“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.
Bipartisan agreement! #RadFem #tcot MT @GIDWatch People with penises aren't women. … http://t.co/7UTtkaDfbn
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 26, 2014
But, but … SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION? #fem2 https://t.co/kkMTzwOv8Y MT @GIDWatch It's not a political position. It's reality. @yidwithlid #tcot
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 26, 2014
So does my wife. https://t.co/FUIGMwibgE @GIDWatch @Correllio
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 26, 2014
.@GIDWatch Bingo. Adrienne Rich. http://t.co/iKnr2fwTVZ and also Dee Graham: http://t.co/MMAAF0XmSK
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 26, 2014
.@GIDWatch Dworkin's psychology is easy to understand: Feminism as Revenge. It's really that simple. @JeanHatchet @Taxpayers1234
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 26, 2014
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.
