“Radical Feminism is, and has always been a political movement focused on liberating girls and women, those who are born into the sex caste female, from the unnatural, yet universal roles patriarchy has assigned.”
— Radicalmamaw.tumblr.com, July 26, 2014
“Women who are sane, normal and happy do not become feminists, because such women do not need feminism.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Aug. 25, 2014
One of the things you recognize, if you pay close attention to feminist rhetoric, is how the “patriarchy” or “male supremacy” — and other concepts like “misogyny,” “the beauty myth,” etc. — function as all-purpose scapegoats for whatever any woman may be unhappy about.
We could revisit the original skepticism that confronted feminists after the rise of the Women’s Liberation movement in the late 1960s. Feminism arose within the extreme fringe of the New Left, and a majority of American women emphatically rejected this crypto-Marxist movement’s attack on marriage, motherhood and Christian morality. Whatever the dissatisfaction women might have felt with their lives, most American women were aware that they were living in the most free and prosperous society in human history. The radicalism of Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone was directly hostile to the beliefs and interests of most women and this is still true today. The American woman views herself as an individual, not as a member of a collective “sex-caste” (to borrow the Marxist jargon of radical feminism) and she not only rejects feminism’s claim of collective female victimhood, she also rejects the claim of collective male guilt that feminists imply by reference to “patriarchy” and “male supremacy.”
We could revisit the arguments of the 1960s and ’70s — were my mother and aunts and grandmother oppressed by the patriarchy? — but this is not 1975. No, it’s 2015, and we now live in a society that has been changed by more than four decades of feminist “progress.” Because of societal changes, young women in 2015 have new problems that are not the same as the problems that were the original grievances of feminists circa 1968. And many of the problems experienced by young women today are arguably caused by feminism’s “success.” If feminism is the cause of your problems, the solution is not more feminism. Let me quote one young feminist’s complaint:
“i wish men understood that when women are talking about feminism and rape culture and sh–t, it’s not just a political conversation. it’s not about being a ‘social justice warrior’ or whatever. it’s about our actual lives being shaped by misogyny since childhood, and the daily reality of living in fear of violence. this isn’t a f–king game or philosophical debate. this is our f–king lives.”
The author of that colorful prose identifies herself on Tumblr.com as “Kina Penelope, gay femme fairy, writer, traveler, feminist, college student living in WA.” If she is a college student, she is about 20 years old, which means that Kina was born circa 1995. What was the “misogyny” that shaped her life since childhood? Who is responsible for the “fear of violence” she confronts as a college student in Washington State? How does a “gay femme fairy” experience “rape culture”? Why can’t she be bothered to capitalize properly?
We are now six years into the presidency of Barack Obama. During the 20 years or so of Kina Penelope’s young life, Democrats have controlled the White House for 12 years. She may say that “talking about feminism” is “not just a political conversation,” but it was feminists who declared the personal is political. If she is merely talking about her own personal problems, or the personal problems of women in general — “our f–king lives” — without any political purpose, is this really feminism at all? Or is it just unhappy women complaining because they are unhappy?
Many of the social pressures that cause young women’s unhappiness in 2015 are clearly caused by the tension between the careerist pressures of liberal feminism — the striving ambition to “have it all” — and their own psychological need for a more traditional womanhood.
That is to say, most women don’t identify as a “gay femme fairy.”
Most young women would like to find a man who loves them, a man who wants to marry them, a man who is willing and able to provide them with a better life than a woman can have by herself.
No matter how much satisfaction she obtains from career achievement, she needs (and no, “need” is not too strong a word for her profound psychological urge) to have the love and support of a man. She wants babies. She wants to find a strong man, a masculine man who loves her so much that he is willing, for her sake, to shoulder the responsibilities inherent in the titles “husband” and “father.”
Feminism is not the solution to that young woman’s problem.
If you are a normal young woman — desiring a life that includes men, marriage and motherhood — you need to recognize how modern feminism is directly hostile to your own self-interest.
Feminism is a formula for unhappiness, an ideology conceived by unhappy women who were unwilling to take responsibility for their own unhappiness. Instead they promoted a false crypto-Marxist worldview in which all men oppress all women. This belief — feminism’s Big Lie — is how unhappy women justify their envy-driven attacks on the actual sources of happiness in other women’s lives.
Confusion about what “feminism” means leads women to embrace this label, and to consume the feminist movement’s rhetoric without skepticism. It is very easy for any unhappy woman to internalize feminism’s resentments and hostility toward male sexuality, an attitude I have described as “Fear and Loathing of the Penis.” There is also a tendency in feminist rhetoric to blame women’s problems on “society,” so that women are encouraged to develop anti-social attitudes, to feel a self-pitying sense of humiliation in the ordinary hassles of everyday life. Here is another woman’s complaint on Tumblr.com:
Don’t eat too much, don’t eat too little. Don’t be fat, don’t be too skinny. God do you ever stop eating? Woah do you ever eat? The not-so-well-concealed looks of disgust, the not-so-well-concealed looks of concern.
Don’t be loud. Don’t be quiet. Have a voice in society, leave the talking to the big boys. You want something, speak up! No, no, when it’s your turn, sweetie. Ugh, she never shuts up, it’s obnoxious. Have you ever heard her talk? I don’t even know what her voice sounds like.
Make sure your skirt is long enough, but not too long. Don’t make yourself too available, but you don’t want to look like a grandma. Show off what you got, but if you do it’s your fault if anything happens. Was your skirt long enough? How is any boy going to look at you if you wear that?
Have sex, but stay innocent. Give us what we want, but we hate sluts. Virgins are so sweet. What do you mean you want to stay abstinent until marriage? Do you even live in our society? Live without sex is boring. Life with sex is disgusting. God, have you seen her? She’s banged every guy in the school. God, have you seen her? Still a virgin at her age.
Be smart, but not too smart. Boys like a smarter girl. Boys can’t stand it when you know more than them. Play dumb. Ugh, not that dumb, god, weren’t you even listening? They like a smarter girl. No, no, now you just look like a nerd. Girls don’t belong in the classroom, they have to take care of the kids. You want a well-paying job? Take some incentive and study. You can’t slack off because your a girl.
Do what you love, but don’t. Be yourself, unless it goes against what we say. Do you love to do your hair and makeup? Great, you’re good to go. Approved. Do you love videogames and guns? You’re faking it. You’re lying. You’re pretending. You’re wrong
Who is telling her these things? Who are these hyper-critical voices the woman hears, constantly reminding her of her own inadequacy, so that she feels wrong no matter what she does?
Satan is the Father of Lies (John 8:43-45). Satan is the false accuser (Revelation 12:9-11). Satan constantly tells us lies about ourselves and lies about God. If you listen to that satanic voice, you will drive yourself crazy, because the lies are contradictory. Satan will tell you whatever you want to believe, whatever it takes to destroy you. Satan will tell you that your sins are so wicked that God cannot possibly love you. Then Satan will tell you there is no such thing as sin. Satan will tell you that good is evil, and evil is good, and that you should do evil because that will make you happier than doing good. Most of all, Satan tells us to reject God’s law, to instead make our own judgment of right and wrong.
This was the original lie of history: “Ye shall be as gods!”
“See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil . . . I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”
— Deuteronomy 30:15, 19 (KJV)
“Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron . . .”
— I Timothy 4:1-2 (KJV)
Maybe you didn’t expect a sermon when you started reading this, but I didn’t plan to preach a sermon when I started writing it, either. Sometimes it’s like these things just start writing themselves.
The truth is still the truth. Satan is still a liar. If we cannot tell the difference between truth and lies, there is no hope for any of us.
* * * * *
What You Can Do
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From Simone de Beauvoir to Laurie Penny we see people bitterly complaining about nothing as if they were a black guy in a 1920 Jim Crow county in the South. They have decided to join an analogy of the NAACP called intersectional feminism.
Since their oppressions are imaginary, we can assume this is a coalescence of women with similar low self-esteem and unreasoning feelings of persecution that verge on and cross over into a psychosis.
It is common for people like that to scapegoat others rather than acknowledge their own lack of productivity, talent or inability to recognize how devastating self-pity is to any human soul. Modern feminism not only defaults to an ideology constructed of mental health issues but one with a stalker-like and aggressive sociopathic attitude towards society, particularly the focus of their obsession: the grey alien, the straight white male. At times gender feminists seem like intellectual sex-addicts; semantic nymphomaniacs.
It all adds up to a meticulously constructed world where one could substitute diabolical Jews, lazy blacks or that mysterious grey alien that stalks their consciousness and they in turn stalk.
If you write about oil-rigs every week in a magazine called “Oil-Rig Weekly” that is normal. If you write about oil-rigs every week on your science fiction blog that is called obsession and an inability to recognize when you drag weird things into inappropriate places as a result of your obsession. Everything is rape culture and male gaze and heteronormativity, trigger warnings, ableisms, privilege and other stupidities to explain why they’ve been forced to segregate into a KKK against their equal protection instincts.
Well of course they are “within” in the sense they have co-opted the use of the word “feminism” when in fact they have nothing whatsoever to do with that movement. There is a reason people wear disguises. Andrea Dworkin had no more interest in equal rights than Adolph Hitler did. I frequently think of people like Dworkin and Louis Farrakhan as Hitler without an army. Their ideology extrapolated out to its logical extension would be conquest, enslavement and destruction. Having no army, competence or even brains, demagogues like Laurie Penny and Andrea Dworkin had to play as if they were an anti-oppression movement or people might see them for the hateful little shits they actually are.
Vaginas don’t write dialogues. They write monologues. Do try to keep up.
No one is arguing for some straw man like eradication. We will never eradicate the KKK but we can delegitimize them when they show up in disguises and start talking about wheel chair access and allergies to scented products and burning sage.
No, but I bet he gets medical-quality pot.
Another straw man. Not being in the KKK doesn’t put me in a group by default. Therefore robbing the KKK of membership by calling them out doesn’t add to my “group.” The existence of feminism didn’t automatically enroll me in an anti-feminist club, and neither does quoting these fantastically nutty women.
I write ‘and shit’ all the time. Then again, I am an idiot… but definitely not a feminist, so I’ve got that going for me at least 🙂
“This was the original lie of history: ‘Ye shall be as gods!'”
Actually, that wasn’t the lie.
Satan observed that by partaking of the fruit, they’d know good and evil, just as the gods know.
In Genesis 3:22, we have confirmation: “And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil…”
So the serpent was telling the truth about the knowledge of good and evil — they’d acquire it, and it is a god-like attribute.
The serpent’s lie was, therefore, “Ye shall not surely die.”
They became mortal when they Fell (although they didn’t die immediately), which explains the second half of Genesis 3:22 — “and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”
Having become mortal (subject to death) Adam & Eve would have hastened to eat from the tree of Life to undo the Fall, but had they done that, they’d have become immortal in their fallen state, which would have prevented redemption.
Hence the cherubim and a flaming sword to guard the tree, and the First Couple being cast out of Eden.
Of course, we aren’t really talking about sane women here.
30 years ago, I knew a young woman who worked her way through college and won admittance to a prestigious law school after being a dropout and runaway as a teen. She was doctrinaire liberal; her fiancee and I staunch conservatives.
We were talking about some typical liberal nonsense of the day, maybe the Nuclear Freeze or some social policy, and she grew frustrated, saying, “I just can’t discuss issues with you or Mike [fiance], you guys know too many facts.”
Modern feminism gets around that problem by simply declaring facts and logic mere artificial constructs of Patriarchal Oppression, and that their feeeeeelings are the ONLY real “Truth.”
To a june bug, anything threatening is a duck.
Simon: What happens if they [Reavers] board us?
Zoë: If they take the ship they will rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing, and if we’re very, very lucky, they’ll do it in that order.
really? Valentine’s Day? the one day where men are practically required by law to treat women like royalty and buy them many things? you’d think feminists would be into that.
No, they can’t compete for that kind of relationship.
I’m not backslidden Stacy, but I like it when you use the word of God. I like being reminded of ghese things.
I would note for the record that the nutjobs live over on the west side. We on the east (or “dry”) side are MUCH more sane, and therefore conservative.
A solution by definition must be pragmatic. You can’t throw the ring in the wrong volcano because its white. Good stuff is where you find it, not where you want it to be. To fix an engine you must directly address the problem. Modern liberalism is almost entirely defined by imaginary racial and gender complaints. It has no new ideas because it has won most of its battles. It tries to pretend it hasn’t and so it drags women’s suffrage and Jim Crow out of a dusty trunk and dresses up feral impostors for hire. Racial micro aggressions are the new black baseball leagues, male gaze the right to vote. Liberalism breaks a leg and then puts a splint on the healthy one.
The deeper malady is the determination of feminists, like the rest of the Left, to destroy the concept of objective truth. You cannot have the kind of irresolvable conflict between the sexes that the feminists promote without first making facts irrelevant — perhaps “inherently misogynistic and patriarchal?” — to the issues.
I found this rant fascinating:
Don’t eat too much, don’t eat too little. Don’t be fat, don’t be too skinny. God do you ever stop eating? Woah do you ever eat? The not-so-well-concealed looks of disgust, the not-so-well-concealed looks of concern. [Etc.]
What an anguished cri de coeur! What a terrible life this person must live! So I clicked on her Tumblr page, half-expecting to see some poor paraplegic wretch barely surviving on dialysis or something.
But no. She’s a quite attractive white middle class girl who looks to be in her early 20’s and with nothing obviously (physically) wrong with her:
http://bigsisterelsa.tumblr.com/me
That is not the face of a girl who has ever known poverty – the true kind, where you have to choose between paying your electricity bill and eating.
It’s not the face of someone who has known hardship – real hardship, like getting up at 6 am to clean shit out of toilets or dig ditches for a pittance.
It’s not the veiled face of some poor girl in the Horn of Africa whose parents had her clitoris chopped off before selling her to a middle aged man as a child bride.
It is the face of a young lady with tons of leisure time:
I love playing POTCO and The Sims 3, and Disney Infinity, and Lego POTC, and that AIW Wii game that is really additcting, and Flappy Bird, when I’m not on tumblr, or reading, or writing…
So where does her anguish come from? Not American society, which inflates the self esteem of girls and women more than any other society on earth. Not TV or Hollywood, which portray women as sexy, smart, in-charge you-go-girls who can do no wrong.
No, this extravagant wallowing in imagined victimhood is a learned trait, originating in feminism, incubated in the disease reservoir of universities, spread through the vector of social media.
It is an obesity of the mind.
She’s a waterhead.
These younger feminists seem to have adopted the jargon of the old gender feminists but only kept the sociopathic part. They seem to see society as a Hell’s Angels club or the mouse in Tom and Jerry if Jerry was a cowardly retarded moron without an ounce of gumption, self-esteem or cleverness. Were Jerry a feminist Tom would be guilty of genocide due to the patriarchal curse of success. I wouldn’t want to live in a hole in the wall and dash out to the fridge to have to eat in fear of my life. But then I’d just kill the cat. Women haven’t had to really fear anything since the pistol was invented. It remains only to have the character to carry it and if necessary use it. But then again they might kill men after a night of regret-rape that went from consensual to “no” on a day’s reflection.
Feminism only appeals to crazy and/or ugly women. And dykes too.
What I see is two groups each using their own morality to call for the other’s elimination.
Would you like to show something better?
Not that it should matter, but I don’t imbibe. I’ve a family history of addiction problems.
If you’ll recheck my postings, you’ll find that I specifically said that the terms “within” and “without” don’t make logical sense in this context.
As a rule I really don’t like either/or classifications.
It was Adobe_Walls who called it a zero-sum game, not I.
Absolutely – the original feminists were nuts. All of them, not just Firestone. But their message, disguised as “women’s rights” has been transmitted to generations of girls and young women, in the universities and by the media. When an original message is obscured, and it is broadcast universally, it has a deranging effect, because young people enact the original message without knowing it.
Thus generations of girls and young women have been inculcated in hatred for their fathers, brothers, potential husbands and sons, and they are not even aware of this inculcation.
Do you see my point? It’s very insidious.
That’s totally false.
“These younger feminists seem to have adopted the jargon of the old gender feminists but only kept the sociopathic part”
See my above point. This is the way inculcation works.
An analogy would be Islam. An impressionable kid falls for Islam for ostensibly positive reasons. But in reality, he’s signing up for jihad.
No one is arguing for some straw man like eradication.
Pardon, but Adobe_Walls did.
…they are indeed within and must be extirpated.
That is what I responded to.
We will never eradicate the KKK but we can delegitimize them…
Yes.
As I said, it’s a reflective game.
To win, conservatives have to quit playing by the RadFem rules and using the RadFem definitions.
Show a better alternative.
Otherwise you’re preaching to the choir.
Funny how so many leftist college students are so worried about rape and misogyny and stuff at leftist colleges run by leftists with leftist teachers, eh?
Welcome to the current state of our education system, which has been dumbed down to make sure the low hanging fruit aren’t stigmatized by constantly failing what used to be basic educational tenets.
In America we’ve seen a large rise in recent years of what can only be called hate groups. They always have two constituents: bigots who developed sophisticated rhetoric to disguise it as social justice, and naive “allies’ who buy into it.
We generally call it political correctness but it has become very much more specific over time and those currents more identifiable.
In my opinion it is the most dangerous thing America has faced since WW II. PC is anti-constitutional, it is pro-racism, pro-group defamation, anti-free speech, anti-military, anti-family, anti-male, anti-heterosexuality, anti-vocational education, anti-science, and pro-totalitarian.
In other words it is a payback culture created by history’s self-identified also-rans firmly against everything that makes America great. It is a national suicide cult.
We already have that alternative. It’s called “equal protection.” We just have to stop letting these frauds pretend they’re operating from that same philosophical and intellectual space as “anti-oppression,” “anti-racism,” when it’s clear they are not.
You do that by delegitimizing them as liars.
I went through the aggrieved Tumblrina’s list of “messages” that every woman supposedly receives. In my four decades of life that has included two husbands and plenty of interaction with the opposite sex, I’ve heard exactly three of these statements. Two (“don’t eat so much” and “be quiet”) were from my family members and were well-deserved at the time. “Guys don’t like smart/nerdy girls” was from one dim friend in middle school, and I went on to thoroughly disprove her theory.
Not only are those “hyper-critical” voices are all in her head, but she uses them as a an excuse to be an angry, bitter under-achiever.
An attempt to eradicate them is the same thing as delegitimizing them. You go at full-speed knowing you’ll never get every one. There is no half-speed because of that reality. It is semantic hair-splitting
It is behavior that should be beaten out of them. Tolerating such behavior merely encourages it. If it will scare one woman back to the path of righteousness, it is worth it. One of the very few views of the Muslims with which I can find some common ground (not the rape stuff). La donna e mobile. It has always been such (at least since Eve). I do not indite all women, only the ones depicted above. Responsible women should be on this case as well. Apparently they are as few as responsible Muslims. This is not misogyny – merely tough love (as opposed to rough sex).
Are we men or pajama boys?
I’ve heard it many times called the Community-Based Reality.
Eric, I like you (and we even met in person once, some 20+ years ago), but coming onto a fellow’s blog and insulting him is not the best way to introduce yourself.
An attempt to eradicate them is the same thing as delegitimizing them.
I beg to differ. Eradication implies force. Also violence, death, and other not so nice things.
If you can’t convince them without force, you’re doing it wrong.
All I’m saying is that you should do it without stooping to their level.
They used to diagnose such women as having Hysteria. They were smart people, our ancestors.
And what is wrong with a ‘religious kick’? Are you so tainted by Leftist Thinking that you see the Godless Society we have these days as being a positive accomplishment?
We need to return to the normal Western situation where talk of God and about God and His purposes is Normal.
MCain knows who I am. He;s even called me “one of the best thinkers on the Internet”, IIRC. And so is he – when he’s not self-addled by supernaturalist crap.
It’s a shame; he usually chooses his enemies well, writes with passion and courage, often makes valid points – then destroys his own credibility by ranting like a slack-mouthed yokel at a tent meeting.
Conservatives need their advocates to be better than this. If they can’t manage better, they deserve to lose to the Marxists.
And now the plan is to make it two years dumber.
“The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally — not a 20 percent traitor.” — Ronald Reagan
What do you suppose adobe walls are for?
“crazy and/or ugly women. And dykes too.”
you say that as if those categories don’t have considerable overlap.
The Patriarchy ran off with my dingo.
You can’t reason with fire, you can’t reason someone out of a position they weren’t reasoned into. It would be easier and more productive trying to explain gravity to a dog, than ”reasoning” with a leftist. At least the dog could feign understanding and wouldn’t interrupt.