The Other McCain

Everybody’s Favorite Feminist™ begins her latest column by ranting about — what else? — the “misogyny” of abortion opponents:

Anti-choice activists are well aware that their position would be seriously undermined if the public understood the misogyny that actually drives their movement, so . . .

Yadda yadda yadda. What follows is mostly routine Marcottean feminism: Abortion is the essence of Women’s Rights; ergo, anyone who is against abortion must be motivated by hatred of women. The belief requires her to ignore, inter alia, the result of a Gallup poll which found that 41% of women are pro-life, and a National Journal poll finding a majority of women favor banning late-term abortion.

Marcotte’s hostility to facts and her tendency to present her bloodthirsty fanaticism as expressing the interests and beliefs of all women are nothing new, and there would be no point in calling attention to her latest screed, were it not for the bizarre lack of self-awareness she exhibits in criticizing conservative arguments about how marriage benefits women:

What this shows is that, with social conservatives, we’re dealing with a view of heterosexual romance that assumes men and women are fundamentally at odds, imagining men as selfish and even violent hedonists and women as priggish police officers who bring unruly men into line by manipulating them sexually.

WHOA! Who has spent the past four decades portraying men and women as “fundamentally at odds,” condemning “heterosexual romance” as oppressive to women, and denouncing men as “selfish” and “violent”? Feminists, that’s who.

“Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.”
— Ti-Grace Atkinson, 1971

“Lesbianism is a threat to the ideological, political, personal, and economic basis of male supremacy. . . .
“Lesbianism is the key to liberation and only women who cut their ties to male privilege can be trusted to remain serious in the struggle against male dominance.”
— Charlotte Bunch, 1972

“The simple fact is that every woman must be willing to be identified as a lesbian to be fully feminist.”
— Sheila Cronan, 1988

“Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women’s bodies.”
— Andrea Dworkin, 1989

“Fucking is a large part of how females are kept subordinated to males. It is a ritual enactment of that subordination which constantly reaffirms the fact of subordination and habituates both men and women to it, both in body and in imagination.”
— Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (1992)

“Male sexual violence against women and ‘normal’ heterosexual intercourse are essential to patriarchy because they establish the dominance of the penis over the vagina, and thus the power relations between the sexes. . . . Men’s sexual violence against women is the primary vehicle through which the dominance of the penis over the vagina is established.”
— Dee Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence, and Women’s Lives (1994)

“Male supremacy is centered on the act of sexual intercourse, justified by heterosexual practice.”
— Sheila Jeffreys, 2005

The typical response of feminists, when confronted with evidence of their implacable hostility toward men, per se, and toward heterosexuality, per se, is denial.

No matter how many examples of anti-male sentiment by important feminist activists, authors and professors you quote — and I’ve only scraped the surface here — the evidence is never sufficient to compel feminists to admit that their core ideology involves a radical hatred of men that makes lesbian separatism the logical expression of feminist philosophy. (Even Melissa McEwan denies being a man-hater.)

What is remarkable about Amanda Marcotte’s latest rant is how she manages to project onto social conservatives her own anti-male beliefs, evidently without seeing the paradox. But if she were capable of introspection, she wouldn’t be a feminist, would she?