More than a decade ago, Lawrence Summers was purged from the presidency of Harvard University after he had the temerity to suggest there are “innate differences” between men and women. Feminists consider all differences between men and women to be socially constructed by the gender binary of the heterosexual matrix, as Professor Judith Butler has declared. Feminism’s goal is to achieve equality through androgyny, eradicating masculinity and femininity so that men and women become exactly identical and, in such an egalitarian post-patriarchal utopia, what basis could there be for romantic love?
None whatsoever, as feminist Carrie Jenkins explains in her new book, What Love Is: And What It Could Be. Professor Jenkins, who teaches philosophy at the University of British Columbia, is an advocate and practitioner of polyamory. Her book has been praised by her fellow feminists as an argument against “traditional, heteronormative, monogamous, pair-bonded, procreative, romantic love.” It is wrong even to imagine that kind of love, Professor Jenkins recently told an interviewer: “This idea that it’s very romantic to be swept off your feet by a Prince Charming figure and rescued from a life of poverty or whatever by a wealthy man, is feeding into these gendered stereotypes. This is built into our ideas of who we find attractive, what it is to have a romantic story attached to your love life.” . . .
Spain is dying. The total fertility rate — average number of lifetime births per woman — is 1.49 in Spain, and this is nearly 30% below replacement level. In December 2015, demographers noted that Spain had passed a crucial milestone — more deaths than births, a harbinger of population decline. Before a nation dies, it first grows old, and the graying population of Spain creates a heavy burden on the country’s pension and health care system, as there are fewer and fewer younger workers to pay taxes.
What Spain is now facing is demographic winter, and a Spanish businessman named Alejandro Macarrón Larumbe has created an organization called Renacimiento Demografico (Demographic Renaissance) to spread awareness of this looming social problem.
“Demographic winter is an uncomfortable truth for radical feminism,” Macarrón said in an interview with La Contra TV this week. The Google translation of an article about his interview is a bit uneven — e.g., using “majors” where a better translation would be “senior citizens,” and using “bigger” where “older” was intended — but I’ll adjust it a bit and you can still get most of what he was trying to say:
Alejandro Macarrón, director general of the Demographic Renaissance Foundation, gives an interview to La Contra TV in which he describes the causes and consequences of the demographic winter that is living Spain. He defines this situation as a “suicide” of our country since, he says, “we are going to die as a people because we do not want children”.
During the half-hour interview, the director general of the Demographic Renaissance Foundation [says] that the fall in the birth rate in our country will cause a deterioration of pensions, “which will increasingly be worse and more painful to pay for active workers”.
Alejandro warns that movements in favor of euthanasia are going to exert more pressure on our society “because there are more and more [retirees] who are very expensive.” “The [elderly] are going to [become] a great percentage of voters, it is the decisive segment for the vote. When the population is smaller and the people are [older], the economy logically goes down,” he assured. . . .
In addition, Macarrón has denounced that before “the woman worked at home. Most of them now work outside the home and it seems that the one that does not is second, one late. Incentives are now given only to those who work outside the home, and that goes against the birth rate. It is discriminatory, the state must be central.”
“Birth is not only a woman’s thing, it seems that the figure of the father has disappeared, in abortion this is very much. Incentives are being given only to mothers. If we think only of women, it favors the absence of family,” he warned. . . .
Finally, Macarrón has pointed out that this situation “is an uncomfortable truth for radical feminism, which discredits traditional women. Also for the environmentalism, which defends that the human being is the problem, since, the less people, the less pollution.”
If you are fluent in Spanish, you may want to watch the video interview:
(Hat-tip: Pete Da Tech Guy on Gab.) Macarrón’s remarks about women working outside the home and the disappearance of the father’s role in families deserve more explanation. This sounds too much like “back-to-the-kitchen” male chauvinism, but motherhood is not incompatible with wage earning. Anyone who looks at demographic data knows that birth rates are actually higher in working-class families than among the affluent college-educated elite. So the idea that careers and motherhood are an “either/or” choice is a false dilemma. More important factors are the decline of marriage, the delay of childbearing, and the rise of the DINK (double income, no kids) lifestyle among upscale professionals. When divorce and unwed motherhood become commonplace, when young couples are discouraged from marrying, when materialism is promoted in popular culture, when young women are led to believe that postponing motherhood until they are past 30 is a good idea — well, these are core factors in the “demographic winter” Macarrón warns about.
Get me started on this topic, and I could go on for thousands of words, but the crucial question is, what kind of messages are young people getting from parents, from schools, from churches and from media?
While I don’t know what’s on TV in Spain, popular culture in the United States celebrates the illusion of eternal youth, the idea that everybody can be like the cast of Friends or The Big Bang Theory, eschewing the most important responsibilities of adult life, marriage and parenthood. We can laugh at the character of Sheldon Cooper, a brilliant scientist with the temperament of a petulant toddler, but such entertainment has the effect of idealizing a lifestyle of perpetual adolescence. Similar messages are reinforced by many other TV shows and movies, so that young people exposed to this incessant media bombardment develop beliefs and attitudes that are incompatible with becoming the kind of adults who make good husbands and wives, good fathers and mothers. Only if parents recognize that the cultural sewage spewing out of Hollywood is toxic, and do what they can to limit its impact on their children’s belief system, can there be hope to avert demographic winter. Parents must exercise a counter-cultural influence, or else their children will believe the deadly lies that Hollywood is selling. Public schools are doing nothing about this problem, because the schools are part of the problem. Our government education bureaucracy is now run by left-wing “progressives” who are anti-Christian, anti-capitalism, anti-marriage and anti-motherhood. Schools now teach young people that babies are bad, abortion is good and promiscuity is harmless. The public school curriculum systematically attacks Bible-based moral beliefs, and schools employ atheist teachers who ridicule Christianity in their classrooms.
There is a connection between belief and behavior, you see. Parents who allow their children’s beliefs to be scripted by Hollywood (and “educated” by government bureaucrats) should not be surprised when the results are catastrophic not only for their children as individuals, but for society as a whole. More than 15 years ago, Jim Sedlak of the American Life League looked at Europe’s demographic decline and warned:
“The ‘success’ of the population controllers in Europe is now taking its toll,” said Sedlak. “The average number of babies per woman has fallen from 1.95 to 1.65, and there is no end in sight.”
“In order to turn things around, four things are necessary,” Sedlak said. “First, the world has to understand that there is not an overpopulation problem, but a problem of too few children. Second, everyone in our society must accept large families and stop using peer pressure to convince people not to have more children. Third, governments and rich philanthropists must stop giving money to population control programs. Finally, young people getting married have to be thinking of having four or more children.”
“We have one generation to turn things around,” Sedlak said. “After that, it may be too late.”
That one idea — promoting “four or more children” as the ideal family size — struck me at the time as the only possible basis of hope. It just so happened that my wife and I already had four kids then, and we subsequently had two more. Our youngest is now 14, president of her eighth-grade class at a Christian school, in the 99th percentile on standardized tests. Just this morning I overheard her talking to a friend, explaining that when she has children, she wants to homeschool them.
You can’t beat something with nothing.
That is to say, pro-family Christians cannot hope to prevail against the toxic ideas of the Culture of Death — which celebrates abortion, divorce, promiscuity and homosexuality — if we are unwilling to be specific in describing what the pro-life alternative could look like.
When we behold the desperate situation of countries like Spain, which are far down the road toward demographic winter, we ought to understand how important it is that we act now to counteract this evil.
Shapiro — after arguing with a young woman about how “gender is not disconnected from sex” — decided to pick a comparable category to prove his point.
“Let me ask you this. I won’t ask you how old – I will ask you how old you are, because you’re young enough that it’s probably not insulting to ask you,” he posed to the young woman, who responded, “I’m 22, so I’m probably a little bit naive, right?”
“No,” he continued. “Why aren’t you 60? Why aren’t you 60? Why can’t you identify as 60? What is the problem with you identifying as 60?” “It’s not the same as gender,” the young woman countered. “You can’t just…”
“You’re right!” Shapiro shot back. “You can’t magically change your gender. You can’t magically change your sex. You can’t magically change your age.”
Since 2014, I’ve been hammering away at this exact same point — feminism is a war against human nature. The claim that we can (and should) alter reality to conform to radical theory leads to the politics of wishful thinking. Education must prepare young people to succeed in the real world. However, our education system has been taken over by left-wing ideologues who indoctrinate children with jargon about “inclusion,” “diversity,” “equality” and “social justice,” which has the effect of rendering young people permanently discontented in life. In many cases, students are learning nothing useful in school, and are rendered incapable of doing any sort of work except progressive “activism.”
Words mean things. Facts matter. When young Democrats dishonestly label their opponents “Nazis” and incite violence as a tactic to prevent the president’s supporters from speaking, we are witnessing an attempt to redefine reality by the abuse of language. And this is not coincidentally related to the feminist gender theory — the social constructionof the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix — popularized by University of California Professor Judith Butler in her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. As I have demonstrated (see “These Discourses of Heterosexuality Which Particularly Oppress All of Us,” Jan. 12), Professor Butler’s theory relies heavily on the work of French radical lesbian Monique Wittig, and on a handful of other writers (e.g., Michel Foucault and Gayle Rubin) who shared Wittig’s hostility toward heterosexuality, per se.
Feminists insist that the mere experience of being female makes women victims of oppression — because patriarchy! — and condemn heterosexuality as an “institution” of male supremacy, so that feminism’s “subversion of identity” requires redefining reality. She becomes “he” and he is “she” and if you don’t agree, your disagreement is transphobia.
Every year, thousands of students enroll in Women’s Studies classes where professors teach them that (a) males are oppressors, (b) abortion is good, (c) heterosexuality is evil, and (d) gender is a “social construct.”
These are the quasi-religious cult beliefs of academic feminism, and no one on the faculty is allowed to criticize this cult. Universities do not employ any pro-life professors, nor is any professor allowed to teach Christian beliefs on the 21st-century campus. Academia is now anti-male, anti-morality, anti-capitalism, anti-Christian, and anti-American.
Everything the 21st-century student learns during his four years of college can be summarized in two words: “Vote Democrat.”
“I think it’s really important to remember that it is an incredible problem that . . . 53% of white women in this country voted for Donald Trump which means that they’re not only voting against the interests of their sisters, of women who may not look like them, who they may not understand but whose rights are just as important, but also remember that they are in that case voting against their own best interest. To me a part of feminism — it’s almost like being a parent to a teenager where they’re so mad at you, they think you’re such a piece of crap and you’re like, I know you hate me right now but the reason I’m doing this is because I love you and I want us all to be safe. . . .
I think what’s really hard, obviously it pains me as a Caucasian women to think about how many women didn’t think about women who looked different or had different life experiences than them. They didn’t look outside their own back yard when they made the choice to vote for Donald Trump. . . .
I also think it’s really important to understand so many women aren’t raised with the rhetoric of self-empowerment. The messages they’re hearing from Donald Trump may be very similar to the messages they’ve always heard from their fathers, from their brothers, from their husbands. They haven’t been given the message that they do matter. And so, while I think we have an incredible amount of work to do with enlightening those women, I also have sympathy for the societal structures that keep them from understanding what they need to keep themselves safe.
Other than the fact that Lena Dunham is the daughter of rich parents who leveraged her connections to land a contract for a low-rated feminist “comedy” on HBO, why would anyone care about her opinions? What has Lena Dunham ever done that would make anyone think that American women are in need of her “enlightening” through feminism? Does her “rhetoric of self-empowerment” include fingering her baby sister and lying about being raped by a Republican?
The most important thing to understand about Lena Dunham is her dishonesty. She wrote a book in which she falsely claimed to have been sexually assaulted by a Republican when she was in college. She refused for months to admit her fabrication, nor did she apologize to the innocent person harmed by her deliberate (and politically motivated) defamation.
Lena Dunham lies routinely and habitually. Slander is her raison d’etre and deceit is her modus operandi. No honest person would willingly associate with Lena Dunham, and only bad people admire Lena Dunham. Therefore, we are not surprised by her latest lie:
Dunham stopped by Howard Stern’s SiriusXM radio show Monday morning and revealed that she has none other than Donald Trump to thank for her slim figure. “Donald Trump became president and I stopped being able to eat food,” she told Stern after he complimented her look. “Everyone’s been asking like, ‘What have you been doing?’ And I’m like, ‘Try soul-crushing pain and devastation and hopelessness and you, too, will lose weight.’”
(Hat-tip: Hogewash.) “Her slim figure”? Compared to what? Vogue magazine recently posted a 9-minute video interview with Lena Dunham at her Hollywood home (introducing us to her gay personal assistant who takes care of her poodle). Anyone can watch that video and conclude that Lena Dunham hasn’t been doing much time on the treadmill. Or to put it another way, Lena Dunham probably won’t be competing in triathlons anytime soon. She is still pudgy and pear-shaped. Her arms are still flabby and her butt is still wide. If she has lost weight since November, she must have been grossly overweight last year. However, it is not her Pillsbury Doughboy physique that makes Lena Dunham so odious and disreputable. Rather, it is her selfishness and the sadistic cruelty of her deliberate dishonesty. What she did to an innocent man in her 2014 book Not That Kind of Girl was unconscionable, as Michelle Malkin (like Dunham, an Oberlin alumna) explained at length in a 2015 column:
When John Nolte of the conservative website Breitbart investigated, he discovered that Dunham’s description didn’t match up with the real Barry. “In the end, Breitbart News could not find a Republican named Barry who attended Oberlin during Dunham’s time there who came anywhere close to matching her description of him,” Nolte reported. “In fact, we could not find anyone who remembered any Oberlin Republican who matched Dunham’s colorful description.” Wham: “Under scrutiny, Dunham’s rape story didn’t just fall apart; it evaporated into pixie dust and blew away.” Humiliated and facing a litigation nightmare, Random House paid the falsely accused College Republican’s legal fees after his lawyer complained. Stung and exposed, Dunham carped about conservative journalists who refused to cover up the real truth. She nursed her self-inflicted wounds by publishing a self-pitying diatribe on the liberal website Buzzfeed . . .
You can read the whole thing, if you’ve forgotten the sordid details. Someone who did what Lena Dunham did — cruelly defaming an innocent man, then falsely claiming to be the victim of honest journalists who helped clear this man’s name — is not merely untrustworthy, but evil.
Dworkin, like Kate Millet, has turned a garish history of mental instability into feminist grand opera. Dworkin publicly boasts of her bizarre multiple rapes, assaults, beatings, breakdowns and tacky traumas, as if her inability to cope with life were the patriarchy’s fault rather than her own. She pretends to be a daring truth-teller but never mentions her most obvious problem: food. Hence she is a hypocrite. Dworkin’s shrill, kvetching, solipsistic prose has a sloppy, squalling infantilism.
Dworkin, wallowing in misery, is a “type” that I recognize after twenty-two years of teaching. I call her The Girl with the Eternal Cold. This was the pudgy, clumsy, whiny child at summer camp who was always spilling her milk, dropping her lollipop in the dirt, getting a cramp on the hike, a stone in her shoe, a bee in her hair. In college, this type — pasty, bilious, and frumpy — is constantly sick from fall to spring. She coughs and sneezes on everyone, is never prepared with tissue and sits sniffling in class with a roll of toilet paper on her lap. She is the ultimate teacher’s pest, the morose, unlovable child who never got her mama’s approval and therefore demands attention at any price. Dworkin seized on feminism as a mask to conceal her bitterness at this tedious, banal family drama.
This familiar type — “the pudgy, clumsy, whiny child” who carries into adulthood a permanent grudge and seeks to make others suffer for her own self-inflicted misery — uses feminism as a rationale for her own vindictive cruelty, justifying her slander of the innocent. What part of “Thou shalt not bear false witness” does she not understand?
Despite her cruel slander of “Barry” the College Republican, however, Lena Dunham continues to be celebrated by liberals, who are so invested in the Feminist™ brand that they will embrace a purveyor of falsehood who deserves to be condemned and ostracized. Of course, Lena Dunham climbed onto the Women’s March bandwagon, employing first-person plural possessive pronouns in a profoundly dishonest Twitter message.
This phony first-person “our children” is a pet peeve of mine. Feminists who advocate baby-killing claim to care about “our children,” and yet none of them will lift a finger or spend a cent of her own money to help any actual children. Feminists not only hate babies, but they hate families — they hate mothers and fathers — and never miss a chance to condemn marriage as an institution of oppressive heteropatriarchy.
Well, “patriarchy” is just another word for paying the bills, and HBO hasn’t offered me a multimillion-dollar deal to create a series called Lying Feminist Trolls, so paying the bills for “our children” requires me to invoke the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:
In an appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight, the executive director of the Sierra Club, Michael Brune, advocated abortion to reduce human population, saying that abortion “helps to address the number of the people that we have on this planet. We feel that one of the ways in which we can get to a sustainable population is to empower women to make choices about their own families.” Ironically, Brune was being interviewed because of his support for an open-borders immigration policy:
Today, the Sierra Club is mobilizing its members across the country to join Center for Community Change, United We Dream, SEIU, Planned Parenthood, the Human Rights Campaign and other allies in national-day-of-action rallies to support immigrants and oppose Trump’s xenophobia.
If Brune wants to kill babies in the womb as a way “to address the number of the people that we have on this planet,” how can he claim is it wrong for America to protect its own borders “to address the number of the people that we have” in our own particular part of the planet? Why does Michael Brune consider it “xenophobia” for America to enforce its own laws, in order to defend our own people?
What is Michael Brune doing about “sustainability” in Uganda and Afghanistan, Burundi and Burkina Faso? Why is he supporting abortion to kill American babies while supporting open-borders policy to add millions of foreigners to our population? The total fertility rate in the United States is already substantially below the so-called “replacement” level (2.1 average lifetime births per woman), so why is “the number of people we have” such a problem for the Sierra Club? Isn’t the real problem that the Sierra Club is a Democrat Party lobbying group, which is trying to reduce the number of Americans who vote Republican?
No, the Sierra Club spends its money from liberal donors to elect Democrat politicians whom it then lobbies to enact liberal policies. Whether these policies are actually helping the environment is less important to liberal donors than whether they’re helping the Democrat Party. Like feminism and the so-called “labor movement,” environmentalism is just another partisan scam, foisted upon weak-minded people who don’t believe in God, but who have a quasi-religious faith in the Democrat Party and “a woman’s right to choose” (so long as her choice doesn’t involve voting Republican).
There is not now, nor has there ever been, an “overpopulation” problem, and certainly not in the United States. The myth of overpopulation was created by a bunch of rich guys including David Rockefeller and Hugh Moore, and was popularized in Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb. Ehrlich wrongly predicted that “overpopulation” would soon lead to worldwide mass starvation, but here we are, nearly 50 years later, and America is suffering from an obesity epidemic. (You can read more about the history of the population-control scam in Donald Critchlow’s Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America.) My point is that the kind of myth-making about “sustainable population” that Michael Brune peddled on Tucker Carlson’s show has been as thoroughly debunked as “Haven Monahan.”
The Sierra Club isn’t worried that there are too many people on the planet; they’re worried that too many people who live in the part of the planet called “America” vote Republican.
The planet is not “endangered,” there is no “overpopulation,” the scientific “consensus” about global warming is phony propaganda, and you should never trust a word anyone from the Sierra Club says.
Friedrich Engels and the original German edition of ‘The Origin of the Family.’
One of the most predictable insults that liberals direct at their critics is “ignorance.” Liberals consider themselves intellectually superior, and so the fact that you disagree with them is interpreted as proof of your inferiority. Never does a liberal consider the possibility that his antagonist has examined the arguments for liberalism and rejected them.
No, it is only ignorant prejudice that can explain the conservative’s opposition, the liberal believes. Convinced that they are both intellectually and morally superior to others, liberals think of themselves as qualified to tutor the rest of us, as if we are simple-minded children.
When we see headlines like that, we are entitled to ask, where is the evidence that liberals are superior to everyone else? The radical mob that burned that limo were convinced they were striking a blow against Trump’s right-wing agenda. After all, what could more perfectly symbolize “facism” than this luxurious Lincoln limo? But the owner is named Muhammad Ashraf, and the driver was Luis Villarroel. Exactly how did torching this car advance the “progressive” cause?
Well, how dare you ask such a question, you ignorant bigot!
It’s the same with feminism. No matter how well-educated you may be, if you disagree with feminists they will accuse you of ignorance. You’re just a dimwitted subhuman sexist pig, if you don’t support their agenda, and no amount of facts or logic can ever convince feminists otherwise:
How much feminist theory have you read? Probably less than I have. You’d have to be a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies to have read as many volumes of this stuff as I’ve plowed through since I started the Sex Trouble project in 2014. You want to talk Judith Butler and Monique Wittig? Mary Daly and Gerda Lerner? I’m thoroughly prepared. And yet at the end of the day, I return to a basic fact: Men and women are different, in ways that are socially significant.
You know who recognized this? Friedrich Engels. Karl Marx’s colleague and co-author of the Communist Manifesto, Engels in 1884 wrote a very important book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which is still worth reading today. Despite his anti-capitalist bias (or perhaps, because of this bias), his foray into anthropology forced Engels to confront the inescapable fact that women’s work as mothers is irreplaceable. . . .
Read the rest at The Patriarch Tree. Not only have I read more feminist theory than has the average feminist, but I’ve also read more Marxism than has the average Marxist. Being accused of ignorance by the kind of fools who voted for Hillary Clinton is a compliment, really.
A caste with pretenses of being superior does not actually become superior until the lower castes affirm the superiority of that caste by conceding to them the immunities and privileges they assert.
Anti-American left-wing teachers at an all-girls Catholic school in Miami taught bisexual pop singer Lauren Jauregui the radical feminist beliefs that inspired her outspoken opposition to President Trump.
A member of the group Fifth Harmony, the 20-year-old Jauregui denounced Republican voters as “racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, a–holes” in a November rant in which she compared Trump to Hitler and declared her pride in being “a bisexual Cuban-American woman.” In that Nov. 18 message, Jauregui specifically cited her attendance at an all-girls Catholic school in condemning Republicans as “narrow-minded” and “selfish.” Saturday, Jauregui attended the pro-abortion “Women’s March on Washington,” obscenely condemning “patriarchy.”
Jauregui’s anti-GOP hatred shocked many Republicans, who have historically received strong support from Florida’s Cuban-American community, most of whom fled Cuba to escape the totalitarian anti-America regime established by Communist dictator Fidel Castro. Among Trump’s leading rivals for the 2016 GOP nomination were Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, both sons of Cuban immigrants.
In an interview with the feminist web site Nylon published today, Jauregui defended federal funding for Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion provider, and credited her feminist politics to attending Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart in Miami:
“I attribute everything that I feel and all of the passion that I have to that school. It’s an all-girls school, and it was instilled in me to be a confident and courageous woman. . . . And each individual girl was told how special she was and how much she could influence the world.”
In her 1973 book Beyond God the Father, Professor Daly announced that “Christianity itself should be castrated,” describing “the Second Coming of female presence not only as Antichrist but also as Antichurch,” as a “rising woman-consciousness” destroying the “Christocentric cosmos” (see “The Radical Theology of Feminism”).
“With this new administration and all of the corruption fueled decisions they will make for their personal interest, it is so important for all of our voices to be heard. . . . I BELIEVE IN WOMEN and the Matriarchy and finding a solution for our dying earth. I believe that our radical ideas are the shaping of the future . . . the oncoming wave of a hard revolutionary fight for justice.”
— Lauren Jauregui, Jan. 16, 2017
In her Nylon interview, Lauren Jauregui called the Trump administration “a fascist regime” and said there is “a lot of hatred in the heart of the country . . .because it was built on slavery.” She also claimed that anyone who opposes her feminist agenda hates women:
I think the whole stigma of the word feminism is such a problem. The only reason that anyone has an aversion to it is because it includes the word “fem,” even though it’s an all-inclusive term. I think that aversion in general is the reason why we need [feminism]. If the word “feminism” bothers you, there’s a reason why it bothers you, and only because it involves women. . . .
I think if I do anything political, it would be activism. I don’t believe in our government, currently. I don’t believe in the way that things are going.
