Some rhetorical follies of feminism
I
know not what course others may take; but as for me, I think that I
shall oppose any totalitarian movement that considers my very existence
to be fundamentally wrong, thank you. The excellent essay "Feminism as Fascism" by the anarchist thinker Bob Black
illustrates why opposing feminism is important and should be shared by
men of all ideologies. This essay dates all the way back from 1983, but
it still describes the basic dynamics of modern feminism as if it was
written yesterday. (And heck, while you're at it, go read Black's other essays too. Not every "anarchist" has to be a snotnosed moron who waves the Palestinian flag while collecting his welfare cheque.)
We have all heard the friendly and reasonable public goals of feminism such as the equal right to education, the right to vote and the right to own property independent of men. Of course, all these goals were achieved in Western countries long before most feminists were even born, which raises the question why the feminist movement simply doesn't just congratulate itself and happily disband. The paradox disappears when we understand that the real goals of the feminist movement such as socialism have not been realized yet. Feminists rarely advertise these goals in public, but they are quite evident in their internal discussion and debate for anyone to see.
At its worst, feminism really is a movement of socialist man-hater lesbians. These women have always formed the ideological core of the movement, and most of the feminist talking points still originate from them. This was undeniable in the recent Feminist Initiative farce in Sweden, when the feminists tried to organize themselves as a political party and thus made the mistake of making their demands explicit. Of course, the inevitable end result was that the more normal (for the lack of better word) women were gradually purged from the party, until only the radical socialist "postgender" ideologues remained. The main Achilles heel of feminism is that it has no possible way of ever saying no to its even-more-oppressed subgroups. Thus my constant advice to fellow anti-feminists is to pound at this weakness as much as possible. After all, it is going to be at least several decades in Sweden until the feminists will ever achieve anything or become a realistic threat to men.
But as loud and hairy and ugly and uppity as they are, the unattractive man-hating lesbians are only a small minority of all feminists. For most of the trendoid feminist women, the mainstream feminism lite is simply about getting extra perks for women while still maintaining all their historical entitlements and privileges. For this reason, the criticism of feminism and feminists for being "ugly" somewhat misses the mark: any woman can join what is basically a lobbying group for women, and at least some of these women don't have to look half bad. (Of course, feminists always equate male antifeminism with sexual unattractiveness, hilariously unaware of their own hypocrisy.) The more capable and successful women also understand what a total disaster socialism would be for them, and tend to downplay these angles except when it would personally benefit them in the form of quotas and such, and of course whatever solidarity they have to show to their less successful sisters. These women know very well that no organization that has to compete in the real world against objective criteria could possibly be based on "women's ways of knowing", since every such organization would quickly collapse under the inevitable freeloading.
Of course, it's kind of hard and even hypocritical to fault people for starting groups and ideologies that try to improve their lot in society in expense of the other groups. Every other group has always done this and probably always will, because it is such an efficient way to get ahead and get your voice heard. Only the very exceptionally exceptional individuals can achieve much on their own. It would therefore be pretty silly to blame women and feminists for demanding extra perks for them. Heck, it's not the moron who asks, but the moron is the one who gives, as the old saying puts it. But this doesn't mean that I shouldn't recognize that I would end up being the sucker who has to pay for these perks, so it is in my best interest to oppose them and prevent them from happening.
I am sure that feminists understand, at least in the gut level, what would happen if they ever had to explicitly organize their movement and write down their demands, so they won't actually do this. It is much better to cherrypick the goals and policies according to the rhetorical needs of the current situation. Since these goals necessarily conflict somewhere, we see the constant rhetoric how "there is not just one feminism" and how "feminists are not a HiveMind", but engage in lively debate among themselves. (It is probably needless to mention that this lively internal debate makes all external criticism of feminism unnecessary and uncalled for: feminists consider themselves to be morally superior and thus above criticism.)
I actually don't doubt even for one second that there wouldn't be lots of internal debate within the feminist movement. Certain internal tensions tend to be pretty inevitable when you try to argue that white university-educated daddy's girls are just as oppressed as some slum-dwelling unemployed minority woman. Or when the morbidly obese feminists just have to silently envy and resent their slender and attractive twentysomething sisters, knowing the latter they will get pretty much everything they want that the former group never will, and compare the men that each group has to settle for.
A common anti-feminist putdown towards feminists is that they "hate men". True, the ideological hard core does. That's certainly undeniable. The problem with this criticism is that misses the mark for the feminist mainstream. It would be much more correct to say that feminists hate the bottom 90% of men, but this still wouldn't be right. After all, there is a big difference between hating someone and just being angry and frustrated for someone for his refusal to change himself to be more to your liking. It would be far more accurate to say that feminists are simply indifferent towards men, considering them a resource to finance their feminism. As an analogy, consider the fact that I love steak. To produce steaks, cows must necessarily be treated in a certain fashion that would make a cow, were it sentient, to believe that humans "hate" cows. But we don't. We simply don't really care about them and their suffering, as they are nothing but a resource that we exploit to make our lives better. This attitude is pretty much the same as the attitude that feminists have towards men in general: walking wallets who should just shut up and obey, and who must be put in line if they ever dare oppose their masters.
A feminist might now counter that this is totally false, because she and the other feminists "love" men. For example, feminists often argue that they love the men in their family and their boyfriends. This is excellent, since an argument this silly totally makes my case instead of breaking it. If the fact that they don't hate their male relatives or their boyfriend really is the best argument that feminists have to prove that they "love men", that pretty much establishes the weakness of their love towards the men as class in general. Tell me, feminists, do you really expect to get brownie points for loving your boyfriends, something that should be pretty much the default setting?
Besides, we already know what the feminists are like when they really do love somebody. No, the feminists don't really love profeminist men, since for all their white-knight acting when a woman is in trouble, they are nothing but toadies who behave as if they knew their place even though they still come to the feminist events carrying hopefully condoms in their wallets, unaware of the fact that the feminists know this and feel disgust towards their obesity and general wussiness. (Heck, even Andrea Dworkin came to understand that the sweet and progressive leftist men will behave the way sociobiology predicts if they are given a chance, as you can read from her unintentionally laugh-riot essay "Abortion".) No, I'm talking about gay men, who the feminists absolutely love and adore to the point that no matter what they, the feminists will reflexively defend and admire. Now that's some true love. It is pretty easy to compare this behaviour of feminists to the behaviour that they display towards straight men, and after even a cursory comparison it becomes pretty difficult to believe that the feminists "love" men even one percent as much as they love gay men. Nobody who has seen the standard feminist gushing for gay men could ever make the mistake of thinking that the feminists "love" straight men, in any objectively meaningful sense of this word.
And oh yes, and let's not forget the old canard of how feminism also somehow benefits men. Other lobby groups are usually at least honest, so that the trade unions don't try to insult the other people's intelligence by seriously claiming that a massive raise for the workers is actually in the employers' interest and benefits them. So tell me, feminists: other than a freedom to wear a dress and make out with other men, neither of which is relevant for my preferences and desires, can you name three freedoms that I don't currently have that would be relevant for me and you actually advocate for me? What would I gain from you gaining total control in society? Waiting... waiting... waiting... OK, time's up. Right, didn't even think so.
When the mainstream feminist has to accept that equality between sexes has for all practical purposes been achieved and there really isn't that much to complain, it's time to play the rhetorical card of the worldwide oppression of women, which makes feminism still necessary. But even this card loses its ability to trump anything if we look at it close enough. To sum up, it is obvious that when a Western feminist complains about men oppressing women in some third world hellhole, her only point is that since the Western man has the same genitals as the oppressor man over there, while she has the same genitals as the oppressed woman over there, this proves that men are morally inferior as a class and the Western man therefore has to pay her compensation and tribute. That's all there really is to it. (Besides, I wonder what would happen if instead of the superficial genitals, we compared the ideologies of both groups.)
If the Western feminist really were serious about ending the women's oppression in the third world, the proper target for complaints and actions might be the men in the third world, yes? But the feminists, just like all leftists, of course never actually criticize their beloved third world and the people there. That would be, like, oppression when you claim that the Western culture is in some way superior to other cultures, and don't we all know that all cultures are equal? And besides, let's take a moment to remember how the leftists reacted the last time the West actually decided to force a primitive third world dictatorship to follow us to the 21st century by adopting democracy, equality between sexes etc. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that the feminists applauded that particular move a great deal.
And of course, all leftists and feminists also know how immensely futile it would be for them to complain to some mullah in Pakistan. Even talking to a brick wall would probably yield better results. Nah, it's so much more fun to criticize the people in West, who actually listen and sometimes even reassess and change their behaviour in response to criticism. Besides, this way the feminists get to posture how they are really brave to publish all their social criticism in West, because if they went to the third world and said the same things, such loudmouths and uppity women would be immediately killed without mercy. It's like they are edgy rebels or something!
Feminists, of course, often have the rebellious attitude of know-it-alls, but it's pretty hilarious when their actual lives can be seen through their writings. Especially the feminists in the ideological hard core would seem to have substantial difficulties in creating and maintaining relationships with men and succeeding financially. (This probably was the master plan all along with the lesbians who originally designed the principles of feminist ideology.) It's actually pretty funny when a feminist tries to criticize some relationship advice column while her own most recent relationship again totally predictably went to the rocks, or when a socialist feminist considers herself an expert in economics and explains how a nation should be run while she can herself barely afford to live in a trailer or some rathole in a semi-slum. The words "fucking loser" that seem to be so beloved by feminists seldom seem to apply to anybody as well as to the feminists themselves! As a good general example, consider the posting "Safety Net", and pretty much everything else in the same site. Pray tell, what good is all your moral superiority over men, if you can't eat it?
One Finnish thinker, Jussi Halla-Aho (my American readers: imagine if Steve Sailer was a Finn but never used any math) recently came up with an ingenious solution. It is based on the unwritten double standard that everybody knows well: white men are only allowed to have sex with and marry white women, since anything else would be an act of oppression, but white women having sex with and marrying men of other ethnic groups is an act of liberation. So the solution, to put it short, have the Western feminists marry Muslim men. The whole explanation is so spot-on that I'm just going to quote it here in full, translated in English:
We have all heard the friendly and reasonable public goals of feminism such as the equal right to education, the right to vote and the right to own property independent of men. Of course, all these goals were achieved in Western countries long before most feminists were even born, which raises the question why the feminist movement simply doesn't just congratulate itself and happily disband. The paradox disappears when we understand that the real goals of the feminist movement such as socialism have not been realized yet. Feminists rarely advertise these goals in public, but they are quite evident in their internal discussion and debate for anyone to see.
At its worst, feminism really is a movement of socialist man-hater lesbians. These women have always formed the ideological core of the movement, and most of the feminist talking points still originate from them. This was undeniable in the recent Feminist Initiative farce in Sweden, when the feminists tried to organize themselves as a political party and thus made the mistake of making their demands explicit. Of course, the inevitable end result was that the more normal (for the lack of better word) women were gradually purged from the party, until only the radical socialist "postgender" ideologues remained. The main Achilles heel of feminism is that it has no possible way of ever saying no to its even-more-oppressed subgroups. Thus my constant advice to fellow anti-feminists is to pound at this weakness as much as possible. After all, it is going to be at least several decades in Sweden until the feminists will ever achieve anything or become a realistic threat to men.
But as loud and hairy and ugly and uppity as they are, the unattractive man-hating lesbians are only a small minority of all feminists. For most of the trendoid feminist women, the mainstream feminism lite is simply about getting extra perks for women while still maintaining all their historical entitlements and privileges. For this reason, the criticism of feminism and feminists for being "ugly" somewhat misses the mark: any woman can join what is basically a lobbying group for women, and at least some of these women don't have to look half bad. (Of course, feminists always equate male antifeminism with sexual unattractiveness, hilariously unaware of their own hypocrisy.) The more capable and successful women also understand what a total disaster socialism would be for them, and tend to downplay these angles except when it would personally benefit them in the form of quotas and such, and of course whatever solidarity they have to show to their less successful sisters. These women know very well that no organization that has to compete in the real world against objective criteria could possibly be based on "women's ways of knowing", since every such organization would quickly collapse under the inevitable freeloading.
Of course, it's kind of hard and even hypocritical to fault people for starting groups and ideologies that try to improve their lot in society in expense of the other groups. Every other group has always done this and probably always will, because it is such an efficient way to get ahead and get your voice heard. Only the very exceptionally exceptional individuals can achieve much on their own. It would therefore be pretty silly to blame women and feminists for demanding extra perks for them. Heck, it's not the moron who asks, but the moron is the one who gives, as the old saying puts it. But this doesn't mean that I shouldn't recognize that I would end up being the sucker who has to pay for these perks, so it is in my best interest to oppose them and prevent them from happening.
I am sure that feminists understand, at least in the gut level, what would happen if they ever had to explicitly organize their movement and write down their demands, so they won't actually do this. It is much better to cherrypick the goals and policies according to the rhetorical needs of the current situation. Since these goals necessarily conflict somewhere, we see the constant rhetoric how "there is not just one feminism" and how "feminists are not a HiveMind", but engage in lively debate among themselves. (It is probably needless to mention that this lively internal debate makes all external criticism of feminism unnecessary and uncalled for: feminists consider themselves to be morally superior and thus above criticism.)
I actually don't doubt even for one second that there wouldn't be lots of internal debate within the feminist movement. Certain internal tensions tend to be pretty inevitable when you try to argue that white university-educated daddy's girls are just as oppressed as some slum-dwelling unemployed minority woman. Or when the morbidly obese feminists just have to silently envy and resent their slender and attractive twentysomething sisters, knowing the latter they will get pretty much everything they want that the former group never will, and compare the men that each group has to settle for.
A common anti-feminist putdown towards feminists is that they "hate men". True, the ideological hard core does. That's certainly undeniable. The problem with this criticism is that misses the mark for the feminist mainstream. It would be much more correct to say that feminists hate the bottom 90% of men, but this still wouldn't be right. After all, there is a big difference between hating someone and just being angry and frustrated for someone for his refusal to change himself to be more to your liking. It would be far more accurate to say that feminists are simply indifferent towards men, considering them a resource to finance their feminism. As an analogy, consider the fact that I love steak. To produce steaks, cows must necessarily be treated in a certain fashion that would make a cow, were it sentient, to believe that humans "hate" cows. But we don't. We simply don't really care about them and their suffering, as they are nothing but a resource that we exploit to make our lives better. This attitude is pretty much the same as the attitude that feminists have towards men in general: walking wallets who should just shut up and obey, and who must be put in line if they ever dare oppose their masters.
A feminist might now counter that this is totally false, because she and the other feminists "love" men. For example, feminists often argue that they love the men in their family and their boyfriends. This is excellent, since an argument this silly totally makes my case instead of breaking it. If the fact that they don't hate their male relatives or their boyfriend really is the best argument that feminists have to prove that they "love men", that pretty much establishes the weakness of their love towards the men as class in general. Tell me, feminists, do you really expect to get brownie points for loving your boyfriends, something that should be pretty much the default setting?
Besides, we already know what the feminists are like when they really do love somebody. No, the feminists don't really love profeminist men, since for all their white-knight acting when a woman is in trouble, they are nothing but toadies who behave as if they knew their place even though they still come to the feminist events carrying hopefully condoms in their wallets, unaware of the fact that the feminists know this and feel disgust towards their obesity and general wussiness. (Heck, even Andrea Dworkin came to understand that the sweet and progressive leftist men will behave the way sociobiology predicts if they are given a chance, as you can read from her unintentionally laugh-riot essay "Abortion".) No, I'm talking about gay men, who the feminists absolutely love and adore to the point that no matter what they, the feminists will reflexively defend and admire. Now that's some true love. It is pretty easy to compare this behaviour of feminists to the behaviour that they display towards straight men, and after even a cursory comparison it becomes pretty difficult to believe that the feminists "love" men even one percent as much as they love gay men. Nobody who has seen the standard feminist gushing for gay men could ever make the mistake of thinking that the feminists "love" straight men, in any objectively meaningful sense of this word.
And oh yes, and let's not forget the old canard of how feminism also somehow benefits men. Other lobby groups are usually at least honest, so that the trade unions don't try to insult the other people's intelligence by seriously claiming that a massive raise for the workers is actually in the employers' interest and benefits them. So tell me, feminists: other than a freedom to wear a dress and make out with other men, neither of which is relevant for my preferences and desires, can you name three freedoms that I don't currently have that would be relevant for me and you actually advocate for me? What would I gain from you gaining total control in society? Waiting... waiting... waiting... OK, time's up. Right, didn't even think so.
When the mainstream feminist has to accept that equality between sexes has for all practical purposes been achieved and there really isn't that much to complain, it's time to play the rhetorical card of the worldwide oppression of women, which makes feminism still necessary. But even this card loses its ability to trump anything if we look at it close enough. To sum up, it is obvious that when a Western feminist complains about men oppressing women in some third world hellhole, her only point is that since the Western man has the same genitals as the oppressor man over there, while she has the same genitals as the oppressed woman over there, this proves that men are morally inferior as a class and the Western man therefore has to pay her compensation and tribute. That's all there really is to it. (Besides, I wonder what would happen if instead of the superficial genitals, we compared the ideologies of both groups.)
If the Western feminist really were serious about ending the women's oppression in the third world, the proper target for complaints and actions might be the men in the third world, yes? But the feminists, just like all leftists, of course never actually criticize their beloved third world and the people there. That would be, like, oppression when you claim that the Western culture is in some way superior to other cultures, and don't we all know that all cultures are equal? And besides, let's take a moment to remember how the leftists reacted the last time the West actually decided to force a primitive third world dictatorship to follow us to the 21st century by adopting democracy, equality between sexes etc. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that the feminists applauded that particular move a great deal.
And of course, all leftists and feminists also know how immensely futile it would be for them to complain to some mullah in Pakistan. Even talking to a brick wall would probably yield better results. Nah, it's so much more fun to criticize the people in West, who actually listen and sometimes even reassess and change their behaviour in response to criticism. Besides, this way the feminists get to posture how they are really brave to publish all their social criticism in West, because if they went to the third world and said the same things, such loudmouths and uppity women would be immediately killed without mercy. It's like they are edgy rebels or something!
Feminists, of course, often have the rebellious attitude of know-it-alls, but it's pretty hilarious when their actual lives can be seen through their writings. Especially the feminists in the ideological hard core would seem to have substantial difficulties in creating and maintaining relationships with men and succeeding financially. (This probably was the master plan all along with the lesbians who originally designed the principles of feminist ideology.) It's actually pretty funny when a feminist tries to criticize some relationship advice column while her own most recent relationship again totally predictably went to the rocks, or when a socialist feminist considers herself an expert in economics and explains how a nation should be run while she can herself barely afford to live in a trailer or some rathole in a semi-slum. The words "fucking loser" that seem to be so beloved by feminists seldom seem to apply to anybody as well as to the feminists themselves! As a good general example, consider the posting "Safety Net", and pretty much everything else in the same site. Pray tell, what good is all your moral superiority over men, if you can't eat it?
One Finnish thinker, Jussi Halla-Aho (my American readers: imagine if Steve Sailer was a Finn but never used any math) recently came up with an ingenious solution. It is based on the unwritten double standard that everybody knows well: white men are only allowed to have sex with and marry white women, since anything else would be an act of oppression, but white women having sex with and marrying men of other ethnic groups is an act of liberation. So the solution, to put it short, have the Western feminists marry Muslim men. The whole explanation is so spot-on that I'm just going to quote it here in full, translated in English:
In the early nineties I knew a loudmouth feminist. I assumed that she was obviously a lesbian, even though this issue never came up explicitly. Men, especially the Finnish men, were reactionary pieces of shit from which all evil of the world always emerged. Men just keep beating women to submission and a woman is, especially in the West and Finland, forced to be a birthing machine.
Last time I saw her in the late nineties, she had become a Muslim and led a flock of dark-skinned kids behind her.
All people, both men and women, thirst for the acknowledgement of their strengths and capabilities. But at the same time, all people thirst for acknowledgement as members of their sex. For men, these two needs are not in conflict, since career advancement increases their stereotypical masculinity and desirability among women. For women, these needs are more in conflict. Individuals vary, but at least I believe that on average, what makes a man feel "like a man" is different from what makes a woman feel "like a woman". I may be falling for a stereotype, but stereotypes don't emerge out of nothing. In all cultures, in all eras, women have wanted to marry a man who is more successful than them and is able to put his foot down when needed.
The central tenet of feminism, or at least of its loudest incarnations, is total blindness towards sexual differences. A feminist is offended if she is treated as a woman within male power structures, such as the business world. At the same time she realizes that she has lost all her traditional female privileges. Doors are not opened for her, no flowers are sent, no courtesies given. In addition, with her aggressiveness she has made men fear her and kowtow to her. This satisfies her thirst for power, but not her femininity. No woman becomes interested in a man who fears her and kowtows to her.
The [Muslim man] comes from a world where ye olde ways are still very much alive. He offers a feminist a way out from the dead end that the feminist herself put up. The feminist doesn't need to admit to a Finnish man that she wants and needs a strong man, but can keep on proclaiming that the Finnish man is a male chauvinistic turd that no woman needs. She doesn't have to condemn the male chauvinism of the [Muslim man] since male chauvinism is part of [Muslim] "culture" and it's "wrong to criticize" a foreign culture. This way a feminist can get a strong man who can put his foot down, but at the same time she can be a "feminist" and a "strong woman". Even better, the Finnish man who she despises gets even more pissed off. The Muslim man is happy, the feminist inside a woman is happy, and the woman inside the woman is happy. Only the Finnish man is unhappy, but that's just his just desserts, because he is a male chauvinist and a racist.
For a while now I have been tempted to join a feminist organization or take a women's studies class and at some point start speaking there publicly about what I consider to be the biggest threat to the equality of sexes (the spread of Islam). I would love to see the reactions.
About Western feminists and the third world: of course the mullahs in Pakistan are not going to listen but Western feminists could, if they wanted to, really do something useful for the third-world immigrant women who live in the West the way they did in the third world - for example they could demand that any parent who orders an honor killing of his or her daughter, or circumcises her, or commits any other similar act of third-world savagery be deported.
Also, I think that Halla-Aho is very wrong about "no woman becomes interested in a man who fears her and kowtows to her". There is plenty of women who do. Although he is probably right about most Western women who marry Muslims.
Posted by Vera | 3:49 PM
Please do that Vera, and report back :-)
Posted by Anonymous | 5:52 PM
What DO feminists want?
Posted by Anonymous | 10:02 AM