48
The radical feminist plague
By Bernard
Chapin
Across the span of human history, men and women have joined together, in complementary roles, to produce a species that is arguably the most successful on earth, yet victory can result in the creation of powerful enemies. Few adversaries have been more potent or destructive in a shorter period of time than radical feminism. With its open hatred of men and complete disrespect for the choices of women, it is unique among the various "isms" currently defiling our culture. It makes a victim out of every female, brings about an element of barbarism to our daily relations, and has conjured up a war between the sexes.
Considering that the media constantly refers to the main feminist organizations as "women's groups" and that pusillanimous politicians pretend that these leftist extremists are representative of the a
verage woman, it is not surprising that there
has been such a frenzied response to the publication of Kate O'Beirne's
Women Who Make the World Worse And How Their Radical Feminist Assault is Ruining Our Families, Military, Schools, and Sports. Activists are so threatened by this rather slim volume that they have waged a campaign to downgrade the author's Amazon ranking and fomented considerable madness on the net (which Kathryn Jean Lopez documented in an
excellent article). With O'Beirne's masterful detailing of the feminist defilement of both human dignity and culture in general along with her pervasive use of logicthe feminist kryptoniteperhaps hysteria was the only way in which the faithful thought they could keep the general public from discovering the true extent of their contempt for the citizenry.
One of the non-response response methods used to deal with O'Beirne'
;s c
ritique will be familiar to conservatives who lived through the taffeta day
s of sperm and innuendo otherwise known as the Clinton Administration. It consists of repeating things like, "are you still dwelling on that? Isn't it time to moveon.org?" Such a tactic was on full display in the New York Times review:
Sure, she tosses invective at some specific (and predictable) targets, but for the most part the women in her book are less a real threat to the contemporary conservative project than a history lesson. Her salvos against such dusty icons as Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda and Catharine MacKinnon do all these women the enormous favor of making them relevant again.
While it is true that these individuals no longer adorn the covers of Newsweek, their ideas, once revolutionary, now reign supreme as conventional wisdom. This aftereffect was far too obvious for the sophistos at The Times to consider. The complaints, recriminations, mental breakdowns, and paranoid
fantasie
s of the feminist avant-garde were given a free pass by hordes of people smart enough to kn
ow better because they cloaked their harangues under the protective cover of femininity. To defy them was supposedly to hate women on the whole. The upshot is that contemporary judges view divorce hearings as a mechanism for punishing men, child custody hearings reflect a considerable bias in favor of women, employers now hire on the basis of chromosomal characteristics, and the workplace, thanks to the sexual harassment industry, is an environment hostile to males.
In these pages, the incompetence and inferiority of the feminist mind is readily evident to the reader as O'Beirne gives us a comprehensive tour of their advocacy and opinion. The Equal Rights Amendment is revealed to be a legal absurdity as its vagueness, should it have passed, would have ensured either tyranny or meaninglessness. The egregious Violence Against Women Act (1994) was designed not to protect women, but, rather, to guara
ntee female
supremacy by elevating them in the eyes of the law. Measures like the Equity Pay Act were pro
posed to allow women to be highly paid for work which matches their personal interests while ignoring the need of consumers. That the root of radical feminism is actually an attempt to procure jobs for the unemployable is a perspective I had never thought of, but it is extensivelyand devastatinglydeveloped here by the author.
The text lives up to its secondary billing by carefully explaining in individual chapters the way in which feminists have denigrated the family, the armed forces, every form of education, and sports. I figured that my favorite chapter would be "Mother Nature's a Btch," but it wasn't because the introduction, albeit quite short, dismantled the jaggedy bricks of this Jacobinism as if they were stones atop Monte Cassino.
The left has tried to dismiss this work as a Coulter-esque rant, but this is clearly not the case. More than anything else, Women w
ho Make the Wor
ld Worse is a scholarly review of the literature surrounding the discrepancy between feminist po
sitions and reality. O'Beirne is not detached from the discussion, however, but she refutes and responds to her opposition far more than she insults them. It would be easy to isolate a quotation like, "A woman being brutally killed alongside men is a long-awaited dream of equality," and pretend that O'Beirne is polemicizing; yet, such a sentence would be taken out of context because it was preceded by a quotation from a retired female general reading, "There's been an acceptance of the fact that women"â┚¬Ã…¡ÃƒÆ’”�Å¡¦are in harm's way and they are being killed. That is defining to me." The author's remark was well-justified in light of the situation.
Perhaps the best reason for the left's outraged reaction to this text is that it exposes the totalitarian foundations of political correctness, an ideology of which feminism is irrefutably a subset. PC has eroded th
e value of a univer
sity education due to its outlawing the search for truth. Indeed, as one psychologist O'Beirne cited remarked concerning daycar
e: "Psychologists must refuse to undertake any more research that looks for the negative consequences of other-than-mother care." Why? Well, the outcomes might not be favorable to the points of view of today's politicized pseudo-scholars, so the findings must be buried when they don't meet the demands of theory.
Radical feminism, with its Manichean outlook and attempt to subjugate men in the name of equality, is a malignant and vile influence upon our society. We should all be thankful that Kate O'Beirne has the courage needed to stand up to these fanatics. It is now time for all of us to stare down these vindictive bullies and prevent them from ruining the lives of any more people than they already have.
http
://www.enterstageright.
com/archive/art...eworldworse.htm
