders in last year’s Democrat primaries and, of course, hashtagging #ImWithHer in October 2016.

 

What does such a hire signify about Inuvo’s corporate policy goals? Last month, Ms. Bowles wore her “The Future Is Female” shirt while she and Ms. Williams gave a presentation entitled “Unmasking Modern Day Workplace Discrimination” at a women’s networking event.

 

What sort of “workplace discrimination” do they propose to “unmask”?  Doesn’t the very fact that these feminists are employed by Inuvo, assigned to organize a “community of women,” more likely suggest that the company intends henceforth to stop hiring males? Certainly, young men seeking employment should be advised to avoid Inuvo, whose hiring policies connote the embrace of an anti-male agenda.

When the SJW handwriting is on the corporate wall, so to speak, intelligent young men seek opportunities elsewhere. There are no career opportunities for an ambitious young man in a workplace where slogans about “diversity,” “inclusion” and “social justice” replace productivity and competitive success as organizational goals. Look at how the NFL destroyed its brand by embracing SJW ideology. The league’s half-empty stadiums ought to be a warning to corporate America that “social justice” is a toxic formula for business disaster.

Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It. Corporate executives who seek to appease feminists are likely to be as successful as Neville Chamberlain was in appeasing Hitler:

Feminism is not just anti-male. Feminism is anti-marriage, anti-motherhood, anti-capitalist and anti-Christian. Feminism is destructive in its goals and methods, entirely negative in its purpose and spirit, defining itself by what it is against, i.e., basically everything good and decent in human life. The only things feminists can said to be for are abortion, socialism and homosexuality.

When I explain this in blunt language, people think I’m exaggerating, until I start quoting from the vast library of feminist books I’ve read in the course of three years of research into this subject. (You can view YouTube video of my presentation last month in Massachusetts.)

 

“Certainly all those institutions which were designed on the assumption and for the reinforcement of the male and female role system such as the family (and its sub-institution, marriage), sex, and love must be destroyed.”
— “The Feminists: A Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles,” 1969, in Radical Feminism, edited by Anne Koedt, et al. (1973)

“Women are a degraded and terrorized people. Women are degraded and terrorized by men. … Women’s bodies are possessed by men. … Women are an enslaved population. … Women are an occupied people.”
— Andrea Dworkin, 1977 speech at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in Letters from a War Zone (1993)

“The first condition for escaping from forced motherhood and sexual slavery is escape from the patriarchal institution of marriage.”
— Alison M. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (1988)

“As those familiar with feminist theory know, feminists advocate lesbianism on a variety of grounds. . . .
“Patriarchy, although it takes different forms in different cultures, always depends on the ability of men to control women through heterosexuality.”
— Joyce Trebilcot, “Taking Responsibility for Sexuality,” 1982, in Dyke Ideas: Process, Politics, Daily Life (1994)

“Women’s heterosexual orientation perpetuates their social, economic, emotional, and sexual dependence on and accessibility by men. Heterosexuality is thus a system of male ownership of women.”
— Cheshire Calhoun, “Separating Lesbian Theory from Feminist Theory,” 1994, in Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, edited by Carole McCann and Seung-kyung Kim (2013)

“[F]eminist scholars argue that heteorosexuality is a prime facet through which male power and dominance is managed and maintained . . . a patriarchal institution that functions to subordinate, degrade and oppress women.”
— Claire O’Callaghan, Sarah Waters: Gender and Sexual Politics (2017)

You see that this is not what I say feminism means; this is what feminists say feminism means. Third Wave feminists like Ms. Bowles and Ms. Williams believe the gender binary is socially constructed by the heterosexual matrix. In other words, feminists assert that there are no natural differences between men and women. Feminists believe all women are oppressed by “the gender dynamics of power” which “reinforce the patriarchal structure of society,” to employ the rhetoric of Ms. Bowles’s senior thesis. The family and marriage must be “destroyed” (Koedt, et al., 1973) because women are “enslaved” (Dworkin, 1993) by “the patriarchal institution of marriage” (Jaggar, 1988). Because “men . . . control women through heterosexuality” (Trebilcot, 1994), feminists are against this “system of male ownership of women” (Calhoun, 1994), “a patriarchal institution that functions to subordinate, degrade and oppress women” (O’Callaghan, 2017). And feminists condemn anyone who disagrees with them as a “misogynist,” a woman-hater.

Feminists have been saying these things for decades, but it seems that no conservative ever bothered to conduct a systematic survey and analysis of feminist theory until I took up this project in 2014.

Feminist rhetoric (e.g., “Smash the Patriarchy”) demonizes males as oppressors, treating all men as villainous enemies in a social-justice narrative based on a zero-sum game mentality in which male success is stigmatized as the result of unjust “male privilege.” The only way any man obtains professional success, according to feminist theory, is through the oppression and exploitation of women. The more men succeed, the more women are oppressed; ergo, feminists regard successful male executives like Inuvo’s Richard Howe as evil.

 

When Maleah Bowles says she is fighting patriarchy, what does she mean? Isn’t it reasonable to interpret this as a denunciation of her male co-workers at Inuvo as perpetrators of systematic oppression? Shouldn’t men be insulted by such an accusation? If we believe that incomes are earned by productive labor, then the more productive we are, the more valuable our labor becomes, and the higher our earnings. What is the value produced by Elise Williams’s “feminist rant” at Inuvo’s Earn Spend Live site? How does this “community of women” contribute to the profitability of Inuvo? Isn’t it likely that embracing this radical ideology will ultimately be harmful to Inuvo’s business? Well, that’s their call to make, and if the company’s stockholders are eager to fund feminism’s agenda of anti-male hatred, they are free to do so. However, if anyone at Inuvo were to complain about this, they’d probably be fired (like James Damore), because it’s discrimination to disagree with feminists.

Feminist demands for “equality” are actually a demand for uncontested power, especially including the power to silence dissent.

 

 

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