Why Not Feminism?

Interesting how some things in life come full circle. For many years I was a pretty faithful feminist. I’ve been to protests and marches, read all the literature, worked at a DV/SA shelter, had intellectual debates with some great feminist minds. I was never a hundred percent enchanted with all feminist ideology, but about ten years ago I took a major U-turn. Why? With the help of Shulamith Firestone and her idea of equality through artificial wombs, I have somehow managed to follow feminism to its logical conclusion, fascism, totalitarianism. Women forced to compete with men on equal footing, except as smaller, weaker, slightly less connected competitors, the state in charge of all reproduction, qualities perceived as feminine, completely erased. See, there’s this thing called biology, and when we’re creating utopian visions in our minds, biology is an important part of the equation. Women have value in this equation.

Today we are beginning to live in that dystopian reality, the harvest of many years of feminist thought. The rad/fems and people like Mary Daly, Robin Morgan, taught me some things about the cultural dangers of gender reassignment, about the dangers of erasing the feminine rather than embracing it. If gender is nothing but a social construct, eventually we’re all going to aim for becoming what we perceive as the dominant gender. The quest for a homosexual gene is also another double-edged sword, we think it will help us to respect gays more, but followed to its logical conclusion, such a gene would likely lead us to eradicate homosexuality entirely. It is simply human nature to remove what we perceive as socially inconvenient. Equality is a fool’s errand if equality does not celebrate diversity, but rather seeks only to elevate the status of those who we perceive as lessors.

When it comes to relationships between men and women, and building communities, again biology plays an important role. Our quest to “help,” our need to solve problems, has often trumped wisdom. For example, since the creation of welfare, relationships in black communities have suffered greatly, marriage rates have declined, active fatherhood has declined, crime has increased, poverty has increased, unemployment has increased. See, it turns out that men, fathers, husbands, actually play an important role in the community, culturally, socially, economically. In many urban areas inhabited by people of all races, the state has replaced the family, with rather tragic results. The State, as an entity, can never care for people properly because it is a bureaucracy, not an empathetic, sentient being. Government is a poor substitute for things that humans were designed to do for themselves.

The most difficult part of feminism for me is actually the modern knee jerk emotionalism. Third wave feminism especially, has descended into a sort of myopic, self-serving, emotionalism, that makes any sort of debate nearly impossible. It’s all about “I feel bad about this, therefore there ought to be a law…” Or “I feel good about this and if you question it, you’re an oppressor.” The personal is now entirely political, so how a feminist thinks, feels, perceives, is the only valid view of the issue and anybody objecting is now the enemy. Or a misogynist, a sociopath, a traitor. It’s a herd mentality. Cult-like.

Merging feminism with left-wing politics so the two are hardly indistinguishable anymore, has not helped matters. In the “olden” days feminism was more radical, more against the grain. Today feminists spend less time trying to make their voices heard and more time trying to silence the opposition. All my old idols, MS magazine, “this is what a feminist looks like” with their picture of the President, have sacrificed all common sense. We are now living in a world where it is perceived as acceptable to engage in the politics of personal destruction. Just ask Sarah Palin. Feminists delude themselves into believing they are changing the system, but they ARE in fact, now the system.

Ironically, what we sought to create we have destroyed. Rather than empowering women and creating real choices, feminism has simply become yet another knee jerk emotional tool on the path towards totalitarianism.

I’ll save you the top bunk in re-education camp.