Sixteen Volts

Perhaps it is time for my blog to have its first guest blogger. Panu, whose Finnish writings I have enjoyed for a few years now and who these days has a paid gig for writing columns for a big internet portal, sent me this translation of his old blog post "Mikä feminismissä vikana?" that I liked. Perhaps my English-speaking readers will also enjoy it, despite the slight cultural differences. With Panu's permission, I also took the liberty to edit the translation a little bit.

---

What's Wrong with Feminism?

I have always wanted to summarize the faults I find with feminism, and I could as well do it now. So, what is wrong with feminism?

To start with, societal irresponsibility. Feminists seem unable to admit that they have (at least in countries such as Finland) had loads of leverage in the development of society and legislation for decades. Feminists are to a great extent part of the power-wielding elites in society. Still, they love to assume the role of a persecuted dissenter or the unmasker of hidden elites.

Ireen von Wachenfeldt, the Swedish über-feminist, stated in the documentary "Könskriget" (The Sex Wars) by Evin Rubar, that women's liberation hadn't made the slightest advance in the years her organisation had been active, although it was Sweden's biggest feminist organization, lavishly sponsored by the state, and able to make one of its supporters the Minister of Gender Equality. If an organization is in such a hegemonical position and still feels unable to actually achieve anything worthwhile, isn't it the organization's own fault, rather than society's and patriarchy's? Shouldn't the organization ask itself in earnest what actually went wrong? Nopey dopey. It's the money and the power, stupid. You can never have enough of those.

Of course, you could ask whether the misdevelopment of an organization such as ROKS (the Swedish national organization of safe houses for battered women and girls, the one led by Ms vonWachenfeldt) can be put down to feminism alone. It shows, too, why libertarians are wrong when they want to make social welfare the business of a "third sector", i.e., the sector of more or less independent non-profit quangos and NGOs. When we have an NGO such as ROKS instead of a government body taking care of social security, we'll be left with ROKS soaking up government money and/or private donations for its own supposed "good ends", but not being accountable or answerable in the way a government body is.

Of course, social welfare offices can be, and are, infiltrated by male-hating feminazis, but as government bodies, they are still accountable and subject to official investigation. If there is a feminazi cell in the welfare office, it can always be unmasked and its members prosecuted or demoted to tasks where they cannot endanger anybody's equal rights. When you outsource social security and welfare services to an organization such as ROKS, you don't have that kind of leverage. Besides, men with a nice, friendly and understanding disposition, such as me and you, tend to empathize with male-hating feminazis even when we shouldn't, if they are working for an organization maintaining safe houses for battered wives. After all, remembering what sort of men women prefer, we know that those houses are visited not only by psychopathic women and frauds, but also by real victims. If you are a woman who meets grotesquely maimed women on a weekly basis, you might as well end up genuinely believing that all men are monsters.

The libertarians love to present the "third sector" as an alternative to the "bureaucratic" welfare of the State. Obviously they want to resurrect the "faith-based" third sector of old, which functioned as a mechanism for ideological control of the poor unemployable mob. However, it is the inescapable nature of all well-meaning bureaucracies - both state and NGO - to expand uncontrollably if not kept in check. All organizations crave more money and influence in order to cure all the ills in the world. This insight is not mine, it is my sister's, who used to work in the welfare office.

This megalomania must be duly recognized and mechanisms developed in order to control it, and this is precisely why social security should be a government matter. The libertarian might for ideological reasons prefer to outsource it to a mafia of rabid feminazi male-bashers, who would even from the libertarian's own ideological perspective be a greater evil than a government-controlled welfare office, which can be held answerable and accountable. Taking away government grants would not necessarily change anything, because "protecting women" is a cause that would certainly be promoted by wealthy, stupid philanthropes. Their donations would turn the organization into a power entirely independent of state, government and political processes. Do the libertarians really believe that such an outfit would in all circumstances be better than a government body subject to political control?

By the way, here we see it again how enthusiastically the libertarian right wants to give away the political power of democratically mandated bodies to all kinds of "spontaneous communities". The idea of vesting Muslim communities with judicial power over their members is essentially a libertarian-rightist idea, although all kinds of naive leftist do-gooders who are ignorant of the basics of democracy and rule of law are easily duped into actually supporting this pipe-dream.

But I digress. Feminists remind me of a certain peculiarity of Eastern European communist states. In those countries, Communist party veterans tended to refer to the "Cause" of Communism in the way Communist conspirators did, i.e., although they wielded all the swords and guns in the country, they still saw the world as if they were the embattled underground opposition. After reading a pile of articles about the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust and the Gulag, I have come to the conclusion that that is precisely the common attitude of all totalitarian governments and juntas: the delusion that you are still a "cause" or a "movement" while you are already in charge of the whole place and should basically be responsible for everybody living in the country. Such a mindset enables you to carry out the most horrible crimes against humanity "in the interest of the Cause", because you think that revolution is still going on and that there is a state of emergency - and, above all, that there will never be any kind of normalcy before the purpose of the revolution has been fulfilled - before Turks are the lords of their own country, before the Aryan race rules the world, or before capitalist oppression has been annihilated everywhere. Of course, these goals are always unreachable and transcendent, which means that the revolutionary state of emergency can go on... and on... and on... and somehow you are always justified to commit more and more appalling atrocities.

As I said, feminists have had lots of leverage for decades, but they never admit this. If they do attain something, they won't be happy with it afterwards, because somehow it always turns out to be favoring the male supremacy, whatever that is anyway. "Equality" and "justice" - the kind of equality and justice that would satisfy the feminist, that is - will always escape her, a fact that strongly suggests they have never meant to be attained anyway - i.e., as equality and justice, for the feminist, are infinitely banished outside the circle of the world, ultimately they do not constitute political, but rather metaphysical and theological concepts, and feminism is rather a religion than a political movement.

Feminists are bad role models for young girls. The typical feminist drinks alcohol, smokes tobacco and probably takes other "recreational" drugs as well. She believes in irrational superstitions such as chakras and horoscopes. Even as a scholar of the humanities she is not very good, because instead of collecting data and information (learning languages, for instance), she prefers to concentrate on scholastics, on the theology of the religion called feminism. Who wants his or her daughter to turn out like that?

To put it bluntly: if I had a daughter who would become a prostitute, I would be worried, because she could catch a venereal disease, develop a dangerous drug addiction, or be assaulted by a violent customer. If she would become a feminist, I would know it for sure that she will catch a venereal disease, develop a dangerous drug addiction and be assaulted by a violent boyfriend or girlfriend. Feminism is very much about assuming the role of a tortured victim, which means that if you are a feminist, you seek the company of dangerous, violent people for the sheer hell of it. It is a kind of narcissistic self-indulgence. Of course, when you live with a violent man, his brutality gives you more reasons to be a feminist. In short, to be a whore is a better alternative than to be a feminist, under the proviso that no special legislation be enacted so as to wilfully and purposefully marginalize prostitutes.

And don't you even imagine that lesbian relationships are more free, less coercive or less violent than heterosexual ones. That would indeed be too naive.

Feminism is also societally irrelevant. Trade unionism, labour movement, socialism etc. have succeeded and acquired influence in society because they have really been about something, about correcting genuine injustices normal people have felt strongly about. These movements have also stressed the self-help activity of the concerned people themselves. Labour movement used to be much more than socialist parties. There were also workers' sports clubs, temperance clubs, educational activities, you name it. Labour movement was ultimately successful because it had positive purposes in addition to capitalist-baiting. In Finland at least, it was part of traditional workers' culture to humiliate the capitalist by being even more polite and mannerly than he, so that he had to be ashamed of his stereotypical ideas of working class.

Hannu Salama, who used to be a renowned communist writer in Finland back in the seventies, was brought up in a traditional working class environment, and as I have been able to observe in person, he is a well-mannered fine old gentleman if there ever was one. I do not marvel at all at the fact that he has been so well liked by women. He makes an impression quite different from his books, which are basically about drinking bouts and sexual excesses.

Feminists, though, are not a societally relevant movement in the way old labour movement used to be. Feminists have mostly just concentrated upon accusing "patriarchy" and men of all the ills of the world in a way similar to the antics of your average resentful racist right-wing loony. In fact, it can be plausibly argued that feminists have strengthened right-wing racism. Racists are not stupid. They have certainly recognized the similarities between their own ideas and feminism, and of course they have reasoned in this vein: If that lot have been able to mainstream their ideology of resentment, - even as part of the leftist platform - why shouldn't we? Here's another instance of the detrimental influence feminism exerts upon the whole society and another reason to get rid of feminism as soon as possible.

The societal irrelevancy of feminism can also be recognized in the fact that feminism couldn't care less for the common problems of common women. If Chrissie the dentist's assistant becomes Jake the truck driver's girlfriend and prospective wife, she will be interested in questions of housing, pay, child grants and other practicalities that will concern her when she actually marries Jake and starts giving birth to children. For the feminist, though, her main problem is Jake, that dirty, stupid MAN, and the feminist will expect her to desert Jake and move in with a commune of separatist lesbians reeking of unwashed old vulva.

The prohibition of prostitution that has been fiercely debated in Finland is another example. The only goal feminism accepts is a utopian one, a world without prostitution. However, as the Christian in me puts it, the world is sinful and prostitutes will always be among us. A societally relevant movement would accept that Utopia is not behind the next street corner, and it would instead minimize the factors contributing to prostitution or mend the reasons why a young lady would drift into prostitution. It would reduce the risks of violent assault and venereal disease both for the prostitute and for her customer, and it would provide possibilities to quit prostitution. Such a movement would most naturally originate among the prostitutes themselves. However, whenever prostitutes spontaneously organize and unionize, their organizations and unions are called the puppets of patriarchy and the front of "sex industry". Women's groups not controlled by feminist ideologues are contaminated by false consciousness, and you must never let them actually decide upon anything. Feminists always know better than the common woman what is in her interest.

If feminists were genuinely interested in taking over society the way labour movement did, they would in earnest try to create alternative power structures instead of the old, supposedly patriarchy-controlled ones. A cooperative of female scientists could grant scholarships to talented girls interested in physics, maths etc. This does not interest feminists at all, however, because they see science as something uncool, uninteresting and male, and prefer to "question" it with new age, hippie magic and "energy crystals". When a woman is unhappy, the only solution feminism has to offer is a separatist wymmyn culture awash with anti-intellectualism, irrationalism, and superstition, not the creation of parallel power structures. This is partly due to the fact that feminism has been infested with the usual anarchist left rubbish about powerless utopia, about Power Being a Very Bad Thing (TM). This applies, of course, only to democratic, formal, mandated power. The dictatorial, arbitrary power usurped by some self-appointed matriarch and then exerted by her upon the feminist community that she heads is of course an organic and natural kind of power which is never questioned.

Feminists do not really believe in the woman being equal. They do not want to admit that a woman can have a will of her own. This fact was amply illustrated by the Lynndie England story. The fact that a young woman should have joined the army and humiliated Muslim men was interpreted as a pseudo kind of emancipation corrupted by patriarchy, not as a natural consequence of the fact that a woman can have her own independent moral choices. When you allow a woman such as Ms England the free moral choice, she could as well choose to satisfy her desires as a sadistic torturer.

Anytime we gamma males find fault with the women who let themselves be fucked and exploited by cynical alpha males, feminists and their secondants declare with a vengeance that a woman has the free choice to pick up her preferred kind of male, and that we gammas are a bunch of hideous reactionaries, if we as much as hint at the possibility of women's predilection for violent and stupid males being detrimental to their own interests. Okay, so a woman has the right to do any stupid thing she wants, because free will implies the right to commit a stupidity. No objection to that. But why the howls of protest from the very same bunch of feminists and their cronies, when some woman is held accountable for the consequences of her wrong choice? Why do they call Ms England the victim of nameless male-dominated power structures?

In my opinion, Ms England is a grown-up person. When a grown-up person makes a wrong choice, in the moral and/or legal sense, she will be held accountable. If wrongs committed by a woman, such as Ms England, are belittled "because she was led astray by patriarchy" instead of following her better female nature, this implies that being a woman, she is not fully human or not fully able to make moral choices on her own. So, it's actually the feminist who does not see the woman as a fully competent grown-up. Feminists don't want to be held fully accountable for the wrongs they themselves commit, and neither do they want any other woman to be. So, feminists are the ones who are standing in the way of full moral and legal equality between the sexes.

Feminists are not capable of dialogue. Feminists aren't even able to face the fact that somebody could be in bona fide disagreement with them. Instead, they inundate every dissenter with a flood of psychobabble, insinuating that he is insane, that he is still too much the slave of his childhood traumas to be taken seriously, that he is a sexually undesirable male (of course, when you answer back in the same vein, there is no limit for the feminists' indignation) or in some other way a subhuman who does not deserve to be taken seriously. Feminism can't be legitimately criticized, because criticism is perceived either as oppression or as insane rants from somebody who hasn't taken his medication. One online feminist in Finland declared categorically that Ms Rubar's documentary of the state of feminism in Sweden "only documented her own state of mind". She didn't, for instance, cite the fact that Ms Rubar had been invited to give speeches at Timbro, the rightist think-tank of Swedish businesspeople, a fact that could be used in order to argue that Ms Rubar was somehow remote-controlled by a right-wing media conspiracy. Even this would have been, on some level, a relevant argument against Ms Rubar and her documentary. However, the online feminist couldn't be bothered even this far - she preferred the ad hominem strategy. For a feminist, the political opponent is always a childhood-traumatized, emotionally unstable, impulsive lunatic, who will be committed to a psychiatric hospital as soon as the great feminist revolution leads to the birth of the Femiet Union.

False solidarity. If you call feminism a totalitarian ideology, feminists always brush away this criticism with the statement that there are lots of different feminisms and much internal debate and dispute within the feminist movement. However, as Janne Vainio has said, feminists can be a totalitarian movement even though they don't agree internally. According to Mr Vainio, totalitarianism can tolerate an internal polyphony, as far as certain minimum requirements are complied with and rituals observed. Everybody knows the Chinese communists have been able to mutate into staunch supporters and promoters of a robber baron kind of capitalism in their own country. This could hardly have been possible, unless the higher-ups of the Party hadn't been given a very free rein in internal disputes on economic policy. However, this does not change the fact that China is a totalitarian, undemocratic country.

The totalitarian character of feminism is clearly seen in the feminist predilection for false solidarity: when the most arrogant one among them condemns something as antifeminist, the whole damn lot of them will condemn it as well, without even taking into consideration the remote possibility that the mother-hen superior who started the chain reaction could be wrong. On the other hand, it is entirely possible to sell hard-core porn to feminists if you market it to them as emancipationist erotica. The very same depiction of sexual intercourse can, according to the feminists, be porn in a porn mag and emancipationist erotica at an exhibition of feminist art.

Am I making this up? Certainly not. I remember a discussion I had in 1988 or 1989 with an anti-porn feminist about Cicciolina, whom she considered something fundamentally different from an "exploited porn actress". The poor hag actually thought Cicciolina was an artist in her own right. I was baffled, and still am. Cicciolina was just another female being fucked in front of a camera: if anything she was more stupid than your average porn girl. But as she had been marketed as a "radical politician", all those cackling feminist hens actually believed she was different. And as some cackler superior was promoting this view, nobody dared to question it.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Wednesday, July 05, 2006 at 9:38 AM