‘The Straight Mind’ author Monique Wittig.
When did feminism become completely insane? Some of us would argue that modern feminism was always crazy from its inception in the late 1960s as the so-called Women’s Liberation movement. However, it took decades for enough of these hate-filled anti-male lunatics to secure faculty tenure and compile their ideas into a body of theory which, promulgated as a cult ideology in university Women’s Studies programs, could substantially influence culture, law and politics.
A major source of feminist insanity in the past 25 years is Professor Judith Butler’s 1990 book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, a jargon-filled work of postmodern theory. Despite being nearly unreadable — trust me, nobody ever read this book for fun — it is consistently a top seller in Amazon’s Women’s Studies category, because it is required reading in so many university classrooms. If by chance you do attempt to read it, however, you will discover that Professor Butler relies heavily on the work of French radical lesbian Monique Wittig (see pp. 25-28, 34-38 and 151-174 of Gender Trouble). We might argue that it is precisely because Professor Butler’s jargon is so opaque, and her sources relatively obscure to those outside the world of academic feminism, that Gender Trouble has become such a successful source of fashionable nonsense. No sane American familiar with the career and works of Monique Wittig would endorse her ideas, which were considered radical fringe extremism even in France. When her ideas were imported and recycled in pretentious academic jargon by Professor Butler, however, this French kook acquired an impressive authority within the Women’s Studies curriculum. Scarcely any professor can publish anything on the subject of gender and sexuality nowadays without citing Wittig or her sockpuppet Professor Butler. Therefore, if we wish to understand feminism in the 21st century, we must study Wittig.
A quick Google search finds that Wittig’s 1992 anthology, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, has been assigned reading at the University of Virginia (Feminist Ethics), the University of Alabama (Feminist Theory), the University of New Mexico (Queer Theory/Queer Lives), the University of Pittsburgh (Introduction to Feminist Theory), and Cornell (Women’s Studies Seminar), among many hundreds of other courses. Having demonstrated the vast influence of this French lesbian’s work, now let’s quote Wittig’s titular essay, “The Straight Mind” (p. 21):
In recent years in Paris, language as a phenomenon has dominated modern theoretical systems and the social sciences and has entered the political discussions of the lesbian and women’s liberation movements. This is because it relates to an important political field where what is at play is power, or more than that, a network of powers, since there is a multiplicity of languages that constantly act upon the social reality. The importance of language as such has only recently been perceived.
Thus she begins, and let’s note a few points:
- Wittig speaks of “recent years in Paris” — i.e., the 1970s, since this essay was originally a 1978 speech to the annual conference of the Modern Language Association;
- According to Wittig, lesbian liberation and women’s liberation are basically the same movement;
- Wittig asserts that language is a source of political power, which shapes “social reality”;
and
- This political power wielded by language “has only recently been perceived.”
Of course, George Orwell clearly showed how the deliberate corruption of language is a source of power in totalitarian regimes, but Monique Wittig was pro-totalitarian, an enemy of capitalism and democracy, so perhaps she didn’t want to give Orwell credit. Having begun with the quote above, Wittig then spends three pages discussing semiology (Roland Barthes) and psychology (Jacques Lacan) before making this assertion (pp. 24-25):
The discourses which particularly oppress all of us, lesbians, women, and homosexual men, are those which take for granted that what founds society, any society, is heterosexuality. . . . These discourses of heterosexuality oppress us in the sense that they prevent us from speaking unless we speak in their terms. . . . These discourses deny us every possibility of creating our own categories. But their most ferocious action is the unrelenting tyranny that they exert upon our physical and mental selves.
So, we are told, “discourses . . . which take for granted” heterosexuality as the foundation of society “oppress” not only homosexuals, but also are an “unrelenting tyranny” that oppresses all women, whatever their sexual orientation. Three pages later, after discussing, inter alia, pornography, anthropology (Claude Levi-Strauss) and radical feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson’s “analysis of sexual intercourse as an institution,” Wittig then makes this assertion (p. 29):
“Man” and “woman” are political concepts of opposition . . . It is the class struggle between women and men which will abolish men and women. The concept of difference has nothing ontological about it. It is only the way that the masters [i.e., men] interpret a historical situation of dominance. The function of difference is to mask at every level the conflicts of interest, including ideological ones.
Wittig finally concludes (p. 32) that the entire concept of womanhood “has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems. Lesbians are not women” (emphasis added).
All of these ideas, you see, Wittig simply asserts. Any skeptic must ask, why are the categories of “man” and “woman” political? Why is there a quasi-Marxist “class struggle” between men and women,” what does it mean to describe heterosexuality as an “economic system,” and what manner of “society” could exist without heterosexuality? All of these questions are left dangling in Wittig’s essay, and the shrewd observer understands why: Wittig’s purpose is to destroy “society” as it exists. Because her purpose is wholly destructive, Wittig feels herself under no obligation to describe a feasible alternative. Here she echoes (perhaps not unconsciously) the Communist ideologue Friedrich Engels’ invocation of a quote from Goethe’s Faust: “All that exists deserves to perish.”
Probably no professor of Women’s Studies has ever explained this to a college classroom full of naïve teenagers, but someone certainly should. No one was actually being “oppressed” by “discourses” when Wittig gave her MLA speech in 1978, and still less can anyone claim to be thus “oppressed” nearly four decades later. Wittig was simply rooting around for some basis to advocate destroying “society” with its “unrelenting tyranny,” etc. Wittig’s destructive purpose was utterly irresponsible, as she did not seem to consider the potential consequences of her anti-social radicalism. The wise reader realizes that heterosexuality is crucial to the preservation of our culture of liberty because, as Mark Steyn has so eloquently said: “The future belongs to those who show up for it.”
Whatever our “discourses” may be, in the present tense, no modern “society” exists in isolation. If we do not produce enough offspring to sustain our population (i.e., “replacement fertility,” an average 2.1 children per woman), then our society will first become dominated by the elderly (gerontocracy), and will eventually be overrun by younger immigrants from societies with higher birth rates. What has been happening lately in France? After last year’s Bastille Day attack that killed 86 people, Australian journalist Andrew Bolt wrote this:
Why have jihadist terrorists made France Europe’s bloodiest battlefield?
Simple answer: Because France let in the most Muslims.
This link between immigration policies and terrorism largely explains why the French are the greatest victims of Europe’s jihadists. . . .
No European Union country has a higher proportion of Muslims than France — up to 10 per cent of its population, or six million people, though statistics are vague, and vary. . . .
Another example: Belgium’s capital, Brussels, is Europe’s biggest Islamic city, with 300,000 Muslims, and has paid terribly for it.
It suffered mass murder by jihadists at its airport last March, its police have had two shootouts with terrorist networks, and an Islamist murdered four Jews at its Jewish museum. But it is France where the fiercest frontline runs in this war between Islam and the remnants of European Christendom.
France has the most Muslims, and that is why four people were killed, three of them children, in an Islamist attack on a Jewish day school in Toulouse four years ago.
That is why 20 people were murdered in Paris in last year’s Islamist attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a kosher supermarket. . . .
That is why 130 more people were murdered in Paris last November in an Islamic State assault on restaurants, a concert hall and a football stadium.
Paramedics treat a victim of the November 2015 attack in Paris.
You see, when Monique Wittig attacked heterosexuality as an “unrelenting tyranny,” she evidently did not take into account the simple math of differential fertility rates between the West and the Islamic world. Nor did Wittig show any understanding of an aging society’s need for young workers, which was the economic justification for France’s immigration policy. Neither do we have any reason to believe that, circa 1978, Wittig had reckoned with the “discourses” of radical Islam.
Europe’s Rape Epidemic:
Western Women Will Be Sacrificed
At The Altar Of Mass Migration
— Breitbart, Oct. 6, 2015
Muslim Male “Refugees” Are
Gang Raping Women in Europe
— Townhall, Jan. 7, 2016
Three Algerian teens charged
after woman lured to Eiffel Tower
via Facebook and gang-raped
— U.K. Mirror, Sept. 17, 2016
The destructive effects of feminism have consequences for women that most feminists evidently never considered. After all, feminists advocate the whole slaughter of children by the abortion industry. The typical Women’s Studies professor is childless and has no stake in the future, where the freedom and safety of other people’s daughters will likely be jeopardized by the consequences of her insane ideology.
Permit me to conclude by asking you to consider this: No university Women’s Studies department has ever been the target of Muslim terrorists, perhaps because our enemies know who their friends are.
