Discussing Radical Nazi Feminista/Feminism

[someperson555]

Your first sentence is on the money. The second sentence demonstrates what happens when women are given free reign. They just do more of the same, but more aggresively. The third sentence demonstrates that not all women obviously agree with feminism.

Because you are burying your head in the sand and ignoring what women are now saying. It’s the earlier feminist activists who are recanting. As I said, if you’d just pull your head out of the sand long enough to do the research.

Sorry, but your old feminist leaders are saying otherwise.The fact that many many women have taken feminist “ideals” to the extreme has proved the ideals were false ones. Those so called freedoms which young men have always assumed was made up by the feminist leaders to con the women into thinking that acting like rakes would be liberating. That’s exactly what Germaine Gree wrote about! Oh, blaming the economic system now, are we?! Fallible in their interpretations? Yes. Unfortunately, the messages being interpreted were pretty explicit and the results have been devastating.

Nice try, but where repression of women exists there is hardly any need for a discussion on the faults of feminism, is there! You adopted the typical feminist tactic of accusing anyone, particularly a male, of being some sort of Taliban if they dare criticise feminism. Sorry, but you now need to throw such lines at those feminists who have recanted too. I never suggested a return, or even a turn, towards anything. Of course, the typical 1970s feminist attack against a male is to suggest exactly that.

thats the other part of the problem, women have been fed this false history of oppression. yeah its true that 200 years ago women had fewer rights than men, but you know what? men had a hell of a lot more responsibilities too lol, the men were expected to be the breadwinners, they were expected to go to war when they had to, not to mention women were usually treated more leniently by the law and society in general. so this feminist notion that “they were being oppressed” is not true.

 

[John21652]

“What happens when women are given free reign”? I’m afraid your privilege is showing, sir.

If you wish to debate a point, how about you try to do it honestly. That sentence you quoted was followed by a qualifying sentence. Was it not? It actually demonstrated what happens when women are given free reign.

And just what is the “priviledge” I am displaying? You’ve used that statement before and failed to explain it then. Is it just a manifestation of your Marxist mindset?

Not all feminists even agree on what feminism is.

You wrote that.

How do you suppose you know so much more about it?

Could be I read lots and lots. Could be I have spoken with lots and lots of feminist women of all shades of feminist ideology. Could be I have spoken to Germaine Greer. Besides, I don’t ‘suppose’, you do.

Do you even know how many varieties of feminism there are and what they all stand for?

Oh Sair, that’s hilarious. It’s common knowledge how fragmented feminism is. Take a look at the thread title as an example.

At some point, you might learn how to distinguish extremists from moderates.

Oh, do you mean the quotes I gave at the start of this thread, from feminist leaders, don’t make that distinction rather obvious?

I am well aware of the extremes to which feminism can and has been taken, thanks all the same,

Great, we are getting somewhere. The trouble is, you have been defending feminism as if there were no distinctions.

but the core principles are still worth upholding. I don’t condemn all religious ideals because some believers fly planes into buildings.

The “core principles”, as you term them, have been so smothered by the extremist leaders of feminism that no-one even knows what they are anymore. Just go back to the first few pages of this thread and, from the quotes of feminisms famous leaders, please explain what those core principles actually are. Or is it that the leaders of feminism do not articulate the “core principles” and never did.

So the ideals of justice for women and freedom from sexism in all its guises are false, are they? Good luck defending that stance.

Sair, again you are being disengenuous, to put it mildly. You wrote that in response to this -

Sorry, but your old feminist leaders are saying otherwise.The fact that many many women have taken feminist “ideals” to the extreme has proved the ideals were false ones.

Now, once again, please explain how the statements and beliefs of the feminist leaders, quoted earlier in this thread, are the “core principles” you named them as, or the “ideals” I named them as. Then, if you can, please explain how the statements and beliefs of those feminist leaders has anything whatsoever to do with "justice for women and freedom from sexism in all its guises". A little logic should tell you that if “ideals” are taken to extreme lengths, that is, altered, then they weren’t “ideals” in the first place.

 

[someperson555]

• not to mention a failure of capitalist society in general to meet the needs of people over economic cycles. How can you not see that humans are fallible in their interpretations?

that is true.

 

[Sair]

If you wish to debate a point, how about you try to do it honestly. That sentence you quoted was followed by a qualifying sentence. Was it not? It actually demonstrated what happens when women are given free reign.

And just what is the “priviledge” I am displaying? You’ve used that statement before and failed to explain it then. Is it just a manifestation of your Marxist mindset?

Privilege is something that attaches to the dominant members of a society. It relates to most of the modern movements for social reform. For most of history, white heterosexual men have been the dominant members of Western society, and still are, in many ways. The fact that you think you can so easily cast a blanket dismissal of feminism because of failures of definition and execution is indeed a display of your privilege. And, no, you didn’t ‘demonstrate’ what happens when “women are given free reign” - you merely implied that it was undesirable and that women need the guidance of men in order to behave well…

Oh Sair, that’s hilarious. It’s common knowledge how fragmented feminism is. Take a look at the thread title as an example.

The thread title was posed by someone who obviously has an issue with radical feminism, hence the use of the word ‘Nazi’. It was set up to be dismissive from the first, by presenting the most negative possible view of feminism.

The trouble is, you have been defending feminism as if there were no distinctions. The “core principles”, as you term them, have been so smothered by the extremist leaders of feminism that no-one even knows what they are anymore.

So moderates like me are ‘no-one’, in your view? I suppose I’d need at least a degree in Women’s Studies before I’d count as ‘someone’

Just go back to the first few pages of this thread and, from the quotes of feminisms famous leaders, please explain what those core principles actually are. Or is it that the leaders of feminism do not articulate the “core principles” and never did.

I already explained what the core principles are. Simple - justice for women (meaning social and economic equality with men, treating women’s rights as human rights) and freedom from sexism in all its guises - that is, all the overt and subtle ways women (and basically anyone who’s not a heterosexual male) are socially and psychologically oppressed, for example gaslighting, trivialising women’s experiences and blaming victims for sexual assault; also the assumption that all women have the same essential desires and ambitions, the same essential character - as Joan Smith put it in her 1997 book, Different for Girls, that women are different from men but all the same as each other.

A little logic should tell you that if “ideals” are taken to extreme lengths, that is, altered, then they weren’t “ideals” in the first place.

Ideals don’t necessarily need to be altered in order to be taken to extremes - sometimes their logical implications go much further than we imagine in formulating said ideals. For example, social and economic freedom for women necessarily means that some women will follow their inclination to pursue careers over marriage and motherhood - the problem being that under our present capitalist system, this is usually an either-or choice for women, in a way it generally won’t be for men.

What’s more, when it comes to power struggles of any kind, especially political ones, ideals can just get lost (and sometimes deliberately twisted) amidst passions, prejudices and expediency. The fact that the Christian ideal of “love one another as I have loved you” succeeded in spawning the Inquisition should be enough to tell you that.

 

[inocente]

Oh Sair, that’s hilarious. It’s common knowledge how fragmented feminism is. Take a look at the thread title as an example.

I read the thread title as a hopeful excuse for a bit of a rant.

You could argue that feminism, to be feminine, must be messy: The evidence from current day African tribes is that we developed with men going off individually to hunt protein alone and women collectively gathering berries and roots while also looking after the kids. This may explain why men tend to be more heads-in-clouds idealistic and women better at multitasking. Real feminism would then throw out all male ideals like Marxism as being vaguely autistic, and go the opposite way by being intentionally pluralistic. The fact that it’s not there yet would be an indication of how hard it is to get away from male thought patterns in our culture. The best result will be a synthesis of these female and male ways of thinking.

For instance, in managing development teams, the thing to do is throw out all your own ideals, find out what everyone in the team (well, 90%) wants in common, and turn them into temporary ideals for the men and a loose framework for the women. Works like a charm. HR call it empowerment, but then they’re on another planet. Or should be.

 

[endoentropism]

Privilege is something that attaches to the dominant members of a society. It relates to most of the modern movements for social reform. For most of history, white heterosexual men have been the dominant members of Western society, and still are, in many ways. The fact that you think you can so easily cast a blanket dismissal of feminism because of failures of definition and execution is indeed a display of your privilege. And, no, you didn’t ‘demonstrate’ what happens when “women are given free reign” - you merely implied that it was undesirable and that women need the guidance of men in order to behave well…

Expanding on this:

At it’s most basic, “privilege” is the belief that everyone is at least as capable or well-off as yourself. One of the most commonplace expressions of (white male) privilege is bootstrapperism, or the idea that the only thing preventing an inner-city black kid from becoming wealthy and successful is their work ethic.

This assumption ignores fundamental problems in our society, such as persistent structural racism. Many people want to believe we live in a post-racial society, but it’s patently false. Here’s Lee Atwater from 1981, on the Reagan Southern Strategy:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “******, , ." By 1968 you can’t say ""—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.[35]
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ", ******”.[7]

(So we’re clear, the ****** is the n-word). Atwater was an aide in the Reagan administration. His political career began in the 1970s, when he worked for politicians such as Carroll Campbell and Senator Strom Thurmond.

But this is what people are talking about when they talk about Newt Gingrich using dogwhistles to racists in his debate a few weeks ago… “Black people are poor because they’re lazy. Obama is the foodstamp president. He’s never worked a day in his life.”

All of that is to say, if certain institutions are aligned along a racist axis, and if politicians running for the highest office in the land are attuned-enough to exploit these latent (or overt) racist sentiments, then it is by definition privilege to claim that the only difference between a suburban white kid and an urban black kid is melatonin and geography. It’s like the reverse Matthew 19:24 – because of the socioeconomic conditions surrounding certain demographics (african americans, women, etc.) it is quite literally harder and more difficult for them to achieve as much as a middle class white man. Despite centuries of progress, the scales are still weighted for men. Hence, feminism.

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of privilege is how it blinds you to itself. When you’re fed an ideology of Just World fallacies and bootstrap economics, it’s easy to believe that you are wholly responsible for your life; that you are the sole architect of your success or failure or mediocrity. It is a profoundly solipsistic worldview.

 

[Sair]

::snip::

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of privilege is how it blinds you to itself. When you’re fed an ideology of Just World fallacies and bootstrap economics, it’s easy to believe that you are wholly responsible for your life; that you are the sole architect of your success or failure or mediocrity. It is a profoundly solipsistic worldview.

Thanks so much for this elucidation - you’ve really helped my comprehension of a concept of which I had a broad understanding, but hadn’t really worked out how to articulate.

I do think you’re right about privilege being so pernicious - many of the assumptions modern feminism is identifying and speaking out against are so subtle and so deeply ingrained that many people don’t even realise they make them. But this seems to be what happens whenever the status quo is challenged - people realise that their main reason for believing something to be true is that they’ve always believed it and everyone around them believes it. It just doesn’t occur to people to question these kinds of assumptions.

My speculation would be that this is part of the reason that modern feminism has become such a catfight (only recently in our local papers there have been back-and-forth accusations flung between columnists who are outraged that any woman would dare to question another woman’s feminist credentials because she happens to hold some conservative Christian opinions). The issues modern feminists are dealing with are much harder to see than those the first- and second-wave feminists fought against, and so it’s very easy to say - especially from a position of privilege - that feminists no longer have anything to contribute and have essentially shot themselves in the foot.

 

[Sair]

I read the thread title as a hopeful excuse for a bit of a rant.

You could argue that feminism, to be feminine, must be messy: The evidence from current day African tribes is that we developed with men going off individually to hunt protein alone and women collectively gathering berries and roots while also looking after the kids. This may explain why men tend to be more heads-in-clouds idealistic and women better at multitasking. Real feminism would then throw out all male ideals like Marxism as being vaguely autistic, and go the opposite way by being intentionally pluralistic. The fact that it’s not there yet would be an indication of how hard it is to get away from male thought patterns in our culture. The best result will be a synthesis of these female and male ways of thinking.

For instance, in managing development teams, the thing to do is throw out all your own ideals, find out what everyone in the team (well, 90%) wants in common, and turn them into temporary ideals for the men and a loose framework for the women. Works like a charm. HR call it empowerment, but then they’re on another planet. Or should be.

 

[Sair]

John21652,

The “tarring and feathering” you are talking about is also being done by women who now realise they have been sold a crock.

Read yet another article by a feminist - The Failure of Feminism.

Interesting. Here’s a quote from Germaine Greer from an article in The Age (Melbourne’s newspaper, for those who don’t know) from last year:

The prevalence of divorce is not something I predicted. The woman who opts to end her marriage after an average of seven or eight years, with divorce following three and four years after, is making a conscious decision to go it alone. She will almost certainly be earning less than her ex-husband; if she has children she faces 15 or 20 years of poverty and unremitting hard work, both inside and outside the home.

She will have no leisure, no spare cash, no money for luxuries such as nice clothes or a decent haircut or a safe car or holidays. Her chances of finding a new partner are much lower than her ex-husband’s. Women who face this fate with equanimity have my unstinting admiration. They are choosing a tough but honourable life over a servile and dishonourable one. If they get it right, and their kids do well, they will get no praise. If their kids screw up, they will get all the blame.

This sounds, to me, less like a Second-Wave matriarch bashing modern feminism than a pioneer commending those who have come after - for working through the difficulties imposed not by feminism itself, but by the failure of society as a whole to embrace its ideals.

 

[Sair]

thats the other part of the problem, women have been fed this false history of oppression. yeah its true that 200 years ago women had fewer rights than men, but you know what? men had a hell of a lot more responsibilities too lol, the men were expected to be the breadwinners, they were expected to go to war when they had to, not to mention women were usually treated more leniently by the law and society in general. so this feminist notion that “they were being oppressed” is not true.

You can have an easier life, but only if you’re a slave who’s intellectually and spiritually substandard?

Might want to go for the hard sell on that one…

 

[Sair]

Read yet another article by a feminist - The Failure of Feminism.

Gosh, I wish I’d read this before.

It makes abundantly clear that the failure in question is not of feminism, but of society’s response to it. The necessity, in justice, of allowing women economic and social freedom was not met by a corresponding realisation by the men in power that women are human, just like them. Most of the problems enumerated in this article are problems of men’s response to the social changes instigated by feminism - once they weren’t socially obliged to remain legally married, they high-tailed it out of there to live the high life whilst their ex-wives did (and still do, even over 20 years after this article was published) the hard yards. Similarly, the structures of capitalism failed, utterly - and still fail - to adapt to the biological differences between men and women. The almighty dollar is far, far more important, obviously, than human wellbeing (well, at least women’s wellbeing…)

 

[endoentropism]

The “tarring and feathering” you are talking about is also being done by women who now realise they have been sold a crock.

Read yet another article by a feminist - The Failure of Feminism. In it she writes -

Kay Ebeling is not an authoritative voice on feminism. She was a freelance writer. The article reads like satire but I suspect it isn’t – which is sad. I doubt she’s any more familiar with formal feminist theory than the OP is; she’s about as authoritative a voice on the issue as I am on astrophysics. And (as Sair indicated) what she’s reacting to is the fact that society is still aligned along patriarchal lines even as women refuse to be subordinate.

Feminism didn’t create deadbeat dads. It’s not feminism’s fault if a man cheats or leaves because the wife’s waist doesn’t “go back to 20 inches after pregnancy.” That’s precisely the chauvinistic behaviour that feminism seeks to correct. Saying “feminism failed and we should go back to how things were” because society is still anti-woman is like saying “the civil rights movement failed and we should go back to how things were” because racism is still an issue.

I really don’t understand what is so controversial about “men and women are equal.”

 

[Sair]

My apologies for taking a while to respond to this. I’ve been thinking about this post a lot, but have been struggling to find the right words. Okay, so you’re happy and fulfilled to submit to your husband. But whatabout women like me, who really wont have that. The idea of submitting to my husband is fairly abhorent. Are you saying that I should have to take a husband who is head of me?

I can’t say what the poster to whom you’re responding really meant, but I do think there are a not insignificant number of women out there who really do believe that a man should be the dominant member of a household, and women should defer to men on all major decisions (or at the very least, give him the impression that he’s in charge). Just google The Surrendered Wife - disturbing stuff.

I would question the “equal in dignity but different roles” approach, especially since part of the concept of human dignity is personal autonomy. How can a woman have dignity equal with a man if she is expected (or coerced or forced) to relinquish her personal autonomy to the will of her husband?

I do find it interesting, though, that both sides of the feminist divide are inclined to blame the economy for the shortfall in achieving their ideals…

 

[In_Spiration]

**To fellow Catholics: Here’s a related post I just recently wrote in another thread.

To all: The following are excerpts from an essay I highly recommend to everyone in its entirety, F. Roger Devlin’s “Home economics”. Given the length, and laziness, though, I’ll just post a few especially relevant parts.**

[T]he high standing of women in our civilization not only long predates feminist ideology but is logically incompatible with it. To understand why, one needs to keep two points in mind: 1) women’s traditional status was linked to behavioral expectations — fulfilling the duties of their station; and 2) it assumed qualitative differences and complementarity (rather than “fair” competition) between the sexes.

As to the first point: strictly speaking, it was never women as such who enjoyed high status but rather the social roles proper to them — those of wife and mother, chiefly. Being born female (or male) is merely a natural fact of no intrinsic moral significance, but the filling of a social role involves effort and often sacrifice. Accordingly, the respect paid to women was not an unconditional birthright; it was reserved for women who fulfilled their feminine obligations.

Among those obligations, marital fidelity was of supreme importance: so much so that in our language general terms such as virtue and morality have often been used to refer specifically to sexual fidelity in women. That is owing not to irrational prudery, as the apostles of sexual liberation imagined, but to the recognition that all which is necessary to destroy a race and civilization is for its women to refuse to be faithful wives and mothers.

. . .

A feminist in the strict and proper sense may be defined as a woman who envies the male role.

By the male role I mean, in the first place, providing, protecting, and guiding rather than nurturing and assisting. This in turn involves relative independence, action, and competition in the larger impersonal society outside the family, the use of language for communication and analysis (rather than expressiveness or emotional manipulation), and deliberate behavior aiming at objective achievement (rather than the attainment of pleasant subjective states) and guided by practical reasoning (rather than emotional impulse).

Both feminist and nonfeminist women sense that these characteristically male attributes have a natural primacy over their own. I prefer to speak of “primacy” rather than superiority in this context since both sets of traits are necessary to propagate the race. One sign of male primacy is that envy of the female role by men is virtually nonexistent — even, so far as I know, among homosexuals.

Normal women are attracted to male traits and wish to partner with a man who possesses them. Healthy societies are marked by a cooperative reciprocity between the sexes, but an unequal one in the sense that it involves male leadership of the female, somewhat as in ballroom dancing.

The feminists’ response to the primacy of male traits, on the other hand, is a feeling of inadequacy in regard to men — a feeling ill-disguised by defensive assertions of her “equality.” She desires to possess masculinity directly, in her own person, rather than partnering with a man. That is what leads her into the spiritual cul de sac of envy.

 

[In_Spiration]

Cont’d:
. . .Most leftist utopias involve enjoying all the benefits of tightly knit communities while paying none of the costs in individual freedom such communities demand. Thus, feminists propose to liberate women from “domestic drudgery” and replace it with unrestricted personal choice. Yet the drudgery of marriage and its duties are, quite obviously, the indispensable basis of the family, the model and source for all real community.

It is true that there is a measure of free choice even in marriage: a woman may choose whether, and to a certain extent whom, she will marry. But once a woman makes her choice by taking the vow and entering into the covenant, she ipso facto no longer has a choice (just as one cannot eat a cake and have it). In other words, marriage is a one-way nonrefundable ticket. Her husband is her choice even if he eventually displeases her in certain ways, as all mortal husbands necessarily must. When a woman keeps her choice of mate open forever, it is called “spinsterhood.”

Ultimately, the fantasies of feminism and sexual liberation rest upon a metaphysical confusion that might be called the absolutizing of choice. The illusion is that society could somehow be ordered to allow women to choose without thereby diminishing their future options. Birth control, abortion, the destigmatizing of fornication and lesbianism, the “right” to a career, arbitrary and unilateral divorce — all these have been pitched to women as ways of expanding their choices.

. . .

A woman’s sexual choices are analogous to a man’s in regard to his calling. Inherently, they cannot be made as easy and reversible as choosing flavors of ice cream. But making them so is what feminism and sexual liberation attempt to do. The underlying motive seems to be precisely a fear of difficult choices and a desire to eliminate the need for them. For example, a woman does not have to think about a man’s qualifications to be a father to her children if a pill or a routine medical procedure can remove that possibility. There is no reason to consider carefully the alternative between career and marriage if motherhood can be safely postponed until the age of 40 (as large numbers of women now apparently believe). What we have here is not a clear gain in the amount of choice, but a shift from one sense of the word to another — from serious, reflective commitment to merely doing as one desires at any given time. Like the dilettante who dabbles in five professions without finally pursuing any, the liberated woman wants to keep all her options open forever: she wants eternal youth.

The attempt to realize a utopia of limitless choice in the real world has certain predictable negative consequences: notably, it makes women’s experience of love one of repeated failure. The liberated woman who rejects both committed marriage and committed celibacy drifts into and out of a series of what are called “relationships,” either abandoning or being abandoned by her man (in her mind, it is his fault in both cases). A popular German novel satirizing this pattern of behavior is titled With the Next Man Everything Will Be Different.

The lesson inevitably taught by such experiences is that love does not last, that people are not reliable, that in the end one has only oneself to fall back on, that prudence dictates always looking out for number one. And that in turn destroys the generosity, loyalty, and trust that are indispensable if love is to succeed and endure.

. . .We are, indeed, protected from certain risks, but we have correspondingly little to gain; we have fewer worries but no great aspirations. The price we pay for eliminating the dangers of intimacy is eliminating its seriousness.

In place of family formation, we find a “dating scene” without any clear goal, in which men and women are both consumed with the effort to get the other party to close options (“commit”) while keeping their own open. There is a hectic and never-ending jockeying for position: fighting off the competition on the one hand, keeping an eye out for a better deal elsewhere on the other.

 

[In_Spiration]

And finally:
These developments are economic in the most proper sense of the term, for the family is still a more fundamental economic fact than the market where goods and services are exchanged. Most professional economists, however, find no place in their thoughts for procreation, or even for sexual dimorphism. And I do not believe that results from the direct influence of anti-natalist or feminist ideology, in which most of them take no interest. It is rather that the home has simply fallen out of the economist’s purview.

For example, economists have produced cogent refutations of the feminist “57 cents on the dollar” canard, critiques of “comparable worth,” “affirmative action,” and so on. But they usually limit themselves to pointing out why men are more productive, i.e., why men’s labor commands a higher price on the market than women’s. They seem to accept the premise that women and men are interchangeable agents of production whose efficiency can be arithmetically assessed; they ignore qualitative social-role differentiation. That tends not only to undermine the dignity of the traditional female role of wife and mother, as gallant conservatives have long pointed out, but also the specifically male breadwinning role. For men are not simply more productive than women (although they are that as well); rather, they have a natural provider role with social and familial meaning.

The economy is not Wall Street; it is Dad dragging himself out of bed at six o’clock in the morning to go to an unglamorous job because he loves his children. It is a remarkable psychological fact that most men find satisfaction in providing for their families. They certainly do not take much satisfaction in paying income tax or meeting car payments. Children are frequently more expensive than taxes or cars, but most fathers take well to the provider role. Family life transforms what might otherwise be mere drudgery into a vocation; the father’s work acquires a significance it cannot have for a bachelor. Is there not something missing from a science of economics that has no use for this fact?

It is, therefore, an insufficient response to the feminist slogan of equal pay for equal work to show that women are not doing equal work. We will eventually have to rediscover the forgotten concept of the “family income” — not only because men usually happen to be better providers than women, but also because the male role is vulnerable in the modern world, and must be shored up for the family to function properly.

. . .

The contemporary white-collar employee is dependent upon a boss for his livelihood, and must therefore be deferential, diplomatic, and often less than forthright about what he thinks. It is not hard to see which sex is better at this sort of behavior. Women are cunning and play their cards close to their chest: an evolutionary adaptation left over from the days when their survival and reproductive success depended on an ability to manipulate males physically stronger than themselves. Today, it makes them naturals at office politics.

Most men find the atmosphere of the modern workplace stifling and tedious, and women themselves are seldom attracted to the sort of docile, gelded drudges that manage to succeed in it. But men cannot find refuge at home either, because the women who might have made homes for them are out competing against them in the activities of the broader society.

To these intrinsic male disadvantages in the modern workplace must be added those directly created by feminism.

British philosopher C.E.M. Joad once characterized cultural decadence as “a sign of man’s tendency to misread his position in the universe, to take a view of his status and prospects more exalted than the facts warrant and to conduct his societies and to plan his future on the basis of this misreading.” Feminism might usefully be viewed in this light as the decadence of European womanhood. It can only have been such a delusion of grandeur that led women with no experience of the world of industry to assert their “right” to a career — meaning, really, an easy and successful career. They pictured themselves, feet up on mahogany desks, barking orders at cringing male subordinates, and getting rewarded for it with fat paychecks and prestige.

The practical result of loudly proclaiming that careers will be opened to talents, as students of the “civil rights” movement know, is that vast hordes of formerly contented mediocrities start thinking of themselves as talented. When they fail at their endeavors, they feel cheated, assume someone else must be to blame, and call for punishment.

The gullible women who entered the workforce at the urging of feminists quickly discovered that they did not like it very much (despite their feminine advantages enumerated above). Work turned out to be … well, a lot of work. Their response to the broken promises of feminism, however, was not to blame the ideologues for having made them or themselves for having believed them; it was to blame men. Men simply had to re-engineer the world of work until women found it “fulfilling.” And feminism would lead the way again. (One of the movement’s greatest strengths has been this ability to profit politically from its own failures.)

I think that can basically serve as a response to every point I’ve missed while I’ve been away from the thread. (Due to outside obligations, I’ve been unable to keep up with the thread since late last week, so that’s the best I can do for now. I apologize if anyone seriously objects. Although, it’s probably better grasped all at once anyway, not spread out.)

 

[someperson555]

You can have an easier life, but only if you’re a slave who’s intellectually and spiritually substandard?

Might want to go for the hard sell on that one…

i agree, that system was bad, but i was just trying to disprove faulty feminist notions that “the men were living la vida loca, while the women were being ruthlessly oppressed”, its just not true. but as i said it was still a bad system. thats why i support equality, but the difference between my definition of equality and the feminist definition of equality is that i define equality as:“equal standards for all”, while the feminists define equality as: “special treatment for women only”.

 

[endoentropism]

To fellow Catholics: Here’s a related post I just recently wrote in another thread.

To all: The following are excerpts from an essay I highly recommend to everyone in its entirety, F. Roger Devlin’s “Home economics”. Given the length, and laziness, though, I’ll just post a few especially relevant parts.

This is such a hodgepodge of insightful and tragically ignorant that I don’t know where to begin.

However, these excerpts are an excellent litmus test for whether or not you “get” feminism.

 

[endoentropism]

So it doesn’t look like I’m arguing in bad faith:

[T]he high standing of women in our civilization not only long predates feminist ideology but is logically incompatible with it. To understand why, one needs to keep two points in mind: 1) women’s traditional status was linked to behavioral expectations — fulfilling the duties of their station; and 2) it assumed qualitative differences and complementarity (rather than “fair” competition) between the sexes.

As to the first point: strictly speaking, it was never women as such who enjoyed high status but rather the social roles proper to them — those of wife and mother, chiefly. Being born female (or male) is merely a natural fact of no intrinsic moral significance, but the filling of a social role involves effort and often sacrifice. Accordingly, the respect paid to women was not an unconditional birthright; it was reserved for women who fulfilled their feminine obligations.

Among those obligations, marital fidelity was of supreme importance: so much so that in our language general terms such as virtue and morality have often been used to refer specifically to sexual fidelity in women. That is owing not to irrational prudery, as the apostles of sexual liberation imagined, but to the recognition that all which is necessary to destroy a race and civilization is for its women to refuse to be faithful wives and mothers.

This is largely true. The woman’s “high status” had less to do with their biology and more to do with how effectively she conformed to the societal expectations of Woman. Hence his remark that the respect paid to women was not an “unconditional birthright.”

It’s also worth interrogating his use of the word “respect” because it is debatable whether chivalry or the medieval cult of Mary/womanhood was about respect, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.

However, he misses the mark at least twice in this short passage: First, he claims that the “high standing of women in our civilization” is incompatible with feminism, which is true, but not for the reasons he argues later. Second, his claim that “all which is necessary to destroy a race and civization is for its women to refuse to be faithful wives and mothers” is an empty platitude.

A feminist in the strict and proper sense may be defined as a woman who envies the male role.

This may be strict but it is not proper, though let’s not start a debate on the subtleties of disparate feminist theories.

 

[endoentropism]

By the male role I mean, in the first place, providing, protecting, and guiding rather than nurturing and assisting. This in turn involves relative independence, action, and competition in the larger impersonal society outside the family, the use of language for communication and analysis (rather than expressiveness or emotional manipulation), and deliberate behavior aiming at objective achievement (rather than the attainment of pleasant subjective states) and guided by practical reasoning (rather than emotional impulse).

This is just… Wildly subjective. At the very best, it’s an anachronism which dates more to the 18th and 19th Centuries than it does antiquity or some other era time forgot. At worst, it creates a false dichotomy between the male and female role. Either way, it’s a false truism.

You can see his bias quite clearly: the “characteristically male” attributes are described in strong, morally positive terms while the “female” attributes are made to sound weak and trifling. Men are communicative and analytical; women are emotionally manipulative. Men seek objective achievement; women seek indulgent pleasure. Is this the “respect” to which he was referring?

Important, too: men are such, women are such. They are not conditioned to be this way, they are this way. He is speaking of biological determinism, which I imagine is something most theists should take issue with.

Both feminist and nonfeminist women sense that these characteristically male attributes have a natural primacy over their own. I prefer to speak of “primacy” rather than superiority in this context since both sets of traits are necessary to propagate the race. One sign of male primacy is that envy of the female role by men is virtually nonexistent — even, so far as I know, among homosexuals.

Again, more false truisms. A more accurate wording would have been,

“Both feminist and nonfeminist women sense that these characteristically male attributes have a socially conditioned primacy over their own.”

This is an extremely important distinction.

To his second point – perhaps the reason the stereotypically female role isn’t envied by men is that society has conditioned us to believe it is weak and effeminate and of less value than the male role. Here is the remarkable doublethink of anti-feminists: women are simultaneously the glue that holds civilization together - they are the homemakers and nurturers and the restorative agents of society - but they are also weak and frail and they desire - no! - need strong men to protect them.

Normal women are attracted to male traits and wish to partner with a man who possesses them. Healthy societies are marked by a cooperative reciprocity between the sexes, but an unequal one in the sense that it involves male leadership of the female, somewhat as in ballroom dancing.

Keep in mind the “male traits” he is describing are generally modern and Western in nature; he says nothing about other societies or cultures.
Furthermore, he’s begging the question with his “healthy society” remark as there is no way to objectively describe our society as “healthy” even if it’s helthier than at any point in the past.

The feminists’ response to the primacy of male traits, on the other hand, is a feeling of inadequacy in regard to men — a feeling ill-disguised by defensive assertions of her “equality.” She desires to possess masculinity directly, in her own person, rather than partnering with a man. That is what leads her into the spiritual cul de sac of envy.

More false truisms. All his false assumptions and biological determinism and general ignorance of history has culminated in his grand point: that feminists are simply envious of men. This is such a simplistic conclusion that it would not warrant address, were it not for the fact that so many people hold it.

Simply put: it’s false. It ignores entire waves of feminist thinking and it fundamentally misunderstands the goal of feminism, regardless of the tactics employed to achieve that goal. Is he even aware that feminism is not some monolithic dogmatic entity, and that there are in fact different theories within feminist theory proper?

However, this is the problem with all the excerpts by this gentleman – if you didn’t know any better, you’d think he was well-researched and logically consistent. He is not. His thesis is irrational and simplistic.