Radical Feminists: Useful Idiots
A useful idiot is someone who, while zealously promoting one cause, ends up advancing a very different one through stupidity, naivete or inattention. The useful idiot never sees the big picture. Vladimir Lenin, the first Soviet dictator, is credited with coining the phrase, although according to P. Boller and J. George’s They Never Said It, he—well—most likely never said it. Not even in Russian. Whatever its origins, the phrase sometimes comes in handy.
My first two experiences with radical feminists in academia didn’t make much of an impact on me until later. The first was in Fall 1987 at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina. It was my first full-time job out of graduate school, and I was making a presentation on what was then my area of expertise: theories about the conceptual foundations of science and the dynamics of scientific change. After outlining four such theories, I took questions. At one point a female graduate student put up her hand and wanted to know to what extent I could relate the scarcity of women in science to scientific method. I hadn’t thought about it. The question had never occurred to me. A few women have made major contributions to science. Madame Curie comes to mind. Their methods weren’t different than those of men, so I considered the range of methods employed in the sciences to be gender-neutral. The relative scarcity of women in science I attributed mostly to women’s overall lack of interest in science. My politically incorrect answer caused me no problems at the time. This was, after all, before the main wave of feminist incursions into academia and the rise of political correctness (speech control, thought control).
The second incident occurred a few months later at an American Philosophical Association (APA) meeting where I had a job interview. The APA is the largest organization of philosophy professors in the country. What I saw and heard was from the hall because of an unusually large, overflow crowd. A somewhat diminutive woman was being verbally attacked—hissed at, in fact!—by an audience that seemed to be mostly women. None of the panelists (also women) came to her defense. The meeting—supposedly of adults and professionals—disintegrated into chaos. I wasn’t sure what I had seen until months later, when reports began circulating and angry letters to the editor began appearing in the association’s flagship journal.
The diminutive woman, I learned, was Christina Hoff Sommers, a then-unknown professor at tiny Clark College in Massachusetts. She had read a paper on “Feminists Against the Family,†arguing just that to an audience unused to having its basic premises questioned. Sommers had concluded that feminists in academia were more interested in promoting revolutionary social change than in furthering a responsible exchange of ideas. Their ends justified their means. Among the ends they wanted was an end to the traditional, nuclear (two-parent) family. According to their Marxist view of things, the family is a repository of gender-oppression. Men are bourgeois; women are proletariat. Such notions, however contrived and unoriginal, took academia by storm in the 1980s and even more so in the 1990s.
Sommers distinguished between “liberal†feminism and “gender†(radical) feminism. The first promoted, e.g., equal pay for equal work, and opposed discrimination. The latter is a full-fledged worldview that subjects every institution of society to scrutiny through the lens of gender. Sommers had no quarrel with the former; she had plenty of quarrels with the latter. Its influence, which puts science under the gender microscope along with everything else, explained the question from the Clemson graduate student.
I met Sommers a couple of years later. My interests had begun shifting from the foundations of scientific method to political thought and the foundations of a free society. I was interested in libertarian ideas and was networking with other libertarian philosophers, several of whom had befriended her. We were all outsiders, after all, because we were not collectivists. Based on what Sommers had to say, and on a few of her articles, I took a look at so-called “feminist scholarship.†What I found jolted me. One radical feminist called Newton’s and Bacon’s ideas about scientific method a “rape manual†(they spoke of “penetrating†nature’s secrets—get it?). Another compared a romantic candlelight dinner to prostitution. These are just two examples, and not even the weirdest (don’t ask!). Around this time it surfaced that a “feminist legal theorist, †Catharine A. MacKinnon, had compared voluntary sexual intercourse to rape. That oversimplifies somewhat; what she says is that in “male-dominated, patriarchical, heterosexist society†the line between voluntary consent and coercion is blurred, so that in sexual relations between men and women a fine distinction between “voluntary†intercourse and rape can’t be drawn. Yup: under the insidious patriarchy, men as a collective are potential rapists; women are helpless victims.
It seemed like a sick joke to me. Men dominating women? Where? At the time I couldn’t even get a date, much less find someone to dominate. Approach an academic woman? I’d have to have been out of my mind! But these people were being lionized and treated as heroines who had cracked the academic “glass ceiling,†and whose “scholarship†was “cutting edge.†They were employed permanently by their institutions and paid comfortable salaries, while guys like myself struggled to survive as academic cheap labor. We migrated from school to school to school on “visiting assistant professor†contracts or “adjunct†appointments every one, two or three years.
It would not have been as bad if the world according to radical feminism weren’t pure fantasy. There is no “patriarchyâ€! The courts clearly favor women in divorce and child custody cases, and have for years. Women tend to live longer then men—possibly because men have long tended to work in more hazardous occupations, and are far more likely to die of work-related injuries than women. Far more attention is paid to—and government money spent on—women’s health issues than men’s health issues. Men have always been the ones to fight and die in wars, or suffer war-related disabilities. (Radical feminists apparently want as many women killed or maimed in wars as men—hence “women in combat.â€)
Radical feminist “research†on academic topics like the philosophy of science is often just silly. Some of their proposals, e.g., for “female friendly science,†seem to invite ridicule—which they sometimes receive, as when around 1990 a responsible woman philosopher named Marguerita Levin asked sarcastically whether “feminist airplanes would stay aloft for feminist engineers†(“Science and Feminism,†The American Scholar). The more I investigated affirmative action programs, the clearer it became that they explained the growing influence of radical feminism (also multiculturalism and other chicaneries of the politically correct era). At the root was the longstanding commitment to collectivism generally. Preferential hiring for “diversity†had led to a free fall in quality control. Political correctness, when it rushed across the landscape like a tornado in the 1990s, made the free fall semi-permanent. (Now to be sure, academic philosophy wasn’t setting the world on fire before this nonsense started, but that’s another article.)
Christina Hoff Sommers went on to write Who Stole Feminism? (1994). Under sustained attack in academia, she dropped her APA membership and finally left teaching for a research position at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. There she researched and wrote The War Against Boys (2000).
Today, the fruits of radical feminism are everywhere in evidence. The nuclear family is in trouble (although in fairness this is due more to the collapse of real, debauched-dollar-adjusted wages forcing both parents to work). Radical feminists dominate many academic humanities departments, including where I did my graduate work; they are well represented in many administrations at four-year research institutions; they control professional groups such as the Modern Language Association. Much contemporary “scholarship†is predictably sex-drenched and gender-obsessed.
Meanwhile, enrollment statistics over the past few years indicate a fall-off in men enrolling in four-year institutions. This has begun to attract national attention. Recent stats indicate that the percentage of men on college and university campuses has fallen to 43 percent nationwide, with some institutions falling under 40 percent. This is treated like a great mystery: why are men falling behind? To those of us who have watched gender politics in academe since the 1980s, the answer is obvious. No man with self-respect is going to sit in a classroom, at the mercy of a radical feminist professor’s denunciations, if he has an alternative. With political correctness shackling free speech, men are speaking with their feet. Some are going to less-politicized technical colleges. Others are choosing occupations that don’t require a four-year degree.
Has radical feminism helped women? A better question might be: was it intended to help women? Some think not. Many women have the careers feminism promised—but also kids born out of wedlock, from one-night stands and the feminist conviction that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.†They come home from work exhausted and then have one or more kids to handle. The result: stress, exhaustion, burn-out. Boys, meanwhile, grow up without proper male role models. One of the effects of radical feminism is the feminization of boys and men. Masculine assertiveness is “outâ€; “metrosexual†sensitivity is “inâ€â€”a recipe for trouble. As Christina Hoff Sommers argues convincingly, normal boys just aren’t wired that way.
Some men are consciously deciding to stay single. They will not approach women, in college or at work, out of fear of guilty-if-charged “sexual harassment†allegations. And with one in two marriages ending in divorce, they are justifiably afraid of being cleaned out—of having their finances destroyed by divorce courts that favor women. Worse still, more than one man has had his life ruined by malicious child-molestation allegations. Again, guilty if charged. Not to mention the emotional devastation to kids after watching their parents fight, sometimes for years.
All of which presages a lot of people—of both sexes—growing older alone.
Could it be that someone wants things this way, because when people’s—especially children’s—families are dismembered and they are psychologically cut off from the most important support network a person can have in an impersonal, materialistic society, they are vulnerable? How does all this tie in with my opening paragraph?
In a recent interview with The New American (June 12, 2006), Aaron Russo, currently of America: Freedom to Fascism fame, reports how he once defended his sympathy with the women’s movement and with equal opportunity to an unnamed member of the Rockefeller clan. Russo describes the chilling response: “He looked at me and said, ‘You know, you’re such an idiot in some ways. We … created the women’s movement, and we promote it. And it’s not about equal opportunity. It’s designed to get both parents out of the home and into the workforce, where they will pay taxes. And then we can decide how the children will be raised and educated.’â€
Behind the feminist movement, like a shadow, was the super elite lusting for control—over men, over women, over children, over the workplace, over education, eventually over society itself. Radical feminists—obsessed with gender politics but never looking behind the scenes—have been great useful idiots for over 40 years. Feminism was never really about women or their opportunities, which is why its benefits, viewed objectively, turn out to be illusory. A lot of women have filled their prescribed roles unwittingly. Still more have followed their leaders naively. Political correctness has been a good tool for gaining the cooperation of men—or, at least, intimidating many of them into silence. Thus today’s “feminized†order: women don’t trust men; men don’t trust women. Women have careers in record numbers; their children are in state-sponsored daycare where they begin their indoctrination into New World Order globalism and the Earth Charter. Neither men nor women have lives. Neither pays significant attention to their real enemies at the top.
© 2006 Steven Yates - All Rights Reserved Steven Yates earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1987 at the University of Georgia and has taught the subject at a number of colleges and universities around the Southeast. He currently teaches philosophy at the University of South Carolina Upstate and Greenville Technical College, and also does a little e-commerce involving real free trade. He is on the South Carolina Board of The Citizens Committee to Stop the FTAA. He is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (1994), Worldviews: Christian Theism Versus Modern Materialism (2005), around two dozen philosophical articles and reviews in refereed journals and anthologies, and over a hundred articles on the World Wide Web. He lives in Greenville, South Carolina, where he writes a weekly column for the Times Examiner and is at work on a book length version of his popular series to be entitled The Real Matrix (hopefully!) to be completed this summer. Visit his archive at http://www.newswithviews.com/Yates | More from Steven Yates
Stumble It!
August 4th, 2006 at 8:01 am
Good article Sir.
I never looked at it in that manor before.
August 4th, 2006 at 8:22 am
Conspiracy theory
I know some people who are really into conspiracy theories and they’re fascinating to listen to. They think the Rockefeller’s have the holy grail in a secret room where they discuss the future of humanity. They claim that Tipper Gore is a member of the Rothschild clan and controlled Al Gore.
I find this theory strange because if someone was truly that powerful to begin with, why would they need to make a mess of things? Wouldn’t it make sense to create an ultra powerful unified patriarchal society with them at the seat?
Look at feudal middle ages Europe: Sure, the kings enjoyed a much better standard of living than the average serf but even today’s poor Joe Six pack today lives much longer and better than they ever did. They worried endlessly about power conspiracies from each other and unknown variables. I’m sure the same applies today. Chaos should be more difficult to control than order. (Hmmm, perhaps I’m a member of the Illuminati writing this to throw you off track.)
I think that the mess we see today is quite simply a variety of social conditions forming a “perfect storm”: The end of the sexual puritanism in the states, statism transformed into socialism in Europe, feminism appealing to upper class white women’s greed, and white guilt. In the middle of such a storm, it may appear that feminism and leftism are permanent forces that cannot be overcome when, in reality, they’ll blow over in just a few weeks (historically speaking).
August 4th, 2006 at 8:36 am
[...] Radical Feminists: Useful IdiotsMen’s News Daily, CA - 48 minutes ago… Not even in Russian. … Many women have the careers feminism promised but also kids born out of wedlock, from … Some men are consciously deciding to stay single. … [...]
August 4th, 2006 at 8:40 am
I don’t think it’s too far fetched. The elites love the idea of micromanaging peoples lives. Having men and women in the workforce and almost exclusive “public education” means those in charge have a huge amount of control over families, and how the next generation is going to think.
Of course a lot of very rich people want to make decisions for other people. Robert Redford wanted to stop people from buying SUVs; when asked why he himself drove an SUV, he said he “needed it”, but suburban housewives don’t. Barbara Streisand said most people should stop using A/C and use a clothesline to dry their clothes. But not her, she needed her modern conveniences.
Interesting ideas our “elites” have.
August 4th, 2006 at 9:08 am
Steven, your column is good and I hope you spread the idea around using your position as an academic and writer. The idea is not new however. It has actually been discussed in blogs before including here at MND in the past. But it never probably reached a large audience at the time. Yours is the first column that I have seen that approaches the subject. Again, good job.
I too believe that the feminists are useful idiots. The first casualty in this has been men and boys. But women will be paying a noticeably bigger price now and in the future.
Ironic, isn’t it that the true power is not an invisible “patriarchy” but the fact that marxists and capitalists have gone to bed? Similarly, governments and corporations have also gone to bed.
Steven, I recommend that you do some future reasearh about The Frankfurt School. This was a Marxist school made up of philospohers and other elites at the time, in Germany, around the 1920s. They fled Germany during Hitler’s reign (he actually gave them incentives to leave as he hated marxists)and set up shop in the U.S., notably at Columbia University in NYC. They gained a lot of influence with elites in this country, including the government, corporations, universities, and foundations. If people wonder why the rich and famous considered marxism “chic” in the 1960s, and why so many activists then had marxist leanings, well, The Frankfurt School had much influence on this. Graduates of The Frankfurt School at Columbia reached high places within governmnet, corporations, universities, foundations. The goal of The Franfurt School was replacing the current social order with what we see today. The Family was one of their main targets. They have realized most, if not all, of their goals from 60 years ago.
Also check out the following link:
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/
(I personally will NEVER buy a Ford. The Ford Foundation is one of the most left-wing foundations out there.)
It’s all about raw power. The family is the greatest force against a powerful and dominating government. A strong family needs only one car, one house, one refrigerator, one….on and on. Broken or non existant families doubles the market for goods and services. Again, the government and corporations work together and the marxists and capitalists work together. Since corporations look like a snapshot of a socialist organization today, one could say that the capitalists have become socialists in how they run the business. But socialists too enjoy money (for themselves and their shareholders). In the past, corporations promoted women’s issues (affirmative action). Now they’ve taken things to the next step: diversity. This will soon include, gays, lesbians, transgender groups targeted for privilege. Other groups have already been welcomed into the Diversity Tent. (Sorry, Caucasian males are still banished to the plantation).
Another area in which corporations and government work together is in labor supply. Rapidly doubling the workforce as was done when women entered in large numbers will drive down incomes. This benefits corporations. And again, it is government who is the front-man for corporations, as it is the governmnet who enforces affirmative action. Look at the illegal alien situation tody. The government is doing the dirty work for business to keep a steady supply of even more cheap labor. The government does not give a fig about “citizenship”, the middle class, or the taxpayers that make it possible for the government to even operate. They work for the corporations. Raw power. In the hands of a few.
You say,
“The nuclear family is in trouble (although in fairness this is due more to the collapse of real, debauched-dollar-adjusted wages forcing both parents to work).”
The issues of feminism and “debauched-dollar-adjusted” wages are related. (This is the only disagreement I have with your column.)
Look at business going to China. Socialists and capitalists can work together when they can serve each others interests. These people do not give one damn about America. They easily could (and will someday) sell out the market (and the country) that made them what they are today for more raw power.
The women have been duped for 40 years. They have created a nightmare for the men and have also created their own nightmare. The true invisible powers don’t care about God, Country, Family. Just their own raw power for global dominance.
August 4th, 2006 at 1:25 pm
I don’t know about the Rockefellers but I do know that David Horowitz “outed” Betty Frieden as a Stalinist from the time she graduated from Smith College in 1942 until she wrote “The Feminine Mystique in 1963.
It seems like Betty was up to more than just liberating American women from “the concentration camp” of marriage.
Gloria Steinem, the “marrying Judas” of the feminist movement, also is supposed to have worked for the CIA at one time and also declared herself to be “a Marxist”
One thing is clear. What we need is a rigorous and thorough intellectual examination of the 60’s and what led up to them. (By the way, Denis, thanks for the info on “The Frankfurt School”. I had never heard of them before)
Anecdotally there are recurrent inter-connections among the feminist movement, homosexuals, secularists, “bohemians” and marxists”
There is a great quote from Daniel Mynihan who said that New York City (home of Columbia) was deeply influenced by deracinated German Jews who had embrace the Enlightenment.
There are 2 elements to “Shumfism” the acronym that I finally came up with to avoid having to write, “secular, homosexual,utopian, marxist, feminist”s. The elements are their ideas, usually traceable back to the 18th cent Enlightenment, and their methods of imposing them, usually indirect, passive-agressive, heavily reliant on emotion and totally reliant on an ethos of power.
Lenin, whose minority “Bolsheviks” wrought horror in Russia from 1917 until 1991, would have felt very close to “Pinch” Sulzberger, Osama Bin Laden and his cohorts.
We should also bear in mind that in the end, Lenin lost.
Big time.
August 4th, 2006 at 4:25 pm
Forget about the conspiracy theories. That is not what I took away from the article. It is an excellent outing of the psychosis of the feminut movment. Bravo Steven. More please!!!!
August 4th, 2006 at 10:52 pm
See what the promise of “free sex” can do?
The introduction of the pill was sold as sexual freedom…little did we know…
This should be archived as a “must see” page for all MND viewers…bravo everyone!
August 4th, 2006 at 10:59 pm
[...] There are those that help us to NOT forget history, and therefore repeat it. Nothing new about the co-opting of political traction by once the heavy lifting has been done by useful idiots.. Steven Yates gives it a shot. A useful idiot is someone who, while zealously promoting one cause, ends up advancing a very different one through stupidity, naivete or inattention. The useful idiot never sees the big picture. Vladimir Lenin, the first Soviet dictator, is credited with coining the phrase, although according to P. Boller and J. George’s They Never Said It, he—well—most likely never said it. Not even in Russian. Whatever its origins, the phrase sometimes comes in handy. (snip) (Hoff)Sommers distinguished between “liberal†feminism and “gender†(radical) feminism. The first promoted, e.g., equal pay for equal work, and opposed discrimination. The latter is a full-fledged worldview that subjects every institution of society to scrutiny through the lens of gender. Sommers had no quarrel with the former; she had plenty of quarrels with the latter. Its influence, which puts science under the gender microscope along with everything else. [...]
August 5th, 2006 at 12:49 am
“See what the promise of “free sex†can do?
The introduction of the pill was sold as sexual freedom…little did we know…”
Joyanna, the nine kinds of hell that have been unleashed on men, children, and ultimately women themselves were not packaged and sold through the promise of “free sex”, so much as the promise of “equality” (and even that end was subverted).
August 5th, 2006 at 4:36 am
[...] Radical Feminists: Useful IdiotsMen’s News Daily, CA - 20 hours ago… Not even in Russian. … Many women have the careers feminism promised but also kids born out of wedlock, from … Some men are consciously deciding to stay single. … [...]
August 5th, 2006 at 7:27 am
Hmm, are feminists useful to anybody or not? Good question, but they certainly are idiots.
In any case, this might explain why we never get any defense of the family, fatherhood in particular, from government, and instead get only “progressive” policies that continually make things worse for children and families, while the true meaning and intentions of The Constitution of the United States of America are increasingly obfuscated. Soon, if not already, as the collective will of political correctness resistance dimnishes, anybody uttering “Give me liberty or give me death”, will be branded a terrorist and forced to live in a federal gay dungeon called “prison”.
If the government hadn’t already confiscated my children and resditrubeted them to politically correct pedophiles, I’d be very concerned.
August 5th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
fourthwire said, in reference to Joyanna’s words:
” ‘See what the promise of “free sex†can do?
The introduction of the pill was sold as sexual freedom…little did we know…’
Joyanna, the nine kinds of hell that have been unleashed on men, children, and ultimately women themselves were not packaged and sold through the promise of “free sexâ€, so much as the promise of “equality†(and even that end was subverted).”
Couldn’t disagree with that position more, fourthwire. Joyanna, as usual, puts her finger right on it:
The so-called ‘goal’ of feminism was ‘equality’, but the packaging in which the concept was sold to the Great Unwashed Masses was most definitely the idea of ‘equality _through_ sexual freedom’.
I clearly remember the debates about the Pill among my peers in school in the ’60s, and the carrot for us kids was not any political goal, but the idea that we could screw all day and never worry about any responsibility ensuing.
It was precisely the idea of ’sexual freedom’ as the most basic, and most personal, expression of ‘equality’ that drew those in my acquaintance to the Poison Pill of promiscuity.
Conspiracy or no, it’s a cinch the FemLibs who promoted the Pill for their political/cultural ends did so by marketing to the selfish sexual desires so common among the young of both genders.
And, based on the cultural events of the last 35 years or so, it seems to have worked so far, and to be working very well still.
August 5th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
It’s entirely possible that you and Joyanna are correct, whraglyn on that count.
I may know a bit about the nature of feminism, but I don’t consider myself an expert on the subject, particularly their history.
I believe that feminism was “sold” to the Great Unwashed Masses, as you put it, through appealing to Western nations’ moral and ethical values, not through the sexual liberation promised through the birth control pill.
It could very well be that I’m wrong. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time….;-)
Mind you, I understand very well how the birth control pill provided a reliable form of birth control for women, which in turn allowed them to pursue careers as well as sexual lives simultaneously.
But while the lure of the pill was easy, “risk-free” sex for both genders, it seems to me that the lure of “equality” that seemed to drive feminism forward for women and quite a few men (not to mention providing cover to those radical feminists with which to work their misandry).
Again, I may well be wrong and you right, whraglyn.
Certainly there are better-read individuals such as Denis, Dave Usher and others who studied the history of feminism better than I.
You and Joyanna certainly may very well be among those individuals.
Having written all that, I am thoroughly convinced that the coming male birth control pill will provide men with an effective means of avoiding reproductive rape, with related improvements to men’s happiness and social, civil, and reproductive rights and general well-being.
And Japan’s health authorities have consistently held off the advent of the female birth control pill in that nation, yet feminism found its toehold after WWII, by means of the American-dictated postwar constitution.
August 5th, 2006 at 3:20 pm
Nicely said, fourthwire; it’s a pleasure doing business with you.
Could not agree with you more on the influence of the male pill being perhaps more culturally convulsive than that of the female pill these last 40-odd years.
Hope the results are a bit more positive…
Above, you state my case better than I, yet you seem to see it not so:
‘I believe that feminism was “sold†to the Great Unwashed Masses, as you put it, through appealing to Western nations’ moral and ethical values, not through the sexual liberation promised through the birth control pill.’
What more basic and critical morals or ethics are there than those related to reproductive decisions and the responsibilities resulting therefrom?
Again:
‘Mind you, I understand very well how the birth control pill provided a reliable form of birth control for women, which in turn allowed them to pursue careers as well as sexual lives simultaneously.’
Then:
‘But while the lure of the pill was easy, “risk-free†sex for both genders, it seems to me that the lure of “equality†that seemed to drive feminism forward for women and quite a few men (not to mention providing cover to those radical feminists with which to work their misandry).’
My friend, I wish I could write as well as this, because you are winning the day for my position.
Can you tell me how I could have been more persuasive than to demonstrate that the Pill, between allowing women the pursuit of ‘…careers as well as sexual lives…’, and offering ‘…risk-free sex for both genders…’, successfully altered personal and public behaviors of almost every person of any age, and did so much for the worse, than any other imaginable influence?
But, this is all speculation, no matter the opinions of anyone. Again, foruthwire, a real pleasure hashing some things out with you.
August 5th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
“Nicely said, fourthwire; it’s a pleasure doing business with you.”
Thank you for your kind words, whraglyn.
“you state my case better than I, yet you seem to see it not so”
That’s entirely possible. I am so far from infallible that I am barely worthy of posting on this forum (and after reading the words of far better-read, more intelligent individuals such as those previously mentioned, I know my limits).
“What more basic and critical morals or ethics are there than those related to reproductive decisions and the responsibilities resulting therefrom?”
Well for starters, the birth control pill provided women with an effective means to separate sexual behavior from reproductive decisions.
Mind you, it also provided women with a form of birth control invisible to their sexual partners, providing an an alibi and means for selective reproductive rape of men.
“My friend, I wish I could write as well as this, because you are winning the day for my position.”
I suspect that you can write much better than I can. And if I am indeed actually arguing your points, that’s fine by me.
I feel no overwhelming need to sacrifice intellectual accuracy or clarity for competitive purposes on this issue.
“Can you tell me how I could have been more persuasive than to demonstrate that the Pill, between allowing women the pursuit of ‘…careers as well as sexual lives…’, and offering ‘…risk-free sex for both genders…’, successfully altered personal and public behaviors of almost every person of any age, and did so much for the worse, than any other imaginable influence?”
I would not dream of even attempting to do so.
I still submit that it was the false dream of “equality” that sold the concept of feminism to the “unwashed masses”, though, rather than the birth control pill.
“But, this is all speculation, no matter the opinions of anyone. Again, foruthwire, a real pleasure hashing some things out with you.”
Agreed, hwraglyn.
I certainly value the opinions of any intelligent individuals on this and other issues related to this and other topics, particularly those individuals’ opinions who are wiser or better-read than myself.
August 5th, 2006 at 8:11 pm
When modern feminism gained the involvement of the government thereby spreading it’s influence into business, academia, etc., during the 60s and beyond, there were no economies other than Western economies where corporations could grow their markets. China was a closed market, and India was a poor nation with few skilled people. The richest nations were all Western: USA, Western Europe, Canada. During the 70s Japan and Australia entered the sphere of Western prosperity. If corporations wanted to increase their markets they all had to work within this Western sphere. Feminism offered the corporations
the ability to double their markets. Feminism offered governments greater reach both in size and power.
Now that China and India have offered corporations new markets they are leaving the West behind. The West, with all it’s entitlements, and costs of doing business, and the huge increase in regulations (and affirmative action is one example)that they themselves brought about,are disincentives for expanding in the West.
Feminism never was about equality for the corporations or the government. It was about raw power.
These multinationals are the driving force behind China’s impressive economic growth. Averaging about 8% growth per year each of the last 25 years. The Chinese economy doubles every 8-9 years. They are also providing China the resources, resulting from this economic growth,
to be a regional and one-day,global military threat to U.S. ineterests. And the U.S. government will once again be calling on American men to be their cannon fodder.
August 7th, 2006 at 7:55 am
The Pill
Men supported the pill, and indirectly, feminism because they perceived them as making women more “loose” and to bust puritanical mores. But I disagree that the pill, by itself, allowed women to pursue sexual gratification in a similar way to men. It’s now clear in hindsight that the pill is tremendously flawed: it’s a hormonal treatment with drastic side effects. It’s not totally reliable. It’s complicated to use.
Consequently, the pill was augmented with other “birth control” solutions (literally): abortion rights, welfare, child-support for bastard children and even legal abandonment. I know leftist men whose eyes glimmer with fear at the prospect of denying women any of these choices for fear that they’ll close their legs.
August 7th, 2006 at 9:40 am
I just want to repeat Denis’s accurate and profound statement: “Feminism never was about equality for corporations or the government (or women either). It was about raw power.”
August 7th, 2006 at 11:20 am
This doesn’t make sense. Why would the corporations want to expand the women’s market to increase consumption and costs in order to benefit their bottom line only to go to undeveloped countries such as India and China because they’re cheaper to do business in?
August 7th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
It makes total sense. Read my posts in their entirety. They wanted women out of the home and into the workforce to lower overall labor costs and to increase the markets for their goods and services. As the West had the only prosperous economies at the time, (and China was closed and India was poor with no skilled labor) the only way to increase markets and lower labor costs was within the western spehere. They are going to China and India now because THEY offer lower costs for skilled labor and available markets. Why pay someone $60,000 (or whatever), with maternity leave, childcare benefits, the high risk of discrimination and/or harrassment lawsuits (recall recently Wal-Mart and female employees), when you can pay someone
one-sixth that amount and be free of the nuisances? Plus everyone else then has to compete with these lower costs. Corporations only think about themselves and they are voting with their feet and leaving.
August 7th, 2006 at 2:52 pm
I’m aware of this theory but it doesn’t work, at least not at the level proposed with illuminati corporations meeting in secret rooms, if they planned to get all this cheap women’s labor and then made it too expensive and then sought cheap labor elsewhere. Pretty damn stupid overlord.
I think it’s just western chivalry, top-heavy puritannnical mores, marxism, and white guilt that all combined to create the perfect nexus or storm to create this huge powerhouse belief of women’s equality that persists beyond rational thought similar to people still knocking on wood to ward off bad luck.
August 7th, 2006 at 6:51 pm
You need to stop using whatever it is you are using. I’m not providing a conspiracy theory here. I’m not proposing backroom secret meetings. I’m not going to draw you a map or spoon feed it to you. To think that some “huge powerhouse belief” from “chivalry”, “top-heavy puritannical mores”, “marxism”, and “white guilt” occured as a big bang during the 60s, and this brought about feminism, and if you are seeing conspiracy theory in the my rationale, then you have only proven for me the popular axiom “if you remember the 60s you were’nt there”.
August 7th, 2006 at 7:19 pm
So what are you proposing happened (or is happening) exactly?
August 7th, 2006 at 7:33 pm
I propose instead you re-read what I wrote. I propose you see it for what is said (and not said). I propose also that you view it as commentary that contributes, in part, to the authors original column. It is not my comprehensive 3 volume set explaining the birth and life of feminism. It does not explain everything. It says what it says. I’m certain others here get (and some maybe don’t) the main points I’ve made, and for some it adds to their big picture, or at least makes them think. That was the extent of my goal here.
August 8th, 2006 at 10:19 am
Hello Denis,
I re-read what you wrote but wanted something a bit more personal from you rather than just rehashing what others had written along with the original author. All of these conspiracy theories together sound a bit contradictory. I was just trying to make some sense out of the big picture. Why would the super-elite want to turn the states into a third world country with expensive pink collar laborers when South America was available all along? How were feminists useful idiots if they ruined things fo everyone? My mind, admittantly, is boggled.