LIVE AT FIVE: 09.05.14

“Every woman who remains in sexual relation to man is defeated every time she does it with the man because each single experience for every woman is a reenactment of the primal one in which she was invaded and separated and fashioned into a receptacle for the passage of the invader. . . . The female in relation to the man is only half a woman and a disadvantaged one at that. . . . You are who you sleep with. Thus the lesbian rightfully says she is the woman par excellence. . . .
“Gay revolution addresses itself to the total elimination of the sexual caste system around which our oppressive society is organized. . . . It is now recognized that any Marxist-Socialist analysis must acknowledge the sexist underpinnings of every political economic power base. Gay liberation cannot be considered apart from women’s liberation. . . . The mere feminist is an incipient revolutionary. She is a woman in revolt against her prescribed and confined feminine role but she has not yet envisioned the solution to her dilemma . . . The lesbian is the key figure in the social revolution to end the sexual caste system, or heterosexual institution . . . The issue keeps turning back over and over to the oppression of women. . . . The lesbian as practicing woman is now reversing the cultural appraisal of womanhood.”
— Jill Johnston, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (1973)

“The word ‘homophobia’ defines fear of lesbians as irrational. . . . This is completely at odds with radical lesbian politics. We cannot think of lesbianism as a challenge to heteropatriarchal structures and values and simultaneously claim that there are no reasonable grounds for men (or heterosexually identified women) to fear us. . . If lesbianism is a blow against the patriarchy, the bonding of women against male supremacy, then it is entirely rational for men to fear it. Contemporary psychology evades these political implications of lesbianism and presents us as essentially harmless.”
— Celia Kitzinger and Rachel Perkins, Changing Our Minds: Lesbian Feminism and Psychology (1993)

With several thousand words in draft awaiting completion of new installments of the “Sex Trouble” series, I felt an obligation to give readers a small taste of what I’m reading in radical feminist books. After all, you paid for these books — “Hit the freaking tip jar!” — that I ordered via Amazon, and it’s important that readers supporting this project know that they’re getting what they’ve paid for.

Johnston’s reference to a “Marxist-Socialist analysis” as a basis of her own lesbian-feminist agenda in 1973 is important to understanding what the feminist movement’s actual goals were at the outset. Johnston makes clear that “women’s liberation” is part of “the social revolution to end the sexual caste system” (i.e., heterosexuality), which she describes as “the sexist underpinnings of every political economic power base.” She wrote this more than 40 years ago, in a book praised by such feminist leaders as Gloria Steinem and Alix Kates Shulman. Considering what Kate Millett’s sister Mallory has recently written about the Marxist influence on the Women’s Liberation movement, doesn’t this seem rather significant?

When feminists talk about “patriarchy,” they mean that our society is one in which all women (collectively) are oppressed by all men (collectively); therefore heterosexuality is inherently oppressive to women, hence the reference by Kitzinger and Perkins to “heteropatriarchal structures and values,” i.e., what most people consider simply normal life. It does not matter, ultimately, whether any particular feminist is herself a Marxist or a lesbian; the movement of which she is a part is ideologically committed to these understandings of women’s oppression and demands a “social revolution” to overthrow the “system” of “our oppressive society.”

More than four decades after the rise of the Women’s Liberation movement (so-called “Second Wave” feminism), the question is whether what Johnston called “the oppression of women” (in 1973) by what Kitzinger and Perkins called “male supremacy” (in 1993) has been significantly ameliorated by feminism. The more any feminist in 2014 considers herself “radical,” the more likely she sees the glass half-empty, believing that women’s oppression has scarcely been eroded at all. Yet no feminist of 2014 can repudiate the original radicalism of Women’s Liberation while simultaneously claiming to be part of the same movement, nor can a contemporary woman call herself “feminist” without accepting the movement’s radicalism as now institutionalized within Women Studies programs and other feminist organizations. Otherwise, the label “feminist” has no useful meaning.

There is no such contradiction, however, if feminism is actually a political movement with a coherent understanding of its own purposes and goals. Insofar as feminism is indeed such a movement, then its purposes and its goals cannot be an ad hoc improvisation, continually revised, so that what feminism means on Wednesday becomes something different on Thursday. Nor can there be multiple and diverse “feminisms,” if such a movement is to claim to speak for the interests of all women. Otherwise, any woman could claim to speak on behalf of the movement, arguing for anything that happened to cross her mind.

Feminism must be one thing or another. It cannot be everything. And if radical feminists don’t speak for feminism, perhaps someone should explain that to the radicals. Good luck with that.

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox, 09.03.14

Posted on | September 3, 2014 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Apologies for the lack of Live at Five this morning; not enough sleep on Monday night plus a late tax class Tuesday night equaled complete collapse when I got home Tuesday night.

First Street Journal: The Work Ethic
Michelle Malkin: Deport The Tsarnaev Sisters
Twitchy: Wassermann-Schultz Suggests Scott Walker Beats Women
American Power: Devastating Megyn Kelly Segment – “Obama Just Doesn’t Know What To Do”
American Thinker: Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Speaks Truth To The Powers
BLACKFIVE: A Real Strategy For ISIS And Islamist Extremism
Conservatives4Palin: Ramesh Ponnuru – Republicans Misread Their “Gender Gap” Problem
Don Surber: Diversify – Texas Style
Jammie Wearing Fools: After Six Months In Captivity, Mom Of Marine Jailed In Mexico Makes Pleas To Obama; He Ignores Her
Joe For America: Rape And Slaughter Surrogacy Centers – The New Sweatshops
JustOneMinute: This Will Work…
Shot In The Dark: Trulbert! Part IX – Freedom
STUMP: Public Pensions Watch – Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls, or, Alternative Asset Classes, Part One Of Many
The Gateway Pundit: Boko Haram Announces Second Islamic Caliphate In Eastern Nigeria
The Jawa Report: Ten Years Ago Today – The Beslan Massacre
The Lonely Conservative: When Did Common Sense Become Offensive?
This Ain’t Hell: 6000 Missing Students
Weasel Zippers: Berkeley Professor Outraged When Michigan Governor Says Israel Has A Right To Exist
Megan McArdle: Are Liberals The Real Authoritarians?

The September 12 Smittypalooza is in nine days!

Category: Blogging, Linkagery

Leave Mary Landrieu Alone!

Posted on | September 2, 2014 | 21 Comments

by Smitty

Hot Air reports on AFP’s praisworthy ad for Mary Landrieus’s re-election campaign:

For crying out loud, Americans: Mary Landrieu is the MOAST HONEST POLITICIAN EVAR! She openly doesn’t care about the benighted peasants of the swamp that hatched her. She’s an aristocrat now; all full of indigna-tion at the situa-tion of the humilia-tion at the thought of losing the election.

In these trying times, we need to preserve the integrity of the Ruling Class contempt for the serfs out there in flyover. That’s why this blog hopes that the continued repression of reform-minded Americans results in another reliably corrupt Congress on our way to the fabled hothouse in this here handbasket.

Category: Farce, Louisiana

Feminist ‘Facts’ Aren’t True

Posted on | September 2, 2014 | 23 Comments

Nothing is more tenacious than feminist mythology. This was what I pointed out yesterday deep into a 5,000-word article:

When one of the foremost leaders of your “social revolution” is revealed to be a raving lunatic, doesn’t this call into question the theories she had previously proclaimed? Alas, it was the ’70s, when people didn’t feel ridiculous wearing polyester bell-bottoms and some people even thought it would be a good idea to nominate George McGovern for president. The ’70s were the Golden Age of Bad Ideas, the era of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Ford Pinto and the Jonestown Massacre. Unlike other fads and disasters of the ’70s, however, feminism endures.
The strange persistence of feminism’s bad ideas can be explained simply enough. Unlike the Jim Jones cult that died in the jungles of Guyana, the feminist cult institutionalized itself, building a permanent base of operations in the Women’s Studies departments of universities and colleges.

Read the whole thing. Excuse me for quoting myself, but I understand that many people don’t get all the way through a long post like that, or they don’t read blogs on the weekend or whatever, and some key points need to be constantly reiterated. Why? Because feminists never stop lying, as Christine Hoff Sommers observes:

Much of what we hear about the plight of American women is false. Some faux facts have been repeated so often they are almost beyond the reach of critical analysis. Though they are baseless, these canards have become the foundation of Congressional debates, the inspiration for new legislation and the focus of college programs.

She cites a widely known falsehood:

MYTH 5: Women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns—for doing the same work.
FACTS: No matter how many times this wage gap claim is decisively refuted by economists, it always comes back. The bottom line: the 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure or hours worked per week. When such relevant factors are considered, the wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing.

Read the whole thing. Repetition of feminism’s false “facts” happens every day, and if we never take time to speak truth to feminist power — if we remain silent while they indoctrinate students and mislead the voting public — their lies will triumph over truth.

You may remember that in June, I mentioned (“Media Bias and Women With Penises”) that the radical lesbian FemiFest was scheduled in London. Recently, feminist Michelle Goldberg reported on the conflict between radical feminists and transsexual activists over the issue of “women-only space,” from which the lesbians wish to exclude trannies. This is a controversy I had been covering since January (e.g., “Feminists Accused of Transphobia: Competitive Victimhood Derby” and “Trannies Keep Harassing Feminists”). To put it bluntly, FemiFest was a gathering of the TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists) your Gender Studies professor warned you about. As I said in June, they are “the ‘extreme elements’ and ‘angry fringe’ of the feminist movement — some of whom are so extreme that even I agree with them (e.g., people with penises are not women).”

Strange to say, I can’t find any journalism about happened at FemiFest over the weekend. Here’s a Facebook note:

Well first day of Femi Fest over. Amazing talks by Janice Raymond, Julie Bindel, Harriet Wistrich, Femi Otitoju and Rachel Moran. Also two female demonstrators outside handing out leaflets to women going in, asking them to boycott the event. Of course nobody did!

Police: Lesbian Coach and Teenage Girl ‘Had an Ongoing Sexual Relationship’

Posted on | September 2, 2014 | 114 Comments

Leah Eames, 32, is a teacher and swim team coach at Sycamore High School in Dekalb, Illinois. On the night of August 10, a police officer checking on the YMCA “after hours found Eames working out with a student.” The circumstances were suspicious; when police checked surveillance video at the YMCA, it showed Eames and the teenage girl holding hands. Upon further investigation “police said detectives were able to identify the student and later interview her, and later discovered that Eames and the student had an ongoing sexual relationship.”

Eames was charged last week with criminal sexual assault and aggravated criminal sexual abuse. She could face up to 15 years in prison if convicted. She was placed on paid leave from her teaching job.

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