The Other McCain

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

Fun With #RadFem: ‘You Magnificent Lesbians — I Read Your Books!’

Posted on | June 27, 2014 | 20 Comments

“Something very strange happened toward the end of the twentieth century. Heterosexuality went from being the norm to being on the defensive. By calling this phenomenon ‘heterophobia,’ I am not speaking abstractly. Rather, I am referring to a distinct current within feminism [since the late 1960s], a current that has been ‘theorized’ explicitly by feminist scholars and agitators alike as they attack men and heterosexuality. . . .
“But heterophobia is not merely the work of lesbian separatists, since they, vastly outnumbered by heterosexual women, could never have imposed such an agenda were it not acceptable to heterosexual feminists as well. . . .
“The British lesbian separatist Sheila Jeffreys, in her 1990 book Anticlimax, gives a clear account of the attitude I am calling ‘heterophobia.’ The ‘sexual revolution,’ Jeffreys argues, is positively detrimental to women. The aim of women’s liberation . . . is ‘the destruction of heterosexuality as a system.’ . . . Far from being grounded in biology, heterosexual desire ‘originates in the power relationship between men and women’ . . . What sort of sexuality, then, does Jeffreys approve of? ‘The opposite of heterosexual desire is the eroticising of sameness, a sameness of power, equality and mutuality. It is homosexual desire.'”

Daphne Patai, Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism (1998)

It is true, as Professor Patai makes clear, that the lesbian radicalism of Sheila Jeffreys was, in the 1990s, at or near the ultra fringe of feminist theory. However, it is also true that “mainstream” feminism, even 15 or 20 years ago, never condemned such radicalism but borrowed from the anti-male analyses written by women whose hostile attitude toward heterosexuality was as explicit as it was personal.

Understanding this phenomenon does not require us to engage the specific content of every theory propagated by radical feminists since the 1960s, although in the past few months I have excerpted the works of several of the most notable of them. It is not necessary that I refute their arguments or disprove their analyses for the very reason that it does not matter, for my purposes, whether they are right or wrong. As a matter of fact, there are certain passages of the most radical feminist treatises where I find myself nodding in agreement.

What conservative would disagree, for example, with Sheila Jeffreys’ assertion that the sexual revolution of the past half-century has in many ways been harmful to women? How many abortions, divorces and loveless hookups with selfish creeps does it take before a “liberated” young woman starts wondering if maybe her grandmother had a genuinely better deal back in the supposedly barbaric 1950s?

Yet a conservative critique of the sexual revolution based in myopic nostalgia for the Good Old Days is futile, and no more helpful to women living in the early 21st century than the obsolete rantings of radical feminists who inevitably view the past as the Bad Old Days.

A politics that promises a return to the past is guaranteed to fail because time moves in only one direction. We can learn from the past, but we cannot go back there. By studying the past, we seek an answer to an important question: How did we get here? And we can also, by plotting the trajectory points, get a good estimate of where we are heading in the future, if we continue going in the same direction.

To put it bluntly: We are going to Hell, by the most direct route.

Last summer, I wrote a post with the title, “Taking Feminism Seriously,” which in retrospect seems like the start of a series. A few people have suggested I compile my writing about feminism into a book, a proposal that gives me a headache.

Nevertheless, the point I wish to make now is that I do take feminism seriously, despite my habitual sarcasm. Just because Marxist lesbians seem ridiculous to sane people, doesn’t mean that feminists are not serious in their craziness. A phrase like “the destruction of heterosexuality as a system” may strike us as lunatic gibberish, but there are influential academics — tenured professors of Women’s Studies — who toil daily toward that goal. Even if their radical project is ultimately doomed, even if we believe that human nature must ultimately triumph over ideology, this doesn’t mean that the destructive work of feminism has no impact. To see self-described “queer feminist” Sara Alcid denounce Valentine’s Day as a celebration of “heteronormativity and gender roles . . . the very systems of domination that we work to critique and dismantle” is sad testimony to the fact that this insanity is contagious. And of course, “PIV is always rape, OK?”

Yes, it’s true: The anonymously crazy blogger at Radical Wind — “dropped on her head” — has returned to the feminist fray. After weeks of silence following her global-warming gloomfest, she took up a critique of radical lesbianism that is so nuanced only a Women’s Studies major could understand it. Her chief complaint is that some lesbian feminists condemn other women as benefitting from “heterosexual privilege,” a rhetoric Windy rejects because (a) there is nothing “privileged” about being raped and enslaved by men, (b) the category “heterosexual” is itself a male-imposed myth, and (c) women who criticize other women are misplacing blame, because everything that is wrong in the world can and should be blamed on men. She then followed up with a lengthy explainer:

Intercourse and hetero-captivity being the central building block of men’s oppression, it comes to no surprise that men do everything to erase our awareness of it. . . .
The essence of heterosexuality is sexual violation, and no woman has escaped this violation when in close and prolonged contact with men. . . .
Heterosexuality is compulsory, that is we are psychologically conditioned (through propaganda) and physically forced into it (through sexual harassment, rape, marriage and pimping). This is one of the very basic tenets of radical feminism. Compulsory means the opposite of choice. By definition women never choose to be owned by a man, and the only free choice we can make is to resist hetero-captivity by becoming separatist, lesbian or celibate.
Heterosexuality is the system which guarantees each man sexual access to a woman and exclusive ownership over her so he can rape, impregnate and use her as his personal breeder and domestic slave. . . .
The term “heterosexuality” is fairly recent in history, and appeared in the 19th century at the same time as the pathologisation and psychologisation of lesbians and gays. When women started to free themselves from the institution of marriage, men progressively replaced marriage with compulsory intercourse to all men, and this was sold as sexual liberation to women. However this was nothing other than the liberation of lefty men so they could fuck all the women they wanted outside of the constraints of bourgeois society . . .

Read the whole thing if you need more anti-male enlightenment. “The personal is political,” and if your personal experience — either as a woman or a man, heterosexual or not — fails to corroborate the radical feminist analysis, the question is, “Why?”

Windy’s answer is that you have been “psychologically conditioned” to enjoy your hetero-captivity and oppression: The patriarchy has brainwashed you, because women can “never choose to be owned by a man . . . as his personal breeder and domestic slave.”

All women are victims of the patriarchy, whether they know it or not, and if women don’t realize how oppressed they are, it is only because they haven’t been enlightened by feminist consciousness.

“Feminism Is a Journey to Lesbianism,” as I’ve previously explained, and it is not my purpose to prove feminists wrong about this.

If they say the penis is oppressing them, let ’em do without it.

Being bound by “the constraints of bourgeois society” myself — as a married father of six who recently became a grandfather — I am not at liberty to take a personal interest in women’s decisions to subtract themselves from oppressive hetero-captivity. Keeping my own “personal breeder and domestic slave” happy is difficult enough, without concerning myself with the discontents of other women.

What does concern me, however, is how feminism’s anti-male rhetoric insults every man — and every woman who loves men. Even if I don’t give a damn what feminists think of me, what about my four sons and my grandson? Why about my wife and daughters? Am I really supposed to remain silent when confronted by radicals who insist that my oldest daughter is being cruelly victimized by my son-in-law, and who further insist that my daughter (who graduated summa cum laude) is too stupid to know she’s oppressed?

Damn you, and damn your insulting ideology.

There is no use in being too angry about these insults, however. “The personal is political,” and feminists who feel a personal sense of grievance toward men do not think specifically about me, my wife or my children when they publish their anti-male screeds. And knowing that their grievances are personal — they are angry about how they have been treated by specific men, and have generalized their personal experience into an anti-male ideology — I don’t begrudge them their anger.

Feminists are so cute when they’re offended.

The politically correct sexuality advocated by Sheila Jeffries — based on “a sameness of power, equality and mutuality” — is rejected even by many lesbians. Do you really want me to quote the words of a hard-core butch lesbian who is tired of being told that she and other butches (and the women who love them) are doing lesbianism wrong? Or perhaps you’d like me to quote a femme lesbian describing how awkward and inauthentic she felt when a partner asked her to wear the strap-on?

News flash: Sameness is boring.

Intellectuals can sit around all day “theorizing” sexuality to fit their own rigid ideological categories, but real human beings are not androgynous interchangeable units. We are different and therefore unequal and you know something? We like it that way!

Being different is sexy. Even within the context of sameness, people find their differences sexy. Go to any Catholic parish in America and see how many Italian-Irish half-breeds you find. It’s almost a cliché nowadays: Every Catholic under 30 named Murphy has a mother whose maiden name was Castellano and vice-versa.

For that matter, I’m a blue-eyed Southerner who married a brown-eyed Yankee; our redheaded oldest daughter married an Argentine (whose nickname is “Che”); and our nearly six-foot-tall 15-year-old son is now dating a girl who is approximately 5-foot-2. Based on the general pattern, there must be a commie peacenik girl somewhere who will one day marry our Army paratrooper son.

A rigid egalitarianism that demands androgynous uniformity — the abolition of gender, as feminists phrase it — fails to take into consideration the voluntary nature of our preferences and how our orientation toward difference benefits both man and woman. We are able to admire and desire each other without envy or resentment. Is Sheila Jeffreys correct that heterosexual desire “originates in the power relationship between men and women”? Who cares?

We want what we want, and we get what we get, and somewhere in that process of wanting and getting, we hope to find happiness.

Feminists view happiness as a zero-sum game in which all happiness enjoyed by men is the product of subtraction from women’s happiness. This is absurd. Men expend enormous effort in their attempts to make women happy, and if we don’t do as much as we should — if, at the end of the day, the women in our lives still experience a happiness deficit — this failure makes us unhappy, too.

Feminism’s fetishistic obsession with power does not signify a concern for the well-being of women; rather, it signifies a totalitarian ambition, a sadistic appetite for revenge, a desire to obtain psychological validation by inflicting humiliation on men.

Unable to find happiness themselves, they insist on making us all equally unhappy. And the bad new is, they’re succeeding.





 

Comments

20 Responses to “Fun With #RadFem: ‘You Magnificent Lesbians — I Read Your Books!’”

  1. Anon Y. Mous
    June 27th, 2014 @ 2:21 pm

    Excellent piece!

    One thing that made me wonder was the “the only free choice we can make is to resist hetero-captivity by becoming separatist, lesbian or celibate” bit that you quoted from PIV-hater Radical Wind. What does she mean by separatist? If celibate and lesbian weren’t already in the list, I might think she was talking about one of those. Do you know what she had in mind?**

    **Please don’t say that if I want to know I need to go read her stuff myself. I had one minor go at that back when you first started writing about her, and I would not want to repeat the experience.

  2. Mike G.
    June 27th, 2014 @ 3:17 pm

    I “turned” a lesbian feminist back in the day. Evidently, it didn’t take because we broke up six months later. Her excuse was…wait for it…”It’s not you, it’s me.”

  3. Antonio Gramsci @ Bolgia 9
    June 27th, 2014 @ 3:45 pm

    To put it bluntly: We are going to Hell, by the most direct route.

    ——-

    Maybe not the most direct route. Believe me I know something about the most direct route.

  4. RKae
    June 27th, 2014 @ 4:06 pm

    So, then, they really ARE cliches right down to the bone marrow.

  5. texlovera
    June 27th, 2014 @ 4:20 pm

    Stacy, another truly excellent post. I particularly enjoy how you argue with feminists by quoting other feminists (such as the tweets at the end of your post); it’s devilishly fun to read.

    I don’t think I could stand to read all the feminist drivel you have obviously delved into; for that alone, you deserve an award. Perhaps the Golden Penis of Patriarchiy??

  6. concern00
    June 27th, 2014 @ 4:47 pm

    “psychologically conditioned…”

    Applying Occam’s razor to this, which is, of course, another tool of the heteropatriarchy thanks to our good Father of Occam; is it likely that the whole world has been psychologically conditioned, or is the simplest explanation that the handful of #radfems have been psychologically damaged?

  7. RKae
    June 27th, 2014 @ 6:44 pm

    Funny. They consider gender and inequality to be “conditioning.” And, yet, if you drop a bunch of human children in the wild, then look for them later, they won’t know…

    …how to drive cars.
    …how to eat with silverware.
    …how read, write, speak, manipulate others through language or lie.
    …how to play a video game.
    …how to make chicken Kiev.
    …how to play the tuba.

    What WILL they know?

    How to put the pushiest guy in charge, and how to separate males and females.

    Gender and inequality are the only two things humans do that ARE NOT conditioning.

  8. M. Thompson
    June 27th, 2014 @ 10:11 pm

    Nah, get him a beer stein.

  9. cmdr358
    June 27th, 2014 @ 10:48 pm

    Aha!
    A member of the hetero-patriarchy being used as part of a sexual experiment by a lesbian feminist… nice.

  10. Mike G.
    June 27th, 2014 @ 11:02 pm

    It was nice being used while it lasted.

    Truth be told, although she was a feminist to the core, I believe she was really a Hedonist and I just caught her during her lesbian experimentation phase.

  11. Separated at Birth: Huma Abedin and…? | Batshit Crazy News
    June 28th, 2014 @ 12:15 am

    […] Chip S. made this request.  At first I thought sure, but it was hard to find a good match.  But they do have similar mouths: EBL: Hillary’s Secret Deal with Huma and Weiner?  (Aridog has some great comments) Rule 5 and FMJRA More tapes of Hillary and Bill! Update: TOM: You magnificent Lesbians–I read your books! […]

  12. robertstacymccain
    June 28th, 2014 @ 3:04 am

    Human beings are tribal by nature. That is to say, kinship and group identity are the core of our social relationships. The attempt to make “gender” the basis of a group identity transcending actual kinship — as Orwell said, you have to be a member of the intelligentsia to believe such things.

  13. The world is on fire. Let’s read the blogs. at Bride of Rove
    June 28th, 2014 @ 9:53 am

    […] “I do take feminism seriously, despite my habitual sarcasm. Just because Marxist lesbians seem ridiculous to sane people, doesn’t mean that feminists are not serious in their craziness. A phrase like “the destruction of heterosexuality as a system” may strike us as lunatic gibberish, but there are influential academics — tenured professors of Women’s Studies — who toil daily toward that goal.”~ Fun With #RadFem: ‘You Magnificent Lesbians — I Read Your Books!’ […]

  14. CPAguy
    June 28th, 2014 @ 11:28 am

    You damn well better write a book, RSM. Or at least publish a collection of all these articles.

  15. ajpwriter
    June 28th, 2014 @ 5:19 pm

    The gag about Irish-Italian interbreeding made me chuckle, as I married a lovely creature surnamed Parochetti…

  16. DeadMessenger
    June 29th, 2014 @ 12:37 am

    And a sammich.

  17. DeadMessenger
    June 29th, 2014 @ 12:49 am

    Stacy, I like the way you can not only read this stuff, but take it seriously enough to bludgeon them with their own illogic later. I wish I could do that; it’s the more mature and adult thing to do. Instead I just enjoy messing with them.

    An irritating radfem scolding culminating with, “Would you honestly actually choose to be owned by a man?” gets this response: “If that man is Chris Evans, then the answer is yes.” And had the perp not stalked away in a snit, my follow-up would’ve been, “You’d be a lot more attractive if you’d pluck your eyebrows.”

    I guess I’m a jerk that way, but I shouldn’t be forced to endure senseless brain vomit, so I suppose that evens things out.

  18. Diogenes_of_NJ
    June 29th, 2014 @ 1:51 pm

    That 72 virgins thing is one way to insulate oneself from the pernicious of the feminist movement – bit of an over reaction perhaps. Then again radicalism begets radicalism. Short of matter / anti-matter annihilation, feminist thinking is just part of a whole raft of cancerous ideology that came into being in late 19th century, grew and flourished in the 20th century and is ready to metastasize the society as a whole in the 21st century.

    It will infect everything and everyone; including amphibians.

    Beer has always been proof of God’s love for mankind – especially when fetched by a buxom wench.

  19. Their Agenda, and Hers : The Other McCain
    July 2nd, 2014 @ 11:28 pm

    […] feminist theory is incompatible with heterosexuality. A little bit of Adrienne Rich, Mary Daly, Sheila Jeffreys — it wouldn’t take much consciousness-raising, probably, before Kelsey Miller got over […]

  20. Crazy: #RadFem Announces ‘Major Shift or Breakthrough in My Feminism’ : The Other McCain
    July 8th, 2014 @ 5:29 pm

    […] spent the past six months plowing through the radical feminist syllabus (“Fun With #RadFem: ‘You Magnificent Lesbians — I Read Your Books!’“), I could imagine an effective manifesto/agenda for their movement, and might even be […]